by A. J. Chase
She picked up her phone and dialed Josh's number by rote, still reading the poem over and over again hoping it would transform itself into something significant.
"Hey, I need you to do something for me. I need you to find out how the words 'take her up tenderly' or the poem The Bridge of Sighs by Thomas Hood relate to Chandler Bentley."
He sounded distracted. "Do they at all?"
She could not stomach telling the story again. Not now. "They must. I'll tell you about it tomorrow. But I have a feeling it won't be an easy thing to find, so you should enjoy yourself with this one."
She heard a feminine voice through the earpiece and sighed. She suddenly wanted to ask him if he thought that he could maybe make it through one whole day without trying to stick his penis in someone, but she knew she was just on edge, and it wasn't his fault. He had pretty much been born a man whore, and would no doubt die one. There was no reason to harass him about it now. "I'll let you get back to who…I mean what you're doing."
He laughed. "Take her up tenderly. Don't know what on earth it means, but I'm on it doll face."
"Okay. Thanks, Josh. See you around." If there were an answer to what the poem had to do with Chandler, Josh would be the one to find it. She stared back at the screen feeling a profound sense of loss.
She reached across her desk and pulled out the list that he had made. To the bottom she neatly added the date, then "Pirates, New York City." Under the other women's names she wrote "Charlotte Wiseman" and the mode of death. Then she got into bed and cried herself to sleep.
Detective Zavad Wallace took another look at the crime scene photos strewn across his desk. It should have been easy enough to say that the Bentley character, with his convenient history and almost tangible arrogance, was the guilty party, but an easy fix wasn't what had kept him up the whole night before. There was something seriously off with this one.
He forced down another swig of the swill that Stan liked to call coffee and shuddered. He really needed to get around to cleaning out that coffee machine. As though that was going to happen. He needed to get around to cleaning his flat too or paying off his ex-wife's settlement so he could get on with his life without the specter of his failed marriage trailing behind him. But he was a cop, good at cleaning up after others, but not so much after himself.
He rearranged the photos so that they started at the farthest point and then worked their way in. He frowned and tried it in the other direction. He needed more than a preliminary autopsy report, but the way the coroner was backed up, there was no point in holding his breath. But he had seen a lot of murders in his time, and he knew some things about knife wounds, and what he knew was not adding up to what Stan thought. Chandler Bentley seemed like a good suspect, but somehow Zavad was not holding his breath on that one either.
He looked at the photographs of Fielding French's ludicrously small footprints trailing across the floor in the victim's blood. He looked at it again and then picked up the phone. "Marvin, Zave here," he said to the CSI tech on the other end. "I got a photo here of some footprints from Wiseman yesterday afternoon. I don't think CSI did any measuring because the girl who found the body said the prints were hers, but can you run a scan and tell me if there's even a fraction of a difference in any of the sizes."
Marvin yawned on the other end of the line. "The finder might have one foot that's bigger than the other. No big."
"Yeah, just humor me okay. Send one of your kids down there to pick up the photos."
"They're in college. They're interns. They all graduate next year." Marvin laughed.
"They're kids to me. I'll be waiting."
Stan wandered into the office and took a doughnut from the box before leaning over Zavad's shoulder. "If only they were all that hot." He propelled a nice even spray of doughnut crumbs into Zavad's black hair, where it would be sure to show. He shook his head slightly trying to do a perfunctory dislodge, fat little good it did.
"If they were all this hot, all the hot ones would be dead." He wanted to add, "You moron." But he stopped himself. Stan was the senior partner, and although he was, indeed, a moron, there was no point in arguing with him without a good reason. And just because Zave thought it was creepy to be attracted to a murder victim wasn't a good reason. Neither was being an idiot.
"Yeah." He chewed in considerate silence for a moment. "There's that. Nothing like a murder on Broadway to produce some scantily clad hotties. I guess we'd better head back on over Monday and do some more interviews. Might as well wait as long as we can to arrest Bentley. He's got millions in that musical, and he's not going anywhere. Maybe we'll get to see the costumes from some other number."
Zavad sighed. "Better not start signing the warrant yet. There's something else going on over there that we're not seeing yet."
Stan paused mid-chew. "You aren't honestly going to tell me that you think Bentley's innocent?
"Let's just say I'm not married to the idea of him being guilty. And don't eat over my head."
Stan looked at his stale doughnut and tossed the rest in the trash. "Some guys are just guilty like weather just moves east."
"I'm not so sure. And I'm not sure about Fielding French either. That girl…do we have some kind of undercover operation going on over there?"
Stan laughed so hard he started to choke, when he got a hold of himself again he grinned. "You think that French girl is a cop? Fat chance. She's an undercover librarian maybe."
Zavad shook his head considering again the way she was always watching, always evaluating, always on. "I don't know what she is, but I know what she's not, and that's just another dancer."
Kyle called Fielding at around noon on Saturday morning, and she was still trying to pull herself out of bed. The night before had yielded plenty of nightmares followed by plenty of tossing and turning, but very little sleep. It was the latest she had woken up since she was a teenager. She pulled the phone to her ear and mumbled hello expecting it to be Mac or Josh, but instead she heard Kyle's soft voice on the other end.
"Hello, dearie. A few of us are headed over to Mitchell's to have a little wake of our own for Charlotte. Do you know where Mitchell's is?"
Actually she did. It was right across the street from the old theater that she and Chandler had used for their private lessons. "Yeah." She pulled herself up in bed shoving her hair out of her eyes. "Now what's going on? Tell me again."
"We're going to meet there at sevenish and drink too much and try to find desperate men to sleep with. It would have been the way she wanted it."
Fielding smiled even though she also wanted to start crying again. Poor Charlotte. It would have been just how she wanted it. "Yeah, okay. Sevenish, Mitchell's. See you there."
Fielding tried hard not to look at the theater across the street as the cab dropped her off in front of Mitchell's at seven fifteen. The bar was busy, as she would have expected on a Saturday night. It took her a moment to find the others, Leslie, Kelly, Kyle, Dwight and his very pregnant wife, Bob, Daphne, and a much unexpected Josh. Fielding gave him a sharp look and sat down next to Leslie.
"Well, hello Fielding." Josh smiled, but he didn't look pleased.
Leslie glanced at him. "Oh, do you two know each other. I didn't realize. I just thought he was Daphne's date."
She sighed. "Guys this is my best…brother." She caught herself just in time. "My only brother really. In fact not even really my brother. My step-brother, ex step-brother."
She felt every eye on her, and she cleared her throat. "He lives in the same building as Daphne. And with me. He lives with me. I mean the apartment is his, I live with him. In the same building as Daphne."
Kyle eyed Josh's dark floppy hair and boyishly messy good looks and smiled slightly. "Ah, the famous ex-step-brother slash roommate. At last we meet."
Josh smiled casually, but his entire body looked tense. "In the flesh. I heard there was going to be heavy drinking and indiscriminate sex. My favorite way to spend a Saturday night. So I tagged along." He m
et all of their eyes, his famous charm already working. "I'm sorry about your friend."
There was a general murmuring of consensus. They were all sorry. And why shouldn't they be? It was beyond horrible. Bob looked like he was still in a daze, and Fielding couldn't help but wonder if their relationship had gone past the mere practicing of Profundo.
Like she had anything to say about it. She only felt sorry for him if it was true. Then it occurred to her that if they had in fact been engaging in a little extracurricular nookie that made Bob as good a suspect as anyone.
Kyle raised his glass. "To our friend Charlotte. She was a slut, but she liked it that way, and we loved her. We're going to miss her."
"Here, here," Kelly murmured, clinking her glass against Kyle's.
There was a lot of agreement all around and everyone drank to Charlotte. Fielding, like Dwight's wife, drank from the glasses of water mostly sitting ignored on the table.
"You didn't tell me about this last night." Josh sounded pleasant enough, but it wasn't hard to see that he was angry with her again.
She shuddered. "I didn't want to talk about it again. I was going to tell you today. Or tomorrow." She caught Leslie's eyes on them and sighed. "He worries."
"Well, maybe he should." Dwight sounded altogether furious. "A girl shouldn't have to worry about things like that. It just isn't right. I mean what if it had been any one of you. Or Melanie." Fielding was guessing that Melanie was his wife since his entire body had a little tremor at the words.
"She was afraid of him." Leslie's words were small.
"Afraid of who?" Bob's body leaned forward across the table.
But Fielding knew who she meant before Leslie even opened her mouth again. Fielding wanted to defend him so badly that the urge pressed against her throat like bile. Instead she took another big gulp of her water and signaled the waitress in an effort to get something harder. She could not defend him. She couldn't. Not unless she could do it without making her bias and insider information obvious.
"Mr. Bentley. She said we all ought to be afraid of him. That there was something she knew about him, something bad. And she was going to tell us about it after lunch. But she never made it until after lunch, did she?"
Kyle was unconvinced. "Come on, she was just trying to scare us. It didn't mean anything."
"Actually," Bob surprised them all by speaking. "There was something. She told me too. She said…" He was hesitant, as if he hadn't believed Charlotte when she told him. "She said he had killed his wife."
Fielding winced. Damage control was the only option at this point. She had to interject the truth, before the supposition got out of control. "It's true that she was killed." Fielding modulated her tone so that she sounded like the voice of reason. "But there's no reason to believe that he was the one who killed her."
Josh's sidelong glance told her that he disagreed, but he knew things that the others didn't, and however much he disagreed with her choices in the course of this investigation, he wasn't about to risk her cover by filling in the blanks. "So why haven't the police arrested him?" Dwight demanded.
"Obviously, they either don't think he's guilty or they haven't got the evidence. Either way, there's no need to make any assumptions the cops aren't ready to make at this point," Fielding pointed out.
Daphne shook her head, and Josh's lips compressed into a tight line. "What?" Fielding protested. "I'm just being reasonable."
She was saved from having to explain herself any further by the arrival of the waitress. She ordered and then turned back to Dwight and Melanie. "Do you know whether you're having a boy or a girl?"
The environment at the table changed again and everyone began to relax. Fielding's gin and tonic helped her reach a modicum of relaxation that she hadn't had in days. Josh was hitting the beers, and Dwight nursed one beer the entire time while his wife drank her water. Daphne's choice was white wine. Leslie was apparently incapable of holding her liquor, and the Jell-O shots that she, Kyle, and Kelly were enjoying in memory of Charlotte, who had apparently devoted many a night to drinking them, were going straight to her head. She was clearly more than a little dazed. Bob drank an imported beer and looked depressed.
Eventually the conversation came around to Charlotte again, and everyone had a story or two about her wry sense of humor, open sensuality and refusal to take life seriously. It was funny and poignant at the same time. If anyone had ever been too young to die…
Finally at about ten to ten, Dwight and his wife proclaimed themselves too tired to stay a moment longer and left to hail a taxi with Dwight's hand on the small of his wife's back. Then it was Daphne's turn to make her excuses. Bob was the next to leave, and he was so drunk by then that Kyle had to help him out to the cab. Then Leslie, Josh, Kelly, and Kyle went to work on the second part of their plan to memorialize Charlotte. In actuality it was mostly Josh, Kyle and Kelly who began working the bar for a cheap lay, and Leslie stayed at the table watching like she was taking lessons in how to engage in indiscriminate sex. She probably was. She didn't strike Fielding as the kind who got around much.
Suddenly, Leslie looked at her across the table. "Fielding, tell me the truth, have you ever been attracted to someone you just met? I mean really? Enough to just have sex with them?"
Fielding thought of the first day of her stupid plan and the buzz along her skin when Chandler had come into the light. If the circumstances had been right…if she'd met him in a club, or at a restaurant…if he'd made a move on her at all, she could see herself making a stupid, impulsive mistake in a club bathroom or the back of a car. "Once," she admitted.
Leslie shook her head. "It's only happened to me once, too, just the other day." She watched Kyle letting an urbane type in an expensive suit stand behind him and show him how to shoot pool when Fielding was sure he already knew how. Kelly had focused in on a twenty-something with a pierced tongue and eyebrow and an assortment of tattoos. He was letting her handle the metal ball on his tongue with a giant grin. Josh had disappeared. "Do you think they're really attracted to those guys?"
Fielding shrugged. "Maybe. Who knows? Maybe our standards are just too high. Maybe they just want to have sex, and they don't care who with. Sometimes I feel too old for this scene. You know what I mean?"
Leslie nodded. "Sometimes I think that I was born too old. My parents are the traditional type. They prefer to pretend like the words bar and sex don't actually exist." She downed another Jell-O shot. "I think I need to go home," she admitted, looking a little green around the gills.
"Hang on and I'll walk you out." She crossed over to Kyle. "Hey, I'm taking Leslie home. She has no more room for Jell-O, and she's pretty smashed. I'm afraid she won't even be able to get in a cab without help."
"Alright. Be safe, okay, sweetie?"
She nodded, waved goodbye to Kelly and helped Leslie into her coat and outside. The younger woman wavered slightly on her heels and then docilely let Fielding lead her to a cab that she had flagged down. "Do you need me to go home with you?"
Leslie shook her head, then immediately looked like she regretted the action. "No. I'm just a few streets up. I'm good. Go enjoy yourself."
"Thanks, but I think I'm probably on my way home too. I don't think I'm capable of sex with a stranger."
"At this point, I'm lucky if I'm capable of walking into my house." Leslie's rueful expression and pink cheeks made her look like a naughty middle-schooler. "See, my parents were right about the evils of alcohol." She smiled slightly and then pulled the door to the cab closed, laying her head back on the seat.
Fielding watched the cab drive away shaking her head. Her parents were right about the evils of alcohol when you had ten shots anyway. Poor Leslie. It was as if her parents were right there in that cab with her. Was there anyone who wasn't burdened down with a legacy of psychosis from their parents? If there was, they certainly weren't in the Pirates cast. She pulled her coat more tightly around herself and considered walking awhile before she bothered with a cab. It had
stopped raining, and although it was still very cold, the streets were busy. It might be a good chance to clear her head.
She started up the sidewalk toward Forty-second and then stopped in her tracks when a cab pulled up in front of the Sunshine Theater. Her mouth dropped when Chandler got out. She looked at her watch. Ten thirty. Their normal lesson time. The ones he was too busy for. Humiliation burned inside her. Yeah, she knew he was embarrassed about the scene at Calor Profundo and his unceasing stream of personal revelations that had spewed from his lips, but still—to say he was too busy and still show up here, that was like a slap in the face.
She turned on her heel and headed back toward the bar hoping he had not seen her, but it was too late.
He had.
CHAPTER TWELVE
She made the mistake of looking over her shoulder and found him still standing there outside the door staring at her. She stopped and sighed. There was no point in running away from him now. That would just make her look like a fool, and she had a little too much pride for that.
She turned back toward the theater, and he made a small beckoning gesture with his hand. The minimal movement still managed to send a shock wave through her entire body. He wanted her to come to him. But was she going to? That was the real question. Another good one being what did he want from her?
He didn't move the whole time that she didn't move. The cab drove away and only went a couple of feet before stopping again to pick someone up in front of Mitchell's. It started to rain again, and still they stood there engaged in a battle of wills she didn't fully understand. She felt pulled toward him as if they were two magnets, and the moment that she forgot to think about what she was considering and thought only of him, she stepped off the curb as though not of her own volition. As soon as she moved, he was in the street, and he took her arm and led her into the alcove away from the rain, silent the entire time.