Kill Smartie Breedlove (a mystery) (28 page)

Closing her hands around the iron rail, Smartie gripped it hard, pulled and pushed, testing it. It didn’t flex or wobble a centimeter.

Centered on the terra cotta tile floor was a little patio set: two scrolled ice cream parlor chairs and a table topped with a mosaic depiction of the Alamo. Dragging one of the iron chairs next to the wall, Smartie set one foot on the seat and lifted herself just enough to shift one hip onto the rough edge of the wall. She got down and gripped the safety rail again, giving it a serious effort, still finding it as solid as the brick wall.

She set her other foot on the chair this time, rested her other hip on the wall. She counted quietly to three, then stepped up and sat both hips on the wall, making a high, bird-like peeping as her tail bone rested against the iron rail. Her fingers ached already, but she kept a claw-hold on the brick wall under her thighs until the peeping settled into one deep, exhilarated breath after another and the dusky colors of Texas at evening surrounded her.

Thinking about Charma with life in her belly and death breathing down her back, Smartie hooked her foot through the scrollwork on the back of the chair and forced her fingers to relax. She opened her arms wide, closed her eyes, floating free and forgiven, becoming part of a sky that would go on forever until skies didn’t matter anymore.

“S
o that’s the precarious position in which we find ourselves,” said Paige Edloe, parsing her words with care.

“Indeed.” Shep tented his fingers, studying the art and artifacts on her desk.

“Suri asked me to give her thirty-six hours to reach her parents’ home in Maharashtra before I deliver the package to the district attorney. According to her sworn affidavit, Miss Cassidy and Mrs. Van Reuse weren’t aware of any ‘special efforts’ on their behalf. Obviously, I find that hard to believe, considering what they’ve been paying her. And I find it even more difficult to believe that all this went on without your participation, Mr. Hartigate, but she makes a point of emphasizing how your complete incompetence and checkered job history kept her from soliciting your help.”

Shep’s jaw hardened as he felt himself once again reduced to a cartoon character. Accepting that from Suri was like trying to swallow a domino.

“According to her affidavit, she orchestrated it all, Barth was the muscle, you were basically Forrest Gump, and then you made the mistake of sleeping with Barth’s little stripper girl, which led to the confrontation in which the police officer was forced to shoot him.”

“You have a sworn affidavit from the girl backing that up, I suppose.”

Paige made a
needless to say
gesture with her hand.

“Paige, I can’t in good conscience—” Shep started.

“
Tsut!
” She sat forward and made the classic
zip it
gesture across her lips. “I don’t want to know, Shep. I am in no way encouraging you to lie when the DA questions you, but I’ll tell you right now, the assembled evidence supports her testimony down to the last thread. They’ll assume your conflicting story is the product of wounded pride. Or stupidity. And it would be.”

Paige pushed a thick file across her desk.

“Your severance package, Mr. Hartigate. And a copy of the confidentiality agreement. In case you need to be reminded.”

“What happens if they get extradition?” asked Shep.

“I don’t see that happening. Her father has friends in high places over there; Suri has plenty of favors she can call in on this side of the pond. But she told me before she left that if they do manage to get her shipped back here, she’s prepared to make a case for herself minimizing collateral damage to the firm.”

Shep laughed out loud and immediately regretted it. The pain was bell-ringing.

“More likely,” said Paige, “she’ll stay there, marry some nice man her parents have selected and spend the rest of her life deeply regretting all this, and sugar, to that, I say
tough shit
. I’ve put thirty years into building this firm. If Suri Fitch is willing to go into the volcano so the rest of us can avoid being unfairly disbarred and bashed to pieces in the media, you won’t see me shed a tear. She brought this on herself. Threw away a brilliant career.”

Paige gathered the files on her desk, placed them in a leather briefcase, and slid them into a wooden cabinet behind her desk. The heavy door clicked shut, and she took more than a moment to rotate the dial of the combination lock between her thumb and index finger. When she turned back to Shep, he could see a swim of those tears she’d vowed not to shed.

“Jesus God,” she said. “When I think what this does to our billable hours…”

L
ate afternoon had turned to evening; it wasn’t dark yet, but the air was getting chilly. Smartie shivered deeply on her perch. She inched herself forward and eased her bottom off the brick wall, holding her breath until her feet found the tile floor and she stood firmly on that foundation, breathing, elated.

There was a gentle knock at the door. She considered pulling on a robe or maybe her jeans before she went to let Shep in, but the knock came again, a little more insistent. The sound of it combined with the euphoria of the open air and the gritty tingle from the bricks against her backside and the lingering thrill of Charma’s last passionate moments, giving her courage to open the door, to let Shep in, to tell him—

“Oh! I was expecting someone else.”

“So I see,” Casilda smiled her serene smile.

“Well. This is embarrassing.”

Casilda stood a good ten inches taller than Smartie, a size sixteen to Smartie’s hard-earned zero. Smartie got a distinct vibe that Casilda wanted her to feel that difference between them as she made herself an immovable object blockading the space between Smartie and the long hallway.

Smartie smiled nervously. “What brings you here, Casilda?”

Casilda smiled and said, “
Audacity
.”

S
hep pulled into the parking lot at the Bonham and slotted Smartie’s car between two pickup trucks. He picked up the room key at the front desk, but opted to stop off for a drink before heading up, thinking fortification may be needed before he sat down with Smartie and set the subject of Bean on the table.

He opted for a table by the window rather than a stool at the bar, where some soggy jackass was slumped with his face buried in the arms of his tweed jacket.

“Sir,” a longsuffering barmaid was prodding, “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“I’m waiting for someone,” the drunk complained without raising his head.

There was a part of Shep that felt the tug, but why should he be the one to step into other people’s troubles? It was her job to deal with the lonely bastards who came in here to get plastered. Let her deal with the dude. Do the right thing, don’t do anything, what the hell difference did it make in the end?

Shep eased into his chair like a creaky old man.

“Shot of Jack and a Shiner Bock,” he told the barmaid when she finally came by.

The shot he put away in one swift tip, but he sat and sipped the beer, watching a pair of lizards bobbing their heads at each other on a century plant outside.

“I
t’s always been a pet peeve of mine,” Casilda said, dragging Smartie by one leg. “In every single book, you do this core dump of information at the end where you drag out the exposition and club readers over the head with everything the average Joe was apparently too dense to pick up on earlier.”

Shrieking and clawing, Smartie managed to grasp the teacart as they passed by, but Casilda kicked it free and kept going.

“Now that we’re here, I understand,” Casilda said, breathing hard with the effort. “The task at hand—it’s so distasteful.”

Out on the balcony, she slid the door shut and allowed Smartie to scramble to the corner of the patio, where she cringed clinging to the solid wall.

“Casilda, why are you doing this? You don’t want to do this.”

“Well, that’s what I’m saying. This irrevocable and truly awful thing is at hand. It’s not about exposition. They’re stalling is what they’re doing.”

“Yes! Stalling. You’re right,” Smartie agreed emphatically. “This is—this is valuable insight into the character who—who finds herself in a situation where—oh, Casilda, you don’t want to do this.”

“No. I really don’t. I’ve been sick with dreading it.”

“Of course! Of course, you have. Because you’re a good person, Casilda. You’re not capable of… of…”

Smartie tapered off as Casilda, searching her handbag for cigarettes and lighter, set Smartie’s handgun on the mosaic tabletop.

“You killed Twinkie,” Smartie said, hollow, struggling with it. “Casilda, why? He loved you. You knew he’d never hurt a ladybug. He’d have sat there as nice as you please and let you trash the place.”

“Oh, he did,” said Casilda. “But I wasn’t at all sure I’d be able to do this. Shoot a person. I couldn’t quite imagine the specifics. So I thought, start with the dog. For research, essentially. Toughen up. Get some practical knowledge about dealing with the physical aspect. But my God, it was… indescribable.”

She paled visibly at the memory, pacing, folding her hands together, wringing her thumbs over and under each other.

“The sound of it. The mess on the floor, on the wall. He collapsed, this mountainous carcass,
and his eyes rolled back, and his tongue lolled. You don’t understand how apt that word
lolled
—”

“Stop it,” Smartie cried, covering her face with her hands. “Please.”

“It’s too awful, isn’t it? I’m still agonizing about including that in my book.”

“What book?”

“
Paperback Writer: The Pulp Fiction Life and Tragic Death of Smartie Breedlove
,” said Casilda, putting a cigarette to her lips. “I may tweak that subtitle.”

“A little wordy. But I see where you’re going with it.”

“Probably the most marketable of my Dead Writers No One Really Cares About biographies, don’t you think?” Casilda touched a flame to the cigarette. “I’ve created journals and letters, mostly correspondence between the pulp fiction hack and the brilliant literary mentor she kicked to the curb, only to realize that without him, she couldn’t write a thing and had no career and consequently, um…”

Casilda nodded to the void beyond the brick half-wall. Smartie felt the chill of the altitude like a blade down the back of the silk night slip.

“Anyway, I’m still finessing the material about the dog,” said Casilda. “Fact is, you can stack a manuscript with as many human corpses as you like, but kill a dog? No.”

“You’ll get e-mail,” Smartie nodded. “Casilda, please. Let’s just go in and forget this happened. You won’t get away with this. Shep’s going to be here any moment.”

“I’ll tell him you said goodbye.”

“The gun’s going to make noise. And leave evidence,” said Smartie. “You’ll have powder residue on your hands.”

“The gun is a last resort. That’s what I gained from the experience with the dog. Instead of making me feel more confident, it left me without a doubt that the last thing I want to do is shoot a human being, particularly a colleague, a friend, in many respects. When we were chatting earlier, I thought, of course! The balcony is perfect. Much easier for all concerned. I had to bump up my timetable a bit, but it’s really solving more problems than it creates—as a good plot twist must.”

Casilda hefted the table aside, positioning it so that one leg blocked the track and kept the sliding door in place.

“I got a wealth of material from your computer,” she said. “All those years of e-mail between you and Fritz. Even in the raw, it’s so well written. Hilarious. Poignant. Shows your fantastically borderline personality. And it lends the blessing of Fritz Goodman, who will have to acknowledge that the e-mail is authentic. A perfect counterpoint to those touching letters you wrote to Herrick over the years.”

“I never wrote to Herrick.”

“No, those are my handiwork. And they’re good, Smartie. I wish you could see what I’ve accomplished. Best ghostwriting I’ve ever done. It’s your voice to a pinprick. It’ll leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that Herrick is the creative genius behind every bestseller you supposedly wrote. Including this one.”

Casilda handed her the bundled manuscript, and Smartie stared at the title page.

Swan Dive: a Smack Wilder Mystery
by Albert Herrick.

“I’ve had the idea kicking around for a while, but I couldn’t do it with that last piece of trash you produced,” said Casilda. “
Dead Sexy
? For the love of God. I don’t even want anyone to think that crawled out from under a rock in Herrick’s brain. So in my book, I have him refusing to help you with that one, which is why you filed for divorce, which worked out
so
perfectly. Honestly, I could have never worked it all out if you hadn’t been caught up in all this. And in my humble opinion, this is your best work, Smartie. I’ll be able to build on this to create a wonderful first bestseller for Herrick and a nice last hurrah for the series. We’ll let all the little geeks and plate-heads who loved Smack say their goodbyes. Then, after all these thankless years of ghostwriting your books, Herrick will start publishing his own novels under his own name. Which will dovetail nicely with your literary estate, which he’s about to inherit. With a bit of patience, I’ll eventually be a wealthy widow.”

Casilda took a last drag from her cigarette.

“All right,” she said, “there’s no point in delaying this. Off you go.”

“Well, I’m not going to jump just because you tell me to,” Smartie huffed. “There’s absolutely no credible motivation for me to do that.”

“That’s why I kept the gun,” said Casilda, taking the snubby weapon between her hands. “But I’m begging you, Smartie, don’t make it necessary. One way or another, you’re going over that rail. If you go over voluntarily, you might be able to climb down to the floor below and save yourself.”

Smartie thought about that, checked the distance from the corner of her eye, and decided it was insanity.

“I won’t go, and if you try to force me…” She groped for any plot hole that might offer a handhold. “There’ll be signs of a struggle.”