Love Notes

by Penny Mickelbury

  LOVE NOTES

  A MIMI PATTERSON/GIANNA MAGLIONE MYSTERY

  By

  Penny Mickelbury

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

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  PROLOGUE

  Washington, D.C.

  It was a dream come true, fantasy become reality, that she, Ellie Litton, could be in this city, strolling the monument grounds on a chilly Fall evening, leaves swirling and crunching beneath her feet, sun setting over the Potomac, Iowa so distant as to be practically non-existent in her consciousness. It was not a stretch to call it a miracle, she thought; after all, she had saved her own life, as surely as if some divine intervention had cured her of a terminal sickness.

  She resisted the urge to pinch herself. She had black and blue marks from so many pinches during this week while she waited for her new reality to take hold and replace the old. She’d always pinched herself. Sometimes, like recently, it was to confirm the reality of some surreal situation or circumstance; but more often, in the past, she had squeezed some secret skin between thumb and forefinger to prevent herself from screaming in anger or frustration or misery or whatever described the lifetime of feelings that she’d spent her life suppressing with painful pinches. But that was all in the past; she wasn’t at home in Iowa, wallowing in misery and fantasizing an escape. Iowa no longer was home, and her escape was a done deal. She was in Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital—the capital of the free world—strolling on a world-famous boulevard, surrounded by government workers rushing to subways and busses and home, and tourists going no place in a hurry. Like herself. Except she wasn’t a tourist and this, her first visit to Washington, actually was a home-coming of sorts. After a week in D.C., soaking up the history and culture of the place and reveling in her new freedom, she would move to her new home in Columbia, Maryland, a sleek, middle-to-upper crust enclave equidistant between D.C. and Baltimore. She could claim either city as home, depending on her mood. “Any place but Des Moines,” she said out loud, and then looked around to make sure no one had heard her talking to herself. Another habit she’d no longer need: talking out loud to herself because she was the only person who’d listen to what she had to say.

  She clutched the tourist map though she no longer needed to refer to it. The map’s details were burned into her memory, so many times had she gazed at it, studied it, mesmerized by the history that had come to be real life for her these last days. She was walking east on Constitution Avenue. The State Department was across the street, in the neighborhood called Foggy Bottom. The Reflecting Pool was ahead, on her right; she’d see it as she walked past it, though she wouldn’t have time to stop and...reflect. She didn’t want to be late for her rendezvous at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and she knew if she stopped at the Reflecting Pool she’d be there a while. That already was a habit, like spending much longer than planned at the Vietnam Memorial, though she wasn’t regretful about that, not in the least. She’d found his name—her oldest brother’s— etched there in the shiny black stone: ELTON LITTON. Alive forever, the name of the older brother dead so many years now, killed in a foreign war that few people seemed to care about anymore. She had touched his name, moved her finger across the carved letters, and closed her eyes and tried to remember what he looked like. She could not. After all, he’d been dead for almost thirty-six years. She was just fourteen when he went off to war, the baby of the family and the only girl, and she had not known it was possible he’d never come home again. She surprised herself that first day at the black Wall by weeping at the thought, and compounded her surprise by not feeling at all self-conscious about such a public display of emotion. She wasn’t the only one crying, and even if she had been, it would have been all right. She was entitled to her feelings, and to express them. This was new to Ellie—as new as her chic, expensive wardrobe, as new as the house she owned, as new as the freedom to stroll at twilight on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., en route to meet her new lover.

  She found herself caught up in a swirl of tourists leaving the Museum of Natural History and, like an unsuspecting insect snared in a spider’s web, she moved along with them, not annoyed or intimidated by their frenetic energy, and she marveled at the growth that had occurred within her. She really was a different person—one who could and would call her mother tonight and tell the old woman about Elton’s name on the Wall. Since she couldn’t tell her about Elvis’s name on the quilt. Elvis, her favorite brother, dead of AIDS, alone and ashamed and afraid. Ellie, ostensibly in Chicago on business, but there really to see the Quilt and Elvis’s name on it. She had sewn the panel herself, and sent it to be included. And it was there! She recalled feeling a strange, odd pride, just as she had at the Vietnam Memorial. Her brothers—the eldest and the youngest—were dead, but their names would live for ever. Her mother wouldn’t have wanted to hear about Elvis’s name memorialized in the Quilt, but she’d care about Elton’s name carved into the black Wall. Maybe that would take the edge of the other news, that she, Ellie, would not be returning to Iowa. Ever. There was no sadness within her, no pang of regret at how the news would affect her mother. She was fifty years old. It was time to leave home, time to exit her mother’s sphere of influence and control, time to stop being the dutiful daughter—the dutiful, only daughter without husband and children whose job it was to care for her widowed, elderly mother. No matter that she held down a full time job with enormous responsibility and that none of her sisters-in-law worked outside the home. “Time for you to take care of yourself, Mom. Or get one of your precious sons or their precious wives to take care of you. I’m busy having a life now.”

  She had spoken aloud again, and the swiftness with which the amiable crowd that surrounded her turned hostile and moved away was startling. “Guess it’s not a good idea to talk to yourself out loud in D.C.,” she said, just as sudden gust of cold air whipped across the monument grounds. One of the women in the tourist group emitted a long, shrill, “Oooooo!” and wrapped her arms around herself. She wore a cotton skirt and tee shirt—not the proper attire for Washington in October. Her comrades laughed and enveloped her in a group hug and, like a giant bug-body with many legs, they scurried up the street. Ellie was toasty in her wool-blend slacks and sweater from Nordstrom. She’d read up on D.C. weather and knew that it could turn sharply colder in October, though it wouldn’t last long so early in the season.

  She enjoyed possessing such knowledge. It meant she wouldn’t look like a stupid tourist. The propriety of her wardrobe marked her a resident of the area; their expense designated her successful. She was a talented enough software designer that she’d been scooped up almost immediately by a Maryland engineering firm after posting her resume on the internet. One month she decided to leave Iowa and the next month she had a new job, a new house, a new car. And a new lover. She twisted the ring on her baby finger and rubbed it like a talisman.

  Ellie stepped off the sidewalk onto the thick grass and angled toward the Potomac. She felt more alive, more excited, more anticipatory, than at any other time in her life. Whoever said, “Life begins at forty,” deserved an award for Biggest Understatement of Fact. “Better late than never,” she said to herself, for she was alone in her approach to Mr. Lincoln, and she didn’t wonder why. It definitely was chillier this clo
se to the water, and much darker. The museums and monuments were closed for the night, the tourists all somewhere warm. “I’ve got this all to myself.” She spread her arms wide and embraced the vista. She had wondered at first, but now she understood why the Lincoln Memorial was the perfect choice for a romantic assignation at dusk on a chilly night. Here beside the Potomac, which drifted lazily toward Virginia and, ultimately, into the Chesapeake Bay, with the planes headed toward the airport hanging low in the sky, circling, waiting their turn to land, their lights flashing almost impatiently—here it was serene and lovely and private. Here, she could be kissed and fondled and no one would see. No one but him, and he didn’t care: Abraham Lincoln, grim and silent, bathed in golden light. She gazed at the solemn visage of the sixteenth president and silently declared her own emancipation.

  Suddenly, a sharply colder wind cut across the path leading to Mr. Lincoln and Ellie shivered and leaned into it. “That felt like Iowa,” she said to herself with a laugh. “D.C., don’t you deceive me!”

  She was still laughing when the garrote buried itself in the folds of her neck and severed her esophagus.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Mimi Patterson hated the ringing of the telephone in the middle of the night more than just about anything else, so when it rang at 3:44 on that Friday morning she pulled the pillow over her head and burrowed more deeply beneath the covers and snuggled more closely into the spoon that was Gianna.

  Gianna Maglione always awoke fully alert at the late-night ringing of the phone, but this wasn’t her phone. It was Mimi’s. Gianna picked it up in the middle of the third ring, pulled the pillow from Mimi’s head and placed the receiver against her ear. “Answer the phone, Mimi.”

  “‘Lo?” Mimi whispered.

  “Goddammit, Patterson, get your ass up and get it in here!” the voice on the other end bellowed. Mimi groaned and pushed the phone away, toward Gianna, who heard, loudly and clearly, “You hear me, Patterson? I said get you ass in here! Fuckin’ David Trimble splattered his fuckin’ brains all over his living room wall and his wife says it’s your fuckin’ fault! She’s suing you, the paper, half the goddam editors, and God only knows who else! Goddammit, get your ass in here, Patterson, and deal with this mess you made! I’ve got a desk to run.”

  The line went dead and Gianna replaced the phone in its stand. She sat up, turned on the light, and looked down at the covered-up lump that was her lover. The pillow was back over her head and she was curled into a fetal ball. Gianna snatched the pillow away and pulled back the covers. It took about two seconds for the chill to envelop Mimi’s nakedness. Her eyes snapped open.

  “What’d you do that for?”

  “Did you hear that message?”

  “What message?”

  “On the telephone, Mimi. Your night editor. Henry’s his name, right?”

  “Henry called?” Mimi asked, shivering and reaching for covers that Gianna kept just out of reach. “Did I talk to him? What’d he say?”

  “No, you didn’t talk to him but I listened to him, and he said for you to get your ass to work because David Trimble committed suicide and his wife is blaming you. She’s also suing you and several editors at the paper.”

  Mimi sat up, still shivering but awake. She required just a few seconds to process what Gianna had said and the potential ramifications of the situation. She’d recently completed a series of stories—yet another series of stories—on yet another corrupt government official. This one, David Trimble, had been, until Mimi’s stories got him fired and indicted, the chief financial officer of a county school system in Virginia. Trimble thought of the county’s money as his money and he used it to play the stock market as if he were a day trader instead of a civil servant. Trimble proved to be a better trader than he was civil servant, earning close to a million dollars with his county school board stake. He even paid back the money he’d stolen, and thought that should have been sufficient to keep him out of trouble. He’d been livid when, after Mimi’s first story, the county supervisors had suspended him, and apoplectic when the SEC stepped in and made it a Federal case, demanding that he relinquish and return the money he’d made in the stock market. “Ill-gotten gains,” the prosecutor called the money. “Mine!” Trimble and his wife called it, vehemently denying the theft of any public funds and insisting that they had a right to keep the stock profits.

  It wasn’t the first series of articles to run under the byline, M. MONTGOMERY PATTERSON, to result in the ruin of a public official, though as far as Mimi was concerned, it easily could be the last. She was sick and damn tired of corrupt public officials, and even sicker and more tired of having the job of exposing their avarice.

  Gianna knew the story and the facts behind it and she watched Mimi ruminate, unable to read the expression on her face. A cop by trade and a lieutenant by rank, she was an expert at reading facial expressions, and knew exactly what it meant when there was nothing to read. But before Gianna could ask what she was thinking, Mimi sighed, shivered again, and hauled herself out of bed, causing in Gianna a sharp pang of regret to accompany the equally sharp pang of desire she always felt at the sight of the lovely, brown body.

  “I hate these stories and I’m not doing any more of them.” Mimi picked up her robe from the floor at the foot of the bed and put it on, wrapping it tightly around her. “It’s already cold and it’s still October,” she said shivering as she crossed to the closet, opened the door, and grabbed a pair of jeans. “What’s December going to be like?”

  “What kind of stories will you do, then?” Gianna asked, sensing that she needed to nudge Mimi back to center. That’s why Gianna couldn’t get a reading: there was none to be gotten, and that occurred only when Mimi was “out of whack,” as she called it, when she was flat and emotionless, as she was now.

  “None, maybe. How’s that sound? I’ll get a job at the gym as a personal trainer and fitness expert. Think I’ll attract any paying customers?”

  Before Gianna could respond the phone rang and Mimi rushed to answer it. She grabbed it up, her face wrinkled in irritation, and before the receiver met her ear she was shouting into it, “Goddammit, Henry, I’m on my way!” She punched the phone off and threw it down on the bed and, hands on hips, glared evilly at it. “And why the hell is it my fault the asshole killed himself? I didn’t tell him to steal the money, the stupid, greedy bastard, but I’m the one who gets blamed when he decides he can’t live with the consequences of his actions.”

  Gianna grinned. Mimi was back—her Mimi, the one full of passion every waking moment of her life. “I’d pay big bucks for your personal attention, but we’ll discuss that later. You’d better get yourself to the paper.”

  “I don’t know what the rush is all about, they don’t need me.” She opened the chest of drawers and got a sweater, panties and bra, and socks, then whipped back around to face Gianna. “Here’s an idea for a new slogan for the mealy-mouthed, weasely politicians since so many of their dicks have gotten caught in the family values vice: Be a Good American—Try Personal Responsibility. Think it’ll fly?”

  Gianna frowned. “What do you mean, they don’t need you? And why are you wearing jeans to work? And no, it won’t fly. That’s why something as weasely and mealy-mouthed as family values does fly. Now, why do you say they don’t they need you?”

  “If Trimble’s wife is going to sue me—me personally and not just the paper—then I’m off the story because I’ve become part of the story and I can’t cover myself. It’ll be assigned to somebody else. Why they want me in now is to see if they can con my notes and sources out of me. That’s why I’m wearing jeans to work. I won’t be going anywhere and I won’t be doing anything but talking to bosses and lawyers. And they’ll hate it that I’m wearing jeans. And that my hair is standing all over my head.” She looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was, indeed, standing all over her head—in unruly, curly ringlets that signified that her need of a haircut was at least a month overdue. Gianna secretly loved Mimi’s hai
r that way—in its pre-dreadlock stage—wild and free and totally resistant to the efforts of the comb.

  “Can they?” Gianna asked, trying to remain focused on the business about notes and sources instead of on Mimi’s appearance, which Gianna found more than a little alluring, even at four o’clock in the morning.

  “Hell no,” Mimi snapped. “This is a brand new story and whoever’s assigned to it can develop their own sources.”

  “Then why wake you up at such an ungodly hour?”

  “Because,” Mimi responded, “lawyers hate it when reporters become part of the story. Personalizing the First Amendment muddies the waters. It’s no longer an abstraction when a reporter or editor’s name is attached to a noble concept. Or to a lawsuit.” She disappeared into the bathroom and Gianna heard the shower start. Shivering in her own nakedness, she slid her feet into her slippers, found her own robe at the foot of the bed, and headed for the kitchen. She had coffee made and in the thermos by the time Mimi was ready to walk out the door.

  “Are you in for a really hard time?” she asked, kissing the back of her neck and further mussing her unruly mop of hair.

  Mimi shook her head and the ringlets danced. “The hardest thing I’ll have to do today is stay awake while I talk to the lawyers and not yawn in their faces. I’m already envisioning myself back in bed tonight and deeply asleep before the news comes on.”

  “Uh, uh,” Gianna said, shaking her head. “Not tonight, my sweet.”

  “And why not tonight?” Mimi whipped around to face Gianna, almost dropping her thermos in an effort to keep from dropping her purse, which hit the garage floor, spilling its contents. And as she cursed under her breath and shoved pens, a notepad and an eyeglasses case back into her purse, Gianna reminded her that they’d promised to attend the grand opening party of the new women’s bar on Capitol Hill.

  “You promised Marianne and Renee you’d be there and they’ll be really hurt if you’re not. Especially Marianne. You know how personally she takes rejection.”