Read A Bad Day for Romance Online
Authors: Sophie Littlefield
Tags: #Mystery: Cozy - Humor - Avenger - Missouri
A Bad Day for Romance (28 page)
He took a few seconds to check his reflection in the pull-down mirror. No lipstick on his collar, and his tie was reasonably straight. Satisfied with his appearance, Joe took a long, appraising look at the house. Set far back from the street behind faux-stone retaining walls and staked trees, it was lit up like Christmas. Sconces, well lights, path lights, spotlights—Joe did a quick inventory and figured the place for twenty grand in landscape lighting alone.
In a pool of brighter light, a BMW 735 and a Lexus sedan were parked front to back in the driveway. Past the cars, Joe could make out the profile of the cop who’d taken the call. Odell Collier’s sloping gut was as distinctive as the painstaking comb-over that invited constant derision from his colleagues.
Joe got out of the car and made his way up the curved stone walk. These Foothills homes—every one tackier than the last—were huge echoing monuments to new and tainted money. Odell had set up a few tripod lights on the driveway, in front of the four-car garage. As Joe got closer, he could see a dark, lumpy form casting shadows on the etched concrete.
“Hey, Joe. You beat Marty here again,” Odell said in his thick drawl. “He must be driving over on a damn golf cart or something.”
“Now, now,” Joe said soothingly. “Traffic on 680 was terrible. He probably got hung up.”
“Well,
you’re
here, aren’t you?”
“Mmm.”
“Coming from Amaris’s?” Odell pressed. “She lives in Berkeley, doesn’t she?”
“Yes.” Joe pressed gently past Odell so he could take a closer look at the body.
“Nice evening y’all were in the middle of having?”
Joe sighed. He’d never brought a woman around before Amaris, but he’d been dating her for nearly a year—a record—and there was a general hue and cry: everyone wanted to meet the woman who’d settled him down. When Joe finally brought Amaris to Nate’s, the one bar in Montair down-market enough for the police department regulars to hang out in, most of the guys had been stunned into slack-jawed silence. Amaris tended to do that to men, with her panther-like build and overripe lips and cascades of ink-black hair.
“Nice enough, until this guy got himself offed. So what do you have so far?”
Odell nodded at the body. “Got a damn mess is what we got. He’s lying in enough blood it’s like somebody stuck half a dozen pigs. Crazy thing is, I can’t see much damage on him.”
Joe looked closer: the blood pool, black and rusty smelling, was indeed enormous, and its outlines irregular, as if it had splashed out of the body instead of seeping.
“Nobody bleeds out like that.”
“Yeah. Well, I’ll wait out here for evidence, if you want. Bertrise is inside.”
“I appreciate it,” Joe said. “What
do
we know about him?”
Odell squinted at his dog-eared notebook. “Tom Bergman, age forty-nine. Guest of the folks who live here, Bryce and Gail Engler; they were having a dinner party. He came out for a smoke. Lives a couple doors down. Wife says he’s a strategy consultant, whatever the hell that is. And I need to check when we get back to the office, but I’m pretty sure I’ve been out here before.”
“Here? You mean, like this house?”
“Yup, this very one. Problem is they all look so dang much alike, but me and Army were out here a couple of months ago on a disturbance call.”
“A domestic?”
“Naw, protestors, if you can believe it. They walked in right past that guard shack, nearly gave the guy a heart attack, carried their little signs and whatnot in here and stood around in the middle of the street chanting. I don’t think anyone even saw them but a handful of gardeners and housewives. And they pretty much took off with their skirts in a bunch the minute we explained how these are private roads and we could ticket their asses.”
“No kidding?” Joe shook his head. “Protesting’s just not what it used to be. Back when I was at Berkeley—”
“Yeah, whatever.” Odell cut him off. “Save your flower power stories. I think they were just hoping one of the news stations would come around, anyway.”
“What were they protesting?”
“Some kind of environmental something. The house they were in front of, which I kind of think was this one, belongs to some sort of developer.”
They both stared at the dead man lying on the ground.
“Any chance it was this guy?” Joe asked.
“Maybe, but that would be too easy, wouldn’t it? Besides, he’s a consultant, not a builder.”
“Maybe he’s a building consultant,” Joe suggested. When Odell merely snorted, he added, “And you seriously can’t see anything wrong with him?”
Odell pointed with the toe of his scuffed black brogue. “I’m pretty sure he took a knock on the head. Didn’t want to roll him before evidence took photos, but see—it’s all matted there—”
Joe accepted the flashlight Odell offered and crouched low, careful not to step in the black pool of blood. He saw what Odell was talking about—just out of sight under the curve of Bergman’s skull, what might have been a broken place with a white outcropping of bone and a red-black crust of blood. It didn’t look like much—not the work of a claw hammer, for instance, or a baseball bat.
Joe stood, considering. “It’s a stone wall…”
“Yeah, I thought that, too. Fell, pushed, whatever.”
“Pushed, you’re thinking.”
“No doubt.” Odell knelt down and touched the surface of the decorative ledge.
“That’s not really stone, Odell,” Joe said. “That wall. Places like this—half the stuff you see isn’t real.”
“I hear that, I do.”
“Might as well lay down a few rubber plants… plastic grass… hell. Cut down on the watering.”
Odell glanced at the lawn, glistening in the gentle spray of the sprinkler system, then up at the sky, where a pale freckling of stars was visible.
“They might just do that, they think of it. These crazy-assed Californians.” Odell had followed a woman to California half a dozen years earlier, but the girlfriend got homesick and hightailed it back to the Lake of the Ozarks. Odell liked California enough to stick around, though he had never completely adapted to the culture.
Joe took a last look and shook his head. The guy’s legs were tangled together awkwardly as though he’d gone down trying to dance, white-guy style, bobbing from side to side and waving his hands in the air, maybe stumbling on his date’s shoe.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Sophie Littlefield
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First Pocket Star Books ebook edition September 2013
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Designed by Akasha Archer
Cover photo © Ingrid Deon/Flickr/Getty Images
ISBN 978-1-4767-1011-2
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