The Mutual Admiration Society(54)
But again, instead of doing what I need her to do, the kid goes toe-to-toe with me and says, “For your information, I did yell sister and run and tree and something else that is really, really, really—”
“That’s great, even more terrific than Tom. Now—” I’m feeling so fed up that I might throw myself on the fence spears and commit Harry Cary the way the Japs do in the movies with Audie Murphy when the war isn’t going their way. “Goddamnit all, Bird!”
She looks down her too-upturned nose at me like I’m the Finley sister who was born with a defective brain, then says with a sigh, “I’m so disappointed in you, Tessie. Knowing everything I yelled when I ran down the hill is so important to our investigation. A real detective would want to know that information so bad that they’d beat the truth out of me if they had to.”
Don’t tempt me, sister.
Q. Does Zorro have to deal with this kind of orneriness from his sidekick, Bernardo? Does Groucho have to take this kind of guff offa George Fenneman? How about Edward G. Robinson? Does he have to put up with back talk from Dirty Rat?
A. My sources say no.
All I want to do is get over this fence safely and see my Charlie and have our meeting and get up to church before confession ends and spend the rest of the day proving that Mr. McGinty is innocent of a kidnapping murder after we grill the other people on the QUESTION OR SURVEIL list, and all my sister is doing, as usual, is gumming up my well-thought-out plans!
I lose my temper and tell stubborn Birdie in a very snotty voice, “Go right ahead. Tell me everything you yelled when you were runnin’ down the hill. Every teeny-tiny, itsy-bitsy word because we have all day to sit here and have a coffee clutch.” I puff out my cheeks like Dinah at the diner. “How do ya take your joe, kid? One cream, twenty sugars?”
Birdie gives me one of her irresistible grins—she’s got cherry bits stuck in her teeth—and says, “I yelled that we can’t prove that Mister McGinty murdered Sister Margaret Mary, because—”
“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” I say, forcing myself to sound nicer than I feel, because even though I want to throttle her, from years of experience, I know that when it comes to getting her to do what I want her to do, I’ll always catch more flies with sugar than vinegar. “Thanks so much for remindin’ me that we need a motive to prove that he didn’t do Sister M and M in.”
“What’s a motive?”
Oh, for godssakes.
“A motive is the why somebody would do a crime. Now, if you love me, I’m begging you—”
“I love you more than you will ever know, Tessie,” Birdie says, so heartfelt. “And you’re right. Knowing the why of the crime would be important to have in our murder case, but only if we had an even more important something.”
Well, this is going about as well as the Scarecrow’s search for a brain. (No joke.)
She’s about to tell me something really dumb, but if I don’t want to stand around in these scratchy bushes with her ’til the cows come home, I have to say, “Fine. What is the more important something we need in our murder case that we don’t have?”
“A dead body.”
See? Dumb with a capital D.
“We got a dead body!” I tell her. “The corpse of Sister Margaret Mary that I saw getting carted behind the mausoleum last night! Remember that?”
“And do you remember when you asked me to check for Charlie from the top of the hill that I told you I didn’t see him near the weeping willow tree but that I saw somebody else?”
I don’t care if she saw someone like a griever rushing to Mr. Peterman’s funeral, so I fire back, “And do you remember that I don’t got holes in my head the way you do? Of course I remember. My brain is a steel trap!”
“Then you better let what you caught in there out, because”—Birdie rocks back on her heels with the same pleased smile that Pyewacket the cat gets when she remembers that she’s got nine lives and she can afford to play a little fast and loose—“the somebody else I saw was Sister Margaret Mary running past the weeping willow tree!”
“You . . . you . . . WHAT?”
Oh, no . . . no . . . no . . . please, God, no.
FACT: Seeing a dead nun running through the cemetery is very bad. Very Virginia Cunningham loony.
PROOF: My poor little sister has finally lost every single one of her marbles.
Could this really be the awful moment I’ve been dreading?
I’ve always pictured this kid with the screwed-up brain and messed-up memory who really loves Daddy and Louise and quiz shows and me and Charlie and candy and playing cards and cat’s cradle and belly laughing at all my impressions and drifting away to parts unknown turning into a 100% raving loonatic on a dark and stormy night, not on a cornflower-blue-sky-as-far-as-you-can-see day. She’s not even doing #11 on the LOONY list—drooling, when not asleep. And she hasn’t murdered anyone, either, unless she did it during one of her wild streaks, so I can’t cross #10 off, either.
We got to hurry back home and pick up our plaid running-away suitcase, and the second thing we got to do is hit the road to California ASAP! But before those chips can fall into place, I have to get Birdie to play along, so I tell her in the voice that I’ve practiced many, many times in the middle of the night to BE PREPARED for when this day would come, “You’re safe with me, honey. Just come along quietly and nobody will get hurt.”