“You left a litter of puppies alone at home?”
“No. They’re at the twelfth precinct.”
Clark laughed out loud. “You’re the only person I know who could get Captain Allen to agree to that.”
“‘Agree’ might be overstating things.”
We reached my car. I found my keys in my handbag and unlocked the door, but paused before climbing in. “Detective Henning…he’s new, isn’t he?”
“Transferred from Amarillo. Nice guy. Came with a good reputation. Didn’t Captain Allen tell you about him?”
“These days, Captain Allen and I limit our conversation to paint colors.”
“Yeah, I can see how he might not want to encourage you.” Clark put his hand on the top of my car door, and after I’d tucked my coat in around my ankles, shut the door and leaned down to the window. “I’m sorry about your friend, Ms. Night. We’ll catch whoever did this.”
The condolences took me by surprise. I’d spent the better part of my morning angry with Jane, but few others knew that. Until I’d received her email, I’d considered her a friend too. If I’d gone a day without checking my virtual inbox, everything would have been different.
I thanked Clark and left. It was after six and I was late picking up Rocky. And while my overactive Shih Tzu couldn’t (and wouldn’t) complain about the extra time he spent with the litter of Shi Chi puppies he’d sired, the puppy sitter would. Even I couldn’t overlook the massive favor the police department had done by agreeing to let the puppies join the officers for Kids Day.
I charged my cell phone with a cigarette lighter adapter. After it had enough juice to power back on, I called Effie at the studio. She didn’t answer. I left a vague message on the answering service to let her know the application had made it in on time and drove directly to the police station.
The Lakewood Police Department was a small precinct that oversaw the Lakewood/White Rock Lake suburb of Dallas, Texas. I’d had more than one reason to become familiar with them, first when I’d found a body under the wheels of my car a few years ago and the crime had led them to believe I was a target (they’d been right), and most recently after a criminal investigation involving the very pajama factory that had caught the attention of the DIDI committee. My familiarity with the police had led me to a different set of complications as well—ones involving my love life. The less said about that, the better, at least for now.
I parked my Alfa Romeo in the visitor space by the front of the small red brick building and entered the front doors. An unexpected wall of heat filled the room. Two officers, one man and one woman, stood inside by the water cooler. The faint sound of happy barking came from somewhere deeper in the building.
“Hey, Madison,” the male officer said.
“Hi.” I fanned my hand in front of my face. “Is it hot in here?”
“Broken thermostat. The gauge malfunctioned two hours ago, and it’s been like this ever since. You might want to tread carefully. Captain Allen’s on the warpath.”
“That’s not why he’s on the warpath,” the woman added. “Wojo ate his burrito.”
“Thanks for the warning.” I turned to the front desk. Officer Garcia, a young Mexican who I still doubted was in police work for the long haul, sat behind the desk. He dangled a pencil over the head of a small white puppy, who hopped on his hind legs while trying to snag the writing instrument. Garcia looked up, temporarily distracted by my presence, and the puppy’s teeth clamped onto the eraser end of the pencil. He yanked it loose from Garcia’s hands and then followed the fallen object to the floor, snarling at it the whole time.
“Chano?” I asked, pointing at the dog.
“Yemana.” We both watched the dog attack the pencil. “Sure was nice of you to let Rocky spend the day here. The kids went crazy over the dogs.”
“I’m glad it was a success.” Just then, a small, furry white Shih Tzu charged out from the back hallway, fur flying. He had a navy and white striped bowtie clipped around his throat. “Captain Allen dressed Rocky up as Inspector Luger?”
“He wanted Rocky to be Fish, but the fedora wouldn’t stay on his head.”
About eight months ago, after Rocky had made friends with a female Chihuahua, a litter of puppies arrived. The Chihuahua had been left with no owner, and the Lakewood Police department had adopted the lot of them. Thanks to either the department’s new diversity policy or an appreciation for classic seventies cop shows, they’d named the Chihuahua Wentworth, after the female police detective of the 12th precinct on Barney Miller, and the puppies after the officers. Several members of the police squad adopted puppies and kept the names, which made reunions that much more fun.
“Get back here!” boomed a familiar voice from the back of the building.
“Is he talking to me?” I asked Garcia.
“I don’t know,” Garcia said.
A door slammed, and a small white puppy sped toward my feet. He stopped short and lifted a leg next to a worn, wooden chair that was pushed under a round table.
“No!” Garcia and I said at the same time.
The puppy ignored us and peed on the table leg and then looked up and yapped like he deserved a prize. The owner of the booming voice, Captain Tex Allen, stormed after the puppy like he had just escaped his parole officer.
“Garcia, take Wojo outside.”
“I’ll take him out,” I volunteered.
Captain Allen slowly shifted his gaze from Garcia to me. The air in the small building grew even hotter, and I wished I could take off my raincoat. The lack of anything other than undergarments kept the coat in place.
“What are you doing here?” Tex demanded. “You’re violating the terms of…the agreement.”
“I came to pick up Rocky.”
“Garcia said you’d pick him up in the morning.”
“Captain Allen, can we talk about this somewhere else?”
Garcia scooped up Wojciehowitcz and carried him to the door. As soon as the door closed behind him, Tex addressed me. “We don’t need to talk, Night. I get it. We gave it our best shot, but this is never going to work.”
“Don’t be hasty, Captain.”
He held out his hand, palm-side up. “I don’t see things changing anytime soon. Now give me back my key.”
FIVE
Perhaps I should back up for a moment. Before finding Jane’s body in the bathroom of the twenty-third floor of Republic Tower, before submitting the proposal for the VIP competition, before going to my studio and reading the critical email that triggered the trip to downtown to confront Jane in person, I’d been in Tex’s bedroom.
Not his bedroom. His spare bedroom. He’d hired me to decorate it and I’d painted it lilac. Apparently, he had a problem with that.
“I left you a note,” I said. “The color dries darker than it looks.”
“It’s purple. You painted my spare bedroom purple.”
“I painted one wall. And what’s wrong with purple? It’s a manly color.”
“It’s the manly version of pink.”
“What’s wrong with pink?”
He glanced at my trench coat. I glanced down too, to make sure the buttons were all secured.
“It’s not going to be bright purple. It’s going to fade as it dries, and the room will have a soft, soothing, lilac glow.”
Tex glared at me. “When I hired you to decorate my bedroom, I had something different in mind,” he said.
Now what was I supposed to say to that?
Tex and I had a combustible relationship. I’d always written the heat off to circumstance. His job in law enforcement and my narrow escapes from the criminal element often kept us working on similar problems from opposite angles. Only recently had I acknowledged (to myself) that the attraction, though highly out of character, wasn’t going anywhere. That acknowledgment came on the heels of my boyfrie
nd, Hudson James, pointing out his own awareness of the situation. Just shy of six months ago, I’d turned fifty, yet I felt like a seventeen-year-old deciding who was going to take me to the prom.
I hadn’t liked it then and I didn’t like it now.
I’d told both men what they were giving me for my birthday: six months. Six months of man-free life. Six months when I didn’t have to make a decision. It was the most self-indulgent thing I’d ever asked for, but I was fifty. I’d earned the right to be self-indulgent.
Those had been the most productive six months of my life.
Once I’d stopped worrying about my love life, I’d made other necessary changes. I told the manager of the local theater that I’d be shifting my role of support from volunteer to patron (a marathon of late seventies Scorsese movies was announced on their promo calendar shortly thereafter). I hired Effie to bring my business practices up to twenty-first century standards while respecting my mid-twentieth century aesthetic. I bid on jobs I’d formerly considered to be too large for a one-woman company and even booked a few.
It was during those six months that I met and became friends with Jane. It had felt like a sign. Arguably the biggest deficit in my life were female friends and here was one who was just like me.
Jane Strong and I were two peas in a vintage pod. Women who had built up our own businesses through hard work and determination. Caught between the boomers and the millennials, we’d both forged our own paths to smaller but laser-focused audiences. The only reason I hadn’t met her earlier was that she’d spent a fair portion of her life working for a company that designed McMansions in the cities on the outskirts of Dallas. A company that happened to be owned by her ex-husband.
Jane’s divorce from Gerry Rose at the age of forty-nine had provided the impetus for her to strike out on her own. Her husband had seen to offer little more than a lump-sum buy-out of her claims to their estate. She’d been with the company long enough to have a guaranteed pension, but the soul sucking work of cranking out house after house with no individuality had given her the motivation to start Posh Pit, her own design company. Where I was looking to work on larger, commercial properties, her business model was aimed at clients with tiny apartments and small spaces.
But right now, it was neither a commercial property nor a tiny apartment that gave me trouble. It was an angry cop with a townhouse.
“You agreed to my terms,” I said. “I have complete creative control over the room you hired me to decorate and my work goes unchallenged and uninterrupted. That’s why you gave me a key, remember? Or do you need me to pull up the contract and show you?”
Tex shook his head. “I agreed to give you a key so you could work when I wasn’t there. I agreed to let you make informed decisions on my behalf. I never agreed to purple walls.”
“Maybe you need to expand your boundaries.”
“I haven’t seen you in almost six months, Night. I gotta tell you, I had an entirely different fantasy about how this was going to play out.”
The only way to honor the decorating job Tex had hired me to do was to schedule my working hours during his shifts at the police station. Ever since Tex had been promoted to Captain, he held office hours, which is how I ended up at his townhouse early this morning. It’s also how I knew he hadn’t come home last night. It might have had a little bit to do with the choice of lilac on Tex’s wall. The man had cad tendencies, and in my world, a little lilac was the perfect antidote to cad.
Tex turned around and headed to his office. I followed. He moved behind his desk and tapped the space bar on his keyboard a few times. Whatever he saw on the screen made him mad. He picked up his cordless mouse and tossed it in the trash. I remembered something Garcia had said.
“Are your computers still down?”
He nodded. “The internet company was supposed to have them back up by five.” We both looked at the clock on the wall, which indicated it was almost seven thirty. “It was as good a day as any for it to happen. When they weren’t up after fifteen minutes, I arranged for the DPD to cover our calls. We spent most of the day out back with the kids.”
“That explains it,” I said.
“What?”
“Why you’re treating me like this.”
“I’m treating you like I always treat you.” His eyes glanced at my pink coat again. For the first time since I’d entered his office, he seemed to focus on something other than his anger over my lilac paint job. “Why are you still wearing your coat? It’s seventy degrees in here.” Slowly, his expression changed from scowl to the lascivious grin I’d become accustomed to since we’d met. “Wait. Did you make a decision? Did it go my way and this is how you wanted to tell me? Is this one of those visits I like to fantasize about? You’re not wearing anything under that coat, are you?”
“I’m wearing a vintage slip.”
“I guess that’s more you than the garter belt thing.” I rolled my eyes. “Hey,” he said. “You’re the one who wanted me to treat you like I always do.”
He was. And that’s how I knew he had no idea what had happened earlier today. Tex had cad tendencies, but he wouldn’t flaunt them if he knew about Jane.
“What’s going on, Night?” He asked, his tone of voice more serious than it had been.
“It’s not what you think.”
“I think something happened.”
“It did. Remember my friend Jane Strong?”
“Sure. Why?”
“She died this morning.” Just saying the words out loud triggered the release of adrenaline that I’d felt when I’d tried to help her earlier today.
Tex sat up. “How? Was she sick?”
“Yes. I don’t know if it was food poisoning or the flu—”
“That’s not what I meant. Was she ill? Was it unexpected?”
“She was murdered, Tex. Assaulted in the powder room at Republic Tower. Blunt force trauma to the head.”
“How did you find out?”
“I was there.” Tex’s brows pulled together in an unasked question. “I just was, okay? It was a simple course of my day-to-day business.”
“You said something about her being sick?” He prompted. “Walk me through what happened.”
Talking to Tex about my day forced me to view the events through an objective filter. I described my trip to the restroom and Jane getting sick.
“She threw up on you?” His eyes went back to my coat. “That’s why you’re not wearing anything but a slip.”
“I told you it wasn’t what you thought.”
“Go on.”
I finished my recap, ending with the blood on the floor. My stomach flipped with the sight and scent memories.
“You left her, and she came to. She tried to pull herself up by the sink and lost her balance again, struck her head, and died. Accidental death.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. Her face, forehead, and hair were all unmarred. The wound was on the back of her head.”
“She struck her head on the floor when she fell.”
“I don’t think so.”
Tex studied me for a few moments. “You usually call me when this sort of thing happens.”
“We agreed. Six months, no pressure.”
“I’m a cop, Night. Calling me about a homicide doesn’t fall under that six-month umbrella.”
“I spoke to a Detective Henning. Do you know him?”
“Yes. Dallas PD. What were you doing at Republic Tower?”
“I was turning in an application to the DIDI offices. The cutoff is at midnight tonight and I wanted to make sure it was accepted.”
“That design competition?” he repeated.
“You know about VIP?”
“Give me some credit.”
“I was there right around five. The receptionist left early, so between
me dropping off my application and Jane being—Jane dying, probably about fifteen to twenty minutes passed. If you don’t believe me, call Henning.” I pulled the detective’s card out of my coat pocket and laid it on the desk in front of Tex. “Or call Officer Clark. He was there too.”
“You talked to Clark?”
“Yes. I talked to both of them.”
Tex picked up Henning’s business card and held it toward me, pinched between his index and middle finger.
“I heard about the murder over the police wire. I didn’t know you were involved.” His voice was gentle, but his attitude was reserved. He was acting as a cop, not a confidante. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
I took the card from Tex but didn’t say anything. A new feeling of unease came over me. That statement was like what Officer Clark had said. I’d been so mad at Jane this morning, but to the rest of the world, we were friends. To the people who knew me well, we were close friends. And now she was gone, and our argument would never be resolved. I wanted to unburden myself, to tell someone how she’d picked a fight with me and I’d been at Republic Tower to defend myself, but what was more self-centered than needing to twist the circumstances of Jane’s untimely death to my need for an apology?
“Thank you,” I said mechanically, taking the card from his fingers. “Did you hear anything else?”
“Not my case.”
“So that’s it? You won’t discuss this with me?”
“I’m honoring the terms of your birthday present.” He smiled. “It’s the gift that keeps on giving.”
SIX
I stood and put Detective Henning’s card back into my pocket. Tex was right. I’d asked him to give me space, and he’d honored my request. The only reason I was here at the police station was because Officer Garcia had called to tell me about Cops and Kids day. When I’d heard their idea to let the neighborhood children interact with the puppies, I’d volunteered to drop Rocky off. Him being here had probably been a surprise to Tex.
LOVER COME HACK Page 4
