by N.L. Wilson
Chapter 6
Now, I’m not saying Mrs. Presley is one to gloat.
Oh, hell, who am I kidding? She sat there with a sandwich in one hand, a cup of tea in the other, and a self-satisfied smirk on her face. Yeah, yeah, I guess I asked for it. And man, did she make me suffer, talking about the weather and countless other trivialities before getting to what I was dying to hear.
Damn, I was blown away.
“You can close your mouth now, sweetie,” she said when she’d finished dishing.
I closed my mouth. “Sorry, Mrs. Presley.” Like any well-chastised schoolgirl, I mumbled my apologies.
The frequent visitor to the Underhill Hotel was none other than the fist-shaking, hostile, bristling Billy Star of my surveillance photos. And get this—he always appeared in the company of a blonde. A blonde who crouched low in the seat while he signed in (W.P. Smith). Mrs. Presley even had the dates and room numbers—Room 10 (that was the mirror-ceilinged room) February 5,12, and 19. Room 108 (vibrating bed) on March 12, April 2. Room 101—that was April 9—had a notation beside it: Fix light fixture, customer complained of shock. Briefly, I got sidetracked wondering what the hell they were doing in that room to get a jolt off a light fixture, but forced my focus back to the issue at hand.
There were other rooms and other dates. Usually twice a week, sometimes more. Until about a month ago, when the rendezvous ended suddenly. My mind roiled with questions. Who was the blonde? Why the Underhill Motel? And why did it end so abruptly?
And most importantly, how was this connected to the murder of Jennifer Weatherby?
No, wait—the most important question was, how was this all going to save my ass?
Afterward, I’d driven back to the office with a death grip on the steering wheel and Mrs. Presley’s spicy pepperoni churning on my insides. I think she’d spared her son the poison and fed it to me!
But no matter, I would surely live. I had to, if only to impart this juicy tidbit to Dylan. I couldn’t wait to catch up with him, to find out what he’d found out, completely certain that my information could trump his information, in my best school-yard nyah-nyah, my-snitch-is-better-than-your-snitch-so-there mentality. Because, well, I was one to gloat too.
But Dylan had some pretty good information of his own.