by Sandra Brown
“The nurse said you remembered something that might help our investigation.”
“Maybe.” Daniels’s eyes nervously sawed back and forth between Smilow and Steffi. “See, it’s like this. Ever since I strayed—”
“Strayed?”
Daniels looked at Steffi, who had interrupted. “From my marriage.”
“You had an affair?”
Leave it to Steffi to cut to the chase, thought Smilow. “Tact” wasn’t in her vocabulary. Mr. Daniels looked completely miserable as he stammered on.
“Yeah. This, uh… a woman where I work? We… you know.” Uneasily he shifted his skinny frame on the hard mattress. “But it didn’t last long. I saw the error of my ways. It was just one of those things that happens before you know it. Then you wake up one morning and think to yourself, what the hell am I doing this for? I love my wife.”
Smilow was sharing Steffi’s obvious impatience with Daniels’s long-winded confession. He wished the man would get to the point. Nevertheless, he warned Steffi with a hard look to give Daniels time to tell his story at his own pace.
“The reason I’m telling you this… She, my wife, gets all worked up if I so much as give another woman the time of day. Not that I blame her,” he rushed to add. “She’s got a right to be suspicious. I handed her that right when I committed adultery.
“But the least little thing—even a kind word to another woman—sets her off. Know what I mean? She goes to crying. And saying that she’s not woman enough for me. That she can’t fulfill my needs.” He looked up at Smilow with weary eyes. “You know how they get.”
Again, Smilow shot Steffi a look that told her not to jeopardize this by lambasting the man’s sexist editorial.
“I didn’t describe that lady to y’all in detail because I didn’t want my wife to get upset. We’ve been doing pretty good here lately. She even brought along some, you know, sexual aids on this trip to spice up our time alone. She sorta looked on it as a second honeymoon. Isn’t much you can do on a church choir bus, but once we get in our room each night… whew.”
He grinned up at them, but then his smile deflated as though someone had pulled the plug on a rubber mask. “But if the missus thought I had paid attention to another woman’s face and figure, she might have thought I was lusting in my heart after a stranger. I’d have had hell to pay over nothing.”
“We understand.” Steffi laid her hand on his arm with rare and, Smilow knew, insincere compassion.
“Mr. Daniels, are you now saying that you can describe the woman you saw in the hotel corridor in greater detail?”
He looked across at Smilow. “You got something to write with?”
* * *
Slowly, he pulled the old T-shirt over her head. Before, he had touched her in darkness. He knew what she felt like, but he wanted to see what his hands had touched.
He wasn’t disappointed. She was lovely. He liked seeing his hands on her breasts, liked watching them respond to his caresses, liked hearing her hum of pleasure when he lowered his lips to them.
“You like this.”
“Yes.”
He took her nipple into his mouth and sucked it. She clasped his head and moaned softly. “Too hard?” he asked.
“No.”
But he was concerned, especially when he spotted whisker burns on her pale skin. He ran his finger over the spot. “I didn’t realize.”
She looked down at the light abrasion, then raised his finger to her lips and kissed it. “Neither did I.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It didn’t matter.”
“But if I hurt you—”
“You didn’t. You won’t.” She curled her hand around his neck and tried to draw his head back to her.
But he resisted. “Do you mind if…” He nodded toward the bed.
“No.”
They lay down, not bothering to straighten the linens. He leaned over her and, holding her face between his hands, kissed her so passionately that her body arched off the bed in order to touch his.
His hand skimmed over her breasts, down her rib cage, onto a smooth stomach. “Jesus. Look at you. Beautiful.” He fitted his hand into the vee of her thighs, covering her mound with his palm, his fingers tapering downward. Inward. Into her softness. “You’re already—”
“Yes.”
“So sweet. So—”
“Oh…” she gasped.
“Wet.”
He rose above her for another kiss. It was a silky, sexy kiss that ended only when she gave a soft cry and climaxed around his fingers, against his thumb.
Moments later she opened her eyes and saw him smiling down at her. “I’m sorry, sorry.”
“Sorry?” he repeated, laughing softly and kissing her damp forehead.
“Well, I mean… you…”
His lips barely grazed hers. His whisper was soft and urgent. “Don’t be sorry.”
He coughed a harsh sigh of surprise when she closed her hand around him. He almost protested, almost told her that she didn’t have to feel obligated, almost told her that reciprocation wasn’t necessary, that he couldn’t possibly get any harder than he was. But when she began to explore and massage, the only sounds he made were soft groans of supreme pleasure. Not fully aware of what he was doing, he folded his hand around hers and enhanced her motions.
She nuzzled his neck. She buried kisses in his chest hair and took love bites of his skin. Unintentionally—or maybe not—her erect nipple rubbed against his. It was exciting. It was goddamn erotic. And it nearly made him come.
When he removed her hand, she angled herself up and frantically kissed his jaw, his cheek, his lips, murmuring, “Let me touch you.”
But it was too late. He repositioned himself and sank into her. Withdrew. Pressed. Deep. Deeper. Then, resting his forehead on hers, clenching his teeth and squeezing his eyes shut, experiencing more ecstasy than he had in all previous sexual encounters put together…
“No, let me touch you.”
… he came.
The ringing telephone rudely jarred Hammond from his steamy recollection. He was embarrassed to realize that he had an erection and he was bathed in sweat. How much time had he lost to that particular memory? He checked the dashboard clock. Twenty minutes, give or take.
The phone rang a third time. He jerked it to his ear. “What?”
“Where the hell have you been?”
Irritably he said, “You know, Steffi, you need to get some new material. That’s the second time today you’ve asked me that, and in that same tone of voice.”
“Sorry, but I’ve been calling your house for an hour and leaving messages. I finally decided to try your cell. Are you in your car?”
“Yes.”
“You went out?”
“Right again.”
“Oh. I didn’t imagine you’d be going out tonight.”
She was hinting that he explain to her where he had gone and why, but he no longer owed her an accounting of his time. It probably stung her pride that on the night he ended their relationship, he wasn’t too despondent to go out.
It would really wound her to know that he was staked out on a dark street like a pervert, steeping in a sweat of sexual arousal, and waiting to see if Dr. A. E. Ladd was the woman who, about this time last night, had been stretched out alongside him naked—his sex cozily sandwiched between their bellies, his hands caressing her ass—asking if he was aware that his eyes were the color of storm clouds.
He had a mean impulse to tell Steffi. But of course he didn’t.
He wiped his face on his shirtsleeve. “What’s going on?”
“For starters, why didn’t you tell me that Mason gave you the Pettijohn case?”
“It wasn’t my job to.”
“That’s a bullshit reason, Hammond.”
“Thank you, Rory Smilow,” he muttered.
“He told me as a friend.”
“My ass. He told you because he’s no friend of mine. Now, are you going to tell me wha
t’s up?”
“Not knowing that I was going to be playing second fiddle,” she said sweetly, “I joined Smilow at Roper Hospital, and we lucked out.”
“How so?”
“One of those people stricken with food poisoning?”
“Yeah?”
Headlights turned onto the street at the opposite end from where Hammond was parked. He started his car.
“Where are you, Hammond?” Steffi demanded impatiently. “Are you listening? It sounds like you’re cutting out.”
“I can hear you. Keep talking. One of the people stricken with food poisoning…”
“Saw a woman outside Pettijohn’s suite. Well, actually, he can’t swear that it was outside Pettijohn’s suite, but that’s a technicality we can iron out if everything else falls into place.”
The car stopped in front of Dr. Ladd’s office. She drove off with some guy in a convertible, Winthrop’s owner had told him.
Steffi was saying, “So after a lot of hem-hawing about an affair—”
Driving slowly, Hammond got close enough to see that the car was a convertible.
“On second thought, never mind about the affair,” Steffi said. “It’s irrelevant. Believe me. Anyway, Mr. Daniels got a much better look at the woman than he had first led us and Mrs. Daniels to believe.”
The glare of the convertible’s headlights blinded Hammond from seeing anything behind them. But as he pulled even with the car, he turned his head in time to see the occupants. A man behind the steering wheel. A woman in the passenger seat. His woman. No question.
“Mr. Daniels now admits that he remembers her approximate height and weight, hair color, and so forth.”
Hammond tuned Steffi out. Once he was past the other car, he cut his eyes to his external side mirror in time to see the man reach across the console and hook his hand around the back of her neck, bringing her face up close to his.
Hammond stamped his accelerator, taking the corner too fast and causing his tires to squeal. Sure, it was an immature, jealousy-inspired reaction, but that’s what he felt like doing. He felt like hitting something. He really felt like telling Steffi to shut the fuck up.
“Just do it, Steffi,” he said, abruptly stopping her in midsentence.
Taken aback, she took a quick breath. “Do what?”
He didn’t know what. He had been only half listening, but he wouldn’t admit that to her. She’d been telling him about a potential witness. Someone who had seen someone near Pettijohn’s suite and could provide a fairly accurate description.
Steffi might also have suggested a sketch artist. She had mentioned that about the time Hammond had rolled past the convertible, and her prattle had been drowned out by the blood that had rushed to his head. The gist of what Steffi told him had registered, but most of it had been obscured by a wild, primal urge to go back and put his hands around the throat of the bastard in the convertible.
One thing was certain: He had to assert himself or explode. Now. Immediately. He had to establish that there was something over which Hammond Cross still had control.
“I want an artist there first thing in the morning.”
“It’s late, Hammond.”
He knew what time it was. For hours he’d been sitting in a sweltering automobile, entertaining sexual fantasies. For his trouble, all he’d got was Dr. Ladd in the company of another man. “I know how late it is.”
“My point is, I don’t know if I can get—”
“What’s the guy’s room number?”
“Mr. Daniels’s room number? Uh…”
“I want to talk to him myself.”
“That really isn’t necessary. Smilow and I questioned him at length. Besides, I think he’s being discharged in the morning.”
“Then you’d better set it up early. Seven-thirty. And have the police sketch artist standing by.”
Monday
Chapter 13
At seven-thirty the following morning, Hammond entered the hospital carrying a copy of the Post and Courier and his briefcase. He stopped at the information desk to ask the room number, which he had failed to get from Steffi. He also stopped at a vending machine for a cup of coffee.
He was wearing a necktie, but in deference to the hot day that was promised, he had left his suit jacket in his car, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and unbuttoned his collar button. His bearing was militant, his face as dark as a thundercloud.
To Steffi’s credit, the others were already assembled when he arrived. She was there, along with Rory Smilow, a frumpy woman in an ill-fitting police uniform, and the man in the hospital bed. Steffi’s eyes were puffy, as though she hadn’t slept well. After a muttered round of greetings, she said, “Hammond, you remember Corporal Mary Endicott. We’ve worked with her before.”
He dropped his briefcase and newspaper in a chair in order to shake hands with the policewoman sketch artist. “Corporal Endicott.”
“Mr. Cross.”
Steffi then introduced him to Mr. Daniels, a guest of their city from Macon, Georgia, who was presently nibbling at the bland food on his breakfast tray. “I’m sorry your visit to Charleston hasn’t been the best, Mr. Daniels. Are you feeling better?”
“Good enough to get out of here. If possible, I’d like to get this over with before my wife comes to pick me up.”
“How quickly we finish depends on how precise your descriptions are. Corporal Endicott is excellent, but she can only do as well as you can.”
Daniels looked worried. “Would I have to testify in court? I mean, if you catch this lady and she turns out to be the one who killed that man, would I have to point her out at the trial?”
“That’s a possibility,” Hammond told him.
The man sighed unhappily. “Well, if it comes to that, I’ll do my civic duty.” He shrugged philosophically. “Let’s get on with it.”
Hammond said, “First, I’d like to hear your story, Mr. Daniels.”
“He’s related it to us several times,” Smilow said. “It really doesn’t amount to much.”
Beyond his perfunctory good morning, up to this point Smilow had remained as silent and still as a lizard sunning itself. Often Smilow’s posture seemed indolent, but to Hammond he gave off the impression of a reptile lying in wait, constantly watching for an opportunity to strike.
Hammond acknowledged that comparing Smilow to a serpent was based solely on his unmitigated dislike of the man. To say nothing of being unfair to serpents.
Smilow’s gray suit was perfectly tailored and well pressed. His white shirt was crisp enough to bounce a quarter, his necktie tightly knotted. Not a hair was out of place. His eyes were clear and alert. After the rough night Hammond had spent tossing and turning, he resented Smilow’s bandbox appearance and unflappable composure.
“It’s your call, of course,” he said politely. “This is your investigation.”
“That’s right, it is.”
“But as a courtesy—”
“You didn’t show much courtesy to me when you arranged this meeting without consulting me first. You say it’s my investigation, but on surface it appears that it’s yours. As usual, your actions belie your words, Hammond.”
Leave it to Smilow to pick a fight on a morning when he was feeling truculent himself. “Look, I went out of town the day Pettijohn was killed, so I’m playing catch-up. I’ve read the newspaper accounts, but I know you don’t share all your leads with the media. All I’m asking is that the details be filled in for me.”
“When the time is right.”
“What’s wrong with now?”
“Okay, guys, King’s X!” Steffi stepped between them, forming a cross with her index fingers. “It really doesn’t matter who arranged this meeting, does it? In fact, Hammond, Smilow had already called Corporal Endicott by the time I reached her last night.” The plump, matronly officer confirmed this with a nod. “So technically Smilow had the idea first, as he should since the case is his baby until he turns it over to us. Right?
“And, Smilow, if Hammond also thought of the artist, that only means that great minds think alike, and this case can use all the great minds it can muster. So let’s get started and not detain these people any longer than necessary. Mr. Daniels is in somewhat of a hurry, and we’ve all got other work to do. Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t mind hearing his account once more.”
Smilow conceded with a curt semi-nod. Daniels recounted his experience of Saturday afternoon. When he concluded, Hammond asked him if he was certain he had seen no one else.
“You mean once I reached the fifth floor? No, sir.”
“You’re sure?”
“Just that one lady and me were the only ones around. But I couldn’t have been in the hall more than… hmm… say, twenty, thirty seconds from the time I got off the elevator.”
“Did anyone share the car with you?”
“No, sir.”
“Thank you, Mr. Daniels. I appreciate your repeating your story for my benefit.”
Ignoring Smilow’s I-told-you-so expression, Hammond turned Daniels over to Mary Endicott. Smilow excused himself to make some telephone calls. Steffi hovered over the artist’s shoulder and followed the questions she was asking Daniels. Hammond carried his lukewarm coffee to the window and stared out over a day that was much too sunny to match his mood.
Eventually Steffi sidled up to him. “You’re awfully quiet.”
“It was a short night. I couldn’t fall asleep.”
“Any particular reason for your insomnia?”
Catching the underlying meaning to her question, he turned his head and looked down at her. “Just restless.”
“You’re cruel, Hammond.”
“How so?”
“The least you could have done was get stinking drunk last night and second-guess your decision to break up with me.”
He smiled, but his tone was serious. “It was the only decision for us, Steffi. You know that as well as I do.”
“Particularly in light of Mason’s decision.”
“It was his decision, not mine.”
“But I never stood a fighting chance of getting this case. Mason favors you and makes no bones about it. He always will. And you know that as well as I do.”