Hard Case Crime: Deadly Beloved (4 page)

I shrugged. “Hubby’s chubbies?”

The dark-brown eyes narrowed. “Did Bernie Levine tell you about the prior incidents?”

“What prior incidents?”

“I’ll take that as a ‘no.’ ” Rafe let some air out. His free hand rested on his hip. “Back when Rich Addwatter was catting around, his wife took a potshot at him on one occasion, and on another, her aim improving, put him in the hospital with a bullet in the upper arm.”

“Is that all?”

“Actually, no. She also clobbered him, once, with a glass ashtray.”

“By that do you mean, clobbered him once, or once upon a time clobbered him?”

“Both apply. And it’s no joke—left him a scar. Gave the poor bastard migraines.”

I shrugged again. “It’s a joke compared to getting shot and killed with a ‘date’ in a sleazy motel room. And, anyway, he’s probably over his headaches now.”

“Some headaches,” Rafe said, as he stared me down, “hang on after you’d figure they wouldn’t.”

I ignored that. “So these past ‘incidents,’ even though she’s been medically stabilized ever since, make her the perfect perp.”

He nodded but he didn’t look happy about it.

“And from Homicide’s point of view, this is a closed case?”

“It should be. It really should. But I swear, Michael—somebody set that poor woman in motion...then expected us to buy it at face value.”

“On the surface, this one’s about as open-and-shut as they come.”

“That’s what bothers me—it’s all surface...but such a perfect surface, we won’t need to dig.”

“And that’s why you’re helping Bernie Levine out, and getting me free passes to the visitor’s room at lock-up.”

He said nothing, but that might have been a smile.

I held my hand out. “May I?”

He shook his head, but put the .38 in my hand and said, “Be my guest. You want a fresh target?”

“No. You left plenty to play with.”

“I’m anxious to see what you can do. After all, you said you’d seen better....”

“Back off and let a woman in.”

Rafe stepped out of the cubicle and I took his place and assumed the proper stance.

I took half a second to aim before my six shots blurred into one roar, and twenty-five feet down, the little puckers in the paper clustered even tighter than Rafe’s had, only mine were centered on the cartoon perp’s forehead.

My smile was smug, I admit it, when I returned the empty weapon to Rafe’s outstretched hand. Cordite smell hung in the air like a curtain that had dropped after my performance.

He was grinning again, shaking his head a little, clearly impressed. He emptied the spent shells from the .38’s cylinder into a waist-high tray at the shooter’s station; the shells made a brittle rainfall.

Then his expression turned innocent. “Does it help?”

I just looked at him.

He nodded toward the head-shredded target down there. “That it’s a guy?”

I rewarded him with a little laugh, then asked, “What do you know about this case that I don’t, Rafe? Come on. Spill.”

He was looking past me, toward the target, reflective suddenly. “You know, Michael, I’m not surprised you quit the force. You really were wasted in Records.”

“That was where you met your husband,” the doctor said.

“That’s right. Records. Mike Tree was a lieutenant with Homicide, and me? I was a glorified clerk. My father had been a career cop, most decorations in the history of the department, and thus far in my so-called career, I’d been a damn drudge, a grunt in Records, a uniformed policewoman copying information from official forms into a computer file.”

“So you quit.”

“No, doc, Rafe was wrong: I didn’t quit, not exactly.”

“But you
did
quit...”

“I resigned.”

“Odd distinction.”

I sighed. “Okay. Let’s just say, quitting hadn’t been my idea.”

He shifted in the chair and the leather squeaked. “Please explain.”

Mike Tree was just this big fullback-looking guy with a military crewcut and gentle blue-green eyes and an unforgiving square jaw and the kind of battered good looks that some women find sexy. Unfortunately, I was one of them.

He was legendary around the department as one of the toughest cops in town, though it was the kind of tough that people usually tagged “but fair” after. He flirted with every woman on the department, whether cute or chunky, married or lesbian, but never really hit on any of them and never dated a fellow cop. That was the word, anyway.

Which I admit frustrated me, because he always stopped and talked to me a little longer, flirted a little more boldly, than with any other girl on the force. A part of me resented that. A bigger part wished it would go further....

On this particular afternoon, I hadn’t noticed him approach my little outpost in the Records bullpen. Suddenly he was just there beside me, dragging a chair from somewhere to sit on it backward next to me in a boldly familiar way, as if he’d done it a hundred times, when it was probably only fifty.

“Afternoon, sexy,” he said. His voice had a husky, almost raspy sound.

I kept typing. Didn’t look at him. “Wow. You must not’ve heard about the new Sexual Harassment Protocol.”

“What new Sexual Harassment Protocol?”

“The one they just adopted, fifteen years ago.”

He shrugged. Yawned and made a show of it. “I’d have to work here for that to matter.”

Now I looked at him. Couldn’t help myself. “Since when don’t you work here?”

His smile was endless and endlessly self-satisfied. “Since five minutes ago. Tended my resignation...or is that tendered? Which is right? Ah hell, make it ‘tendered’...I’m feeling more tender today, anyway.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked irritably, doing everything I could to sound like I didn’t care. I was back to my typing, not looking at him anymore, but I won’t say it was easy.

He leaned in. “What I’ve been talking about. For
months
now.”

“Remind me.”

“Starting my own agency.”

“Oh. Mike Tree, Private Eye. I thought that was a pipe dream.”

He gestured with both hands, leaning against the back of that chair as his friendly mug hung over it. “If so, I’m smoking some really good stuff. ‘Cause I turned in my written resignation and my badge and I.D. and even my gun.”

Now I looked at him, right at him. “You’re serious.”

“As a heart attack.” He pointed at me, Uncle Sam-style. “You know why I stopped by, don’t you?”

“To say goodbye? Goodbye.”

“No. Because I need a few good men.”

“You what?”

“For my new agency. I need a few good men.” I’d turned back to my typing, but from the corner of an eye, I saw that cocky half-grin of his. “I could even use a few good women.”

I paused. Turned toward him again. “What is this, a proposition?”

He didn’t rise to my bait, instead shifting tone and, seemingly, subject. “Look, your pop was the best cop ever...a cop’s cop...so you became one, right?”

“Right.”

“You were the only child, and you happened to be a girl, which disappointed Daddy but which I happen to be fully in favor of....Anyway, the point is, you picked up the family banner. You got a two-year law enforcement degree at that junior college out in the suburbs, what’s it called? Doesn’t matter, and before you know it, you’re at the academy acing every damn thing they could throw at you. Right?”

“Right. So?”

He leaned in again. Way in, this time. The eyes, typically, were gentle, sweet, but that jaw remained determined. “So where’d you start out, after graduating with top honors? Where did this boy’s club called the Chicago PD feel your gifts could best serve our fair city?”

“Don’t say it.”

“Writing parking tickets,” he said.

“I asked you not to say it.”

“And so you worked your way up to Records. And gee whiz, gee willikers, it only took three years. Why, you’ll be on the street in...let me do the math...
never
.”

I said nothing for a moment.

He let me mull it.

Then I said, “You have a better offer?”

“Miss Friday, I certainly—”

“I prefer ‘Ms.’ ”

“Do you?” The blue-green eyes twinkled. No shit, they twinkled. “Maybe you’d prefer being a
real
cop.”

I frowned. “Private variety? Divorces and security systems? No thank you.”

Both eyebrows went up. And his smile had no smirk in it at all. “Even if I offered you a full partnership? I’m bringing over a couple of other coppers, too, though they aren’t as cute as you...well, maybe Dan Green is.”

“You don’t mean that kid Green, the patrolman?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly who I mean. Took
him
a whole
year
to get out on the street. Oh, and Roger Freemont, of course.”

“
That
asshole?”

“Yeah. That asshole.” He flipped a hand. “Roge was my partner starting out, and the first person I thought to ask aboard...though you were always high on the list, Ms. Friday.”

“You’re on my list, too. And please spare me the story about Freemont saving your life in Desert Storm. I’ll wait for the movie.”

I swung back toward the computer, my fingers poised. But somehow I couldn’t bring myself to type.

He stood watching me not work. But he wasn’t smug at all when he asked, “So—what do you say, Michelle?”

“It’s ‘Michael.’ ”

He shrugged. “Whatever. You’re a rose by any name that deserves better than sitting behind a computer at some goddamn desk in a dreary uniform that does lousy things to your....What do you say?”

“What do I say?”

“Is there an echo in here?” His grin was big and friendly but something in his eyes was serious, almost pleading. “Yeah, Michael, what do you say?”

My lower lip quivered. My eyes were tightening and untightening. My breath was coming fast.

“...Yes?”

And six months later, I was a partner in the Tree Agency, smartly attired in a black suit with white blouse, both courtesy of Norma Kamali...

...behind a desk, typing at a computer keyboard.

Well, somebody had to run the office, Mike said. And I was the only one among the handful of Tree Agency employees who had the computer skills. Once we had expanded, as our new Michigan Avenue suite of offices would easily allow, I could replace my own position and finally get out in the field.

Mike said.

I admit I was frustrated. Dan Green, Roger Freemont and Mike made up a smaller boys’ club than the Chicago PD, but a boys’ club all the same. Each had his private office—there were three offices and a conference room at the rear—and I would see them conferring just outside those offices, in various combinations. Our agency may have been in the Loop, but I wasn’t. I kept my own company in one of the eight cubicles that were to be filled one day.

Freemont I particularly found grating.

Fortyish, bald, burly, in black-rimmed glasses and off-the-rack suits, he looked like an accountant having a bad day. Every day. He was civil but spoke to me only when necessary, and I had the feeling he resented that I—like he and Dan—was a full partner.

Once, about three months after we opened the office, Freemont had stopped by my desk and awkwardly tried to make nice. Sort of.

He said, “Look, I know you’re qualified, and the time will come. Trust me.”

“Why?”

Behind the lenses of the glasses, his dark blue eyes blinked owlishly. “Why what?”

“Should I trust you.”

He frowned. “Because you trust Mike, and he trusts me. I know you feel...left out.”

I smiled at him the way a teacher does a problem student. “That’s right. Things are going on around here, cases looked into, that I’m not part of. There’s more whispering than a teenage slumber party.”

Suddenly he seemed ill at ease; or I should say, even more ill at ease.

“You’ll have to take it up with Mike,” he said, and was off to the privacy of his office.

Dan Green, on the other hand, was genuinely friendly, and we hit off. We followed a couple of the same TV shows and that gave us some common ground for office chitchat, and we both had a jones for Gino’s deep dish pizza, which led to an occasional business lunch or dinner.

Just the same, he never got fresh with me; we were strictly business buddies.

But when we hired Bea Vang away from the Chicago PD—where among other things she’d worked undercover vice and, along the way, picked up a taste for fun if mildly slutty clothes—Dan took more than a professional interest. Or was that less?

Ms. Vang was a good-looking young woman whose attributes may have been emphasized by the Betsy Johnson fashions she preferred, but even in Ann Taylor she’d have been the kind of attractive nuisance that could lead a Dan Green to spend way too much time stopping by her desk.

Bea hadn’t complained to me, but I could see she was getting uncomfortable, so I brought the subject up with Dan—boiled down, it came to “Cool it!”—and then reported to Mike.

“I had to talk to Dan today,” I told him.

“About hitting on Bea?”

“Right. Last thing a new small business needs is a sexual harassment lawsuit.”

My point, admittedly, was undercut by our being naked in bed together at the time I brought this up....

Mike’s bed, in his apartment.

He threw the paperback he’d been reading onto the nightstand, moved closer and slipped an arm around me. “Sexual harassment, huh? Isn’t this where I came in?”

“Never mind where you came in,” I said, thumping him on the nose with a forefinger, gently. “Bea’s got a solid law enforcement background, and—as we expand—we need to get her out from behind that desk and into some real case work.”

“Is this a veiled criticism?”

I beamed at him—one hundred watts of sarcasm. “About my being stuck behind a desk? Why, no! Not at all! I would never accuse you of bait and switch. Not in a million fucking years....”

He slipped his arm out from around my shoulders and sat up in bed, sheets gathered at his waist, his muscular chest and broad shoulders meaning absolutely nothing to me, much, and gave me his most earnest look. “Hey. By next year, you will be out from behind that desk. One way or the other.”