Odd Partners

by Mystery Writers of America

  He repeated this annoying act the next few times he saw me, while I tried a variety of countermeasures: First, veering way to the side of him onto a lawn when he came by and did the bunching up the leash trick. Next, brushing very close to Hugh as I passed. The third time, I squatted down and said, “Nice doggie,” ignoring the man’s babble about how he had found the poor beast, thin and scabby, tied to the fender of a car, how she flinched if anyone got near her. Once, the dog regarded me with eyes the color of caramels, then slowly wagged her tail.

  The effect on Hugh was incredible. “She likes you!” he exclaimed. He immediately became a different person. He told me his name, a name his grandmother did not like, he explained, so she always called him Hug and gave him one when she said it, laughing at her joke. Wasn’t that cute?

  It was not. There was very little about this man that was, so why I had agreed to accompany him and the dog, whose name was Antigone, for coffee outside at a nearby dog-friendly café, I could not really say.

  I fell, not in love, but into a kind of desultory romance with Hugh Hug. This was the way he was about sex: He would come into the room and fix me with a stare that had everything stripped away but pure, animalistic urge. It was as if he didn’t speak English, as if he were some kind of primitive off an island, like the guy in that movie Swept Away. For some reason, this held a certain appeal for me. But after sex, he would always examine the uneven, white-rimmed flesh of his cuticles, which he didn’t seem to know how to push down like everybody else, and say something like “I had a fort when I was seven that I built myself and the goddamn contractor next door shoved it over with a bulldozer. He is the only person I ever wanted to murder.”

  But what really made me break up with him was when, post-coitus, he started making a mental survey of my friends, one by one, and wondering aloud what it would be like to have sex with them. I told him to stop, I told him to leave, and, out of desperation, when he got to my best friend, Jen, I told him to go ahead, that she was a holy-terror bitch underneath that helpful façade, and the two of them having a relationship would be my greatest revenge for all the crap he’d put me through. I added that he should put his pants on, get out, and, not incidentally, never come back. My so-called obsession with Oglethorpe, despite Jen’s theories, thus had nothing to do with the breakup, though, just for the record, Oglethorpe had not liked Hugh or Antigone and seems quite content that I sleep alone now, though I can’t say that I am.

  Whatever. I grab my coat and purse and head out the door.

  Cops. All over the place. Sirens. A small crowd gathering around my neighbor’s oleander bushes. I see some dirty tennis shoes, sprawled, connected to corduroy-clad legs. Those tennis shoes. Orange. How I had hated them.

  I push past a lady with a waist-length white ponytail. Knock into a kid toying with a skateboard, pushing it forward a few inches, back. “I need…” I gasp, elbowing him.

  Oh no. It’s true. Hugh.

  He is facedown, sprawled. The hair on the back of his head is dark, matted, and sticky-looking. I hunker down in a squat, my hands pressed to my lips, squashing them against my teeth. I feel silent, very silent, alone silent, but I hear little whimpering noises coming from my lips.

  Something soft bumps against my chin. A black-and-tan dog, trying to crawl into a lap that isn’t there, trying to fit under my chin. “Oh, Antigone!” I moan and hug her.

  The cop trying to keep the gathering crowd back looks at me sharply. “You know the deceased?”

  I nod miserably.

  He takes out his phone. “Name?”

  “Hugh Connoley.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Blaire Elliott.”

  “What’s your relation to the deceased?”

  “He…a friend. He was a friend.”

  “Do you know his address?”

  Absurdly, I point, backward, down Delaware three blocks to his apartment.

  The cop enters all this info into his phone, then speaks into his shoulder radio. “Stay here, ma’am, please,” he says when I stand up and grasp Antigone’s dangling leash.

  I wait what seems a long time. Probably forty-five minutes. Hugh is covered with a white plastic sheet. One of the cops, poking in the foliage, picks something up, shows it to another, grunts “Nine millimeter.” The shell casing is bagged. More cops arrive and double-park, slowing workday traffic. There’s a coroner’s van and a crime unit truck.

  Finally, a detective arrives, asks various questions. I am pointed out. He comes over to me and introduces himself. “I’m Kevin Lanke. I’m in the homicide unit of the Berkeley Police Department. I’d like you to come with me and give a statement at the station, if you would.” His tone implies that indeed, I would.

  I look down at Antigone. He does, too. “Can you take your dog home, please? I’ll follow you there.”

  I explain that it’s not my dog, it’s Hugh’s dog. His eyebrows raise. “I can put her in my house,” I offer, “temporarily.” I wonder what Oglethorpe will think of that.

  The detective alerts on that. “Where do you live?”

  “Right here.” I gesture backward one house.

  The detective ponders this, tapping his phone against his leg. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s do that.”

  * * *

  —

  The detective comes into my kitchen, where I enter through the back door. His eyes rove the house as I get Antigone a bowl of water and some dog biscuits I had bought for her when Hugh and I were an item.

  “You have a dog yourself?” he asks.

  “No,” I say.

  We go downtown—well, a mile away—to police headquarters, in his unmarked car. He does a million things while he drives: looks around, fiddles with his onboard computer, checks his phone.

  Once there, he puts me in one of those windowless rooms that always make me claustrophobic when I see them on TV programs. He leaves me there. I figure I am being filmed. I think of Oglethorpe and wonder, for the first time, if he objects to having a camera trained on him every night. When the detective finally returns, I am feeling a little asthmatic. He asks me if I need medical care. I say no and that I want to get out of here quickly. He smiles.

  I am in there for an hour and a half, mostly because Detective Lanke evidently has a bad memory, ha-ha, and asks me to repeat everything a million times. I tell him how we met and about our relationship. I tell him about his grandmother hugging him. I tell him that Hugh was a techie but consumer-oriented. I tell him he has designed software that eliminates many of the bugs present in the most popular operating system, and was just trying to bring it to market, but…

  The detective pounces. When he’s interested in something I am droning on about, he kind of smiles, I have noticed as the minutes tick by. It’s not a real smile, just a baring of teeth that seem uncommonly wet.

  “But what?” he asks.

  I don’t really want to get into this. “Well, his investor, his friend, was trying to get his money back, and Hugh didn’t want to because he was just about to launch, he said. Something like that. This information is two months old,” I added.

  “Is that when you broke up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you break up, again?”

  I flap my hand sideways. “No real reason. Just got…tired of each other’s acts. You know.”

  “No. I don’t know,” he said, smiling wetly.

  “Well, you know. People get tired of one another.”

  “What ‘acts’?” he pursues.

  I am not going to tell him about his primitive islander routine. “I don’t know,” I said tiredly. “He seemed uptight all the time, and he thought I was too devoted to my cat.”

  “Was this your only serious relationship, Miss Elliott?” Detective Lanke asks, abruptly exploring new ground.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.
“Of course not. I am thirty-seven and, though my cat does not think so, I’ve been told I’m reasonably attractive.”

  “I meant recently. Just before or just after Hugh.”

  “Well, my husband was just before Hugh. Our divorce came through about three weeks after I met Hugh, but we’d been separated for almost a year before that.”

  “How did he feel about Hugh?”

  “Oh!” Another hand flap. When had I developed this habit? “He—Joe, I mean—would come over to my house and tell me a million things wrong with me, then break into tears and beg me to come back to him. Yeah, he hated the whole idea of Hugh.”

  “Joe…what?” Lanke’s hand is poised over a notebook.

  “Oh, please. Joe didn’t kill Hugh. I don’t know if they ever met.”

  “Joe what?”

  I sigh. “Joseph Ardle Smythe.”

  I give him the address, and he finally lets me go. He offers me a ride home, but I am sick of him. It’s only a mile. I walk.

  * * *

  —

  Two days later, I am served with a search warrant. First come a team of crime scene types in white overalls with shower caps over their shoes. They spend a lot of time in the bedroom and the bathroom, emerging with three evidence bags: one containing the bloody cap, one my plastic gloves, and one my sink stopper. Uh-oh.

  Next come detectives with big feet. They open every drawer and paw through my papers. Then comes a two-man tech team. They take Oglethorpe’s camera.

  “Oh no!” I wail. I am given a receipt.

  I slam the door on the last of them and go upstairs and climb on the bed. Oglethorpe appears in the window and looks at me, tail switching. He thumps down on the floor and disappears for a while. But within five minutes he is on the bed with me, pushing into my armpit with his nose, as he likes to do. I hug him. He purrs.

  “I’m sorry, Oglethorpe,” I whisper. I think of his fan base.

  * * *

  —

  I call Jen the next day and tell her that she better put something on Oglethorpe’s Facebook page telling his fans that he is on hiatus. Or something.

  “Why?” she demands.

  I tell her about the police taking the camera. “Hoo, boy!” she says, and chuckles.

  “What’s so funny?’ I ask.

  “Gotta go!” I can hear her laughing as she slams down the phone.

  * * *

  —

  I never do this, but I go to a nearby bar, Chez Here, by myself. I sit at the bar and order a margarita. I need to think, and the atmosphere is not conducive in my own home, with the uneasy truce of Antigone and Oglethorpe and things still a mess from the police.

  The first thought I have, after the agave and lime juice have engineered some rearrangement of my brain cells, is that I am a suspect. Duh. It seems so obvious now. Is that what Jen had meant by “Hoo, boy!”—that she had realized it right away? I take another swallow and lick salt off my lips. If so, best friend, why did you laugh?

  Someone slides onto the stool next to me. He smiles. He has wet teeth like you-know-who.

  “What’re you drinking?” he asks, signaling the bartendress.

  “Go away,” I say.

  He frowns. “I don’t know that one.” He points a finger at me. “Cointreau, pear juice, and muddled sinsemilla, am I right?”

  I have to smile.

  He holds out a hand. “Steve Lanke.”

  “Lanke!”

  “You say that like you know my brother.”

  “Know and dislike,” I say.

  “That makes two of us. Police work turns you cold.” He mock-shivers.

  “You’re a spy,” I say. “You followed me here and are going to try to pump me for information because your horrible brother thinks I killed Hugh.”

  “Who?”

  “Hugh.”

  “That’s what I asked!” It’s stupid, but we both laugh, he for the normal duration. But I go on giggling for almost a minute. Okay, I admit it. A little alcohol goes a long way with me. Especially when I’m stressed. After two more margaritas, I am convinced that Steve not only is not a spy, but that we are united in despising his cop brother, and furthermore that it would be a really good idea to brave Antigone and Oglethorpe and repair to my camera-less bedroom. We do so.

  * * *

  —

  I live on orange juice and aspirin the next day at work, but after coming home and consuming most of a small cheese-and-olive pizza, I start to feel better and cognitive activity returns. I feed Antigone and Oglethorpe on opposite ends of the kitchen, then put on my coat and trudge over to Jen’s.

  She’s not acting like a bitch tonight. She pours us two jumbo-sized glasses of zinfandel and we repair to her couch. I end up telling her about Steve. “Woo-hoo!” she says.

  “I hope he’s not a spy,” I say, looking up at the ceiling.

  “Think you’ll get first degree?” Jen asks.

  I drop my eyes. “That is not funny, Jen.”

  She smiles. Something evil in that smile. “Sorry.”

  I see something beyond her, on a side table. “Hey, that’s not Oglethorpe’s camera, is it? I thought the cops had it.”

  “Well, gee, Blaire, they made more than one, you know?”

  “Yeah, but why do you have another one?”

  “Jeez, Blaire, you’re so suspicious. Don’t you know cops keep things forever in a murder case? I was going to set up another camera for Oglethorpe. You know, a gift? And a gift of my time, too, which I don’t have much of left over.”

  I sit forward drunkenly, set down my glass with a clink on the coffee table, and heave myself out of the too-soft low couch. I traverse the coffee table and lift the camera. “Will I be able to learn how to use it?”

  “Sure. It’s just the same as the other one. Besides, you don’t have to do anything. I do everything.”

  “I have to know how to shut it off.” I playfully look through the camera’s viewfinder at her. “There’s Steve now, you know.”

  Jen spits wine down her sweatshirt in a half-cough, half-guffaw. “Don’t worry,” she says when she is able. “This camera works exactly the way the last one did.”

  * * *

  —

  She installs it the next evening and that night, late, Steve comes over. I show him the camera and explain about Oglethorpe’s worldwide fame and ostentatiously flip the switch on the side. “There now, privacy.”

  He feigns wide-eyed non-comprehension. “What do we need that for?”

  I slip my robe off. “I’ll show you.”

  I am sitting on Steve’s lap when I hear a thump and whirl around. Oglethorpe has deposited an old flip-flop, filthy, with crumbling rubber, on the floor. He gives me a look of pure contempt, scrabbles out the window and disappears.

  * * *

  —

  I am not doing such a great job at work the next day. I’m an assistant property manager at a big commercial building in the Financial District in San Francisco, and I’m supposed to “sell” the square footage and know the amenities and how much reconstruction is allowed and so on for each unit, but a lot of that keeps getting obliterated by memories of last night with Steve.

  I am happy to see his number light up my cellphone. “Hey,” I say.

  “Got a call from Kevin today. He told me to knock off any relationship with you, that you were a murder suspect.”

  I freeze. I mean, I know I am a suspect, but how the hell did Detective Lanke know about Steve and my relationship? I ask Steve this pressing question. “I don’t know,” he says. “I haven’t told a soul. Have you?”

  “Well, just Jen. She’s my best friend. But she wouldn’t tell.”

  “Well, I guess she did.”

  My clients come back from a review of the toilets and I have to hang up. I show
the rest of the space in a daze. Jen wouldn’t do that. I mean, who would? Call the detective and rat on her girlfriend that she was boffing his brother? It didn’t make sense, even if Jen didn’t like me. And Jen did like me. She was my best friend.

  * * *

  —

  Steve has some lame excuse for not coming over tonight. I curl up on my bed with a cup of hot tea, trying to figure out another person besides Jen who would have told Detective Lanke about us. I give it up. It seems petty…unless the detective really thinks I killed Hugh. Ridiculous. It is merely coincidence that Oglethorpe selected the bloody cap, coincidence that I knew Hugh, coincidence that he was found dead near my house, and his bloody cap was found in my house. I clutch hunks of my hair. That confluence of events does sound really bad. But not to someone who knows Oglethorpe. And the cops had been given the URL for the cat’s Facebook page. Anybody who knows Oglethorpe’s nightly forays, and there are thousands of people who do, knows that he just selects items at random and brings them to me.

  Or does he? I sit up and swing my legs off the bed. I remember that I had thought that I really don’t know what Oglethorpe does nights. Maybe it is time I find out.

  * * *

  —

  Do cats have good senses of smell like dogs? I wonder, as I crouch in my own bushes in black sweats, if Oglethorpe will be able to detect me. I wait for what seems like an hour, freezing to death, my thigh muscles cramping as I squat, for the cat to return.

  From my vantage point, I see someone in a hoodie across the street looking like he is casing George Dodd’s MINI Cooper. I hear a thwack and then the tinkle of glass. The thief reaches in, opens the door, rummages within. A black SUV screeches up, and the hoodie climbs in. Off they go. Geez! I didn’t know Delaware Street was such a hotbed of crime.

  I change my position slightly and rub my fingers together, and then I hear it: that oh-so-familiar thump of small feet. Oglethorpe. I straighten up in time to just see his tail disappearing inside the window frame. A few minutes later, after depositing his find, presumably on my bedroom floor, he is out again, jumping from window frame to wisteria loggia to fence to car hood. He turns left on the sidewalk and disappears. I follow silently.