Macdeath (An Ivy Meadows Mystery Book 1) Page 7

  It seems the mother and daughter had met William at a country club where they played doubles regularly. He showed up one day from Palm Beach and swept the older woman off her feet. “An abominable tennis player,” she’d admitted to her daughter, “but so adorable in his tennis whites.” His abominable tennis playing had raised the daughter’s antennae. He’d told her he’d been a member of the Palm Country Country Club for years. The horrible redundancy of the club name, she said, was another clue that something was dirty beneath those tennis whites.

  “So,” said Uncle Bob, “is there a Palm Country Country Club in Palm Beach?”

  “Nope,” I said. “There is a Palm Beach Country Club, a North Palm Beach Country Club, a Palm Beach Polo and Country Club, and a Palm Beach National Golf and Country Club. I called them all, asking for him, just in case he misspoke. No William Nottingham.”

  “Good,” said my uncle.

  “Why do people lie about things that are so easy to check out?” I asked.

  “Don’t know.” He shrugged. “But it happens all the time and it keeps us in business. Had a guy once say he’d been mayor of Why, Arizona. But Why’s never had a mayor. It’s not incorporated. Want to know why?”

  I nodded.

  “Then you gotta live there for awhile.” He chuckled. “Get it? To know Why, you gotta live there.”

  I shook my head. Didn’t want to encourage him.

  “What else you got?” he asked.

  “Aliases,” I said with a grin. “A ton of them. His real name is not William Nottingham, it’s Billy Bob Nuttin. He has been Bill Nettham, B. McNaughton, and Will Nott. He was billed as ‘Naughty Willy’ in a racy British film and had a brief career as a hip hop singer by the name of B.B. Nuthin.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He had a single that got a bit of airplay, ‘Nuthin’s Good Enough for You.’”

  “Are you making this shit up?”

  I crossed my heart. “Swear to God.”

  “Nice work,” said my uncle, patting me on the head. I really wished he wouldn’t do that. “Ready to lock up?” he asked.

  “Almost,” I said. “Just need to finish up a few things. See you in the morning?” I was learning that my uncle often spent most of the day out of the office doing PI-type stuff like surveillance.

  “Yep,” said my uncle, picking up his keys. “See you later, alligator.”

  “In a while, crocodile.”

  Uncle Bob left, whistling whatever tune he’d begun earlier. Once it had faded away down the hall, I quickly went back to the web page I’d been looking at before he came in.

  “Alcohol poisoning,” read the medical info page I’d pulled up, “can be deadly.” I quickly scanned the information. Most people who die of alcohol poisoning, it said, either lapse into a coma and stop breathing or pass out and aspirate on their own vomit. When I found him, Simon was definitely unconscious and he had certainly thrown up. But did he really die from drinking one bottle of brandy? I kept reading until I found what I was hoping for—the information that convinced me Simon did not die from alcohol poisoning.

  CHAPTER 16

  Ere the Set of Sun

  “HONK!”

  “Oh my gosh, I’m sorry,” I shouted out the open window of my car. I’d almost made a left turn into an SUV. “Sorry!” I yelled again to the woman behind the wheel, who shook her head at me.

  I was on my way home from Uncle Bob’s and thinking about Simon. Not only could I not think and move at the same time, it seemed I couldn’t drive and think either. Luckily, I was nearly at my destination. I focused on the road until I got to my apartment complex, pulled into my reserved space, locked my car, and resumed thinking again.

  It wasn’t the new information I had about alcohol poisoning that was bothering me. It was the note. And the fact that Simon was Jewish. My brain had decided there was a connection, but couldn’t quite make sense of it, like when you see the shape of a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle, but none of the ones that look right actually fit.

  I climbed the exterior stairs to my second-floor apartment, went in, and wanted to leave immediately. I had prepared myself for the 90-degree interior, but not for the smell. While grocery shopping after the show last night, I bought some “discounted for quick sale” chicken breasts, brought them home and skinned and cooked them. I had thought losing a few pounds might help me fit better into my XXS leotard (which the costumers had deemed okay, probably because they were already building costumes for the next show). I had also left raw chicken skin in a 90-degree apartment all day. I grabbed the offending trash bag, scuttled down the stairs, and threw it in the dumpster.

  Back in the apartment, I used up a whole can of Dollar Store air freshener. It didn’t get rid of the stink, just layered a grape juice-like scent on top of it. I turned off the air conditioner and opened all the windows. A hot breeze wafted through the screens. It would raise the temperature inside a few degrees, but it should also take care of the smell.

  I changed into a tank top and pair of shorts and headed out toward the canal. Maybe a walk would clear my head while the breeze cleared out my apartment.

  The canal was just a few blocks from my apartment. Part of an irrigation system that zigzagged across the Valley, it had gravel walking/biking paths along each side and a slightly cooler air temperature, thanks to the water. The coolness was what drew me, not the water. I made sure to stay a good fifteen feet away from the canal’s steep concrete edges.

  I walked at a good clip (fitting into that leotard was never far from my mind), my jigsaw puzzle mind still sorting pieces. What was it about the note? The words “I am so sorry I caused you pain” did sound like they came from someone who knew he was doing harm, but they weren’t specific. Was that what was bothering me?

  I heard a crack under my feet and looked down. Just an old bit of sun-bleached plastic trash. A scrap of paper fluttered nearby.

  A scrap. Huh.

  I stopped, that “not being able to move and think” issue kicking in. A scrap. My brain tried to fit this piece into the puzzle. Simon’s note had been torn—at the top and the bottom. Even if he had decided to not give me the first part of the note, why tear off the bottom?

  A duck landed with a splash in the canal, which shone orange with the setting sun. I turned to go home. One of Arizona’s superlative sunsets stretched across the western sky. Sunset. “Sunrise, Sunset...” The tune from Fiddler on the Roof ran through my head. My mind picked up the Jewish piece of the puzzle.

  A few weeks ago, I was in the greenroom with all of the other actors when we heard shouting down the hall. The typical pre-rehearsal hubbub stopped as we all tried to eavesdrop.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” Pamela, her voice loud and uncharacteristically screechy.

  A murmur from a male voice.

  Riley poked his head into the hall. “It’s Pamela,” he said, stating the obvious. “And Simon.”

  “Your behavior?” Pamela sounded a bit unhinged. “Your treachery, you mean? Your betrayal? Your—” We all heard what sounded like a slap, followed by a door slam.

  I waited a few minutes then knocked on Simon’s dressing room door.

  “Come in.”

  Simon sat in front of the mirror staring at a red slap mark on his face.

  “I heard,” I said.

  “I just wanted to talk to her. To apologize.” He shook his head at himself. “This step, I thought it would be like the Day of Atonement, but I’m afraid for me it may turn out to be a Lifetime of Atonement.”

  I was confused by what Simon meant, but it didn’t seem a good time to ask about it. I patted him on the shoulder and left him alone. Now, thanks to Fiddler on the Roof and the strange way my brain made connections, I recognized the Day of Atonement as something from Simon’s Jewish past. But what did the rest
mean?

  I had stopped walking again. Not good, as I wanted to be off the canal by dark. I stepped up my pace and walked toward the sunset, now fading into violet.

  By the time I reached my still-smelly but bearable apartment, my brain had fit the puzzle together. “This step,” Simon had said. He was in A.A., a twelve-step program. Atonement must be one of the steps.

  CHAPTER 17

  Commencing in a Truth

  I tried out my new theory on my uncle the next day at the office. He was working on the computer at his desk, so I had set up my laptop on a wooden TV tray facing the window. “So when he said ‘atonement,’” I said, “I figure he must have been talking about...” I consulted my computer screen. “‘Making direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.’”

  Uncle Bob had moved the swamp cooler to his garage for the season so I could see out the window. It was a nice idea, but all I could really see was the jail across the street. Bet some of those folks could have used a Day of Atonement.

  “Olive.” The look my uncle gave me was tinged with sympathy.

  I ignored it. “So I’m thinking maybe he wrote that note to make amends, as an apology.”

  “Olive—”

  “Not to me,” I charged ahead, “but to someone else, for something in his past. I mean, he had quite the past.”

  “Olive!”

  I stopped. My uncle rarely raised his voice.

  “I think you’re going to be disappointed in your theory,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Look at your screen.”

  I did.

  “That step you just read to me—it’s one of the Twelve Steps. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “What number?”

  I looked. “Step Number Nine.”

  “And how long had Simon been in A.A.?”

  I stopped to think. He’d started going to meetings right before the read-through and we had four weeks of rehearsal. “A little over a month.” As I said it, my heart sunk a little. “Does it take longer than that to get to Step Nine?”

  “Yeah,” my uncle said. “Usually a lot longer.”

  I’m sure he saw the way my face fell, because he decided to put it in a professional light. “If you’re going to work in a detective agency, you’re going to have to remember you can’t stop investigating when you find the answer you want. You have to follow any ideas all the way through.”

  So I did. After work, I used my budding investigative skills to find Simon’s former A.A. meeting. Actually, it was pretty simple. Simon had told me he attended meetings at “the Cupcake Church.” I Googled that, found out the real name of the church was Asbury United Methodist, and with another click of my mouse discovered that an A.A. chapter met there on Tuesdays at 6 p.m. I felt inordinately proud of myself.

  I spotted the church a block before I reached it. Its nickname served it well—the stand-alone concrete building looked like, yep, a giant cupcake, with several slender crosses where birthday candles might be.

  My dashboard clock said six on the dot when I turned into the parking lot. I jogged to the cupcake and pulled on the door, but it didn’t give. I looked at my watch. Just a few minutes past six. I was sure this was the right time and place.

  “You looking for the A.A. meeting?” A fiftyish man wearing a shirt and tie called to me from the parking lot.

  “Yeah.”

  “Over here.” He pointed toward a low cinderblock building. “That’s just the chapel,” he said, nodding at the building I’d come from. “We meet in the Fellowship Hall.”

  I followed the nice man, who held the door for me as we entered the building. The utilitarian-looking room was brightened up by a colorful mural of a desert scene on one wall. I smelled cigarette smoke and coffee, though I couldn’t see anyone smoking.

  The meeting was already in session. A small group of people sat in a circle near the mural. They were a real mixed bag: from a young guy with a shaved head and tats to a sweet-faced woman with a long gray braid.

  “I’m Tammy and I’m an alcoholic,” said the woman with the braid.

  “Hi Tammy,” everyone said. My new friend grabbed two more folding chairs from a rack. A few people scooted to make room for us.

  “Want a Big Book?” The guy I’d followed in grabbed a blue book from a stack on the table and handed it to me. I sat down and flipped through the book, which had Alcoholics Anonymous written on the cover. Inside, passages were underlined and circled, and in the front of the book someone had written “Sober for 17 days.”

  I heard Simon’s voice in my head: “I have been sober for thirty-eight days.” Thirty-eight. That was the last number on the notepaper taped to the mirror. Simon was keeping track of his days of sobriety. One item crossed off my investigative checklist and one more reason to think he hadn’t been drinking.

  I noticed it had gone quiet.

  “It’s your turn,” said my new friend.

  I stood up. “My name is Ivy Meadows and I am an actress.”

  “No last names,” the woman with the gray braid said kindly. “And it’s ‘alcoholic,’ not ‘actress.’ Though some of us are pretty good at acting.” A few chuckles from the group.

  I felt my face flush. I hadn’t thought this all the way through. “But I’m not,” I said. “An alcoholic, I mean.” Sympathetic eyes looked at me. “Wait, let me start again. I’m a friend of Simon Black—”

  “No last names,” someone said.

  “Right. Sorry.” I fumbled for the words. “I’m here because they say Simon died of alcohol poisoning. But I don’t think he relapsed. I just don’t believe it. I guess I’m here to see what you think. Oh! And to find out what step he was working on.”

  My new friend in the shirt and tie shook his head slowly. “Ivy, there’s a reason it’s called Alcoholics Anonymous.”

  Oh. Duh. I shut my eyes. “I am so sorry,” I said. I sat down.

  “It’s okay,” my friend said. “But we can’t help you.” Then he said, “I’m Rodney and I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Hi Rodney,” said the group.

  I was getting ready to sneak out of there when Rodney said, “I used to go to a regular A.A. meeting...”

  A regular meeting? Then what was this? I sat back down and listened. People shared their experiences and their struggles. They took turns reading from the Big Book, passages of which were also projected on a screen. Every so often, someone would read a question and the entire group would respond affirmatively. The experience felt a bit like going to a very accepting church. In fact, they closed the meeting with the Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.” I prayed it along with them.

  When the meeting broke up, most of the group ambled over to a table where coffee and cupcakes waited. “In honor of the church,” Rodney said, handing me a pink frosted beauty with red sprinkles. I wasn’t planning to eat one (that leotard again), but I took the cupcake, just to be polite. “Listen, if you ever want to know more about A.A.,” he said, “just give me a call.” He handed me a business card. It had only his first name, a phone number, and “A.A. Back to Basics” written on it.

  I put the card in my purse. “I’d like to apologize for the way I barged in here tonight.”

  He waved away my apology, no big deal. “You were just trying to help your friend,” he said. Then, as I opened my mouth, “But we really can’t talk about that.”

  “No, no, I understand. I wanted to ask what you meant when you said ‘a regular meeting.’ Isn’t this a regular meeting?” I nibbled at my cupcake. It was moist and tender and really, really good.

  “Well, it’s a regular meeting of Back to Basics.”


  “Back to Basics?” I took a bigger bite of the cupcake. Calories be damned.

  “Yeah,” he said, warming to the subject. “We work on the Twelve Steps the way the original founders of A.A. did back in the 1940s. Back then, people who came to A.A. had a 50-75% rate of recovery. The success rates in regular groups have gone down since then.”

  “But what’s the difference?” I said, trying not to lick my empty cupcake wrapper.

  “Sorry.” Rodney smiled with all his teeth. “I do get on a roll. It’s just that this program has worked so well for me. The difference between a regular A.A. group and Back to Basics,” he said, “is that we complete all of the Twelve Steps in one month.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Worth More Sorrow

  After the show on Wednesday, the greenroom was full of people waiting for Simon’s memorial. Everyone was in attendance: Pamela, Edward, Linda, the entire cast and crew. I snaked my way through them, an enormous plate of Candy’s homemade Pecan Sandies in one hand and a pitcher of punch in the other. I tried to focus on handling the very full pitcher and the plate stacked high with cookies, but my mind kept circling a new idea: If Simon didn’t drink himself to death, something else killed him. Or someone else. I considered each person I passed. Did Simon write one of them a note of apology? A note that ended up in my dressing room, intended to convince me Simon’s death was suicide?

  “Witch!” I jumped at Bill Boxer’s voice, too close. One of the Sandies slid off the plate onto the floor. Riley nabbed it. “Five second rule!” Right. Riley’s rule was probably more like five months.

  “May I carry that for you?” asked Bill. Unusual. No one would call Bill gracious.

  “Thanks.” I handed him the pitcher.