Kill Smartie Breedlove (a mystery) (2 page)

Tucking a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, she hitched the lighter and watched it flicker for a moment before she pulled at the flame.

“It had to be Belinda,” she said, but Shep didn’t get the impression she was still talking to him. “She gets rid of Charma. Has the old man declared incompetent. Gets power of attorney. Gets everything. Am I right?”

Nothing in Shep’s stoic expression confirmed or denied.

“You know what’s ironic?” Smartie set her chin in her hand and sighed a churlish blue wisp of smoke. “The whole Charma
thing
, it was all about the superficial. T and A. All anybody saw was the dumb little bunny. But I’ve never known anyone who was more willing to look beyond the superficial in other people. She actually had this weirdly nerdy side. She had a thing for guys who were smarter than they were decorative, and whatever you think about Otis Bovet, a person doesn’t get that rich without being pretty dang smart.”

“Too smart to get taken in by a gold digger?”

“I’m telling you, they genuinely loved each other.” Looking past Shep’s shoulder at the swarm of worker bees from the coroner’s office, Smartie blinked back tears again. “Charma was a sexpot and a thrill-seeker and a party girl and a gold digger and everything else the tabloids said about her. But beyond all that, Charma was a Hoss.”

“A Hoss?”

“Like the big fat guy on
Bonanza
. A great big sweetheart, but a badass when needed. That was Charma. Mr. Bovet has a fourteen-year-old grandson with Down’s Syndrome. Marco. Belinda’s kid. Charma was great with him. She’d take him to play laser tag and paintball. She’d talk to him, while Belinda and everybody else managed him and schlepped him around like a retarded sack of potatoes. I suppose she understood what it felt like to be disregarded on principle.”

Shep glanced at his watch and pushed the notebook back into his pocket.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Ms. Breedlove.”

Smartie dragged on her cigarette without answering. Shep got up to leave, but a police officer standing guard at the yellow caution tape slanted a flat-handed traffic cop gesture in Smartie’s direction.

“Ma’am, you can’t smoke in here,” she said. “And where do you think you’re going, Hartigate? I told you, we need a statement from you.”

“Claire, give me a break. I need to get home.”

Smartie saw a definite shadow pass through the sea green part of the officer’s eyes. Above the stiffly pressed collar of her uniform, her mouth went narrow and snappish.

“I don’t care how short your leash is, Hartigate,” she said, one hand on the butt of her service revolver. “Have a seat.”

“Claire.”

“Officer O’Connell,” she corrected him. “Sit your ass down, Hartigate.”

Shep sighed and sat. As Officer O’Connell sauntered down the tapeline, warning off the milling paparazzi, Smartie snubbed out her cigarette on a saucer and said, “Interesting.”

“Sit your ass down, Mason,” snapped the lady in blue.

There was enough chemistry between them to pickle a meth lab. This infidelity dick was a study in “takes one to know one,” savvy to every trick in the Cheater’s Handbook because he wrote it.  

“Was Charma cheating?” Smartie asked. “Was she having an affair?”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss it,” said Shep.

“Okay, then blink once for yes, twice for no.”

Shep folded his arms, and Smartie leaned in, scrutinizing his face.

“Was that the
yes she was cheating
blink?” she asked. “Or a normal blinking your eyes blink?”

“That was the ‘I’m not at liberty to discuss it’ blink.”

“She didn’t jump, Mr. Hartigate. I don’t know what happened, but I know that.”

“The police have been up to her room. They saw no sign of foul play.”

“Did they see any sign of fair play?” Smartie dismissed that with a flip of her hand. “Give me ten minutes and a martini, I’ll give you six fully-peopled scenarios in which a woman goes unwillingly off a balcony leaving nary a hint of foul play.”

“I’m sure you could, Ms. Breedlove, but courts don’t deal in pulp fiction scenarios,” said Shep, and he had to rub his eyes because now that she’d made him aware of it, he felt himself batting his lashes like a debutante. “Courts deal in evidence, and in this case, there isn’t any.”

“Did you leave any evidence, Mr. Hartigate?” Smartie asked tartly. “When you were two-timing your wife with Officer Claire?”

Shep rocked back a bit in his chair. He couldn’t say “How did you know?” because there was suddenly a lump in his throat, a white hot coal of sadness and guilt that lurked below his Adam’s apple almost all the time these days.

“Backstory is not everything,” he mumbled, carefully collecting the last undamaged rose, trying to keep his face in play as he walked stiffly toward the revolving door, ignoring Claire O’Connell’s voice over his shoulder.

“Hartigate,” she warned. “Sit down, or I will remember that you didn’t.”

Shep didn’t doubt she meant it, and he knew for a fact that Claire O’Connell had a scalpel-sharp memory. He pushed through the door anyway, and Claire barreled onto the sidewalk after him.

“Hartigate!”

“What?” Shep wheeled and gripped her shoulders. “What else do you want from me, Claire?”

She looked up at him and said, “Nothing.”

Beyond a slight, momentary quiver of her chin, the expression on her face was utterly flat and unfathomable. Shep let go of her, and they stood in the halogen-lit drizzle.

“Do they still talk the same shit about me downtown?” he asked.

“Now and then.”

“Don’t stick up for me.”

“Don’t worry.”

He nodded and walked away.

Smartie Breedlove stood at the window and watched him go. As Shep Hartigate disappeared down the teeming street, the desire for a cigarette needled up her spine, along with the need for a drink, the need to know. Curiosity consumed her. She needed to see what Charma saw on the way down: the face of the person who’d pushed her, the rapidly receding stars, the fleeting lights of the city, the moment of truth.

\\\ ///

2

T
he half-lit kitchen was fragrant with cinnamon toast and coffee when Shep came in. He crept up the back stairs to the bedroom where Janny was sound asleep, her body curved in a protective fortress between the edge of the bed and the tiny figure in footy pajamas. She stirred only slightly when Shep kissed her lips and laid the filched white rose on the pillow beside her, but the baby puckered into the fiercely hiccuppy beginnings of a squall. Shep took him up, brushing his mouth against his impeccably soft crown.

“Shhhh, Charlie,” he crooned. “Put a cork in it, Tonto.”

Charlie moved his drooly mouth against Shep’s neck, bunching a bit of Shep’s shirt in a fierce little fist.

“We’re okay,” Shep whispered in the baby’s tiny seashell ear. “We can do this.”

Charlie tensed his little Buddha belly, brayed like a mule, and noisily filled his diaper.

“Whoa,” Shep recoiled. “Let’s go see mommy.”

Like
Riverdance
—feet moving fast while the upper body stays stone frozen—Shep supported Charlie’s hatchling neck as he hurried down the hall.

“Libby?” He rapped softly on the bathroom door. “Candygram.”

There was a slosh of bathwater, creak of the linen closet door, and a moment of whatever Shep didn’t care to imagine his little sister doing before Libby opened the door, piling a towel on top of her head. He proffered her malodorous cub at arm’s length.

“Happy Mother’s Day.”

“Wheesh. Stinky McGee,” Libby puffed a gentle raspberry against Charlie’s tiny palm. “How’s your day, big bro?”

“Long. Strange. How’s Janny?” asked Shep.

“Hypoxic. BP’s very low. She’s been asking for you.”

“Sorry. I had a thing I had to look into.”

“We’re at that place now, Shep.” Libby squeezed his hand with the loving but practiced candor of a registered nurse. “The hospice doc is fairly certain it’ll be tonight.”

“Okay.” He nodded and repeated it woodenly. “Okay.”

“Don’t do the emotional manhole cover, all right? She needs you to be with her. It’s time for you to start your family leave.”

“Tell her I’ll be in after I make the call.”

Libby kissed his cheek and took Charlie to her encampment in the guest room. Despite the lousy timing (or perhaps it was perfect timing because she was still on maternity leave from her job in the ER at St. Luke’s) she’d arrived like a Freon injection precisely at the moment when Shep had begun to feel utterly overwhelmed by Janny’s care.

The vocabulary alone was pulverizing. Cardiomyopathy. Idiopathic hypertrophic subaortic stenosis. Atrial fibrillation. Paroxysmal nocturnal dyspnea.

Early on, Janny had mined the experience for material, as she did everything about their life. Using her illness as a storyline in
Janny’s World
, her syndicated comic strip, was a great opportunity to educate women about heart health. But after a few months, doctors had determined that even if a heart became available, Janny was no longer a viable candidate to receive it. She was removed from the transplant list, and the final months of
Janny’s World
served as a vehicle for thinly veiled thanks, farewells, and
F-you
s to a long list of people, including the middle school art teacher who’d dismissed her ambitions and the internist who’d dismissed early signs of the viral infection that eventually pulled the plug on Janny’s heart.

As each breath became a multi-phased project—formation of intention, execution of effort, aftermath of complete exhaustion—Janny worked diligently to finish the final week of
Janny’s World
to run after her death. Many of her readers had been dedicated to the comic strip through its ten years in syndication, and she felt strongly that they deserved a resolution to the story.

Fans felt like they knew Janny and “Skip,” comic Janny’s galumphing high school boyfriend, who graduated to galumphing college fiancé and eventually became her galumphing traffic cop husband. Over the years, Skip had been portrayed with increasing paunch and decreasing virility. Skip drank. Skip didn’t get comic Janny’s jokes. Skip, in fact, was the joke most of the time, especially on Sundays, when his bulbous nose was scuffed with a rosy glow and his five o’clock shadow was shaded reddish gold.

Back in the day, when Shep was still HPD and Claire O’Connell was his partner, Claire had found the whole Skip thing hilarious. But the teasing turned bitter after he ended up in bed with her, and the affair devolved to a ball-hammering, bullet-sweating powder keg. Claire pointed to
Janny’s World
as evidence that Shep’s wife didn’t understand him. The opposite was true. Skip was the man Shep couldn’t hide from Janny. The jerk who failed and drank and didn’t appreciate her but always came galumphing home.

Despite the not insubstantial ups and downs of their marriage, he loved her with a depth of feeling that threatened to buckle his knees at times. He had to stop, lean on a wall, teeth clenched against the void that had already begun to settle over him. She hadn’t eaten anything for several days now, and her Living Will precluded the insertion of a feeding tube or ventilation.

Shep felt the quiet house crumbling around him, the bricks and windows and two-by-fours collapsing into each other. The life he and Janny had made together. It was all slipping away now. They’d put all their financial resources into keeping her alive. Without Janny’s income, the house was unsustainable. Without Janny’s heart, Shep saw his own heart similarly foreclosed.

He fished his iPhone from his pocket, and Suri Fitch answered on the second ring, her clipped, birdlike accent equal parts India and Oxford.

“Mr. Hartigate. Where are you? I’m at the hotel to make a statement to the press. I expected you to be here.”

“Sorry. It’s Janny.” Shep cleared his throat. “They’re telling me this is it.”

“Oh, God. Shep, I’m so sorry. Is there anything I can do?”

“No.” Shep shook his head, half expecting it to rattle like a tackle box. “I hate to bail on you in the middle of this Bovet thing. I’ll upload my notes and photos with the previous surveillance items for Barth and get back on task next week. I might need ten days.”

“Upload the products of surveillance and take your family leave,” said Suri. “There’s nothing else you need to do on the case.”

“Suri, there’s a lot of unresolved questions here.”

“It’s as resolved as it needs to be. The coroner’s ruled it a suicide.”

“Already? How is that even possible?”

“Because it’s obvious. Particularly in light of the damaging information you brought us last week.”

“I told you, something is off with that. I’m not buying—”

“Shep.” She stopped him gently but firmly. “It’s not your concern. Mrs. Bovet is dead, which renders the property issues moot. My job now is to protect our client from the media. Your job is to be with your wife. Your contract allows for eight weeks bereavement leave. I don’t expect to see you here one day sooner.”

“If I sit in this house for eight weeks, I’ll be a worse basket case than I am now.”

“Then go somewhere,” Suri said. “Clear your mind. Do what you have to do, then go to India. Take the train from Chennai to Pondicherry. I could arrange for you to stay with friends.”

They both knew it wasn’t something he would do, but there was kindness in the offer and comfort in the tilted melody of her voice.

“Shep, I had a word with the partners about your wife’s expenses. They’ve agreed to cover a hundred thousand, which I’ve had deposited to you through payroll. I persuaded the insurance company to relent and cover the rest, so you’ll be reimbursed for the hundred grand you already kicked in. Consider the matter resolved.”

“I don’t know what to say.” Shep found it a bit easier to breathe with that particular cinderblock lifted from the back of his neck. “I can’t tell you how grateful we are. I know you went outside the box for this, for the specialists, getting Janny moved up on the transplant list.”

“I only wish it could have made a difference. God, Shep, I’m so bloody sorry.”