Kill Smartie Breedlove (a mystery) (3 page)

“Thank you, Suri. During this whole process, you’ve been a Hoss.”

“Pardon?”

“A good friend. But a badass when needed.”

“Well. In that spirit, I forbid you to show your face in this office for eight weeks.”

Suri clicked off without saying goodbye, which is what Suri did when she deemed a conversation over. Shep folded the phone back into his pocket, went up to the bedroom and lay down next to Janny.

“Hey, beautiful.”

“Hey,” she smiled. “Hand me the notebook. I thought of a few more items.”

“Janny. Enough,” said Shep, but she shot him a look, and he took up the blue spiral notebook in which she’d been recording basic instructions and reminders. Household, financial and personal issues were separated by tabs.

“Motorcycle helmet,” she said with some difficulty. “Promise to keep wearing the helmet.”

“I promise,” he said, though they both knew he wouldn’t.

“Don’t revert to beer and Tex Mex like you do when I’m out of town. And don’t look at porn, Shep. It’s so unseemly.”

“Damn straight,” said Shep, pulling her into the crook of his arm. “It’s the pirate’s life for me now. One big pay-per-view, leave-the-seat-up stag party, fueled by beer and Tex Mex.”

“Shep?” Janny wove her fingers through his hair and turned his face toward hers. “Is there anything you need to tell me before I go?”

Shep swallowed, his heart hammering hard. Salvation was at hand; he could see it in her face. This was his opportunity to tell the truth. Janny would forgive him, and the lies that weighed him down would evaporate off his back.

“You need to know… Janny… I have always loved you. Even during the bad times. I’ve never loved anyone but you.”

It was too late to even wonder if it was too late. Shep knew he’d be left with a rotting hole in his soul, but he wasn’t about to unburden himself at her expense.

Janny smiled and with substantial effort took in her last insubstantial sip of air.

\\\ ///

3

S
hep had secretly hoped there would be a moment of redemption for old Skip somewhere in that last installment of
Janny’s World
, but it didn’t happen. In the final Sunday strip, colorized comic Janny is on her deathbed with Skip holding her hand.

“I’ll see you in my dreams,” says Skip, and over the next few panels, comic Janny tells a little Zen parable, illustrated with meticulous skill by real life Janny, whose graceful prowess with pen and ink was never adequately showcased in the comic format.

“There was a monk who meditated for many years,” says cartoon Janny. “One day, he finally experienced a wonderful vision of the Buddha. He ran to his master and said, ‘It was everything I imagined it would be.’ And the master said, ‘If you see the Buddha again,
kill him
.’”

“I don’t get it,” says clueless Skip.

“The Buddha he saw was not the real Buddha,” comic Janny explains. “It was merely a manifestation of the monk’s longing, a projection of what he wanted Buddha to be.”

“So?”

“When you see me in your dreams,” says Janny, “if you truly love me, kill me.”

Her editor balked. Thought it was a downer. Tried to get her to end with something about angels and Heaven and harps and such, but Janny was adamant about her final word, and she knew her audience. People loved it. Posted it all over the Internet.

A year later on the anniversary of her death, which neatly coincided with the release of
Janny’s World: A Ten Year Retrospective of America’s Gal Next Door
, papers ran it again, and again, people Facebooked the hell out of it, exactly as anticipated by Janny and her agent.

Studying the hardcover coffee table book on the bar at the Bonham Hotel, Shep wasn’t sure how he felt about Skip’s latest incarnation. Rather than parse it or argue with himself, he was doing his best to blunt it with a few boilermakers. His objective was to get drunk, get a cab, and be unconscious within five minutes of stumbling up the front porch steps.

Earlier in the evening, he’d entertained a fleeting hope of getting laid, but not many likely candidates passed through the Bonham Hotel bar on a Monday night. He’d stooped so low as to confide in the shapely barmaid, “My wife died a year ago today,” thinking she might be stricken with a moment of judgment-impairing tenderness.

She walked over and played a little glissando with her purple acrylic nails on his empty glass. “How ya doin’, handsome?”

Shep sat up straight and tried to smile, searching himself for the horndog instincts that ruled him in his youth. The Shep of yore would have had her in the supply closet by now, but even as that idea crossed his mind, he felt dishonorable, disloyal. Unseemly. Particularly if she was doing it out of pity.

“I’ll have another round,” he said wretchedly.

The barmaid leaned in and whispered, “Strawberry blonde at seven o’clock. Corner booth. Drinking gimlets. Specified ‘gin, Rose’s lime juice and nothing else.’”

“Is that significant?” asked Shep.

“She said it was from a book. Google it and act like you knew.”

“Thanks.”

Shep sighed and thumbed up Google on his iPhone. The only thing sadder than a pity lay was a pity go-lay-someone-else, but he figured he could do worse than the diminutive subject in the corner booth. He’d seen her from the corner of his eye when she walked in wearing skinny jeans and stiletto boots she was not quite too old for. She’d been sitting there tapping at a MacBook Air for an hour or so now. Periodically, Shep had felt her attention on the back of his gray suit coat. Now he shifted on his barstool to position her at the edge of his peripheral vision and found her watching him without pretense.

In the watery light of the MacBook, her eyes were bright and bad girly. The neon glow in the window behind her made a chaotic halo of her corkscrew hair. It took him a moment to click to it. Clara Bow mouth. Little sugar vertebrae.

“Smartie Breedlove,” Shep said, and she smiled.

“Hello, Mr. Hartigate. Care to join me?”

“Sure.”

He collected his book and gray suit coat and made his way across the room, feeling a surge of guarded optimism as he folded his tall, stocky form into the booth.

“Good evening, sir.” The barmaid arrived and ceremoniously positioned a cocktail napkin in front of him. “What’ll it be?”

“Gimlet,” said Shep, adding, “A real gimlet. Half gin, half Rose’s lime juice and nothing else.”

Smartie reacted with a slight tick of her left eyebrow.

The mook lumbered over to my table and popped out a Raymond Chandler ort like a hastily memorized Bible passage. Jesus wept.

“So…” Shep searched for an onramp. “How have you been?”

“Fine as a flea wing. How ’bout you?”

“Giving it my all.”

“Well, you’re lookin’ good. That’s something.”

“You’re looking well yourself,” said Shep. Feeling rusty but encouraged, he nudged her steely heel with the side of his weathered loafer and added, “Nice boots.”

“They’re Italian,” I said. “Like Mussolini, but not as tenderhearted.”

“Maybe you should get off your feet, Smack.”

“Still writing books?” said Shep.

“Yup,” she said. “Still chasing scalawags?”

“Yup.”

On the table next to her MacBook Air lay a leather folio embossed with a familiar Edwardian lettered logo. Salinger, Pringle, Fitch & Edloe: Attorneys-at-Law. Smartie had made no attempt to hide it, so Shep didn’t bother pretending he didn’t notice.

“What’s your interest in my employer?” he asked.

“I’m thinking of getting a divorce.”

“Oh.” Shep withdrew his foot. “You’re married?”

“Not exactly. Vaguely.”

“Vaguely married? How does that work?”

“Oh, you know,” she sighed. “Yeats. Peyote. Vegas. Long story.”

“It always is.”

“It was eight years ago. Charma and I both settled down after that.” Smartie sipped her gimlet. “I guess you heard what happened with the so-called investigation.”

“Only that they ruled it a suicide,” said Shep. “And that the old man died a few months later.”

“Yes. Astonishingly, things worked out beautifully for your incredibly wealthy client who benefited from having them both dead. Who’da thunk?”

Shep shrugged a gesture of concession. “I was out of the loop for a while, but apparently there was nothing about it that didn’t smell right, as far as the coroner was concerned.”

“Didn’t smell right,” Smartie echoed. “What a tasty little turn of phrase.”

Shep studied her hard in the lamplight. “How did you know I’d be here?”

“I was about to ask you the same question.”

“You’ll have to do better than that,” he said curtly. “I’m not a believer in coincidence.”

“Oh, I am. But it usually turns out to be the Agatha Christie dynamic.”

“Meaning what?”

“You get all these characters on stage together, and at first it seems like happenstance, but then you find out that each person has a perfectly plausible reason for being there. So you keep narrowing it down until you figure out who’s there for the wrong reason.”

Shep folded his arms, listening.

“My reason for being here,” said Smartie, “is that my best friend died here a year ago today. Where else would I go? There’s no grave to visit. Her ashes are scattered half in Bermuda, half over by Dimebox, where she was born. Believe me, they wasted no time getting rid of her body.”

“If by that you mean releasing it to her family in accordance with the law.”

“I can think of only one plausible reason for you to be here, Mr. Hartigate.” She handed him the expandable file. “Something doesn’t smell right.”

Shep slipped the stretch closure on the file. The first thing he saw was the first thing he expected to see: a file on Charma’s death. Police report, newspaper coverage, a
People Magazine
obituary, tabloid tear sheets dating back to the party era she and Smartie had shared. There was a file on Belinda Bovet, her marriage and pending divorce, her society doings and charity work with the Bovet Foundation, which she’d started after giving birth to a son with Down’s Syndrome.

In the SPF&E file, Shep found printouts of the online propaganda, a fee schedule and profiles of all the principle players and higher up office staff, plus the security advisor, Barth, and the firm’s only full-time in-house investigator, Martin Shepard Hartigate. His jaw hardened as he flipped past Janny’s obituary and a series of
Houston Chronicle
articles pertaining to his departure from the Houston Police Department.

Sugarland shooting: Local youth gunned down by police

Sugarland incident stirs controversy in Latino community

HPD detective suspended without pay

Sugarland shooting connected to missing evidence

HPD detective no-billed: Hartigate’s resignation leaves unanswered questions

“Smartie, I had nothing to do with your friend’s death.”

“I know. You wouldn’t be here if you did. But given what was happening in your personal life at the time, you could have missed something, Shep. Isn’t that your real reason for being here? Because you know you made a mistake?”

Shep’s bulldog expression didn’t confirm or deny.

“Please,” said Smartie, “look at the rest.”

She moved the archive articles aside and handed Shep a piece from
Texas Monthly
: “Splitsville, Texas: Divorcing the Rich and Famous.” Paige Edloe had complained bitterly about the accompanying photograph that made her look matronly, while Gwynn Salinger, Maddie Pringle and Suri Fitch came off like Charlie’s Angels. Suri hadn’t wanted the article done at all. She devoted a lot of effort to keeping clients out of the media, which was like trying to coordinate disaster drills for centipedes.

The firm practiced family law in all its heartbreaking forms, but they’d become famous for the shark-infested society divorces that routinely made papers all over the state. Smartie Breedlove had conducted a thorough search of online archives from El Paso to Texarkana with particular focus on three high-profile cases:

A River Oaks plastic surgeon whose silicone Galatea turned on him before she was killed in a single-vehicle car accident.

A pop star whose boy toy was in the process of taking everything but her platinum records off the wall when he washed up drowned on the shore of Lake Austin.

An anesthesiologist who’d gambled away half of his estranged father-in-law’s antiques collection before he swallowed the business end of a genuine M712 Schnellfeuer machine pistol said to have spent WWI on the hip of an Imperial German general.

“I see where you’re going with this,” Shep said. “It’s ridiculous. It’s laughable.”

“But you’re thinking the same thing.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Then how do you know where I’m going with it?”

Shep laughed sharply. Because it was laughable. He said, “This is ludicrous.”

Because it was. Ludicrous.

“Smartie, I work for one of the most highly respected law firms in the state. You think we gather round the ol’ water cooler every morning and talk about who we’re going to knock off today? Do you have any idea what kind of money these four women pull down? Why would they jeopardize that? They don’t have to kill people to get the job done. Trust me, they do enough damage in the courtroom. So whatever you think you’re doing here—”

“I’m doing exactly what you do,” said Smartie. “Gathering information and making observations that form a story.”

“No, you confabulated a story, and now you’re searching out circumstantial evidence to shore it up.”

“Offer me an alternative plotline. Was Charma having an affair?”

“Smartie, anything I know about the case is confidential, which might present a dilemma if I knew something. But I don’t.”

“Tell me about Suri Fitch.”

“She is a delightful person and a fine attorney. I can highly recommend her for your vague divorce.”

“Did she know that Charma was pregnant?”

Shep hadn’t known it himself, but he tried not to let that show in his face. He shuffled Smartie’s research back into the expandable file, not wanting to look at the fragmented misfit details of his own investigation. At the time, everything had been eclipsed by his all-consuming concern for Janny. After she died, there was nothing but numb autonomic function for a long time. Recently, as that fog lifted, Shep was disturbed to find the off-kilter elements of the Bovet case still loitering stubbornly at the edge of his peripheral vision, but he had a hard time believing he’d missed anything of this magnitude.