Contract Pending

by Jenna Bennett

  While I’d been contemplating the living room, Mrs. Jenkins had shuffled to the bedroom door, and now she turned to me.

  “You’re prob’ly gonna wanna see this, baby. And then you’re gonna wanna call that nice detective.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  I went to join her in the doorway, and staggered at the level of destruction in my bedroom.

  The rest of the apartment was pretty much pristine, or as pristine as I keep my living quarters. If the front door hadn’t been open, I might not have noticed that anyone had been here. I could have left the electric bill on top of the stack of mail myself, and just didn’t remember; and I could have bookmarked and closed “Desire under the Desert Moon” instead of leaving it tented, as is my usual habit. It was possible.

  This was another matter. Whatever had been going on in the other part of the apartment—whatever my uninvited guest had been looking for, and had or hadn’t found—he or she had made up for in here.

  My bedroom looked like a chicken coop. There were feathers everywhere, where someone, using something sharp—like a knife; and my stomach clenched at the idea—had slashed my pillows to ribbons and scattered the contents throughout the room. The padding was protruding from my washed silk comforter, which was a total loss. My shimmery nightgown lay crumpled on the floor, it too sporting long gashes, and on the wall above the headboard was written a single word in red, the letters spiky and angry. Trollop.

  It wasn’t blood. Just lipstick. Which was bad enough, since I’d probably have to repaint the wall to get rid of it. Blood washes off, or so I’ve heard. L’Oreal Endless Kissable 16 hour No Fade, No Smudge Ruby-Ruby lipstick, not so much.

  The rest of the stick was ground into the tan carpet. I might have to replace it, too. Or maybe I should just let the landlord keep my $500 security deposit and call it even.

  “Don’t touch nothing, baby,” Mrs. Jenkins admonished me. I shook my head. No, I wasn’t about to touch anything. Except for my cell phone. I fished it out of my purse and dialed Tamara Grimaldi’s number.

  “Detective? This is Savannah Martin. I have a problem.”

  “What kind of problem?” the detective wanted to know. I explained what had happened, and she said, “Get out of there. Now.”

  “We were going to stay here...” I said inanely, looking around at the destruction.

  “Are you listening to me? Get out of there. Go to a hotel. Stay at the house on Potsdam Street. Or drive to Sweetwater and ask your family to put you up for a few days.”

  I snorted. My mother might be willing to help me, but accommodating Mrs. Jenkins—the notorious Rafe Collier’s grandmother—was not the same thing at all.

  “Spicer and Truman are on their way,” Tamara Grimaldi said in my ear. “Leave the apartment and wait for them outside. Don’t touch anything.”

  “Can I pack a bag? I’m going to need something to wear for the next couple of days.”

  She hesitated. “Has this maniac been in your closet? Will packing clothes disturb the crime scene?”

  I opened the louvered closet doors and peered in. “Doesn’t look that way.” Everything was neat, hanging on hangers. My underwear was another story; the drawers in the bureau were open and a tangle of silk and lacy scraps were falling out. Blushing, I pushed them back in and closed the drawer with my hip. Crime scene or no crime scene; I wouldn’t have Officers Spicer and Truman pawing through my lingerie.

  “OK,” Tamara Grimaldi said. “Gather some things, but be sure not to touch anything important. Clothes and toiletries only. And then get out of there. Fast.”

  I promised I would, and—heart beating—started yanking clothes off hangers and dropping them into a suitcase. We were back in the courtyard within five minutes.

  Spicer and Truman showed up shortly thereafter, and I left Mrs. Jenkins outside by the fountain while I walked the officers upstairs to the apartment, and showed them the crumpled welcome mat that had held the door open, the electric bill, and the book. “I can’t swear I didn’t close it myself, but I usually just leave it tented.”

  “Nice, glossy cover,” Spicer remarked appreciatively, eyeing the picture of the half-dressed Bedouin with the headcloth clasping the swooning Lady Serena to his manly—and supremely well-muscled—chest. When I looked at him, incredulously, Spicer added, “It’d take fingerprints well. If whoever was here touched it, and wasn’t wearing gloves, we might get lucky.”

  “Oh.” Of course. “I guess I’d better leave it here, then.” I’d rather looked forward to losing myself in the adventures of Lady Serena—and the imaginary arms of Sheik Hasan—but if leaving the book here would help the police figure out who had broken into my place, then they were welcome to it.

  “That’d be best,” Spicer agreed.

  “Just lock up when you’re done, please. We’ll be at the house on Potsdam Street.”

  Spicer nodded. “The boy and I’ll wait for someone from CSI to get here. The detective’ll let you know when you can move back in.”

  “Thank you.” I shivered.

  “You want I should send the boy for a new lock?” Spicer asked. “No telling how this yahoo got in, but a new lock, and some chains and bolts, ain’t gonna hurt none.”

  “That would be great. Thank you.”

  He nodded. “We got it covered. Just take care of Mrs. J. I don’t wanna go back to driving around looking for her couple times a day.”

  I promised I would. And then I left the two of them there, to wait for CSI and to replace my lock, and I headed back down to the courtyard and Mrs. Jenkins, who was still sitting there in the sun, looking around with beady little black bird eyes.

  “Ready?”

  She got to her feet. “Where we going now, baby?”

  “I figure we’ll just go back to your house. We can stay there just as easily as we can stay here.” If a little more uncomfortably, at least on my part.

  “OK, baby.” Mrs. Jenkins didn’t seem to care one way or the other. She shuffled toward the blue Volvo. I followed, clutching my suitcase and toiletries bag, and with Rafe’s duffel over my shoulder. Life was just getting worse and worse.

  I spent the rest of the day setting up house at 101 Potsdam Street. We had to go back out, to the grocery store to restock the kitchen. Apparently, Marquita hadn’t done any shopping in a while, and Mrs. J had eaten her way through most of the groceries in the days since Marquita left. After that, I had to make dinner, to feed the poor old dear, and clean up the kitchen and wash the dirty dishes. By hand, since Rafe hadn’t gotten around to installing a dishwasher before he had to flee. Although there was a hole between the cabinets, where one was supposed to go.

  This kitchen was where I’d first set eyes on Mrs. Jenkins, back in August. She’d scared the bejeezes out of me. It was also where Rafe had first seen his grandmother, on that same occasion. And it was where Mrs. J and I had come face to face with a murderer, and damned near hadn’t gotten away with our lives.

  That thought brought me back to my apartment, and the destruction of my bedroom, something I’d tried really hard not to think about for the past few hours. Detective Grimaldi hadn’t called, so presumably the CSI-team was still doing its thing. Seeing as I was someone who’d gotten herself mixed up in two different homicides in the past two months, the police were probably taking my break-in a little more seriously than they would have otherwise.

  Whoever had been in my apartment didn’t seem to have chosen it at random. If so, surely the TV and laptop would be missing, along with the few pieces of semi-valuable jewelry I own.

  I really ought to tell the detective about that phone call I’d gotten the other day. The one where the caller had wanted me to go out on the balcony. I had complied, thinking he or she wanted me to see something outside. But what if they’d wanted to see me instead? If the burglar was someone who knew that I lived in the complex, but not which unit was mine, it was a reasonably safe way to discover where my apartment was located. My cell phone number is easily
accessible; as a Realtor I broadcast it far and wide. My home address is harder to come by. I’m not listed in the White Pages, and since I don’t own the place, I don’t show up in Metro Nashville’s courthouse records, either.

  My burglar was not someone I knew well, then. Unfortunately, that left most of Nashville. Maybe I needed to come at it from another angle instead.

  It seemed I’d been singled out, but why? It wasn’t to steal anything, since nothing seemed to be missing. That left someone looking for something, or someone who just plain wanted to scare me. Maybe a little of both. Riffling the mail and digging through my lingerie drawers seemed to imply someone looking for something. But shredding my pillows and lipsticking my wall... that was either someone holding onto sanity by a shred, or someone very calculatedly trying to scare the living daylights out of me. And succeeding.

  My hands stilled in the sudsy water as I went down the list of people I had upset lately.

  First there was Walker, of course. I’m sure he didn’t appreciate the fact that I proved he’d committed two murders. But he was in jail—Tamara Grimaldi would have told me if he’d escaped or been released—and besides, we’d parted on reasonably good terms last time I saw him. Plus, he wasn’t stupid; he had to know that doing, or ordering, something like this would only make things worse for him.

  Maybelle Driscoll and I hadn’t ended up as best friends during that whole fiasco, either. Maybelle was Brenda Puckett’s neighbor, and Brenda hadn’t even been in the ground a week when Maybelle managed to get herself engaged to the grieving widower. The fact that Alexandra, Steven and Brenda’s daughter, liked me and didn’t like her, didn’t help. The obscenely devoted Maybelle was loony enough to do something like this. But I hadn’t seen any of the Pucketts for a month at least, and Maybelle herself for even longer.

  Maybe there was a clue in the writing. A trollop is a loose woman, a prostitute or adulteress. The last time I’d come across the word, was in a Barbara Botticelli novel. Historical, of course; it isn’t an expression that’s much in use these days. Anymore, a promiscuous woman is more likely to be called a slut. Or, if you’re my mother, maybe a hussy.

  Barbara had used it to describe a character who was sleeping with someone else’s betrothed. I wasn’t. I wasn’t sleeping with anyone at all, and the men in my life were—by their own assertion—single. I’d never had even the mildest of flirtations with Steven Puckett, who was at least fifteen years older than me, and not my type. Todd had been married for a couple of years, but he and Jolynn separated just after Bradley and I did. By now, they were probably legally divorced, as well. Bradley was married to Shelby now, and I hadn’t seen him since the divorce, so Shelby had no reason at all to suspect me of anything. If he was cheating—and I wouldn’t put it past him—it was with someone else. I wouldn’t touch him with the proverbial ten foot pole. And Rafe had told me he’d never been married. On most subjects, I wouldn’t trust Rafe any farther than I could throw him, but in this case, I was inclined to take his word for it. His lifestyle over the past ten years hadn’t been conducive to steady relationships, and his personality doesn’t seem to be, either.

  Perry Fortunato had had something of an obsession with loose women. He had killed Lila Vaughn because she, as he put it, always flaunted her body and then refused to put out. He’d had some of those same issues with me, in spite of my never, ever being anything but perfectly businesslike with him. If you ask me, it was all in his head. Besides, Perry was dead. And not by my hand. If anyone had decided to avenge his death—and I couldn’t imagine who—they’d come after Rafe, not me. I’d been tied to a bed when Perry died. Rafe was the one who had wielded the knife.

  Funny how everything that had happened in my life over the past couple of months seemed to come back to him. To Rafe. I shook that particular thought off, and went back to soaping and rinsing dishes, no closer to figuring out what was going on than I had been when I started.

  Detective Grimaldi called some twenty or thirty minutes later, and caught me in the middle of contemplating sleeping arrangements.

  “Miss Martin.” She sounded tired.

  “Detective.” It was after eight; I couldn’t blame her. She’d probably put in at least twelve hours today. And not in a nice, relaxing, comfortable desk-job, either.

  “The CSI-team is finished at your apartment. With your permission, I’d like to stake it out for a couple of days, just in case whoever broke in comes back for another look.”

  “Sure,” I said. “What do you think they were looking for?”

  “No idea. It’s possible they were looking for you.”

  That idea gave me a shiver down my spine, as an image of my slashed nightgown came back to me. Someone who would do that to my clothes, might equally well do it to me. “Surely not?”

  “No way to know. That’s why I’m going to station a decoy in your place for a couple of nights.”

  “Whatever you need to do. Please. Did the CSI-team find anything of interest?”

  “Fingerprints,” Tamara Grimaldi said. “Yours. Mr. Satterfield’s—they’re on record with the state, seeing as he’s a D.A.. Mr. Collier’s; they’re on record with the state—”

  “Because he’s a felon. I know.” No one ever passes up an opportunity to remind me. “Anyone else’s?” I don’t entertain much, and very few people have ever been to my apartment.

  “The late Lila Vaughn’s. We took them after her death, while we were investigating her murder.”

  “And that’s it?”

  Detective Grimaldi sighed. “There are several others, including a lovely set on the glossy cover of that masterpiece you were reading. But they’re not in the system, so until we have a suspect, there’s no one to compare them to.”

  “At least it isn’t a professional criminal, then.” To look on the bright side...

  “Unfortunately not,” Tamara Grimaldi said. “Believe me, Miss Martin, in these situations, the devil you know is almost always preferable to finding the needle in the haystack. Any ideas who this could have been? Somewhere for us to start?”

  “I’m afraid not. I’ve been wracking my brain, but I can’t imagine who would want to scare me this way. Or what they could have been looking for.”

  The detective didn’t answer. The silence lengthened. A sort of pregnant, very eloquent silence, that kind that said, loudly, that I should know what she was thinking.

  “What?” I said.

  “You said your mail had been riffled, is that correct? You may not have realized it, but your email was accessed, too. New messages as well as sent, deleted, and your address book. And someone looked through your Rolodex.”

  I blinked. “That’s weird.”

  “Very,” the detective said dryly. “Would you consider that this might have something to do with Mr. Collier?”

  “Why would it?”

  Her voice was patient. “Because he’s been gone for... what is it, almost six weeks now? If someone were looking for him, your apartment might be a good place to start. The two of you spent some time together before he left, and from what I understood, you’d become...” She hesitated delicately, “close.”

  “Where did you hear that?” Rafe and I weren’t close. Not in that tone of voice, anyway.

  “Officers Spicer and Truman told me they’d found the two of you steaming up the windows of your car not too long ago.”

  “I told you,” I said, my cheeks pink, “we were just looking for Julio Melendez.” Body temperatures might have ratcheted up a little—mine, at least—but it was from the conversation. Nothing else had been going on.

  “And then there was that evening when Mr. Collier left town, on the sidewalk outside your apartment. Officer Spicer said he was considering running you in for indecent behavior...?”

  “Officer Spicer was joking,” I said. “It wasn’t indecent. Rafe kissed me. Because he was leaving. But that was all it was. And I haven’t heard from him since he left. By snail mail, e-mail, or telephone. Or carrier pigeon or
anything else. I swear.”

  “Of course,” the detective said blandly. “But to someone who doesn’t know that, it might seem reasonable to think that you would know where he is.”

  “I don’t!”

  “I believe you. However, if your unknown visitor was looking for an address or a location for Mr. Collier, and didn’t find it, and can’t find Mr. Collier, he or she may be back to try again. Just on the off-chance that you might know, but haven’t written the information down anywhere.”

  “Hence the decoy in my apartment,” I nodded. “I get it. I’ll be staying here for the next couple of days anyway. You know where to find me if anything happens.”

  “I do, indeed. And if Mr. Collier should happen to get in touch...”

  “I’ll let you know,” I said.

  “Of course you will,” Tamara Grimaldi answered. And hung up, without waiting for my answer. I made a face and went back to contemplating sleeping arrangements.

  Chapter 5

  I ended up sleeping in Rafe’s bed. Like Goldilocks, I considered and discarded Mrs. Jenkins’s bed—she needed it herself—Marquita’s bed—what if the nurse came back in the middle of the night?—and the love seat in the parlor—too hard and at least six inches too short. But Rafe’s bed was just right: unoccupied, big enough—a little too big for just one person; two would have been better—and already made, with crisp sheets and a soft comforter. There was no chance that he’d come home and find me there—or at least only a very slim chance—and the benefits seemed to outweigh the minimal risk. I changed into another lacy nightgown, similar to the one that had been hacked to pieces back in the apartment, and crawled under the satin comforter. And did my best to go to sleep.

  It wasn’t easy. There was some kind of ruckus outside in the middle of the night that woke me, and the strangeness of being in someone else’s house and the knowledge that I was sleeping in Rafe’s bed, surrounded by the smell of him, made it hard to sleep. Then there were the nightmares and the—pardon me—pornographic dreams, and between all of it, I woke up bleary-eyed and exhausted, with a lingering sense of having spent the whole night breathless. Someone was after me, some nameless, faceless someone with a sharp knife, and no matter where I went or how fast I got going, they were always there, just out of sight. Waking up didn’t do much to dispel that feeling either, unfortunately.