A Bitch Called Hope (3 page)

“Doing what?”

“Whatever the man wants. See that hedge over there?” He pointed to a low wall of boxwoods that ran along the fence line. “I’m the one keeps this place neat and tidy.”

“The uniform suits you. I like the white shirt. I didn’t want to say anything at the time, but orange was not your color.”

Resnick scowled.

“Cooper.” Hyatt steered her away from Resnick and his buddy. “You’d better put a move on. I don’t want Sloane giving me shit about why I let you talk to the witnesses.”

“Sloane?” She hoped her voice hadn’t cracked.

Tommy and Sloane were partners. Which meant Tommy probably took the call about Bill Pike just after she did. How was it going to look to the other cops to see her anywhere near Tommy during an investigation? Christ on a crutch, what would Tommy think? Twenty minutes ago she was pushing him out of the loo.

Meantime she’d made it to the front door and the officer wouldn’t let her pass. She tried to explain. Showed him her identification.

“Then you know the drill.” He pulled his chin in and looked stern. “Until the manner of death is established, this area is treated as a crime scene.”

A black Crown Vic pulled up and triple-parked alongside the front squad car. Tommy wore a tweed jacket and a puzzled expression. The jacket she recognized was the same one he kept on a hanger in the cruiser when they’d gone out after shift. He brushed next to Lennox, his sleeve touching hers. He smelled minty fresh like he’d taken a bath in mouthwash. Nobody would guess he’d been swilling beer a half hour ago.

“Change your mind?” he said to her in a low voice. As if they’d agreed to rendezvous at the Pike house. He turned to the officer. “The techs here yet?”

If the officer had the wispiest of clues about her and Tommy, he didn’t let on. “Just called, sir. Probably ten minutes at the most.”

“The body?”

“Still upstairs. They’re waiting for your go-ahead. Detective Sloane is interviewing witnesses.”

“My mother found the body,” Lennox said. “I’m here to bring her home.”

“Your mother?” Tommy turned to Lennox as if it had never occurred to him that she would have a mother. Then he recovered.

“Go ahead,” he said.

The officer looked like he wanted to object but caught himself.

“Show me the body,” Tommy told him.

Lennox followed them through the open front door.

Through the foyer into the Pikes’ enormous living room. Big enough so the fifty guests, give or take, could stay out of the way of the cops and EMTs. And judging by the way the guests pressed themselves against the walls and sofa cushions, that looked to be exactly what they were trying to do. Pumpkin-colored walls, russet upholstery, the room looked like it was slowly oxidizing, but in a tasteful way. A twelve-foot Christmas tree stood in the corner. Someone had unplugged the twinkle lights.

Detective Sloane looked up from a witness and gave Lennox the stink-eye as she crossed the room to where her mother was sitting all by herself on the loveseat beneath the north windows. Aurora looked even smaller than she actually was. Her garnet-colored hair stood up like she’d been pulling on it. She was shivering.

Lennox draped her leather jacket over her mother’s shoulders and sat down next to her so that their bodies touched, thigh to knee. Aurora was so tiny, the two of them cozied down on half a loveseat. Her mother smelled the way she always did: a braid of Coco Chanel, Listerine and Parliament 100’s.

Lennox looked over at Sloane who smiled reassuringly at the next witness and motioned her to the chair facing him. The witness hesitated, probably scared to death of Sloane with his horse face and long yellow teeth. Lennox should be the one interviewing these people, and it was killing her to sit here on the sidelines with all the taxpayers.

How she ended up losing her badge was a story Lennox had told over and over again to the Independent Police Review Authority, to Internal Affairs, and to the Police Board who eventually discharged her ass. Lennox and her partner, John Doran, were the first responders on a level-three assist, officers taking fire at 5260 North Russell. They had heard shots coming from the back of the residence as they pulled up. Lennox sprinted across side yards and vaulted a cyclone fence to reach the neighbor closest to the residence. As she peeked around the corner of the house she saw a man in a black tee shirt lying face down in the packed dirt. He wasn’t moving. Blood, patches of scrub grass, broken glass and a derelict sofa twenty feet from the back porch made up the yard. Two more men sprawled by the sofa, one in uniform, the other in jeans and a leather jacket. Both of them looked to be breathing. One of them groaned. The last officer standing was pinned behind the sofa.

The shooter on the back porch popped up from a chest freezer long enough to take a shot at the sofa. Lennox sighted her gun from the edge of the house next door. Which is when she recognized Tommy as one of the downed men, the one in the leather jacket. He was collapsed on the ground curled around his wound, blood seeping into the ground from his body.

What Lennox was supposed to do: wait for the cavalry so as not to endanger herself or her fellow officers. What she did: ran in a feint: left, right, trying to get to Tommy.

Doran, her partner, shouted. Stepped out from cover, guns blazing, doing his best to draw fire away from her.

The shooter hit him in the side of the head with a forty-four.

Before they fired her, Lennox got one month paid leave. And a good man and his widow on her conscience for the rest of her life.

Aurora squeezed Lennox’s fingers until her rings bit into the flesh of Lennox’s hand. “They think I killed him,” she said in a low voice.

“Don’t be silly.”

Lennox followed Aurora’s sight line catty-corner across the room to Bill’s wife, Delia. She looked very pale and thin sitting on the sofa wedged between two men, one dark, one fair. Dan and Scott Pike. Dan all grown up. More than grown-up, her thirty-eight years plus four made him forty-two. It looked good on him. The blond one must be Scott. Scott had been beneath notice, a year younger than Lennox and a big baby. Now look at him nursing a large glass of scotch.

Lennox heard noise coming from the direction of the kitchen. Trouble. A big cop marched into the room with a backpack, a crying woman trailing, her hand still clinging to one of the backpack straps. She was young and dressed in a caterer’s uniform. Just by entering the room she sucked up all the attention; she was that breathtakingly gorgeous.

“It’s not what you think,” she told the cop. Over and over.

A redheaded waiter hovered nearby. The way he watched the girl, Lennox pegged him for the boyfriend.

“What’s going on?” Aurora half-lifted from her seat to get a better look.

Lennox pulled her back and shushed her.

The cop set the backpack on the interview table. “Sir, you need to look at this,” he said to Sloane.

Sloane dumped out the contents. He fished out a banded stack of bills from under a rolled-up pair of jeans and held the bills in front of the girl.

“Bill gave it to me,” the girl said in a voice loud enough that people within twenty feet of the table could hear.

“Poor Delia,” Aurora said in a voice that wasn’t altogether surprised.

Lennox had thought Bill was a nice dad just like her nice dad. Another childhood illusion shot to hell.

All the color drained from the boyfriend’s face. His freckles stood out in big blotches.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” the girl said.

“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about,” Sloane told the girl. The cop who’d discovered the backpack led the girl past all the guests out the front door. The room went completely silent, but Lennox could feel the buzz. The girl and the money: everyone in that room telling a story to themselves about what it meant. Speculation: it’s what we humans do.

Lennox heard a car engine come to life. The crunch of gravel on the drive as the cop drove away to headquarters with the girl.

One of the guests, stick thin and elderly, left his chair and went over to Delia.

In his big cop voice, Sloane told the man to sit down, but the old dude wasn’t having it.

“I’m Delia’s doctor,” the thin man said. “She’s been through a terrible shock.”

Tommy re-entered the living room. Sloane jerked his head in the doctor’s direction. Their conversation was too quiet for Lennox to pick up.

Tommy turned to the guests, his gaze panning the room. He cleared his throat. “I think we have everything for now, folks,” he said. “So thank you for your cooperation. You can go home, but it may be that we’ll need to contact you again.”

Sloane began shepherding the guests from the living room. Tommy came over to Aurora, just as she and Lennox had stood up to leave. He introduced himself.

“If you would stay a little while longer, ma’am. I want to go over your statement with you,” he said.

“Am I in trouble?” Aurora said in a frightened voice.

“No, ma’am. You could bring your daughter with you if that would you make you feel more comfortable.” He glanced over at Lennox, his eyelid fluttered in a ghost of a wink.

They followed Tommy through the dining room into the kitchen and sat opposite him at a small table in the breakfast nook.

Tommy paged back in his notebook to a sketch of the master bedroom. He pointed to the sketch and asked Aurora where she’d been standing at the moment she first discovered Bill’s body. He asked her if she had touched the body. She had not. What time was it when she found him? She didn’t know. Tommy glanced at her hands clenched together on the table, a designer watch encircling her wrist.

“I didn’t think to look at the time.” Aurora’s voice came out in a squeak.

“You’d had a shock.” Tommy soothed. “We see that all the time. Don’t we, Lennox?”

Aurora swung around to Lennox. “You know him?”

“She saved my life,” Tommy said. He had no idea what a colossally bad idea it was swap stories with Aurora. He probably thought Aurora would love hearing about Lennox’s heroics. How they would all bond over this memory. And once they’d bonded, he’d be that much closer to getting Lennox in bed. He didn’t know her mother.

“You’re the man my daughter pulled to safety?” Aurora said. There was an edge to her voice that you could shave your legs with. Tommy hadn’t noticed; he was that sure of his ability to charm the socks off any female.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“She was very brave,” Aurora said.

“A hero,” he said.

“You should’ve stopped the police board from firing her. You should’ve raised holy hell, threatened to quit yourself.”

He was so not expecting this little old lady to challenge him. He stood and yanked up his shirt. “I was in the hospital!” he said. An eight-inch purple scar keloided from below his rib cage to just above where his slacks hung from his skinny hips. “The hospital had me sedated until I didn’t know if I was coming or going. By the time I got out, it was all over and Lennox had moved on.”

There was probably enough truth there to sell it, just like his story about his wife and how she happened to find out about them after Lennox had been fired. But Lennox wasn’t going for it. And from the way Aurora had her jaw set, she wasn’t going for it either.

Chapter 4

It was nine a.m., two days after Bill Pike’s death. The crows outside Lennox’s office window were shrieking at each other. Lennox sipped her first cup of coffee of the day, looked at the morning
Oregonian
and saw Bill’s name in the headline. The paper was calling it murder.

Lennox had half expected it. Something felt off beyond the girl with the packet of money. The murder made front page of the Metro section the same day his funeral notice ran in the back of the paper.

Lennox clipped both the headline story and the obit and called her poker buddy, Sarge. Sarge ran the police evidence room. He could tell you how many open cases a cop had on his desk and whose arrests made it to conviction. And he could recite a bad guy’s rap sheet the way a sportscaster rattles off baseball statistics.

“Can’t talk to you now,” he said in a low voice. “I’ll call you back.”

Lennox had to wait until he took his coffee break. She could hear traffic noise, the splash of a car driving through a puddle.

“Where are you?” she said.

“I’m standing under a tree in South Park,” Sarge said.

She imagined rain beading on his bald head. “You’ll catch a cold,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it.” He lowered his voice. “You know what will happen to me if it leaks out I’ve been talking to you.”

Lennox swore on her mother’s head that she would not so much as hint about anything she learned.

He told her the autopsy report had come in the night before. Cause of death: insulin poisoning.

“That’s a new one,” Lennox said. “How could that happen?”

A car alarm went off down the street. Sarge said, “They don’t know how it was administered yet, but I’ll tell you what, there was a doctor on the scene called it a heart attack. They’re taking a good hard look at him.”

“Sounds like the murder was premeditated.”

“Does,” Sarge agreed.

Lennox asked about the girl with the wad of cash in her backpack. Her name was Alice Stapely. She’d been released but the ten thousand dollars remained in custody.

Lennox whistled.

According to Ms. Stapely, she’d had a relationship with Bill when she was fourteen. Lennox would never have guessed Bill for a pervert. He’d always acted fatherly towards Lennox.

“Stapley says the deceased gave her the money,” Sarge said. “Told her he wanted to help her.”

“But they don’t think she killed him?” Lennox said.

“They don’t see how she could have pulled it off. She says she was with the victim in his office before the party, but once the party started she was never alone with him. She passed the lie detector test.”

“Any other leads?” Lennox said.

Sarge hesitated. “Rumor has it you and Tommy are an item again.”

“I’m just an ambulance chaser,” she told Sarge. “Trying to scare up more business.”

“Because you can do better than that guy.”