Five Uneasy Pieces

by Debbi Mack

  “Light in the loafers? You mean he’s gay?”

  “Is da Pope Cat’lic? What surprises me is that you couldn’t see that for yourself. You said they were close, right?” He must have removed the cigar. His words were clear.

  “Well, yes, but I thought it was all business.”

  There was dead air. “You sure you’re not trying to make a sap outta me?”

  “I can absolutely assure you that isn’t my intent, Mr. Greeley.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. I wangled a bit of info out of Brant. He left the office not long after your husband. He said he got a phone call from someone who wouldn’t give his or her name—couldn’t tell whether it was a man or woman. When he figured out I wasn’t police, he wouldn’t tell me squat. His exact quote was ‘It’s none of your beeswax.’ Man, that’s a cute one. Anyway, he has no alibi for the time when your husband was probably killed. So maybe he found out your hubby was hittin’ the escort service for a little on the side, got jealous and made up the call to draw your husband home. Brant could have followed Ed home, got him in the bedroom for a little slap n’ tickle, complete with drinks, grabbed the knife and plunged it into his chest in a jealous rage.”

  I tried to remember the last time I’d heard anyone use the expression “slap n’ tickle.”

  “Unless ...” Mr. Greeley used my silence as an opportunity to present another theory. “Unless you had the photos all along. And you knew about your husband’s relationship with Brant. You didn’t want to do the dirty work. No, you sent Brant copies of those photos. You wanted your husband dead, but you couldn’t bring yourself to do the deed.

  “So, knowing he’d be jealous anyway, you had him come to the house, worm his way in and kill your husband for you. You wanted it to look like someone else did it, and told Brant that it would get you both off the hook. Maybe you set it up to happen while you were in my office, talking to me about some mystery woman you thought your husband was seeing. Then you went home, found the body and left the photos. With me as your alibi, you could get away with the perfect murder and blame it all on Brant.” He paused for effect. “So, maybe you set it up for Brant to take the fall. Is that how it played out, sugar?”

  “First of all, I have no desire to see Brant suffer a fall, Mr. Greeley, even if he is mean to me,” I said. “And, second, it is not appropriate for you to call me ‘sugar’—especially under the circumstances.”

  “So the question is, what circumstances are those, Mrs. Hastings? Why did you come to my office? The truth, lady, because so help me, I won’t play—”

  “I know, I know!” I said. “Stop saying that! Besides, the killer ... well, it’s not Brant.”

  “How can you be so sure?” he asked.

  So I told him.

  *****

  The next day, I invited Roz over. She came bearing her specialty casserole. Tuna and canned peas mixed with mushroom soup concentrate, topped with crumbled potato chips and baked until golden brown. She placed it on the counter then hugged me with the force of a boa constrictor. I shuddered. “Roz, I can’t breathe.”

  “Sorry, sweetie,” she said, her nicotine breath hot in my ear. “How ya’ holdin’ up?”

  She let go and stepped back. “Roz. How could you?” I asked.

  Roz blinked and withdrew a crushed pack of cigarettes from her jeans pocket. “What?”

  “How could you kill Ed? And how could you set it up to make it look like I might have done it?”

  Her hand trembled. She lit the twisted cigarette then snapped the lighter shut with authority. “How can you accuse me of such a thing? I thought we were friends, Lainie. Besides, I gave you that PI’s name. Why would I do that if I had photos proving he fooled around with other men?”

  I let out a long sigh. “I never told you they were photos of men.”

  Roz’s mouth gaped like a frog’s.

  “B-b-but ... you did,” she sputtered. “You did. I remember. You”—she pointed with her gnarled, smoldering cigarette—”you, you were so rattled, I could barely get a coherent story out of you. You did tell me.” She lowered her voice. “You just don’t remember.”

  I shook my head. “No, Roz. I told you there were photos, but I never said what was in them. The police told me not to discuss the men in those photos with anyone. And, frankly, I was too ashamed to. When you mentioned Ed cheating on me with men, I knew something was off, but I was too rattled to figure it out at the time. Then I connected the dots. You killed him.”

  Roz stood there mute.

  “My biggest question—what I really can’t understand, Roz—is why? If Ed was gay, why would you kill him? Why?” My voice rose.

  Roz’s face contorted. She looked at me with complete disdain. “You are so fucking naïve, Lainie. How you avoided learning more about real life, I’ll never fucking know.”

  She tamped out the cigarette on my new Silestone kitchen counter (brand new from Home Depot—I could’ve cried). After digging the last smoke from the pack, she crushed the wrapper and threw it at me. It bounced off my left breast and onto the new parquet floor.

  She took her time lighting up. “Good ole’ Eddie swung both ways, my dear.” Smoke billowed out with her words.

  Roz leaned against the marred counter, her gaze directed somewhere over my right shoulder. “We had a thing. He was getting sick of you, sweetie.” Sarcasm coated the word. “You and your goody two-shoes ways. Your wide-eyed stupidity. He was supposed to leave your dumb ass. We were supposed to be together.” Smoke poured from her dragon’s nostrils. “But that never happened. He kept ... making excuses for not leaving you. At first, I thought it was because you’re so beautiful. Or maybe he was worried about the divorce settlement, especially since you lost your job.”

  She frowned. “Then he stopped seeing me so often. He started making excuses about his whereabouts. I wondered if I was ... losing him to someone else. Someone who wasn’t you.

  “That’s when I talked to you about hiring a private eye. I figured you’d share whatever you learned. Tell the best friend who gave you the idea.” She smiled weakly. “But you ... you took so long to call him. I finally said, fuck it, and followed Ed myself. I followed him to that bar and that dump of a motel where he always took his dates. But I still needed proof.

  “I couldn’t hire the guy I told you about. But I used something learned during my divorce. Hidden cameras—the best tool for catching people in the act.”

  She took another drag and blew the smoke in my face. “I bought myself a nanny cam. I bribed the motel manager to make sure Ed and his date went to the right room. I paid him plenty. He let me place the camera to get the right shots. Those photos are stills from the video.”

  She glared. “When I found out he was seeing other men ...” She lifted her hands like a would-be strangler. “I wanted to kill him, right then and there. But I played it smart.” She nodded. “Oh, yeah. When you told me you were finally going to that PI, I waited for you to leave for your appointment. Then I called Ed and told him to meet me here. I also called that fairy assistant of his and sent him someplace where no one could give him an alibi. I told him I had photos of their liaisons.” She shook her head, mouth wrinkled with distaste. “I didn’t. I was just bluffing. I’d seen them together, though. I knew ...

  “When Ed got here, he fixed us some drinks. After we’d had a couple, I excused myself to make a quick phone call.” She snorted. “That’s what I told him, anyway. I put on latex gloves, got the knife and ran at him so fast, he didn’t know what hit him. He landed on his back and I stabbed him in the heart. Not that he had a heart, the son of a bitch. One way or the other, I figured I was covered. I’d committed the perfect murder.”

  She turned and fixed me with an angry stare. “But you couldn’t leave it alone, could you? You had to go and figure it out, didn’t you?” She took a breath and continued in an anguished voice. “It could’ve been perfect. It didn’t have to be you, you know? Brant could’ve taken the fall, but you wouldn’t let that
happen.”

  “Brant didn’t kill anyone,” I said. “And neither did I.”

  Her lips curled with disgust. “There you go. Little Miss Innocent. Aren’t you sweet?” she said, in a mocking tone. “So fuckin’ sweet! So fuckin’ clueless! You just have no idea. You could twist men ‘round your little finger, get them to believe anything, if you wanted. You could make saps out of them all!”

  I was tired of hearing about saps. Before I could speak, Roz pivoted, yanked my second-biggest knife from the butcher block and charged toward me. At that moment, Mr. Greeley burst out of the closet (no pun intended) and tackled her to the floor.

  Detective White emerged, along with a uniformed officer, reminding me of circus clowns packed in a VW Beetle. I’d been bugging Ed to expand that closet. Who knew it could hold so much?

  *****

  After the police read Roz her rights and took her away, I sat in the kitchen with Mr. Greeley. I couldn’t believe the whole thing. While he downed Ed’s Scotch, I sipped herb tea with honey.

  “Thank goodness that’s over,” I said, feeling like a deflating balloon.

  “It appears you’re in the clear.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Roz doesn’t strike me as the sort to have taken the fall for you. Say, per a prearranged financial incentive?”

  “But she did fall, Mr. Greeley. She fell when you knocked her down.”

  He laughed in the mirthless way he had when I first met him. “C’mon, Mrs. Hastings. You’re really not that innocent are you?”

  I thought about how often Roz said that I could win men over by flirting with them. I decided to test her theory. I raised a hand to my breast and batted my eyes. It felt silly and frivolous, but I did it anyhow.

  “Really, Mr. Greeley,” I said, in a breathy voice. “I may not be that innocent, but I’m not the Devil.”

  I waited for his laugh. He smiled and blushed. “No, I don’t guess you are, are you?”

  Golly, I thought. Roz was right.

  Excerpt from

  Least Wanted

  CHAPTER ONE

  Shanae Jackson breezed into my office like she owned the place. Not even a knock or word of greeting. Pint-sized and wiry, in jeans and a plain orange T-shirt, Shanae projected an attitude to compensate for her lack of stature.

  Her daughter, Tina, trailed behind her. Though she was quite tall for a 13-year-old—taller by a couple of inches than her mother—she slouched as if standing up straight carried too much responsibility. Tina slumped into a chair and began reading a book, while Shanae took the other seat and glared at me.

  “Hi,” I said, hurriedly closing out the online research I’d been doing. “You must be Shanae Jackson.”

  “You got someone else you meetin’ at two o’clock today?” she asked. Her piercing brown-eyed gaze pinned me to my chair.

  “Um, no.”

  “Then I guess I must be.” She spoke in a tone reserved for the village idiot.

  I plastered on a big smile and refrained from telling her to fuck off. Standing and extending my hand, I said, “I’m Sam McRae. It’s nice to meet you.”

  I half expected another snappy comeback, but she remained seated, looking at my hand like I’d just blown my nose into it. After a moment, she reached out and grasped my fingers.

  I risked further sarcasm and turned to the girl. “And you must be Tina. Hi.”

  Tina glanced at me. “Hey,” she said and glued her eyes back on the book.

  In contrast to Tina’s slouch, Shanae sat bolt upright, her posture as intense as her gaze. Her abundant hair was plastered back from a dark chocolate face with high cheekbones and angular lines.

  I sat down and opened the thin file containing notes of my earlier phone conversation with the angry woman sitting before me.

  “Is that the paperwork?” I asked, nodding toward an envelope clutched in her left hand.

  Shanae thrust it at me. I pulled out folded copies of the police report and other papers concerning her daughter’s case. Smoothing them out on my desk, I took some time to review them.

  “This looks pretty straightforward,” I said. “As I mentioned on the phone, I’ll need to speak to your daughter alone.”

  I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Shanae’s expression hardened.

  “I gots to stay,” she said. “I’m her mother.”

  “Tina is my client. I have to discuss the case with her alone.”

  “But I’m her mother,” she said.

  I suppressed a sigh. In juvenile cases, it’s never easy to explain to parents the need for complete attorney-client confidentiality. From the moment I saw her, I knew Shanae Jackson would be no exception.

  “I have an ethical duty to keep client confidences,” I said. “Things Tina and I say in front of you are no longer confidential.”

  “But I’m her mother.” She stressed the last word, as if I hadn’t heard it the first two times. Shooting a withering look at Tina, she slapped the girl’s arm. “Put that book down, child!” With a grimace, Tina closed the book and set it on her lap.

  “In the eyes of the law, you’re another person. I have to ask you to leave.”

  “I’ll find another lawyer,” she said, her eyes filled with accusations of my shortcomings.

  “You can ask the Public Defender for the name of another lawyer who’ll do this for a reduced fee, but whoever you get will tell you the same thing.”

  Still glaring at me, Shanae kept silent. If she thought that look would force me to change my mind, the woman knew nothing about me. Or maybe she resented the fact that, while she was too well-off to get a public defender, one glance at my dinky sublet office and she could see I was no Gloria Allred. I was just another scrambling solo who took work from the public defender’s short list of private attorneys willing to represent defendants on the financial borderline.

  “White people,” she said, for no apparent reason.

  I didn’t know if she was smitten with her own voice or blamed white people for her lot in life, the rules of professional conduct or the price of gas. Maybe she was disappointed at my color. For the pittance I stood to earn from this case, I was ready to tell her to find a black attorney.

  I considered telling her about my childhood in the Bed-Stuy section of Brooklyn or pointing to the wall behind her at my father’s photo of Jackie Robinson entering the Dodgers clubhouse through the door marked “KEEP OUT.” Not so much to impress her, but to clue her in that she didn’t know jack shit about me.

  She grumbled, “This is bullshit.”

  I yanked open the bottom drawer of my old wooden desk and hauled out my Yellow Pages, dropping it, with an intentional thud, in front of her. “Here you go,” I said, flipping to the attorney listings. “Call anyone. And be prepared to pay dearly for what they have to say.”

  She pursed her lips and continued to give me the evil eye. But she knew I had her. “Fine,” she said. Grabbing the large black purse she’d parked next to her, she shot to her feet as if the chair were on fire. “I need to do some shopping,” she announced.

  I nodded and smiled, like I gave a damn where she was going or what she intended to do. “This shouldn’t take more than an hour.”

  “Hmmph.” She turned toward Tina. In a stern voice, she said, “You behave. And answer Ms. McRae’s questions, you hear me?” Over her shoulder on her way out, she tossed the words, “I’ll be back.”

  Goody, I thought. Tina’s sullen expression suggested our thoughts were identical.

  Sinking into the chair like a deflating balloon, Tina’s elbows jutted over the armrests as she crossed her arms. Her blue-jeaned legs waggled, signaling boredom. I could see the outline of rail-thin arms and bony shoulders under the loose-fitting pink sweatshirt that swallowed her frame. She must have taken after her father. Her chubby-cheeked face and café au lait complexion were nothing like her mother’s. Her hair was tied in a ponytail with a pink sequined scrunchie.

  “Tina, it says here you knocked an elderly woman down while trying to snatc
h her purse. Is that right?”

  She shrugged. “Yeah.” Her look said, “What about it?”

  “Based on what I have, this looks like your first offense. What brought this on?”

  She shrugged again. “I just tried to jack her purse,” she said, revealing a crooked overbite. “She wouldn’t let go.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  She rolled her eyes. At least her repertoire included more than shrugging. “Why you think?” she said, in a tone that suggested I might be missing a few brain cells.

  “I could assume lots of things, but I’m asking you.”

  Again, she shrugged. “Money, I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “Money,” she said, in a flat voice.

  “How much money did you expect to find in an old lady’s purse?”

  Shrug. I suppressed the urge to hold her shoulders down. “I dunno,” she mumbled.

  I scanned the report again. “This happened three blocks from where you live. Do you know this woman?”

  She shook her head.

  “You have a problem with her?”

  Silence.

  “You just figured you had nothing better to do, so why not pick up some spare change from a little old lady who can’t defend herself?”

  Tina shrugged and rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”

  “Was breaking her arm part of the plan?”

  Some emotion—regret?—flashed in her eyes, but her game face returned quickly. “I wasn’t tryin’ to knock her down. If she’d let go the damn purse, she’d o’ been all right.”

  “But she didn’t let go. And you got caught.” A pair of undercover cops sitting surveillance had intervened when they heard the woman scream.

  “Yeah. Jump out boys got me,” she said. “Motherfuckers.”

  “Jump out boys?”

  “You know. Unmarked.”

  I nodded. You learn something new every day. “What are your grades like?” I asked, switching gears.