Tomb With a View

7

I would much rather save my empty calories for the occasional martini than waste them on fast food. Which was why, though the rest of northeast Ohio was flocking to a new franchise called Big Daddy Burgers, I had never been inside the front door of one of the distinctive purple and white buildings. The next day was Saturday and apparently a whole bunch of people were out for lunch celebrating the weekend. It took me a while to find a parking place at the BDB nearest to the cemetery, and even longer to get up to the front of the line so I could ask one of the harried-looking teenagers who was packing the orders and ringing the register if Ray Gwitkowski was working that day.

“The old guy?” The girl’s eyebrow was pierced, and the little silver stud in it jumped when she gave me a look. Clearly, she was trying to figure out why someone as young and stylish as I was needed to speak to Ray. She poked a thumb over her shoulder toward the kitchen behind the counter and I noticed Ray flipping burgers at a grill. He was wearing an apron that matched the purple shirts of the kids taking the orders. “It’s not his break time. I know, because he goes right after me, but, well . . .” She glanced around, and since none of the workers looked as if they were old enough to drive and nobody seemed to be in charge of the chaos, she shrugged. “I don’t think anybody would notice if you went back there. If anyone sees you, they’re going to think you’re from the main office, anyway, since you’re old, too.”

So much for young and stylish.

Insult aside, I managed a tight smile and ducked behind the counter before anyone could tell me I didn’t belong. I’d like to say Ray was happy to see me, but truth be told, he was so busy flipping burgers about the size of a playing card, adding cheese, and stirring the chopped onions browning nearby, he didn’t exactly have a chance.

“I checked your file at the cemetery,” I said by way of explanation, even though Ray didn’t have time to ask for one. “I saw that you have a part-time job here and—”

One of the kids at the counter interrupted me with a shrill, “Big Daddy special. Hold the onions. Extra cheese.”

“Hold the onions. Extra cheese,” Ray mumbled under his breath. He tossed a few more frozen squares of meat on the grill and flipped like his life depended on it.

“It’s just that I’ve been thinking about everything that happened at the cemetery and—”

“Baby Big Daddy! Extra onions. No cheese. Extra well done.”

“Extra well done.” Ray slid a burger nearer to the center of the grill, where it sizzled like mad.

“It’s just that—” I dodged out of the way of a skinny kid carrying a box filled with hamburger buns. “With everything that happened, you know, I thought—”

“Wish I could help you, kid.” Ray took his eye off the grill long enough to shoot me a smile. “I don’t have time to talk. Dang!” Ray stabbed his flipper under the burger at the center of the grill. The patties were paper thin, and that one had already gone from raw to crispy. “I hate when that happens,” he grumbled. He tossed the burger into a nearby trash can and moved another one over to take its place. “If the owners weren’t so cheap and would hire a few extra people around here, I wouldn’t have to worry about burning food and wasting it. As it is, I’m the only grill chef at this time of the day, and Saturdays are always busy.” Expertly, he whisked a couple burgers off the grill, slid them onto buns, stepped to the side where he could better reach the pickles, lettuce, and tomatoes in plastic containers, and grabbed a squirt bottle of ketchup.

“Waiting on that Big Daddy!” the kid up front called out.

Ray grimaced, torn between the burgers that needed to be dressed and finished and the ones still cooking on the grill.

And I knew an opportunity when I saw it. Even when it was one I would rather not have recognized.

There was a purple apron like Ray’s hanging from a hook next to the grill, and I grabbed it, looped it over my head, and took the squirt bottle out of his hand.

I hope it goes without saying that I have never worked in a fast-food restaurant. No matter. The work was just as interesting as I always imagined it would be. After a couple minutes, my brain turned off and my hands moved automatically over the buns.

Ketchup. Squirt.

Mustard. Squirt.

One slice of tomato. One piece of lettuce. Three pickles.

Ketchup. Squirt.

Mustard. Squirt.

“Too much mustard,” Ray critiqued while he stirred the onions. “Not enough ketchup on that one. Here.” He thrust a plastic container of grilled onions at me. “Add those. No! Not to that one.” I stopped with my hand suspended in midair above a square of meat. “That’s the Big Daddy special. No onions. Extra cheese.”

“No onions. Extra cheese.” I was beginning to sound as mindless as all the other Big Daddy workers, and I snapped myself out of it and slid Ray a look, all the while not missing a squirt-squirt-lettuce-tomato-pickle beat.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

He didn’t look especially happy about it. Which he should have considering I was doing condiment duty. “What about?” he asked.

I thought he would have figured that out by now, but since he didn’t, I supplied him with the Reader’s Digest Condensed version. “Marjorie.”

Ray’s spine stiffened. The burger on his flipper slipped off and hit the floor. He stared.

Worried he’d gone catatonic on me or had some kind of age-induced stroke or something, I waved the ketchup bottle in front of his face. “Earth to Ray! I said I needed to talk to you about her, I didn’t say I was raising Marjorie from the dead or anything.”

He shook himself back to reality. “Of course. Yeah. Sure.” Though no one called out another order, he went to the cooler, came back with a stack of burger squares, and carefully arranged them on the grill. “I figured someone from the cemetery would be talking to all of us, taking up a collection for flowers,” he finally said. “If you’re looking for a donation, Pepper, of course I’m willing to contribute. Only it’s kind of hard right now in the middle of the lunch rush.”

I didn’t bother to point out that if I’d been looking for a donation, I could have found a way better place to solicit it. Besides, I didn’t have a chance. A local suburb’s senior citizen bus pulled up outside, and a collective groan went up from the kids behind the counter when a group of bluehaired grannies trooped in.

Oh yeah, we were plenty busy before, but I learned soon enough that busy meant zip in the fast-food business. Not compared with being slammed.

“Thanks for helping me out, kid.” Ray slipped into the purple booth across from where I sat and plunked a medium diet cola in front of me. “After six months at this racket, I’m good at the grill, but not good enough to keep up with a crowd like that on my own. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

Any right-minded person who’d learned the intricacies of squirt-squirt-etc. in so little time would have been rightly proud of herself. I would have been, too, if I wasn’t so bone-tired I could barely sit upright. It was an hour-and-a-half later, the crowds had finally thinned, and Ray had invited me to join him for his break. Since I was never planning to go near a Big Daddy Burger franchise again, it was the perfect opportunity for me to make my escape from the kitchen. Not to mention a chance for me to ask Ray all the things I hadn’t had a moment to talk to him about while he flipped and I squirted.

“This is what the owners of this joint think of as good employee relations.” There was a purple plastic tray on the table in front of him, and Ray tipped it my way so I could see it better. “Every day we get one free Big Daddy burger, an order of fries, and all the soft drinks we can swallow. I wish they’d just add another twenty-five cents an hour to my minimum wages. The food, it’s OK for the first week. Then your stomach starts reminding you that too much Big Daddy is not a good thing.” He pushed the tray away.

The sight and smell of food reminded me that I hadn’t eaten a thing that day. Empty calories be damned! I made a grab for the burger.

“I wouldn’t eat that if I were you.” Ray shook his head in warning. “I know what they put in those things.”

I set the burger down, then let my hand hover above the fries. When he didn’t offer another warning, I popped one fry into my mouth and grabbed a few more. I waited until I swallowed before I said, “So here’s what I’m doing. I’m trying to figure out what happened to Marjorie. And so far I’m not getting anywhere and I’d really like to solve her murder because . . .” Big Daddy Burgers wasn’t exactly the kind of place I wanted to discuss my relationship with Quinn, and Ray wasn’t a person I wanted to do it with, either. He reminded me of my grandfather, and Grandpa wouldn’t have understood. Not about Quinn. I was beginning to realize that when it came to me and Quinn, even I didn’t understand.

I twitched the thought aside. It was then that I noticed I had ketchup stains on the sleeves of my new black tunic shirt. It was cotton, sure, but it was dry clean only, and I promised myself I could pout about it later. For now, I couldn’t afford to waste time. “Every time I try to think through what happened to Marjorie,” I said, “it doesn’t make sense. That’s why I’ve been wondering . . . you know, about that night you stopped at her place. The two of you were fighting.”

“Were we?” Ray didn’t blink. In fact, except for the fidgety tap of his fingers against the purple tabletop, he didn’t move a muscle. His face was suddenly as pale as if he’d already swallowed a couple Big Daddy burgers before someone bothered to tell him what they were made out of.

Oh yeah, I knew Ray was a lousy liar. I recognized all the signs. He looked exactly like my dad always did back in the day when he swore up and down that he didn’t have anything to do with the Medicare fraud that landed him in federal prison.

I was so not in the mood to try and convince Ray that there was nothing to be gained from keeping anything from me. “Come on, Ray,” I whined. “I know you might not want to gossip about it since Marjorie’s dead, but it might be important.”

“I don’t see how it could be.” There was a paper napkin on the table and he folded it with careful creases, then unfolded it again. “Marjorie and I, we hardly knew each other.”

This time, I didn’t need the lie-o-meter to see the writing on the wall. All I had to do was think back to that night. I propped my elbows on the table, the better to stare Ray down. “Hardly knew each other, huh? Is that why the minute you walked into her place, she was all over you like white on rice?”

Ray’s cheeks got red. “You noticed that, huh?”

“I noticed that Marjorie seemed a whole lot more interested in you than you were in her.”

“Yeah. Well . . .” He ran a thumb and forefinger up and down his throat. “Marjorie . . . well, I don’t exactly know how to say this . . . Marjorie, she thought—”

“That you were a hot hunk?”

When he realized he didn’t have to actually come right out and say it himself, Ray let go a sigh of relief. Now the tips of his ears were red, too. “Something like that,” he admitted. “She’s been after me practically since the day my Vanessa went into hospice. Once word of my wife’s death went around to the other volunteers and Marjorie found out I was available . . .” Yeah, his cheeks and his ears were red. The rest of Ray’s face turned an unflattering color that reminded me of olives. He fiddled with the straw in his diet cola.

“Marjorie was a pompous windbag, and I’m sorry she’s dead, but really, there’s nothing more to say about her and . . .” He glanced at his watch and slid toward the end of the bench, making it clear that it was time for me to get a move on. “You probably have better things to do on a Saturday afternoon.”

Was I imagining it? I thought he looked disappointed when I stayed right where I was and said, “What I can’t figure out is if the reason you stopped in at Marjorie’s has anything to do with her death.”

“No! Of course not. Not at all.” All that color drained out of his face and left him as white as the napkin in his trembling fingers. “Marjorie and I, we were . . .” He creased the napkin again. “Well, this is a little hard to explain. And it’s embarrassing, too.”

He expected me to give in and tell him if that was the case, not to bother explaining. When I didn’t, Ray swallowed hard and said, “A few months ago, Marjorie came to see me one day when I was working on a mailing project for the cemetery. I was in the copy room, sticking labels on envelopes. I knew she thought I was . . .” Another flush of color darkened his face. “Well, what you said. About me being a hot hunk. I knew she felt that way about me and I hope you know me well enough to realize I never thought of her like that. Not at all. Marjorie was a heck of a dedicated volunteer and an intelligent woman, but she wasn’t . . . I wasn’t . . . I didn’t . . .”

Sure I was looking for the truth, but I hated watching him suffer. “She wanted you, but you didn’t want anything to do with her.”

He nodded. “I’d been avoiding her. Until that day in the copy room when she planted herself in the doorway and cut off my escape route. That’s when she told me . . .” Ray leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Marjorie came to me and told me that she had a get-rich-quick scheme. It was a sure bet, she said. Can’t miss. She told me she’d do me a favor and let me in on it.”

Marjorie and money. The two words didn’t jibe, not with her personality, and certainly not with a wardrobe that included those cheap, ugly shoes of hers. Maybe she was about to corner the market on filmy head scarves?

I batted the thought aside and asked Ray, “And did she? I mean, did she tell you about the get-rich-quick scheme?”

He sat back and chucked the napkin down on the table. “She didn’t say any more than that. Not that day, anyway. But she promised she would. And I was stupid enough to believe her. It’s not that I’m some kind of shallow jerk, Pepper. I don’t want you to think that. I don’t buy lottery tickets and I don’t bet on the horses. I don’t even play poker. And I don’t light up like a Christmas tree anytime somebody just mentions money to me. It’s just that Vanessa was sick for a long, long time and the bills really piled up. If I didn’t have those medical bills to pay, believe me, I wouldn’t be working here four times a week.”

He didn’t need to convince me it would take an act of desperation to don the purple apron.

This was all interesting, but I knew there was something he wasn’t telling me. Ray was as jumpy as if he were one of those burgers sizzling away on the hottest part of the grill. “Why was Marjorie being so generous?” I asked. “She liked you and you’d been avoiding her. I can’t believe she didn’t get the message. So why was she willing to let you in on the scheme?”

“Don’t you get it, kid? It was her way of getting her claws into me.” His shoulders drooped. “And I was so desperate, I let it happen.”

It was pretty pathetic (not to mention totally disturbing), but I couldn’t afford to get distracted by that. It was my turn to lean forward, the better to pin Ray with a look. “So this get-rich-quick scheme of hers, what was it? And do you think it had anything to do with Marjorie’s death?”

My hopes had been riding high that I could find some answers. They thudded to the ground when he shrugged. “Wish I knew. You see, Marjorie wasn’t the kind of woman who was going to make this thing easy. That day in the copy room, she told me about this scheme, and she said she didn’t have all the details yet, but she would soon. She promised she’d tell me as soon as she knew more.”

“And did she?”

“She called a week or so later. She told me we had to talk. I wanted to do it right there, right on the phone. But she said she needed a couple more hours to get all her ducks in a row. She told me we could talk that night over dinner. That I could pick her up at seven, and that she’d already gone ahead and made reservations at one of those places in Tremont.”

I knew the area. Old neighborhood, new bars and restaurants and clubs. A few of them were local hangouts, but some of the others were of the candlelight-dinner variety, pricey, and with reputations for excellent food and ambiance galore. Something told me Marjorie wouldn’t have gone out of her way to plan dinner at one of the shot-and-a-beer bars. Something else told me I knew where Ray’s story was going.

He confirmed my worst suspicions when he said, “That night at dinner, she put me off. She told me she still didn’t have all the details. After that it was always the same thing. She’d tell me she had more information for me, and that she’d tell me all about it if I’d just take her to a movie, or to hear the Cleveland Orchestra, or if I showed up to act as her date for a party or something like that.” Ray’s shoulders rose and fell.

“I should have told her to get lost. I would have, too, but she was always dropping little tidbits about this moneymaking scheme, telling me it was can’t-miss, and that she even had a financial planner check into it and he assured her it was a sure thing. I needed the money so bad, it got to the point where I just couldn’t wait to talk to her again. I kept hanging on, and I kept hoping. I kept telling myself that maybe this time, Marjorie would stop stringing me along. Maybe this time, she’d finally tell me everything I wanted to know. Gosh, Pepper . . .” He gave me a hangdog look.

“Listening to me now, you must think I’m an idiot. I know I think I’m an idiot. I should have seen what she was up to, but all I kept thinking about was that pile of bills, and the calls that were coming in from the hospital and the doctors and the collection agencies. I was holding out hope that, eventually, Marjorie would come clean and tell me what was up.”

“But let me guess, she never did, right?”

He didn’t confirm or deny, just went right on. “When I stopped at her house . . . well, I’d never done that before. I mean, I’d been there to pick her up for dinner or a concert of whatever, but I’d never just stopped in to socialize. I didn’t want to socialize with Marjorie! But what happened that afternoon, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. You see, I knew Marjorie’s nephew was getting married. She’d mentioned it more than a couple times, and I’d always just pretty much ignored her or changed the subject. I didn’t want to go to that wedding with her. I knew if I did, she’d parade me around in front of people and show me off and act like there was more to our relationship than there ever was. I know it might not sound like it, but I have my pride. I wasn’t going to let that happen. Then that day—the day before she died—I got a copy of the wedding invitation in the mail. The one for Marjorie’s nephew, Nick. It was from Marjorie, of course, and she’d written across it with red magic marker: It’s black tie, don’t forget to rent a tux.” Ray slammed his fist on the table.

“That’s when it hit me. She was treating me like a trained monkey, and I’d had enough of it. That’s why I went to see her that night, and I was so relieved to walk in and see you there, I can’t even tell you. The thought of being alone with Marjorie . . .” He shivered inside his purple shirt, and he didn’t meet my eyes. “When we excused ourselves and went into her den, that’s when I told her I wasn’t going to take it anymore, that she had to tell me right then and there what this moneymaking scheme was all about. That if she didn’t, she could find another patsy to put up with her nonsense.”

“And did she?”

“That’s the real kicker.” Ray scrubbed a finger behind his ear. “That’s when she told me it was all a mistake. She told me the whole thing fell through, that there was no surefire moneymaking plan because she’d done some digging and she found out it was all a scam. Can you believe it? Marjorie had the nerve to tell me she never should have mentioned the whole moneymaking scheme to me in the first place.”

I drummed my fingers on the table. “Which means you’d been pimping yourself out and you weren’t going to get anything for it.”

“That’s not exactly the way I’d put it,” he admitted, “but I guess it’s true. What a sucker I was! And I’ll tell you something else, Pepper, I’m not sure she was telling the God’s honest truth, not even then.”

My drumming stopped. “Because . . .”

“Because Marjorie had that invitation. Not the invitation to her nephew’s wedding, the framed one, the one for James A. Garfield’s inauguration. I’m sure she showed it to you. Marjorie never missed a trick. Everybody who walked in the door, they had to see all that presidential crap of hers. She told me about that inauguration invitation about a month ago, said she saw it in an on-line auction and that she wanted it bad, but there was no way she could afford it. But there it was, hanging on her living room wall, right?”

Right. I turned this thought over in my head. “So you think she really did have some magic way of suddenly making money?”

Ray started with the tap, tap, tap against the table again. “It’s the only thing that explains it,” he said. “I think she was holding out on me. And all that time . . .” Disgusted with himself, he shook his head. “The worst part of the whole thing is that I just started dating someone, a really nice woman, you know?”

I did, I just couldn’t get past the whole unnatural thing about old people dating.

Thank goodness, before I had a chance to consider it for long, Ray went right on. “A couple times, I’ve had to make excuses to this other woman about why I couldn’t see her. You know, because Marjorie had me going here or there with her. I was too embarrassed to just tell my new lady friend the truth. Now . . .” This time when he sighed, it was with relief. “Well, now at least I don’t ever have to lie to her again. So you see, kid . . .” Ray looked at his watch again, and this time when he slid out of the booth, I knew it was because he had to get back behind the grill. “That whole thing about me and Marjorie fighting, well, it was just me standing up for myself finally. It doesn’t have anything at all to do with her dying.”

“Of course not.” It was an incredibly corny comeback, but I didn’t have time to question him further, and besides, my head was suddenly spinning with possibilities. After I downed the rest of the fries, I headed to my car, thinking about everything he’d told me and wondering about that get-rich-quick scheme of Marjorie’s. Could the money have anything to do with her murder?

Or was there more to Ray than the sweet, old guy he pretended to be?

Like a man who was tired of being Marjorie’s love monkey and who’d had it up to his eyeballs? Sure he was angry at having her string him along. Angry enough to meet her at the memorial and give her the heave-ho off the balcony?

And then there was that new woman in Ray’s life who he’d mentioned. Could she have been jealous? Was it possible she didn’t want to share him with Marjorie?

Could there be enough passion in an old-people romance to account for murder?