by Joni Rodgers
Shep stirred with a gruff snort, scratching his armpit and soft spare tire, then resuming a steady snore, his face relaxed and handsome.
He had a great ass.
Smartie lit a real cigarette and leaned against the headboard.
Nash returned to bed, bearing Scotch and compliments. Before he lapsed, slack-jawed and spread-eagled in a post-coital coma, he murmured, “If you were a martini instead of a woman, Smack, I’d kill myself and come back as hard liquor.”
Not quite.
“Smack, if you were a Maserati instead of a woman, I’d kill myself and come back as a dipstick.”
Smartie made a small, agonized sound between her teeth.
“Smack, if your body was a meth lab, I’d dip myself in Nyquil and
No.
“Smack, if your body was Oklahoma, I’d kill myself and come back as an oil rig.”
Shifting in his sleep, Shep kicked the duvet off of his thick, hairy legs. He’d been shot, she observed: once low on the meatier part of his hip and twice on the left side below his ribs. Smartie smiled against the side of her hand, her whole body tender with use. She found it ridiculously sexy, his naked damage and unselfconscious sleep.
It was the kind of love affair that comes on like Beowulf and clings like a nicotine addiction. But this wasn’t my first pile of dirty laundry. I’d been there, done that, and bought the souvenir antibiotics. I wasn’t about to let this thing Molotov out of control.
“Hey.” Shep stroked Smartie’s thigh without opening his eyes. “Are you okay?”
“Okay like Pompeii.” She stretched luxuriously and stubbed out her cigarette in a little china saucer. “Sleep well?”
“Like a brick. Except… what the…”
Shep pushed at a lumpy spot under his pillow, then reached down and pulled out the .38 Smartie kept tucked between the mattress and box spring. He flipped the barrel open to ascertain that it was fully loaded.
Smartie played it off like Mae West. “I used to keep a vibrator in there, but the burglars kept coming back for more.”
“Unusual weapon,” said Shep, turning it over in his hands.
The Sig Sauer .38 was old not quite old enough to be an antique, ornately engraved with scrolls and swirls on the barrel with the word SMACK inlaid in mother-of-pearl on the handle.
“Charma got it for me at a pawn shop on our first trip to Houston,” said Smartie. “I love the word Smack. It’s such a feisty little word, isn’t it? It even looks feisty with that little k kicked up at the end. And when you say it—Smack—it’s like smile and then crack like a baseball bat. It works as a slap across the face or a kiss on the lips. Slang for something dark and addictive.”
“So that’s the backstory on Smack Wilder?”
“Yup.” Smartie took the gun from him, feeling its weight, tracing the scrolled design with the tip of her finger. “I couldn’t stop thinking about who it might have belonged to. I used to tell Charma stories at night. She said I should start writing them down.”
Shep replaced the gun under the mattress and set aside Smartie’s MacBook, pulling her into his arms, drifting his fingers down her spine, roving around her ribcage along a trail of subtle divots and ridges from her left hip to her shoulder blade and a pale constellation that dotted her breast. In the dark, reading the marks like Braille, he’d felt the velvety shadow of scar tissue but hadn’t realized the extent of it. Now, in the gray dawn from the window and the unforgiving light from the computer screen, Shep sucked in a deep, involuntary hiss, realizing he was looking at a crime scene.
“Jesus… Smartie…”
“No scar stories.” Smartie brushed his hand away. “Unless you want to tell me how you got shot.”
“It’s not a great story.”
“It never is when you’re the one it happens to.”
Over the years, Smartie had warehoused a repertoire of little fables about the jagged lines and scored patterns that etched her back like cave art. Cliff diving. Running with bulls. Her favorite was how she went through the windshield just like the handyman’s moll in The Postman Always Rings Twice, but she knew Shep wouldn’t be that easily fooled.
“Don’t feel bad for me,” she said. “That was someone else. I woke up one morning in the back seat of Charma’s car, and she said, ‘You don’t have to kill yourself. That girl died. You’re Smartie Breedlove out of Sugarland, Texas. Born just today. Welcome to the world, baby girl.’”
Shep stroked her hair away from her eyes, but she kept her gaze focused on the bay window. He felt her growing noticeably cooler.
“I hope I haven’t been a huge jackass here. I didn’t mean to take advantage of—”
“You didn’t,” she said seriously. “You were deelish.”
“So were you,” he smiled. “Don’t throw me out yet.”
“Take it as a compliment. When it’s good, it leaves me zizzing with creative energy. I need to get to work.”
Shep felt the weight of Twinkie’s head along with a blast furnace huff of foul, wet breath on his shoulder.
“You’re in his spot,” said Smartie.
Shep sighed and sat up on the edge of the bed, scratching Twinkie behind his mud-flap ears, wondering if maybe a small modicum of fladder-yap wouldn’t have been so bad. Smartie got up and pulled on a pair of pinstriped pajama pants and an oversized tee shirt.
“Death is something Jews do well,” she said. “Death rituals. Grieving. We really do it right. First there’s Shiva. The person dies, and you do all this fracketty foo for seven days. Cover the mirrors, sit on the floor, go barefoot.”
Smartie lit a real-deal cigarette and took a deep drag, careful to exhale in the opposite direction from where Shep stood, quietly resigned and hitching up his gray trousers.
“It’s not really about the dead person at all. Hill said it’s to acknowledge how we are humbled by loss. Brought low. Made vulnerable.”
Shep pulled on his shirt, eyes focused downward at the buttons.
“This would be Yahrzeit,” Smartie continued. “That means ‘a year’s time.’ On the anniversary of the person’s death, a candle is lit, prayers said. You unveil a matzevah, a monument to your loved one. And then you put away mourning. You suck it up and start living again.”
“Easier said than done,” said Shep.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first schtup,” she said philosophically, and he laughed.
When he came to retrieve his watch and wallet from the lowboy, Smartie gently took hold of his wrist, selected an oblong piece of malachite from a bowl, and set the smooth stone on his palm, closing his hand between both of hers.
“Yizkor elohim nishmas ishtee hayekarah Janny Hartigate shehalacha l’olama.” She touched her cigarette to the wick of an aromatherapy candle on the dresser, and it flamed with a hushed hiss. “May God remember the soul of Janny Hartigate, who has passed to her eternal rest.”
The lighted candle called the quiet morning close around them. Shep felt the blessing in his bones like the subtle rewarming of bathwater.
He cleared his throat and said, “I should take you to get your car.”
“Herrick can take me. He needs to feel needed.”
Shep was out on the sidewalk before he realized that perhaps he should have kissed her before he left. As he backed the Range Rover down her driveway, he looked up and saw her at her desk by a bay window upstairs, utterly focused on what she was typing.
Zizzing with creative energy.
\ ///
5
Pacing a wide circle around her desk, Smartie snapped her fingers, pattered her hands on her shoulders, shifted some papers on her draft board. For some reason, Smack Wilder #13: Scratch and Sniff, in which Smack solves the murder of the perfumer she’s been sleeping with, was putting up a struggle.
Cash Buckalew had built his overpriced fragrance empire on the perfectly turned pulse-points of leggy Rodeo Drive power shoppers and self-medicating suburban AmExaholics. With the laser-sharp nose of a
coked-up Doberman and the high-brow pedigree of
Not quite.
With the coke-honed nose of a Homeland Security Doberman and the highborn pedigree of
Smartie picked up the phone and speed dialed her editor.
“Fritz Goodman,” he answered, in the office well before the intern whose job it was to answer phones.
“I need a dog that evokes snootiness.”
“No,” said Fritz, “you need someone to tell you you’re not a hack.”
“Am I, Fritz?”
“No.”
“Yes, I am.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Are you sure?”
“Beyond a shadow. Dare I ask how we’re doing on Smack 13?”
“Shoot me,” said Smartie. “Just come down here and shoot me between the eyes.”
“Deep breath. You’ve got plenty of time before the deadline.”
“How married are we to this Scratch and Sniff proposal? It’s a stupid idea. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Who cares? Phone it in,” said Fritz. “You’ve cultivated a loyal readership. Those schmucks will buy anything with your name on it.”
“Fritz, how could you even suggest that? I couldn’t live with myself if—”
“Ah-ha!” he crowed. “See? You’re not a hack. That was the hack test, and you passed. Smartie Breedlove is the Mick Jagger of metaphors. The Nick Cave of character development. You are the Artist Formerly Known as Prince of plotlines. Now stop obsessing and write the effing book.”
Smartie tapped a cigarette out of the pack, and Fritz allowed her a moment to light it before he went on. She could feel him choosing his words carefully, sorting the syllables into a small velvet bag. Steelies, aggies, shooters, ghosts.
“Smartie, I’ve done twelve books with you in the last nine years. I know how you work. I know how you think. You’re completely focused. Even when you’re not writing, you’re writing. The reason this book isn’t flowing is that for the last several months, way too much of your energy has been eaten up with—”
“She didn’t jump, Fritz. I know this.”
“Smartie, the coroner ruled it a suicide. It’s been a year. Let it go.”
“I did, Fritz. I let her go. That’s the problem. She and I promised each other, made a vow in the worst possible place and moment that we’d always be there for each other. Maybe if I’d been a better friend and not such a hermit… but I was there, Fritz. I was there. She called me, and I came. Why would she jump, knowing I was waiting for her?”
“Has it occurred to you that she needed you down there so she wouldn’t be jumping into the arms of strangers?”
“No. Charma would not have done anything so indescribably cruel.”
“She killed herself, Smartie. I’m sorry, but you have to find a way to deal with it.” Fritz held off the cajoling for a moment and allowed her to cry quietly. “Smartie? Come on.”
“I’m having a very strange day,” she whispered.
“That’s valid,” he said gently.
“Fritz, do you believe God sets a certain person in a certain place at a certain time? As a gift, you know? Or maybe as a trick. Or do you believe in coincidence?”
“I believe in Norman Mailer.”
Smartie rifled the midden around her desk, searching for a box of Kleenex.
“Fritz, if she jumped, why don’t I?”
“Because you have something, Smartie. Something that belongs to you. She had a knack for getting things that belonged to someone else, but you, my girl, you have something only a few people have. You can do something only a few people can do. You know how many manuscripts are submitted to this publishing house on a daily basis, Smartie. Hundreds. Every day. Thousands every week. But I’m spending my time talking to you because I believe in you, and one of the things I love about you is that you appreciate it. We make a good team because I know how good you are and you know how lucky you are.”
Smartie sniffled something that sounded vaguely Vietnamese but conveyed that yes, she did, indeed yes, feel very, very lucky.
“God knows, Smartie, no one wants you to be prolific more than I do, but you can’t be productive if you don’t keep your head together. You need to find some balance in your personal life. You need to get a personal life. Get some perspective. Put this unhappy matter to rest so you can focus on your manuscript.”
“Put it to rest,” said Smartie, and in that moment she made the decision to do it. “You’re right, Fritz. That’s exactly what I need to do. Sorry for the drama-go-round.”
“Bouvier des Flandres.”
“What?”
“A dog that evokes snootiness. Bouvier des Flandres,” Fritz repeated, and he spelled it for her.
“You’re a good person, Fritz.”
“And you’re a pain in the ass. But you are a brilliant writer. So go write.”
Smartie hung up the phone and padded in her bare feet down to the kitchen for a Diet Coke. Back upstairs, she paced between her office and bedroom, letting the carbonation crackle at the tip of her tongue.
Cash Buckalew had the penthouse sensibilities of a Bouvier des Flandres and a lowdown, leg-riding sense of entitlement that rivaled
No.
Crash Huxtable caught a finely tuned whiff of caviar with his Bouvier
Wrong.
Dash Babbit heeled like a Bouvier des
Crap.
Smartie leaned on the inside edge of her bedroom door. The sheets and comforter still smelled manly and warm.
The sight of Nash Babcock in the raw caught me like a hard left hook and turned me inside-out like… a… Chinese laundry… folding… person…
She took a pillow from her office sofa and screamed into it.
“Hack! Hack! Hack!” Pacing with the pillow in her arms, Smartie sussed it out aloud. “All right, focus. Think about Nash. Nash is a perfumer. Nash inhales… he breathes… he sniffs… he sniffs out trouble… he’s nosy… nosing around... his nose knows… something doesn’t smell right.”
Returning to her computer, Smartie lit another cigarette and started typing.
“Your friend had a smokejumper’s eye for opportunity,” said Nash.
This observation was last week’s tabloids to me. Twyla Chanel had lived her short life with the unmitigated moxie of a pole dancer in a revival tent. I knew all too well that a girl could make more than a few enemies that way.
Otis Bodett, the horny old goat, was made of old money and oil wells. Big philanthropist. His daughter, Belinda Fischer Bodett, had hospital wings and lecture halls and inner-city baseball diamonds named after her everywhere from Dallas to the damned Alamo. The Bodett Foundation gave millions each year to scholarships and cancer research. Charma loved being a part of that. Giving all that money away. Tossing it like candy from a parade float.
“Girlfriend, I am in some tall cotton,” Charma had bubbled over that day. “And it’s forever this time. Smartie, I’m gonna have a baby.”
“And who doesn’t love the pitter patter of little Baby Billionaire feet? Other baby billionaires, Nash. They don’t like to share.”
If anyone other than Belinda Bodett had gotten into a slap-fight over a pedicurist, it most likely wouldn’t make the Houston Chronicle, but a billionairess and a congresswoman going at it in the Zen garden at Chez Diva Day Spa? Way too delicious.
At a Special Olympics fundraiser, Belinda punched out a paparazzo for calling her son a retard. The tabloids called her “scrappy” and “feisty” but the paparazzo used the word “assault” in his lawsuit. Had he won? Smartie tried to remember, rifling through the manila folders on her desk, looking for her Belinda file.
But the Belinda file wasn’t there. Neither were the others.
“Oh… yams,” she whispered. “The Rodin Burgher took my files.”
\ ///
6
Janny always wanted flapjacks after they made love. They’d go naked to the kitchen, whip up a stack of buttermilk pancakes from a boxed mix and st
and there by the counter, eating, talking about everything and nothing, kissing the syrup from each other’s lips.
Thinking about it now, Shep experienced a fresh wave of raw grief. His midsection ached with hunger and unfamiliar exertion. He wanted flapjacks. He’d often felt homebound and entrapped by the pleasant domesticity of Janny’s world. It was a cruel punch line, how he missed that now, how specific memories haunted him. He’d taken it all for granted and betrayed Janny when she was alive. Now Janny was dead, food was a takeout afterthought, and getting laid was just another trudging step in the grieving process.
Passing no fewer than seven Starbucks before he came to the one on Holmes and Holy Oak, Shep pulled in to the pleasant corporate coffee shop that had become his routine morning stop. He’d never been a Starbucks devotee in general, but he’d been frequenting this one for the last three months. The girls behind the counter recognized him as one of the regulars who ordered straight up black coffee and consistently left good tips.
Shep exchanged pleasantries with them and went to his usual easy chair in the corner, from which he could see both entrances and the hallway to the restrooms. He opened Smartie’s files on the table, thumbing through a whole lot of coulda-told-you-that amateur crap. Google searches. Wiki-fodder. Nothing that would elicit anything but eye rolling should she decide to go to the police. Nothing about Starbucks on Holmes and Holly Oak.
The subject previously identified as Benjamin Franklin Bean entered at 6:06 a.m. with a green apron rolled up tightly under his arm. With iPod ear buds blasting heavy metal music directly into his head, Bean didn’t even register the soft clicksss-check of Shep’s camera behind him.
“Dr. Beano!” Bean’s coworkers called out to him, and he waved his narrow arm, knobby-elbowed, lanky-wristed. A ruffle of unruly red hair clowned out from under his black baseball cap, making him look more like a fifteen-year-old mathlete than a twenty-three-year-old PhD. His watery blue eyes were warped as big as a troll doll’s behind his thick glasses. His Adam’s apple had a life of its own. Except for a few freckles and some scattered acne, his skin had the blinding sallow cast of a computer-addicted, Halo-playing hermit who spent his days indoors, mainlining information and Dr. Pepper.