Dead in the Rose City: A Dean Drake Mystery

by Flowers, R. Barri

  I threw the stick against a wall, pulled out my Glock, and said to the closing ranks: “No one has to die tonight. But if I go, I guarantee I’ll take several of you with me.” I moved up to the bartender and put the gun barrel against his throbbing temple. “Starting with you, my man—”

  He got the message. “Let him go—”

  I hoped those who were eyeballing me like I was Public Enemy Number One were listening. I kept the Glock in a firing position just in case.

  “If you happen to run into The Worm,” I told the bartender in a parting shot, “tell him to give himself up. It’s the only way he’ll get a moment’s peace.”

  The bartender stood mute, defiant. I carefully made my way out the door, glad to still be in one piece, with my head firmly planted on my shoulders.

  For a person who seemed to have few redeeming qualities, Jessie Wylson had remarkable support from those he was arguably harming the most. Evidently he really was a worm who was slithering his way through a network of cooperative tunnels.

  For me, it was just a job—one I was determined to complete as if it was my last. For The Worm, it was staying one step ahead of the law and a private eye named D.J. Drake.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  After Nightmares, Jasmine’s seemed like a dream place to unwind. I took a table and a beer. Star Quality had been replaced by another soul singer only half as attractive, but with stronger backup vocals. Gus had the night off. This was a minor miracle, since I could scarcely remember a time when he wasn’t hovering around making his intimidating presence known.

  I couldn’t help but notice the woman sitting all by her lonesome two tables over, as if anyone getting too close to her would pollute the air she breathed. It would have been hard not to notice a platinum blonde white woman in a club that catered predominantly to blacks and Latinos. But she was something special, if appearance counted for anything.

  She looked to be in her late twenties or early thirties. She wore a ruby red dress, which had latched on to every curve and fold of her voluptuous body like a second flesh. A white hat, tilted slightly with class, sat atop golden hair that was cascading like a waterfall onto her broad shoulders. If her intentions were to bring men down to their knees without so much as lifting a finger, she had succeeded from where I sat.

  “Wonder who the lucky dude is?” Al Johnson whispered in my ear. He was a regular at the club. At forty-eight and nearly all muscle, Al was still reliving the glory days when he was a linebacker for the Seahawks. He made his living now as a dentist, deciding it was better to help people keep their teeth than lose them on the field. He appeared to be leaving when his imposing frame came between her and me.

  “Not me,” I said sadly. “I can’t get that lucky.” For some reason that made me think of Vanessa King.

  “Don’t sell yourself short, D.J.,” Al said, and rubbed his horseshoe shaped hairline. “You never know. Your name could be the one on the winning lottery ticket. I don’t see anyone else claimin’ the prize.”

  I had to admit that he had a point. So I said hopefully: “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Big Al gave me a supportive pat on the shoulder and left with a nice looking Latino woman. I did not feel particularly lucky tonight, except for the fact that I had avoided serious bodily harm in Nightmares.

  I glanced over at the blonde bombshell and was surprised to see she had already discovered me. She offered me a tantalizing smile and I reciprocated unevenly, in case it was someone else who held her attention.

  After mulling it over with the rest of my drink and deciding the lady was not waiting for Mr. Right to show up, present company excluded, I figured what the hell. I flagged down a waitress to offer her a refill of whatever she was drinking, courtesy of the gentleman sitting two tables over.

  But she declined, got up, and left as if she suddenly realized she had no business being there or perhaps had already completed it. She never once looked my way as she sauntered towards the door and exited.

  I let out an expletive or two, suddenly wishing I had a hole to could crawl into. That old saying immediately came to mind: If it seemed too good to be true, it probably was. At least that was the case for me tonight.

  I had an urge to follow blondie, but decided it was best to leave well enough alone. Tonight, I would let the sweet sounds of jazz be my lady. I called it quits after the set ended, slightly intoxicated, but still in control of my faculties.

  Outside, I breathed in the warm air for a moment or two, before beginning the quarter of a mile walk to my apartment. I had only covered half a block when a bright red Porsche pulled up alongside the curb and a sexy voice said: “Can I give you a lift somewhere?”

  Upon closer inspection, I realized the person behind the wheel was none other than the sexy blonde bombshell from the club. If I hadn’t believed in fairy tales before, I was beginning to now.

  She leaned across the front seat, her chest flirting with me, opened the door, and said: “Get in.”

  It was an offer too tempting to refuse on this warm—and getting warmer by the second—night.

  “Where to?” she asked without looking at me.

  “Straight ahead.”

  She no longer wore the hat. Her lemon-colored hair seemed to glow in the dark, as did that tight red dress. Whatever perfume she was wearing filled the air with something delightfully appealing.

  If I hadn’t known better, I would think I was being picked up. Coming from the macho brotherhood of the police academy, it had taken me a while to catch up with the times of liberation and equality when it came to sexual aggression. Fortunately, I was a quick learner.

  “Who are you?” it seemed time to ask.

  “My name’s Catherine Ashley Sinclair,” she said, the words rolling off her tongue with a slightly Southern tilt.

  “Dean Jeremy Drake,” I followed. “You can call me D.J.”

  “Nice to meet you, D.J.” She gave a rich, melodious laugh.

  I studied her sculptured profile. “Do you always give men you don’t know rides, Catherine?” The question was one of pure curiosity. “Especially when they tried to buy you a drink and were dumped on.”

  She fluttered her long lashes at me. “I saw you. I liked you. I didn’t need to go through the BS of pretending to get to know each other.”

  “So you waited for me outside?” I was left scratching my head.

  “Why not?”

  We stopped in front of my building. “So where do we go from here?” I hesitated to ask, reluctant to see this fairy tale come to an end prematurely.

  She ran a silky smooth hand down the side of my face and said without preamble: “How about to bed?”

  The lady certainly didn’t pull any punches. This wouldn’t be my first time being with a white woman. If I learned one thing from my parents, it was that there was no such thing as racial incompatibility when it came to sex.

  But there were other considerations. I didn’t consider myself especially promiscuous, not these AIDS days. But my sex drive was about as strong as a twenty-year-old’s. Okay, a forty-one-year-old who had never lost the desire to be with a beautiful woman. That, combined with being a bit tipsy and currently unattached, made it a done deal.

  * * *

  I hadn’t exactly prepared the place for company, but had the feeling she wouldn’t mind dirty sheets.

  “Would you like a drink or something?” I asked Catherine Ashley Sinclair, gazing into eyes so blue they appeared to be violet.

  She licked her full, glossy red lips, smiled, and said: “Nothing to drink, but I would like something—” She kicked off her high heels and unzipped her dress. In slow motion it sank down her perfectly curved and angled, very naked, tall, tanned body. Her eyes danced at me provocatively. “That’s assuming you like what you see.”

  It would have been damned hard not to. The woman had a body to die for, and knew it. Like a man on a mission, I held her cheeks and put my mouth to hers. It turned into a passionate kiss, neither of us backing off in
the slightest.

  She finally did, looked me ravenously in the eye, and lowered to her knees. There, she methodically unbuckled my pants, yanked them down and took me in her mouth, all without missing a beat. To say it—she—felt good would be an understatement. But the better part of me refused to have this fantasy end only half completed.

  I brought Catherine Ashley Sinclair back to her feet and scooped her up in my arms in one motion. We made our way to the bedroom where I tossed her on the bed, dirty sheets and all. It took me only a second to whip a condom out of the nightstand, put it on, and join the lady who had my full and undivided attention.

  For the next hour, we made love as if there were no tomorrow. Or yesterday. I felt as if I had been reborn. Or maybe given a new lease on life. This was a woman who demanded every bit as much as she gave, and then some.

  When it was over, I was one exhausted, but contented man. I was not looking ahead, only basking in the glow of one night to remember and cherish.

  Somewhere between the oohs and aahs of orgasm, I must have told Catherine Ashley Sinclair I was a private eye, for as we unraveled from each other’s limbs, she said to me casually: “I’d like to hire you—”

  At first I thought she meant as a boy toy. “I’m afraid my services as a lover are not for sale.”

  “I want to hire you as a private investigator.”

  I sat up, intrigued and surprised. “Since when?”

  She tilted her head slightly. “Since I overheard someone at Jasmine’s say that you were a private investigator.”

  I rubbed my nose with annoyance. I never liked mixing business with pleasure and definitely not tonight. “You picked one hell of a way to solicit my professional services.”

  Catherine shrugged her beautiful pink shoulder. “I got your attention, didn’t I?”

  I looked at her naked body. “Yes, I’d say you definitely got my attention.” There had to be more to this seduction than attention grabbing. “So why come on to me? I don’t require my clients to sleep with me before I take on their cases.”

  She seemed unaffected by this. “Maybe I wanted to see what you were made of. Maybe you turned me on. Does it really matter?” She rolled off the bed, giving me a bird’s-eye view of her shapely, firm ass.

  I was now feeling more than a little unsettled, and perhaps inadequate. It would get worse before it got better. Leaning on my elbows, I asked the logical question: “Why do you want to hire me?”

  She drove fingers through her thick mane like she was searching for something, and said evenly, without giving me the benefit of her stunning blue eyes: “I think my husband is cheating on me. I’d like you to prove it—”

  I thought I had heard it all, or at least most of it. But this strange bit of irony nearly left me speechless. If I hadn’t detected a strong note of sincerity in her voice, I might have broken into a boisterous laugh. Instead, I was deadly serious when I said: “You’re joking, right?” The joke was not that she was married, though not many married women ended up in my bed that I was aware of, but that she had a problem with an unfaithful spouse, considering the present circumstances.

  Catherine painted my face in even strokes with her eyes. “This is no joke,” she stated firmly. “I’m very serious.” She placed her hands on curvaceous hips, teasing me with that gorgeous frontal view of her full breasts. “I mean, this is what you do for a living, isn’t it?”

  She was serious, I decided. That didn’t make the situation any easier to swallow. I sighed. “Lady, I do a lot of things in my line of work. That doesn’t mean I’ll do anything—for anyone.” I found myself fumbling with the covers as if I had nothing better to do with my hands. “Are you saying you want me to get the kind of proof on your husband that we just experienced?”

  Color stole into her cheeks. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  That cliché about the pot calling the kettle black or in this case, white, immediately came to mind. Whatever she was up to, I wasn’t buying it. “You picked the wrong man for the job.” I got up and went for my clothes, scattered about the floor like leaves.

  “I picked the right man,” Catherine insisted, coming over to me and dribbling her fingers across my chest. “What happened between us in a moment of passion has absolutely nothing to do with me and my husband.”

  “If you say so,” I muttered sourly, grabbing her fingers, which had suddenly become more irritating than pleasing. “And it was more like an hour of passion.”

  Who the hell was I to tell her how to conduct her life? Whatever was going on between this lady and her husband was between them, as long as she didn’t put me in the middle. A part of me knew she already had and I was still trying to figure out why.

  Catherine sucked in a deep breath and said: “Maybe I should explain—”

  I was all ears as I watched her sinuously pull the dress over her body and zip it, as if performing in a Broadway show.

  She flipped her hair back haphazardly. “My husband is a very wealthy man and also quite a bit older than me. We signed a prenuptial agreement before we married three years ago, giving me a generous sum in the event of a divorce. Last week, I overheard him asking his attorney if the terms of the agreement could be renegotiated, giving me less.” She sighed exaggeratedly. “I don’t want a divorce, but it seems as though he does.”

  I stared at her. “And you want to make sure if it comes down to that, you’ll get every cent coming to you.”

  She batted her lashes. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Only if I deserved it.” I wasn’t usually this flippant and judgmental with potential clients. But I usually hadn’t just slept with them either.

  Catherine hit me with a look of indignation. “Whether you choose to believe it or not, I love my husband very much!”

  I couldn’t help but laugh in stark disbelief. “Lady, if you call making love to another man that you just met loving your husband, that’s your business—not mine.”

  “I have never been unfaithful to my husband,” she insisted, “until now. But the same is not true for him.” She sat on the bed and began to whimper like a child who had just been told she wasn’t getting a Barbie doll for Christmas after all. “I just accepted his affairs as part of the package because I loved him and wanted to make our marriage work—no matter what!” She dabbed convincingly at her eyes and gazed up at me. “I guess when I heard him talking to his lawyer, I felt used and humiliated; betrayed that he should think me such a fool. All I could think of was getting revenge.”

  “So you seduced me to get back at him?” I uttered, feeling a certain sense of betrayal myself.

  “It started out that way,” she admitted, “but it ended up being more than that.”

  I knew it didn’t make one damned bit of difference one way or another. She was a married woman and I was a single man. There was no future here. And, based on what I now knew about her, there should never have been a past. “What makes you so sure your husband has been cheating on you?” I asked, not sure I even cared.

  “He told me,” Catherine surprised me by saying matter-of-factly. “He said it had nothing to do with me or how he felt about me, but that he could never be faithful to just one woman.”

  “And you accepted that?” A doubtful thread stitched my brows.

  “What choice did I have?” she whimpered. “I didn’t want to lose him.”

  “You mean his money, don’t you?”

  “That’s not fair,” she whined.

  “Life isn’t fair,” I said sadly, suddenly in need of a drink. Somehow I found it hard to accept that any man would need more woman than this blonde, blue-eyed beauty with an insatiable sex drive.

  I pressed on for more feedback, though having serious reservations about taking on another case—this one in particular. I asked, while slipping into my leather boots: “Other than the call to his lawyer, has your husband given you any other reason to believe he wants out of the marriage, short of telling you face to face?”

  “Yes.”
Her nostrils flared. “He hasn’t been in my bed for the last six months.”

  Was he out of his mind? I wondered incredulously, and conceded to the embittered would-be client: “I’d say you definitely have a problem.”

  That could certainly explain her need for me tonight. Sexual repression had a way of making most normal people horny. Myself included. I was still left with a sour taste in my mouth. Knowing that I had been nothing more than a sex object in her eyes was a wound to my normally powerful male ego.

  Catherine rose, facing me. “I want to know who my husband is seeing! Once I have positive proof he is having an affair, I’ll be better equipped to try and save my marriage or”—her voice broke—“leave it with dignity.” She turned her eyes up at me with emotion and asked tenderly: “Will you take the case, D.J.?”

  I thought about it. While doing so, she upped the ante. “I’m willing to pay you twice your normal hourly fee, plus expenses—”

  Wealthy clients were always willing to shell out more, usually as much an indication of their desperation as their bank statements. It was getting harder by the minute to turn her away. Though I had a problem working for Catherine Ashley Sinclair, her generous offer definitely got me to think in terms of financial reality rather than sexual frustration and resentment.

  Besides, it seemed like a relatively quick and easy job that wouldn’t really take much time away from my search for Jessie Wylson. The Worm could remain free just a while longer. “You’ve got yourself a private investigator, Catherine,” I told her unenthusiastically. “For better or worse.”

  She seemed to think it was for better. Before I could react, she kissed me excitedly on the mouth, and said with relief in her voice: “Thank you, D.J. I’ll be forever indebted to you!”

  I raised a brow thoughtfully. “Better not make promises you may not be able to keep, lady,” I warned her.

  We went to the living room where she had left her purse on the couch. I watched as she removed a stack of fresh hundred dollar bills as if it was Monopoly money, and a color photograph.