The Mutual Admiration Society
Lesley Kagen
1
PARTY POOPER
I, Theresa Marie “Tessie” Finley, hereby confess that on the night of October 17th, 1959, instead of keeping my ears to the ground and my eyes peeled for suspicious goings-on in our neighborhood, the way I swore to do on the Holy Bible, I screwed up really bad.
For cripessakes, any president of a blackmail and detecting society worth their salt would’ve at least poked their head outta their bedroom window at 12:07 a.m. to see who was hollering their head off in the cemetery behind their house, “I’m warning you! Watch yourself! You’re treading on dangerous ground!” But what did I do? I acted like some dumb schmoe who doesn’t know the score.
According to Chapter One in what has to be the best book ever written on the subject, Modern Detection, a private investigator is never supposed to “assume” they know something without having proof and they’re also never supposed to “let emotions cloud their judgment.”
But the minute I heard that hollering over at Holy Cross, I’m ashamed to say, instead of really listening to the voice barging through our bedroom window so I could figure out who it was—I am an ace at that sort of thing—I right away “assumed” that it was Mr. Howard Howard, because every once in a while (mostly after he’s been hitting the schnapps bottle), he staggers over to the cemetery in the wee hours to collapse in a heap on his wife’s grave to bawl his eyes out and threaten God that He better give his Mrs. back ASAP or else. And if that wasn’t bad enough, I also let my emotions cloud my judgment, because Mr. Howard Howard and me, we have that in common.
I could be an expert witness on sad madness. If Mr. Perry Mason called me to the stand, I’d step right up, swear to tell the whole truth and nothin’ but, and testify in that court of law how when the missing sadness comes out of nowhere to kick me where it hurts, I’d say and do almost anything to make the pain stop. And how when I start remembering the smell of the Pabst Blue Ribbon beer sloshing around on the bottom of the white motorboat, the cracking sound my father’s head made when it hit the motor, and the taste of the lake water that splashed into my laughing mouth after he fell overboard, I can switch real fast into the off position of God’s and my on-again, off-again relationship, too.
So, when I first heard the yelling in the cemetery, I thought, Give ’em hell, Mister Howard Howard. Let HIM do a little sowing of what HE reaped for once and see how HE likes it, and I went back to doing what I always do in the middle of the night—besides slipping my hand under my sister’s heinie every once in a while to make sure she hadn’t wet the bed, working on my lists, shadowboxing, practicing my impressions, and a couple of sure-fire jokes that I think will get the crowd going—I breathed in deep and got ready to launch into the “Favorite Things” song that I’m going to perform for the talent portion of Miss America someday in honor of my father.
But when a high-pitched scream, also coming out of the cemetery, interrupted “Raindrops on roses . . . ,” a couple of ideas hit me over the head like a “bright copper kettle.” Mister Howard Howard’s voice is much gruffer than the one I’d heard yell, “I’m warning you! Watch yourself! You’re treading on dangerous ground!” And that screeching? Even though it sounded kinda familiar, that couldn’t have belonged to him, neither. That had to have come out of a mouth wearing lipstick.
And thanks to a certain librarian, I knew exactly what I had to do next.
You wouldn’t think by the looks of the gray-eyed brunette that she’d have a brain in her head, but boy, oh, boy, the famous saying that I bet is thrown around the Finney Library on North Ave. more than anywhere else, “You can’t judge a book by its cover,” is so true.