“I think it’s OK. Thanks for charging to the rescue.” She smiled and stuck out her hand. “I’m Phyllis, and these are my friends.” She introduced them one by one: June, Evie, Dot, and they all shook hands. “How long have you been coming here?” Phyllis asked once the pleasantries were out of the way.
“A few years,” Mimi replied.
“We can tell,” Evie responded. “You’re in absolutely wonderful shape.”
Mimi ignored the meaning beneath the words and the accompanying assessing look. “Do you have a trainer here?”
They all shook their heads, and June asked, “Why? Do we need one?”
“It seemed that you were trying to lift too much weight. That’s the quickest way to get hurt.”
“We’re trying to lose some weight and we thought the best and fastest way to do that would be to put more weight on the machine,” Phyllis said.
Mimi shook her head. “The opposite is true. Less weight and more reps. That’ll burn the calories faster.” She leaned across the machine, pulled the pin in the stack of weights and replaced it in a higher plate. “Try it now,” she said to Phyllis, and helped her into the seat. Phyllis grasped the hand rails, stuck her feet beneath the padded bar, and lifted. Up and down and up and down, slowly, methodically and properly.
Phyllis nodded. “That’s better. It doesn’t feel like I’m straining.”
“And it shouldn’t feel that way,” Mimi said.
“What about no pain, no gain?” Evie asked.
“Grossly overrated as a concept,” Mimi replied. “What could you possibly gain by hurting yourself on a regular basis?”
“A body like yours,” June shot back at her, looking her up and down. “You can’t tell me you manage to look like that by taking it slow and easy.”
“I could take it slow and easy with her,” Evie said.
Mimi ignored Evie, kept eye contact with Phyllis. “I’ve been coming here three or four times a week for five or six years,” she said, “no secrets, no miracles.”
“How about fewer birthdays?” asked Dot, who’d been quiet up to that point. “It makes a difference that you’re younger than we are.”
Mimi shook her head. “Not a bit.” Four pairs of eyes gave her a disbelieving look and she could all but see the sarcasm drip.
“Easy for you to say,” Evie said. “Have you even had your fortieth birthday yet?”
Not willing to be drawn into that conversation, Mimi smiled. “Three or four days a week, continuously increasing the number of reps, and every couple of months increasing the amount of weight, is the way to burn calories, if that’s what you’re after. It was nice meeting all of you. See you tomorrow?” she said with raised eyebrows, and, with a wave, returned to her treadmill. As she departed, she heard suppressed giggles and one loud guffaw which sounded exactly like Sue, and Mimi wondered whether any of them were looking for love, whether one of them was a reluctant roommate, and why she’d never before noticed the fifty-something women in the gym.
*****
“Because you’re supposed to be watching your own form—and occasionally mine—not those of other women, that’s why you never noticed.” Gianna replied lazily, caressing Mimi’s right nipple.
“I know, but a couple of them had forms worth noticing, especially the one named—” Mimi didn’t get the name out because Gianna claimed her mouth in a bruising kiss, and it was some time before she could return to the subject. “You wouldn’t by any chance be jealous, would you?”
“Of course I am,” Gianna replied matter-of-factly if distractedly, as she now was attending to Mimi’s left nipple. “And what’s the name of this older woman I now have to worry about? And what was it about her form that got your attention?”
“I’m flattered. I’ll take a generous helping of jealousy after being so totally and thoroughly ignored.”
Gianna released the nipple she was massaging and raised herself on her right elbow to gaze down into Mimi’s face. The glow cast by the flickering of the candles burning on the bedside tables highlighted the chocolate brown skin recently burnished by the Florida sun, even as it accentuated the fatigue that Gianna could see in her eyes. And the seriousness. “You think I’ve been ignoring you?”
“I tried to talk to you three different times when I was in Florida and you couldn’t take two minutes to talk to me.”
“Mimi, I was buried under!”
“I know you’re busy, Gianna. I know how hard you work and I don’t often ask for your time. But when I do, I don’t think it’s asking too much for you to stop and give me two minutes, unless you’re actually processing a dead body or chasing a perp.”
Gianna peered deeply into Mimi’s eyes, her clear hazel ones finding both love and reproach in the dark brown ones. “Shouldn’t we talk about this another time?”
Mimi pushed Gianna away and sat up. “You do this all the time. Why can’t you talk right now?”
“I do what all the time? And we can talk about it now if you want to. I just thought you looked tired and that you should get a good sleep tonight.”
“But we could make love for another two hours and you wouldn’t worry about whether I was getting enough sleep.” Mimi’s statement was accusatory and flat, emotionless.
Gianna sat up, too, and turned to face Mimi. “What’s bothering you?”
“That we don’t talk.”
“We talk all the time!”
“About everything but what we spend ninety percent of our waking hours doing: Our jobs. You wouldn’t talk to me when I called because you didn’t want to have to tell me what’s going on with the murders of older lesbians.”
Gianna concealed and controlled the anger and frustration that so quickly welled up inside of her. How the hell did Mimi always know about her investigations? And why the hell was she always sniffing along the same trail? “You know I can’t talk about my cases, Mimi, with anyone. Not just you.”
“And I’m not asking you to talk about your cases specifically, Gianna. I’m asking you to tell me what you think and feel.” She held up a hand to halt Gianna’s protest. “For example, what would be wrong with saying something like, ‘I’m really worried about these murders?’ I know better than to ask you about specifics but at least I’d have some sense of what you were coping with and what I should expect of you. For example, I wouldn’t have had to be so worried about getting back last night to be with you had I known how intensely you were working this case. I’d have slept later, had a big brunch, and not had to suffer being trapped in a parking lot by a truck full of drunken Irishmen. Which is why I missed my plane, by the way.”
“Drunken Irishmen,” Gianna snapped. “What drunken Irishmen? Where?”
Mimi gave her a wary look. “In the parking lot of the cafe where I ate breakfast Sunday before I left Florida. Why? What’s your interest in drunken Irishmen?”
Gianna hopped out of bed, ran around to Mimi’s side and stood over her. “Tell me, Mimi, please!”
“Tell me why you want to know.”
“That’s blackmail!”
“Call it what you like but I’m not giving up any info without a reason.”
Gianna scowled, shivered, and hopped back into bed, snuggled against Mimi, and told her about the Irish, the guns, and the Ganja. Then Mimi told her how she’d left Sue and Kate’s early Sunday morning and stopped to have breakfast at a waterfront cafe before heading to the airport. When she returned to her car, she found herself hemmed in by a blue panel van that wouldn’t start. Meaningful conversation with the van’s driver failed because he was blind drunk, even at so early an hour, as were his two passengers. The only thing she could ascertain through the alcohol haze and the thick brogues was that the truck wouldn’t start. She got the restaurant manager involved. She called a tow truck. By the time the truck arrived to tow the van, it was too late for Mimi to make her flight. “But now that I’m remembering it, I remember thinking that if I were home, here in D.C., I’d jot down the license plate number of
that van and report the driver.”
“Why?” Gianna asked.
“Because it was illegal. It had a commercial tag on the front and a passenger tag on the rear.”
“Do you recall the plate numbers?” And when Mimi shook her head, she demanded as full a description as Mimi could recall of the men in the truck and of the truck itself.
“You really think it’s them?”
“Yeah,” Gianna said, “I do. It fits. They can buy guns all day long in Georgia and Florida and South Carolina and not have to worry that the license plates would be noticed. But closer to home, in North Carolina and Virginia, where people know what D.C. tags are like, they’d have a problem.” She reached for the phone. “I wish I knew the chief’s home phone number,” she muttered, punching buttons.
“I know it,” Mimi said casually, “but who’re you calling if not the chief?”
Gianna punched off the phone and looked at Mimi. “You really know the chief’s private home telephone number?”
“Sure,” Mimi said as if talking to a new arrival to the planet, and she rattled it off as Gianna punched the buttons, all the while muttering to herself. Mimi got up and went to the bathroom, and when she returned, Gianna was sitting in the middle of the bed with the covers up around her shoulders, a bemused look on her face.
“So,” she said.
“So what?” Mimi asked, crawling into bed and under the covers, plastering her body next to Gianna’s.
“Don’t you want to know what the chief said, and don’t you want to know how we’re going to find the Irish and the guns?”
Mimi yawned and shook her head. “No, I don’t. I don’t care about the Irish and their guns, or about the Jamaicans. I just want to go to sleep.”
“Well,” Gianna said, snuggling against her, “I want to know the name of that woman you were ogling in the gym and what aspect of her form you found so intriguing and whether I need to spend extra time in the gym working on that aspect.”
Mimi yawned again and mumbled something Gianna couldn’t hear but which sounded like “breasts.” It was a while longer before she was able to just go to sleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The casual observer would not have believed that Sandra Mitchell had lived in D.C. barely three weeks. The third floor of the bay front house that was her new home possessed that well-cared for, lived-in look: pictures, curtains, blinds, shutters and clothes neatly hung; books, video tapes and compact discs neatly shelved. The refrigerator and cabinets were well-stocked; the dishes in the dishwasher were clean. The cable guide and the TV and VCR remotes were in a basket of magazines beside the easy chair that faced the television across the living room. Only the small stack of cardboard boxes, cut, flattened, tied and ready for the recycling bin, might suggest a lack of longevity; but to the practiced eye, it was the newness of everything that bore witness to the truth of Sandra Mitchell’s tenancy. Furniture, clothes, dishes, the paintings on the wall, the rugs on the hardwood floors—everything was just-out-of-the-carton new. Only the objects in the room that Sandra Mitchell used as an office were well-used and seasoned, as if they had belonged to her in a previous life. Even the paintings in the hallway leading up to her third-floor walk-up, and the mat at her door, screamed their newness. As did the bulb in the fixture above the door, which was burning a full two hundred and fifty watts when the women of the Hate Crimes Unit arrived to begin their investigation.
“Security conscious, paranoid, or just scared to death to be in the big city?” Cassie Ali wondered aloud as she blinked at the light that was blinding even in broad daylight.
“All of the above,” Alice Long had replied when they finally threw the third dead bolt and entered the immaculate apartment.
“And a neat freak,” Linda Lopez murmured as she strolled about the apartment, scrutinizing and assessing. “The woman hasn’t been here in two days and there’s not a speck of dust anywhere, not even in a corner. Even the dust knows better than to show up in here.”
Gianna didn’t say anything but everything she saw caused her to grow more and more uneasy. They all had pulled on latex gloves upon entering the building, and aside from the most cursory of checks, wouldn’t disturb the premises until the crime scene investigators finished their work. But Gianna wanted—desperately needed—to find some clue as to who Sandy Mitchell was, some bit or piece of information or knowledge that would explain her move to D.C., her presence at The Bayou the night she was killed, the reason for her departure from the norm of her previous existence. Gianna’s gaze went everywhere, and though Sandy Mitchell’s apartment was fully furnished, it may as well have been as empty as Ellie Litton’s town house was when they finally received permission to search it, so devoid of personality was this place.
Without a word spoken among them, Alice turned down the hallway to the bedroom, Linda crossed the living room into the kitchen, Cassie crossed to the bookshelves in the living room and stood, head thrown back, to read up at the neatly aligned spines, and Gianna invaded the only space that spoke Sandy Mitchell’s name.
The room at the rear of the apartment that Dr. Sandra Mitchell had set up as an office overlooked the backyard terrace that all the residents of the house shared and it was here, Gianna believed, that any vestiges of the old Sandy Mitchell would remain, if indeed any did. She stood in the doorway of the room, hoping for a sense of the woman who had lived here so briefly.
An L-shaped desk was in front of the windows, and on it, all the tools expected of a 21st century academic: computer and monitor, printer, fax machine, scanner. A bookshelf adjacent to the desk was filled with academic-looking books and books were stacked in neat piles on the floor beside the desk and on top of it. The heavy drapes at the windows were closed, suggesting several things to Gianna: that the upstate New York native knew very well how to insulate against the cold; that she knew she’d spend a lot of time at this desk, and would need the barrier against the winter winds just beginning to blow; that Alice and Linda and Cassie were right on in their assessment of Sandy Mitchell’s proclivity toward paranoia and the heavy drapes certainly would obliterate the outside world.
The doorbell sounded, followed seconds later by voices, and Gianna returned to the living room. The landlord, who’d been called and who had agreed to meet them at the apartment, confirmed their impressions of Sandra Mitchell. Jared Taylor was his name and he began by saying that Sandra Mitchell was a “dreamboat” of a tenant. Jared was eighty-two years old and looked like Ray Bradbury. He was tiny, the way older people sometimes are, but with not the slightest hint of frailty. His blue eyes sparkled with mischief like a child’s despite the bushy white eyebrows above them, but they also held a wealth of wisdom, and the cadence of his voice was slightly Southern. He had raised his family in this house when it was a single family residence, but when his children grew up and moved away and when his wife had a stroke, he converted the three-story building into three flats and moved with his wife to an assisted living complex in Montgomery County.
All of his tenants, he said, were long term, and he had expected that Sandra Mitchell would be, too. The top floor became vacant when the woman who’d lived there for a decade and worked for the State Department got a promotion and moved to Europe. Jared rented only to “mature, professional women,” he said, because they were more responsible than any other group of people. He’d had a total of three conversations with Sandra Mitchell: One on the telephone and two in person, the second when she moved in two weeks ago. He described her as polite, articulate, and “a little bit young for her age.”
“What does that mean, Mr. Taylor?” Alice Long asked. Cassie wrote his reply in her notebook.
“According to her application and her tax returns, she was fifty-six years old, but when you met her in person, you had the feeling she hadn’t seen any more of life than a sheltered child. She said she was glad the place was on the top floor and she asked me to install a third security lock, and the first day she put in that million-watt bulb. I told her
it was safe, that we hadn’t ever had in trouble in this building, and I’ve owned it for almost fifty years. But she said no place was safe, and that nobody could be too careful.” He took a deep breath. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about what happened to Dr. Mitchell but I can tell you I’m grateful that it didn’t happen to her in this building. I told her the truth when I said there’s never been any trouble in this building or in this block.”
“She lived in upstate New York, Mr. Taylor,” Alice said, bringing the old man back from his mental musings. “How’d she find out about your place?”
Jared Taylor’s smile was almost smug. “I only advertise in professional journals. My youngest daughter taught me that one. Professor Mitchell saw my ad in the social workers journal. I forget what it’s called.”
The old man was on a roll and Gianna had to leave in a few minutes, so as much as she regretted having to do it, she cut him off. “Did she have any visitors that you know of? Or receive any mail or packages that you’re aware of?”
He shook his head. “I got the feeling she didn’t know anybody here at all. And to tell you the truth, I was surprised that she had the gumption to pick up and move all the way down here. I’m telling you, she struck me as a sheltered type of person. Smart as a whip—you could tell by talking to her that she was smart—and she was pretty as a picture. But all she knew came from books, you know what I mean? Not from life. Now that Dr. Jenkins who lived here, the one who went to Europe? Now she was the adventuresome sort.”
Gianna cut in again to ask whether Sandy Mitchell had used a professional moving company or whether her move had been a do-it-yourself operation, and Jared cut her a big, wide grin and threw in a knowing wink and Gianna had to work not to return the gestures in kind. Then he explained that Sandra Mitchell had arrived driving her brand new Cadillac and towing “one of those little U-Haul trailers. Nothing in it but her desk and chair and computer stuff and all those books. She paid the guys next door a hundred bucks to unload it for her. All the furniture came the next day from a local store, not some place in New York, and I thought that was kind of unusual.”
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