Not everything, I thought ruefully, as I eyed the little goldfish swimming contentedly in his tank.
CHAPTER THREE
Samantha Healy lived in one of the newer neighborhoods in suburban Highlands Ranch. I wasn’t particularly fond of the area – too many houses that followed a few basic floor plans. The homes were all two-story with three-car garages and vaulted roofs, each at least three thousand square feet, and every house was painted a neutral shade of tan with off-white trim. Where was the originality? As I drove along a wide street I couldn’t help but feel that the area lacked the kind of charm that older neighborhoods have.
After getting Samantha Healy’s phone number from Jack, I had spent the entire weekend trying to get in touch with her. I got an answering machine each time I called, and concluded, as a shrewd detective would, that she was either screening her calls, or she wasn’t home. So on Monday morning, I decided to visit her personally.
I pulled the 4-runner up in front of a house with a number of windows in the front, and a porch just large enough to display a green Welcome mat at the door. I rang the bell and waited, peeking in through the beveled glass window beside the door. After a moment, I heard the sharp click of heels and a shadow approached. Then the door opened.
I was speechless for a moment. The person before me was Samantha, but at the same time it wasn’t. This woman had the same face, the same build, the same breasts, but angry lines spread around eyes that stared at me with an intense fury. Her lips turned down into a scowl and I prepared for her to bite at me.
“What do you want?” she snapped.
“Samantha?” I asked, taken aback. Perhaps she’d forgotten about the Welcome sign I was standing on.
“Yes? What do you want?” she repeated, clearly irate.
I introduced myself. “I’d like to speak to you about Ned Healy.”
If she was trying to look even angrier, she succeeded. I didn’t know eyebrows could actually join together until I saw hers do just that. Then she slammed the door shut. And I did what every detective in every pulp novel or movie did. I stuck my size-ten Reebok in the entryway to block the door from closing. And I damn near screamed as the heavy wood crushed my foot into the doorjamb. Those fictional detectives who managed this trick in so smooth and suave a manner must never have actually tried it.
“Argh,” I grunted, putting my hands on the door and pushing back. Maybe if I wore a Fedora like Bogie I’d look tough enough that I wouldn’t have to go through this. I pushed harder.
I swear Samantha snarled as she pushed with equal force on the other side of the door, surprising me with her strength. I heaved my shoulder into the door and shoved. “Look,” I gasped. “I just need a few moments of your time. I’m not the police.”
She suddenly stepped back and I catapulted into the entryway, stumbling and then catching myself on a half-table across from the door. I righted myself and turned around. I felt just like a cat that, misjudging a jump and falling ungracefully to the floor, looks at you like “I meant to do that.”
“Are you always this nice to visitors?” I asked, resisting an urge to take my shoe off and rub my wounded foot.
“You’re not a visitor,” she said, snipping off each word as if she were breaking twigs. “More like an intruder.” She crossed her arms and glared at me. “You have one minute to explain yourself, or I’m calling the police.” To emphasize her threat, she pulled a tiny cell phone from her jeans pocket and prepared to dial.
“I was hired by Jack Healy. He doesn’t believe that Ned’s death was an accident.”
“Oh, brother,” Samantha said, rolling her eyes in an exaggerated manner. “Now I’ve heard it all. I should call the psych ward, not the police.”
“Why do you say that?” I took a more imposing position with both feet firmly planted on the floor. She’d need a crane to move me. Or the cops.
“It was an accident, you idiot. The police said so. He ran his bike off the trail.”
“Did Ned like to ride when you were married?”
"Ride what?" she snapped.
"A bicycle."
She hesitated. “No, but maybe he’d taken it up in the last year. The man needed something cheap to do, that’s for sure. But my money says he set this whole thing up himself.”
“What do you mean?”
Samantha leaned forward as if she was telling me a secret. “If you want my opinion, Ned committed suicide and made it look like an accident.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Ned was not a sensible man.”
“How can you be so certain he committed suicide?”
“Have you seen where he lives? The car he drives?” Samantha threw her hands up. “The man doesn’t have anything. A few pieces of furniture and bare walls that a stupid movie poster won’t help. He screwed up and lost everything. And he couldn’t live with that.”
Wow. The words “amicable divorce” definitely did not apply.
“Did he ever seem suicidal when you were still married? Or depressed?”
“Are you listening to me? He was depressed all the time. He hated his life, what he turned into. The fact that he’d lost everything.”
“Why make it look like an accident unless someone was going to benefit?”
“You mean insurance money?”
I nodded. “But who would get the insurance money? You?”
Samantha briefly considered this. “Of course not. Maybe he was thinking about his brother.” The silence stretched out. “You’re the detective,” she said at last, unable to defend her theory. “You figure it out.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do,” I hit back. “Did he drink a lot or do any drugs?”
“Ned never took any drugs, and he only drank a little. Although the last time we talked, he sounded drunk.”
“When was that?”
She screwed up her face, thinking. It was not a becoming look for her. “I think it was a couple of weeks before he died. He kept talking about how things were going to turn around, that I’d see a different Ned. Like I haven’t heard that before. The man didn’t have a dime, so how was he going to turn things around?”
“What about the alimony he paid you?”
“What about it?”
“Might that have something to do with his having no money?”
For a second I thought she might smack me, but instead she chose to bore a hole into me with her eyes. “I gave up a promising career when I married Ned. He at least owed me for that.”
“And what career was that?” I asked.
“I’m an actress,” she said, tossing her hair in a not-too-subtle eye-catching way. I tried to keep the corners of my mouth from moving up, but she must’ve seen something in my expression. “It’s true.” Now she pulled some hair behind her ears. “I’ve done some theater, and commercials. And I was in line for a new Steven Spielberg movie, but then Ned swept me off my feet.”
This version definitely didn’t fit with what Jack had told me. “Really?” I wasn’t sure what else to say.
“It’s true.” She flicked her hair again. “As you can see, I would’ve made a lot of money if I had continued my career. I felt Ned owed me for that. Once I got some good acting jobs, I was going to revisit the alimony.”
“What are you going to do now?”
She started to answer, then stopped. “I can’t see that that’s any of your business. And I said I’d give you a minute, which I did. Your time’s up.”
I wondered what had made her end the conversation so abruptly. “Here’s my card.” I pulled one out of my wallet. “If you can think of anything that might be helpful, please call me.”
“Anything helpful about a suicide?” she said with more than a hint of sarcasm, taking my card and dropping it unceremoniously on the half-table.
“If it was suicide.” I stepped cautiously by her and out the door. It slammed with a thunk behind me.
CHAPTER FOUR
I left Samantha’s house and drove ba
ck downtown, mulling over my not-so-pleasant conversation with her. Either Samantha had changed after Ned divorced her, or he had definitely been blinded by love because I couldn’t see how Samantha’s personality would woo anyone.
I spent the remainder of the day preparing a file for the Jack Healy case, paying some bills, working out, and practicing at the gun range. Last Christmas, while working on my first case, I’d been shot in the rear. The embarrassing incident made me acutely aware of how vulnerable I’d been, so I felt it would be prudent if I bought a gun. Bogie had a gun, I rationalized. Having bought one, I felt it would be even better if I knew how to use it.
When I finished at the practice range, I took the gun back to my office and placed it back in a locked box on a high shelf in the closet. Hey, I didn’t say I was ready to actually carry it around yet. My errands done, I decided to head home.
I own a third-story condo in the Uptown neighborhood east of downtown. Since the Goofball Brothers, who were anything but party animals, lived below me and we were the only tenants in the newly constructed building, living here was peaceful.
I parked in the alley garage and walked around the side of the house to the stairs that led up to my place.
“Hey, stranger,” I heard a sultry voice call out.
“Hey, yourself.” I turned to see Willie Rhoden walking over to me.
“You’re just getting home?” I nodded. “Have you eaten? We could order a pizza or Chinese.”
I smiled. Willie, real name Wilhelmina, was my neighbor, and I’d had a crush on her since she moved into the building across the street a year ago. She had recently broken up with her longtime boyfriend, Alan, and I had tried more than once to get Willie to go out on a date with me, only to be politely rebuffed. I assumed that she needed time to get over Alan.
“Dinner sounds great,” I said. “My treat?” Willie was an emergency room admissions nurse at nearby St. Joseph’s hospital, and I was so enamored of her that I thought her petite frame looked great in her medical smock. Even her sturdy walking shoes gave her just the right amount of boost to her height. She tucked her short blond hair behind her ears, her mischievous green eyes twinkling.
“No, we split the cost.” Willie linked her arm in mine and I could smell jasmine in her hair. “That way things don’t get complicated.”
“How is my paying for dinner complicated?” I asked as we strolled across the street to her building.
“Are you working on a new case?” she changed the subject.
“Just started something. I’m not sure where this one is going yet.”
“I hope you’ll be careful. I’d hate to see you get shot again.”
I laughed, but her emerald eyes sliced through me. “I’m sure this isn’t as dangerous.”
Willie stopped at the door. “Reed, I like you. A lot. Even before I broke up with Alan, I was tempted to go out with you. But you want to know why I won’t?”
“Because you need time to get over Alan?”
She shook her head. “That’s only part of the reason. I don’t want to get involved with you and then find out that you’ve been hurt or killed.”
If she’d thrown ice water in my face, I wouldn’t have been more surprised. I forced another laugh. “C’mon. I got shot in the rear as I was diving to the floor. An inch higher and the bullet would’ve gone right over me.” An inch in another direction, and I might not be able to have kids, but I didn’t think Willie would appreciate the humor, so I left it unsaid.
“But it could’ve gone any number of ways,” Willie pointed out. “I’ve seen it happen before. You were lucky it was only your ass.”
“And what a cute ass it is.” I grinned at her.
Willie stared at me, her cute lips turning into a frown.
“You also were attacked right here on the street,” she said, referring to the same case, in which a bat-wielding female vigilante assaulted me on the sidewalk outside my building.
“And I lived through it.” I beamed at her. “Besides, you even helped me out on that case. Why did you do that if you’re so concerned about me?” Willie had helped with a deception by pretending to be my client and luring the FBI after her so my client and I could get to a rendezvous undetected.
“I thought that it would be fun. And it was. But it never seemed dangerous.” She paused, biting her lip. “I know that sounds naïve, but it seemed harmless at the time. Then when you got shot, the reality of what you do for a living hit me.”
We lapsed into silence.
“Look,” I finally broke the tension between us. “I’ll be careful. You’ll see. Besides, you can’t resist me.”
She resisted, but then smiled. “How about that pizza?” she said, changing the subject again.
*****
The next morning I was up by seven, early for me. I hadn’t slept very well after leaving Willie’s place. I had no idea that she felt the way she did. We had been playing a flirting game for some time, but I really never thought that I’d been making any headway. Not only was I wrong about that, it never occurred to me that if she did like me, she wouldn’t want to date me because of what I did for a living. I thought only my parents hated my being a detective.
I pondered the previous evening while I went for a jog. Things had gone okay. We had decided on Chinese instead of pizza, and had a local restaurant deliver Moo-Shu chicken and garlic pork. We added an inexpensive white wine, and dined by candlelight on her back balcony while we watched the sun disappear behind the downtown high-rises. I told her a little bit about my latest case, she told me some of her hospital stories. But we never touched on what she shared earlier. It was like an emotional wall had been erected, and neither of us was sure how to break it down.
As I ran, my frustration built, and not just on a physical level. I enjoyed spending time with Willie, and as I inched ever closer to my mid-thirties, I was becoming more conscious of wanting to share my life with someone. And when the one woman who cranked my chain finally came along, my job was getting in the way.
I went five miles, and by the time I rounded the corner of my block, my legs were burning. I slowed to a walk, cooling down. Maybe Willie would cool down a bit, too, and I could make her see what she was missing. What could be more appealing than a financially secure, recently-employed-as-a-detective male?
I took the stairs two at a time up to my condo, ate a quick breakfast, and showered. I threw on a pair of jeans and a white Izod shirt and drove to the office. I tackled a few mundane work things, like checking through my mail, mostly bills, returning phone calls to two potential clients, watering the two hanging vines in the front reception area, and responding to emails.
In every batch of emails that I received, I could count on one from my parents. My mother, retired in Florida with my father, loves the usefulness of email. She’s quite the typist, having spent a number of summers working as a secretary in a huge law firm before she met my father, who took her from average Jane to wealthy Jill. Since those long-ago workdays as a transcriber, her skills are used to email friends and relatives. And I am one of the lucky few who receives at least a weekly update from her, long diatribes on her every moment since the last time she either wrote or called on the phone. I love my mother dearly, but I wish she could only type a few words per minute. Then maybe I wouldn’t have to read about each card game with the Smiths and Joneses, their close retiree friends, or about my father’s health issues, which always amount to nothing more than a slight case of gas or indigestion.
Just as sure as ice cream melts in the Florida sun, there was an email from Mom. I wrote a quick note back to her, lamenting with her about Dad’s pending visit to the doctor for his yearly exam, assuring her that everything would be fine, telling her that my job was indeed going well, and that I was working on a new case. My parents had not been enthused when I launched my detective business. Dad thought it didn’t qualify as real work unless you worked with a Fortune 500 company and earned a steady paycheck, and Mom worried constantly that I
would get hurt. She and Willie would have to battle for the rights to that, I thought, as I typed her assurances that I was safe and sound.
Once that was done, I searched the Internet to see what I could find out about Ned Healy’s death. One article gave me the facts of the discovery of Ned’s body, and another two follow-up reports shed light on the investigation into his death.
Ned Healy’s body had been found outside of Buena Vista, off County Road 162 where the Mount Princeton to Raspberry Gulch ride begins. A pair of riders first reported his abandoned car at the trail head. It had been parked overnight on the side of the road. Three days later, a different set of riders on the trail spotted Ned’s bruised and torn body, along with his dented mountain bike, at the bottom of a thirty-foot ravine. He hadn’t been wearing a helmet, and his shirt and shorts were not specifically designed for mountain biking. An autopsy performed on the body determined that Ned had trace amounts of Seconal, a barbiturate, in his bloodstream, and he had a blood-alcohol level more than twice the legal limit. The official cause of death was a broken neck caused by his fall. With the help of witnesses who remembered when the car appeared at the trail head, authorities believed that Ned was riding late in the evening while very intoxicated, and that he lost control of his bike and went over the ledge, falling to his death. Ned’s death was ruled an accident.
I had never ridden that trail, but had heard of others who had. It wasn’t a very difficult trail, overall, but there were a couple of more technical areas to traverse. A novice rider could get off and walk through those parts with no danger of personal injury. But anyone on a mountain trail could succumb to an accident – that was one of the risks in the sport. Ned’s death may have been nothing more than an inexperienced rider trying to tackle too difficult a trail.
I found another article discussing potential risks of mountain biking, which referenced Ned, and obituary listings. That was all. Nothing suspicious. I sat back and stared at the poster from The Big Sleep. Bogie looked so tough in that poster, so sure of himself. He had it so easy, though – the plots already had an ending, and Bogie always won.
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