I tried to smile. It probably came out as a fixed, evil stare. “I’m not thinking about doing anything.”
She reached out one thin, bone-white hand and put it over mine. Her hand was so much smaller than mine. And cooler. “Everything’s going to be okay, Dru. You didn’t have anything to do with what he’s talking about, so there’s not a problem, right?”
I pushed back the black bangs off her face. “Here’s what I want you to do while I’m gone. Sit tight, and watch the telly. I’ll give you a call when I’m done with Colin and reassure you that he’s still alive and in one piece, okay?”
She nodded. I kissed her forehead and grabbed my purse.
I was glad Stevie had faith that I was going to deal with Colin in a rational, careful, adult manner. Because at the moment, I was so furious I had no such faith in myself.
CHAPTER FIVE
IT WAS MIDNIGHT before I arrived at Colin’s apartment. I found a space a block away and considered myself lucky, because I hadn’t seen much parking. The streetlights cast little skirts of light here and there, leaving enough dark patches to make me hug the street-side of the sidewalk. I can take care of myself and I don’t seek out trouble. It finds me often enough anyway.
As I neared Colin’s apartment, I saw a light brown sedan at the end of the block, near one streetlight. A common enough car, but a light brown sedan sat outside my Las Vegas apartment every day for six weeks, Vin Behar sitting in it, watching my comings and goings morning, noon, and night. What a coincidence that a similar light brown car, down to the dent on the front bumper, was right here, by Colin’s apartment.
In my universe, there’s no such thing as a coincidence.
I walked right past Colin’s building. In the front seat of the car was the glow of a cigarette held in a beefy hand.
Vin Behar was here.
How in the hell was Vin Behar here?
As I got nearer, the passenger side window slid down. The odor of sweat and cigarettes and sour cheese wafted out of his car. “So you found him after all,” he said to me. “Congratulations.”
Vin Behar, as large and ugly as ever, was right in front of me. This was a long way from the Marrakesh Casino. Vin looked like the cop he used to be, except older and meaner and with extra gut. He gave me the creeps the first time I’d met him and my feelings hadn’t changed since then. I wanted away from him and his ragged cuticles and short-sleeved shirt that I knew had the armpit stains burned in, even if I couldn’t see them in the dark car.
“Why are you here?” I said.
“Maybe I followed you.” He grinned.
Maybe he’d planted something on my car. A GPS tracker was a couple of hundred dollars. A lot of money for a tightwad like Coffey. The boss must have been desperate to find Colin.
“Did you get a good morning’s sleep?” I asked.
He spat out the window. Lovely man. “You’re going to pay for that.”
I appeared to consider the idea. “No, don’t think so.”
Behar smiled at me, those ugly tobacco-stained teeth dark in his mouth, and he started his car. “Go see loverboy.”
I walked back to Colin’s, wondering why Behar was here. If he was supposed to bring Colin back, shouldn’t he be in Colin’s apartment, wrestling my husband into a gunny sack or something? Why was he outside Colin’s apartment, so calm?
Screw them. Screw them all, hard. I would go in to that stupid, tiny apartment, deal with Colin, and then leave him to his own problems. It couldn’t be much harder to get divorced than it had been to get married, could it? Hell, my mother had managed three divorces by the time I was fifteen.
At the stairs, I hesitated again. Move it, I told myself; let’s get this over with.
The thumps of my footfalls should have alerted Colin to my presence, prompted him to open the door. But the door remained closed.
I peeked in through the bars over the side window. No lights on, no one moving around.
“Colin?” I said.
After waiting a few seconds, I rapped my knuckles on the door. That apartment was so tiny he had to have heard it. But he didn’t show.
I had arrived late, but damn it, I’d told him I was coming. Colin should have been on pins and needles, ready to talk, ready to get me to help him out of whatever he’d been babbling about on the phone.
Colin did not come to the door.
When something smells wrong, do not be around. And if you need to stay and not run far, far away, at least make it seem as though you are not around. I reached in the pocket of my jacket and took out a pair of latex gloves.
After I had the gloves on, I tested the door handle. If I’d needed to, I could have jimmied open the door—hell, breathing hard probably would have done it. But the doorknob turned.
My breath caught and I stopped pushing the door. Alarms went off in my head. Of course, there were lots of possible reasons for the door being open and Colin not answering. Maybe he’d walked to the nearest Starbucks for a midnight cappuccino. Or perhaps he’d gone out for a pack of cigs for himself, taken a walk around the block, gone to do some food shopping while waiting for me.
I pushed the door open.
The smell of copper hit me first. On top of the copper lay a faint acrid odor, like the wind near a portable toilet. Urine.
Turning on the light showed me Colin on his side by the kitchenette, his back toward the door. The back of his head was a pulpy red mass, mixed with plaits of his golden hair. Red flecks decorated his white shirt; a large red stain soaked the carpet under his head. I walked in a wide circle around him until I could see his face, with his eyes wide open in surprise. He’d left a puddle of vomit on that dusty carpet. His jeans were wet, which explained the smell of urine.
Colin looked like a part, a gruesome part, of our Grand Guignol stage act, with much better visual effects and an awful, horrible smell. It seemed unreal. It had to be unreal. I had to be hallucinating. There was no way he could be dead.
I leaned down and touched the side of his throat, my gloves smooth against his skin. His body was warm, but nothing pulsed under my fingertips. It had been two hours since I talked to him. How in the hell could he be dead?
Oh my God. Colin was dead. Dead.
I’ve seen dead bodies before. Even ones whose heads have been cracked open. And the smell is horrible and the sight is horrible and neither of those is the worst part. Someone who had been alive not too long ago was silent forever. Their soul, their spirit, whatever you call it, that animates the human body and gets it through the day is gone and there is no going back.
I wasn’t even aware I was crying until a tear dripped onto Colin’s sleeve.
Come on, Col, get up and wipe yourself off. Fun and games are over.
A glint from his hand got my attention: his hand was over my bracelet. He’d been holding it. Blood had smeared on the faint etching, highlighting the words there: IN C SE F EM G NCY LL and the phone number. That phone number. The number I couldn’t call ever again. Had Colin called it? More important, had anyone answered?
I thought about taking the bracelet. I even reached for it. But it was there, under his hand, and it was going to be obvious someone had disturbed the body taking it.
Near the other hand was his cell phone.
When I stood up, I did notice the bottle of gin that had been tossed aside, its glass smeared with blood and hair and flesh. Bombay gin. My brand. I was willing to bet folding money that was the bottle I’d left at Colin’s place in Vegas. Zeus in a sidecar, my fingerprints were on that bottle.
My bracelet. My fingerprints. I had to get out of here.
Colin, what did you do? Why would someone do this?
Behar had been sitting there in his car. Waiting for me? Waiting for me to come in here and see this? Waiting for me to get caught in here? He’d driven away as soon as I’d gone up the steps.
I ran out onto the top of the steps and promised myself I would find a pay phone and I would call 911, but until then I was getting the he
ll out of here. And maybe I wouldn’t use the first phone I found. I could put a little space between me and this.
As it turned out, I didn’t need to find a phone at all.
The first patrol car, lights and sirens blaring, rounded the corner.
Someone had called the cops. Behar, most likely. Or, if Behar hadn’t killed Colin, whoever did kill him. And Behar had to know who that was.
I stripped off the latex gloves, shoved them in my pocket, and pulled out my cell phone to call Stevie as I walked down the steps. No use waiting until the last second to get her working on this problem.
And there was no question that I had quite the problem staring me in the face.
She answered after one ring. “Is everything okay?”
“Find me a defense lawyer.”
She stuttered a number of noises, like she wanted to ask something but couldn’t find the words. Then she managed: “We have no money.”
“The money in the briefcase, Stevie. Use it.”
“We don’t know where it came from—”
“Stop arguing, and start dialing.”
The patrol car slowed to a stop in front of Colin’s apartment. The officer got out and shined a flashlight right at me.
“You’re at Colin’s?”
“I’m at Colin’s. Hurry it up.”
I popped my phone in my pocket and settled down to wait.
CHAPTER SIX
WAITING AROUND AT a crime scene is not only not glamorous, it’s distinctly awful. For one thing, there’s no comfortable seating.
The first uniformed cop out of the car bounded up the steps to Colin’s apartment while the second one, a red-haired guy named Ulriki, took my statement, which was as close to the truth as I would get: he was my estranged husband, we were getting together tonight to talk, I showed up, and he was dead. I did not volunteer the words “Penelope Gurevich,” “blackmail,” or “Vin Behar.” One thing at a time, and right now the necessary thing was shutting the hell up.
The presence of cops attracted the attention of neighbors. The street went from lifeless to full of people in about ten minutes.
I realized we were in LA when I overheard one woman asking the man next to her, “Where are the cameras?” and the man replied, “Nah, I think this is for real.”
The second pair of cops blocked off the scene with yellow police tape. Then one of them, the only woman of the four, asked me for my statement again. I asked her if we could talk under the stairs, away from the growing crowd of people. She thought I wanted to get away from the noise. In reality, I needed away from the cameras that were coming out and focusing on me.
After I talked to the second cop, I stood in the shadows under the stairs and waited for the next time I had to tell the same damn story again. Stevie hadn’t called me back, which meant she didn’t have good news for me yet.
When the Ford drove up and double-parked behind the second patrol car, I knew two things: the homicide detectives had arrived, and I would be leaving soon. Either with police escort, or without.
The driver got out—thin, wiry, shorter than my one hundred and seventy-five centimeters. Under the street lights, his skin color looked Hispanic and he had the flattish nose of a Central American Indio. He had an empty expression that must have taken years to develop.
The second detective got out and I wondered whether he was free for dinner, and then whether I would be free to join him. Or at least out on bail. Forget dinner; I wanted to talk about breakfast. Great gods above, people really were better looking in Los Angeles. He was maybe a decade younger than his partner, taller, and muscular. I admit to being deeply shallow and preferring men who are in damn good shape, which he was. He seemed congenitally unable to smile. I was willing to work very, very hard on that problem. He glanced around the scene and stopped when he came to me. I saw the barest twitch in the side of his lips. A good sign. A very good sign.
Was being sexually attracted to one of the homicide detectives investigating your husband’s death a normal reaction? I’d ask Stevie, but at a question like that she’d blush and hide in a corner for a while. Until such time as she’d researched the answer in a couple hundred books, half of them in German, and had a prepared a treatise on the topic.
Then one of the uniforms pointed me out. My current object of serious lust glanced at me, and then said something to his partner, shielding whatever he was saying from view. From my view. But not before I saw that twitch flatten right out and the shoulders stiffen enough to indicate the shields were going up. Clearly, I should make other breakfast plans. And I needed to watch what I said to him. The most likely suspect in someone’s death is immediate family. A marriage like ours, doubly so.
I hoped Stevie was having luck finding me a lawyer. Any lawyer. Who was willing to accept a down payment of cash from an unknown source.
Once in my life, I needed to find out if there was an easier way to do something. There had to be. For once, I needed to try that option first.
The detectives walked toward me. My pulse raced and my solar plexus seized up, which meant my nervous system was in working order. My father used to say the only people who weren’t tense around the police were other cops and criminals.
My father: a man never nervous around cops.
After all, he had half of Scotland Yard on his payroll.
My affect when I’m nervous is to get languid. Relaxed. Some have used the word “cool” and others “patronizing,” but in my own defense I was raised to be patronizing—people were either of our class or they were below it. Just because my station in the world has fallen precipitously doesn’t mean all that early training went to naught.
When the detectives got to me, the badges came out with introductions. The tall one with the nice body and the not-so-nice scowl was Detective Samuel Gruen. The twitch in his lips developed into a hard stare. All right then—he would be playing the bad cop. His partner was Detective John Vilar. Vilar had a softer, less confrontational stance, and a sadder air. I wondered how long each man had been doing this job.
Vilar’s eyes were soft and brown. “Mrs. Abbott.” His voice as polite and sad as his demeanor suggested. “We’d like to ask you a few questions about your husband.”
Very nice. The power plays were starting. Excellent. I put on one of my tight half-smiles and looked at Vilar. “It’s Thorne. Drusilla Thorne. I don’t use Abbott.” I gave his partner a swift glance. Gruen didn’t change expression; he shifted his weight, and I could tell he’d wrapped up this case in his mind.
Vilar nodded sympathetically and made a note in his book. Along the lines of how I was obviously the murderer, perhaps. He wrote another line in gorgeous handwriting I couldn’t make heads or tails out of. As I’ve said, reading isn’t my strong suit. He looked up. “Ms. Thorne.” What a soothing, musical voice he had. “Can you tell us what happened?”
Gruen stepped backward and started walking around the area under the stairs, which was a not very subtle way of circling me. I felt intimidated, which I was sure I was supposed to. Now that he was not a Possible Prom Date, I was not in danger of being overly helpful. Not that I ever am, to be honest.
My father’s number-one rule echoed in my mind: Never volunteer information. Despite the fact that it came from my father, it was still good advice that has come in handy a number of times. “I don’t know what happened.” I spoke quietly, which made Detective Vilar lean in closer to me and Gruen stop pacing. “I think my husband’s been murdered.”
Gruen looked me up and down in a way that made me think maybe breakfast was back on. He stopped when he got back to my eyes. “That’s a nice outfit. You have something planned for today?”
I shook my head. “I like to dress well, Detective.”
He nodded, his gaze still on me. He had beautiful hazel eyes. “Do you often carry latex gloves in the pocket of your nice outfits?”
I believe the only reaction to have to that was: Fuck.
The gloves were showing.
“Don’t answer that.”
The voice startled both me and the good detective, and we turned to see who’d joined our little tête-à-tête.
The man standing there wore the most expensive suit I’d seen in quite a while. He wasn’t handsome—plain, with thinning blonde hair on top—but what he lacked in conventional attractiveness, he more than made up for with the most direct stare I’d seen in a while. He carried a dark leather briefcase and he looked as comfortable telling us what to do as, well, only a successful lawyer could be.
A lawyer.
My lawyer.
Stevie’s supernatural powers could make a religious convert out of me.
“Nathaniel Ross. Good to see you again, Detective Gruen.”
Gruen gave him a malevolent look that made me damn glad he didn’t have me in an interrogation room.
Ross took me by the elbow. “I need to talk to my client.”
He started to pull me toward the street, where the lights and the cameras were, but I shook my head and pulled him toward the darker alley on the side of the house. I didn’t want to be seen.
What can I say? Acting guilty is a habit with me, formed at a tender young age. When I was, after all, guilty at least eighty-five percent of the time.
“You’re quite well-known, aren’t you?” I asked, smiling enough to seem flirtatious.
He shrugged, as if to say Of course I am. “My being your lawyer is going to make the cops look that much harder at you.”
I nodded. “So you’re expensive.” As if the shoes hadn’t told me that. “What on earth sort of payment did my sister offer you?”
Ross raised an eyebrow at me. “Sister?”
“My sister didn’t call you?”
“I don’t think he’s your sister, no.”
“He?” Fire of Hades, had Stevie managed to overcome her fear of leaving the house and of meeting strangers in order to ask Gary to help us? And he had said yes? “Does he have a name?”
“I’ll just say I was surprised he doesn’t have a stronger Spanish accent.”
And the answer became clear: “he” was Roberto. Roberto Montesinos, that is. A very wealthy man. Also, my stepfather, and most probably the man who had told my mother not to save me that night eleven years ago when I was covered with blood. Now he saw fit to get me a lawyer.
You Know Who I Am (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries Book 2) Page 6