Dead Man Docking - Mary Daheim [9]
“Mother!” she exclaimed. “The producers sent you more money!”
Gertrude snorted. “About time.” She reached to take the check and note from her daughter’s outstretched hand. “Hunh. What does it say? Twenty bucks?”
“Use your magnifier,” Judith urged in an excited voice.
Gertrude moved her empty plate and silverware, the jumble puzzle she’d been solving, and a deck of cards. “Ah. Here it is,” she said, taking the magnifying glass out of her still-full soup bowl. “It’s kind of messed up. Did you make that soup or did it just grow under the sink?”
“Very funny, Mother,” Judith snapped. “It’s from a leftover roast.”
“You should have left it over at Rankers’s house,” Gertrude grumbled. “Are you going to clean that magnifier or not?”
Annoyed, Judith went into her mother’s kitchenette and washed the glass. “Here,” she said, “now read the damned thing.”
Gertrude’s expression slowly changed from testy to pleased. “Well, well! Isn’t that nice. Maybe I can buy new corn plasters.”
“Why not?” Judith was searching the card table, trying to see if there had been a check included with the most recent version of the script. “Are you sure there wasn’t a separate envelope with this latest batch of revisions?”
Gertrude nodded several times. “’Course I’m sure. I don’t get the last check until the moving picture gets shown.”
That made sense to Judith. “Why don’t you let me put that check in the bank for you tomorrow?”
Gertrude, however, shook her head. “I’d like to look at it for a while. Besides, I’m not sure I trust you.” She narrowed her eyes at her daughter. “In fact, with that floozy hairdo, I’m not sure I recognize you. You could be an impostor.”
Frowning, Judith ignored the barb. “Don’t you dare mislay that check,” she admonished. “It’s already several months old. The bank may not even honor it. Then you’ll have to ask for a replacement.”
“Don’t fuss,” Gertrude said airily, holding the check up close to her face. “What’s today? Tuesday? You can take it in on Friday. Isn’t that when you usually go to the bank?”
“Usually,” Judith admitted. “Okay, a couple of days won’t hurt, I suppose. But don’t you dare—”
“I know, I know,” Gertrude interrupted. “I’ll watch it like a hawk.”
Although she didn’t say so, Judith still had misgivings.
Approaching the back porch, she could hear the phone ringing inside. Judith snatched up the receiver just before the call switched over to Voice Messaging.
“Good news!” Renie cried, then lowered her voice. “Except for poor Bill.”
“What happened?” Judith asked, confused by her cousin’s pronouncement.
“Bill convinced Lorenzo that he shouldn’t commit suicide again,” Renie began.
“I didn’t know you could do it more than once,” Judith put in.
“You know what I mean,” Renie said. “I told you, this guy’s tried it at least a half-dozen times before. Anyway, after Lorenzo got down to the third floor and saw Oscar, he asked why Bill had a stuffed monkey. Bill informed him that Oscar wasn’t a monkey, he was a dwarf ape. Monkeys have tails, and Oscar doesn’t, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
“I haven’t, really,” Judith said, sometimes wondering if her cousin and her husband were crazier than some of Bill’s patients.
“So Bill and this guy got into a real argument,” Renie went on. “Lorenzo was convinced Bill was wrong because at one time he’d worked at the zoo. Lorenzo, I mean, not Bill.”
“Define zoo,” Judith murmured.
“What?”
“Nothing, coz. I coughed.”
“In fact, when Lorenzo was working there,” Renie continued, “he tried to kill himself by jumping into the lion pit. Unfortunately—or not—it was just after feeding time. Anyway, that was years ago, before they put all the natural habitats in at the zoo.”
Judith picked an apple out of the fruit basket on the kitchen counter and began to munch. “Um.”
“So Lorenzo told Bill that he had a primate book in his apartment, and he could prove that Oscar wasn’t an ape. You can imagine how Oscar felt about all this. He was really getting irritated.”
Judith kept munching. “Um-um.”
“Then Lorenzo suddenly got off the ledge—he was sitting on it, facing Bill and Oscar