The 9 Lives of Marva DeLonghi

I

1

I leaned against the brick façade outside our office, drawing figures of infinity in the air with my favorite four-inch pocketknife. My thoughts were as stained as my shoes from wandering every dark alley in Omaha. Two voices spoke muffled words on the other side of the door: maybe love, maybe fear. I flicked my knife closed, dropped it in my purse, and turned the knob to see which. With the door open an inch, I paused. First impressions say so much. If I walked in on love, there’d be a happy ending. I didn’t want to think about fear. I knew Lyle’s gristly baritone anywhere, but my partner’s guest spoke with an unfamiliar lilt. When I stepped into the office, the conversation paused.

Lyle pointed a ham and cheese hoagie at me. A smile formed around shreds of lettuce and a dribble of mustard. Luke! We were just talking about you.

The tableau I faced wasn’t love, though Lyle might’ve thought otherwise. The woman opposite him had yellow hair. She wore high heel shoes. Lipstick was everywhere. Some faces look made for bruises. I shook my head to shoo the lopsided thoughts. Extended my hand. Detective Mia. Some people call me Little Cancer, and not just because I was born in July.

A fat lip didn’t stop this woman from showing a seductive smile. You weren’t kidding. She looked at Lyle. Your partner’s a real charmer.

He took his time chewing a bite of sandwich. She grows on you.

Like a tumor, I’m sure.

I patted my pockets. I’ve heard that one before. My cigarettes were somewhere.

Before I found them, Lyle said, Let me finish eating, huh?

He hated the smell of smoke. I slipped the hard pack of Pyramid Menthol from my jacket and tapped the clamshell in my palm. When do you think that’ll be?

He tongued a piece of ham lodged in his gums. Maybe you should consider quitting.

I tossed my smokes on the office desk next to the rent bill. We were several weeks past-due and two lost cats from destitute. I gave Lyle the finger and looked again at his guest. What’d you say your name was?

I didn’t. She cradled her cheek in her hand like no one had ever loved her. Marva DeLonghi. I was just telling Mr. Kuperchink how someone’s trying to kill me.

I smiled. Death gives meaning to life. Let me guess. You don’t know who it is.

I have a few ideas, but it seems I’m growing short on time.

It’s almost endearing that Lyle won’t correct a person when she butchers his last name. I spoke on his behalf: It’s Kuputchnik, by the way.

I— Tossing a fist-sized chunk of bread and meat into his mouth Lyle uttered a sound like a gut-punched boxer. I moved a step closer. If Heimlich Maneuver isn’t a band name, it should be. He put his hand up to ward me off. A smear of mayonnaise shaped like a bear clung to his palm. We waited for choking or monologue, whichever came first. On both accounts we were disappointed. Luke— he swallowed hard—Get us some drinks, huh?

When have drinks not been a good idea? I’ve tweeted this question multiple times, and no one yet has posed an unreasonable setting. On my way to the kitchenette, I snagged my smokes. Neat or on the rocks?

Lyle and Marva answered in unison. I struck a match and walked it to the refrigerator. A moment later I returned carrying two highballs of Magdalene bourbon, neat, in my right palm, and one on rocks in my left. A cigarette smoldered between my lips, wisps of smoke drifting toward my face. I couldn’t decide if my tears were from the smoke or because I’d glimpsed the future. One of us wasn’t going to make it out alive.

Lyle tossed a handful of mixed nuts into his mouth, his expression half-vacant as Marva delivered the detailed account of the door that had put the hurting on her. He swirled his bourbon around the rocks, sniffed, drank, frowned, drank. Coughed.

Marva must’ve been president of some sorority back in college, because she treated her drink like bitter medicine. The glass thudded on the end table next to the armchair into which she’d retreated.

Her story came out a lot slower.

It started with a text message from a blocked number: Any last requests? The following morning, she woke to a text, picturing her, but in a bad way. Whoever wanted her attention got it in bold. She recognized her face, but couldn’t remember the costume party when she’d worn a noose. It was tempting to admire the photo manipulation, except nobody liked seeing herself dead. Whoever the prankster was, they’d even gotten right the blood droplets dribbling from the eyes.

Lyle peeled the wrapper from a chocolate bar. Blood from the eyes isn’t typical with hangings. Only manual strangulations.

Marva traced the rim of her empty glass with her finger. And you know that why?

I’m a detective, doll.

I’d dismiss any other man who demeaned women with pet names as often as he did, but no other man had spent the balance of a decade putting up with me. If he was the guy who grumbled when his favorite radio host was fired for preying on women staffers, he was also the guy who’d hunt a month for a lost child pictured on a milk carton, find the boy and decline the reward because the six-year-old’s tears of joy at the reunion were payment enough.

I joggled my cup. Refills?

Marva asked if we had wine. I dug a dusty bottle from the closet, judged it gently-aged, and poured a glass. She dispatched the evidence, and I refilled her twice before she picked up her story again.

In the days following the troubling text messages, Marva began to think she’d overreacted. An Instagram follower with a bad sense of humor, a teenage prankster with a perverted definition of flirting. She fixed dinner for her husband, Ransom. He took her to a movie. They spent a morning at the Joslyn Museum enjoying a special Grant Wood exhibit. Marva obsessed over The Perfectionist. Why was the second button on the woman’s blouse half undone? What did it mean? The painting’s title was more important than all the work Wood did before or after. And that button!

A few weeks later, walking to Jackson Street Bookseller, Marva’s heel broke. She fell, spilling the contents of her purse. At the same time, a brick fell from the sky and crumbled on the pavement inches from where she’d fallen. It smashed her lipstick tube into a crimson splatter. If her shoe hadn’t broken, the brick would’ve crushed her skull, sidewalk painted in brains.

Leaning from a window on the fifth floor of a loft above J’s on Jackson, was the man with the pitchfork from American Gothic: same wireframe glasses, same hollow cheeks. She blinked. When she opened her eyes he’d vanished. The windows were all closed. Hysteria? But there was the brick to consider. She retrieved it from her purse and handed it to me. It was stamped with the Riverfront Park Logo. As I corrupted any DNA evidence that might’ve lingered, she resumed her story.

At the bookstore a first edition of Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler, caught her eye. She bought it for thirty-five hundred cash.

Lyle chewed ice cubes while a lime popsicle melted in his left hand. As in, three thousand five hundred?

It might’ve been a little overpriced.

Let me guess. I drummed my fingers on the arm of my chair. Your hubby’s a lawyer.

Bio pharm. Emphasis in advertising and development.

I pinched my lower lip. Must be nice, having all that money.

Who knows? When you have it, you don’t really think about it.

Of course.

Lyle decapitated a blueberry muffin. He offered me the bottom half. I said I wasn’t hungry and poured myself another drink.

Marva had returned home from the bookstore to find a package on her front porch. Inside the package was a blood-stained shirt. It looked familiar, though she knew she’d never owned it. And it wasn’t the kind of thing she could call her girlfriends about so she did the next best thing, going straight to the cellar for a bottle of '85 Château Margaux.

When Ransom returned from work he found her on the lounger, humming fragments of Miles Davis’s So What. The trail of bottles from the living room to the kitchen was ten thousand dollars long, and there at the end of it lay Marva. She wasn’t much for conversation so he led her to the room, helped her into pajamas, tucked her in, and killed the lights.

The next morning he brought her breakfast in bed and asked if they needed to look into a local chapter of AA. She laughed a migraine laugh meant to mean no but that felt a little like yes. Anything, she was thinking, to get my head on straight.

She asked him to leave her alone, and when he meekly retreated, she threw off the duvet, walked to the bathroom and cranked the shower full-hot. The water burned her skin and cleared her head. She marched down the stairs robed, her skin lobster red. Ransom was folding white cheddar into scrambled eggs. She asked him what she should do if someone was trying to kill her. He said the only person trying to kill her was herself. With booze.

She wanted to show him the text messages, the brick, the bloody shirt, but instead she said. Would you call the police?

He plated his eggs, cut sprigs of chive and sprinkled them on top. Is someone trying to kill you, honey?

She lost her nerve. Yours look better than mine did.

Want a bite?

No. She thirsted. I’m just embarrassed.

He rubbed her shoulder and reminded her she was his morning star, his white daisy. What we need is a good vacation. You’re absorbing all my stress from work.

Lyle sprung from his chair. Why don’t you trust your husband? He buried his hand in a bag of potato chips. Crumbs sprayed from his mouth when he said, Won’t he believe you?

Marva’s eyes cleared from the fog of memory. He’s always so busy.

I lit another cigarette. Butts overflowed from the ashtray next to me. A haze of smoke tickled the ceiling. Lyle lacked a certain knowledge about women. He appreciated their bodies, usually managed to get their phone numbers, but he’d never known one more than sheet deep.

Go back to the brick. I lifted it to eye-level. Doesn’t it seem strange that it came from the riverfront? I mean, every building downtown is brick. Hell, the streets are paved in bricks. Why lug one from a mile away unless you’re sending a message?

Marva folded her legs beneath herself on the armchair. I hadn’t thought about that.

I was teasing at angles to justify this object, lost in thought, hunting a trail, and when I came to the conversation had wound back to Ransom.

His company’s finishing human trials for a sleeping med. They’re calling it Vivifica, and it’s going to make everyone a lot of money. I don’t need him worried about me.

Lyle groaned. I’d think he’d want to know some creep’s trying to scare you witless.

Marva seemed enchanted by the empty wine bottle: code for I didn’t come to discuss my husband’s deficiencies. All we had left was Magdalene, and I said so. She nodded. I poured her three fingers. You want us to solve this without involving your husband?

Lyle had scratched up a fried chicken leg and was savoring the crispy skin. The air conditioning compressor kicked on. Marva had something to hide but wouldn’t show it straight on so I asked her to finish her story and listened for cracks in the narrative.

During the previous month she’d almost been mown down by a car that ran a red light; she’d narrowly avoided falling into an elevator shaft when the door opened to an empty lift; hours before she’d come to visit us, the aforementioned door had knocked her unconscious. These all could’ve been viewed as bits of bad luck if it hadn’t been for the accompanying text messages. On the morning she’d almost been run down, she’d received a picture from a blocked number of a speeding car with a skull and crossbones for its hood ornament. The night before the elevator incident, late, as Ransom tossed and turned, fighting wakefulness beside her, her phone vibrated. She opened the message to a picture of a cliff: no words, just a rocky precipice. Hours before the door bloodied her nose and blacked her eyes, her phone had buzzed, Knock knock?

I put out my cigarette and leaned back in my chair. I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but do you think this mystery person is more into scaring you than killing you? Why all the forewarnings? Wouldn’t a gun be quicker?

Marva pinched her nose and sniffed. She asked for a tissue. I started wondering the same thing, after the door this morning, but then I got this. She unlocked her phone and passed it to me. The most recent message read, Start planning your final meal.

I gave her phone back. You ever reply?

Dead end.

Filet mignon, Lyle said. Garlic mashed. Asparagus in chive butter. He rubbed a green apple on his shirttail.

You won’t tell your husband, and you refuse to call the police. I hesitated. Why?

Lyle popped a cheese puff. Your cross to bear, huh?

Something like that.

The bourbon had permeated to the tips of my fingers, fogged my eyes, and swollen my tongue. I stared dumbly at Lyle as he chomped the last bite of apple and licked his fingers.

I picked a hangnail from my thumb. Let’s talk money.

Marva laughed. Got any cigarettes left? I checked the pack. There were two. I handed her one, offered a light. Smoking with someone forges an instant bond. As she dragged and exhaled, my empathy grew. What must she have felt? How had loneliness shaped her? She tapped ash into her cupped palm. Five grand every day I wake up.

I passed her the ashtray. She emptied her palm into it and set the tray on the chair’s arm. I tend to negotiate, but then again, most widows and cat lovers don’t start by offering a month’s wages as a daily rate. Won’t the hubs notice all the debits?

Marva smoothed her skirt. Her legs were muscle, milk and honey. Not your business.

Lyle stood, walked to the window behind our desk, and looked over Maple at the shops in Benson. Your husband might be rich, but anybody’s going to notice that kind of spending.

He hasn’t looked at our books in ten years.

Suddenly I couldn’t stand the smell in our office. Suppose that changes tomorrow.

Nothing changes with him.

Bad practice to empathize with a client, but her loneliness splashed all over me. We’ll see what we can do. I told her she needed to forward any of the text messages she’d received from the blocked number. If Marva was right about time winding down, we needed everything we could get to put us on the trail of her stalker.

She stood, dug an envelope from her purse and tossed it on the desk atop the rent bill. What about the bloody shirt?

I rose from my chair on wobbly knees and made for the desk. I’m small, but I hold my liquor, and the zig-zags were for show. Everything.

Marva started for the door. She rested her hand on the knob and looked back. You’re right, Mr. Kupershack, Miss Mia does grow on you.

I sneered at Lyle and the bag of cheese puffs in his hand. When I turned Marva had gone. Lyle snapped up the envelope from the desk, tore open the flap and fanned out a stack of Benjamins. Looks like we got rent money, huh?

2

We drove Maple Street to Radial Highway as it curved and turned into Saddlecreek, stopping at QT for gas and smokes. The street lamps seemed half again as dim as a normal night. The city meets your mood as only a loving mother can. There’s something just a little too convenient with this damn brick. I hefted it in my hand.

Lyle dispatched a box of Cracker Jacks. He dug a kernel from his gums. That, and I got money on this broad’s husband being the type to shell out on fundraising souvenirs just like it.

"That woman’s husband has narcissist written all over him, maybe more."

Something’s funny about him, for sure, huh?

I cracked my window and tapped out a smoke. Lyle shook his head. I ignored him and sparked a flame. Through smoke, I said, "Funny haha or funny look out?"

Lyle peeled an orange and flung the rind onto the street. Yes.

I gave him the you-should-be-ashamed stare.

Biodegradable.

I shook my head. You still haven’t told me how you two met.

He chewed an orange segment, juice misting between his teeth. Nothing much to tell. He said he’d gone to Jake’s on the Benson strip for a couple beers, to absorb the nightlife. She came in not long afterward, looking around like she was expecting to find someone. Lyle tipped his glass to her. She smiled, approaching him, said she was looking for Lyle Kupnuchip. He said she’d come to the right place. She said she needed his help.

I laughed. "Your help?"

I’m telling a story, huh? He pressed his palm to his forehead.

So tell.

We talked. I ordered her a glass of wine. Annie was working. God she’s a sight. What I could do with those pigtails, huh?

Stay on topic.

So Marva says she’s being followed and I say, ‘As in, we’re being watched?’ and she says, ‘Maybe,’ and I say, ‘By who?’ and she says, ‘Whom?’ and I say, ‘Yeah, who?’ and she says she doesn’t know, and I say, ‘You don’t know who’s following you, but you know you’re being followed,’ and she says that’s pretty much the long and short of it, and I ask why she thinks she’s being followed, and she says someone wants her dead, and I say her situation sounds pretty serious and doesn’t she think it’d be better to call the cops? and she says, ‘The cops won’t believe me,’ and I say, ‘Don’t matter. They have policies and procedures when someone reports suspected crime,’ and she says even so they won’t help her come morning, and I start thinking certain things so I say, ‘You’re looking for around-the-clock protection,’ and she says, ‘Not exactly,’ and I say, ‘Then what?’ and she says she wants someone who won’t stop digging when they hit bedrock, and I say I don’t exactly get her metaphor, and she says, ‘My situation is unique, I think, and not many people are going to give me the time of day,’ and I ask why, and she says I’ll just have to trust her, and I say—pardon me, but it’s true—I say, ‘You don’t have to worry about me trusting you, but my partner’s never met a person she doesn’t doubt. She’s got a bad case of cynicism no medicine can clear up.’

Christ! You said that about me?

Only the truth.

Go on.

So I say, ‘Maybe we should go back to my office,’ and she asks why, and I say, ‘Even if my partner’s a cynic, she’s my partner and we don’t work alone,’ and she says, ‘Not even if I pay you for two people’s work?’ and I say, ‘As tempting as it sounds—’

Don’t lie to me. You’re lousy at it anyway.

Fine. She said she wanted a woman’s perspective.

"I said don’t lie to me."

I was going to give you your cut.

We’re getting closer.

Between cheese puffs, Lyle said, Can I help it if the lady wanted me and not you?

I started into a third cigarette just as Lyle was pulling up to the riverfront, the souvenir brick being our only decent lead. Doesn’t matter what she wanted, because she got both of us.

He angled into a parking space. All for the best.

Even if you don’t think so. I opened my door. You could’ve had this one all to yourself if you hadn’t brought her back to the office for a seduction.

She’s married, I—

When has a diamond mattered to you?

Hey, I admire all the legal mumbo jumbo behind ‘I do.’ Respect the court papers.

My ass.

He opened his door and we stood. Plus. You’re the brains of this operation.

3

Behind the Gateway Boathouse, at Riverfront Park, Charlie and Rube and a few dockers I didn’t know were tossing crumpled bills to the center of a shipping crate outfitted with a plywood tabletop. Charlie was making splinters of a toothpick. He treated women like auto repair shops: a necessary service where everything is overpriced. Rube gnawed a mostly smoked cigar. Get him talking and you usually learned something you wanted to know, and a lot you’d rather not. The air smelled of skunk, sweat, and tobacco.

Uh oh. Rube spat tobacco leaf. The cancer’s back.

Charlie laughed big as a blank check. He needed a new set of teeth or a zipper for his lips. The three unknown dockers looked up startled from their cards. Who died, blondie?

I pushed my hair out of my face. Men never let a natural blonde forget it. No one yet.

See boys. Charlie flicked his toothpick away. Told you I needed a new baseball bat.

Rube wiped his lips. Who you extorting tonight?

Lyle flipped an empty produce box upside down and sat. Deal me in, huh?

Charlie snapped. No one plays on credit, bud.

It was a mistake letting Lyle hold Marva’s fee. He punched a clean hundred on the plywood. No hole too deep tonight, fellas.

Some nights I feel like taking it in the teeth. I stepped up to retrieve the bill, but one of the dockers brought a blade to my wrist. Money on the table stays on the table.

Easy does it, Slice ‘N Dice. Charlie lifted his hand. We’re all friends here.

Rube relit his cigar. Rules is rules.

Some nights I feel like taking it easy. I pulled my arm back.

One of the other dockers dealt the cards. Charlie asked us to what he owed the pleasure. I showed him Marva’s brick and asked if he knew anybody who had the funds to buy one. Lyle cracked a pistachio shell with his teeth