Client Trap (Nick Teffinger Thriller)

by Jagger, R. J.

  “So who killed Grace Somerfield?”

  Neva collected her thoughts.

  “Okay,” she said. “Saturday night, after dark, I was in a car with a woman. We were parked on a side street up on Capitol Hill. It was storming out pretty hard.”

  “I remember,” Wilde said. “It started about ten.”

  “Right,” she said. “What I’m telling you about happened around ten-thirty or eleven. Anyway, me and the woman were in the backseat getting friendly, if you catch my drift.”

  “How friendly?”

  “Very.”

  “You’re a lesbian?”

  “I am but I don’t discriminate,” she said.

  “So what does that mean, you’re bi?”

  “Bi, tri, wherever the mood takes me,” she said. “The point is, my friend was on her back. I was on top, straddling her face, meaning my head was up and I could see out the window. A woman came running out of the back yard of a mansion across the street. She headed for the car that was parked directly in front of ours. I lowered my head so she wouldn’t see me. She got in her car, fired it up and squealed out. The whole thing was so weird that I looked at her license plate as she took off. It was FC211.”

  “Okay,” Wilde said.

  “That was pretty much the end of it until Monday when I saw in the paper that a rich woman named Grace Somerfield got murdered in her Capitol Hill house Saturday night,” she said. “I went back there and looked around. It turns out that the woman I saw running Saturday night was coming from the address that belonged to Grace Somerfield.”

  “Interesting,” Wilde said.

  Neva nodded, pulled a cigarette out of her purse, dangled it in her mouth and gave one to Wilde. He lit them up and said, “Did you get a look at her face?”

  She blew smoke.

  “I got a fairly good look,” she said. “She was young, I’d guess about my age and very pretty. Her hair was blond. She had it pulled up into a ball. There was a tattoo behind her ear. It wouldn’t have shown if she had her hair down but, like I said, it was up.”

  “A tattoo?”

  “Right, something black, right here,” she said, pointing.

  “What was it?”

  She shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It was about the size of a quarter and either black or dark blue. I didn’t see any reds or yellows or anything colorful like that.”

  “Could it have been a birth mark?”

  “No, it was a tattoo. She was carrying a black bag. It looked like one of those bags doctors use.”

  Wilde stood up, walked over to the window and pulled it up. No air came in, no air went out, no air moved anywhere. Down below, Larimer Street buzzed.

  “I don’t get why you’re telling me this,” he said.

  “Here’s my dilemma. The woman I was with Saturday night can’t be associated with any of this. She has a reputation to maintain. She won’t have anything to do with filing a report. She’s also made it clear that I’m not supposed to file one either. She wants both of us totally, one hundred percent, uninvolved. She says the police will eventually figure it out without any help.”

  “Who is this woman?”

  “That’s not important.”

  She took a long drag on the cigarette, mashed it in the ashtray hardly smoked and stood up.

  “What I want you to do is be me Saturday night,” she said. “Pretend you were in the area taking a walk or something—say you were taking shelter from the storm next to a tree, something like that—and make a police report. All you have to do is give them the information I just gave you.”

  “You want me to be a fake witness?”

  Neva frowned.

  “Fake isn’t the right word,” she said. “Fake implies there was no witness at all. Substitute’s a better word. You’d be a substitute witness.”

  Wilde pictured it.

  Then he shook his head and braced himself to say something he didn’t want to say.

  “I’m sorry, I really am, but that’s not the kind of thing I do.”

  Neva wrinkled her forehead but didn’t pick up the envelope. Instead she walked to the door, stopped halfway through, turned and said, “Then find someone who does. Justice is calling. Answer it.”

  Then she left.

  Wilde watched her from the window as she swaggered down to 16th Street and disappeared behind an ice truck. He turned on the radio and twisted the dial until he got a song he liked, “Rocket 88.” While Jackie Brenston filled the speakers with the virtues of his Buick, Wilde circled the desk three times, staring at the envelope, then picked it up and counted what was inside.

  It was all there.

  Three hundred singles.

  He slipped it into the top drawer.

  Something was wrong.

  What?

  He couldn’t figure it out.

  He was 31 years old and wore his hair combed straight back. It was blond, thick, longer than most and played well against his green eyes and Colorado tan. He wore his usual attire, namely a grey suit, a white long-sleeve shirt rolled up at the cuffs, a loose blue tie and spit-shinned wingtips. His hat, ashen-grey, was over on the rack. When he went out it would go on, dipped over his left eye. With a strong body topping out at six-two, he was every bit Neva’s equal.

  Suddenly he figured out what was wrong.

  His gun was supposed to be in the drawer.

  It wasn’t there when he put the envelope in.

  What the hell?

  Suddenly he heard a crashing noise from the other part of his office, the room behind the adjoining door.

  Someone was in there.

  He took a deep breath and headed that way.

  A man had his back against the wall, facing straight ahead, when Wilde came into the room. He was smaller, in fact considerably smaller, but he had the gun in hand. With a cat-quick move, he raised the weapon and pointed it at Wilde’s chest.

  Wilde froze.

  Four steps away.

  That’s how far he was.

  Four steps.

  Four eternities.

  Too far.

  He lunged.

  The gun exploded before his feet even left the ground.

  2

  Day One

  July 15

  Tuesday Morning

  The bullet didn’t stop Wilde. It may have hurt him, maybe even mortally, but it didn’t kill him on the spot and that’s all he needed to close the gap and swing a furious fist at the shooter’s face. His knuckles connected solidly. Wham! The man’s head snapped back and his body dropped to the floor and slammed face down. Wilde stood over him with a cocked arm, ready to explode on the back of his head if it moved even an inch.

  No movement came.

  Not an iota.

  Wilde straightened up, nudged the body with his foot and got no response.

  Was he dead?

  Wilde didn’t care.

  Screw him.

  It was self-defense.

  He looked down at his chest for blood and found none. Same for his arms. Where did the bullet get him? He darted into the bathroom and checked his face in the mirror. There was no blood, not a drop, not anywhere.

  He hadn’t been hit.

  How could anyone miss that close?

  He walked back to the body, rolled it face up and pulled the man’s hat off. Something unexpected happened, namely a good amount of light brown hair escaped from under it. Closer examination of the man’s face showed he wasn’t a man at all.

  He was a woman.

  Her face had no makeup.

  She appeared to be in her mid-twenties.

  The right side of her face was swelling up and beginning to turn a strange color. Wilde felt her pulse and got one. Then, just to be sure, he put his ear by her mouth and heard breathing.

  Okay.

  She wasn’t dead.

  He checked the wall to see how close the bullet came to hitting him. Naturally, it wasn’t showing up, because that’s the way his life w
orked. It should be easy to find. Where the hell was it?

  Then he saw it.

  It wasn’t in the wall at all.

  It was in the ceiling.

  Straight above the woman’s body.

  Wilde slumped to the floor and studied her. So, she hadn’t tried to kill him after all. She’d merely fired a warning shot.

  Wilde smiled.

  That was pretty gutsy.

  Pretty gutsy indeed.

  More gutsy than he would have been if someone twice his size was charging.

  At the woman’s feet was a pillowcase filled with odds and ends from the office. Wilde put everything back where it belonged, including the gun, and thought about calling the police before deciding against it. Instead he went back to the desk and recounted the three hundred dollars again, coming up with 299 this time.

  Two minutes later he heard the shower running.

  Wilde pulled a clean white shirt out of the coat closet, opened the bathroom door just enough to reach through and hang it on the inside knob, then went back into the main room and stared out the window.

  His office was in the 1600 block of Larimer Street, on the second floor above the Ginn Mill and two doors down from the Gold Nugget Tap Room. Right outside his building was a water fountain sculpture with cherubs, a throwback to the area’s better days.

  The water didn’t run anymore.

  Once the retail heart of Denver, now Larimer Street and its backdoor cousin, Market Street, were an unhealthy mixture of liquor stores, bars, gambling houses, brothels and flophouses, occasionally punctuated with the sound of gunplay. If this section of Denver was a smoke it wouldn’t be a Camel or a Marlboro, it would be a cigar—not the worst cigar in the world, not the one that creeps into everything it touches and dies an immediate stinky death, but a cigar nevertheless.

  Wilde didn’t care.

  He could afford an office in a nicer section of town, say over on 16th Street near the Daniels & Fisher Tower, or even over on 17th Street near the Brown Palace, but he wasn’t interested. He liked it fine right here, smack dab in the middle of the universe, and didn’t apologize for his taste.

  He liked the buzz.

  He liked the edginess.

  He especially liked the nights. That’s when the dames got dangerous, cigarettes dangled from ruby-red lips and the tension got steamier than a Norma Jeane Mortenson movie down at the Zaza Theater. That’s when whiskey-soaked jazz weaved out of apartment windows and the headlights of Packards and Hudsons and Studebakers and Buicks and Fords and Chevys punched up and down the asphalt.

  The shower shut off.

  Five minutes later, the woman came through the door, barefoot and barelegged, wearing the shirt. Her hair was flat and dripping with water, but she scrubbed up pretty nice. She looked to be about twenty-three or twenty-four. Her eyes showed that life had dealt her a few blows and there were more to come. The left side of her face was in bad shape, thanks to Wilde’s fist.

  “I figured if I’m going to jail, I’m at least going clean,” she said.

  “You’re not going to jail,” Wilde said. “You can leave.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He shook his head.

  Then he did something he didn’t expect; he pulled the envelope out of the drawer and tossed it to her.

  “Take this with you,” he said.

  She peeked inside then studied him.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “The way I see it, you saved my life,” he said. “You could have shot me. You probably have a story why you were here in the first place. Let’s just call it a draw.”

  She put the envelope back on his desk.

  “I’ll leave but I don’t want your money,” she said.

  Three minutes later she was dressed and stepping out the door. She turned before she got all the way out and said, “I’ll return your shirt some day.”

  Wilde smiled.

  “You do that. Do you have a name?”

  She nodded.

  “Alabama,” she said. “Alabama Winger.”

  “Well you take care, Alabama Winger.”

  “You too.”

  Then she was gone.

  3

  Day One

  July 15

  Tuesday Morning

  At exactly ten, an alarm clock pulled Davit Durivage out of a deep sleep with all the subtleness of a T-Rex attack. He punched it off and called room service to have coffee and croissants delivered in fifteen minutes, which is all he needed to shower, shave and dress.

  The food arrived two minutes early.

  He said “Thanks,” in almost-perfect English and gave the woman a healthy tip.

  His hair was pitch-black and European long, not American short. Ordinarily he let it hang free but today he parted it on the side, American style, and got it flat to his head. It was a different look but not necessarily a bad one. He had one of those faces that couldn’t be ruined no matter what frame he stuck it in.

  Every woman in Denver was his right now.

  None of them knew it but that was the reality of it, if he cared to bring that reality home to them.

  Unfortunately for them, that’s not the reason he was here.

  He was here for something much more critical.

  He downed the food, took one last look in the mirror, blew himself a kiss and headed for the elevator, dressed in a summer-weight wool blend suit with an expensive hang and a tan hat up top.

  The hotel was on Wynkoop, just down from Union Station, the shelter of choice for the rich, affluent and relevant as they passed through this part of the world.

  To Durivage it was nothing.

  In fact, although he’d only been in town for almost no time, he’d already seen enough to tell that all of Denver was nothing. It was actually a curiosity that a cow town like this even occupied a space on the same blue sphere that held the likes of Paris.

  Paris was it, end of story, period.

  Admittedly, there were a few places that held a candle to Paris.

  London.

  Rome.

  Athens.

  But even those candles were weak and shined with hardly any light.

  Outside the hotel sat one and only one lonely cab, which proved Durivage’s point about Denver. He slipped into the back, pulled the door shut and said, “Sixteenth and California, please and thank you.”

  Someone outside rapped on the glass just as the driver turned on the meter and shifted into first.

  “Hold on,” Durivage said.

  Standing on the other side of the rap was an Asian woman.

  Even through the glass she was stunning.

  Thick black hair.

  Moist lips.

  Mysterious eyes.

  Gorgeous golden skin.

  Dressed for success.

  She opened the door, looked nervously at her watch and said, “Are you heading downtown by any chance?”

  Yes.

  He was.

  “Can we share the ride, I’ll pay.”

  He scooted over.

  “Sure, no problem.”

  “Thanks, you just saved my life.”

  He smiled.

  “That’s good. It looks like a life worth saving.”

  Durivage kept the woman in the corner of his eye but said nothing, getting ready for some clever words when she finally broke down and made a move.

  She didn’t make a move, however.

  Instead she kept her face pointed ahead.

  She wore a perfume that could have been French.

  Very sensual.

  Not too strong.

  Her nylons ruffled when she moved her legs.

  Downtown the cabbie dropped Durivage off, the woman looked in his direction just enough to say, “Thanks again,” and that was it. At the last second, Durivage asked how far she was going then paid the cabbie to get her there, plus a tip. She said, “Thanks,” and disappeared from his life.

  Sixteenth Street was bustling with the proportion
ate vigor of Champs-Elysees. Durivage stepped back against a building out of the way and checked his wrist.

  10:28 a.m.

  He had two minutes to kill.

  He could still smell the woman’s perfume and hear the rustling of her nylons.

  When he closed his eyes he could taste her lips.

  He should have gotten her number.

  4

  Day One

  July 15

  Tuesday Morning

  Jina Savannah was a lawyer but not a big-time one, meaning her ratty, one-room law office had no air conditioning, hence the sticky downtown heat would radiate through her windows later today with full intent and opportunity to beat her senseless, once again, for the tenth day straight. She already pictured herself walking over to the window fan, lifting her skirt and letting the wind blow up her 28-year-old legs.

  Hot.

  Hot.

  Hot.

  Too hot.

  She tossed the morning paper on her desk, got the coffee going and checked her face in the mirror. A mildly but not wildly attractive woman stared back, a woman with black glasses, light brown hair, a good nose and white teeth. She did a little repair to her blush but stopped midstream.

  Something was off.

  It was almost as if someone had been inside the office.

  She looked around for something out of place.

  There was nothing evident.

  Still, the feeling was inescapable.

  Did someone break in?

  If so, why?

  There was nothing worth taking, except maybe the Royal, but even that had a sticky e key, so it would almost be a blessing if it disappeared.

  It hadn’t, though.

  There it was, sitting right there in the middle of her desk.

  She walked over to it, hit the b key three times, then looked around some more.

  If someone had broken in, they hadn’t left any marks.

  She opened the paper and saw something shocking on the front page. Grace Somerfield got murdered Saturday night.