Kill Smartie Breedlove (a mystery) (19 page)

“It’s looking that way.”

Breathing out pure relief, Smartie went to Shep and latched her arms around his neck, but he held her firmly at arm’s length.

“Smartie. Thinking with my dick has cost me a lot in the past. I can’t afford that here.”

She nodded. “What happens now?”

“Best case scenario, I lose my job. Worst case, Boodle goes back to being Ozymandias.” Shep turned away to tend the eggs and bacon. “Talk to me about that fan fiction guy who messed with your car.”

“He’s just a kid,” she said. “It’s not connected to the Suri thing.”

“I’ll decide for myself. Start talking.”

“I don’t know what else to tell you. Two years ago, he started showing up at my book signings. He was perfectly nice at first. Nerdy, bookish, like ninety-nine percent of my fans. But then he started getting… not threatening exactly, but mean.”

“How so?”

“I was on a panel at South By Southwest, and during the Q and A, he asked a million ridiculously pedantic questions, like ‘Did you find the history of prestidigitation to be over your head or are you always this lax about research?’ Contentious nut butter like that. Basically trying to demonstrate to the audience that he’s brilliant and I’m a stupid hack.”

She sat cross legged on the kitchen rug, fiddling with Boodle’s floppy silk purse ear.

“I gave a talk at the Dallas Mystery Guild, and he tried to engage me in this big debate about how radio bastardized the characters of Dash—
ow!
” Smartie snatched her bare foot away from Boodle’s pointy puppy teeth and gently scolded, “Say, you. Chew on your chew toys.”

“And?” Shep pitched a rubber dumbbell for Boodle to chase.

“A few weeks later, there was a fundraiser for the Barbara Bush Library up north of Houston, and there he is. Wants me to look at this manuscript he’s working on. He said if I read it I’d discover that we have this amazing connection, and that frankly scared the livin’ catfish outta me, so I asked the event organizer to make him leave. And he got very upset. They sort of bullied him out the door, and he’s yelling at me about clues and evidence right in front of me and how if I wasn’t such a stuck-up bitch I would see it, and now everybody’s freaked out, and I begged the event coordinator not to call the police, but she did, and when the cops got there, he was down in the parking garage and… oh, Shep, this part hurts my heart,” Smartie cringed. “He’d slit the convertible top on my car and was stuffing it with the crumpled up pages of his manuscript.”

“His manuscript,” said Shep. “Was his name on it?”

“He’d used some painfully continental pen name. I forget what. I couldn’t even bear to look at it. He got arrested, and Shep, he was in tears, and I felt horrible. I really don’t think he meant any harm. He was just trying to get my attention.”

“Smartie, he meant to set your car on fire.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Hmm.” Shep gave his chin an exaggerated stroke. “Batshit crazy dude. Crumpled paper. Matches. Yeah, something about that says
fire
to me.”

“Why would you assume he had matches?”

“Why would you assume he didn’t?”

“Hill used to say, ‘We look at the world and see ourselves,’” Smartie piously quoted.

“Yeah, well, I look under rocks and see roaches.”

“Shep, you don’t know what it’s like trying to get published. You’re all alone inside this book, trying to make sense of it, and everyone thinks you’re crazy, and you desperately need someone—
anyone
—to see what you see, so you keep praying someone will open a door, only you don’t know where the door
is
, and you think there’s a secret knock, but there isn’t, and then
yes
, you finally find the door knob, but
no
, it comes off in your hand, because even when you get a book deal, all you can do is look in through the keyhole at the round-mouthed, Cobb-salad-munching critics denouncing your life’s work as mass market crap while falling all over the Fancy, Pantsy & Giroux book that sold a whole forty-one copies.”

“Smartie, where in all that is it okay for this guy to vandalize your car?”

“I’m just saying, it’s a crazy-making business filled with people who want what they want so badly, they’re willing to do just about anything.”

“Which makes him exactly the kind of guy Suri can use,” said Shep. “Smartie, the car and the office on the same day? Even if I believed in coincidence, I wouldn’t believe that. The car was done to stall us long enough to provide time for the office activities.”

“Why is there never a can of red herring repellent around when you need it?” Smartie pressed her fingertips to her temples. “Shep, I finally figured out that none of this is connected. Please, don’t tell me it is.”

“Suri was the only one who knew you’d be there. She rounds up this guy who’s already got a rap sheet for messing with you, sends me down there so I’ll see it and ‘pop round’ to your place like a jack-in-the-box. Jesus, it hurts my head to see what a wind-up monkey they’ve made out of me in all three of these cases.”

And how many others?
Smartie wondered but didn’t say it out loud. She tossed the rubber dumbbell again, and Boodle chased after it.

“She’s got it set up so that if I go to the police, there’s a brick wall of evidence that makes it look like I was complicit from the start,” said Shep. “That’s if her other chore boy hasn’t already used your gun to kill me.”

“Or me,” said Smartie. “Or both of us.”

“I’m not jumping to any conclusions, but we need to talk to this guy. If I’m right, if she got to him, either he tossed your office and killed Twinkie, or he knows who did.”

“I have a book signing this weekend. Maybe he’ll come.”

“Mind if I tag along?”

“Please do.” She stepped to the living room door and called, “Boodle? What are you destroying in there?”

Boodle gamboled in with the mangled remains of a couch pillow, his outsized paws plopping on the tile like blobs of raw bread dough.

“I think he actually grew while he was in the next room,” said Smartie.

She pitched another puppy toy, and he flailed on the tile floor until he found his big feet and took off down the hall. Shep went to the coat tree by the door and took an envelope from his jacket pocket.

“The only way I can share information about the cases I’ve worked is if I’m subcontracting the services of a consultant,” he said. “That’s how I get straight on medical and technical stuff that’s beyond my expertise. Forensic character analysis, for example.”

He watched for her slow smile as she clapped on to the idea.

“You’re signing the same confidentiality agreement that binds me.” He handed her the envelope. “That means you can’t mine this for material, Smartie. None of it.”

Her smile faded. “You’re killing me, Shep.
Killing
me.”

“If that’s what it takes.”

Smartie made a gritty sound, signed the agreement, and handed it to back to him. Over breakfast, Shep shared the ballad of Kara Lynn and the most expensive blowjob ever caught on tape.

“When I look at this girl and the guy Charma was messing with,” said Shep, “those two are peas right out of the over-privileged suburban pod. College age. Thrashing to make the kind of money they grew up with. Clever enough to pull off the job, but not nearly as smart as they think they are. A lot easier to intimidate than they’re willing to admit.”

“College age,” said Smartie. “Charma’s boyfriend?”

“He’s twenty-two now, but he was twenty-one at the time. I observed her entering his dorm on several occasions. She bought him a laptop, iPod, iPhone, Wii. The last time I pegged them together, they were outside the place he works, and I got him on tape threatening to go to the tabloids. The next day he was driving a brand spanking new Mini Cooper.”

“Go to the tabloids with what?” Smartie said stiffly.

“I can’t say for certain, but whatever they were doing, Smartie, she was willing to pay to keep it quiet.”

“So you never actually saw them in any kind of sexual situation,” said Smartie. “What exactly did he say about the tabloids? Exactly.”

“He said, ‘Enquiring minds want to know, Charma. Maybe I should go and tell them all about it.’ Her checkered past was common knowledge, so unless there was something major she actually managed to keep secret…”

Smartie bent to nuzzle with the puppy rather than meet his eye.

“Smartie,” Shep said after a quiet moment. “What did he have on her?”

“I don’t know for sure.”

“Make a wild guess,” he said without humor.

“She had a baby and gave him up for adoption,” said Smartie. “He’d be about that age. The baby’s father was involved in some shady goings on.”

“Like what?”

“Drugs, dog fighting, bogus papers for illegals. I don’t know what all. Shep, if he is her son, she would have let him into her room that night. Maybe he wanted money. Or maybe he felt resentment about the baby she was carrying. A baby she wanted.”

Shep shook his head. “He has a rock solid alibi. I never liked him for Charma’s murder anyway. He’s basically an okay guy. Not the type who could hide it, even if he did muster the balls to get it done.”

“Then maybe the thug father is back in the picture.”

“That’s a possibility.”

Boodle assumed an ominous posture near Shep’s shoe, but Smartie managed to scoop him out the kitchen door in the nick of time.

“No, no, puppy! Back yard is where we do our bizzies.”

Shep cleared the table before he followed them outside, bringing a retractable leash from the box of supplies from the breeder.

Palm trees and crepe myrtles lined the boulevard that stretched down the main street of Smartie’s subdivision. At each intersection, leafy wrought iron gaslights sprouted from phony Grecian urns, and Boodle didn’t miss a tree, hydrant or mailbox.

“That dog lifts his leg more often than a Rockette,” Shep commented.

Smartie laughed and made a mental note to use that.

“The first dead spouse,” she said. “That was the plastic surgeon’s Barbie remix?”

“Right. Dr. Juarez came to Suri with pretty strong suspicions. I did some work on it, but things were headed downhill with Janny. Suri used some muscle to get her in with a cardiologist in Boston, so I was up there with her. The day after I got back, Mrs. Juarez turned up dead. I should have gotten her,” Shep added with a heavy shadow of regret. “If I hadn’t been so slow on the uptake, she might still be alive.”

“You can’t assume that,” said Smartie, touching his elbow lightly. “Sounds to me like Suri got you out of town long enough for her and Barth to do the deed.”

“And I got back just in time to have no alibi for the murder.”

“What about the second spouse? The backup dancer for Spicy McWhatser-chicklet?”

“Caitlyn Cassidy,” Shep nodded. “Now, that guy I had nailed to the wall. I had footage of him freebasing, cruising hookers, porking club kids of unspecified gender. If that had been a Suri Fitch pre-nup, he’d have been sliced on rye. Sadly, Miss Cassidy didn’t come to Suri until after they were married, and this guy’s attorney was like the unkillable cockroach. He and Suri went at it with bare knuckles for about six months before the spouse kacked it on his jet-ski.”

“Maybe it’s not just the pre-nup then,” said Smartie. “Maybe Suri just doesn’t like to lose.”

“Maybe.” Shep took the plastic bag Smartie offered and picked up after Boodle.

“What about the anesthesiologist with the German pistol?”

“Not much to say there. He gambled a lot, but I never got him fooling around on his wife. The autopsy revealed advanced prostate cancer, so I’m not sure he could have screwed around if he’d wanted to. And he was the one who filed for the divorce, not her.”

Arriving back in Smartie’s front yard, they paused while Boodle worried at a clump of monkey grass.

“That’s the odd one out, isn’t it?” Smartie said. “The only one where the pre-nup actually wasn’t being violated. If you take that out of the equation, assume that he actually did kill himself—”

“Then you’ve got nothing. No common denominators,” said Shep.

“We don’t know that, Shep. You can tell a story from more than one point of view,” Smartie said. “We’re assuming this was about something the dead spouse did—because it’s always about the ex. But what if it’s not?”

“You’re saying… what if it’s about the spouse who’s still alive?”

“I think we should at least talk to them.”

“They all know me from the firm,” said Shep. “You would have to do it.”

“Would I be wired?” Smartie was instantly alive to the last freckle. “Oh, Shep, wire me up. Wire me up with spy toys.”

“Not if you’re going to be like that,” he said in annoyance. “You can’t be like you were in Suri’s office, spending all your energy playing detective instead of paying attention. You’ve got to shut up and listen.”

“Yes, but with spy toys, right?”

“Smartie, you have to do it like you do when you’re not trying.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“The first time we met, before I said three words, you knew I’d been a cop.” Shep leaned on the newel post and looked out across the yard. “You knew I screwed around on Janny.”

“Shep, I was upset about my friend and completely talking out of my hat. That’s just a little game I learned in Herrick’s character studies class.”

“The point is, you can’t go into this like you did with Suri. She tagged you instantly, and I don’t think we’ve seen all the fallout from that yet. Be like you were with Barth in the parking garage. You just played that little game, and he walked right into it.”

“Boodle, don’t wreck on the lawn ornaments, baby.” Smartie scolded and clapped, but Boodle already had one plastic flamingo’s neck chewed to a slimy Twizzler. “What’s the backstory on Barth?”

“I wish I knew,” said Shep. “He oversees a small team of people who say he’s a nice guy. The company he works for is based in Dubai. I haven’t been able to come up with a damn thing prior to his employment with them, and I haven’t been able to get anyone in their home office to return my calls. Obviously, he’s playing some role in all this, but I’ve yet to figure out exactly what his area of expertise is.”