Kill Smartie Breedlove (a mystery) (4 page)

“How do you know she was pregnant?” he asked.

“Charma told me earlier that day. She was
thrilled
,” said Smartie. “She said nothing that sounded even remotely depressed, much less suicidal. I was supposed to meet her for dinner. To celebrate.”

“Then what was she doing upstairs in a hotel room without her skivvies?”

Smartie shook her head. “There has to be an explanation. The last time I spoke with her, she said she was going to tell Belinda at lunch. Bovet was flying home the next day. She couldn’t wait to see him. ”

“You should have included all that in your statement to police.”

“I tried. Several times.” Smartie opened her arms to the big wide nothing that had come of that. “I was told the coroner had ruled, case closed.”

“Told by whom?”

“Officer Claire O’Connell.”

Shep rubbed his hands over his face. It was impossible to tell from one day to the next if Claire was trying to help him or string him up.

“I understand your concerns, but I’m done discussing it,” said Shep, handing Smartie the disheveled file. “To be honest, this is a difficult day for me. I’m just trying to get through it. So we can change the subject and have another round, or I can go back to the bar and get quietly shitfaced on my own. Up to you. Part of the solution or part of the problem?”

“Solution,” Smartie said meekly.

Shep signaled the barmaid. “Another round, please. Make mine a boilermaker. Boilermaker, Ms. Breedlove?”

“Heck, yes,” said Smartie.

They sat quietly for a bit, hands molded around their empty glasses.

“I’m familiar with the dead spouse dynamic,” said Smartie. “I won’t insult you by saying it gets easier.”

“I appreciate that.”

“How long were you married?”

“Twelve years,” said Shep.

“Good years?” she asked frankly.

He thought for a moment and said, “Nine and a half.”

“That’s more happily ever after than a lot of people get.”

“I guess if I were a bigger person, I’d feel lucky.”

Smartie reached across the table and touched the corner of Janny’s book.

“May I?”

He shrugged and slid it toward her. The barmaid came and went. Shep tipped his drink in silence, listening to the neon fizz outside the window while Smartie leafed through the pages of Janny’s anthology, lingering over the lavish last page.

“That’s brilliant,” she said, tracing the panels with her fingertips.

“Yeah.”

“I always liked Skip. He reminds me of my dog.”

Shep chuffed a humorless half-laugh.

“Take it as a compliment,” said Smartie. “He’s a wonderful dog. English Bullmastiff. He has that sad look, but he’s smart as all get-out. And very well hung.”

Shep’s laughter was a bit warmer this time.

“I have a book coming out next month,” she said. “Would you like to see it?”

“Sure.”

She excavated a Kindle Fire from her bag, thumbed to Chapter One of Smack Wilder #12:
Dead Sexy
and handed it to Shep.

With his impeccable dove gray suit and helmet hair, Tag Mason was a square-jawed, Hog-mounted rebel without a flaw. I caught a definite whiff of precinct when he entered the dining solarium.

Thin Man tie. High mileage shoes. He had the chiseled face, imposing body and beat-walking nobility of a Rodin Burgher.

Mason stepped to the podium and handed something crisp to a hostess the width of a swizzle stick. Heroin Chic Barbie tucked the
raison d’etre
into her hoist-up bra and seated him a cagey seventy-five degrees from the object of his detection. When he pulled out his iPhone, a telltale trickle of ions down the back of my neck told me I was being Googled.

“See, he’s sitting there pretending not to watch Smack Wilder,” said Smartie, “and he’s as stunned as she is when a car crashes through the wall of the hotel bar. But he calmly takes charge and keeps things under control until the police arrive. He’s kind and soft-spoken, even though he’s on a mission. He even manages to rescue a single rose for his wife’s grave. Smack instinctively knows this is an extraordinarily stand-up sort of man. Despite what she’s heard about his past.”

Studying the widely divergent portraits of himself side by side with a boilermaker in between, Shep felt his throat go strangely warm.

Smartie slid Janny’s book across the table.

“Don’t kill Janny,” she said. “Kill Skip.”

She dug into her purse for a silver cigarette case etched with the Eiffel Tower.

“I don’t think you’re allowed to smoke in here,” said Shep.

“Oh, I quit smoking. This is one of those snazzy South Beach vapor thingies.” Smartie dragged deeply on the placebo cigarette, and the tip lit up like the tiny eye on a toy robot. “Gives you a blast of nicotine and lets you avoid the behavior modification. I smoke the real thing only on special occasions now.”

“So I guess you ‘vaguely’ quit smoking.”

“
Success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed
.”

“Don’t I know it,” said Shep. He clicked off the Kindle and handed it back to her. “So how do things turn out for ol’ Tag Mason?”

“I had to kill him. Once he’s slept with Smack, he’s marked for death.”

“Ah. Well. At least let him get laid first.”

“I’m not inhuman.” She blew fake smoke across the table, leaving fire engine red lipstick on the faux filter. The vapor smelled faintly of vanilla. “Was that your real reason for coming over here? You were hoping to get laid?”

“That would have been part of the solution.”

“Been a while, has it?”

He nodded grimly. “Just me and Rosy Palms for sixteen months now.”

“You’re an honest man, Shep. And I feel your pain. I haven’t been properly keelhauled since…” She had to think it over for a moment. “Shlomo Taubechik. Guest cantor from Estonia. Five Sukkoths ago.”

“Sue coat?”

“Feast of Tabernacles. You do this yibber yabber with a lemon and a stalk of wheat. Ushers in the season of rejoicing.”

“The Baptist girl who married the rabbi,” Shep suddenly remembered. “It was you.”

“Rabbi Hillel Lipschitz,” said Smartie. “He counseled Holocaust survivors and POWs. People who’d been tortured. That was his specialty.”

“How long were you married?”

“Nine years.”

“Good years?”

“Very,” said Smartie. “That’s why I have to divorce Herrick. I can’t be married to him longer than I was married to Hill. It would be an insult to Hill’s memory. I couldn’t stand that.”

The invading stench of nostalgia was as sad and pointless as the sickly vanilla vapor from Smartie’s robotic cigarette. Shep started forming an exit strategy.

“How about a moratorium on the dead spouse stories?” Smartie suggested.

“Agreed.”

“My problem is I don’t get out much,” she said. “My office is at home. Work occupies 90% of my waking hours. Meeting someone who’s decent-looking and reasonably nice—sweet Patty’s tassels, the odds are infinitesimal to begin with. Then there’s all that howdy-doody-dinner-movie, ‘Oh, you’re in business forms processing? How interesting,’ after which he turns out to be married, gay or both. Shep, I’m on deadline all the time. I can’t spare that kind of mental real estate, but I have an ironclad rule: I do not sleep with a man I’ve known less than twelve months. So candidly, for you to show up—drug tested, background checked, straight as an arrow—precisely one year after we meet?” Smartie laughed a delicious laugh. “That’s no coincidence. It’s a
minchah
. A gift from God. I say we help each other out, Shep. Just a one-time thing without all that fladder-yap.”

Shep looked at the corners of her Clara Bow mouth, trying to determine if she was jerking him around.

“Are you serious?”

“Like a skull fracture.”

“Check! Check, please!” Shep flagged the barmaid, then stood and wobbled bills from his wallet without waiting. “I’ll get a room. Leave the change. Bring the boilermakers.”

“I think I’d be more comfortable at my place.” Smartie glanced up at the mended roof in the solarium.

In the dark parking, Shep helped her into his Range Rover, supporting the delicate point of her elbow in his palm. He felt her shiver and asked, “Do you need my coat?”

“I’m not cold,” said Smartie. “I’m scared witless.”

The admission evoked a tenderness in Shep that came into his line of work as rarely as fine ink-work had come into Janny’s.

“No worries. Just like riding a bike,” he said, but the analogy made him a little apprehensive, conjuring images of flat tires and flying over the handlebars.

At Smartie’s front door, they were greeted by a fawn-colored English Bullmastiff the size of a yak. Smartie bent to embrace the beast around his pickle barrel neck, and he pushed at her cheek with his graying muzzle.

“Hey, Twinkie,” Smartie crooned. “How’s my sweet baby, huh? How’s my Twinkle Dinkle Boo-Binkle?”

“Oh, Jesus,” Shep winced. “You’re one of those baby talk, kiss the dog on the mouth people.”

“Yes, we is, ’cuz our Twinkie giveses big puppy smooches, yes he
do. C’mon, Twink. C’mon, boy. Potty time.”

Smartie let Twinkie out the back door and went in the pantry to shovel Twinkie’s special geriatric kibbles into a bucket while Shep filled the dog’s water bowl at the sink.

“Let me guess,” said Shep. “He weighed about a hundred pounds less when you named him Twinkie.”

“Try one-twenty,” Smartie laughed, remembering. “Hill traveled a lot, and I was apprehensive about being home alone, so he got me this dear little Crackerjack of a puppy, neither of us suspecting it would morph into Moby Dog. By the time he was six months old, he’d destroyed every stick of furniture, ate the drapes, chewed up my office chair. But you gotta love him. He’s such a big ol’ sweet potato.” She looked at the floor and added, “That was a dog story, not a dead spouse story.”

Shep shrugged.

They stood quietly until Twinkie whined at the door. Smartie let him in. Shep followed her up the stairs. He was too needy to be tentative; she was too pragmatic to be coy. They did quick minimal ablutions in separate bathrooms and met without ceremony on opposite sides of her bed.  

Shep was profoundly relieved to discover that Smartie Breedlove naked was the antithesis of his naked wife. Janny had been tall and streamlined, a body born for tennis whites. Smartie was petite and voluptuous, inviting, round, a temple. He rejoiced in her
amen
corner, took communion on his knees and even found a modicum of the redemption for which he’d been longing; for one blinding come-to-Mary moment, Shep knew exactly what was needed, and he was able to be exactly that: a man, fully fleshed instead of line-drawn. There was an element of sorrow, but it was quickly displaced by a great rushing sense of being alive.

\\\ ///

4

S
weating like a welder in the wake of the beast-making, Nash Babcock prodded my hip and uttered a Helen Keller request for water.

“Get it yourself,” says I, mostly so I could watch him walk down the hall. The man had the spectacularly differentiated glutes of a Rodin Burgher.

Wait. Not a Rodin Burgher. That rang a bell. She’d already used that, Smartie reminded herself, backspacing on her MacBook.

He had the spectacularly differentiated backside of

His backside was as spectacularly differentiated as a well-marbled

His well-marbled backside was as spectacularly differentiated as

Shep stirred with a gruff snort, scratching his armpit and soft spare tire, then resuming a steady snore, his face relaxed and handsome.

He had a great ass.

Smartie lit a real cigarette and leaned against the headboard.

Nash returned to bed, bearing Scotch and compliments. Before he lapsed, slack-jawed and spread-eagled in a post-coital coma, he murmured, “If you were a martini instead of a woman, Smack, I’d kill myself and come back as hard liquor.”

Not quite.

“Smack, if you were a Maserati instead of a woman, I’d kill myself and come back as a dipstick.”

Smartie made a small, agonized sound between her teeth.

“Smack, if your body was a meth lab, I’d dip myself in Nyquil and

No.

“Smack, if your body was Oklahoma, I’d kill myself and come back as an oil rig.”

Shifting in his sleep, Shep kicked the duvet off of his thick, hairy legs. He’d been shot, she observed: once low on the meatier part of his hip and twice on the left side below his ribs. Smartie smiled against the side of her hand, her whole body tender with use. She found it ridiculously sexy, his naked damage and unselfconscious sleep.

It was the kind of love affair that comes on like Beowulf and clings like a nicotine addiction. But this wasn’t my first pile of dirty laundry. I’d been there, done that, and bought the souvenir antibiotics. I wasn’t about to let this thing Molotov out of control.

“Hey.” Shep stroked Smartie’s thigh without opening his eyes. “Are you okay?”

“Okay like Pompeii.” She stretched luxuriously and stubbed out her cigarette in a little china saucer. “Sleep well?”

“Like a brick. Except… what the…”

Shep pushed at a lumpy spot under his pillow, then reached down and pulled out the .38 Smartie kept tucked between the mattress and box spring. He flipped the barrel open to ascertain that it was fully loaded.

Smartie played it off like Mae West. “I used to keep a vibrator in there, but the burglars kept coming back for more.”

“Unusual weapon,” said Shep, turning it over in his hands.

The Sig Sauer .38 was old not quite old enough to be an antique, ornately engraved with scrolls and swirls on the barrel with the word
SMACK
inlaid in mother-of-pearl on the handle.

“Charma got it for me at a pawn shop on our first trip to Houston,” said Smartie. “I love the word
Smack
. It’s such a feisty little word, isn’t it? It even looks feisty with that little
k
kicked up at the end. And when you say it—
Smack
—it’s like
smile
and then
crack
like a baseball bat. It works as a slap across the face or a kiss on the lips. Slang for something dark and addictive.”