Kill Smartie Breedlove (a mystery) (10 page)

“Eight years,” he mourned. “Eight years. And now I’m alone.”

“You’re not alone. You have Casilda.”

“She’s upset with me,” he mumbled. “She’s gone to a hotel.”

“Oh, Herrick. Go to her. Right now. Go tell her you love her.”

“I can’t drive. I’m shitfaced.”

“Take a cab.” Smartie suddenly felt herself slipping away. “Herrick, I took a Lunesta. I have to go to bed before I drown in my bathtub.”

But she was still vaguely conscious when he left the first message.

“It’s not the divorce. It’s not even that damned blog. Truth is, Harcourt rejected
Flight of the Cocksparrow
today. After dangling me by a piano wire for seventeen weeks, they simply…
puh
.”

He made a sound that indicated finality, desolation and the microcephaly of acquisitions committees.

“Same old story. Dear Mr. Herrick, We think you’re a terrific writer, but this book doesn’t have a clear market niche. It just isn’t
buzzable
. The only way to get published by us is to castrate your artistic integrity and fellate the mass audience like a midget whore in a donkey show. Why don’t you sit down and shit a pile of mass market crap like your brilliant wife Smartie fucking Breedlove, the hacking, talentless mass paperback twat, and I’m not about to sink to your level, you whoring, hacking, Oprah-sucking—”

Herrick’s rant was truncated by an electronic
ding
, but by this time, Smartie was oblivious. The second message didn’t stir a ripple on the surface of her Lunesta-blessed slumber.

“It’s me again. I guess I got cut off. And I didn’t mean that. You are brilliant. The first day you walked into my classroom twelve years ago, I knew you’d be a blazing star.”

Twinkie whined and snuffled at the sound of Herrick’s voice on the machine.

“You deserve all the success you’ve gotten as a result of your hard work… your incredible mind… the way you drank in everything I taught you. Ah, God, the words I brought out of you. I could hardly believe I was capable of… not that I take credit, of course. You deserve all the accolades. All the applause. All the money. The money, money, money. Every damn dollar you suck out of this perverted industry, because—hey, kid, if you’re willing to let some editorial Uncle Vanya twist your vision and hand you off to the PR pimps so they can pump that money shot down your throat, and
you love it, don’t you?
You love every minute you spend with your cluster-fucking fans on the
Today Show
book club Barnes and Noble bullshit sellout shelf, you hacking, whoring, Walmart—”

Ding
.

An hour or so went by before the last message, and Herrick was obviously trashed to the outer limits now, his breath heavy, his voice folding weakly into his cell phone.

“All the good ideas are dead. Raped and murdered. All that’s left is chain stores full of fifty shades of Da Vinci coded monkey crap. Congratulations, my Galatea. You’re one of the ‘Hottie Literati.’ And even if I get a contract from some brave little press someday, I will never have ‘hangers on.’ But you know what they say. Writing is easy. You just…” Herrick sighed deeply and let a bit of silence go by. “You just open a vein and bleed all over the page.”

\\\ ///

11

L
istening to the message on her bedside machine the next morning, Smartie rewound the message to that silent bit. She heard the tinseled chime of her own sunroom mantel clock in the background. Gathering a yellow silk robe around herself, she crept down the floating staircase that levitated between her living and sun rooms, nervously calling, “Herrick? Herrick, are you still here?”

She was frantic but not entirely surprised when she discovered him in a sea of blood and pages on the sunroom floor.

As Herrick was loaded into an ambulance with barely the shadow of a pulse, the EMT handed Smartie a little refrigerator magnet styled to look like a Rubik’s Cube and printed with the message: “Hewitt & Son Crime and Trauma Scene Decontamination: We get you SQUARED away!”

“Call this guy,” said the EMT, ticking his thumb toward the clotted pools and arterial spray that festooned the sunroom. “He’ll clean all that up for ya.”

As unnerved as she was by the events of the morning, Smartie was immediately enchanted by the idea of this particular sort of squaring away and cleaning up. Of course! How astonishing that she’d never thought of it before. Of course
,
this was someone’s business. And what this person must witness in the average work week! The story possibilities took Smartie’s breath away.

When Penn Hewitt arrived at her door half an hour later, he was a bit breathtaking himself.

Digg Manpole was every woman’s handyman fantasy. He stood a meat-lover’s six-foot-four with eyes the color and density of fresh-poured cement and a body carved like a rough climb up the Matterhorn. I didn’t know if I needed a Sherpa or a cold shower.

“Cat’s pants,” Smartie said. “Look at you.”

“Sign here, please.” Penn Hewitt handed her a service contract on a clipboard. “Initial here, here, and here to indicate you’ve read the highlighted portions. I just need to upload these photos to finalize the authorization on your homeowner’s insurance.”

“Can I come with?” she asked. “I want to see all your equipment and fracketty foo out there.”

“Um… sure,” said Hewitt.

Still in her silk robe and PJ pants, Smartie stepped into sneakers and followed him out to his truck, observing intently over his shoulder as he linked up the camera, sent the photos and Velcroed the wrists of his hazmat suit.

“Is all that necessary?” asked Smartie.

“Blood protocol,” he said. “Typical biohazard standards.”

“Ah. Of course.”

The confirmation e-mail came through, and he forwarded a copy to Smartie.

“Good to go,” he said. “I’ll give you a shout on your cell when I’m done. You can pay the deductible with check, VISA or American Express.”

“Oh, but I want to watch,” Smartie said. “For research. As soon as they told me to call you, I knew I had to write something about someone who does… my goodness, I can’t even imagine what you do every day.”

“It’s really not something you want to participate in, ma’am.”

“No, it is! It really is. I definitely have to watch.”

“Ma’am, this is a biohazard, not a scary movie. We’re required by law to treat any biologically enriched site as HIV contaminated,” said Penn. “You’d have to get completely geared up, sign a blood-born pathogen waiver, all that.”

“Geared up?” She clapped her hands together, all but hopping with excitement. “Oh, yes. Gear me up, by all means! I want to feel how it feels.”

A while later, dangling the rustling white legs of her hazmat suit over the side of the staircase, she watched Penn go about his task, scrubbing arterial spray from the brick fireplace.

“It’s not something you want to participate in, Miss Wilder.”

“Call me Smack,” I said. “This ain’t
Little House on the Prairie
.”

She scribbled notes in a Moleskine notebook, inquired at great length about decomps and meth labs and asked a thousand questions about protocol, procedures, equipment and risks, listening to anecdotes about Hewitt’s most salacious sites with wide eyes and interjections of “Holy all fours!” and “Oh, Jesus rutabagas!”

“It’s a bloody business,” said Digg. “And business is bloody good.”

“What do you charge for a dismemberment?” I asked. “Arm and a leg?”

After a few hours, Smartie ran out of questions and shuffled upstairs, returning with cigarettes and a little yellow lighter.

“Ms. Breedlove, you can’t smoke in here with these chemicals.”

“Oh. I suppose not,” she said. “Another great little detail.”

“Not bursting into flame is kind of a big detail. Are you feeling sick?”

“No,” she said. “Just sad.”

“Of course,” he acknowledged, offering no platitudes, as per his training.

“Herrick wasn’t my first husband,” said Smartie. “I married a rabbi when I was nineteen.”

“How’d that work out?”

“We were making love on my twenty-eighth birthday, and he had a heart attack and died.”

“Geezes. What a terrible experience for you.”

“Truly, it was horribly traumatic. Of course, vampire that I am, I used it in a novel. Herrick says I’m pathologically detached.”

She sighed, taking the fake cigarette out of her pocket, tucking it at the corner of her mouth.

“I suppose he thought it would be like that guy who killed himself and then won a Pulitzer. I’d bet anything he gave up the ghost, literally
convinced
he was about to win a gosh dang Pulitzer, and the pitiful part is, even if he had succeeded in doing himself in, even invested with a tragic backstory, this book is as dull as an emu. And I don’t mean dull in a Pynchonian anvil on your head kind of way; I mean dull like six hundred-eighty-three pages of dog crap. Except this thing doesn’t arouse the passion required to put a plastic bag over your hand and pick it up. And you know, this might sound pathologically detached, but I’m annoyed that he tried to off himself in
my
sunroom. He knows I was never in love with him. I know he was never in love with me, but he knew that certain PR people would be all over this because as far as they’re concerned, any time they can shove my name in the paper, an angel gets its wings. This was just a rotten little ploy to get his name out there in connection with mine, and
damn it, damn it, damn it, Herrick!
”

Smartie anguished, fist clenched against her heart.

“What an idiotic thing to do. He could have gone the self-publishing route. Truly, the stigma’s not what it used to be except in the minds of a few academics and New York old-schoolers who actually enjoy living with their heads up each other’s asses. I just can’t believe he did this. And the quantity of blood that came out of him—holy nobs. Is that normal? The guy doesn’t weigh a buck-sixty.”

“Average size male has about five quarts for starters,” said Hewitt, folding her Persian rug into a biohazard bag. “With exsanguination via the forearms, cardiovascular collapse happens at about fifty percent bleed out. You get some gravity leakage beyond that. Other fluids get involved, of course. You got your bile, urine, lymphatic issue and what not.”

“Cats on a carousel.” Smartie hated the choked up feeling that was building in her throat, and the sound of it didn’t escape Hewitt’s notice.

“Blood always looks like more than it is,” he said.

“Is that the standard thing you tell people?”

“Yeah, but it’s true.”

“That’s good. I’ll use that.” Smartie looked longingly at the pack of cigarettes between her hands. “I should have taken the house key from him. I just didn’t have the heart. He’d have been so insulted.”

Down on his kneepads, Penn Hewitt worked solvent into the hardwood floor where blood had soaked through the rug.

“So what’s the story gonna be on this CTS guy in your novel?”

“I don’t know yet.” Smartie welcomed the undisguised attempt to divert her to a new topic. “I’ve been looking for a character to start another series, though, and this could work. Maybe he’ll solve mysteries based on clues left behind by the police, who are idiots, of course. Always missing crucial elements, tromping through blood evidence, driving off with coffee cups on the roof of the cruiser. Stuff like that.”

“That doesn’t happen. The majority of cops are very professional as a rule.”

“Maybe the cleaner is a serial killer.”

“That makes more sense,” Hewitt said without looking at her.

“You talked your way up to Twyla’s room,” I said. “Got her hot. Got her hips up on that railing. Kiss kiss bye bye.”

Digg didn’t deny it. How many other bodies were buried behind those fresh-poured concrete eyes?

“So he butchers beautiful women,” said Smartie, “and gets off on cleaning it up?”

“That would be expensive for him.” Hewitt ducked his head uncomfortably. “Why would he get off on that?”

“Because you’re twisted, Digg. A twisted deviant ruled by dark, voracious appetites.”

“That’s right, Smack, and right now I’m hungry for

“But then he falls in love,” said Smartie. “He falls in love with one of his victims. After he kills her, he’s obsessed with her and imagines that they’re having an intensely hot but seriously twisted affair, and then—
plot bomb!
—we find out
he’s
a figment of
her
imagination. Yes
.
Yes, this could work.
She’s
the one killing everybody. She’s a soccer mom gone horribly awry in the grip of a peri-menopausal psychosis.”

“I thought she was dead.”

“Yams.” Smartie moaned softly and posted her chin in her hand. “You see? The random killer in the mist thing. That never works. You open that can of spaghetti, and all logic flies out the window. That’s the downfall of all slasher stories. It’s just not pragmatic to perpetrate all that mayhem for no dang reason. No. If she wasn’t killed for the money, it had to have been an accident. Or else she really did kill herself.”

Hewitt didn’t seem to mind that the conversation had moved on without him. Smartie silently observed him down on his hands and knees, seriously going at that wood grain with a scrub brush.

“He’s going to have your backside, that’s for definitely sure,” she remarked. “I bet you’re the figment of a few vivid imaginations your own self.”

In her mind, the comment had formed as a professional observation, but Hewitt sat up on his haunches, breathing hard, trying to stay businesslike.

“Ms. Breedlove, technically, it’s against company policy for me to socialize with a customer.”

“Right, right, right,” she waved him off. “Don’t get your fribbles in a snivet.”

Hewitt scrubbed in silence for a long time, then sat up on his haunches again.

“Plot bomb,” he said. “The deviant cleaner turns out to be a super suave undercover narcotics operative. And a Peterbilt sex machine,” he added, sliding her a sideways smile.