Uncorked

by Lois Greiman

  “You gotta clear the area,” he said. “We got another customer wants a wash.”

  I filed a police report at the nearest station that night, sat in a snot-green plastic chair while they dusted for fingerprints and checked for DNA, then refused an escort and drove home like someone in a functional coma. Once there, I turned on every light in the house and crawled into bed, fully dressed. Harlequin heaved himself up beside me and let me cry onto his velvety ear until I fell asleep.

  I woke up sometime before dawn. The house was as bright as a shooting nova and utterly silent. Harley’s right ear was still wet from my tears, I was sweating like an ox, and my chest ached. For a second I thought I might be experiencing a well-deserved heart attack, but then I remembered the diminutive tape recorder I had shoved between my boobs.

  Harley gave me a jaundiced glance as I sat up and retrieved the tiny device. It took me a few minutes to remember how to play back the recording. A series of hisses and scrapes issued from the machine. The noises were totally unidentifiable and did nothing but make my hands shake and my stomach heave.

  The rest of the night was pretty much of a bust.

  The following morning wasn’t much better, but I applied makeup to the worst of the bruises, assured myself I looked somewhat better than road-kill and drove to the office. Once there, I told my clients a not-too-far-fetched story about being dragged down the sidewalk by Harlequin, and tried to carry on as if my face didn’t look as though it had mauled by a grizzly.

  In the afternoon, I drove to Rivera’s station to talk to Captain Kindred. He came in through the back door finally, hound-dog face haggard, but when he saw mine he winced.

  “Holy shit,” he rumbled, and motioned me irritably toward his office.

  I followed him into a room the size of my thumb. Despite the fact that my face looked like an impressionist’s angry pallet, I was doing a pretty fair job of controlling my tears if I do say so myself. But by then I had spent the past sixteen hours blubbering like a spanked infant, so maybe my stoicism had more to do with a lack of body fluids than with fortitude.

  “Sit down,” he ordered, and motioned toward a chair beside the door.

  I considered refusing, but my legs were as weak as my bladder. The chair felt hard and solid against my thighs.

  “What happened?” His voice was as hard as the chair.

  “Last night…“ I took a deep breath and wondered if the proverbial dam would hold. “At approximately 7:15 I stopped at an Arco station on Foothill and Cullen.” I’d been through enough of these situations to know how to give a detailed report. It wasn’t a good sign. “I paid for thirty dollars worth of gas and a car wash. When I returned to my vehicle there was someone in the backseat.”

  He clenched his teeth and moved to the far side of his desk for a pad of paper. “You filled out a full report?”

  I swallowed hard and managed a nod.

  "I'm sure they've checked the video cam, but I'll look into it."

  "Thank you." I still didn’t cry. Miracles do happen. I took a deep breath and dove in. “I believe the perpetrator was Officer Coggins.”

  The pad dropped out of his hand. He didn’t seem to notice. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  I tightened my fists and wished I had fortified myself with a couple dozen cupcakes. Or at least a glass of wine.

  “I was supposed to meet him at the Wheel at 7:30. I was attacked at 7:17. When I called the restaurant at 7:42, he still hadn’t shown—”

  “Why?” His body was very still, his voice low.

  “What?”

  “Why the hell were you supposed to meet him?”

  “I just…” I considered telling him I was irresistibly attracted to the man, but my face hurt too much to formulate a decent lie. My Emerald Isle antecedents, a list of prostitutes and con artists as long as my arm, were probably rolling over in their graves like loose dice at my lack of ability. “I believe I told you about my suspicions regarding his connection with Rivera’s incarceration.”

  “God damn it.” He said the words very softly.

  I straightened my spine. “He knew my name.” My hands were shaking again. I put them against my thighs and raised my chin like a martyr at a lynching. “I believe he was going to warn me not to interfere with the…” My voice failed me. I cleared my throat. “With the investigation.”

  The captain’s hang-dog gaze didn’t leave my face for several seconds, but finally he strode to the door, yanked it open and growled at some poor gopher on the far side.

  In a second he was back. He turned away from me, gazing out his dusty window. He had a dynamite view of the parking lot and the northwest corner of the city library.

  “Did I or did I not warn you against getting involved in this?” His back was as broad as a Ping-Pong table. His button-down shirt was wrinkled except where it was stretched tight across his shoulders.

  I felt my eyes tear up and swiped the back of my hand beneath my nose lest it join the drippy brigade.

  “Miss McMullen,” he snarled, and pivoted toward me just as the first traitorous tear fell.

  “Ahh, hell,” he said, and dipped his head as if trying to disavow my tears, but they were the real deal…the stuff that makes grown men run screaming into the night.

  He reached for a squashed box of tissues just as the door swung open.

  Coggins stood in the opening, gaze sharp on the captain’s. His squinty eyes were narrowed. His nose was an odd hue of purple and his left cheekbone harbored a superficial laceration about two inches long. “You wanted to see me?”

  “Come in here,” the captain ordered.

  He stepped inside. I felt my guts shake.

  “Shut the door.”

  He did so. And in that second his porcine eyes swung toward me.

  “Holy fuck!” He breathed the words, narrow eyes going wide. “What are you doing here?”

  I tried to speak, but it was impossible to open my mouth.

  “Where were you at 7:15 last night?” Captain Kindred asked.

  “What? I…” Coggins’s mouth remained open as he stared at me. No more words came.

  “Coggins!”

  “What the fuck is this about?” he rasped.

  “Just answer the damn question.”

  “This is a fucking set-up.”

  The captain took a step toward him. “Where were you?”

  Coggins scowled. His eyes darted from side to side, but he finally conquered the worst of his terror and steadied his gaze. “I was supposed to meet her.”

  The captain fisted mallet-sized hands beside his thighs and lowered his head.

  “But you already know that, don’t you?” Coggins asked.

  “So why didn’t you?” The captain’s voice was low, laced with suspicion and anger. “Why didn’t you meet her?”

  “I don’t think it matters,” Coggins said, and flattened me with his glare. “Not when Rivera’s bitch is here telling stories about-”

  “I’m going to ask you once more,” the captain said. His tone had gone from dangerous to deadly. “Where were you?”

  For a moment I thought Coggins would refuse to answer, but he wasn’t suicidal. “I got a flat.”

  Silence filled the room like toxic smog.

  “A flat tire?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where?”

  “What the hell difference—”

  “Where?” the captain asked, but I was already speaking despite my smarter instincts.

  “What happened to your face?” I asked. I meant to sound accusatory and self-assured. I may have sounded more like a quivering castrato.

  He tightened his hands to fists and took half a step forward. “You hit me in the nose, you—”

  “Coggins!”

  He straightened immediately at the captain’s reprimand. “She hit me,” he said. “When we went to pick up Rivera.”

  "I didn't hit you in the cheek. What happened to your cheek?"

  "That's from the tir
e iron. Not that it's any of your business, you fucking little-"

  “Watch your language!” Kindred snarled, then turned to me. “Is that true?”

  “I—”

  “What the hell is this?” Coggins snapped. “You sucking up to her, too, just because she’s Rivera’s—”

  Kindred took a step toward him. Coggins dropped his head and went immediately silent. The room echoed with tension.

  “Tell me what happened last night,” Kindred ordered.

  “Just because—”

  “Tell me!” he growled.

  Coggins snorted a laugh. “You’re not going to believe me anyway. The whole fucking department knows you’re kissing up to Rivera’s old man. We all know who the real problem is in this—”

  “Coggins!” the captain barked.

  The man seemed to visibly shrink. “My tire blew on the 710.”

  Their gazes met and smoldered. “Any witnesses?”

  “Sure. Sure there are. About a thousand fucking commuters flying by at a hundred miles an hour over the speed—” He stopped, frowned, seemed to try to think. “Yeah,” he said, relief lightening his tone. “Yeah, I have a witness. A guy from some towing company stopped.”

  “You called a tow truck?”

  “On my god damn salary?” The words were a sneer. “He wanted fifty bucks just to drag the piece of shit off the interstate.”

  “Who was he?”

  “How the hell should I know? You thinking we were pen pals or something?”

  “I’m not a patient man,” the captain warned.

  Coggins stuck out his jaw, but there was caution in his eyes now. Caution and enough fear to make him seem sane. “Hey,” he said. “He gave me his card.”

  Chapter 15

  You’re only given a drop of madness. Don’t piss it away.

  —Dagwood Dean Daly, who may have been granted more than his fair share

  It took forever for the captain to contact Sure-Fire Towing. Longer still to get connected with the right man. But finally he did. And that right man collaborated Coggins’s story.

  Ten minutes later, I stumbled out of the station like a chimpanzee on opium, mind buzzing with possibilities. Maybe the 'right man' was lying. Maybe Coggins had hired someone to attack me. Maybe I was on the wrong track entirely and Andrews had been released from the hospital. It was entirely possible, if not probable, that he still held a grudge and was-

  “Ms. McMullen?”

  I jumped at the sound of my name and spun toward the speaker in a kind of pseudo-kung fu stance.

  Officer Eric Albertson stepped back a pace at my weird-ass reaction, then straightened and sobered at the sight of my face.

  “Who did that?” he asked, voice low.

  I stared at him.

  “I mean…Jesus!” He said the word on a harsh exhalation.

  I shook my head. “I doubt it was him.”

  He gave me a look that suggested he thought I might be two scoops short of a banana split. For a licensed psychologist, I get that more than one would think probable. “Are you all right?”

  “Never better,” I said, and turned toward my car.

  He followed. “What happened?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Hey, that’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it. Just…” He lengthened his strides to catch up. “Just let me buy you a drink.”

  “I don’t need a drink,” I said. My voice was petulant, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “Then buy me a drink.”

  I snorted. It was better than crying.

  “Dinner. Let me buy you dinner.”

  He’d followed me to my car. I gazed into the tiny backseat, hunting for perverts, thieves and guys who like to jump defenseless psychologists in car washes. All I saw was fingerprint dust sticking to every possible surface. They'd left enough of the stuff to build sandcastles but had come up empty. The perpetrator, they said, had probably worn gloves.

  “Ms. McMullen?”

  “It’s three o’clock in the afternoon,” I said, and turned fuzzily back toward him. My backseat seemed to be empty, but one can’t be too cautious. Rivera had once suggested that I check my trunk. I believe that at the time I had maligned his mental capacity. The idea didn’t seem quite so ludicrous now. In fact, I found myself contemplating checking the inside of the Saturn’s tires.

  “Pie, then? A scone? A cup of coffee?” he offered.

  “It’s a million degrees out here.” I tried to scoff the words but they came out a little wobbly.

  “Ice cream. How about a hot-fudge sundae?”

  Maybe he knew I was about to cry. But to my credit, the thought of ice cream often makes me cry. It may have had nothing to do with the fact that I’d been attacked in a car wash. I mean, for Pete’s sake, who gets attacked in a car wash?

  I wiped my knuckles roughly beneath my nose.

  “Would you prefer butterscotch?” he asked, leaning around me a little as if to catch a glimpse of my reaction.

  I shook my head. “Listen, I really appreciate your concern, Officer…”

  “Call me, Eric. Please. And we’ll go all out. Hot fudge with cashews or something. Just wait here one minute,” he said, and left me alone in the parking lot. To his credit, his mission really did take sixty seconds or less. He was back before I got up enough nerve to enter my traitorous vehicle and leave without further conversation, which was just as well because I would have hated myself in the morning if I had missed out on the free-ice-cream offer.

  “Want to take my car?” he asked.

  I shrugged. He touched his hand to my back in that protective way that men sometimes have and ushered me toward a late-model Toyota. It was still cool inside. Air conditioning, I knew, was contributing to the global-warming problem, but just then the irony failed to either horrify or amuse me.

  “Where to?” he asked.

  I wanted to simply shrug again, but that seemed infantile and a little bit dumb. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I should be getting back to work anyway.”

  “When’s your next appointment?”

  “Four thirty.” It was a decent lie. I didn’t have any clients for the rest of the day, but it’s often a dynamite idea to have an end time to a date. Mostly because if you sit around too long sometimes men will attack you. Not that I was still obsessing about the car wash incident or anything.

  He glanced at the digital clock on his dash. It was three twenty-seven. “How about Dairy Queen?”

  I may have made a childish face. He grinned.

  “Okay. No,” he said, and listed off a couple other mediocre suggestions before coming up with Cold Stone. Maybe he recognized the adulation gleaming in my puffy eyes, because we were walking through the door of that esteemed establishment in less than fifteen minutes.

  I considered getting something modest like a small vanilla cone, remembered the car wash, and ordered two scoops of cake-batter ice cream with caramel, chocolate and almonds. At the last second, I added bananas, in case I was low on potassium.

  The very first bite made the world a better place. The second made it almost bearable.

  Eric stared at me from across the table. He was a good-looking man with cleanly etched features, heavily lashed eyes and a dimple in the exact center of his chin.

  “Aren’t you going to get anything?” I asked, which was a small miracle, because generally when I’m communing with ice cream there’s no time for chitchat.

  “I don’t really care for dessert.” To his credit, he did look a little chagrined, but I didn’t cut him any slack.

  “Were you dropped on your head as a child or something?”

  He grinned and shook the aforementioned head, still watching my eyes. I licked the edge of my waffle cone.

  “Did you suffer from some sort of frozen food trauma?”

  He smiled at me. It was a pretty good smile. “What happened?” he asked.

  I considered not telling him, but I really couldn’t think of any reason reticence
would improve the situation.

  “When I returned to my car after getting gas…” My hand shook a little and I resented the hell out of that. If I lost a droplet of ice cream, someone was going to pay in blood. “…a man was in the backseat of the Saturn.”

  “Fuck it,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  His eyes sparked with anger. His mouth was pursed into a hard line. “Did you get a description?”

  I took a deep breath and held it. I didn’t want to tell him about my suspicions, but it wasn’t as though he wouldn’t find out.

  “I thought it was your partner.”

  “What?”

  I winced. “Do you want to confiscate the rest of my cone?”

  “Coggins? You thought it was Coggins?” He sounded incredulous.

  I scowled at the ice cream, though it had done nothing wrong. “I know Rivera is innocent.”

  He shook his head. “That doesn’t make Joel guilty.”

  I exhaled carefully, keeping all the tension inside like I tell my clients never to do. “Tell me about Stacy.”

  “Stacy?” he began, then scowled. “Oh yeah.” He gave me a guilty glance.

  So it was true. There had been something between her and Rivera. I shouldn’t have been surprised. But I was. Surprised and wounded. Still, I told myself I had bigger fish to fry.

  Eric sighed and glanced toward the table. “Yeah, Coggins was pissed about that, but sometimes he’s just a loose…” He paused, shot his attention back toward me and shook his head. “It wasn’t him.”

  “He called me by name.”

  “The bastard in the car wash?”

  My throat was freezing up. Not from the ice cream. It was innocent of all crimes. “He called me McMullen.” I tried to relax the muscles around my larynx and slanted a glance in his direction, going for casual, almost achieving better-than-totally-freaked. “Any idea why that makes it worse?”

  “That he knew you?”

  I nodded.

  “Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he just knew of you. I mean…” He shrugged. “Considering your profession, I have to assume some of the people you know aren’t the most stellar examples of sanity.”