The Mutual Admiration Society(59)
When we come to a stop at the bottom of the steps, Charlie grabs a hold of the metal railing and pants out, “I’m really glad that Birdie saw Sister Margaret Mary near the weeping willow, because that means Mister McGinty didn’t murder her and neither did you, Tessie.”
“Yeah, but just ’cause we know now that Sister Margaret Mary isn’t dead, that doesn’t mean—”
Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute.
What in the hell kind of cruddy president am I?
This is a huge something to miss that could really affect our bottom line!
“Maybe I saw some other person getting murdered in Holy Cross last night!” I shout as we climb the steps toward the big church doors.
“Ummm . . .” Charlie says, “please don’t take this the wrong way, Tessie, but you do have a tendency to . . . ahhh . . .”
“Lie?”
“That’s true, but what I was gonna say is that maybe your facts are right about what you heard and saw out your window last night, but you mighta just added them up wrong. Like that time you saw your mother drop something into your applesauce at the fish fry and you were so sure that it was curare or . . . or how about the night we were spyin’ on Mister Johnson doing some stuffing in his basement and you immediately went positive that he was working on the head of a man with a thick tan beard.”
“But . . .”
Okay, fine. It might’ve been a little too far-fetched to think that Louise dropped curare into my applesauce instead of mixing in that disgusting crushed-up iron pill that she’s always trying to force down my throat, but I’d just seen a Sherlock Holmes movie at the Tosa Theatre where that deadly poison was a real problem for him and Watson. And I really resent Charlie bringing up that spying night over at Mr. Johnson’s house. Didn’t I right away admit that I might’ve jumped the gun when the Lutheran taxidermist reached for his beer and I could see by the light on his work table that the head he was working on really belonged to a deer and not a man with a thick tan beard? (We might not have caught him doing something bad that night, but I still think he’s stuffing things he isn’t supposed to in his basement.)
“But if I didn’t see or hear somebody getting murdered,” I say to Charlie in more of a henpecked way than a future wife maybe should, because if he thinks I am going to marry him if he keeps pulling the rug out from under me like this, he’s got another think coming, “then what do you think I saw and heard last night?”
“The Gilgood mausoleum is near the necking tree,” he says, like he has given this a lot of thought.
“Roger that, Charlie,” Birdie nods and tells him with one of her irresistible smiles.
“So what you might’ve witnessed, Tessie, was two greasers having a screaming m . . . m . . . match about how many bases they should run and when the girl wouldn’t do what the boy wanted her to do he punched her in the face and . . . and that’s why she screamed and her body went limp, and then he took her back behind the m . . . m . . . mausoleum to kick her when she was down.”
He knows a lot about what goes on under the necking tree because his four older brothers, when they aren’t wrestling boys, wrestle with girls beneath its branches and they have no problem bragging about who they pinned. And even though his father is not a Golden Gloves champ, the reason Charlie started nervous stuttering is because he knows almost as much as I do about punching and knocking people out. His father used to do that to his mother. Mrs. Garfield couldn’t hide those purple bruises under her eyes at Mass on Sunday no matter how much Pan-Cake makeup she piled on.
But even though what Charlie said could’ve happened last night, because those greasers do have hot-to-trotting and fighting as their two main hobbies, I’m not even close to being sold on that idea. So when my sister bats her slightly bulging eyes at him and says, like she thinks his idea is the best idea she’s heard of since the invention of peanut butter and marshmallow on Wonder bread, “Charlie, that’s such smart thinking!” I’m starting to feel like the odd man out around here, and like maybe I need to spend some time refreshing my sister’s memory about which of us Charlie is engaged to.
My fiancé stops climbing and says to Birdie, “Thank you for the vote of confidence,” but then he turns and says to me, “I really hate to break it to ya, ’cause I know how m . . . m . . . much you’re counting on this now since she wasn’t m . . . m . . . murdered, but . . .” Whatever he’s about to tell me, isn’t going to be good. “Sister M . . . M . . . Margaret M . . . M . . . Mary getting kidnapped by M . . . M . . . Mister Mc . . . Mc . . . McGinty or anybody else is very far-fetched.”
That’s such an awful thing for him to say that I’m too shocked at first to form words to argue with him, and if Birdie opens her mouth to agree with him one more time, I don’t care if she is a featherweight, I’m going to smack her clean off this step!
FACT: The Finley sisters were in the cemetery all morning, so we’ve been out of touch, or what Modern Detection calls “incommunicado.” You wouldn’t believe what can go on in this neighborhood in a couple of hours. Babies get born every five seconds, Mr. Skank gets a new customer on his table, some kid breaks another kid’s nose and sends him to the hospital, fires get set, windows broken, the gals have gab sessions over their backyard fences and hang out some other poor gal to dry.