Too Lucky to Live

by Annie Hogsett

  After about a minute, I stopped that. Mostly. I wiped off my face and pulled myself together. A little. I waited there with Ulysses, as quietly as I could, considering how much I was trembling. What was I supposed to be doing? This might be a crime scene. I knew that much from watching the CSIs et al., over the years. Too bad I’d already broken the CSI Don’t Bust Out Crying Rule of dead-guy-discovery.

  I knew enough to preserve the area around any dead body—around Ulysses Aeneas Grant, a formerly alive human being of my acquaintance, whom I had liked—intact. So I loaded my junk back into my purse and stepped back, but as I did, I spotted the scrap of paper lying on the dirty floor where it had fallen from Ulysses’ hand.

  Evidence?

  The first rule of crime scene television: Leave the evidence undisturbed. I could hear a siren unraveling a thin ribbon of sound. Closing the distance between itself and me.

  Leave the evidence undisturbed.

  No kidding.

  I was just looking….

  I glided over, picked up the slip of paper, and stepped further back into the room, sneaking a glance at my reflection in the blackened windows. My heart was trying to hammer its way out of my chest. Had anyone seen? Wouldn’t there be a security camera in here somewhere? Was it a felony to disturb a crime scene? What class? How much jail time? Too many questions, with answers I probably wouldn’t like.

  Camera first. I swiveled around, scanning. Crap. Yes. There was one.

  Good news. It was dangling by its wire. Any video it had captured would be a close-up of the wall.

  So I had disturbed the evidence? Tough. I was willing to bet that this paper had something to do with why Ulysses had lured me down here, had risked his life. And mine. With mixed results. So far.

  The siren was still pretty far out, but its fragile whine was rounding into a fuller, deeper wail. Getting closer. Not too late for me to drop my incriminating scrap back onto the floor beneath Ulysses’ dead hand. But wait. Wouldn’t my prints be stuck to it? Didn’t your prints stick to practically anything?

  Jesus wept.

  Siren. Closer. A throaty howl. I unfolded the paper. It was lined, like a ripped off half page out of a small notebook, stained all over in smudges of reddish brown. My hands shook. I forced them quiet so I could read. Here’s what I read:

  DIRTY!!!~~~

  Seriously?

  This was evidence? This was a clue? The word and its oversupply of punctuation ended in an unreadable scrawl. Great. I’d risked probably jail time for one word, three screamers, and a squiggle. Served me right.

  I clenched my hand around the note to make it smaller. While I’d been staring at it, the siren had blasted up and been choked off. Footsteps clattered toward me down the hall. I faced the door, trying not to look like I’d had my hand in the cookie jar, or that the cookie was still scrunched up in my fist, as Officers Valerio and Clark rushed into the room.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I didn’t get arrested this time either. Not that I didn’t deserve it. Valerio and Bob had focused all their attention on Ulysses’ lifeless body at first. They handled him in a way that probably would disturb the evidence. Grabbing him out of the chair, laying him on the floor, pulling open his shirt, checking for any sign of life. Then the EMS team arrived and they checked, too.

  Don’t bother, I could have told them.

  The distractions worked fine for me, since I had recently probably become a Class-Something Felon. While everybody was dealing with the body of Ulysses, I slipped my scrap of contraband into my jeans. Tucked in behind the Marriott key card, it wouldn’t show up at all.

  I brought my self-serving little mind back to Ulysses. By the way they attended to him, I decided neither the police nor the EMTs thought they were looking at a crime. There was no gunshot wound. Therefore, no gunshot residue, or as I like to call it, “GSR,” either. I congratulated myself on my extensive knowledge of police procedure. No wound. No blood. No petechiae that would indicate strangling or asphyxiation.

  He was simply an old guy with yellowed, bloodshot eyes. Probably drank too much and ate bad. When they’d rolled him out of his chair I was shocked to realize that one of his legs was missing below the knee. A diabetic, probably. He’d called me and then had himself a heart attack. And died without any help at all. That looked likely. Surely, that was possible. And plenty sad enough.

  Except. In my pocket was a piece of paper that might have been Ulysses’ dying message to me.

  DIRTY!!!

  At the very least, someone warned someone else that another someone was dirty. Or maybe some thing was. Could be this note was about the floor in the common room. Or some unknown rotten shame? What did I know? The brown stains sure looked like blood to me. I needed some of that magic cop blood-identifier spray.

  My brain was back online. All in all, I found it to be an improbable coincidence that Ulysses had called me to share information about a crime and then just…died. But I could only be sure about two things: Ulysses had something to tell me. And he was gone now.

  The rest was up for grabs. Dirty could mean anything. As far as that went, Dirty could mean cops.

  My no good very long day caught up with me and I swayed, dizzy.

  Bob saw me swaying and that put the spotlight of interrogation back onto me. “What the hell?” He caught the look Valerio shot him. “Sorry. Pardon my French. But why are you here, Ms. Harper?”

  I would have dearly loved to take Bob aside and spill the whole story. I thought, given our friendship, he’d probably look the other way on my felonious meddling with the note if I handed it over and said, “Here. I picked this up for you.” But tough old Valerio was standing right in front of me. Glaring in a disconcertingly by-the-book way. And besides, what if DIRTY did mean cops? I had a couple of those right here, looking grouchy at me.

  An icy trickle snuck down my back.

  I needed a story to explain my presence but I had nothing plausible prepared. So I dived in with the bare bones of the truth. “I got a call from this man here. Ulysses. We met last night right here in this room. He told me he had something to tell me. That Tom and I were in danger. So I came. But when I got here, he was already dead.”

  Oh, and I found this cool note, too. And I got my sleazy prints all over the damn thing and now I have to hide it or probably go to jail.

  I bit my tongue and arranged my face for innocence and stupidity. “Maybe the strain of calling me brought on the attack?”

  Officer Valerio gave me a look which I interpreted as Thank you so much for providing us with the obvious explanation, Ms. Clueless Civilian. But then he shrugged.

  “You’re probably right. I don’t see anything particularly suspicious here. We’ll look into it. But if you’re thinking ‘murder,’ Ms. Harper, you can probably let that one go.”

  Murder? Yes, sir. I was. I was, for sure, thinking murder.

  My worldview tilted and I got dizzy again.

  These guys were all saying, by word and demeanor, “Nope. Nothing homicidal here.”

  Not me. No way. I could see murder, rolling on, like that giant stone in the Indiana Jones movie, crushing a path that led straight from a woman’s voice reciting numbers in the night to this. Twenty-four hours later, murder had found me here, standing over the body of a spunky old man named Ulysses Grant in this scary room.

  Overnight, it brushed by Renata on its way to smash the life out of Felix, Muff, and Frank. It bruised my Margo and now it had obliterated poor Ulysses. I couldn’t see a rational pattern or plan in any of it.

  Yet.

  Maybe everything until right now could be chalked up to senseless violence. But this right here? Oh, yeah. Murder. I could feel it right down to the soles of my cold little feet.

  The piece of paper in my pocket was burning a nice felonious hole in my leg.

  Buck up, Allie. Escape with yo
ur Clueless Citizen reputation intact and take your lethal ideas about what’s going on to a safer place where you can decide what to do.

  And hide.

  My lame “natural causes” scenario had at least made me out to be a good citizen. Not at all smart, but not particularly criminal either. After a few minutes the cops released me on my own recognizance and gave me an EMS man to escort me to my car.

  The return drive downtown, with a motley crew of terrors and sorrows riding shotgun with me in the Maxima, took about a year. The numb unreality of every single thing was my buffer zone, so I didn’t fall utterly apart, but my body was overrun by a nasty, bug-crawling sensation. And every now and then a sob would break loose and shake me around.

  It purely sucked.

  At least it wasn’t after two a.m. I had one more compromising note to pick up before this night was done.

  My guy handed me back my envelope. A trace of curiosity in his eyes.

  “Everything okay then?”

  If you only knew.

  “Peachy. Thanks so much.”

  I was back in my fabulous Marriott Bed, tucked in with my unauthorized little murder-scene visit and my DIRTY!!! little probable felony, by two a.m. And in spite of the whole new array of guard dog alerts in my head, I was out cold by 2:05. As far as I could tell, Tom had slept the sleep of the just—or the just laid—all the time I’d been gone.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Thursday, August 20

  I was dead right. Tom was worried and mad.

  I’d waited to tell him about 1) my unauthorized trip to the projects, 2) the death of Ulysses Grant, and 3) my stealing a piece of paper—until we were having breakfast at David’s in the Marriott. I figured he wouldn’t yell if there were people around. And I wouldn’t cry if there were pancakes and bacon in front of me.

  So far it wasn’t going too badly on either count. I focused on how handsome he looked. How lean and tan he was. And to ignore how high his color was at the moment. How his sexy smile had gone missing.

  “Allie, for God’s sake, how could you do something so dangerous?” he hissed. “I mean, at one in the morning on a good night—when people don’t know you’ve won a lot of money and there haven’t been break-ins and beatings and killings, and God knows what all—that is no place to be.”

  He’d hit “killings” extra hard. The woman with three small children at the next table, shot him a look that was half alarmed, half annoyed. Which was lost on him. I gave her back one that said, Men. We know how they are. That put her on hold for the moment.

  “Tom.” I lowered my voice, hoping he would follow suit. “I know. I know. I’m sorry. Ulysses called and I was shocked he had my cell number. And when I asked him, he said everybody’s got my number and yours, too. Because of the Internet. That threw me. And then he also warned me about some man, who was involved with Renata somehow, and who had come around looking for Rune. Claiming he should get custody. Ulysses thought that man was what he called ‘big T trouble.’ That really tore it. I thought if he had something that could help us…help Rune…help the police…I couldn’t just not—”

  “Okay. Okay. Why didn’t you come get me?”

  “You were asleep. I wore you out. You said I was going to kill us both, remember?”

  Our neighbor lady must have heard the “kill” word again or maybe the “wore you out” part, and she started rushing her kids through the end of their French toast.

  “Besides, Ulysses specifically told me not to bring you.”

  “Why not?” His face got still and stern, and I had a disorienting jolt of who is this angry stranger?”

  “Why not?” he repeated with even more heat. “Because I’m blind? You have to understand one thing right now, Allie. That will never be a good enough reason for you not to tell me what’s going on. Not ever.”

  “No! Tom. That was not the reason. I promise. Ulysses said you looked like ‘easy money on a stick.’” I let a grin slip into my voice. “I suppose he could have been referring to your cane—I hadn’t thought about that. But now that you mention it—”

  After a long couple of steely seconds Tom let his shoulders slump. “Okay. Stop. As long as we understand each other. As long as we have some ground rules. From now on until things calm down, you go absolutely nowhere without telling me.

  “I guess all’s well that ends—” he paused for a second, reflecting, I presumed, on the inappropriateness of saying “that ends well” under the circumstances, and finished, “with only one dead guy.”

  The mother next door signed her check, scooped up her young, and departed. As she went by, she muttered, “You people should be very careful.”

  Tom frowned. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Too much death and destruction in our conversation for her kids. But she’s gone now and I need you to listen to something and not get so mad you can’t hear it. Deal?”

  I tried to assess his state of mind. On a one-to-ten scale from “peaceful and loving” to “screaming freak-out,” I’d have put him at about a six. I reached over and put what I hoped was a calming hand on his arm. It felt tense to me.

  “Tom. There’s a bigger problem.”

  “That’s hard to fathom.”

  “I know. And I’m sorry, but you want me to tell you what I’m up to and not go off on my own. It’s hard to tell you anything when you’re vibrating like that.”

  He dragged in a breath and huffed it out. Corralling his state of mind.

  “I’m sorry. Most of this mess is my fault, not yours. Go ahead. I’ll listen.”

  “Okay. Here. What happened to Ulysses made everything look different to me. I’m about ninety-nine percent sure somebody killed him. Not accidentally. Not in some shootout that was maybe unmitigated dumb-assed-ness. Killed. Him. On. Purpose. In a clever way that would make it look like he simply died. Ulysses was murdered, Tom. Maybe murdered because he called me. Almost certainly murdered because of something he knew about Felix and those guys not really killing each other in some argument. He was murdered because of whatever that miserable little scrap of paper meant to him. And to us.

  “Us.”

  “The cops don’t see this. They’ve got their hands full. Plus, Valerio and Bob may be mixed up somehow in what’s been going on. They may not want to look too hard. And I can’t give them the paper now, not just because it’s wrong for me to have it, but because it says “dirty” and dirty could mean a lot of people, including cops.”

  “Allie. Do you mean that?”

  “I do. I don’t like it, but I do. Hang in here with me. Here’s another reason we’re on our own: The EMTs looked at Ulysses and saw an old, unhealthy amputee with no bullet holes in him. There’ll be an autopsy, but I can tell you—because I heard it from the lips of the Medical Examiner himself once upon a time—it could take weeks for something obvious to show up, and if it’s something subtle, they may not run the tests for that at all. Nobody’s looking at this as a homicide. Except me.”

  “And you think we’re next?”

  “Not exactly. I was scared out of my mind last night, but I’m better this morning. I can’t think of any rational reason for somebody to kill us today. They couldn’t use the ticket. Surely nobody could be stupid enough to think about that at this point. We don’t have it anymore, anyway, and we don’t have the cash yet. Somebody smart enough to murder Ulysses in a way that mimicked his health profile will be looking forward to the moment the jackpot is paid out. So far, I’ve got no plan for addressing any of this. But rocking along like nothing’s happened would not be on my agenda.”

  Well, I hadn’t made him happy, and my stock hadn’t gone up much. His face was no longer flushed and angry. Pale now, and troubled. Not an improvement. He smiled, though. It was weak, but welcome. He freed his arm from my iron grip and put his hand over mine. Big sigh.

  “If I could di
smiss all this, I’d be a happy man. But I can’t. Night before last, the moment I heard those numbers and realized what they were—what they meant—everything changed. Fact of life, Allie. The world is full of greed and ruthlessness. It’s around us all the time. If we’re lucky it doesn’t touch us. But guess what? I got so extra-ultra-lucky that it’s unlucky. I woke up the greed and ruthlessness. I turned its attention toward Rune, toward me. And you.

  “Renata. Margo. My house. Your house. Because of my big bad Mondo, three people were dead before the sun came up yesterday morning. And now Ulysses. This is my problem. I made it. But it belongs to both of us now. Everybody we care about. Everything we touch—I’ve got to stop pretending I can make it all go away by not liking it and wishing it had never happened.”

  He stopped and sat there, silent. Calming down. Pulling himself together. Coming out of his nightmare of regret and disaster. Coming back to me.

  “We’ll decide how to proceed, Allie. We’ll be smart. And careful. But we’ll also do what we can to find out for ourselves what’s going on. We’ll put our skills together. My blind man’s sixth sense. Your…” An almost smile of forgiveness. “Your irrepressible you-ness. I’m on board, I swear. But for now, I promised to take Rune to see his mom. And you’re going to keep your part of our deal. Yes?”

  “Yes. Two Musketeers. That’s us, babe. I’m with you.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  A moderately disconcerting thing happened after we left the restaurant but before we made it to the elevator. Tom’s cell phone rang. And it didn’t simply go ring, ring like a plain old phone. No, it had a ringtone like a cool phone. Like mine, as far as that goes. And the ringtone was—wait for it—a few bars from the piano intro of Diana Krall’s cover of “A Case of You.” The moody, hot, triple-sexy version. Talk about coincidence. And talk about accessibility. There was nothing even slightly disabled about that phone.