“Yeah, sure. I’m just, you know, kind of bored, that’s all.” I went to the piano and sat on the bench and lifted the fallboard to expose the keys, thinking that if I played for her, she might stay longer.
She came to the piano and stood there, but she didn’t stop talking long enough for me to begin playing. “You don’t know bored until you’ve gone to lunch at Aunt Judy’s. Poor sweet Malcolm. Judy’s husband, Duncan, is ages older than she is. When Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, he based Scrooge on Uncle Duncan, who has nothing but deep disdain for anyone named Pomerantz, with some justification. He recently suffered congestive heart failure twice, he’s not long for our world. Aunt Judy isn’t able to have children, so Mom persists in the delusion that Judy will develop a great affection for her socially inept nephew, which she never did with me. Anyway, Mom hopes that when Duncan dies, Judy will turn on the money spigot to help her troubled nephew and his family. Fat chance. Aunt Judy isn’t a moron. What I expect is, if Uncle Duncan hasn’t gone to Heaven by the next time they have lunch, my mother will keep Judy distracted and expect Malcolm to find our uncle and smother him with a pillow or nudge him over the balcony railing and down forty stories to the street. Are you sure you feel all right?”
“Yeah. I’m fine. Why do you keep asking?”
“Why do you keep putting a hand to your chest?”
“What hand?”
“That hand, your hand, you just did it again, like you’ve got indigestion or a pain or something.”
I looked down at my hand on my chest and realized that I had been unconsciously, habitually checking to be sure that the Lucite heart remained under my shirt, at the end of its chain.
“I have this little patch of stuff,” I said.
“Patch of stuff? Patch of what?”
“A rash or something. It itches a little. I’m pressing on it instead of scratching it, ’cause I don’t want to spread it.”
I don’t know why I didn’t show her the pendant. Maybe I worried that she’d have lots of questions about it, and that once she got me talking, I might spill too much. What a smooth liar I had become.
“Let me see,” Amalia said.
“Are you kidding? No way. I’m not letting a girl look at my chest rash.”
“Now, don’t be silly. You’re still a child, and I’m not a girl, I’m me.”
“I’m not a sissy, you know. I’m not going to make a big deal about a little rash.”
She rolled her eyes. “Masculine pride. All right, let the skin fungus or whatever it is eat you alive.”
“It’s not a skin fungus. There isn’t such a thing.”
“Well, there is,” she said. “But I didn’t come over here to talk fungus. I’m thinking you and I and Malcolm ought to take the bus into Midtown on Monday, have another excursion. The poor dear deserves it after Aunt Judy, and the summer is melting away.”
The following day, Sunday, both my mother and grandfather would be home, and we would probably do something fun together. On Monday, however, they would be at work again, and I would be home alone if I didn’t go with Amalia and Malcolm. Mr. Yoshioka wasn’t likely to hear from Mr. Otani until late Monday afternoon. If I stayed home, I’d be going a little crazier hour by hour, checking and re-checking the window screens and the cutlery drawer.
“What would we do?” I asked.
“Something cheaper. No admission fee this time. Just the bus fare and a little money for lunch. You seemed to like the courthouse tour, so I thought we could make it a day of architecture, all those fabulous old public buildings in that neighborhood. Malcolm loves architecture.”
“Okay,” I said. “I guess that sounds cool.”
“Same time as before.”
“I’ll be ready.”
“Cortaid.”
“What?”
“For the rash,” she said.
71
By eight o’clock Saturday evening, as he would later testify, Dr. MaceMaskil had reached the conclusion that the wisest course would be to say nothing to Lucas Drackman about Mrs. Nozawa inquiring after him. Maybe she was telling the truth, and maybe Lucas had done some great kindness for her and her husband in an uncharacteristic moment of humanity, in which case he would not be high-tailing it to Illinois to kill her and perhaps the professor, too, and there would be no danger that the truth about the murder of Noreen by proxy would become known. Hell, maybe Lucas had killed someone for them. Why couldn’t it be, he asked himself, that the Nozawa bitch was lying about having inadequately thanked Lucas and was instead trying to contact him because she had someone else she wanted him to blow away? She was a businesswoman, after all, queen of clean, cars and clothes, and in the professor’s opinion, there were no more ruthless, bloody-minded people on the planet than business types.