thirteen
I IMAGINE THAT TO ANYONE PSYCHICALLY TUNED, I looked like a human firecracker right about then, what with my aura all green and yellow and red spikes flying out with lightning speed. Zorita had never reappeared, having hollered up through the hole in her floor that she would forgive “my” bill if we would just leave. My bill, my rear. I guessed that by predicting I was about to inherit Ricardo’s estate, she was trying to get me not only to cough up the money for his last reading but to beg her to read my future as a millionairess as well. She predicted the future wrong there, didn’t she? I wasn’t going to ask squat.
I was going to let my faithful assistant ask instead.
“Zorita,” Trudy cajoled, perched on her spike heels on the edge of the hole in the floor. “We so need your help. The police really don’t seem to be on the right track, and we’d hate to see the person who did this to Ricardo get away with no punishment.”
“We all will meet divine punishment for our sins one day,” came the response from the hole. “The guilty one will pay that way.”
Great, a Bible-thumping psychic. I thought those who relied on otherworldly talents were supposed to be the spawn of Satan or some such. At least, that’s what Great-Granny Penscik always warned me about. My luck to have encountered the only psychic in this zip code who wanted to let divine redemption instead of mortal law deal with a homicidal maniac.
“All we really need is a list of Ricardo’s clients. Not for all the salons, of course, what a chore that would be,” Trudy explained patiently. “We would so appreciate it if you could pass along just the names of the women he still personally serviced.”
Trudy caught my jolt and blushed, stammering down the hole. “I mean, I mean, you know, the ones he still did the hairdos for.”
“I know what you meant, Trudy,” Zorita sent back up the hole. “With your truly good heart, you aren’t the kind of woman to imply otherwise, although your friend is. However, you are a good enough friend to her to do whatever she wanted you to do. And to say whatever she wanted you to say.”
She was right, of course, on both counts. Maybe there was something to this psychic stuff, after all.
“Hey!”
Trudy was mad now, spitting mad, as we call it back in Dime Box. It didn’t happen often, but I loved to see it happen when it did. I had the short fuse, she had the long one. It took a lot to push her over the edge, and Zorita just had. No doubt, there were red spikes shooting out at that moment amid all her placid blue and pink, although it would take someone more psychically tuned than I to ascertain them. Imagining them was enough for me. I grinned.
Trudy stomped over to the edge of the hole and hollered at the top of her lungs. “If being a good friend is a bad color aura in your book, then you can have it, lady, because I will keep being a good friend no matter what color it turns my aura. Right now, you ought to be reading whatever is the most threatening color to you, because I am about to crawl my heinie down there and get the list of Ricardo’s clients from you, whatever it takes. So what’s the color for stubbornly persistent and fiercely loyal?”
I was impressed.
So was Zorita, apparently. Because within a minute, a sheet of what looked like hand-beaten papyrus decorated with dried violets appeared at the hole’s opening. A list of about a dozen names and corresponding addresses had been written down on it in a crooked mess amid the squashed stems and petals. What was the purpose of paper like this? Hmmm. Before I could entertain too many thoughts of the deep meaning of violets and the scary curses they might represent, Trudy plucked it out of her hand and mince-marched on her spikes toward the door, cocking her head at me to get a move on. She is a bossy britches when she gets mad.
I followed. She had gotten the goods.
“Before you go off on this ill-advised journey of discovery,” came Zorita’s disembodied voice rising from the hole, “I have to warn you…”
Trudy paused in mid-mince. I kept going. My hand was on the doorknob when I realized Trudy just might not be able to resist asking the question Zorita wanted asked. I spun and tried to get Trudy’s attention with my zip-the-lip motion, but her gaze was glued to the hole in the floor.
“Warn us about what?”
I groaned.
“You must know, Trudy, not everyone on the list is a client. They are the names that came to me. And holding that list is shaking hands with fate.”
“Uh-huh,” I muttered. “A fate named Violet.”
Shooting me a glare, Trudy put her finger to her lips.
“Whose fate?” she asked the hole.
“The fates of six people. Leave the list here, it goes one way. Take the list with you, it goes another.”
“Which way is it supposed to go? One way or another?”
“Ah, Trudy,” she said, buying time as Trudy’s insistence clearly surprised her. “The age-old question.”
I silently mimicked what she’d said so pompously. Trudy glared. We waited. When Zorita added no more, Trudy asked, “Okay, I guess what you’re telling me is we don’t know which way fate is supposed to go. Which are the six people, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“No duh,” I said under my breath. Trudy threw me a warning look.
Zorita wasn’t finished. “But I do know that many things die in the face of truth.”
I grunted. “Yeah, like lies.”
“Lies and more,” Zorita intoned, having heard me, apparently. “Happiness, peace, and, often, lives.”
Trudy gasped. “Someone’s gonna die?”
I rolled my eyes, reached over, grabbed the violet papyrus, and pulled open the door. “Turn on your brain, Trude. Someone’s already dead.”
“I mean someone else besides Ricardo,” Trudy snapped at me as she made a dive for the list. I held it up over my head, wrenching my back but successfully keeping it out of her hands. I dashed for the truck.
“If we take this list, Zorita, is someone else gonna die?” I heard Trudy call back into the house.
The front door banged closed in Trudy’s face, and the dead bolt shot. Now, I never saw Zorita’s rotund shape rise up out of the hole, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t, right? And I wasn’t telling Trudy the windowed room backlit with the setting sun looked empty when I jumped into the truck, cranked the engine, and honked her out of her daze.
We didn’t talk much on the way back. Trudy was so spooked she could hardly put a sentence together, and I was so frustrated that I wasn’t able to answer one as sensitively as I should have for my pinky-blue friend, anyway. Our one attempt to converse went something like this.
“Trude, can you read me the names on the list?” I reached to retrieve it from the side pocket of the truck door.
“I, I’m not…ah…I don’t think we should have it.”
“Trudy, please! I am dying to know who’s on it.”
“Reyn! Don’t…I mean, you can’t…say that word.”
“Word? What word?” I really was stumped for a moment, before bursting out, “Dying! Dying! Dead! Die! Died! Maybe I’ll really do it, and then all the suspense will be over, and you can snap out of this trance, you freak.”
Then she started crying. “I’m (sniff)…I’m sorry I care (snort) about you. Finding Ricardo’s killer isn’t worth losing your life.”
“Maybe not, but is it worth getting me hooked up with Detective Darling?”
A glimmer came into her eyes then, and I thought I had her back, but her eyes filled up with tears. “You can’t date him if you’re dead (intense sobbing).”
I stopped trying after that. Dusk fell fast, and the stretch of Highway 281 we were on was so busy I couldn’t even turn on my interior light and take a look at the violet-pitted page. It would have to wait until we got home. I weaved in and out of traffic, knowing the girls must have their legs crossed in the backseat. I’d intended to let them out to relieve themselves on the top of Zorita’s hill before we started back to the city, but, considering the way our close encounter had ended, I had a vision of them coming out of the woods as a trio of horny toads or armadillos or something worse, so I decided they could hold it until we got home.
Chardonnay was whining in my ear by the time we turned into my driveway. I parked, snatched up off the console the damned barf bag Scythe had slipped me at the crime scene, stuffed the violet list in the rear waist-band of my skirt, opened the back door for the girls, and walked around to the iron gate at the side of the house to let them into the backyard. Trudy had gotten out and walked around the left side that front McCullough, where the salon parking lot is, presumably to get into her car and go home to Mario. Just as well. I wanted to review the list alone and collect my thoughts about it before I got her input. I crunched my way across the grass, littered with the hard, waxy leaves of the three-hundred-year-old oak trees in my front yard. They were evergreens that molted spring and fall, and I thought with some sense of relief that it would be pretty hard to sneak up on my house while the trees were shedding their leaves. See, sometimes it pays to be a lazy gardener.
I heard Trudy talking to someone in the parking lot. A baritone someone. Not the flasher, I hoped, especially hoping it was not the murderer. My heart pounded.
As I was about to round the fat, blooming gardenia bush that sits at the southeast corner of my house, I heard Trudy giggle. “Lieutenant Scythe, you rascal.”
Not the flasher; not the murderer, much, much worse.
“Just telling the truth, ma’am, that’s all.”
That again. Did he know the truth can kill? Zorita told us so. I leaned into the gardenia bush and peeked through the leaves. He’d shed the sport coat, and his baby-blue knit shirt fit a little too tightly across the chest and biceps and a little too loosely at his abdomen. They need to redesign polo shirts to fit his body type.
“I just don’t think I look all that good,” Trudy was saying modestly. “I mean, after Reyn dragged me all over the county and beyond today.”
“I’ve just never seen a woman look so pretty and fresh at the end of the day like you do,” Scythe lied.
Didn’t Trudy realize that it was night, and night meant it was dark? The security light over the salon’s front door was about fifty watts shy of doing any good and only highlighted their shadows. I leaned deeper into the bush. What was Scythe up to?
“To look so good (tsk), especially after all your cross-county adventures,” he added, saccharine-sweet. “Where all did you say you’d been?”
Ah-ha. The light might be dim out there, but it lit up in my head. How could Trudy not know he was pumping her for information with his lame flirting? He wasn’t even any good at it. The flirting, that is, although there was no proving that by the way Trudy giggled again. Maybe she was just trying to be polite.
She twisted a lock of hair around her forefinger. “We went—”
“Shopping.” I extracted myself from the bush and swung around the corner very suavely and just in time to stop the blabbermouth from spilling our secret.
They both turned to me. Trudy blushed. “We did?”
“Shopping for what?” Oh, but that Scythe was quick. Damn him.
“Uh, baby clothes,” I blurted. Well, I figured the only three things I might know more about than he did were salon products, feminine hygiene products, or baby stuff. I discarded the first one, since he might know more than I thought he did, considering it was his business because of Ricardo’s murder. I discarded the second, because I didn’t want even to mention anything that remotely had to do with sex in front of him. So that left the third. And, yes, I did consider all this in the approximately five seconds it took to answer his question. As I said, a chaotic mind but a swift one.
Clearly too chaotic.
“Baby clothes?” He sounded skeptical.
“Yes, rompers, jumpers, and those cute little onesies…” Thank the good Lord for big families, especially the mini-humans, my nieces and nephews.
“Onesies?”
“Brilliant inventions.” I smiled, nodding idiotically.
“Cotton knit deals that button…”I started to demonstrate, Scythe’s gaze following as my hand went to my crotch. I blushed and dropped my hand. “Between their, uh, legs.” That one eyebrow half hitched. I rushed to fill up the air. “Kind of like the leotard I have on.”
Both eyebrows shot up. He smothered a grin and looked studious. “Now, with the babies, I could understand that the design is one of convenience. For diaper changing, of course. For you, however, I fail to see the advantage of extra buttons. Unless it is some variation on a chastity belt,” he offered, glancing at Trudy in exaggerated question.
Trudy looked at me thoughtfully. “Maybe that’s why you don’t get dates. You need to be more accessible!”
“Trudy!” My face was blazing hot now, and I never blush. I didn’t even feel like myself. My tongue felt thick. My mind felt loopy. Zorita must have put a curse on me. Either that, or I wasn’t cut out for this investigating stuff.
“So, who are you shopping for?” He’d had his fun. He was focusing back in on his prey.
“Oh, one of the girls at Illusions.” Trudy jumped right in.
“Is that right?” The corners of his mouth were dancing again. “I wasn’t sure those ‘girls’ had quite the right equipment to give birth.”
“Just because you’re not equipped doesn’t mean you can’t be a parent.” I jutted my chin and met those laser eyes in challenge. “Bettina was such a help to us that we thought we ought to get her a little thank-you. And then Trudy remembered her talking about adopting a baby, and we thought that might be a way to show our appreciation.”
Both Trudy and Scythe stared at me.
“What did you decide on?”
Trudy and I shared a look. Uh-oh, it said. “We couldn’t agree.”
“No.” Trudy laughed. “One argument after another.”
“Over onesies,” Scythe deadpanned. He was on to us but couldn’t prove it. Ha! Us 1, Them 0.
“Oooh.” Trudy glanced from me to Scythe to her Seiko. “Look at the time. Mario will be missing me. I have to run, Reyn.”
“Not so soon.” I grabbed her left upper arm with two hands, hard, leading her to the back door, which takes me straight into the kitchen. “Come in, have a glass of cab. We can talk about what gift to get Bettina, and I’ll run pick it up tomorrow.”
Prying my fingers loose, she backed toward her car. “I’ll have to take a rain check.”
“But I won’t,” Scythe said. “I have time for a glass of wine.”
Trudy couldn’t have smiled bigger if she’d just found out they’d discovered a cure for cellulite overnight. Not that she had any, she was just obsessed with it. I glared. She ignored me as she deactivated her car alarm and slid behind the wheel of her lime-green VW Bug. “Thank you for the compliment, Lieutenant.”
“You’re welcome, Mrs. Trujillo. Please call me Jack.”
“Only if you call me Trudy,” she returned before buzzing off down the street.
How cozy.
Speaking of cozy. “Now, about that wine,” Scythe purred.
“I thought you cops aren’t supposed to drink on the job.” I stood my ground. I didn’t trust this cat.
“I’m not on the job.”
“Right.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“From what I understand, detectives can be called twenty-four hours a day. Besides that, you don’t seem the type able to leave a case at the office. I bet you hang on to an investigation like a pit bull.”
“I see. You’re an amateur psychologist in addition to being an amateur detective?”
“Touchy, aren’t we? What happened, did I hit close to a nerve?” I flashed a grin and let myself into my house. I felt a surge of confidence. I could deal with him. If he wanted to follow me in, well, he’d just better watch himself.
I threw the keys and the barf bag onto the kitchen table. “Don’t you want to take that back, since I didn’t need it?”
“Not yet, you haven’t.”
What did that mean? I didn’t bite, though. Instead, I walked straight to the pantry, although kind of sideways like a crab, since I didn’t want him to see the list sticking out of my waistband. Then I flung open the pantry door like I was intent on dinner and he was imposing. He looked over my shoulder.
“You aren’t the world’s skinniest woman, but there’s no way you can eat all the crap that’s in your kitchen.” He read off some labels. “Lemongrass sauce. Dark chocolate layered truffles. Bayou Beef in a can. What gives?”
“I’m not the world’s skinniest woman, huh?” I jammed my hands on my hips. You certainly have a way with words. A bad way.”
“Your friend didn’t think so.”
“Ha! You were just trying to butter her up for information.”
“There’s all kinds of ways to get information,” he said with a sly shift in that right eyebrow.
“What way would you say you’re using with me, then? The insulting method? Do they teach that at the police academy? The piss-them-off method?”
“Who says I’m trying to insult you? Who wants to be the world’s skinniest woman, anyway?”
“Ninety-nine percent of the female population.”
“”Really?” He looked interested in understanding the female psyche for a nanosecond. That quickly disappeared. “Well, that just shows how stupid women are. Have you ever slept with a really skinny woman?”
I probably looked like I was going to hurl. I mean, it was one thing to rub elbows all day with transvestites, but I had to draw the line at imagining myself in bed with a skinny woman.
“No. Have you?”
Scythe looked a little disgruntled at my ability to reply. “None of your business.”
“You made it my business when you brought it up.”
“Now, about that wine.” He smoothly tried to change the subject, wandering over to the refrigerator. Who keeps cabernet in the refrigerator? I realized he must be a Bud man, because otherwise he’d be checking countertops.
I was mulling over this likelihood so hard that I failed to remember that my refrigerator hadn’t been cleaned in at least six months. Once I did, I jumped up and tried to block him from getting the door all the way open. Too late. He stood staring into the chilling recesses of the Whirlpool. After what seemed like ages, he looked down at me.
“I see your next murder weapon.”