Friday, May 11
The first thing I had to do was get Kenneth Kingzette out of my system. Take my measure of him. The way I’d taken my measure of Mickey Gitlin.
The question was how. I didn’t want to foul up Detective Grant’s investigation. And I sure didn’t want to end up missing like Donald Madrid.
The answer didn’t come to me until that Friday night, when I was curled up on my back porch, watching James watch me. I was also reading the East Side Leader.
Hannawa has only one daily newspaper, The Herald-Union. But like any big city, there are also a number of neighborhood weeklies: The South End Trader, The Greenlawn News, The Brinkley Bee, there are just oodles of them. Once a month or so I go through them to make sure I haven’t missed anything important. So I was making my way through The East Side Leader when I saw a promising solution to my Kingzette problem. It was in the classifieds, under FOR SALE, MISCELLANEOUS:
Charming 6 pc. patio set, glider, two chairs, coffee table, end table amp; serving wagon, wrought iron with floral cushions, $250.
I’d been thinking about buying new furniture for my porch for years. The wicker set I had out there now was wobbly and musty smelling, real bird’s nest material. Lawrence and I bought it the same year we bought the house. Now here was a way to feed two fish with the same worm, as my Uncle Wally used to say, assuming that patio set was as charming as the classified promised.
Saturday, May 12
Saturday morning I called the number listed with the ad, to make sure the patio furniture was still available. The eager woman on the other end told me it was. I made sure James’ food bowl was full and headed toward Union City.
Union City is anything but a city. It’s a little nub of a community on the eastern edge of Hannawa’s suburban sprawl. There are some impressive houses out there these days. And some pretty modest ones. The woman with the patio furniture lived in one of the modest ones. She led me through her house to the patio. It was a ten-foot square of red brick overlooking the back alley of a strip mall. “When we moved here it was a beautiful woods,” she lamented. She was in her late fifties, overweight, overwrought and newly widowed. She was selling her house and moving into a condo.
Well, the patio set was not exactly charming. But it wasn’t horrible either. The iron frames on the chairs and tables were painted a pale yellow. There were a few speckles of rust here and there. The cushions were faded from years in the sun, making the crazy red and orange floral pattern a tad bit easier on my eyes. “This is exactly what I’ve been looking for,” I said. I wrote a check for the full $250.
When I got home I bolstered my nerve with a strong cup of tea and then called the Kingzette Moving Co. “I just bought this patio set on the other side of town,” I told the unfriendly man on the other end, “and I was hoping you could help me out.”
“That’s why we’re in business,” he said. From the pitch of his voice I gathered he was a younger man, presumably Kingzette’s son.
And so I made arrangements for them to deliver my patio set the following Thursday afternoon. It would cost me another $150.
Thursday, May 17
Right after lunch I told Eric I was starting to “feel a little woozy.” Which was a lie. I was actually feeling a lot woozy. My wooziness had been growing all week, since I’d made those arrangements to have Kingzette Moving deliver that awful patio set.
Eric dislodged the Mountain Dew bottle from his mouth long enough to speak. “I suppose that means you’re going home early.”
“You think I should?”
He rolled his Chinese-American eyes. “Maddy, you’ve been preparing to go home since you got here.”
So I drove home and camped in front of my picture window, getting woozier and woozier waiting for that truck to pull up.
It pulled up at three. There was a big gold crown painted on the side, along with these words: