Sinister Shorts

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  Nina listened. After several years of solo practice in her Tahoe office, it was something she was finally learning to do. She didn't offer words of comfort or false assurances. She waited to hear it all first. Emily opened her purse and her wallet and pulled out a small photo. Nina took it.

  A little girl, Eurasian, bright-eyed and still with baby teeth. “She's deaf. What money I have from my husband's life insurance, I need for her education. I want her to have the best. Right now, she's in a wonderful school. They do whole language training, a mixture of signing, lipreading, and speaking. She's thriving there. I can't take her out. I can't!”

  “What's her name?” Nina asked.

  “Caitlin.” Emily returned the photo to her wallet.

  “You saw the man-Neal Meurer-get cut off?”

  “Another car cut right in front of him. I don't think the driver even knew what he did. He was long gone.”

  “Do you remember anything about the car?”

  “A sedan with ski racks,” she said promptly. “Wait a minute. I remember the license plate had three eights. I noticed that because my late husband was from Hong Kong. He told me how lucky the number eight is considered to be in China and I just had time to think, what a lucky license plate…”

  “That's great.” Nina wrote that down and thought, Amazing. Nobody ever noticed license plates.

  “I just thought of it.”

  “Be sure to go to the police station on Johnson Boulevard tomorrow and tell them you want to add that to your statement.”

  “I'm not positive. I'll think about it a little more.”

  “What about the man in that car? You're sure it was a man?”

  “Oh, yes. He had a mustache. They're out of fashion now, so I noticed.”

  Nina wrote that down, too. After a few more minutes and settling the business of the retainer agreement, she followed Emily out to the parking lot of the Starlake Building. Then, buffeted by the storm, she fought her way down Pioneer Trail in the Bronco. At the corner of Golden Bear a pickup suddenly spun out in front of her. Pulling sharply to the right, she hit the snowbank. Behind her, brakes squealed.

  But the car behind her didn't hit her, just honked savagely and continued on its way. Very cautiously she backed into the darkening street and drove home, teeth gritted, furious because sudden chance events that ruined lives weren't acceptable to her. Nina didn't believe in accidents.

  A few days later, with light snow still falling, the lights were on in the middle of the day at Lake Tahoe Community College. Nina caught Juliette Meurer coming out of her poli sci class with a tall, bespectacled young man who had his arm around her and was kneading her shoulder.

  “Oh,” she said when Nina introduced herself. “Am I allowed to talk to you?” Standing near Nina, who was on the small side, she towered. She was almost as tall as the man standing with her.

  “It's not a lawsuit yet,” Nina said. “It might help.”

  “This is my friend Don.”

  Don shook hands, saying, “Juli's been through a lot.” He seemed cool and kept his distance. Without asking, he tagged along to the Bronco, climbing into the back seat behind Juliette. Nina drove them to the Pizza Hut near Ski Run and the three of them sat down in a booth and ordered coffee.

  Nina started slow and easy, letting Juliette Meurer relive the moments after the Tahoe police called her, listening to her talk tearfully about Neal's incredible talent, his charm, how she missed him so much… In spite of the reports of frequent brawls at the house, a few of which resulted in calls from the neighbors to the police, she sounded very much in love with her husband. Don glowered next to her, saying nothing. The two of them went together very well, Nina couldn't help noticing, both handsome, athletic, blond, and long-haired.

  “The gas can in the back,” Nina said. “It bothers me.”

  “Neal was stupid about cars. The weather has been so bad, if you ran out of gas in the mountains you might freeze. Maybe that's what he was thinking. Poor Neal. But he would have been fine, except the woman-your client-she had been drinking, hadn't she?”

  “Mmm,” Nina said. “But the thing about the gas can, you know, is that it had prints on it that weren't Neal's.”

  “What?” Juliette looked stunned. “Why would the police take fingerprints?”

  “Oh, to be thorough. What's amazing is that there were prints left to take. Luckily, they found a fairly large piece intact ten feet away in a drift.”

  “Those prints probably came from the guy who sold Neal the gas,” said Don. “Where's the big mystery in that?”

  “Well, at first I thought that, too, and it was hard to check because the can didn't have the store sticker on it or anything. But this is a small town. My investigator managed to locate the fellow who sold that gas can. They weren't his prints. He remembered selling one three days before Mr. Meurer's death, at the Chevron at the Y, and he recognized it by the bits of paint color left on the metal piece the police found. That can was the only one he could spare that day, a really old one.”

  “So?” Juliette said.

  “Well, the thing is, I showed him a picture of your husband just to confirm everything. And this fellow who pumps the gas says it wasn't Neal Meurer who bought it.”

  “He's wrong.”

  “Said all he could see was the man was short, with blue eyes. Like everybody else around here, was mostly covered up. Wore a parka, muffler, ski hat. But Mr. Meurer had brown eyes, didn't he?”

  Juliette nodded.

  “Strange, don't you think?”

  Don's blue eyes stared at her. “You can see what she's doing, can't you, Juli? She's weaseling her client out of trouble. She sees disaster heading straight their way. It's her job to do anything to head it off.” He half-rose. “Let's get out of here.”

  Nina shrugged. “The gas attendant could be wrong but the fingerprint expert isn't. Your husband never touched that can.”

  “Then-the rescue workers!”

  “They had a fire and your husband to deal with.”

  “Oh,” Juliette said, “this is too much. You're trying to tell me somebody else put the gas can in the back? That Neal was murdered? Well, who-who would have put the can there except your client, then? Nobody forced her to run into Neal that night.”

  “Who would want to kill Neal, Juliette?” Nina asked the girl. “My client says she never even met your husband. And I hear there were a few domestic problems between the two of you.”

  “Your client is responsible! She ran into my husband and killed him!” Juliette wailed. “She was drunk! God, are you serious about all this?” Don yanked her to her feet.

  “Come on,” he said urgently. He looked down at Nina, who was calmly sipping her coffee. “I detest you shysters,” he said in a thick voice. Then he was pulling Juliette away toward the exit. She looked back once, her face a mask of anguish, blue eyes filled with tears.

  ***

  Nina's investigator, Tony Ramirez, spent a week working on the three eights.

  Tony, who was on the shady side of sixty and had the relaxed attitude to prove it, hailed from the low-tech school of investigation. He could have worked with the police to obtain a list of hundreds of people in California and Nevada with triple-eight license plates, and things could have gone on for months, but, as he put it, he liked to use his noggin to save himself work.

  “Neal's sister lives in Illinois with her husband and five kids and hasn't talked to Neal for years. She's off the hook. There's no other family. So I looked to the workplace. Turns out Neal didn't have a workplace. I checked the license on his last supervisor at the casino-no eights on his plates. I checked Neal's gambling buddies and his bookie. No triple eights. Then I looked for Neal's women. There weren't any recent ones I could find and lately he stuck to his wife like a leech.”

  Nina read through the police report again while Tony stood at the window, flipping through his notes.

  “So maybe he just pulled a Pinto,” she said. “Emily gets a personal judgme
nt for wrongful death against her for about a million dollars and goes to jail for reckless driving, and her daughter leaves school.”

  “When you put it that way I feel like I better hustle back out on the street and do better,” Tony said.

  “At least her blood alcohol was only point-five,” Nina said. “She wasn't impaired as a matter of law; not this time anyway.”

  “The fingerprints came back from NCIC. Whoever bought that gas can has never had trouble with the law and ain't in the system.”

  “Juliette gets the money. So we check out Juliette. We look at her friends and family.”

  ***

  South Lake Tahoe is a small town, and Nina knew Lenny Dole, who was her brother Matt's auto insurance agent, as well as Juliette Meurer's brother. Lenny's office was at Round Hill Mall, around the lake on the Nevada side. He was waiting for her, and he was terrified; she could see that.

  Short, not much taller than she was, according to Tony he had triple-eight license plates on his sedan. That plus his obvious terror excited her. She couldn't believe he had agreed to see her without consulting his own lawyer first, and she wanted to be very careful.

  No need. Lenny proceeded to spill his guts, and it wasn't a pretty sight.

  “When I told Neal I'd do it, I was drunk,” he said. “The next morning I called his house and left a message. ‘No way,' I said. Neal would understand what I was talking about.”

  “But he talked you back into it?”

  “No! That's what I'm saying! I refused! Absolutely!”

  “But it was your car,” Nina said. “A witness saw the license number: six-K-L-S-eight-eight-eight,” which was a slight bending of the truth, since Emily had remembered only part of the license, but he didn't need to know that.

  “It wasn't me. Somebody must have taken my car. I parked it out front all night-it was snowing…”

  “You left the keys in it?”

  “Those Cutlasses, you can hotwire them in three seconds…”

  “So you're claiming someone tried to frame you? Who else did you tell about Neal's plan?”

  He gaped. “Nobody!”

  “You didn't tell Juliette? Or your wife?”

  “I…” He shook his head weakly.

  Nina took out a portable fingerprint kit. “Lenny,” she said, “if you're innocent, you'll do this.”

  Looking guilty as hell, he shuffled up close. When he looked up she saw brown eyes and thought, Phooey.

  ***

  The snowchains requirement had snarled traffic into a pile of stationary ski racks, but somehow Tony Ramirez made it up the hill from Reno to bring the print comparison back to Nina's office a day later. This latest Sierra storm had dumped two more feet and South Lake Tahoe looked as quaint as Santa's village.

  The expert had found no fingerprint match. Lenny Dole hadn't left his prints on what remained of the gas can. Nina had also obtained prints on coffee cups from Don and Juliette, and those results were in, too. No match, no clue. Nina studied the whorls and notches and lines on the blowups as if they were hieroglyphics that might reveal a hidden story. “Tony,” she said. “I just can't put this together.”

  Tony pried off his hiking boots and sticky, wet red socks, complaining about having to get out of the car to put on chains. “Can I?” he said. She nodded and he laid them across the heater. The smell of wet wool spread through the hot office.

  “We're making progress,” Tony said, drying his toes with a tissue from her desk. “There was a conspiracy, whether Lenny stayed in or not. Emily was set up, no doubt about it. Lenny or somebody cut Neal off deliberately per the plan and Emily was the scapegoat.”

  “But nobody would be stupid enough to arrange a rear-end collision with five gallons of gas in his trunk,” Nina said.

  “A double cross,” Tony said. “Neal's partner decided to make it permanent.”

  “Juliette would get the money,” Nina said. “She's at the center of it. But whose prints are these? Who bought that can of gas? Some short, blue-eyed ghost. None of these people is short and blue-eyed. Juliette must be nearly six feet tall. Who drove the Olds Cutlass that cut off Neal Meurer? A man with a mustache, Emily said. Nobody I know in this case has or had a mustache.”

  “A buck sixty-nine at the joke shop,” Tony said. “Cheap whiskers for kids four and up.” He rattled the keys in his pocket and looked worried. “Nina, don't drive yourself too nuts with this stuff. Our job is to do our best, then let the chips fall.”

  “I can't do that. I feel responsible for Emily. I feel if I push harder, work smarter, and go that extra step, I'll arrive at the heart of the matter. That's the only way to a just outcome. Then there's nothing to regret.”

  “Just don't expect thanks when you've killed yourself for months and you hand over the bill for your outstanding service.”

  Nina sighed.

  “C'mon,” Tony said. “Let's continue this conversation over at Passaretti's. A glass of red wine and something smothered in olive oil and fresh pesto will put things back into perspective. What do you say? Let's get fed.”

  “What about your socks?”

  He pulled the boots on over bare feet and stood up. “Keep 'em for a souvenir.”

  Nina got home about seven thirty. Her dog, Hitchcock, and her teenage son, Bob, were out front under the floodlight. Bob was making a snowman, a very peculiar snowman with a rubber dog ring on top like a halo. Hitchcock ran to the truck and gamboled around it while she swung down and shut the door. “You know he's going to jump on it and destroy all your work,” she called to her son. “He loves that ring.”

  As if taking note of her words, Hitchcock turned abruptly and made a beeline for the snowman. Bob grabbed for the ring, snatching it off the snowman's head just before the dog made contact. “What's this, boy? C'mon, what's this?” He waved it at Hitchcock, who jumped vainly, tongue lolling, for his toy, until finally Bob put it back on top of the hillock of snow that made up the snowman's head. In one final heave, Hitchcock leaped valiantly into the air, landing with an audible “oof” near the top. His jaws closed around the ring. Bob jumped on, too. For an instant he clung to the hard-packed snow, arms circling the head as if to protect it. Then the whole shebang, snowman, dog, and boy, toppled into a cloud of snow.

  Hitchcock chewed vigorously on his ring, having destroyed an hour of hard work. Lying in the white powder, Bob laughed helplessly. Destruction was still far more gratifying than building.

  Nina went into the cabin. Bob had made himself frozen burritos as she had instructed, but appeared to have had a run-in with the microwave in the process. She found that mess easier to clear away than Emily's. Removing the cracked glass tray, Nina swabbed down the insides of the microwave almost gratefully.

  By ten o'clock, Bob had been nagged through his shower and into bed. Nina sat on the rug in front of the fire with her glass of sauvignon blanc, comfortable in her silk kimono. She was trying to think, but the thinking kept turning into a kind of dozing, a hypnagogic dreaming. She kept thinking about the rubber ring and Hitchcock, such a patsy, going for it, doing his dogged doggy number, until he actually got what he wanted…

  So easy to know what he wanted. In the end, so simple to get it.

  “I'm sorry to disturb you,” Nina told Carol Dole the next morning. Carol was in a plaid wool robe and glasses. Nina had watched from the Bronco while Lenny drove off to work.

  A small woman, Carol had blue eyes behind the specs that were blinking against some strong emotion right now. She tried to close the door, but Nina's six-hundred-dollar Manolo Blahnik boot heel was wedged between the door and its sill.

  “Ah ah ah,” Nina said. “It's me or the cops. You'll do better with me.”

  “Go away.”

  “It's cold out here. Twenty degrees and dropping, I'd say. We can talk with the door open and run up your heating bill or you can let me inside and we'll both be better off.”

  Carol looked once more at the boot in the door and gave up. “Come in,” she said ungr
aciously, opening the door and turning her back to Nina.

  The house showed a lot of pride around its shined surfaces. On the walls, signed lithographs hung: a gaudy Peter Max, an English cottage scene by the guy who billed himself as the Painter of Light in his TV ads, and a Picasso scribble showing hands passing a bouquet of flowers. Showy knickknacks decorated the bookshelf.

  “Lenny says he told you about Neal's plan,” Carol said. She was sitting on the white leather couch, bare legs crossed. Her robe gaped a little, exposing an angular bosom.

  “How did you get involved?” Nina said.

  “He was too worried to keep his mouth shut about this.”

  “Lenny saw an opportunity in Neal's plan, didn't he? He could set his sister up for life and get rid of her troublesome husband, all in one stroke. Did he ask you for help, or was it your idea to buy the gas can and put it into the trunk? Neal had no idea it was there, did he? But you and Lenny had easy access to Neal's car, and you fit the description…”

  “You're barking up the wrong tree. Lenny and I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Short and blue-eyed. That's how the person who bought the gas can was described,” Nina said.

  Carol Dole shook her head. “Have you taken a good look at your client lately?” she asked with a smile as wide as a half-moon. She tipped her head back so that Nina could follow the long line of her throat. It reminded her of Emily screwing up her eyes, closing them, leaning her head back…

  Emily, petite, blue-eyed.

  “Em was my best friend in high school,” Carol said. “That's where she and Neal met. Then just a couple months ago, after her husband died, she came across him again.”

  Carol's meaning hit Nina hard. Emily had lied to her. Well, clients lied. She knew that. “So you know Caitlin,” she said.

  “Who?” Carol said, and Nina felt like she was drifting off into some kind of space, only it wasn't calm and peaceful there. Supernovas were going off all around her. Through the distant chaos she heard her voice saying quite normally and correctly, “Emily Chuvarsky's little girl?”