Love Notes

by Penny Mickelbury

  Gianna sat up, pulling the covers up to her chin. “Then what is it?”

  “People,” Mimi spat out. “The citizenry,” she said with a sneer. “They don’t give a damn anymore about graft and corruption in high places. Half of them have come to expect it and think it’s normal and the other half subscribe to some sick notion that whatever anybody can get away with is all right and that it really is my fault that Trimble killed himself. If it hadn’t been for me nosing in his affairs, he’d still be alive. After all,” she said bitterly, “he did repay the money.”

  Gianna pulled her closer. “I have noticed that the public tends to accept and excuse a lot more illegal behavior, and yes, there is that tendency to blame the messenger. But does that mean you quit? Give up?”

  Mimi shrugged. “Why not? I don’t want to get used to being sued every time I uncover some dirt, and I definitely don’t like being made to feel that it’s all my fault. Anyway, I’ve decided that I could really get into working a forty-hour week. That would give me time to become a regular at The Bayou, which would give me time to work on my dance moves.”

  “And when did you decide all this?”

  “If you’d been on the dance floor with me you’d know when. And why. Which reminds me.” She threw back the covers, exposing their nakedness to the chilly air. “Get up and feed me!”

  “I already did,” Gianna whined, grabbing the covers and pulling them all the way back up to her chin.

  “I don’t mean that,” Mimi said, wrapping her robe tightly around herself. “I mean food. I’m starving!”

  “How could you be?” Gianna asked, disbelievingly. “It’s only been a couple of hours since we ate. Did you work up that much of an appetite?”

  “I haven’t eaten since this aft...wait a second! Do you mean to tell me that you ate at The Bayou?

  “Of course! Didn’t you?”

  “Did you see that line?” Mimi practically bellowed. “It wrapped twice around the room! And I told you that’s where I talked to Cassie Ali, in the stupid line. Or was that one of the many times you weren’t listening to me?”

  Gianna shook her head at Mimi, as if she’d done something really dumb. “I always listen to you. And why ever would you stand in a line, Mimi?”

  “And I suppose you didn’t stand in the line?”

  “Of course not,” Gianna said with a derisive snort as she climbed out of bed and slid into her robe. “Marianne took me into the kitchen. I looked for you, but the crowd was too dense. I had shrimp remoulade and jambalaya and half a catfish po’ boy and some red beans and rice and a crawfish something or other—I’d never heard of it—but it was scrumptious! And coffee with chicory in it! Have you ever had that? It’s an amazing taste. What is chicory anyway? Think we can buy some to go in our coffee?” The pillow hit her square in the face.

  “Cops!” Mimi said in disgust as she chased Gianna down the hallway to the kitchen. “You get to gorge your face in the kitchen while the rest of us stand in a line that never moves and now I’ve got to settle for eating spinach ravioli leftovers while you’re burping catfish po’ boy!”

  Gianna stopped and let Mimi catch her. She pulled her into a tight embrace, hands busy beneath the bathrobe. “I’ll make it up to you. How’s that?”

  “How, indeed!” Mimi was struggling to maintain her feigned indignation, was on the brink of giving up the struggle and giving in to Gianna’s hands when, a beat after the fact, she picked up on Gianna’s teasing tone of voice.

  “What did you...you didn’t...did you? You did!” She raced past her into the kitchen and flung open the refrigerator door. Three bright scarlet bags with the newly minted logo of The Bayou sat on the top shelf. “Maglione, you’re magnificent! I think I’ll keep you!”

  “I think you’d better,” Gianna responded dryly, getting plates from the cabinet. “Who else would have you?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The chief of police was Gianna’s mentor and her friend, but it was the role of boss that he was playing to the hilt at the moment, making Gianna more angry, miserable—and wary—with every word he spoke. In his youth, the chief had been a Golden Gloves boxer, and he still looked fit enough to climb into the ring with a man half his age. He also still lived up to his ring name of Scrappy, and while he didn’t pick fights, he not only never backed away from one but he frequently would escalate a contentious conversation to the level of almost-fight just so he could win. He liked winning, no matter that an adversary these days never stood a chance against him. He stood in front of his desk, hands stuffed into his pockets and jiggling change. He watched her as he talked, knowing that she was getting angry as she listened.

  She sat facing him, legs crossed at the knee, hands folded in her lap, and held his gaze for several long seconds before looking away. What a way to start a Monday morning. She stood up and turned her back to him so he wouldn’t see what was in her eyes, though she knew he’d know anyway. “Why are we sloshing around in this kind of a mess, Chief? This is the business of the Federal authorities.”

  “It’s my business, Maglione, when assholes of any stripe, mad bombers or drug dealers or whoever, decide to do their dirt in my town. Besides. Think about what I just told you, and play it all the way out to its legal, if not logical, conclusion.”

  He dropped down into the chair behind his desk and watched her work her way through the situation, which was: He’d received information (and he wouldn’t divulge the source of this information) that an offshoot of the Irish Republican Army was based in D.C. and bringing in truckloads of guns from the southern and southwestern states, where weapons could be purchased easily and legally, for shipment to Ireland; and that a Jamaican drug dealing cartel, also based in D.C., was aware of the Irish group’s activities and planned to steal the next consignment of weapons.

  Gianna did as ordered and it didn’t take long for her to recognize the potentially bloody nature of such a confrontation; but that wasn’t what the Chief wanted her to see. “You think the fight between the FBI and ATF will be worse than the one between the Irish gunrunners and the Jamaican drug dealers.” She hadn’t asked a question but he nodded his answer.

  “You know that old African proverb about what happens when two elephants do battle? The grass beneath them gets the shit stomped out of it. That’s what’ll happen to us if the ATF and the Fibbies start pissing on each other over who has jurisdiction. Is it gun running or is it domestic terrorism? And by the time that gets resolved, blood will be flowing in the streets. I won’t let that happen.”

  “But they’ll both be mad as hell if they find out you’re in the middle of this, Chief, and we’ll get stomped on anyway.”

  “I don’t give a damn about them being mad. Besides, if you do your job right, Maglione, by the time the Feds find out about it, those guns’ll be scrap metal and the mayor’ll be kissing my ass for saving his.”

  Gianna didn’t know whether to feel greater sympathy for herself or for her boss, given their predicaments, but there was no doubt about her feelings for Federal agencies. The messes they created and then left for local police departments to clean up when they battled among themselves were legendary. No local law enforcement agency, big city or little town, was happy to find itself bound to—or burdened by—a Federal presence in a case. The Chief, no doubt, was wedged between the proverbial rock and the hard place. And he wedged her in there with him, for to do what he wanted her to do, which was find the guns before the Jamaicans found them, required that she split up her team in a way she found distasteful. She was rolling the possibilities around in her brain when the Chief stepped onto her wavelength.

  “You want me to let you off this hook, don’t you? So you don’t have to split your people up along those lines?”

  “Why is it me who’s on the hook, Chief?”

  “Because I don’t have anybody else, that’s why. Because I need somebody I trust, somebody who answers directly to me.”

  For the better part of a year, Gianna and her Hate Cr
imes Unit had been Cowboy Cops. That meant they didn’t operate under the rules of a chain of command and that Gianna, as a lieutenant, didn’t report to a captain. She answered directly and only to the Chief of Police. There were, to her knowledge, three other such units that reported directly to the Chief: immigration, drugs, and the gang and violence task forces. There were rumors of others but no one knew for certain, and the Chief certainly never volunteered any clarifying information. These specialty units enjoyed an enviable amount of freedom to work cases as they needed to be worked, without the oversight of, in Gianna’s case, a captain to report and answer to. The down side was the requirement to respond, as now, to an immediate order of the chief, no matter what.

  “Find those damn guns before the Jamaicans find them, Maglione. I’ll be damned if I’ll let a bunch of foreign assholes wreak that kind of havoc on my town!”

  “Foreign assholes?” Gianna looked at him in amazement. She’d never heard him say such a thing.

  “That’s what they are! They’re from someplace else and that makes ‘em foreign, and they think they can come into this country and raise all kinds of hell and get away with it and that makes ‘em assholes. I’m sick of it and I won’t stand by and let it happen in my city. Now. You got anything relevant to say?”

  “What makes you so certain the guns are here? I’ve never heard of any IRA activity in this area.”

  “Technically, it’s not the IRA you’re familiar with, it’s an off-shoot, a group that wants the peace process to fail. And they’re definitely here,” he said, and something in his tone caused her to take a hard look at him.

  “Is there something you’re not telling me, Chief?”

  He managed a little laugh. “There’s always something I’m not telling you, Maglione, and I ain’t ever gonna tell you everything I know. But suppose you tell me how you plan to work this thing, now that you’ve had time to think about it.”

  “Now that I’ve had time to—are you kidding?”

  “I’m not, and I’m waiting.”

  She shook her head at him. What a crafty bastard he was. “Eric and Tim on the IRA and Bobby, for sure, on the Jamaicans, though I definitely can’t send him after that bunch alone.” And I can’t send Cassie along with him, she thought. She’s not ready for that kind of pressure. “Can I have Alice Long detailed to me for this job?”

  He was nodding his acquiescence before she finished speaking, and adding, “But you’re going to have to get Cassie Ali back on the books or let her go, Maglione. I can’t carry her any longer. Now, what do you have on the back burner that she and the rest of your people can be working on?”

  “Missing lesbians,” she retorted.

  He dropped a beat but recovered too quickly for her to enjoy his all too brief consternation. “Missing from where, for how long, and how come I’m just hearing about it? And what kind of missing? As in they got a new girlfriend and forgot to tell the old one, or missing as in nobody knows where they are?”

  “You’re just hearing about it because all I’ve got right now are rumors based on concerns. At least four women, all of them new to town, have disappeared without a trace within the last eighteen months or so. Because they were newcomers, they didn’t have a solid circle of friends yet, just a few new acquaintances. But those acquaintances think it’s more than a little odd that four people, all of them solid citizens with jobs and property, would just disappear without notice or a trace.”

  “And you think it’s worth looking into?” He pressed her. She knew he’d respect her hunches because she’d earned that respect, but she also knew he wouldn’t just turn her loose to pursue a wild goose chase.

  “Yes, I do.” She recalled her conversation with Marianne, whom she’d known for twenty years. She’d been a bartender or owned a bar all those years, and she’d seen, heard, and done everything at least once, and she didn’t panic or overreact ever. She was the kind of person whose intuitions could be trusted; and if Marianne felt there was something “mucho squirrelly” about the disappearance of the four women, then Gianna was prepared to accept that there could, indeed, be something worth looking into.

  “Will your sources talk to the cops?”

  She nodded, again impressed with his level of awareness. Not every victim of a hate crime, or every observer of one, trusted the police sufficiently to confide in them. Marianne would talk because she had nothing to hide and she feared no person or thing. “I’ll put Cassie, Kenny and Linda on this,” she said, hoping he heard and felt her contrition. He didn’t deserve her pique. And just as she was deciding she owed him an apology, he put his foot down on her toe again.

  “I know you can work both of these cases simultaneously, Maglione, and I expect you to. Along with the daily reports I’ll expect.” He picked up a folder from his desk and gave it to her. “This is the Irish file. What time do you want Detective Long to report to you tomorrow?”

  What a crafty bastard he was! “Nine o’clock,” she answered, crossing to the door and opening it.

  “I’m counting on you, Maglione.”

  “Yes, sir,” Gianna said, and closed the door behind her, relieved to be out of the glare of his scrutiny. No matter how long she worked for him, or how well she thought she knew him, he always managed either to surprise or annoy her. At the moment she was annoyed. He was constantly after her to behave more like a lieutenant, which meant she should monitor and direct her cases from her office and not work her cases in the field with her subordinates, and she knew that he took heat for her past behavior: showing up at crime scenes in the middle of the night and punching out perps and spending the night on the couch in her office. Lieutenants weren’t cops, they were paper-pushers, politicians-in-training, the future captains and deputy chiefs and assistant chiefs. His demand that she submit daily reports on the progress of both cases meant that he didn’t want her in the field. He wanted her in the office, probably in uniform a couple of days a week. He’d clipped her wings and there was nothing she could do about it.

  *****

  Mimi was releasing all her pent up anger and frustration on city editor Tyler Carson and he was allowing it, though it would serve no useful purpose, except perhaps to relieve Mimi of the weight of her fury. But it wouldn’t change her situation because Tyler was not her editor. He was her friend and, in a pinch, her protector; and while he could—and often did—put in a good word to the higher-ups on her behalf or in her defense, he could not assign her to stories.

  “Did you read this pile of shit?” Mimi brandished a copy of the Trimble lawsuit, then tossed it across the table at him. “Tell me why I should have to be put through this kind of mess.”

  “Comes with the territory. There’ve been a couple of those over the years with my name on them.” He picked up the document, glanced at it, and put it down.

  “I’ll quit, Tyler, I swear I will.”

  “I believe you, Patterson, but you’ll be playing right into his sweaty little palms if you do that. ]The little weasel would like nothing better than for you to walk away.”

  Mimi knew he was right. “Weasel” Wassily, her editor and head of the Special Projects Unit, was an Ivy League Neanderthal who, despite the dawning of the 21st century, hadn’t yet accepted that women and Blacks had a legitimate place in the newsroom and who hated not only her presence, but the fact that Mimi was his brightest star. Tyler was right: he wouldn’t, of his own volition, get rid of her; nor would he allow her to make a lateral move—say, to Carson’s desk—but he’d accept her resignation in a heartbeat.

  She put her elbows on the table and cradled her chin in her hands and glared balefully at Tyler, who was chewing a big bite of his club sandwich and reading a folded-up section of the New York Times, while taking cursory glances at a stack of summer intern applications. Mimi didn’t mind. Tyler always did three things at the same time, though the activity usually involved talking on two telephones while editing copy. But since they were at lunch and not in the office, he made do with what was at h
and. She took a bite of her veggie burger and grabbed the section of the New York paper that Tyler wasn’t reading, and they ate and read in silence for a while until Mimi saw an article by someone she knew.

  “Look at this, Tyler! I know this guy! He covered the state legislature for years, and now he’s doing sports. So why can’t I switch to the arts and entertainment desk, Tyler?”

  “I’m not the one who won’t let you, Patterson.”

  “No, but you are the one who agreed that a ‘certain expertise’ was required to cover the arts.” Mimi still was pissed at what she considered his betrayal.

  He put down his sandwich and the paper, wiped his mouth on his napkin, and looked at her, green eyes serious behind the rims of his tortoise shell glasses. “But it’s the truth, Patterson, and you know it. Everything is much more complicated than it used to be. You’ve gotta know something about film to cover it. You’ve gotta know something about theater and music to cover them. It’s not enough any more just to be interested in a subject. You can’t cover what that new artistic director is doing any more than the theater critic can cover government graft and corruption.”

  “And I can’t cover it any more. I truly wouldn’t care if every bureaucrat in every government in D.C., Maryland and Virginia stole every penny from every treasury and they all came tumbling down. Not only wouldn’t I want to write about it, I wouldn’t even want to read about it.” And what she felt when she said those words let her know that she truly needed a break from her routine, or she really would quit the job that she had loved for so long. She saw that Tyler knew it, too.

  “Why don’t you get away from here for a while? You’ve got plenty of vacation time. A couple of weeks in the mountains or on the beach and you’ll feel differently about things. And maybe by the time you get back the stupid lawsuit will have returned to the fairyland where it originated.”

  “That’s what Gianna said.”

  “How is your gorgeous police person?”