DYING FOR
A CLUE
By
JUDY FITZWATER
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events described in this novel are fictitious or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 1999 and 2011 by Judy Fitzwater
Originally published by The Ballantine Publishing Group, October 1999.
Cover art copyright © 2011 by Vanessa Garcia
All rights reserved. This book, or any part of it, cannot be reproduced or distributed by any means without express permission in writing from the author.
Prologue
Lazy jazz swelled in the background as Jennifer Marsh looped the belt of her tan trench coat and cinched it tightly against her thin waist. She opened a tube of lipstick and rouged her lips. Then she tucked her long, taffy brown hair behind her ears, ran her hand over the crease of the brown fedora, and placed it on her head, tugging it snugly over one arched eyebrow. She raised the collar of her coat, drew on a pair of thin, synthetic calfskin gloves, and winked at her reflection in the dresser mirror.
Murder was about to become her business.
Chapter 1
The alley behind the short side of the L-shaped strip of shops and offices on Macon’s southern side was dark, dirty, and rank, and Jennifer had just about had it with playing detective. The last ten minutes had held none of the dark, brooding atmosphere of a Philip Marlowe novel nor the cool sophistication of Lawrence Sanders’ Archy McNally. She was hot and muggy, she was bored, and she felt gypped.
Crouching behind a stack of cardboard boxes, staring at two delivery men whispering to someone at the back entrance to the East Lake Fertility Clinic was hardly what she’d had in mind when she’d signed on as Johnny Z’s assistant. She didn’t even know who the men were or why they would be making deliveries on a Sunday night, and every time she tried to ask Johnny, he shushed her. All he told her was they were to pick up some material for a client.
She glanced over at the lean, wiry form hunched behind one of the larger boxes. She'd had great hopes for him. If she squinted just right and looked at him out of the corner of one eye, he bore a remarkable resemblance to Humphrey Bogart. But right now he seemed as bored as she was, cleaning his nails with a large pocketknife.
Then one of the delivery men shouted something and dropped down. His hand went to his back pocket, and a woman screamed. A loud pop echoed down the alley.
Jennifer jerked back. The box she was hiding behind shifted, and Johnny's knife clattered to the pavement. The man turned in their direction.
The next bullet clipped past Jennifer's ear, leaving her temporarily deaf on her right side. Instinctively, she rolled, tumbling painfully into the brick wall of the alley and into shelter behind a Dumpster. She felt the sleeve of her trench coat tear across her aching shoulder.
"Oh my God," she wailed, more a prayer than a curse. "They're shooting at us." She was shaking so badly she could barely pull herself up.
Johnny Z was still hunched behind the boxes, but cardboard offered only psychological protection against bullets, and if he didn't bail quickly...
Another bullet tore past, and this one left a dark trail as it skidded across the asphalt. Johnny Z crumpled backward, and Jennifer watched in horror as a dark pool seeped beneath him. He'd better not die on her. She had a few choice words she wanted to say to him first.
She was desperate to escape but she knew she couldn't outrun anyone, especially not in her current jellylike state.
She dragged herself up against the Dumpster, found a foothold on the side of the bin and dove, head first, into something squishy, and worse, smelly. She'd worry about what disease she'd catch later—if there was a later. She sucked in one great nauseating gulp of air, her heart straining against her rib cage. It would be nice to stop breathing altogether, but last time she checked, it was a requirement for living.
She waded back under the cover, closed her eyes, and prayed—prayed for Johnny Z, the third-rate private detective whose lifeblood was staining some grimy alley in Macon, Georgia, and prayed for her overly ambitious and overly stupid self.
What a revolting situation for a crime writer—fictional crime, Jennifer reminded herself. Doing some practical research for her novels had seemed like such a good idea. But did that mean she had to hook up with some guy she found in the phone book—the last name listed under INVESTIGATORS—and the only one willing to let her tag along after him?
They'd find her body in the morning. Riddled with bullets, alongside Johnny Zeeman's. Or suffocated amidst a Chinese restaurant’s garbage, the victim of noxious fumes. Dead. And she wouldn't even know why.
Poor Sam. He might even be the one to identify her corpse, sent to the scene to cover the story for The Macon Telegraph. He'd take it hard. They were close even if they did share a kind of limbo relationship because of her obsession with becoming a published novelist.
Ever since he’d helped her clear her name in the Penney Richmond murder, they’d been more or less a couple: him being the more, her the less. She had real feelings for him, but she needed time to sort them out. Unfortunately, time was something she might well be fresh out of.
She heard two sets of footsteps running toward her.
"Where'd the other one go?" a man asked.
"Must have run off," a second voice suggested.
"Check the Dumpster."
Jennifer froze. If God was with her, they wouldn't have a flashlight. She heard a foot hit the metal support she'd used to push herself high enough to climb in.
A nearby voice said, "Man, you've got to be kidding. No one would hide in that stinking mess."
Jennifer heard him push off, his shoes hitting the pavement, and she allowed herself to breathe again. Bad idea.
"Come on," the other man called. She listened as the two sets of footsteps hurried back up the alley. An engine started, followed by what sounded like a truck pulling away.
What seemed like an eternity passed. Jennifer opened one eye and then the other. The ringing in her ear had now softened to a dull throb.
They were gone. Maybe they wouldn't come back.
She raised her head and strained to hear. She needed to check on Johnny Z. Her muscles twitching wildly, Jennifer popped her head out of the bin. Ah! Fresh air—at least relatively speaking.
The alley was silent. She heard nothing and saw nothing, except for Johnny's body lying a few yards away.
She'd have to chance it. She hoisted herself up onto the lip of the bin, threw one leg over the side, and lowered herself to the ground. She was covered, head to toe, in yuck, her precious brown fedora forever lost. Ducking down, she scurried to Johnny's side.
His eyes were closed, and a small patch of blood discolored the shoulder of his shirt. She bent over him and lightly touched his craggy cheek, a great sob welling in her throat. "Oh, Johnny," she whispered, as though she'd known him much longer than two days. Her tears splashed onto his nose. "I'm so very—"
Suddenly, Johnny's eyes popped open. "What the hell is that godawful smell?"
"You're alive!" Jennifer shrieked in good Frankenstein fashion, jerking backward.
"I am now. Whatever you're wearing is a lot more powerful than smelling salts. Are they gone?"
She nodded frantically, as much to reassure herself as him.
Johnny tried to move his arm but stopped, gasping. "There's a cell phone in my inside jacket pocket. Call 911 before I bleed to death."
She groped for the phone, found it, and dropped it.
"Don't break the blasted thing," Johnny chastised.
She peeled off her gloves, which were covered in something resembling duck sauce, scooped up the phone, and made the call with fingers that felt like concrete.
"They'll be he
re in about five minutes," she assured Johnny.
"Good. How many shots did you count?" he asked.
"Three."
"That's what I thought. Check it out. See where the first one went."
"Me?" she asked incredulously.
"What? You expect me to get up and leak blood halfway up the alley to see who else went down?"
"I don't know. How bad are you hurt?"
"Do it, Marsh," Johnny ordered.
Well, this was what she'd come for, wasn't it? To find out what it was like to be a real detective.
She shed the coat, folding it neatly inside out, and laid it on the pavement. September in Georgia, even on a cool night, was too hot for it anyway.
Johnny made an impatient motion, and she stood up. "All right, already. I'm going."
Quietly she covered the fifty feet to the back entrance of the clinic, fully aware that she was in the open and there were no handy Dumpsters to provide shelter should the gunmen return.
The door was standing open, light illuminating the narrow, brightly white hallway. She inched forward. Did she really have to do this? She should be home writing, not running around in some dingy alley looking for who knew what. But she couldn't just leave. Someone inside might need help, and, unfortunately, she was the only able-bodied person on the scene. Even if she did get sick at the sight of blood.
She cursed her own cowardice, threw back her shoulders, and plunged forward.
Just inside, she found a woman, sitting in a pool of blood, slumped awkwardly against the wall. Jennifer bent down next to her and gently lifted her chin. Two round eyes stared up at her, wide open. There was a small hole in the woman’s neck.
The eyes. Large, beautifully shaped, tilted like almonds and fringed with long lashes. Startling. Arresting. Unnatural. One blue, one brown. Jennifer felt somehow confused. As if she couldn’t quite make sense of what she was seeing. As if her own eyes were betraying her.
For a moment she swayed back on her feet. The light in the hallway seemed to grow bright and then to dim. Blue mixed with brown, brown with blue, until she wasn’t sure what she saw. Her head became light, and she lost her sense of up and down. She felt like she was falling, then tumbling into the whirlpool of those stone cold, dead eyes.
Chapter 2
Her right cheek stung and then her left. Jennifer opened her eyes just in time to flinch from the back of a large hand threatening to land yet another blow.
"She's awake," the man squatting in front of her announced. “I don’t see any wounds, but I still haven’t figured out what happened to her. She looks like she’s been slimed.” Turning back to Jennifer, he asked, "Are you hurt?"
This from some baby-faced cop who was slapping her mercilessly? She scowled, rubbed her cheek, and pulled her legs up under her. There was hardly room for one person in the narrow hallway, let alone half a dozen.
"Sorry, ma'am—about your cheek," he added.
The Big Three-O was bearing down on her, but Jennifer hardly considered herself a ma'am. The word stung more than the slap.
She shook her head. Except for a crick in her neck from the way she’d fallen when she fainted, the muddle where her brain should be, and the fact that she smelled like a sewer, she was doing great.
The policeman helped her to her feet. Her hip ached and her knee almost gave way when she put her weight on it. Maybe she wasn’t so all right after all. She bit her lip and hoped he wouldn’t notice. All she wanted was out of there.
A paramedic was bending over the other woman, fortunately shielding Jennifer from those wide-open, blank eyes.
"She's dead, isn't she?" Jennifer asked, keeping her own eyes steadfastly on the man next to her.
"Oh, yeah," the policeman assured her, shuffling her outside, his arm securely supporting her. Police cars, blue lights flashing, blocked her view of either end of the alley. He pulled her toward an ambulance waiting near the door, but she balked.
"I think it'd be better if you went to the hospital and let them check you out," he insisted.
"No, I'm fine. How's Johnny Z?"
"You mean Mr. Zeeman, the man we found up the way?"
She nodded.
"They've already taken him in. He was lucid. Lost a bit of blood, but I think he'll be all right."
Good! Then he'd feel it when she strangled him. Johnny Z had said nothing about guns or bullets—or dying—when he'd invited her along. A simple case. Hah! People didn't get shot over a simple anything.
Jennifer licked her lips. This whole P.I. business was tasting pretty sour about now.
"Where'd they take him?"
"Macon General."
She started off down the alley. "We need to talk to you," the policeman insisted, following her.
She spun on her heels and almost bumped into him. "You said I should go to the hospital. You can talk to me there."
It was fortunate he'd called her ma'am and that he was younger than she was. It made it a whole lot easier to flout her ingrained respect for the law and march, with only a slight limp, straight up that alley toward her car and through a news crew from Channel 14.
When they finally wheeled Johnny Z into his room, he looked at least ten years older than the forty or so Jennifer guessed him to be. He was ashen and looked more like he belonged in the morgue than in a hospital. But then, the couple of times she’d seen him, he hadn’t looked much better.
His shoulder was swathed in gauze. The bullet had gone straight through, Jennifer could testify to that, so the doctors had been left with clean-up and patch-up.
Two nurses fussed over him, adjusting his IV, and then left.
"Does it hurt much?" Jennifer asked.
Johnny shifted and winced. "How'd you get in here?" Obviously he was too tough to grouse about his wounds.
She took the chair next to the bed. "I simply kept my eyes forward and acted like I knew what I was doing."
He nodded. "Usually works."
"That—and I'm now your niece, your only living relative."
"Welcome to the family."
She ignored the leer in his watery eyes.
“You know, when you didn’t come back, I thought somethin’ might’ve happened to you,” he said softly.
Sentimental? Johnny? Could it be he was having an attack of conscience for taking her with him? Hah! She hardly thought so.
"You in a lot of pain?" she asked again.
"Not particularly. Who took the bullet?"
"A short woman with the most incredible eyes."
"Damn," he cursed.
"You know her?" Jennifer asked.
"Yeah, you know her, Zeeman?" It was a big, middle-aged man in a suit with the baby-faced cop. They were standing in the doorway.
"I don’t know. Could be my client, Diane Robbins."
"Guess you won't be getting your bonus," the older man suggested, grinning smugly.
"Bonus?" Jennifer asked.
"Zeeman here takes a bullet, and he gets an extra five hundred dollars, plus hospital expenses, on top of his daily fee while recovering."
Could that be why Johnny waited too long to get out of the line of fire? Nah. Surely not. No one would—
"It's in his standard contract. Part of the fine print. How much you made off that clause now? Three, four thousand maybe?" the man asked, sizing up Jennifer as he approached the bed.
She felt at a distinct disadvantage. Although she'd stopped at the restroom, paper towels only went so far getting Dumpster crud out of hair.
"So, niece, you got a name?"
"Jennifer Marsh," she offered.
She could tell from his smirk he already knew who she was. He offered his hand. "Lieutenant Schaeffer, Macon Police. You're the one who made the 911 call."
She nodded. This nice-looking lieutenant had an easy, friendly manner, but she knew to be wary. She felt like she’d done something wrong even if she had no idea what it was.
He turned around a straight back chair, sat, and then stuck a toothpick into his mou
th and proceeded to chew on it. "So tell me, Johnny. What happened in that alley?"
Jennifer crossed her arms and leaned back. Schaeffer had asked the question she wanted answered.
Johnny shook his head. "Hey, man, you know about as much as I do. All I know is five days ago this Robbins woman comes into my office, requesting my services. Young. Good-lookin’."
Jennifer rolled her eyes. Sheesh! This guy was acting like he’d crawled out of the pages of a Sam Spade novel. The next thing she knew, he’d be saying she was wearing one of those little pill box hats with black netting on it.
Zeeman shrugged his shoulders and let out a painful sounding gasp. "She said she needed my help. All I know is, I was to pick up something at the back door of the East Lake Fertility Clinic, but these two punks in a delivery truck showed up. I was waiting for them to leave when all hell broke loose."
Schaeffer took the toothpick out of his mouth and pointed it at Zeeman as if it were a lethal weapon. "Don't play cute with me," he warned. "You're not as stupid as you look."
Now both of them were doing it. But she could sympathize. If she’d had a rubber hose, she would have handed it to Schaeffer.
"Could we just cut to the chase?" she begged.
They ignored her.
"I swear. That was all there was to it. She said she didn't want to plant no ideas in my head."
Why not? Apparently there was plenty of room.
"I was to collect some envelope and deliver it to her. End of story.”
Schaeffer drew a bead on Jennifer. "That sound familiar to you?”
She pursed her lips. "He's told you more than he ever told me."
"Just what the hell were you doing in that alley with Zeeman anyway?" he demanded.
She opened her mouth but stopped short. Right now the whole mystery writer business seemed even more ludicrous than it had in the alley with bullets whizzing past. She cleared her throat and pasted on her most naive smile. "You're probably not going to believe this and even if you do—"
"She's my new partner," Johnny interrupted. "I was training her."
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