Kill Smartie Breedlove (a mystery)

KILL SMARTIE BREEDLOVE

Joni Rodgers

Dedicated to The Midwives

Barbara Taylor Sissel

Colleen Thompson

Gwyneth Atlee

TJ Bennett

and Wanda Dionne

with love, awe and gratitude.

KILL SMARTIE BREEDLOVE

(a mystery)

Joni Rodgers

Published by
Stella Link Books

Copyright 2012 by Joni Rodgers

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

ISBN 9780983339274 (ebook)

Text and cover design by FUdog Book Bling

The End

F
rom the balcony of the Lady Bird Johnson Suite on the forty-fourth floor of the Bonham Hotel, the city of Houston was an ant farm teeming with red taillights. It sheered upward and expanded outward at the speed of glass and steel, an unstoppable network of cross streets and skyscrapers, parking lots, palmy backyards, broken bayous, taco trucks, shaved ice stands, girls in flip-flops, folks on porches. There was nothing in this corner of Southeast Texas to stop the parade of eroding neighborhoods and shiny shopping malls. Not a mountain nor a river nor a God nor much of anything until you got to the Gulf of Mexico.

From the forty-second floor, Smartie Breedlove could see it all.

Houston was the fourth most populous city in the United States and arm-wrestled Los Angeles for the dubious distinction of having the worst air quality. The city was over a hundred miles wide. Six million busy people. Eleven thousand restaurants. Almost that many churches. Smartie had gathered these factoids while conducting research for her first novel,
Get Wilder
, a moderately successful bit of pulp fiction in which late night classic rock disc jockey Smack Wilder solves the murder of the Pentecostal televangelist with whom she’s been sleeping.

By the thirty-eighth floor, Smartie’s silk slip dress had ridden up under her arms. She wore no panties, and wickedly, she was glad for that. She’d gotten her roots done a day or two earlier and was sporting a fresh mani-pedi just a few hours old. Also a good thing; cell photos would undoubtedly leak onto the Internet within minutes.

Lighted windows flashed by like comic book panels, and in them Smartie saw her life unreel: the secret struggles of her childhood and boozy hijinks of her youth, fleeting lovers, book covers, contracts and rejections, fan mail and hate mail, blogs and twitter streams, screen shots and publicity stills from movie versions of the “Smack Wilder: Voice of the Graveyard Shift” series.

By the twenty-first floor, her eyes were as dry as red clay on account of the wind, so she couldn’t see the couple on the eighteenth floor balcony, but she heard the woman’s scream whip by like the startled shrill of a seagull. Loud music from a thirteenth floor stag party rose and fell past her ear like a speeding train.

As the glass roof of the dining solarium rose up to meet her, Smartie remembered that the human brain is believed to function for up to sixty seconds after decapitation, firing fine electric signals, searching out its last sight, registering every fast-fading sensation. She’d learned this while researching Smack Wilder #7:
Splatter Cat
, in which Smack solves the murder of a Jackson Pollock forger with whom she’s been sleeping. Or maybe it was Smack Wilder #9:
Doggy Style
, in which Smack solves the murder of the Weimaraner breeder with whom she’s been sleeping.

The men in Smack’s life were handsome and caddish and rarely around long enough for a second martini. The same could be said for most of the men in Smartie’s life, but they were fewer and far between, and little mystery surrounded the circumstances of those hasty departures.

One man in particular did cross her mind at the moment she breached the steel-framed ceiling of the dining solarium, which gave way in a cascade of shattered glass and scattered voices.

Whiteness.

Darkness.

The precious presence of roses.

Sixty seconds later, Smartie Breedlove was dead.

\\\ ///

1

Thirteen months earlier

“T
he human brain functions for up to sixty seconds after decapitation,” Smartie Breedlove told the man in the dove-gray suit.

“That’s disturbing,” he said. “If it’s true.”

“It’s true,” she assured him. “During World War II,
Pravda
documented a soldier continuing a bayonet attack with his head hanging by a thread. Just like… like that.”

Smartie slid a pained glance toward the oddly angled body on the table.

Charma Nicole Bovet lay in an abstract tableau of blood and broken china, wearing a brief silk slip dress, no panties, and a punch bowl. A chilled drizzle descended through the jagged fissure Charma’s body had left in the glass roof of the Bonham Hotel’s dining solarium, and as moisture settled like dewdrops on the broken stems and bluebells of the decimated centerpiece, a soft, Charma-like aroma arose, causing Smartie’s breath to snag and form a small sob inside her chest.

If the sixty second rule held true for Charma—if her wide open eyes did trickle information to her shattered brain for one last minute after she quite literally crashed the Smith-Putzke wedding rehearsal dinner—Smartie hoped that those last flickering images were of roses.

“Do you need to sit down, Ms. Breedlove?” asked the man.

Smartie nodded, bottom lip trembling.

Firmly supporting her elbow, the man steered her toward a table in the corner and pulled out two chairs, setting them to face each other. Both of them went for the chair with the better view of the scene, but Smartie was faster, and the man didn’t seem surprised or dismayed.

In less time than it took to cross the room, Smartie had sized him up and caught an unmistakable whiff of ex-cop. Blend-into-the-woodwork gray suit.
Thin Man
tie. High mileage black shoes. His white shirt was clean, but not quite crisp; there was a melancholy sense of second day about it. A weathered leather notebook was stashed in his breast pocket instead of a handkerchief. He smelled pleasantly of precinct. The dark of a wooden desk drawer. Cool blue carbon paper. Black ink ribbon in an old-school typewriter. In his hand was a perfect white rose that had somehow survived the chaos.

Interesting, Smartie decided.

“Is Smartie Breedlove your given name?” he asked.

“Someone gave it to me.” She shrugged one shoulder.

“Why?”

“Elmore Leonard was taken.”

He smiled patiently.

“It’s because of the candies,” she said. “Those little sugar vertebrae.”

He offered his card. Just his name: MARTIN SHEPARD HARTIGATE, followed by a cell phone number.

“My friends call me Shep,” he smiled.

“Why are you tailing me, Mr. Hartigate?”

“Actually, I was tailing her.” Shep Hartigate thumbed a reverse hitchhike gesture back over his shoulder, indicating Charma. “I’m a private investigator for Salinger, Pringle, Fitch & Edloe.”

“Ah.”

No further explanation was needed. The law firm of SPF & E was well known in Houston for handling high profile divorce cases. Charma was a floozy savant married to a decrepit tycoon.

“You’re here to catch her cheating,” Smartie bristled. “To screw her with the pre-nup.”

“That was the plan,” said Hartigate, because well before Smartie had sized him up, he’d sized up Smartie and knew that trying to schmooze her would be a waste of time.

Her lively blue eyes were sharp and intuitive, despite a swimmy skim of tears. She was remarkably small in stature, barely at his shoulder even in her black stiletto boots, but she sat up straight in her chair in a way that engaged the room around her, an act of occupation. Dressed in jeans and a suede blazer over an easy V-necked shirt, she wore no makeup except a blaze of red lipstick. Something at the corners of her Clara Bow mouth gave Shep the odd feeling that he was entertaining her.

“No offense to your friend,” said Hartigate, “but she’s a D-list centerfold married to a wealthy man in his late seventies. Why tiptoe around it? His family is quite reasonably concerned.”

Smartie played with a renegade corkscrew of blond hair, tried to thread it behind her ear, but it immediately sprang loose, like birthday ribbon dragged across a scissor blade.

Shep Hartigate had helmet hair, Smartie observed: unmistakably mashed down on top, curled out little at the nape of the neck. A man who was willing to fly by the seat of his pants, but only with proper safety gear. This appealed to Smartie. She decided to use that for Smack Wilder’s current crush.

With his impeccable dove-gray suit, Thin Man tie and helmet hair, Tag Mason was a square-jawed, Hog-mounted rebel without a flaw, the kind of man who’d ride to Hell and back, but wore clean underwear just in case.

“Ms. Breedlove, how did you know Mrs. Bovet?”

“We were roommates.”

“When?”

“A long time ago.”

“In college or…” He paused for her to fill in the blank. “Someplace else?”

“The second one.”

“When did you last see Mrs. Bovet?”

“It’s been too long.” Smartie shook her head, and her eyes clouded. “We used to go out a lot, but then she went on the wagon and got married. We email. We play Words With Friends on Facebook. I call her up and say let’s do coffee, let’s do lunch, let’s pretend to walk the dog so we can watch the roofers climb up and down their ladders next door.” She shrugged her small-boned shoulders. “Seems like she’s been busy lately.”

“Did she confide in you about any troubles she was having?”

“D-list centerfold marries a wealthy man in his late seventies,” said Smartie. “What troubles could she possibly be having?”

“Can you think of any reason for her to jump off the balcony tonight?”

“I can think of a thousand reasons, Mr. Hartigate, but she didn’t jump. Don’t expect me to help you make it look like she did.”

“Miss Breedlove, I’m not trying to make it look like anything,” said Shep. “My task was to observe Mrs. Bovet, not to make judgments.”

“Tasked by whom? Belinda Bovet or her father?”

“Does it make a difference?”

“I don’t know, does it?”

“Not to me,” Shep said. “I’m just gathering information.”

“And what have you gathered?”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss that.”

Tag would die a fiery death, Smartie decided. He would crash and burn. She flashed on the title
Dead Sexy
for Smack Wilder #12 and jotted that in her notebook.

“Ms. Breedlove, no one had a problem with this industrious young woman collecting what she earned should that horny old goat kick the bucket while still married to her, but she entered into a legal agreement with specific parameters. My job is to find out if she was in breach of that contract.”

“So without making any judgments, you’ve decided she was an unscrupulous opportunist.”

“Is there another kind of opportunist?”

“Yes. Lots of kinds,” Smartie exclaimed. “Jesus rutabagas. I know of a Baptist girl who married a rabbi when she was nineteen. A forty-nine-year-old rabbi marries a teenage girl, Southern Baptist born and born again every summer at Bible camp. It’s not a bit unreasonable to draw whatever conclusions you might, but maybe the Baptist girl genuinely loved that rabbi. Maybe he understood her in a way other people didn’t. Maybe he thought she was worth something, and it had nothing to do with his freckle fetish. You don’t know the backstory. And I’m here to tell you, backstory is everything.”

“And what’s the illuminating backstory on Mrs. Bovet?” asked Shep.

“She was an unscrupulous opportunist.” Smartie unzipped her cavernous handbag. “Aren’t we all? Don’t we all gravitate toward certain people because of what they do for us? How they make us feel?”

“So she married him for love, but she loved him for money.”

“It’s not that simple. People aren’t always what you think. People are a mystery.”

Rummaging the bag, she laid one item after another on the brocade table runner. Lipstick, iPhone, scribbled notes. Shep made a one-eyed inventory as she excavated a pack of cigarettes and a little yellow lighter.

“Charma saw an opportunity to live a big life, and she worked it, you bet,” said Smartie, “but she genuinely adored that horny old goat. There’s not a thing in the world she wouldn’t do for him, and let me tell you, for a man his age...” She put her hand on Shep’s arm and whispered, “He was remarkably
spry
.”

“You think he was satisfied with the situation then?”

“Satisfied? He was sated. He was smitten. He was gelatinous in love with her,” said Smartie. “They play this little game. When he gets off his flight, she sends him a text message:
Catch me if you can
. Then she sends him little clues, and he has to chase all over the city, buying lacy undies, chocolates, jewelry, champagne—like a scavenger hunt—getting closer and closer until he finally finds her, and then they make crazy perverse love. Does that sound like a woman who was about to kill herself? Does that sound like a man who wanted a divorce?”