“That’s different. Highway Patrol just assumes women lie, so they automatically add ten pounds. We know they do it, so we have no choice but to play the under. It’s a vicious circle.”
Sam plopped down in his ergonomic chair and stretched his arms across his desk. “Look, just charge the junkie now so everybody’ll calm down. I’m not asking you to end the investigation. Later, if we find out he’s innocent, which I highly doubt, we’ll drop the charges. It happens all the time.”
“Not on purpose,” Nola countered, her patience wearing thin. “Crackheads are rarely crack shots, and this one’s got junkie-Parkinson’s so bad he can’t hold a thought straight, let alone a .38. And where’s the gun?”
“Who knows? Maybe he ditched it?”
“He ditches a five-hundred-dollar gun and tries to pawn a forty-dollar guitar? Now, if you wanted me to charge him with being the dumbest junkie ever . . . Sam, I’m telling you, he’s not the guy.”
“Well thanks for your opinion, but I happen to disagree.”
“Then you charge him! I don’t want any part of this!” Frustrated, she stood up to go; then remembered she needed his permission to leave.
Sam gave it one last shot. “Come on, Nols, you caught him. If I charge him, it’s just going to look weird. Can’t you for one moment think of the greater good?”
“There’s nothing good about charging the wrong guy.”
“Fine, if you’re so sure he didn’t do it . . . go on. Get out. You’re dismissed.”
“Quite frequently,” she replied on her way to the door, “and by many people, usually as just another airhead blonde, but I won’t lie about murder.” She’d wanted to sound tough, but even at rounded-up forty, she couldn’t quite get the little-girl whininess out of her voice when she got mad.
Outside Sam’s office, Nola was met by the surprised faces of her fellow officers. Clearly the walls were thinner than she thought. Kesha was holding out Nola’s mock-Chanel tote. “I thought you might want to make a quick getaway.”
“Thanks, Kesh,” Nola said, grateful for intuitive girlfriends. On her way out of the squad room, she chided her colleagues. “Okay, folks, move along. Nothing to see here.”
Rehashing the argument on her ride home, Nola imagined herself saying the millions of things she wished she’d said, in that sexy Kathleen Turner growl that reduced tough guys to marshmallows. “This ain’t over, bub.” But the image burst when she pulled into her parking space and dropped her purse getting out of the car, then spent what seemed like an eternity down on her knees, fumbling under the wheelbase for her MAC berry lip gloss, a carton of Tic Tacs, and her badge.
When she finally opened the door to her condo, she kicked off her shoes, not giving a rat’s ass where they landed, and collapsed on the sofa with a belly full of mad.
Her spirits lightened a little when her phone whistled, signaling a new text. But it wasn’t Chicago P.D. getting back to her about Charley. It was a message from a guy she hadn’t seen in years saying if she wasn’t married yet, he’d like to fly her to his place in Telluride for the weekend.
When women got lonely, they repainted their bedrooms and had lunch with their friends. When men got lonely, they panic-texted old girlfriends.
Nola was grateful that men still found her worth the price of a lobster bisque and a crisp Pinot Grigio at Brophy’s, let alone a ski trip to Colorado, but she couldn’t help missing the boys they used to be. The carefree guys who’d laughed too loud and played too hard and replaced each other so effortlessly in her heart that it was hard to tell where one relationship had ended and the next one had begun. All except for Josh. But then every girl needed a good eight-year cry in her life. How else would she understand pop music?
It was a sad ending to a frustrating day. She knew she was getting old, but old-boyfriends-start-texting-you old? She might as well take up scrapbooking. When she texted back, she was surprised to find it was actually fun catching up again, but she made it clear that a ski-trip booty call wasn’t in the cards. “No, no, u r not the 1 4 me.”
Seven
Nola was stretched out on her living room rug listening to the outré fabulous Chrissie Hynde and rereading her case notes on Charley when she heard a knock at the door. It was after nine. Tony was at dinner with his latest thing, her girlfriends would call before dropping by, nothing was due from Amazon, and she hadn’t buzzed a serial killer up in weeks. Maybe, if she just lay quiet, whatever Mystery Achievement was out there would give up and go away. The second knock was louder. On the off chance that it might mean Thin Mints in her future, she planked off the rug and went to peep out the peephole.
Outside in the hallway, a petite, pixie-cut brunette in Bluefly overalls and a pink crop top was staring sheepishly down at the carpet. One of the cluster of twentysomethings who had just moved in down the hall, she probably wanted to borrow a scissors or a sofa or something. They hadn’t looked all that put together when they moved in. Putting on her best meet-the-new-neighbor smile, Nola opened the door and said, “Hi.”
“Hi. I’m Nancy. I was wondering if you had a hammer and screwdriver I could borrow?”
Nancy was as cute as a button, if the button had big brown eyes that had recently been crying. Tactfully pretending not to notice, Nola swung open the door. “Yeah, sure, come on in.”
Nancy followed Nola into the kitchen to the everything drawer, where useful items like obsolete phone chargers, loose batteries, and stale Chinese fortune cookies lay dormant for months.
“I’m Nola MacIntire, by the way,” Nola said, remembering her manners as she rooted through the drawer for the tools. A hammer and a screwdriver, no wonder the poor girl had been crying. Do-it-yourself construction projects were about as much fun as outside-your-comfort-zone sex. Sure, they both started out exciting, but eventually you found yourself twisted into some ridiculous position, trying to fit the right part into the wrong hole, hoping it would all be over soon because you forgot to record Scandal.
“Phillips head or regular?” Nola asked, holding up both.
“I don’t know,” Nancy replied in a voice that was holding back tears.
“Hey, it’s okay. We’ll figure it out. What are you putting together?”
“It’s a bookcase thing from Ikea.” A tear broke free and made a run for her cheek.
“Looks like it’s putting up quite a fight.” More tears came chasing after the first. Nola tore a paper towel from a roll on the sink and handed it to the tiny stranger who had unexpectedly become the focal point of her evening. “Sweetie, are you okay?”
“My boyfriend broke up with me today.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Can I get you a glass of water or something?”
“In a tweet.”
“O-kay, margaritas it is.”
Two boxes of Kleenex and one bottle of Skinnygirl margaritas later, Nola was totally up to speed on the ill-fated romance of Nancy and Ken. They’d met at an art show. Nancy had been working as a cater-waiter, and Ken was covering the event for the Santa Barbara Reader. Nola loved the Reader. A free weekly that survived on advertising, it was a perfect blend of hard news, horoscopes, community awareness, and movie listings.
Unfortunately, its owner and managing editor had a daughter. Nancy had sensed something was going on between Ken and his boss’s offspring, but like most people who cheat, Ken had lied and told her she was crazy. She’d believed him because she loved him. She still loved him. In spite of his 140-characters-or-less breakup tweet, in her eyes he was still Ernest Hemingway, the God Apollo, and a Jewish Johnny Depp all rolled into one. Nola thought of how Josh had once seemed like all that and more to her own twentysomething eyes. Moles, near blind from birth, were VEGA 3 electron microscopes compared to young women in love.
As sure as Nancy was that she’d never get over Ken, Nola was equally sure she would, but strangers crying their hearts out in your living room tend to be a tad resistant to even the most well-reasoned arguments. The best she could do was maneuver Nancy away from her beige linen
sofa to a more snot-resistant rattan chair and parcel out platitudes between drinks and drinks between sobs.
“You’ve got to be Taylor Swift. You know, just ‘shake it off.’ “It was late, and she was clearly running low on cogent advice.
“I don’t know what I should do,” Nancy sobbed. “Maybe I should text him, or go over to his apartment. Do you have a baseball bat?”
“Sorry, I never let my guests drink and drive high fly balls.”
“Too bad, ’cause that’s just where I’d be aiming. Oh God, I love him so much. I really need some pot.”
“Ah, you know, this might be a good time to mention that I’m a detective with the Santa Barbara police department.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, I get that reaction a lot. Look, you don’t need this guy. He sounds like a thoughtless egomaniac who probably got way too much love as a child. ”
“His mother framed his bar mitzvah suit. It’s hanging in her bedroom.”
“Really? Wow. Well, there you are. I’d rather arm wrestle ISIS than deal with that brand of crazy. There are a million great guys out there, Jewish, Japanese . . . Argentinean, so sexy, am I right? Trust me, one day you’ll be bodysurfing or at a party, and suddenly you’ll realize you haven’t thought about Ken for a few days, and that’s when it’ll all start to turn around. How long were you two together?”
“Eight months.”
“Then the general rule of thumb is to suck it up and focus on your work, and in half that time, maybe less if you get a promotion, meet a new guy, or get a really spectacular haircut, you’ll be over him.”
“I don’t want to be over him.”
“I know, but the good news is, you will be. In the meantime, no pot. Not ‘cause I’m a cop, pot will just make you hungry. Ken’s already done a number on your heart. Don’t let him mess up your thighs. Best breakup food: kale salad with salsa. You can binge for days and still look good in your breakup bikini. Did I mention you need to buy a breakup bikini?”
“You should write a book or something. Breaking Up for Dummies.”
“You’re not a dummy. This happens to everybody.”
Nancy made a halfhearted attempt at a smile, but the tears were still falling. Nola patted her shoulder and carried their margarita glasses into the kitchen. It was time to transition from Mexican beta-blocker to Colombian caffeine.
The clock on the coffeemaker read 12:45. Less than twenty-eight hours ago, Sam hadn’t been furious, Nancy hadn’t been heartbroken, and Charley Beaufort had been looking forward to a long, full life. Back in the living room, Pink came up on the iPod shuffle. “Darlin’, who knew?”
Eight
Augustus Gillette the Third was a big man, both physically and in the moneyed circles he traveled in. As chairman of the Santa Barbara Coastal Commission, multimillion-dollar deals rose and fell with the bang of his gavel — his “second dick,” as it was jokingly referred to by the dot-com commodores he slapped backs and downed single malts with down at the yacht club.
Married thirty-seven years to his Yale sweetheart, Gus felt he’d earned his divorce and the gorgeous new arm charm he laughingly called his “Viagra wife.” Her name was Haven, and she was everything that name suggested. Twenty-two years of Santa Barbara sun had produced the kind of warmly tanned tits and ass that a man pushing sixty could happily retreat and retire to. But tonight Gus was far from the lee shore.
His father had often cautioned him to be outwardly genial but inwardly leery of the “hail fellow well met” members of his own class, the theory being that only people you innately trusted were in a position to cheat you. But Gus had trusted: in the old boys’ club, the rich boys’ club, the Yale boys’ club. And the result had been an economic collapse of catastrophic proportions.
Upon hearing they were broke, Haven had taken to sleeping in a guest room on the pretext that Gus’s snoring kept her awake. An excuse not worthy of her guile, since the impending loss of his expertly tailored Savile Row shirt had robbed Gus of any semblance of sleep for the past six weeks.
Alone in his darkened bedroom, Gus lay pondering his folly. He was a big man made small by the vastness of his king-size bed. Not a standard king, but one custom designed to be just a few inches bigger than the next guy’s. Even in sleep, he’d strived to get an edge. But now he was sleeping alone. He pictured Haven lying awake on the other side of the thick Venetian plaster, calculating how much she might still get her manicured claws on in a divorce.
The cause of Gus’s ruin was awaiting trial in federal prison. Nicholas Ridener-Howe Esq., aka Nicky Boy, aka First Class Son of a Bitch, had turned out to be a Ponzi schemer of Madoffian proportions. Gus chuckled to himself imagining Nick, who’d once refused to give him a lift to the Super Bowl because sharing a G6 made him claustrophobic, trapped in an eight-by-ten-foot cell with whatever tattooed homie the cat dragged in.
When the world first caved in, Gus had cursed his fair-weather wife and the phony financier, but now he could afford to laugh, because now he had a secret, one that rendered both his bankruptcy and his impending divorce moot.
He was shaken from his thoughts by the sound of the bedroom door. There she stood in all her gauzy, backlit, baby-doll glory. So, Gus thought, she couldn’t even wait until dawn to break the news. He wondered how long she’d been rehearsing her speech. “It’s not you, you did your best. It’s just I . . . I . . .”
Of course, there’d have to be a suitable pause for tears before she segued to the topic of her financial settlement. The see-through negligee was a sinister touch, but he couldn’t really hate her for that. The fact that Haven often went to absurd lengths to look devastatingly sexy in any situation was one of the prime reasons he’d married her. It had flattered him to think, “Here I am, almost sixty, and I can still get that.”
Haven lingered in the doorway, letting the hall light that was shining through her nightie give maximum play to her curves, before whispering, “Baby, are you awake?”
Gus decided to keep the tone light. “I’m not snoring, so I guess I must be.”
She crossed to the enormous bed, looking chastened and ashamed. “Oh, daddy, I’m sorry I’ve been such a bitch.”
Gus’s hope started to stiffen. Was it possible he’d misjudged the depth of her lack of feeling for him? She slipped under the covers, all kitten warm and female softness.
“It was just the shock of learning you’d invested so much without even discussing it with me. And then you tried to hide it from me . . . I know I’m not a brainiac like Angry Susan, but I’m just as much a wife to you as she was. I was hurt that you didn’t trust me.”
Gus’s mind raced. “Of course I trust you, sweetheart.” He hoped the lie would buy him time to divine what she was up to.
“I wanted to apologize last night, before the movie,” she said, running a finger along his jaw. “But then someone took you aside somewhere, and with all the excitement of meeting Ryan Gosling . . .”
And there it was, a motive as transparent as her nightgown. Words exchanged out of sight of prying eyes. She must have sensed a little bribery was afoot. After all, how many yes votes in front of the commission had been followed by long vacations in Tahiti and shopping sprees in Paris? Of course, things were different now, but Haven didn’t know that. She didn’t know the secret.
Gus smiled down at her impossibly pretty face as he tallied up the cost of their short life together. Marriage to Gold Digger Barbie . . . half his assets to his ex-wife, Susan . . . her young flesh yielding to his aging carcass . . . the dream mansion in Hope Ranch and the huge diamond on the hand now gently stroking his chest . . . the pleasure of telling her she was going to have to kiss the mansion, the diamond, and all the rest of it goodbye — ahhh, something far too delectable to rush. The higher she hung her own rope, the more pleasurable it would be to pull the chair out from under her.
“I do trust you, sweetheart. I was just ashamed,” Gus lied.
“Shhh,” she cooed. “Don’t say that. Nic
ky fooled a lot of smart people.” The hand with the diamond slid lower.
“Thank you, but smart people don’t lay themselves open to be conned. It was a hard lesson, but it stuck. The ‘someone’ you saw me with tonight offered to solve all our financial problems if I’d endorse a certain development project that’s before the commission. Even offered to cut me in on the deal.”
“Really? What did you say?”
Her voice was cool, not a trace of mendacity, but Gus could hear the hum of the cash register in her head. He savored the words on his tongue like fine cognac before finally whispering, “I turned it down flat. I’ve even written a speech against the project to ensure the other board members will have no choice but to vote no along with me.”
The look of stunned fury he’d imagined failed to materialize. No frown lines marred her perfect features, no storm raged in her ice-blue eyes. Confused, he pressed on. “I’ve been greedy and unprincipled my whole life, and look where it’s gotten me. I’ve decided it’s time to make a change.”
“Good for you, baby.” Haven stretched her arms over her head to better showcase her breasts, a clear sign she was still expecting sex.
“Good? I turned down cash that would have saved our ass, and you’re okay with that?”
“Better than okay, I’m proud of you. Never mind about the money. We’ll find some way to get by.”
The hot slap of shame Gus felt for having misjudged her took the stiffness out of his sails. Haven held him, small and flaccid, both literally and figuratively, in the palm of her hand.
“But we’re going to have to do better than this if we’re going to celebrate.” She took a playful nip at his earlobe, then rolled across the bed to a drawer in the nightstand. “I bought a new toy.”
She must have hidden it earlier, but when? A question Gus instantly pushed aside to make room for one far more tantalizing. Six weeks of celibacy were about to end with whatever she was reaching for in that drawer. They’d already graduated from handcuffs and spankings to leashes and dog collars. Even in Susan’s best days, she’d only wanted run-of-the-mill sex, but Haven’s taste in kink was all-embracing: a cuddly stuffed animal disguising a dildo, a cat-o’-nine-tails, Woody Allen’s vibrating egg. Whatever it was, she’d bundled it under the covers and was slinking back toward him with it. His salacious imagination was working like a little blue pill.
Marry, Kiss, Kill Page 3