Love Notes

by Penny Mickelbury

  “Eric, you and Tim, my office, eight-thirty tomorrow morning. Bobby, I’ll see you and Alice at nine. The rest of you report here every day at four thirty. Cassie, I need to see you before you leave.”

  The clean-up and leave-taking proceeded rapidly and in a matter of a few moments, Gianna and Cassie faced each other across the table in the empty and quiet room.

  “I know you don’t think I’m ready to be back,” Cassie said quickly, preempting her boss, “and I really and truly do appreciate the chance to show you differently.”

  Gianna held the young cop’s gaze. If ever she were forced to admit having a favorite, she’d name Cassandra Ali. She was smart, aggressive, fearless, instinctive, loyal, and hard-headed—a dangerous combination of worthy traits. “I’m not comfortable with it, Cassie, and I’m worried that in trying to prove something to me, you’ll hurt yourself.”

  “So, why did you bring me back?” But even as she asked the question, the answer dawned on her face. “It was that or lose me forever? The budget cuts are real?”

  Gianna had known that Cassie would figure out the truth, but that didn’t make her admission any easier. She nodded, keeping a tight lock on Cassie’s gaze.

  “I’m grateful that you think enough of me to take that kind of risk, Boss.”

  “You’re a good cop, Cassie.”

  A hint of a smile lifted the left corner of Cassie’s mouth. “That’s what your girlfriend said.” And the smile increased at Gianna’s wary surprise and Cassie quickly and wisely changed the subject. “I really am doing all right, Boss.”

  “All right isn’t good enough. You’re blowing off the shrink. And don’t look so surprised. Of course I talk to her. It’s only on her recommendation that I’d ever agree to take you back into the Unit. And that’s why your return is ‘provisional.’ Until she’s convinced that you’re ready, I won’t be convinced that you’re ready.”

  Cassie shook her head angrily. “I would have been fine if they’d let me see the therapist of my choice.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. Not very many therapists are qualified to assess the fitness of police officers for duty, and you know that, Cassie.”

  “But Dr. Connors is a wonderful therapist!” Cassie wailed, sounding more like the injured 25-year old that she was than like a hardened cop she aspired to be, and having no idea that her boss knew exactly how wonderful Beverly Connors was. Not only were they good friends, but Beverly was Mimi’s former lover.

  “You can see Dr. Connors on your own time, and I think it’s probably a good idea if you do. But you’re also going to have to keep regular appointments with the Department therapist, Cassie, and she’s going to have to be able make an unequivocal recommendation for your return. Am I clear?” Gianna stood to indicate the discussion was over.

  “Yes, Boss,” Cassie said in a small voice, and she, too, stood up. “And I really do appreciate you taking a chance on me.”

  Gianna walked over to the young woman and touched her shoulder. “The risk is all yours, Cassie. If I’m making a mistake bringing you back before you’re ready, you’re the one who gets hurt. I’m being selfish.”

  And instantly uncomfortable with the stark truth of her words, Gianna crossed to the door, opened it, waited for Cassie to exit ahead of her, and turned off the light, giving no thought to the nocturnal activities of mice, and wishing instead that she could go home and be with Mimi instead of upstairs to her office to finish her monthly report, due on the chief’s desk in fourteen hours.

  *****

  Mimi sat in her car across the street from The Bayou, deciding whether to go in. Being a regular was one thing; being predictable was something else entirely. Yet, she found that she didn’t know what to when she didn’t work twelve and thirteen-hour days. She’d already been to the gym and had a workout and a sauna, and now she was ravenous. So, why not eat where she enjoyed the food and the atmosphere? Better still, why not just resume the habit of working all the time and relieve herself of having to wrestle with such mundane matters?

  Annoyed with herself for her mental ramblings, she was about to drive off when she saw Cassandra Ali walk in the front door, and there was something about the way she carried herself that captured Mimi’s interest. She knew that Gianna had met with the Unit that night and that she’d fed them Bayou food. So, what was Cassie Ali doing here? A date? The comfort of a friendly crowd? Mimi was out of the car and sprinting across the street before she allowed herself time to wonder what the hell she was doing, or why.

  She got inside the front door in time to see Cassie climb up on a bar stool. The dance floor was packed but only half the bar stools were occupied and Marianne walked immediately over to her. Mimi slid sideways, out of Marianne’s sight line, and angled around toward the rear of the bar and snuggled against one of the floor-to-ceiling beams that gave the place its rustic, on-the- water look and feel. She saw Cassie reach into her pocket, take out her badge, and place it on the counter in front of her, so that only Marianne could see it. She smiled, extended her hand to Cassie, and picked up a telephone from somewhere beneath the counter. She punched some buttons, waited, spoke briefly, and returned the phone to its hiding place. She and Cassie talked for a few seconds before the tall, lean, blonde—and rude—bartender named Trudi replaced her, and Cassie followed Marianne toward the kitchen and, Mimi knew, Marianne’s office in the corridor behind the kitchen and storage area.

  “Well looky there,” she muttered, secretly pleased that her assessment of Gianna and Marianne’s intense conversation the night of the party was on the mark. Obviously there was something serious on Marianne’s mind, serious enough to require police attention, and serious enough for her to discuss it with Gianna in the middle of a party. But what? Something to do with the club? Mimi thought not. The place had just opened; and anyway, Gianna wouldn’t send a Hate Crimes cop to investigate anything but a hate crime. She was a by-the-book cop through and through. So, Mimi mused, a hate crime either had occurred or Marianne was afraid that one would, meaning that perhaps it was about the bar after all. Perhaps neighbors in the upscale, trendy neighborhood objected to the presence of a lesbian establishment. But that didn’t make sense, either. Gay bars and clubs on Capitol Hill were nothing new, and Mimi knew that in the 1970's there were almost a dozen gay bars and clubs and restaurants and book stores in this neighborhood. But that was then and this was now.

  Renee, Marianne’s partner in life and business, emerged from the game room and looked immediately toward the bar, expecting to see Marianne. She frowned at the presence of the substitute bartender and started toward the bar. Mimi hurried to cut her off, formulating a plan in her mind.

  “Hey, Mimi! I ordered that bar stool with your name on it, but I’m thinking now that I should have measured your butt to guarantee a perfect fit.”

  Renee was slightly taller than Mimi’s five-foot-seven, and with her silver-streaked black hair and Mediterranean coloring, she was as dark as Marianne was fair.

  Mimi took her ribbing with good grace and admitted that she’d had no idea what she was missing by being such a workaholic. “But it’s no fun being normal alone. Gianna’s still working like a fiend. In fact, one of her Unit is holed up with Marianne now.” She watched the look of understanding that crossed Renee’s face. “So, should I blame you or Marianne if Gianna spends tonight with Officer Ali instead of with me?”

  Renee raised her hands, palms forward, in a defensive gesture. “It wasn’t my idea, and I couldn’t talk Marianne out of it. You know how she is when she gets a hold of some idea or thought or feeling.” Renee shook her head in resignation.

  Mimi commiserated. “Yeah. A lot like Gianna.”

  “But there’s nothing there,” Renee said, sounding truly annoyed. “All Mare has to go on is some women who don’t come into the bar anymore. She claims they’ve disappeared but in reality, all she can say for a fact is that they’ve stopped coming to the bar. Which, last time I looked, they had a right to do, no matter how wonde
rful Mare is. And she’s pretty wonderful, if I do say so myself.”

  Mimi’s antennae were at attention. She worked hard at trying to sound both reasonable and sympathetic instead of on the scent of a story, while not seeming to discount Renee’s assessment of her partner. “Come on, Renee, you know Marianne better than that. She’s not a ‘the sky is falling’ kinda gal, so she must have some reason for believing that the women have disappeared.”

  “Oh, she’s got reasons all right, and they all stink! Listen to this, Mimi: All these women were from out of town and they’d just moved to the D.C. area, OK?”

  Mimi creased her brow and nodded to indicate that she was following the conversation, though internally she was screaming for Renee to get to the point.

  “And these newcomers had claimed Marianne and the bar as family and home. You know how she is about family and home and creating a homey atmosphere in the bar. Two or three times a week, every week, these women were in the bar. One of ‘em, a woman from somewhere in Georgia, I believe, even wanted to invest with us when she found out we were looking for larger space.” Renee paused in her recitation and her face became serious. “She was the first one to stop coming in. That was more than a year ago and I have to admit, that one was pretty strange.” The smile lines around her large, grey eyes crinkled and she pursed her lips.

  “Strange how?” Mimi pounced on the information cat-like. “And why? Maybe she didn’t like here and decided to move back to Georgia.”

  Renee shook her head and the silver strands danced in the light. “She’d never have done that. She had just barely escaped one of those fanatical religious families. They’d actually kept this woman locked in an attic because she was a lesbian and had some kind of preacher praying over her, in tongues, no less. Can you imagine? They wouldn’t let her work, and they put her through an exorcism or some such bullshit, trying to get the devil out of her. No way she went back to that. And she loved it here. She had a condo out in Reston, on the lake.”

  “Condos on the lake in Reston don’t come cheap,” Mimi said, then stopped at the evil grin spreading across Renee’s face and waited for the details.

  “That’s the other reason she wouldn’t go back down south. Her folks might have been religious crazies but they were rich religious crazies. She stole half a million dollars from them when she left.”

  “Half a million dollars!” Mimi yelped. “Hell, I’d disappear, too, if I’d stolen that much money from somebody I was related to. Disappear is the least she could do.” Mimi knew her cynicism was riding on the surface, so she tried to tone it down; after all, the woman wasn’t a government official stealing from the public coffers. She was just an abused woman stealing from her abusive family. “Maybe she was overcome with guilt and joined a convent.”

  “Believe me, Millicent Cartcher didn’t join anything with a religious aspect to it. She just dropped off the radar screen. Not a blip anywhere.” Renee shook her head and again the silver strands danced in the light.

  Mimi’s interest had waned and unless Marianne had told Gianna more than Renee had told her, Mimi couldn’t imagine what there was to investigate. “Well, good thing Gianna’s the cop and not me, because I can’t make anything out of that.”

  “Me, either,” Renee said. “I think Marianne’s got Gianna sniffing around the wrong bush. Just as long as she doesn’t waste too much of the tax payers’ money while she’s at it,” she said, and then quickly apologized as she misread the look on Mimi’s face. “I didn’t mean that Gianna wastes taxpayers’ money.”

  “The money,” Mimi said, instincts on alert again. “What happened to the money?”

  “What money?”

  “Millicent whoever’s money. The half million dollars and the condo on the lake. If she wasn’t in contact with her real family, and if you and Marianne and women in the bar were her only other ‘family,’ what happened to the money? And the condo? Does Marianne know?”

  Renee’s face wrinkled in a thoughtful, puzzled frown. “I don’t know. We called a couple of times after she stopped coming in and as I recall, we got her answering machine once, and then one of those ‘that number has been disconnected’ messages.”

  But Mimi was no longer listening. She was thinking about the money. Even with the cash purchase of a condo, there could have been as much as a hundred thousand dollars left, more if the woman had a job earning decent money. “What kind of work did she do, Renee? Do you know?”

  “Sure. She was a veterinarian. Made house calls, so grateful was she not to be looking after farm animals. She said cats and dogs and birds were a breeze after pigs and cows and horses. That’s why we’re not the only ones lamenting her absence. Every dyke and queen in a thirty mile radius with more than one cat misses Millie.”

  Now Mimi was interested, and when she probed her internal responses to learn why, the answer depressed her: The story—she already was calling it that—had all the elements of one of her governmental graft and corruption stories. Where, she asked herself, was the human interest element? Couldn’t she just care about a story because she cared about the people involved? Couldn’t she just care that a woman was missing? Not because half a million dollars was missing? Maybe that’s what Tyler and the other editors knew about her that she didn’t know about herself: that she couldn’t cover entertainment and the arts because she couldn’t find the soft underbelly of a story, the humanity of a story.

  “What are you thinking?” Renee asked.

  “That I need to go home and go to bed,” Mimi replied. “Tell Mare I’m sorry I missed seeing her.” And she turned and walked out of the bar, immediately missing its warmth and the good smells. She crossed the street against the light, climbed into her car, and drove home, the recent self-discovery a stronger feeling within her than the gnawing hunger pains. She was at home, in panties and bra, staring into the open refrigerator, when she remembered that she was supposed to be at Gianna’s tonight. And for a moment, she contemplated dressing and driving the ten minutes to Gianna’s place. The moment passed. She was too committed to exploring what was happening inside her.

  She recalled both Gianna and Beverly making cracks about her lack of humanity, and she wondered, now, whether they really were teasing her, or whether real concern lurked beneath their words. She could hear Beverly’s voice: “Don’t tell me you’re becoming a human being.” The comment had stung at the time, Mimi recalled, even as she’d convinced herself that Bev was joking. Only Bev didn’t joke about that kind of thing. She’d been a school counselor for years until completing her Ph.D. and going into private practice with several other therapists. People’s feelings always had been important to Bev; and Mimi’s lack of regard for other people’s feelings—especially Bev’s—had been a major cause of their break-up.

  “So, Patterson, you’re a selfish, insensitive, uncaring, unfeeling jerk,” she said to the food inside the refrigerator.

  The refrigerator hummed loudly, as if suggesting that she either get something from it or close the door. She grabbed a bottle of seltzer water from the top shelf and slammed the refrigerator door shut. She got a can of nuts from the cabinet, and went to bed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The mood in the Think Tank that afternoon was, if not buoyant, at least more energetic than it had been in months, though there still was some residual grumbling about the split in their assignments. But Alice Long had been welcomed back warmly and she was a good fit. She and Bobby were comfortable with each other, as were she and Cassie.

  “Eric and Tim, let’s hear from you first.” Gianna, clad in black jeans and Western boots, her shoulder holster visible under her left arm since her jacket was upstairs in her office, leaned back in her chair and propped her feet on the table.

  Eric scowled, curling his lips in distaste. “What’s that line about mad dogs and Irishmen?”

  Alice Long guffawed. “It was ‘Englishmen,’ and it said that only mad dogs and Englishmen were crazy enough to go outside during the hottest part of th
e day in India and Africa and the Caribbean—all those places where the British had colonies. It was the natives’ way of calling the English stupid.” She was still laughing when Eric, face as red as his hair, recovered enough to speak.

  “Anyway, we hung out most of the day at that pub where these gun runners are supposed to hang out, and I gotta tell you, Boss, there wasn’t a guy in that room who could hatch a plot to send flowers to a funeral, to say nothing of buying illegal guns to ship illegally to Ireland.”

  Tim chimed in with a wide grin. “That’s the truth, Boss. As much as I hate the all-Irish-are-drunks stereotype, every guy in there was a big time boozer and I swear half of them were on the job, don’t you think?” And he looked to Eric for confirmation, readily receiving it. “Nobody could seriously think of looking for gunrunners in the Shamrock,” he concluded.

  “Somebody could,” Alice said quietly, and every eye turned to her. “Bobby and I paid a visit to the Eight Rivers Lounge on 14th Street. That’s one of the main hang-outs for the Ganja crew.” She hesitated briefly at the sideways look Gianna gave her, then continued with her story.

  Alice Long had worked undercover long enough to have acquired vast stores of knowledge on many different topics and Gianna knew it; knew better than to question or challenge it, though she hated having it sprung on her in the middle of an investigation.

  “Anyway,” Alice continued, “I went in there pretending I had to use the bathroom, and attracted a little attention.”

  She was stopped this time by the hoots of laughter. Alice Long was a stunner by anybody’s definition, though the only time she ever traded on her physical attributes was to benefit her job.