Book Club Bloodshed (7 page)

“Lee didn’t do something justice?” She smiled at the weak joke, stood, and reached her hand out. Hopefully she could give him the female handshake, just fingers, but the PI was having nothing of it.

He held on just a little too long. His palm was clammy. When he let go, she couldn’t help it but wipe her hand on her jeans.

“Oh, sorry.” He held his palm out for her to see. “I have a condition. Hyperhidrosis. I sweat a lot.”

Missy could sympathize. She never got man-sweaty, but for a women she soaked easily from little exertion. Five minutes on the treadmill and her shirt was usually sticking to her.

“What’s your name?”

“Paul I.S. Gold. As in, Paul Is Gold.”

Missy arched an eyebrow. “That’s your actual name?”

“Yeah. I mean, it has been ever since I changed it.”

Missy could not comprehend the fact that Lee Greenberg, possibly the most successful attorney in the area, used this guy as his investigator. Maybe Paul I.S. Gold was so underestimatable that he essentially flew under the radar.

Either way, here he was.

“What was it before you changed it?” Missy asked, curiosity getting the better of her.

“Dwayne.”

She laughed, thinking he was actually making a good joke. But when she was met with a serious face, she stopped chuckling.

“What?” he asked.

“Oh. Nothing.”

He put his hands on his hips. It was supposed to be an angry gesture, but on him it was comical.

“Dwayne just didn’t sound right. It sounded like such a dweeby name.” He smiled.

She nodded and decided to be gracious. “Well, Paul Is Gold is a much better name than mine.”

“Missy Demeanor?” he said, not getting it.

Really? “Yeah, like
mis
demeanor?”

“Oh.” He laughed. “Right.”

She smiled. Time to get down to business. Paul Is Gold couldn’t keep his eyes off her breasts and she was beginning to feel self-conscious even though they were undoubtedly her best feature.

“So Lee filled you in?”

Gold nodded. “We got a dirty cop. What a surprise.”

Missy frowned. “They’re not
all
bad. Most of them are good, actually.”

Again, it was weird she felt the need to defend Tyler even though he’d wrongfully arrested her best friend. But Missy didn’t dwell on this because she didn’t want to understand what it could mean.

“Too good for me,” Gold said. “Can you believe that? They took three other guys over me, none of whom went the distance. And one of them, Stan Garbo, is actually in prison now for that Ponzi scheme he started
while he was working as a cop.
”

Missy pegged Gold to be mid-forties, so the police had probably passed him over twenty years ago at least. He should have been over it by now.

Like she had room to talk. This morning she had almost asked her high school sweetheart for closure.

“Lee told me you were going WiredFit tonight. I think that’s the perfect place to start.”

His eyes migrated south again, and Missy couldn’t stand it anymore. She was so self-conscious about her body, that even positive attention sometimes made her uncomfortable.

“Okay.” She shot out a palm. “Can you keep your eyes up here?” She put her hand in front of her face.”

“Hey, sorry.” He smirked. “I can’t help it. I’m a chubby chaser.”

Missy
hated
that term. “Excuse me?”

“What? Is chubby a bad term now?” He threw his head back and rolled his eyes. “Somebody call the thought police. I’ll tell you, political correctness has gotten out of control in this country.”

“Women don’t like to be called chubby, in case you didn’t know.”

“Big? Thick? Curvy? BBW? What do you prefer?”

She had called herself all of those things. And that was okay. For her to do. Not okay for somebody else to do.

“Look, Paul, can we keep this strictly business? No offense.”

“I get it. I get it.” He put his hands on his hips again and it was difficult taking him seriously in that pose. “You don’t like short, thin men. Women tell me that all the time, that I’m not their type.”

Missy said nothing.

He pointed at her. “I’ll bet you know what that’s like. To not be somebody’s type, huh?”

She wanted to punch him.

“Oh.” He snapped his fingers in her general direction. “I forgot. Lee can’t get Noreen released.”

“What?” Missy couldn’t believe it. Even after she’d given Tyler the jealous lover lead? “Why not?”

“Attorney-client.” Paul shook his head. “He couldn’t say. But reading between the lines, it’s not good.”

She shook her head. “Noreen didn’t do this.”

He shrugged, like that was unimportant to him. “I hate to break it to you, but that means the police have all they need. Right now they’re just dotting all their I’s and crossing all their T’s. Your friend is in big trouble.”

“You’re not exactly reassuring.”

“What can I say? I tell it like it is.”

Missy was dying for this conversation to be over. “Anyway, yes, I’m going to WiredFit tonight.” She groaned inwardly at the idea of immersing herself in an environment filled with super fit people, who were strong, athletic, flexible, and less than six percent body fat.

“Good.” He nodded at her and stuck his lower lip out again. She realized he was trying to look tough, or smart, or both. “You shouldn’t have trouble getting one of them to pick you up, so then you can invite yourself to the bar after.”

Missy wasn’t looking forward to this. “What are you going to do?”

“I’ll be following your every move.”

She couldn’t help but be sarcastic. “Great.”

Missy called in a favor with Brett, asking to leave early in light of the fact she’d be working around the clock the next three days. Of course he agreed. Brett was a nice man, probably too nice.

“Brett, I really owe you.”

He smiled. “Miss, good luck. I know what you’re going to do.”

“You do?” she asked, incredulous. She hadn’t told him anything about her investigating the murder.

He nodded. “I’ve worked with you a long time, Melissa DeMeanor. I’ve gotten to know you well. And I know this about you: you will not stand by and do nothing when there’s something wrong. You’re a good person.”

She was embarrassed by the compliment. Missy just thought she was doing what anybody else should do for a friend.

“Thanks, Brett.” She hugged him. “Have a nice vacation, I mean, as nice as you can.”

“Thanks, Miss. Sell a lot of books while I’m gone.”

Missy got home at six and found Cody in the same spot from when she’d left this morning. She quickly fed her, then hurried upstairs. The WiredFit class started at seven and she needed to find something appropriate to wear.

Searching her bedroom, she found an old pair of yoga pants she forgot she had and a wicking shirt that was a size too small. She looked through her dirty hamper to see if she could reuse the outfit from her aborted run this morning, but like Paul Is Gold, she sweated a lot and the clothes had taken on an odor after being balled up in her laundry for the entire day.

So yoga pants and undersized wicking shirt it was.

Missy went back and forth on using the regular bra versus the sports bra, and eventually settled on sports bra. She’d heard the WiredFit workouts could get really crazy.

The yoga pants stretched across her thighs and became almost transparent. She examined herself in the mirror…and almost died.

***

Missy was normally a planner. As the day wore on she racked her brain to come up with a strategy. Finally, with nothing coming to her, Missy gave up and decided to wing it. She was not a
winger
by nature but she didn’t have much choice. Noreen was in jail and Tyler didn’t seem interested in pursuing any other angle to the case.

Her phone buzzed as she pulled into the WiredFit parking lot. Lee Greenberg. She hoped against all reason that Lee had good news, that Noreen was being let go, that Tyler had caught the killer, because as selfish as it sounded she
really
did not want to set foot inside WiredFit. She might have lost fifteen pounds over the last two months, but she had a
long
way to go and the hardcore exercisers weren’t usually the most sympathetic when it came to being overweight.

Lee said, “Missy, I wanted to give you a status update.”

“Are they letting her go?”

“No.” Lee’s voice was hesitant for a change. “Actually, they’re bringing formal charges tomorrow, which means they’ll schedule the trial.”

Trial
? This couldn’t be happening. How could Tyler be so obtuse? She wondered what had happened between them, maybe they had burned each other and the past was now bleeding into the present.

“What do we do?”

“Not to worry, Miss. This won’t go to trial if I have anything to say about it. I’m going to keep working my angle. Have you connected with Paul Gold yet?”

“Actually, Lee, I wanted to talk to you about him…I don’t know if you’ve worked with him before, but he—”

“He’s the best, Miss. Paul really
is
gold, ha ha.”

Missy couldn’t let this go. It was too important. “Uh, I’m not sure how to say this but—”

“Miss, he works well because nobody sees him coming.”

Actually, Missy thought everybody would see him coming because he unfortunately looked like a pedophile in his overcoat. How Lee expected him to be able to tail the cops without being noticed was beyond her.

“I don’t know, Lee.”

“I do.” In the background, she heard him opening a door. “Now I gotta run, Miss. I have to prepare for the indictment, it’s going to take a very compelling motion.”

“Lee, just one more thing—”

“Gotta run. Talk to you tomorrow, Miss. And stay safe.”

He hung up.

Missy dropped the phone in her lap and leaned her head back against the seat cushion. Taking a deep breath, she told herself she shouldn’t be worried about what others would think of her inside WiredFit. Her body was her body. It might have contained her but it didn’t reflect some deep character flaw. She was just overweight. That was all. All her life she had struggled to keep the pounds off. Most of the people at WiredFit had never faced what she had. Sure, anybody put on weight if they weren’t careful or as the years rolled by, but she was on the—

Thud, thud, thud.

“Hey, Missy!”

Missy nearly hit her head on the roof of the car when she jumped. Paul Is Gold’s face was practically smooshed up against her window as he waved excitedly at her.

When her pulse got back down to just under a million beats per second, she grabbed her keys, phone, and exercise bag and got out of the car.

“Whoa,” Paul said, eyeing her up and down.

Missy decided to ignore it. “Maybe next time, could you not bang on my window like that if you can tell I don’t see you coming?”

Paul held out a palm. “Sorry, I was just excited to see you. Even more so now.”

“Paul, I appreciate the compliments, but can we focus on business here?”

“I can focus on both.” With the southward drift of his eyes, she couldn’t tell if he meant her breasts when he said
both
. “Are you ready?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be.” She still had no plan, other than to go to the class, hope she struck up a conversation with one or more of the guys, and then…who knew. “I am not looking forw—what is that?”

Paul was holding up an expensive looking camera that was strapped around his neck. The lens was aimed at her, and he adjusted the focus manually.

“Camera.”

She covered herself like she was naked. “No pictures of me.”

“You look great!”

“What do you need the camera for?”

“Missy, I am a private investigator. I take pictures. I need to get all of these guys on film.”

That might have been true, but she suspected he had other motives in mind too. No doubt she and the other women training inside WiredFit would miraculously appear in the pictures too, in various suggestive poses.

She shuddered. “I have to get inside.”

“Hey, wait.” He grabbed her arm, which made her skin crawl. “Better give me your cell phone number.”

“Can you let go of my arm?”

He did and took his phone out. “This way we can stay in contact at all times, even if we get split up.”

“Uh…”

“Missy, one of these guys might have killed Anne Baxter.”

As much as she didn’t want to give him her number, that last point struck home. She read off her number and he typed it in.

When he was done, he did that weird gesture of nodding while sticking his lower lip out. “Nice choice of outfit, by the way. Especially the lemons.”

She frowned, thinking he was making some kind of innuendo. For a brief second, she thought about challenging him but she really had to get inside. She knew from Lee that class started in a few minutes, and she’d need that time to talk to Lee’s trainer first.

“I’m going in.”

Paul stayed where he was. “I’ll be right here. Watching you the whole time. Don’t worry.”

She wanted to throw up for a lot of reasons.