The Wicked Flea

Commonwealth of Massachusetts are packed with innocent guys I been locking up ’cause I’m so dumb. You see, I get taken in by appearances."
    I waited.
    “Typical scenario,” Kevin continued. “Junkie slithers into a convenience store and grabs the cash, scares the daylights out of two little old ladies and a mother with a babe in arms, and the clerk ends up with bullet holes where his brains used to be. And who takes the rap? Hey, next time it happens, I’m gonna know better. Instead of arresting the poor innocent junkie who just looks guilty because he happens to be holding the weapon, I’m gonna chase after the real perp, who’s lo and behold, the last one the dumb cops’d ever suspect. The old ladies? Not them. They could’ve done it. The mother? No. She could’ve. And there are lots of rotten mothers around. Obvious suspects.” He paused before his triumphal finish. “Yes, the baby! From now on, all the jails are going be filled with puking little babies, last people you’d ever suspect, right? See, Holly? The little suckers aren’t called babes in arms for nothing.”
     

Chapter 20
     
    “Ceci,” I said when she called the next morning, “what makes you think that the Metzners are sitting shivah? There was nothing in the paper about visiting the family. There wasn’t even anything about a funeral. And it was her husband who was Jewish, wasn’t it? Not Sylvia.”
    “In Newton,” Ceci insisted, “everyone is more or less Jewish.”
    Or Catholic, I wanted to add. Or Protestant. Not to mention Russian Orthodox, new age Buddhist, agnostic, atheist, and a lot of other things. Instead, I kept quiet.
    Ceci defended her claim. “Everyone in Newton eats bagels.”
    “Everyone in America eats bagels!”
    “Taking food to the bereaved is not a strictly Jewish custom,” Ceci lectured. “It’s a lovely gesture for anyone to make to any family, and when you took Zsa Zsa home, Eric told you that there was no food in the house, didn’t he? Holly, I can simply feel that this is the right thing to do,” by which she meant that she was itching to hear the latest news of Sylvia’s murder and was determined to use any excuse to barge in.
    If Ceci had been under the age of seventy-five, or if she hadn’t taken care of me and my dogs after my head injury, I’d probably have informed her that if she wanted to turn up uninvited on someone’s doorstep, she could do it by herself. If she’d pestered less vociferously, I’d have held out. As it was, I succeeded only in extracting a promise from Ceci that she’d call the Metzners before we stopped in and that we’d stay only long enough for her to leave her food offering.
    Hah! Kind people over seventy-five are no more trustworthy than anyone else. As Ceci and I stood at the front door of the late Sylvia Metzner’s brick Tudor waiting for someone to answer the bell, I suddenly experienced a flash of ESP. Maybe I just knew Ceci. Anyway, all of a sudden, I’d have bet anything that she had not, in fact, warned the family to expect us. Before I had time to question her, the door opened. One glance at the person who stood there confirmed my suspicion. A muscular young woman with a deep tan and sun-streaked brown hair, she wore jeans and a wrinkled chambray shirt. Instead of greeting Ceci, she eyed us with clear expectation of a pesky pitch for some religious movement, charity, or political cause. Or maybe she thought we were selling something, for example, the lemon cake swathed in plastic wrap that Ceci had made me carry.
    “Oona, dear,” Ceci said, “this is Holly Winter, who knew your mother. We’ve come to express our condolences. And I’ve brought you a cake. It’s terribly difficult to think about food at times like this, isn’t it? But it’s terribly important to keep up your strength!” As I was about to seize the mention of the cake as an opportunity to shove it into Oona’s hands and make a rapid departure, a male voice sounded from inside the house. “Oona, is that UPS?”
    Delicately brushing Oona aside, Ceci stepped through the foyer and into the hall. “We’ve just come to express our sympathy!” she called out. Too late, I understood that she’d refused to carry the damn cake because she’d wanted to be unencumbered, the better to avail herself of exactly this kind of opportunity. “Eric, dear, I’m so terribly sorry about your poor mother!” she gushed.
    After rolling her eyes, Oona glared at me and said, “You might