excused himself. “Think I’ll browse a bit,” he said. He headed straight for Ye Dirty Stuff.
Effie didn’t have any tea bags, but she did have a coffee maker. She divided what was left of the sludge in the carafe. “I guess I’m having trouble with Gordon’s death,” I began.
“Aren’t we all,” she answered.
She offered me an ancient jar of artificial creamer. I waved it off. “I’m afraid the police may get the wrong idea, Effie,” I said. “About some people.”
“Some people like Andrew Holloway?” she wondered.
I nodded. “He seems like a nice boy. And a smart boy. But I gather he’s pretty thin in the alibi department. And God knows what his relationship with Gordon was.”
She put a lethal dose of the creamer in her mug and stirred it with her pinky. She took a bitter slurp. “I can’t vouch for Andrew’s predilections.”
“How about Gordon’s?”
She laughed like a flock of ducks. “If you didn’t know me as well as you do, I think I’d have to be insulted.”
More than likely I was blushing. “You know what I mean, Effie.”
“Yes I do, Maddy. And I can swear on a stack of Masters amp; Johnson studies that Gordon was quite fond of the opposite sex.” She paused and took a quick sip. “If he went the other way, too, well, I never saw any evidence of it.”
“Which brings me to David Delarosa,” I said.
The ducks were back. “I’ll have to put on another pot of coffee if you’re going to bring up every man I’ve slept with.”
I forced a smile. “I can’t help but think Gordon’s friendship with Andrew was a little like his friendship with David.”
Effie spread her fingers across her necklaces, like she was Scarlett O’Hara or something. “My oh my! I don’t think you’re getting enough sleep, Maddy.”
This time I made sure I was frowning. “As I recall, Gordon’s friendship with David Delarosa was quite intense, and quite out of the blue. And then a few weeks later David was dead.”
Effie now told me something I hadn’t known. “The way I remember it, David hired Gordon to tutor him. In biology. And they just hit it off.”
“Gordon did do a lot of tutoring,” I said. “So I suppose you’re right.”
Effie backtracked a little. “But, to tell you the truth, I’m not sure David was as crazy about Gordon as Gordon was about him.” Her voice shrank to a whisper now, as if we were surrounded by ghosts. “I think he latched onto Gordon to get laid. He was a horny boy from the boondocks. And Gordon was up to his armpits in female acquaintances majoring in liberal arts. So he figured he could put up with a little poetry and bebop jazz in exchange for a little beatnik-”
The store’s heavy wooden door squealed open. The windows shook from the hurricane of cold air gushing inside. “That’ll be Edward,” she said.
A man hidden deep inside a fur-lined parka appeared at the counter. Effie excused herself. She handed him a stack of discreetly wrapped books from under the counter. He handed her a Ziploc bag filled with half dollars. “One of my regulars,” she said when the man named Edward left. “He likes Victorian stories about bisexual pirates.”
If I was going to get anything useful out of Effie, I knew I’d have to risk telling her my discreetly wrapped theories. “At the memorial service, you said maybe Gordon had been digging where he shouldn’t have been digging.”
“Ah-so you’re the one who put that bug in Detective Grant’s ear.”
“He’s already talked to you about all this?”
“Not the David Delarosa stuff,” she said. “That’s all yours.”
If Eric had been there, I’m sure that’s when I would have made my excuses and fled. But he was back in the erotica, immersed in stories about God knows what. I had no choice but to plow on. “There are lots of other possibilities, of course,” I said, “but I think maybe Gordon was looking for the weapon used to kill David Delarosa. And maybe somebody figured that out. And killed him.”
Effie was sitting two feet away from me, but she might as well have pushed her chair across the street. “I don’t know anything about that,” she said.
The eyes inside Effie’s lollypop glasses widened. “So you really have no idea what Gordon may have been digging for?”
“No, I do not.”
I bent forward and grabbed her hands. “Oh, Effie, I don’t want to see anybody put through the wringer if they don’t deserve it,” I said. “Not Andrew or Chick or anyone else.”
I got exactly the reaction I wanted. “Chick?”
“That old argument over the cheeseburger,” I explained. “They fought about it at the Kerouac Thing, two days before Gordon was killed. You saw them, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but it was nothing.”
“But the police might interpret it as something,” I said. “You remember what happened to Sidney after that little incident at Jericho’s. If you hadn’t come forward the way you did?who knows what would have happened.”
Effie laughed. Not like a flock of ducks. Like a single, very nervous duck. “How in the world do you know about that?”
I pawed the air, to make her believe I’d known forever. “It took a lot of guts, Effie, times being what they were. I don’t think I could have done it.”
“Slept with Sidney or told the police about it?”
I stood and buttoned my coat, to make her think I was finished prying. “I promised to get Eric home by six,” I said.
We put our arms around each other and headed for the back of the store to extricate Eric from his fantasies. “Why do you think Chick and Gordon fought about such a stupid thing all those years?” I asked her. “It’s so absurd.”
“Absurd but not absurd,” Effie said. “Both Gordon and Chick considered themselves Kerouac’s apostle at the college. They were the best of friends, but they also wanted their version of his legendary visit to prevail. To fortify their own legends. So if Chick was right, and Jack had a cheeseburger, then Chick would be the rock upon which Kerouac’s Hemphillite church was built. But if Gordon was right, and Jack ordered a plain burger-well, they’re hardly the first college professors to get caught up in some meaningless turf war.”
“No, I guess not,” I said. I got Eric’s attention and impatiently motioned for him. He put the tiny green book he was reading back on the shelf and sheepishly trotted toward us. Effie drilled both of us in the elbow before we made it out of the store.
It was exactly six o’clock. The westbound lane was clogged with cars fleeing downtown. Our side of the road was nearly empty. We zoomed along at thirty-five, missing as many red lights as we hit. “You learn anything useful in there?” Eric asked.
“Not as much as you did, apparently,” I said.
“It was erotica, Maddy. High art.”
I groaned. “Unfortunately, so is reading Effie’s mind.” I turned onto Pershing Avenue and headed north toward Cedar Hill. “Either I learned a lot from her or nothing at all. Either intentionally or unintentionally.”
“You think she’s covering up for someone?”
“Protecting maybe.”
“Protecting a murderer?”
“Good gravy, no! Protecting the right of people to be different. To be left the hell alone. Fredricka Fredmansky marched to a different drummer long before she ever read Thoreau. Her father was a rabbi and her mother danced in a burlycue, if that tells you anything. She’s the most virtuous woman you’ll ever meet, but for better or worse her personal morality is cherry picked from a rather large and varied orchard of truths.”
