3 Loosey Goosey

by Rae Davies

  George waited, patient and maybe a tad bored.

  I blew a breath out through my nose. They would see. “He thought she was high on something.” I stepped back, giving room for my bombshell to explode.

  “And?”

  George did not seem impressed.

  “He said she was acting funny. Eyes dilated and all that.”

  Behind me, Stone cleared his throat. After a furtive glance at the detective, George turned to the side with the pretense of scribbling something in his notepad.

  Stone moved into view. “And you think this relates to Daniel’s injury? Would you like to explain how?”

  Daniel was injured? I hadn’t noticed an injury. He might simply have collapsed, though not from heat. It wasn’t warm today, but the excitement of historic cattle coupled with body-painted protesters could have given him a case of the vapors.

  So Stone’s comment that Daniel was injured was a slip, even if it was a small one. This gave me new confidence.

  “Well, he told me about Tiffany. Maybe he told someone else.”

  “Someone who would then...”

  Stone’s steady stare was making me nervous. Confidence lost, I threw up my hands. “I don’t know! I just knew he hadn’t told the police, and I thought it might be important. What with me finding her dead and all the next morning.”

  “And now you find Daniel.” Stone tapped his finger against his lip as if thinking, adding two and two, and getting twenty-two by the looks of things.

  He turned his focus back to me. “When you see your brother, tell him we need to have another talk.”

  Then he stalked off, leaving me to feel that somehow I had just made things three hundred times worse.

  What else was new?

  Chapter 11

  Dismissed by Stone, I didn’t dally. I didn’t bother saying goodbye to Peter or George either.

  They’d been no help.

  Instead I scanned the grounds, looking to see if Marcy and Gary, mainly Gary, were still around.

  They were, and it appeared they were looking for me.

  I trotted toward them, looking, I hoped, friendly and not at all like I was about to wrestle Gary’s camera from his hand and crush it like an empty soda can under my foot.

  “The paramedics wouldn’t tell us anything. What did Stone say?” Gary asked.

  It took me a minute to remember that they were here to check on Daniel and that they might actually have friendly feelings for him. Not that I wanted anything to happen to the reporter, but my concern was controllable.

  “Not much.”

  “George said you found him.” This from Marcy, looking a mix of terrified and relieved. Terrified, I’m sure, because Daniel’s injury left an opening in the crime reporting department, and Marcy was a lot more about killer cute than just plain old killer. Relieved, I guessed, because she hoped to just talk to me rather than having to approach Stone herself.

  I couldn’t say I blamed her for that.

  Feeling generous, and hoping if I gave a little, Gary would give a lot—in the form of a certain picture or two—I filled them in on how I had found Daniel and what Stone had said about him being injured.

  “And he was under there?” Gary pointed to the shrub where a few officers in uniform were still poking around.

  I turned to stare at the space. “Yes.”

  Marcy angled her head as if that would give her a better view. “Kind of weird, don’t you think?”

  Gary and I looked at her in question.

  She fiddled with her pencil. “I mean, finding him under the shrub. It’s kind of like how the chef was found, under that van. How’d he get under there?”

  It was a good question. We all turned to stare at the shrub.

  “Maybe he tripped and fell into it,” I offered. “Stone said he was injured, but maybe that means he hit his head when he fell.”

  Gary held up his camera, zoomed in, and clicked off a few frames. “He wouldn’t have fallen through, though, would he? Some of those branches are pretty thick. I think he would have gotten caught.”

  I could see what Gary meant. If Daniel had tripped, as I did, he wouldn’t have fallen through the shrub, he would have fallen onto it.

  “I also didn’t notice a lot of leaves on his clothes,” I contributed.

  “Were they torn?” Marcy asked.

  “Not that I could see, but obviously, if he was injured, I missed that too.”

  Marcy’s phone dinged. She waved an apology and scurried to the side to take the call in private.

  Giving me the perfect opportunity to talk to Gary about that photo.

  “Wild day, huh?” I asked, starting out casual. I didn’t want to look crazed or anything.

  “Definitely. Especially for you.” He grinned, and his eyes did the little crinkle around the corners thing that I used to find so appealing. Now it just made me wonder if my charm was working.

  “I made a bit of a scene.” I smiled, good natured, nothing bothering me. No siree bob.

  “You could say that.” He held his camera up, giving me an opening.

  “I saw you had your camera.” And was snapping the hell out of it. “Too bad the shots probably weren’t family-friendly enough for the News.” Right? I looked at him expectantly.

  “Oh, some weren’t, but there were a few. In fact...”

  My phone chirped, reminding me that I’d stupidly charged it in the Jeep on the way over. I clutched at my pocket as if suppressing the sound would change what I felt coming.

  “...I already sent the best ones to Ted.”

  I jerked my phone from my pocket. There on the screen were three ominous little words. Lucy. CALL ME.

  Crap. Crap. Crap.

  After damning Ted, the editor of the Daily News, in my head for about the millionth time in the five years I’d known him, I shut off my phone completely.

  You were trying to reach me? I’m sorry. I forgot to charge my phone... again.

  My mother could and would get onto me about that too, but hopefully by the time she had a chance, the initial shock of whatever she’d just seen on the Internet would have passed, or she would have managed to have tracked down Ben and taken her shock, hurt, disappointment, etc. out on him.

  I stopped for a minute. I’d suddenly realized that my brother’s stand against cell phones most likely had very little to do with the survival of gorillas and everything to do with the survival of his sanity.

  The sneak.

  Marcy returned with her phone off and a nervous look on her face. “Daniel’s going to be okay, but he’ll be out of work for a while. The doctors think someone hit him on the head.” She licked her lips and looked a bit green.

  “He couldn’t have just hit it when he fell?” I asked.

  “Maybe, but Ted said the wound looked more like someone hit him with a metal bar.”

  “Like that?” Gary, camera to his face, clicked away at two officers pulling something out of a flower patch not too far from the shrub where I’d found Daniel.

  “What is it?” I asked. I had good eyesight, but Gary’s zoom lens gave him a distinct advantage.

  “Looks like a piece of fencing. Maybe the kind of pole they stick in the ground and attach plastic net to.”

  “Like they use here for special events?” We all turned to look at the half-dismantled pens that had moments before held the historic breeds. The fencing for the cattle was thicker than what the police held.

  I walked twenty feet to where I could get a view of the street that ran on the side of the Capitol. Sure enough, there was a stack of metal poles ready to be driven into the ground and strung with hunter orange plastic netting. Someone either forgot to set them up this morning or they were waiting to be put into use for the next, bigger event: the cattle drive. Which made sense. Wouldn’t want a tourist mowed down by a steer.

  “So, if someone did hit him, it wasn’t planned,” I mused. At least, I guessed that whoever hit Daniel took advantage of the stack of poles, rather than l
uring Daniel to where they knew a stack of poles would be.

  Marcy cleared her throat. “Like I said, he’s going to be out for a while.”

  “But he’s going to be okay.” This was an important point to reiterate. He wasn’t dead or dying, I hadn’t found another body, and I didn’t have to feel all that guilty that my heart still wasn’t overflowing with love for the conniving reporter.

  “But he’s going to be out of work,” she said again, this time with a new urgency.

  “Yeah.” I’d got that. Then it dawned on me. “Why did Ted call?” I asked. Not to ease Marcy and Gary’s minds over Daniel, that was for sure.

  “Well...” She twisted her toe on the grass. “He’d wanted me to take over Daniel’s beat. Go see him at the hospital. See what he could give me information-wise and all that...” More toe twisting. “But then I mentioned that you were here...” Her eyes morphed from those of a regular human to something you’d see on a cartoon cat begging for tuna. “And he thought, if you weren’t too busy...”

  “Ted wants me to work for him again?” This had happened before, and it never went well. I’d left the paper for good reasons, Ted being a major one, and I’d only returned before because I was in danger of having to live on dry beans and rice. But times had changed. I had Phyllis now, procurer of goods that sold and supporter of my need to eat.

  “What’s in it for me?” I asked, but before she could answer, I held up my hand. “Wait. I know.” A smile pulled at my cheeks.

  Oh did I know.

  Twenty minutes later, Ted and I had come to an agreement, and I was at the hospital. I stopped in the lobby to use the computer in the waiting room to check if Ted had fulfilled his end of the deal.

  The Internet was slow. As I waited for it to grind its way to the Daily News homepage, I made notes on what all I needed to get from Daniel.

  Finally, the page loaded. Any sign of yours truly or Ben was gone. Now the page was dominated by a striking image of Pauline sitting on Meagher’s horse’s back in her HA! T-shirt and looking annoyed as hell. Which is to say, her usual cheerful self.

  I clicked around some more, making sure Ted hadn’t pulled a fast one and buried the picture of me somewhere deeper in the site. Satisfied that photographic evidence of my misstep was, for now, out of the public record, I shut down the computer and went to see my favorite reporter.

  Ted had given me Daniel’s room number, so I strolled in as if invited.

  The reporter was lying on the bed, covered with a blue sheet and sipping water through a straw out of a plastic cup that I’m pretty sure was new in the 70s.

  “Lucy,” he said, blinking.

  “Daniel,” I returned, but more kindly than I would have under normal circumstances. With a horror-movie-quality bandage around his head, he didn’t look good.

  “Someone whacked you,” I added.

  He took another sip. “Wishing it was you?”

  His witty comeback lost some of its impact when he winced.

  I sighed. I really preferred my rivals operating on all cylinders. This strange feeling of sympathy for the reporter was not welcome.

  Still, the feeling was there. I softened my statement. “Ted said someone hit you on the head.”

  Daniel touched the bandage. “That’s what they tell me.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I remember walking and pain. That’s it.”

  “No strange sounds or smells?”

  “Like metal cracking my skull or blood spurting from my body?”

  For someone so feeble looking, he was doing a good job of maintaining smartass status.

  “I was thinking more like someone walking up behind you, the smell of cologne, or something.”

  He squinted his eyes in thought and then winced.

  I winced too. Damn sympathy. I couldn’t seem to shake it.

  Looking back at me, he announced, “Nope, nothing.”

  He seemed pretty cheerful about it. If someone had bashed me in the skull, I’d be chomping at the bit to figure out who’d done it.

  “Are you sure you don’t remember?”

  He frowned. “Of course I’m sure. What I’m not sure of is why I’m talking to you about it.”

  Ah, Ted. Trust him not to make my new job any easier.

  “Ted didn’t call you?”

  “Sure he did. He wanted to know...” The frown deepened. “He didn’t... I’m not giving you my byline.”

  I didn’t want his stinking byline. I didn’t even really want to write this story, not with my inside knowledge that Stone saw Ben as suspect numero one. But I had to stay on the story long enough that any appeal of running my picture completely drained away.

  I studied Daniel for a minute, sizing up the challenge and determining how best to begin negotiations.

  “I don’t need your permission.”

  “You need my notes.”

  Okay, maybe that had been the wrong approach. What did Daniel want more than anything? A byline. Credit that he could use to get a bigger and better job somewhere else. It was a noble goal, especially considering how much I’d like to move him out of town too.

  “I’ll share the byline.” It was a fair offer, for both of us.

  “My byline. You’re an assistant.”

  Which meant all the crap, none of the credit.

  I’d thought I didn’t care about the byline, but seriously... “One story.” I held up one finger. That would be fair, since anything I wrote for the next day’s paper would be coming directly from Daniel and his research.

  “One week.” He smiled. Self-satisfied.

  In other words, he was planning on being back at the paper in a week.

  “Two stories.” I flashed him a V.

  “Five.”

  Argh. He made me want to bash my own head into something.

  “Three, and that’s it. If you won’t go for that, I’ll do without whatever you have. I can reproduce it anyway.”

  His eyes narrowed, and I thought for a moment I’d blown it. “I doubt that.” He tapped his finger against the blue sheet. “Okay, but I’m not just handing everything over. I want input.”

  Input. That meant more time with Daniel. It was almost a deal breaker. I glanced down at my pocket and my silenced phone. Of course, working on the story gave me access to the paper and what was being posted online.

  “Deal.” I held out my hand to shake.

  With our deal set, I pulled out a chair and got down to the business of getting as much out of Daniel as quickly as I could.

  I decided to stick with what had happened to him for now.

  “What were you doing at the Capitol?” I asked, borrowing a notepad from his bedside table.

  “Did you not notice the group of naked people marching around?” he asked.

  I ground the tip of my pencil into the pad. “I mean, who did you talk to? What did you do?”

  “Everyone. Your brother, Eric Handle, even the goose.”

  I was pretty sure we could rule Pauline out as the assailant. Not that she wouldn’t have wanted to bash Daniel, or anyone for that matter, in the head, but she was lacking the necessary dexterity.

  “And what did you say to them?”

  “You seem to be assuming that I said something that provoked being attacked.” Even green, he managed to look indignant.

  “Uh, yeah.” Duh. “Unless you think it’s more likely some crazed person was wandering the Capitol grounds and just took a swing at you for fun.”

  “What I mean is that the motivation didn’t have to be something I said or asked at the Capitol. It could have been something someone thinks I know.” He gave me a telling look.

  “Like your drug theory.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So who have you told about that?”

  “You.”

  “Well, I didn’t hit you.” As much as I wished right now that I had.

  “But who did you tell?”

  I squeezed one eye shut. “You’re trying
to pin this on Ben again, aren’t you?”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “No. I haven’t even talked to him since I saw you this morning.”

  “Who have you talked to?”

  I really didn’t like how the bony finger was moving my direction, but still, I thought back. I’d talked to Phyllis, of course, and Richard Danes and Betty. I didn’t remember mentioning Daniel’s theory to any of them, but Phyllis could certainly have overheard our conversation.

  I looked him in the eye. “No one.”

  “Right.”

  I shrugged. “You don’t have to believe me. Let’s get back to who you talked to.”

  Looking more than a little disgruntled, he ran through his time at the Capitol. “When I got there, the protesters were still milling around. They hadn’t lined up yet. They were taking pictures of each other, talking about the evils of meat, that kind of thing. I talked to your brother…” He emphasized brother.

  I smiled as if I didn’t get the point of his intonation and nodded for him to keep going.

  He flitted his eyes to the side, but kept talking. “...the other protesters and Handle. I talked to him the most. He was obviously the person in charge of dealing with the press.” He made a face, which I understood completely. The last person a reporter wanted to interview was the person prepped with talking points.

  Thinking about what a reporter wanted made something else occur to me, though. “Why were you there at all?”

  He gave me an “are you stupid” look. “I told you. Protest. News. Me. Reporter.”

  I pointed at him. “You. Crime reporter.”

  He had the grace to look a shade sheepish, but only a shade. “It was a chance to talk to your brother when he would want to talk to me.”

  I never said Daniel was a dummy.

  I kept the admiration to myself.

  “So you did bring up the drugs.” He didn’t have to answer. I knew he had. It was what he’d most wanted to know about. The real question was how and who else had overheard him.

  “I didn’t bring up the drugs,” he said, huffy.

  I raised a brow.

  “Okay, I might have made a joke or mentioned that I’d heard Tiffany liked to have a good time.”