“Yes, it is. Donna?”
“Officer Nast.”
“I’m sorry, Officer. May I speak to Tex? Is he there?”
“Is this your damsel in distress call of the day?” she demanded.
“I’m sorry to interrupt your evening, but this is important. I need to speak to him. It has to do with his case.”
“He’s off duty,” she said and hung up.
I immediately called back. “Officer Nast, I’m serious. I need to speak to him.”
“Like I said, he’s off duty.”
“It’s important.”
“If you need help, call the station.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “You’re different, Madison, and I know how his mind works. Different to him is good. He sees you in those polyester outfits and thinks you’re sexy. And I’ve seen how you two relate to each other.”
“Then you know we spend more time arguing than agreeing on anything.”
“To a cop, that’s foreplay.”
I took a quick, sharp breath and exhaled it in a huff. Officer Nasty was earning her nickname tonight.
“If you talk to Tex, let him know I’m on the verge of withholding evidence in his case.” I hung up the phone and stuck my tongue out at it.
I called Tex’s personal cell phone, and the call went to voicemail. I left a brief message. “I have something at my apartment I think you’ll want to see. Come over when you get the message. I’ll wait up.”
As I waited for Tex’s return call or possible arrival, I sorted the contents of the wallet into piles: business cards, credit cards, membership cards, and condoms. In truth, the wallet contained only one condom, but it warranted its own pile by sheer nature of “one of these things is not like the other.”
I stacked the Doris Day memorabilia back into the box with the wallet at the bottom and poured a glass of wine. I dozed off in the armchair twice, until it seemed as though Tex would not be returning my call. After a brief shower, I searched the closet for a clean pair of pajamas.
I pulled a yellow chiffon nightgown out from a stack of peignoir sets that had been professionally laundered last year and dove into the sheer layers. Dozens of pleats heat-set in the polyester fabric cascaded over my trim body, like being inside a ray of sunlight. I blew kisses to Rocky, who stood up and followed me to the bed. Within minutes we were asleep.
An unfamiliar sound woke me hours later. An eerie glow from the parking lot behind the building illuminated the room through my curtains. My heart pounded like a drummer keeping time in a parade, but I lay still, listening for sounds of movement. A stillness hung in the air, until I heard it again. A single tap on my window.
My unit was on the second floor, facing the parking lot. Unless Spiderman had decided to pay me a visit, I doubted anyone was directly outside. I pushed the covers back and approached the window, peering between the floor-to-ceiling curtain panels. Tex stood in front of his Jeep. He wore a camel blazer over a white T-shirt and jeans and held a megawatt flashlight in one hand. He shined the light directly at me, and I backed away from the window. The light went out.
I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was close to three thirty. In my experience, nothing good happens at three thirty in the morning. I slid the window open and hissed through the screen.
“What are you doing here?”
“Unlock the back door. We need to talk.”
“Can’t this wait until the morning?”
“No.”
“Fine.”
I belted myself into a plush white terrycloth robe, slipped into matching slippers, and went downstairs. I turned the knob on the back door and pulled it open. One of my neighbors cracked their front door in the hall behind me, but no one appeared.
“Come in if you’re coming in,” I said in a low voice. I headed up the stairs to my apartment, and he followed.
“If anybody should ask, I was never here,” he said once we were inside.
I shook my head. “My neighbors are going to think I made a booty call.”
“It’s a duty call, not a booty call. You said you have evidence?”
My eyes bugged out. “I called you hours ago! Why didn’t you call me back?”
“I did. Your phone’s off.”
I looked around the apartment for my phone and located it on the corner of the Danish modern desk. The screen was black. I powered it on, the battery blinked twice, and it went black again. I walked away from Tex to the kitchen and plugged it in to the power cord. When I turned around, he was staring at the walls of the living room.
“If you couldn’t respond in a reasonable amount of time, this should have waited until morning,” I said.
“I had to get out of the house.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“I knew it would be safe here.”
“Safe from what?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” He reached down and picked up one of the red kitten heeled shoes I’d worn earlier that day. It dangled there, rocking back and forth. They were a far cry from the stilettos I’d seen Officer Nast wear when she wasn’t in uniform. I couldn’t picture her and Tex as a couple. It seemed by his presence that he was having a hard time with the concept too.
“Tex, when people are in a relationship, they’re supposed to want to spend time together. So why are you here?”
“I want to see this evidence,” he said, and set the shoe on the table.
I moved back to the living room and waved a hand toward the box on the floor. “Have at it.”
“What is it?”
“It’s what Joanie Higa called me about today. Most people would call it junk. Somebody dropped it off at her store with my name on it. Mostly Doris Day memorabilia. Pictures, magazines, sheet music. A couple of lobby cards.”
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d agree with Donna that you made up an excuse to get me over to your apartment.”
“It’s a quarter to four in the morning. I was asleep. I didn’t ask for you to come over here and interrupt my sleep, and I don’t need to make up excuses to get you or any man to my apartment. Lately, it’s been like Grand Central Station around here.”
“Nice rant. Are you finished?” he asked.
I was vaguely aware that I wasn’t making any sense, but I didn’t care. “I’m tired and I want to go back to bed. Just take the box and leave. I hope poison ivy is contagious via cardboard and you get a rash all over your arms.”
“What did you say?” he said, his head snapping up to look at me. His blue eyes drilled into me, and I tugged at the collar of my robe to make sure my privates were concealed.
I waved my hand toward the rubber gloves on the carpet next to the lobby card from Midnight Lace.
“Poison ivy. That’s the reason for the gloves. The person who dropped the box off at the thrift store was covered in it, and I don’t think I’d mind you catching it as punishment for coming here at this hour.”
He stared at me.
“Take the box, don’t take the box. If you insist on going through the contents here, please be quiet. And if all of this is an elaborate ruse to avoid your girlfriend, you can crash on my sofa. I don’t care anymore. I just want to go back to sleep.”
I stormed into the bedroom and shut the door behind me. I heard the front door open and close, heard footsteps on the stairs, and heard the back door to the building click into place.
I unbelted my robe and climbed between the covers. Rocky was fast asleep on the left-hand side of the mattress so I fit myself on the right and pulled the puffy comforter up to my chin. The apartment was quiet again. I rolled away from the window and closed my eyes, returning to sleep.
The rays from the sun filtering through my curtains woke me hours later. Rocky was upside down, paws in the air. I rubbed at his tummy.
My stomach growled, and I realized neither Rocky nor I had eaten anything since yesterday morning. I pushed the covers back and got out of bed. Natural light flooded the living room. I padded in bare feet into the carpeted hallway before reaching the living room with the new hardwood floors.
Sunlight bounced off the yellow walls of the living room ahead of me. I wondered if I would ever become accustomed to the changes Brad had made to the room. As perfect as it had seemed initially, it felt unfamiliar now, something I didn’t like feeling in my own apartment. The wood floors were cold, and I scampered through the room with my head down, not wanting to spend time thinking about it.
When I reached the kitchen, I lifted Rocky’s water bowl from the floor, refilled it with fresh water from the tap, and replaced it next to his food bowl. I started a pot of coffee and leaned against the counter, waiting for it to brew.
As I waited, I thought about Tex’s visit to my apartment in the middle of the night. There had been more to his arrival than avoiding Officer Nasty. He was interested in what I knew. But we hadn’t gotten far enough for me to tell him what I found inside the box. He left before I ever told him about the wallet.
The clock on the microwave said six fifteen. I didn’t know if Tex had returned to his apartment last night or not, but I had a better chance of reaching him now than if I waited. I picked up the now fully-charged phone and dialed his number. I listened to the rings. One. Two. Three—
And then I heard the ring in stereo, from the receiver I held to my left ear and from my living room.
If Tex had dropped his phone at my apartment, there were going to be issues, not the least of which was explaining to his surprisingly jealous girlfriend how it had come to be at my apartment in the first place. I rounded the corner from the kitchen and stopped short. Returning Tex’s cell phone dropped a few notches down the priority list because his cell phone wasn’t the only thing at my apartment.
Tex himself was stretched out on my sofa.
He lay on his back with his head turned toward the center of the room. His dark blond hair stood out in spikes against the pillow. I could make out his white T-shirt and the faded denim of his jeans under the loose weave of the white afghan that covered his midsection. A pair of boots sat next to the sofa, one upright, the other on its side. Rocky’s head was inside the tipped one, his tail whipping from side to side. Tex looked at me, sleepy-eyed. He closed his eyes and then opened them again, blinking twice.
“Where did you come from?” I demanded.
“You said I could crash on your sofa.” He stretched his arms over his head, then sat up and spun himself to a sitting position. “Damn, Night, is that what you always wear to bed?”
I looked down at the sheer yellow peignoir gown, all fluffy layers of pleats. I wasn’t supposed to have to worry about decency in my own apartment, alone, sharing a bed with a Shih Tzu.
I stormed away from him to the bathroom and pulled my robe from the back of the door. I glanced at my reflection, started to leave, but turned back to the sink and put a few drops into my bloodshot eyes.
When I returned to the room, Tex held two cups of coffee. Rocky was draped over his foot swatting at the frayed edge of his jeans.
“I want to know why you’re here,” I said.
“You extended an invitation. I didn’t know how long I’d have to wait to find you in that generous of a mood again.”
“But you left! I heard you!”
“I’m going to have to teach you a thing or two about what you hear and what you think you hear. You heard your front door open and the back door shut. You might have even heard my car door. You didn’t hear me pick up your keys and let myself back in. You never rescinded the offer, so I figured it was fine.”
He raked his fingers through his bed head, but it fell forward against his forehead as soon as he let go.
“It is definitely not fine.”
“You’re kind of cranky for a morning person,” he said.
“Don’t try to make this about me. I want some answers.”
He drank a good amount of coffee before answering. “You obviously are not a fan of being woken up in the middle of the night, but, after you mentioned the poison ivy, I wasn’t about to leave.”
“Why? What does the poison ivy have to do with anything?”
“For starters, our victim was covered with it.”
ELEVEN
“You still don’t know his identity?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
“I think I can help you with that.”
I made a great show of pulling on the gloves and rooted into the corner of the box for the wallet. At first, I flipped it open and held the driver’s license for Tex to see. He leaned forward and made a grab for it, but I pulled it away, out of reach. Without speaking, I held up a gloved finger in a just-a-minute gesture. Using my thumbs to hold the billfold open, I waved the wallet closer to Tex’s face to make sure he saw the five thousand dollar bill.
“Well? What do you think?” I asked.
“That’s our vic.”
“Don’t you think it’s suspicious that he has a five thousand dollar bill in his wallet?” I asked. “These bills are supposed to be rare, and they’re springing up all over town like blue bonnets. It’s like someone found a five thousand dollar bill printing press in their basement.”
“Sit down, Night. Tell me everything you know. Tell me what you can about that box.”
I lowered myself into the chair opposite Tex and adjusted the hem of the robe to cover my thighs. When I looked up, Tex was staring at my face, not my legs. His expression wasn’t playful anymore.
“You heard Joanie’s message. She runs a thrift store out by Lemmon and Inwood. When I got to her store, she brought this box out of the back. Apparently some guy covered in poison ivy dropped it off along with a bunch of other boxes. This one had my name on it. I guess she peeked inside, saw the Doris Day stuff, and figured somebody knew I was a fan.”
His eyebrow twitched, and I shrugged. “So I’m predictable. Anyway, when I went to her store, I saw a framed James Madison on the wall behind the register. I asked her about it, and she said the same guy dropped off both things.”
“Where is it?”
I held up a hand. “I’ll get to that in a second. She told me to wear rubber gloves before handling the box, said the guy was covered in poison ivy. She felt so bad she gave him a bottle of Calamine lotion. She carried the box to the stockroom and probably called me right away. I don’t think she even really went through the rest of the box.”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“There must be some kind of explanation that does make sense, but you’re not seeing it.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. We have a victim covered in poison ivy. The guy who dropped off this box was covered in poison ivy. The contents of this box connect those two people. If we could find the guy who dropped this off, we’d have enough to bring him in for a nice long conversation in an interrogation room. So why would this guy risk it? Why not get lost and lay low until the rash is out of his system?”
“That takes more than a day or two. Poison ivy lasts about two weeks.”
“You sound like you know from experience.”
“Baseball camp, seventh grade. The whole team was down for the count. Well, except for the catcher. She was so suited up nothing could get to her.”
“Baseball camp.” Tex studied me for a second. “Every time I think I have you figured out, you throw me a curve.”
“Here’s what really doesn’t make sense. You have to come into contact with the oil from the plant to get the rash. So, what, he rubbed the box down with the oil? Which he would only do if he wanted someone else to get the rash. And since it has my name on it, did he want me to get the rash? Why?”
Tex shrugged. “By this
point, the rash would be mild enough it wouldn’t do much damage. Maybe take you out of commission for a few days. Give somebody a chance to take care of you. You know anybody who would want to do that? Maybe somebody who recently came back into your life?”
I glared at him. “You recently came back into my life. Does that make you a suspect?”
“C’mon, Night. You have any other theories?”
I stared at the box for a few seconds when it hit me. “What if the guy who dropped off the box wasn’t trying to protect Joanie from getting the rash as much as he was trying to protect whatever is in the box?”
“Saying the box is covered in poison ivy. That’s a pretty good way to make sure people don’t go snooping in your things.” He lifted the flap with his index finger. “Did you unpack the box?”
“Yes, but I wore the gloves the whole time.”
“So the guy who dropped off the box had everybody who touched it wear gloves. And inside the box is a wallet of the guy who was killed. You think—”
“That the whole point of the box was to get me the wallet?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to spend more time thinking about it, but with the wallet, at least we can figure out if it’s him. It’s a start. Thanks, Night.”
Being thanked came as a surprise. “You’re welcome.”
He looked around the apartment, taking in the changes. “This is the apartment makeover?”
“Yes.”
“I’m surprised. I have to say, it looks like you. Do you like it?”
“Not really.” I didn’t know why that mattered to Tex, but I could tell that it did. “I’m probably going to redo the whole thing when I get a little free time. Let me know if you have any ideas. I’m open to suggestion.”
As soon as I heard the words out loud, I braced myself for a sarcastic comment. None came.
Tex ruffled Rocky’s fur, then stood up. “Was there anything valuable in there? Any of the Doris Day stuff?”
“Nothing I can’t live without.”
“I’m sorry, but you can’t keep it.”
That Touch of Ink Page 8