Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Five

With a spatula picked off the kitchen floor, I began poking through the spilled, opened tins that had been swept from the refrigerator. Louise Thomas had liked canned fruit-pineapple chunks and sliced peaches and fruit cocktail were mixed in among the peas, corn, and salmon. She ate frugally, saving partial cans, and she ate nutritiously. I imagined her to have been a slender woman.

I stood up, certain. The tins on the floor had all been opened. The full cans I’d seen the day before were gone.

For one crazy second, I thought about picking up the few metal spoons, forks, knives, the plastic plates, the saucepan, and dropping them into the sink. The water had been shut off, though, and executors, even seven-hundred-dollar ones like myself, weren’t responsible for cleaning up, especially when the executor himself disdained metal utensils and used only what plasticware he could grab from fast-food restaurants. Still, for a moment, the mess on the floor nagged. It wasn’t about cleaning up for the landlady; it was about respect. I was beginning to shape Louise into a woman of propriety, someone who’d be troubled at leaving disorder behind.

I looked inside the few cabinets. Every one was empty. That fit with the stolen canned goods. Rambling was poor, and the rips in the plastic sheeting were wide. It wasn’t like the dead woman would need the food. Someone in that worn town had seen an opportunity and had taken it.

Outside, automobile tires crunched on the driveway. A second later a car door slammed and heavy feet pounded up the two wood stairs to the porch.

I hurried through the living room and got to the porch just as a short, stout, gray-haired woman wearing a long greasy red coat was raising a key to the porch door lock. Behind her, a Ford station wagon, loaded with empty cardboard boxes, had been backed into the drive. I put on a neighborly face and opened the door.

“Name’s Sturrow,” the woman said, trying to push her way in. “I own this place.”

Amanda tells me I’m too quick to form dislikes, but that’s usually when she’s conned me into taking her to unfathomable places, like sushi restaurants or opera performances. Still, there was no doubt it was happening now, with Mrs. Sturrow. I disliked her pushiness instantly and was eager to dislike more.

I stood in the doorway, blocking her entry. “I’m Elstrom, court-nominated executor,” I said, fumbling with the lint in my pocket as though looking for a business card.

She wasn’t impressed. “I own this place,” she said again, pressing her bulk between my right side and the doorjamb.

I stood my ground, being a full head taller and ballasted by more Oreos than she could ever eat. “I can’t let you in,” I said, pressing back. “In addition to being a crime scene, this is a court-nominated site of executing, and I’m here to protect the interests of the judicial system.”

I had no idea what I’d just said, nor did she, but it was enough to make her pull an inch of her bulldog bulk back. Or perhaps she’d merely recognized my superior weight advantage.

“Well, what the hell am I supposed to do?” she asked.

“About what?”

“About the mess in there,” she said. “I got prospective tenants wanting to rent this place.”

I looked past her, at the empty boxes in the Ford, and knew who’d cleared out the kitchen. It must have been her headlights I’d seen the previous evening. She’d lurked someplace, waiting until I left, then emptied the place of the undamaged canned goods. And who knew what else.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but no one gets in until everything has been inventoried.”

She rolled her eyes. “Inventoried for what?”

“Surely you knew Ms. Thomas was an heir to the great Thomas fortune?” I summoned as straight a face as I could muster.

“The what?” Mrs. Sturrow pressed forward again, suddenly aquiver at the word “fortune.” A foot below my chin, a little gray whisker sprouted from a mole on her cheek.

“Though eccentric, Louise was quite a wealthy woman.” I looked around as if I were making sure no one could hear. “As a court-nominated executor, I can tell you the court will be quite generous to those who have eased our work in this inventory.”

Her small eyes grew wide.

I gestured at the Ford full of empty cartons. “You’ve not taken…?” I made a delicate cough.

“Of course not!”

“No clothes, no personal items, no radio or television?”

She scrunched up her face, trying for indignant, but it only made her look like she was suffering from irregularity.

“As soon as I locate those Krugerrands-little one-ounce gold coins, you know-I can turn over the place to you…” I paused, then added, “Appreciatively.”

She wet her lips. “You mean like a reward?”

“What did she look like, your Louise Thomas?”

Her eyes narrowed. “You mean you don’t know what she looks like?”

“Just verifying we’re talking about the same woman,” I said, as greasy as a griddle cook’s nose.

Mrs. Sturrow pursed her lips. “Can’t quite say. She wore a scarf wrapped around her neck and mouth, even though it was warm that day. She had on a big trench coat, though I had the impression she was skinny.”

“Last May?”

“How much of a reward?”

“What do you remember about Louise’s height, or the color of her eyes?

Mrs. Sturrow’s eyes narrowed further in suspicion.

“In matters of high net worth, especially when there will be substantial rewards for information, it’s vital that I verify each claimant’s information.”

“Five five in height,” she said quickly. “Don’t know about the eyes; she wore sunglasses, even indoors. How big did you say that reward was?”

“Did she pay the rent with a bank check?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Month by month?”

“A year in advance, with utilities.” She shook her head almost mournfully. “When do you pay the reward?”

“As soon as we find the gold.” I expelled the sigh of a true bureaucrat. “Problem is, those little gold coins are so very easy to hide. And like many rich women, Louise was very, very clever. Can you believe I found a can-sealing device? I believe she actually could have hidden the gold in cans of food, if you can imagine. Alas, I’ve not found any sealed canned goods, so I’ll just have to keep searching.”

If she’d had a functioning brain, one not clouded by greed, she would have smelled manure.

“I won’t keep you,” she said, bustling down the two steps. “Take all the time you need.” She strode to the Ford, fired it up, and shot out of the driveway.

I watched her speed away, thinking she’d have all of Louise’s canned goods opened within ten minutes of getting home. Once she realized there was no gold inside, she would eat as much as she could of the filched fruit, rather than let it all go to waste. It was another kind of greed.

“Let us hope her bathroom has wide pipes, Louise,” I said to the porch ceiling.

I began in Louise’s bedroom because there was sun and I didn’t want to be in that room if it turned cloudy. It was her most intimate room, the place where she slept, the place where she was most defenseless. The place, if Reynolds was right, where she was first attacked.

I started by picking up the newspapers. I’d almost filled one garbage bag before I realized I wasn’t picking up whole newspapers, pulled apart, but rather single sheets of different editions, some going back at least a year. All seemed to feature astrological forecasts, crossword puzzles, and advice columns.

Bagging her clothes was quick. What she had would have fit inside one large suitcase, had one been around. Everything was sensible. Her underpants were high and white, her bras serious and small. She had two pairs of black jeans and one pair of khaki slacks, a few knit tops in blacks and beiges, a light fleece jacket, a thick black wool sweater, and a couple of plain sweatshirts, one a faint green, one a faint yellow. Eights and thirty-twos and smalls and petites, the labels from JCPenney and Sears. She’d dressed in dark or muted colors, the frugal Louise, in clothes not meant to be noticed. I put them all in one bag, next to the bag of newspapers.

All that remained in the bedroom now was the old Underwood Number Five, but I wanted nothing to do with that. I carried the two bags to the porch and labeled the clothes with masking tape as donations for the Salvation Army or the Goodwill box. Anonymous clothes from an anonymous woman.

I’d emptied her bedroom, that most intimate room, in less than fifteen minutes. It didn’t seem right, to be able to empty such a room so quickly.

The living room was quick work as well. As in the bedroom, I started with the newspapers. This time I filled two bags with the tabloid-sized sheets. I took them to the porch, then came back in to drop the cushions back onto the sofa, right the red upholstered reading chair, and set the white plastic lamp on the chipped brown end table. Restored, the living room didn’t look much better than when it had been trashed.

In the corner, beneath a fresh-looking nick in the plaster, the pieces of a small green glass ashtray lay on the worn sculpted rug. Mixed in were three cigarette butts and a tablespoon of cigarette ash. I bent to pick up one of the cigarettes. It was a Salem, smoked down to the filter. I dropped it back on the floor for Mrs. Sturrow.

On my way out of the cottage, I grabbed a half dozen newspaper sheets from one of the bags. By now, it was eleven thirty, and I hadn’t had any nutrition since the Wal-Doughnut earlier that morning. I drove to the exposed-brick-and-fern place in West Haven. Again I took a booth against the wall. Again I turned up my nose to the evils of a cheeseburger with French fries, ordering vegetables, though this time I selected a large chicken Caesar salad to accompany the foot of onion rings on a pole.

Five of the newspaper sheets had come from the Southwest Michigan Intelligencer, a shopping advertiser, but one went back over a year and had been pulled from a shopping rag on Windward Island, in Florida. All six contained variations of usual middle-newspaper filler: crossword puzzles, astrology columns, ads for groceries and women’s clothing, some cartoons. All, though, shared one identical item. Each contained an advice column, headlined in capital letters, called “HONESTLY, DEAREST.”

The waitress came then with the salad and the foot of onion rings. I moved the salad out of the way and began eating as I read on.

There was no picture of the advice columnist, nor a name. Each column ran two or three responses to reader letters. “Dear Honestly Dearest,” each began, “I’m a…” Then the letter reported the quandary. The first ones I read were from a fourteen-year-old girl miserable about the breakup with her boyfriend, a midforties man married to a woman who’d lost interest in him sexually, and a twenty-one-year-old woman whose new husband wouldn’t help address the thank-you notes from their wedding.

I assumed the columnist was a woman. In every case, her voice was respectful. To the fourteen-year-old, she wrote, “Honestly, Dearest, this will pass. You will love again, and again after that, and twenty years from now…” To the midforties man, “Honestly, Dearest, perhaps you might begin by talking, really talking, about how things are going for her. You’ve said she’s a terrific mother…” To the young woman beginning her married life with a man who wouldn’t address thank-you notes: “Honestly, Dearest, surely some compromise over such a minor, first disagreement can be reached? Perhaps you could suggest you’d be happy to address those to your side of the family, but for those to his side… well, perhaps that’s when you put on your sexiest smile, and…wake him up!”

Honestly Dearest wrote ordinary advice to ordinary people, but she had fun with it. She did it with a clever business touch, too. From the Honestly Dearest column heading, through the Honestly, Dearest salutation beginning each response, to signing off with yet another Honestly Dearest, she was drumming the column’s identity into her readers’ brains. She was building Honestly Dearest into a brand name.

I finished the last onion ring and folded up the newspaper sheets. The waitress handed me my untouched salad in a box, and I walked out into the cold wondering whether, on one of the newspaper sheets I’d stuffed into a garbage bag, there was printed a letter from Louise Thomas, because she’d had no one else to talk to.

Aggert was in. Today’s checked shirt was blue, the suspenders and tie green. Joining the rectangular red and white tin of Altoids on his desk was a prim little stack of white sheets of paper. The additional clutter must have been driving him crazy. I parked myself in his guest chair.

“I’ve made two lists of banks and post offices,” he said, pushing the sheets to my edge of the desk. “The first is those within a half hour’s drive of her cottage. The second lists towns an hour away. I didn’t go farther, thinking that would have made it too long a drive. I didn’t figure she’d want to spend the gasoline.”

I picked up the sheets. There weren’t very many towns with banks and post offices, and a couple of big ones were missing.

“Kalamazoo? Grand Rapids?”

“I skipped them. Too much city congestion and hubbub.”

“You’ve got a sharp eye, counselor. All that from her one visit.”

He opened the tin of Altoids and popped a little white tablet into his mouth. Instantly, the scent of spring touched the air. “You ought to be able to check out a couple of others besides West Haven yet today,” he said in the fresh breeze.

I shook my head. “If I have no luck here, I’ll do them tomorrow. The rest of the afternoon, I’ll be at her cottage, finishing up.”

He ground the Altoid with his back teeth. “I told you: That’s a waste of time. Let Mrs. Sturrow get rid of the stuff.”

“What’s the rush?”

Aggert pointed at his desktop, blessedly bare now except for the tin of Altoids. “I like things neat and tidy.”

“I met Mrs. Sturrow,” I said, standing up. “For seven hundred bucks, Louise Thomas gets the full-respect treatment. That includes privacy from Mrs. Sturrow’s pawing little hands. I’ll dispose of Louise’s things myself.”

“Waste of time,” Aggert said again.

“I like things nice and tidy,” I said, reaching for the doorknob.

The assistant branch manager of the bank next to the shuttered beachwear shop shook his head. “Not one of ours,” he said, handing back Louise’s will.

“You’re the closest bank to Rambling?”

“Us and First National, one block over.”

The customer service manager at First National said Louise didn’t bank there either.

Down the street, the postmaster scrutinized Louise’s will, then went to the back. He returned in five minutes. “We have no mail holds for anyone in Rambling. Most of the people there have moved away.”

“How about mail being held general delivery for Louise Thomas?”

He shook his head. “I checked that, too.”

“You are the nearest post office to Rambling?”

“Your Miss Thomas could have rented a post office box anywhere.”

“There would be no reason for that, would there?”

“People are funny,” he said.

Leo called as I was driving back to Rambling. “Want to have dinner tonight? Endora’s working late, and Ma’s having her friends over for late-night cable. Even listening to you blather about executing a will would be preferable to a blow-by-blow-you’ll pardon the pun-running commentary about cable sex, in Polish, by septuagenarians.”

Two years before, Leo had bought his mother a big-screen television. It hadn’t taken her but a day to discover late-night soft porn on the premium channels, and only one more day to tell her friends. They’d flocked to her, in the late evenings, like lemmings.

“You don’t speak Polish,” I said.

“Even through the floor, I get the gist from the giggles, the sharp intakes of breath, and then the long silences. Mrs. Roshiska bounces her walker when the action gets really interesting.”

“I’m still in Michigan.”

“The estate is that complicated?”

“Do you want the short answer or the long answer?”

“Give me both; I’m desperate for diversion.”

“Here’s the short: Louise Thomas was killed during a home invasion.”

“Random burglary?”

“So it would appear, though burglars who kill are rare.”

“What’s the long answer?”

“Nobody’s interested, except a security guy who works for some fruit growers. Louise Thomas’s lawyer just wants to be rid of the matter.”

“She wasn’t wealthy enough for real attention?”

“For sure.”

“And?” Since we were kids, Leo’s been able to read my mind as if my thoughts were playing on a movie screen. He knew there was more.

“She lived in a shingled cottage the size of a small house trailer, drove an old Dodge, had very few clothes, no friends, and read advice columns just for the human contact.”

“At least now you know why there was no named beneficiary: There was nothing of value to leave.” He said it like a question. He was still prompting.

“Why hire an executor?” I said, before he could.

“Exactly. You’ve got yourself a riddle.”

“Nobody even knows when she died, except that it was in the last couple of weeks. Apparently, the house was too cold for them to accurately determine time of death.”

“Nobody missed her, reported her missing from work?”

“Her lawyer doesn’t even know if she worked. I still have to talk to the cops.”

“You need to do that?”

“Do you want the short answer or the long answer?”

He laughed. “I told you: both.”

“The short answer is, I pack up her things, drop whatever she has in clothes in the Goodwill box, toss the rest. Stamp ‘paid’ on an unfortunate life, try to forget why she needed me as her executor.”

“What’s the long answer?” he asked.

“I’m not sure when I’ll be back,” I said.