That Touch of Ink

by Vallere, Diane

  Tex didn’t wait for my reply. He crossed the parking lot and met the officers gathering at the back door.

  I turned my back on them again and stared at the vacant lot in front of me. Soon enough, someone would need to take my statement, and they would easily find me when they did. Until then, I wanted no part of their investigation.

  Still shaken by the sounds of the scene behind me, I reached into my car and pulled the magazine out of my handbag. Under the collectible bill was the phone number. I took my phone out of my handbag and stared at the keypad. I closed my eyes. It didn’t matter that I’d tried to erase Brad from my memories. I might as well have tattooed his face on my thigh. He was that clear in my mind.

  I punched the buttons and listened to a ring and a half before I thought about Tex’s request that I make this call. Before I could analyze his motivation or question my willingness to comply, I heard Brad’s voice. I had hoped for a recording; I was not so lucky.

  “Brad?” I asked, even though I knew it was him. “It’s Madison.”

  “Maddy?” There was a pause. “I was hoping you’d have a change of heart.”

  I closed my eyes and took a ragged breath.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I’m—no. I’m not okay.” My voice quivered, and I fought to keep it calm. I was fairly certain I was unsuccessful. I looked at the house. Uniformed officers stood at varying degrees of proximity to the window. A few others were off to the side by my tire tracks.

  Tex rounded the building with his hands on his hips. A female officer was behind him. Tex said something to her, and she came over to me and picked up the dog. Tex’s eyes connected with mine. I looked away.

  “You surprised me this afternoon,” I said to Brad. “How long have you been in Dallas?” I asked.

  “A few days.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “Mads, can we meet somewhere? There’s so much I want to say to you, and I’d rather do it in person. Dinner? Can I take you to dinner?”

  “Not Italian,” I said, remembering the smell of marinara.

  “I saw a Polynesian place by the highway when I drove in. Trader Josh’s? Do you know where that is?”

  “Yes. When?”

  “Half an hour?”

  “Fine. I might be a little late, but I’ll be there.”

  We said goodbye, and I hung up quickly, preventing him from saying anything else. I had surprised myself by asking to see him, but something about tripping over a body had affected me. Brad wanted to talk to me, and I didn’t want to be alone. Something about Tex’s cold request that I make this phone call affected me too. I was an inconvenience to his crime scene. He was getting me out of the way. He was a cop, and he was there to do cop things.

  Watching Tex work, I was reminded that his mind was not limited to only the most basic of male triggers. He was alert, constantly processing his surroundings, driven by a problem-solving obsession that made him an excellent detective. If I had been an anomaly in his landscape of women, he was the same to me. We were different but alike. An unanswered what-if hung between us, like a helium balloon at a party. But eventually the what-if lost its buoyancy and slowly descended, like a relic of a party that never happened.

  “Yo, Night!” called Tex. He walked toward me. I stood and met him halfway.

  “Did you make your phone call?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How’d it go?”

  I didn’t know how to tell Tex how I felt about seeing Brad again. I was barely able to answer that to myself. Questions assaulted me. The kind of questions a single woman in her late forties shouldn’t have to answer.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” I waited for a couple of seconds. Tex didn’t move. “I’m seeing him tonight. We’re meeting at Trader Josh’s.”

  I looked past him to the edge of the property where the gravel parking spaces gave way to grass that had turned a bland shade of brown. When I looked back at Tex to gauge his reaction, I got nothing.

  A slight breeze swept past us, lifting the hair from his forehead. The door to my car knocked into the back of my legs and I fell forward. Tex put his hands out to catch me. I fell into his chest. His arms wrapped around my body as I pressed against him. Heat seared between our clothes. I pulled away and looked at his face. His pupils had dilated in the darkness, and his blue eyes went dark, smoky. He didn’t move right away, and, selfishly, neither did I.

  “You okay? He asked.

  “I’m fine.

  “Good.”

  “Fine.”

  I stepped back. He reached into the car and pulled out the towel, opened it up, and wrapped it around me. I pulled down the bottom of my sweater and looked up to find him staring at the gingham boat appliqué on the front of it. I took the ends of the towel from his hands and secured it around my waist to cover the stains on my pants and keep them from getting onto my car’s interior. Another cop approached us and Tex made a brief introduction. Before he left me to make my statement, he leaned in and whispered, “I’ve missed you, Night.”

  I didn’t remember driving back to the apartment. My mind was otherwise occupied and my internal auto-pilot got me to the building, through the back door, and into my apartment. Already I regretted making plans with Brad. I wanted to pick Rocky up from my neighbor’s apartment and cradle him all night, but I knew if I didn’t confront the issue, he’d show up on my doorstep a second time.

  There was a note lying just inside the front door. Madison, I took Rocky out to White Rock Lake. Can you pick him up tonight? Anytime after nine would be good. Thanks, Effie.

  Effie was a teenager who watched Rocky for me when he was a puppy. Now that he was trained, I knew I could leave him alone, but he’d traded his habit of knocking over lamps for chewing on shoes, and besides, Effie loved his company as much as he loved hers.

  The note was time-dated seven thirty. I checked the clock on the wall. It was twenty after eight.

  The first thing I did was take off the pink corduroys that were stained with marinara and blood. I balled them up, put them in a plastic grocery bag, knotted it shut, and set it by the front door. My left thigh held a six-inch-long scratch from the windowsill.

  I hopped in the shower, and then changed into a vintage peony-printed, full-skirted dress, draped a whisper-pink cardigan over my shoulders, and slid my feet into pale pink ballerina flats. Before I left, I took the envelope from inside Atomic Ranch out, wrote Attn: Night Company on the front of the envelope, and left a note about a new paint job on the back. I dropped the envelope into the secure metal rent drop-off box in the front of the building. At least it was out of my apartment.

  Brad was waiting for me by the bar inside the renovated Tiki restaurant. “I’m glad you called,” he said. He brushed my blonde hair away from my face. “You’re as beautiful as ever. Come here,” he said gently.

  He leaned forward and kissed me, and an electric shock snapped between us. I jerked away. I expected him to apologize for being forward. He didn’t.

  A thin gray-haired man in his sixties approached with two Mai Tais. He wore a Hawaiian shirt in shades of navy, orange, and yellow. A plastic nametag clipped to his collar had a piece of masking tape over it. Del had been written on it in black marker.

  Brad was startled by the waiter’s appearance. I took a glass and thanked him to cover for Brad’s odd behavior.

  “Don’t thank me, thank the gentleman who ordered for you.” He gestured to Brad and hovered by us for a moment. “We’re clearing a table for you now. It’ll just be a minute.”

  I thanked him again and took a sip of my drink.

  “I thought you had second thoughts,” Brad said.

  “I almost didn’t come,” I said. I didn’t know if I was going to tell him about the body at Paper Trail. I didn’t want t
o think about it, let alone talk about it. If anyone asked, I could make the argument that the only reason I showed up was because this was the one thing that had the potential to distract me.

  “So, Maddy, how are you? How have you been?”

  “Nobody calls me Maddy, Brad.”

  “I call you Maddy. Don’t you remember?”

  “I’ve tried to forget.”

  “I made a mistake. I’m sorry. I’m sorry a hundred times over.”

  “Come on, Brad, you can do better than that, can’t you?”

  He pulled the tortoiseshell frames from his face and polished the glass between the thin cashmere of his sweater. After putting them on, he focused on me.

  “If I were playing a game, I could. But this is for real, and I’ve missed you. More than I ever thought possible. Every single day I think about how I pushed you away, how I did it for your own safety. I’ve wondered if you knew that, or if you’d understand. Even when I took a job in Carmel, California, right after you left, I was still haunted by you. Didn’t help that the job was in Doris Day’s hotel. Hell, that’s probably why I took the job to begin with.”

  I tipped my head down and looked at my drink. Brad didn’t know that he had seen me while on that job in California. After getting out of the hospital, not sure where to go, I took a spontaneous getaway. The night he saw me, my hair had been stained to a temporary brown rinse and I’d worn a stranger’s clothes. It had been paralyzing. We’d been face-to-face and he hadn’t recognized me. That one fact had hurt as much as the break-up and the knee injury, and had been the tipping point between clinging to the emotional pain and shutting out the world and moving forward.

  By the time I left Carmel by-the-Sea, I knew I had to start over. And I did. But I always wondered, if I really had been so important to him, why hadn’t he recognized me when I was right in front of him? Was it me he really wanted, or the package: the vintage dresses, the poufy blond hair, the Doris Day-lookalike, fifties chick that seemed to fit so well with his hipster dude image?

  “There are things about me you don’t know, Maddy, things I wish weren’t true. But you, you’re pure. The blonde hair, the blue eyes, the way you look in those cute vintage dresses.”

  I cringed at how closely his words followed thoughts.

  “The way your hair smells and how perfectly we fit together when we dance. I miss it all. How you used to watch the Doris Day show when you couldn’t sleep. You know, after you vanished, I bought the entire series. I watched the episodes so many times I practically committed them to memory. It was the closest I could get to having you with me.”

  “But I wasn’t with you. Not after you lied to me.” I looked into my drink, swirling it around. The red plastic stirrer was stacked with pineapple cubes and a maraschino cherry. “I don’t know if I can forgive that, Brad. No matter what you feel, no matter what I felt, once.”

  “Give me a chance, honey, and I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to you. Every day, every night. I’ll be there. I’m on the straight and narrow from here on out. I won’t risk losing you again.”

  The waiter returned. “Mr. and Mrs. Turlington? Your table is ready.”

  “We’re not married,” I said with a little too much force.

  “Yet,” said Brad, behind me.

  Del smiled and asked us to follow him. We weaved through a couple of small tables, past the Moai, to a quiet spot in the back of the restaurant.

  “Brad, that drink hit me harder than I thought it would. I need some air.” My head was starting to swim. “I’ll be right back.”

  I eased my way past the bar, through the narrow front hallway, past the hostess desk, and out the front door. The darkness of the interior matched the darkness of the night. Cool air hit my face. I walked to a wooden bench and propped my palms on the back, closing my eyes, breathing in, breathing out. I needed to relax. I needed to chill.

  I opened my eyes, prepared to face whatever the night brought. Which was too bad, really, because as it turned out the night brought Tex, leaning against the back of my car, arms folded across his chest.

  FOUR

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “What do you think?” Tex smiled, softening the hard planes of his face and igniting the flirtatious glint in his eye. I hadn’t seen that look for several months, and considering the crime scene we’d been at earlier, I was surprised to see it now.

  “I think you’re checking up on me.”

  “Maybe I wanted to see how your date was going,” Tex said.

  “It’s not a date.”

  He scanned the fitted bodice of my dress. “Looks like a date dress,” he said.

  “I had to change. You saw the other outfit.” I’d put this dress on because it was the counter-opposite to the blood-stained corduroys: innocent, feminine, sweet. “It had Stanley Mann’s blood on it,” I finished.

  “Here’s the thing. We don’t think that was Stanley Mann. There was no wallet, no identification. We got a neighbor to come in and she said she didn’t recognize the guy.”

  “But who else would it be?” I asked.

  “That’s the hundred thousand dollar question.”

  I shivered for a moment as an unexpected cool breeze blew past us. Tex reached forward and adjusted the cardigan around my shoulders.

  “How’s the dog?”

  “Scared, but fine. One of the officers is going to look after him until we figure out what happened to his owner.”

  “Were there signs of a struggle? Any evidence that someone else was there?”

  “The marinara was still warm. Whatever happened over there happened right before you showed up.”

  I shivered again, but not because of the temperature.

  “Night, why would this Brad guy send you a collectible five thousand dollar bill?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’s really, really sorry for what he did to me and is trying to buy a lot of forgiveness.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Not even close.”

  We stared at each other for a couple of seconds. I didn’t offer anything else about the conversation Brad and I had in the back room of Pierot’s Studio when he first showed me the framed James Madison on the wall. I also didn’t mention the promise I’d made Brad.

  “I thought you’d like to know a little more about our victim,” Tex said.

  “Since when do you report in to me about your cases?”

  “He was shot,” he said, ignoring my question. “Five times.”

  “Sounds like someone didn’t like him.”

  “One new one. You might have seen that one. And four old bullet wounds. Healed, mostly. Scattered over his thigh. Can’t tell if they were from the same gun that killed him until I get a report from ballistics and that’s going to take some time. He probably walked with a limp. Sound familiar?”

  I misunderstood. “Tex, I have a torn ACL, not a series of gunshot wounds. Just because I occasionally walk with a limp doesn’t mean I’m a card-carrying member of the ‘injured below the waist’ club.”

  One of Tex’s eyebrows shot up for a second, and his eyes flicked to a place below my waist that was definitely not my knee. His gaze returned to my eyes. “He didn’t have any identification, so for now he’s a John Doe.”

  “But I talked to someone at Paper Trail not long before I got there. He said he was Stanley Mann. If the man I found wasn’t Stanley, then where is Stanley?”

  “We don’t know. There’s a chance you didn’t talk to Stanley Mann but someone using his name. Based on what we know, our vic might have attracted attention because of his injury. Somebody might remember him, help us figure out who he is. Once we have an identity, we can start working on why he was at Paper Trail. We’re putting out information to the public, trying to figure out if anybody
knows anything.”

  “No wallet?”

  “No wallet. No identification at all. Expensive suit, fancy shoes, Rolex. That’s about it.”

  “Why would someone take his wallet but not his Rolex? Especially if it was valuable?”

  Suddenly, Tex looked behind me. I turned around. Brad approached, walking casually.

  “Maddy, I was worried about you.”

  He slid his arm around my waist. His fingers rested on my hip, above the pleats on my dress. He and Tex stared at each other for a few seconds.

  Tex’s face went rigid. Until this moment, the only knowledge he had of Brad Turlington was from the strip of film we’d watched together at the theater. I didn’t want to make an introduction, but I wondered why neither of them were doing it for themselves.

  “I told you, I needed fresh air,” I said.

  I felt Tex’s eyes on me while I faced Brad. Brad tipped his head down and kissed my cheek. “You want to leave?”

  “I’ll be back inside in a second.”

  Tex uncrossed his arms and stood straight. “I need to be getting out of here anyway. You kids have fun tonight.”

  Without moving my head, my eyes bounced back and forth between the two of them. Brad’s hand dropped from my waist, and his fingers closed around my hand. He stepped toward the restaurant and gently pulled me with him. I took two steps and then pulled away, back toward Tex.

  He leaned close and whispered in my ear. “Call me tomorrow. I’d like to know your take on things.”

  I nodded, then returned to Brad’s side and went back into the restaurant.

  “Who was that?” Brad asked as we reseated ourselves at the table.

  “Did I forget to introduce you two? I’m sorry.”

  “Forget about it. I have to understand that you have a life here, a life that I wasn’t a part of. Is he one of your clients?”

  “Not exactly.” I stared at the windows that faced the parking lot, wondering about the real motivation behind Tex’s appearance. The only reason he knew where to find me was because I’d told him. Was he there to check out Brad?