The Mutual Admiration Society Read online

  I told her, “Thank you,” even though my knees buckled under the weight of Modern Detection and I had 0% interest in reading the darn thing, but what choice did I have? I had to keep up my front.

  I almost sprained my arm pulling home the nine regular-sized mystery books and the other giant one Miss Peshong gave me in my Radio Flyer wagon, but I knew that baby-smelling librarian meant well, so I didn’t hold it against her. I also knew that she would ask me what I thought of Modern Detection the next time I stopped by the Finney, because she had to, if I wanted the book to count for the Billy the Bookworm contest, which I did. So to have at least a little something to make her believe that I’d read it, I reluctantly cracked it open that night, but in no time at all . . . I found myself flipping through those pages with fingertips that felt on fire! And at Mass the next morning, I went ahead and said a few Hail Marys for Miss Peshong, because it was thanks to her that I learned I could play both sides of the fence. I could steal a cake and eat it, too!

  Due to extenuating circumstances—my mother—I hadn’t found the time to finish the book that has turned out to be such an eye-opening life changer, but I had learned in Chapter Two of Modern Detection that when it came to crime, it was extremely important for me to arrive at the scene of it sooner rather than later. So I snatched the double-Dutch jump rope from the closet, knotted it to the bedpost, and got ready to climb out of my bedroom window. The second my feet hit the ground, I was going to run across our backyard to the black iron fence that surrounds Holy Cross Cemetery and monkey over it faster than King Kong scaling the Empire State Building to do some gumshoeing.

  On the other hand—I’ve come to learn that there is always another hand to slap you around, usually about the time you’re feeling like you got the world by the tail—no matter how much my detecting mind was telling me that heading over to the cemetery in the dead of night was a swell idea, my guts were reminding me about that other famous saying, “Haste makes waste,” which means a person should never be too fast to act or they could end up holding the shit end of the stick.

  Believe me, if I coulda, I woulda shaken awake my sleeping sister so we could snoop at the cemetery together, but since there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in h-e-double-hockey-sticks that I could get Birdie up and running at that hour of the night—she has never been much of a night owl—it was just me and my churning tummy that wrestled my trusty Roy Rogers flashlight out from under the mattress, slid Daddy’s lucky Swiss Army Knife from under my pillow, and got down to business.

  Watching my father die taught me the most important lesson I’ll ever learn in life—BE PREPARED—so I was already wearing my regular snooping clothes—black shorts, a navy-blue T-shirt that matches my eyes, and filthy white sneakers—when I slid my always nicked-up legs out of our bedroom window, shot a quick look over at Holy Cross to plan the quickest route to where I thought the voice and the scream might’ve come from, and . . . and . . . lo and behold! In the glow of one of the flickering streetlights alongside the road that snakes through the cemetery, I caught sight of a guy slithering through the gravestones with what looked like a limp body in his arms seconds before he disappeared behind Mr. Gilgood’s mausoleum!

  FACT: That tall, thin man definitely wasn’t Mr. Howard Howard.

  PROOF: Due to my weekly surveillance of his Precious Gems and Jewelry store on North Ave. that I might have to heist someday if things go from bad to worse around here, I’ve watched the stumpy owner lock up his shop and waddle next door to Dinah’s Diner dozens of times to stuff his mouth with jelly donuts and wash them down with a cup of joe with three sugars.

  So there I was, all set to sleuth after that mystery man and the no-longer-screaming gal he was lugging around, when my wiggle over the windowsill was stopped in its tracks by even more suspicious noises ripping out of the black, velvety night. Not more shouting or another screech coming out of the cemetery. These sounds hit even closer to home and were even more blood-curdling. Elvis Presley was warbling about a hound dog out of a car radio, and then the hot rod that belongs to our mother’s new boyfriend laid squealing rubber down Keefe Ave.

  12:21 a.m. I barely had enough time to scramble back into bed and yank the sheet up to my chin before our mother, Louise Mary Fitzgerald Finley, came through the front door of our two-story wooden house that looks about the same as most of the other two-story wooden houses that beam out in blocks from St. Catherine’s Church and School like rays on a holy card.

  After Louise turned on the bathroom light so she could swipe off her makeup with Noxzema cream and tinkle out the beer she wet her whistle with at Lonnigan’s Bar, she kicked her red high heels off in front of the Finley sisters’ bedroom door. All she probably wanted to do was hit the hay after her big fat date, but she had to make sure that Birdie and me weren’t sneaking around the neighborhood the way we do any time we get the chance, because she’s got something she wants really bad and she’s worried our “shenanigans” might screw it up for her. (For a gal who blew out twenty-nine candles on her last birthday cake, our mother is such a sucker. She’s fallen for the old stuff-pillows-under-your-sheet prison trick at least six times. In the last month.)

  Of course, I kept my eyes shut when she came to the side of our bed, but I knew she was looking down at Birdie and me. I could smell the beer and peanuts wafting off her, the same way they did when Daddy would come home from working his late-night shift at Lonnigan’s. Only he wouldn’t stand next to our bed and sigh. “Good Time Eddie” Finley would belly flop onto the mattress between my sister and me, gather us in his strong arms, and belt out his favorite song. But instead of him sticking to the real words, “We belong to a mutual admiration society, my baby and me,” Daddy would wail, “We belong to a mutual admiration society, my babies and me.”

  But there were other nights when the smartest and sweetest, handsomest and funniest man in the whole neighborhood wouldn’t sing. He’d lean his ladder against the side of our house, crawl through his “babies’” bedroom window with a black nylon stocking pulled over his face and a five and dime gun in his hand. “This is a stickup! Give me all your hugs,” he’d growl like a bank robber, only a lot slurrier. When Birdie and me would yank the covers over our heads and pretend to scream if we were waiting for him, or really scream if we weren’t, Daddy would slap his knees and say, “Ha . . . ha . . . ha! Gotcha!” because he adored jokes of all kinds, but he got the biggest charge out of the ones that practically scared the poop out of a person.

  But as soon as our mother got done pressing her salty lips against Birdie’s and my foreheads a little bit ago and clicked the door shut behind her, I rolled over and wrapped my sweet-smelling sleeping sister in my arms and popped the top offa my biggest grin. Sure, the worst party pooper on the planet might’ve wrecked my investigating what went on in the cemetery as fast as I would’ve liked to, but when the sun came peeking through the cracks in our bedroom window shade, believe you me, the Finley sisters would have the last laugh. All the way to the bank.

  I’m not so good at arithmetic, but one guy yelling + one gal screeching + the both of them disappearing behind the Gilgood mausoleum in the middle of the night? Any idiot could see that added up to one thing and one thing only.

  The Mutual Admiration Society had a bloody murder case on our hands!

  2

  COME HELL OR HIGH WATER

  “Good Time Eddie” Finley’s last words to me were, “What a great day to be alive and out on the water with one of my favorite girls.”

  DADDY’S REMAINS

  Birdie.

  Jokes.

  A hankie.

  The Swiss Army Knife.

  His Timex watch.

  A brown belt.

  Famous words of wisdom.

  If only he hadn’t borrowed The High Life boat from his friend Joey T so him and me could do a little fishing on Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on August 1st, 1959. And after he slipped on the bottles of beer rolling around the bottom of the boat, hit his he
ad, and fell overboard, if only I hadn’t sat there laughing my head off because I thought at any second he was going to swim to the surface and say, Thought I was a goner, didn’t ya, Tessie? Ha . . . ha . . . ha. Gotcha!, Birdie and me wouldn’t be able to see the curve of his gravestone out our bedroom window.

  With every beat of my heart, every breath, every lightning bolt, and every joke, I miss him. There is not a minute that goes by day or night that I don’t wonder how I’m going to live to the next minute without him. But I had to force myself to stop bawling every time I pressed Daddy’s watch against my ear or when I smelled his Old Spice stuck in the seams of the white hankie or felt the weight of his Swiss Army Knife in my hand. And when I waited outside of Lonnigan’s Bar, I had to stop pretending that the only reason the best bartender in the world didn’t come laughing and stumbling out of the back door after his shift was because I got my nights mixed up. What choice did I have? A broken heart is so heavy to lug around that a kid can feel the life seep out of them with every step, and I needed every ounce of strength I had left to honor the promise I made to myself to step into Daddy’s shoes. It was the only way I could figure out to pay penance for not even trying to save him.

  6:30 a.m. I’m so excited to tell still-snoozing Birdie that I’m 95% sure a murder got committed in the cemetery last night, but from years of experience, I know that if I don’t want her to go unruly on me, I have to settle myself down and follow her TO-DO list instead of mine. It’ll take me four tries to wake her up. It does every day. That’s her favorite number.

  I wipe her too-long bangs off her forehead and say, “Morning!”

  Neither one of us are even close to being as beautiful as our Irish mother. My sister and me got more of Daddy’s English blood running through our veins, thank God. But with her blah-brown hair and nose that’s turned up a little too much and slightly bulging eyes, my sister is the much better looking of the two of us, which is good by me, because the poor kid doesn’t have much else going for her.

  On try #2 to wake her, I slip my hand under the top of her pink baby-doll pajamas and play her ribs with my pointer finger like they’re a xylophone. “Time to face the music!” (Joke!)

  Since I turned eleven two weeks after Daddy died, that makes Birdie ten years old, because we have the same birthday—August 15th, which just so happens to also be the Catholic holy day of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. (Probably why I have such a horrible tendency to assume things.)

  We weren’t supposed to be born on the same day, but even before she came into this world, Robin Jean Finley couldn’t stay put. She popped out of our mother two months too soon at St. Joseph’s Hospital on Burleigh St. weighing too little under five pounds. After the nurse cleaned her up and placed her in Daddy’s boxing arms and he got a load of her fluffy hair, big eyes, and little bones, he smiled and declared my new baby sister a “featherweight.” He tried out a couple of different nicknames but settled on Birdie, which was darling once upon a time but had a bad ending. (How was he supposed to know that “Birdbrain” would be just one of the names kids in the neighborhood would end up calling her if I’m not around to set them straight?)

  And no matter how much I wish and pray it wasn’t so, as the Titanic would say, when it comes to my sister, being dumb is just the tip of the iceberg. (Joke!)

  Try #3. I whisper straight into her ear, “Time to get the show on the road, kiddo.”

  I still haven’t found any information on this subject at the Finney Library, but it sure seems like being born before the time you’re supposed to be can cause a lot of weirdness to set up shop in a kid’s brain, because even I, who love her most of all, now that Daddy’s gone, have to admit that Birdie is one odd duck. And sad to say, according to this movie her and me saw at the Tosa Theatre called The Snake Pit that we thought was gonna be another one of those animal-dying movies like Bambi or Old Yeller but turned out to be about this shapely brunette who ended up in an insane asylum, my sister also greatly resembles another one of her neighborhood nicknames—“Loonatic.” (The harmless kind. Not the kind like Ed Gein, who got everyone so worked up around here after he murdered a bunch of people near our state capital of Madison and sewed lampshades and slipcovers outta their skin. Birdie would never do something like that. She can’t even thread a needle.)

  Sure, some days go so bad around here that it might seem like she has, but Birdie has not yet gone completely nuts.

  She doesn’t have #10 and #11 on the list yet, but if she starts doing those anytime soon, we’re going to have to scram out of the neighborhood before the men in the white coats show up, which is one of the main reasons I started up The Mutual Admiration Society in the first place. To save up a lot of running-away money, because Daddy wouldn’t like it if I let our mother toss my sister into the county nuthouse, which, believe you me, is getting less far-fetched by the day.

  SURE SIGNS OF LOONY

  Seeing, hearing, and smelling stuff that nobody else can.

  Acting more high-strung than a Kentucky Derby winner.

  Wearing clothes that don’t go together.

  Not understanding what’s going on in movies or television shows or the neighborhood.

  Wetting the bed all the time sometimes.

  Wild-streaking.

  Extreme stubbornness.

  Having a leaky memory and a drifting brain.

  Not getting jokes and the ones they tell are lamer than Tiny Tim.

  Murdering.

  Drooling, when not asleep.

  On my fourth and final try to get my sister up and running, I tell her what Daddy told her every morning since she was born, “The early Bird gets the worm!” And after she pops open her run-of-the-mill blue eyes that I tell her are a gorgeous Robin’s-egg blue—she loves to be buttered up, and if you can throw her name into the mix, that’s frosting on the cake—I hold up the little gift she left under my pillow last night. It’s a nickel. 1958. “Thank you, honey. It’s the shiniest one I’ve ever seen!”

  After I bounce out of bed, I toss her the pile of clothes that I picked out before we turned in last night, because if I let my sister choose what to wear, she’ll slip on a pink-striped T-shirt with a pair of yellow polka-dot shorts and running around the neighborhood like that is not only #3 on the LOONY list, it’s the worst possible getup for snoops and blackmailers to parade around in. We gotta blend in. (Green is good to wear in the springtime and summer, brown or tan is best for the fall, white when the snow flies, and no matter what time of year, black or navy are our go-to outfits on night missions.)

  “Hurry and get dressed. We got a big, big day ahead of us,” I tell Birdie. “You’re not gonna believe our great good luck! When I was in the middle of practicing my Miss America routine last night, I heard this shouting, and then . . .” Shoot. It’s going to take forever to explain what I heard and saw while she was sawing logs and even longer for her to understand. It usually works out better if I play show instead of tell with her. “Pull your shorts up. We gotta get over to the cemetery ASAP. There’s something I really, really, really, really want to show you!”

  ’Cause Birdie loves our home away from home as much as me, I’m so positive that she is going to love this idea that I can’t believe my ears when she says, “I’m sorry, but we can’t go over to the cemetery this morning to look at whatever you really, really, really, really want to show me, Tessie.”

  Oh, boy.

  Most of the time she’s real easy to boss around, but sometimes, for some unknown reason, the kid can go more stubborn than a bloodstain on me. This better not be one of those times. I got a good feeling that today could be the start of something big and I’m not the only one who thinks so. I have what Modern Detection calls in Chapter Four “corroborating evidence.”

  Daddy used to be the one to answer all my questions, but when I get stymied these days, I have to rely on the next best thing. My Magic 8 Ball. I keep it hidden in my closet so our mother doesn’t find it, because she’d blow her top if she did. It�
��s a sin to ask anything to foretell your future, only God’s supposed to know that, but honestly, I already got so many sins, what’s one more? Especially since after I asked the Magic 8 Ball this morning, “Will today change our whole lives?” the little white paper that floated up informed me, It is decidedly so!

  “Did you forget that we go over to the cemetery every day to visit Daddy?” I ask as I wiggle Birdie’s tan shorts up to just below her protruding tummy that’s the only chubby part of her, so from the side she looks like a pelican.

  “No, I didn’t forget that we go over to the cemetery every day to visit Daddy, Tessie, but we can’t go over there right now, ’cause . . .” She cocks her little head. “Listen.”

  There are so many sounds in our neighborhood this morning, the same ones there always are: WOKY AM blaring rock ’n’ roll songs out of the car radios that belong to the fathers on their way to their shifts at the American Motors plant or the Feelin’ Good Cookie factory, milkmen delivering their clanking bottles, the Milwaukee Sentinel landing on front porches, St. Catherine’s “St. Kate’s” church bells clanging, dogs barking, and moms and dads hollering at their kids from their front porches to get outta the street.

  None of those everyday noises have ever kept the Finley sisters from running over to the cemetery before, so what is Birdie picking up on that I’m not—oh, dang it all!

  FACT: The kid’s got better hearing than Lassie when that pooch goes looking for Timmy Martin in an abandoned well.

  PROOF: I didn’t notice the way she did that Trouble with a capital T is up much, much earlier than usual, brushing her teeth and gargling in the bathroom down the hall, which is probably why Birdie is digging in her heels.