Lloyd Corricelli - Ronan Marino 01 - Two Redheads & a Dead Blonde

by Lloyd Corricelli

  She slid her hand between our bodies and undid my belt and zipper, then helped me pull off my jeans and underwear. Reaching into her purse, she pulled out a condom, unwrapped it and expertly rolled it onto me. She held the wrapper up for me to see in the dim moonlight.

  “Ribbed for my pleasure.” She laughed, throwing it onto the floorboard.

  Hiking up her skirt, Karen climbed on my lap and mounted me. She moved her body up and down rhythmically, letting out a slight moan each time. We moved faster and faster, and her breathing grew quicker. She bit my bottom lip, and I grabbed her hair and pulled her head away to kiss her neck. She leaned in, kissed me hard, and our tongues intertwined as we inched closer to climax. The car windows had steamed up, and I couldn’t see outside. I didn’t need to. Everything I needed at the moment was right inside that car.

  Ten minutes later, she lay in my arms snuggling post coitus.

  “I wish I could stay here with you all night,” she said as she reached over and drew a heart with our initials in it on the fogged window.

  I had no idea what to say; I was overwhelmed. Somewhere the line between infatuation and love started to blur. There were no more words exchanged between us, it was a near perfect moment until a sudden rapping on the window ruined it.

  The beam of a flashlight burned through the steamy windows, filling the car. Lowell’s finest had just found something to amuse themselves. It was a damn good thing that I’d pulled my pants back up. I checked to make sure my fly was zipped and stepped out of the car, followed by Karen.

  Two young officers, their nametags said Davis and Sanchez, looked at me suspiciously while trying to blind me with their flashlights. It didn’t work because my blue eyes reflected the light, and I could see them perfectly.

  Both men looked like they had been pressed out of the same mold they used in the secret law enforcement factory to make all street copsfirm near-angry faces, crew cuts, and uniforms tailored to show off their rippling muscles. I knew the look well because I had many friends who had gone into civilian police work after college.

  The odds were very good that in five years one of them would have a beer gut and a serious Dunkin Munchkins addiction. The other would have a drinking problem, maybe even serious enough to affect his job. I’d been there at one low point in my life and I’m not talking donuts.

  “Can I help you officers?” I asked.

  “Do you have identification, sir?” Davis replied.

  “Sure, right here.”

  I reached back and found my wallet.

  “Is everything alright, ma’am?” Sanchez asked Karen.

  “It was, until you boys decided to disturb us.”

  “It’s okay, Karen, they’re just doing their job.” I said.

  I handed Davis my driver’s license. He looked it over, then me, and then back to the license, just to make sure it was really mine. Karen reached into the Mustang to get her license, and I sneaked a look over to make sure she wasn’t flashing these young uncorrupted lads. As she bent over, the bottom of her butt stuck out from her short skirt mesmerizing the two cops. It was like she was using a Jedi mind trick on them, except this was the ass they were looking for. She’d clearly just made their night.

  She turned around smiling and handed Sanchez her license. He looked it over and gave it to Davis. He pulled a little black notebook out and wrote down our names.

  “Is there some kind of problem?” Karen asked.

  “No, we saw the vehicle steamed up and wanted to make sure no one was in trouble, ma’am,” Davis replied.

  If they were truthful, they would have told us they had hoped to catch a glimpse of a woman in her birthday suit. I was sure these long third shifts caused them to look for anything to break up the monotony, and a naked girl was always a great way to make your night, especially when she was as hot as Karen.

  When I was in the service, I’d sometimes ride patrol with the base cops and they’d play a little game to kill time on long overnight shifts. You would receive points for finding various unusual items. For instance, a live skunk, which they referred to as an “Air Force black and white unit,” was worth ten points. A naked breast was worth fifty points. A full on beaver shot pretty much assured a winning point total for that shift. Davis and Sanchez were picking up minor points tonight, unless Karen decided to give them more of a show.

  “You think we can go now?” I asked.

  “What were you folks doing?” Davis inquired.

  “We were talking.”

  A mischievous grin came over Karen’s face. I braced myself.

  ”Just tell them the truth, honey. I can’t tell a lie, officers. If you had gotten here ten minutes earlier, you would have caught us fucking like two dogs in heat.”

  They were stunned. They might have expected that from me, but this elegant, beautiful blonde talking like an Arkansastrailer park denizenthey never saw it coming. I held my hand over my mouth to contain the laughter.

  “Uh, yeah, okay. Um, you folks have a nice night,” Sanchez said, his face red from embarrassment. He motioned to Davis who handed us back our licenses.

  “Thanks,” Karen replied, smiling broadly.

  The officers walked off, peering over their shoulders every few steps to look at Karen, who gave them a little wave.

  “That certainly was fun,” she quipped.

  “You have a strange sense of humor.”

  “But that’s what makes me so much fun.”

  I looked at my watch. It was well past three. “So much for a quickie.”

  She grabbed my arm and kissed me. “It was worth it.”

  “Maybe next time we can do it in a phone booth,” I said with a laugh.

  “If you can find one, I’m ready to go.”

  She enjoyed toying with the young cops. I hadn’t seen that side of her before, and I kind of liked it as long as that smile wasn’t turned on me. It was like a mutant power to turn men into mush.

  “I should get going,” she said. “I might be able to squeeze in a few hours of sleep before class.”

  I nodded, and she gave me a long passionate kiss.

  “Call me tomorrow, hero. I’ll be out of class around three.”

  “I’ll stop by your place.”

  “I probably won’t be there; gotta’ study with the girls at the library. We’ve got our first tests of the semester coming up.”

  “No problem. Just call me when you’re free.”

  She climbed into the Mustang, turned the ignition, and the big five-liter engine roared to life.

  “Be careful driving home,” I said.

  “Always.”

  She pulled away, then stopped and backed up, rolling down the window.

  “Ronan, if no one ever told you this before…behind that tough guy façade, you’re really a wonderful man.” With a smile, she zoomed off into the night.

  Something inside of me didn’t want to let her go. I had a nagging feeling that I needed to be with her at that moment. I should have listened to my instincts.

  THREE

  When I came back from California, I spent a horrible month at my parent’s house. After about a week of listening to my father complain about his aching muscles, his vision, my mother, the washing machine, television, the Red Sox, the Big Dig, taxes, noises in the woods, and every other conceivable problem known and unknown to man, I had to find a house and fast.

  I called a friend of mine with the Drug Enforcement Agency I’d worked with in L.A. who recently bought a home in the area, and he recommended a good realtor named Fred. Over the next month, Fred and I became close personal friends; at least it felt that way as we spent what seemed like every waking moment together looking for the perfect house. The problem was I didn’t really know what I wanted. My brother wanted me to buy the house next to him, and I almost broke down and did.

  Good sense prevailed, however, and I realized living next door to relatives was a bad idea. The idea that I should live in the same town as my parents circulated thr
ough the family, but I had visions of them showing up unannounced on a far too regular basis. My father would be holding a six-pack of Budweiser and my mother a tuna casserole. I hated tuna and I only drank Bud in desperation. I crossed that option off the list with a thick black marker, to make sure it never saw the light of day again.

  To my family’s dismay, I finally settled on a blue four-bedroom Garrison Colonial with a detached two-car garage and loft located right on the river down on Pawtucket Boulevard close to the Tyngsboro line. They tried to talk me out of it, assuming a guy with my money should be living in a wealthy suburb like Andover; the city I had grown up in had become not good enough for me in their eyes. If they knew what I had paid for the house, they might have changed their minds. Real estate had gone crazy in the years since I’d left, and waterfront property has never been cheap–unless it was on the Merrimack in the days when the river smelled like a garbage dump.

  I never quite understood their whole line of thinking, especially since my parents lived there for over thirty years until they moved to Westford. It was fine during the down years, why not now when it made major improvements? Just because I had money certainly did not make me better than any other local.

  I was very happy with my new house. It had lots of chahm and charactuh, which in New England usually meant it needed lots of work. This house truly was full of those attributes in the best sense of the words. It had recently been restored, with central air and many other amenities such as a hot tub in the rear glassed-in porch, a finished basement, and black granite floors in the kitchen.

  I saw some of the before pictures, and it easily could have been the featured home on “This Old House.” I half expected Bob Villa, or whoever the guy hosting the show is now, to give me the sales pitch. Being the good realtor he was Fred extolled all the virtues of the house, such as it being located close to all the major highways and great for commuting. The poor guy seemed confused when I told him it was a moot point, because I had no intentions of working a regular job and joining the rat race. I assumed at that point that, other than my band, there would be no work. The days of having career ambitions were long behind me.

  The look on Fred’s face was even better when I wrote a personal check for the full asking price on the spot during our first trip to the house. The sellers almost went into shock, but once my check was verified, I became a proud homeowner and for the second time in my life escaped the clutches of my parents. Don’t get me wrong, I love them dearly but…

  It took me a couple of weeks to pick out furniture, other than my bedroom set. I lost most of what I owned in my divorce and never bothered to replace it. My last apartment in California had been furnished, and I was in Iraq for most of the time I had it anyway. I finally settled on black and gray leather for my living room and oak for the dining room. The first thing I did after closing was call the cable company and set up installation. I wouldn’t survive long without ESPN or the other sports networks, as whatever sport was in season generally dictated my schedule.

  I had a hard time figuring out what to do with all the rooms in my new house. If I’d had a family, there would have been no problem divvying them up, but being a single guy living alone made it a challenge. I felt compelled to do something with the rooms and not leave half the place empty. After watching a documentary on the Travel Channel, I came up with a not-so-unique concept. Each room would be themed like my own little Graceland. The difference was I had no intentions of dying on my toilet as a fat bloated drug addict.

  One bedroom became my military room, where I hung all my medals, citations and plaques on an “I love me” wall. It also functioned as my office, complete with computer and stack of books I’d probably never read again. I made the finished cellar a sports room with memorabilia such as my prized Bobby Orr autographed jersey, pool table, and bubble hockey game. I even had a separate temperature zone put in the huge walk-in closet in my bedroom to ensure my valuable comic book collection wouldn’t rot away, as paper is prone to do.

  The other two bedrooms remained empty until I could decide what to do with them. I had fleeting thoughts of a sex room with framed, blown up pictures of Playboy centerfolds, a big round vibrating bed and mirrors on the ceiling. In retrospect, the idea seemed pretty immature, and I canned it rather quickly. In my defense, the idea came after I’d had a few too many Sam Adams.

  The loft over my garage became the practice area for my band. Hopefully the neighbors wouldn’t mind too much; although they were probably too far away to notice.

  Karen helped me decorate the living room, dining room, and the other common areas. I didn’t know a damn thing about curtains and wallpaper, but she had some innate woman sense about decorating. Maybe that’s a sexist way of looking at things, but outside of women and gay men, no one I hung with could decorate without making a room look like a bar or frat house.

  My mother offered to help but I tactfully turned her down. Her taste runs toward Wal-Mart prints of little kids playing baseball, and I couldn’t bear the thought of living in a mirror image of her house. I also didn’t want the constant grief from my buddies about the pictures of sweet faced cherubs on my walls. I could almost hear the Michael Jackson comments within thirty seconds of their first visit. My friends were all a bunch of ball busters, not much different than myself. I still got a rash of shit over the frilly drapes Karen picked out for my kitchen, but I could live with that. Comparisons to a whacked-out dead pop singer, I could not.

  I parked my Jeep in the garage and managed to stumble into the shower to wash the smell of cheap beer and sweat off me. After taking a whiff of myself, I’m surprised Karen could stand it. My clothes should have been burned but a heavy-duty washing might save them.

  I fell into bed sometime around four. Before I drifted off, I thought of Karen, again feeling like I should have been with her at that moment. Somewhere in my dreams, I was bounding across roof tops in some random crime filled city, my cape flowing behind me, when the doorbell rang and a pounding on my front door woke me.

  I slowly opened my eyes and looked at the clock. It was nearly ten in the morning. My mind raced through all the possibilities of who could have been banging on my door this early, and none of them were good including a scary image of my mother and tuna fish. I dragged my ass down the stairs and looked out the window. It would have been better if it were my mom with a casserole.

  “Open the door, please.”

  Two guys in jackets, ties, and dark glasses stood on my porch. This is never a good sign.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “We’re with the Lowell Police Department. Please open the door, sir.”

  I unlatched the door and opened it.

  “Ronan Marino?”

  “You got em’. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m Detective Morley. This is Detective Garcia.”

  They badged me, and I quickly glanced over their shields and nodded. There looked to be about a twenty-five-year age difference between them. Garcia was a squat tough-looking Puerto-Rican with a Marine high and tight, while Morley was tall and lanky with thinning gray hair and a big pointy nose. They were an odd pair to say the least.

  “We’d like you to come down to the station,” Morley said. His breath smelled like he had eaten rotten fish with garlic for breakfast.

  “What’s going on, guys?”

  “Were you with a Karen Pommer last night?”

  A feeling of dread washed over me. “Yeah, we left Max’s together after closing.”

  “She was found dead this morning, floating in the river near the Pawtucket Falls.”

  The news hit me like a Ray Bourque slapshot between the eyes.

  They didn’t handcuff me or read me my rights, so this was going to be a voluntary interview. That meant I could choose to leave anytime I liked, though in reality it never actually worked that way. There is always an excuse to keep you there. I was a suspect in my girlfriend’s death.

  I quickly got dressed and sat in t
he back seat of their unmarked patrol car, feeling ill with thoughts of Karen floating in the cold waters of the Merrimack.

  They drove into the police garage off of Arcand Drive and parked next to an old paddy wagon that must have been left from the days when they didn’t transport in cruisers. I was led up the stairs, past the booking area to an interview room.

  “Can we get you something?” Morley asked.

  “I could use a cup of coffee, regular.”

  The elder detective nodded and exited, leaving me alone. The room was a standard interview room, white sound dampening tiles on the walls, a small table and three chairs. On one wall was a large pane of one-way glass, and I figured I was being watched for any behaviors they could use against me. No doubt Morley and Garcia chatted behind that glass right now, plotting their interrogation strategy. That’s what I would have been doing if our positions were reversed.

  I’d used the same technique for many years. Was the suspect nervous or cool, calm and collected? Right now, I was upset, verging on anger, but I made an effort to conceal it. They were probably hoping I’d just admit to killing Karen, so they could spend the rest of the day accepting pats on the back for a job well done. If that was the case, I was about to dash their hopes.

  After what seemed like an eternity but was much closer to five minutes, I grew impatient and waved to them from my side of the mirror. They returned, shortly after, without my coffee. Bastards.

  Morley took the lead interviewer chair directly across from me while Garcia sat behind me with a steno pad. He wouldn’t write anything important, just notes like what an asshole when I told them to shove their questions.

  Morley just stared, trying to instill the fear of the Lowell Police Department into me. It wasn’t working. The staring went on for a good thirty seconds before I chose to instigate the questioning. I’m a great instigator.

  “Do you have something to ask me, or are we going to sit here all day and see who blinks first?”

  “Don’t get smart, you’re in a lot of trouble, pal,” Morley growled in his best Jack Webb voice.