It Takes Two to Strangle (3 page)

Damon arrived before Rebecca and was seated at a table directly facing a striking couple sitting across from one another. He was a lean, clean-cut black man in his early thirties hunched forward trying to impress a point. She was Eastern European with a mien that could best be described as sultry. Her dark features were rough and sensual, and she had a raw aura that emanated sexual hunger.

Damon ran his hand over the small widow’s peak touching down in the center of his forehead. He once looked up the term and had been horrified to see a list of famous widow’s peaks topped by Eddie Munster and Richard Nixon.

He felt a momentary wave of intensity and realized that the dark haired, dark eyed woman at the table across from him had torn her gaze away from her companion and settled her sights briefly on him. As soon as the feeling had come, it passed as she swept her eyes around the restaurant.

Moments later, Rebecca joined him. Damon pushed a check for five hundred dollars across the table to cover the credit card thief’s donation. He held a finger to his lips and wouldn’t allow Rebecca to refuse it.

They ordered nachos to share and shortly after the food arrived, Damon managed to singe his wrist in scalding cheese. He quickly sucked away the burning sensation and Rebecca launched into a rant about Cynthia’s salon. Cynthia continually placed her trash bins behind The Cookery rather than at the back of the salon. When the garbage collectors inevitably dropped heaps of trash while loading it onto their truck, the refuse wound up in front of Rebecca’s back door.

At a lull, Damon said, “When I was younger I wanted to be a trash collector.” He paused. “I thought they only worked on Thursdays.”

“Hilarious,” Rebecca responded but she had a smile stretching between her dimples.

The restaurant’s front door swung open and Lirim Jovanovic appeared, trailed by Victor McElroy. Lirim had replaced the hunting vest with a dark green polo short, but hadn’t changed his jeans.

Neither man noticed Damon, and Lirim’s eyes fixed on the nearby couple. Lirim approached the table and said callously, “Hello, Clara.”

The woman remained seated. “Hello father, you remember Jordan.”

The neatly dressed Jordan stood and extended his hand. Lirim shook it after a slight pause and took a seat at their table. “You remember my accountant Victor, don’t you, dear?” Lirim said directing his words toward Clara, and intoning “dear” as a euphemism.

“How are you, Victor?” replied Clara with equal coldness and introduced Jordan. Victor declined to shake Jordan’s hand and wedged his square, but muscular, frame into the last remaining seat.

“To what do I owe the honor of a personal meeting with you and the good doctor here in Arlington?” Lirim asked. This time, he managed to make the word “doctor” sound like an insult.

“We’re staying at the Sheraton here for a few days and I need my money,” Clara said without preface. “Probate on Mom’s will finished three months ago and you’ve been holding back what’s rightfully mine.”

“There are some legal complications, Clara.”

“That’s bull. Mom’s accident was a year and a half ago and I know for a fact that Uncle Toma already received his share.”

“Your situation is different than Toma’s, and stop shouting,” countered Lirim. He noticed Damon sitting just feet away.

Damon tried to shift his eyes to Rebecca, but not before Lirim saw him focused on their table. Lirim lifted his hand weakly in Damon’s direction.

Damon gave him a nod and the conversation at Lirim’s table swung to hushed tones.

“I wonder what kind of accident she had,” whispered Rebecca after Damon filled her in that Lirim was one of the carnival owners. Damon imagined a giant claw plucking a woman from the fairgrounds and just as she reached the height of the Ferris wheel, it opened its grip and sent the woman plummeting downward.

After they finished their meal, Damon obliged the manners his mother had instilled in him and stopped at Lirim’s table. The carnival operator treated Rebecca to the same unctuous once-over he had given Liz de la Cruz. Rebecca suppressed a shudder. Lirim introduced them to Clara and to her boyfriend, Jordan Hall.

Clara stood to meet Damon and he felt a spasm below his waist. Her full lips mouthed a tranquil “hello.” It took all of his efforts not to let his eyes follow their way down to her breasts, especially after internally chastising Lirim for doing just that to Rebecca. Clara seemed to instinctively read his thoughts and shifted her hips to wickedly draw his eyes to the curves tugging at her Capri pants.

“You have arresting blue eyes, Mr. Lassard,” she said bluntly and gave his outstretched hand a delicate shake, letting the tips of her fingernails graze his wrist. Noticing the intimate gesture, Jordan stood abruptly and proffered a handshake of his own to cut off the interlude.

“Damon is helping with the standard red tape here in town,” Lirim told the group as Clara swiveled back into her chair. “My daughter Clara here never really was one for the carnival business. She thinks she can make a better living roping in doctors like Jordan here.”

Clara frowned.

“She’s actually one of the best geriatric nurses the hospital has Mr. Jovanovic,” Jordan said.

Rebecca stepped into the middle of the family argument and asked Jordan, “Do you and Clara work at the same hospital?”

Jordan turned grateful eyes to Rebecca and nodded. “Yes. We’re both at St. Michael’s outside of Richmond. She works in one of the upstairs wings. I’m down in the Emergency Room.”

“Are you going to make it to the fair?” Rebecca asked.

“I’m not sure,” Jordan said. “We’re just in town to see some friends and take care of some family business.”

They bantered for another minute while the tension cooled. Victor sat stolidly and Lirim glared at his daughter who picked at her food. Damon forced himself to wish them a pleasant evening before he and Rebecca escaped.

“Be careful of that one,” Rebecca said as they stepped through the patio to the sidewalk.

“Which one?”

“I meant Clara. I saw the way she hooked your attention. But I guess Lirim and his silent bodyguard-accountant warrant some caution, too.”

“I suppose,” Damon replied, “but they’ll all be out of town by Sunday.”

They made their way toward the Hollydale’s residential district in a comfortable silence, and Damon’s thoughts drifted to the movement of Clara’s hips. Hers was a sexuality very unlike Bethany’s. Clara was physical and raw. Bethany was refined. He peeked sideways at Rebecca and wished he felt the same internal stirring for her, but it just wasn’t there.

When Damon arrived home, his duplex neighbor was sitting on their shared front porch per his usual evening routine. David Einstaff poured Damon a tumbler of whiskey and ashed his cigarette. “So what do you think about this business with your mother?” David inquired in his low drawling voice.

A fifty-something father of three, David was recently divorced. As far as Damon could glean in the few months since David moved in, his neighbor went to work six days a week in a suit, didn’t like to talk about his job and enjoyed his evenings outside with whiskey and more than a few cigarettes.

Damon plunked down in the chair beside David’s. “What business about my mother is that?”

“Just that she was getting herself dolled up over at Cynthia’s this afternoon,” he said taking a sip from his glass. “Mrs. Chenworth stopped me at the Safeway. Seeing as how you and I are neighbors, she figured that I was just dying to know that Lynne Lassard-Brown might be headed somewhere special on a Tuesday night.”

Damon’s mother was about the same age as David, if not a year or two younger, and Damon wouldn’t put it past David to have an interest in her. Most men in the fifty and above set did. “I guess I’ll have to ask her about it,” Damon said. “Or maybe I should just find Mrs. Chenworth. I’m sure she’ll know.”

Later that evening, Damon called his mother and quizzed her.

“Now how in the world do you know about that?” she asked.

“Mrs. Chenworth was telling anyone who would care to listen that you were making yourself even prettier than usual at Cynthia’s earlier today.”

“Well it’s no secret,” she said. “Charles Swickley took me to a steakhouse in Georgetown.”

“Charles Swickley? He must be pushing eighty!”

“Seventy-two and so what? It was nice to dress up and go out on the town for once.”

“Mother, there are countless men who would take you out. And it’s not as if they ever stop asking you. What made you say yes to Swickley?”

“Do you really want to know?” she asked demurely.

“I do.”

“I thought I could have a nice dinner out without having to worry about him trying to get into my pants at the end of the night.”

Damon groaned.

“Well,” she said. “Don’t you want to know if he tried?”

The county fair opened for business the following evening. Walking through the entryway marked by a pair of poles dressed in colorful flags, Damon was hit by an avalanche of carnival scents. The combination of funnel cakes, cotton candy and corn dogs sent his olfactory glands into overdrive. A row of vendor trucks—the original “food trucks”— staffed by fresh faced youths lined the front right side of the grounds. To the left of the entrance stood the exhibition pavilion. Directly in front of him stretched a vast labyrinth of carnival games and rides flanked on its outer edges by a pig-racing course on one side and an outdoor amphitheatre on the other. The amphitheatre would host puppet shows and magicians during the day, live auctions in the early evening and local bands at night.

Damon meandered through a warren of skee-ball, whack-a-mole, and pop-a-shot games. He saw a father curse under his breath at the giant claw as a stuffed dolphin slipped out of its grasp and a four-year-old girl shrieked in dismay. Emerging from the flashing lights and crush of carnival workers touting the glory of balloon dart and shoot-the-star winners, Damon rested his eyeon the largest of the rides. The Matterhorn, Gravitron and Zipper might look small in a commercial amusement park, but here, at the fairgrounds, they loomed like giants.

He cut through a line forming for the derelict “haunted house” and spotted Bethany Krims nibbling the hardened exterior of a cherry-dipped ice cream cone. Wavy chestnut hair bobbed at her shoulders. She was alone, but scanning the crowd. Damon took a deep breath and approached.

“Hi, Bethany. How’s the ice cream?”

“Oh, hi, Damon. It’s pretty good.”

“I might have to get one myself pretty soon. No weather forecast tonight?”

“Thankfully I get Wednesdays off,” she replied, swatting at a fly that made a beeline for her cone. She bent her head to lick a bit of vanilla that had run down the backside.

“Do you want to take a ride on the Matterhorn?” Damon asked nervously.

She held up her cone. “Sorry.” The mild gesture made Damon feel as if he had just been eliminated in the first round of a grade school spelling contest.

Before he could stammer out a reply, she waved excitedly past him and a gangling woman with heavy eyebrows rushed forward. The two women gushed over each other for a few moments. Bethany quickly introduced Damon to her cousin Laura and the two women walked off arm-in-arm toward the exhibition pavilion.

Victor McElroy’s voice boomed through a megaphone over the crowd, announcing the upcoming pig races. Damon purchased a greasy cardboard cup of waffle fries and headed over to the racing stands.

From a makeshift press box, Victor shouted out the names of the entrants in the first heat, along with a colorful commentary of each pig’s racing prowess. The lines were well scripted for comedic value, stock-in-trade verbiage repeated by pig racing announcers across the country, but Victor’s delivery lacked enthusiasm.

Making his way up the pre-fabricated metal stands, Damon saw his mother and Charles Swickley sharing a tub of caramel corn in the middle of an aisle. Damon took a seat near the top corner where he could monitor them.

“Spy much?”

Damon looked up at Rebecca’s toothy grin hovering overhead. She had a raincoat draped over one arm and was sporting muck-style rubber boots.

“I couldn’t help it,” Damon replied. “What’s she doing with him?” Rebecca squeezed past him to the open seat on his left.

“The same thing as everyone else here,” she said. “Having a good time watching pigs sprint around a muddy track.” A horn sounded and six svelte swine sped off, splashing small spurts of mud, though it failed to reach the first row of spectators.

“Good thing you brought your raincoat,” Damon teased.

“It might rain later. And the boots are for the petting zoo.”

All six pigs turned the final corner and made their way down the stretch, with the red-shirted number three eking out a victory over the green-shirted number five.

“They weren’t chasing anything,” Damon observed.

“What do you mean?”

“At dog races, the dogs chase a stuffed rabbit.”

“And do rabbits chase stuffed carrots?” quipped Rebecca.

“Seriously. Why are the pigs running if there’s nothing in front of them?”

“Well, horses don’t have anything in front of them.”

“But they have jockeys. Are they trained?”