The Mutual Admiration Society(20)
Because I’m pretty sure that Birdie and me are going to find kidnapped and murdered Sister M & M behind the Gilgood mausoleum, I tick that one off and go straight to the next step.
The first time I came across #2, I thought that Mr. Lynwood “My friends call me Woody and my enemies call me their worst nightmare” Bellflower had written “mean, motive and opportunity,” so I almost closed up my detecting business before it even had a chance to take off.
There are so many mean people in the neighborhood that my suspect list for a crime would be too heavy to carry around in my pocket without my shorts falling down around my ankles. It wasn’t until I went back and reread #2 that I saw it was mean with an s, but that threw me into a tailspin, too, because other than meaning more than one mean person, I had no idea what means meant. So, of course, as a kid who takes reading and spelling very seriously, I did what I always did when I got confused over a word. I rode on my Schwinn bike to North Ave. and looked it up at the Finney Library that I really love. (I would steal the big dictionary they got up there if I could, but I think Mrs. Kambowski, the crabby librarian who works with nice Miss Peshong and acts like she owns the joint, might have my number, because I think she nailed it to its pedestal.) When it comes to detecting, means was defined by Merriam-Webster as having the ability to commit a crime. For example, you couldn’t be guilty of running somebody over if you didn’t know how to drive a car, or you couldn’t stab someone seventeen times if you didn’t have any hands to hold a butcher knife in, or if you wanted to sew slipcovers out of a person’s skin—you couldn’t do that, either, if you didn’t own an upholstery knife. So if Sister M & M is dead, like I think she is, The Mutual Admiration Society is going to have to look for a suspect who is strong. I can’t really tell just by looking if our principal has any muscles underneath her black habit, but I have seen her break a chalkboard pointer in her bare hands, so she would put up a good fight. And if nuns were allowed to play basketball, she would be a starting forward, so she could not be kidnapped and murdered by a guy who only came up to her rosary beads on a good day.
Figuring out the motive, which is why somebody would want to kidnap and murder Sister Margaret Mary, well, that’s going to be a lot tougher, because nobody likes her, except for my bighearted sister, who likes everybody. But take it from me, a person of much sounder mind, the Creature from the Black Lagoon has a better personality than the principal of St. Kate’s.
But tracking down someone who had the opportunity to commit the crimes? That should be a breeze. All The Mutual Admiration Society has got to do is search for someone who could’ve been in the cemetery last night at 12:07 a.m. yelling, “I’m warning you! Watch yourself! You’re treading on dangerous ground!,” not someone who had laryngitis or was working the night shift at one of the factories.
Because I’m their leader, I can’t turn up at our Mutual Admiration meeting under the weeping willow tree without a couple of smart detecting ideas. My partners in crime are counting on me as much as all of us are counting on President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower. So while I’m waiting for Birdie to come back downstairs wearing my old sneakers after she hung out the white towel from our bedroom window that’ll let Charlie, our Sergeant of Arms, know where to find us, I flip another page of my navy-blue detecting notebook over and jot down a new list:
QUESTION OR SURVEIL
Mr. McGinty.
Kitten Jablonski.
Butch Seeback.
Mr. Johnson.
Suzie LaPelt.
Of course, after I tell my fiancé about our new case, I’ll listen to what he has to say, but since we’ll already be at the scene of the crime soon, my vote would be to talk to our good friend Mr. McGinty first. The way I wanted to earlier when I saw him from the back porch talking to Mrs. Peterman about her husband’s burial. Hardly nothing happens in the cemetery that the caretaker doesn’t know about.
8:14 a.m. Birdie still hasn’t shown up in the kitchen, which means she probably forgot why she went upstairs in the first place. I bet she’s in our mother’s bedroom. Sitting at the vanity table and trying on her shiny jewelry and smelling her lotions and playing with her makeup, because unlike me who really doesn’t go for that sort of thing, Birdie is a lot like Louise in some ways. She can’t help it, poor thing, that’s just the bad luck of the draw of blood.
I take a giant step to the bottom of the stairs, and yell up, “Get down here ASAP!”
Due to her dawdling, I’m sure that’s gonna take her a while, so just as I’m about to take the garbage out the way Louise told me to, I’m surprised to hear the running of little feet over my head and my sister hollering back, “I’m ready, Frank!”
When Louise is gone for the night, I like to pop some corn and curl up on the sofa and watch TV shows like 77 Sunset Strip and Hawaiian Eye so I can get some free detecting pointers, but those whodunnits? They’re way too hard for Birdie to keep straight in her brain. Besides Walt Disney Presents, what tickles her fancy are game shows. She’s not smart enough to shout out any of the answers to the questions the way I do, she just loves the shiny prizes, and when the duck comes down on one of her favorite shows of all, that’s always good for one of her great belly laughs that can give even the saddest person a little hope.