I couldn’t help but think of Vanessa King and what might have been.
Soon painful grogginess gave way to total blackness.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
There appeared to be life after death as I opened my eyes with a splitting headache that seemed to echo throughout my body. Otherwise, I was still in one piece. I was lying flat on my back and smelled as if I had just taken a bath in scotch. This alone gave me concern, as I hated the stuff. I was strictly a beer man, with an occasional glass of wine. Yet my throat burned as if I’d been force fed the scotch.
A moment or two of regaining my bearings told me I was on a bed in my birthday suit. And I wasn’t alone.
I first saw her hair, blonde and long, but not as blonde and not as long as Catherine’s tresses. Then it all began to come back to me—my last memory before I was put to sleep. Someone had conked me on the noggin with what felt like a sledgehammer. And I was sure I knew who it was. Gregory Sinclair.
I stared at the badly bruised, beaten, and swollen face next to me, and my eyes threatened to pop out. In spite of being worked over to the point where positive identification might not come easily, I recognized Catherine Ashley Sinclair’s features enough to know she wasn’t the woman on the bed. It took a bit longer before I realized the face, or what had become of it, was not totally unfamiliar to me.
It was the blonde bimbo who was having an affair with Gregory Sinclair. Aside from her black and blue face, she was naked and alabaster white from the neck down. Judging by the absence of life in her wide-open green-blue eyes, she was almost certainly dead.
What was his mistress doing here? I wondered. The obvious and frightening answer was that it was probably for the same damn reason I was here. Suddenly I began to put two and two together. It added up to a scenario I didn’t even want to think about, but knew I had to.
I managed to lift onto my elbows, the throbbing pain in the back of my head almost too much to bear. Not to mention the hangover that left me weak and slightly disoriented.
Why did I get the feeling I was about to regret the day I ever laid eyes on Catherine Ashley Sinclair?
There was something sticking out of my bedmate’s bruised, protruding lips, as if put there to silence her. Just as I had found the strength to investigate further, a voice that sounded like a sonic boom bellowed:
“Don’t move!”
Before I could, the bed was surrounded by two uniformed male cops with guns drawn, aimed directly at my face. I didn’t recognize either man. Since retiring from the force and going into the private investigation business, my contacts with my former profession had been largely perfunctory and superficial. Most of the cops I worked with had retired, committed suicide, or were too damned inflexible to have much use for an ex-cop.
“Listen...” I moved my mouth, hoping reason could prevail over circumstances that even I had to admit didn’t look very good, “this isn’t what it seems—”
“No, you listen, asshole,” said the same raucous voice. It belonged to a burly cop who looked to be in his early to mid twenties. “I said don’t move! Not unless you wanna see me blow your black face off.” He kept the barrel of his gun inches from my nostrils.
I was no martyr looking to give a racist cop an excuse to pull the trigger. Though I suspected he would have one hell of a time explaining why he shot an unarmed, unclothed man at point blank range.
Use your head, D.J. Don’t make any sudden moves. After taking a deep breath, I told the burly cop in an even voice: “I’m not moving, man. Think you can get that gun out of my face?”
“Why the hell should I?” he asked defiantly.
“Because I’m not the bad guy here,” I said tersely. “My name’s Dean Drake. If you’ll just let me explain, I think we can straighten this out and all go home to see the sun rise.” I knew it was never that simple.
“Drake, huh?” the other cop said with a hint of recognition. He was in his forties, a bit thinner than his partner, with a horseshoe shaped hairline and brown-gray hair. He studied me more than I cared for him to and said: “Homicide a few years back, right?”
Now I felt we were beginning to turn the corner in sorting out this precarious predicament I’d gotten myself into. I said proudly: “And before that, I was out on the beat in blue. Those were the days.”
He now seemed to regard me with a certain amount of respect, if not admiration.
“I’m Officer William Cornwell,” he said. “And this is”—he pointed his humped nose—“Officer Rick Muncie.” The stocky, raw-faced Muncie seemed unimpressed. Cornwell looked at me almost humorously and said lasciviously: “I’d say you had one hell of a night, Drake. Heavy on the booze and boobs before you punched her lights out—”
“If she’s dead,” I said with an edge to my voice, “I didn’t kill her.”
Muncie felt her neck and confirmed what we all knew. “She’s dead all right. Looks like she’s been beaten and strangled.”
I recalled the gunshot I heard before entering the room. There were no apparent signs that this woman who I believed was Gregory Sinclair’s now dead mistress, had been shot.
Could Catherine Sinclair have been the recipient of a bullet? I wondered. If so, where was she now?
All of us seemed to zoom in on the dead woman’s swollen, discolored face. Or, more specifically, her mouth agape as if she were frozen in time. Using a corner of the bedspread, Muncie pulled from between her teeth what looked to be—
“A man’s briefs,” noted Cornwell. Or at least they used to be before they were stretched out of shape to resemble more of a saliva and blood-soaked rag.
Muncie glared at me, his gun still dangerously close, but said to Cornwell: “He must have strangled her with his own underwear then made her eat what was left of them.”
The implications were starting to get scary. My ability to stay cool, calm, and collected with a pounding headache was being severely tested, and failing fast. “I did not lay one damned finger on that woman!” My voice rang out at Muncie in particular. “Even a green assed cop fresh out of the academy ought to be able to see a setup when it’s staring him right in his white face!”
Muncie colored indignantly. “Hey, asshole, keep your mouth shut or I’ll shut it for you!”
Cornwell seemed to come to my defense. “Maybe he’s right,” he offered his hotheaded partner. “Something definitely ain’t right about all this.”
I kept up the pressure. “Think about it. Doesn’t it seem a bit odd that you two would show up here at just the right time to find me buck naked in bed with a dead woman?”
“That’s enough, Drake!” ordered Cornwell, as if remembering loyalty to his partner and profession came first. “A silent alarm tipped us off that there might be trouble at this address. Looks like we came too late,” he said mournfully, glancing at the deceased.
I sneered. “Right. Isn’t that always the case? Do you really think I would kill the lady and decide to take a nap beside her, waiting to be discovered by you?”
Cornwell put a hand to his face, smoothing his jaw line while he regarded me. “If you’re innocent, Drake,” he muttered thoughtfully, “we’ll find out soon enough. In the meantime, we’re gonna have to take you in on suspicion of murder.”
Murder. The mere word caused bile to rise to my throat. Though I knew I was one hundred percent not guilty of killing this woman, I also knew that I’d been suckered into a tight corner like a rat. For one of the few times in my life, I felt helpless at the moment to do a damned thing about it.
Cornwell used a tissue to lift my Glock off an end table. How it got there was another mystery to me. Next to it was an empty bottle of scotch, no doubt with my fingerprints all over it.
He read me my rights, and then said, flashing crooked, yellow teeth at me: “Look at the bright side, Drake. You won’t have to go through the humiliation of being frisked by your ex-colleagues. I think it’s plainly obvious that you can’t possibly have any weapons on your person.” He then glanced down at my
private-not-so-private parts, and added dryly: “Except for maybe one—”
The two cops enjoyed a wicked laugh at my expense. As if the degradation wasn’t enough, I still had to face up to the fact that I’d been set up and made the fall guy by Catherine Sinclair—a woman I had made the mistake of sleeping with twice and allowing myself to trust.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Homicide detective Lew O’Malley headed the interrogation and murder investigation that had me in hot water. As Irish as St. Patrick’s Day, he was forty-three pushing sixty, blue eyed, a shade over six feet, and thick around the middle. What little hair O’Malley had left was brown and swept sideways across his pate. He had one of those hidden-upper-lip bushy mustaches that made him seem as if he would have been right at home in the Old West.
As good or bad fortune would have it, depending on how you looked at it, O’Malley also happened to be my partner before I called it quits as a cop. Since then, we had more or less gone our separate ways. Cops usually stuck together, while ex-cops were basically left to fend for themselves. I still liked to think of O’Malley as a distant friend. Or, at the very least, a friendly adversary.
It was an awkward interrogation in a hot room. Neither of us really wanted to give an inch, but admittedly O’Malley had me at somewhat of a disadvantage. After all, he represented the side of the law, while I was there as a murder suspect.
I tried as best as I understood it myself to explain the circumstances that led to my being in bed with the as yet unidentified dead woman. If I were in O’Malley’s shoes, I wondered if I would believe my own story.
He contemplated my account curiously while keeping his distance, having said to me earlier with his nose bent out of shape: “What the hell have you been rolling around in, Drake? You smell like crap!”
I blamed it on the scotch and the arresting assholes who refused to let me borrow my host’s shower before bringing me in.
O’Malley lit a cigarette, tilted his head, eyed me with some misgiving, and said: “Let me see if I have this right, Drake. You say you met this sultry blonde named Catherine Ashley Sinclair at Jasmine’s, took her to bed, and then she hired you to get the goods on her wealthy, cheating husband.” He blew smoke condescendingly at me. “How am I doing so far?”
“So far you haven’t missed a beat,” I said, feeling sick to my stomach. My head still pounded as well. I’d been duped by Catherine, and probably Gregory Sinclair, to take the fall for the murder of his girlfriend. Though I knew there was still a lot to this tale of seduction, betrayal, and homicide that I wasn’t even privy to, and I sure as hell didn’t intend to wait till the Second Coming to get to the bottom of it. Unless, of course, the law locked me up and threw away the key. At this point, that was a distinct possibility.
O’Malley sucked on the cigarette. “So you dug up proof on the cheating husband, screwed the wife some more, and came running to the rescue when she called you to say that her husband—Sinclair—was trying to kill her?”
I nodded reluctantly.
“And that’s when you heard a shot, ran into the bedroom, and were clubbed on the head before you knew what hit you.”
“That’s how it went down,” I muttered lamely. Instincts and the knowledge that comes when you work with a guy for five years told me that O’Malley’s play-by-play account was really designed to incriminate rather than clear me.
He had something else on his mind he was holding back. And this kept me on the edge of my chair, wondering.
O’Malley continued his methodical interrogation, which he almost seemed to be enjoying. “And when you woke up, you found yourself intoxicated, lying in bed next to the dead blonde woman that you photographed having an affair with Catherine Sinclair’s husband?”
I nodded, and O’Malley glanced at a notepad.
“And that’s when Cornwell and Muncie showed up?”
“It’s all in my statement,” I told him laconically. My voice sounded hoarse from the alcohol, while my head refused to let me forget the induced headache and hangover.
O’Malley gave me a spare-him-the-wiseass routine. “I want to hear it from your mouth,” he demanded, bridging his brows grimly. “Look, D.J., we may go back a long ways, but I still have to do it by the book. Believe me, this is one time you can’t afford not to cooperate.” He paused, studying my reaction. “It’s still not too late to have your attorney present—”
I balked at that for now, wanting to keep this as unofficial as possible. That seemed like my best bet for maintaining my innocence of everything, except maybe stupidity and being turned on by a nice looking, sexy blonde. Inside, I was as unsettled as I’d been in some time. And with good reason.
I confirmed and reconfirmed everything in my statement.
O’Malley remained unconvinced. “This lady who hired you—Catherine Sinclair—are you sure it wasn’t the same woman you woke up next to, with your underwear stuffed halfway down her throat?”
“Give me a damned break, O’Malley!” Vexation raged in my voice. “I’m not blind and I’m not lying. Whoever the hell she is, she is not the woman I was working for!”
Or slept with.
The resentment I was beginning to feel for O’Malley was growing in leaps and bounds. This was Dean Jeremy Drake he was talking to. His ex-partner. And one time friend. Not some idiot too stupid or drunk to know the difference between the two women.
Knowing I was up to my ass in hot water, a cool head prevailed when I looked O’Malley in the eye. I told him in a controlled voice: “Look, I know it all sounds crazy, even to me, but everything I’ve told you is true! I never met the dead woman face to face until after she was dead.”
O’Malley lit another cigarette. “Why do you suppose this Catherine Sinclair would set you up for the murder of her husband’s lover?”
I blinked with bafflement. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be sitting here. Maybe she needed a patsy to get rid of the woman she felt threatened by. And I was the perfect candidate. That way she got to keep the money and the man—”
Even that suggestion was hard for me to swallow. Or maybe I just didn’t want to think I was anybody’s perfect candidate to take a murder rap. I didn’t figure Catherine to be capable of murder. But what did I know about her, other than what she wanted me to believe? Someone set me up. From where I sat, she was the first person to come to mind.
“But why at her own house?” Smoke streamed from O’Malley’s wide nostrils. “Wouldn’t it have made more sense if this woman you say is Catherine Sinclair killed her husband’s mistress somewhere where the Mrs. was less likely to be a suspect—like maybe at your place?”
“Maybe Catherine had her reasons for wanting to see the other woman dead in her own bed,” I suggested, though such reasons escaped me at the moment. “Poetic justice or something like that,” I tossed out weakly.
O’Malley dragged on his cigarette, studying me very much like a man who had just been condemned.
Tired of waiting to see where this was all headed, I made O’Malley’s face and said: “Look, I’ve told you everything I know, O’Malley. If you think you have enough to charge me, do it. If not, I’m outta here—”
He stepped up to me, dropped the cigarette on the floor after one last puff, squashed it with his foot, and said bleakly: “All right, Drake. I’m gonna give it to you straight. Your story doesn’t hold up worth a damn. There is no other woman—at least not by the name of Catherine Ashley Sinclair.” He paused. “At the morgue, the housekeeper identified the dead woman as none other than Catherine Ashley Sinclair.”
“What—?” My lower lip dropped several inches. “But that’s impossible.”
“It’s not only possible,” stated O’Malley brutally, “it’s true! Her driver’s license verified the I.D. If this is the woman you say you took pictures of with Gregory Sinclair, you photographed him having an affair with his own wife!” O’Malley blew his nose nosily into a discolored handkerchief. “It gets worse—” he said ominously, and I wondered how
it could.
I was about to find out.
“From what we’ve been able to put together so far, Catherine Sinclair was the money bags of the family rather than her husband, as you claim you were led to believe. Apparently she was born on an easier street than you or I will ever know. So you see, it doesn’t figure that you would have been hired to spy on a supposedly wealthy man who stood to lose far more than he gained in the event of a divorce.”
Damn! I cursed under my breath. What type of dark and deadly game had I gotten myself into?
My thoughts quickly turned to the real source of my troubles—the woman who led me to believe she was Catherine Ashley Sinclair. If she wasn’t the real thing, much less dependent upon a prenuptial agreement for her life’s blood, then who the hell was she?
The obvious answer seemed to be Gregory Sinclair’s real mistress/lover. It made sense the more I thought about it, though I’d never in fact seen them together. With the rich wife out of the way, the two of them could get all her money and still have each other without missing a beat. It wouldn’t be the first time greed and lust led to murder. But that still didn’t account for all the weird things about this situation I found myself in.
If the dead woman was the real Catherine Ashley Sinclair, why was she secretly meeting Gregory Sinclair at such out of the way places as a dumpy motel across the river in neighboring Vancouver, Washington?
Speaking of the bereaved husband, I asked: “Where was Sinclair when the murder occurred?”
“He’s still unaccounted for,” said O’Malley nonchalantly. “Don’t worry, we’ll find him, assuming he’s still alive—”
O’Malley flashed me a doubtful look. I met his eyes man-to-man, hostility building up inside me like a volcano threatening to explode. “What the hell are you trying to say, O’Malley? You think I killed Gregory Sinclair?” My mouth became a straight line.
“Did you?” He glared.
“No, I didn’t! No more than I killed Catherine Sinclair—” I breathed in deeply. “Why would I kill a man I didn’t even know?”
Dead in the Rose City: A Dean Drake Mystery Page 8