Saturday Night Cleaver (A Barbara Marr Murder Mystery #4) (5 page)

I wanted to cry at the sadness in his voice. Without the FBI he didn’t have a job and he felt he didn’t have a purpose. A place to go and a place to be needed every day. I wanted to shout at him, pound his thick skull and remind him that his job and purpose was to be a father, husband, and son.
We
needed him and he was exactly where he needed to be. But the moment didn’t call for another lecture. We’d had
that
discussion too many times before. Instead, I concentrated on where this research all began. “So, you think there are swingers’ clubs in Rustic Woods, Colt is investigating them, and he thinks our neighbors are involved? Yikes.”

“I didn’t say that.”

Outside, a leaf blower revved into action.

“Speaking of neighbors,” I said, getting up to look out the window, why I don’t know since it was pitch black and street lights were banned in Rustic Woods. “That’s the second night I’ve heard that noise. I think it’s coming from the Penobscotts’ backyard. Why would they blow leaves around in the middle of the night?”

Howard cocked an ear and listened for a minute. “I don’t think that’s a leaf blower.”

“Lawn mower?”

He shook his head. “No way. Chain saw maybe.”

I looked at the digital display on our bedside alarm clock and plopped back into bed. Ten after ten. “Who saws something this late?”

“Do they both work? Maybe this is the only time for him to get stuff done around the house. Fixing his deck maybe?”

This comment burned the feminist in me. “What? You’re so sure it’s
him
fixing the deck? How do you know it’s not
her
out there sweating over those deck boards?” Truthfully, I don’t have a hard-line feminist bone in my body. I’m pretty much middle-of-the-road in all of my philosophies. I was just cranky and looking for a fight. The beauty of this particular moment was that Howard knew this.

“Still mad at Colt and Peggy?”

“They stood me up.” I was pouting again, although, I’ll admit, even I was getting tired of my pity-party. “I’m more worried about Colt, though. If we don’t hear from him tomorrow, I’m going over there. As for Peggy, well, she’s a traitor. Plain and simple.”

“You don’t think you’re over-reacting?”

“About Colt or about Peggy?”

“Peggy.”

“She bailed on me. For Dandi Booker.”

“Did you talk to her and find out why?”

“Do I need to?”

He looked at me over his half-eye reading glasses. “You do this, you know.”

“What?”

“Go to the worst conclusion first. Isn’t she your friend and don’t you always say your friendships mean everything to you?”

“What do you mean, I go to the worst conclusion first?” I did not like his accusatory tone.

He flicked a glance to the ceiling, then back to me. “I remember some episode a year or so ago when you were up in arms because Peggy and Roz were doing things without asking you along. You were so sure you were being excluded from lunches and shopping dates, and you even drove by Peggy’s house late one night when you thought Roz was over there without you...”

Howard never seemed to have a good memory for things I considered important, why all of the sudden was his recollection of this embarrassing moment in my life so clear? I had driven by Peggy’s house that night with my lights out to avoid detection and totaled Simon’s old Ford parked at the curb when I careened into it. It was a black car. I couldn’t see it. I had to make up a story on the spot that I was out searching for Indiana Jones and a deer darted into the road causing me to swerve. Howard remembered, because our car insurance went up two hundred dollars a month.

My face flamed from anger and shame. I crossed my arms while working hard on a justification for my actions that would make me feel better.

“It seems to me,” he continued on like Buddha or Ghandi, “that if you value friendship the way you
say
you do, you’d...I don’t know exactly how to put it. You know—assume your friend’s intentions were good. I just always see you going to the worst conclusion first.”

I know. He’d said that already.

This was beginning to feel like a scene in
To Kill a Mockingbird
with Howard playing Atticus and me portraying Scout, but without the Alabama drone.

“Gee, why don’t you whip up a meme for Facebook and share that one around, Mr. Deep?”

The justifications weren’t coming quickly enough so I had resorted to name calling. And when I realized my name calling was really lame, I resorted to the very mature you-do-it-too argument.

“You should talk,” I huffed. “How about the way you’ve treated Colt all of these years? Huh? Do you feel good about that?”

He didn’t produce the answer I expected. “No,” he said simply. Then he elaborated after an especially effective pause that even the great Gregory Peck would have been proud to have delivered. “I don’t feel good about how I treated him at all. One thing nearly dying did was help me put my relationships in perspective.”

He kissed me on the forehead and then softly, but shortly on the lips. It was the kind of kiss that says, “I love you and now I’m going to sleep.” Evidently his marital relationship perspectively did not require a romp in the hay.

Fine by me, because even if we’d been active in the lovemaking department, I wasn’t in the mood after his one-two punch-attack on my character. He might have been right, but I wasn’t going to like it.

And yes, I know: perspectively isn’t a real word.

Chapter Four

T
hankfully, a good night’s sleep
can cure just about any foul disposition. Saturday morning found me mostly simpatico with Howard again.

He had agreed to see Dr. Sadistic, I mean Dr. Sadjik, for a discussion of his overall health and the prescription of a superior diet like the one I had abandoned in three days flat. He still needed to see his orthopedist for a final pass on the leg and collar bone, and he’d be visiting the neurologist for an undetermined amount of time because of the head trauma, so you’d think we’d be sick of medical practitioners. But after coming so close to losing him, I was determined to see Howard live a good long time whether he liked it or not.

Off we motored to Natural Life Wellness Clinic after telling Mama Marr, sadly, that I had forgotten this appointment and would not be able to make our first art class together.

She shook her head in disappointment. Creak, pop, snap. “You can not make this appointment for another time?”

“Nope,” I said. Which was not a lie. Dr. Sadjik and her husband shared the care of their two young children, so she worked early evenings and held Saturday and some Sunday hours. Her schedule booked out weeks in advance since she was only one of a handful of naturally-oriented physicians in the area.

“Too bad for you. Such fun we would have together.”

“Yup. Too bad.”

“I will take the notes so you can be prepared next Saturday, okie dokie?”

“Okay,” I said, while making a mental note to find something urgent to do next Saturday at 11:30.

For the record, it wasn’t an art class with poor creaky, canary-less Mama Marr that put me in a panic. It was an art class with Mama Pushy-Pants Pettingford. Really and truly, because my mother would have been running the show. Telling me my apple was too oval or that my vase looked like it was melting onto my oval apple, or that my pear (was that a pear?) was upside down. I already had a teen-aged daughter at home telling me I was wrong at least fifty times a day, I didn’t need any more criticism. And besides, I knew my mother wouldn’t boss Mama Marr around, so the two of them would sketch away happily together and never even notice my absence, I was quite sure. There. Phew. Absolution complete.

While I drove us to the clinic, I asked Howard to call Colt again. Unfortunately, this produced the same results as the previous day. Just voicemail at home and on his cell. Something was wrong now, and we both knew it, so after Howard’s time with Dr. Sadjik where he walked away with the same bad-food tome as mine (except he could keep drinking coffee, which annoyed me greatly), we made a bee-line for Colt’s condo. We did not stop at Go, we did not collect our two hundred dollars.

That little trip didn’t solve any mysteries. His prized GTO wasn’t in the parking lot. We knocked on his door to no avail and peeked through the sliding glass door as well as his bedroom window, which luckily were easy to access since the condo was on the ground floor. We did not see Colt’s dead or comatose body lying on any floor, but we also didn’t see a live body in bed or eating lunch at the tiny two-person kitchen table. In retrospect, we both realized that we should have thought to stop at our house for the spare condo key we kept.

As we backed out of our parking space to motor back home, a dark blue sedan pulled in two spots over. An Asian woman in a slick suit and small heels exited the driver’s side door. She was pretty. Probably in her mid-to-late thirties.

“Slow down,” said Howard. “Let’s see where she’s going.”

It became quickly apparent that where she was going was Colt’s condo. Without a moment of a second thought, I threw my gear shift into park and leapt from the van. The lady was knocking on the door when she spotted me. Fear shone in her eyes, which she quickly dropped to the ground as she began hoofing it back to her car.

“Wait!” I shouted. “Are you looking for Colt?” I was following her now. “He’s my friend.”

“No speak English,” she spurted, shaking her head. “No speak English.”

“I’m worried about-”

She cut me off. “No English!” Her car door slammed and she peeled out of that parking lot faster than Bill Clinton chasing down a lead on a party full of young and eager interns.

Howard was standing outside of the van when I returned, writing on a piece of paper.

“License plate?” I asked.

He nodded. “I’ll ask Lamon to run this for me.”

“Is he allowed?”

“Officially, no. Will he do it for us? I’m sure he will.”

It was good to know good cops. Especially cops that looked like Brad Pitt.

At home, Howard went straight into the house to call Erik while I stepped down the mailbox to see what bills and junk mail Mr. USPS had delivered to us that fine autumn day. In the process, I ran into our new neighbor and possible deck-fixer, Melody Penobscott.

“Hi Barb!” she waved as she opened the door to her mailbox. Her face was lit with a mile-wide smile. “How are ya?”

Melody was about my height, but as skinny as a stick. Her dirty-blond hair was always pulled back in a ponytail that bounced around as if it were its own entity. It was kind of creepy, that ponytail. I never asked her how old she was but she looked like she was fifteen pretending to be thirty. She and her husband, Neil, moved to the area from Wisconsin and that was about all I knew about them. Oh, and she liked sushi.

They had moved in right after Howard’s accident, so I hadn’t really had the time or energy to venture into making-friends-with-neighbors territory. Colt had actually talked to them more than I had. I did like our short meet-in-the-street chats though, because she sounded just like Frances McDormand’s character in
Fargo
, dontcha know? She said my name Bea-rb, kind of like she was about to say Bear, but then changed her mind at the last minute and changed it up to get that “arb” at the end.

“I’m good,” I said, returning her smile but with a little less enthusiasm. “How are you?” I waited, anticipating with relish the response which I knew would be filled with Canadian sounding O’s and lots of nasally other vowels.

“Oh, ya know, things are just grand. We love our new house ya know.”

I nodded. Someday I would have to get to know her better so I could have a long conversation with her over coffee and dohnuts. I’m not making fun. I really loved her deep, mid-western accent. And now of course, there was the added curiosity to find out if she and her husband had dipped their toes into the marital trading pool. “You must be making some improvements,” I said. “We heard you working away last night.”

That bright smile dropped from her face so fast and hard I thought she might have had a stroke. “Heard what, Barb?