The Mutual Admiration Society Read online

  Birdie and me still have those costumes. Sometimes we wear them to bed at night when we’re especially missing Daddy, and we wear them most of the time when we snoop on neighbors who might recognize us. But because our black wigs and scruffy beards are balled up in the Radio Flyer in our garage with our other TOOLS OF THE TRADE, I’m going to have to come up with a different bright idea to get Birdie and me out of this fix ASAP! Something like . . .

  Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute.

  What was it that Modern Detection also mentioned in Chapter Thirteen? “If an operative should find themselves in a tight spot without their disguises, I highly suggest they use what is on hand to extricate themselves. Improvise! Assume an alternate identity!”

  Now there’s the ticket!

  I got both of those helpful hints covered better than a coat of Sears and Roebuck paint!

  And while I’m at it, what the hell, why not go for broke? Daddy would.

  If the killer is behind the mausoleum and if he still hasn’t peeked around the corner to recognize me, for all he knows, I could just be half of a pair of two other sisters racing around the cemetery on a not-a-cloud-in-the-sky beautiful Indian summer morning. Two other sisters like Barb and Jenny Radtke, who ran over to this mausoleum just for fun and not to investigate the crime he committed.

  Boy, oh, boy, I’d sure love that tall, skinny guy to pay a visit to one of them sisters if he is on some kind of kidnapping murdering rampage, that’d be so great. That’d take care of #5 on my SHIT LIST: Brownnoser Jenny Radtke. I could run a line through her name with permanent ink. (Joke!)

  All I gotta do now is hope that Birdie doesn’t blow the roof offa my ruse and say something stupid like, Who are you pretending to be, Tessie Finley, the kid who saw a kidnapping murderer sneak behind this mausoleum last night out of our bedroom window? Because my sister adores game shows, I’m hoping to improve my chances of getting this trick past her by putting on a toothy grin before I announce really loudly in the voice of eighth-grader Barb Radtke, who everyone in the neighborhood knows has trouble saying words that start with the s sound, “Congratulations, Jenny Radtke, who was thleeping over last night at the white house behind the themetery and thaw a man murdering at twelve-oh-theven a.m. Unfortunately, due to thircumstances beyond my control, I’ve forgotten your prize for winning the race to this mausoleum this morning, but never fear! I’ll award you your blue ribbon and cash prize after you’re done practicing your thpelling words tonight. When you’re completely alone and defenseless in the first-floor bedroom in the back of our blue house located at 7022 North Keefe Avenue, tho be thure to keep your eyes open for—”

  “Land sakes, child,” Birdie interrupts in a suddenly extremely polite, old-fashioned way. “While I generally find your voice characterizations delightful, may I remind you, and please feel free to correct me if I am in error, but I believe we’ve arrived at our current destination with the singular purpose of further pursuing pertinent clues in our ongoing criminal investigation. Carpe diem!”

  Damnation!

  Birdie has no idea of the danger we could be waltzing into. She doesn’t have a clue that there’s a fifty-fifty chance that Daddy could be signing one of us up for heavenly harp lessons in the next few minutes and the other one of us will be taking up handbasket weaving in Hades. But before I can get my jaw that dropped down to my knees snapped up and working again to warn off my wild-streaking, babbling-in-tongues, and definitely-going-more-old-timey-on-me-more-often sister, she melts behind the Gilgood mausoleum like freshly churned butter on a just-baked biscuit.

  And that leaves me with no other choice but to swallow back the breakfast eggs and Spam that have come halfway back up my throat, pray that God is as big of a fan of Shirley Temple as I am, and prepare to rescue the kid who is now screaming at me from behind the mausoleum in her usual way of talking, “Come quick, Barb Radtke!”

  Now she’s figured out the improvised identity I was using to throw the kidnapping killer off our tracks?

  Now?

  Sometimes, like right this second, forgive me, Daddy, but I very much wish that I’d never stepped into your enormous shoes and made Birdie #1 on my TO-DO list. I’ve already had it up to here with her today and it’s only 10:35 a.m.

  In fact, my sister is getting on my nerves so bad that I’m tempted to let the murderer rough her up a little to teach her a lesson about how important it is to never forget that I’m the boss of the Finley sisters and always will be, but then, dang it all. No matter what Gert Klement tells anyone who’ll listen, like it or not, I do have a pesky, chirping voice in my head that tells me right from wrong.

  And right now my conscience is reminding me how 95% of the time, no matter how weird Birdie is, no matter how mad she makes me, no matter how many Tums I gotta eat because I worry about her getting all the numbers on the loony list, or how many tossing-and-turning nights I spend dreading what she might come up with when the sun does, if a genie magically appeared to grant me three wishes, not one of them would be Please change Birdie into a normal sister. To make a long story short, no matter how much I am currently despising her, I’m mostly willing to overlook her extremely short plus column because I love her with what’s left of my heart. Warts and all. And if I don’t rush behind the mausoleum to save her, the way I didn’t save Daddy, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life, and even after I die I’ll be bawling so hard that my tears will put out the everlasting fire, which will probably piss Satan off so much that he’ll send me to an even lower circle of Hell.

  If I had Mr. McGinty’s gun that’s a souvenir of the war, I could shoot or bayonet the killer. If I had my double-Dutch jump rope, hog-tying would be good, and so would lynching him. With the saw I had to steal from Mr. Holland’s gardening shed after I heard that he was planning to cut down the apple tree in his backyard that Birdie likes to pick from, I could cut off the murderer’s feet to slow him down. But all I can get my hands on at the moment are Daddy’s watch, my lists and detecting notebook, a stubby pencil, Hershey’s kisses, and the lucky Swiss Army Knife. So, unless the murderer wants to know the time, is interested in snooping and blackmail secrets and lists, wants to write a letter, can’t resist chocolate, or wants to add another murdering knife to his collection, what am I left with?

  It looks like I’m gonna have to stab the guy with Daddy’s Swiss Army Knife. Not just once, but many, many times. I found that out the hard way when #2 on my SHIT LIST, Butch Seeback, ambushed Birdie and me during the middle of a game of ghost in the graveyard a few weeks back. He jumped out from behind a tree, snatched Birdie, tucked her under his beefy arm, and ran off to the pond with me in hot pursuit. At the slippery edge, he threatened to throw my sister, who can’t swim any better than me, into the deep end, if I didn’t give him back the Oriental kitty that Mr. McGinty and me saw him try to drown in the same water that he was about to toss my sister. All the greasers push littler kids around. Trip them, pull their pants down, or throw their bikes off a bridge, that sort of thing, but Seeback? There’s something seriously wrong with that boy. Never in a million years would I give him back the kitten we called Pyewacket after the one in the excellent movie starring Miss Kim Novak, Bell Book and Candle, so what choice did I have when that maniac hoisted Birdie over his head on that muddy bank to make good on his promise? I took Daddy’s knife out of my pocket and flicked it open. Seeback sneered and said, “Whatcha gonna do, Finley?” Hardy har har. “Stab me?” I told him, “Looks like,” and then I lunged at him and slid the Swiss blade in right above his knee, and when he dropped my sister, we took off to the sound of him squealing like a stuck pig, “I’ll get ya for that, Finley, ya fucked-up little shit.”

  Lesson learned. One stab into the body of a despicable person isn’t enough, so after I dig Daddy’s knife out of my pocket, I’m ready to do an impression of Lizzie Borden when I come galloping around the corner of the Gilgood mausoleum to save Birdie from . . . from . . .

  Damnation!

  I hate it whe
n she gets me all worked up like this over nothing.

  She’s kneeling in front of the ivy-covered back wall of the mausoleum, calmly sorting through a teepee-shaped pile of red and orange leaves. Mr. McGinty must’ve been doing some tidying. He takes good care of all the graves in the cemetery, because that’s a part of his job that he takes very seriously, but I have noticed that he seems to take a little extra-special care of this mausoleum. I think it might be because he has shyness in common with the deceased hermit or maybe our friend is just very proud of this stone building that’s the biggest in the cemetery, maybe in all of Milwaukee, I don’t know. Whatever the reason, I’m not kidding, you could eat off the ground anywhere in Holy Cross, God knows my sister has, but Mr. Gilgood’s tomb is especially tended to.

  When I come to a heaving stop at her side, Birdie looks up at me and then down to my hand and says, “Whatcha gonna do with Daddy’s knife?”

  If I ever have to write a story in school about what the famous saying “Ignorance is bliss” means to me, I would use this exact moment as the perfect example. Instead of slowly explaining to her the horrible danger she could’ve been in, I do what I always do to protect what little of her mind she has left. I lie. Believe me, it’s for her own blissful good.

  I tell her, “You know how important it is that Charlie and me have things in common.” Good Housekeeping sits next to True Detective in the magazine rack at Dalinsky’s, so when I’m done reading about gumshoes and broads with big boobies in angora sweaters each month, I page through that ladies’ magazine, too. There was an excellent article in the June 1959 issue called “Secrets of a Happy Marriage” that said it was very important that a wife have “shared interests” with her husband. “I got the knife out because I’m preparing to do a little whittling with him during our Mutual Admiration meeting.”

  I’ve found that visual aids always make whoppers more believable, so I snatch up a stick that’s lying under the most famous oak tree in the whole cemetery and use Daddy’s sharp knife to shave off some of the bark. The “Necking Tree” has had a ton of initials carved into its trunk by teenagers over the years—including Louise’s and Daddy’s. They come at night, because the graveyard is so pretty and peaceful, but mostly because it’s closer and cheaper than steaming up their car windows at the Bluemound Drive-In movie theater.

  FACT: I sneakily observe those hot-to-trotters outta my bedroom window rolling around in the grass, pawing at each other beneath the flickering streetlights. And at the Milky Way Drive-In, any idiot can see that the boys with their poufy, slick hair and Camel cigarettes stuck into their rolled-up T-shirt sleeves have got one thing on their minds, and believe me, it’s not Orion onion rings.

  PROOF: Dawn Jablonski was voted Queen of the Milky Way three summers in a row, so I guess the “exercism” that special priest performed to drive the devil out of her didn’t work so good.

  I stick the Swiss blade back into its red case, slide it back into my pocket, and ask my sister, “And what, may I ask, do you think you’re doin’?”

  “Lookin’ for clues at the scene of the crime, a course.” She’s stirring the pile of raked up leaves she’s kneeling in front of like they’re a bowl of cake batter and her arms are Mixmaster beaters. “Isn’t that what detectives are supposed to do?”

  Oh, that’s so, so, so, so heartbreaking.

  Birdie wouldn’t know a clue if it jumped up and bit her in her tail feathers.

  On the other hand . . . she does have that super-duper smelling power. Could she be picking up on a scent that I can’t?

  Uh-oh.

  What if it wasn’t our friend Mr. McGinty who raked the red and gold leaves into the pile Birdie is searching for a clue in? What if the murderer I saw last night thought: I could get caught if I stop to bury this body here at the scene of the crime, so I’ll just hack it into little pieces and throw the bloody, disgusting parts into these pretty fall leaves, and then I’ll rake them up nice and neat and make my getaway through these conveniently located spooky woods and no one will be the wiser.

  It’s not like I’m a rookie in the corpse department. I’ve seen a boatload of stiffs during the Saturday afternoons I’m listening to Braves baseball games with Mr. Skank at his funeral parlor and he’s teaching me about embalming and advertising and such, but all of those dearly departeds had their parts still attached to them.

  “Stop digging!” I scream at Birdie. “There could be a dead body in there!”

  “Don’t be so thick, Tessie,” she says with her spooky, wild-streaking laugh that always makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. “The pile isn’t deep enough to hide a dead body.”

  “It is if it got cut into little pieces!”

  Dear Jesus, what the heck have I gotten us into?

  I know better.

  Right around the time summer started, a burly guy with MOTHER tattooed on his right arm showed up at Lonnigan’s Bar after closing time. I thought at first that Louise had sent the bruiser because she’d gotten tired of coming up to the bar to make sure Daddy wasn’t playing cards and that gal can suck the fun out of just about anything faster than one of those Hoovers sold by Horace Mertz. But it turned out this galoot, name of Hall, was sent by his boss, Mr. Three-Finger Louie Galetti, which explains why he has to have someone else do his dirty work. Daddy told Hall very politely after he burst through the door, “Sorry. I’m a little short. Next week for sure.” But Three-Finger Louie must’ve needed his money back ASAP, because that muscle man got the jump on the best fighter in the neighborhood and knocked him to the bar floor with a powerful right hook to his nose and then he emptied out the cash register. “Let this be a lesson to you, Tessie,” Daddy told me when he was patching himself up in the GUYS bathroom after Hall left with the dough he stole. “Whatever you do, don’t get in over your head.”

  What he was trying to teach me that night was that I was supposed to be very careful not to let my sister and me get into too much hot water and I am having a very bad feeling that’s what I’ve done. I’m having so many grave doubts, in fact, that I’m about to cross out #2 on the list:

  TO-DO

  Take tender loving care of Birdie.

  Solve whatever happened to Sister Margaret Mary for big blackmail or reward bucks.

  Make Gert Klement think her arteries are going as hard as her heart.

  Catch whoever stole over $200 out of the Pagan Baby collection box.

  Practice your Miss America routine.

  Learn how to swim.

  Be a good dry-martini-making fiancée to Charlie.

  Do not get caught blackmailing or spying.

  Just think about making a real confession to Father Ted, before it’s too late.

  I’ll do a 180 turn and tell Birdie I was dead wrong about what I heard and saw happening over here last night. That Louise’s newest “gourmet” dish she served us for supper yesterday—liver with green olive frosting—must’ve given me some kind of brain poisoning that made me see things that weren’t there. When my sister tells me, “Roger that, Tessie,” we can run to Charlie at the weeping willow tree, have a quick Mutual Admiration meeting, and take out some of the treasury money we keep hidden in the trunk of the tree. And after we pick up the chocolate-covered cherries offa Mr. Lindley’s grave—I sister-promised—we’ll have a visit with Daddy, and then go straight home and get the red Schwinn out of the garage. I’ll set Birdie on the handlebars and Charlie can hop on the back fender, and I’ll pedal us over to the Milky Way Drive-In. Even though we’ve just eaten breakfast, we can always make room for their “out-of-this-world” food. I’ll treat us to double Galaxy cheeseburgers and Pluto fries and we can slurp up a strawberry Mercury malt, three straws.

  Yes, this is an excellent plan to keep us from getting in any deeper over our heads, because never in a million years would my almost-always-starving sister say, “No thanks, Tessie,” to a visit to “The Milk” with Charlie. On this I am 100% positive.

  “Tweetheart?” I say to
the pitiful kid who’s still kneeling in front of the leaf pile. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but I got you all worked up over nothing. Louise’s olive liver musta poisoned my brain and made me imagine seeing a murder last night and . . . hey, speakin’ of food, I bet you’re starvin’ from all the climbing and runnin’ and leaf searchin’, and I mighta accidentally stepped on that peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich I brought for you, so whatta ya say we just call it quits and—”

  “Tessie!” she jumps to her feet and shouts. “I found a clue!”

  10

  A LITTLE BIRDIE TOLD ME

  My sister may be acting like she’s Charlie Chan, but believe me, whatever she found at the bottom of the leaf pile is not “inscrutable.” It’s probably a Juicy Fruit wrapper, which she likes to make necklaces out of, or maybe it’s just one of those skinny balloons that are half-filled with what looks like Elmer’s glue that, for some unknown reason, appear near the necking tree on Sunday mornings.

  On the other hand . . . what if my idea about the killer burying a chopped-up corpse in the leaves was right? Could my sister have her hand wrapped around somebody else’s hand or some other hacked-off body part? My tummy couldn’t take seeing something like that. Just looking at the tongues in the window of Mr. Lebowitz’s deli store that we have to walk past on our way up to the library, well, God Almighty. I have to do the same Helen Keller impression that I’m doing now whenever I need to get up to the Finney to tell Miss Peshong that I read a bunch more books so she can move me up on the Billy the Bookworm chart, because I’m going to beat brownnosing Jenny Radtke at her game of one-upping me or die trying.