by April Hill
“I’m busy,” I growled. “What do you want?”
“I heard a vicious rumor that you were being uncooperative with an official police investigation,” he said. “Knowing your sweet, agreeable nature, I figured that had to be a mistake, so I dropped in to ask you—as politely as possible, of course—to get your butt out here and answer their damned questions.”
I threw my hands to my cheeks in my best Scarlett O’Hara impersonation. “Mercy me, Detective O’Connor! You are simply so forceful and masculine this morning! I do declare! Such a display of testosterone makes me positively giddy!” The line might have worked better if I hadn’t been dressed like a Hawaiian bag lady, in a shabby, gigantically too large muumuu with orange hibiscus and what looked like big green worms—one of Carlotta’s discards.
He leaned on the doorjamb and smiled. I should explain here that Matt has the kind of smile that forms little crinkles around the corners of his mouth and makes his eyes look like they’re laughing. He has this sandy blond hair, and his eyes are sort of grayish blue, and his … Okay, don’t say it. I know. In spite of his cave-man tendencies, and our painful—my painful—history, I have a very serious case for the lieutenant. It’s too bad he still thinks I’m a lush and a screw-up. I would never have admitted it to him, but I had concluded some time ago that I richly deserved every stinging swat of that spanking, and probably a lot more like it. The problem is, that’s just not the kind of thing you can tell a man you’re in love with, now is it?
Matt took a little notebook and a pen from his hip pocket and assumed a very serious demeanor while we carried on with the familiar silliness. “Are you aware that cruelly mocking a member of the Los Angeles Police Department is a serious crime?” he asked. “Punishable by a fine of one thousand dollars, ninety days in jail, and by being turned across the offended officer’s knee for fifty good, hard swats on the bare butt?”
I rolled my eyes, and played the game as usual. “And have you thought about looking for work in a Turkish prison? I was not born yesterday, Lieutenant. There is no such law, and that last part is pure, adolescent fantasy.”
Matt shook his head. “Okay, next time, I’ll just have them call the SWAT team, how’s that? Now, do you want to try giving me a straight answer, or had you rather we do this downtown?” Then he grinned that wonderful grin I’ve already mentioned. “Sorry, but I’ve always wanted to say that to someone. You know, ‘We can do this downtown.’.”
Matt managed to smooth the waters with the officers I had offended, by explaining that while I was not exactly a candidate for Citizen of the Year, I was probably not a murderess, either. I’m not sure the cops were convinced, but they seemed willing enough by then to hand the problem off to Lieutenant O’Connor. At first, I was relieved, but after going through our usual little tap dance, Matt suddenly turned very coppish on me.
“Let’s start with you telling me everything you know about this Gabriel Tannhauser,” he said. “From the beginning. And I’m warning you right now to skip the crap. I’m not in the mood.”
I should have known right then that it was going to be a very long, hard day—and knowing Matt, I should have known that it would be a lot harder on one part of me than on others.
Chapter Two
I met Matt for the first time on the night my neighbor, Buffy Devereaux, went missing under very suspicious circumstances. Buffy wasn’t her real name, of course. She was no more Buffy Devereaux than I was June Cleaver. Buffy was the name she used as an exotic dancer, and although we weren’t what you could call intimate friends, we had shared a cup of coffee now and then. I knew her simply as LouEllen From Next Door. In those days, I lived in a seedy rabbit warren in a still ungentrified section of Venice. That was before I came up in the world, and moved to the beach, and to the overpriced, corpse-strewn Encantada Cove.
LouEllen had once told me that she had a husband somewhere. As far as I could tell, though, the husband didn’t get to town often, which was probably a good thing. When he wasn’t home, LouEllen whiled away her lonely hours by entertaining a lot of company. No, I mean a lot of company. LouEllen was a kind of trailer trash Jay Gatsby. All night and well into the morning each weekend, her guests came and went like Gatsby’s luminous moths, or in LouEllen’s case, maybe more like buzzing houseflies. Since her apartment was no bigger than mine, the guests did a lot of their coming on the hall stairs, just outside my door, and when they came, they came at top volume, if you take my meaning.
So, when the nosy old hag across the hall confided to me that LouEllen had been found hanging in her closet in a plastic dry cleaner’s bag—a suspected suicide— I knew there had to be something fishy. In the first place, you’d have to be an ambidextrous contortionist to do something like that. In the second place, LouEllen From Next Door was having way too good a time in life to blow it off like that. Now, if a woman like me, whose social life had recently gone from paltry to plainly pathetic, had ended her days twisting in amongst her shabby and hopelessly out-of-date finery and smelling of pine-scented closet freshener, it might reasonably have been ruled a suicide.
“What else could such a drab and pitiful creature do on a Saturday night?” the coroner would ask, shaking his head in sympathy when my withered corpse was found dangling like a giant salami in a delicatessen window. “The poor woman had completed the TV Guide crossword,” he would surmise, “washed her hair (rinsing and repeating exactly as instructed) and then eaten herself into a mindless stupor on frozen double-cheese pizza. She had already seen every National Geographic ever made at least twice, had committed to memory every word of every rerun of both The Golden Girls and The Nanny, and she’d run out of Oreos, Cheez Doodles and microwave popcorn the day before. It was a full week until payday, and the wretched woman—a New Yorker by birth and disposition—had been reduced to drinking tap water in lieu of natural spring water in petite plastic bottles. Hanging herself in a closet could only be an improvement upon the ignominious Saturday evening she was facing—date night for the rest of mankind.”
So, there you have it—the dismal story of my life, in one overly long, boring paragraph.
And then, on that very same lonely night, my life changed. Matt O’ Connor knocked on my door. Thank you, LouEllen From Next Door, wherever you are.
Contrary to what I thought when I first opened the door and saw him, this gorgeous guy was not there in answer to my prayers, but rather was in his official capacity as a homicide detective with the LAPD. It appeared that Mrs. LouEllen Ebersole, aka Buffy Devereaux, had been reported missing. Did I have any information regarding her current whereabouts?
“I thought you guys found her hanging in the closet,” I whispered.
The gorgeous detective rolled his eyes and muttered an oath under his breath. “So much for securing the crime scene. No, there was no body hanging in the closet. No human body, at any rate.”
I loved the sound of that so much I repeated it in a stage whisper. “No human body?”
He nodded. “For reasons yet to be determined, Mrs. Ebersole had a number of mummified wolves in her clothes closet.”
Now, this, I knew something about. “Coyotes,” I explained, thrilled to be thrown into the middle of an honest-to-God police investigation. “They were, like presents—from a smitten admirer.”
I had just told the man that a woman was keeping a horde of stiffened coyotes in her clothes closet, but Matt never even blinked. This was Los Angeles, after all. “An admirer?” he repeated.
“Some bloodthirsty son of a bitch she met out in Palmdale, “ I explained. “The asshole promised to get her enough coyote skins to make a full-length coat. He kills them by running over them with his mini-van. Like a hobby, I guess. Your Mrs. Ebersole hangs out with some really swell folks.”
The lieutenant shook his head, looking more sad than surprised. I sensed the presence of another animal lover.
“The Comanche called the coyote ‘God’s Dog’,” I said glumly.
He nodded. “Makes you wo
nder if that habit the Comanche had of dipping their enemies in honey and tying them down over a nest of fire ants didn’t have its good points.”
Somehow, I’d just known I was going to like this guy, and now he had proven me right. After that, the handsome detective came in and asked me a lot of questions. No, I hadn’t heard anything, but that was suspicious, in and of itself. I didn’t have anything against LouEllen, except maybe for the coyote thing, so I wasn’t especially eager to tattle on her, but facts are facts. LouEllen was a naughty lady. Matt wrote down everything I said, gave me his card, and left. Five minutes later, he was back. Would I be interested in taking care of the naughty lady’s little dog, until they could get in touch with her, or her husband? Someone had left bowls of food and water, but Matt was reluctant to leave the “little guy” all alone. I was really surprised to hear about the dog. LouEllen had never seemed to me like an animal lover, and I could only hope that the dog wasn’t the beginning of another coat project.
Matt disappeared for a few moments, and reappeared with a petite, adorable bundle of white fluff with a lavender ribbon in its top knot. It was just the kind of dog I detested, but I was trying to make this one of my nice days, so that Lieutenant O’Connor would be impressed, so I took the dog and smiled as sweetly at it as I knew how. The dog looked at me like it wanted to tear my throat out.
“What does a dog like this eat?” I asked. “Beluga caviar? Pheasant under glass? Peacocks’ tongues and hummingbird wings, maybe?”
The handsome detective took the dog back and looked at it closely. “Beats me. I’ll run down to the corner, if you want, and pick up a couple of cans of something.” He laughed. “You know, those very little cans—the expensive ones?”
“Do you think he’d settle for a can of tuna?” I asked hopefully. I despise tuna, but I had bought eight cans of the stuff on sale at a fabulous price, and was saving them for some night when I was desperate enough to eat the something that smelled like the floor of a fish market.
Matt shook his head doubtfully. “This doesn’t look like a canned tuna kind of dog. You could make him a steak, I guess, or maybe a hamburger.”
“Yeah, sure,” I grumbled. A week before payday? I don’t think so. What about pizza? Leftover pizza, that is. There wasn’t any pizza left, of course, since I had just eaten it all, but that was my little secret. The dog would eat the damned tuna or dine elsewhere.
“I’d take him, if I could,” Matt apologized. “I’m never home, though. But, if you’d rather, I’ll take him down to the pound for tonight. Maybe Mr. or Mrs. Ebersole will show up tomorrow.”
“I wouldn’t hold my breath, Lieutenant,” I said. “Mr. Ebersole, if there is one, is an infrequent visitor. I’ve never seen him, or this dog.”
Matt shook his head. “Funny. There’s a lot of shaving stuff in the bathroom, and the hall closet is full of men’s clothing.”
“Is it all the same size?” I asked. Yeah, the question did sound kind of catty, but if he was interested in my astute observations, Matt wasn’t talking. I tried again. “I know it’s none of my business, but what do you think happened to LouEllen? To Buffy, I mean?”
Matt provided no juicy details at all. “We don’t know, yet, and I’d appreciate it if you don’t spread that coyote thing around, either. It might turn out to be important.”
I was about to make a stab at prying some tidbit of information from the detective when the damned dog lifted its scrawny leg against my pajama leg. Matt reached down quickly, scooped the little shit up in one hand, and dumped him out in the hallway, but it was too late. My leg and socks were drenched, and I was standing in a spreading puddle of puppy pee.
“Jesus, I’m sorry!” Matt said, bending down to pull up my pant leg. “Stay there, and I’ll get a towel, or …”
I sighed. “Never mind, detective.” I started to the kitchen to get something with which to mop up. The stupid dog was standing out in the hall, now, looking offended, and apparently waiting for an apology. “Bring him back in. He seems to have drained the tank, for the time being.”
When I came back with a bunch of wet paper towels, Matt had already spread newspapers on the puddle. The dog was on the couch, watching a rerun of The X Files and chewing on the TV remote.
“Maybe you’d better lock him in the bathroom for tonight,” Matt suggested. “I’ve got this real strong feeling he’s not housebroken. I promise I’ll get him out of here in the next day or two.” He looked at me curiously, pointing to my dripping pant leg. “Hadn’t you better change? I’ll watch him while you …”
I looked down at my socks, and nodded. “Yeah, maybe I’ll take your suggestion. I’ll get dressed, then go down to the Quik-Shoppe and check out the doggie gourmet section.”
“Have you had dinner, yet?” he asked, and like an idiot, I came back with a crack.
“Well, personally, I’m trying to cut down on canned dog food, but maybe I’ll pick up something.”
He grinned. “What I meant was that if you’re going out anyway, maybe I could take you to dinner— if you haven’t already eaten.”
I had eaten, of course. All day. In the throes of my customary Saturday night depression, I had scarfed down everything in sight. I had eaten the afore-mentioned king-sized frozen pizza, a half a bag of nacho-flavored tortilla chips, close to a quart of rocky road ice cream, and finished with two stale fortune cookies, one of which had promised that I was on the verge of a huge career breakthrough, and another that suggested I should run for political office.
“No,” I lied, hoping he hadn’t noticed the telltale debris of my marathon feeding frenzy scattered around the room. “I’m famished, as a matter of fact. Enough to eat dog food, even.” At this point, I may actually have giggled. I hope not, but I can’t lie about it. It’s possible that I giggled.
So, I accepted temporary custody of the dog, which turned out to be one of the dumber decisions of my life. No good deed goes unpunished, they say, and the dog—nameless as yet—set out to prove it. After two days, I decided there was something seriously wrong with him. No animal that small could generate that much pee and poop unless it was suffering from some grotesque disease.
Matt and I settled for a quick sandwich that night, since I was afraid to leave the dog alone for too long, but our actual first date, on the following night, was about as romantic and perfect as anyone could imagine. Dinner overlooking the yacht harbor, holding hands for a long walk along the beach, tender, exploratory kisses in the moonlight. Afterward, he took me home, fondled my breasts while kissing me goodnight at my front door, and then made sure I was safely inside with the door locked before going downstairs to his car. I’d had a little too much to drink, of course, but he’d been too polite to mention it.
The second date, only two days later, was even better—a play at a small downtown theater, a Japanese restaurant complete with a serene bamboo fountain and a tiny bridge arched over a jade green fishpond of jewel-toned Koi. Once again, I had too much to drink. Sake, this time, and once again, Matt said nothing about it. We parked in the hills and watched the lights of Los Angeles, and necked like teenagers. I was more than ready to make love right there in the car, but Matt wasn’t, and even in my inebriated condition, I recognized a sense of honor when I saw it. I had had too much to drink, and there were rules about that kind of thing. For the first time in my life, I was being courted.
Three days later, on the night I knew “it” was finally going to happen, we went to dinner at an Italian place in the valley where the waiters sang Puccini and Verdi while carrying steaming plates of pasta. We laughed and talked, and had the kind of evening you read about in romance novels. Ignoring Matt’s quiet suggestion that maybe I’d had enough to drink for one evening, I downed my fifth glass of Chianti, and ruined everything.
So, what the hell was my problem, you’re asking. I’m not sure, exactly, except that I had never met anyone exactly like Matt, and I was desperate to make him like me, and at the same time to get him in the sack. Ma
tt had turned out to be one of those gentlemanly, careful types, and though we had done just about everything but, as we used to say in high school, he was being very cagey about that last step, and his hesitation was confusing the hell out of me. Until now, my romantic partners had been disappointing, and had a habit of dropping off the face of the earth after the first few dates, but most of them had been very adept at getting naked down to their socks long before we got to the bedroom. Frankly, I was bewildered.
Most of my failed romances had probably been my fault, of course. I have this big mouth and I almost always think I’m right. One guy told me—pausing just long enough to grab his shorts before he fled the scene—that I had a big, fat chip on my shoulder, and that I’d rather compete with men than fuck them. He was wrong, though. I want to compete with men, and fuck them. I was looking for the kind of man who already knew who he was, and who wasn’t worried about competing with me, or anybody else. But most of all, I wanted a man who would like about me the relatively few things I liked about myself, if that makes any sense. It was beginning to look like a lost cause, and then, when I was least prepared for it, along came Matt.
Anyway, on our third night together, after the Italian place, we ended up at Matt’s condo, and yes, I’d had a lot to drink by then, mostly because I was nervous, and felt like a fourteen-year-old virgin, again. As I already mentioned, I’d started swilling down everything in sight before we left the restaurant, and when Matt suggested for the second time that evening that maybe I’d had enough, I got a little testy. By the time we got to his place, I’d cooled down, but I was still angry. I’ve never been a sloppy drunk, and I don’t stumble and slur my words—up until that point, at any rate, so when Matt suggested taking me home so I could “get some sleep,” it struck me as patronizing—a little too much like “sleep it off.” I declined the offer, went to his bathroom and brushed my teeth with my finger, splashed my face with cold water, and returned to the bedroom wearing nothing but a slightly drunken, come-hither smile.