“Which room, Ms. McFadden?” he asked.
“Room 106,” Vivi answered. “It was…our room.” The impact of the moment suddenly strangled her and her voice weakened. Harry squatted down on one knee to face Vivi eye to eye.
I walked over to the old water fountain and grabbed one of those pointy paper cups. I filled three, one for each of us, and walked to Vivi and Harry and handed them the water.
“Shouldn’t we head over there?” I said.
“Yes and no,” Harry said. “Yes, Vivi will need to be there for statements, but no, I’d rather her not talk. But…we don’t have a choice about that.”
We all took a swig of the water as if it were bourbon in a shot glass, throwing it back like it would stop this nightmare.
“C’mon, honey,” I said to Vivi. “I’ll be right there next to you.”
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s get this over with.”
She grabbed my hand and pushed her red mass of curls from her eyes. I could see Vivi breaking, tears coming quickly now. I squeezed her hand and helped her up.
“It’s okay, honey,” I said. “We all know you did nothing wrong. You are going to be fine. Besides, you’ve got the two best attorneys in the state.”
And I was sure hoping I was right.
2
“Vivi and I will go in my car,” I said.
“Okay,” Harry agreed. “I’ll take mine in case I have to leave.” We heard the sirens of the police and emergency vehicles racing ahead of us as we walked to the parking lot behind the station.
The warmth of the late-spring sun hit my face in the street. God, I so loved this time of year. With the magnolias in full blossom, the smell of the coming Southern summer was overwhelming and transporting. A sweet, pungent aroma lingered in the breeze, reminding me that summer and good watermelon were just around the river bend.
As though a time portal were drawing me in, I was suddenly eight years old and on my grandmother’s screened front porch. I could smell her roses and honeysuckle and the huge magnolia trees in the front yard. I watched the bees on her camellias. I loved Mother’s, every corner of it. I took in a deep whiff and pulled in as much of the fragrance as I could, held my best friend’s hand and put her into the Navigator.
As I walked around to get into the driver’s seat, I felt so protective of Vivi. People could call her a lot of things, but they certainly could never call her a murderer.
As I slid onto the warm leather seat and put my key into the ignition, Vivi looked over at me with her wet green eyes full of insecurity. “Am I goin’ to jail, Blake?”
I answered her without hesitation. “Not on my life, sweetie. Not on my life.”
“Blake,” she said. “Thank you.”
“For what, honey?”
“For always being my Swiss Army knife.”
I smiled at her. I knew what she meant. I also knew how much she was counting on me to get her out of any mess that lay just on the other side of the river.
Vivi would be a person of interest simply because she was the last person to see Lewis alive. She wasn’t guilty of a thing. They were just screwing, for God’s sake. But Vivi is a reactionary. She will think the absolute worst and in the most dramatic way possible. It’s just part of being Vivi. Regardless, I was bound and determined to make sure she would never be charged with anything.
Vivi broke the conversation in my head. “I’m a nervous wreck, Blake.”
“Why, honey?”
“It’s just that, well…uh, we had a little friend with us in the motel room.”
“What? You were in a threesome?”
“Oh, my good God, no, honey. I meant—you know…a sex toy. I named him Deputy Dick.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake…I thought you were fixin’ to really shock me. I know you and Lewis can be a bit on the kinky side, no big deal.”
“I just don’t want the police to discover him. It. I will just die of embarrassment. But I have no idea where he got to. I was in such a panic when I ran for help.”
“Don’t worry, I’m sure you aren’t the only woman in the world to play with toys in the bedroom. I’m sure he will turn up.” I tried to get my thoughts together as we drove, and wondered if Vivi had any other interesting details she needed to divulge.
Though we rode in silence, I never let go of her hand. The emotions were stuck in our mouths. Vivi and I have never really needed words. In moments we had crossed the bridge over the Warrior River to the Fountain Mist motel. We drove in and parked as Harry made his way over to us. He opened Vivi’s door and helped her out.
The Fountain Mist was one of those old, side-of–the-highway kinds of motels. The kind that could charge by the hour. It had a red neon sign out front and a lighted fountain, like one of those old silver Christmas trees from the sixties that had the colored lights spinning underneath. The fountain changed colors and definitely helped to cheapen the motel’s appearance. Inside the lobby, the green carpet was threadbare and fading. The entire place needed painting. And sanitization.
Harry had his legal pad in hand and was standing with the police and the paramedics outside room 106. Everyone was in a panic, and Harry looked like he’d gone into shock.
“Where’s the body?” a paramedic yelled out at us as we approached. “There’s no body here!” Vivi and I walked over to the door at a clip. The dust from the gravel parking lot swirled in the air.
A frenetic chaos filled the room. The motel manager was standing on the dusty carpet, answering questions while a police officer took notes. I couldn’t see for the glare as the sun bounced from the mirror of the cheap dresser. Two officers and two paramedics had turned the room upside down. The frustrated sounds came again from the first paramedic. “Where the hell’s the body? We got a call from someone saying that her boyfriend had stopped breathing.”
“I left him right there, dead on the bed, buck naked and blue as blue blazes,” Vivi said with fear and panic in her eyes. I looked at Harry and he looked at Vivi.
“Vivi!” Harry said. “Where the hell is Lewis?”
In a split second, a breathless silence fell over the room and Vivi fell over backward right onto me. I caught her just as she slumped sideways, and a paramedic rushed to her while a policeman radioed the station.
No body, I thought. Is Lewis possibly alive? Or is someone hiding evidence? I held Vivi up till the paramedics got hold of her.
I looked at my stoic Harry. I knew he was thinking of his public image and trying not to show any emotion. At the same time, I knew he was trying to process and manage this unbelievable situation. But this was typical Harry. Sometimes so closed off he became his own worst enemy. He locked everyone out to make sure his image was so perfect it was almost not even human. It was robotic, with all the right responses, always so prepared with just the right answers. Sometimes he was just exasperating. Feel, I thought. Let me see you. Though he would say that I feel too much. I overfeel, he had said once. Too happy, too sad, too angry.
What was happening to us was much like the story of Scarlett and Rhett. You don’t show me any emotion, so I won’t show you any. Both of us would be independent, spirited people, strong and stubborn, who just didn’t need anyone but ourselves.
And so it had gone for about six years now. Lots of work, lots of career building and even lots of sex. But not much lovemaking.
I wanted him to really see me again. But he was not about to let me see him. In that moment I jus
t felt sad for both of us.
We were still all crowded inside room 106 with the bright sun streaming in like a laser beam through the open door. It made it difficult to see anyone except in silhouette. But the next image I saw coming through that door was a shape that I knew well. At six foot three, he looked ominous in the shadows, even with his slender frame. Shadows or not—I knew that body all too well. I’d know that man anywhere.
Sonny Bartholomew had been all mine at one time. From my first year of high school to my first year of college, Sonny was my on-again, off-again love. Over those years we went from harmless exploration to seriously discussing forever. And now, on the rare occasion that Harry and I had a heated conversation, Harry would say, “Why don’t you just go look up your cop? I’m sure you should have just married him anyway.”
This was my cop. My detective, actually.
Sonny Bartholomew. Homicide Investigations.
I fell in love with him back when he was the yearbook photographer during our freshman year of high school. Back then, he was sort of a misfit like me. Sonny had the cutest smile I had ever seen. He would cock his head to one side as he grinned at me. That’s all it took. His smile turned up at both corners of his mouth. He was precious, with his sandy hair and oversize feet and it all came together to make him even cuter. And he sure grew into those feet.
At fifteen we were just the right age for the beginning of the end of our innocence. But we never did go all the way. I was the good girl—at least in that respect. Though, somehow, I have always wished I hadn’t been so good back then. He should have been my first.
It felt really good—and really odd—to see him standing there in the doorway of the motel room. It had been a long time since I had run into him last, at a Bama game a few years back. It was a fall football Saturday, with bright blue skies and a bite in the air. We were in line for a beer at one of the bars along the strip. I’d asked him about his life and prodded him for information about his wife, a wallflower of a girl, Laura Logan. She’d gone to Catholic school with me and Vivi. She was so quiet and certainly was never involved in any of our infamous pranks. Laura was so shy and good that we believed she might actually become a nun.
Obviously, she did not.
Sonny had seemed uncomfortable during our chance encounter in the beer line. I told him I was married.
“I know,” he said. “I saw it in the paper.”
At that moment, standing in line on that football Saturday, I suddenly couldn’t imagine a life without Sonny. We should be friends, I’d thought. At least friends.
I had loved him for as long as I could remember and so I’d grabbed his hand in mine and said, “Look, we’re both married now. Can’t we all get together sometime, all four of us? For a cookout? I know Laura, for heaven’s sake. She was at my birthday parties growin’ up. We made our first communion together. Whatdaya say? I really miss you, Sonny.”
Sonny still had a face full of freckles and the darkest brown eyes. They could always see right through me. And I could still see that fifteen-year-old in him. As he paid for his beer, he looked at me with that smile and his famous one eyebrow up, cocked his head and said, “Blake, we run in different circles now. You’re all elite with your law school buddies and your near-blue-blood husband. My friends are good ol’ boys, rednecks, ya know? On the weekends we got longnecks in one hand and a remote in the other. And I always said, Blake, if I can’t have you in every way, I can’t bear seeing you, knowing somebody else is lovin’ you.”
I had been lost in his words and that curled-up smile when the beer lady’s shrill voice had shattered the moment. “Honey, you want yer change ’er what? C’mon now.”
Sonny tipped his baseball cap to her and shoved his change into his too-tight jeans. He’d looked back at me, leaned in and kissed my cheek. “It was good to see ya, Blake. Hi to Harry.”
With that I had felt a sudden chill in the October air. I’d watched him walk away for only a second, then I turned to the lady with the shrill voice. “I’ll have one of those longnecks, please.”
Room 106 was now filling to capacity. Nobody knew if it was really a crime scene or what. The police took a few notes and never even cordoned off the scene. No one seemed to know how to classify it. Vivi, now revived, sat on the side of the bed sipping water from one of those little square glasses from the motel bathroom. Harry moved toward her and Sonny stepped fully inside the room.
“Hey, Blake. How are ya?” Sonny greeted me with a quick kiss on the cheek. He sounded happy with his deep baritone, honey-dripping, slow Southern drawl. Seriously, he had me at “Hey.”
I swallowed instead of speaking and smiled at him. But I couldn’t stop myself. I stood.
“Hey, Sonny!” I stepped in closer and gave him a hug. That’s how Southerners say hello. We hug everyone, all the time, both hello and goodbye. It’s bad manners not to. In fact, it’s downright hurtful. I heard the heavy Southern drawl in my hello. When I’ve had a few drinks or I’m feeling a little flirtatious, my accent seems to intensify. And Sonny, well, I guess he just brought out a tinge of my inner redneck. We all have some. Inner redneck, I mean. There’s someone in everyone’s family that’s a teeny bit red. Think about it. For me, it came from my dad’s side. Way back in his line were the moonshiners. Yep. I know. Unreal, huh? My mom’s family is a bunch of lawyers. One story has the moonshiners on my dad’s side being defended by the lawyers on my mom’s side. And of course, if you think about it, you can imagine what the payoff was—yep, fresh whisky, right from the backyard! I’m not from stupid lawyers!
As I stood, Harry caught Sonny’s reflection in the mirror. He left Vivi and came over with his hand extended. Harry’s not a hugger anyway, but he would never hug Sonny. This was my cop, remember?
“Hey, Sonny. Thanks for coming.” Over the years, these two men I loved had come to an understanding through work. This was not the first case they had worked on together and I’m sure it would not be the last. Harry and Sonny stepped outside into the late afternoon sun and I sat down on the bed next to Vivi.
“You okay, hon?”
“Oh, I’m just fine, but you’re lookin’ a little red,” she teased.
“Oh, stop it,” I said.
“He does it to you, doesn’t he?” She scooted back on the bed to make room, but kept one eyebrow cocked.
“He who?” I shot back as if shocked at the insinuation.
“You know, there was a time I thought you’d marry that boy.” She looked at me, seeing right into my soul as only Vivi could.
“I’m taking the Fifth,” I said, grabbing her water and taking a swig. I decided to get the conversation back on track. We needed to talk about the body, or lack thereof. This was no time to be gossiping about my love life.
Just then, in walked Bonita Baldwin, the newest investigator on Sonny’s team. She was African-American, plus-sized and drop-dead gorgeous. Sonny had just hired her from Mobile and it was in all the papers that she’d be joining the force. The daughter of Tuskegee professors, this apple sure didn’t fall far from the tree. She’d graduated top of her class and her loud, opinionated mouth had all of our attention, as did her designer shoes. She could size things up in seconds, and she wasn’t afraid to tell it like it was. That’s why Sonny hired her.
“Hey, Blake, how are you?” She leaned in and gave me a hug. I had met her at a function at City Hall for the police benefit the month before. “We’ve got us a squirrelly little situation here, I see,” she sai
d as she quickly took in the room.
“I know,” I said. “Vivi is just a mess because of it.”
“Well, look here, Vivi, not to fret. We’ll get to the bottom of this before long. Just trust me and Sonny. We got this, okay?” she said as she snapped on her latex gloves. And with that, she bent over and began looking all around the bed, lifting the bed skirt until…
“Oh, my good God in heaven above. What in all hell is this?” And up she came with Deputy Dick in her hand, holding it like it was the Olympic Torch.
“Vivi, you recognize this nasty thang?”
Vivi turned ten shades of crimson, threw back the last sip of her water and choked.
“We’re gonna need us a big ole’ plastic bag for this. Just somebody get over here quick and take this disgusting thing from me!” She was holding it by two fingers, her face contorted somewhere between fear and nausea, turning in circles in the tiny motel room looking for anyone to take the rubbery blue dildo from her perfectly manicured, and thankfully gloved, hand. “Ooh, Lawd have mercy, I need to have my hands sanitized after this!”
Vivi leaned into me and said, “That’s Deputy Dick.”
“Well,” I said, “I am so happy to finally meet him in person. He is certainly a lovely shade of blue.” Vivi smiled and that relieved her embarrassment, but only for a second. Another officer came in with a bag and Bonita dropped the “deputy” into it.
“Have mercy, I ain’t never seen such a big ugly thing as that. It’s gonna give me nightmares….” She went to the sink, tossed her gloves and washed her hands, muttering to herself as she primped in the mirror. Her makeup was a thing of perfection. She looked like a doll with the most beautiful hair and all of it in place, all the time. She, too, was a former pageant queen and knew how to carry herself, plus size and all. Her weight never seemed to matter—if anything, Bonita gave curves a good name. All anyone ever noticed was her beauty and her spunk. As a detective, she was able to avoid the uniform—which was a good thing, since her sense of fashion would never stretch to black polyester. Today, she was wearing one of her many Chanel suits, cream and trimmed in black. She was stunning to the eye.
The Sassy Belles Page 3