A Bad Day for Romance (23 page)

“You know what these are for?” she asked conversationally.

“Yeah, ’cept I’m having a bit of a disconnect here. Thought you were just going to fill up the truck and go. I’ve cooperated, I’ll give you the code for the safe.” He looked increasingly disappointed in Stella, which made her more uncomfortable than if he’d been furious. She was having a hard time picturing the man in front of her killing anyone, but she had learned that human beings were capable of fooling those around them—sometimes for years—about what they were doing in private, and who they were doing it to. “I’m well insured, ma’am, so this is just going to be a big paperwork headache for me. Don’t know that you need to go compounding that with the, uh…” he gestured at the tools laid out on the desk and swallowed, the only hint that he was nervous about what was to come.

“Let me catch you up. I ain’t robbing you. I’m here about Bryant Molder. To put it plain, I think you killed him and I’d be obliged if you just go ahead and get it off your chest.” Stella pulled the last piece of her equipment out of her purse, a digital recorder about the size of a credit card that she kept in a pink vinyl cigarette case. “You’ll feel better, and we can get you started down the debt-to-society road and Bryant’s family can get the answers they’re sure to be wanting. You must a been keeping a lot of anger stored up inside you since you and Lexie split—you need to start getting that out there so you can heal.”

“Lexie?” Wayne’s eyebrows shot up. “What the hell—why, I haven’t even talked to her in three, four weeks. I heard about Molder getting shot, but I wasn’t even in town when that happened!”

Stella rolled her eyes. “Uh-huh. If I had the time, I’d get my assistant in here to take a crack at your phone and your PC there. I bet you anything she’d find you still got Lexie on your speed dial, and you been Facebook stalking her since she told you not to let the door smack your butt on the way out. What happened, did she finally decide to serve papers on you once she started seeing Bryant?”

Wayne’s face went dark with anger. “Lexie’s one of my best friends,” he said, his irritation finally blossoming into full-scale fury, the sort of mad that made the tendons in his powerful neck stand out and his wrists strain against their restraints. All of which made Stella glad she’d gotten him secured before she started the grilling. “It’s none of your business, but the only reason she and I ain’t divorced is so she can stay on my insurance. I got vet benefits.”

“You served?” Stella said, her righteous indignation crumbling a little.

“Yeah. Afghanistan, ’03 to ’04.”

“Look, that’s all the more reason for us to get this sorted out. You probably got all kinds of combat strain and PTSD. You need help.”

“What I need, ma’am,” Wayne said grimly, “is for you to give that mouse a nudge.”

Stella looked warily to where he was casting his gaze. The computer mouse rested on a pad, which, curiously, held an image of George Takei making a live-long-and-prosper sign. “Why?” she demanded, meaning suspicious.

Wayne gritted his teeth. “Because sometimes a picture is worth a whole lot of us sitting here arguing, is why.”

Stella gave the mouse a little tap and the screen lit up with an image that took up the entire space—a very nice portrait of Wayne and a smiling red-haired fellow, both wearing tuxedos, standing next to a flower-decked bower while a tropical sunset lit up the sky behind them.

The gentlemen were kissing.

“That’s my partner, Lincoln,” Wayne said. “We’ve been together almost two years. That picture was at my sister’s wedding. Lexie was there, too, by the way—she’s stayed close to my family. They all love her. I do, too, actually, but I wouldn’t go killing anyone over it.”

“Wait,” Stella said. “You’re
gay
?”

“Yes, damn it, only I didn’t have that all the way figured out when Lexie and I were together. Obviously.” Wayne let out an aggrieved sigh. “All of which I’m sure she would have told you, if you’d asked her.”

“I didn’t… it didn’t come up,” Stella said, an awful feeling of remorse turning her skin clammy.

She’d fucked up, and worse yet, it was a fuckup she could have avoided if she’d paid attention to her instincts and stuck to her SOPs. If she’d proceeded in her usual fashion, doing the background work and easing into using force only after she’d methodically closed all the other doors, like for instance checking his alibi before threatening him with a nipple clamp, this information would have come to light.

And there was only one reason why she’d rushed in the first place. Just as Stella was winding up to face the truth, which was going to be both embarrassing and uncomfortable, she heard a sound from the shop. Someone was moving around just a few feet away.

“Who else has the key?” she demanded.

“Just my night manager, but he don’t come in on weekends,” Wayne said, looking confused.

“One minute,” Stella said, jumping to her feet. “And, uh, I’m, like, sorry about… well.”

A more detailed speech would have to wait; as genuinely remorseful as Stella was, she wasn’t keen on issuing her apology from prison up in Fayette, which was where she was sure to end up if someone stumbled on the scene in the back room.

She’d barely cracked the door to the back room when a big hand shot out and grabbed her wrist and yanked her all the way through the door, unsettling her grip on the Ruger and nearly causing her to shoot a hole in the floor.

“Damn it!” Goat Jones yanked Stella hard up against him while grabbing for her gun with his injured hand, his fingers scrabbling awkwardly in the splint. Stella probably could have held on, but the sight of her brand-new boyfriend took all the fight out of her, and she let him take the gun from her. “Confound it all to hell, Stella, I let you out of my sight for two fucking
hours
, after extracting a promise from you that you ain’t going to get up to nothing worse than—than acting like a
girl
for one miserable afternoon of your life, and the first thing you do is come running over here and threaten a man’s life, which I wouldn’t even know except Ian saw your Jeep heading out Route 9 when he went into town this morning and I knew—I just
knew
it, Stella. Deep down I guess I knew I couldn’t trust you, not even after what we done and what we shared and what I thought we—oh, fuck it.
Fuck
it.”

He released her so abruptly that Stella stumbled backward. But he wasn’t quite done.

“I thought we had a chance,” he said, all the anger drained from his voice, replaced by a quiet sadness that was a thousand times worse. “I ought to of known better, but I really thought if we both gave a little—if we tried to see the other person’s point of view—if I remembered we both want the same thing in the end, which is justice—that we could…”

“I messed up,” Stella said in a very quiet voice. “Wayne didn’t kill Bryant. I got some… ah…” She was about to say she got bad information, but that wasn’t entirely true, and even if her heart was breaking in half, even if she was watching the only man she’d ever love stop loving her back, she wasn’t going to tell anything but the truth. “I didn’t do my research. I usually do, Goat, I swear it to you, I don’t ever go in half-cocked the way I did today but I—I—”

How could she say it? How could she tell him that she wanted to look nice for him, that when she got ready for dinner, she hoped he’d look at her and find her pretty enough, that she’d shine brightly enough to catch his eye forever? How could she tell him that he’d become so important to her that she’d temporarily lost her sanity?

“You nearly hurt an innocent man, is what you did,” Goat snapped. “I been standing here for five minutes, hoping I wasn’t hearing what I was hearing.”

“How did you…”

“I was on your tail ever since the turnoff,” Goat said. “Can’t believe you didn’t see me in the rearview.”

Stella couldn’t either—a rookie mistake if there ever was one—except she’d been so busy mooning and singing along to the radio and remembering how Goat’s hands felt on her body that she doubted she’d checked once.

“And now I got to go back and pretend I ain’t ever heard any of this. It’s just lucky I showed up before you seared off his privates or put a few thousand volts through his chest hairs or something.”

Stella blushed furiously. She had always suspected that Goat had a vague idea about her contribution to helping abused women find justice, but she had hoped he’d never found out some of the starker details, like the fact that she had a corporate discount at the Fetish Mart or that she knew more about the tender places of a man’s anatomy than thirty years of marriage had ever taught her.

“I’ll make this right,” she whispered. “Just give me a chance, Goat.”

“I done gave you one chance too many,” he said, and if his voice was a little choked up as he stomped out of the shop, it was little consolation as Stella went back to clean up the giant mess she’d made for herself, weighted down with a heavy heart.

CHAPTER TWENTY

AT LEAST STELLA DIDN’T HAVE TO
suffer the indignity of watching the tailgate of Goat’s pickup all the way back to town. She got Wayne untied and mollified as best she could, while leaving just enough murkiness around her cover story to suggest that silence about what had transpired might be the man’s best option—a move necessitated by a desire to preserve her reputation that nonetheless left Stella feeling even worse, even after Wayne, who turned out to be an extremely polite gentleman, assured her that “we all make mistakes” and asked her to give Lexie his best the next time Stella saw her. When she finally left Wayne’s World, Goat was long gone, and Stella drove back slowly in the beautiful autumn sunshine, watching the blue sky reach down to fields of pumpkins and turned-under corn.

On the way, she called Taffy to deliver a status update.

“What have you found out, Stella?” Taffy demanded. “You figure out who done it yet?”

“I’m afraid not.” She briefly went over her latest dead ends, skipping the details of her failed interrogation. “At this point I don’t think it was Lexie
or
her ex. I think we got to start over at square one. I keep thinking there’s something I’ve missed. When Divinity gets out on Monday, I was thinking you guys could bring her down here and Chrissy and I can go over everything from top to bottom again.” She chose her words carefully. “Last time we spoke, I’m afraid the, ah, stress of incarceration might have made it hard to focus.”

“I guess we could do that,” Taffy said reluctantly. “I suppose they probably aren’t going to let the whole thing drop until they have someone else locked up.”

“If by ‘the whole thing’ you mean the murder investigation, then, yes, that’s true. Cops are funny that way.”

“Well, then, I guess you best keep on it.”

Taffy hung up without ever getting around to thanking Stella for her ongoing efforts or apologizing for the danger she’d been dragged into, but Stella figured she could make do with Tilly’s gratitude and the satisfaction that came from not having someone try to kill you.

By the time she parked, all she wanted was to lie down in her room with the pink satin gel mask Noelle had given her laid out across her eyes, and catch a little nap before she had to put her game face on and join the party.

Which was why, when she heard BJ’s voice on her way into the hotel entrance, she wished there was some way to get to her room that didn’t involve walking across the lobby right past her maybe–sort of boyfriend. But unless she was going to scale the side of the building to get to her balcony—a feat she was actually fully capable of, except her carabiners and belay plates were neatly stored in her garage at home—she was going to have to do the grown-up thing and face him.

“. . . told me the parade was this afternoon,” a confused-sounding BJ was saying. “You know, the Fairy Golf tournament?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” an even more confused desk clerk answered, “but if you’ll hang on here a moment I’ll see what I can find out.”

Oh no
. Stella had forgotten entirely about the excuse she’d given BJ the other day. Evidently he’d managed to get up out of bed, a thought that filled Stella with remorse since she hadn’t bothered to think of his welfare since earlier that morning when she was chatting with Novella and Gracie. She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders in preparation of doing the right thing, and walked into the lobby.

And there he was, BJ Brodersen, her plenty-sweet, plenty-handsome, plenty-devoted yet just-not-quite-right suitor, standing on his own power and dressed in a pair of tan Dockers and a pistachio green shirt that contrasted nicely with the sparkly pink wings affixed to his shoulders.

“Guh,” Stella sputtered. BJ’s wingspan ran easily to four feet, and their lacy surface, as Stella got a better look, was spangled with tiny stars as well as a copious amount of glitter. Also, whenever he moved—as when he spun to face her, slowly and carefully, with his spine very straight—a pleasing tinkling sound was emitted by the tiny bells sewn to the tips. “You’re up and around.”

“Just stitches, this time, and my nose, of course,” BJ said, a slight clenching of his jaw the only hint that he suffered any discomfort as he pointed to his scalp, where an oblong bandage bumped up against his hairline to the north and the butterfly-shaped bandage across the bridge of his nose below. “As far as the back goes, Doc says I might as well be up walking around, get it all moving again. Can’t really swing a club yet though, so…”

His smile had a pained quality to it, and Stella’s chagrin—already a giant sloshing pool in her heart, given the unnecessary grief she’d already heaped upon one innocent man today—swelled up to nearly take her breath away.

“So you dressed up for the parade,” Stella finished for him. “Oh, BJ.”

His face underwent a sort of twitching realignment, passing through revelation to comprehension to mortification. In that moment, if Stella could have bartered with the Big Guy to undo all the mistakes of the weekend, she would have given just about everything she had.

“There ain’t any parade, is there,” he said softly.