Separating Riches (20 page)

“Do you really think it’s necessary for Melinda to be there, Meg?” Chris asked.

“I’m sorry, Chrissie. I know this must be hard for you, and I promise, if there was any other way, I’d do it. But I don’t know anyone in this town, like the police, or other detectives that I can pull information from. I’m flying blind here.”

“Chris, baby, we can drop the whole thing right now, if you want,” Blackie said. “It doesn’t matter to me now that I know you believe me.”

Chrissie looked at her crossly. “Well, it matters to me, honey. I admit, I don’t want those tits anywhere near you, but I don’t want them trying to come between us ever again.” She turned to me next. “Meg, I trust Melinda implicitly, but as the saying goes, I don’t trust Tori. You won’t let them be alone together, will you? She’s very devious and my sweetheart can be too trusting.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Blackie said. “Any trust I may have had with her is completely gone. She’s been an albatross around my neck for too long now, and I would like…, uh, never mind.”

“What?” Chrissie asked. “Tell me what you want to do, Melinda. You have just as big a stake in this as I do. Bigger, in fact.”

“What I want is to never fear losing you again like that. It felt like a shotgun blowing a hole through my heart, and it still twinges whenever I think of almost losing you. So what I want is to break that albatross’ hold on me, once and for all.”

“All right, we’ll do this together,” Chrissie said. “Well, except that I should probably stay home while you and Meg bait the trap, as it were. If I saw her I’d probably rip her heart out and stomp on it, like she did mine.”

“My wife, the tigress,” Blackie bragged.

Chapter Fifteen

Hanging at the Pizzeria — Meg
,
Melinda
and
Tori Wilson

We’d been sitting in my rental car for an hour, and I could tell that Blackie was already bored. I reached back to the cooler filled with snacks and drinks that I had stored in the back seat. I pulled out a couple of sodas and handed one to Blackie.  

“So, we’re just going to sit here in the car all day and hope that Tori walks through that door?” she asked, nodding at the pizza restaurant’s doors.

“Yes, that’s pretty much it,” I answered. “Unless you know another way to find her?”

“No, like I said, that was the first time I had seen her since college.”

“Do you think she knew that you would be here the other day?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t know,” she replied. “I mean, she bought me a beer, and all, so I guess she could have known I was there. I just thought it was a coincidence, but I take it that you don’t?”

I shook my head. “If it was, it was a one in a million coincidence. The only thing that stops me from saying it was pre-arranged was her friends, who told me that they hang out here every week.”

“And you believed them,” Blackie asked.

“I have no reason not to. Listen, Blackie, are you going to be cool about this? If Tori feels threatened by you then she’s not going to open up to you, and that’s the only reason you’re here. To get her to talk.”

“Yeah, I hear you,” Blackie said. “And I’ll try to control my temper, but damn it, Meg, she almost took something very precious away from me. I can never forgive her for that.”

“And I won’t blame you if you lose your temper. God knows I would. But I believe that Tori is a puppet, and someone has been pulling her strings. We need to find out who that is, and then you can lose your mighty temper down on all of them,” I said half-jokingly.

“Lose my mighty temper,” she repeated with a smile. “I like that.”

“All right, but just remember, I promised Chrissie that I’d keep you out of trouble,” I said.

“No. You told her you’d make sure I’m not alone with Tori,” she reminded me.

“Same thing,” I retorted.

“You know, we’ve had our differences,” Blackie commented, “probably because we don’t like each other much, but we do love Chris, and that means we will always be in each other’s life. So, uh, I mean it when I say thanks for helping me on this.”

“Well, you got part of that wrong,” I said.

“You mean you do like me?” Blackie joked.

“Uh, no,” I replied. “The part about helping you out. I’m doing this for Chris.”

“Well, too bad, because when you help Chris, you help me.”

“I’ll keep that in mind the next time,” I jibed. For some reason that I will never forgive myself for, I looked at her and winked. She laughed.

“Look, here she comes.” Blackie pointed toward a woman sauntering up the sidewalk.

She was the type of woman who wanted to be seen, wearing a fake leopard skintight dress that clashed with her cotton-candy pink hair. We had a name for women like her back in the South… Saturday night whore.

“Okay, she doesn’t know me, so if her friends aren’t waiting for her inside, I’ll just sit close by and let you ask the questions. Remember, we need to know who the boyfriend is, and—”

“Yeah, yeah. I know what to ask,” Blackie snapped.

“So then, you know not to ask why she drugged you, right?”

“Uh, no.”

“We already know why, to blackmail you. No sense risking putting her on the defensive with needless questions,” I said.

“Okay, I get it. By the way, the lab called this morning, and I tested positive for Flunitrazepam,” Blackie reported. “So the bitch did in fact drug me.”

“And what, you forgot to mention it earlier?” I asked disbelievingly.

“I was going to, but got sidetracked,” she replied. “It’s been a crazy week, you know. Besides, Chris came back to me, so the test doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Of course it matters. If we go to the police with what we know, it will go a long way to prove our case.”

“Do we have to go to the police?” Blackie asked. “That’s a lot more red tape than I want to deal with right now. I want to take my bride on a honeymoon, not sit in a court for months on end.”

“No, we don’t have to, if it’s just you that they’re blackmailing. If they’ve done this to others, I feel it’s my duty to report it to the police.”

“So noble. Okay, if it’s just me, let’s keep it out of the courts. Besides, I have my own punishment in mind.”

“Don’t be stupid, Blackie.”

“What you consider stupid, I consider revenge,” she quipped, and opened the car door.

We both got out and walked in the restaurant. There weren’t that many patrons in there, and Blackie spotted Tori right away. Tori was alone, so I sat down with Blackie across from her. She looked shocked, and started to get up, but Blackie stopped her.

“Where you going, toots?” Blackie asked in a casual tone. “I wanted to thank you for the other day.”

“You remember that? Um, I mean, you liked it?” Tori questioned.

“Yeah. In fact, I told my friend here all about it, and we were wondering if you’d be interested in a threesome?”

Blackie knew just what to say to distract Tori. If she could keep the charade up, Tori might relax enough to trust her. There’s also another way to help people loosen their tongue.

“Excuse me, Miss,” I called to the waitress. “Can we get your best Scotch all round times three, please?”

The waitress nodded and left to get our drinks. Blackie gave me a fierce stare and I smiled at her. I knew about the promise she had made to Chris, but I was hoping she’d realize that she didn’t have to actually drink the hard stuff, just fake it.

“Oh, the good stuff,” Tori exclaimed. “Well, do tell. Blackie, sugar, where are your manners? Introduce me to your rich friend. I want to know who I’m jumping into bed with.”

“Oh, you tease,” I said flirtatiously.

“Tori Wilson, meet Meg Bumgartner. She’s a little goofy, so don’t take offense if she blurts out the first thing that comes to her mind. You’ll get used to it.”

The waitress brought over nine whiskey glasses, and sat each one down on the table.

“This place has been holding out on me,” Tori said, as she picked up the glass of scotch and looked at it.

“Mind if I do the honors?” I asked, holding up my glass for a toast.

“Here’s to new friendships and better sex.” One didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the other, but I knew if Tori heard anything, she’d hear the word sex. I knew this because her foot was rubbing up my leg as soon as I said it.

“Here-here,” she said, and we clinked glasses.

Tori gulped her drink, I sipped mine, and Blackie held the glass up, but coughed instead, to distract from the fact that she wasn’t drinking. It was a good ploy.

“Tori, do you still have some of those date rape pills left?” Blackie asked.

Oh shit. Now she’s blown it.

“What?” Tori practically spit her drink out. She looked like she was caught red handed, which was not the way I wanted this to go.

“What the hell, Blackie?” I said, as I pushed another glass of whisky toward Tori.

“No, seriously,” Blackie said. “If you use just a tiny amount of the stuff, it enhances the sex like crazy. Give too much of it, and you end up like one of Cosby’s victims. That’s sort of what happened with us, Tori. And the funny part is that you didn’t need to use it at all. I was ready to come the moment I saw you in here the other day.”

“You… you were? Gosh, I wish I had known. I’m sorry, Blackie.”

I could not believe it. Blackie had Tori eating out of her hand even as she accused her of using the drug on her.
Amazing.

“If you’d like to make it up to me, you could tell me who your supplier is. I’d like to get some for myself,” Blackie said, pulling her glass down under the table. She must be pouring it out on the floor… no, make that pouring it on my foot. I looked at her and she smiled.
Did she do that on purpose?

“Oh, I don’t know, Blackie. I might get in trouble,” Tori countered.

“Don’t worry, I can pay twice what it’s worth,” Blackie assured her. “Your supplier will thank you for bringing me to him.”

“He’s not my supplier, he’s my boyfriend,” Tori explained, and then took another sip of Scotch.

“Boyfriend?” Blackie questioned. “But I thought you were gay? Man, I’m going to need another drink after this disappointment.”

Blackie sat her empty glass down and picked up a full one. Her acting was amazing and if she wasn’t such a rich bitch, as she likes to call herself, I’d consider offering her a job at my detective agency. But then again, she’d just buy me out and fire my ass, so maybe I’ll rethink that.

“Don’t be silly, Blackie. You knew I dated him back in college,” Tori said, her words beginning to slur.

“Uh, that was me, remember, sweetie?” Blackie asked.

Tori shook her head. “No, sugar. That was John Mooney.”

“The fuck you say!” Blackie exclaimed.

What Do We Do Now? — Melinda
, Meg
and
Chris

The ride home from the pizzeria was a quiet one. I was so furious that I was afraid to speak. What a fool I had been. I came all this way to help that bastard only to learn that he was the one putting Tori up to it. How could I not have seen that? I had been intimate with Tori quite a lot during college and she never once mentioned a boyfriend. Of course, she was drunk or high all that time, but I believed her when she said I was her main squeeze. I knew that we weren’t exclusive, but I never would have guessed that she dated men, too. What a sucker I’d been. An idiot. A fool.

“Don’t beat yourself up over it, Blackie,” Meg said, interrupting my self-loathing.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” I snapped.

“If that were true, you wouldn’t be married to Chris right now,” Meg replied.

“Now is not the time for your positive logic, Meg. It makes me want to punch you in the face.”

Meg laughed. “Yeah, I should have known better.”

Meg needed to pick her wife up at the airport, so she dropped me off at the house. Before I got out of the car, I invited her to bring Frankie over for a late night supper. She said she would suggest it to Frankie, but that she hadn’t seen her in a few days, so she might be otherwise busy. I had to laugh at the similarities, because I hadn’t seen Chris in a few hours, and as soon as I walked in the door, I fully intend to be
busy
.

And, in fact, I
was
busy. It just wasn’t the kind of
busy
I had in mind. Chris wanted to know everything, so I belayed my desires for a while and told her the whole story. Leading her up the stairs and to our bedroom, I explained what we did, assured her that I was never left alone with Tori, and told her who we learned was the mysterious man in Tori’s life.

“Oh, wow. John Mooney is Tori’s mystery man?” Chris asked, even though I had just told her that we thought he was. She couldn’t believe it either.

“Yes,” I replied, as I close the bedroom door and walked over to our bed. “The man whose wife we assured that we would help, is also the man has been setting me up.”

“But why? Why is he doing this to you, Melinda? What does he gain from it?” Chris questioned.

“Well, remember I told you that he hacked into my father’s radio station playlist? I think he blames me for my father having him kicked out of school.”

“That could be,” she reasoned, as she unbuttoned her blouse. “Your father is too high up on the totem pole to be reached, so he goes after you instead.”

“Very possibly true,” I agreed, unzipping my jeans. “And it probably pissed him off even more when Derrick, the photographer he used to take those pictures the first time, ended up with my Lamborghini and a job at one of my father’s newspapers.”

“Oh, yeah, John has a big ol’ chip on his shoulders,” she replied, as she pulled off her shoes.

“The question is, what do I do about it?” I asked, as I pulled back the covers on the bed.

“That is a good question,” she said, climbing into bed.

The answer to that question would have to wait, because one touch of my wife’s skin, and I forgot everything else.

Tonight at the Round Table — Melinda
, Chris, Meg & Frankie, Norma
and
George

Oops. I had forgotten to tell Konani about having company over for a late supper, and she had already retired for the evening. So I asked Charlotte to call and have food delivered. I had no preference as to who she called or what she ordered and was impressed when I walked into the dining room and found a smorgasbord of meats, casseroles, cheeses, fruits, hot and cold hors d'oeuvres, and assorted drinks like tea, beer and sodas, on the buffet table. She must have pulled from several different restaurants in the area. I knew Charlotte would be insulted if I tipped her, but maybe I could give her a gift of some kind instead. I’ll ask Chris what she thinks about that. Maybe she’ll have some ideas.