Second Guessing

by K. J. Emrick

  Well, well. So Mister Arnie Chen has a magic spell over his restaurant. A spell that throws genies out on their ear. Makes me wonder why he needs to protect himself from beings of magic like Harry. Or why it didn’t work on me, if Harry’s so sure that my future-sense is magic. Kind of makes the argument that it’s not magic at all, just like I’ve been telling him.

  Too bad whatever spell it is didn’t work on non-magic people, actually. It might have stopped whoever got through that window and stole the statue.

  Yes, I know. Here I am just accepting the idea of a magic protection spell. One of Detroit’s criminal element has magic at his disposal and I’m not batting an eye. Just remember, I live with a genie. I’ve had to get used to things like this. I can’t very well say magic isn’t real when I have Harry grant magic wishes for me.

  Besides. ‘Adaptable’ is my middle name.

  Okay, fine. It’s really not. But maybe it should be.

  I also have to wonder who put that spell in place for him. Did Chen do it himself? Doubtful. If he had magic of his own, he could use it to find whoever took his stuff. More likely he paid someone else to use it for him. Chen’s money has obviously been used to buy more than just brilliant private investigators. His criminal connections must include someone—at least one person, maybe more—who can create magic spells for him.

  Yup. Now I’m scared of him. I think maybe tomorrow I’ll send him a text saying I want nothing to do with this case. A text I’ll send from my apartment, when I’m far away from here.

  A girl has to know when to cut her losses. There’s going to be a whole chapter on that in my book when I write it.

  “I’m sorry, Harry.” I reach over, put my hand on his. “I shouldn’t have doubted you. Can you forgive me?”

  “Of course,” he says immediately in a soft voice. “What are friends for?”

  His hand lays itself over mine. His skin is warm, and his hands are surprisingly gentle for a guy his size. I’m not sure what I’d do without him in my life. Hard to believe that just a few short months ago I actually thought genies were fiction. Just make-believe and Disney nonsense. I know better now. I can’t imagine a better friend than him.

  When he leans in closer, I pat his cheek. “Thanks, Harry.”

  He sits there, his eyes searching mine.

  Suddenly the atmosphere in the car is very close. I feel… something between us. Something hard to describe.

  “What?” I ask him.

  After a moment of his eyes looking deep into mine, he sits back, taking his hands away and folding them into his lap. “It’s nothing, my lady. I guess I’m just anxious to get back home. Shall I make breakfast when we get there?”

  “That’s going to have to wait, Harry. I’ve got a stop to make first. Hey… did you just say there are places inside your rug?”

  He laughs, and just like that the mood changes back to normal. “I did indeed. I can tell you about them, if you like?”

  “Yes. I think I definitely would like that.”

  Starting up Roxy’s engine, listening to her purr, I set the car in the direction of the Seventh Precinct of the Detroit Police Department.

  Chapter Five

  Before I got the call this morning from Arnie Chen, I’d been laying in my bed, thinking about Amelia Falconi. You may remember, that’s when Harry walked in on me lying there nearly naked. That’s when several things came together for me, there in the silence of my bedroom.

  Which is why I’m back here at the front desk of the Seventh Precinct, asking to talk to Amelia. If I’m going to turn down a ten-thousand-dollar payday, then I’m going to need some kind of employment to take its place.

  It’s still not daybreak in the city. True dawn happens later in the heart of a city than it does everywhere else. No matter what the app on your phone tells you about when to expect sunrise, skyscrapers and clusters of buildings keep everything dark until the sun has climbed a good way up the sky. So when I walk in around six o’clock it’s still early for us city folk.

  Officer Apollo Belson is already working the precinct house reception area. These guys work twelve-hour shifts. Not sure how late he was here last night but here he is, back again, bright-eyed and eager to help.

  “Sidney,” he tells me, “you know I can’t let you back there to talk to her.”

  Well. ‘Eager to help’ might be a bit of a stretch.

  “Apollo, listen. She asked for me when I was here yesterday, remember? She wanted my help.”

  “Yeah, I remember.” He scratches at the side of his nose, thinking back. There are a couple other officers up here at the front counter but they’ve got their own work to do and aren’t paying us any mind. “I also seem to remember you told her no.”

  “Come on, now, Apollo. A girl isn’t allowed to change her mind?”

  “Heh. Yeah, I guess so. You here with the blessing of Lieutenant Baker? He know you’re here, does he?”

  “Nope. I haven’t spoken with him.”

  “Uh-huh. What about Christian? He know about this?”

  “I talked to him yesterday,” I say right away, which was true as far as it went. I maybe didn’t tell him about coming here today, but I definitely spoke to him. I even talked to him about Amelia’s case. So I’m not exactly lying. Not exactly. “Look, I know you’ve got a job to do but so do I. Are you really going to make me wait until Chris gets here?”

  Apollo chews the inside of his lip, thinking about it all, and then shrugs. “No. No reason to wait. Christian trusts you. Amelia’s already been arraigned we’re just holding her until she can be transferred to the Wayne County Jail over on Woodward. “

  “Sorry I missed that,” I tell him, even though I’m not. I can only imagine the media circus that must have been.

  “Yeah. Good thing you’re here, actually. The transport bus is going to be here around seven-thirty.”

  “Well, you know,” I say with a big grin. “Punctuality is my middle name.”

  “Oh yeah? That a fact?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Didn’t figure. It’s probably something like Barbie or Sophia or something, right?”

  I tap my finger against my lips. “It’s a secret. I’ll never tell.”

  “That’s a woman’s prerogative too, or so my girl says. Sure enough.” Tapping his hand against the counter, he motions for me to follow him with a tilt of his head. “Come on along, mystery woman. I’ll bring you back to the cells. You’re just lucky it was me up here this time and not Sergeant Iwan. He would’ve perp walked you outside.”

  “He’s warming up to me, I think. Yesterday he didn’t even flip me the finger.”

  We walk down the halls together. Apollo hums a little tune along the way. Harry’s waiting for me back in the Mustang. There’s no magical spell keeping him from entering the Seventh Precinct, but my big genie friend was going to draw all the wrong kind of attention from the police officers that would have seen us together. Even more so than if my neighbors saw him at our apartment. I figure I should tell Christian about Harry first, since he’s my friend, but there’s a whole issue of when the right time would be to tell my one guy friend that I’m living with another guy friend who just happens to be a centuries’ old magic wish granter. I’m thinking there’s never a good time for that.

  It must have been a slow night in Detroit. In the several holding cells at the back of the Precinct House, there’s only just one person here. Amelia looks very different from the way she did yesterday. Her fancy clothes are gone. Her jewelry is gone. The smeared makeup has been washed away and her plain face is still annoyingly gorgeous. She’s wearing an orange jumpsuit that buttons up the front, the overlong leg cuffs rolled up above white crocs that have probably been on the feet of more than a hundred prisoners before her. Of course the police would have taken her clothes for evidence. Trace evidence. Every murder has some, and the police are very skilled at finding it.

  The lesson there, of course, is don’t kill people. I know that’s
a rule I try to live by. Not saying I don’t break that rule sometimes. Only when I have to, mind you, but even good rules have to get broken sometimes.

  Behind the gray bars, in a cinderblock room painted gray, sitting on a gray metal bench attached to the wall, Amelia looks up when she hears Apollo clanging the heavy key in the sliding metal gate that sections off the holding area from the rest of the building. They don’t have an officer stationed back here. The security cameras watch every single cell from a couple of angles and transmit the images to the front desk where officers can watch them on the monitors. It’s efficient, and the Seventh Precinct has never had an in-house prisoner suicide.

  Unlike the Wayne County Jail over on Woodward.

  Without her makeup there’s nothing to disguise the look of utter relief on her face when she sees it’s me. She’s up from that bench in an instant, throwing herself at the bars and hanging on with one hand while she reaches through with her other, grabbing for me.

  “Sidney! Oh, Sidney I’m so glad you came back. I hoped…” She sobs and has to start over. “I mean, I was hoping you would change your mind. I need your help. It’s been…” Sob. “Oh, Sidney it’s been awful. The reporters were all over the arraignment and the judge told me he didn’t care who I was in front of everybody and then they made me stand there in these hideous clothes while they told me I killed him but I didn’t do it, Sidney, I didn’t do it!”

  Remember that book I’m going to write about tips for the modern P.I.? Somewhere in that book is going to be a simple rule. You don’t know someone is innocent, until you can prove they’re innocent. Sure, I just heard her say she didn’t do it, with both my future-sense and my ears, but that doesn’t make it true. If everyone always told the truth they wouldn’t need private investigators at all.

  But Amelia needs one. Real bad.

  “Amelia, I came back because I want to take your case.” The look of relief on her face is overwhelming. “But, you have to tell me a few things.”

  “Whoa there, Sid,” Apollo says, swinging the long key around in the air. “I can’t be here if you two are going to start talking about this case. I don’t want to be called as a witness later and testify to what you all had to say. Uh-uh. No sir. Give me a minute to get out of earshot, will you?”

  “Sure thing, Apollo. Thanks.”

  “Sure thing, Sid. When Chris gets in, I’ll send him back here, okay?”

  “Uh, yeah. Sounds good.”

  The fact of the matter is that I’m hoping to be out of here long before Chris gets here. He doesn’t actually know I’m here, and I’d like to keep it that way for now. He’s not going to like this at all. Apollo waves his fingers at us, and when the door clangs shut, it’s just me and Amelia.

  “I didn’t do this,” she says again, dropping her hand back inside the cell.

  “So why do they think you did?” There’s a couple of plastic chairs across from the cells and I sit down in one of them because I have a feeling this is going to take a while. “They must have a reason. The police don’t just arrest people randomly. Judges don’t hold people in Wayne County Jail without a good reason.”

  “I’m famous. That’s reason enough, isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s not. Amelia, I’m not trying to judge you in the media like everyone else, I’m talking about cold hard facts. I know they have some or you wouldn’t be here. If you want me to help you then you need to take this seriously. The police have evidence against you. What is it?”

  Amelia wrapped her arms around herself. Her smile was frigid. “You’re just like you were in high school, you know that? Always focused, never relaxed.”

  “All right, let’s get something straight from the start, okay? You and I weren’t friends back then. I think you maybe spoke five words to me the whole time we were in school. I’m not interested in rehashing the past, and I have no idea why you were being so friendly to me in the Shake Shack, but we’re not friends. You’re hiring me to do a job. That’s all. I’m very good at what I do, and I’ll give you my best for as long as I’m working for you, but that’s the extent of our relationship.”

  “You don’t have to be mean about it.” She sniffs, holding back tears, looking honesty hurt. “High school was a long time ago and maybe I’m not the same woman I was back then, you know? People change and they get better—”

  “That’s fun,” I say, interrupting her on purpose. “I meant it when I said I didn’t want to talk about high school, Amelia. I do my job, I run down the information and you get the best private investigator in the city. After that, we go our separate ways. So. Let’s start from the beginning. I saw you in the Shake Shack with your two bodyguards, and then the next day you’re accused of killing one of them. Donnie, the cute one that you were trading whispers with. You guys had eyes for each other. I saw that right off. So. Tell me what happened after I saw you. How did Donnie die?”

  She sobs again and backs up until she can drop down on the bench, arms still crossed over her chest.

  I woke up, and he was dead, I hear her say before the words come out...

  “I woke up, and he was dead.”

  Well that clears it up not at all. “So, wait. If you woke up next to him, that means I was right. You and Donnie were…”

  I listen for the answer, and sure enough.

  We were lovers.

  “We were lovers. Yes. That was a secret we were trying to keep from the media but now it’s going to be in all the supermarket tabloids and all over TMZ, so sure. We went to my hotel, and he and I spent another amazing night together and we fell asleep next to each other and then I woke up. And he…” She chokes, and stutters, and finally gets the words out.

  He was dead.

  “He was dead.”

  Okay. That’s a start. If she’s expecting me to be surprised that she was dating her bodyguard then she’s going to be sorely disappointed. Not after the week I’m having. First, I find out the Chaldean mob is shipping drugs through Detroit. Then I find out a local restaurant owner is connected with the criminal underground somehow but more than that, he’s got a magic spell on his place. I’m sure that spell isn’t just to protect Chen’s restaurant. It’s there to protect his criminal activities, too, and God alone knows what else.

  So, yeah. Having Amelia Falconi, world-famous Hollywood actress, tell me that she was in love with a lowly bodyguard isn’t going to surprise me in the least.

  “You didn’t hear anything?” I ask her. “You were in bed with the man all night long, sleeping next to him—”

  “Actually there wasn’t much sleeping,” she tells me.

  “Whatever. You were in bed next to him and you just woke up and he was dead? You didn’t notice anything at all during the night? See something, hear something?”

  “We screwed each other, hard, then we drank some champagne like we always do after he finally climaxes—”

  Oh, this is way too much information.

  “—and then I fell asleep. I didn’t wake up until around ten yesterday morning. I rolled over, and tried to get Donnie up, but he was cold, and he was dead, and there was nothing I could do.”

  Hmm. People do die in their sleep. That happens, but it doesn’t get you arrested by the police for murder. “There must be something else. He didn’t die from natural causes or we wouldn’t be here.”

  She shakes her head. “They said he was strangled. There was bruising all around his throat like someone had wrapped a sheet around his neck and squeezed until he… until he…”

  Right. Until he died. Strangled to death, right next to Amelia. Strangulation is the great equalizer when it comes to men and women. In order to kill someone, you don’t need to block off their air flow. In other words, you don’t need to crush their neck to kill them. It takes about thirty-three pounds of pressure to block off the trachea and suffocate the air out of someone, which can take up to ten minutes to achieve.

  On the other hand, you only need about eleven pounds of pressure to block off the arterie
s supplying blood to the brain. Cutting off the flow of blood to the brain cuts off the oxygen going to the brain, too. No oxygen, and the brain shuts down. No brain, and the body shuts down, including the heart. Brain death happens in less than four minutes.

  Any woman in the world can kill a man that way. Eleven pounds of pressure isn’t that much. It takes twenty pounds of pressure to open a can of pop. If you can open a can of Faygo, you can kill a man. So not only does that not rule out Amelia as a suspect, it proves she could have done this. Just the two of them in a hotel room, and she wakes up next to him strangled to death.

  Damn. Maybe it wasn’t so smart for me to take this case after all.

  Never give up. Follow the clues wherever they lead you. That’s going to be in my book, too. Follow the clues and follow your instincts.

  And don’t second guess yourself.

  “Do you always sleep that hard?” I ask her. “Somebody’s getting strangled next to you and you don’t even wake up?”

  She snorts, amused by my question. “I always sleep really good when Donnie and I spend the night together. Haven’t you ever had a man take you in bed so hard that your whole body just—”

  “Okay,” I cut her off. My future-sense has already told me what she was going to say and I’m just as glad not to have that all spoken out loud. It’s a pretty vivid picture. “I get the idea. So you slept through it. That’s your defense?”

  She gives me a shrug. “It’s not much of an alibi, is it?”

  “It’s not an alibi at all. In fact, it sucks. If you’re going to get out of this, you’ll need to give me a lot more than that.”

  “I’ve got nothing else to give you, Sidney. That’s all of it. We screwed each other into oblivion, we drank some wine, Donnie drank far more than me by the way, and then, we fell asleep. It’s hard work shooting a new movie, you know, and I haven’t worked in a couple of years, so I was tired. More tired than I realized, I guess. Then I woke up, and my whole world was turned upside down.”