Kill Smartie Breedlove (a mystery) (16 page)

In the grainy picture, Charma and Bovet leaned toward each other, the preacher’s hand blurred in a flat gesture of benediction. Her flame red lips were puckered up for action, but there was no greedy tongue at the corner of Bovet’s mouth, no leer in his eye.

He looked like a man in love.

“S
o he kills her in a jealous rage?” Fritz said skeptically. “Feels too easy.”

“But Fritz, the actual murder is just the beginning,” said Smartie. “Inky has to make it look like suicide so the insurance company won’t have to pay out, right? So she gets Nash to sweep things under the rug. Do her dirty work.”

“But you already set up the Nash character as being possessed of this very Phillip Marlowe code of ethics. Why does he go along with it?”

“Money, power or love,” said Smartie. “And it’s not money or power.”

“Nash is in love with the unscrupulous Inky?”

“No.” Smartie saw it like a hand in a black leather glove. “He’s in lust with her. Which is twice as dangerous.”

“I
do enjoy you, Mr. Hartigate,” Suri had told him at the firm’s holiday party nine months after Janny died. “I appreciate your irreverence.”

Facing his first Christmas alone, Shep was half drunk, dreading going home and in no way capable of facing the loud crowd and jingly music of the firm’s office party. Suri made a brief obligatory appearance at the festivities and spent the rest of the evening in Shep’s office talking about legal philosophy and local politics, her flawless bare feet up on his desk, her elegant hand supporting a martini, her melodic dialect fogging his brain like opium.

After the Korean cleaning ladies finished policing the party midden and turned out the lights in the reception area, Suri tugged Shep by the tie and led him under the mistletoe.

“Don’t be so sad,” she whispered against his mouth.

She kissed him lightly. Shep kissed her back hard. She flicked his lip with her tongue, soft and tweedy as a cat’s tongue, and he instantly lost himself, rubbing his body sloppily against hers, lapping at her like a bloodhound, grinding an obtuse erection against her pelvis. When she pulled away from him, she was laughing.

“Well. Merry Christmas.” She straightened her blouse where he’d mauled it.

“I’m sorry,” Shep swallowed. “Jesus. I apologize.”

“No worries.” She smiled and placed her cool hand on his burning cheek. “Let’s get you a taxi.”

Suri was mercifully good-humored about it at the time and never said a word after the firm reopened for the new year. Shep did his best to ignore the demons down below, but every time he saw her striding down the hallway, he experienced an uncomfortable shuffling north of his kneecaps and south of his common sense. And he was certain he wasn’t in it alone; there were several occasions when he’d escorted her to her car late at night and felt something like a heat-seeking missile coming at him from her side of the elevator.

Shep felt the opposite of that now. A cool, compressed breeze down the back of his neck told him there’d been a sea change. His irreverence was no longer appreciated.

Certainly, Suri knew Shep wanted her because every man who saw her wanted her. Shep had seen her ride that dynamic like a pony in courtrooms and conference rooms, but he’d never felt her running any such game on him. He’d considered her a friend.

Someone he could trust with the secrets that burdened his past.

“T
hat’s it,” said Smartie. “She has something on him. From when he was a cop.”

“Nash was a cop?”

“A dirty cop.”

“Yes,” said Fritz. “Now we’re going somewhere.”

“Smack starts digging. She realizes there’s a whole lot of shady stuff going on. She’s onto them, and Inky knows it.”

“Working, working...”

“She’s digging, she’s digging, she’s excavating. What’s this? Two people mysteriously dead. Were they disposed of by their ultra-rich spouses?”

“Dig, girl, dig!”

“Meanwhile, the chemistry is zinging and zanging between Smack and Nash. She doesn’t want to believe he’s involved. She’s seen his gentle humor, his quiet intelligence. She’s seen his tender side. And his impeccable backside.”

“Do we need to vent a little steam here?”

“Oh, God, yes.”

“Then I assume he’s about to die?”

“No!” Smartie startled herself. “Maybe. Probably so. Or not.”

I got out of bed, reinstalled my brain, and dropped my panties in my purse.

“What’s the matter, Smack? You don’t trust me?”

“Like a pussy trusts a python.”

“He’s a good character,” said Fritz. “Maybe you should keep him around.”

“In what capacity? He’s too strong a personality to be someone’s sidekick. He’ll end up taking over the whole book. Remember back in book four, the shrink said Smack compartmentalizes sex in order to avoid intimacy. Nash is already way too close for comfort.”

“Well, then do the
Gunsmoke
, Matt Dillon, Miss Kitty thing,” said Fritz. “They’re friends, first and foremost, but there’s always the whiskey on the lips, the hint of cleavage above the antique lace, the healthy bulge between the six-guns.”

“Last call,” I told him, but
Nash’s hands were like two bad boys sneaking under the saloon door. “Here, kitty kitty.”

“No. He dies.” Smartie bit the knuckle of her index finger. “He’s definitely dead.”

“Logistically, it makes sense to have Nash help her,” said Fritz. “A licensed investigator is somewhat better positioned to gather certain types of information than a disc jockey.”

“Smack doesn’t need help,” Smartie said defensively. “She’s about to crack this baby wide open. Sink the whole banana boat, including Nash and the hog he road in on.”

“She’s literally clueless, Smartie. She has absolutely nothing on them.”

“But Inky doesn’t know that. As far as she knows, Smack has acquired some ridiculously damning information. Inky has to find out, right? So she tosses Smack’s office, looking for… what? What could she have found? Whatever’s on her computer, I guess.” Smartie pondered that for a moment. “Smack’s e-mail to and from the bimbo.”

“Have her take the hard drive for now,” said Fritz. “Figure it out later.”

“But they didn’t take the hard drive,” Smartie said, mostly to herself, and then she realized, “Because she wouldn’t physically take it, would she? No, she’d copy it. Fritz, of course. She uploaded it. To the secure online storage facility.”

“Can she do that?” asked Fritz.

“Her henchman could.”

“S
ure. It would only take a few minutes,” said Evan Filer, the law firm’s aptly named computer forensics specialist. “This is a personal computer?”

“Yes,” said Shep. “But the client runs her business out of her home, so there’s a lot of sensitive material on board. Is there any way you can tell if it’s been copied?”

“Not from this.” Evan shook his head and pushed a manila envelope across his cluttered desk. “The hard drive itself appears to have been formatted. Good ol’ hubby deleted all programs and files before he busted it up.”

“Were you able to recover anything?”

“I’m good, but I’m not that good.”

“Okay. Thanks for trying,” said Shep, and Evan nodded. It seemed like the cue for Shep to get up and leave, but something told him to wait a little. In the silence that followed, Evan’s eyes slid over toward the door. Ambient background sounds drifted through from the outer office. One of the paralegals was telling a joke.

“A horse, a rabbi, and a divorce lawyer walk into a bar…”

“Shep,” Evan said quietly, “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but you helped me with that issue a few months back. I trust you to forget where you heard this, all right?”

“I haven’t heard anything.”

“One of the partners had me put a Dick in your computer.”

“Excuse me?”

“Dick Tracer. It’s spyware. Records every keystroke, every web search, everything.”

“Ah.” Shep nodded. He didn’t even bother asking which partner.

“It’s set to report on your productivity every six hours and ping me immediately if certain things crop up.”

“What things?”

“The usual. Porn, Facebook, job offerings at other firms. She also wants to know every time you tap the storage facility. And then some random stuff.”

“There’s no such thing as random stuff,” said Shep. “I need to see the list.”

“Forget it,” said Evan. “I owed you one. Now we’re even. This is a sweet gig for me, Shep. I’m not about to screw it up just to be a pal. I don’t know what you’re into, man, with this ‘Jailbait’ webcam girl. I don’t want to know. Whatever gets you through the night. I’m just telling you to keep it out of the office because whatever turns up goes into my report. I’ll do my job, understand?”

“I understand.” Shep offered his hand, but Evan seemed reluctant to take it.

“Dude, I know you’ve been lonely, but a teenage hooker? It’s not worth your job. It’s sure as hell not worth ending up in the clink.”

“Thanks for the heads up.”

Before he left his office, Shep spent half an hour making sure Evan would be able to turn in his homework assignment: ample evidence of diligent delving into two or three pending cases. He picked up the phone on his desk and called Smartie to tell her about her hard drive, but when the call rolled over to her voicemail, he felt something—perhaps it was Smack Wilder’s telltale trickle of ions—that told him he wasn’t alone on the line.

“Ms. Breedlove,” he said, “Shep Hartigate from Salinger, Pringle, Fitch & Edloe. Our computer forensics man wasn’t able to recover your hard drive. I’m holding off on any further action until we hear from you how you want to proceed against your husband. I wouldn’t blink once about pressing charges.”

“S
o that takes care of the computer,” said Fritz. “What’s our plan for the gun?”

“She could be planning to shoot Smack with her own gun. Make it look like suicide,” said Smartie. “Or shoot someone else and frame Smack for the murder.”

“The second one. You need the classic ‘death in the middle.’ So who on this cruise ship needs shooting?” After considering it, Fritz said, “I say the uncle. If ever a character was marked for death, it’s that guy.”

“Oh, no,” Smartie gasped. “It’s Nash. She’s going to kill Nash and hang it on Smack.”

“S
mack? As in smack you upside your head?”

“Right,” Shep told the pawnbroker. “Engraved on the barrel with a little scroll design.”

The pawnbroker shook her head. She’d been all blousy
hey darlin’
when he walked in the door, but quickly figured him for what he was and decided not to waste the energy.

“Is there a reward?”

“Doing the right thing,” Shep smiled. “Isn’t that a reward in itself?”

She made a sound like “
Fbbshyah
.”

“Two-fifty then. You’d be lucky to get two-and-a-quarter for the gun.”

“See there?” she smiled. “Doing the right thing is its own reward.”

He gave her his card. “Let me know if it turns up.”

After conducting a thorough search of Smartie’s house and yard the day Herrick went off his nut, Shep had insisted on reporting the gun stolen, which Smartie reluctantly did, and he hadn’t seen or spoken to her since. Now he was making the grand rounds, checking for the gun at all the local pawn shops and a few outlets with less public storefronts.

The possibility still nagged; Smartie could have orchestrated the whole thing to string Herrick up. But it was also possible that Suri had had the office tossed to yank Smartie’s chain. And get the gun.

“You’ll know it if you see it,” he told the old man behind the counter at the next hockshop. “Sig Sauer .38 with
Smack
engraved on the barrel.”

It could be traced back to Smartie with laughable ease, Shep figured. Once they dug the slug out of his brain. And it followed that if Smartie conveniently killed herself before the police got to her…

“Evidence,” Shep reminded himself as he crossed the parking lot. He’d been reading too many paperbacks lately. He was trained to deal in evidence, not shoot ’em up scenarios. And so far, there was not one scintilla of hard evidence that connected Suri to any wrongdoing.

“O
h, for crying out loud, put him out of his misery already. The man-candy doesn’t last past page one-thirty-seven. It’s part of the Smack Wilder brand. Honestly, I think that’s key to your East European sales numbers.”

Smartie’s agent, Dove Hungerland, never wavered from the pragmatic view. She also insisted on sitting outside so she could smoke while they ate lunch, which was Smartie’s preference as well, especially on a bright blue day like this one.

“The bitch insurance exec kills Nash or—
or
—the crazy uncle kills him,” said Dove. “Either way. Dead man walking.”

“Fritz likes Nash,” said Smartie. “He thinks I should keep him going.”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong.” Dove gestured with her salad fork in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “He’s a great character. I mean, we gotta love the flawed anti-hero, right? Especially if he’s great-looking, witty, cock-a-doodle-doo, but I’m not sure there’s any depth there. Where’s the grit? Where’s the spiritual wound? And where the hell is that hobbit with my Chardonnay? Waiter? Sweetheart?” Dove waved a manicured hand and made a tippy sippy gesture in front of her lips. “What does this guy have that makes us give a crap about him? That makes him
real
?”

“Well, he has…” Smartie fought the vampire in herself and lost. “He has…”

“
J
anny
.”

Shep didn’t mean to speak her name out loud, but looking into his wife’s eyes felt like falling down a mineshaft.

“She looks great, doesn’t she?” said Janny’s agent, Carson Epps, a painfully well-styled young man who barely cleared Shep’s shoulder, but negotiated deals like a hammerhead.

“Yeah.”

Shep’s voice cracked the syllable in half, and seeing his embarrassment, Epps focused his attention toward the pretty young publisher’s rep who was busy glad-handing the sales staff and setting up the
Janny’s World
display at the main entrance of the Barnes & Noble flagship store on Westheimer.