Second Guessing

by K. J. Emrick

  “Stupid? Like what?”

  He gives me a look, because we both know the list of stupid things I’ve done is long enough to reach from here to Australia and back again.

  When I shrug without arguing, he drops my hand again. I kind of wish he’d kept holding it. He’s always so uptight when he’s working. He only really relaxes like that when we’re alone together. I like my friend when he’s relaxed enough to be himself. He’s a whole other Christian Caine when he’s like that. That’s a guy I wouldn’t mind being around more.

  “Just tell me what you found already, Sid.”

  And just like that, he’s back to being a cop.

  “Come here,” I tell him, pointing over at the living room area. I wait until my back’s turned before I roll my eyes.

  “I saw that,” I hear him say.

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Yeah, I did. You shouldn’t make faces. It’ll give you wrinkles.”

  “Shut up,” I tell him, only sort of joking. You never tell a woman she’s getting wrinkles.

  Picking up the report from the lab, I hand it over to him. He scans it, then looks over at me, and scans through the report again. “There’s no way you got your hands on a lab analysis report for those champagne bottles.”

  Then he looks past me, at the coffee table, where the champagne bottle is still sitting.

  Oops.

  “You took that from the crime scene?” he says, which I thought was a little obvious. “Do you have any idea—I mean, any idea—how much trouble you could be in for this? If Lieutenant Baker found out you took that bottle he wouldn’t just yank your license. He’d put you in jail. No, scratch that. He’d put you under the jail. You’d have to dig to find daylight.”

  “Well, then it’s a good thing he’s never going to find out, isn’t it?”

  He stares at me, and then he drops into the couch, flipping through the report. “You’re just lucky that I dislike the man as much as you do. So this says there was a sedative added to the champagne, huh? Pretty strong one too, if I remember my basic drug knowledge. Looks like there was enough in the bottle to easily knock two people out. So that’s your theory? They were knocked unconscious and someone else came in the room and killed Donnie?”

  “Yeah. It fits with Amelia’s recollection—or rather, her non-recollection—of the events, but it’s a little more complicated than that.”

  I run down the whole story for him, everything I’ve figured out and all of my guesswork, and he listens to me all the way through without interrupting me once. When I’m done, he nods thoughtfully.

  “That all makes sense, except for one thing.”

  “Oh?” I ask him sarcastically. “Just one? You usually find a dozen holes in my theories.”

  ‘Well, just one for now, let’s say.” He waves the pages in his hand. “However you managed to get your hands on this report, it only proves there was sedatives in the champagne. Liquid tranquilizer. Now, the autopsy on Donnie Sterling will confirm if there was any of that same substance in his blood when he died. Even if it does, that’s only proof that he was drugged. At this point, this long after the murder…”

  I know what he’s going to say even as I hear it in my future flash. “This long after the murder there’s no way to prove there ever was any tranquilizer in Amelia’s bloodstream. It would have metabolized by now.”

  “Right,” he agrees.

  “She could have drugged Donnie, killed him, and then faked being out of it when the police arrived as a cover story.”

  “Exactly my point.”

  Yeah. He’s not wrong. I kind of hate it when he’s this brilliant. “I mean, it’s possible, sure,” I admit, “but I’m telling you Chris, I’ve seen her movies. Her acting is not that good.”

  “I’ve seen a dozen fan websites devoted to Amelia Falconi that would argue otherwise. So let me ask you this. For the sake of argument let’s assume the killer is someone other than Amelia. Why did they kill Donnie, and let Amelia live? If someone went through all the trouble of setting this up, wouldn’t Amelia be the more obvious target? She’s the famous star. She’s the one in town to film a new movie. Donnie’s just her bodyguard.”

  That was true, actually. “I think there’s one person who would benefit from Amelia being pushed into the news like this. Her agent. Amelia’s in town to shoot a new movie and publicity like this would draw all sorts of attention to whatever hack film she’s making this time. Her agent could have set the whole thing up and killed Donnie for exactly the reason you just said. Donnie’s a nobody. Someone who won’t be missed. On the other hand, all eyes are going to be on Amelia now that she’s been arrested. If she’d been killed, the media splash would have been gone in a few days. Instead, now her new movie will make a killing at the box office.”

  Chris shrugs. “I’ve seen stupider reasons for committing murder. So. We should go and talk to the agent.”

  “Together?”

  “Yup. You’re already hip deep in this investigation even though you know you should’ve kept out of it. I seem to remember telling you something about being a witness, and how you couldn’t get involved.”

  “That’s not quite what you said.”

  “I’m paraphrasing.” He purses his lips, and I get the impression he’s trying not to smile. “Anyway. You’ve got a new angle on the investigation that needs to be followed up on but I’m coming with you from this point on, to make sure you don’t get the whole thing thrown out in court. So. When were you going to talk to the agent?”

  “Um. Well.” Yeah, that was the one part of my plan I hadn’t figured out yet. “I don’t actually know who the agent is. I don’t suppose you do?”

  “Of course I do.”

  He can get so smug sometimes. “What do you mean, of course you do? This isn’t your case. How come you seem to know so much about it?”

  “Well, see,” sitting up on the couch, he hooks a smug arm over the back and crosses one smug leg over the other. “Here’s what happened. You’re gonna laugh. I got into work this morning and you know who was waiting for me? Clancy Whitaker. That’s who. Apparently, Lieutenant Baker had brushed him off, so he was waiting for me instead. He was there to confess to the murder of ‘that actress’s bodyguard’ is how he put it. Didn’t know the guy’s name, didn’t know what hotel they’d been staying at, he just knew that the guy was dead and he was the murderer.”

  “Oh, wow.” I shake my head and sit down next to Chris. “That guy needs help.”

  “More like he needs to be punished for something. I think the best we can do right now is just give him someone to talk to.”

  Chris was right. Treating Clancy with decency and respect was the best thing for him. Sometimes the problems of the people who came to the police for help were simply beyond their ability to fix. Maybe when we had the time, after this case, me and him could sit down and brainstorm something to help. Right now, I had the feeling we were going to be a little busy with other things.

  “Yeah. So anyway,” Chris says, “Clancy gave me his statement and I told him we’d look into it like I always do. Then I went right up to Lieutenant Baker’s office and told him we had a new suspect in the case.”

  I almost choked on a laugh. “Are you serious? Oh, man! I would have paid to see that. What did he say?”

  “What could he say? Every time Clancy confesses to a crime, we’ve got to exclude him as a suspect. So, since Baker was too busy to handle this himself—”

  “You mean, since he wants to keep himself available to talk to the reporters covering this case.”

  “Right. That’s what I said. Since he’s too busy, he told me to take care of this myself. Clancy came to me, he said, so that made it my problem.” He shrugs, and now even his little smile is smug. “What could I do? Baker’s a lieutenant. He gave me an order. So I got a copy of the casefile and went to the hotel room. That’s when I found out that my good friend Sidney Stone had gotten herself into the room somehow and now, here I am.”
/>
  “That is… I don’t know what that is,” I tell him. “You couldn’t have played that better if you set it up yourself.”

  “I know, right? You can’t make this stuff up. No mystery writer in the world would ever think up a character like Lieutenant Nathan Baker, in all his glory. Guess real life really is stranger than fiction.”

  I shake my head slowly, amazed that Chris had managed to do all that in the time it took me to have a nap. Men can be so infuriating sometimes. As a matter of fact, the way he’s sitting, with that arm over the back of the couch, he reminds me of how Harry looked earlier, sitting right in that exact spot.

  Speaking of which… where is Harry? I thought he’d done this whole disappearing act because a spell-bound Arnie Chen was at our door. Now that I know it was Chris, and not Chen, I can’t understand why he wasn’t here when I woke up…

  “Sidney?” Chris says to me. “You listening?”

  “Uh… honestly? No. I was thinking about someone… I mean, something else.”

  “Well, I was telling you that Amelia’s agency has its main headquarters in Los Angeles, but the East Coast office is here in Detroit. We can be there in twenty minutes depending on how traffic is moving on the Fisher. Get your shoes on and we’ll go.”

  “Okay. Um. Give me just a minute, will you? I want to change my shirt.”

  “Why? You look fine.”

  I pat his shoulder as I get up. “It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her clothes at least twice a day. Didn’t you know that? Plus I don’t feel very intimidating in a tank top.”

  He humphs and mutters something about modern women that I choose not to hear. After all, I’m only using this as an excuse to get down to my bedroom, and close the door, and hope that the privacy might encourage a certain genie to pop himself back from wherever it was he’s gone because he knows I need to—

  “Sidney Stone, I don’t like this.”

  There he is, just sitting on the edge of my bed, hands folded in his lap like he somehow knew I was going to come down here looking for him.

  “Shh,” I hiss at him. “Keep your voice down unless you want to explain to Chris why there’s a guy wearing armbands lurking in my bedroom.”

  He lifts his arms up to look at the metal cuffs around his wrists. “What’s wrong with my armbands?”

  “So not the point, Harry. What did we say about genies in my bedroom? Hmm?”

  “You said I was not to come in here without invitation.”

  “Right. Exactly.”

  “But I thought this might qualify as a special circumstance.”

  “What circumstance, Harry?”

  “As you said, my lady. You don’t want your friend Christian Caine to know I live with you.”

  Oh.

  “Uh, yeah. I guess you’re right. Sorry. I was just… worried, I guess, when you disappeared.”

  He rolls his shoulders, and I can’t help thinking that he looks a little upset about having to hide. I can sort of understand him feeling left out when I don’t want to show him to other people, but it’s just too complicated. That’s a whole lot of explaining to do, just so he can show his face in public with me. I don’t want to make him feel like I’m keeping him up on the shelf like a toy I only take out of the box when nobody else is around. It’s just the way it has to be. For now.

  I sit down with him, nudging my shoulder against his. “I guess we’ll make an exception this time. Just stay out of my sock drawer, okay?”

  His eyes go wide behind the guyliner. “I would never—”

  “I know, Harry. I know. I was just trying to make a joke. Listen, someday soon I’ll tell Chris about you and then you won’t have to run and hide when he comes around, okay?”

  He nods, but his frown is so deep it dimples his chin.

  “Harry…” I put my hand on his arm.

  He pulls away from me and stands up.

  “My lady, I don’t like this.”

  “I know. I mean, I understand. You don’t want to be kept separate from the rest of my friends but Harry, I don’t know what else to do. This is a strange situation for everyone and I’m just trying to juggle it all.”

  He waves a hand through the air. Suddenly, he can’t meet my eyes. “Not what I meant.”

  “Okay, well, if you weren’t talking about you and me and Chris, then what were you talking about? What don’t you like?”

  “That I can’t be there with you when you go to confront the woman who may be the killer.” He’d been pacing, but now he turns to face me, his hands fidgeting like he doesn’t know what to do with them. “In the past when I have not been able to accompany you, buildings have blown up in your face. You’ve been shot at. You have almost died. I don’t… I do not think I could handle you not coming home again to me.”

  He’s got half a point. “Are you worried about what would happen to you if nobody came to collect your rug? Is that it?”

  There’s a silence that falls between us as his shoulders sag and he looks away again. “No, Sidney Stone. I am worried, but not about myself.”

  Me, he means. He’s worried about me. “Harry, I don’t know what to say. That’s touching, but I’ve been doing this kind of work for a long time now. I’m good at what I do. I know when I can handle things by myself and when I need to ask for help.”

  “Just not help from me, because I can’t be there.”

  “Harry, listen.” I get up and step over to him and put my hands on his broad back. “You have to trust me. I’m not going off to war, we’re just going to talk to Amelia’s agent. We’ll get some information, we’ll see if she’s a good suspect and if she is, then we’ll figure out some way to nail her for it. There won’t be any gunfire. No burning buildings. Nothing like that. I promise.”

  His arms slide around my waist as he turns to fold me into his embrace. “By ‘we’ you mean you and Chris, of course.”

  “Yes. This time it’s me and Chris, and that’s even more reason to relax because Chris is a great police officer. He and I will protect each other. You’ve got nothing to worry about, Harry. Promise.”

  “I feel useless, my lady. I tried to go with you to meet Arnie Chen, and because of what I am I couldn’t be in the same building with him. I can’t help you and Chris now, because we can not reveal our secret without raising questions you don’t want to answer. All I can do is stay here, wait here, and grant you a few wishes when you decide it’s relevant for me to do so.”

  “And make coffee,” I add, trying to lighten the mood. “You make the best coffee ever.”

  He manages a chuckle, followed by a long sigh. “Then at least I am good for something.”

  I get the sense that there’s something else bothering him, more than what he’s telling me. I wait to see if he’ll share that part with me too, but he just leans in and kisses the top of my head.

  “Don’t wait too long to introduce me to the rest of the people in your life, Sidney Stone. I can’t stand waiting here, in this empty apartment, for you to come home.”

  I hold him for a while before I tell him to turn his back so I can change my shirt. It feels like he needs a hug.

  Or maybe that’s me.

  Chapter Eight

  At an upscale office complex just outside the Downtown area, Chris parks his car in a small side lot under the shade of a snake bark maple tree. There’s a hedgerow along the front, trimmed to a perfectly squared edge. The façade of the building was faux stone and stucco. Pretentious, is the word that came to mind. It said a lot about the people who worked here. It said they were in the business of making money.

  “Yeah, this is the kind of place I’d expect to find the agent handling Amelia Falconi.” I guess that maybe sounded a little more caustic than I meant it to, because I see the look Chris gives me. “What? I’m serious. Amelia is all about what she can do for Amelia Falconi. Nobody else matters. Anything she can do to get in the spotlight, that’s what she’s going to do.”

  “Like kill her lover?”

/>   “Uh, well that’s not what I meant…”

  He makes a fine point, though. We haven’t eliminated Amelia from the list of suspects. We’ve just come up with another name to add to that list.

  Chris waves a hand like he didn’t mean it the way he said it. “Hey, Amelia’s your client. You must have seen something good in her if you agreed to work with her.”

  “For her,” I clarify. “I work for her, not with her. She’s paying me for a job and that’s it. In case you forgot, I needed the work.”

  “You know, people like to mock me for the size of my meager government paycheck, but at least it’s a steady salary. You ever consider changing your line of work?”

  “I’m not going to become a police officer,” I tell him for probably the twentieth time. “I’m too old to go to the academy.”

  “No, you’re not. You’d run rings around half the academy class.” Taking the keys out of the ignition, he gives me a shrug. “You’re smarter than half of them, too. That’s why I know you didn’t take this case just for the money. You must have some reason to think Amelia Falconi is innocent.”

  I did, actually, but it was all instinct with no proof. I can’t exactly submit ‘true love’ as exhibit A, now can I? I know Amelia was in love with Donnie. That and a dollar will get me any size coffee at McDonald’s.

  And their coffee is nowhere near as good as Harry’s.

  “Just call it a hunch,” I finally tell him. “That, plus the sedative in the champagne, equals reasonable doubt in my book.”

  “Assuming Amelia took any of the drugged champagne.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you think the agent has a good motive?”

  “Yeah. I do. Motive, means, and opportunity. Besides. Right now she’s the only suspect I’ve got. What was her name?”

  “Melissa Thorne. Topnotch female agent based on her online biography.”

  “Okay, well, women tend to use poison when they commit murder, and statistically they favor strangulation, too. So that fits.”

  Halfway out the car door, he stops and looks over at me again. “You know what you just did, right? You just said the killer is probably a woman. That’s another nail in your client’s coffin, too, seeing as how Amelia’s a woman.”