The Mutual Admiration Society(24)

On account of the great Indian weather we’re having, like everybody else’s on the block, all the windows are open in Old Lady Klement’s house, so I can hear Bishop Sheen sermonizing when I’m standing at her front door. She’s listening to his show on the radio in her kitchen, and something smells really good and I’m 100% sure it’s not her. I think she must be baking a devil’s food cake, because, of course, that would be her favorite on account of that famous saying “Like attracts like.” (No joke.)

FACT: I know the layout of her house.

PROOF: It’s easy for me to jimmy the lock and wiggle through her basement window.

Daddy always said, “Throw the first punch,” so by pocketing our next door neighbor’s change and moving around stuff in her house when she’s asleep or up at church, I’m working on #3 on my TO-DO list: Make Gert Klement think that her arteries have gone as hard as her heart. That way, when her granddaughter, Lily Klement, who is so sweet and nice that she had to have been adopted out of St. Rose’s Orphanage, enrolls Gert in the kind of “home” she’d like to send Birdie and me off to she will not put up a fight. The day the moving truck pulls up in front of her house to lug her and her belongings up to the Catholic Home for the Aged on Burleigh St. will be a big red-letter day for Birdie and me, because I am 50% sure that Louise wouldn’t get rid of us once that buttinsky can no longer whisper not-so-sweet nothings about us into her ear.

On the other hand . . . timing really is everything, so I have to BE PREPARED that the artery-hardening plan won’t work before the men with the nets show up to take Birdie away or before I get sent to live at the juvie home, so I’m feeling a big desire to solve this kidnapping murder case for lots of running-away bucks when I lean on Gert’s doorbell.

When the old witch hears the doorbell ding-dong, she slams a kitchen cabinet shut, turns the radio down, and hollers, “You better not be another Fuller Brush man or vacuum cleaner salesman interrupting the bishop and my baking!”

Ha . . . ha . . . ha . . . Gotcha!

She thinks she’s so smart, but she’s doing one of the worst things she could possibly do, according to my expert boxer Daddy. Just like Louise is underestimating her opponent in the election, Gert is underestimating me. I know she can give door-to-door salesmen the boot, but it’s a huge sin not to help St. Kate’s raise money, which is why I lower my voice that is already so deep and yell back at her “Church paper drive!” before I jump the porch railing and take off around the side of her house.

8:33 a.m. I can make the round trip from Gert’s kitchen to her front door in under ten seconds, but once she sees that nobody’s come from St. Kate’s to collect her old newspapers, it’ll take her around three minutes to shuffle back to Bishop Sheen and her picture window, depending on how much her bunions that I gave her by praying every night for a month to Mary Magdalene, the patron saint of feet, are bothering her this morning.

Keeping track of the time on Daddy’s Timex with one eye after I make it across our neighbor’s backyard and into ours, I use my other eye to get busy looking for Birdie in the bushes in front of the cemetery fence where she’s supposed to be hiding. I need to guide her over the pointy spears on top, because I get too petrified that one of these days her little hands are going to lose their grip and she’ll end up looking like a lollipop.

When I can’t get a bead on her right away, I go nervous, but not straight into shock. This is just another example of that famous saying about a Bird in the hand being better than a Bird in a bush. (No joke.) It’s also not the first time she’s pulled something like this and I’m 100% positive it won’t be the last. Considering how often she gets away from me, I can only think of one good reason why the Finley sisters shouldn’t have been born connected at the hip like the two Siamese sisters we saw at the freak show at the Wisconsin State Fair.

Q. How do Ling and Ming go to the bathroom?

A. Outlook not so good.

I whisper-holler into the bushes, “Bird?”

Not a peep.

“Tweetheart?”

That’s my forgetful sister for ya in a nutshell. Instead of running over to these bushes when I gave her the whistle signal, she musta ran somewhere else. I’d go it alone, but I can’t. It’s never a good idea to let Birdie out of my sight for too long. If she doesn’t answer me this time, I need to go find her and work out another plan. “Honey?”

She pops up in the bushes on the other side of the black iron fence that I never want her to climb over without me and says with a funny little smile, “You rang?” like beatnik Maynard G. Krebs of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis show, which is kinda strange. She doesn’t get jokes and is not supposed to know how to crack a funny “You rang?” one about me ding-dong ditching Gert Klement.

8:45 a.m. According to the second hand on Daddy’s watch, our neighbor is going to be standing at her kitchen window that’d give her a great view of Birdie and me in 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . , so I hurry over the fence and pull my giggling sister deeper and lower into the bushes and not a second too soon.

Through the parted leaves, Birdie and me watch as The Wretched One flattens her nose against her giant picture window. She’s locked on to the spot where we’ve hidden from her a gazillion times before, so I know she can’t see us, but we gotta be careful that she doesn’t hear us, because just like The Mutual Admiration Society, our enemy has got what Chapter Five in Modern Detection calls TOOLS OF THE TRADE of her own. “A fedora may be worn low over one’s eyes to conceal one’s identity,” the book says, which makes sense. Eyes can tell somebody everything about you because they are the windows to our soul. I couldn’t find a fedora hat to fit me at Toppers, so I boosted a pair of sunglasses from the five and dime last week to keep my peepers hidden. A trench coat—a tan coat that has nothing to do with sickness of the mouth—also comes highly recommended, but I figure a beige top and shorts would work just as good. And an ordinary drinking glass is also nice to have on you if you want to listen to people talking on the other side of walls, and I keep one of those in our Radio Flyer.