The In Death Collection, Books 11-15

by J. D. Robb

  chapter ten

  Mavis Freestone and her lover Leonardo cohabited in Eve’s old apartment.

  What a difference a year made.

  Eve had lived in the single-bedroom unit contentedly enough with a few basic pieces of furniture, no decor to speak of, and an AutoChef that was empty more often than stocked. She’d preferred to think of her lifestyle as simple rather than bland.

  Then again, compared to Mavis, a surf on Saturn’s outer rings in a comet buster was bland.

  The minute Mavis opened the door, Eve was struck with color. Blasts of it. Every hue and tone on the palette was turned up to scream level, in patterns and textures that boggled the eye.

  And that was just Mavis.

  The living area of the apartment was draped with miles of fabrics. Some, she supposed, were art of some kind; others, Leonardo’s designs in progress. The rather lumpy sofa Eve had left behind when she’d moved in with Roarke was covered now with a bright and nervy pink material that shimmered like polished glass. If that wasn’t enough, it was heaped with pillows and throws of clashing colors that seemed to drip onto the floor where more cloths were cleverly tossed in lieu of rugs.

  Beads and spangles and ribbons, and God knew what, rained down the walls, tinkled gaily from the ceiling, which had been painted a high-sheen silver studded with crimson stars.

  Even the tables were fabric, arty lumps of shape that could be called in for seating in a pinch. Eve didn’t think there was a hard surface or a right angle left in the place.

  And while she was vaguely concerned that staying there for any length of time might bring on a stroke, it was a frame that suited the picture of her oldest friend perfectly.

  The effect was something like a storm-edged sunrise. On Venus.

  “I’m so glad you came by.” Mavis dragged Eve into the psychodelia, then turned a stylish circle. “What do you think?”

  “Of what, exactly?”

  “Of the new gear?”

  Tiny, slim, and bright as a fairy wand, Mavis turned again, showing off a short-skirted . . . you couldn’t call it a dress, Eve decided. A costume, she supposed, of crossed diagonal stripes that ran from deep purple to neon pink and back again. The bodice scooped low, just tucking the nipples under and left Mavis’s shoulders—adorned now with twin pansy tattoos—bare.

  Sleeves—they had to be sleeves because as far as Eve knew, gloves had hands—skimmed down her arms. Needle-heeled boots, in the same dizzy stripes, rode up her legs to just under crotch level.

  “It’s—” She had no idea. “Amazing.”

  “Yeah, isn’t it? TTT. Too totally terrific. Trina’s going to do my hair to match. Leonardo’s a complete genius. Leonardo, Dallas is here. He’s making a batch of screamers,” she told Eve. “You came by at the exact moment. I hate drinking alone, and you know how Leonardo can’t.”

  She kept up the chatter, pulling Eve toward the pink couch. She wasn’t giving her friend a chance to escape until she knew what was going on.

  “Here he is.” Her voice went to coo, her eyes went gooey. “Thanks, honey love.”

  Leonardo, a giant of a man with long, glossy braids, gold eyes, and the smooth copper skin of a mixed-race heritage, swirled into the room. He moved with uncanny grace for a man topping six-five and wearing a hooded ankle duster of Atlantic blue. He beamed at Mavis, and the ruby studs beside his mouth and just under his left eyebrow winked flirtatiously.

  He cooed right back at her. “You’re welcome, turtledove. Hello, Dallas. I put together a little snack, in case you haven’t had dinner.”

  “Isn’t he TTT?”

  “You bet,” Eve said as Mavis cuddled up against him. Even in the boots, she didn’t make it to his breastbone. “You didn’t have to go to any trouble, Leonardo.”

  “None at all.” He set down a tray loaded with food and drink. “It’s nice you came by so Mavis won’t spend the evening alone. I have some appointments.”

  Mavis sent him an adoring look. Their plans had been to have a rare quiet evening together. When she’d told him Eve was coming by and something was wrong, he’d agreed without a murmur to her request that he make himself scarce.

  He was, Mavis thought with a sigh, perfect.

  “I can’t stay long,” Eve began, but Leonardo was already scooping Mavis up in his long arms, kissing her in a deep and intimate way that had Eve wincing and looking away.

  “Enjoy yourself, my dove.”

  He sent Eve a quick, flashing smile and managed to glide out of the apartment without running into anything.

  “He didn’t have any appointments.”

  Mavis started to protest, then grinned, shrugged, and plopped down to pour the first round of screamers. “I told him we wanted a little girl time. He was ultracool with it. So . . .” She passed Eve a glass the size of a small birdbath, filled to the rim with emerald green liquid. “You wanna get a buzz on, then tell me about it, or just dive in?”

  Eve opened her mouth, then closed it and pursed her lips. It had been a hell of a long time since she’d downed a batch of screamers with Mavis. “Maybe I can get a buzz on while I tell you.”

  “Solid.” Mavis tapped her glass against Eve’s and knocked back the first of what promised to be many.

  “So . . .” Mavis was on her third screamer, and most of the soy chips, whey-cheese dip, and corn doodles Leonardo had arranged were long consumed. “Let me sort of put this in a box. You went to square off with some bad guy who used to have business with Roarke, without telling Roarke you were going.”

  “It’s police business. It’s my job.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m just scoping it down. Then the bad guy sent second-string bad guys after you.”

  “I handled it.”

  Mavis glanced over with a gimlet look in her eye. “You want my take or just your own?”

  “I’m shutting up,” Eve muttered and poured another screamer.

  “When you got back home, there were flowers from the bad guy and a smarmy card.” Because Eve’s mouth opened again, Mavis held up a purple-tipped finger. “You figured he did it to rile you up and to get Roarke’s goat, so you had Summerset ditch the posies. But Roarke saw them and called you on it. Then you were like: ‘Duh, what flowers?’ ”

  “I didn’t say ‘duh.’ ” The screamers were doing the job. “I never say that. I think, maybe, I said ‘Huh.’ That’s entirely different.”

  “Whatever. You . . . what’s a word that means lie, but’s nicer than lie?” Mavis closed one eye as if to sharpen her focus. “Fib. You fibbed because you didn’t want Roarke to go out and crush the bad guy like a bug and maybe get messed up in the process.”

  Eve actually preferred the word lie to the word fib but decided not to make an issue of it. “More or less.”

  “Well, that was stupid.”

  Eve’s mouth fell open. “Stupid? You’re saying I was stupid? You’re supposed to tell me I was right. That’s how this works.”

  “Dallas.” Mavis leaned over, then slid gracefully to the floor. “You didn’t figure the man factor. They got dicks. You can’t ever forget the dick when you’re dealing with a man.”

  “What’re you talking about?” Eve slid to the floor as well, sucked down the rest of her drink. “I know Roarke has a dick. He uses it every chance he gets.”

  “The dick’s connected to the ego. It’s medical fact. Or maybe it’s the other way around.” With a shrug, Mavis emptied the last of the screamers. “It’s a mystery to all womankind. You didn’t trust him to handle himself.”

  “He didn’t trust me to handle myself.”

  “Dallas, Dallas.” Shaking her head, Mavis patted Eve’s thigh. “Dallas,” she said a third time, with great pity. “Let’s make more screamers. We’ll need them when we get to the men are pigs stage.”

  Halfway through batch two, Eve lay on the floor staring up at the beads raining from the silver ceiling. “If men are pigs, why do so many of us have one?”

  “Because women work on an emotion
al level.” Mavis hiccupped delicately. “Even you.”

  Eve rolled over, eyed Mavis narrowly. “Do not.”

  “Do, too. First he got you by the hormones. I mean, Jesus, look at him. The man’s a sexual . . . Gimme a minute. A sexual . . . banquet. Yeah, that’s a good one. Then he clicked into your head, because he’s smart and interesting and mysterious and all that stuff you’d really go for. But then, the whammer was when he jammed right into your heart. Whatcha gonna do then? A guy’s got his hooks in your heart, he just reels you right in.”

  “I’m not a goddamn fish.”

  “We are all fish,” Mavis said in rounded tones, “in the great sea of life.”

  Eve had swallowed enough screamers to find that hysterically funny. “You moron,” she managed when she got her breath back.

  “Hey, I’m not the one in emotional crisis here.” On her hands and knees, Mavis crawled over and kissed Eve, smackingly, on the cheek. “Poor baby. Mommy’s gonna tell you just what to do to make it all better.”

  She crawled off for the screamers, crawled back, and poured them out into the glasses, somehow managing not to spill a single potent drop.

  “Well, what?”

  “Fuck his brains out.”

  “That’s it? That’s Mommy’s best advice?”

  “It’s the only advice. Men, being pigs and having the dick factor, will usually forget what they were pissed about if you lay them right.”

  “So I’m supposed to use sex to fix this?” Somewhere in her alcohol-dulled brain there was a glimmer of a thought that this approach was seriously marred. But she couldn’t quite grab onto it. “It could work,” she decided.

  “Guaranteed. But . . .”

  “I knew there was a but. I could almost feel it.”

  “It’s only a . . . what do you call it, a temporary measure. Dallas, you’ve got like, you know, issues. So you gotta figure out why you went behind his back. Not that there’s anything really wrong with that, ’cause sometimes you just gotta do what you do. But what you got here are two really rock heads that are rapping up against each other.” She demonstrated by banging her hands together, and spilled some screamer after all. “Oops.”

  “You’re saying I’m a rock head?”

  “Sure you are. That’s why I love you. And when you got those rock heads smacking together like that, you’re gonna have something crack now and again.”

  “He’s hardly speaking to me.”

  “He’s so mean.” Mavis polished off the screamer, then gave Eve a hard hug. “Want some ice cream?”

  “I’ll be sick. What kind?”

  They ended up back on the floor with enormous bowls of Triple Fudge Decadence topped with clouds of pink whipped cream.

  “I wasn’t wrong,” Eve said between bites.

  “Of course you weren’t. We’re women. We’re never wrong.”

  “Even Summerset went on my side, and he hates me.”

  “Doesn’t hate you.”

  “I love the stupid son of a bitch.”

  “Aw, that’s so sweet.” Mavis’s eyes, seriously blurred, went moist with sentiment. “If you’d tell him, you guys would get along better.”

  It took Eve a minute. “Not Summerset. Jeez. Roarke. I love that stupid son of a bitch. You’d think he could cut me a break when this case is hammering at me, and I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “You always know what you’re doing. That’s why you’re Dallas, Lieutenant Eve.”

  “Not with the job, Mavis. I know what I’m doing with the job. With Roarke, with the marriage deal, with this love crap. You must be drunk.”

  “Of course I’m drunk. We each drank an entire batch of Leonardo’s—isn’t he the cutest thing—special screamer mix.”

  “You’re right.” Eve set her empty bowl aside, pressed a hand to her stomach. “I have to go throw up now.”

  “Okay. I’m next, so let me know when you’re done.”

  As Eve stumbled to her feet, staggered out of the room, Mavis simply curled up, tucked one of the satin throws under her head, and went blissfully to sleep.

  Eve washed her face, studied her pale, sloppy-eyed reflection in the mirror. She looked soft, she thought. Soft, a little stupid, and more than drunk. With some regret, she raided Mavis’s supply of Sober-Up. After brief consideration, she decided to take only one. She wasn’t quite ready to give up the buzz a full dose would dull.

  When she found Mavis asleep on the floor, like a doll among a forest of colorful toys, she grinned. “What would I do without you?”

  She leaned down, gave Mavis’s shoulder a little shake. When she got a sexy little purr as a response, she decided to forgo her plan to help Mavis to bed. Instead, she plucked one of the many fabric throws off the sofa, tucked it around her sleeping friend.

  And straightening again, had her head spin.

  “Yep, still half drunk. Good enough.”

  She left the apartment, rolling her shoulders like a boxer prepping for a bout. She would deal with Roarke all right, she thought. She was more than ready for it.

  The fresh air hit her, knocked her back. She stood a moment, breathing slowly, then walked, in mostly a straight line, to her car. She had wit enough to program it to auto and let it take her home.

  She was going to straighten this out, she told herself. Yes, she was. And if she had to get Roarke into bed to do it, well . . . the sacrifices she had to make.

  That made her snort with laughter and settle back to enjoy the ride.

  New York looked so cheerful, she decided. The glide-carts were doing brisk business, as the pedestrian traffic was thick. The street thieves, she thought with mild affection, were having a field day plucking the tourists and the unwary.

  Greasy smoke stinking of overcooked soy dogs and rehydrated onion bits plumed in front of her car. Two street LCs were in a shoving match on the corner of Sixth and Sixty-second while a hopeful john cheered them on. One Rapid Cab tried a sneak maneuver around another, missed, and scraped fenders. The two drivers were out of the cars like jacks from the box, squaring off with fists.

  God. She loved New York.

  She watched a flock of the head-shaven Pure Sect, well out of their bailiwick, herd each other uptown. An ad blimp, past curfew, glided overhead and touted the delights of a package trip to Vegas II. Four days, three nights, round-trip and deluxe accommodations for two, all for the low-low-low price of twelve thousand and eighty-five.

  What a deal.

  The blimp chugged its way downtown as she continued up.

  The pedestrian traffic thinned out and trimmed up. The glide-carts took on a sheen.

  Welcome to Roarke’s world, she thought, amused at herself.

  As she approached the gates, a figure stepped into the path of her vehicle. Eve let out a yelp, and fortunately, the programming accessed the obstruction and hit the brakes. Mild annoyance turned to disgust when Webster stepped out of the shadows.

  She rolled down her window, glared at him. “You got a death wish? This is a city vehicle, and I was on auto.”

  “Good thing, as you look a little impaired.” Sleepy, he thought. Sleepy, smashed, and sexy. “Night on the town?”

  “Bite me, Webster. What do you want?”

  “I need to talk to you.” He glanced at the gates. “It’s not easy getting into this place. How about a lift?”

  “I don’t want you in my house.”

  The engaging smile he’d fixed on his face hardened. “Ten minutes, Dallas. I promise not to steal the silver.”

  “I have an office at Central. Make an appointment.”

  “If it wasn’t important, do you think I’d be hanging out in front of your house waiting to give you a chance to bust my balls?”

  She wished she didn’t see the logic of that. Wished she wasn’t sober enough to resist the urge to roll the window up and leave him outside the gates. She jerked a thumb toward the passenger seat. While he walked around the car to get in, it occurred to her that for the last few hours, m
urder hadn’t entered her head.

  “It better be important, Webster. If you’re hosing me, I’m going to do a lot more than bust your balls.”

  She completed the turn toward the gates. Her vehicle ID was scanned, and they opened silently.

  “Pretty heavy security for a residence,” he commented.

  She didn’t nibble at that particular bait, but she wished she’d gone for both Sober-Ups so her mind would be absolutely clear.

  She left the car at the end of the drive, led the way up the steps. He was doing his best not to gape at the house but didn’t manage to swallow the low whistle when she opened the front door.

  “I’ve got a meeting,” she said, even as Summerset stepped into view and opened his mouth.

  With her hands jammed in her pockets, she headed upstairs. Webster gave up, stared down at the elegant butler, scanned what he could see of the lower floor. “Some place. I’m trying to picture you in this palace. You never struck me as the princess type.”

  But when he stepped into her office, one Roarke had modeled to reflect her previous apartment, he nodded. “This is more like it. Streamlined and practical.”

  “Now that I have your approval, spill it. I’ve got work to do.”

  “You had time to go out and knock a few back tonight.”

  She angled her head, folded her arms. “Are you under the impression you have any say in what I do with my time, on or off the job?”

  “Just an observation.” He prowled the room, picking up, setting back, items at random, then nearly jolted when he saw the enormous cat curled up in his sleep chair and watching him out of narrowed bicolored eyes.

  “Palace guard?”

  “Damn right. One word from me, and he’ll claw your eyes out and eat your tongue. Don’t make me set him off.”

  He laughed, ordered himself to relax. “Got any coffee?”

  “Yes.” She stood just where she was.

  He laughed again, a short, resigned sound. “I was going to say you used to be friendlier, but you weren’t. Something about that mean streak of yours always did it for me. I must be sick.”

  “Get to the point, or get out.”

  He nodded, yet still he stalled, walking to her window, staring out. “Your current avenues of investigation are infringing on an IAB movement.”