Swimsuit Body (8 page)

“Don't tell me.” I groan, anticipating what he's going to say. “I can't believe I ever thought you were actually getting some time off.” This is the third time he's had his vacation deferred.

“We're seeing some action up north, and Fettie wants me to stick around a while longer.” “Fettie” is Brian McFettridge, the Middle East bureau chief for CNN. “Sorry, babe. I know it's a disappointment.”

For you or for me?
It's been four months. How much longer does he expect me to wait? Then the voice in my head reminds me,
You knew what you were getting into
. My boyfriend made no promises and never pretended to be someone he wasn't. So I swallow my disappointment and say lightly, “Well, at least I don't lack for male companionship.”

Bradley's eyebrows go up. “Should I be jealous?”

“Oh, definitely. He's cute, has all his hair, and he doesn't snore or hog the bed.” I pull the Yorkie from the afghan at the foot of my bed where he was curled asleep and hold him up for Bradley to see. “Meet the competition. His name is Prince.” Bradley laughs.

We talk a little longer before we say our good-byes around midnight my time. Normally, I'm asleep by the time my heads hits the pillow, but tonight I lie awake, the wheels in mind turning. When sleep finally comes, I dream of an Elvis impersonator singing Gladys and Arthur down the aisle.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The following morning, I wake to all hell breaking loose.

I look out my living room window as I'm making my way to the kitchen to pour myself some coffee, and find news crews on the sidewalk in front of my house and satellite trucks parked two deep along the curb. It's barely light out, but the glare of handheld lights makes it look like high noon. The hum of voices is punctuated by the trilling of ringtones. I watch a shapely, coiffed blonde in a powder-blue dress whom I recognize as Kendall Benson, the morning anchorwoman for the local CBS station, perform the gravity-defying­ feat of balancing on my lawn in five-inch heels while doing her standup. I wish now I'd installed that automated sprinkler system.

What in God's name is going on? I've had reporters calling, wanting to interview me, because I have the dubious distinction of having discovered Delilah Ward's body, but this is a whole other level of media attention. I throw on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, and step outside. Questions are fired at me as the pack of reporters moves in.

“Tish, can you confirm that your brother is wanted for questioning in connection with the murder of Delilah Ward?” A deep baritone cuts through the other voices. Improbably, it belongs to a scrawny little guy, who thrusts a mike flagged with his station's call letters in my face.

“What kind of dumb-ass question is that?” I shoot back, forgetting, for the moment, that I'm surrounded by video cams.

“So you're denying that your brother is wanted for questioning?” Little Guy homes in.

“Damn right. I don't know who your source was, but they're full of—” I catch myself before I can say something that will get bleeped. “They don't know what they're talking about.”

“I heard your brother left town,” Little Guy persists. “Can you confirm that?”

Blond, bubble-headed Kendall Benson asks, “Is he in hiding?”

“He's not
in hiding
,” I blast back. “He went on a trip.”

Have you spoken to him?

Where is he?

Is he a suspect?

Can you confirm he has a history of mental illness?

The barrage of questions continues, swamping me. I duck back inside to call Spence. “Is my brother wanted for questioning?” I demand when he picks up, sounding groggy as if I'd woken him.

“Where'd you hear that?”

“From the reporters outside my house.” He mutters an expletive. “So it
is
true. What in the hell is going on?”

Spence sighs. “I can explain, but I'd rather do it in person. Can you meet me in an hour?”

Forty minutes later, I'm sitting down opposite Spence in a booth at a diner on Freedom Boulevard, which seems to be patronized mainly by truckers. He wears jeans and a tan windbreaker over a navy Lacoste polo. If he looks unhappy, it doesn't appear to be directed at me for a change. He signals to a plump brunette waitress, who hurries over to take our orders.

“I know this place doesn't look like much,” he says, after she's left, “but the food's good.”

“I didn't come for the eggs and hash browns,” I reply grumpily. “I want to know why a bunch of reporters seem to think my brother is a wanted man. Let me guess. Howard Sedgwick. He's behind this, isn't he?”

Spence lets out a frustrated breath, which tells me I'm right and also expresses how he feels about Howard Sedgwick, who's been pestering the cops to issue an APB for his missing mother. “He seems to think we've been remiss in not questioning Arthur in connection with the murder.”

“He'd say anything to get what he wants.”

“Which is what, exactly?”

“For his mother's fun and games to be over. He wants her to be a doddering old lady who he can control, not a geriatric cougar.”

“Whatever the reason, Arthur's on the DA's radar now.”

I feel a trickle of cold fear in the pit of my stomach, followed by a rush of heat to my face. “That son of a bitch. I'll kill him. I swear.” Belatedly, I remember I'm talking to a cop, who may see me as a person of interest in Delilah's murder. “This is bullshit. You know that, don't you?”

I'm surprised when Spence says, “Between you and me? Yeah. Guys like Sedgwick, they throw their weight around to compensate for not having been the big man on campus. Unfortunately, we can't just ignore him.”

“Because he's a prominent citizen?”

“Also because he and his wife hosted a fund-raiser when the DA was up for election.”

I feel sick all of a sudden. “So the DA owes him.”

Spence nods. “It's not just that. He's under pressure to make an arrest. All the media attention is making him look bad.” And Spence is taking the brunt of it, if what McGee said is true.

“You're wasting time chasing after Arthur when you could be looking for a
real
suspect.”

“Believe me, I'm trying.” I see the frustration on his face. “The reason I asked you here was so you'd know where I stand. Personally, I don't think your brother had anything to do with either the murder of Delilah Ward or the abduction of Mrs. Sedgwick.” He makes air quotes with his fingers around the word
abduction.
Sedgwick hadn't gone so far as to accuse Arthur of it, but he'd implied as much.

“So what now?” I pick up the coffee in front of me that our waitress must have poured, though I don't recall her doing so. I notice my hand is trembling as I lift it to my lips to take a sip. A trucker in a gimme cap and plaid shirt who's eating at the counter flirts with our waitress, who seems to know him. The bell over the door jingles, and I see a young woman with bottle-blond hair enter, looking frazzled and pulling a whiny little boy by the arm.

“I can only stall for so long.” He leans in, saying urgently, “Tish, you need to tell your brother it would be in his best interests to come in on his own.”

“I would if I knew where he was. I don't, and he's not returning my calls.”

He stares at me with a flat expression. Clearly he doesn't believe me. “If you know and you just aren't telling me, you're not doing him any favors,” he says in a stern voice. “I don't want to see him railroaded any more than you do. But I can't prevent it if we're working at cross-purposes.”

“This isn't you playing good cop, is it?” Spence isn't the only one with trust issues.

“No, but I know there's nothing I can say to convince you, so I'm asking you to take a leap of faith. Can you do that?” I hesitate before giving a small nod. What choice do I have? Deep down, I also wonder if maybe, just maybe, I misjudged him.

“I swear to you I don't know where he is.”

He holds my gaze and seems to debate with himself before he decides to take me at my word. “But you'll let me know as soon as you hear from him?” I nod again. He looks past me out the window, remarking, “Well, what do you know. We agreed on something and the world didn't come to an end.”

“Yet.”

He smiles and I smile, too, because I know what he means. It seems strange to be on the same side for once. Our food arrives, and Spence dives in like there's no tomorrow, while I nibble on the toast I ordered. “First decent meal I've had in a week,” he says around a mouthful of bacon and eggs.

“Looks like you're making up for lost time,” I observe.

He chews and swallows, while chasing another mouthful from his plate with his fork. “This is what comes of living alone. You open the fridge expecting it to be magically stocked and end up dining on canned soup and Saltines.”

“What, did your wife leave you?” I say in jest, thinking she must be out of town.

He stops eating and stares down at his plate for a second. His expression is pained when he lifts his head to look at me. “Other way around actually. It was me who moved out, though it wasn't my idea.”

I'm surprised. I've never met his wife, but I assumed he was happily married. I glance down at his hand. “You're still wearing your ring.”

“I'm hoping we can work it out. We're in counseling.”

“How's that going?”

His weary expression says it all, and my heart goes out to him unexpectedly. Maybe because he seems human, whereas before he only seemed like a jerk. “I don't blame Barb. All the years I was working crazy hours, I wasn't much of a husband or father. To be honest, I wasn't always in a hurry to get home. There's a reason the divorce rate is high among cops. If you don't decompress, you end up taking it out it on your family, so you have a beer with your buddies after work, and one beer becomes two. Most wives, they don't get it. And why would they?”

“How are your kids taking it?”

“Katie keeps asking when I'm coming home, and Ryan's decided he wants to live with me.”

“I imagine that wouldn't go over too well with your wife.”

His mouth stretches in a cheerless smile. “She'd serve me my balls on a platter.”

Silence falls. The sun glares through the window behind him, highlighting his blond hair, which I notice is starting to thin on top, another thing that makes him seem disturbingly human. “Sorry,” he says after he's chewed and swallowed another bite. “I didn't mean to lay all that on you.”

“We've all been there,” I reply with a shrug, though my own breakups, most recently with my ex-boyfriend Daniel, hardly compare with the ending of a marriage. “I hope it works out for you.” I spread jam on the uneaten portion of my toast to keep from making eye contact. We're like dance partners made clumsy by a change in tempo; we don't know the steps to this number.

“Get you folks anything else?” the waitress asks when she returns to clear away our plates.

“Just the check,” Spence says with a glance at his watch.

“I'll let you know when I hear from my brother,” I promise when we're saying our good-byes in the parking lot, then I call after him as he's walking toward his car, “Don't let it go too long!” When he turns to look back at me, I explain, “The fridge. Man cannot live on hash browns alone.”

I phone Ivy on my way to work. She shares my outrage at Howard Sedgwick, but she's glad to hear that Spence and I are working together. “It's about time you two buried the hatchet.”

“I prefer to think of it as a temporary alliance.”

“Call it what you like. I've always suspected he had a heart under all that muscle.”

I'm cruising through the historic district in my Explorer. I drive past stucco storefronts painted in pastel shades and curlicued in decorative wrought iron. Most of them date back to the twenties, excluding the ones that were destroyed in 1989 by the Loma Prieta earthquake and were rebuilt in the same style. At the Bluejay Café, where Ivy and I often eat lunch on days when she's pulling a shift at the Gilded Lily, the line of customers waiting for tables stretches out the door. A busker strums his guitar outside the new-and-used bookstore, the Dog-Eared Page, collecting spare change and dollar bills in his velvet-lined guitar case.

“Did you know he and his wife split up?” I ask Ivy.

“Wow,” she expresses surprise at the news. “I wonder what brought that on. I saw them in the shop a few months ago, and they seemed fine. I didn't get the impression their marriage was headed for the rocks.”

“He seems sad about it.”

“He won't be for long. The women will be lining up.”

The less I think about Spence's romantic prospects, the better. “How's it going with Brianna?” I inquire, changing the subject. “If she's driving you nuts, you have only yourself to blame.”

“You warned me she was annoying, but you didn't mention she was anal.”

“Why, what did she do?”

“She was up at dawn cleaning the house. Believe it or not, she says she finds it relaxing.”

“Why soak in a hot tub when you can scrub toilets?” I brake at the crosswalk opposite the old art deco courthouse, which was converted into a mall with boutique shops and eateries, to allow pedestrians to cross—a gay couple holding hands and what appears to be an Elder Hostel tour group who are walking at a pace far more sprightly than the dreadlocked stoner trailing behind.

“I'm getting free maid service at least.”

We say a quick goodbye and my next call is to Brianna, who texted me while I was on the phone with Ivy. “I got a ping!” she says excitedly. The signal from my brother's phone came out of Paso Robles, she reports, which is on the route to Vegas, and which seems to confirm my worst fear. I pray I'm not too late.

“With any luck, the next sound we hear won't be wedding bells,” I say.

Brianna informs me she made up a flyer to fax to the motels along US 101 between Paso Robles and Vegas with a photo of the couple that she'd found on Gladys's Facebook page and a number to call. I praise her for the progress she's made so far and ask how she's settling in at Ivy's. She replies cautiously, “Maybe you should ask her.”

“I did. She said you were up early cleaning house.”

“She's not mad, is she?” An anxious note creeps into Brianna's voice. “I didn't realize she was still asleep when I vacuumed the hallway. I saw Rajeev leave, and I thought …” She trails off.

“Do you have any hobbies that don't involve a vacuum cleaner?”

She's quiet for a moment, then she bursts out, “I know what you're thinking. You think I'm some kind of freak. I know I can be a bit … obsessive. My college roommate requested a room change after the first semester. I don't know what Courtney told them, but I was assigned a single every semester after that. ‘Psycho singles' they were called.” She sounds bitter about it, even after all this time.

I'm not unsympathetic. As difficult as she can be, it must be even more difficult to
be
her. “Well, when you see her at your next class reunion, she'll probably weigh three hundred pounds, and you can have the last laugh.”