Читать книгу Lament for a Lounge Lizard - Mary Jane Maffini - Страница 9

“What do you mean ‘so-called alibi’?”

“I’m your alibi. Remember? And the local hotshots just blew a lot of the taxpayers’ dollars trying to catch me in a lie.”

“Okay, but why ‘so-called’ ?”

“Get a grip. Your hands are shaking. Make sure you don’t spill my drink.”

She was right. My hands were shaking. After all, she is a doctor (even if no one can figure out when she keeps office hours), and doctors are trained to recognize things like shaky hands.

“I’ve been fingerprinted. I’ve outrun the media. I’ll never be able to sleep in my bed again. I can shake if I want to. What do you mean ‘poking holes in’?”

“Relax. They’re just doing their job.” Easy for her. She was already fully relaxed in the bean-bag chair in my living room, swilling the final two inches of my last bottle of Courvoisier.

“Yeah, but ‘poking holes’ in. I don’t like the sound of that.”

Liz rubbed Tolstoy’s belly with her foot.

The phone rang for the thirty-seventh time. Tolstoy perked up. He loves to hear the voices recording their cranky little messages.

“I hate it when you don’t answer the phone.”

“I’ve had a rough day, Liz.”

“Who hasn’t? You know, this is the sort of thing we can anticipate from now on. Now that we’re forty-five, we have to accept the fact we’ll be surrounded by death and decay.”

“Speak for yourself. I won’t be forty-five for six months. I don’t expect it to lead to a flurry of corpses in my bedroom.”

“I think you know what I mean. We have to come to grips with our own mortality.” She tossed back a slug of Courvoisier.

“You come to grips with your mortality, if you want to. And don’t rule out cirrhosis of the liver as a contributing factor while you’re at it. I’m trying to figure out what happened here last night.”

“See this?” She grabbed hold of the skin at her jaw and pulled at it. “My chin line. Look at it. It’s disintegrating. You know what they call these things?”

“No. I’m more interested in who might have murdered Benedict. You know, since I didn’t and my so-called alibi is having holes picked in it.”

“Poked in it. They call them dewlaps,” she said, still tugging at her chin. “They start to develop around our age.”

“Your age,” I said. “I’m six months younger, remember? Anyway, let’s deal with the Benedict thing first. I can’t figure out who could have killed him.”

Curled up in the beanbag chair, with her rumpled short black hair, tight black jeans, bare feet, and red toenails, Liz reminded me of a sexy, self-centred cat.

“Just about anybody probably wanted to. Are you telling me you never felt like killing him?” Liz said, barely holding back a yawn.

I ignored a new banging on the front door. “Not in the last seven years. But I take your point. So the cast of possible villains is roughly the population of St. Aubaine.”

“Yeah, that’s a problem. Anyway, my chin line is...”

The banging on the front door escalated. I said, “In the greater scheme of things, I really don’t give a flying fig about your chin line.”

“No need to be nasty.”

“There is a need to be nasty. My home’s been violated. Large strangers have snooped in my medicine cabinet and wastepaper baskets. The coroner was rude, and the police are poking...”

The front door opened by itself. Flashes went off. A ragged fringe of ginger hair shot in. The door slammed behind Josey Thring. Voices clamoured.

“Oh, no, you should have locked it,” Liz said to me.

“I thought I did lock it.”

“Hi, Miz Silk. I figured you couldn’t hear me knocking with all the racket outside.” Josey said. “Jeez. You got every TV station in the region out there. Even some from Ontario. Gonna be a big job to get that lawn repaired.” Josey may be only fourteen, but she runs her booming business, THE THRING TO DO , out of the ramshackle cabin she shares with her Uncle Mike in the backwoods of St. Aubaine. Josey provides services in gardening, repairs, errands and anything else anyone wants done, legal and notso. For a fee. For the record, Uncle Mike is St. Aubaine’s leading drunk.

“How did you get in?”

“Jeez, Miz Silk. A dead guy. In your bed.” Her freckles stood out in sharp relief. Visions of business opportunities must have been dancing in her head, like sugarplums.

“It’s two o’clock. Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

“No school today. It’s a Professional Development Day for the teachers.” With those round blue, unblinking eyes, you’d almost swear she was telling the truth.

“In September?” On one hand, it wasn’t my business if Josey attended school, but on the other, I didn’t want her hanging around for a cozy chat about the corpse. On the third hand, I didn’t want her spilling any of my personal details to the gang on the lawn.

“I’m pretty sure it is a school day,” I said.

“What’s this thing you have about school days? You know, there’s other things besides formal education. What about educational experiences?”

Liz snorted into her Courvoisier.

“Jeez, Miz Silk. I thought you might need some chores done. I’m raising funds for the field trip. Remember? To France. That’ll be a major educational experience.”

“France?” Liz will argue with anybody. “France? You don’t need to go to France to have an educational experience. You live in the best country in the world.” Liz has never gotten over the last referendum. She still feels the threat that Quebec could separate from the rest of Canada.

Josey didn’t even blink. “Sure, Dr. Prentiss, but France...”

“But France nothing. What about Canada? You want educational or cultural experiences, you can find them right here.”

“Yeah, sure. Anyways, France is like the seat of civilization.” It took more than Liz to get Josey down.

“I believe you mean Greece. Possibly Egypt. You could even make the case for China. France is a non-starter.” “France is supposed to be very beautiful.”

“France is beautiful? You don’t think we’ve got beautiful? What about our Gatineau Hills? What about our river? What about the Findlay Falls? You’ve been there?”

“Liz, I don’t think...” I didn’t want Josey planning trips up the Gatineau Hills to the Findlay Falls with me panting along behind her.

“That’s not educational,” Josey said.

“Sure it is. Historic caves. Arrowheads and rare birds and crap. Unique to this area. Look through your binoculars. You have more educational experiences than you can use.”

“I don’t have binoculars. Anyways, I can do that stuff any time. France is something special. I even got my passport.”

“I give up.” Liz turned back to her Courvoisier.

I was stunned. How did Josey get a passport? Her only local relatives were her grandmother, currently doing a stretch for senile dementia in the Hôpital St. Mathieu, and her Uncle Mike, renowned for his inability to remain upright in public places.

“So anyways, I got enough for my ticket, but I need a bit for expenses. That garden of yours needs a good fall clean-up before the ground gets any soggier. And today I figured you’d need help keeping people away.” She flicked a glance at Liz.

Liz snorted again.

“I have to think about the garden.” Meaning I wasn’t sure whether my bank account could handle a good fall clean-up.

“And firewood. I can get you a deal. Money under the table.”

“Absolutely. But you know, now that I think about it, I’m positive it is a school day.” I hustled Josey toward the front door. “You can get in a lot of trouble playing hooky.”

“Speaking of trouble,” Josey said. “That Dr. Prentiss is some grouchy. I thought she was supposed to be your best friend.”

“She was just making a point about other educational experiences. She means well.”

“No, she doesn’t. She’s bossy and sarcastic and mean.”

And self-obsessed, I thought.

Josey added, “Not just to me, to you too, Miz Silk. I’ve heard the way she talks to you, for months now. I don’t know why you put up with that.”

Not that I really had to explain the behaviour of a middleaged physician to a kid who had decided on her own initiative to elbow her way into my life, but I tried. “Dr. Prentiss has been my best friend since Grade Six. She’s bailed me out of I don’t know how many situations. She’s always been there for me.”

I didn’t tell Josey what a rock Liz had been when my socalled marriage was disintegrating. Or how I’d cried on her shoulder during every disaster of my adolescent and adult life. I wasn’t about to betray her by announcing that she was not handling her forty-fifth with grace and dignity.

Josey looked unconvinced. “Is she there for you now that you’ve got all these problems?”

“She will be,” I said, meaning, this too shall pass.

“Yeah, I hope so. She sure goes through your booze. So this guy who died in your bed. He’s that crazy poet who hangs out at the Britannia, right? Everybody in St. Aubaine is talking about it. How did you get involved?”

Good question. I damn well didn’t know the answer. But it was time for me to stop being distracted by Liz’s midlife misery and Josey’s travel plans and find out.

* * *

After Liz left, I took the phone off the hook, put on some soothing Chopin waltzes, made a fire and curled up with Hélène’s papers.

Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars! That was more than the International Dublin IMPAC prize. It made the Giller and the Governor General’s awards look picayune. How the hell did Benedict get his mitts on that? Looked like I wasn’t the only one surprised by the choice. The Toronto and Montreal papers dusted their write-ups with faint praise like “travesty” and “garbage”.

The only poem of Benedict’s I could even bring to mind was a seasonal favourite entitled “Turkey Farts”. The critics must have read that one too.

Despite a grudging agreement that his latest book of poetry, While Weeping for the Wicked, was unlike anything else he’d ever written, the papers were united in their shockedness and appalledness. The major French-language dailies fumed about French-Canadian poets being passed over for a Quebec literary plum. I couldn’t say I blamed them.

The weekly St. Aubaine Argot was alone in its enthusiasm.

The Flambeau Foundation Prize for Literature

This prestigious literary honor is awarded at the discretion of Mme Velda Flambeau, reclusive widow of the late mining magnate, Alphonse Flambeau. The Flambeau, which has not been awarded in the five years since it was established, is estimated to have an accrued value of $250,000, and this year will honour our own local son, the poet Benedict Kelly.

According to the Flambeau Foundation, Kelly’s poetry is tender, emotive, deep and touching in its pure, soaring spirit.

We rejoice with St. Aubaine’s well-known, favourite poet as he finally receives the recognition he deserves.

The Argot didn’t mention that the so-called favourite poet was best known locally for cadging drinks and mooching other people’s fries at the Britannia.

As usual, the St. Aubaine French-language weekly, L’Impératif, went too far in the opposite direction, bleating about the insult to Marc-André Paradis, a mechanic who was also a poet. Apparently, this Marc-André Paradis was pretty hot stuff. Every French paper mentioned him as a far more deserving recipient of the Flambeau than the late you-know-who. Come to think of it, most of the English ones named him, too.

I’d never heard of him. L’Impératif had a special reason to bleat. Didn’t MarcAndré Paradis turn out to be another local boy.

* * *

At the best of times, it’s hard enough cranking out three novels a year. Especially if they’re romances and your own life is one hundred per cent romance-free. Add an intimate little murder, and just watch those adjectives shrivel. But since my bank account had sunk even lower than my spirits, I had no option.

I spent the rest of the evening trying to entice my fictional would-be lovebirds, the twittery Cayla and the accident-prone Brandon, as far as the bearskin rug in front of the roaring blaze in the fireplace at Brandon’s remote log cabin.

“Cayla, Cayla, I’ve waited so long for this...”

“Oh darling, I can’t believe it’s finally really happening.”

“Cayla!”

“Brandon!”

Thunk.

“Brandon? What happened, darling? Did you hit your head on the sharp stone at the edge of the...? Brandon? Brandon?!! Oh God, speak to me! Oh God, no. Help him! Somebody help him!”

Deep, wrenching sobs shook the lonely, log...

I crumpled the printout and threw it in the wastepaper basket. That’s what really bugged me. How the hell did Benedict, a boozed-up, undisciplined skirt-hound, capture one of Canada’s most prestigious literary prizes while I couldn’t even pump out a decent piece of genre fiction?