Killer in High Heels

by Gemma Halliday

  Uh oh. I watched Law & Order; I knew this room. This was where they shined those bright lights down on people and fed them soda after soda without letting them go to the bathroom until they finally cracked and confessed to everything.

  I hesitated in the doorway.

  “Don’t I get one phone call?” I asked.

  Belushi snickered. “You watch too much TV.” Then she sat me down at the peeling laminate table. “You wanna soda or something?” she asked.

  Gulp. See, what did I tell you? “No, thanks.”

  She just shrugged, then walked out, shutting the door behind her.

  I cautiously looked around the room. No bright spotlights. No video cameras in the corner. The only thing that screamed “interrogation” was the big one-way mirror. I stared at it. I admit, I was curious. Of course I’d seen these things a hundred times before on TV, but I’d never actually seen one in person. I slowly stood up and walked over to it, wondering if there was anyone watching me from the other side.

  “Hello?” I whispered, doing a little wave at the reflective surface. No answer. I took a couple of steps closer, squinting to see if I could make out anything on the other side. Nothing. I put my nose right up to the glass and smushed my face into it. Still couldn’t see a thing.

  Unfortunately, Belushi picked that moment to come back into the room. I jumped back from the mirror as the door popped open.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Nothing.” I pulled my sleeve down and rubbed a nose print off the mirror.

  “Uh huh,” she said, believing me about as much as I believed no one was watching this whole exchange from the next room. She gestured to the table and I obediently sat down in one of the metal chairs as two men entered the room. The first was a short guy in brown slacks and a short sleeve button-down that looked like it came with a free pocket protector. His bald head and sparse mustache bore an uncanny resemblance to Detective Andy Sipowicz from NYPD Blue and his round figure just barely made it through the door.

  But my gaze didn’t stick with Sipowicz for long, my attention immediately falling on the second guy as his broad-shouldered frame walked through the door.

  Ramirez.

  I had never been so glad to see anyone in my entire life. I would have jumped up and hugged him had he not been giving me the death look.

  Ramirez and Sipowicz sat down on the opposite side of the table, the portly detective placing a lined yellow notepad in front of him.

  “My name’s Detective Romanowsky,” he said with a Jersey accent. “You already know Detective Ramirez. We need to ask you a few questions about your activities over the past two days. Before we begin can I get you a soda?”

  “No!” I blurted out.

  Sipowicz jumped in his seat.

  “Uh, I mean, no thank you.” I bit my lip, looking to Ramirez. He wouldn’t actually let them do the soda-no-bathroom routine on me, would he? I searched his face for any sign of leniency but he just stared back, doing his stony Bad Cop.

  “Okay, then. Let’s start with your whereabouts this afternoon,” Sipowicz said, pen poised over the notepad.

  I swallowed, my mouth feeling like sandpaper. “I went to a funeral and was on my way to the salon and after that I swear I was going to leave Vegas,” I said, addressing Ramirez’s poker face.

  Sipowicz raised one eyebrow. “So you were on your way out of town when the officer picked you up?”

  “No, wait. I mean, I didn’t try to leave leave. Not like I was skipping town ’cause I did something bad or anything. I was just going away. With a totally guiltfree conscience. Okay, well, maybe I feel a little guilty for lying to my mother about the whole Palm Springs thing, but that’s a whole different kind of guilt. I mean, that’s the I’m-going-to-have-to-endure-dinner-at-her-house-for-a-month-straight-to-make-up-for-it kind of guilt. Not the someone-died-and-I’m-not-taking-the-rap-for-it kind. Not that I want to take the rap for this. I don’t. Because I didn’t do it. Which is why I wasn’t fleeing at all. I was just leaving. Slowly. No fleeing.”

  Sipowicz raised the other eyebrow.

  I looked to Ramirez, desperation bubbling into my voice. “You believe me, don’t you?”

  But all I got in return was Bad Cop.

  See, here’s the thing: Last summer when I kind of got involved in that murder investigation, Ramirez had, for a fraction of an instant, believed I had something to do with it. In his defense, I did suspiciously keep turning up in the vicinity of dead bodies. But I’d hated the fact that he doubted me, even for a second. And now that our tongues had done the mambo together, I hated that blank, give-away-nothing stare of his even more.

  My hands fidgeted in my lap as I waited for him to say something. (Anything!)

  Finally he broke his silence, turning to Sipowicz. “Could you give us a minute?”

  The balding detective looked from Ramirez to me. Then shrugged. “All right. I’ll be outside.”

  I waited until the door clicked shut behind him before pleading my case again. “You have to believe me,” I blurted out. “I didn’t kill anyone! You know I wouldn’t do that.”

  Ramirez sighed, rubbing one hand across his face. “Of course I know that. Jesus, Maddie, why can’t you just go shopping or get your hair done like a normal girl?”

  I did an internal sigh of relief. Okay, so the comment was sexist on so many levels, but at least someone knew this was all a big mistake. “Then why am I here?” I asked. “What happened to Bobbi?”

  “Bob Hostetler’s body was found this afternoon in your father’s garage.”

  “But that’s impossible,” I protested. “I was just—” I paused. Oh my god, the bag of fertilizer! I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. I hadn’t tripped over a soil treatment. I’d tripped over Bob!

  “You were just what?” Ramirez leaned his elbows on the table, his eyes narrowing in on me.

  “I was just…talking about Bobbi the other day.”

  Ramirez shook his head. “Look, now is the time to come clean with me, Maddie. Your fingerprints are all over that house and the crime scene unit found half a credit card with your name on it wedged in the back door.”

  Damn! My Macy’s card! In my haste to slip past Unibrow, I’d forgotten all about it.

  “And,” Ramirez continued, “the shoe print of a size seven high heel was found next to the body. Any guess whose?”

  “Jimmy Choo’s?”

  Ramirez ground his teeth together. “Yours.”

  “Okay, I can explain.”

  “Oh, I bet you can.”

  I put my hands on my hips. “Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?”

  Ramirez tilted his head from side to side, working a whole new set of kinks out of his neck. “Nothing. Go on.”

  Considering he had handcuffs and I was currently a ward of the state, I let it go. “Okay, well, I just went to the house to talk to Larry. Only he wasn’t there so I thought I’d have a little look around, so I tried to get in the back door, but picking a lock with a credit card is a lot harder than it looks on TV, and it broke. So I tried the side door and that one was open, so I went in and looked around. That’s how my prints got there.”

  Ramirez stared at me. “Do you realize you just admitted breaking and entering to a police officer?”

  “I didn’t break and enter! My credit card broke, so I entered through an open door. Totally different.”

  Ramirez looked up at the ceiling. I wondered which saint he was praying to. Probably the one that looked over men who had to endure babbling blondes.

  “It wasn’t me,” I said again for good measure. “They’re framing Larry; don’t you see?”

  “Who’s framing him, Maddie?”

  “Monaldo and Unibrow!”

  His eyebrows knitted together. “Unibrow?”

  “That big guy who works with Monaldo. He was at Larry’s house yesterday too.”

  Ramirez sat forward, all ears now. “You saw him with the body?”

  “Well, no, not
exactly. But I saw him in Larry’s house and then saw his car outside and the trunk was open. That must have been how he transported the body.”

  “So let me get this straight.” Ramirez rubbed his temples again as if following my train of thought gave him a headache. “You actually saw Unibrow in Larry’s house.”

  “Yes. Kind of.”

  “Kind of?”

  “I was hiding under the bed at the time. But I saw his shoes.”

  Ramirez threw his hands up in the air. “Jesus,” he muttered.

  “But I could totally pick them out of a lineup though. They were chocolate brown, soft leather, wingtips, thin rubber soles, with a tiny detail on the back like a diamond shape.”

  Ramirez gritted his teeth together again. “We are not doing a shoe lineup.”

  “But you’ve got to believe me. You know I didn’t do this!”

  Ramirez sighed, blowing a big breath of air up at the ceiling. “I’m sorry, Maddie,” he said, his voice a little softer, “but it doesn’t matter what I know; it only matters…”

  “…what you can prove,” I finished for him. He was starting to sound like a broken record.

  He nodded. “Look, I’ll see what I can do to get you out of here. But I’m telling you, the DA has enough to hold you over for arraignment. This is murder they’re talking about. I can’t just make this go away because I like you.”

  I bit my lip. I know I should have been plummeting into despair at the thought of going back to my friends in holding, but instead I was fixated on that last part of the sentence. Ramirez liked me. He really liked me.

  I reined in my Sally Field impression, instead asking, “So, about Bobbi. How did he…you know, expire?”

  “The cause of death was blunt force trauma. Someone hit him over the head.”

  Not a gunshot. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. Okay, I know I told Ramirez Larry was being framed, but until he’d said that a teeny tiny part of my mind had been replaying the sound of that gunshot on my answering machine.

  “So where has he been for the last week?”

  Ramirez shook his head. “I don’t know. Look, this isn’t even technically my case. I should be with Monaldo right now.”

  “Sorry,” I said, hanging my head. Just when I’d vowed to stay out of Ramirez’s way, here I was jeopardizing his case all over again.

  He reached across the table and put his hand over mine. It was big and warm and I had the sudden urge to feel that same comforting grip wrapped around my whole body. Tears stung the back of my eyes at the thought of him leaving me alone here.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he promised. Had anyone else said it, I would have told them they were full of donkey doo. But somehow, coming from him, I believed it.

  Instead of letting the sting develop into full-fledged tears, I sniffed and nodded in what I thought was a pretty brave display, considering the circumstances.

  “Here.” Ramirez pushed the notepad across the table to me. “Write down everything you just said to me. Though,” he paused and shot me a lopsided grin, “you may want to leave out the whole breaking and entering part.”

  I nodded. “Right.” I picked up the pen and tried to put down the events of the last two days in a semicoherent fashion.

  “I’m going to tell Detective Romanowsky he can come back in now,” Ramirez said, standing up.

  I nodded. Then did a little wave at the mirror.

  Ramirez paused halfway across the room. “What was that?”

  I pointed at the mirror. “I was waving to the detective.”

  He cocked his head to the side and gave me a funny look.

  “You know,” I continued. “On the other side of the glass.”

  The corner of his mouth quirked up ever so slightly, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “That’s just a mirror.”

  “But on Law & Order they…” I trailed off as Ramirez shook his head at me, that quirk turning into a full-fledged grin.

  “Honey, you watch way too much TV.”

  I ducked my head back down to the notepad, feeling volcanic heat blush my cheeks as Ramirez did a low chuckle out the door. I think I just hit an embarrassment scale seventy-five.

  After I finished my written statement, then verbally repeated the whole thing to Detective Sipowicz, I was escorted back to the holding cell where Buggy and the Bra Lady were still waiting.

  There were no windows in the cell and since my watch had been confiscated along with my shoes (I was still trying to figure out just how my Fossil could be used as a weapon), I had no idea how long I sat there. But it felt like an eternity. Especially since I hadn’t used the bathroom since before the funeral and despite refusing every soda offered, now had to pee like a racehorse. I eyed the very public commode in the corner. Even overlooking the fifteen million germs lurking on its steely metal surface, there was no way I was going to do my business out in the open for all to see. I crossed my legs and prayed Ramirez got me out of here soon.

  In the meantime I replayed my encounter at Larry’s house in my head again. After listening to Ramirez, I was sure Unibrow had killed Bobbi, then planted the body in my dad’s garage. What I wasn’t sure of was if the LVMPD could ever really prove it. So far Monaldo had gotten away scot-free with Hank’s killing, and by the looks of things—me in a jail cell!—he wasn’t doing much worse with this one. Which begged the question: Which was worse, my father being on the run from the Mob or on the run from the police?

  I uncrossed and recrossed my legs again, wondering just how long it took for a bladder to burst. I was pretty sure I was seconds from finding out when Mizz Belushi finally came back in and called my name. I almost wept for joy when she opened the doors and said I was free to go. Almost. Instead I pleaded with her to point me in the direction of the nearest bathroom.

  After using the facilities (which honestly weren’t a whole lot better than the ones in the holding cell), I splashed a little water on my face and went in search of my belongings. Specifically my cover-up. My eyes no longer qualified as bags. I was packing steamer sized trunks.

  Belushi escorted me to a little metal cage where a guy in a uniform handed me a plastic baggie with my personal belongings. I was instructed to check to make sure everything was there then sign my name on a slip of paper in triplicate. They were, including my brokenheeled Cavallis. I put them on anyway. Broken or not, they were better than the paper booties. Besides, they went perfectly with my grass-stained blouse and mangled skirt.

  Before I left, Sipowicz met me at the door and informed me in no uncertain terms that I was not to leave Clark County. Even slowly.

  I stepped outside into the cool night air and took a deep breath. I felt like I’d been locked up for days instead of hours. The sun was long gone, the sky a dark blue, and above the layer of Vegas lights there might have even been stars twinkling. I wrapped my arms around myself against the chill in the air, feeling the weight of the last twenty-four hours sitting on my shoulders like a tension headache just waiting to explode.

  Part of me had hoped that Ramirez would be waiting for me when I got out, but the only people on the steps of the Clark County Regional Justice Center were a couple of homeless guys and a man handing out flyers for a strip club downtown. I was torn. The fact that he was working meant he was that much closer to putting Monaldo behind bars and my father out of harm’s way. But the fact that he’d chosen work over me, yet again, didn’t speak well of whatever sort of non-relationship relationship we were attempting to have here. I tried not to think about it (lest I incur the wrath of that tension headache). Instead I sat down on the stone steps and pulled out my cell to call Dana for a ride.

  But before I could hit send, the phone rang in my hand.

  “Hello?”

  “You were arrested!” came the screeching tone of my mother’s voice.

  Why, oh, why couldn’t I remember to check the caller ID before I picked up?

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Oh my god, please tell m
e it’s not true. Tell me that my baby is not in jail!.”

  “Okay. I’m not in jail.” Which, as of five minutes ago, was actually the truth.

  “Oh Maddie, how could you do this to me? Last time Vegas, now Marco calls and tells me you’ve been hauled off to jail!”

  Great. Leave it to Marco to spread news faster than a grassfire in the Hollywood Hills.

  “Mom, I’m okay, really.”

  “Where did I go wrong, Maddie?” she asked, ignoring me. “What did I do to turn you to a life of crime?”

  Mental forehead smack. “Mom! I didn’t do it.”

  “Of course not. And we’ll get you the best lawyer in town to prove it. Let’s see, Mrs. Rosenblatt’s second husband was an attorney. Of course, he’s dead now, but I’m sure she knows someone from his firm who will take our case. Oh, I know! Al Weinstein has a brother who knows a man who did time for mail fraud. Maybe we can call his lawyer…”

  “Mom!” I interrupted before she started calling names from the yellow pages. “I’m fine. Look, this is all just a big misunderstanding.”

  “They didn’t hurt you, did they, Maddie? I saw this Barbara Walters special last month about how those guards take advantage of female prisoners. They didn’t take advantage of my baby, did they?”

  “No, Mom. I’m fine. The officers were very nice.”

  “Are they standing right there? Are they making you say that? Cough twice if they’re making you say it.”

  I seriously hoped Dana had an Advil in her purse because the tension headache had just started flirting with migraine territory.

  “I’m fine, Mom. F-I-N-E.”

  “This is all your father’s fault. He dragged you into this. I could kill that man.” She paused. “Woman. Whatever.”

  I rubbed my temple. “Let’s not bring Larry into this, okay?”

  “Oh, my sweet, sweet, sweet baby. You always were so protective. So caring. So loving.”

  So in denial.

  “But don’t you worry, Maddie,” she continued. “Mommy’s here. It’s okay if you want to cry.”

  “I don’t want to cry.” What I wanted was an aspirin with a tequila chaser.

  “Oh, my brave baby! Don’t worry, honey, we’re going to take care of everything.” Then I heard a funny sound in the background. Almost like an announcement over a loudspeaker.