Armed and Glamorous

by Ellen Byerrum

  “All right, people, let’s get started. First let’s get to know each other a little. I’ve been teaching this class for a while, I’ve been a private investigator for a lot longer, and I’ve learned a few things.” Hunt liked to hook his thumbs through his belt loops while he talked, when he wasn’t pointing to something, gesturing, or posing like a tough guy with his hands on his hips. “I’ve learned something about the kind of people who take these classes. Let me give you a rundown and we’ll see if I’m right.”

  Everyone sat up straight in their seats.

  “Who takes a PI class?” Hunt asked. “Mostly you got your ex-cops and your retired military. Do your twenty years, take the money, and run. Time for a change. Or maybe you get injured in the line of duty. Or maybe the system was cramping your style. Maybe you had a problem, a bad shooting, a bad review, a discipline beef, whatever.” Lacey heard chairs squeaking. Hunt laughed.

  “Yeah, I hear you,” he said. “Cops, top sergeants, MPs, right? You think being a PI is a cakewalk? Divorce, embezzling, white-collar crime, no heavy lifting? All your experience, this stuff’ll be easy as pie, right? You’ll find out it’s a little different when you’re out there on your own, without the authority of the Man to back you up. Next type: I generally get a bounty hunter or two, wanting to class up his act with a PI ticket. And shackling bail jumpers gets pretty old, right?”

  “That would be me, Bud.” A ponytailed man with old eyes and a young face raised his hand and grinned at Hunt. Lacey was fascinated by the colorful tattoo of a python writhing up his neck under the ponytail. “Name is Snake, Snake Goldstein. That’s me. I’m your bounty hunter here.” Snake had a New York accent as thick as his neck.

  “Goldstein, huh? You’re a tough guy?”

  “Tough enough.” Snake wore a tight, dark blue sweater over bulging muscles.

  “Good luck to you,” Hunt said. “Tough is good. But you might want to moderate your skill set somewhat as a PI. We don’t generally shackle our clients, or our subjects. Sometimes a bounty hunter needs a lighter touch.”

  “Duly noted.” Snake’s voice was a low rasp. He smiled beatifically. “I’m as gentle as a lamb.” There was more laughter from the group.

  “Okay. That’s covered. Let’s see, every once in a while I get”— Hunt winked at them—“a writer. Mystery writers. Thriller writers. Someone who wants to write a crime novel. The kind of novel where nothing real ever happens. But if you do write that best seller, be sure and spell my name right. Only if it’s a best seller. If it bombs, leave me out of it.”

  He looked over his student body judiciously. “Sometimes I get people here with a personal problem. Cheating spouse, abusive boyfriend, kids on drugs. Let me caution you, friend, if you think you’re going to solve your own private troubles here, you’re not. Don’t try to be your own PI. This job is damned hard, even if you’re a pro. Ten times worse when it’s personal. You’ll only get the basics here, enough to get your Virginia PI registration, not a lifetime of professional experience.”

  Hunt sighed and rubbed his chin. His eyes surveyed the crowd. “Every other class or so, a woman walks into this room with a serious problem. Maybe she’s been abused, beaten—a little or a lot—but now she’s worked up some courage. She wants to learn how to deal with the bastard herself. That’s generally not a good idea. Anyone here got a personal problem, you can talk to me. Later.”

  The dozen or so students looked around, eyeing Lacey and the other woman, sizing one another up, slotting one another into Bud Hunt’s categories. Hunt clapped his hands for their attention. He lifted his coffee mug toward Lacey.

  “Okay. You. Smithsonian, isn’t it? Lacey Smithsonian?” She heard a smirk in his voice. “Smithsonian ain’t a name, it’s a museum. You two related?”

  Everyone laughed, except Lacey. Someone was bound to make a crack about her name. The truth, Lacey thought, was that many people had silly names. She kept a little list of all the wild and wonderful names she came across in her newspaper, names like Hezekiah Witherwax, Jeremiah Fussfield, Cricket Blicksilver, and Sherry and Jerry Derryberry and their kids, Gary and Mary.

  Lacey blamed her grandfather. A Cockney from London named Smith, he brought his Irish wife to America and decided to fancy up the family name. “Smithsonian” sounded pretty grand to him. If he’d only known the trouble that name would cause me.

  “It’s my name,” she said through her teeth. “It’s a long story.”

  “It’s always a long story. Let’s start with you anyway. I’m guessing you’re not a bounty hunter like Goldstein here. Why are you here?”

  Why? It was January, the air was chilly, and the trees were bare. In northern Virginia, freezing drizzle was falling on dirty snow. The sky, low and the color of pewter, matched her mood. If Lacey was not having a dark night of the soul, she was at least having a dreary gray wintry afternoon of it. Lacey Smithsonian was a news reporter stuck on the accursed fashion beat and going nowhere, in spite of everything she’d accomplished. Some unexpected adventures, some major scoops, all of which had served only to sentence her to the fashion beat.

  That’s the problem with being good at the wrong thing, she thought. You get stuck in a box and labeled forever. And no one else will take the job, so why would anyone promote you out of it?

  In Washington, D.C., the fashion beat was something The Eye Street Observer couldn’t give away with a free toaster. And always hovering around Lacey’s consciousness was this: The last fashion editor at The Eye actually died on the job, hunched over her keyboard, her death unheeded on the forgotten fashion beat. Mariah “the Pariah” Morgan, Lacey’s predecessor, had been dead for hours when the news editor finally realized his writer who had missed her deadline wasn’t just taking her usual nap. She had to be wheeled out of the newsroom in her desk chair in full rigor mortis. The chair came back. Mariah didn’t.

  It’s a proven fact. The fashion beat can kill you.

  Chapter 2

  “Don’t be shy, Ms. Smithsonian,” Bud Hunt said, clearing his throat. “We’re all friends. Tell me and Snake here why you’re taking this class.”

  “Curiosity. I’m curious about what it means to be a private investigator.”

  Looking for a clue how to escape my beat, she thought, but didn’t say. The truth was, Lacey needed a change. A big change.

  She could come up with lots of reasonable explanations, ones she could write about for her “Crimes of Fashion” column. She even had some possible headlines. Being a reporter, she often thought in terms of newspaper headlines. A PRIVATE LOOK AT PRIVATE EYES: FASHION CLUES IN DIRTY GUMSHOES? Or perhaps: UNCOVERING THE INSIDE STORY ON UNDERCOVER COVER-UPS! No, not that. Maybe: SNEAK A PEAK AT SPY COUTURE: LOOKING TRENCHANT IN A TRENCH COAT.

  But Lacey didn’t want just another insubstantial fashion story. She wanted a great story in a big way, something that might get her off the accursed fashion beat for good. Her successes inspired envy in some of the more testosterone-deprived guys in the newsroom, the ones who thought of themselves as hard-driving newshounds but were really lazy-day dogs. They couldn’t understand how the lousy fashion beat kept getting a scoop on murder.

  Yet nothing had broken her free of the fashion beat albatross. Perhaps this PI class, Lacey thought, might lead to something, somehow. At least she’d learn more about what her PI boyfriend, Vic Donovan, did for a living. He was always telling her she should leave the investigating to the professionals. Maybe here she could pick up some professional private investigation skills any news reporter could use and score her PI registration, and then he couldn’t say that anymore. Maybe she’d even find an angle for a real non-fashion -related story. A reporter can dream, can’t she?

  Hunt gave her a smug grin. “What it means to be a particular private investigator, I’m guessing. I hear you’re Vic Donovan’s girlfriend. You just want to see what he does when he’s not hanging out with you. Or maybe you want to out-gumshoe the gumshoe?”

  “You know Vic?” Lacey felt stare
s from the rest of the class.

  “Donovan and I go way back.” Hunt bared his teeth in a crocodile smile. “It’s a mistake, you know. Never investigate the ones you love. It’s bound to disappoint you.”

  “Thanks for the professional advice.” Lacey hated it when people played with her. She raised her eyebrow at him, a professional skill she had perfected over the years.

  “That Bogey and Bacall stuff. That bother you?” he asked.

  “No. Should it?”

  He shrugged his shoulders and smirked. “It shouldn’t. You’re the closest thing to Lauren Bacall that’s ever walked into this classroom.”

  He’s still playing with me. Lacey’s personal style, the sass and class of the 1940s lovingly updated into the twenty-first century, prompted Hunt’s crack. Her honey brown hair skimmed her shoulders in a long pageboy, the blond highlights, courtesy of her stylist, Stella, accenting the waves that brushed her cheekbones. She was wearing a fitted burgundy vintage jacket from the 1940s, nipped in smartly at the waist and featuring large cuffs with giant buttons. On the right lapel she’d attached an enameled pin—two pink birds with blue stones—just for luck. The rest of her outfit was modern enough, she thought: blue jeans, black turtleneck, black leather boots, Gypsy hoop earrings, red lipstick. She felt ready for anything. Except possibly this grilling. Lacey felt herself blushing. She was about to unleash a smart comeback, as soon as she thought of one, when someone else spoke up.

  “She’s a femme fatale too, just like Bacall. If she whistles at you, buddy, you’re a dead man.”

  A new student had let himself into the room, looking like a beatnik who’d lost his bongos. His boyish black hair needed a trim, and his severe square, black-framed glasses and scruffy goatee looked like a failed attempt to seem older and hipper. His clothes were all black too, jeans, turtleneck, boots, jacket, as if he’d rolled in on a Harley-Davidson instead of the early 1960s dirty blue and white Volkswagen Bus out in the parking lot, emblazoned with his Web site address and the slogan, DIG THE TRUTH! Lacey’s spirits sank. It was Damon Newhouse, smiling and waving at her from a seat near the door.

  “Closest thing to Bacall,” Newhouse repeated, laughing. “You got that right! Lacey Smithsonian’s a dangerous woman. Lethal with implements of female persuasion, the scissors, the hairspray, the quip. I’ve been there to chronicle it. Check it out on my Web site, DeadFed dot com.”

  “What the hell are you doing here, Damon?” Lacey tried not to sneer.

  “Following your lead, Smithsonian, as always,” he replied.

  “I get all the funny classes,” Hunt grumbled. “Lucky me. As I was saying—”

  Newhouse tossed business cards to the guys sitting near to him. “Smithsonian as a femme fatale? Bacall to Vic Donovan’s Bogart? I’m using it on the Web. Check my blog later today.”

  “Use it, Damon,” Lacey muttered, “and yours will be the next body to fall dead at my feet.”

  “Hey, Smithsonian, I’m your biggest fan,” Newhouse protested.

  “For those of you who are not in the know,” Hunt said, commanding their attention again, “our Ms. Smithsonian here is a fashion reporter at The Eye Street Observer. That’s a little newspaper of some sort over in the District. Generally speaking, private eyes don’t much like reporters. Personally, I only read The Washington Times, but I don’t see any harm in her writing about all that girly fashion stuff. How having a PI ticket will help her do that is beyond me, but welcome to PI school, Ms. Smithsonian.”

  Girly fashion stuff? Apparently Bud Hunt was unfamiliar with her recent front-page stories. Murdered women, lost corsets full of jewels, homeless children at risk in the District . . . Serves him right for not reading The Eye. Hunt turned his attention to Damon Newhouse. Lacey was glad to share the hot seat with him. May he find it even hotter.

  “Newhouse, right? You volunteered. Who are you, what do you do, why are you here?”

  “I’m a journalist too,” Damon said proudly. “A reporter. Just like Smithsonian.”

  “Not even close,” Lacey cut in.

  “Oh, lucky me again,” Hunt snorted. “Two reporters. Reporter for what?”

  “Conspiracy Clearinghouse, better known as DeadFed dot com.” Damon Newhouse fancied himself the Woodward and Bernstein of cyberspace, a crusading newshound in a parallel universe of fringe phenomena, complete with aliens and Bigfoot and Area 51. But he was a lone ranger, a self-styled journalist without a legitimate news organization. Lacey considered him little more than an out-of-control blogger. He was also her friend Brooke’s boyfriend, so she couldn’t always avoid him. But Damon? All the way out here in the burbs? In PI class? It was a setup.

  "DeadFed dot com? God help us,” Hunt said. “A cyberspace cowboy.”

  “I hope this class will polish my investigative reporting skills and help me break the kind of stories the print media won’t touch,” Newhouse continued grandly.

  “Yeah, right,” Hunt chuckled. “Remember, everything I say, in or out of class, is confidential. Copyrighted and trademarked. You got that, kid?”

  Obviously Brooke told Damon about Lacey’s plan to take a PI class, and here Damon was, copycatting her. The nerve of him, stealing my class! And my rationale too. Lacey felt steam rising from her brain. Oh, yeah, Brooke has a lot of explaining to do.

  A noise from outside the window caught Lacey’s attention. She gazed out at the exit of the parking lot and a sliver of wintry sky, the clouds knitted together in a dull gray lament that threatened more rain and snow. Lacey watched at hubcap level as the bottom half of a car rolled past the window.

  Probably looking for parking for the Falls Church Farmers’ Market across the street, she thought. Farmers and craftspeople sold their wares every Saturday morning under colorful awnings of red and green, yellow and blue, a cheerful suburban oasis on a chilly day. Parking could be tough. The car disappeared.

  Hunt turned from Newhouse to the only other woman in class, a well-tended matron who gave her name as Edwina Plimpton. She looked fortysomething, but Lacey guessed her real age at fiftysomething. Her straight white-blond hair fell to her shoulders in a long smooth bob, held in place by a black velvet headband. She wore black slacks and a white oxford shirt beneath her buttoned melon-colored cardigan. Talbots, Lacey surmised of her outfit. Nothing but Talbots.

  The woman’s face was long and her chin disappeared into her neck. Her eyebrows arched in a supercilious way. A Rolex adorned her wrist; her manicure was French and expensive. Her voice resonated expensively of private schools and country clubs, polite but with just the faintest tinge of superiority.

  “Just call me Edwina,” she invited Hunt chummily. “Are you quite sure my car will be all right in your little parking lot? I belong to the big silver BMW,” she added with a tinkling laugh.

  Lacey confessed silently to wondering the same thing. She “belonged” to a very different BMW parked in the same lot, a green vintage 1974 model 2002tii that Vic had restored himself, his surprise Christmas present for her. Possibly the most amazing present she’d ever received. She was still babying the little car as if it were made of crystal.

  “Lady, this is Falls Church, Virginia. It ain’t exactly the District. And the police department is right across the street.” Edwina laughed as if she were holding a highball and he had made a witty cocktail-hour remark. Hunt kept a straight face. He sighed deeply and waited to learn why she was honoring his class with her presence.

  “Well, if you say so,” Edwina said with a flourish of her left hand, which was decorated by a two-carat emerald-cut diamond ring with a diamond-encrusted band set in platinum. “Actually, I’m here because I made a little bet with Mary Lou, my bridge partner, on which one of us could do the most unusual thing this winter. She chose skin diving. In the Bahamas.” Edwina snickered as if the Bahamas were so last year. “I chose this. I win!”

  “You win?” Hunt said. “What about me? What do I win?”

  “I’ve been skin diving for years,” she confided at l
arge. The big detective closed his eyes for a moment, perhaps to ban the vision of Edwina’s body in a wet suit.

  “You don’t win unless you finish the course, Ms. Edwina Plimpton. Sixty hours. Classwork, fieldwork, and a written test.” He stepped away to his next student, then turned back to her. “And by the way, dilettantes never finish this class.”

  “I am not a dilettante.” She gave him a genial I’ll-show-you look. “Of course, I was a debutante once, but I’m not saying when.” The tinkling laugh again.

  Hunt rolled his eyes. He focused on a new arrival, a woman who slipped in quietly while Edwina was charming them. “Glad you could join us. What’s your story?”

  Hunt made a show of checking his fancy watch. Lacey became aware of someone settling into the seat next to her. The latest addition to the class was a young woman who kept her head down and said nothing. In her late twenties or early thirties, she had dirt brown hair and pale eyes. Her hair, slacks, and khaki sweater all blended with the décor as if she were camouflaged in office-drab camo.

  Blending into your environment might be an admirable trait for a PI, Lacey mused. Pretty hard to score a date when you’re invisible, though.

  The woman peeked up at Hunt warily through her bangs and mumbled her name: Willow Raynor. She said something else, too softly for Lacey to hear. Willow Raynor looked like she was about to crawl right under her desk.

  Hunt sighed and let Ms. Raynor off the hook. He smiled at the guy sitting in front of her. One of those just-between-us -guys-ain’t-these-dames-nuts kind of smiles. The man smiled back at Hunt. Perhaps also fortysomething, Lacey guessed, but he seemed somehow older than forty, with tired eyes and deep crow’s-feet at the corners. The wrinkles gave him an air of maturity, as did his silver-tipped hair and dark suit. His brown eyes looked steady and somber.

  “You.” Hunt’s face lit up: Here was a solid citizen, someone he could talk to man to man. A guy’s guy. “You’re a serious guy. What’s your story?”