Cry Uncle (24 page)

“
No! You’re kidding! You
hear that, Brick? Lizard and Joe’s wife are going to renovate
Birdie’s house.”

“
Uh-huh,” Brick
grunted.”

“
Thing of it is,” Kitty
continued, then read Joe’s lethal frown and lifted the daiquiri
onto her tray, “Pamela’s smart, you know? She must have had a good
reason to marry you. Something more than she wanted to finger-paint
with Lizard.”

Joe knew Pamela’s reason. He wondered if
Kitty did. “You think she had a good reason, do you?” he asked
casually. “Like what?”

Kitty shrugged. “Like, you’re a great
guy.”

He was tempted to reveal Pamela’s true
reason, which had nothing to do with Joe’s greatness. But, as Kitty
had pointed out, she’d known Pamela longer than he did. If Pamela
had wanted Kitty to know about her Seattle assassin, she would have
told Kitty herself.

He nudged Kitty’s tray, giving her the choice
of either lifting it or letting it crash to the floor at her feet.
Rolling her eyes at his impatience, Kitty balanced the tray on one
hand and moseyed through the dense evening crowd.

Free of her badgering, Joe contemplated
Pamela’s reason for marrying him. Ever since they’d tied the knot,
she hadn’t said a word about the hit man. She’d been in a big hurry
to change her name and her legal papers, but that was it. She
didn’t behave paranoid, barring the windows and carrying a firearm
at all times. As far as he knew, she wasn’t constantly on the phone
to Seattle, tracking the moves of her nemesis. She didn’t act like
someone with a price on her head.

What if there wasn’t a hit man? What if she’d
made the whole thing up?

The idea jolted him. He gripped the bar,
nodding vaguely as Lois hollered for a malt liquor and a
Seven-and-Seven. God, he thought—it was possible. Pamela could have
invented that cock-and-bull story as an excuse to marry him. She
was smart, and anyone as smart as she seemed to be wouldn’t testify
publicly against a professional murderer, right?

But why would Pamela have made up such a
story? Why, if her life wasn’t hanging in the balance, would she
have married Joe?

Surely not because he was a great guy.
Kitty’s concept of what made a guy great would likely bear little
resemblance to Pamela’s. Joe happened to agree with Kitty that he
himself was a great guy, but he doubted Pamela would rate him that
high.

She couldn’t have married him for his money.
He was no millionaire—and if she were a gold-digger, she wouldn’t
hook up with a guy raising a kid. Someone like Pamela had enough
class to reel in a stock broker or a bank executive, if finding a
sugar-daddy had been her goal.

“
Come on, Joe, wake up. I
need a Seven-and-Seven,” Lois declared, rapping the bar with her
knuckles to jar his attention.

“
Oh. Yeah.” He glanced
around and saw Brick about to slice lemons. “Hey, Brick, cover for
me for a minute. I’ve got to make a phone call.”

“
Uh-huh.”

Ignoring Lois’s frown of bewilderment, Joe
hurried to the end of the bar and around it, down the hall and into
his office. He nearly stumbled against Lizard’s box of toys in his
haste to slam the door shut. Even with it closed, he heard the
noise of the bar, the cacophony of voices, laughter and juke-box
music infiltrating his private haven.

Tuning out the din, he slumped into the chair
behind the desk, propped his head in his hands and glowered at the
telephone. If he called Pamela, what would he say? “Hi, honey—I
crave your body but I don’t trust you.” “Hi, Pam—just checking to
see if your life is truly in danger.” “Hi, wife—I want to know the
real reason you married me.”

His uneasiness surprised him. Why should he
give a damn about her real reason for anything? She’d done him a
favor by marrying him, and she was continuing to do him favors by
making his house presentable and taking care of his niece. So what
if she’d lied about why she married him? He’d gotten what he was
looking for.

Even so... Back in the beginning he’d had a
few qualms about marrying someone with a price on her head. He’d
swallowed those qualms—and, rational or not, it ticked him off
royally to think those qualms might have been baseless. Not just
ticked him off—it made him wonder what Pamela was after. No sane
human being would take on Lizard without expecting something in
return.

He fingered the phone, trying to decide
whether to call her and demand proof that her life was in jeopardy.
It didn’t seem like something he ought to do over the phone, but if
he faced off with her in person, it could turn into a nasty scene.
A man couldn’t accuse his wife of scamming him and expect her to
laugh and kiss him on the cheek for being so perceptive.

One thing Joe couldn’t afford was a nasty
scene, not when he had Ms. Whitley breathing down his neck. He’d
rather be conned by Pamela than let the social worker catch a whiff
of trouble between the oh-so-happy Brenner couple.

He ran his fingers over the phone buttons
again, then woke his always-on computer from sleep mode did a
search for the Seattle Police Department. He dialed the first
number listed on the website. When the operator asked which
department he was trying to reach, he faltered for a moment, then
said, “The main office, whatever. Cop Central.”

While he waited for her to transfer his call,
he gave himself a brief, silent pep talk about how he wouldn’t
panic if it turned out that the woman he’d married—the woman he
lusted after—had invented a cockamamie story about a hit man for
some ulterior purpose. He breathed deeply and promised that
whatever he learned through this phone call wouldn’t change his
arrangement with Pam. He needed her, after all. He needed her to
convince the court he was respectable.

“
Seattle Police Department,”
came a woman’s voice. “This phone call is being
recorded.”

Joe took one more deep, steadying breath.
“Hi,” he said in a ridiculously casual voice. “I’m hoping you can
answer a question for me. It’s about a woman named Pamela Hayes,
who testified in a murder case in Seattle a few months ago.”

The woman on the other end of the phone
didn’t respond right away. “A murder case?”

“
She witnessed a
professional murder, and she testified against the hit man. I don’t
know his name, but—”

“
Who is this?”

Now it was Joe’s turn to hesitate. “Do I have
to give you my name?”

“
If you want your call taken
seriously, yes.”

He sighed and assessed the situation. These
were law enforcement folks he was talking to. They were supposed to
be on Pamela’s side. Joe could give them his name without doing
harm to her. “I’m Joe Brenner. I’m...a friend of Pamela’s. A very
good friend. And I’m worried because she thinks she’s in danger
from this murderer she testified against.”

“
I’m going to have to
transfer your call to homicide,” said the woman at the other end.
“Perhaps they can help you.”

He heard a few clicks as his call was
transferred, and then a man came on the line. “Detective Wilcox
here,” he identified himself. “What can I help you with?”

Joe started all over again: “I’m concerned
about a friend of mine, Pamela Hayes. I mean—she’s concerned, and
I’m concerned for her.” He was rambling, and he gave his head a
sharp shake to clear it. “She testified against a hit man at a
trial a few months ago, and she’s worried that the hit man might
come after her.”

“
Pamela Hayes?”

“
Yeah. She’s a very good
friend of mine, and I want to make sure she’s safe.”

“
Ah, yes. I know that case,”
Detective Wilcox said. “I understand she got so spooked after the
conviction fell through, she left town for a while. The D.A. says
her only contact with Seattle is that she occasionally calls her
lawyer. No one else knows where she is. Then again, even if I did
know where she was, I wouldn’t tell you.”

“
That’s all right,” Joe said
magnanimously.
He
knew where she was, and he wasn’t going to tell Wilcox, which
he figured made them even. “I was only wondering—is she still in
any danger?”

Detective Wilcox chuckled.
“
Still
in danger? I
don’t think she was ever in any danger.”

“
But she did testify against
a hit man,” Joe reminded him, although his voice curled up at the
end, turning the statement into a question.

“
Yes, she did. She’s a gutsy
lady.”

“
So what makes you so sure
she isn’t in danger?”

“
Look,” Detective Wilcox
said gently, “if I had my druthers, the perpetrator wouldn’t have
been released on bail once his conviction was overturned. The guy’s
guilty as sin, but these courts, you know—one screw-up, one minor
technicality, and the process has to start all over again. That’s
the American legal system for you.”

“
I see.” Joe should have
been appalled that Pamela’s story was checking out—if she’d
testified against a hit man, then she very well might be in danger,
regardless of what this detective was telling Joe. But he was too
relieved by the knowledge that she hadn’t lied to him. “So...is she
in any danger?”

“
Nah.”

“
Are you sure?”

“
We have the perpetrator
under constant surveillance. We’ve got a cop assigned permanently
to him. He hasn’t been anywhere near Ms. Hayes since he got out on
bail. He hasn’t come within a mile of her. If he had, our man would
have stepped in.”

“
She said that when she was
in Seattle, the creep was following her.”

“
It’s understandable she’s
nervous. Let’s face it, she witnessed a murder. It could make any
lady a little crazy, right? But, no, he wasn’t following her. He’s
under watch, twenty-four hours a day. If she thought she saw him
following her, it was just her imagination playing tricks on her.
She’s perfectly safe. Our officer is making sure of
that.”

“
I’m glad to hear it,” Joe
said. Thanking the detective, he ended the call.

So, she was telling the truth—or, at least,
the truth as it appeared from her perspective. The cops in Seattle
thought she was paranoid—just as she’d said. And maybe, if the
murderer was under full-time surveillance, she was being a little
paranoid. Maybe, as Wilcox had said, she was a little crazy.

Joe could handle a little crazy. Just that
morning she’d proven to be as close to the absolute, ultimate,
picture-perfect mommy as a thirty-year-old architect who didn’t
know anything about children could be. If she happened to be a
little crazy on the side, so be it.

This marriage wasn’t made in heaven; it was
made on a handshake. And within a reasonably short time, it would
be over. By then, Joe fervently hoped, he would have regained his
old taste in women. He would stop fantasizing about a pale,
flat-chested, angular-shouldered, possibly demented woman, and he
would stop being so damned serious. Once he had permanent custody
of Lizard, he could forget Pamela Hayes had ever entered his
life.

He shoved away from his
desk, strode across the office, and opened the door. Someone had
programmed the juke box to play
Stand By
Me
. Suppressing a groan, Joe squared his
shoulders and returned to his post behind the bar.

Chapter Eleven

PAMELA SUPPOSED EVERY marriage took time to
find its routines and rhythms. That she and Joe managed to settle
into their own patterns of functioning after less than two weeks of
wedded bliss ought to have satisfied her.

Except that the patterns Joe had settled into
chafed at Pamela’s nerves, leaving her troubled and glum.

He no longer seemed to be going to great
lengths to avoid her. On rare mornings, he would actually venture
into the kitchen before ten a.m. and mumble a good-morning to his
wife and niece before he buried himself in the pages of the
newspaper.

He would spend the morning with Lizard if
Pamela wanted to run errands. She had learned from experience that
grocery shopping was sheer torture if Lizard accompanied her.
Lizard had a habit of running up and down the aisles, grabbing junk
food and tossing it into the shopping cart before Pamela could stop
her. When Pamela made her put the junk food back on the shelves,
Lizard whined in a pitch that could shatter fine crystal. And when
Pamela got home and emptied the bags, she always discovered among
her purchases some sugary pink item Lizard had smuggled past
her.

In the afternoons, when Joe left for the
Shipwreck, Pamela would engage in various activities with Lizard.
Sometimes they would toil in Lizard’s weed-infested herb garden.
Sometimes they would go to Birdie’s house to begin their first
renovation project: breaking down the windowed interior wall of the
kitchen and turning the room beyond it into a spacious dining area.
One afternoon they went to see the latest Disney animated feature
at the theater in town.

It rained every day. The air was thick,
sticky, soupy with humidity. Every now and then the sun would peek
tentatively through the clouds, and Pamela would feel an answering
ray of hope inside her. But then another army of clouds would march
across the sky, obliterating the sunlight, and her mood would
plummet once more.

The atmosphere inside the house was as
overcast as the atmosphere outside. Even though Pamela’s and Joe’s
paths intersected several times a day, he never touched her. His
smiles were reserved, his eyes lacking the warmth she’d seen in
them the last time he’d kissed her—when he’d been putting on an act
for Mona Whitley’s benefit. Key West might be in the tropics, but
the Brenner household was currently operating under an Arctic
freeze.