The Middle Finger of Fate (A Trailer Park Princess Cozy Mystery Book 1)

by Kim Hunt Harris

  Viv stuck her hand out. “Detective Sloan, my name is Vivian Carson and, of course, you know my partner Salem Grimes. We’re investigating the Lucinda Cruz murder.” She raised her wobbly chin and spoke with authority. “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  Bobby burst out laughing. “All right, Cagney and Lacey. Come on back.” His shoulders shook as he led us down the hallway to his office.

  Viv sat in the chair I’d been in Monday and faced Bobby across his desk. From the way her jaw twitched, I figured the Cagney and Lacey remark hadn’t set too well with her. She took a deep breath, though, and smiled. “I acknowledge that we are new to this arena, and I can imagine you see little advantage in helping us, so I want to assure you right away that have not come empty handed. We have information to trade.”

  Bobby did a poor job of hiding his grin. “Is that so?”

  “It is so. We’ve been conducting interviews and we have a few persons of interest.” Viv folded her hands over her three hundred dollar purse.

  Bobby leaned back in his chair. “Now, that is interesting.”

  Viv gave him an indulgent smile. “Of course, we want to help in every way, and we’re more than willing to share what we have. On the condition the favor is returned.”

  Bobby rubbed his upper lip hard, then took a deep breath of his own. “The police department is always indebted to active and concerned citizens. As I’m sure you can understand, we can’t be everywhere all the time, so we rely on people like yourselves to assist us in gathering information. I will gladly listen to every concern and thought you have, and I promise every lead will be followed up on.”

  Viv and I both waited for the “but.”

  “But I can’t comment on an open investigation.”

  “It would be strictly off the record, of course.” Viv leaned forward in her chair.

  Bobby fiddled with a manila folder on his desk and slid his gaze over to me. As he slid the folder into the top drawer of his desk he lifted one eyebrow as if to ask, “Where did you come up with this one?”

  I quickly decided there was nothing I could do or say that would make this episode any less humiliating. I shrugged slightly and looked at Viv as if I didn’t know what she was talking about.

  Viv, bless her heart, appeared to be actually waiting patiently for the police detective to spill his guts to two amateur – in every sense of the word – detectives.

  “You know, I think it would be extremely helpful to hear your thoughts on this investigation. You strike me as a very wise person.” Bobby finally said. “I’d be willing to bet you’re one of those people who can size up a character in no time.”

  Viv shrugged modestly. “Well, I don’t like to brag, but I am an excellent judge of character.”

  “Intuition is one of the most powerful tools we have to work with. And a mature woman such as yourself has probably honed her intuition through years of experience.”

  “Exactly.” Viv bobbed her head. “There is no substitute for experience, is there? In fact, I would dare say…” She trailed off and rubbed her chest. She opened and closed her mouth a couple of times, like a guppy scooped out of its tank. Her face flushed, then paled. “Excuse me,” she croaked.

  I grabbed her arm. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded, still pale and now shaking. “I’m fine, I’m fine. I just feel a little fluttery.”

  Bobby stood. “Fluttery?”

  Viv shook her head. “It’s nothing, I’m sure. I just –” She stopped again and took a couple of quick breaths. “I need my heart pills.”

  I didn’t even know she took heart pills. I grabbed her purse and was about to start rifling through there.

  “No, no, they’re in the car.” She stuck her hand in the purse and clutched a ring of keys. “Detective Sloan, please be so kind as to fetch my pills from the glove compartment of my car. It’s a powder blue Deville.”

  “I can get them,” I said. God, please don’t let her have a heart attack here, I prayed.

  Viv turned achingly frightened, watery eyes on me. “No, please stay here. Please stay with me,” she whispered. “Please.”

  Bobby grabbed the keys and hurried out the door. I fought the terrified pounding of my heart and the tears that rose suddenly. “You’ll be okay,” I said fiercely. “You’re going to be fine.”

  Viv blinked a couple of times, then shot to her feet. “That arrogant little jerkweed. Can you believe him? Using transparent flattery to try and get us out of his hair.” She rushed around his desk and slid the drawer open. “And he called me old! What a dipstick.”

  She slapped the folder onto Bobby’s desk and opened it.

  “Viv!” What the heck was she doing? I jumped up and ran to the door. “Are you insane? You’ll get us arrested!”

  “A mature woman with years of experience.” Her wrinkled mouth pursed and her head wobbled as she mocked Bobby. “What a putz. Let’s see what we have here.”

  “You can’t do this.” I did a little dance from one foot to the other, torn between getting help – which would undoubtedly only make things worse for me, since I’d been the one to bring her in there in the first place – and throttling her.

  “Oh yes I ca-an,” Viv sing-songed. She rifled through pages in the file. “I knew this was Lucinda Cruz’s file. Did you see the way he slid this into the drawer, as if letting us even look at the outside of the folder was too much for him? Selfish. Wants all the glory for himself.” She mumbled to herself as she eyed whatever was inside the folder. “Blunt force trauma to the head. Mmmmhhhmmm. I see.”

  “Viv!” I hissed. “Put it back. Bobby will be back any second.”

  “Darned straight I’m a good judge of character.” She flipped through a couple more pages. “I can tell, for instance, when someone’s trying to blow smoke up my –”

  “Viv!” I heard voices approaching. “Someone’s coming!”

  She had the file back in the drawer and her head between her knees so fast I barely caught it. One second she was there, the next she was hidden behind the desk. Two uniform cops walked down the hallway and looked at me. I froze, unsure what I was supposed to do. Act like everything was normal? Were we still pretending Viv was having a heart attack?

  Good thing for me Viv was on top of things. She moaned and sat up straight, one hand to her chest and the other patting her cheek. “Okay, okay. I think it’s passed.” She stood and moved back to the front of the desk, leaning against it and breathing hard. Her face was flushed and even a little sweaty. How did she do that?

  Bobby rounded the corner, a bottle of pills in his hand. “This is all I could find.”

  “That’s perfect, thank you.” Viv popped the top and flipped a tiny white pill in her mouth. “I think it’s passed, but the doctor told me if I felt fluttery to go ahead and take the pill just in case.”

  Bobby took Viv’s wrist in one hand and felt her pulse. “Let’s call an ambulance, just in case.”

  “I’m sure that’s not necessary, but I’ll defer to your judgment.” Viv turned worshipful eyes on him and waited while Bobby counted heartbeats.

  “Salem, could you grab Mrs. Carson a cup of water from that cooler around the corner? Why don’t you sit back down and lift your feet?”

  “Okay.” Viv drifted weakly into the chair. “Really, I think I’m fine. But whatever you think is best…”

  I decided maybe I needed a little white pill. My hands shook as I let the water into the paper cup and I spilled it all over the floor. If Bobby was in there taking her pulse, surely he would figure out she was faking it. And there would only be one reason for her to fake that – to do exactly what she’d done.

  He would put two and two together and pretty soon we’d be in a windowless back room while Bobby and a partner played good cop and bad cop.

  There was a time in my life when I might have been able to stand up under interrogation; that was during the time when I stayed in a permanent but variable state of inebriation. Now I was stone cold sober an
d cried during sentimental car commercials. I was ready to spill my guts as soon as I walked through the door, and I didn’t even have that many guts…metaphorically speaking, of course.

  Viv was on her cell phone talking to her “doctor” when I got back. “Okay, we’ll be right there. Yes, yes of course.” She nodded a few times and then flipped it closed. “He said that everything sounded fine but he wanted to see me this afternoon just to be on the safe side. Definitely no need to send the ambulance, though.”

  Bobby turned to me. “Can you drive her to her doctor’s office?”

  And get the heck out of here? “Sure.” I nodded and shoved the half-empty cup at Viv. “Be happy to.”

  Viv milked the sympathy for a couple more minutes and then clung to my arm as I led her down the hallway.

  When Stump saw me, she jumped up and wagged her back end before she remembered she was mad at me and flopped back down. Viv leaned on the bike rack and breathed dramatically deeply while I unhooked Stump.

  My own pulse was getting back to normal, and mad as I was, I was mostly relieved it looked like we were going to make it. As soon as we got in the car, though, I let her have it.

  “How dare you put me in that position? First of all, I thought you were honestly having a heart attack. You scared me half to death.” I dumped Stump onto the seat between us and started the car.

  “I am a classically trained actress, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know, and that was…it was cruel. I thought you were really sick.” And I believed you desperately wanted me by your side in your hour of need. “You could have gotten me into serious, serious trouble by pulling that file out. I’m on probation, you know. I’d go to real jail.”

  Viv waved a hand. “It’s not that bad. I suppose you ought to drive, just in case he’s watching.”

  I decided I would throttle her as soon as I was far enough away from all the police witnesses.

  “I wish you had a little cooler head. I could have gotten more information out of that file besides “blunt force trauma” and “St. Christian.”

  “St. Christian? What does that mean?”

  “Beats me. I didn’t get a good look at it because you were having such a conniption. Watch out for that pickup!”

  “What?” I swerved and honked out of reflex, then realized the pickup she was talking about was twenty yards away. “That?”

  “You were headed straight for him.”

  “I was not. Geez, Viv, you’ve given me fifteen heart attacks today. Can we give it a rest?”

  “I’m sorry, but frankly you’re not the best driver in the world.”

  I pulled into Sonic and ordered a large vanilla Coke for me and a chocolate malt for Viv. “You can drive now. We’re safely away from the police station.”

  She got behind the wheel and smiled. “There now. That was kind of fun, don’t you think? Pulling one over on the guy who’s supposed to have all the answers?”

  “No, it was fraudulent and wrong and mean, and it didn’t get us anywhere.” St. Christian – that didn’t even make sense. There wasn’t a St. Christian, was there? I mean, weren’t all saints Christians? Wasn’t that some sort of prerequisite? “What did it say about St. Christian?”

  “I don’t know, I told you. I just saw those words and then you started crying and I closed the file.”

  “I wasn’t crying, I was trying to keep us from being arrested. Maybe it was St. Christina. Is there a St. Christina?” And what would that have to do with Lucinda Cruz and Tony?

  The girl brought my forty-four ounce vanilla Coke and I slurped down a good eight ounces of it. “Hey! Could it have been St. Christopher?”

  Viv sucked on her chocolate malt so hard her eyes bugged. “Could be. It was St. Something-or-other.” She gasped and sat back. “Oh no. Brain freeze, brain freeze.”

  Stump wagged at both of us hopefully, and I opened the lid to my drink and took out a piece of ice. She chomped it down noisily.

  “Tony always wore a necklace with a St. Christopher medallion on it. I wonder if that’s what you saw.”

  Viv moaned and rolled her head back and forth on the headrest.

  “Maybe his necklace was found at the scene of the crime or something.”

  “Maybe she was strangled with his necklace!” Viv raised up, then let her head fall back. She listlessly spooned malt into her mouth, her eyes closed. “This is what you call painfully good.”

  “Except that wouldn’t be a blunt force trauma to the head, would it?” I shivered when I realized how casually we were discussing the death of a young woman and her baby.

  “You have a brain freeze, too?”

  “No, just thinking about Lucinda Cruz.” And her crooked neck. If she’d died from blunt force trauma to the head, why had her neck looked like that?

  “Was that an autopsy report you saw first? That had the blunt force trauma thing on it?”

  Viv shrugged, spooning in more malt. “No idea. It was a form with a bunch of blanks filled in.”

  I almost said I wished she’d gotten a closer look, but figured she would throw her malt at me.

  Viv started the engine. “It’s too hot to be sitting in this car without the air conditioner running. Okay, our next stop has to be your husband’s house.”

  I whipped my head around. “It does?”

  “Of course. We have to find out if he has his St. Christina necklace.”

  “St. Christopher.” I had prayed that morning for some guidance. Now Viv and Sylvia both said I needed to see Tony. I’d secretly been hoping the Holy Spirit would guide me to a smoking gun with little effort and no awkwardness.

  They were both right. If I wanted to do anything for Tony, I should actually talk to the guy, but talking to him would probably lead us to the subject of whether or not we were still married, and that was something I wasn’t too keen on discussing just yet.

  “Where am I going?” Viv asked as she got to the street.

  I dug through my purse and found the addresses Sylvia had written down. “Home or office first?” I wondered out loud.

  “Home. If I was arrested for murder I would call in sick the next couple days.”

  “Work, then. Tony would go to work as long as he had a pulse.”

  Tony’s office was on the edge of town, in the industrial district. White vans with blue and green Solis Services logos lined up neatly outside large garage doors, and an SUV and a nice sedan sat in front of a windowless door.

  “Oh, it looks like he’s got company,” I said, grateful for an excuse to put this off.

  Viv was out the door before I finished the sentence. Good thing, I supposed, that one of us wasn’t shy. Any crime-solving duo needed at least one person who wasn’t a total chicken.

  Viv rapped on the door, then stuck her head in.

  Tony appeared almost immediately, his polite expression replaced by one of surprise when he saw me. He smiled. “Salem. What are you doing here?”

  “We’re investigating your case,” Viv announced. “We have a couple of leads, and we’d like to talk to you about them.”

  A prematurely bald man in a suit popped his head over Tony’s shoulder. “You’re investigating his case?” He looked at me, at Stump, then up at Tony and cocked an eyebrow.

  Tony stepped back and gestured for us to come in. “This is my attorney, Craig Pharr. We were just discussing my case. Come on in.”

  He led us through an outer reception area and into a large office. The place was nice, and whoever decorated it had done a good job of disguising the fact that we were in the middle of a bunch of warehouses. It had thick mint green carpet, creamy vanilla walls, and expensive looking furniture. I placed Stump strategically over the refried bean stain on my shirt and followed them into the inner sanctum.

  “Salem is my wife,” Tony said, his face completely impassive, as if it was routine for wives to show up from out of nowhere. He reached over and rubbed Stump’s head. She licked his hand and sighed.

  Mr. Pharr nodde
d and gave me only a slightly strange look as he held his hand out to shake mine. From his expression, it looked as if the subject of Tony’s “wife” had already been discussed. I shifted Stump, who groaned, and held out my hand.

  “We kind of need to talk about that,” I said to Tony as I returned the lawyer’s handshake. “This is Viv Carson.”

  I’d seen Craig Pharr on the news before, giving comments about various cases he was defending. I was under the impression he was a fairly big gun in town, and was glad for Tony.

  We all took seats around a coffee table on the right side of Tony’s office. My legs complained as I bent to sit. I was going to be sore tomorrow, my legs from the climbing and my arms from carting Stump around. As soon as I sat she sighed again deeply, closed her eyes, and fell asleep.

  Craig cleared his throat and straightened his tie. “So. You say you have a few leads? I’d be interested in hearing about them.”

  “They’re not really leads per se,” I said. Being laughed at twice in the span of an hour didn’t suit me. “But we talked to Sylvia and I got a weird feeling she was holding out on me.”

  “Definitely holding out,” Viv said. “Buttoned up tight as a drum.”

  Tony leaned forward and placed his elbows on his knees, his gaze on me like there wasn’t another person around for miles. Geez, his brown eyes were a mile deep. “What makes you think that?”

  “I couldn’t really put my finger on it, but it had to do with Rey. Like she didn’t want to talk about him.” Now that I said it, it seemed even flimsier than I’d thought. “I mean, I guess maybe she just didn’t want to talk about him, but it seemed a little weird. Remember how he used to always wear so much Polo? Does he still do that?”

  Tony cocked his head. “Yes, I suppose he does.”

  “Polo? The cologne?” Craig cast a glace from me to Tony and I could tell he was already out of patience with our “leads.”

  Tony nodded. “Rey lives in Oklahoma City.”

  “Is this the girl’s ex-boyfriend?” Craig asked.

  “What girl?” Viv asked at the same time Tony said, “Yes.”

  “What girl? Lucinda Cruz? Rey was her boyfriend?”