Death on Planet Pizza Read online

  This book is dedicated to my loving family and extraordinary friends.

  SPECIAL THANKS:

  To all the characters in my life. To my hero, my mom, the original Little Mary, for her unflagging support even in the face of my doubts. To my little brother, Charlie (I miss you Chickie), who once challenged me to write something besides all that dumb poetry. And so, I did. To my Mom-Mom Rachel from whom I inherited my wanderlust and who always made me feel like a principessa. To my Uncle Rocky, the best father an uncle could ever be. To my editors and best friends, Denise and Dorene, for their insights and for helping me keep Spenser real. To all my nieces and nephews and cousins who always encouraged me. And especially to my cousin, Rocco Glyn, whose wonderful stories really do take place on Planet Pizza. I love you all.

  DEATH ON PLANET PIZZA

  Madeline Lepore Martin

  PROLOGUE

  Pam Vacarro's body shuddered in terror. The room was moving; pitching and yawing like a small boat in a big storm. She was sickeningly dizzy and finding it hard to focus. She wanted to scream, to cry out for help, but her words came out as whispers, faint and ineffectual.

  It's an earthquake. It’s just an earthquake. She thought it because she wanted to believe it. But, no, it wasn't an earthquake, and the room wasn't really mobile. It was her; it was her body.

  She was nauseous, disoriented, finding it harder and harder to breathe. Her teeth clenched violently and every muscle in her body was taut and straining. She started to panic.

  Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it ended. The dizziness abated. Her body released its awful grip and a wonderful euphoria wrapped itself around her; calming her. She was at peace. For the first time she could remember, everything was all right. All fear was gone. She marveled at the sensation.

  Leaning her head back, she stared at the stuccoed ceiling enjoying the play of shadows on the imperfect plaster. She smiled at the tigers, bears and wheeling birds. And then, with her eyes fixed in wonder, Pam Vacarro's heart stopped.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Monday - morning

  A bead of sweat broke loose from her forehead. She monitored its slow progress down her temple, onto her cheek, following the contour of her jaw, until it mingled with the wet evidence of similar journeys on her pillow. The morning sun, pushing through the uncurtained window, began to bake a permanent greeting on her face, but still she did not move. It's not time yet, dammit.

  The unspoken words banged around inside her head. She refused to acknowledge the new day except on her terms. When the alarm sounded, then she would open her eyes; then she would notice the sun; then she would hear the birds; then and only then. Lying in bed solidly awake with no hope of getting back to sleep. Pathetic.

  Spenser Isaac’s thoughts lingered on her insomnia only briefly. She'd become uncomfortably aware of a small pain growing in the pit of her stomach. It was familiar, unwanted and it was making itself to home more and more frequently. Okay, it wasn't really a pain. It was more like an emptiness. The way your stomach dislocates on the downward slide of a rollercoaster. Or maybe the emptiness you feel when you've lost a dear friend or beloved family member.

  Yeah, she knew that feeling far too well. This pain was like that. A yearning. A sad, humbling feeling of something forever out of reach. Merda. She grabbed the not-even-close-to-Egyptian quality sheet and hauled it over her head.

  Spenser was thirty-eight years old, fifteen pounds overweight and living in a 10' x 30' Silverstream in a vacation-camp-cum-monthly-resident trailer park in the less than vital city of San Oaks, California. The Sylvan Glen Mobile Home Park and RV Resort was nestled smack dab in the middle of some low hills that separated the East San Gabriel Valley from the Pomona Valley and skirted a man-made lake plopped at its feet.

  The Laguna Bonita, or beautiful lagoon - which, if you squinted your eyes and looked directly into the sun, it was - managed to attract every retro-hippie in Southern California. And, since the Sylvan Glen catered to both permanent residents and transients alike, there was always a lively influx of flora and fauna.

  Spenser's journey to this Los Angeles suburb was also less than vital. It did not form through any consciously pursued soul-searching. It was not predicated on any career course. It simply happened. It was the culmination of a defense industry layoff. A seven-year job as junior switchboard operator arbitrarily lost to make way for the end of the cold war and the beginning of an even colder peace for Spenser. When her job went so did her functional apartment on Havenhurst in Hollywood.

  With her few accumulated savings, she bought the old trailer, conveniently close to her immediate family and dearest friend, and set up a miserly housekeeping in the boondocks hoping that finding work in San Oaks and environs would be easier than finding work in employee saturated LA. Spenser was intelligent, but hardly ambitious and poorly skilled, making job-hunting a decided challenge.

  When she sat down at her $10 chipped Formica and chrome Salvation Army kitchen table with the duct-taped plastic chairs, she would wonder not only what is life but why.

  Nothing ever seemed to make sense. She was a smart cookie her mom would always say. So, why was she taking home $970 a month as a part-time courier for a printing company? Because she wasn't a very smart cookie after all. Intelligent, yes. Inquisitive, yes. Smart? Not very.

  Spenser lifted her beefy arm and blindly cut off the alarm before it could sound. She twisted her body out of its fetal position and stretched her stocky 5'1" frame into a splayed prone. She opened her eyes grudgingly, surprised to see the clock blink 6:44 am. Only one minute short of its set alarm. She'd been a hopeless insomniac since her preteens. Instead of sleeping, she would lie in bed wondering what possessed her to do or say something so ridiculously stupid. She never enjoyed going to bed. At least not to sleep. There was so much more she’d rather be doing instead.

  “'All life death does end and each day dies with sleep'.” Spenser turned to Rocky, her plush stuffed raccoon. "Normal people quote Robert Frost. I quote G.M. Hopkins."

  She picked up the reticent pet and began caressing his soft, peach fuzz coat wondering yet again just where exactly she did go during those hours of complete unconsciousness anyway. When there were no dreams to keep her company. When all she was melted into a darkness so profound it bothered her every single night of her life. Spenser stared into Rocky’s black, all knowing eyes. "What do you think? Therapy?" The Rock remained stoic.

  Spenser rose slowly, dangling her feet childlike off the side of the bed, then shoved on her worn slippers. What a conceit, she thought. Standing there buck-naked, but shod. She didn't even want to know the psychology behind needing her feet covered, if not the rest of her body. Rocky resumed his place of honor on the nightstand. "Too Freudian for me, Rock."

  She walked to the kitchen, twelve steps, and started the coffee. No java - no sentience. She walked to the bathroom, seven steps, and looked at herself in the mirror. Sometimes she actually liked what she saw. Hard to believe, but true. She had a good face. A bit too full to be sure, but attractive in an indiscriminate way.

  ‘Tu sei mia bella nipotina’, her Mom-Mom Raquela would say. But don’t all Italian grandmothers think their granddaughters are beautiful? Spenser moved a loose curl from her prominent forehead and checked out her high cheekbones, cleft chin, and one single dimple just to the left of her mouth. Cute maybe, but not actually beautiful. “But thank you anyway, Mom-Mom.”

  Out of the blue, a metal trash can slammed itself against her tin home making her jump like one of those sad Mexican jumping beans filled with moth larvae that would never become moths.

  Santa Anas! Should have guessed. The infamous devil winds of California. Now she understood her melancholia.
/>   Santa Anas, Sundowners, Mistrals, Chinooks, Siroccos. Whatever you called them, they were a force to be reckoned with. She listened as the apocalyptic winds buffeted the trailer on their rampage from the northern deserts. She sort of liked the Santa Anas, despite their tendency toward mass destruction. There was something ominous about their Sheridan-like march to the sea. There was definitely no ignoring them. But there was also an intensity about them, as they rode the crest of positive ions, that excited Spenser in a masochistic way. Excited her and frightened her and heightened her predisposition to depression.

  "Therapy. Definitely."

  Spenser showered, dressed, and brought her newspaper, caffe latte, and bagel onto her front porch. The 5' x 4' canvas-awning-covered portico barely managed to hold two folding lawn chairs, a plastic end table large enough for two glasses of iced tea, and a mini-hibachi perched precariously in the V formed by the side and rear railings.

  It wasn't much of a porch as porches go, but on warm evenings she could smell the heady scent of honeysuckle and jasmine and listen to the plaintive ululations of the widgeons, teals and mallards winding down after a full day of waddling and wading on Laguna Bonita. She could also watch with amused wonder the comings and goings of Winnebagos crammed with bored teenagers and patience-frayed parents. Or contemplate the oddities of her super odd neighbors.

  "Mrs Spector had her baby."

  Spenser turned to stare at her neighbor’s screen door. Mr Rasmussen definitely fit the description of odd. Spenser had yet actually to see him. She knew his name only from his mailbox. But almost every morning she could rely on his disembodied voice breaking through her reverie making pronouncements of events within the park.

  "6 pounds, 8 ounces." Rasmussen's voice sounded like a clogged lawnmower. "David Philip. Mother's fine. Baby's healthy." How he knew all this without Spenser ever having seen him leave his trailer was a complete mystery to her. "Mr Spector had to be hospitalized, though. Chest pains. He's okay now. Thought it was a heart attack. Come to find out it was just the cafeteria pastrami."

  The screen door fell silent, the Sylvan Glen crier having completed his unappointed broadcast. Spenser grinned to herself. "Gotta love it."

  Spenser tried to scan the local paper, but the winds were a defeating force. The right half of the headline on page six was blending into the left half of the headline on page one creating an interesting montage about an eagle scout going to the arctic with a hippopotamus named George, an ice cream cone having won a regatta and the FBI kissing a grandmother in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Spenser refolded the paper, poorly, just as her black, rotary dial, cradle phone started ringing.

  She opened the screen door and reached for the phone. It was exactly 8:30 am. "Beatrice," she intoned.

  "Eighty-two, Spense," wheezed Beatrice McNichols. "Eighty-two degrees in October! God, I hate L.A."

  Spenser smiled and shook her head, having heard this same lament many times. "Bea, you're a native. Shouldn't you have acclimated by now?" An annoying crackling sound told Spenser that her pal was wandering around her condo with the ever-present cell phone glued permanently to her ear.

  "What for? Soon as that New York editor realizes she can’t do without me, I'm outta here. She’ll gush rhapsodic about my potential, offer to move me to the Big Apple, all expenses paid, and introduce me to dry martinis, Zabar’s and Woody Allen. Not necessarily in that order. Then it’ll be goodbye pretentious tan lines, leg waxings and margaritas. Goodbye smoggy Big Orange, hello sooty Big Apple."

  “Said that in high school. Except for the margaritas. Back then it was Sangria and 7-Up, I think.”

  “Ginger ale. And I meant it, smart ass.” Bea’s sniffles punctuated every other word. “Santa Anas. Jeez, they named ‘em right. These devil winds are really fucking up my sinuses.”

  "Watch your language," chided Spenser, not all that serious. She picked up the lighthouse entombed crystal paperweight that Bea had gifted her on her last birthday. She held it to the window watching the prism colors skip faerie-like from lampshade to carpet to chair to kitchen counter.

  "Oh, sorry, Mother Teresa. Forgot how your Catholic school upbringing prohibits any expression of individuality."

  Spenser’d spent grades 1 through 8 under the protective wing of the Ursaline sisters of the Wilmington, Delaware diocese, grateful for the outstanding education, but dubious of the added baggage of an ever-ready guilty conscience.

  "Profanity," countered a pontifical Spenser, "has very little individuality attached to it. Actually, to profane is to make one small. To make one less than they are. Now, the true confirmation of one's individuality ..."

  "Oh, God," moaned Bea.

  "What?"

  "You're in one of those moods."

  Spenser replaced the paperweight on the side table and watched as the devil winds batted the pull-down blinds over the sink into a frenzy. "What moods?"

  "Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche."

  "If you mean, dearest, I am being introspective...yes, as a matter of fact I am. If you mean I'm a dead philosopher...yes, as a matter of fact..."

  "Spare me," interrupted Bea.

  Spenser smiled. Only Beatrice was allowed to cut her down to size like that. Only Bea. And only once a day.

  "Gotta go, Spense. Big doings at Bielestock und Blum today. Why, I might actually have to...wait for it...look something up!"

  Bea's job as senior researcher for a group of television documentarians always seemed to generate a sense of pride as well as frustration. The dichotomy lying in the knowledge of being the best at what she did and wondering why she did it. "I got all this useless information in my head," she'd tell Spenser. "Someday I'm going to overload and it'll all come spilling out like Cream of Wheat out of a baby's mouth." An image Spenser found rather unpalatable.

  "See you at Mary's. Six o'clock. Leave the 'tude at home."

  "You're such a comfort to me."

  "Drive safe."

  Spenser hung up and walked the three steps back to her porch. She grabbed the morning's detritus, deposited all in the tiny kitchen, picked up her keys, and walked to her car.

  "Hello, gorgeous," trilled Spenser to her 1989, midnight blue, Dodge Shadow. Of her two big-ticket possessions, Bessie was her pride and joy. Her first grown up car. Automatic, instead of stick; four-door coupe, instead of two-door sport. AM/FM radio, cassette player, cruise control, and what finally sold her, air conditioning. Which, if the weather continued in this vein, would be necessary more often than a reality check at a Star Trek convention.

  Spenser opened the car door only to be blasted by furnace intense heat. Bea was right. It was far too hot for October. Even for Southern California where the seasons change from warm to hot to warm again. She pushed the A/C to polar, feeling the tingle of cold air fanning sweaty brow, then put the car in gear and headed west, sort of. She sighed as the Shadow circumnavigated the nonsensical street patterns of the park. She was absolutely convinced that from the air the serpentine streets looked like Medusa’s head. Or maybe they all connected into a phrase. Like, 'do you feel as stupid as you look'?

  Once out of the park, having dodged flying trash can lids, the twenty-minute non-freeway jaunt to Markstone Printing was uneventful. The East San Gabriel Valley was a curious mix of affluence and poverty. There was the yuppie kitsch of La Verne, with its converted packinghouses sporting murals depicting the orange groves that were felled to make room for those same upwardly mobile who bemoaned their passing.

  There was the old money dominion of Glendora, with its effete doyennes contemptuous of impropriety, yet eulogizing the city's most infamous resident, the tartly seductive fan dancer, Sally Rand.

  There was also the defeated sadness of Azusa, with its oppressive downtown, a buck short and a dream shy of greatness, whose immigrant population still held fast to the American dream and still believed in miracles.

  They were all conscientious objectors to life's vagaries. Hoping for more, but willing to accept less. Escaping the violence of New York
or Detroit or Baltimore only to have it follow them. And yet, Spenser envied them all. They, at least, had some purpose in their lives. They, at least, accepted the inevitable struggle as a necessary evil; be the struggle for power, prestige or simply a decent wage. Struggling suggested a goal. Something distinctly lacking in Spenser's life.

  Spenser drove over the dry San Gabriel River and felt her nerves prick up like the spiny hairs of a cactus. The Santa Anas were tossing palm fronds and tumbleweed onto the roadway and extending a sandy pall over Azusa Canyon. It was like a movie set from some spooky 1950s horror film. Them...Them...Spenser's thoughts retroed to her favorite "B" sci-fi movie.

  "I see just one killer atomic ant..."

  Spenser grinned wryly. Maybe it was the devil winds wreaking havoc on her emotions. They wailed like Banshees through minute cracks between the car doors and the windows. Folklore predicted mayhem and old timers nodded knowingly as how them damn Nor' Easters always brought death and destruction. Spenser shivered. There it was again. That same ominous feeling of doom that had greeted her with the morning sun. "Damn." She turned up the volume on Charlie Parker's ‘Perdido’ and concentrated only on her driving as Markstone came into view.