The Mutual Admiration Society(8)
“Corpse! Now zip it. I gotta concentrate.”
“A corpse? Oh, no.” Birdie puts her arm around my waist with a real forlorn look on her face. “I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you this bad news,” she says like she’s Nurse Barton getting ready to explain to a patient that they got a deadly disease. “Your good timing is very off this morning, Tessie.” She reaches into my pocket and slides Daddy’s watch out so fast that I don’t barely feel her, because she has real potential as a pickpocket on account of her hands not being much bigger than the ones on the watch she’s holding up. “I think it’s around seven o’clock and Mister McGinty told us yesterday when he was digging Mister Peterman’s grave that he’s not gonna get buried until twelve o’clock today.” She taps the face of the Timex. “That’s when the hands are both straight up and they’re not.”
See who I’m working with here?
She can remember our mother’s #1 Commandment, how important good timing is, and she can recall when the heart-attacked foreman of the Feelin’ Good factory is getting buried today, but she can’t keep in her memory any of the really important stuff, which is just about everything I need her to.
“A course I didn’t forget that Mister Peterman is getting buried at noon today,” I say crossly, because honestly, as much as I love the skin she’s in, she can get on my nerves. “I’m not looking for his old corpse. I’m looking for a really fresh one.”
“A really fresh what?”
Showing and not telling her what I heard and saw last night in the cemetery isn’t working out, so I point at Holy Cross and come clean. “I’m ninety-five percent positive a murder got committed over there last night!” When Birdie’s slightly bulging eyes go even bulgier, I go ahead and tell her the whole story, wrapping up with, “I couldn’t see him real good because it was so dark and those streetlights are always flickering in that part of the cemetery, but I could tell that our suspect was tall and skinny before he disappeared behind the Gilgood mausoleum with a limp body in his arms, which is why it definitely couldn’t have been Mister Howard Howard. He’s built like a fire hydrant and he really likes—”
“Dinah’s jelly donuts and three sugars in his Jim,” Birdie nods and says, very knowingly.
“You mean three sugars in his joe.”
“Roger that.”
“That’s why I wanted you to climb the cemetery fence this morning with me.” I am feeling as deflated as my bike tire went when I rode over that broken glass last week behind Lonnigan’s. (I know I gave it up, but I just couldn’t help myself from wanting to stare at the back door of the bar one more time and wish Daddy would walk out of it.) “I wanted to show you that murder,” I tell my sister.
“A murder?” she says. “Huh.” She scratches her head. “You wanna show it to me now?”
I sure would, but we’ve run out of time. Two streets over, the bells of St. Kate’s are clanging quarter past seven, which means Louise will be expecting breakfast on the table soon, so that’s that. But when I turn to look back at what I can see of Holy Cross one last time to make sure I didn’t miss anything, it hits me that my remorseful sister might be able to lend a hand after all.
Along with her excellent hearing, because her eyes bulge slightly closer to objects, Birdie can also see better than me or anybody else I know. (The kid can scout things out better than an Apache searching for a wagon train during a total eclipse.)
“We can’t go over there anymore,” I tell my almost-always-starving sister, “because it’s almost time for breakfast and I know you wouldn’t wanna be late for that.”
She licks her lips and says, “No, I certainly would not want to be late for breakfast,” and then her tummy growls to second that motion.
“But before we go back into the house,” I tell her, “you know what you could do for me real quick?”
“What could I do for you real quick, Tessie?” she says, looking a little less hungry and more like she’d knock herself over the head with a rock if I asked her to, because she might have a really cruddy memory and all other sorts of weird problems, but she really does love me.
Quickly, before her big tummy can get control of her tiny brain again, I point at Holy Cross and say, “I’ve looked and looked, but I don’t see any evidence of a murder taking place over there, so could you take a quick peek?”
“Why, what an absolutely splendid idea, young lady!” she cheers up and says. “I’d be delighted to lend a helping hand!”
Oh, boy.
She just started doing this lately. Out of the blue, for some unknown reason, she starts to act and talk old-fashioned. It’s not like she’s perfectly imitating voices the way I discovered I could do in St. Kate’s choir loft last year. I thought it was some kind of miracle, ya know? Like turning loaves into fishes. There I was making fun of Sister Raphael behind her back like I always did and still do, because she makes me sing with the boys, when . . . lo and behold . . . instead of my own husky voice coming out of my mouth, I sounded exactly like that crabby penguin! And it wasn’t just Sister Raphael. With some practice, I found out I could do pretty good impressions of just about anybody. That’s not what Birdie does. She just suddenly goes really old-timey on me every once in a while. She might’ve picked it up from the ton of movies and TV shows we watch that take place in cowboy and Indian times, gangster times, and monster times, I don’t know. I’m also not sure if I should make this problem #12 on my SURE SIGNS OF LOONY list. It’s kinda hard to pin down.