Red Blooded Murder

by Laura Caldwell

  “What’s with you?” I said, as he slipped into the seat opposite me.

  “What do you mean?” He picked up a large, laminated menu. We were at a café on Webster, named John’s Place.

  “You’re chipper.”

  “I’ve barely said two words. Why would you think I’m chipper?” He glanced at the menu. “The Cobb sounds good, doesn’t it?” He glanced back up at me, then shook his head. “Jesus, that did sound chipper.”

  “So, what’s the deal?”

  He shrugged. “Sorry I was late. I had to drop someone off.”

  “You had to drop someone off? Did you have someone spend the night?” Like I did, I almost added.

  “Shut it.” He kept looking at the menu. “I took someone to the hardware store this morning.”

  It sounded innocuous, but he still had a faint smile on his lips.

  The waiter came over then. Mayburn ordered a club sandwich. I asked for an omelet with red peppers, since I hadn’t gotten to eat the one Theo made that morning.

  “Are you dating someone?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Someone I’ve known for a while…well, kind of.”

  “Is it Meredith?” Mayburn had told me that he’d once dated a gallery owner named Meredith Saga, a woman who lived for art and sex and little else.

  “No Sagas for me.”

  “So who?”

  “Why are you so nosy?”

  “Why won’t you tell me?”

  Mayburn seemed to be looking at anything but me now. He studied the family at the next table. He frowned at their baby, who was in a stroller as big as an RV and blocking the aisle.

  All the while, I stayed silent. It was one of the smartest things I’d learned from being a lawyer-the best way to make someone tell you something is not to badger them with questions but to confront them with silence. And then there were the things Mayburn himself had taught me-when you’re surveying someone, listen to everything, look at everything. Especially look at what people do as much as what they say. Look at what they don’t say, too.

  A few seconds ticked by. Then a few more. Finally, Mayburn met my eyes. “You want to know who it is?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Lucy.”

  One of the other things the law had taught me was to never show shock. But it was impossible at that moment.

  “Lucy DeSanto?” I blurted so loud that the baby in the stroller began to cry.

  “Yeah.”

  “The same Lucy DeSanto whose husband you and I caught laundering money for the mafia?”

  “Yep.”

  Lucy DeSanto was a tiny, lovely, elegant blonde who lived in Lincoln Park. She was married and had two children. Her husband, Michael DeSanto, was not living at home, however. Rather, he was living at a maximum-security holding cell, awaiting his federal trial for racketeering, fraud and money laundering. Due to the nature of the people DeSanto worked with-mafia people who tended to run for parts unknown if they got even a glimpse of sunlight-bail had been denied.

  Mayburn had been hired by the bank where Michael DeSanto worked and he’d pulled me into it when he hit a brick wall with the case. As payback for aiding me in my search for my missing fiancé, Mayburn asked for my help because I could fit in the upscale North Side neighborhood where Lucy lived. He trained me on surveillance techniques and had me pose as a neighborhood mom to get close to Lucy and get inside their house. When Michael DeSanto had come home one day and found me in his office fiddling with his computer, I thought that my time on earth had come to an end. But I managed to get out of it, and the evidence I got out of Michael’s computer had sent him away, at least for now. Although Mayburn had never met Lucy during the investigation, he’d spent plenty of hours watching her come and go from the house, and I’d always suspected he had a long-distance crush on her.

  “I didn’t think you were supposed to meet your subjects,” I said.

  “You’re not. But you know Lucy.”

  The waitress delivered our food. The omelet didn’t look as delicious as the one Theo had created. But then again, if Theo had put a pile of dirt on a plate and handed it to me while naked, it would’ve looked good.

  “I do know Lucy,” I said, taking a bite. “She’s probably the sweetest person on the planet.”

  “Isn’t she?” Mayburn’s voice carried something like awe. “She is such a good person.”

  I blinked. I’d never, ever heard Mayburn talk this way. He sounded more like one of my girlfriends than the sarcastic, seen-everything P.I. he was.

  “How did this get to the point where you know Lucy DeSanto personally, and you’re taking her to the hardware store?”

  “You know how bad we felt for her after they took Michael away?”

  “Yes. I even called her to tell her that.”

  “Well, I did, too.”

  “So you admitted that you were the investigator who was hired to watch her husband?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you tell her that you’d been spying on her for months, trailing behind her when she took the kids for a walk and following her when she drove to the grocery store?”

  “I did.”

  “That’s not the typical pickup line. How did she take it?”

  “You know Lucy.” He smiled with one side of his mouth and then pushed his plate away, as if the thoughts of Lucy had fed him enough. “She was kind about it. She was actually happy that it all happened. She had no idea Michael was into something dirty. She’s filed for divorce.”

  “And now she’s got you, apparently.”

  That one-sided smile again. “This is it, Izzy.”

  “It, like you’re in love?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It, like you want to marry this girl?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow. I’m jealous. I can’t seem to decide if I want Sam or…” Or Theo. Or Grady. Or someone else altogether. Or no one at all. “Anyway, does Lucy feel the same way?”

  “Not sure. It’s a lot more complicated for her.” He pushed his chair back. “All right, enough about me. I need you to eat that omelet fast, because we have to go to the lingerie store.” He turned and pointed through the front windows at a store across the street.

  “The Fig Leaf? Don’t tell me you want me to model lingerie so you can pick out something for your girlfriend.”

  “Nope. Have you ever worked in retail?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I want you to work there.”

  “You want me to fold panties?”

  “And I want you to sell them and ring them up, and mostly, I want you to watch Josie, the manager. My client, Marie, the owner of the store, doesn’t trust her lately, but technically the store is running great, so she doesn’t want to fire her.”

  “This doesn’t sound like your usual case.” Mayburn worked for big law firms, monster corporations and international banks.

  “It’s not. Marie is a family friend. Maybe she’s being paranoid about her manager. Who knows? But I’m not treating it different from any other investigation.”

  “Okay, so what’s Josie up to? Skimming money off the top?”

  He shrugged. “The books seem like they’re up-to-date. Inventory seems well-handled. They’re just getting a lot more traffic, which obviously is a good thing, but they haven’t increased marketing efforts or their PR. Marie can’t figure out exactly how it happened. She wants to make sure everything is on the up-and-up, especially since she spends most of her time in Palm Beach now. If there’s nothing to find, everyone’s happy.”

  I stared at the Fig Leaf. It was an upscale place I’d been once. The merchandise had been ludicrously expensive, but still I had purchased a white nightie, very short and very sexy, for my wedding night. The nightie still hung at the back of my closet, tags on.

  “Since Marie started spending more time out of town, Josie has been telling her they need to hire a clerk,” Mayburn said. “This morning, Mari
e told Josie she’d found someone-her family friend Lexi, who is attending law school during the day.”

  “Does Lexi have red hair?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lexi,” I said, trying the name out. “Lexi what?”

  “Lexi Hammond.”

  “Lexi Hammond,” I repeated. “I like it. But wait a minute, what about filling out IRS forms and stuff? Won’t I need a social security number?”

  “They’re paying you cash under the table. And then I’m paying you a freelance investigator fee.”

  “Shouldn’t I be getting an investigator license if I’m going to keep doing this?”

  “Nah. It’s a pain in the ass to get a license in Illinois. And expensive. Plus, I just need your help to get intel. I don’t want you to testify or anything like that.”

  I thought of something else. I told Mayburn about my job at Trial TV. “But Jane says I won’t be going on-air right away.”

  “Should be fine. I need you to start tomorrow, Sunday, and if we’re lucky I won’t need you more than a few weeks. So, what do you think, Lexi?”

  “Does Lexi get a discount?”

  “I knew you were going to ask that. Thirty percent.”

  I clapped my hands and pushed the omelet away. “Let’s go.”

  10

  Z ac Ellis opened their weekend house in Long Beach, Indiana, the way he always did. He walked through the place, turning on lights, dialing the thermostat up or down, opening windows just to get some fresh air in the place. Often, he would be followed by Jane when she was done with a broadcast, and the fresh air would twist its way though the house and into their lungs and even into their relationship, and they almost always felt much better within hours of arriving.

  But he could tell today would be different. The fresh air, colder today on this side of Lake Michigan, seemed too harsh. And so was the news of Jane’s latest bit of messing around. How had he ever thought he could handle it?

  He stopped for a moment in their kitchen. It was narrow and crammed with old, kitschy appliances they’d picked up at antique malls and flea markets-so different from their vast, metropolitan kitchen in Chicago. Standing there, he thought about his history with Jane. Before they’d met, he dated deep, brooding women. Artists like his ex Zoey, who were dark and moody, who wore funky clothes and who painted in a studio for days at a time.

  Jane was so different from those women-tall and flashy and up-front about everything. He hadn’t been mesmerized with the whole TV world, or even really that interested. Which had given him the mistaken impression that he would never fall for Jane. How very, very, very wrong he had been.

  He left the kitchen and walked down the narrow hallway toward their bedroom. The house was built in 1927, and so, like the kitchen, the room was small, and their antique brass bed had to be pushed into the far corner. He leaned against the wall, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans, imagining Jane there. Almost ten years ago, about a year and a half after they’d met, they got married on the beach two blocks from here, and they spent their first night as a married couple in that bed.

  It felt good to picture Jane this way, with him. Lately, his mind only held pictures of her with other men.

  Yes, Jane was the love of his life. He never doubted that-still didn’t-but he was starting to wonder if his love, his passion, his intensity for her could survive these affairs. She’d said she would stop, but she hadn’t. And after coming home from New York and discovering her gone again, he saw that fidelity was a lofty goal in Jane’s eyes, one she was never going to be able to achieve on a regular basis.

  He walked over to the bed and scratched at the brass with his thumbnail. It was starting to blacken, losing its luster. He would have to polish it. He was always the one who had to do these tasks around the beach house-cleaning up the yard, splitting the wood, retouching the crumbling paint. Jane disliked such chores, and it pleased him to take care of them for her, for them.

  He kept scratching at the brass. The chalky black wouldn’t seem to budge. He wondered if it could be removed at all, or whether it had spread too far. He wondered the same thing about Jane’s affairs.

  The thing was they weren’t even affairs. They were one-night stands mostly. She loved only him, she said, wanted to be married only to him. But damn it, what did it say about them that she needed such experiences, that she couldn’t give them up?

  Suddenly, taken by a rage that exploded in his belly and shot into his hands, he grabbed the rail of the headboard and rattled it violently, as if he might shake away the tarnish. The headboard banged against the wall, which only made him think of Jane, rattling someone else’s headboard. He shook it harder, the pounding increasing, the bam, bam, bam getting louder and louder. He liked the violence of it, the feeling that energy trapped inside him was coming out, and so he kept shaking the bed, kept hammering it against the wall, until it sounded like the staccato of gunfire.

  And then he pictured himself, acting like a teenager, unable to control his emotions.

  He stopped. He calmed down. “Enough,” he muttered out loud, to no one, his voice forlorn in the empty house.

  He turned and kept walking through the rooms, inching open a few windows, wiping the dust from the end tables in the living room, embarrassed at his solitary display of rage.

  Zac liked to consider himself a strong person. Jealousy had rarely been a problem before this. When Jane told him about the first guy, a year after they were married, she was so nervous, he almost thought it funny. He had never been possessive, and he had never thought he could possess someone like Jane. And so he told her to be careful and to not make it too much of a habit, but that he understood. Of course, he added, if she was going to do that, then he could sleep with the occasional woman if he wanted. But the thing was he never wanted to. Jane was enough for him. He had ventured outside their marriage only once, with Zoey, mostly because he felt it would somehow even the score, but all he could think about was Jane.

  And now he was tired of being her fool. Check that. Judging from his tantrum with the bed, he wasn’t just tired, he was pissed off. Truth was, he was starting to despise her a little bit. And he hated that. How could he love her so much and hate her at the same time? It was a sadistic circle.

  Strangely he had seen the same pattern play out in his parents’ relationship. His mother, Martina Ellis, was an artist, a flamboyant woman who hit her stride in the seventies when she changed her fine arts perspective to one of “super realism.” His dad, after their marriage, followed her to different places around the world-sometimes Manhattan, sometimes the South of France or London-so she could paint. His father often sat in the background, supporting his wife. When Zac was born, it was no different. He loved his mother, but she intimidated him with her talent and her unapologetic exuberance. That was true even to this day. It was his father he was close to. And so when his dad finally grew weary of taking the backseat, Zac understood perfectly why he had to divorce his mother.

  His dad understood Zac well, too. He understood why Zac would be attracted to someone like Jane, and he had been very empathetic lately when Zac called him, asking vague questions about marriage and how his dad handled it. His father answered all such questions with his usual blend of patience and candor. He spoke to Zac of how he “managed” Martina when she needed it, how he propped her up when the critics were ruthless, how he held her arm proudly when they walked through a glittering gallery showcasing her work.

  But in a recent conversation, his father paused and spoke a few words that haunted Zac.

  “Remember one thing,” he said. “It was a battle, and I didn’t win it. I had to leave.”

  Those words blazed through Zac’s mind now as he walked through their house one more time, then outside and onto the deck. In the summer, the deck would hold chairs with big padded cushions, a chaise, a hammock, two umbrellas. But now only an iron patio table stood alone, stark and lonely in a cool patch of light.

  Usually, he would be relaxin
g now that the house was open, maybe starting to think about a bottle of wine to uncork for Jane. But Jane would not be coming today. He’d told her to stay the hell away from the beach house, from him. Without her, the house seemed only half-full of its usual vitality, but he couldn’t stand the sight of her right now. Her bullshit dalliances were causing his mind to swirl, to wonder-Was it him? Or was it them? And how could he get his mind around it? Because he didn’t want to lose the love of his life.

  And then there was another persistent question-why should he be the one who had to ask these questions, to ponder new versions of right and wrong?-Why was it Jane who got to do whatever she wanted while he had to wade through the muck left behind?

  He stormed from the deck back into the house. He would focus on something else, on some work around here. That was what always calmed him.

  He hurried down the old, slanted staircase into their basement. On the workbench that was original to the house, amid the house paint and the tools, he found the brass cleaner he had used on the bed when they bought it. He grabbed a few rags from the bin under the bench and took the stairs back up two at a time.

  In the bedroom, he chose a spot on Jane’s side and furiously scrubbed at it with the polisher. The black started to lift, but the brass remained dull. He grabbed a clean rag and ran it back and forth, hard, over the spot. Still, it wouldn’t shine. The brass appeared slightly greenish, as if it had been inhabited by a mold that had simply taken over the bed.

  He squirted more tarnish remover on the rag, scrubbed again and again and again. He tried a clean rag. The tarnish couldn’t be removed.

  “Goddamn it,” he said. “Goddamn it.”

  His voice, low as it was, cut through the crisp, spring coolness of the house, and he heard the anguish there. For some reason, it was that sound, that tone, which overwhelmed him.

  He sank to his knees and grief washed over him. He couldn’t go on like this. They couldn’t go on like this. He began to sob. He hadn’t cried in eight years, not since his grandmother, his dad’s mom, passed away.