Uncorked

by Lois Greiman

  He laughed. And that was another thing that made him über likable. He had a deep, rich belly laugh that would better suit a man with a beard and a reindeer sleigh. It was the kind of laugh that made you want to sing along. “I’m not offended.”

  “Thank you. I really am sorry.”

  He shrugged. His shoulders were moderate-sized and covered by a well-fitted polo shirt that revealed just enough golden skin at the V of his neck. “I think you’ll agree that I have bigger fish to fry. Like the fact that I’m certifiably insane.”

  “You’re not insane,” I assured him. He was, however, somewhat troubled. Apparently it kind of messes with your head when your parents give you up for adoption and keep your two siblings. Personally, I had often fantasized about being part of that scenario. Growing up in someone else’s dysfunction would have probably been therapeutic for me. But maybe Phillip was made of more sensitive stuff. He’d always known he was adopted, but he’d only learned about the other two children seven months ago. Five days later, he’d shown up at my office with a box of Crispy Creams in one hand and a gun in the other. He’d been showing up every Wednesday at four o’clock sharp ever since.

  “What am I, then?” he asked. There was laughter in his voice, but a sober backdrop lit his pretty, heavy-lashed eyes.

  “Sounds like you’re in love,” I said.

  He gave me an exaggerated look that suggested both surprise and reproach. “I don’t believe in love.”

  I raised my brows. “You don’t believe it exists or—”

  “I think it’s a euphemism for lust.”

  “Really? Then how do you explain couples who stay together for sixty plus years?”

  “Dementia?”

  I didn’t laugh out loud. It didn’t seem like it was my job to encourage such talk, but I did smile a little. “What about your mother?”

  I watched his reaction. He was quite an accomplished actor and could almost hide it, but I saw his jaw tighten just the slightest amount. “Obviously she wasn’t a believer either,” he said.

  I let the words lie undisturbed for a moment, then, “I meant your adoptive mother.”

  “Oh.” There was a shitload of complexity in that one word, an intriguing blend of gratitude, guilt and confusion. His shoulders slumped, and his expression softened.

  “Do you think she believes in love?” According to Phillip, he’d been an undersized asthmatic with an over-sized attitude when Lisa Murray had taken him in.

  “She doesn’t count,” he said.

  “Because…”

  “She also believes in the tooth fairy.”

  “Phillip—”

  “She told me there was a tooth fairy.” He shrugged and grinned. That grin had probably gotten him out of more trouble than most people get into.

  The man was too charming for his own good. I kept a somber expression. “She also told you that she’d love you whether you were an ax murderer or an actor.”

  His wince was almost imperceptible, which, strangely, seemed to make it more powerful. “Do you think I made the wrong choice?” he asked.

  “The point is,” I said, “she loves you.”

  “Well, that’s because she’s…” He paused. Irreverent and sharp-witted as he was, he couldn’t manage to belittle his mother’s enduring adoration. “Okay, maybe love exists, but only as it pertains to a mother and child.”

  I stared at him, using my wise face. My smart-ass face was tired.

  “And…” He opened his hands, palms up, as he worked his way carefully through the quagmire. “Maybe it doesn’t have to be a biological bond.”

  I nodded like an ancient sage. “Okay, if love exists and it doesn’t have to be biological, doesn’t it seem probable that it can also exist between two adults?”

  He narrowed his eyes and seemed to be ruminating, then said with absolute certainty, “Nope.”

  “Really?”

  “Think about it.” He leaned forward, animated and earnest. “How many marriages break up?”

  “Just because they break up doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t care about each other.”

  “So they can be in love and still want to kill each other?”

  I actually thought that was feasible, but I also thought he was trying to hijack the conversation. “I think they can have considerable differences and still have a strong emotional bond.”

  “In other words, they can want the other person’s head on a spit.” Phillip was currently a plebe in a miniseries set in ancient Rome, and sometimes the setting colored his language. “Well, hell, if that’s the case, I’ve been in love a half dozen times.”

  “Okay.” I decided to work from where we were. “So are you in love now?”

  “I don’t think so. I haven’t considered killing Greg once yet.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  He put the pads of his fingers together and stared into the distance. “He’s oddly fond of the combustible engine.”

  “And you still speak to him? That must tell us something.” Phillip didn’t own a car. In fact, he was quite an outspoken proponent for public transportation, which, actually, was one of L.A.’s better jokes on humanity. Citizens of the greater Los Angeles area have been known to drive from their garages to their mailboxes just to get the free coupons that doomed rainforests from Brazil to Alberta. But Americans’ penchant for vehicular overuse was only one of Phillip’s causes. Institutions such as the Humane Society and Greenpeace considered him a demigod.

  “Well…” He shrugged. “He’s got a really nice head of hair.”

  “Hair?”

  He grinned a little. “That might be code for ass.”

  “How about his personality?”

  He canted his head. “His what?”

  I gave him a look.

  He sighed. “The man’s a Neanderthal. He lives in a cave.”

  “Literally?”

  He returned my look. “No. But if there were any unspoken-for caverns in L.A., I’m sure he’d take up residence. His apartment’s a mess.”

  “And that bothers you?”

  He shrugged. “Not as much as his accent. It sounds like he just escaped from the Hazard County demolition derby.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He dresses like a redneck time traveler. Pearl snaps on his shirts and everything.”

  “Sounds like a match made in heaven.”

  “Did I tell you about his hair?”

  “So you’re just seeing him because he’s attractive.” See how I tone down my own redneck roots when I’m in professional mode? Yee-haw.

  “Well…” He shrugged. “That and his dogs.”

  “He has dogs?”

  “A couple,” he said, but his tone almost sounded defensive.

  “Two dogs is a lot of responsibility,” I said, thinking of Harlequin. But maybe a Great Dane counted as one hundred and two dogs.

  “Actually there are six of them.”

  “Six.” That was a lot of dogs.

  He looked as if he rather wished he hadn’t started down this road. “Six greyhounds.”

  “Oh?” Now we were getting somewhere, I thought, but I kept my tone level. I can be sneaky if I want to. “Does he race them?”

  He stared at me for several seconds, mouth tilted slightly as he contemplated my question. “You know he doesn’t race them,” he said finally.

  I raised my hands, palms up. “He’s a messy Southerner with no positive attributes other than the physical. I naturally assumed…” I let my voice trail off.

  He glanced out the window, hands tense on the arms of the chair, before he turned back. “He fosters them.”

  “Oh? From the Grey Save organization?”

  “Maybe.” He was being evasive. That meant I had touched a nerve. Go, me.

  “I’ve heard good things,” I said, keeping my voice level.

  He shrugged. “It doesn’t mean he should be canonized or anything.”

  “Six big foster dogs in one apartment.”
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  “It’s a two-bedroom.”

  I almost laughed out loud, but that would have been unprofessional. “Maybe just listed as a lesser saint, then.”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “But you’re way off-base. I don’t have a thing for him because of his sensitive soul.”

  “Okay.”

  He scowled. Clearly I had not sold the “okay.”

  “Love is just a figment of Hollywood’s overdeveloped—”

  “McMullen!”

  I snapped my attention to the left. Lieutenant Jack Rivera stood there, right hand on the doorknob, left on the jamb. A half dozen unexpected expletives tried to escape my mouth, but I held them at bay like a real live grownup. “I’m sorry," I said, and gave him the benefit of a prissy smile. “But you’ll have to wait for an appointment like all my other clients.”

  “We need to talk,” he growled.

  I upped the wattage of my smile. “I’m sure your returning psychosis seems particularly disturbing, Lieutenant. But you’ll have to speak to my secretary about my next available—”

  “Listen—” he snarled, but Shirley, my super-secretary, interrupted him.

  “I’m sorry, Ms McMullen.” She spoke from the hallway, sounding professional and harried and more than a little pissed. “I told him you were with someone.”

  Rivera’s gaze, dark and hard and brooding, snapped to Phillip’s. “I need to talk to her,” he said.

  Phillip raised a brow, first at Rivera then at me. For a petite, self-proclaimed pacifistic, he seemed pretty unfazed.

  “LAPD, lieutenant,” Rivera said, and flipped open his badge. I was impressed by his self-control. With Rivera, the flashing of the badge generally takes place before the salutations.

  “Actor’s Guild, plebe,” Phillip countered.

  “Listen…” Rivera said, and stepped into the room. He was looking pretty caveman himself by the time I stood up and leapt into the fray.

  “Surely this can wait until after Mr. Murray—” I began, but Rivera interrupted me.

  “No!” he said. “It can’t.”

  Phillip stood, too, but he kept his gaze on Rivera though he spoke to me. “I’m friends with Chief Haskell,” he said. “Do you want me to give him a call?”

  I snapped my gaze to his. Turns out little Phillip was no slacker in the balls department. “No. Thank you, Phillip. I’m very sorry for the interruption, but do you mind giving us a minute?”

  He stared at me for a second, eyes asking a dozen questions at once. “No,” he said finally, seeming to find answers I wasn’t sure I had provided. “Of course not. I’ll be outside if you need me.”

  “Thank you.” I tried to keep my professional tone, but the surprises were coming at me rough and ready: Phillip was kind of a champion. Rivera was kind of a prick. Some things were more surprising than others.

  A moment later, the room was empty except for Rivera and myself. I stood beside my desk, pissed and stiff.

  “Perhaps you weren’t aware that this is actually my place of business,” I said.

  “Listen—” he began, but by then I had worked up a pretty good head of steam.

  “Perhaps you didn’t realize that this is actually my chosen career and that that”—I pointed toward the reception area, to where Phillip had just retreated and from which my front bell chimed—“is my client.”

  Rivera’s jaw ticked, but he didn’t glance toward the entrance. Instead, he kept his gaze as steady as a wolf’s on my face. “What did you do after I left your house last night?” His voice was little more than a growl.

  Surprise took me by surprise, but I didn’t let it show on my face. “It’s none of your business what I do in my spare time,” I hissed, and hoped rather frantically that he didn’t know about my date with Francois.

  “That’s bullshit!”

  “That’s not—”

  “Dammit!” he snarled, then visibly pulled himself together and drew a deep breath. “Andrews was shot last night. A single bullet to the head.”

  “Jackson Andrews?” Just the sound of the name put a little tremor in my fingertips. I placed them carefully on the edge of my desk.

  Voices murmured from the reception area. Rivera glanced in that direction now, but only for an instant before turning back to me.

  “Is he…dead?” My voice was fraught with something that might have been hopefulness in a less charitable person.

  “No.”

  Outside my office, the voices were getting louder. Two male tenors plus Shirley’s bossy alto. Hers almost drowned them out. “I said she’s busy at the moment.”

  “We understand that, ma’am.” Male One’s voice was low and reasonable.

  Shirley’s was neither. “If you understood that, sir, you’d already have your butts in the chairs like good little boys.”

  “We’re here on official business. We have a—”

  “Sit your asses down!” she ordered, but I barely heard her. The world around me was sinking slowly inward, caving in under my feet. Rivera’s haunting eyes were all I could see.

  “You think I did it,” I said.

  He watched me, face expressionless, hiding a thousand secrets. “You knew he was free.”

  I shook my head.

  “He hurt Elaine,” he added. “You're a vengeful person."

  “But how would I even…” I ran out of words. He filled in the blanks.

  “You have a lot of friends.”

  “No, I—”

  “Friends who don’t mind breaking a few laws.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “D,” he said.

  I winced. D is a gangster from Chicago. An actual gangster who was said to have removed people’s livers if they displeased him. If there was anyone in the world who would know how to make someone dead, it would be D. But I hadn’t spoken to him in months.

  “Solberg,” Rivera suggested.

  J.D. Solberg might be a geek of extraterrestrial proportions, but he loved Brainy Laney with every fiber in his scrawny, disgusting little body and might, in fact, shoot Andrews to avenge her. The thought fired through my mind like a torpedo. Rivera must have seen my uncertainty. He stepped forward, strides long and aggressive.

  “You told Solberg that Andrews was free, didn’t you?” he asked.

  I wanted to back away, but I don’t like being a wienie in my own office so I raised my chin and gave him my best Scarface impression. “You know I won’t talk to Solberg without a Hazmat and a—”

  “You can’t go in there!” Shirley shouted. Her voice was stretched tight with terror. Shirley, I knew, had premonitions. “You leave her alone.”

  My gaze had melded with Rivera’s. I was barely able to draw a breath. “They’re coming to arrest me, aren’t they?” I asked. My voice sounded hollow to my own ears.

  “No,” he said, and as my door flew open, he turned toward it, held out his arms behind his back and pressed his wrists together.

  Chapter 6

  There’s a surprisingly fine line between interesting and stark raving mad.

  —Chrissy McMullen, who’s found stark raving mad quite interesting on more than one occasion

  I stumbled back a step as two officers rushed into the room.

  “Jack Rivera…” One was Hollywood handsome, medium height and sandy haired. He was already pulling handcuffs from his belt. “You have the right to remain silent.”

  I stared at Rivera, at Hollywood, at Rivera. “What’s going on?” My voice was flat, my extremities numb.

  “Anything you say or do—”

  “Jack!” I moved toward him, but the second officer stepped into my path, blocking my way. He was short and squat with a bulldog body and a face that made his body irresistible by comparison. “What’s happening?”

  “Stay back, ma’am,” said Bulldog.

  “I am back!” I snapped, then softened my tone. This was my office. I try not to be the queen of the bitches in my office. “I just want an explanation,” I said. I s
ounded reasonable, but Rivera was already being pivoted away and nudged toward the door.

  Something ripped inside of me, sending a thousand shards of terror shrieking through me. “Jack!”

  He turned his head and glanced over his shoulder at me. His eyes were hooded, his back hunched, his soul shuttered. “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about it? Don’t worry about it!” I was still attempting to remain professional, but remaining human was becoming more difficult by the second. I shouldered past the squat cop. He reached for my arm but I jerked away. “Let him go!”

  “It’s all right,” Rivera said, but something in me screamed that it was a lie. It wasn’t all right at all. Who was going to drag me out of my next stupid mistake? Who was going to save me from the next psychiatrist or octogenarian or CEO who wanted to kill me for reasons I couldn’t even guess? Who was going to save me from myself?

  “Ma’am—”

  “He saved my life!” A dozen frantic memories streamed through my mind. “He saved Laney’s life!” I said, but he was still being prodded toward the door.

  “Stop it!” Things were happening too fast. “Just wait a minute!” I demanded, reaching frantically for the officer guiding him out.

  “Ma’am!” said the one behind me. He grabbed my arm.

  And here’s where things get kind of fuzzy. I mean, I know better than to strike an officer of the law. It’s not as if I regularly go around punching them out. I’m not crazy. People go to jail for that sort of offense. People get decked for that sort of offense. But my Irish was up. One minute I was following Rivera like a lost lamb and the next I was swinging my elbow to the rear. I followed it with the weight of my body like Casey at the bat.

  As luck would have it, my olecranon struck Bulldog square in the nose. He stumbled backward, bent at the waist, blood seeping between his Vienna-sausage fingers, but I had already swung back toward the door.

  “Rivera.” My voice was breathy with uncertainty. “Talk to me.” But his attention was glued on the officer who had just been accosted by an Irish elbow.