by Joni Rodgers
Shep shrugged a gesture of concession. “I was out of the loop for a while, but apparently there was nothing about it that didn’t smell right, as far as the coroner was concerned.”
“Didn’t smell right,” Smartie echoed. “What a tasty little turn of phrase.”
Shep studied her hard in the lamplight. “How did you know I’d be here?”
“I was about to ask you the same question.”
“You’ll have to do better than that,” he said curtly. “I’m not a believer in coincidence.”
“Oh, I am. But it usually turns out to be the Agatha Christie dynamic.”
“Meaning what?”
“You get all these characters on stage together, and at first it seems like happenstance, but then you find out that each person has a perfectly plausible reason for being there. So you keep narrowing it down until you figure out who’s there for the wrong reason.”
Shep folded his arms, listening.
“My reason for being here,” said Smartie, “is that my best friend died here a year ago today. Where else would I go? There’s no grave to visit. Her ashes are scattered half in Bermuda, half over by Dimebox, where she was born. Believe me, they wasted no time getting rid of her body.”
“If by that you mean releasing it to her family in accordance with the law.”
“I can think of only one plausible reason for you to be here, Mr. Hartigate.” She handed him the expandable file. “Something doesn’t smell right.”
Shep slipped the stretch closure on the file. The first thing he saw was the first thing he expected to see: a file on Charma’s death. Police report, newspaper coverage, a People Magazine obituary, tabloid tear sheets dating back to the party era she and Smartie had shared. There was a file on Belinda Bovet, her marriage and pending divorce, her society doings and charity work with the Bovet Foundation, which she’d started after giving birth to a son with Down’s Syndrome.
In the SPF&E file, Shep found printouts of the online propaganda, a fee schedule and profiles of all the principle players and higher up office staff, plus the security advisor, Barth, and the firm’s only full-time in-house investigator, Martin Shepard Hartigate. His jaw hardened as he flipped past Janny’s obituary and a series of Houston Chronicle articles pertaining to his departure from the Houston Police Department.
Sugarland shooting: Local youth gunned down by police
Sugarland incident stirs controversy in Latino community
HPD detective suspended without pay
Sugarland shooting connected to missing evidence
HPD detective no-billed: Hartigate’s resignation leaves unanswered questions
“Smartie, I had nothing to do with your friend’s death.”
“I know. You wouldn’t be here if you did. But given what was happening in your personal life at the time, you could have missed something, Shep. Isn’t that your real reason for being here? Because you know you made a mistake?”
Shep’s bulldog expression didn’t confirm or deny.
“Please,” said Smartie, “look at the rest.”
She moved the archive articles aside and handed Shep a piece from Texas Monthly: “Splitsville, Texas: Divorcing the Rich and Famous.” Paige Edloe had complained bitterly about the accompanying photograph that made her look matronly, while Gwynn Salinger, Maddie Pringle and Suri Fitch came off like Charlie’s Angels. Suri hadn’t wanted the article done at all. She devoted a lot of effort to keeping clients out of the media, which was like trying to coordinate disaster drills for centipedes.
The firm practiced family law in all its heartbreaking forms, but they’d become famous for the shark-infested society divorces that routinely made papers all over the state. Smartie Breedlove had conducted a thorough search of online archives from El Paso to Texarkana with particular focus on three high-profile cases:
A River Oaks plastic surgeon whose silicone Galatea turned on him before she was killed in a single-vehicle car accident.
A pop star whose boy toy was in the process of taking everything but her platinum records off the wall when he washed up drowned on the shore of Lake Austin.
An anesthesiologist who’d gambled away half of his estranged father-in-law’s antiques collection before he swallowed the business end of a genuine M712 Schnellfeuer machine pistol said to have spent WWI on the hip of an Imperial German general.
“I see where you’re going with this,” Shep said. “It’s ridiculous. It’s laughable.”
“But you’re thinking the same thing.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Then how do you know where I’m going with it?”
Shep laughed sharply. Because it was laughable. He said, “This is ludicrous.”
Because it was. Ludicrous.
“Smartie, I work for one of the most highly respected law firms in the state. You think we gather round the ol’ water cooler every morning and talk about who we’re going to knock off today? Do you have any idea what kind of money these four women pull down? Why would they jeopardize that? They don’t have to kill people to get the job done. Trust me, they do enough damage in the courtroom. So whatever you think you’re doing here—”
“I’m doing exactly what you do,” said Smartie. “Gathering information and making observations that form a story.”
“No, you confabulated a story, and now you’re searching out circumstantial evidence to shore it up.”
“Offer me an alternative plotline. Was Charma having an affair?”
“Smartie, anything I know about the case is confidential, which might present a dilemma if I knew something. But I don’t.”
“Tell me about Suri Fitch.”
“She is a delightful person and a fine attorney. I can highly recommend her for your vague divorce.”
“Did she know that Charma was pregnant?”
Shep hadn’t known it himself, but he tried not to let that show in his face. He shuffled Smartie’s research back into the expandable file, not wanting to look at the fragmented misfit details of his own investigation. At the time, everything had been eclipsed by his all-consuming concern for Janny. After she died, there was nothing but numb autonomic function for a long time. Recently, as that fog lifted, Shep was disturbed to find the off-kilter elements of the Bovet case still loitering stubbornly at the edge of his peripheral vision, but he had a hard time believing he’d missed anything of this magnitude.
“How do you know she was pregnant?” he asked.
“Charma told me earlier that day. She was thrilled,” said Smartie. “She said nothing that sounded even remotely depressed, much less suicidal. I was supposed to meet her for dinner. To celebrate.”
“Then what was she doing upstairs in a hotel room without her skivvies?”
Smartie shook her head. “There has to be an explanation. The last time I spoke with her, she said she was going to tell Belinda at lunch. Bovet was flying home the next day. She couldn’t wait to see him. ”
“You should have included all that in your statement to police.”
“I tried. Several times.” Smartie opened her arms to the big wide nothing that had come of that. “I was told the coroner had ruled, case closed.”
“Told by whom?”
“Officer Claire O’Connell.”
Shep rubbed his hands over his face. It was impossible to tell from one day to the next if Claire was trying to help him or string him up.
“I understand your concerns, but I’m done discussing it,” said Shep, handing Smartie the disheveled file. “To be honest, this is a difficult day for me. I’m just trying to get through it. So we can change the subject and have another round, or I can go back to the bar and get quietly shitfaced on my own. Up to you. Part of the solution or part of the problem?”
“Solution,” Smartie said meekly.
Shep signaled the barmaid. “Another round, please. Make mine a boilermaker. Boilermaker, Ms. Breedlove?”
“Heck, yes,” said Smartie.
They sat quietly for
a bit, hands molded around their empty glasses.
“I’m familiar with the dead spouse dynamic,” said Smartie. “I won’t insult you by saying it gets easier.”
“I appreciate that.”
“How long were you married?”
“Twelve years,” said Shep.
“Good years?” she asked frankly.
He thought for a moment and said, “Nine and a half.”
“That’s more happily ever after than a lot of people get.”
“I guess if I were a bigger person, I’d feel lucky.”
Smartie reached across the table and touched the corner of Janny’s book.
“May I?”
He shrugged and slid it toward her. The barmaid came and went. Shep tipped his drink in silence, listening to the neon fizz outside the window while Smartie leafed through the pages of Janny’s anthology, lingering over the lavish last page.
“That’s brilliant,” she said, tracing the panels with her fingertips.
“Yeah.”
“I always liked Skip. He reminds me of my dog.”
Shep chuffed a humorless half-laugh.
“Take it as a compliment,” said Smartie. “He’s a wonderful dog. English Bullmastiff. He has that sad look, but he’s smart as all get-out. And very well hung.”
Shep’s laughter was a bit warmer this time.
“I have a book coming out next month,” she said. “Would you like to see it?”
“Sure.”
She excavated a Kindle Fire from her bag, thumbed to Chapter One of Smack Wilder #12: Dead Sexy and handed it to Shep.
With his impeccable dove gray suit and helmet hair, Tag Mason was a square-jawed, Hog-mounted rebel without a flaw. I caught a definite whiff of precinct when he entered the dining solarium.
Thin Man tie. High mileage shoes. He had the chiseled face, imposing body and beat-walking nobility of a Rodin Burgher.
Mason stepped to the podium and handed something crisp to a hostess the width of a swizzle stick. Heroin Chic Barbie tucked the raison d’etre into her hoist-up bra and seated him a cagey seventy-five degrees from the object of his detection. When he pulled out his iPhone, a telltale trickle of ions down the back of my neck told me I was being Googled.
“See, he’s sitting there pretending not to watch Smack Wilder,” said Smartie, “and he’s as stunned as she is when a car crashes through the wall of the hotel bar. But he calmly takes charge and keeps things under control until the police arrive. He’s kind and soft-spoken, even though he’s on a mission. He even manages to rescue a single rose for his wife’s grave. Smack instinctively knows this is an extraordinarily stand-up sort of man. Despite what she’s heard about his past.”
Studying the widely divergent portraits of himself side by side with a boilermaker in between, Shep felt his throat go strangely warm.
Smartie slid Janny’s book across the table.
“Don’t kill Janny,” she said. “Kill Skip.”
She dug into her purse for a silver cigarette case etched with the Eiffel Tower.
“I don’t think you’re allowed to smoke in here,” said Shep.
“Oh, I quit smoking. This is one of those snazzy South Beach vapor thingies.” Smartie dragged deeply on the placebo cigarette, and the tip lit up like the tiny eye on a toy robot. “Gives you a blast of nicotine and lets you avoid the behavior modification. I smoke the real thing only on special occasions now.”
“So I guess you ‘vaguely’ quit smoking.”
“Success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed.”
“Don’t I know it,” said Shep. He clicked off the Kindle and handed it back to her. “So how do things turn out for ol’ Tag Mason?”
“I had to kill him. Once he’s slept with Smack, he’s marked for death.”
“Ah. Well. At least let him get laid first.”
“I’m not inhuman.” She blew fake smoke across the table, leaving fire engine red lipstick on the faux filter. The vapor smelled faintly of vanilla. “Was that your real reason for coming over here? You were hoping to get laid?”
“That would have been part of the solution.”
“Been a while, has it?”
He nodded grimly. “Just me and Rosy Palms for sixteen months now.”
“You’re an honest man, Shep. And I feel your pain. I haven’t been properly keelhauled since…” She had to think it over for a moment. “Shlomo Taubechik. Guest cantor from Estonia. Five Sukkoths ago.”
“Sue coat?”
“Feast of Tabernacles. You do this yibber yabber with a lemon and a stalk of wheat. Ushers in the season of rejoicing.”
“The Baptist girl who married the rabbi,” Shep suddenly remembered. “It was you.”
“Rabbi Hillel Lipschitz,” said Smartie. “He counseled Holocaust survivors and POWs. People who’d been tortured. That was his specialty.”
“How long were you married?”
“Nine years.”
“Good years?”
“Very,” said Smartie. “That’s why I have to divorce Herrick. I can’t be married to him longer than I was married to Hill. It would be an insult to Hill’s memory. I couldn’t stand that.”
The invading stench of nostalgia was as sad and pointless as the sickly vanilla vapor from Smartie’s robotic cigarette. Shep started forming an exit strategy.
“How about a moratorium on the dead spouse stories?” Smartie suggested.
“Agreed.”
“My problem is I don’t get out much,” she said. “My office is at home. Work occupies 90% of my waking hours. Meeting someone who’s decent-looking and reasonably nice—sweet Patty’s tassels, the odds are infinitesimal to begin with. Then there’s all that howdy-doody-dinner-movie, ‘Oh, you’re in business forms processing? How interesting,’ after which he turns out to be married, gay or both. Shep, I’m on deadline all the time. I can’t spare that kind of mental real estate, but I have an ironclad rule: I do not sleep with a man I’ve known less than twelve months. So candidly, for you to show up—drug tested, background checked, straight as an arrow—precisely one year after we meet?” Smartie laughed a delicious laugh. “That’s no coincidence. It’s a minchah. A gift from God. I say we help each other out, Shep. Just a one-time thing without all that fladder-yap.”
Shep looked at the corners of her Clara Bow mouth, trying to determine if she was jerking him around.
“Are you serious?”
“Like a skull fracture.”
“Check! Check, please!” Shep flagged the barmaid, then stood and wobbled bills from his wallet without waiting. “I’ll get a room. Leave the change. Bring the boilermakers.”
“I think I’d be more comfortable at my place.” Smartie glanced up at the mended roof in the solarium.
In the dark parking, Shep helped her into his Range Rover, supporting the delicate point of her elbow in his palm. He felt her shiver and asked, “Do you need my coat?”
“I’m not cold,” said Smartie. “I’m scared witless.”
The admission evoked a tenderness in Shep that came into his line of work as rarely as fine ink-work had come into Janny’s.
“No worries. Just like riding a bike,” he said, but the analogy made him a little apprehensive, conjuring images of flat tires and flying over the handlebars.
At Smartie’s front door, they were greeted by a fawn-colored English Bullmastiff the size of a yak. Smartie bent to embrace the beast around his pickle barrel neck, and he pushed at her cheek with his graying muzzle.
“Hey, Twinkie,” Smartie crooned. “How’s my sweet baby, huh? How’s my Twinkle Dinkle Boo-Binkle?”
“Oh, Jesus,” Shep winced. “You’re one of those baby talk, kiss the dog on the mouth people.”
“Yes, we is, ’cuz our Twinkie giveses big puppy smooches, yes he do. C’mon, Twink. C’mon, boy. Potty time.”
Smartie let Twinkie out the back door and went in the pantry to shovel Twinkie’s special geriatric kibbles into a bucket while Shep filled the dog
’s water bowl at the sink.
“Let me guess,” said Shep. “He weighed about a hundred pounds less when you named him Twinkie.”
“Try one-twenty,” Smartie laughed, remembering. “Hill traveled a lot, and I was apprehensive about being home alone, so he got me this dear little Crackerjack of a puppy, neither of us suspecting it would morph into Moby Dog. By the time he was six months old, he’d destroyed every stick of furniture, ate the drapes, chewed up my office chair. But you gotta love him. He’s such a big ol’ sweet potato.” She looked at the floor and added, “That was a dog story, not a dead spouse story.”
Shep shrugged.
They stood quietly until Twinkie whined at the door. Smartie let him in. Shep followed her up the stairs. He was too needy to be tentative; she was too pragmatic to be coy. They did quick minimal ablutions in separate bathrooms and met without ceremony on opposite sides of her bed.
Shep was profoundly relieved to discover that Smartie Breedlove naked was the antithesis of his naked wife. Janny had been tall and streamlined, a body born for tennis whites. Smartie was petite and voluptuous, inviting, round, a temple. He rejoiced in her amen corner, took communion on his knees and even found a modicum of the redemption for which he’d been longing; for one blinding come-to-Mary moment, Shep knew exactly what was needed, and he was able to be exactly that: a man, fully fleshed instead of line-drawn. There was an element of sorrow, but it was quickly displaced by a great rushing sense of being alive.
\ ///
4
Sweating like a welder in the wake of the beast-making, Nash Babcock prodded my hip and uttered a Helen Keller request for water.
“Get it yourself,” says I, mostly so I could watch him walk down the hall. The man had the spectacularly differentiated glutes of a Rodin Burgher.
Wait. Not a Rodin Burgher. That rang a bell. She’d already used that, Smartie reminded herself, backspacing on her MacBook.
He had the spectacularly differentiated backside of
His backside was as spectacularly differentiated as a well-marbled
His well-marbled backside was as spectacularly differentiated as