With a sharp look, Eddy said, “You about done there? That wasn’t funny.”
I tried to compose myself and opened my mouth to speak, but the words that tumbled out weren’t the ones I’d meant to say. “JT’s been arrested.”
Eddy cocked her head and frowned like Dawg often did. I thought for the briefest moment she was going to ask me what in the world I’d been smoking. Instead she said, “You best tell me what is going on.”
I unloaded the whole mess on the poor woman, who sat through my recitation without so much as a question. She let me pour it all out.
When I finished, she said, “Well, that’s one hell of a note.”
My mind felt scrambled, bruised actually. My mouth ran off before my neurons had a chance to catch up. “Eddy, I can’t believe JT held out on me from the moment we got together. Now she’s a murderer. Well, a theoretical, could-be murderer,” I amended. I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees and dropped my head in my hands. “What a mess.”
“Shay, you stop right there.” Eddy’s voice dropped, low and deadly. “That girl no more killed someone than I suddenly became Olivia Benson from SVU. Or maybe Tina Turner would be a better comparison. JT had her reasons for not telling you. Anyway, the question is—what can we do to help her? We could bake her a cake with a file in it so she could saw her way out.”
“Eddy.” I said, and closed my eyes. At a base level I knew she was right about JT. My cop did everything by the book. Okay, maybe not everything, but most things. She sure as shit didn’t kill anyone. No way. That would be beyond her. Wouldn’t it? And even if she did kill this Krasski guy, so what? I thought the man deserved to die. But not by JT’s hand, if only because of the repercussions she’d have to live with.
But then, what did that say about me? About her? The inside of my head was doing the swirlies again.
I was under the assumption that long-term lovers shared deep shit. I’d always shied away from divulging my true feelings and deep, dark skeletons with those I hooked up with. Come to think of it, hook-ups was exactly what they were because I refused to let anyone in. I never bothered to analyze my psyche deep enough to root out the cause of my recalcitrance. A mind and the depths of the soul can be scary things.
But amazingly, things were different with JT long before I laid eyes on the badge in her hand when she’d come to question me about Coop and the death of his employer eleven months ago. Trust was hard for me to come by, but for whatever reason, she made me feel safe. Like it was okay to have imperfections, self-doubt, and a complex, sometimes shameful past. That confiding those issues would make life easier to bear. I had coughed up most of my inner demons, and I thought I was getting the same in return. But JT had hidden her greatest pain from me, and damn, that stung like hell.
I stared grumpily at Eddy.
“Easy, child. Come on now. I’m kidding. We can get her one of those lawyers, like those Meshbesher and Spence people who are always on the TV, interrupting my shows.”
With a great deal of effort, I managed to rein in my sparking emotions. “I think they’re personal injury attorneys, not defense lawyers. Tyrell said he’d talk to some people.”
“Well, whatever you want to call those shysters, make sure JT gets one—gets some, maybe more than one. What she needs is someone to figure out who did the deed. Killed Krasski the ass. That’ll take care of the situation.”
I shot her a look. She didn’t usually take liberties with people’s given names.
She said, “Dead man’s name was Krasski, right?”
I nodded.
“See, he’s got an ass in his name. K-R-A-S-S-K-I, get it?”
I rolled my eyes.
“So now we gotta find out who did the pickle stuffing and that’ll get JT off the hook. Tyrell had a file, you said.”
I could see where she was going with this, and I did not like it one bit. “Yes, he did, and it’s locked up tight at the police station.”
That troublemaking gleam appeared in Eddy’s eyes.
“Oh no,” I said. “No way. We are not going to steal Tyrell’s file.”
“It wouldn’t be stealing. All you’d have to do is just a little peek. I’m sure there’s a list of no-good scallywags in there who’d want to see Krasski swinging from the nearest flagpole. That’d be a start.”
Prior to Hill Street, Eddy had been on a Pirates of the Caribbean kick.
“Besides, we need to piece together why the whole Krasski thing got to JT so bad. I’m sure she’s seen lots of terrible stuff on the job, so why did this send her off the deep end? She’s usually a steady, even-keeled little gal.”
I wasn’t happy with the we in her sentence, and that little gal had about eight inches of height on Eddy.
She continued, “It was certainly something more than the fact the man was evil. She deals with evil all the time.” Eddy stretched and then recrossed her Winnie the Poohs. “You find out why that ass got to her and you’ll understand the reason she couldn’t tell you. And beyond that, why she became obsessed. Mark my words.”
My brain was pretty much melted as I drove to the house I shared with JT. It was a little after ten, and I was wiped.
I pulled into the attached double garage and killed the engine. JT’s two-story, redbrick colonial was originally owned by an aunt of hers. Somehow, JT managed to inherit the joint outright, which was fortunate since property taxes on a place overlooking Lake of the Isles were close to the same amount that a mortgage would run. Add utilities and upkeep to the equation, and JT wouldn’t be quitting her day job anytime soon. Too bad that aunt hadn’t left JT a nice trust fund to help out.
I shouldered open the truck door and exited. The two dogs clambered down onto the chipped concrete floor, and I slammed the door shut. It was past time for doggy din-din, and the mutts knew it. Dawg didn’t think I was moving fast enough, so he gave me a healthy nudge in the butt and woofed. Bogey added his two cents by drooling a long, stringy trail of saliva onto my right shoe. I was still working on accepting his horrifyingly excessive salivation.
Together, we headed for the door that led from the garage into the house. It opened directly into a short hall that we used as a mudroom.
Dawg and Bogey scrambled past me and bolted into the kitchen, their nails scrabbling noisily on the linoleum.
A bench sat on one side of the tile floor of the mudroom with footwear neatly lined up beneath it. When I lived in my apartment, I was used to kicking off my tennis shoes and tossing them helter-skelter out of the way. But since I’d moved in, JT had been gently working on me to take the time to be less of a slob, and I was getting better about it. Most of the time.
Tonight, however, was not one of my more well-behaved moments. I toed my sneakers off, and with a flick of my foot, first one, and then the other shoe bounced against the wall and tumbled to the floor beside the bench.
Five coat hooks lined the opposite wall waiting for the heavy jackets that spelled winter in Minnesota. Soon enough they’d have more than windbreakers and sweatshirts hanging from them.
The hallway opened into a spacious dining room. It was filled with JT’s aunt’s ancient, heavy, hand-me-down furniture. They might be antiques, but they were so well used that I didn’t think they’d be worth much more than family memories. The collection included an oblong table that probably weighed two tons and eight straight-back, walnut wood chairs. A matching gargantuan hutch filled with family glassware took up a big chunk of one wall, and a sliding patio door opened onto a nice porch that faced the backyard. I particularly liked the two-person rocking glider JT had tucked into the corner of the porch. We spent many evenings rocking and talking as the dogs exhausted themselves playing in the yard. I often wondered why JT’s aunt had decided to leave all this to her, but I hadn’t felt it necessary to be that nosy. Yet. Sometimes family politics worked in strange ways, and a grudge against one became the windfa
ll of another.
The hall ended at the bottom of the stairway to the second floor. The rest of the main floor was taken up with a laundry room, the kitchen and living room, and JT’s office.
I dumped my backpack next to the steps. The battered, broken rose JT bought me drooped from the zippered opening like an at-rest marionette. That’s how I felt: bent and bruised, although not quite yet broken.
I scored the mutts their food, which they devoured in record time. I hadn’t gotten anything to eat at the Renaissance Festival myself, and now, my stomach reminded me it was ready to rumble with a none-too-quiet grumble. I peeled a banana and smeared on Nutella, wolfing it down as I leaned against the sink.
Bogey wandered over and sat on his haunches facing me, one eye on the banana peel I’d tossed to the side of the sink. He’d eat just about anything—including plastic bags and tin foil—as long as it had any kind of food residue on it. He didn’t much care for details, but he almost always managed to prove his guilt either by barfing up bits and pieces or leaving some interesting (and highly disgusting) doggie doo with remnants that pointed at exactly who the serial offender was. Luckily, he’d had no lasting negative effects. So far.
Dawg was Bogey’s opposite. He never chowed on anything unless it was offered to him. I often wondered if his good behavior came from his horrible past life as a junkyard dog. Dawg had lived in daily fear of beatings at the hands of his jailer—I couldn’t stoop to calling that man an actual dog owner—who starved the poor mutt on top of it. Now the jackass was lounging behind bars for murder. The best part was that he was cooling his heels in the brig because Coop and I stuck our noses where they didn’t belong last fall while trying to prove Coop innocent of offing his bingo barge boss. The adventure was a success for the good guys all around. Well, except for Coop’s dead employer, but he wasn’t exactly a pillar of goodness anyway.
When I’d swallowed the last of the chocolate-hazelnut banana, I secured the banana peel in the garbage. Bogey huffed disgustedly at me, attempted to lick his chops (which just relegated more drool to the floor), and wandered off.
After wiping up after the mad salivator, I grabbed my backpack and stomped up the stairs. A hallway ran from one end of the house to the other and divided the space in two. Our amazingly spacious bedroom occupied one entire half of the floor, with two additional bedrooms situated on the other side of the hall. One room had become my office, and the other was used as a spare bedroom for overnight guests.
In my office, my mother’s antique desk and wooden office chair took center stage. The set had been carefully hauled from my tiny apartment above the Rabbit Hole. Buttercream yellow paint covered three walls, and the fourth was taken up by mostly empty built-in bookshelves. A couple of filing cabinets and a new, buckskin-colored leather loveseat filled the rest of the room.
I set the backpack on the floor and dropped heavily into the desk chair. It squeaked as I leaned back and closed my eyes.
Everything that happened after five o’clock today was a surreal blur. I still could not wrap my mind around exhibit A: I’d found a dead body in an outhouse and that body had been iced. Smoked. Murdered.
Or exhibit B: a cop who apparently hated JT had arrested her, dragged her away, and locked her up like a common criminal. My JT, the maker and keeper of justice and the American way.
Then there was exhibit C: Russell Krasski. A man who did dastardly things, including trafficking children, had beaten the system and walked after JT’d wigged out and whomped him. I could feel the depth of self-hatred JT must have harbored against herself—and must still. I shuddered in my chair. It must have been absolutely awful knowing you were the one who was responsible for putting that spineless bastard back on the street. Would I have done the same thing had I been in her shoes? Probably. I suppose it depended on whatever Krasski had said that set JT off. I didn’t lose my temper all that often, but when I did, it was a doozy. I really wondered what buttons he’d tweaked that pushed her into the deep end of the pool—wondered if she’d ever feel comfortable enough to tell me.
My day at the Ren Fest ran in Technicolor on the video screen of my mind. JT had been gone a lot longer than I’d expected fetching my pickle. I didn’t know exactly where she was or what she’d been doing during that time, but I was sure there was no way she shot anyone. Wasn’t I? Then I thought about the tangy wet spots on her shirt. The pickle chunks. Krasski had a pickle crammed down his throat … were the bits and pieces clinging to her shirt from that same pickle? I couldn’t blame JT if she had indeed plugged him then stuffed him, though it still ate at me that she hadn’t shared what had happened. She had to know by now that I would’ve completely understood.
Christ on a cracker, this was a lot for my poor gray matter to work through. I scrubbed a hand over my face and pressed on my temples. If JT had seen Krasski during her pickle quest, she theoretically could’ve followed him into the privies. The rowdy crowd watching the Tortuga Twins had been geared up, screaming at top decibel, and I wasn’t sure if a gunshot would have been heard through the ruckus.
With a wheezing sigh, I sat up and watched the screensaver swirl its colorful patterns on the computer. Coop still hadn’t returned my calls, momentarily distracting me from my morose thoughts. For the seventy-sixth time, I wondered what was going on at the protest up in Duluth. Open Rabbit Hole bills lay scattered off to one side of my desk, and my mind skipped from Coop to finances. Stress-induced ADD? I randomly picked up the electric bill and thought inanely that the total due seemed high. Costs just kept going up. And up. I tossed the bill on top of haphazardly stacked, color-coded Rabbit Hole file folders next to the computer.
My eyes caught a framed 5x7 photo of JT and me that I’d set close to my workspace, snapped a few months ago when we’d taken off for a long weekend in Duluth. We were on the pier at Canal Park, standing on the stairs leading to the lighthouse at the canal entrance, grinning like fools in love at the camera. JT was a step above me, her arms tightly wrapped around my shoulders. I loved that picture. It froze in time a moment of new love in carefree abandon. We needed to find that abandon again very soon.
I reached out a trembling finger and traced JT’s face. Her long hair was pulled up in a ponytail, and wisps floated around her face in the breeze. Sunglasses rested on the top of her head. She was hot, she was beautiful, and somehow, she was all mine.
My throat constricted. I wished with every fiber of my being that she were home, safe and sound, in my arms instead of banging her head against the bars of a jail cell. Alone. Ugh.
I pulled the backpack onto my lap and gently slid the waxed flower from the bag. The colorful head was somehow still mostly intact, barely attached to the stem. I chucked the stem, hauled myself out of the chair, and gingerly set the head on an empty shelf. Better some than none.
The house was unnaturally quiet and depressing without JT. My jaws popped in a huge yawn. I desperately needed to sleep. Whether or not it would come was another question.
I descended the staircase to turn out the lights on the main floor.
Dawg was curled up on one corner of the couch, his head propped on the arm. At the sound of my footsteps, he hopped off and followed me as I extinguished the lights in the dining room and entered the kitchen to do the same. He licked his lips and gazed longingly from me to his bowl and back again. His entire upper lip was snagged on his lower teeth, giving him the most pathetic, irresistible face ever. However, tonight even that wasn’t working.
“Sorry buddy, that’s it. You don’t want to be up all night with indigestion, do you?”
He whined and put an even more woeful look on his squashed face. I gave him a vigorous cheek rub that flapped his lips up and down.
Then I turned my attention to Bogey, who was sprawled out on the kitchen floor. I stroked the soft fur between his eyes and he gave me a slow, deep sigh. He peered up at me with big brown eyes, and the loose skin on his forehead c
rinkled up. I patted the frown down, and he sighed again.
Life was sure easier when you only required some decent food, a nice yard to play and poop in, and lots of unconditional love.
Sleep, unsurprisingly, was hard to find. Time and again I jerked awake after groping for JT’s solid warmth and finding nothing but cool sheets.
I rolled over yet again and stared at the glowing red numbers on the clock radio. 7:15. Not the way I liked to start my Sunday mornings. With a frustrated sigh, I sat up and snapped the bedside light on, illuminating the room. When I moved in, we’d redecorated the bedroom to make it feel a little more like mine as well as JT’s. The walls sported a light orange color that at first I thought would be disconcerting, but now I actually kind of liked it.
A couple pictures of Coop, Eddy, and the rest of the café gang graced the walls, along with a few shots of JT’s folks. Above our bed was a headboard-sized painting done by Alex Rodriguez, a local artist pal of mine. She’d given it to JT and me when we’d finally decided to live in sin together. It was an abstract desert scene, done in both muted and vibrant desert colors. I had to admit it went well with the orange walls.
I threw off the covers and stood, the beige-speckled loop and pile carpet soft under my bare feet. I padded into the large bathroom and flicked the light. Three bulbs at the top of the medicine cabinet popped on, making me squint. I was headed toward the shower when I caught sight of myself in the mirror. What a case of bed head! My dark hair was flattened on one side and shoved up in tufts elsewhere. A line ran down the left side of my cheek where I’d laid too long on a fold in the pillowcase. Haunted, bloodshot eyes stared back at me. I turned quickly for the comfort of a hot shower, which did little to clear the fog in my head.
I rolled through the motions of dressing myself, pulling on black jeans and a semi-clean purple First Avenue T-shirt I’d tossed across the back of a chair earlier in the week. Fortunately, I didn’t have to work at the Hole on this dreary, misty morning. I was so distracted I’d probably give hot chocolate for coffee orders and serve up whipped cream instead of tapioca pudding.
Shay O'Hanlon Caper 03 - Pickle in the Middle Murder Page 4