Change of Heart

by Jenna Bennett

  Yesterday’s clothes were still strewn where we’d dropped them—his and mine both—and I contemplated leaving his where they were, to register my displeasure with the way he’d snuck out on me. But by the time he came back I’d probably be so happy to see him that I’d feel guilty about not picking them up in the first place, so I just went ahead and did it. And then I showered and brushed my own teeth, and by then my phone signaled a text message.

  Sorry, it said. Had to go.

  I resisted the urge to make a snide comment. Everything OK?

  Fine. Tell you later. Love U.

  I melted a little, and texted back, Love U 2, instead of what I wanted to type.

  And then, since the conversation seemed to be over, I got dressed and headed out. To the office, where everything was exactly as it had been when I left yesterday afternoon. No Heidi Hoppenfeldt, no Brittany at the front desk. No Tim.

  I sat at Brittany’s desk for a while again, but there was no email from Tim today. No messages from anyone else, either. Not even an excuse from Brittany as for why she wasn’t at her post. I didn’t bother to call; I just assumed the cold she’d told me she had yesterday would serve as her excuse today too.

  At the rate we were going, LB&A would soon fizzle into obscurity.

  I thought about calling Tamara Grimaldi, but then I’d have to tell her about last night and listen to her yell at me for trying to do her job, and I was annoyed enough. It’d be different if I had something to tell her, but I didn’t. Only that Tim had—supposedly—had an appointment at Chaps the night before he showed up here with blood on his hands; the same night Brian Armstrong ended up dead. I had no real proof that he’d even been there—Tim, or for that matter Brian. Just because Sally said she’d seen a blond in a green shirt sitting at the bar, didn’t mean she’d seen Tim.

  If nothing else, I should make sure of that bit of info before I called Grimaldi. And luckily, there was an easy way to do it.

  I wandered down the hall to Tim’s office and snagged his headshot in the frame on his desk. It was a good likeness, if half a dozen years out of date. But Sally ought to be able to recognize him from that, if I showed it to her.

  Then I went back to the reception and logged onto Brittany’s computer to look for images of Beau Riggins.

  He wasn’t difficult to find. He had a Facebook page. There was even a picture of him in the Wonderjocks™ prominently featured on the main page. I imagined he got quite a lot of business from that.

  I copied it and printed it out, as big as I could make it. However, the focus of the picture was the Wonderjocks™ and not Beau’s face, so I thought there was a chance that people might not recognize him. So I found a picture of him with a friend, an angelic looking blond, uploaded just a few days ago—Friday night, as a matter of fact; they were both bare-chested and grinning into the camera—and printed that too. And then I went back to Google and typed in Brian Armstrong’s name in the search bar.

  I had expected the late Mr. Armstrong to be harder to find, being older and less of an exhibitionist, but I underestimated the power of the internet. He had a website, with what looked like a professional headshot on it.

  I hadn’t seen a picture of him before. Erin hadn’t had any at her house, or not that I’d noticed.

  He looked like he might be in his early-to-mid forties, with lots of straight, blindingly white teeth in a tanned face with bright blue eyes, surrounded by slightly too-long dirty blond hair.

  He looked like an aging surfer dude, or maybe that was just because Tamara Grimaldi had told me he’d moved to Nashville from California. But he had that look: tan and healthy, like he was used to spending a lot of time outdoors.

  And now he was dead.

  I printed that photo too, and put it with the others. And since I couldn’t think of anyone else whose photo might come in handy, I gathered what I had and headed out.

  Sally’s place is down on Franklin Road, on the south side of downtown, in the antique store district. It’s a cute little yellow bungalow set back from the street, with Sally’s name in curly script above the door. The place looks as if Sally ought to sell seashells by the seashore, or at least something more girly than pepper spray and Chinese stars.

  The bright red Harley Davidson parked beside the house ruined the effect a little bit, and once I got inside the yellow bungalow, there wasn’t anything girly about the interior, either.

  I wended my way between racks of body armor and shelves full of hand-and ankle-cuffs over to the display case in the back where Sally was waiting. “Good morning, princess,” she boomed. “You all right?”

  I nodded. “Fine.”

  “Your boyfriend take good care of you?” She winked.

  I blushed, of course. “Yes, thank you.”

  “Whatcha got there?” She nodded to the picture frame under my arm.

  “I just wanted to ask you whether this was the man you saw at Chaps on Friday.” I held Tim’s picture up in front of her.

  She contemplated him for a moment. “Looks like. Him or his elder brother.”

  “This is a few years old.” I put it down on the counter, face up. Tim continued to grin at us from out of the silver frame. “Are you sure you don’t know who you saw him with?”

  She shrugged. She’s as muscular as any man, and her biceps bulged beneath the sleeves of the T-shirt. “Can’t rightly say I do, princess. He was just a guy sitting at the bar, you know? Not my type, so I stayed away. A lot of the guys didn’t, but I don’t know that he settled on anyone in particular. Looked more like he gave’em all the brush-off.”

  “Like he was waiting for someone?”

  She nodded, and the red cock’s comb bobbed.

  “But you don’t know who?”

  “It’s like I told you, princess. Lots of people come to Chaps on a Friday night. Leather’s gotten popular lately.”

  As far as I was concerned, leather was a classic, but I figured she was talking about the lifestyle and not the material.

  “Used to be, only the insiders would show up. These days, we get tourists.”

  “No kidding.”

  She shook her head. “Friday and Saturday nights, half the people in the place are looky-loos. I blame that damn book.”

  I had a feeling I knew which book she was talking about. I hadn’t read it—a nice steamy romance novel is good enough for me—but I had heard talk.

  “Damn thing got it all wrong,” Sally said with disgust, “and suddenly we’re overrun with people wanting to experiment. Stupid idiots.”

  I couldn’t have agreed more. “So there were people wanting to experiment there on Friday night?”

  “There were strangers there,” Sally said. “Your friend. Other men. A couple girls hoping for God knows what. They didn’t get it.”

  Obviously not, if said girls were straight and hoping for a tall, dark, heterosexual dominant male to discover them.

  “Can I ask you to look at a few more pictures?”

  “Sure,” Sally said. So I brought out the picture of Brian Armstrong and put it in front of her.

  She nodded.

  “He was at Chaps Friday night?” The well-to-do married—presumably heterosexual—orthodontist?

  “Dunno about Friday,” Sally said, “but he’s been coming around for a few months. Not every night, but enough.”

  “Doing... what?”

  The look she sent me was jaundiced. “Whatcha think, Miss Priss?”

  “Um...” I cast about for a euphemism, “looking for company?”

  “Yeah,” Sally said, with a snort that sounded suspiciously like a laugh.

  “So he was... gay?”

  “I’ve no idea what he was,” Sally said. “All I know is, I’ve seen him around.”

  She glanced at the other piece of paper in my hand, and I put it on the counter. Her lips curved. “Twinkies.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Didn’t you ever hear of Hostess Twinkies, princess?”

  Of course I had
. Golden snack cakes filled with cream. Great taste but no nutritional value.

  And then I realized... “Oh.”

  “Yep,” Sally said. “That’s a twinkie.”

  “Do you know them?”

  “I’ve seen’em around lately. This one more than the other.” She put the tip of a beefy index finger on Beau’s companion.

  “Did you see either of them on Friday? Talking to my friend?”

  But she hadn’t, or said she hadn’t. “That don’t mean they weren’t there, princess. Like I said, the place gets busy. You coulda been there, and I might not have noticed.”

  “But you’re sure you saw Tim?”

  She was.

  And since that was the best I figured I’d get out of her, I thanked her and took my leave.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I called Grimaldi from the car and told her everything. About Tim’s calendar page, about Chaps, and about Sally and her identification of Brian Armstrong as someone who spent time at the leather club. I didn’t say anything about Beau and his friend, since I’d already pointed out to her that Beau and Tim knew one another. And I was lucky and got her machine, so I didn’t have to tell her any of it in person—or listen to her tell me I should stay out of her business. I just rattled it all off before the time could run out, and hung up.

  And then I drove to the house on Potsdam Street so I could tell Rafe everything... and so he could tell me what had been so important that he had to leave our bed so early this morning.

  I was half a block away when the Harley came out of the driveway, spurting gravel. And lucky for me, I was behind a bus that was idling at the bus stop down the street. I’d been thinking about pulling out and around the bus, which was disgorging and taking on passengers, but now I was glad I hadn’t. Because of the bus, I was hidden, and he hadn’t seen me. And that gave me the opportunity to figure out where he was going.

  Except I was stuck behind the bus. A bus which moved a lot slower than the Harley. Rafe has a lead foot under the best of circumstances, and when he has a reason to, he has no problem pushing the speed limits until they break. We were in a residential neighborhood, so he had to keep himself under control to a certain degree, but as the bus lumbered back into motion, and creaked up the street with me breathing exhaust behind it, Rafe and the Harley pulled further away with every second that passed.

  When he disappeared over the knoll at the top of the hill, while the bus slowed down to make another stop, I decided I’d been good for long enough. I made sure there were no cars coming toward me in the other lane, and then I stomped on the gas pedal and squealed out and around the bus. The driver laid on the horn as I flashed by, a deep, angry honk like a mutant goose, and then I was past and on my way up Potsdam, driving hell for leather to try to catch Rafe before he turned onto Trinity Lane and I wouldn’t know which way he’d gone.

  I crested the hill just in time to see the taillight of the bike disappear down the road to the left. By the time I hit the light on Trinity, it had turned red, and I had to wait for it to turn back to green again before I could cross the intersection and follow. By then, there was no sign of him up ahead. A half dozen cars had driven by while the light was red, and I was at the back of the line where the bike was at the front. And on a busy two-lane street, there was no way to pass anyone, either.

  But I got lucky. A few blocks later, as the line of cars crested another hill, I saw the red traffic light at the intersection of Dickerson Road, and the bike waiting there.

  He was still a block and a half away, and the light changed to green while I was on my way down the hill. The bike took off like a shot, but at least I had him in my sights again. I kept an eye on him while I did my best to keep up.

  Not surprisingly, he headed for the interstate. I crossed the Dickerson Road intersection, just a few blocks north of where we’d broken into Brenda Puckett’s storage locker back in August, as he zoomed past the entrance to I-65 north. He was either going straight, or taking the entrance for I-65 south on the other side of the underpass.

  I made my foot a little heavier on the gas and gained a few yards.

  He took the entrance for I-65 south. By the time he hit the top of the ramp and started merging with traffic, I zipped through the underpass and started climbing. Then it was my turn to merge, and once that was done and I was integrated into the traffic flowing south toward downtown, I started looking around for him again. And spied him two lanes over, in the exit-lane for the I-24 east bypass.

  I followed suit, and made sure to keep a few cars behind us so he wouldn’t notice me there.

  I did realize that my chances of going undetected were slim, just to make that clear. After all those years undercover he was adept at picking up a tail. I’d seen him do it before. I’d also seen him outrun one. I was fairly certain he could outrun me. The bike was much smaller and easier to navigate than the Volvo, and it had more pick-up-and-go. It also had—might as well admit it—a better, less cautious driver.

  Although maybe he wouldn’t bother. If he saw me back here, maybe he’d just let me tag along until he could stop me to find out what I thought I was doing.

  Nonetheless, I did my best to stay back as far as possible on the off-chance that I might escape his notice, at least for a while.

  We skirted the east side of downtown and he merged into one of the two lanes for I-40 west. I followed suit. Not immediately, because if I did, he might notice that I was mimicking his moves. That was something he’d told me once, about tailing someone. Make it as unobtrusive as possible. Change lanes before them, if you know where they’re going, or wait as long as possible after they do, so they may not notice. The worst thing you can do, is do it right away.

  So I waited. And as he zoomed into the underpass, I squeezed between two SUVs in the exit lane. The one behind me honked angrily. I just hoped Rafe was far enough away by then that he wouldn’t bother to check his mirrors for the reason why.

  He got off at the exit immediately after merging onto I-40, and took a left at the light at the bottom of the ramp. I got caught at that same light, and had to wait a minute or two before I could turn. As I headed down Fourth Avenue South, I peered out the windshield for a glimpse of the motorcycle.

  Like most modern cities, Nashville is set up in a grid pattern, with streets running east to west and avenues running north to south. Fourth Avenue is a straight shot out of downtown in both directions for a couple of miles, at least. I could see ten or twelve blocks in front of me, until the road crested the hill by the fairgrounds and turned into Nolensville Pike just beyond. But there was no sign of Rafe or the Harley.

  My heart dropped like a rock. After all that effort, how could I have lost him now?

  Had he seen me after all, and ducked out of sight? If I kept traveling south, would he pop up on my tail in a block or two? Or had he simply vanished, ditching me and going on to wherever he was headed?

  And then I saw, out of the corner of my eye, movement in a parking lot on my left.

  And there he was, behind a building, in the process of getting off the bike.

  I couldn’t stop, of course. I was in the middle of moving traffic, with cars in front of and behind me. And I couldn’t turn around, because Fourth Avenue is a one-way street, running south. The only thing I could do was take a left at the next cross-street, another left on the next northbound street, which happened to be Second Avenue—Third dead-ended at the interstate—and then I had to go back under the interstate, take another left, and yet another left, to end up where I’d started.

  It took a couple of minutes, but the bike was still there when I came back around the block. I found an empty spot in a parking lot across the street, as far away from the bike as I could get while still keeping it in sight, and settled in to wait.

  It didn’t take long. He came back out just a minute or two later. And he wasn’t alone. But before that happened, I’d had time to examine the building he’d gone into, and I’d realized something.

&nbs
p; The building across from it, where I was parked, was a commercial print shop. The area on the south side of downtown has a lot of businesses like that. Print, merchandizing, that sort of thing.

  However, the building Rafe had gone into was what is euphemistically known as a gentlemen’s club. The kind of place that features—from what little I know about it—naked women swinging around poles.

  It was called Benny’s Booby Bungalow, which killed the whole ‘gentleman’ concept right there, if you ask me. No real gentleman would be caught dead in a booby bungalow. No real gentleman would visit a gentlemen’s club at all, but certainly not one with a name like that.

  I was floored at the realization that my boyfriend had just done so.

  Part of me wanted to leave. Just drive away and find something else to do, something to take my mind off what I’d just discovered. He could be in there for hours. I’d heard stories about men who blew all their money in places like this, while their wives and children starved. I should leave.

  But the other part couldn’t tear myself away. My boyfriend was inside that building, with a bunch of naked women and—judging from the number of cars in the parking lot—a few dozen sweaty, horny men. How could I leave?

  And then I was glad I didn’t because it was just a couple minutes after I parked, that he came back out, followed by a woman.

  Considering the location, I assumed she was one of the strippers. She looked like a stripper. Long legs in tight jeans, lots of long, blonde hair. I didn’t get a good look at her, though. Rafe handed her his helmet and got on the bike without it himself. While she stuffed her hair up under it, he glanced around. I ducked down below the dashboard so he wouldn’t see me, and then I lay there, curled up with my heart beating hard in my throat, until I heard the bike start up. He must not have noticed me, and I wouldn’t have to explain—in front of her—what I was doing there.

  They roared out of the parking lot and down the street.

  I followed, of course. I knew I was acting stupidly, pathetically, like the worst kind of stalkery girlfriend, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to know where they were going. I wanted to know who she was, and what he was doing with her, and why he kept telling me he loved me, while he kept seeing a girl in a strip club.