Unscrewed (15 page)

“Someone called nine-one-one,” he said, and glanced at me from the corner of his feral eyes. “Any idea who that might have been, McMullen?”

I swallowed, shrugged, and refrained from saying anything that would get me eaten. “There were a lot of people there. Could have been anyone.”

He nodded, but something about his stillness suggested he wasn’t buying it.

“People were scared,” I said.

“Yeah? How about you? Were you worried about me?”

“He had…I heard he had a gun,” I said, not wanting him to know that I’d been there, that I’d seen them fighting, that, in fact, I
had
been afraid for him.

But maybe he was better at analyzing people than an inebriated cocktail waitress from Schaumburg, because his face softened the slightest degree. “I can take care of myself, McMullen.”

“So did the captain put you on the case?”

His face was devoid of emotion. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. I’m on the case.”

“What’d you find out? Are there clues? Was there DNA?”

“You taking up forensics between clients, McMullen?” he asked. His smile was sardonic, his tone dismissive.

I raised my nose toward the Saturn’s ceiling. I’d always liked my high horse. “I think I have something of a stake in this.”

“Leave it alone,” he warned.

But I was on a roll. “Your mom said Salina—”

He jerked his gaze toward me.

Maybe I was drunker than I’d realized. I kind of hope so. The alternative is that I was dumber than a box of rocks.

“What exactly did my mother say about Salina?”

“She said that…” I paused. He had that hungry wolf look in his eye again. “She said she was a beautiful woman.”

He stared at me a moment, then laughed and scrubbed his hand across his face. “God, McMullen, you are one piss-poor liar.”

I was surprisingly offended by his opinion, which may have said something about the state of my sobriety. “Am not.”

He shook his head and rested it on the cushion behind him. “Mama hated Salina from the moment she laid eyes on her.”

“Oh?” I tried to sound innocent. It’s not my best act. “Why is that?”

“Sali could pull in the men,” he said. “But women…” He sighed. His eyes looked tired. I wondered if he hadn’t been sleeping again. I wondered if he’d always called her “Sali,” with that soft, wistful voice that made him seem strangely vulnerable, strangely young. “Women generally wanted to kill her.”

“Did one?”

“What?”

“I mean…not your mother, of course.” I tried a chuckle. Whoa, Nellie. “She’s a saint. But do you think a woman might have actually killed her?”

“Damned if I know. Coroner’s looking at a couple dozen possibilities. None of ’em make sense. He’s not even sure yet if it
was
murder.” He seemed a million miles away suddenly. “Neighbors saw squat. Not a car, not a visitor. Nothing suspicious. But if I could get another look at the crime…” He snapped his gaze up. “Fuck me,” he said. Snorting at himself, he put the Saturn in drive and pulled back out into traffic. “Half a lifetime on the force and I’m singing to a nosy shrink like a fuckin’ choir boy.”

“I’m just curious,” I said, all innocence.

“And I’m Batman,” he countered, and laughed at me.

“The hell you are,” I grumbled. I don’t like to be accused of murder, and I don’t like to be shut out. But being laughed at makes me mad as hell.

He glanced my way.

“Bruce Wayne had a soul,” I said.

He raised one brow. “You think I don’t have a soul, McMullen?”

I thought it might have been wise to keep my mouth shut. But maybe I should have thought of that before guzzling ten gallons of tequila.

I gave an eloquent shrug. See, eloquent, I was sobering nicely…and thinking. If there were no problems at work, and he was officially on the case now, why couldn’t he get a look at the crime scene? And why the hell did he seem so haunted? Yeah, a young woman he’d cared about was dead, but he was a doer, a shaker. If he could do and shake, why did he look like last year’s corpse? “Question is, what does Captain Kindred think?” I asked.

“He thinks you should keep your nose out of it.” He skimmed me with his eyes. Heat seared me. “Along with your pretty ass.”

He said “ass,” but I resisted giggling. Maybe I was still a little bit drunk. “You’ve still got your badge, then?” I pressed.

“In my pants pocket. Wanna see?”

“I’m drunk, not stupid,” I said.

He laughed. “They’re generally one and the same, sweetheart.”

“Not this time.”

He grinned.

My hackles rose. “Worse luck for you, Rivera.”

He wheeled right onto Opus Street. I tipped wildly toward him, falling facefirst into his lap.

“Looks like my luck’s improving.”

I scrambled to right myself. “Pervert.”

“Yeah,” he said, and pulling up to my curb, threw the Saturn into park before catching my gaze. “But you still lust for me.”

“I do not—” I began, but at that moment I remembered my exact words to his mother, and I knew he had heard them.

I felt the blood drain from my body, felt my feet go numb. Maybe I tried to think of some pithy put-down. Maybe I struggled for a denial, but in the meantime my fingers were fumbling for the handle. The door popped open. I half fell, half leapt onto the sidewalk. I heard him call out after me, but I was racing along my crumbled concrete.

The car door slammed, his footfalls sounded on the walkway behind me. But I was inside my house and locking the door in record time.

“Open up, McMullen,” he said. I leaned my forehead against the door and prayed for divine intervention. I heard him jiggle the doorknob. “Let me in,” he said.

I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes. “Go away.”

I thought I heard him chuckle. “If you let me in, I promise not to talk about how you’ve got the hots for me.

“Or the fact that it’s been…” I heard him rest a shoulder against the far side of the door. “How long has it been for you, McMullen? Ten years?”

My stomach cramped. I bent double and stumbled toward the bathroom. Four seconds later I was paying homage to the porcelain god. Ten minutes after that I was passed out on my bed, drunker than a freshman and blessedly dead to the world.

17

H
OW WAS—” Elaine stopped mid-sentence when she glanced over the desk at me. “Holy cow, Mac, are you all right?”

“Shh.” I tried to hold my head on while I said it.

She rounded the reception desk. Her progress sounded like a charging herd of rabid rhinos. “What happened?”

“Tequila.” I was pressing on my right eyeball with the heel of my hand. It might have looked strange, but I was pretty sure the damned orb was going to pop out, and no one wanted that first thing in the morning.

“Tequila?”

“Chablis.”

“Sit down.”

I eased into the proffered chair. “And I think…” It hurt to wince…or live, and thinking made me ache down to my personal aura. “I think there might have been some grog.”

“I thought grog went out with the thirteenth century.”

“Well, it’s back.”

“Impressive.”

I opened an eye carefully, lest it take that opportunity to hop out. “I’m dying, Laney.”

She laughed. Sometimes I forget how nasty she can be. And loud. Like a blow horn on steroids. “What’d you find out?”

“That I hate grog. I’m not all that wild about myself right now, either.”

“What about Salina?”

“Nothing.”

“You have to hold your eyeballs in and you didn’t even learn anything?”

“No.” I propped myself up straight in the chair. “That’s not true.” There was a small but mighty demon pounding on my cranium. “I did learn something.” The alcohol was solidifying in my system, galvanizing my inebriated resolve. “I did learn something.”

Maybe I said it with a fair amount of drama, because Laney was staring at me, brows well into her hairline. “Tell me of your newfound knowledge, Sensei.”

I ignored her facetious tone. “I learned to mind my own business.”

“A valuable and difficult lesson.”

“Yes.” I stood up, resolute. The demon cracked me a good one right between the eyes. I sank slowly back into my chair.

“Maybe I should cancel your first client.”

“No.” I rolled one eyeball in her direction. The other one was busy keeping tabs on the demon. “Who is it?”

“Emily Trudeau.”

Emily was a Baptist minister’s wife. “Oh God,” I said.

Laney helped me to my feet. “Maybe you should have started praying before you drank your weight in fermented fodder.” We were making our way toward my office. “You must have learned something helpful.”

I stopped in my doorway, looking at her through a red veil of veins. “Look at me, Laney. Do I look like last night was helpful in any regard?”

“That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

“Including alcohol poisoning?”

“I can only assume.”

“No.” I shook my head…carefully. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right,” I said. “This has made me stronger. Stronger and smarter.”

“Good to hear.”

“I’m through with Rivera.”

“That’s great.”

“No more snooping about where I’m not wanted.”

“Thatta girl.”

“I’ve got better things to do.”

“Absolutely.”

“It’s not like I’m some tuba-playing, drink-toting kid with—” The demon struck. I winced. “I’m a psychologist,” I finished weakly. “Too good for an overbearing, macho, overbearing—”

“You said overbearing.” She was pulling a bottle of liquid gunk out of my mini-fridge and pouring it into a glass. It was the color of slime, which, I thought muzzily, was the same color as the carpet my mother had installed in her living room when I turned five. If the seventies were put in a blender, that’s the color they’d be. Taking something out of her purse, Laney dumped it into the glass and stirred it with a spoon she’d probably had stashed in her bra. It was metal. Laney doesn’t believe in plastic.

“Rivera can get his own ass out of trouble,” I added.

“He is a cop,” she said, and tapped the spoon twice on the glass. The noise made my eyeballs twitch.

“Isn’t he just,” I said through gritted teeth.

“Cheers,” she said, and giving me a salute, she handed over the slime.

B
y that afternoon I was back on track. I had again sworn off alcohol, carcinogenics, and paper that wasn’t at least seventy percent post-consumer waste.

I don’t know what was in the garbage Laney poured down my throat, but it must have been some powerful stuff, ’cuz I had also, at some point during the night, vowed to learn Hungarian and take harpsichord lessons.

I was pondering the age-old question of where to buy a harpsichord while being pulled down the dog food aisle behind a bicolored moose, when a pseudofamiliar face passed me.

It stopped. Turns out, it was attached to a person.

I tried to stop, too, but the moose was still on the move.

“Christina?”

I planted both heels and dragged Harlequin to a halt. “Yes?”

“Rachel Banks,” she said. “From the visitation.”

I recognized her then. Maybe it was the fact that she wore a pink Prada suit and looked as if she’d just been pulled off a Miss America runway, not a lint ball on her jacket, not a hair out of place.

I tried to coax my own coiffure into some semblance of order, but I’d just spent ten minutes in the car with an animal the size of a eighteen-wheeler.

“You shop here, too?” she asked, eyeing my dog from a safe distance.

I considered a smarmy comeback, then realized she had a dog, too. It could have fit into the cavity of my molar and was sitting beside her like a hirsute princess.

“Yes.” I reeled my hound in before he could swallow hers whole.

She gave him a wary glance. “What does he eat? Or should I say, whom?”

I gave her a careful smile. I felt itchy and overfleshed.

“Listen.” She scowled a little, looking a thousand times more sober than the last time I’d seen her. “I’d like to apologize for the other night.”

I would have commented, but I was busy having my arms yanked from their sockets while trying to look serene and in control.

“I shouldn’t have said those things about Salina. She and I were friends….” Emotion flickered across her face. It might have been regret. “Once.”

“Once?” Not that I cared. I had sworn off. Remember?

She looked at me. “Long time ago.”

Not too long. She’d barely reached puberty. Besides, I wasn’t listening.

“Before we were both members of Jack’s Club.”

“What!”
The word had a shitload more emphasis than I intended. She raised her perfectly groomed brows at me. Maybe because my eyeballs were popping out of my head, or maybe because Harlequin was lunging against his collar like Moby-Dick at the end of a harpoon while her dog sat like a silky little bean beside her designer footwear.

“Hey,” she said. “Do you want to grab a drink or something?”

Jack’s Club! What the hell is Jack’s Club?

She tilted her head at me, eyes narrowed a little. “You’re not in love with him, are you?”

“What? No. I’m not…What? Who are you talking about?”

She gave me a little smile. “I think we should talk.”

Jack’s Club? “I’d love to,” I said, my voice a nice blend of pissy sophistication. “But I’m afraid—”

“Meet me,” she said. “At the Quarry. On Burbank. I’ll be the one with the dirt on your boyfriend.”

“He’s not my—” I sputtered, but she was already continuing down the aisle, fur ball sashaying sassily beside her.

I purchased fifty pounds of dog food in a haze and hoped it would last until morning. By seven o’clock I had fed the beast and showered. By 7:30 I had curled my hair and artfully applied makeup. But for no particular reason. I just like to look sharp as I lounge around in the evening. It wasn’t as if I was stupid enough to drive halfway across town for no apparent reason.

By eight o’clock I was dressed in a taupe linen sheath and pacing.

It was 8:42 when I walked through the door of the Quarry.

I found Rachel instantly. She was drinking something clear. I didn’t think it was Sprite.

“Christina,” she said, and gazed at me with bird-bright interest. It wouldn’t have been necessary for me to schlep drinks for half a decade in order to tell she was getting sloshed. “You didn’t have to dress up for me.”

“What? Oh this,” I said, barely glancing at my most expensive ensemble. “No. I had a meeting.”

“On Saturday?”

“Psychotics never rest,” I said.

She raised a needle-thin eyebrow. “So you
are
dating Jack,” she said.

I meant to object, but just then a waiter arrived.

“What can I get you?” He was cuter than a pile of puppies.

“Do you have organic tea?” I asked.

“This
is
L.A.” he said, tone bored.

“How about…” I paused, trying to think of a beverage that wouldn’t make me wish I were dead. “Jasmine.”

“You got it,” he said, and turned back toward the bar.

Rachel gave me a look. “Organic tea?”

“I’m cleansing.”

She laughed. I’d heard Laney talk about cleansing a dozen times. No one laughed at her. Men drooled and women called their personal trainers to ask why the hell they weren’t cleansing. “Good God,” she said, “you’re never going to be able to climb the Rivera family tree that way.”

Jack’s Club?
I thought crazily, but I leaned back in my chair, looking regal and unconcerned. “I’m afraid you got the wrong impression,” I said. “Lieutenant Rivera and I aren’t—”

“Whole damn family’s nuttier than baklava, but he’s Houdini between the sheets, isn’t he?”

My mouth was still caught on my denial and soured up like I’d taken a double shot of lemon juice. “I beg your pardon?”

She sipped her drink. It looked like Absolut. I’d never seen anyone drink it straight before, and working at the Warthog had offered me the opportunity to see quite a lot. Folks having sex doggie style under the tables, for instance. That was a staple.

“Jack and I…we never meshed.” She shook her head, glanced up. “He wasn’t into politics. Couldn’t play tennis worth a damn. And half the time he’d show up looking like he’d been running marathons in his sleep. But get him in the sack, and hold my calls.” She blew out her breath and laughed, but it sounded funny, like she might rather be crying. She cleared her throat. “How’d you meet him?”

I didn’t squirm. I was too busy trying to figure her out. The shrink was on the job. “As I was about to say,” I said, “we’re not dating. We’re just—”

“Dating?” When she laughed this time there was a little more feeling behind it. “God, no. We weren’t dating, either. It’d be like playing chess with a breeding stallion.”

“Breeding—”

“Better equipped for other things,” she explained, leaning toward me.

The waiter arrived carrying my tea. I thanked him. “So Salina,” I began when he was gone. “Did she…play chess with breeding stallions?”

“She’d play with anything if it was a means to an end. Or had an end with means.” She laughed. The sound was hollow.

“So Rivera was just a stepping-stone?”

She studied me for an instant. “Rosita tell you that?” she guessed.

I blinked. “Rosita who?”

“Oh, please. Don’t play a player.” Did that mean she had spent time with breeding stallions, too? “What else did she say?”

I considered denying any knowledge again, but it seemed like I should know something about something. “Mrs. Rivera wasn’t very fond of her.”

“No shit?” she said, and leaned back, arm flung loosely across the back of her chair.

“Said she couldn’t cook.”

“Sal?” She shrugged. “She had a cheesecake recipe that would make you want to bitch-slap Betty Crocker. She baked about once a month, whenever she was ready to break up with some moony sucker. Balm for their weepy wounds or something. Or maybe her way of saying she was just the girl next door and had to follow her heart. Man, she could work them, could read men like a deck of cards. Knew what they liked, what they were hiding, what drove them mad.” She drank. “I learned from the best.”

I shook my head, trying to pretend I was dumb as a doorknob. It wasn’t real difficult.

Leaning forward, she propped her elbows on the table. “Sal, she knew the value of sex.”

Could one be struck dead for speaking poorly about the deceased? I squirmed a little and took a chance. “I heard she wasn’t actually paid for it.”

She grinned. “She got her pound of flesh one way or the other.”

“How do you know?”

“Gossip is like mother’s milk in the world of politics. You must know that.”

“Just organic tea for me,” I said, raising my glass. “New Year’s resolution.”

She narrowed her eyes, drank. “I bet you drive him crazy.”

I tasted my tea, straight up. No sugar. Made me thirsty for paint thinner. “Him?”

“He doesn’t like to be outsmarted. Makes him angry.” Her eyes glowed. “And when he’s angry…” She tilted her head back a fraction of an inch, as if imagining. “Not everyone’s got a pair of working handcuffs, you know. And when—”

“Listen!” I cleared my throat and lowered my voice. “I appreciate you inviting me here, but I think you’ve gotten the wrong idea. Rivera’s an attractive man, but—”

“He didn’t kill her.”

“What?”

“He might hang for it just the same, though. Depends how the cards fall.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I admit”—she leaned across the table, expression suddenly earnest—“a few years ago, I would have been judge, jury, and executioner, but…” She scowled, shook her head. “Now…I’ve aged. Mellowed.”

She looked about as mellow as a hand grenade.

“What changed?”

She paused a moment. “Let’s just say there were lots of people standing in line to kill her. Rivera…” She gazed at her drink, as if she could see things that weren’t there. Come to think of it, after that much vodka, it was pretty likely. “He would have been way toward the end.”

“Who was at the front?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“Where were you?”

She laughed. “In D.C.”