Skin and Blond

by V. J. Chambers

  “Can I help you?” I said.

  “You the private detective?” he said.

  I nodded. “That’s me.”

  “I want to pay you to follow my wife around and see if she’s cheating on me,” he said.

  Well, that was fairly typical. I saw this all the time. But I had a specific spiel that I generally went through in cases like this, so I gestured for him to have a seat. “Let’s chat this out, all right?”

  He sat down.

  I sat down behind my desk and turned to a new page in my legal pad. “So, before we get going on this, I just want to caution you that once you see certain things, you can’t unsee them. Do you love your wife?”

  “Yeah, if she’s not cheating on me.” He leaned back in his chair. “How much is this going to cost me, anyway?”

  Well, this guy wanted to get right down to business, didn’t he? Generally, I didn’t like to talk rates at all, so I left it to the end, but maybe it would be easier getting it out of the way up front. I told him what I charged.

  He let out a low whistling breath. “That’s a lot of money.”

  “It’s my standard rate.” I shrugged. “Besides, maybe you don’t want to know if your wife’s cheating. Here’s the thing about people. They aren’t perfect, you know. They screw up a lot. But in my experience, if people want out of a relationship, they’ll just leave. A lot of times, these affairs, they’re just… someone trying to get something out of her system or reacting to a problem with her current partner. If you leave it alone, if you try to repair your relationship, she’ll probably stop anyway. But if you have photographic evidence, sir, it’s probably going to break your marriage up. Are you prepared for that?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, think about it. And think about the fact that you’ll be spending a lot of money just to make your life harder.”

  He was quiet for a bit, looking bewildered. Then he shifted on the seat, leaning forward. “I gotta know. You get that? I’m going insane here. Either way, it would be better if I was certain.”

  I did get that. I nodded. “All right, then. I’d be happy to provide you with answers, sir. Let’s start with why you think your wife is cheating.”

  “Oh, you know, the usual,” he said. “Her phone’s always ringing. She looks at it, but she won’t pick it up. She says it’s work or something. She’s been spending a lot of time alone, going out late with ‘friends.’ And she just seems distant.”

  “Have you accused her? Confronted her?”

  “Nah. I want to know what I’m dealing with before I do something like that.”

  “So, she has no idea that you’re suspicious?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “So, you’ll follow her?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “How soon can you start?”

  “Well, when does she engage in the suspicious activity?”

  “She’s supposedly out with friends this evening. She said she was leaving for dinner at the TGI Fridays in town.”

  “You’re in luck,” I said. “I don’t have anything scheduled for this evening. I can get started right away.”

  * * *

  It turned out that the husband’s name was Colin Pugliano and that his wife was Rhonda. Neither of them looked particularly Italian, despite his surname. Of course, Rhonda had married into it, so she wouldn’t have. I parked across from the Puglianos’ house after grabbing some take-out. I saw her leave the house. She was dressed up in a sexy outfit that would probably be appropriate for a club. High heels and a low cut shirt. I couldn’t tell if that meant anything. Lots of times, women all got dressed up like that to go out together, so she might in fact be meeting friends.

  I wasn’t really that kind of woman. To be that kind of woman, you needed female friends, which I didn’t have in an abundant supply, and you needed to actually enjoy doing your hair and makeup. I wasn’t exactly what you’d call high maintenance when it came to my appearance. Don’t get me wrong. I made sure that I looked presentable. But I didn’t do things like getting my nails done or visiting a hair dresser to get my hair colored. I didn’t go out shopping for clothes for fun. I was a simple kind of girl.

  And the thing was, I’d discovered that none of it mattered. Women often claimed that they got dressed that way to impress men, but I’d found that it didn’t make any difference to men whether you were wearing makeup or not. Most men barely noticed.

  I didn’t have trouble getting laid, anyway.

  When Rhonda pulled out of the driveway, I followed her at a safe distance. I wasn’t obvious about it, but I didn’t go to a lot of trouble to hide the fact that I was following her, because I figured she wasn’t savvy enough to notice.

  She didn’t seem to.

  I followed her car not to a restaurant to meet friends, but to a motel at the edge of town—the kind where you can rent rooms by the hour.

  I shook my head as I pulled in to the parking lot. “Really, Rhonda, I was looking forward to something a little bit more challenging than this.”

  I got out my camera and took a few shots of her getting out of her car and going into a room. She didn’t talk to anyone, so there was still a little bit of plausible deniability on her part.

  I settled in, getting my takeout and watching the door. I waited for someone else to show up and go inside. No one did. That meant that he was already inside or that she was in there alone.

  I found myself pulling for option number two.

  It would be interesting if one of these surveillance cases actually went a different way. I’d like it if Rhonda actually turned out to be a Russian spy.

  Well, she didn’t really look Russian, to be honest. Besides, Russian spies were so 1985. It wasn’t the Cold War anymore. What country should she be from then?

  Somewhere in the Middle East, I decided. Of course, she didn’t look Middle Eastern either. And besides, I was fairly sure that the Muslim religion would prohibit women from being spies. So, that didn’t really make any sense. But maybe she wasn’t a woman at all, but a man in disguise. Of course, that really didn’t make sense. How would a man fool someone like Colin Pugliano into thinking that he was a woman without a sex change operation?

  For that matter, what would a spy want with Colin Pugliano anyway?

  I sighed, digging into my kung pao beef.

  There was probably nothing exciting going on here. As much as I wished my job didn’t boil down to same-old, same-old drudgery, it did. And the fact that I was stuck doing it was my own fault. I maybe didn’t agree that the department should have fired me for the things I did. After all, I did them on my own time. They were personal decisions, nothing to do with my job at all. But I had done them. I couldn’t argue that.

  Doing that stuff didn’t make me a bad detective, though. Pike knew that.

  Still, it had ruined my life. My weakness for sex had destroyed everything. I should stop, I guess, but what was the point now? I didn’t have anything to save. I’d lost my job. I’d lost my relationship with Pike. I’d lost my self-respect. I didn’t have anything left except my vices. Everything else had abandoned me, but the vices stayed steady and strong, like old friends.

  All I had left were my bad habits. I wasn’t about to let them go.

  I finished my Chinese food, right down to the fortune cookie. I got out of the car to find a trash can to dump the stuff. Just because I was on a stake-out didn’t mean that I had to make my car dirty. I prided myself on keeping it clean. I kept my eye on the motel room the whole time, though.

  Nothing happened.

  Bored, I tried using my camera to zero in on the window, in case I could see inside the room. No dice. The curtains were pulled shut tight.

  I waited. I watched.

  While I was watching, I listened to some podcasts on my phone. It was the only way I could handle passing the time. Boredom, that was the name of the game. Most of my job involved doing a whole lot of nothing,
while I tried to combat acute mind numbness.

  But then, just as I was starting to feel as if I couldn’t handle waiting for much longer, I was rewarded when Rhonda came out of the hotel room with a man in tow. They had their arms around each other.

  “Jackpot,” I whispered, snapping a picture.

  Then, as if they wanted to make my life even easier, they kissed. Not just a peck on the lips, either, but a full-on passionate kiss that lasted for several minutes, their hands roaming all over each other’s bodies.

  I snapped picture after picture.

  Nice. Open and shut case, got the proof on the first try. Stretching it out might have meant a bigger payday for me, but truth be told, I was glad to have the time to focus on the Webb case, which was at least unusual.

  With my luck, that was probably going to turn out stupid, too, though. Madison Webb had probably run off with some guy, leaving everything behind for a romantic weekend. Hell, the guy was probably rich, and that was why she didn’t need anything. Maybe he was going to buy her a new phone and a new laptop. Or maybe they were going someplace remote, and there wouldn’t have been any service anyway.

  Why she took the sheets off her bed though…

  Rhonda and the man released each other. They kissed again, this time briefly. I snapped photos again.

  And then they parted. Rhonda went back to her car, and I packed everything up.

  I was done for the evening.

  Miller time.

  * * *

  Truthfully, I drank a lot of Miller High Life. It’s the champagne of beers, and it’s cheap. Plus, I could drink a lot of it and not get very drunk. That was generally my goal. I didn’t drink to get drunk. I drank to stay at the bar. The drunker I got, the more likely it was I would have to go home, and I didn’t want that. However, I didn’t want to be one of those people who comes to the bar and drinks Coca-Cola and tries to hang out with the drunk people.

  When I was sober, drunk people annoyed me.

  Being a little drunk was part of it, I had to admit. It was the first step. The alcohol dumbed down my senses, made my brain just a little fuzzy. I liked that. I thought too much, and most of my thoughts weren’t nice ones. I was happy enough to let the beer go to work on my brain, its foamy coldness numbing me just a little bit, loosening me.

  I didn’t go out to drink in Renmawr.

  I wasn’t an idiot.

  For one thing, I worked in Renmawr, and I didn’t want to run into anyone that I might have worked with, either as a private eye or from my days on the police force. I didn’t want to chum around with clients, and I didn’t want anyone that I’d busted to show up and be pissed off with me.

  The other reason was that I wasn’t a fan of drinking and driving, and Renmawr was a thirty-minute drive from my home. I went back to Keene to drink instead, where my apartment was a five-minute walk from the bar. It was much safer.

  But the biggest reason was that I liked it in Keene, which was why I’d chosen to live there. I had gone to college in Keene and cut my teeth on drinking in that town. I still had friends from those days, and it was a completely different atmosphere than in Renmawr. Keene was a college town, and it attracted people who liked to have actual conversations about actually interesting things. As opposed to Renmawr, where bars seemed to be for shouting at people over pounding music. Overall, Renmawr felt like a city—huge, sprawling, and dangerous—while Keene felt like a small town. I felt safe in Keene. It was home.

  Upon entering the bar, which was called The Remington, I felt like I’d come home. I was greeted by the sight of familiar faces, many of whom smiled and waved or called out hellos. I sidled up to the bartender, who was already getting my Miller High Life out of the cooler. He set it in front of me. “Cash or tab, Ivy?”

  For years, I’d always used cash at the bar. It seemed to make the most sense to me. I’d go out with a certain amount of money, and when it was gone, that was that. There was no need to worry about remembering to get my bank card when I left the bar, and there was no attempting to calculate a tip when I was three sheets to the wind.

  But cash was inconvenient. I didn’t carry it for anything else. If I wanted to have cash for the bar, it meant that I had to go by the ATM before coming to the bar, or else use the one in the corner, which added a hellish surcharge. Using my bank card seemed to make more sense, and so I was trying to nudge myself into the twenty-first century.

  Old habits died hard, though. I happened to have some cash on me. I slid it across the bar.

  The bartender chuckled at me. His name was Alan. He worked on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and every other Thursday. I knew this because I was basically in here every night. I had the schedule down.

  I took a drink of my beer, and the first fizzy, cold bit of it washed down my throat, making everything just a little bit better. I relaxed a notch. Life might be shit. But I was home now, and I was drinking. I’d manage.

  “When you going to stop drinking that piss, huh?” said a voice behind me.

  I turned, grinning. I knew that voice. It belonged to Dr. Crane Drakeley, professor of English literature at Keene College and a beer snob. He loved to rag on me about the beer I drank. As usual, he had something on tap sitting next to him on the bar. Something dark, with a thick head of white foam at the top. It probably tasted like bitter toasted nuts or something. I really didn’t understand the appeal of “good beer,” to be honest. That was probably because I didn’t really like the taste of beer all that much. I tended towards lighter beers with very little actual taste, like High Life or Rolling Rock. Still, I couldn’t spend too much time in Keene without being exposed to lots of micro-brewed aficionados, one of which was Crane.

  “How’s it going, Crane?” I said.

  He waggled his eyebrows. “Better now that you’re here.”

  Crane was twice-divorced. He had a bad habit of taking up with women and falling madly in love with them, diving in with both feet, only to have the whole relationship blow up about three months later. Sometimes, however, he got carried away and married these women. Then the relationships—really over at the three-month point—would drag on for long, miserable periods of time, sometimes years.

  I’d known Crane since I was a senior at Keene College myself. He’d arrived as a first-year professor, and I used to bum cigarettes from him before class. Since then, I’d quit smoking. He’d switched to one of those electronic numbers. He was always trying out outlandish flavors. Right then, he put the contraption to his mouth and blew out a puff of something that smelled vaguely of maple syrup. He’d been through at least ten different kinds of e-cigarettes, and each new one he got looked less and less like an actual cigarette. This thing he had now looked like something out of the Terminator franchise.

  When Crane first arrived in town, he and I only saw each other in passing. It wasn’t until after I graduated that we actually fucked for the first time. Crane had issues. He was probably as screwed up as I was, in his own way, but he wasn’t the kind of professor who’d have sex with students. He had standards. I was gainfully employed with the Renmawr Police Department, putting in my time to work my way up the ladder and make detective, the first time we went to bed together.

  Most guys are used up after getting busy with them once or twice. Men tend to get needy and attached if you have sex with them too often. There’s some kind of ridiculous stereotype out there that men don’t want to settle down as much as women do, and I think it’s bullshit. I think men are more likely than women to want a steady relationship. Only difference being that men do seem to get less interested in sex with the same woman over time.

  Of course, I might be biased. I have a fairly insatiable appetite for sex. I’d be happy to get it from one man, though. I could totally do the monogamy thing, really. Thing is, I’ve never met a man who could keep up with me. And despite that, none of them seem to want to share, more’s the pity.

  Well, there was Pike, of course. Pike and I had a sort of arrangement. But there’s no point in
thinking about that, because there’s no more Pike and me.

  Anyway, Crane was a keeper. Not because he was relationship material or anything. He wasn’t. I couldn’t stand dating him, and he wouldn’t be interested in dating me. I wasn’t his type. He needed someone a little flighty, a little fragile, a little naive. Someone who could believe that it was possible to be swept away by love. A girl like that, well, she could make him believe it too. That was the thing about Crane. Whenever he was head over heels, he always believed this was it. This girl was the one. She was the one who’d make him change his ways, who’d set him on the straight and narrow, who’d make an honest man out of him.

  That was bullshit. He knew it deep down. He’d eventually fall off the high of infatuation, come crashing down to earth, and then he’d get depressed. And then he’d be knocking on my door, bottle of whiskey in hand, crestfallen and sad.

  I cared about him, and he cared about me. Some people in town thought of him as my on-again-off-again boyfriend, but I always set them straight. Crane was my long-standing fuck buddy, and that was all there was to it. We cooled off if one or the other got into a serious relationship, but those relationships always broke up, and we ended up having sex again.

  I didn’t have sex with him all the time, but he was there if I needed him. He was comfortable.

  “Sure I can’t buy you an actual beer?” he said.

  “I like my High Life.” I grinned at him.

  He grinned back. “So, you got any exciting cases?”

  “Mostly just cheating husbands and wives.” I took a slug of my beer. “But I did get a missing girl this morning.”

  “Girl? Little girl?”

  “Nah, she’s in her twenties. Recent Keene grad, as is everyone around these parts.”

  “Oh, what’s her name?” he said. “Maybe I had her in class?”

  “Madison Webb,” I said. “I don’t think she was an English major.” Crane had made tenure a few years back, and now he didn’t have to teach the general freshman sections of English. He had all upper level courses, which he said was a slice of heaven.