I’d been back to the house many times since then, especially in the five weeks since he left, but I’d endeavored not to go into his room. I didn’t think Marquita would let me, for one thing, and for another, I was feeling ambivalent enough towards him already; I didn’t need any more temptations thrown in my path.
I stopped outside the door and took a deep breath, steeling myself before I turned the knob and pushed the door open.
I don’t know what I had expected, but whatever it was, I wasn’t disappointed.
The first thing to strike me was the smell. Spicy and citrusy, just like Rafe himself. Aftershave, shower gel, shampoo, laundry detergent... I had no idea what it was—maybe a mixture of a lot of things—but it was distinctly his, and heady. If I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, I could imagine that he was standing right next to me.
The second thing I noticed (after I opened my eyes again) was the bed, and before you think too badly of me, I should mention that it did rather dominate the room. King size, with crisp white sheets and a black duvet-cover. Satin. Horribly clichéd, but it packed a punch nonetheless. It didn’t take much effort to picture him there: all hard muscle and golden skin warm against those cool sheets, with hot dark eyes under long, smudgy lashes, and that melting grin...
Giving myself a hard mental kick, I turned toward the closet. Nothing good would come of having erotic daydreams about Rafael Collier, especially since I couldn’t act on any of them.
There was a black duffel in the closet, and I grabbed it and carried it back down the hall to Mrs. J’s lavender and white bedroom. There, we layered flowered housecoats with several more pairs of fuzzy slippers and old-lady underwear. I zippered the bag and hoisted it over my shoulder, and away we went. Leaving a note for Marquita on the kitchen table, pinned down by a salt shaker, to the effect that I had removed Mrs. Jenkins from the premises, and if Marquita was ready to take up her duties again, she could call my cell phone and let me know. If Rafe happened to come home—and there was a little flutter under my breast bone at the thought—he’d know where to find us, as well.
My apartment is only a couple of miles from Potsdam Street as the crow flies, but it’s a whole other world. East Nashville is one of those transitional areas of historic homes that have done a whole lot of changing over the past twenty years, but which still has a ways to go. And it’s comprised of several different neighborhoods, that are not all at the same level of gentrification. In the area where I live, on the corner of Fifth and East Main, renovating has been going on for years and years. It started with the bachelors, back when no one else dared move into the ghetto, and these days, you’d be lucky to touch a house for less than a half million dollars. The Potsdam area, on the other hand, is still lagging behind. There are a few big and impressive houses—like Mrs. Jenkins’s Italianate Victorian—but mostly the neighborhood is made up of small mid-century cottages. And where renovators are always happy to get their hands on big, potentially beautiful Victorians and Craftsman Bungalows with tiled fireplaces, pocket doors and built-in china cabinets, they’re not so excited about rows of cracker box houses built in the 1950s, with no particularly fine features and not a lot of room. So gentrification is slower in coming to Potsdam. In my neighborhood, nice-looking young people jog and push strollers and walk their well-groomed dogs on the spic-and-span sidewalks. On Potsdam Street, unshaven homeless men and kids with pants falling down around their ankles scowl at you as you drive by, and the only dogs are mongrels, scavenging for food.
“Nice place,” Mrs. Jenkins said when we pulled up outside my condo complex on the corner of Fifth and East Main. I looked around, too.
“Thank you.”
Her grandson was well aware of where I lived, having a habit of knocking on my door at inopportune moments—like, when I was getting ready to go on a date with Todd—but this was the first time Mrs. J had visited.
“That’s my apartment, up there.” I pointed to the balcony and the sliding glass doors on the second floor. “It’s just a one-bedroom, but you can take the bed and I’ll sleep on the sofa in the living room.”
“OK, baby.” I’m not sure whether my words actually registered or not; she was already on the move toward the gate. I snagged the duffel from the back seat, grabbed my purse, and followed.
It took some time climbing the stairs to the second floor, and I had to keep my hand under Mrs. J’s elbow the whole way, and boost her from step to step the last few times. Upstairs, I pointed down the hallway. “Just down there. Third door on the right.”
Mrs. Jenkins nodded and made a beeline for it, her speed better now that she was on level ground. She tilted to one side, though, and I hurried after her, hands outstretched to catch her in case she over-balanced.
“Door’s open, baby,” Mrs. Jenkins said.
I stopped and lowered my arms. “Pardon?”
She nodded to it. I looked.
Yes, it was. Open, that is. The heavy metal slab was pulled to, but not latched: a small corner of the welcome mat had gotten caught in the crack and kept the door from shutting all the way.
My first reaction was telling. A stab of excitement jabbed me in the pit of my stomach, and I caught my breath quickly.
A moment later I was chastising myself for my response: in order for Rafe to get here this quickly, he’d have to be in Nashville already, and if he were in Nashville, I’d already know about it. Or Mrs. Jenkins would. Still, there was that shiver of anticipation when I pushed the door open. Or maybe it wasn’t anticipation so much as apprehension. Or fear.
“Hello?”
No one answered.
“Don’t think nobody’s here, baby,” Mrs. Jenkins said from behind me.
Maybe not, but it didn’t hurt to be careful. I dug Sally Harmon’s little bottle of pepper spray out of my purse and thumbed the lid off before I ventured into the apartment. Slowly.
It isn’t a big place. A tiny foyer with a coat closet and a postage stamp-sized powder room leads directly into the living room/dining room combination. The kitchen is on the way, opposite from the coat closet and half bath, and the single bedroom is to the left of the living room, with the master bath behind the kitchen. It’s less than 1,000 square feet all told, and it was empty.
Though someone had clearly been by. It wasn’t just the open door: the stack of mail on the kitchen counter had been riffled. An electric bill had pride of place on top of the stack, where I last remembered looking at a circular from the Opry Mills Outlet Mall. Ditto for the stack of magazines and paperwork on the coffee table; the corners were squared, where I’m not usually that neat. And hadn’t I left “Desire under the Desert Moon” on the sofa, pages splayed and spine up, last night when I went to bed? Now it was sitting on top of the stack of magazines, closed, with a piece of scrap paper—a coupon from Starbucks—in lieu of a bookmark.
It was something my mother would do, but she didn’t have a key to my apartment, and even if she did, I couldn’t for the life of me imagine Margaret Anne Martin driving all the way from Sweetwater to Nashville, just to straighten my living room.
So if not my mother, then who? And why?
Nothing seemed to be missing. My little laptop was still sitting on the dining room table, open but intact, and the TV and other electronics were in their respective places, as well. I don’t own much of value; anything joint stayed with Bradley after the divorce, including the expensive furniture, and my apartment was furnished mostly with reupholstered second-hand furniture and things I’d bought at Target. It was bright and cheerful, but not valuable.
So if not a thief, then who? Someone looking for something? But what?
While I’d been contemplating the living room, Mrs. Jenkins had shuffled to the bedroom door, and now she turned to me.
“You’re prob’ly gonna wanna see this, baby. And then you’re gonna wanna call that nice detective.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
I went to join her in the doorway, and staggered at the level of dest
ruction in my bedroom.
The rest of the apartment was pretty much pristine, or as pristine as I keep my living quarters. If the front door hadn’t been open, I might not have noticed that anyone had been here. I could have left the electric bill on top of the stack of mail myself, and just didn’t remember; and I could have bookmarked and closed “Desire under the Desert Moon” instead of leaving it tented, as is my usual habit. It was possible.
This was another matter. Whatever had been going on in the other part of the apartment—whatever my uninvited guest had been looking for, and had or hadn’t found—he or she had made up for in here.
My bedroom looked like a chicken coop. There were feathers everywhere, where someone, using something sharp—like a knife; and my stomach clenched at the idea—had slashed my pillows to ribbons and scattered the contents throughout the room. The padding was protruding from my washed silk comforter, which was a total loss. My shimmery nightgown lay crumpled on the floor, it too sporting long gashes, and on the wall above the headboard was written a single word in red, the letters spiky and angry. Trollop.
It wasn’t blood. Just lipstick. Which was bad enough, since I’d probably have to repaint the wall to get rid of it. Blood washes off, or so I’ve heard. L’Oreal Endless Kissable 16 hour No Fade, No Smudge Ruby-Ruby lipstick, not so much.
The rest of the stick was ground into the tan carpet. I might have to replace it, too. Or maybe I should just let the landlord keep my $500 security deposit and call it even.
“Don’t touch nothing, baby,” Mrs. Jenkins admonished me. I shook my head. No, I wasn’t about to touch anything. Except for my cell phone. I fished it out of my purse and dialed Tamara Grimaldi’s number.
“Detective? This is Savannah Martin. I have a problem.”
“What kind of problem?” the detective wanted to know. I explained what had happened, and she said, “Get out of there. Now.”
“We were going to stay here...” I said inanely, looking around at the destruction.
“Are you listening to me? Get out of there. Go to a hotel. Stay at the house on Potsdam Street. Or drive to Sweetwater and ask your family to put you up for a few days.”
I snorted. My mother might be willing to help me, but accommodating Mrs. Jenkins—the notorious Rafe Collier’s grandmother—was not the same thing at all.
“Spicer and Truman are on their way,” Tamara Grimaldi said in my ear. “Leave the apartment and wait for them outside. Don’t touch anything.”
“Can I pack a bag? I’m going to need something to wear for the next couple of days.”
She hesitated. “Has this maniac been in your closet? Will packing clothes disturb the crime scene?”
I opened the louvered closet doors and peered in. “Doesn’t look that way.” Everything was neat, hanging on hangers. My underwear was another story; the drawers in the bureau were open and a tangle of silk and lacy scraps were falling out. Blushing, I pushed them back in and closed the drawer with my hip. Crime scene or no crime scene; I wouldn’t have Officers Spicer and Truman pawing through my lingerie.
“OK,” Tamara Grimaldi said. “Gather some things, but be sure not to touch anything important. Clothes and toiletries only. And then get out of there. Fast.”
I promised I would, and—heart beating—started yanking clothes off hangers and dropping them into a suitcase. We were back in the courtyard within five minutes.
Spicer and Truman showed up shortly thereafter, and I left Mrs. Jenkins outside by the fountain while I walked the officers upstairs to the apartment, and showed them the crumpled welcome mat that had held the door open, the electric bill, and the book. “I can’t swear I didn’t close it myself, but I usually just leave it tented.”
“Nice, glossy cover,” Spicer remarked appreciatively, eyeing the picture of the half-dressed Bedouin with the headcloth clasping the swooning Lady Serena to his manly—and supremely well-muscled—chest. When I looked at him, incredulously, Spicer added, “It’d take fingerprints well. If whoever was here touched it, and wasn’t wearing gloves, we might get lucky.”
“Oh.” Of course. “I guess I’d better leave it here, then.” I’d rather looked forward to losing myself in the adventures of Lady Serena—and the imaginary arms of Sheik Hasan—but if leaving the book here would help the police figure out who had broken into my place, then they were welcome to it.
“That’d be best,” Spicer agreed.
“Just lock up when you’re done, please. We’ll be at the house on Potsdam Street.”
Spicer nodded. “The boy and I’ll wait for someone from CSI to get here. The detective’ll let you know when you can move back in.”
“Thank you.” I shivered.
“You want I should send the boy for a new lock?” Spicer asked. “No telling how this yahoo got in, but a new lock, and some chains and bolts, ain’t gonna hurt none.”
“That would be great. Thank you.”
He nodded. “We got it covered. Just take care of Mrs. J. I don’t wanna go back to driving around looking for her couple times a day.”
I promised I would. And then I left the two of them there, to wait for CSI and to replace my lock, and I headed back down to the courtyard and Mrs. Jenkins, who was still sitting there in the sun, looking around with beady little black bird eyes.
“Ready?”
She got to her feet. “Where we going now, baby?”
“I figure we’ll just go back to your house. We can stay there just as easily as we can stay here.” If a little more uncomfortably, at least on my part.
“OK, baby.” Mrs. Jenkins didn’t seem to care one way or the other. She shuffled toward the blue Volvo. I followed, clutching my suitcase and toiletries bag, and with Rafe’s duffel over my shoulder. Life was just getting worse and worse.
* * *
I spent the rest of the day setting up house at 101 Potsdam Street. We had to go back out, to the grocery store to restock the kitchen. Apparently, Marquita hadn’t done any shopping in a while, and Mrs. J had eaten her way through most of the groceries in the days since Marquita left. After that, I had to make dinner, to feed the poor old dear, and clean up the kitchen and wash the dirty dishes. By hand, since Rafe hadn’t gotten around to installing a dishwasher before he had to flee. Although there was a hole between the cabinets, where one was supposed to go.
This kitchen was where I’d first set eyes on Mrs. Jenkins, back in August. She’d scared the bejeezes out of me. It was also where Rafe had first seen his grandmother, on that same occasion. And it was where Mrs. J and I had come face to face with a murderer, and damned near hadn’t gotten away with our lives.
That thought brought me back to my apartment, and the destruction of my bedroom, something I’d tried really hard not to think about for the past few hours. Detective Grimaldi hadn’t called, so presumably the CSI-team was still doing its thing. Seeing as I was someone who’d gotten herself mixed up in two different homicides in the past two months, the police were probably taking my break-in a little more seriously than they would have otherwise.
Whoever had been in my apartment didn’t seem to have chosen it at random. If so, surely the TV and laptop would be missing, along with the few pieces of semi-valuable jewelry I own.
I really ought to tell the detective about that phone call I’d gotten the other day. The one where the caller had wanted me to go out on the balcony. I had complied, thinking he or she wanted me to see something outside. But what if they’d wanted to see me instead? If the burglar was someone who knew that I lived in the complex, but not which unit was mine, it was a reasonably safe way to discover where my apartment was located. My cell phone number is easily accessible; as a Realtor I broadcast it far and wide. My home address is harder to come by. I’m not listed in the White Pages, and since I don’t own the place, I don’t show up in Metro Nashville’s courthouse records, either.
My burglar was not someone I knew well, then. Unfortunately, that left most of Nashville. Maybe I needed to come at it from anot
her angle instead.
It seemed I’d been singled out, but why? It wasn’t to steal anything, since nothing seemed to be missing. That left someone looking for something, or someone who just plain wanted to scare me. Maybe a little of both. Riffling the mail and digging through my lingerie drawers seemed to imply someone looking for something. But shredding my pillows and lipsticking my wall... that was either someone holding onto sanity by a shred, or someone very calculatedly trying to scare the living daylights out of me. And succeeding.
My hands stilled in the sudsy water as I went down the list of people I had upset lately.
First there was Walker, of course. I’m sure he didn’t appreciate the fact that I proved he’d committed two murders. But he was in jail—Tamara Grimaldi would have told me if he’d escaped or been released—and besides, we’d parted on reasonably good terms last time I saw him. Plus, he wasn’t stupid; he had to know that doing, or ordering, something like this would only make things worse for him.
Maybelle Driscoll and I hadn’t ended up as best friends during that whole fiasco, either. Maybelle was Brenda Puckett’s neighbor, and Brenda hadn’t even been in the ground a week when Maybelle managed to get herself engaged to the grieving widower. The fact that Alexandra, Steven and Brenda’s daughter, liked me and didn’t like her, didn’t help. The obscenely devoted Maybelle was loony enough to do something like this. But I hadn’t seen any of the Pucketts for a month at least, and Maybelle herself for even longer.
Maybe there was a clue in the writing. A trollop is a loose woman, a prostitute or adulteress. The last time I’d come across the word, was in a Barbara Botticelli novel. Historical, of course; it isn’t an expression that’s much in use these days. Anymore, a promiscuous woman is more likely to be called a slut. Or, if you’re my mother, maybe a hussy.
[Cutthroat Business 01.0 - 03.0] Boxed Set Page 58