Thugs and Kisses (8 page)

He leaned back in his chair, ready to hear more. Exhaustion was as noticeable on his face as his late-afternoon stubble.

“First of all, I called Steele’s contact person, Karen Meek, his ex-wife. She saw him Saturday and Sunday in Santa Barbara, but not since. She said he was heading to the Ojai Valley Inn. My friend, Detective Devin Frye of the Newport Beach police, had someone in the Ojai PD do some checking. Mike Steele had reservations at the inn for both Monday and Tuesday nights, but never arrived and never called to cancel.” I hesitated, swallowed, and continued. “The Ojai police also did a quick patrol of the roads, just in case Steele had an accident and went off the road somewhere, but they turned up nothing.” I paused again. “Detective Frye suggested we file a missing person report.” I started to say more, but stopped to get my thoughts in order.

“Anything else, Odelia?”

“Yes, Carl, something Karen Meek said.” He nodded for me to continue. “She said Steele was going to the inn to think in peace for a few days—said he was preoccupied about something having to do with the upcoming trial.” I paused, again trying to dig through my brain for anything I may have noticed before Steele left town. “I don’t recall anything unusual about the Silhouette matter, but then I’m not working closely with it, just here and there as Steele needs me. Do you recall anything unusual about it?”

“Interesting,” Carl said as he played with a pen, tapping it against the edge of his desk. “There have been some oddities here and there, but that’s with every trial.”

Carl leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Every now and then, he’d purse his lips. I knew he was mulling over the information, trying to decide how to proceed. Carl Yates had a methodical, orderly mind, not unlike a computer. He could quickly categorize information and yield a best course of action, all on the fly and with excellent results. I sat quietly and waited. After a few minutes, Carl opened his eyes, leaned forward, and looked me straight in the eye.

“So, Odelia, here’s what we’re going to do.”

I arrived at Houston’s exactly at seven thirty to find Sally Kipman at the bar toying with the stem of a nearly empty martini glass. She announced our table would be ready soon.

Waving her empty glass at the bartender, she said, “Grey Goose, extra olives.” He nodded and looked my way.

Oh hell, why not? After what Carl Yates just told me, I could do with three or four martinis. “The same,” I told him.

Sally looked good. She was dressed in neatly pressed light gray wool slacks and a pale blue silk blouse that accentuated her eyes and blond hair. On the back of her bar stool hung a matching gray blazer. She held her frame erect and her head high in self-confidence. The overall effect was quite striking.

We sat in silence until our drinks came. After giving her three olives a swirl in the alcohol, she lifted the glass in my direction. “Here’s to new old friends.”

I smiled slightly and clinked the edge of my glass against hers. She took a healthy swallow of her drink, and I followed suit. The strong alcohol caused me to sputter and cough.

“Something tells me,” Sally said after I recovered, “that you’re more used to drinking cosmopolitans and appletinis.”

“This … is fine.” I coughed again.

“Would you like something else?” Her voice was laced with amusement.

“No, I’m fine. Thanks.”

Truth is, I’m a lightweight when it comes to drinking. But I do have an occasional fondness for cosmopolitans, thanks to watching reruns of
Sex and the City
, and I can’t remember the last time I had a regular martini, if at all. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to let Sally Kipman know that. I was gingerly taking my second sip when the hostess announced our table was ready.

We sat opposite each other in a booth and picked up our menus. We were doing everything but getting to the reason we were there. The waitress came and took our order: grilled salmon with asparagus, and caesar salad to start, for both of us.

“I owe you a big apology, Sally,” I told her after another sip of my drink, which I was really beginning to enjoy.

“For what?”

“For high school—you know, the lesbian thing.”

She let her chin fall a bit forward and laughed almost into her drink. “You don’t owe me anything, Odelia. You were right, I was a lesbian—am a lesbian. I knew it even then. You, on the other hand, were never pregnant, yet I told everyone you were.” She looked up, holding my eyes with hers. “It’s I who owe you an apology.”

“Why were we so hateful to each other, Sally? Do you even remember?”

She shrugged. “I’m not sure, but it probably had to do with us both being miserable and wanting to take it out on someone. I was angry about my parents’ divorce and moving to California. I also knew I was different from the other girls and was trying to cope with that. There wasn’t the support for gay youngsters there is now.”

Sally paused, took a sip of her drink, and continued as if stepping on glass. “As I recall, Odelia, your mother disappeared about the same time. Am I correct?”

Although I remembered her personal history, I was shocked that she had remembered mine. Maybe, because I had spent thirty years trying so hard to forget, I had hoped everyone else would. Looking back, there were lots of things about my junior and senior years in high school I would have liked to have erased from my memory completely, not just the prom. Is it possible to invoke selective amnesia and not be considered delusional?

“Yes,” I answered. “After she left, I was forced to go live with my father and stepmother. That alone would have made Mother Teresa malicious and spiteful.” I shuddered, took another quick drink, and went eyeball to eyeball with one of the large olives in my glass. “To this day, I still don’t know what happened to my mother.”

We were silent for a moment, then Sally picked up her glass in an exaggerated toast. “Well, we may have been screwed up, Odelia, but at least we had good skin.”

I snorted in laughter and raised my own glass in a toast of the truth. While other kids in school had battled acne, oily skin, and trips to the dermatologist, both Sally and I had enjoyed clear and beautiful complexions. And from the looks of it, we still did. Even as fifty loomed ahead, we both had creamy skin with few wrinkles.

Our salads came. Sally started eating. I picked up my fork, then put it back down and extended my right hand across the table. “Let’s call it a draw, shall we? Let’s just call it two teenage bitches that survived their parents and finally grew up.”

She put down her fork, took my offered hand in hers, and shook. “You’re on.”

We picked up our drinks, clinked our glasses once again, and drained them. Sally ordered two more.

Over our entrees, I learned that Sally had gone to college at UCLA, the same college Donny had attended. She had graduated with an engineering degree, he with a business degree. They knew some of the same people and occasionally ran into each other. She became pregnant with Lucas their senior year, but never told Donny.

“Okay,” I said, holding up a hand. “If you knew you were a lesbian in high school, what were you doing screwing around with Donny Oliver in college? Did you get drunk at some frat party and lose your mind? Did he seduce you on some bet?”

“No, actually I planned the whole thing.”

“You planned it?” Suddenly, I was hit with a sense of déjà vu. “You
planned
to sleep with Donny?”

I shook my head in disbelief and immediately felt the effect of the two martinis. My skull felt like a huge and heavy pimento- stuffed olive lolling around in a tub of booze. I should’ve had a few of these the night Greg dumped me.

I steadied my head and tried to focus again on Sally. “You bedded Donny Oliver? Not the other way around?” Unable to control myself, I started laughing.

“Does that seem so far-fetched?” Sally tightened her lips and narrowed her eyes. “Do you think I’m that unattractive?”

“No, I didn’t mean it that way.” I waved my right hand in the air and continued to giggle. In my hand was my fork, and on the fork was precariously perched a bit of salmon. I pointed the fork at her. “Just one thing I gotta know.” As I spoke, I bobbed the fork. The tidbit of salmon flicked across the table and landed in her martini glass.

Her look from across the table was stern. She put down her own fork and crossed her arms in front of her. When she spoke, her jaw was so tight her lips hardly moved. “And that is?”

I stopped giggling long enough to speak. “We may have a lot more in common than you realize.” Decency told me to stop, so I told decency to sit somewhere else. There were things I wanted to know, even if just for entertainment value. “Was Donny Oliver your first?”

For a minute, I thought Sally was going to throw down her napkin and leave. But instead, she dabbed at her mouth with the napkin and replaced it in her lap. She no longer seemed cross, just annoyed around the edges, like a frayed piece of fine linen.

“Donny Oliver was my first and my last … man.”

I started to speak but was hit with a case of hiccups. Picking up my glass, I drained it with one big, exaggerated swallow before continuing. “You’re …
hic
… lucky.”

I waved my empty martini glass in the direction of a passing waiter, but Sally reached out and took it from me before he could notice. “I think we’ve
both
had enough, don’t you?”

“Truthfully, Sally, I haven’t had nearly enough, considering the past week or so.”

I looked across the table at Sally Kipman, my one-time high-school nemesis. It was my turn to narrow my eyes.

“Since Donny’s murder on Saturday night, I have been dumped by my boyfriend, a man I wanted very much to marry, and my boss has gone missing. And before all this, I was smacked in the face with a leg of lamb in a fight at the market.”

Sally interrupted with a short chuckle. “Yes, I thought I saw your photo in the paper.”

I was not amused. Sally collected herself under my evil eye, and I continued. “Seems that just because I lucked out and solved a couple of problems in the past, one of my other bosses now thinks I’m just the person to find Mike Steele. That’s my missing boss, who, quite frankly, is doing us all a favor by remaining gone. Which is why I was late tonight: I was getting my marching orders to put aside my other work in order to find the missing asshole. And now you’ve called to discuss Donny’s murder. I should hang out a shingle:
Odelia Grey, P.I.
But in my case, the P.I. would stand for
plump
and
irritable
.”

Finished with my rant, I leaned against the back of the booth, exhausted. A busboy cleared our plates, and our waitress stood ready for further orders.

“Do you still have that incredible brownie sundae with the caramel sauce?” Sally asked the waitress. She confirmed that they did. Sally turned to me. “Want to split one, Odelia?”

I took a deep breath. “No,” I snapped. “I don’t want to split one. I want one of my own, with extra ice cream.”

The waitress looked embarrassed. She turned slightly toward Sally, awaiting instructions, her body language clearly stating that she thought me demented and Sally the sane one.

Sally didn’t miss a beat. “Make that two brownie sundaes, both with extra ice cream.” She glanced over at me, then back to the waitress. “And please bring two cups of strong, black coffee.”

I got into the office early on Thursday, even foregoing my usual exercise. My night had been a restless one because of the information floating around in my brain. Nothing fit together. Bits and pieces of Steele’s disappearance and Donny’s murder swirled around in my semiconscious mind like cat hair adrift on an air current. It drove me nuts. On top of that, I woke up with another headache and a stuffy nose. The headache I could explain with the martinis, but the nasal congestion made me worry that I had caught Greg’s cold. Oh well, at least I’d have something to remember him by.

Over a couple cups of coffee and the brownie sundaes, which also didn’t help my sleep last night, Sally and I finally got around to discussing her history with Donny Oliver.

Like me, Sally Kipman had seduced Donny Oliver, but she had done it for a very different reason. In college, she had been involved in a serious relationship with an older woman. The two had even set up house together and talked about children. Near the end of her senior year at college, Sally and her partner decided it was time to start a family. They considered many men they knew as donors, and even a sperm bank, but for one reason or another, each one fell short. It was then Sally brought up the idea of Donny Oliver.

He was attractive, athletic, and intelligent. Sally knew something about his family and the type of people from which he had come, so there was little mystery to what they were getting. With the majority of his characteristics so favorable, the women figured the jerk gene could be overcome, so they fired up their plan.

Donny had been both an easy and potent mark, thinking he had won an easy lay, never suspecting he was the victim of a sperm holdup. In her sixth month, Sally and her lover broke up, leaving Sally devastated, alone, and very pregnant. The story was an old one—evidence that the same things happened to women over and over, both straight and gay.

Sally moved back in with her mother and awaited the birth. A few months after Lucas was born, Sally, armed with her recently acquired engineering degree, landed a job. Shortly after, she started work on her master’s degree. A job, grad work, and a new baby—just the idea of all that stress made my head throb.

According to Sally, everything was going well. She got her master’s degree, landed a great new job with the company she is still with today, and raised Lucas, who turned out to be a bright, charming boy with no signs of the jerk gene. She even found love again, this time with a woman named Jill Bernelli, whom she met through a lesbian mixer. They met shortly after Sally’s mother passed away from a heart attack and just before Lucas’s eighth birthday, and have been together since.

“I should have known,” Sally had said to me as she cut off a piece of brownie with the edge of her fork, “that things were going too good to last.” She took the bite and chewed it thoughtfully. “When things are going well, we tend to become complacent about happiness. That’s always when some monster comes out from under the bed and scares the shit out of you. You know what I mean?”

I nodded, my own mouth full of chocolate pastry and creamy ice cream. I chewed and swallowed the concoction. “One minute you’re dancing, thinking of white gowns and orange blossoms, and the next minute you’re being called a corpse magnet.”

“Huh?” Sally looked at me like I had a screw loose as she dabbed whipped cream from her lips with her napkin.

“Nothing.” I took a sip of coffee. “So was Donny the monster under the bed?”

She shook her head. “No, he wasn’t, but he was the monster the initial monster summoned, like a ghost summoning the devil.” She pushed her dessert plate away and moved her coffee in front of her. “I’m stuffed.”

I was full, too, but took a few more bites before giving up and pushing my plate away.

Sally drank some coffee. “When he was almost ten, Lucas became ill. It turned out to be some odd allergy, but for a long time we had no idea what it was. The doctors wanted to know his family’s medical history. Of course, I knew mine, but Donny’s was a complete unknown. As time went on and Lucas didn’t get any better, I finally decided to go to Donny and ask about his family.”

“He had no idea he had a son?”

“None at all, and he had no clue that I was gay. If I had my way, he never would have found out about either.”

“Did you come right out and tell Donny you were a lesbian when you contacted him?”

Sally slowly shook her head and smiled. “He had no idea. Unfortunately, it was Lucas who spilled the beans about having two mommies.” She took another sip of coffee. “I contacted Donny through the alumni association. He thought I was trying to shake him down for support money, but once he realized I wasn’t, he wanted to know more about Lucas.”

“And he wanted custody once he knew?”

“Again, it was like a monster hiding under the bed. At first, Donny was happy to help with the medical history. He met Lucas, and they got along great. Donny even got along well with Jill and me after he found out we were a couple. Donny had three daughters with his wife, Cindy, and often they took Lucas with them on day trips. Lucas always returned to us excited to have spent time with his father, and he grew quite close to Cindy and the girls. I began to be sorry that I hadn’t let him know Donny sooner.”

Our dessert plates were cleared and fresh coffee poured.

“So what spurred the custody battle?”

Sally sighed and suddenly seemed to shrink a bit. “Several months after Donny came into our lives, the doctors finally pinpointed Lucas’s health problem. Like I said, it turned out to be an allergy, and once discovered was easily cleared up. During that time, Donny made no mention of custody issues. But as soon as Lucas was a healthy, vibrant boy again, Donny moved in for the kill.

“Out of the blue, one day we were served custody papers. Donny accused me of being a morally unfit mother, flaunting my perverted lifestyle in front of
our
impressionable preteen son.”

She stopped, looked down at the coffee in her cup, and traced the cup with her right index finger.

“The court agreed with Donny. After all, he had a good job as an executive of a sports equipment company and was in a traditional marriage, complete with three children and a dog. It was the happy American family.”

“But you had a good job and a stable home life.”

“Yes, I did, and my lawyer trotted out many character witnesses, including my boss, coworkers, and even Lucas’s doctor. But,” she said, holding up her index finger, “in the eyes of the court, especially in the eyes of the male, ultra-conservative judge assigned to us, I was a woman living an unnatural and perverted lifestyle, a woman who spurned men and the natural order of the universe.” She gave a short, rueful laugh. “That’s almost exactly what the judge said in open court; that I was ‘a woman who spurned the natural order of God and the universe.’ And that such a woman should never be considered fit to raise a child, especially a male child, when the father had the desire and ability to do so in a more traditional manner.”

“But that’s downright ridiculous. Gay couples adopt and have children all the time.”

“Now they do, Odelia. But that was fifteen years ago, and while some judges were starting to see the light, not all were.”

“Didn’t you appeal?”

“Yes, and we lost. Lucas went to live with Donny and his family, and I got limited visitation rights. I even had to pay Donny child support.” Her voice was beginning to crack, like a hairline fissure in good china. “Even after all this time, it’s difficult to talk about.” She looked up at me and gave me a weak half-smile. “And I haven’t talked about it for a long time.”

I reached across the table and patted her left hand where it rested on the table.

“I don’t know what I would have done without Jill’s support.”

“Are you close now to Lucas? I remember you have a grandson.”

Sally squared her shoulders, and her face lit up with the mention of her grandchild. “Oh yes, Lucas and I never let this come between us. When he was fourteen, we petitioned the court, and Lucas was allowed to choose where he wanted to live. He returned to Jill and me. Even though I discouraged it, he never had many nice things to say about his father or Cindy, though he clearly favored Cindy over Donny. He said they fought all the time, mostly about Donny’s drinking and carousing.”

“Was Donny’s wife at the reunion? I don’t recall seeing him with anyone but Steve and a few of the other guys.”

Sally shook her head. “I didn’t see her there.”

The waitress came to refresh our coffee. I declined, but Sally accepted more. After the waitress left, she leaned across the table and whispered, “I’m not sorry the bastard’s gone, Odelia. Not sorry at all after what he put me, Jill, and Lucas through.” She paused. “And after what he did to you at the prom, I doubt you’ve cried over his demise.”

“Truthfully, I haven’t. But, Sally, do you really think someone like Donny deserves to die?” I leaned forward, looking her straight in the eye. “Honestly, do you?”

She leaned back in the booth and turned her face away. After a moment, she turned back and looked directly at me. “As harsh as it sounds, yes, I do.”