Marry, Kiss, Kill

by Anne Flett-Giordano

  “Betty White,” Nola’s inner voice chastised her age-obsessed brain as she grabbed some nitrile exam gloves from Tony’s scene case. Just lighten up and focus on the corpse. But when she looked down at the face of the victim, her heart sank.

  “Oh no.”

  Tony shot her a puzzled look. “You know him?”

  “I don’t know him, know him. It’s that sweet street singer who makes up songs outside Café Roma. Why would anybody want to shoot him?”

  “Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to catch and fry,” he replied, holding up an evidence bag with two .38-caliber shell casings. “Found these underneath the archway.”

  Nola followed Tony’s gaze to the massive stone archway at the far side of the lawn. It was roughly the distance of a city block. The killer was definitely someone who knew how to shoot.

  “Anything else?” she asked, running her eyes over the body.

  “Nothing overtly visible to the naked eye.” Tony recognized a familiar look on her face. “Okay, what are you already seeing that I don’t?”

  “It’s what I’m not seeing. Where’s his guitar?”

  Tony shrugged. “This is just how the patrol officer found him. The man was traveling light.”

  “Doesn’t make sense,” she said, snapping on the exam gloves. “That guitar was his livelihood. I never once saw him without it. It had a strap with a green feather on it. You can still see the chafing marks it left around his neck.” She knelt and gingerly pulled down the T-shirt, revealing the strap marks still visible on the rigored flesh.

  “Maybe he left it home last night,” Tony said, squatting down at her side for a better look.

  “Good theory if he’d had a home. And I’m guessing he was far too savvy to leave it at the shelter.”

  Tony signaled to a police photographer to come get a clean shot of the chafing marks, then turned back to Nola. “So, you think some sleazebag offed the poor guy for an old guitar and some spare change?”

  “I hope not, but we better send an e-alert to the pawnshops just in case. Jeez, I’ve smiled at him a million times, but I never had a clue what his name was. Any ID in his pockets?”

  Tony handed her a dog-eared card. “All we found were a couple of old roaches, more lint than pot, and this library card.”

  Nola read the name on the card. “Charles Beaufort.” It sounded Southern, apropos of the smooth, warm baritone and the Mississippi-wide smile that had been Charles Beaufort’s best feature back when he was still breathing.

  “What’s Alex’s call on the preliminary time of death?” The question was asked more out of habit than need to know. Nola had been around enough victims, algor mortis, to recognize the stages of body cooling and muscle stiffening, even without the medical examiner’s assessment.

  “He’s guesstimating between seven and nine last night. Cause of death is most likely those two sizable bullet holes to the chest.” Tony nodded toward the ME’s ambulance parked under a wide-leafed fig tree. “Alex is having his morning blood clots in syrup, waiting for us to give him the okay to remove the body.”

  “It’s beet juice with ginseng,” Nola laughed.

  “Whatever it is, it creeps me out,” he said with a shiver.

  “The guy makes his living Ginsuing dead bodies. Being creepy is pretty much part of the job description.”

  Tony stood and helped Nola to her feet as he continued to fill her in on the prelim investigation of the scene. “Evidence team ran a detector over the lawn, but so many tourists tromping through every day, it’s a forensic stew. Going to be hell sorting it all out. Juan and his guys are doing a door-to-door for witnesses, but I don’t expect much help there either.”

  Detective Juan Garza always got the canvassing detail. Thin and dark with a wry smile, Juan had a natural knack for putting people at ease. A cop at the door usually remained at the door; Juan was regularly invited in for coffee. But Tony was right. If there had been a witness, he or she would most likely have come forward already. Nearly ten hours after the fact, the best they could reasonably hope for was that someone had heard the shots and mistaken them for fireworks from the festival. At least that would help them pinpoint the TOD.

  By the time Nola and Tony finished assessing the crime scene, the sun was already glinting off the courthouse’s red-tile roof. The bell tower clock chimed seven-fifteen. Charles Beaufort had been lying out in the wet grass all night, and his killer wasn’t likely to have hung around waiting to see what happened next.

  Nola shielded her eyes and smiled at her handsome partner.

  “Nothing more to do here. Shall we head over to the shelter and see if we can verify that Charles Beaufort was his real name, and hopefully discover that somebody had a better motive for killing him than stealing a beat-up old guitar?”

  Tony took a last look at Charles Beaufort’s lifeless body being bagged and tagged. “What’s the difference at this point?”

  “The difference,” Nola said, grabbing her sandals off the stretcher to make way for sadder cargo, “is that if the world’s really that messed up, I’m not sure I want to Zumba in it anymore.”

  “Zumba? Is that one of those words only women know, like Pinterest?”

  “It’s a Latin dance exercise thing. You get too old to go to clubs, you got to get your salsa on somehow.”

  “Oh, we’re in midlife-crisis mode again. So how ’bout, before we hit the shelter, we swing by Max’s for some cheer-up pancakes and bacon?”

  “Italian, please. A woman over forty has to get an hour of sustained aerobic exercise every day just to not gain weight. You’d be cheering me right into my fat pants.”

  “Since when are you over forty?”

  “I’ve decided to start rounding up so it won’t be such a killer shock when it happens.”

  “Okay, then, how ’bout you get some tasteless eggwhite-y thing, and I get double pancakes, extra bacon, and you can have fun telling me about how many empty calories I’m consuming?”

  “I love the way you get me.”

  Four

  The gray-ponytailed woman on duty at the shelter dabbed tears from behind her wire-rimmed glasses. She wished she could give Tony more information. Women always did. Nola had long ago learned to just hang back and let her partner work his charm. She studied the small group of transients loitering nearby, anxious to hear what had befallen one of their own, while the woman told Tony what she could about the late Charles Beaufort.

  “Charley was originally from Chicago.”

  Not the South, Nola thought. Well, that’s the first thing I got wrong.

  “He had a happy way about him. The first night he came in for a bed, I asked if he liked to be called Charles or Charley, and he said, ‘Ma’am, you can call me anything but late for supper.’ ” She fished under her sleeve for another of her seemingly endless stash of sweater tissues, but came up empty.

  “Any idea where Charley might have been going last night, or who he might have been seeing?” Tony asked, as he passed her more Kleenex.

  The woman blew her nose and said she couldn’t be certain. He’d been at the Arlington most nights that week, playing for the folks in town to see the movies, but beyond that she had no idea. The gathered transients under her care had little more to offer. None of them knew if Charley had been meeting up with anybody or why anybody might want to kill him. Always in a good mood, Charley had steered clear of the petty arguments that occasionally flared up among the dispossessed, often making up songs that soothed the commotion and made everybody laugh.

  Nola studied their tired faces, weathered by drugs and disappointment, and tried to imagine them laughing. She reminded herself for the thousandth time to be grateful for what she had, to quit whining about what she missed, and to always wear sunscreen.

  “. . . watching the detectives. . .”

  Elvis Costello’s funky drawl drew everyone’s attention to Nola’s knock-off Chanel tote. She’d realized her ringtone was too cute by half the first time it went off, but s
he kept forgetting to change it. They watched as she pawed through pens and makeup and a million loose receipts and finally came up with her cell.

  It was Kesha at the station. The e-alert had paid off. A twitching junkie was trying to pawn an old guitar at a shop on Haley Street. Nola flashed on Charley’s big, warmhearted grin, snuffed out for the price of a little bit of high.

  “Excuse me. Tony, we’ve got a possible hit on the guitar.”

  Outside, the street was filling up with news vans. The local press was being outflanked by reporters up from Los Angeles to cover the film festival. “Murder at the Movies!” It was just the kind of tie-in that would send the mayor and the city council sledding down freak-out mountain shrieking, “Noooo!”

  On her way to the shelter, Nola had popped the top on the T-bird, a decision she was currently regretting. As she started to pull away from the curb, Rachel Palmer, a petite Action News reporter with alabaster skin, raced over, grabbed hold of her steering wheel, and stuck a microphone in her face.

  “Detective MacIntire! Who were you here to interview? Do you know who the shooter is?”

  “Well, I can’t say for certain, Rachel, but it’s usually the guy with the gun.” Nola revved the T-bird’s engine. “You want to let go of my steering wheel now?”

  Rachel’s skin was even more flawless in person than it was on TV. Invisible pores and no lipstick-catching lip lines — it was every woman’s dream. Under different circumstances, Nola would have been tempted to ask what C serum she used, but Rachel was more than just a pretty face. Her tiny hand remained doggedly attached to Nola’s steering wheel as she fired off another question.

  “According to my sources, Mr. Beaufort was last seen outside the Arlington Theater before the Batman premiere. Do you believe his murder is somehow related to the film festival?”

  Nola didn’t dare be glib this time. “We have absolutely no reason to believe that Mr. Beaufort’s murder is in any way connected to the festival. He was a street performer, so naturally he gravitated to large crowds. Last night the largest crowd just happened to be in front of the Arlington.”

  “Have you spoken to the festival organizers?” Rachel pressed.

  “The police department has no further comment at this time,” Nola replied as she eased the T-bird out of Rachel’s grasp and into the street. Looking back in her rearview mirror, she saw Rachel and her colleagues descending on the shelter like a pack of sound-bite-hungry wolves. She hoped the occupants, long accustomed to being shunned and neglected, would enjoy their fifteen minutes of fame, but the full-court press meant the push would be on to solve this one fast.

  “. . . watching the detectives. . .”

  It was Tony calling from his Audi up ahead.

  “Excited you’re going to be on TV?” he asked, knowing full well she’d rather gargle with pushpins.

  “I almost pulled Rachel’s arm out of her socket trying to get away. She’s trying to establish a link between Charley’s murder and the film festival.”

  “Well, we had to know that was coming. Think we’ll get lucky and this junkie at the pawnshop will turn out to be our guy?”

  “As Cassady probably once said to Kerouac, ‘Beats me, Jack.’ But I’m sure starting to hope so.”

  Five

  It was a short drive to the pawnshop. The owner, a sharp little sparrow of a man, had kept the suspect haggling while his plump, bedazzled peacock of a wife called the cops. Walking through the dust-caked door, Nola felt like she was passing through a portal to an older, dingier era. Cases full of cheap jewelry, stacks of used DVDs, and a jumble of battered luggage filled every inch of the cramped space.

  The junkie was cowering against a counter in the back. He was high as a kite and about as sharp as a marble, but he was clearly no killer. The stringy little guy was shaking like the San Andreas Fault inside him was shifting plates, but there was no mistaking the blood on his tattered sweatshirt and Charley’s guitar with the feather on the strap.

  Nola and Tony flashed their badges and took turns asking questions.

  “I’m Detective MacIntire. I need you to tell me where you got that guitar.”

  The junkie started scratching a scabby patch of skin on the side of his neck. “Wasn’t no point leaving it with a dead man.”

  Tony picked up the guitar and played a chord. “You know how he got dead?”

  “Dude just shot him, click, click, click.” The scratching grew more intense.

  Nola’s eyes lit up. “You saw the shooter?”

  “Under the circle by the pink flowers. Shot him and just ran away,” came the disjointed reply.

  The stone archway where they’d found the shell casings was bordered by pink hibiscus. So far the junkie’s story was fitting perfectly with their reconstruction of the crime. An eyewitness, even one with tweaker vocabulary issues, was still worth his weight in circumstantial evidence. If he could give a halfway decent description of the shooter, they could get a police sketch out on the street by noon.

  “What did this dude look like?” Tony strummed another chord.

  The junkie stared at the old guitar like it was his next fix. “Wasn’t no point leaving it with a dead man.” He was scratching so hard now, tiny fissures in the scabby patch were opening up and starting to bleed.

  Nola took his dirty hand from his neck and gently held it. “Relax, okay? You’re doing great,” she said, channeling her inner nurse. “This dude, was he tall, short, white, black?”

  “Dude just shot him, click, click, click.”

  No matter how they framed the questions, the methalated answers always came back the same. Thirty minutes later they were no closer to a description than they were when they’d started. Obviously the little crank vulture had seen something and heard plenty before he picked Charley’s bones clean, but it was impossible to glean anything from his ramblings beyond, “Dude just shot him, click, click, click.”

  Nola and Tony passed him off to a patrol car to be taken in and booked for theft. Hopefully he’d babble something more coherent once the drugs playing badminton with his brain cells started to wear off.

  Tony struck a final chord on the guitar and grinned. “And so the handsome detective and his intrepid female partner were back to square one.”

  Six

  Nothing new broke that afternoon. As expected, Juan’s canvass of the area around the courthouse hadn’t produced any new witnesses. Nola and Tony interviewed the street people who congregated near the Trader Joe’s parking lot, but nobody knew of anyone who had beef with Charley. For the price of a dollar in an old Starbucks cup, one entrepreneurial soul sent them in the direction of Dargan’s Pub, where Charley liked to drink, but the bartender there told the same sad story. Charley had been a model patron, no fights, no attitude. He just drank a few beers and made up songs.

  “Why would anybody want to kill a nice guy like that?”

  Nola assured him they’d do their best to find out, but with nothing to go on but the musings of a strung-out junkie, the prospect was looking bleak.

  She was back in the squad room, wrapping up an email about Charley to Chicago P.D., when she was summoned to Chief Johnson’s office. Tony had already gone home, and she’d been two minutes from doing the same. Passing Kesha at her desk, she smiled and sighed.

  “So close.”

  Sam Johnson had been Nola’s boss for a little over five years. Most times their mutual respect and fondness for each other made working together a breeze. This wasn’t one of those times. Sam started off calm, but five minutes into their “discussion” he was ready to wring her pretty neck. The shit, in the form of the six o’clock news, had hit the fan. True, it could all be managed with just a little cooperation, but blind cooperation wasn’t exactly her strong suit. She watched Sam’s corn-fed, country-boy complexion turn from healthy pink to over-ripe plum as she refused for the umpteenth time to charge the junkie thief with Charley’s murder.

  “This isn’t just me asking,” Sam huffed. “The city’s
elected pains-in-the-asses are on my phone every five minutes! We’ve got a town packed with celebrities and a murder right outside the damn courthouse!”

  “I understand that,” Nola said calmly, wondering what color would come after plum. Puce, maybe?

  Sam crossed and stood over her chair like an angry gym teacher. “Well, try to understand this. If you charge the junkie, we can make it clear to the press that this was just an isolated case of homeless-on-homeless crime. The filmies will go back to La La Land and tell their friends that Santa Barbara’s still a safe place to go to the movies, and maybe you and I can keep our jobs!”

  Nola knew better than to try to out-shout Sam in his own office, but he was coming off like some clichéd captain in a TV drama berating the detective beneath him for not playing ball, and it was starting to piss her off. To avoid sending him into full cardiac arrest, she tried to adopt a tone somewhere between Sincere English Teacher and Ruler-Wielding Nun.

  “I’m sorry, Sam, but I’m not going to arrest a man for a crime he didn’t commit.”

  “How do you know he didn’t do it? He had the victim’s blood on his clothes! He was pawning his guitar! He’s a meth addict, for God sakes!”

  “So’s Charlie Sheen. He’s hanging by the pool over at the Bacara — should I arrest him too?”

  “You think you’re funny?”

  “In a winsome kind of way.”

  “Well, maybe for a change you could try being pragmatic?”

  “You mean like stop carrying a purse and start wearing a fanny pack? Sure, it would make chasing bad guys easier, but it’s never gonna happen.”

  “I mean like charging the little tweaker with murder so the film freaks won’t go home blabbing to anyone who’ll listen that Santa Barbara’s got a crazed killer on the loose!”

  “That’s not pragmatic, it’s lying, and I don’t lie.”

  “Really? Shall we check your real weight against what I’m guessing it says on your driver’s license?”