Kill Smartie Breedlove (a mystery) (17 page)

The free-standing unit featured a life-sized cardboard cutout of Janny attached to a bookshelf that held a supply of
Janny’s World
books, including the new retrospective coffee table volume. Standing opposite her, a smiling comic Janny folded her flat arms and smiled in a longsuffering “what’s the fuss” sort of way. Real-life Janny rested one elbow on the bookshelf and, through a miracle of computer-generated graphics, casually draped her other arm around the sloping shoulders of galumphy old Skip.

“Shep, let’s let them know we’re grateful for this, all right?” Epps said
sotto voce
. “These point of purchase displays cost a bundle. It’s a demonstration of their enthusiasm for the new book.”

“Jesus,” Shep said softly. “It’s not like I forgot how beautiful she was, but… Jesus.”

He had to stop talking and swallow hard. The photographer had captured Janny’s skin at the precise moment of midsummer when it was peach soft and milk smooth. He’d caught the tiny crinkle that appeared at the corner of her eye at the moment her smile broke into laughter.

You unveil a matzevah, Shep remembered. A monument to your loved one. And then you put away mourning.

“B
ut he can’t move on,” said Smartie. “He’s haunted by guilt because he cheated on her.”

“What? He cheated on the cancer wife?” said Dove. “Why don’t you just give him herpes? How about a penchant for stepping on baby bunnies? Yes, there’s a character the book clubs will love.”

“You said you wanted real. It doesn’t get any realer than that.”

Dove abandoned the salad fork and embraced her Chardonnay.

“For Christ sake, Smartie, make the man a syphilitic, kitten-frying drunk, but darling, he can’t have cheated on the cancer wife. For one thing, her husband cheats on her
and
she gets cancer? Is this a minor character or a soap opera? If her husband cheats on her, she’s immune from cancer. Believe me, if I wasn’t banking on that, I’d be getting mammograms twice a week.”

“You’re right,” Smartie reluctantly conceded. “He cheated on cancer wife. His only hope for redemption is to be brutally gunned down while protecting someone else.”

“Anyway, this isn’t about the wife,” Dove dashed one cigarette out in her coffee cup and lit another from a slim silver case. “It’s about bimbo, sex, splat,
hello,
sex, guns, cars, clue, clue, sex, clue, danger, danger, sex, danger, big confrontation, sex.”

She snapped her fingers and sat back in her chair.

“The end.”

“W
hich is just the beginning,” the young woman from the publisher was telling Epps. “Next week the print ads run concurrent to the TV and radio campaign that ties into the whole American Heart Association fundraising thing, and let me tell you, they are super excited. They’ve already received thousands of orders for the commemorative coffee mugs and tote bags, plus a million dollar pledge from Mr. Hartigate’s employer.”

“My employer?” Shep’s attention ratcheted back to the conversation. “The law firm gave a million dollars?”

“Suri Fitch made the donation in Janny’s name,” beamed the publisher’s rep. “I don’t know how you wrangled that, Mr. Hartigate, but it’s going to do a lot of good. They asked me to thank you personally.”

“By the way,” said Epps. “Janny was worried that you wouldn’t cash the royalty checks, so she set up a direct deposit to your joint account.”

This news didn’t surprise Shep. Janny had set up the majority of the bills for automatic payment online. She’d preordered Christmas gifts to be shipped to family and friends mid-December and programmed reminders into Shep’s palm computer.

“Have your cholesterol checked!”

“Turn in quarterly tax payment!”

He’d flip a page on his desk calendar and find a pink Post-it note.

“Oleander needs to be pruned and spiked this week!”

Nine months after Janny’s death, Shep had kept Charlie overnight, and when he went to make pancakes in the morning, there was a note inside the boxed mix: “No bacon grease down the garbage disposal! Let it solidify in the OJ can.”

“Is that arrangement still satisfactory?” asked Epps.

“Sure,” said Shep, unable to drag his eyes from Janny’s smile. “Whatever my wife wanted is good for me.”

“I
t’s good for you! So good when it bloody burns!” Smartie’s spin class instructor was a New Zealander and railing evil. “Push that resistance! Push it!”

“If I don’t die from this,” Phyllis gasped, “I’m going to kill you, Smartie Breedlove.”

“Yes,” Smartie huffed like a smoker. “Do that now, please.”

Sweating and pedaling, pedaling and sweating, longing in her blackened heart for a deep drag off an unfiltered Camel, Smartie kept rewinding Shep’s terse message in her head.

“I wouldn’t blink once about pressing charges.”

Either he was making fun of her or he wasn’t able to speak freely.

“Casilda called me this morning,” Phyllis said during the cool down at the end of class. “She asked me if I wanted to join the Buchans. I guess they’ll be meeting at her place from now on.”

“Join the Buchans?” Smartie echoed.

“Well, because they’re all doing literary fiction, and Quilters are more in the commercial realm.”

“Right,” said Smartie, trying not to feel the sting of that. “Did she say anything about Herrick? Is he doing all right in rehab?”

“Oh, he left rehab.”

“What?” Smartie said with dismay. “After only a week?”

“She says he’s drinking like a fish, but writing brilliantly.”

“Squids.” Smartie sorrowfully mopped her neck with a hand towel. “Poor Herrick.”

“Casilda says this new novel is like nothing he’s done before,” said Phyllis. “She’s going to take care of him while he finishes it and then ship him back to dry out.”

“Whatever works, I guess,” Smartie said, smitten upside the head by another cold, wet rag of guilt. “I suppose it’s none of my business.”

“Smartie, please don’t misunderstand what I said a minute ago,” said Phyllis. “I’d never leave the Quilters, and you know I love your books. So does Casilda. She asked me all about the one your working on.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her we don’t talk about each other’s work outside the group, of course,” said Phyllis, but she busied herself with her water bottle, and Smartie couldn’t see her face.

E
pps offered a firm handshake before he hustled off to hammerhead on someone else’s behalf. The young woman from the publisher parted with polite words and went up the street to do lunch with the store’s Community Relations Manager. Shoppers poked at Smartie Breedlove books in the Bargain Mystery bin.

Shep stood for a long while, staring at Janny, his chest aching with a wanting to die feeling he hoped he would never lose. But eventually, his eyes drifted over to Skip.

It was a bit gut-wrenching to see him on such a large scale. Skip the lovable loser. The Shiner Bock savant. Paunchy. Balding. Smiling a benignly dumbass smile that was actually just a skillful zigzag bisecting his flaccid face. At the place where his shirt was a little too strained to meet his baggy pants, a strip of hairy belly protruded. Below it, his fly was the slightest bit open. Shep felt his face crawling with yellow jackets.

Janny knew.

She’d known the whole time and published her disillusionment daily so he’d never forget what a sagging, stupid, can’t keep it zipped dumbass he really was. The only thing more painful than having the entire world see him this way was knowing that Janny had seen him this way at the moment she died.

He’d been afraid the truth would cost him her love; instead his lies had cost him her respect, and his guilty compliance with the rules she’d laid out for him had only diminished him more as the years went by.

Trapped in the canyon of words on paper, Shep made his way through one deep breath after another. A lump the size and hardness of an egg pushed at the inside of his throat. Not grief or guilt. He’d spent all his grief, grown accustomed to guilt and given up on redemption.

Shep didn’t give a shit about redemption anymore.

He wanted beer. And Tex Mex. And porn. He wanted to ride his motorcycle without a helmet and die on the freeway before he ever had another opportunity to floss, prune the goddamn oleander or have his cholesterol checked.

He left the store with a single driving purpose:

Kill Skip
.

\\\ ///

19

S
tripped down to his bathrobe, boxers and socks, Shep finished the fourth Shiner Bock dark lager from a cold six-pack and belched a deeply satisfying queso-scented belch. He’d discovered a website where classic fuck films were available for download, started with good ol’
Debbie Does Dallas
and moved on to
Deep Throat
and
Inside Annie Sprinkle.

Most contemporary porn girls looked way too young for his taste.
Girls Gone Wild
and that sort of thing. It made Shep’s skin crawl to think what kind of forty-year-old man was into that, but there was no escaping it these days. In the skin-crawly, low-budget commercials running up to
The Devil in Miss Jones
(“an erotic masterpiece in which the incomparable Georgina Spelvin portrays a frustrated spinster exploring her inner depravity!”), there was a sadly tilted emphasis on youth that brought out the older brother in Shep and left him worried about the world.

Something Evan Filer had said kept replaying in Shep’s head. About the webcam girl. Through the lowering haze of the fifth Shiner, he felt that capital J on “Jailbait.” Shep tore himself away from Georgina Spelvin, wiped his hands on his robe and typed a few keywords into the search bar: jailbait, webcam, teenager, sex, Houston.

The results were pretty much as expected. As Shep clicked down a list of thirty or so webcams that had “jailbait” in the copy, a pop-up phone sex ad purred, “Houston hotties want to meet you now,” and a presumably Houstonian hottie flashed a gap-toothed smile at the camera and concurred, “
I
want to meet
you
. Now.” Which seemed an odd thing to say with another man’s genitals swinging in such close proximity to her face.

Shep looked down woozily and flicked a bit of chimichanga from his chest hair. After a side trip to the patio to piss in the oleander, he meandered out to the kitchen for that last beer and the remainder of the takeout food, then returned to the search list.

A webcam site called LilTarts.com snagged his attention with oily promises about “jailbait virgins” and coeds and tightness and sweetness available in your area now. Shep shifted the monitor and pushed the keyboard aside to make room for his beer and sopapillas. He was about to prop his feet up again when the girl on the screen turned toward the camera, whisking her honey-colored hair over her shoulder, an expression of wide-eyed innocent surprise on her heart-shaped face.

Shep thrashed forward in time to hit the screen shot function. He clicked his wireless mouse on the
SEE ME LIVE! NOW! NOW! NOW!
flashing between her small, pert breasts, but the link took him to a webcam where two Hispanic girls cavorted in a hot tub.

“Damn it.”

Wheeling toward the printer, Shep seized the paper as it fed out and minimized the incomparable Georgina Spelvin. Knowing it would start the clock ticking, he opened a shortcut to the secure online storage facility, entered his password and scrolled down the case list to Van Reuse versus Van Reuse. He was hating hard the conclusions he was drawing, but there was no looking away now. Opening the video file, Shep fast-forwarded to the stoplight, listening to the drone of his own narration.

“Here we go. We got him.”

There was a blur as the Range Rover pulled forward, the back of the girl’s head bobbing in the driver’s lap. Shep leaned in and pushed his reading glasses up on his nose.

Turn. Whisk. Surprise.

Shep paused the video and held the printout next to the screen. It was the same girl. The babysitter with the heart-shaped face was LILTART2920.

Van Reuse had been set up.

“N
ot by me,” said LILTART2920, whose actual given name was Kara Lynn Sweet, an even pornier porn name than Georgina Spelvin. Little chin pointed stubbornly, she defied Shep across the booth at a corner coffee shop in Montrose. “Don’t even try to make like I’ll get arrested. I wasn’t doing anything illegal.”

“You were having sex for money, Kara. That’s illegal. Mr. Van Reuse said you were drinking beer. Are you telling me you’re twenty-one?”

“I’m twenty-
two
,” she proclaimed with wide-eyed, heart-shaped innocence. “I know I look sixteen. That’s why my webcam does so well, but hey, I am a legal adult. You can check my driver’s license if you don’t believe me.”

Shep held out his hand. Kara dragged her wallet from her purse and made a great demonstration of eye-rolling and hair-flipping while Shep examined the license on both sides, flexed it between his thumb and forefinger, bit the corner gently, then handed it back to her, satisfied that it was the real deal.

“While we’re at it,” she said, “here’s my student ID from Texas A&M. I graduated last year with a double degree in business and applied physics. I’m not some stupid kid you’re gonna take advantage of, okay? So if you came here planning to scam yourself a nice little piece of schoolgirl ass, guess again.” She poked her coffee spoon at him for emphasis. “Applied physics, asshole. Texas A&M.”

Shep tapped the front of his white shirt. “Criminal Justice. Sam Houston State.”

“Ooh. Intimidating,” she scoffed and flipped her flat-ironed hair again.

Shep waited quietly, both hands on his coffee cup.

“You do not intimidate me,” said Kara. “Not in the slightest.”

Another long, quiet moment went by, and her chin trembled.

“I am not a—” She leaned forward so she could whisper. “I’m not a hooker. All I did was babysit the kids and fluff him a little in the car. I was promised there would be no actual sex involved. I was told that you’d show up before anything major happened.”