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Bisbee,
Arizona news, reviews, art, events, history, business and entertainment
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A Lydia Lozenge mystery From the security of my employer's hideout, I gazed down over a twinkling Bisbee night, and fell into a muse as I waited for him to summon the courage to request another outlandish task of me. At eight dollars an hour, I had already finished assembling the maps I'd previously photocopied at the library; he did not want to pay for his own. Assembling the copies was a trying task, an example of his contradictory impulses of stinginess and generosity, as new maps cost less than my time. Bisbee, so bewitching and mysterious below the nearly full moon, whispered a cool breeze of invitation to me, "Lydia, come wander my streets Lydia, I am not the provoker of panting perspiration, she of the subtly lengthening hills of daytime, I am the regeneration of childhood, the renewal of magic..." I resisted her siren song; I know her dark side, her winding streets with their houses full of ghosts and the abuses of the living, the murders, the suicides. She begs me to investigate her mysteries but I have done with all that, ever since the case of The Purple Dog. Ever since I realized that detectives must delve into death. "Lydia, I feel my strength draining from me," interrupted my employer's peevish voice. "I need some coffee." Of course he was not the kind to keep coffee available for such an eventuality. "The Coffee Company is closed," I told him. "Damn. It's only 8:30. What are they thinking?" "Well, if you would have normal business hours...." "Lydia, you know that the heat of the day is difficult for me to think in," he reprimanded primly. "Is there not some other place downtown for me to find coffee?" You mean, for me to find coffee, I thought. Slyly, I said, "Well, I heard of a Starbucks in the Copper Queen lobby." He looked aghast. "Horrors. A Starbucks in Bisbee? We are nearing the apocalypse." I shrugged. I know very well his opinions on the spread of corporations and do my best not to inspire a prolonged reiteration thereof. He thought it over, his fat face a series of red knobs, his thick fingers drumming nervously on the antique Chinese writing desk. Finally, he sighed deeply and looked up to meet my stare. "I guess I'll have to settle for the lesser of two evils. Safeway it is. Take my car."
I hate driving; he knows this. My already considerable fear of it has grown since a psychic told me that I would die in a car accident. My brother attributes my "trepidation" to a past life among immobile people, perhaps cut short by the entrance of modern machines; he would like me to think that the death already happened. Each in their own way, the men in my life try to help me overcome fear. "You must drive to Safeway," my employer had told me. "I must have my coffee." The road from his house is tortuously steep, and his truck a stick shift that resists second gear. He has remarked that it is good for my personal growth to grapple with such challenges. I, too, try to provide him with challenges. And so I devised a trick. I would go to the Copper Queen and buy Starbucks coffee and then to Circle K (which he seemed to have forgotten about) and purchase there a cup to transfer the coffee - it would be worth the expenditure. I would watch with bated breath and then laugh snidely after he drank it all. Depending on his mood I would reveal the deception or revel in it privately. He once said that Starbucks coffee tastes of venom.
The wide graceful curves of the steps leading into the Copper Queen recalled to me how much I had enjoyed them as a child. The bulk of my Queen memories are from when I was little, although there was a spell during the wildness of my teenage years when my friends and I would take advantage of the bathroom at the end of the downstairs hall. My remembrances were broken by a loud and angry voice. I looked over at the veranda to see an irate man with a military style haircut, looking to be in his sixties, well-groomed and dressed, gesticulating with tight anger at a beautiful young woman of impassive demeanor and long lean legs. "It's wrong," he said. "And I won't stand for it." I wanted to linger, but had to admit to myself that it was not my business. My business lay inside. Inside the lobby was dim and empty. Though I looked in all directions there was no Starbucks in sight. Who had told me of its presence? I couldn't recall. Had I dreamed it? I didn't think so. Regardless of how Starbucks came to be in my head, it was not in the Queen. Mark that down as a failed plan; Circle K coffee it would be.
O Circle
K of the zapping neon lights, ever-friendly 24-hour store, your
employees know almost all our faces; in old Bisbee you are second
in popularity only to the Post Office. Of course my employer, representative
of Bisbee's recluse population, rarely shows his face anywhere,
let alone Circle K. And yet, I thought to myself, perhaps the feeling just comes from the greenish nausea glow surrounding Circle K, reminding me of that god-awful painting Markla has hanging in her gallery. A man with a serious face and wild gray hair held the door open for me. I was about to thank him when I heard my brother's voice. He was standing by the counter with a girl I'd never seen before. She was pretty, even featured and fair, and her hair was a mass of red-dyed curls. "Mort!" "Sis!" he cried, smiling at me over an enormous soda. The girl narrowed her eyes and frowned at me. He did not introduce her. My little brother is the coolest of the cool, with his open shirt and pants falling down his ass to reveal silk boxers, and the easy manners of a natural people-person. "Watcha doin', Lyd?" he asked me. He smelled of fresh shampoo, a familiar scent. "Just gettin' some coffee for the employer." I walked out with him as we spoke. The girl stayed inside and was joined by another teenage girl, who I didn't get a good look at, because I knew they'd feel me looking. "I shoulda known you wouldn't be doing anything interesting." "Listen, Mort, I've got one of those feelings." "Oh.... One of... those... feelings," he drawled it slow and sarcastic. "Stop it! You know what I mean." "Maybe it's because you're driving that thing." He pointed at my employer's battered truck. "I don't know why it is... but that certainly doesn't help." The girls pushed out of the store and walked past us wordless. "Gotta go, Lyd. I'll call you tomorrow. Maybe." Mort followed them to a shiny car, in which his big shaggy dog, who goes by the name of Batmuffin, eagerly awaited a night on the howl.
"Lydia! Thank God!" rejoiced my employer, after he'd unlocked the deadbolt to let me in. (His house has a higher than average amount of active locks.) "What's the matter? Did you think something bad had happened to me in that wreck of a truck?" "No, no.... I just had this bad feeling.... But what's this?" He'd caught sight of coffee cup in my hand. "That is not from Safeway?" "No. Try it, you'll like it." "Well, at least it's not Starbucks." He slurped cautiously. "I had a feeling something bad was going to happen, too," I said, looking around at the mess he'd prepared for me in my absence. My employer does not have a lot of stuff, but he manages to pull it all out and spread it faster than a three year old child. Great stacks of papers, accumulations of bags, collections of mail (which often includes presents from friends), and random assortments of books are what he mainly manages to spread out for me to tidy up. He knows how important it is for me to exist in a clean environment. Sometimes I think he does such things from a deeply hidden hostility towards clean people like myself, and at other times I think he does it to provide me with work when there is nothing else. Tonight I did not feel up to it. "Listen," I said, "if you've got nothing important for me, I'm going to go home and spend some time with Albert." "That's fine. I feel like doing some writing. I don't need you."
As I approached my little house near Central School I got a feeling of something amiss. Sure enough, the front door was unlocked. Though I am nowhere near as fanatical as my employer, I am aware that Bisbee has its population of thieves. Besides, I wouldn't want some random addled person to wander in and scare Albert; he has a delicate nervous system. So I make it a point to lock the front door. The light was on in the kitchen and the fan was spinning. Albert was nowhere to be seen and the food dish on the checkerboard floor was undisturbed. This was not a clue - generally he doesn't eat when alone. "Albert? Albert!" I called. I found him in that time-honored cat hiding place -- under the bed. He crouched, blobby, in the darkest corner. No amount of coaxing would convince him to come out before. "I don't have time for this," I told him. "I have to investigate." The window in the living room was open, with fluttering purple curtains. This made me suspect my brother. Though I gave him a key, he prefers that window. And it would be like him to leave through the front door. But why would he stop by my house? I'd already offered him the couch, after he and his roommate were kicked out by their landlady in favor of her grandchildren, but he had refused my offer, saying he had a place to stay. With a girlfriend I had thought, though he wouldn't tell me anything more. Suddenly I remembered the familiar smell of the shampoo - my brand. He must've come over to take a shower. The wet towel in the bathroom confirmed it. The red tile was covered with muddy paw prints. I felt very tired. Had it been Batmuffin that took the shower? There was no dog hair on the towel. The claw foot tub was extremely muddy. I thought something like this: Both of them took a shower, either together or separately, and neither of them bothered to clean up. I was glad they felt comfortable.
It seemed like Albert and I had just snuggled into sleep in the coolest hours of the morning when the phone rang. "H-hello?" "Lydia, I need your help." "How can I help you?" Though bewildered I found my secretary voice. "Lydia, this is Markla. I need your help. It's about a painting... an expensive painting. Just a moment." She covered the receiver and spoke louder to some folks I assumed had just entered the shop. She said something like this. "Welcome," and then her customers responded with indistinguishable sentence fragments. "Yes. It is," she responded. "In fact, his painting, just a moment - " then, loud again in my ear. "Lydia, I'll call you back." "Don't bother, I'll come down." "Good. Bye." And then she was gone from my ear.
It only takes me five minutes to get to the Markla Morninglory Gallery, but it took me twenty more to get ready, and clean the bathroom floor and tub. I brought a granola bar with me and ate a banana along the way. The going was smooth except when I had to navigate around some gawking tourists lost in their own worlds, and get past a certain town drunk without stopping to be asked for money or time . I had heard the tone of mystery in Markla's voice; I was anxious to join her. The lovely brunette was alone. "Lydia! That was fast! I just made another sale! And I sold that 7000 dollar painting on Wednesday!" "No way. Why would somebody want to pay so much for a painting?" She shrugged, a delighted sparkle in her brown eyes. "I guess he can afford it. Guess which one it was?" "I don't know. Wish it was that one I hate." She nodded. "It was?" "Devil Sandwich. The one and only. Wish I could tell David, but I can't find him." "Wow.
I always wondered why you took that on." "Wow. I didn't notice anything like that. To me it seemed mostly the kind of green that I think people invented, with one corner that was more of the color of a Temperate Rainforest. I didn't notice more than that." "Well, you were turned off by that ugly color - why should you look farther? Sometimes I think David purposely employed the art of aversion." "I'm impressed." "I don't take any pride in exceptional artistic insight, I just happened to have the leisure to study it, and discovered the pictures below that odd bright of green. I mean shade of green, but it's not shady." She blushed. "I understand," I told her. "But why did you call me?" "Because the guy who bought the painting never came back for it."
I lay in bed for siesta and thought about our conversation, and how Markla requested my help. Albert (all twenty pounds of him) sprawled beside me, smiling and asleep. It
was the most unusual sale Markla had experienced. She remembered
a great deal of it and told me it all in detail. I promptly forgot
most of what she said. |
