Lament for a Lounge Lizard. Mary Jane Maffini
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becoming burgundy hair and a flair for the dramatic. She’s also one hell of a community organizer. Never mind. I like her anyway. In spite of the fact that her wretched husband had been trying to oust me from my little converted cottage on its two-acre riverside lot ever since I’d moved in two years earlier. He might have been sleaze personified, and I might have hated the sight of him, but Hélène’s a different matter.
“Fiona! I have been so worried. I phoned and phoned and you didn’t answer,” Hélène said.
“I’m not answering the phone,” I said.
“But what is this terrible news?”
I summed up my shock, paranoia, acute embarrassment and desire to evade the media.
“ Oh là là,” she said. Before I met Hélène, I would have sworn nobody outside of the movies ever says oh là là. But Hélène sometimes even adds an extra là.
“It is a shame. Right after he won such a big prize too. But Benedict was always trouble,” she said.
“No kidding. Which reminds me, do you still have any newspaper write-ups about Benedict winning the Flambeau?”
“In the recyclage.”
“Good. Recycle them to me. I need them.”
“And now you will need new sheets too.”
“Not only that, but Tolstoy needs to pee, and I need a diversion.”
“ Pas de problème. Leave it to me. By the way, did I mention I still need volunteers for the Charity Auction next month?”
“Anything,” I said. “Just get those turkeys off my lawn.”
* * *
The media vans peeled out of my driveway, three seconds after Mme Jean-Claude Lamontagne, glamorous wife of St. Aubaine’s most successful developer, let it slip to a reporter that she’d just sighted Fiona Silk, prime suspect, pawing through the black push-up bras over at the Boutique Minou. As soon as the vans disappeared, Tolstoy and I dashed out. My mind was on Hélène’s discarded newspapers. Tolstoy’s mind was on lower things.
* * *
Too bad there’s no answering system for doors. People could leave little messages, and you could let them know whether you were in...or not. Hi, this is Fiona and I never, never, never answer my door, but go ahead and leave a message if it makes you happy. Knock, knock...Hi, Jack here, I want to read your meter...give me a call...Hi, this is your newspaper carrier, you owe me for July and August and...Hi, how well do you know your Bible? I’d like to tell you how you can find peace and contentment. I’ll be back next Saturday morning at about seven-thirty. Hi, this is the media. We’d like to smear this story all over every front page and television set in the country. How about opening the door and spilling your guts?
But Dr. Liz Prentiss doesn’t stop just because you don’t answer. When I finally capitulated, she breezed through and slammed the door on a ferret-faced reporter just back from a wild goose chase to Boutique Minou.
She said, “Get me a drink on the double. The police have been trying to poke holes in your so-called alibi.”
What are best friends for?
Four
“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