’Cause the three of us have lived in this neighborhood our whole lives, The Mutual Admiration Society knows all the best shortcuts.
We didn’t have time for even a short meeting of the minds on Charlie’s back porch, so when we’re racing down the alley that’ll take us the fastest way to church—Charlie is holding one of Birdie’s hands and I got hold of the other to keep her from gallivanting into Mr. Holland’s yard to grab ripe apples off his tree—I announce, “I hereby call The Mutual Admiration Society to order,” and give Charlie the Reader’s Digest version of THE CASE OF THE MISSING NUN WHO MIGHT BE KIDNAPPED AND MURDERED BUT NOT BY MR. MCGINTY as we bust through the crooked white gate in the Baxters’ backyard, duck under the wash that’s hanging on the Muldoons’ clothesline, hop the rickety fence in the Winners’ side yard, and run across 68th St. to our final destination—St. Kate’s.
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.