by Jaye Maiman
“By a family member?”
“Why, no. Finnegan was an orphan, raised in foster homes. There were no living relatives identified in her records. The individual acting as next of kin is...hold on.” He tossed his legs over the bench and shifted some papers around till he found what he was looking for. “A Ms. Emanuela Diaz, resident of Manhattan. We called her first thing this morning. She said, and I quote, ‘No autopsy. You touch her with a scalpel without my express permission and I’ll sue your ass off.’ Police Chief Crowell and I decided there was no cause to upset her.”
No cause at all.
Chapter Four
K.T. was in her element. I never imagined that a woman could look so incredibly sexy in an apron, flour smeared on her cheeks, her hands kneading dough for buttermilk biscuits. She brushed a strand of hair away from her forehead with the back of her hand and smiled at me enticingly. “I missed you in bed this morning,” she said.
I lifted her hand and sucked the batter from her fingers. “Mmmm. Delicious.”
“Where’d you go?”
I summarized my morning interrogations. “I stopped by Dean Flynn’s place, but he was already out. I left a note for him to call me.”
I wrapped my arms around K.T.’s waist as she continued to massage the dough. We were standing so close, her body’s motion became my own. Unexpectedly we began rocking together, her rounded ass tight against my hips. She murmured my name. Her tone was articulate. I could hear the desire. And something more. She wanted to possess me. And, God help me, I wanted suddenly to be possessed. Tbe realization thrilled and terrified me.
“You’re cooking,” I responded inanely. I wanted to make love to her right there, on the kitchen counter. I also wanted to run outside into the bracing cold air.
“You bet I am,” she said lustily, turning around in my arms and planting her full lips on mine. Her tongue, smooth and insistent, explored my mouth, licked the inside of my lips, curled around my tongue. The contact ripped through me, triggering a flash flood that drowned my senses.
I swept the dough aside, flour wafting into the air like spray from a curling wave. I lifted K.T. onto the counter, my pulse rushing. Our mouths had not parted.
I moved my head back, but the link between our bodies didn’t break. Firmly, I braced my hands against her cheeks and pushed her away, then I stared into her eyes. I wanted to know her, to memorize her face so that I could visualize her features even in the dark, so that I could remember what she looked like even...
When she’s gone, I thought, startling myself.
The words ricocheted inside my head.
When she’s gone.
The assumption rested under my heart like a burr. K.T. would leave me. Like my sister Carol. Like my father. Like Mary. And Cathy.
Nothing lasts, I’ve complained to my therapist. Especially not love. Or the people you love. And each time someone leaves, a part of you is cut away until, like a tree struck repeatedly with an ax’s edge, you can no longer stand.
I did not want to fall, but I could feel K.T. slicing into me, deeper than I had allowed anyone in my past to go.
Her eyes were boring into mine, their tenderness peeling away the layers of defenses, leaving me raw and exposed. Her kisses, light now, like the flutter of eyelashes against a pillow, sailed over my cheeks. “You’re safe here,” she murmured, again reading my heart with uncanny accuracy.
I closed my eyes. The death rattle in Carol’s throat filled my ears. Once more, I tasted her warm blood as it spurted over my face and lips, smelled the acrid smoke from the gun as it filled the darkness of the closet, felt the cold metal in my small palm, the stillness of my own heart. Don’t leave me, Carol. Don’t.
I buried my head under K.T.’s chin. In the past six months, my memories had become sharper, more vivid. Sometimes, like now, I feared they would break me, shatter me like a rock hurled through a pane of glass. I started sucking K.T.’s neck, seeking to lose myself as I had so many times before, in passion, in fantasy, but the images pursued me.
My father ripping open the closet door, horror and fear distorting his stubbornly inexpressive face. His thick, calloused hand grabbing the .22 caliber from me. The blue-tinged barrel pointing at my temple, still stinking of gun smoke, and then the click, metal on metal. Afterwards he howled, the piercing cry of an animal whose body lay mangled in a hunter’s steel trap.
The volatile memory, unexpectedly unearthed, detonated inside me.
He had pulled the trigger.
K.T.’s arms tightened around me as I shuddered. Softly, she sang into my ear, “Let me be your shelter.”
My hands, cold and trembling, lifted her shirt and ran along the cool indentation of her back. I hungered for her in a way that felt unfamiliar. Our mouths met again, and this time our exploration was more urgent, more insistent.
I pulled off her apron, tugged open her powder blue shirt, and lifted her bra above her breasts. Her nipples were swollen before my lips even grazed them. Now I took one between my wet lips and sucked with steadily increasing pressure. Her moans filled the air the way sound swells under water. She was my only world. My center.
She moved a hand to her breast and wordlessly offered me more of herself. I took her, my palms pressed against her back, her body arching into me. I floated back and forth between her breasts. Then K.T. began talking to me in a hoarse sing-song, repeating my name, describing her sensations, urging me to please her, take her. With each beat of her sweet, ardent litany, my excitement surged, the sensation between my legs spinning into a painful whirlpool of need.
I unzipped her jeans, slipped them down over her butt, raised her, and swept them down her long legs. We were both groaning openly now, stripped of pretense, stripped of decorum, elevated to an intimacy at once vulgar and exquisite.
Biting at her thighs, I traveled up toward the source of her intoxicating scent, then I parted her and entered her first with my tongue, then my fingers. Her hands pulled my head to her as she bloomed in my mouth. I struggled to slow my pace, to savor her taste, the hot pulse of her body around my finger, the glorious rhythm of her hips as they rocked against me. I eased my other hand under her ass and K.T. beseeched me to take her. As I entered her, her moan collapsed to a mewling long past the realm of speech. Gradually I quickened the flicker of my tongue, the depth of my suck, the gentle pump of my hands, till her thighs clenched around my ears, her fingers curled in my hair and her cry reverberated through the room like the final thunderclap in the last storm of a torrid summer.
We were curled up on the throw rug in front of the stove, the odor of burned biscuits bringing us slowly back to earth. K.T. reached up and turned off the oven, then returned to my arms laughing. Flour and raisins coated our damp bodies. Sometime during our lovemaking, we had overturned a five pound bag of flour and a bowl of raisins. I ate one off her shoulder and smiled contentedly.
“You actually look happy,” K.T. said as she stood up and offered me a hand for support.
As soon as she separated from me, as soon as her words penetrated, my mood shifted. Guilt crawled over me, stinging my flesh like a swarm of red ants. Then horror.
My father had tried to kill me.
I ignored her hand and stood up.
“Whew, wrong words,” K.T. remarked as I grabbed my corduroy pants from the countertop and smacked them clean of flour.
“Sorry, it’s just the case.”
The excuse sounded rehearsed, even to my own ears. I had used them before to distance myself from Cathy Chapman, a woman I met in San Francisco while I was investigating the death of my ex-lover Mary. Before I stopped writing romance novels and joined the Serra Investigative Agency, the catch phrase was, “I’m working.” Or thinking about working. Or coming down from work. But there was always a place to which I could retreat at will. A travel article. A silly novel about hot hetero sex that had no connection to my emotional life. And now “the case.”
Still, I knew that some part of me had stopped running.
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I tied my sneakers and looked up at K.T. She had dressed and was now scraping burnt biscuits off the cooking sheet. Her face looked strained, confused. I crossed to her. Surprising myself I said, “I’m scared. I can’t risk another loss.”
She stared at me for a second, then nodded. I waited for her to touch me, to fold me into her arms protectively, but she did nothing. Her stillness made me anxious.
“Do you understand?” I asked her, a slow burn beginning along my scalp.
Again she nodded, then turned away and began cleaning the burners on the stove top. Quietly, so quietly I barely made out the words, she said, “At some point you have to let go of the past.”
I sensed she was talking more to herself than to me, but that didn’t stop me from saying, “Don’t tell me what the hell I’m supposed to do.” How can I let go of my past, I thought angrily. It’s all I have. The only barrier between me and . . .
Between me and what?
K.T. touched my arm and said, “Stop pushing me away, Robin.”
Terror gripped me. Then indignation. “I’m not pushing you,” I snapped, swinging my arm free. “For chrissakes, do you see how we make love? How can you say that to me?” The words pouring out of my mouth had nothing to do with what I was feeling. I wanted to scream out, “Hold me. Tell me you won’t ever leave me, no matter what.”
I picked up a sponge to violently scrub down the counter. “Look, I’m opening up to you and you respond with some cheap psychobabble you probably picked up in the supermarket back home in West Virginny, but I got something to tell you, honey. It doesn’t fly here. Not in New York, and not with me.”
K.T. was observing me with narrowed eyes. I had a feeling she was seeing me far too clearly, and I wanted desperately to render her blind.
“What you got, babe, comes cheap. Believe me.” I winced at my own words. What the hell was I doing?
K.T. fingered the earring in her left lobe, then shook her head and walked out of the room. I had won.
I stood over the sink, watching the soap bubbles crackle into nothingness, and listened to K.T. stomping up and down the stairs. Then the front door slammed and I doubled over. By the time I straightened up and forced myself to follow her, the rental car was gone.
My therapist’s answering machine beeped in my ear. I didn’t need a recorded voice. I didn’t need voices. Just silence. Antiseptic, deafening silence. I hung up sharply and went out for a run, pounding the road till my teeth hurt and the noise in my head turned white and sweet.
I spent the rest of the morning burying myself in housecleaning details and phone calls. The first call went to my housemate, Dinah, back in Brooklyn. She and her lover Beth were trying to adopt a child. Listening to the two of them chatter nervously about the social worker’s impending home visit just made me antsier.
I cut the conversation short and made a quick call to Amy. She ran her business out of her home, so I assumed she’d be in. I gave her an update, then halted when I heard a voice in the background. “Who’s there?” I asked, knowing Carly wouldn’t be home from the school where she teaches for at least another hour.
“Helen. I’m treating her nerves with a new herbal remedy I’ve just developed. From the tension in your voice, you could probably use some yourself.”
My teeth ground together. Something about their relationship worried me. I made a weak joke and hung up with a little shiver.
After a moment, I decided to contact Tony Serra, my partner in the detective agency. I informed him of my unexpected involvement in a murder investigation, then waited for him to numb me with a barrage of comfortingly useless Christian adages. Instead he casually updated me on his active cases.
Strangely, he saved the most important news for last. After months of negotiation, we had finally landed a big-ticket job with CompTek, a rapidly expanding mail-order company specializing in personal computers. The thirty-two-year-old owner was a tad paranoid, and a billionaire twice over. He had just moved the firm to Jersey City and wanted to install a state-of-the-art security system. My brother, a one-time burglar who now owns the largest locksmith shop in Staten Island, would handle the equipment selection and installation at a steep discount, while Tony and I developed all other security procedures. The five-year contract would push SIA far into the black, practically guaranteeing the agency’s survival.
Tony evaded my questions about hiring additional staff and subcontracting with computer specialists, then drifted off into an explanation of how a peculiar chemical released from turkey meat causes drowsiness. A shiver of anxiety ran through me. Shit. Just what I needed. He sounded listless and unfocused. I waited till he paused, then asked him to transfer me to Jill Zimmerman, our office and research manager.
“Miss us already?” she quipped.
“Is Tony within earshot?” I asked impatiently.
“No. Why?” I could tell from her voice that she already knew the answer.
“He doesn’t sound good. The old Tony would have been prancing around the office about closing the CompTek deal. He would’ve inundated me with quotes about how hard work pays off. Instead, I didn’t hear a single disciple mentioned in almost forty-five minutes of conversation. And he kept digressing.” I waited for Jill to respond to my implicit question. When she didn’t, I hurried on. “Has he been to the doctor again?”
She sighed. “Who knows? When I ask, he jumps down my throat.”
Tony has AIDS. He contracted the virus in 1985 when he made the mistake of entering a Brooklyn bodega at the wrong time. He had gone in to buy a pack of Marlboros and interrupted a robbery. As a decorated New York detective, his instincts were sure and fast. But not fast enough. Before he could draw his own gun, a .25 caliber bullet ripped through his shoulder. The bullet shattered his clavicle. The subsequent operation and transfusion left him HIV-positive.
After Tony confided in his partner, the news ripped through the NYPD like wildfire. Soon after, his partner was transferred to another precinct and Tony was strongly “advised” to take an early retirement. He opened the agency almost immediately. Its success was the medicine that had kept him energized for almost seven years.
Two months ago Tony had another bout with pneumonia. In the past, he had bounced back with surprising resilience. But this time, recovery had been slow and painful. In recent weeks, his weight had begun dropping at an alarming rate. What concerned me most was his attitude. He had become apathetic and occasionally forgetful. I knew Jill and I were thinking the same thing.
She broke the silence first. “I hope it’s not the beginning of AIDS dementia.”
A horrifying chart detailing the various possible progressions of AIDS was hidden under the blotter on Tony’s desk. Jill and I had discovered it one day when we were searching for a lost file. While Tony tenaciously avoided all discussion of the disease with anyone but his doctors, he had been carefully and grimly underscoring each and every symptom he manifested in yellow highlight. The chart was his road map to death. AIDS dementia, or HIV encephalopathy, was near the end of the line. But forgetfulness and distractedness did not necessarily herald AIDS dementia.
“Call his doctor and make sure he knows about Tony’s behavior,” I said.
“Robin, we promised to respect —”
“He’s my partner, Jill. I need to know what’s happening. Tell Tony if you have to, but make sure that his doctor gets the information. As a matter of fact, make sure you tell Tony I ordered you to call Dr. Kleinau. It’ll piss him off. Knowing Tony, he’ll live another ten years just to get even with me. And tell him I called him an asshole, too.”
Jill laughed. “A balding asshole. He’ll be frothing at the mouth.”
I felt my fears ease a little. Tony was a fighter. We just had to remind him about what he was fighting for. “One last thing. Make sure he realizes the case I’m on right now is pro bono.”
“You’ve got a strange way of demonstrating friendship.”
“Glad you noticed. By the way, I could use a little
help on this investigation. It’s not really official, but still I’d like you to check Noreen Finnegan’s financial transactions. Credit card usage, bank withdrawals, the basics. Let me know if there’s been any unusual activity in the past few months. She also had a suit pending against Fred and Camilla DeLuca.” I gave her their address and the name of their business. “Round up as much data as you can.” It was routine work, but Jill agreed readily. We had computerized our offices only a few months ago, and she had already become adept at ransacking computer files.
Just before I hung up, I remembered something else. I explained that Noreen had apparently planned to hire me to search for siblings from whom she had been separated following her parents’ death. “Can you check and tell me if Pennsylvania has a state reunion registry?”
I heard the thump of books, then Jill came back on. “They have one, but it’s for birth parents only. Are you sure she was born in Pennsylvania?”
Reluctantly, I said no, then paused. “But I know how I can probably find out.”
After banking the fire, I headed outside. For a few minutes I just stood on the front deck and listened. Tree branches swished in the chill breeze. I looked up through the twin white pines planted to the left of the house and watched birds flying south in ragged Vs. The sky was a rich late-autumn blue, dotted with brilliant cumulus clouds. A perfect day for rifling through files. I started up my car and began backing out of the driveway. A second later a dark blue Taurus whipped by the house. I recognized the driver instantly. I slammed on the brakes and cursed. Then I followed the car over to Valley Road.
Chapter Five
Manny Diaz was unlocking the front door as I pulled up. She glanced over her shoulder at me, then hesitantly turned around and waited for me to climb up the driveway. Twice, her gaze darted to my left. I checked behind me, but no one was visible. Still, a shiver of apprehension ran up my spine as I halted next to her.
Her eyes were bloodshot and the lids heavy. I suspected that she had neither stopped crying nor eaten since hearing the news. I took in her sallow skin, the paleness of her lips, the droop of her shoulders, and shuddered. I recognized the blank stare of mourning that had not yet matured into conscious anguish. But there was something else—a distinct edginess that pierced her expression of grief like a knife point under silk.