Motion for Malice (3 page)

I didn't pay much attention. I'd learned long ago that Maizy tucked away random bits of knowledge as a squirrel stored nuts. Plus I was too busy looking over my shoulder. For some reason, I felt as if we were being watched, and it made the hairs on my arms stand on end.

"Is this it?" Maizy stopped in front of a narrow doorway with a frosted glass inset. A handwritten sign taped to the door read Destinies with Dorcas, with an amateurish rendering of four tarot cards rising like rays of sunlight behind an oddly egg-shaped crystal ball. A second sign was tacked to the wall, written in black marker on a piece of cardboard. It read,
Your destiny can't wait. Back in fifteen minutes.
"She's not very successful, is she?"

"I told you, she's a crackpot." I glanced down the hall to our left. Dimly lit, with threadbare carpet and dirty white walls. I couldn't imagine coming to work here every day. No wonder Dorcas's crystal ball was giving her dark readings. It was probably depressed.

"Are you sure she's here?" Maizy cupped her hand against the frosted glass and peered inside. "Looks awfully dark."

"She must be on a break." Although Maizy was right, it did look dark. I wondered why Dorcas would turn off the lights when leaving for a break.

Fifteen minutes later, I was still wondering. There'd been no movement inside the office, and, except for us, no movement outside, either. We were alone in the hallway with the eerie silence.

"I'm tired of standing here." Maizy tried the knob, and it turned easily. "Should we just go in? Maybe she has a waiting room."

"Maybe we should hold off—" I began, but she was already inside. With a sigh, I followed her, careful to shut the door behind us although I resisted the impulse to lock it. It was as if we were stepping into a creepy alternate universe where all the senses had been sucked away. I felt along the wall for a light switch, found it not far from the door, and switched it on. It didn't improve things. This space was as shoddy as the rest of the building. Same dirty white walls and worn carpet. A rickety card table draped in black remnant fabric stood off to the right, a tarot deck fanned across its surface. A nondescript wooden desk stood to the left, its high-backed executive chair facing the windows. No phone, no coffee maker, no signs of warmth or welcome. Dorcas had a lot of nerve, charging those rates for all this luxury.

"She's not here." Disappointment was evident in Maizy's voice. "Maybe she left early and forgot to lock the door."

I didn't think so. Something felt off. I took another look around. No crystal ball. Why would Dorcas come to work without her crystal ball when it took center stage in her readings?

My skin prickled as I approached the desk. Maybe Dorcas had left a note. But while there were plenty of papers there, in surprisingly organized piles, nothing explained her absence. I took a closer look at a check made payable to Dorcas, careful not to touch it since that would just be nosy. It was for $8,000. I did some quick math in my head, and came to the conclusion that I couldn't do quick math in my head. Even with my nonexistent math skills, I knew that was an awful lot of readings at $125 per half hour. I might not know exactly how many, but I did know that if someone gave me a check for $8,000, I'd be at the bank before the ink was dry. Something urgent must have called Dorcas away.

I turned to leave, and that's when I noticed the stain on the rug to the left of the chair. It was dark and wet, and it sort of looked like grape juice. I tried to keep my voice even and calm. "Why don't you go back out to the hallway, Maizy? I'll be right there."

"What's wrong?"

I glanced over at her. She was frozen in place, her fingers twisted together in front of her, her eyes wide, her face pale.

"Maybe nothing," I said, trying to sound reassuring. I moved closer to the executive chair, careful to avoid looking at the stain on the floor, and leaned forward to take a peek at the seat, my heart thumping.

Dorcas was slumped over with a crystal ball-sized dent in her head, and even I could tell she wouldn't be doing any more readings.

A few hours later, after Maizy and I had given statements to the police and had our fingerprints taken for what we'd been told was elimination purposes, I was back at Curt's place, wrapped in a blanket but still cold, staring at the television that wasn't on, sipping hot chocolate that I couldn't taste. Maizy was home where she belonged. Before she'd gotten there, I'd managed to keep her away from the desk and Dorcas, but Maizy wasn't stupid. Leaving the studio, she'd had a haunted expression that was going to be hard for me to forget. I knew how she felt. I could still picture every detail of the day Doug Heath had died. Some things stayed with you for life whether you wanted them to or not.

Curt came into the room with a bag of pretzel rods and the cordless phone. "I just talked to Cam. Maizy's doing better."

I nodded. "Good. I'm sorry, Curt. I should've known better than to take her there."

"She wanted to get a reading." He dropped onto the couch, put his feet up on the coffee table, and tore open the pretzels. "Here. Eat."

I didn't want anything, but I took one anyway. "What if she's scarred for life?"

He took a swig of beer. "She's not scarred for life."

"How do you know that? She almost saw a dead body, Curt."

"Almost doesn't count. She didn't see it." His eyes slid down my blanket and narrowed a little. I'd like to think he was imagining me naked. In my mind, Curt seemed to imagine me naked a lot. He must have had some imagination, because I was built like the pretzel rod in my hand. A plain, salt-free pretzel rod that stood only five three and weighed ninety pounds with
meh
brown hair and passable blue eyes. A pretzel rod built to blend into the crowd.

"How can you be so cavalier about this?" I asked him, ignoring the tingling in areas hidden below the blanket. It seemed wrong to be tingling when Dorcas would never tingle again.

"I'm not cavalier." He made a move to lift the edge of the blanket. I slapped his hand away. "Cam said she's on YouTube watching Tony Bennett videos. Does that sound like traumatized to you?"

"Tony Bennett?"

He shrugged. "What can I say? The kid's got good taste. Here, sit forward a little."

I shook my head. "I'd rather keep my eye on you."

"Flattering," he said. "But it'll make it harder to rub your shoulders."

Shoulder rubs were my second weakness, next to Butterscotch Krimpets. I sat forward. "The blanket's not going anywhere," I told him. "Just so you know."

He snorted. "Honey, if I wanted to, I could unwrap you like a burrito."

I gnawed on my lip, wondering if he wanted to, and guessing that he didn't, since a second later I felt his hands on my neck and shoulders, kneading away the tension. I wasn't sure how I felt about that. Maybe I wanted him to want to. I thought about that for a few minutes while he worked over my muscles, letting my mind skim across the surface of a fantasy involving dropping the blanket to reveal lacy black lingerie…

Except, I was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. And the sweatshirt might or might not have had a spaghetti sauce stain on its sleeve. Even my bra was boring, no underwires, no padding, no water, no wonder. Just a pattern of tiny roses on cotton that had been on sale in the Undeveloped Misses department.

"How's that?" he asked, taking his hands away.

"Boring," I said without thinking. My shoulders were chilly, but my face was hot with embarrassment. I sat back, rewrapping myself like a mummy. "I mean, that was great. Thanks."

"Do you need anything?" he asked. "More hot chocolate? A sponge bath?"

"I'm perfectly clean," I told him.

"In body if not in mind." He flashed his dimples. "You think I don't know you're lusting after me at this very minute? It's written all over your face."

"That's the hot chocolate. I'm a slob."

He smirked. "Not exactly breaking news, sweetheart. Let me help you with that." And he reached out to rub his thumb along my jawline, where I was pretty sure there was no hot chocolate, not that I was about to say anything because his warmth felt so good. His eyes were steady on mine. "I'm not getting hot chocolate here," he told me.

I wasn't about to ask what he
was
getting.

"Maybe you spilled some on your neck." He leaned forward to take a look, close enough that I could feel his breath. "Nope, nothing. Maybe it's on your shoulder." And he took hold of the blanket with two fingers to peel it off of my right shoulder.

I snatched it from him. "I'm not that big a slob."

He grinned. "You wanna be?"

"Why don't you put on the news, Romeo? I want to see if there's anything on Dorcas." I felt as if I somehow owed it to her. But I didn't have to explain that to Curt—he got it. He thumbed the remote and a few talking heads appeared, gabbling about the NFC East's chances in a competitive conference. Under other circumstances, I'd be all over that, but under these circumstances, it was just noise that I endured until the eleven o'clock newscast began. Curt put his arm around me, and we both watched the day's recitation of mayhem in silence.

Dorcas's murder wasn't the lead, but it didn't take long for the toss to the somber reporter in front of Dorcas's building. The reporter didn't impart much information, just enough to confirm what I already knew, that Dorcas had most likely died from blunt force trauma, probably from the cracked crystal ball which had been discovered by police at the scene. My guess was it had been hidden by the robe at her feet. I was glad I hadn't seen it. The thought of Dorcas's cracked crystal ball wasn't nearly as funny as it had been that morning. Nothing was as funny as it had been that morning.

The story wrapped up with the mention that Dorcas's husband of twenty-four years had been notified and asked for the courtesy of privacy to grieve his beloved wife. No mention of children. There was a subtle dismissiveness when mentioning Dorcas's chosen profession, which I resented, since it smacked of speaking ill of the dead.

When the newscast was over, Curt switched off the TV. Neither of us said anything for a few minutes, and then something occurred to me. "You know, there was a black SUV parked down the street when we got there. Someone was sitting in it, but I couldn't see who. Do you think…?"

Curt drained his beer. "Don't suppose you got a license plate I can pass on to Cam?"

I shook my head. I'd been too busy hustling Maizy inside, away from the behemoth she'd insulted.

Curt hesitated. "You didn't touch anything there, did you?"

I shook my head. "Of course not." I bit off a tiny piece of the pretzel rod and thought some more. I was surprised to hear Dorcas had been married for twenty-four years. I guessed maybe it was human nature to assume the totality of people's lives was what we saw through the narrow prism of our own experiences with them. But Dorcas had had a life beyond lawsuits. And now it was over.

I felt my face crumple and grow hot, and my eyes began to sting. I turned into Curt and without a word, he pulled me closer, stroking my hair until I was calm again. Tomorrow I'd send Weaver Beeber a sympathy card. Tonight I didn't want to think about it anymore.

*   *   *

Curt insisted I stay in his guest bedroom overnight, but his nearness didn't help me sleep. I tossed and turned and finally got up in the five o'clock hour to do a little yoga, careful not to wake him, which wasn't all that hard since my idea of a little yoga was practicing Upward Facing Dog for about thirty seconds before collapsing onto my belly on the floor and catnapping until the sun came up. Which coincided with my philosophy that no human being should be awake in the five o'clock hour of the morning.

It was almost seven by the time I hauled myself off the floor and into Curt's kitchen, which was everything a kitchen should be. A coffeemaker, a toaster, a microwave, and a set of lethal-looking knives in a wooden block. Food in the cupboards. More food in the refrigerator. Dishes above the sink. I thought about cooking breakfast and decided Curt deserved a better start to the day than that.

So when I heard the shower start a few minutes later, I grabbed a box of Chocolate Cheerios and hustled upstairs to my own apartment before I had second thoughts.

Things didn't get any better when I got to the office just before nine on Friday morning. I'd spent much of the night thinking about how close Maizy and I might have come to walking in on Dorcas's murder and what might have happened if we had. I didn't
want
to think about that, but I couldn't seem to stop. I didn't know how to process what I'd seen. I didn't handle death well, natural or otherwise. I could never seem to come up with the right thing to say to the bereaved and tended to indulge in a gauzy sort of nostalgia about the deceased. I knew Dorcas wasn't the most pleasant person, but she hadn't deserved what she'd gotten. My heart ached for Weaver.

Missy was already at her desk when I got there, and she let me talk my way through it without interruption. I'd hoped maybe the more times I told the story the less impact it would have, but that didn't seem to be happening. Maybe it was too soon. I wondered how long it would take before I'd stop seeing Dorcas's crumpled body at the mention of her name. It wasn't a memory I wanted to live with.

I spent the morning working my way through the short stack of files on my desk, churning out grist for the Parker, Dennis mill. I couldn't remember any of it five minutes after it had rolled off the printer. After awhile, Missy came over and took away some of the files, leaving me simple correspondence and medical records requests that would keep me just busy enough to stay off Howard's radar. Just before lunchtime, she answered the phone and held up the receiver to indicate the call was for me.

"I bet it was that SUV." Maizy. She sounded almost angry, as if she'd spent the night taking Dorcas's murder personally. "We have to find that SUV."

I swiveled my chair so my back was to Missy. "No," I said firmly, "we don't. We don't have to do anything but stay out of the way. The police will solve this."