Joan Hess - Maggody In Manhattan

"Merely a coffee shop," Durmond said, sighing. "The young lady professes to have other plans for the day. I shall find a park bench and sit among the old men, watching the children play and flicking popcorn to the pigeons."

Cambria gave me a stern look. "Is this true?"

Durmond was biting his lip to maintain his sorrowful expression, but his chin was trembling and his eyes patently guileless. "I fear it is."

"We're going for coffee," I said to Cambria. "Is there a place nearby?"

He pointed out a restaurant on the corner and wished us a pleasant day. As we walked down the sidewalk, I heard a slightly suspicious noise from my companion, but refused to so much as glance at him until we were seated in a booth.

Once we'd ordered coffee, along with bagels and cream cheese, I gave him a level look and said, "So why did you enter the Krazy KoKo-Nut thing? The other contestants are…shall we say, more suitable for this kind of lunacy?"

"And I'm not?"

"Not from what I've seen thus far," I said, then paused while the waitress from the Rambo School of Table Service banged down our order and challenged us to ask for anything else. Neither of us dared. I took a sip of coffee and resumed my oh-so-delicate inquisition. "Have you always enjoyed cooking?"

"Since my wife died, I've found it an amusing occupation." I waited, and after a moment, he said, "Inoperable cancer. Grueling, but brief. I took off for the remainder of the semester, sat in my boat and stared at the gulls, and pulled myself together in time to start the spring semester."

"What do you teach, and where?"

"Connecticut, a small liberal arts college. You wouldn't have heard of it. I teach obscure things." He slathered a piece of bagel with cream cheese and carefully took a bite, all the while feigning preoccupation with the process instead of the postulator.

"How obscure?" I persisted.

"Very, very, obscure. Now how about you? You're a cop, you mentioned last night. In this little town your mother mentioned?"

I was searching for a way to explain Maggody when two figures dashed by the window, faces contorted, bags thudding wildly, a guidebook loosing a stream of papers, and one red beehive at a perilous tilt.

"That was…" I said, stunned, then put down my cup and struggled out of the booth. "I'll catch up on the bill," I said as I rushed past the waitress and out the door (in retrospect, I admitted this wasn't wise; customers are shot for much less than skipping out). I caught up with Ruby Bee and Estelle as they reached the door of the Chadwick.

"Oh my lord," Ruby Bee said, grabbing my arm and gaping over my shoulder, her eyes as round as I'd ever seen them. "There's a maniac after us! We got to call the police before he gets here and kills us on the spot!"

"Ladies, ladies, calm down." Cambria put arms around both of them. "You are safe now. I personally will see that this maniac does no harm to you."

"He's been aiming to kill us ever since we set foot in this place!" Estelle shrieked. Like Ruby Bee, she seemed to be anticipating an assault from the direction they'd come. "Get out your gun, Arly! I plan to die in my own bed, not in this dirty filthy place!"

I looked down the sidewalk. There were hordes of people, of course, but all of them appeared to be preoccupied with missions more mundane than murder. A few of them may have noticed the excitement in front of the hotel, but they maintained the introspective expressions of big-city pedestrians and continued around us.

"Who's trying to kill you?" I asked.

"That maniac," Estelle said in a slightly calmer voice. "Doncha remember? I told you about him when I called."

"How silly of me," I said as Durmond joined us. "So what happened a few minutes ago?"

Ruby Bee clutched her bosom, one of her more elegant and well-rehearsed gestures. "Well, first off, we went down the stairs and followed signs to where there was a nice lady in a booth. She sold us tokens, but she wasn't real clear on which way to go to get to the place you take the boats out to visit the Statue of Liberty."

"I had already said a number of times which train we needed," Estelle cut in with a sniff. "I studied the map this morning while others of us dallied in the bathroom for a good hour."

The accused bristled. "You said one time that we needed the downtown train."

The accuser bristled back. "And I suppose one ain't a number anymore?"

I barely restrained myself from assaulting them. Both Durmond and Cambria sagely had decided to refrain from asking questions, and they'd also shown enough sense to back away from the twosome. "One is a very good number," I said irritably, "and I would like one of you to tell us what happened. Did this person actually approach you and make threats?"

After an exchange of dark looks, Ruby Bee shrugged and said, "Estelle decided to consult this big dirty map on the wall, and some old geezer started trying to explain how we had to change trains somewhere down where the map was so smudgy it was a disgrace. That's when I saw him. I told Estelle to stop yammering and come through the little gate so we could get on a train. She couldn't find her token, and by the time she remembered it was in her pocket, why-the maniac was not ten feet away."

"How did you know he was a maniac?" Durmond asked.

"I did not get off the watermelon truck yesterday," Ruby Bee retorted. "Anyway, we got by the track, kinda down toward the end where he couldn't see us, and then, just as the train pulls up, there he is coming at us like a rabid skunk."

"Then," Estelle said, "the train doors open and all these people come spewing out like ants out of a flooded hill, and people from behind are shoving us and nearly knocking us down, and we finally get on, but there he is in the same car, grinning and licking his lips, so I scream at Ruby Bee to get off-"

"And we did," she interrupted smoothly (they'd perfected the routine over the last thirty years). "But so did he, and we didn't know where the exit was, so we had to climb over the little gates. The lady in the booth starts yelling at us, and Estelle has to go and spill her purse, and by the time she's gathered up everything, this policeman shows up."

Estelle tightened her grip on her purse. "The strap got caught, which was hardly my fault. The policeman was right friendly about it, but the maniac, who was no dummy, had disappeared."

"I don't think he believed us," Ruby Bee said, winding down. "But I'd like to know something-how come you can't ever find a policeman when you need one?"

We all mulled that one over for a minute. Durmond sighed and said, "I'm sure it's my fault, but I don't understand why you were so sure this…man was following you, determined to harm you? Did he say or do anything?"

"He's been following us since we got here," said Estelle, making it clear she didn't appreciate being doubted for one teensy second, "I saw him leaning against the wall over there when we got out of the taxi, and yesterday morning when I went to call Arly from a pay phone on the corner up there, guess who turned up like a bad penny not five minutes later? This is the third time, and he probably thought it'd be the charm. He just didn't realize who he was tangling with!" Cambria lifted his bushy white eyebrows. "Isn't it possible he simply lives in the neighborhood? That would explain his presence on the street and in the subway station. And why shouldn't he have noticed two attractive ladies like yourselves, noticed and admired?"

Patting her hair, Estelle said, "That's right kind of you to say so. He did sorta smile, so maybe he thought he was being friendly." She and Ruby Bee moved away from us to evaluate this newest theory.

I glanced down the sidewalk, then nudged Durmond in the opposite direction and in a low voice said, "I'm not comfortable with the explanation. It's possible they've attracted the attention of someone with less pure motives than Cambria assigns him. I'm not suggesting this man is a serial killer out to get them, but there are a lot of screwy people on the streets. However, if I try to warn them, especially now that they've decided the city is thick with secret admirers, I'm afraid they won't take my advice." I made a face at the hissing pair. "Not that they ever do."