I'd Rather Be in Philadelphia, page 11
And in I went, pushing my trusting down arrow through the alphabet until I got to the T’s, and then, to Wynn and Lydia Teller.
Columbus couldn’t have been more excited than I was, discovering my own new world of mechanical wizardry.
A squeak somewhere outside the office ended the elation. My pulse rate doubled as I strained to hear, and my hand trembled as I pulled a sheet off a pad embossed with from the desk of helga putnam. Another squeak. Closer. Did buildings still settle after one and a half centuries?
My hand shook even more as the noise changed. Feet scuffed on the marble foyer now. Just outside.
I scribbled the address in a handwriting I’d never seen before. The writing of a trapped woman.
A shadow darkened half of the closed, frosted glass door to the hallway. I shoved the paper into my bag, then stared at the computer screen, mind as blank as I wished it would become. I was about to be caught illegally using Helga’s computer. I was about to be fired. Soon, Macavity and I would be living in the car, sleeping under the ripped convertible top, hoping for a dry spring.
I glanced at the manual as the shadow inserted a key, turned it, and shook the door in vain.
I’d left it unlocked and the shadow had just locked it. Which gave me maybe ten seconds.
No time to find out how to exit gracefully. The instructor had said something about saving, about not destroying disks, but it was too late for niceties.
“Sorry,” I told the machine, hearing bits and bytes scream in agony as I eradicated them by simply switching the power off.
I stood up and tried to activate my innocent who, me? facial muscles. But they didn’t hold when the door actually opened. “Why—what are you doing here?” I asked, one millisecond after it was asked of me.
Neil Quigley looked terrified. His gangly body gangled more than usual. “I…I…I forgot my roll book. Failure warnings due, and I couldn’t…well, I couldn’t come sooner, you see, because, um, because I couldn’t.” He tried for a laugh, but missed by a mile. “It was a shock seeing you here.”
Our mutual terror agreed upon, we left. A needle-sharp, icy rain threatened sleet, and when I got into my damp car, I sighed and hoped that I was projecting and that Neil was not as crazed and frightening as he’d looked to me tonight.
* * *
The pilfered address led me to a pleasant two-story house not far from my sister’s. Philadelphia and environs are a medley of brick: weathered and new, rose, yellow, tomato, rust, brown, wine, and pink. Even wet, and in the dark, the Tellers’ house was on the rosy end of the spectrum. It was two stories and square, with a peaked roof and chimney, its green front lawn split by a walkway to the front door. It looked like a child’s drawing of home. A separate garage, to the left and rear, was a miniature peaked-roof replica.
Carefully laid-out flower beds lined the walk and foundation of the house. They were mostly empty now, except for bushes carved and coerced into unnatural egg shapes and oblongs. The topiary, plant abuse if there was such a thing, confirmed all my suspicions.
It was eight o’clock. Dinner should be over by now, and if Glenda had been honest on the phone, Wynn was back at the office.
I walked the path between the frozen bushes, rehearsing my spiel. I had the hotline number of the shelter. I could get her there, and they could get her to a safe house. By the time her husband returned, she’d have disappeared without a trace.
A chill crept through my bone marrow, and it had nothing to do with the freezing rain.
It had nothing to do with the house, either, glowing at every window against the wet night. I heard music in its recesses, and I faltered, suddenly draggy, exhausted, and full of doubts. Everything—except the topiary, but my view of it is not widely shared—indicated the sort of ideal family Beth and Martha and Philadelphia magazine suggested. Time, perhaps, to beat a hasty retreat from this radiant shelter. Everybody’s incredulity now became rational.
But so did doing something about that book. I promised myself that if this were another dead end, I’d give up the search. But meanwhile, I’d consider the glow proof only of being wired for electricity, not of connubial bliss. I pressed the bell and waited. Then waited some more.
The music was very loud. I heard a rousing chorus. Something familiar, Broadway, upbeat. The least depressing of songs, but its decibel level jarred and didn’t fit my mental image of how the cameo woman would fill her time.
Plus, it meant she couldn’t hear me.
I followed the foundation plantings around the house, looking through the ground level windows, hoping—and fearing—finding her, but getting musical, not human, cues. I finally identified the song. “People Will Say We’re in Love,” from Oklahoma! I listened at the window of a living room that matched my mental image of Lydia—understated, elegant, and painfully correct. Nothing looked used. The plush carpet still showed vacuum tracks. There were no personal touches, no idiosyncratic chances taken. It was as carefully safe, designed for the public, and as desperate not to offend, as she had to be. I moved on, imagining Lydia curled deep in a more comfortable, private part of the house, afghan over her knees, letting Rodgers and Hammerstein take her far away to sunny fields of corn.
I wouldn’t have minded a quick trip there myself. My legs were wet to the knees, and I had to stop for a sneezing fit as I reached the back of the house. There was a small covered porch, and I ran toward it.
I took the three steps quickly, eager for the shelter of the overhanging roof. The music was even louder here, a different song now, slow and dolorous.
I raised my hand to knock before it registered that the top half of the Dutch door was open, swinging in the gusts of wet wind, and then I shook almost as wildly as the half door.
“Mrs. Teller?” I called, standing back, away, hand held rigid. My voice quavered like a ninety-year-old woman’s. Bam! The half door slammed into the frame. The dirge played on.
I backed up a step. Gone, my vision of quiet rooms and afghans. Something was seriously wrong. Too wrong.
I was too late and I was sick with the futility of good intentions and what was that song, that low, rumbling, funereal sorrow? What had happened to the happy music?
Bam! Another gust of wind, another smash of wood on wood.
“Mrs. Teller!” I screamed over and over, voice drowning in the wet chorus of winter storm and mournful song. I gathered strength to come closer, to look through the open half of the Dutch door.
When I finally did, I grew silent.
Sometimes it’s too scary to scream, and too late, and too useless.
I recognized the song then, too. Back in fictional Oklahoma, the villainous Jud was six feet under.
But there, in the Tellers’ blue and white kitchen, things were more on the surface—ruby splatters on the refrigerator, a crimson splash on a white counter, and a bloody handprint on a cabinet door.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I whispered, “I wanted to save you, but I’m too late, too late.”
I finally forced myself to lean over the open edge of the Dutch door and look down below the cabinets and the counters. I gasped in shock, surprise, horror, confusion—I don’t know which. There on the blue and white tiles, in a scarlet puddle, lay the inert and disfigured remains of Wynn Teller. What was left of his face looked as disbelieving of his condition as I did.
Poor Jud was dead.
Eleven
I BACKED AWAY FROM THE GORY REMAINS OF WYNN TELLER.
Down the three steps, out into the rain, where I breathed deeply—once, twice, a dozen times. It didn’t make much of a difference. I held on to an oak tree, the wet ground beneath me shining in the deceptively warm and homey kitchen light.
There were procedures you were supposed to observe. Tell somebody. Notify somebody, but don’t disturb the crime scene. As if I’d dare go in that house. I released the tree and backed off. After two days of obsessively searching, insisting time was running out, it had. There was no need for urgency.
I had to fight a powerful desire to rush home and bury my head under my comforter. The house to the right of the Tellers’ was dark, so I ran to the left and pushed the bell. “Help!” I shouted. I was soaked and scared and toppling toward hysteria. “Help!”
Nobody did. I wheeled around and checked the other side of the street, or what I could see of it in the downpour. A picture window directly across was brightly lit, so I ran, slipping in the middle of the road, soaking through my coat all the way to my underwear.
“Thank God you’re home!” I said when the door opened, even though I couldn’t see anyone.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I thought for a moment she was a dwarf, because her head poked forward halfway down the door. Then I made out the edge of a wheelchair. “No door to door allowed in this neighborhood,” she snapped. “It’s a law. No soliciting. I saw you—I saw you over there, and now you’re here.” She shook her head so vigorously her glasses slid down her nose. They were steel-rimmed, as was she. From her iron-gray hair to her gun-metal wool dress to the chair itself, she was of a piece, and that piece was pure unyielding metal. “Well?” she said.
I was dripping and shivering at her half-open front door. Poor frightened wheelchair-bound woman, but poor me, too. “May I use your phone?” I asked. “It’s an emergency.”
“Car won’t start? No wonder. That maroon number across the street, isn’t it? You’re too old for that kind of thing. Teenagers drive cars like that.” Then she sighed, slowly and deeply, as if pneumatically lifting the weight of her considerable chest. “Tell me the number and I’ll dial it for you.”
I knew that was good sense. I do it myself when strangers want to use my phone, and this woman was especially vulnerable to crazies; but I was nonetheless shaking and soaking wet and as threatening as a dying flounder. “The police,” I said through chattering teeth. “Call them. They’re needed at the Tellers’.”
“Oh, my Lord!” Her iron ore melted slightly. “Used to be a safe neighborhood. I have nightmares thinking what happens these days.”
My nervous system was shot and my core temperature sinking too quickly for nonessential empathy. To be precise, I couldn’t give a damn about her bad dreams. “Please,” I said.
“Wait a minute,” she interrupted, eyes squinting, “why are you calling if they were robbed? Who are you, anyway?”
“Mother,” a gentle voice said. Its owner was a younger, upright version of the wheelchair-bound woman, with the minerals leached out. “I’ll call,” she said. “But please, what division needs to be alerted?”
“Division?” Her mother coughed a hard-edged laugh. “What are we talking about here? A war?”
“Homicide.” It is difficult to say that word gently.
The daughter looked stricken and suddenly much older than her childish voice and gestures had made me think. She turned and ran deep into the house to phone.
“Tell them I’m waiting in my car,” I called after her. Damp seats would be more hospitable than these front steps. “The Mustang.” Tell ’em to look for a lady in a car that’s too young for her.
“Oh, no. Wait. Wait a second,” the young woman said. It took longer than that, but not much, for her to return. “They’ll be right here, or rather, right there,” her daughter said. “I’m Patsy Benson, and why don’t you come in out of the rain?”
“Patsy!” her mother hissed.
Patsy waved me in.
“Well,” her mother said. “Don’t blame me if we wind up dead, too.” She shook her head. “Just don’t drip all over my clean floors, you understand? I’ll make tea so you don’t get sick and sue me. I know how people are these days.” She swiveled around and wheeled off.
“Please don’t mind Mother,” Patsy said. “When she’s nervous, she’s gruff, and she’s nervous a lot. Runs in the family, I guess.” She took my dripping raincoat and waved me toward a sofa. I tried to remember where I’d heard her name before.
Patsy headed for a weathered wing chair that faced the front window. She turned it so that it more or less aimed toward me. “I’ll keep an eye out,” she said. It seemed obvious that her eye was constantly out, although what there was to watch on a dull suburban street escaped me.
Making conversation under these circumstances is not easy. I smiled to be sociable, but couldn’t think of anything except Wynn Teller’s destroyed face, my own pathetic rescue fantasies, and the terrible way Lydia Teller had solved her dilemma herself.
“Who is it?” Patsy whispered after a long silence.
“Mr. Teller.”
The brown eyes behind her round glasses widened. “I was hoping it was one of their guests. Nobody I know. Oh, why is it always the good ones? He devoted his life to helping children.” She pulled off the glasses and wiped at her eyes.
“Always kept it so pretty over there, too, shaping those shrubs so beautifully. I’ll miss his flower beds…he’d always wave to me.”
She stood up and clasped her hands, then sat back down. “Poor Lydia, too! What will she do? They were so close—a perfect marriage, everybody said. He even came home for lunch every day.” Then she pulled back, looking even more alarmed. “Oh, heavens, I didn’t even think—is she all right? Lydia?”
“She wasn’t there.” Actually, I didn’t know for certain whether that was so. What was I assuming—that if she were still there, having heard me call, she’d have stepped over the corpse with a cheery “Can I help you? I’ve just murdered my husband and it’s a bit of a mess, but give me a sec.”
Was Lydia alive, or had I just seen half of another MAN KILLS WIFE AND SELF headline? “What guests did you mean?” I asked. “Were the Tellers entertaining?”
“I thought they might be.”
“Who was there?” Hordes, I wanted her to say. All carrying guns.
Patsy put her glasses back on. “People. I only saw their backs, and the rain, you know. Coats, umbrellas.” She shrugged.
“But a lot of them?”
“Half a dozen, give or take. One or two at a time.”
Her mother wheeled in. “Tea’s ready. Come into the kitchen, and don’t listen to Patsy. How could you see anything, daughter, while you were washing dishes back in the kitchen?”
“Before then, Mama.” Her voice and attitude lost two decades when she talked to her mother. “And after. You know.”
“Don’t I ever,” her mother muttered.
I placed them. The adventure reader who never left home, and her mother. I controlled an urge to tell Patsy there were phobia programs that could help her. From now on I intended to keep a lid on all do-good urges. I stood to follow the two women into the kitchen, but lights flashed silently outside. The police were not using their sirens. “I’d better go over,” I said.
“You’ll catch your death!” Mrs. Benson snapped.
An ill-chosen idiom given the circumstances, but I acknowledged her kindness and took my leave. The best thing I could do for my health, both mental and physical, was get this over with.
There is an amazing similarity between policemen. Like springer spaniels, or guppies, they are a breed with only minor variegations and distinguishing marks. The species specific trait I detected for genus suburbia was that they seemed rather more shocked by the fact of murder than the exhausted and jaded city police have become. It endeared them to me. And then it made me wonder, and worry, whether they might have reacted differently than Mackenzie had if I’d brought them the book.
A plump and businesslike policeperson looked as reluctant to let me in from the rain as Patsy’s mother had been, but she eventually took me to a covered patio and through its sliding glass doors into the edge of a family room, where we huddled in relative dryness and warmth. We couldn’t speak for the teeth chattering and for the deafening refrain of “Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City.” I saw the phonograph player, its arm up so that a record would repeat through eternity. I also saw more disarray and upheaval than I would have believed possible of the woman who cared for the pristine living room I’d glimpsed earlier.
My policeperson told me to stay right there and shouted some questions and suggestions to a cohort who came in from the center of activity in the kitchen and turned off the record player. “Okay, now,” she said. “From the beginning.”
“I was looking for Lydia Teller,” I said. “Is she okay? She’s not, she wasn’t also…was she?”
The policewoman shook her head. “You’re her friend, then?”
“More an acquaintance.” I wasn’t going to incriminate Lydia with talk of the underlined book.
“Do you know her present whereabouts?”
“No. I was looking for her here.”
I retold each step of my arrival and discovery. Take away the book and the dreadful pressure it had produced, my arrival wasn’t much of a story when you got right down to it.
No, I said, I hadn’t seen, let alone removed, a murder weapon.
The questions continued, but they were not the ones I wanted answered. Like where was Lydia, and who were the people Patsy’d seen coming and going tonight?
My mind backed up and bumped into Neil Quigley, wild-eyed in the office, stumbling through an unnecessary explanation of why he couldn’t have picked up his materials earlier, forcing it on me, although I wouldn’t have even wondered if I hadn’t had such a guilty conscience and if he had simply kept quiet. That same Neil who, earlier in the day, had sworn he’d get Teller.
I had more secrets than I could handle, so I said only what I absolutely knew, which was nothing. And I said it several more times. Yes, I had met Dr. Teller twice, but only in a professional capacity. I’d applied for a tutoring position.
Soon as I said that, I realized that the death of the man who’d interviewed me probably meant I could kiss my island fantasy good-bye. My sad sigh seemed to convince the law that I was not a warped killer who’d stayed to call the cops.
