Kill Smartie Breedlove (a mystery) (15 page)

“Three weeks?”

“At least.”

“Okay. I can work with that. Hey, thanks, man.” Hewitt warmly shook Shep’s hand. “I appreciate your help, Dude. Seriously. I don’t want to screw this up. I really like her.”

As Hewitt drove away, Shep climbed the porch steps and leaned on the rail, reaching for what to say.

“Getting pretty cozy with the serial killer, huh?”

“We had quite the conversation,” said Smartie. “Decomposing corpses, blood, meth labs, mayhem. He really has a wealth of knowledge.”

“Seems like kind of a macabre fellow.”

“Squabs,
yes
,” she agreed, as if Shep had meant it as a compliment. “Plus he has the chiseled behind of an Argonaut. Talk about dinner and a show.”

Shep felt a distinct
fa-whoosh
past the side of his head.

“Any idea why Herrick tossed your office like that?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“In the living room, he just knocked things over. Upstairs, he seemed to be looking for something.”

“Like what?”

“You tell me.”

“Shep, I haven’t the wildest idea.”

“Did he have some particular beef against the dog?”

“Everyone loved Twinkie, and Twinkie loved everyone.” She shook her head, misty-eyed. “I never would have imagined Herrick was capable of such a thing. And I’ve always thought I was a pretty good judge of character.”

“Everybody’s boneheaded when it comes to people they care about.”

“I do care about him, Shep, and that makes it worse,” Smartie mourned into the palms of her hands. “I hate him right now, and I
hate
hating people, especially people I love, and the worst part is that Casilda’s right. It’s my fault he went off the deep end. I should have left things alone.”

“Smartie, you are not obligated to stay married to that jackass so he can use you as conversational currency.”

“No, but I should have divorced him at the right time for the right reasons. When he sobers up and realizes what he did, he’s going to feel horrible.”

“Yes, he will,” said Shep, silently promising to make that an understatement.

Smartie hugged her knees in front of her. “Can I ask a favor, Shep?”

“Fire away.”

“Before I had Twinkie, I had a lot of trouble sleeping. Hill took the bed frame apart and put the mattress on the floor. That seemed to help because…”

“Got it.”

Knowing Smartie had agonizingly real reasons to fear imaginary beasts under her bed, Shep didn’t make her say any more. He fetched a red metal tool kit from the back of the Range Rover and followed her upstairs.

Smartie’s office was stripped bare and smelled strongly of cleaning solvents, Hewitt had parsed the debris into boxes for her to sort, scrap, repair or reshelve at her discretion. Only the desk and a stubby two-drawer file cabinet were left undamaged.

“Cats pants,” Smartie moaned, kneeling next to a plastic bin of battered computer bits. “I hadn’t even thought about how to get my office functional again.”

“The firm has an excellent computer forensics guy. He might be able to recover the hard drive.” Shep puffed a low, hopeless sigh. “I shot some video for documentation this afternoon. You’ll need to inventory all these damages. I put out a call to a former client who’ll document the dollar value of the dog.”

Shep cracked open his tool box and poked around for an Allen wrench.

“Now you’ll find out what Suri Fitch is really about,” he assured her. “She’ll build a civil case against that little weasel that doesn’t leave him with enough scratch to get a cheeseburger on his way home from the ass-whipping.”

“I don’t care!” Smartie snatched up the cracked open computer mouse and hurled it at a dented place in the drywall, her voice breaking and brittle again. “None of that matters compared to Twinkie. Herrick’s already getting half of everything I have. Everything I’ll ever get in the future. I’d give him the rest if I could have Twinkie back.”

“Wait, wait. Half your assets? Where did you get that impression?”

“Suri told me he could take control of half my works, published and unpublished.”

“You must have misunderstood,” said Shep. “She told me it was a simple annulment. He can’t touch your assets.”

They stood in the middle of the naked parquet floor, questions and answers sitting in the corner, heavy objects, waiting to be sorted and reshelved.

“Shep, she set me up.”

“You must have misunderstood,” Shep repeated on his way to the bedroom.

Heaving the mattress and box spring up against the wall, he took a Phillips screwdriver from the red box and loosened the bolts on the metal rails that connected the bulky head and foot boards. Smartie went to the linen closet down the hall and came back with clean sheets as Shep flopped the mattress flat on the floor. He leaned the rails, boards, and box spring against the far wall while Smartie shoved the mattress into the corner farthest from the door and made her bed.

As the lingering daylight drained from the room, she sat on the floor with her back against the wall, palms together between her knees. There was so much sadness about her; she actually appeared smaller in the waning light. Shep remembered what she’d said that day about sitting shiva, about the humbling power of loss.

He sat down beside her and said, “Libby says you need to eat.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Whenever Janny had a tough day, I used to take her for TexMex and margaritas at Tortugas del Fuego. Their mariachi band covers hair band hits from the 80s. ‘Sister Christian,’ ‘White Wedding.’ C’mon. It’s a hoot.” Shep caught a corkscrew strand of her hair, drew it out straight, let it spring back. “That’s a dinner invitation, not a dead spouse story.”

“I can’t go anywhere for seven days,” said Smartie. “I’m sitting Shiva for Twinkie.”

“Next week then.” Shep took her hand and squeezed it. “Is there anything else I can do?”

“I can’t have intercourse, but you could kiss me. See what that’s like.”

He shook his head. “Not today. Too much other stuff going on.”

But as dusk settled over them, knowing it wasn’t the right thing to do, he stretched out on the mattress and pulled Smartie spoon-style in front of him, trying to be large and safe and Twinkie-like for her.

“I should have let you come upstairs that night,” she said, pushing back into the warm cove of his body.

“No,” said Shep. “You did the right thing.”

“I’ve been told that my ability to form appropriate relationships with men is attenuate.”

“Meaning?”

“Squirly.”

“You have a good excuse,” Shep said, drifting his fingertips over the ridges and divots on her back. “How old were you?”

“Thirteen.”

“Jesus.”

“Most of it I can’t remember,” said Smartie. “The rest I can’t talk about.”

Shep tightened his arm across her midsection and nuzzled the crown of her head.

“Poor Twinkie,” she whispered with a hitch in her voice. “I know how he felt. Trapped. Hurt. All alone for God knows how long while I was off making an idiot of myself. I should have been here for him.”

“I don’t know if this makes it better or worse,” said Shep, “but he was dead before the shelf came down on him. He’d been shot in the head, Smartie. He didn’t suffer.”

She stiffened and said, “How could you tell?”

“Blood evidence. Distinct spatter pattern on the wall. The pool on the floor showed no movement after he fell. Debris from the shelf was clean, for the most part. By the time it came down on him, clotting had occurred.”

Smartie sat up. “He was shot. You’re certain.”

“Positive.” Shep sat up beside her. “I got a second slug out of the wall. From a .38. Smartie, did you or Hewitt find Smack when you were cleaning up?”

“No. I didn’t even think of it until now.”

“Herrick could have chucked it in the yard, maybe hid it somewhere downstairs. We’ll find it. Libby got permission for residue testing along with a tox screen, so an independent lab will be able to provide rock solid prints and ballistics.”

“They won’t find anything,” said Smartie. “That’s entirely out of character. Herrick despises guns. He wouldn’t even know how to get the safety off.”

“Smartie, a three-year-old can pick up a gun and kill somebody.”

“It wasn’t him, Shep. I could believe that he trashed my office,” she said, “and I assumed that hurting Twinkie was an accident. But a gun? No. Not Herrick.”

“Smartie, you saw him when we came in. He didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.”

“It wasn’t him.” She looked at him with wide, frightened eyes. “Someone else was in my house.”

She scrambled to her feet and frantically groped for the pull chain on a floor lamp in the corner. She went from doorway to doorway switching on lights in the bathroom, office, and hallway.

“She set me up,” said Smartie. “She knows I’m onto her. She baited me with that dratch about my literary estate and let me play out that whole stupid scene so I’d look guilty while she sent someone over here to wreck the place and kill Twinkie.”

“You have no evidence to support any of that,” he said stolidly. “Until we find that gun and see the powder residue results, I’m not jumping to any conclusions.”

Nash turned his brawny back and headed for the door.

“You’re being paranoid, Smack.”

Maybe I was. But Confucius say: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

\\\ ///

18

“F
ritz Goodman here.”

“I need a profession that evokes mental instability.”

“You already have one.”

“I’m serious,” said Smartie. “I need something for the futzy uncle.”

“You need a giant can of red herring repellent.”

Smartie made a sound like a screen door opening. “Help me, Fritz.”

Having concluded her week of mourning for Twinkie, she was back at work on Smack Wilder #13, and it wasn’t going well. The residue test and tox screen showed that Herrick hadn’t fired a gun and was marinated with enough medication and alcohol to keep him from noticing if someone else had fired one from between his knees. This left Smartie with a tangle of distracting questions and a tormenting snap from a twisted wet towel of guilt every time she thought about the terrible words she’d shrieked at poor Herrick.

She hadn’t heard word one from Shep. She was sleepless and heartsick over Twinkie, her manuscript was wallowing like a wild hog in a morass of claptrap and cypress knees, and it was all for nothing. Suri hadn’t tipped her hand an inch.

“This plot is an uncrossable salt flat,” said Smartie. “It’s Namibia. Except Namibia has more sex appeal.”

“I take it back,” said Fritz. “You need to get laid.”

“P
lease hold, Mr. Hartigate.”

After a moment, Suri’s effete boy toy secretary came back on to tell Shep that Ms. Fitch was on another line, but they both knew which line he was talking about: the line firmly drawn between Suri Fitch and the people who did her bidding.

“Can I tell her what this is regarding?” asked the secretary.

“I need to speak to her about the Van Reuse case. There was another incident, and Officer—” Shep stopped himself before he said Claire’s name, not wanting to set her in the line of fire. “The arresting officer requested… look, just tell Suri I’ll deal with the police. Tell her that’s why I get the big bucks,” he added in an effort to relocate their genial camaraderie.

He hoped the message would translate that way.

“L
et’s rewind and see where we jumped the tracks.”

Fritz pulled up the latest version of the rewrite of the redux of the revamp of the rework of Smartie’s synopsis for the retitled Smack Wilder #13:
Swan Dive
.

“Okay, the bimbo goes off the balcony,” he said. “Smack is distraught and—let’s call a duck a duckling—she’s consumed with curiosity. Nash Babcock, elitist perfumer, chichi fragrances, black and white ad campaigns—”

“Nash works for an insurance company now,” said Smartie. “He’s an investigator.”

“What? Smartie, I can think of nothing less sexy than insurance.”

“Two words:
Double Indemnity
.”

Fritz made a sound that conceded the point. “All right. Spin it.”

“The old man is this incredibly rich perfume czar.” Smartie settled into storytelling mode. “And the bimbo was the star of the company’s high class black and white ad campaign, and that’s how they met.”

H
ow they met hadn’t concerned Shep in his initial investigation. How does a dog meet a tick? How does a tumbleweed meet a stiff wind? What the hell difference does it make?

Nothing had meant a damn to him during those months, other than Janny’s fight for a few last inches of life. Surfing now through YouTube videos and archived articles about Charma and Bovet in
People
and the tabloids and the
Houston Chronicle
society pages was like revisiting ancient reruns of the original
Dallas
.

Big money. Big hair. Big tits. Big hats.

Everybody talkin’ so damn Texan, you couldn’t bounce a hard
r
off the side of a barn.

Bovet had bought into a casino near the Texas-Louisiana border, along with three other Trump-caliber high-rollers, and Charma had been cast from a cattle call audition to be the official TexaLou Gold Digger, the fabulous face and luscious embodiment of the TexaLou Goldmine Casino and Hotel.

Computer animated billboards on I-10 between Houston and New Orleans announced the
Grandest Damn Openin’ Ever!
and featured a looped image of Charma leaning forward to blow a flame red kiss toward oncoming vehicles, causing numerous traffic incidents and prompting vehement complaints from a coalition of Baptist ministers. Coverage in the
Chronicle
’s business section featured a photo of Charma flanked by the old geezers, two on each side of her.

Bovet had his arm around her corseted waist. His eyes were as big as saucers.

His expression was different in a stolen photo from their wedding. At the moment the preacher pronounced them man and wife and gave Bovet permission to kiss his bride, someone in the string quartet had snatched the image with a cell phone cam and sold it to a gossip magazine.