Whiskey, You're The Devil: An Addison Holmes Mystery (Addison Holmes Mysteries Book 4) (7 page)

“You are the girlfriend of death. Maybe that’s not the best comparison.”

I snarled before I could control myself and Lester jumped back in the seat. “I am not the girlfriend of death. So I’ve found a couple of bodies. It’s not like I killed them. How about a little sympathy?”

Lester nodded frantically. “And just to be clear I’ve never called you that. I’ve just heard it around. You know how it is with cops.”

“Right. Who came up with the name?”

“Jacoby in Homicide,” Lester said, throwing Jacoby under the bus to save himself. I nodded and walked back toward the café without saying goodbye.

The little bell above the door jingled and I was immediately smacked in the face with the smell of grilled meat and pine trees. A fat Douglass Fir sat in the corner, listing to one side, and was covered in ornaments of all shapes and sizes, and brightly wrapped packages of all shapes and sizes were placed underneath for the toy drive they sponsored every year.

The café was divided into two sections—the dining area where four-tops and booths with cracked red vinyl seats were located, and the bar area that catered to those coming in for a quick meal or drink. The wood floor was scarred and stayed sticky no matter how many times they mopped it, and the white paint on the walls had long since turned dingy. Black and white photographs of Whiskey Bayou from more than a hundred years before were framed and hung from the walls.

Business wasn’t booming on a Monday night, and only a few families occupied booth. They all turned to stare at me as I made my way to the back of the café. I was still a hot topic of conversation in the area, and all the chatter stopped as they bored holes into my back. Then the whispers started with a whoosh, and I knew it wouldn’t take very long for the curious to stop by our table on the pretense of asking about my family.

Up until the last year it had always been Phoebe who’d be the most gossiped about Holmes. Phoebe carried it off with a cheeky smile and a shrug of her shoulders. She didn’t care what anyone thought and she did as she damned well pleased. Sometimes I thought she purposefully made the wrong decision just to live up to everyone else’s expectations.

I made it to the table just in time to hear Rosemarie mention Priscilla Loveshack and the fact that she was a murder suspect. Rosemarie wasn’t the kind of woman who eased into anything gently. All attention was focused on her camouflaged tracksuit and animated retelling of how we came across the body.

My mom’s new husband Vince looked at me with a raised brow and I gave him a tight-lipped smile. Vince had been my dad’s captain for a lot of years, and he was retired from the force now. Apparently he’d had a thing for my mom for a while, and after my dad died a few years back he kind of eased into her life as a friend until she came out of the fog of grief. Then he made his move and that was that. I was happy for them both.

Vince looked like James Brolin—ruggedly handsome with a full head of silver hair—and he was extremely vocal during sex. I knew this because of the fact that the walls are thin at my mom’s house.

“They’re tailing me as we speak,” she said. “You know they’ve probably got the whole restaurant bugged and are listening to this very conversation.”

I took the seat at the end of the table between Rosemarie and Phoebe’s date. I didn’t need to look at the menu. Anyone who had a lick of sense ordered half price burgers and dollar beer on Monday nights.

“I don’t think Savannah PD has that kind of surveillance budget,” Vince said. “I’m sure our conversations are safe.”

“At least from Savannah PD,” my mom chimed in. “I saw that 60 Minutes special about how the government was monitoring our every move. Big Brother is watching. Gives me the skeevies to know some politician is sitting in his office watching me do naked yoga every Tuesday and Thursday.”

My mom was an older version of me—enough to where we were often thought sisters instead of mother and daughter. She was in her early fifties, but looked a decade younger, and she’d recently gotten her hair cut in a sleek bob and added blonde highlights just to change things up a bit.

When Phoebe and I had been growing up mom had been an accountant and all around superwoman. She’d worn suits and pantyhose during the day, been homeroom mother, and kept the household running smoothly. She and my dad lived a very conservative lifestyle with a conservative outlook on life.

Since dad’s death a few years ago I’ve had to get to know a whole new Phyllis Holmes. She’d ditched the suits and pantyhose and started wearing yoga pants and flip-flops. She took paint by numbers classes, played golf badly, and went to naked yoga with a bunch of other fifty plus women. It was like she’d been living a lie her entire life and was just now getting to be herself.

“What’s the big deal?” Phoebe asked. “People are seeing you naked anyway. What does it matter if it’s other people in the class or old guys wasting our tax dollars by sitting behind their desks with their pants around their ankles.

“Good Lord, Phoebe,” mom said. “What an image. And I’ll tell you straight out if any man can get it up watching Gladys Hinkle doing the downward dog butt ass naked then this country is in bigger trouble than I thought.”

Phoebe and I both snickered and Rosemarie gave mom a knuckle bump and said, “Amen, sister.” The man sitting to my left wasn’t quite so enthusiastic. He cleared his throat and tugged at the knot of his tie.

“I don’t know you,” I said to Phoebe’s date.

“Maxwell Gunter,” he said, holding out a well-manicured hand.

“Nice to meet you. How long have you and Phoebe been seeing each other?” What I really wanted to know was when Phoebe had stopped seeing Savage.

I won’t lie. Even though I’d picked Nick and we’d decided to have a committed relationship, it still smarted a little to know that my sister had been interested in the man I’d been thinking about sleeping with while Nick and I were broken up. My jealousy made zero sense. But neither did emotions for the most part. And mine made less sense than most people’s recently.

FBI Agent Matt Savage was something of an enigma. I hadn’t known at the time when I’d moved into the little rent house in Savannah that he lived across the street. It was safe to say his law enforcement skills were somewhat unorthodox. If Nick was a fine wine then Savage was straight up tequila. You knew you’d regret it in the morning, but it was a hell of a good time while you were doing it.

There’d been definite chemistry between us, but I knew he wasn’t built for the long haul. He was all flash and no longevity. Did I regret not taking a walk on the wild side with him while I had the chance? Oh, yeah. Was I a little pissed that Phoebe had once again been the one to take the plunge and live dangerously? Most definitely. But life’s a bitch and then you die. There was no looking back now. Especially now that Savage had dipped his wick into Phoebe, hypothetically speaking. There were some things sisters didn’t share.

Maxwell Gunter looked to be mid-thirties and a little buttoned up for Phoebe’s taste. She had a tendency to fall fast and hard when it came to life and men, and if the man couldn’t keep up then he didn’t last long with Phoebe. This guy looked like a banker. Or a lawyer. He wore a gray suit, a white shirt, and a boring gray tie. His glasses were horn-rimmed—which granted were kind of cute—and his hair was parted and combed neatly on one side.

“Oh, Max and I aren’t dating,” Phoebe piped in. “Unless you want to give it a go, Max.” She winked at Maxwell and I shook my head as his cheeks flushed red and he started to stammer.

“Take it easy, Phebes. I don’t think he’s used to women like you.”

“Darling, there are no other women like me.”

“That’s the God’s honest truth, sister dear.”

“Max came at my request,” my mother said. “He sits next to me in my pottery class. He makes the most beautiful fertility sculptures.”

“And no doubt you told him about your two daughters,” I said under my breath. But mom had always had ears like an elephant.

She smiled at me and I recognized it as the same smile I’d given Detective Graham just a few minutes before—saccharine sweet and up to no good.

“Max is a dear friend of mine, Addison Holmes, and last time I checked I was allowed to invite friends to dinner without an ulterior motive. And where is Nick tonight?”

She glanced down at my hand and saw there was still no ring on my finger. Nick and I were living in sin for all the world to see, but to my mother that wasn’t making a commitment. Really, to anyone south of Atlanta that wasn’t a commitment. In the South, commitment meant standing up in a church in front of two hundred of your closest friends. Nick and I weren’t there yet.

“He caught a double.”

Vince winced and signaled the waitress to come take our orders. Once she’d left us alone again Vince said, “I heard about it on the way here. It’s a bad one. You might not see him for days.”

“So he tells me,” I shrugged. “I’m used to it.”

There were a lot of wives and girlfriends of cops who couldn’t take the long and erratic hours and the high risk of the job. I’d been raised as if it were normal since my dad’s days on the force, so to me the most irritating thing was that Nick always took the seat facing the door when we ate out, which was where I always wanted to sit. If death was coming through the doors I wanted to face it head on instead of relying on someone else to tell me to duck and cover.

“Max is one of the top defense attorneys in the state,” mom said. “Isn’t that right, Max?”

It was then I realized what she was doing. Mom had kind of adopted Rosemarie—like a stray puppy or one of those children you sponsor from another country. Mom would’ve heard the reports as soon as we’d found the body and notified the police this morning. She had a scanner in her car so she knew the juiciest bits of gossip to pass around at all her hippie classes.

“I’m very good at my job,” he assured her. “I understand you ladies had an exciting morning.”

Rosemarie was buttering a roll and not paying any attention to Maxwell. I figure she’d written him off as an unacceptable substitute for her burned out motor, and after thinking about what she’d said about her muscle control and snapping sticks in two I was hoping she’d give good old Max a wide berth so as not to put another man in traction.

I nudged her beneath the table and she looked up, a startled expression on her face and butter greasing her lips.

“Maxwell is a defense attorney,” I repeated for Rosemarie’s benefit.

“It’s like all the stars have aligned in my favor. Because I’m pretty sure I’m going to need some defending.” And then Rosemarie burst into tears and tore off toward the kitchen, knocking her chair over as she fled.

I heard a couple of bangs and shouts and winced as a stream of inventive swear words floated out the swinging door.

“It’s been a difficult day for her,” I told Maxwell, “but in all honesty she could probably use the help just in case something goes wrong.”

“That’s why I’m here.” Maxwell winced as pots clanged and Rosemarie started swearing back at the cook. “She seems a little unstable.”

“She’s just had a rough month. She broke her tantric master and it set her on the path to destruction.”

“Understandable. I was in traction for almost three months after an unfortunate tantric incident.”

Phoebe perked up at that and scooted her chair a little closer to Maxwell’s. “I had no idea sex could be so dangerous.”

“Oh, good grief, Phoebe. Stop raping the man. He’s here to save Rosemarie.”

“He looks like a capable multitasker.”

“I swear, Phoebe, your father and I did not raise you to talk that way at the dinner table. If you’re going to make your move do it in the back seat of the car like everyone else in this town. If I had a nickel for every child conceived in the back seat of a car in Whiskey Bayou I’d be a rich woman.” She refilled her beer from the pitcher.

“I’ve busted up my fair share,” Vince said. “It sure made my nights on patrol a lot more interesting.”

Mom nodded and had to talk a little louder because World War III was happening in the kitchen. “I’m pretty sure you and Phoebe were both conceived that way. And let me tell you, that was a task. Your father didn’t like to experiment outside the bedroom.”

Everyone in the café had turned their attention from the kitchen to staring at my mother as she let out that little nugget of information.

“Jesus, mom,” Phoebe said.

My smile was tight-lipped. I loved my mother dearly, but sometimes I missed the buttoned-up accountant.

“I love family dinner night,” I said to Maxwell. He hadn’t moved a muscle and I figured for a defense attorney to be taken caught off guard after some of the things he’d heard over his career wasn’t such a shining endorsement for my family. “If you think this is bad, you should see what Thanksgiving is like.”

The thought rightfully horrified him and he sucked down a big gulp of his own beer. I sat back in my seat and decided it was best to focus on Rosemarie and what was going on in the kitchen instead of thinking of my father—who was not a small man—knocking up my mother in the back seat of his squad car.

“You remember Daphne Dreyer,” mom went on. “She was just a few years behind you in school, though Lord knows she never amounted to a plugged nickel. Her mama was always beside herself wondering what to do with that girl. Just last week Daphne got caught down off Route 1 at the edge of the bayou in the backseat of an old Camaro.”

“Ooh,” Phoebe said, shaking her head. “Amateur move. The new ones don’t have near the backseat room as the classics.”

Mom arched a brow at Phoebe and Phoebe grinned sassily.

“Anyway, it turns out Daphne’s foot kept pressing against the horn on the steering wheel and one of the deputies was riding by with his window down when he heard it. By the time he got there he said that car was rocking so hard he was surprised the tires still had air in them. And there was Daphne and little Duane Johnson going at it like rabbits, their legs hanging out of the open window and him wearing nothing but his socks.”

“The socks are the most awkward part of sex,” I piped in. “There’s no sexy way to take off your socks. You either leave them on or you both have to stop and get out of the moment to peel them off.”