by Joni Rodgers
Shep felt the opposite of that now. A cool, compressed breeze down the back of his neck told him there’d been a sea change. His irreverence was no longer appreciated.
Certainly, Suri knew Shep wanted her because every man who saw her wanted her. Shep had seen her ride that dynamic like a pony in courtrooms and conference rooms, but he’d never felt her running any such game on him. He’d considered her a friend.
Someone he could trust with the secrets that burdened his past.
“That’s it,” said Smartie. “She has something on him. From when he was a cop.”
“Nash was a cop?”
“A dirty cop.”
“Yes,” said Fritz. “Now we’re going somewhere.”
“Smack starts digging. She realizes there’s a whole lot of shady stuff going on. She’s onto them, and Inky knows it.”
“Working, working...”
“She’s digging, she’s digging, she’s excavating. What’s this? Two people mysteriously dead. Were they disposed of by their ultra-rich spouses?”
“Dig, girl, dig!”
“Meanwhile, the chemistry is zinging and zanging between Smack and Nash. She doesn’t want to believe he’s involved. She’s seen his gentle humor, his quiet intelligence. She’s seen his tender side. And his impeccable backside.”
“Do we need to vent a little steam here?”
“Oh, God, yes.”
“Then I assume he’s about to die?”
“No!” Smartie startled herself. “Maybe. Probably so. Or not.”
I got out of bed, reinstalled my brain, and dropped my panties in my purse.
“What’s the matter, Smack? You don’t trust me?”
“Like a pussy trusts a python.”
“He’s a good character,” said Fritz. “Maybe you should keep him around.”
“In what capacity? He’s too strong a personality to be someone’s sidekick. He’ll end up taking over the whole book. Remember back in book four, the shrink said Smack compartmentalizes sex in order to avoid intimacy. Nash is already way too close for comfort.”
“Well, then do the Gunsmoke, Matt Dillon, Miss Kitty thing,” said Fritz. “They’re friends, first and foremost, but there’s always the whiskey on the lips, the hint of cleavage above the antique lace, the healthy bulge between the six-guns.”
“Last call,” I told him, but Nash’s hands were like two bad boys sneaking under the saloon door. “Here, kitty kitty.”
“No. He dies.” Smartie bit the knuckle of her index finger. “He’s definitely dead.”
“Logistically, it makes sense to have Nash help her,” said Fritz. “A licensed investigator is somewhat better positioned to gather certain types of information than a disc jockey.”
“Smack doesn’t need help,” Smartie said defensively. “She’s about to crack this baby wide open. Sink the whole banana boat, including Nash and the hog he road in on.”
“She’s literally clueless, Smartie. She has absolutely nothing on them.”
“But Inky doesn’t know that. As far as she knows, Smack has acquired some ridiculously damning information. Inky has to find out, right? So she tosses Smack’s office, looking for… what? What could she have found? Whatever’s on her computer, I guess.” Smartie pondered that for a moment. “Smack’s e-mail to and from the bimbo.”
“Have her take the hard drive for now,” said Fritz. “Figure it out later.”
“But they didn’t take the hard drive,” Smartie said, mostly to herself, and then she realized, “Because she wouldn’t physically take it, would she? No, she’d copy it. Fritz, of course. She uploaded it. To the secure online storage facility.”
“Can she do that?” asked Fritz.
“Her henchman could.”
“Sure. It would only take a few minutes,” said Evan Filer, the law firm’s aptly named computer forensics specialist. “This is a personal computer?”
“Yes,” said Shep. “But the client runs her business out of her home, so there’s a lot of sensitive material on board. Is there any way you can tell if it’s been copied?”
“Not from this.” Evan shook his head and pushed a manila envelope across his cluttered desk. “The hard drive itself appears to have been formatted. Good ol’ hubby deleted all programs and files before he busted it up.”
“Were you able to recover anything?”
“I’m good, but I’m not that good.”
“Okay. Thanks for trying,” said Shep, and Evan nodded. It seemed like the cue for Shep to get up and leave, but something told him to wait a little. In the silence that followed, Evan’s eyes slid over toward the door. Ambient background sounds drifted through from the outer office. One of the paralegals was telling a joke.
“A horse, a rabbi, and a divorce lawyer walk into a bar…”
“Shep,” Evan said quietly, “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but you helped me with that issue a few months back. I trust you to forget where you heard this, all right?”
“I haven’t heard anything.”
“One of the partners had me put a Dick in your computer.”
“Excuse me?”
“Dick Tracer. It’s spyware. Records every keystroke, every web search, everything.”
“Ah.” Shep nodded. He didn’t even bother asking which partner.
“It’s set to report on your productivity every six hours and ping me immediately if certain things crop up.”
“What things?”
“The usual. Porn, Facebook, job offerings at other firms. She also wants to know every time you tap the storage facility. And then some random stuff.”
“There’s no such thing as random stuff,” said Shep. “I need to see the list.”
“Forget it,” said Evan. “I owed you one. Now we’re even. This is a sweet gig for me, Shep. I’m not about to screw it up just to be a pal. I don’t know what you’re into, man, with this ‘Jailbait’ webcam girl. I don’t want to know. Whatever gets you through the night. I’m just telling you to keep it out of the office because whatever turns up goes into my report. I’ll do my job, understand?”
“I understand.” Shep offered his hand, but Evan seemed reluctant to take it.
“Dude, I know you’ve been lonely, but a teenage hooker? It’s not worth your job. It’s sure as hell not worth ending up in the clink.”
“Thanks for the heads up.”
Before he left his office, Shep spent half an hour making sure Evan would be able to turn in his homework assignment: ample evidence of diligent delving into two or three pending cases. He picked up the phone on his desk and called Smartie to tell her about her hard drive, but when the call rolled over to her voicemail, he felt something—perhaps it was Smack Wilder’s telltale trickle of ions—that told him he wasn’t alone on the line.
“Ms. Breedlove,” he said, “Shep Hartigate from Salinger, Pringle, Fitch & Edloe. Our computer forensics man wasn’t able to recover your hard drive. I’m holding off on any further action until we hear from you how you want to proceed against your husband. I wouldn’t blink once about pressing charges.”
“So that takes care of the computer,” said Fritz. “What’s our plan for the gun?”
“She could be planning to shoot Smack with her own gun. Make it look like suicide,” said Smartie. “Or shoot someone else and frame Smack for the murder.”
“The second one. You need the classic ‘death in the middle.’ So who on this cruise ship needs shooting?” After considering it, Fritz said, “I say the uncle. If ever a character was marked for death, it’s that guy.”
“Oh, no,” Smartie gasped. “It’s Nash. She’s going to kill Nash and hang it on Smack.”
“Smack? As in smack you upside your head?”
“Right,” Shep told the pawnbroker. “Engraved on the barrel with a little scroll design.”
The pawnbroker shook her head. She’d been all blousy hey darlin’ when he walked in the door, but quickly figured him for what he was and decided not to waste the energy.
“Is there a reward?”
“Doing the right thing,” Shep smiled. “Isn’t that a reward in itself?”
She made a sound like “Fbbshyah.”
“Two-fifty then. You’d be lucky to get two-and-a-quarter for the gun.”
“See there?” she smiled. “Doing the right thing is its own reward.”
He gave her his card. “Let me know if it turns up.”
After conducting a thorough search of Smartie’s house and yard the day Herrick went off his nut, Shep had insisted on reporting the gun stolen, which Smartie reluctantly did, and he hadn’t seen or spoken to her since. Now he was making the grand rounds, checking for the gun at all the local pawn shops and a few outlets with less public storefronts.
The possibility still nagged; Smartie could have orchestrated the whole thing to string Herrick up. But it was also possible that Suri had had the office tossed to yank Smartie’s chain. And get the gun.
“You’ll know it if you see it,” he told the old man behind the counter at the next hockshop. “Sig Sauer .38 with Smack engraved on the barrel.”
It could be traced back to Smartie with laughable ease, Shep figured. Once they dug the slug out of his brain. And it followed that if Smartie conveniently killed herself before the police got to her…
“Evidence,” Shep reminded himself as he crossed the parking lot. He’d been reading too many paperbacks lately. He was trained to deal in evidence, not shoot ’em up scenarios. And so far, there was not one scintilla of hard evidence that connected Suri to any wrongdoing.
“Oh, for crying out loud, put him out of his misery already. The man-candy doesn’t last past page one-thirty-seven. It’s part of the Smack Wilder brand. Honestly, I think that’s key to your East European sales numbers.”
Smartie’s agent, Dove Hungerland, never wavered from the pragmatic view. She also insisted on sitting outside so she could smoke while they ate lunch, which was Smartie’s preference as well, especially on a bright blue day like this one.
“The bitch insurance exec kills Nash or—or—the crazy uncle kills him,” said Dove. “Either way. Dead man walking.”
“Fritz likes Nash,” said Smartie. “He thinks I should keep him going.”
“Oh, don’t get me wrong.” Dove gestured with her salad fork in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “He’s a great character. I mean, we gotta love the flawed anti-hero, right? Especially if he’s great-looking, witty, cock-a-doodle-doo, but I’m not sure there’s any depth there. Where’s the grit? Where’s the spiritual wound? And where the hell is that hobbit with my Chardonnay? Waiter? Sweetheart?” Dove waved a manicured hand and made a tippy sippy gesture in front of her lips. “What does this guy have that makes us give a crap about him? That makes him real?”
“Well, he has…” Smartie fought the vampire in herself and lost. “He has…”
“Janny.”
Shep didn’t mean to speak her name out loud, but looking into his wife’s eyes felt like falling down a mineshaft.
“She looks great, doesn’t she?” said Janny’s agent, Carson Epps, a painfully well-styled young man who barely cleared Shep’s shoulder, but negotiated deals like a hammerhead.
“Yeah.”
Shep’s voice cracked the syllable in half, and seeing his embarrassment, Epps focused his attention toward the pretty young publisher’s rep who was busy glad-handing the sales staff and setting up the Janny’s World display at the main entrance of the Barnes & Noble flagship store on Westheimer.
The free-standing unit featured a life-sized cardboard cutout of Janny attached to a bookshelf that held a supply of Janny’s World books, including the new retrospective coffee table volume. Standing opposite her, a smiling comic Janny folded her flat arms and smiled in a longsuffering “what’s the fuss” sort of way. Real-life Janny rested one elbow on the bookshelf and, through a miracle of computer-generated graphics, casually draped her other arm around the sloping shoulders of galumphy old Skip.
“Shep, let’s let them know we’re grateful for this, all right?” Epps said sotto voce. “These point of purchase displays cost a bundle. It’s a demonstration of their enthusiasm for the new book.”
“Jesus,” Shep said softly. “It’s not like I forgot how beautiful she was, but… Jesus.”
He had to stop talking and swallow hard. The photographer had captured Janny’s skin at the precise moment of midsummer when it was peach soft and milk smooth. He’d caught the tiny crinkle that appeared at the corner of her eye at the moment her smile broke into laughter.
You unveil a matzevah, Shep remembered. A monument to your loved one. And then you put away mourning.
“But he can’t move on,” said Smartie. “He’s haunted by guilt because he cheated on her.”
“What? He cheated on the cancer wife?” said Dove. “Why don’t you just give him herpes? How about a penchant for stepping on baby bunnies? Yes, there’s a character the book clubs will love.”
“You said you wanted real. It doesn’t get any realer than that.”
Dove abandoned the salad fork and embraced her Chardonnay.
“For Christ sake, Smartie, make the man a syphilitic, kitten-frying drunk, but darling, he can’t have cheated on the cancer wife. For one thing, her husband cheats on her and she gets cancer? Is this a minor character or a soap opera? If her husband cheats on her, she’s immune from cancer. Believe me, if I wasn’t banking on that, I’d be getting mammograms twice a week.”
“You’re right,” Smartie reluctantly conceded. “He cheated on cancer wife. His only hope for redemption is to be brutally gunned down while protecting someone else.”
“Anyway, this isn’t about the wife,” Dove dashed one cigarette out in her coffee cup and lit another from a slim silver case. “It’s about bimbo, sex, splat, hello, sex, guns, cars, clue, clue, sex, clue, danger, danger, sex, danger, big confrontation, sex.”
She snapped her fingers and sat back in her chair.
“The end.”
“Which is just the beginning,” the young woman from the publisher was telling Epps. “Next week the print ads run concurrent to the TV and radio campaign that ties into the whole American Heart Association fundraising thing, and let me tell you, they are super excited. They’ve already received thousands of orders for the commemorative coffee mugs and tote bags, plus a million dollar pledge from Mr. Hartigate’s employer.”
“My employer?” Shep’s attention ratcheted back to the conversation. “The law firm gave a million dollars?”
“Suri Fitch made the donation in Janny’s name,” beamed the publisher’s rep. “I don’t know how you wrangled that, Mr. Hartigate, but it’s going to do a lot of good. They asked me to thank you personally.”
“By the way,” said Epps. “Janny was worried that you wouldn’t cash the royalty checks, so she set up a direct deposit to your joint account.”
This news didn’t surprise Shep. Janny had set up the majority of the bills for automatic payment online. She’d preordered Christmas gifts to be shipped to family and friends mid-December and programmed reminders into Shep’s palm computer.
“Have your cholesterol checked!”
“Turn in quarterly tax payment!”
He’d flip a page on his desk calendar and find a pink Post-it note.
“Oleander needs to be pruned and spiked this week!”
Nine months after Janny’s death, Shep had kept Charlie overnight, and when he went to make pancakes in the morning, there was a note inside the boxed mix: “No bacon grease down the garbage disposal! Let it solidify in the OJ can.”
“Is that arrangement still satisfactory?” asked Epps.
“Sure,” said Shep, unable to drag his eyes from Janny’s smile. “Whatever my wife wanted is good for me.”
“It’s good for you! So good when it bloody burns!” Smartie’s spin class instructor was a New Zealander and railing evil. “Push that resistance! Push it!”
“If I don’t die from this,” Phyllis ga
sped, “I’m going to kill you, Smartie Breedlove.”
“Yes,” Smartie huffed like a smoker. “Do that now, please.”
Sweating and pedaling, pedaling and sweating, longing in her blackened heart for a deep drag off an unfiltered Camel, Smartie kept rewinding Shep’s terse message in her head.
“I wouldn’t blink once about pressing charges.”
Either he was making fun of her or he wasn’t able to speak freely.
“Casilda called me this morning,” Phyllis said during the cool down at the end of class. “She asked me if I wanted to join the Buchans. I guess they’ll be meeting at her place from now on.”
“Join the Buchans?” Smartie echoed.
“Well, because they’re all doing literary fiction, and Quilters are more in the commercial realm.”
“Right,” said Smartie, trying not to feel the sting of that. “Did she say anything about Herrick? Is he doing all right in rehab?”
“Oh, he left rehab.”
“What?” Smartie said with dismay. “After only a week?”
“She says he’s drinking like a fish, but writing brilliantly.”
“Squids.” Smartie sorrowfully mopped her neck with a hand towel. “Poor Herrick.”
“Casilda says this new novel is like nothing he’s done before,” said Phyllis. “She’s going to take care of him while he finishes it and then ship him back to dry out.”
“Whatever works, I guess,” Smartie said, smitten upside the head by another cold, wet rag of guilt. “I suppose it’s none of my business.”
“Smartie, please don’t misunderstand what I said a minute ago,” said Phyllis. “I’d never leave the Quilters, and you know I love your books. So does Casilda. She asked me all about the one your working on.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her we don’t talk about each other’s work outside the group, of course,” said Phyllis, but she busied herself with her water bottle, and Smartie couldn’t see her face.