Extreme Unction: A Lupa Schwartz Mystery Page 6

  I wasn’t about to learn either. As the tape clicked off, he simply smiled like a gargoyle and said, “Very satisfactory.”

  ***

  Dinner that evening was a vegetarian utopia. Fried green tomatoes flavored with fresh basil and dill, green beans and corn succotash, and pita bread and humus, with a crumbly peach pie for desert. I didn’t even realize that the meat course was absent until I was almost through my cobbler.

  Just about the time that Schwartz was finishing up his second cup of coffee, the doorbell rang. Beverly excused herself to see who it would be, and Mia and I cleared our places; or as Beverly would say, we “wret up” after ourselves. No sooner had we placed our dishes in the sink than a loud argument began in the foyer.

  Mia and I scurried around the stairwell to see a smallish but solid woman holding Beverly by the hair as Schwartz’s cook reached around to claw at the woman’s left eye. We were about to lend our assistance to the fracas, when Schwartz appeared in the foyer from the dining-room’s middle exit. He had the bread knife he’d been using at dinner which he brandished in the face of the strange woman who held Beverly’s collapsed French twist in her unforgiving grasp. “Miss,” he said assuming her marital status having not been properly introduced as yet, “please release Miss Seanesy’s head.”

  The woman violently pushed Bev to the floor and stepped boldly toward the flatware that threatened to skewer or butter her as the case might warrant. “Are you the asshole that flattened my tires?” the angry stranger, who was becoming less of a stranger each minute, demanded.

  “I am,” Schwartz said, “if you’re the delinquent who blocked my drive.” Beverly had sat up and was clutching at her scalp as Schwartz lowered his arm from full mast to half.

  “The street was full when I got here. I had to park somewhere, pal!” the woman said seemingly owning up to her delinquency.

  Schwartz was shaking his head. “It’s just laziness; laziness and arrogance. There were spaces when we arrived, and because of your self-centeredness, I was forced to park on the street.”

  “Well boo-hoo!” the delinquent said. “Why couldn’t y’ins just wait till I moved, or park out back? Sounds to me like you’re just as lazy. Anyway, you’re paying for my new tires.”

  “You don’t need new tires,” Schwartz said. “I merely let the air out. Just have your car towed to the nearest filling station, and have the air replaced.”

  “Yer a real jagoff, you know dat?” the woman said. “I can’t have a tow truck pull my car on flat tires. They’ll tear on the rims.”

  Schwartz made a gesture of frustration. “Where did you get your driver’s license, from a box of caramel corn?” As he explained the premise of the spare and the tire inflator, Beverly intentionally bumped the woman as she passed on her way to join Mia and me. It scarcely seemed to register.

  “I’m not gunking up a perfectly good tire with that liquid rubber crap you left on my hood!” the woman insisted, “And I refuse to get all filthy changing a tire that you deflated.”

  “You should have considered that before you chose to block my drive,” Schwartz retorted.

  “What should I have considered?” the woman said. “That the owner of the house might be a hot-headed car-snob with a vendetta complex?”

  “Suppose,” Schwartz said, “that I had wanted to pull out while you were parked there rather than pull in? What then?”

  “How does flattening my tires get you out of your garage any quicker?”

  “That’s not the point. The point is…”

  “The point is,” the woman interrupted, “I can’t afford a tow truck, so I’m taking a bus home. Tomorrow is Friday, and I’m not working tomorrow. I also don’t need the car over the weekend, but I’ll come up Sunday with my uncle’s truck to have the car towed to a garage where I can re-inflate the tires. Have a nice weekend, jagoff.”

  The woman turned and skulked from the house with Schwartz close behind berating her and insisting that she move her car immediately. She ignored his shouting, and stood under the bus stop sign on Murray Ave. Eventually, we grew bored of watching the excitement from Schwartz’s porch, and the three of us — Mia, Bev and I — returned to the dishes. Finally, Schwartz came into the house. He went directly to the garage entrance and disappeared for several minutes. When he returned he had a second can of fix-a-flat, and he stormed through the house to the front exit.

  Mia ran after him. “Mr. Schwartz,” she said “what are you doing?”

  Schwartz stopped and said, “I’m going to re-inflate two of her tires and have the city come and impound her vehicle.”

  “You’d better not,” Mia said. “It’ll give her a case for vandalism. You go to bed. I’ll take care of things here.”

  “What are you going to do?” Schwartz asked sheepishly. Mia, however, refused to answer.

  ***

  For the next hour and a half, Beverly and I drank chocolate milk and piña coladas as Mia got revenge for Beverly’s humiliation. First, she brought a diesel powered air compressor up from the garage and re-inflated all four of the flattened tires. Next, she brought out four industrial jacks and hoisted the woman’s car several feet off of the street. She put a boat trailer under the car’s carriage and lowered it gently aboard, then she stopped a few strong looking men who’d happened past and asked them to help move her “grandmother’s car” up the block. We invited them to join us for a drink, and two beers later, we excused ourselves from the company of these incidental muscles so that we could return to the business at hand.

  With the woman’s car safely out of our jurisdiction, Mia retreated to the garage and returned shortly with a similar looking if better maintained auto to the one we had been dealing with; this one from Schwartz‘s collection. She quickly made a switch with the license plates, and for all practical purposes, this new car was the one that had been parked here for several hours.

  Mia came up to the porch, and gestured for my cell phone. I handed it to her, and she dialed the police. She reported that a car had been left blocking the drive at this address for several hours and requested a tow truck to come and remove it. When she finished with the call, she went into the kitchen to pour herself a rum and Coke. Beverly and I waited for her return, and once she was comfortable, we asked her how having Mr. Schwartz’s car towed was going to satisfy our prank.

  “Once I know where they’ve towed the car to, I’ll go and switch back the plates. Then I’ll bring her car back here before she comes for it on Sunday. I’ll meet her and explain that we felt badly, so we refilled her tires with the compressor. She’ll drive off, and good citizen that I am, I’ll wait a few days, then report that she stole her car from impound.”

  Beverly laughed out loud, but I still had questions. “What about Schwartz’s car?” I said. “It will still be locked in the impound lot.”

  Mia grinned. “But there’ll be no record of Mr. Schwartz’s car having been towed there. I’ll just take a bus out to the impound lot someday next week and drive home in Mr. Schwartz’s car.”

  “What makes you think they’ll let you onto the lot?” I asked.

  “What made me think that I could get two guys to help me pull my grandmother’s car up the street?” she answered.

  Chapter 9

  Breakfast the next morning was a contest of will, but the only will being challenged was Schwartz’s. He desperately wanted to ask what had become of the car belonging to the irritating female delinquent who had ruined his digestion the evening before, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. We ladies, on the other hand, couldn’t have cared less if he knew or not, but we made a show of wishing he would ask.

  “Is your coffee hot enough, Lupa?” Beverly asked while she rubbed her scalp as if it were still hurting.

  “Yes,” Schwartz said. “It’s fine, um…” he poised as if to say more, and then gestured it away with a brush of his hand. “Mia,” he said at last, “Were you able to get the Lambourghini into the garage last night?”

 
Mia brought her juice glass to her lips and nodded. “Mmm hmm,” she said.

  “Do we need to make any repairs?” he asked when it had sunk in that she wouldn’t be offering more.

  “No,” she answered. “Why would we?”

  “So everything is in proper order?”

  Mia was cutting into her short stack, pretending not to realize that he was addressing her with a question. Schwartz cleared his throat softly, and Mia glanced up. “It’s fine,” she said in the attitude of one who spoke the obvious.

  “Mr. Schwartz,” I said, “about last night…” I waited for him to ask for more. He didn’t disappoint.

  “Yes,” he said in eager agitation. “What about it?”

  “Well,” I said, “you never set today’s schedule. I assume you’ll be going to the garage after breakfast, but do you have anything you’d like for me to be doing during that time?”

  He sat back; a little annoyed that I had changed the subject despite the fact that the subject was transient. “No,” he said. Then, “Yes! Yes, I have. I want you to take one of my cars and watch the Hanson’s as they arrive at the funeral home. I’ll arrive afterward, and we can enter together to continue the interrogations. First though, I want for you to observe unannounced to see if you notice any odd behavior.

  “You should take something unspectacular, something that won’t draw anybody’s attention, something like that car driven by that annoying little woman parked in front of my driveway. Mia, we have a black Fiero like that, don’t we?” Either he was showing off that he knew more than we thought, or (in his desperation to get us to tell him what had happened the night before) he had stumbled onto just the right question to ask.

  Mia quickly recovered and answered, “I think she should take the Tracer. That’s what you bought it for. It’s the stakeout car.”

  He had been flounced, and it galled, but he had to admit that this was fact. “I thought,” he said, “that we were having problems with the reverse.”

  I jumped in. “I won’t pull in anywhere that I’ll have to back out. That’s all.”

  So that’s how I would come to be stuck in downtown Pittsburgh in a funeral home parking lot in a Mercury Tracer with a pair of binoculars, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

  ***

  Getting around Pittsburgh’s downtown (or dahntahn if you’re a native) is not an easy task to begin with, but when the car you’re driving insists on moving in a forward only disposition, it’s a frustration of epic extent. Pittsburgh is not built on a regular grid-work of longitudinal and latitudinal cross-streets. The map starts at the confluence of two rivers into a third called “The Point,” and the main streets radiate out from this site like spokes from the hub of a wheel. Consequently, the intersecting streets chop the city up into irregular shaped blocks that scream, “You can’t get there from here.”

  At one point, I realized in the proverbial “nick-of-time” that the street I was turning down was extremely narrow and ran straight under the center of a department store. Had I been forced to make way for a passing mini-van, unable to back out as I was, I might have been permanently stuck behind a parked car. At another juncture, I found myself passing the cross street I needed while on a one-way street that had no left turning lane and right turns that seemed to head only to another one-way street oriented in the wrong direction. I could have pulled over to get help, but I’d have had to parallel park, and how do you do that without reverse?

  At last, I was able to pull over by parking side-long across three marked spaces at a gas-n-go (an act that would have earned me the valve-core treatment from Schwartz.) Armed with good filling-station-attendant directions I was able to locate the funeral home.

  As I turned into the far lot of the establishment, I noticed a Sedan pulling in close to the building. I stopped on the gravel lot and rummaged in my purse for the opera glasses Schwartz had given me for my task. I saw that the Sedan held Carl Hanson in the driver’s seat and his mousy little wife Sara beside him. In the back seat sat his mousy tall sister Marjorie and her unimpressive engineer husband Melvin. This alone would have been unremarkable except for the fact that the women seemed to be rebuking Carl. I had no idea what for; whether it was for killing his father or for driving too far to the left on the way there; but that these women (who had been so mealy around Peg) were actually naggish to their men-folk gave me a moment’s pause. With my mind thus occupied, I pulled head-on into the nearest parking space.

  The instant I’d crossed the point of no return, I realized that there was no way to simply pull through when it came time to exit. At first, I considered waiting for Schwartz, but I couldn’t stand to let him see me in this pickle. Besides, I was on stake out. What if I had to beat a hasty retreat?

  I put the gear shift on “N” and opened the driver’s-side door. I placed my foot as firmly as possible on the gravel (which wasn’t very firmly since I was in heels, this being a funeral home visit,) and I shoved my back into the car-seat, my shoulder braced on the frame. I pushed steadily, and the car simply rolled back until the slack in the axle gave out. I thought to rock the car, so I began to rhythmically push and relax and push again. Several times my foot slipped out and scuffed on the dry dusty rock-bed. At one point, I actually had the car rocking to where I thought it might begin to coast, but when I stopped rocking, it rolled forward and left me in an even worse location deeper into the parking space.

  I was about to get out of the car altogether and push from the front when I saw a second car parking near the funeral home. This car contained Sam Hanson and his wife Melissa. I hadn’t met her yet. She’d been working at her job at the hospital when we’d gone to the Hanson home. When they got out from the car, I saw that she was of medium height and had short brown hair. Her figure was neither stocky nor svelte. Her gate was neither slumped nor majestic. If there was such a thing as perfectly average, she fit the bill with mundane flawlessness.

  Before they could make it into the building, a third and final car squealed onto the asphalt lot. Matthew Hanson had chauffeured his siblings, Peg and Lewis, as though he’d wanted to show them how prompt the insurance company he worked for was when he filed his own claim after the car-crash. Lewis disengaged his seat-belt and pushed open the car-door in one fluid and disturbed motion. He was on the parking lot and out of Matthew’s version of hyper-space as fast as he could be.

  Mellissa walked over to hug Peg, who seemed to be genuinely receptive to condolence for the first time. The brothers gathered in a cluster with their hands each thrust into their pockets. They spoke in short sentences and nodded a lot. Soon, however, Matthew’s hands were out of his pockets and on his brothers’ shoulders. He spoke conspiratorially and laughed at his own witticism. His brothers chuckled politely and kicked at the ground. Then Peg directed that they should all go into the building. They all entered except for Matthew, who waited under the awning as he smoked a cigarette.

  A few moments later, a sporty red car pulled into the parking lot next to Matthew’s car. The driver remained in her seat, while Matthew stepped out his cigarette and ambled over to her. He leaned over and kissed the driver and spoke to her for a few minutes, then he indicated the building with a head tilt and kissed her again. He waved as she pulled out of the lot, and then he went inside to join the others.

  I passed the glass over the building one last time to satisfy myself that I couldn’t get any further information from this vantage. Then I set back to the task of trying to free the Mercury.

  I don’t know how I’d missed the sound of his footsteps on the gravel, but as my foot fell from the car, it lit on the toe of the police officer who had been watching me watch the Hansons. “What are you doing, ma’am?” he asked.

  “Er,” I said, “I’m uh — I’m a reporter,” I said holding out the spy glass as if it were a standard piece of journalistic gear. “I’m covering the Hanson/Coneely case for Gamut. I have my credentials.”

  “The funeral home’s parking lot is private property
, ma’am,” the policeman said. “You’re going to have to move on.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “My reverse is out, see?” I said indicating the scuff marks on my shoe as if that proved it. “I was trying to push it out earlier. I’m kind of stuck.”

  “License and registration, ma’am,” John-law said. To which I said, “What?” He repeated himself, and I said, “The registration isn’t in my name, and my license is from out of state.”

  Next he said the worst possible thing. “Step out of the car please, ma’am.”

  ***

  Over the next long minutes, I’d explained everything about why I was in this predicament to the officer. Everything that is, except that the reason I was driving a car that I knew had no reverse was because we didn’t want to explain to Schwartz that another of his cars was in the city impound lot with bogus plates. He found the story funny and had decided to let me off the hook. I was about to leave the officer’s car to resume rocking Schwartz’s defective Tracer out of this predicament, when a Ford Thunderbird identical to the one in American Graffiti pulled onto the lot.

  Schwartz’s smirk was as unwelcome to me at that moment as an uncle in drag at a christening. Schwartz ambled over to the driver’s side of the squad car and greeted the officer. Apparently he knew every cop on the force by name, since he said, “It’s okay, Larry. She’s with me.”

  “That’s what she tells me,” Larry said. “Do you want me to call for a tow?”

  Schwartz shook his head. “That won’t be necessary. I thought this might happen, so I brought a chain. I’ll pull her out.”

  ***

  We waited for the officer to leave before pulling the car to the middle of the lot. Schwartz showed some character by not saying anything unkind. He asked me to tell him what — if anything — I’d observed, so I filled him in on everything — up to and including the kissie-face in the red sports car. When I’d finished, we went into the funeral home.