Cuts Like a Knife: A Novel (A Kristen Conner Mystery Book 1)

by M. K. Gilroy

  I throw the bedroom curtains all the way back and start barking for the kids to get up and get ready in a hurry. Neither looks so inclined. Kaylen is going to be mad.

  We had a great time at Chuck’s. Klarissa ended up joining us and that was a blast. After winning close to a million tickets, most of them based on my mad skills at skee ball, we were able to cash in and get both kids a prize worth at least one buck each.

  We invited Klarissa to make it a slumber party, but I think the mechanical gorilla was all the youthful frivolity she could handle, so she booked it back to her place, winding her GTR’s engine into a loud whine before she exited the parking lot. Kendra, James, and I pulled up to Chez Kristen at ten with yet another voice message waiting for me. I keep saying I am going to get rid of my landline since I never talk to anyone on it. It is, however, my defacto message machine—and who would I hang up on if salespeople didn’t have it to pass around?

  I hit the flashing red button and put it on speakerphone. It was Dell with a tone of voice the kids had never heard. Me either.

  “Well, well, well . . . I guess you’re really not at a seeing-somebody phase in your life,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm, loud enough for me, the kids, and my neighbors on either side to hear before I could snatch up the receiver and click off the speakerphone.

  “Nice way to repay someone who treated you like a queen. That’s right, a queen. Thanks for kicking me in the teeth. I deserved better and you sure as heck didn’t deserve to be treated as good as I was to you. I have assumed you have had a rough year because of your dad—but now I’m not so sure. I’m not sure you have feelings. No one has ever treated me as poorly as you. Lucky you have a nice family or you wouldn’t have a friend in the world. You asked for space and I gave you all the space in the world and boy did you run with it. Your day will come. You’ll know how it feels to get hurt and abused by someone you care about. Payback is a killer. And, princess? I know the world revolves around you and your whims, so good news, you won’t be hearing from me again.”

  I put the phone down gently. The kids were looking at me with curious eyes. I forced a smile.

  “Is Mr. Dell mad at you?” James asked. “Is he going to beat you up?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Kendra said to him. “Boys aren’t allowed to beat girls up.”

  “They are too!” he yelled. “And you’re not allowed to say ‘stupid,’ stupid!”

  “And neither are you,” I said, tickling him. “Now get your pajamas on and let’s watch a movie, you two!”

  I wish Kendra was right. But sometimes boys do beat up girls. I will be running a background check on Mr. Dell first thing Monday morning.

  I didn’t even bother putting the kids in the spare bedroom. We all climbed in my bed and watched half a Disney movie before the kids—actually all of us—finally succumbed to the call of sleep. I woke up an hour later to check all the locks on my door and was wide awake. So I watched the rest of Beauty and the Beast by myself. When I was a little girl I liked to think of myself as Belle—the hair color was even right. But I wonder if I became the beast when I grew up.

  Klarissa always claimed to be Ariel from Little Mermaid. Kaylen clung to Snow White. Even as a kid, she was old-school.

  I think I dreamed that Lumiere, the candlestick with the heavy French accent, was scolding me for turning my back on true love. I don’t think that little clock guy was very happy with me either. His face looked like Dell.

  • • •

  Kaylen is waiting for us as I run in the door to the children’s area of our church. We got out of my apartment in fifteen minutes flat. But the kids were starving and we stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts. I’m obviously not a mom or I would have known not to let James get a powdered sugar donut. His mouth and the front of his shirt are coated in white. I brushed Kendra’s hair out and put it in pigtails. I now notice that the part is a jagged line and that the left pig tail is twice as big as the right. So does Kaylen.

  I give a sheepish smile. She just shakes her head. I want to say something smart, but just walk up to her and hug her tight.

  “I love you, Sis,” I whisper. “Sorry.”

  I then do the only thing I can think of under the circumstances because frankly, between Dell and Van Guten, I’ve been scolded enough for one twenty-four-hour period.

  I turn around and walk out the door.

  54

  I DROVE SOUTH after my dramatic exit from Kaylen and went to Don and Vanessa’s church. I read a sociology textbook back in college that had a highlighted sidebar noting that Sunday morning is the most segregated window of time in America. I’m not sure how much that bothers me, but nonetheless, even if I don’t bow at the throne of diversity—something you don’t say out loud when you work for the city of Chicago—I know it would be a good thing if people from all walks of life got together for worship. I remind myself of that when I discover that I am a minority—of one—at Don’s church.

  The sign out front indicated that it was a temple. It was a one-story converted strip mall and wasn’t very ornate, so in my mind, it’s a church. I got there at 10:15 and no one seemed to care that I was late. Ha! I say to Kaylen in my mind. A lot of people came in after me. No one seems to feel guilty about timelines here.

  The service didn’t end until after one. I think we stood for more than an hour of singing. And dancing. And shouting. Don has invited me to attend church with him and Vanessa a bunch of times. I’m not sure he thought I’d actually take him up on the offer. I think I’m putting a damper on his freedom of expression. Vanessa feels no such inhibition. Not only can that girl sell real estate, but she’s got moves.

  I liked the people, the music, and the preaching. Even the announcements were pretty good. I might have some helpful suggestions for Jimmy on livening things up at our church. I do have one problem with Don’s church—and I know it shows a lack of character and spirituality for me to admit this—but I can’t handle three hours of church. Sometime after noon, I committed myself to working things out with Kaylen. I could go to church with Klarissa one Sunday as a power play—but I suspect this will be my sole excursion into discovering the diversity of worship experiences in my community.

  Afterward, Vanessa invited me to dinner at their place. The place was nicer than I had even imagined—and I assumed the Squires’ lived in a nice place. Don and the kids showed me around while Vanessa finished pulling everything together in the kitchen.

  It wasn’t a new house, but it was big, at least 4,000 square feet—probably more—with a whole lot of remodeling and upgrades like a marble foyer and everything granite and copper in the kitchen. The hardwood floors look fairly new. Jimmy and Kaylen keep talking about some things they want to do with their place and Kaylen’s lament is that it costs more per square foot to build out and remodel than what you pay per square foot if you just buy what you want new. I live in a two-bedroom apartment and don’t have to deal with things like that.

  Vanessa may make the money but Don’s the king. Both he and Vanessa have their own offices, but his looks more like the lounge of a British private men’s club, with brass-studded maroon leather chairs and a lot of pheasant and fox hunting scenes on the wall. I’ll have to ask Don at work if he’s ever been pheasant hunting. Having never been to a private men’s club in the British Isles—or to the British Isles at all, for that matter—I’m using my imagination here. Vanessa’s office is nice, but Spartan in comparison. I’m guessing a lot more real work takes place in her space than his.

  The kids’ rooms are way cooler than anything me or my sisters grew up with. Devon’s nine. He has bunk beds, his own space-age desk, a nicer media center than I have at age twenty-nine, a basketball goal over his laundry hamper, and a bunch of those oversized Fathead posters of sports stars on the walls. He likes Brian Urlacher. Everyone in Chicago likes Urlacher. There’s also a whole collage of posters dedicated to Walter Payton. That was Don’s influence. He has an informal shrine to the immortal number 34 of the Bears
on his desk.

  Veronika is eight, same age as Kendra. Vanessa has had one of her walls painted by a local artist with a scene out of a fairy tale. It actually has a Beauty and the Beast look to it, though I don’t remember Belle being quite that dark skinned, which makes me remember the lousy feeling I had all last night.

  We spend ten minutes looking over things in the half-basement game room—pool table, foosball table, Ping Pong table, Xbox set up with a huge flat-screen TV, a couple of old arcade games—I had forgotten about Space Invaders—a table that might be for Monopoly with the kids and poker night for Don and his heathen friends if Vanessa lets them in the house, and a wet bar. Then we walk up another flight of stairs and down a back hall into the formal dining room. The paintings look real. The china is something out of a Martha Stewart decorating special—and I’m not talking her prison phase.

  I’m not sure Vanessa was expecting me to accept her lunch invite, because she told me numerous times that the meal wouldn’t be much. And she’s absolutely right, if salmon with dill sauce, creamed spinach, new potatoes baked with a fresh rosemary and garlic seasoning, fruit compote with the fattest blackberries I’ve ever seen in my life, steaming mini-loafs of sourdough bread, and some kind of sweet potato casserole that ends up tasting an awful lot like Mom’s pumpkin pie, isn’t much. The iced tea flavored with peach nectar was a particularly nice touch that I want to remember when hostessing. Ha.

  We were almost through with dinner, the unbelievable aroma of an almost-baked apple pie now wafting through the room, when my phone buzzed four times. I figured it was probably Kaylen so I decided to ignore it. Good, she misses me. When it started a second round of buzzing, I looked at the tiny screen.

  Zaworski.

  • • •

  “I wish you didn’t have to run.”

  “I know, Vanessa. This was wonderful. I feel so bad running off before dinner is even over. I would have helped with the dishes.”

  “We’re just glad you could come, girlfriend!”

  Cool. I’m a girlfriend. Vanessa and I are in the doorway with Don and the kids dutifully in the background. He doesn’t look happy. I went into the living room to talk with Zaworski, but I know he probably figured out who I was talking to. His phone hasn’t made a peep. He keeps glancing down at it.

  After what he said about me seeing Reynolds to move up the food chain on this case, I refuse to explain. He’ll find out soon enough where I had to dash off to, and he will feel bad. Maybe even get a grip so he doesn’t leave me any more “poor me, left out of the big boys’ club” messages.

  “You know, Kristen,” Vanessa says as I’m halfway through the door, “I bet we’ve said ‘let’s do lunch’ a hundred times and we’ve never done it. We need to do it. Really.”

  “I’d love that,” I say.

  We hug, everyone calls good-bye at my back, and I’m on my way to Saint Elizabeth’s hospital.

  Jeff made a couple of calls and finally reached Zaworski. He has asked for me to get there as fast as I can. Patricia’s in intensive care.

  55

  “I DON’T KNOW what I’m going to do. I love her so much.”

  Jeff is sobbing, his face in his hands. We’re sitting at a forty-five-degree angle in the family waiting room of the ICU at Saint Elizabeth’s. A 911 call came in at five in the morning. Patricia was found in an alley, just outside the back door of a biker bar. Raped—presumably—and beaten to a bloody pulp. I barely recognized her pretty features when I went to her bedside. Nose broken in three places. Broken jaw. The emergency room doctor wasn’t sure, but he thought she might have a detached retina. Blood alcohol levels high enough to have drunk herself into a coma or even to death. She would’ve been in the hospital even if some Neanderthal hadn’t decided to make her his punching bag.

  “I’m so sorry, Jeff.”

  He looks up at me, eyes red and puffy. He doesn’t look like a high-powered mergers and acquisitions lawyer at the moment.

  “What do I do?”

  “I don’t honestly know, but you’re here right now and that’s the best thing in the world a man can do for his wife in a moment like this.”

  “Do I stay with her? For good?”

  “You’re here now, so I’m guessing the answer is yes. You’re going to do all you can to hang in there with her.”

  “I screwed up driving you out of her life. You were good for her.”

  “Jeff, I barely knew Patricia. For all intents and purposes, we had one major conversation in our entire lives—and you were there for most of it.”

  “Something about you rang true with her.”

  “Despite the fact that I was lying to her about why I was at AA?”

  He actually laughed and snorted at that.

  “Yeah, despite the fact that you helped her under false pretenses. I’ll drop the lawsuit tomorrow,” he says with a shake of his head. “But I need your help tonight.”

  “Jeff, drop the suit if it’s the right thing to do. But you can’t attach strings to it. I don’t know if I can be there for Patricia.”

  “I’ll drop the suit against the church, the city, the police department, and you—because it’s the right thing to do. I’ll also keep tearing up the checks you send me for that bucket of bolts you drive because that’s the right thing, too. All I ask is that you consider being a friend and sponsor to Patricia.”

  “Jeff, you do realize that I’m not really an alcoholic?”

  “Yeah, but somehow, someway, you’re a wonderful mess, too.”

  We both laugh. Then he starts to cry again. When he halfway pulls himself together, I ask, “How’d you guys get together in the first place?”

  “I met Patricia when we were undergrads at Northwestern. I was a senior, she was a freshman. We dated the whole time I was in law school. She got her English degree and a teaching minor. She never went into the classroom. Might have been good for her. Believe it or not, she was the prude and I was the party animal. I don’t know how things got so out of control for her.”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary happened?”

  “I guess just what she told you that night at our house. Things went south in a big way when her dad died. They never got along. When he passed on, I think she got hit with a wave of guilt and remorse for never getting things worked out.”

  I don’t say anything. I just wait him out, just like they taught me in cop school. Most people can’t handle silence, so they talk. As Don says, I’m the master of the awkward silence. But with Jeff right now, silence feels just fine. Comfortable.

  “It’s a tough thing losing a dad, but to be honest, I never liked the guy, so I probably didn’t pay attention like I should have. I’ve always worked too much. I didn’t spend enough time with Patricia.”

  “You don’t have to apologize for working hard,” I say. “I’ve seen a lot worse habits from husbands in my time on the force. And that’s just the cops. You should see the bad guys.”

  He gives a half-hearted laugh.

  We talk some more. We motion for an investigating officer to come over and the three of us cover some incredibly uncomfortable questions that may or may not help with finding who messed Patricia up. My guess is Jeff won’t be much help. Any answers will come from finding and talking to everyone who was in the Sexy Hog last night. No easy task. I can’t even imagine entering an establishment called the Sexy Hog, let alone questioning all her patrons.

  I walk back into Patricia’s room with Jeff. She woke up for just a minute or two when I first got there. Her eyes were filled with tears when I hugged her. I hug her again now, kiss her forehead. I whisper the serenity prayer in her ear. She opens her eyes as I finish. I tell her I love her. I tell her that Jeff is here for her and to let him love her. I don’t know if she hears me or not.

  Jeff walks me outside the door and down to the lobby. “So what do I do?” he asks, dried tears streaking his face. “Just do what you’re doing now. Be here for her.”

  “Can she get better?”

>   “Yeah, I think so,” I answer. “She’s got a good man who loves her. And she loves you. That’s a heck of a start.”

  It must be nice, I think as I push out the door into the bright sunlight and wonder how obvious it is to the rest of the world what a wonderful mess I am.

  56

  “I’M SORRY, KLARISSA, but I just can’t break free tonight. You know how bad it is right now.”

  “You’re there for the drunk.”

  “Klarissa, be nice and please don’t call her that. She needs me right now.”

  “Who says I don’t need you?”

  “Do you?”

  “Does it matter? Hey, I don’t have to beg to get a dinner date. So please, don’t go out of your way for your sister. I guess booze is thicker than blood.”

  “Is this still about Warren?”

  I shouldn’t have asked that, but her calling Patricia “the drunk” made me mad. There is a pregnant pause on the line.

  “I cannot believe you just said that,” she says, barely controlling her anger. “When have I once mentioned that my breakup with Warren is a problem? Give me one example. Now you and Kaylen and Mom talking about it is another issue. Behind my back I would add!”

  “Don’t bark at me, Klarissa. The fact that you haven’t mentioned him makes me figure you’re having a tougher time with the breakup than you admit. I wasn’t trying to make this into a big deal.”

  “I am not barking,” she yells. “You just don’t listen. No wonder you’re having a tough time being a detective these days.”

  “I’m not listening to this,” I storm back.

  “You don’t listen to anything anyway.”