Kill Smartie Breedlove (a mystery) (21 page)

Shep blew softly across the rim of his coffee cup.

“At night, there was this woman on the radio. Doing her smartass patter between songs. Reading the weather. Plugging diners with late night hours. I was so hungry. Sometimes he gave me a little can of cat food, and I’d save it until I could hear her talking about pulled pork and home fries and beer bread. I imagined this elaborate story about how she was searching for me. Finding clues. Coming to get me. I kept going over and over that part. She kicks in the door.
Get off her, you sonofabitch!
Shoots up the place. That sort of thing. I remember that story. The tiniest details of it. The rest of it, not so much.”

Smartie tipped the whisky in one swift shot. Shep refilled her glass from a square bottle.

“I never really knew what happened until Hill looked it up in the newspaper archives. He thought it would help me. It said some prisoners from county lockup were picking up trash on a state road and saw blood coming out of a sewer pipe. Saw a foot. A leg. A girl. It said this girl had been missing for sixteen days. The Baptist minister was quoted saying it would have been a mercy if his daughter had been found dead.”

Shep made a small, involuntary sound, but he didn’t look away, and the expression on his face betrayed neither pity nor anger on her behalf.

“I can’t believe how stupid I was.” Smartie shook her head in disbelief. “All I could give them was the radio knobs and a few odd details and that ridiculous made-up story. You’d think after all those detective stories I’d read—Trixie Belden, Sherlock Holmes, Ellery Queen—but I didn’t notice things or memorize things or try to leave some kind of clues they could find after I was dead. I gave them so little to go on. It’s astonishing that they were able to track him down. Truly, the police work was… well, you know how riveting that is. All that procedural stuff.”

That wasn’t the word Shep would have used to describe the tasky, check-listed nature of police procedure, but he nodded and kept listening.

“They got him a few months later, and he ’fessed right up. Took a plea bargain. Twenty-five to life. Makes me curious after the fact. That plea bargain. God only knows what else he got away with. How many little girls in what all ditches. I’d have been useless had it gone to trial. But they had the DNA evidence on him. From amniocentesis.”

Shep poured a shot of whiskey into his lukewarm coffee.

“I was a good Christian girl, thirteen years old. I’d never even been told about sex or penises or anything beyond this very perfunctory explanation of Aunt Flow from the church secretary a few months earlier when I got my first period. All I knew was ‘First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes whoozy with a baby carriage
.
’ I actually thought—because of this part in
The Maltese Falcon
…”

Smartie hiccupped a sharp giggle.

“Brigid O’Shaughnessy presses her whole body against Sam Spade, and it says, ‘His eyes burned yellowly
.’
So I asked the librarian, ‘What does that mean, his eyes burned yellowly?’ And she got this secret sort of smile and whispered, ‘It means he had an erection.’ Well, the word of a librarian, that was gospel to me. So I thought ‘erection’ meant that a man’s eyes would literally light up like a coyote on the side of the road. I thought, holy hops! There’s something I’d like to see
.
”

Shep laughed at that, a fleeting moment of relief for them both.

“The first four months, I was in the hospital. They kept me sleeping mostly. So I’d stop screaming. At first, I thought a roach had gotten inside me. But it got bigger, and I thought, no it’s a rattlesnake.”

Smartie closed her arms tight across her midsection, gripping her ribs with white fingers.

“Daddy said an abortion would make me go to hell. He sent me on the bus to El Paso to a home for girls gone bad. Nueva Vida. Nuns run it, and you know nuns. The schoolwork was hard. I liked that.”

“Charma was there,” said Shep, finally putting it together. “That’s where you were roommates.”

Smartie smiled and sighed a deeply relieved sigh.

“Charma. A gift from God. Five years older than me and a whole world worldlier. She’d gotten in trouble by this man with whom she was passionately in love, but he was stung in a dog fighting bust and deported back to the Dominican Republic, all of which I found wildly engrossing. Listening to her talk about her escapades—it was like oxygen. She was so bright and fun and full of ideas. She’d say, ‘
Nueva Vida
, that’s
español
for ‘new life,’ chicky. We’re gonna take off out of here, change our names and be brand new people, and anybody who don’t like us can fall in a hole.’ I wanted to be Sharon Gless from
Cagney and Lacey
. Of course, Charma couldn’t see herself as anything less than Madonna.”

Tracing her finger through the condensation, Smartie drew small circles on her water glass.

“Charma’s baby was in the room with us for a few days before he was adopted. Charma nursed him and rocked him. She was utterly heartbroken to let him go. She wrote him a letter. Made the sisters promise to send it with him to his new family. I knew that’s how girls are supposed to be. But when I thought about that thing that was about to crawl out of me, I told Charma if I ever had to look at it, I’d kill myself.”

She balled her fists beside the glass. The memory etched tight strands down the sides of her neck.

“It’s the words, Shep.
With
.
And
.
We. In
. I’m trapped in those words with that monster. He kept saying
you’re my girl now
. Kept saying I might as well stop fighting because
you ain’t never gonna get away from me, little girl
, and he was telling the truth.”

“No, Smartie. He won’t get to you again.”

She looked up, her eyes dry and hopeless. “He’s
getting to me
now
.”

Grimly, Shep considered the literal and legal truth of that. Bean had located Smartie handily enough. If he really was the computer whiz he’d cracked himself up to be, he could have found his biological father as well. Despite everything, Shep still had a gut feeling that Bean was a basically decent guy, but there was no telling what version of events Bean might have heard and believed, what recompense he might feel entitled to.

Another nightmare scenario arose from the likelihood that Bean’s biological father had probably never been informed of his parental rights, much less afforded the opportunity to legally waive them. If, Christ forbid, that asshole ever got out of the joint, he could get ten kinds of stranglehold on her.

Suri can handle that
, Shep thought purely out of habit, but then he realized with sickening clarity that perhaps Suri already had. It was possible that she’d already banked Bean as a commodity far more useful than Shep could have imagined.

“How did he find me?” Smartie asked.

“Charma’s letter,” said Shep. “They sent it with Bean by mistake, and his parents showed it to him when he turned eighteen. When he got in touch with Charma, she was happy. She was eager to meet him.”

“But the moment she saw him, she must have known exactly what happened,” Smartie shuddered. “I don’t know how I didn’t see it myself. It’s like that man took my skin and stretched it over his own bones. Like he dug my eyes out and stuck them in his own skull.”

“Charma tried to tell him that the girl who’d given birth to him died when he was born, but he got around that story pretty quickly and put the rest together.”

“How?”

“He’s not an aspiring writer, Smartie. He’s a hacker. He’s actually kind of amazing. Graduated high school at fifteen. Got his PhD last year.”

“Stop talking about him like he’s human.”

“He’s just a kid, Smartie. He says he just wanted to know you, tried various ways to approach you. The fan fiction thing—you were supposed to figure it out from clues in the story. When you didn’t read it, he got frustrated. After he got arrested, Charma tried to help him. She knew how you felt about it, so she tried to buy him off, and things got out of hand.”

“He killed her to get back at me.” Smartie’s throat felt cold and hollow. “He killed Twinkie. He hijacked my computer. He has my gun.”

“No, I told you, he has an airtight alibi for the night of the murder, and you can’t just jump to those other conclusions. There’s no evidence to support that.”

“What happened to ‘batshit crazy dude, crumpled paper, matches’? You think this changes any of that?” Smartie’s blue eyes blazed in the spidery lamplight. “People harbor these sentimental ideas about reunions and hugs and unbreakable bonds, but this is not a long lost
child
, Shep. This is a strange man who cyber-stalked me, vandalized my car and extorted money from my friend, threatening to string me up in the tabloids. You don’t call that evidence?”

“You’re right. I’m sorry,” Shep said evenly. “We’ll hook up a restraining order. I will inform Bean in no uncertain terms that he’s not to come near you or contact you again.”

“Thank you.”

Smartie moved her hands back to the whisky glass and drank the second shot down in one deep, cleansing burn that ignited a flash fire in her sinuses and made her wheeze.

“Are you okay?” asked Shep, sliding the water glass toward her.

She nodded and tried to speak past the molten lava in her throat.

“Gotta get home,” she coughed. “Walk Boodle.”

“Maybe the two of you should come home with me tonight.”

“No. I want to walk my dog and sleep in my house. I want to be…” She finished with both hands flat, palms facing, a gesture that vaguely meant
now
or
this
or
here
, because she didn’t know what else to be. “I need to keep working on this manuscript, Shep. That’s what I do. I work. I set words in a row. To the right or left of that is… suicide.”

She closed her eyes, and one hot tear to roll down unchecked next to her nose. Smartie was grateful when she tasted the salt on her upper lip; it troubled her when Herrick accused her of being pathologically detached because she knew it was true. She was an observer. A storyteller who saw people as characters and life as a series of plot twists. She was glad that Shep didn’t try to touch her right now, but she needed him here, across the table. He seemed to know that.

Shep studied his coffee cup, thinking about that piece of shit probably coming up for parole right about now. Thinking someone had better make sure he didn’t get it. Hopefully, he was incarcerated here in Texas, where justice was stone blind and bitch hard and knew how to put down a rabid dog.

“Did the assault happen here in Houston?” Shep asked.

It was his first question since they sat down, Smartie noted, and she was awed by that. As much as he may have wanted to extract the story from her long before this, he hadn’t wanted the telling of it to cost her more than it was worth in scars seen or unseen. Starting the day they met, Smartie had observed this seemingly endless supply of patience beneath the procedural action items that drove Shep through his caseload like a deep river beneath a fleet of little motorboats. Being around him was calming but carried her forward at the same time. Smartie appreciated this about Shep. It made her want to offer him something in return.

“La Grange,” she said in answer to his question, and as a small gift, she spoke the name that hadn’t been spoken since the day Smartie Breedlove was born in the backseat of Charma’s car: “The girl’s name was Sarah Jim Smallwood.”

Shep placed his hand on the table, leaving an inch or so between her wrist and his index finger. They sat there looking at the high glossed wood grain. Postage stamps and old war bonds had been lacquered in a staggered pattern around the perimeter of the tabletop, and Smartie studied the finely etched faces and officious buildings and bald eagles, allowing a tiny story about each one to trickle into her mind, taking up space, turning the page.

Shep watched the change swim through her blue eyes, as if she was listening to distant music on an old radio.

“Shep,” she said, “this means Charma wasn’t having an affair. Belinda had every reason to kill her.”

\\\ ///

23

“Y
ou’re awfully quiet tonight.” Temple linked her arm through Smartie’s as Smartie unsleeved the Fig Newtons. “Is everything all right?”

“Fine,” said Smartie. “I feel like this manuscript is finally coming together.”

“How are things with Mr. Hartigate?”

“Don’t get your hopes up, Temple. He’s interested in someone else.”

“Oh, dear. He told you this?”

“He didn’t have to,” Smartie said impatiently. “It’s fine, all right?”

“Fine.” Temple held up her hands. “Don’t snap my head off.”

“Smartie, you’re not upset about that
Publishers Weekly
review, are you?” said Yuki.

“
PW
review? What
PW
review?”

Yuki and Phyllis exchanged troubled glances.

“Yams. No wonder Fritz didn’t send it to me,” said Smartie. “Someone Google it up while I put the tea kettle on.”

“Sugar, don’t,” said Temple, but Smartie opened her lap top on the island in front of Yuki, who called up the review and read it in a nasal, academic mock.

“It says, ‘Breedlove is at the height of her storytelling powers in
Dead Sexy
, bringing the Smack Wilder mystery series to an even dozen.’”

“So at least you get that nice little pull quote out of it.” Temple smiled sympathetically, knowing how it felt to be pan-fried by
PW
.

“‘Unfortunately, that height is barely above an overpass on Highway 45 out of Houston’,” Yuki read on. “‘While
Dead Sexy
will undoubtedly delight those devoted Smack-heads who eagerly gobble down anything to which Breedlove applies her midgeted writing talents, more discerning readers will scratch their heads, guffaw at major visible panty lines in the plot, and wander off to the refrigerator in search of something more substantive. Like Cheese Whiz.’”

After a moment of silence, Smartie said, “Midgeted?”