The Mutual Admiration Society(33)

She’s kneeling in front of the ivy-covered back wall of the mausoleum, calmly sorting through a teepee-shaped pile of red and orange leaves. Mr. McGinty must’ve been doing some tidying. He takes good care of all the graves in the cemetery, because that’s a part of his job that he takes very seriously, but I have noticed that he seems to take a little extra-special care of this mausoleum. I think it might be because he has shyness in common with the deceased hermit or maybe our friend is just very proud of this stone building that’s the biggest in the cemetery, maybe in all of Milwaukee, I don’t know. Whatever the reason, I’m not kidding, you could eat off the ground anywhere in Holy Cross, God knows my sister has, but Mr. Gilgood’s tomb is especially tended to.

When I come to a heaving stop at her side, Birdie looks up at me and then down to my hand and says, “Whatcha gonna do with Daddy’s knife?”

If I ever have to write a story in school about what the famous saying “Ignorance is bliss” means to me, I would use this exact moment as the perfect example. Instead of slowly explaining to her the horrible danger she could’ve been in, I do what I always do to protect what little of her mind she has left. I lie. Believe me, it’s for her own blissful good.

I tell her, “You know how important it is that Charlie and me have things in common.” Good Housekeeping sits next to True Detective in the magazine rack at Dalinsky’s, so when I’m done reading about gumshoes and broads with big boobies in angora sweaters each month, I page through that ladies’ magazine, too. There was an excellent article in the June 1959 issue called “Secrets of a Happy Marriage” that said it was very important that a wife have “shared interests” with her husband. “I got the knife out because I’m preparing to do a little whittling with him during our Mutual Admiration meeting.”

I’ve found that visual aids always make whoppers more believable, so I snatch up a stick that’s lying under the most famous oak tree in the whole cemetery and use Daddy’s sharp knife to shave off some of the bark. The “Necking Tree” has had a ton of initials carved into its trunk by teenagers over the years—including Louise’s and Daddy’s. They come at night, because the graveyard is so pretty and peaceful, but mostly because it’s closer and cheaper than steaming up their car windows at the Bluemound Drive-In movie theater.

FACT: I sneakily observe those hot-to-trotters outta my bedroom window rolling around in the grass, pawing at each other beneath the flickering streetlights. And at the Milky Way Drive-In, any idiot can see that the boys with their poufy, slick hair and Camel cigarettes stuck into their rolled-up T-shirt sleeves have got one thing on their minds, and believe me, it’s not Orion onion rings.

PROOF: Dawn Jablonski was voted Queen of the Milky Way three summers in a row, so I guess the “exercism” that special priest performed to drive the devil out of her didn’t work so good.

I stick the Swiss blade back into its red case, slide it back into my pocket, and ask my sister, “And what, may I ask, do you think you’re doin’?”

“Lookin’ for clues at the scene of the crime, a course.” She’s stirring the pile of raked up leaves she’s kneeling in front of like they’re a bowl of cake batter and her arms are Mixmaster beaters. “Isn’t that what detectives are supposed to do?”

Oh, that’s so, so, so, so heartbreaking.

Birdie wouldn’t know a clue if it jumped up and bit her in her tail feathers.

On the other hand . . . she does have that super-duper smelling power. Could she be picking up on a scent that I can’t?

Uh-oh.

What if it wasn’t our friend Mr. McGinty who raked the red and gold leaves into the pile Birdie is searching for a clue in? What if the murderer I saw last night thought: I could get caught if I stop to bury this body here at the scene of the crime, so I’ll just hack it into little pieces and throw the bloody, disgusting parts into these pretty fall leaves, and then I’ll rake them up nice and neat and make my getaway through these conveniently located spooky woods and no one will be the wiser.

It’s not like I’m a rookie in the corpse department. I’ve seen a boatload of stiffs during the Saturday afternoons I’m listening to Braves baseball games with Mr. Skank at his funeral parlor and he’s teaching me about embalming and advertising and such, but all of those dearly departeds had their parts still attached to them.

“Stop digging!” I scream at Birdie. “There could be a dead body in there!”

“Don’t be so thick, Tessie,” she says with her spooky, wild-streaking laugh that always makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. “The pile isn’t deep enough to hide a dead body.”

“It is if it got cut into little pieces!”

Dear Jesus, what the heck have I gotten us into?

I know better.

Right around the time summer started, a burly guy with MOTHER tattooed on his right arm showed up at Lonnigan’s Bar after closing time. I thought at first that Louise had sent the bruiser because she’d gotten tired of coming up to the bar to make sure Daddy wasn’t playing cards and that gal can suck the fun out of just about anything faster than one of those Hoovers sold by Horace Mertz. But it turned out this galoot, name of Hall, was sent by his boss, Mr. Three-Finger Louie Galetti, which explains why he has to have someone else do his dirty work. Daddy told Hall very politely after he burst through the door, “Sorry. I’m a little short. Next week for sure.” But Three-Finger Louie must’ve needed his money back ASAP, because that muscle man got the jump on the best fighter in the neighborhood and knocked him to the bar floor with a powerful right hook to his nose and then he emptied out the cash register. “Let this be a lesson to you, Tessie,” Daddy told me when he was patching himself up in the GUYS bathroom after Hall left with the dough he stole. “Whatever you do, don’t get in over your head.”