Kill Smartie Breedlove (a mystery)

by Joni Rodgers

  Smartie took cigarettes and a lighter from the bottom of the chiminea and sat sideways on the porch swing.

  “Red Harvest,” she said after two or three deep, contemplative drags.

  “I’m not following.”

  “Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. The Continental Op comes into Poisonville, and he’s completely outgunned. Can’t figure out who’s in bed with whom. Rumrunners, gangsters, grifty politicians. He knows he can’t take them all on, so he gets them to screw it to each other. He doesn’t go around rattling everybody’s cages. He just sort of smokes them out by planting little seeds of doubt.”

  “Because we look at the world and see ourselves,” said Shep, considering the possibilities. “Belinda Bovet’s been in Europe since her father died, but I did some legwork on her pending divorce. She’ll be back in Houston for custody hearings next week.”

  “I’ll ask my agent to connect with Caitlyn Cassidy’s people. I’ll tell her I want to write a magazine article or something.”

  “Good. Meanwhile, I’ll get to Barth. What about Dr. Juarez?”

  “Easy,” said Smartie. “I’ll schedule a consultation for breast implants.”

  “Better make it a nose job,” said Shep.

  Smartie’s eyes got huge and wounded.

  “Not that your nose—I just meant—because the other is obviously…” He cleared his throat and threw a pine cone for Boodle. “Take it as a compliment.”

  \ ///

  21

  Cardboard Janny smiled over the crowded bookstore like a two-dimensional Madonna, but Shep avoided her smile, focusing on the forming mob of mystery lovers. Of the eighty-odd people gathered for Smartie’s appearance, about half were wearing some type of costume. The bookstore was offering prizes for Edgiest Edgar, Most Dashing Hammett, Sassiest Smack, and Spiffiest Spade.

  Smartie was costumed in what she called her “nut-busting duds”: tight charcoal jeans, a Ramones tank shirt with a Macy’s Maximum Push-Up bra and Chanel blazer, accessorized with a diamond tennis bracelet. A scaly pair of Louboutin python stilettos elevated the top of her head almost to the level of Shep’s Adam’s apple. Her unruly curls had been flat-ironed and teased to stack on another inch or two. Her lively blue eyes were smudged with shadow and mascara, her It Girl mouth plumped with wine-red lipstick. Not exactly the gal next door, unless you happened to live next door to a home for wayward rock stars.

  Glancing from Smartie’s nut-busting persona at the podium to cardboard Janny in her white blouse and floral skirt, Shep had the distinct feeling of an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. He stood, arms folded, eyes ranging around the room, jaw set like a cinderblock; he wasn’t even trying not to look like a bodyguard. Smartie took great delight in introducing him to the event coordinator.

  “This is Dirk Beefhoss. He’s handling my security tonight.”

  Temple was out of town with her husband, judging a professional hog barbecue, and Yuki was at her boys’ basketball game, but Phyllis was there and made her way through the fray to give Smartie a hug.

  “Smartie, I can’t stay long. I’m meeting my editor for a working dinner. Be wonderful.”

  “Thanks for coming.” Smartie hugged her back. “You remember Jag Slamhead, the company muscle.”

  “Good to see you again,” Phyllis said, and Shep nodded, stern but cordial.

  The store manager stepped up to a small podium. She tapped the microphone and introduced Smartie with a lengthy gush of pull quotes from the New York Times Book Review and London Daily Mail. The audience cheered madly, and Smartie stepped up to read from a fresh copy of her new novel. The excerpt was halfway between stand-up comedy and bedtime story. Sporting twice the hair and triple the southern drawl she normally had, she clearly ate up every gale of laughter, every burst of spontaneous applause, every catcall from the peanut gallery.

  “I grabbed the guard rail and dangled by a frantic claw-hold as Tag Mason’s Harley Fat Boy arced off the overpass, pirouetting in a blaze of gas fumes and glory. Above us, Texas sky burned blue into forever. Below us, Houston traffic gushed in a merciless river. Tag was about to get up close and personal with a soccer mom clicking eighty in her suburban assault vehicle.

  The moment before he kissed the windshield, the man who thought he was invincible uttered his last words: ‘Damn you, Smack Wilder!’”

  The gathered fans reeled off a long ovation, and Smartie thanked them over and over, making properly gracious and self-effacing little jokes, inviting questions and comments. Shep shifted his feet, scoping out the crowd, short-listing possible problematics.

  “Smartie, how do you get your ideas for your books?”

  “Well, look around this beautiful city,” she said. “Fascinating folks, wild goings on. How the hell does one not get ideas?”

  “Smartie, I wrote a mystery novel, and all my friends say it’s like the best book they ever read and like—no offense, but way better than yours—and I was wondering if you’d be willing to read it and recommend it to your agent?”

  “Oh, hon, I’m not allowed. Those intellectual property lawyers keep me tied up like the appetizer at a bondage party, but I sure do wish you all the luck in the world with it, and if you go to my website, you’ll find boatloads of resources for aspiring writers.”

  Shep scrolled his focus from one face to the next, studying upturned lapels and shabbily blocked fedoras, watching for hands in pockets, waiting for one of them to ask the wrong question. A tall, pole-thin Sam-Spade-wannabe in the back corner raised his hand. Shep swore softly and angled between two tall bookshelves.

  “Ms. Breedlove,” said the thin man, attempting a Bogart dialect but sounding more like he was chewing a Novocain toothpick, “there’s no way Smack Wilder has the tensile strength in her carpals and/or metacarpals to hang off the guardrail by her fingers. Don’t you think it would have been better to have her get her arms around it somehow?”

  Her heart stumbling out of step, Smartie kept a practiced smile in place. She glanced over to nod at Shep, but he wasn’t there. Smartie experienced a flash of fear, followed by a flash of anger because she hated feeling fearful, and Shep had said he’d be there, but now he wasn’t.

  “Great idea, hon.” She smoothed a strand of hair behind one ear. “You should use that trick in your next book. Another question? Over here?”

  Smartie tried to move on to the other side of the room, but he spoke over her.

  “One more thing, Smartie. You were quoted in last month’s Vanity Fair magazine saying that Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon was your favorite book, and in March of last year, you were quoted in People saying that Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep was your favorite book. I was just wondering. Are you always such a lying whore?”

  There was a startled murmur amongst the Smack-heads, booing and lewd suggestions of what he should do with that. Smartie stood fast and overrode them all sweetly.

  “C’mon now, y’all,” she said. “It’s a valid question. Am I always a lying whore? Well, I do spend every day makin’ up stories, and I’d like to think anyone who buys a Smack Wilder book will enjoy having me in bed.”

  She held up a copy of her new book, and the assembly hooted and cheered. Smartie smiled and blew kisses and waved like a rodeo queen.

  “Sweet dreams, everybody. Thank you all so much for coming out. Y’all are too, too wonderful.”

  Smartie was muscled over to the signing table, flanked by bookstore employees, and the crowd closed in immediately. Because she was so much shorter than everyone else, she didn’t see Shep lay a heavy hand on the skinny kid’s hunched shoulder.

  “We need to talk, Mr. Spade.”

  Shep steered him by the back of the neck through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY and spun him up against the wall, knocking the blocked fedora to the floor. The guy looked like a kid up close. Younger than twenty-two. Shep wondered how he could have missed it before.

  Same blue eyes, same pepper of freckles.

  On the kid’s acne-
speckled face, the porcelain skin looked sallow and sun-starved, but without asking question one, Shep connected the dots between Smartie Breedlove and Benjamin Franklin Bean.

  \ ///

  22

  Smartie wasn’t one to leave before the last dog was hung. She was humbly grateful to these people who’d given her the life she loved. Even after the store’s business hours had passed and the lights in all but one area were off, she stayed at the table, signing every copy set before her, greeting each reader as if he was a long lost cousin or she was a best gal pal from school.

  She handed a book to a blushing boy in a Scout uniform and was in the act of blowing a kiss after him when a yellow rose tickled her nose.

  “Hey, Smartie.”

  “Hewitt, you came.” She got up and gave him a hug.

  “Sorry I’m late. Did a major meth lab today.” He embraced her in his big arms and whispered in her ear, “Geezes, you look hot tonight.”

  “Well, you clean up pretty good yourself,” said Smartie. “Lord knows I love a man in a hazmat suit, but look at you all in leather.”

  “I’m on my new Harley Softail. Let me give you a ride home. We’ll stop off for a beer.”

  “She’s busy,” Shep said flatly, and Smartie turned, startled. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized he was behind her.

  “I’m sorry, Hewitt. Another time,” she said. “Come knockin’, okay? Don’t be a stranger.”

  She hugged him again and over her shoulder, Hewitt grinned and gave Shep a thumbs-up. Shep nodded and flashed him a toothpaste smile.

  As Hewitt walked away, Smartie whispered, “Where did you go? He was here.”

  “I know,” Shep said quietly. “We’ll talk after.”

  “Miss Breedlove, I’ve read all your books,” said the next woman in line. “Every one of ’em was filthier than the last. You should be in jail for pornography.” She tapped the cover of the new novel. “Sign it ‘To Mee Maw.’ Make it nice and neat.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Smartie smiled and signed as neatly as she could, but her hands had begun to tremble a little. She glanced over her shoulder at Shep, trying to make sense of the expression on his face. The line dwindled to the last few die-hards around eleven. After that Smartie sat for another hour, cheerfully chatting with the sales staff and signing stock for the store shelves. Shep waited patiently, knowing the drill. He’d been through it many times with Janny, who was just as unwilling to leave a single reader behind.

  It was after midnight when they crossed the dark parking lot to the Range Rover.

  “Did you talk to him?” Smartie asked.

  “I talked to him.”

  “Is he involved with Suri? Shep, do you think he killed Twinkie?”

  “No.” Shep chirped the car unlock and opened Smartie’s door for her, but instead of closing it after she climbed into the passenger seat, he stood with one hand on the seat back close to her shoulder. “Smartie. His name is Benjamin Franklin Bean. Does that name mean anything to you?”

  “Kites? Lightning?” She shrugged. “Poor Richard’s Almanac?”

  “He’s the same guy I observed with Charma. And you were right, Smartie. She wasn’t sleeping with him. She was buying him off. Trying to keep him quiet.”

  “Oh, God…” Smartie stiffened as a witching breeze stirred through the sego palms at the side of the parking lot. “He was threatening to go to the tabloids about me.”

  Shep nodded.

  “Oh, God. Oh, Jesus. Shep.”

  “You’re okay,” he said, but she shook her head and covered her mouth.

  Shep gripped her arm and helped her over to a tree in the grassy median, holding her hair back and stroking her neck as she threw up. When the worst had passed, he handed her a clean handkerchief from his breast pocket and a water bottle from inside the car.

  “He did it all,” Smartie said. “He took my gun. He killed Twinkie.”

  “He four-square denies it. Swears he’s never heard of Suri or Barth and doesn’t know anything about what happened that day.”

  “He’s lying, Shep! He’s a monster.”

  “He’s a very angry young man, but honestly, Smartie, I never got a whiff that this guy was dangerous, and I still don’t,” said Shep, searching for a way to explain what he’d seen in Bean’s face, the tears that choked Bean’s voice and made him seem like a boy.

  Smartie pulled her arms close across the front of her body and looked up at the sky, but the power-glow of halogen streetlights made it impossible to see a single star. She felt freezing cold. She wanted to ask Shep to put his arms around her, but what came out was, “I need a drink.”

  They found a quiet corner at the back of the Red Herron, away from the rattling juke box and the parquet dance floor where a few remaining drunks stumbled with honeys who were starting to look last call beautiful. Shep rarely walked into his old haunt anymore, except when he needed information, and he regretted the decision to bring Smartie here when he realized how seedy the place had gotten.

  Smoke hazed the de-silvered mirror behind the bar. Dust clung heavily to animal heads and college wrestling trophies on the walls. An industrious spider had spun her web between the lampshade on a tarnished wall sconce and the wainscoting next to the table. Smartie stared for a long while at the fractal pattern.

  Lined up on three coasters in front of her were a double shot of whisky, a can of Diet Coke, and a tall glass of ice water. She finally cracked the seal on the Diet Coke and said, “I like this place.”

  Shep waited quietly. Smartie sipped her Diet Coke, set it back in its place, picked up the shot glass. She held the whiskey under her nose, watching the drunks and honeys shuffle back and forth.

  “I remember knobs on a radio,” she said. “The old kind. Twisty, not digital. Very clearly, I remember exactly what the dial looked like. White line divvied up with little blue lines. Little red light behind the part that moved back and forth. The only other light was a crack under the door. But I didn’t go over there. I could hear him breathing on the other side.”

  Shep blew softly across the rim of his coffee cup.

  “At night, there was this woman on the radio. Doing her smartass patter between songs. Reading the weather. Plugging diners with late night hours. I was so hungry. Sometimes he gave me a little can of cat food, and I’d save it until I could hear her talking about pulled pork and home fries and beer bread. I imagined this elaborate story about how she was searching for me. Finding clues. Coming to get me. I kept going over and over that part. She kicks in the door. Get off her, you sonofabitch! Shoots up the place. That sort of thing. I remember that story. The tiniest details of it. The rest of it, not so much.”

  Smartie tipped the whisky in one swift shot. Shep refilled her glass from a square bottle.

  “I never really knew what happened until Hill looked it up in the newspaper archives. He thought it would help me. It said some prisoners from county lockup were picking up trash on a state road and saw blood coming out of a sewer pipe. Saw a foot. A leg. A girl. It said this girl had been missing for sixteen days. The Baptist minister was quoted saying it would have been a mercy if his daughter had been found dead.”

  Shep made a small, involuntary sound, but he didn’t look away, and the expression on his face betrayed neither pity nor anger on her behalf.

  “I can’t believe how stupid I was.” Smartie shook her head in disbelief. “All I could give them was the radio knobs and a few odd details and that ridiculous made-up story. You’d think after all those detective stories I’d read—Trixie Belden, Sherlock Holmes, Ellery Queen—but I didn’t notice things or memorize things or try to leave some kind of clues they could find after I was dead. I gave them so little to go on. It’s astonishing that they were able to track him down. Truly, the police work was… well, you know how riveting that is. All that procedural stuff.”

  That wasn’t the word Shep would have used to describe the tasky, check-listed nature of police procedure, but he nodded
and kept listening.

  “They got him a few months later, and he ’fessed right up. Took a plea bargain. Twenty-five to life. Makes me curious after the fact. That plea bargain. God only knows what else he got away with. How many little girls in what all ditches. I’d have been useless had it gone to trial. But they had the DNA evidence on him. From amniocentesis.”

  Shep poured a shot of whiskey into his lukewarm coffee.

  “I was a good Christian girl, thirteen years old. I’d never even been told about sex or penises or anything beyond this very perfunctory explanation of Aunt Flow from the church secretary a few months earlier when I got my first period. All I knew was ‘First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes whoozy with a baby carriage.’ I actually thought—because of this part in The Maltese Falcon…”

  Smartie hiccupped a sharp giggle.

  “Brigid O’Shaughnessy presses her whole body against Sam Spade, and it says, ‘His eyes burned yellowly.’ So I asked the librarian, ‘What does that mean, his eyes burned yellowly?’ And she got this secret sort of smile and whispered, ‘It means he had an erection.’ Well, the word of a librarian, that was gospel to me. So I thought ‘erection’ meant that a man’s eyes would literally light up like a coyote on the side of the road. I thought, holy hops! There’s something I’d like to see.”

  Shep laughed at that, a fleeting moment of relief for them both.

  “The first four months, I was in the hospital. They kept me sleeping mostly. So I’d stop screaming. At first, I thought a roach had gotten inside me. But it got bigger, and I thought, no it’s a rattlesnake.”

  Smartie closed her arms tight across her midsection, gripping her ribs with white fingers.

  “Daddy said an abortion would make me go to hell. He sent me on the bus to El Paso to a home for girls gone bad. Nueva Vida. Nuns run it, and you know nuns. The schoolwork was hard. I liked that.”