Hey DSD,
Fall is officially here, and, if you're anything like me, you're using the excuse provided by cooling temperatures and falling leaves to stay inside with a good book, hopefully with some burning incense and a perfectly mixed drink by your side.
But if you're unsure what you should be reading, allow me to make a recommendation: Negative Girl by friend of DSD, Libby Cudmore.
You'll certainly know Libby's name from the multitude of awards she's been nominated for (including a Shamus award this year!) and the number of excellent stories she's penned. Negative Girl follows many of those stories, tracking her series character, Martin Wade, as he explores what happened to an old bandmate who fathered a young woman before disappearing.
It's a hell of a novel, featuring a hell of a cast of characters, and to celebrate, we're offering you a reprint of one of Libby's original Martin Wade stories, "All Shook Down", which originally appeared in "Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Sept/Oct 2020".
The story follows below, but, before you jump in, take the time to order Negative Girl right now.
Like Martin can attest, the first one is free. But after this, you'll be hooked.
All Shook Down
Originally Published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Sept/Oct 2020I never had to stand in front of the judge. No, my managers and handlers and all the privileges of fame kept me away from all that. Can’t be booked for possession if you shoot all the junk in your pocket. Never had to steal change from car cup holders to get my fix, not when there was per diem, a yes-man backstage to find some pills or a bottle or that coveted little baggie, a taste to even me out enough to stagger out on stage or hold myself up in front of a studio mic. The French Letters may have been long dissolved, but those days were only as far behind me as I let them stay.
Today’s docket was the usual punks and drunks, a plea on a two-year-old manslaughter case and then whatever Judge Lawrence Romy wanted me for. No sense waiting on the hard bench outside his office. Not when all the action was in the courtroom.
“What are you doing here, Martin?” Jack asked, sitting next to me on the back bench. “Trolling for clients?”
District Attorney Jack Lorenz looked like the Yale bulldog in an off-the-rack suit. But tough as he was, he was one of the few in law enforcement that would lower themselves to talk to a PI like myself. “Always good to see you too, Jack,” I said. “Business is booming, I see.”
Jack rolled his eyes. “Business,” he spat. “Christ, you know how many junkies I got on my desk? I can’t even ship ‘em to Drug Court. Judge Bryant’s docket is full, no beds in rehab, barely any left in the jail. I’d be pissed if it wasn’t so goddamn sad.”
“The manslaughter must be a good diversion.”
He shrugged. “Another plea,” he said. “Glad not to put the family through it, but it’s been too long since I had a trial. A man gets bored writing ten-to-fifteen-to-twenty bargains.”
“I heard the Dillon Playhouse is doing Inherit The Wind,” I joked. “In case you’re craving an audience.”
“That’s Vinny’s gig,” he said. “Don’t want the entire justice system traipsing the boards, after all.”
The Assistant DA accepted a plea on a drunk driving case. He was weeping as the Sheriff’s Deputy led him away. Six months. The last time we talked, Vic, my old drummer, mentioned that Ron had gotten picked up on another DUI. But Ron had money. This man looked like he spent all his watering those gin blossoms. His bus bench lawyer shrugged and threw a too-thin folder in his vinyl briefcase. Prison, probation or picking up litter, he still got paid.
“What does Larry want with you?” Jack asked. “No offense, but he’s got cops. He’s got me. What does he need a PI for?”
“No clue,” I said. “Maybe he wants me to investigate where you got that hideous tie.”
He snorted. “Try my wife,” he said. “I told her if she wants a divorce to just ask me next time.”
Judge Romy called the manslaughter docket. He glanced at me for only a second before he had to pretend like I wasn’t in the room. Jack clapped me on the shoulder as he got up. “Good seeing you,” he said. “We’ll get a drink sometime.”
That drink was never going to happen. Not for any fault of Jack’s. But because I didn’t have a manager or a yes-man anymore. Didn’t have anyone to make excuses for me. No one to keep me from facing down the judge except myself.
***
Judge Romy’s law clerk offered me coffee while he was in the bathroom. I took it. Court always took an hour longer than it needed to and that heavy, bored exhaustion was creeping up. I stared at Romy’s line of law books like I knew what any of them meant. He had pictures of his wife and his kid on his bookshelf, an autographed baseball in a hard plastic case, a folded American flag presented to his brother, killed in action overseas. I was halfway done with my coffee when he finally came out and sat behind his enormous oak desk.
“Jack recommended you,” he said. “But I need to trust that you can be discreet.”
I nodded. I gave him the quick rundown of what I expected – no missing persons or drug cases, consultation is free but I’m under no obligation to take a case, payment expectations, half up front. He didn’t send me away immediately. Now the talking had to turn on him.
“My wife,” he said. “I think she’s cheating on me. I don’t want to make a fuss, but I also don’t want her to get everything in the divorce. I just need enough to prove she’s being unfaithful and then maybe she’ll go quietly.”
I had trouble believing that a judge like Romy wouldn’t be able to get a shark lawyer to strip her of everything even without the dirty pictures in hand. I nodded anyways. I didn’t like divorce work; it was ugly and unpleasant and somebody always cried, but it kept my fridge half-full and my office lights on, now that the royalty checks had dried up. If not me, it would be some other name in the search engine, someone without morals or standards. I was getting mine back, little by little.
He said he’d email a photo. I told him I’d email the paperwork and once that was in hand I could get started. He wrote me a check and I took it without glancing at the amount. If you couldn’t trust a judge, who could you trust?
***
Matilda Romy was allegedly keeping company at the lake house. It was always the lake house. Cheap hotel rooms were for middle management, suburban dads and soccer moms. Just the act of buying a lake house seemed to be an acknowledgement that an affair was to come. Otherwise, be content with a rental a couple weeks a year. You’re getting grim in your old age, I scolded myself.
I studied the photo Romy had sent over. Matilda was pretty, a rusty blonde, a little on the younger side but not enough to turn heads. The same blonde drinking cocktails in the bay window with a gentleman friend, a khakis-and-polo type with half a head of thinning black hair. I snapped a few photos through the long lens when she kissed him. But that was all I got. If it was an affair, it wasn’t a torrid one. They had dinner and kissed goodnight and then she drove home.
I followed her back to a house on Reno Drive, a two-story with vinyl siding and a yard cut so short it might as well have been a patch of Astroturf. Not the neighborhood I would have expected a judge to live in, but then again, it seemed like every week another neighborhood in Perrine fell to the slums and pay-in-cash rentals. There was no one else home when she turned on the lights. I shot another photo, took note of the time and drove home listening to Elvis Costello. It was a Brutal Youth kind of night.
For the first time in a decade I wanted a cigarette. Three miles on the treadmill didn’t cure the craving, the needless fidgeting, the sluggish crawl of my blood that suggested something wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t until I looked at the calendar that I realized what today was. The anniversary of the release of Sidewinder. I wondered if I should call Vic to celebrate. I wondered if Ron even remembered. Kurt had been dead for more than a decade, shot in a liquor-store robbery in 2006. No Albumism tribute or Paste retrospective; The French Letters were lost to time. I didn’t even have my own copy of the album to play.
***
The office of the Wade Agency was over a vape shop that had been an ill-fated art gallery when I moved in. I had gone to a few of the shows, vanity affairs for New Yorkers who imagined Perrine to be quaint by virtue of it being a small city where the real estate was cheap. Never set foot in the vape shop, though. Had no need. The nicotine craving went away this morning with the second cup of coffee and a spin of The Replacements All Shook Down on the record cabinet in the reception area. One day I would get an assistant to occupy the lonely little desk gathering dust in the corner. One day, perhaps, when there was money.
I wanted to know the identity of the man in the photo with Matilda. There was something familiar about him, something off about her. I opened my laptop and got on Facebook. I maintained a dummy page just for prowling, a handful of photos purchased in a package from some digital warehouse specializing in pictures of people who seemed to enjoy jogging and grilling and walking hand-in-hand through overgrown fields. It was often tempting to go hunting for Ron or see what Vic was up to between the occasional phone call or family Christmas card, but temptation was something I’d become good at resisting over the decades.
Judge Romy maintained a static page; his last posted photo was one of him with a woman at the Fourth of July fireworks. His sister, perhaps, or a grown daughter? She didn’t look like Matilda. And yet, Matilda had commented, “So Cute!” underneath. I clicked on her page.
Matilda Romy was a brunette with soft hips and dark hair with little streaks of grey that picked up sunlight like tinsel. She was smiling wide in every photo. She was not the athletic blonde I had photographed drinking cocktails in the window last night. I checked her About Me section. A first-grade teacher at Riverside Elementary. A Virgo. Married 28 years to Lawrence Romy, mother to a son who was a grad student in Ohio.
I clicked through her photos. Couldn’t find the blonde. Not a sister, not a cousin, not a daughter, not a friend. I went back to the photos on his page. She was only in one, in the background, standing next to the same man she was drinking with last night. I scrolled through comments on all of his posts, hoping to find a name, a comment, some notation of life from either of them. There was nothing. Not even a whisper.
I didn’t like the feeling I got in my gut. I’d been had hard. But I wasn’t about to tear up his check. I needed to know who had me and why and what I had gotten my stupid self into.
***
I was eating yesterday’s Pad Thai with my feet on my desk when someone knocked on my door. I turned down The Smithereens and answered to two detectives with badges clipped to their belts. “Can I help you?” I asked, without making enough room for them to step inside.
“If you’re Martin Wade, you can,” said the bigger of the two, flipping open a badge that read Detective Edgar Roland.
I pulled a card out of my wallet and handed it to him. He took it and handed it to his partner. “Were you working for Diane Bowery?” he asked in a voice like Velveeta. The name on his badge was Detective Willard Rue.
“If I was, I’m under no obligation to tell you,” I said. It was a name that meant nothing. Nothing unless…
“Someone said they saw a car with a license plate matching yours hovering around her house on last night,” said Rue. “Care to explain what you were doing there?”
So that was her name. Diane Bowery. Judge Romy had spun me a story about a wayward wife to get me to spy on some woman I now knew nothing about. I could get pissed later. It does no good to lose your cool in front of cops. “Sometimes a man just likes to drive around and collect his thoughts,” I said. “It’s meditative, you know?”
“If she is your client, I hope she paid cash up front,” said Roland. “Because she’s missing.”
It took me a second to process that information. Then my throat closed up and my muscles tightened and that adrenaline started pumping. Stay cool, I reminded myself. You didn’t take her. They have nothing on you that can tie you to a crime you didn’t commit. I knew that was a crock. Cops can tie you to any crime they want to. That’s what they do.
“You gonna let us in now?” said Rue.
I quickly snapped back to reality. “Not without a warrant,” I said.
“C’mon, Martin, make this easy,” said Roland. “We know you were at the scene, we just want to know what you saw.”
“I’ve got a client to protect,” I said. “But I’m feeling generous, so call my lawyer and make a formal invite, and I’ll come down to the station and tell you what I know. It isn’t much, but I won’t put it on record without my council present. I know better than that.”
The two of them exchanged a glance that would have shattered at my feet if they’d dropped it. “Who do we call?” Rue finally asked.
“Vinny O’Brian,” I said.
“No surprise there,” said Roland, snorting. “A yellow-pages dick and a billboard lawyer. Match made in scumbag Heaven.”
I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of rising to that remark. “I appreciate you stopping by,” I said with as much cordiality as I could dredge up. “I’ll wait to hear from Vinny.”
I shut the door in their faces. Locked it too. I watched from just inside the window ledge until they drove away. Now, at least, my mystery woman had a name – Diane Bowery.
***
Diane was a public defender. I knew I recognized her from somewhere. I shot off a quick email to Jack expressing my concern and did the usual work of figuring out her story. A SUNY grad, law school in Philly, working with the county for a year and a half. No husband, no kids, which explained the shoddy little house. Just a place to stay, no one to share it with.
The newspapers got the story just a few minutes after I did. I watched the updates in real time, first a car found by the reservoir, then a brief note of missing persons investigation from Chief Liam Hollander, a plea for her to come home from her co-workers. I’d have to wait until 2 p.m. for the full press conference.
I put in a call to Liam. “I can’t talk to you right now,” he said. “Not just because I’ve got a missing woman on my hands and every reporter in Upstate New York ringing my damn phone off the hook.”
I didn’t like his tone. “Something I need to know?” I asked.
“Something you want to tell me?” he snapped. “You were at her house, Martin, two hours before she went missing. The only reason you aren’t in handcuffs right now is because we don’t have enough evidence. But that could change if we find a body.”
I’d heard those same words 18 years ago, when Cecelia took off. The LAPD banged down my door a week after I’d reported her missing and grilled me in a cold room for hours, demanding to know where I’d stashed her body, promising to go easy on me if I just told them where she was because hey, couples fight, things happen even when we don’t mean them to. They didn’t know if she was dead or alive, but they saw a junkie ex-rock star aching for a fix and a blackout where a woman should be. But blackout or no, I know I didn’t kill her. She was just…gone. And she stayed gone. 18 years and she was still missing. No body, no note or postcard from a Mexican resort. Just…silence. Even after I got my PI license, learned how to run searches and what to look for, there was no trace of the woman I had once planned to spend my life with.
“You know I had nothing to do with this,” I said. I didn’t know if that was true or not. Maybe she had seen me parked outside and taken off. But why? We all needed answers, but none of us were going to reveal the cards in our hands.
“I should hope not,” said Liam. “But if you know anything, I’d rather you tell me now, rather than wait for your mouthpiece to tangle it all up.”
“When I get something,” I said. “I’ll let you know.”
***
The press conference didn’t give me much. Diane’s car had been found around 5 a.m. by someone walking their dog, and her boss had reported her missing when she didn’t show up for work. Dive teams had been in the reservoir, but the water was deep and the shoreline was jagged. If her body was in there, it might take weeks to find it. Liam did make a point of saying that no suspects had been identified. That, at least, gave me some breathing space.
The Real Property Tax Lookup put the lake house in the name of DC Realty LLC, a generic name that went nowhere. The company owned properties all over the city, mostly slums, and had been written up for code violations a couple dozen times. No photo, though, and the mailing address was in Astoria. I sent an email to a friend at the Perrine Courier in hopes that any filed legal notice might give me a name to look into.
I wrote down some of the other addresses the company owned. I left a message with Vinny to tell him to expect a call from the cops and drove to the first house on my list, a converted duplex on Beaumont Drive, not far from my own little place on Lido Avenue. There was a For Rent sign in the window of the first-floor apartment. I knocked on two doors before a woman in leggings answered. “Drove by and saw there was an open apartment,” I said. “Do you have a contact number for the landlord? I couldn’t make it out on the sign.”
She looked me over and rolled her eyes. “You don’t want that apartment,” she said. “Last guy who lived here just got arrested for cooking meth, the guy before that was selling crack out front. This building sucks. I’m only here because my ex kicked me out when I caught him cheating on me.”
“Good apartments are hard to find,” I said. “But your place looks nice. Maybe it’s just bad luck on the landlord’s part that he got rotten tenants.”
“Carl doesn’t give a shit,” she said. “I haven’t had a stove in two months because he can’t be bothered to order it. He takes whoever has first and last month’s rent and if they trash the place it’s for the next tenant to worry about.”
Carl. Would it be too pushy to ask for a last name? I decided yes. “I’ve got a cousin in code,” I said. “Give me this guy’s number and I’ll pass it along, get someone up here to make him fix that stove.”
She smiled at me. “That’s sweet of you,” she said. She took her phone off the bookshelf and scrolled through and rattled off a number. I took it down in my memo app and read it back to make sure I had it right. I did. I thanked her and left her my card and got back in my car and called Code Enforcement. I had lied about the cousin, but I knew a few people by name who might be able to help. It cleared up a little bit of my conscience. I hadn’t let myself sit with the fact that I may have chased Diane to her doom; that she might have known she was being watched and took off, only for something awful to befall her. The only question was what she was hiding and why Judge Romy wanted it so badly as to lie.
***
Romy was in court until after three, so I waited in my car until I saw him leave for lunch and followed him to the Rose and Thistle Café. I waited until he was alone to go inside and pull up a chair at the table next to his. “Meeting your wife?” I said. “Or rather, Diane?”
“I can’t be seen with you,” he hissed.
“I’m just getting lunch,” I said. “You’re the one who hired a PI to tail a woman who isn’t your wife, the same woman who went missing this morning. So really, I shouldn’t be seen with you. It’s bad business. Question is, what is it going to take to keep me from going to the cops with her photo and your signed contract?”
“Just the word of a judge,” he said. “Is that a risk you want to take?”
The waitress came by. I ordered coffee. Romy ordered a Tanqueray and tonic and inhaled most of it in the first swallow. So much for sober as a judge. “Why did you have me tail her?” I asked. “And why did you tell me she was your wife?”
“I needed you to take the case,” he said. “You wouldn’t have otherwise.”
“You needed a fall guy,” I said. “Now she’s missing and the cops think I had something to do with it. You’d better hope she’s just out for a walk, because if she turns up dead, I’m going to the cops. I’ll take that risk.”
He polished off his drink and motioned for a second. “I think she was involved in something shady,” he said. “I couldn’t go to the cops; I think one of them might be in on it. I didn’t mean to set you up. I just needed to know. Once I had some proof, I was going to bring in Jack and file charges. But I wanted it all done quietly.”
“Hard to be quiet when there’s a missing woman,” I said. “What do you think she was doing?”
The waitress brought his drink. Watching him swallow it made my stomach turn. “She was working with some slumlord to empty out his properties. She would cut her clients shitty deals and put them away, with the idea being that once the properties were empty, they would reinvent the place as condos and she’d get a cut when they sold.”
I thought about 2B and her broken stove, likely another attempt to get her to leave so the place could be put on AirBnB or rented to college students who would pay by the head. “Do you know the landlord’s name?” I asked.
“Carl Wright,” he said. “Wormy little guy, going bald up top.”
That sounded like her drinking buddy. “Do you have any proof of this?” I asked. “Emails, real property tax records, anything?”
He shook his head and I continued, “Do you think he might have something to do with her disappearance?”
“I don’t know him, don’t know what he’s capable of,” he said. “But it’s possible.”
“Call the police,” I said. “Tell Liam what you know. But leave me out of it. I’ll delete the photos and shred the contract. The check too. I don’t want any trace of this case left anywhere to be found, got it?”
“I’d appreciate that,” he said. “But, if I may, what did you see when you went up there?”
I finished my coffee. I stood up. “Nothing,” I said. “She wasn’t home.”
***
I didn’t delete the photos. Or the contract, and certainly not the check. Not until I was sure Romy had gone to the cops. I had no reason to trust him. If he put the cops on me, I needed to know I had something that could turn them back on him. It wouldn’t be good business, but neither was sitting in jail on a kidnapping charge. Or murder. At some point they were going to find a body. It was just a matter of where – the water, the ledges, dangling from a tree in a staged suicide.
I left a message for Wright from the number his tenant had given me, locked up the office and went home. I ran through a couple of tunes in the Steely Dan piano book to distract me from thinking about Diane. I was about as good a detective as I was a pianist – competent, but not especially innovative. Next time I’d ask more questions before I took a case. I sang “Babylon Sisters” aloud to no one. No one except whoever was knocking on my door.
***
Diane Bowery was not dead. She wasn’t missing. She was cold and she was exhausted from hiding out in the woods but she was very much alive. I made her a cup of tea and let her wrap up in a blanket and quietly wondered at what point the cops would need to be called.
“I suppose I should have gone to the police,” she said. “But I was afraid they would try and cover it up.”
“Cover up what?”
“Wright’s scheme,” she said. “The one he and Romy were in on.”
“Funny,” I said. “Romy picked you at as the mastermind.”
She got quiet. “Of course he did,” she said.
“Something you want to tell me?”
She peered into her cup like she was reading tea leaves. “We had an affair,” she said. “A year ago. I broke it off when he slugged me. He was drunk, we were arguing, but I knew it was only going to get worse. Then six months ago, he approached me with this scheme, threatened to have me fired if I didn’t go along with it. Convinced me no one would get hurt – I mean, what’s another six months to someone with a trunk full of stolen video games?”
Of course. Sex and greed. Too many of my cases came down to that, but this was the first one that got the cops involved. “How many?” I asked.
“How many what?”
“How many pleas on this scam?”
“A dozen, maybe.”
A dozen people rotting on trumped-up charges. A dozen people stuck in prison cells on shitty deals made for money, without even an apartment to come back to. “All Wright’s properties?”
“No,” she said. “He roped a few of his buddies in too. They’d call the cops on minor infractions, get their tenants arrested and then we’d take on the cases.”
“This is all pretty ugly,” I spat. “And I really don’t have a reason not to call the cops and let you explain this all to them. So unless you give me a compelling one, my next call is to Chief Hollander.” First Romy, then her. If I wanted to play as someone’s pawn, I’d get out my chess set.
“I can’t go to the police,” she said. “Not yet. Tomorrow, after I can get the evidence out of my office. I’m worried one of them might go over there and destroy it if they know I’m alive to testify.”
“So you hid out for a day,” I said. “Set a manhunt in motion. What makes you think they haven’t already destroyed it?”
“I guess I’m just hoping they haven’t,” she said. “But if you could just let me stay here, we can go in tomorrow, first thing….”
“Not a chance,” I said. “Get a hotel room or go to a friend’s place.”
“I’m missing,” she said. “Any front desk person will call the cops the minute they see me.”
She wasn’t wrong. I sighed. “I know where you can stay,” I said.
***
The Vanguard wasn’t cheap, but like all playgrounds for the thick wallet set, it was discreet. I knew they’d be watching for activity on her credit cards, so I booked online with a card I kept for emergencies and drove her over there, checked myself in and let her in from the veranda. “I’ll pay you back,” she insisted.
I didn’t believe her, but I could worry about my credit card bill later. “One night,” I said. “I’ll pick you up in the morning. If you’re not here, I’m going straight to the cops.”
“I’ll order us room service,” she purred.
I wasn’t in the mood. “Not on my card you won’t.”
I left out the same door I’d let her in through so as not to alert the bellhop. I called Jack from my car. “How about that drink?” I asked.
***
I got to Topsy’s early and ordered a seltzer but tipped like I’d ordered a real drink. The jukebox was playing “I’ll Be You” and I had a moment of loneliness that passed about half as quickly as it had come on. We were touring on Fait Accompli, our second album, when Don’t Tell A Soul came out and I made our driver pull over in every town until I found a record store that had the tape, then played it until Vic threatened to throw it – and me – out the window. For the first time in awhile, I missed those days.
Jack looked wrong when he arrived. I don’t think I’d ever seen him in anything but a suit, so it took me a second to recognize him in carpenter jeans and an untucked polo. He got a pint from the bar and joined me. “You know the cops want to talk to you,” he said. “I shouldn’t be anywhere near you.”
I was already getting sick of hearing that. “It won’t matter tomorrow morning,” I said. “Diane is alive.”
“That’s good news,” he said. “But how do you know this?”
“She came by my place,” I said. “She wants to flip on Romy and some landlord named Carl Wright.”
“What’s the scam?”
“I want you to hear it from her.”
He rolled his eyes. “Where is she now?”
“I put her up someplace safe,” I said. “She’s worried someone’s after her.”
He took a sip of his pint. “So what do you need me for?”
“I need you to help me take her to the cops,” I said. “She said she’ll tell the whole story. Just thought she might feel safer with you present. She is accusing a judge, after all.”
He didn’t answer. He took out his cell phone and swiped his thumb across it a couple times. “You said she’s alive?” he said.
“I saw her an hour ago.”
“Then you need to tell the cops where she is,” he said.
“Why’s that?”
He turned his phone to me. “Because they just found Carl Wright’s body in the reservoir.”
***
Diane wasn’t at the Vanguard. She wasn’t at her office or her shabby little house. But the light was on at the lake house. I watched her through the window. No drinks this time. She was alone.
My phone buzzed in the cup holder, loud enough so that I was sure she heard it. When I got my heart back on a regular rhythm I checked the notification. My friend at the Courier. DC Holdings is Diane Bowery and Carl Wright, she wrote. Equal partners, established about a year ago.
That contradicted the six-month timeline she gave me through tears. So now the entire company was hers. The only question remaining was whether she took out Romy too. I texted Liam my location and counted to ten, then crept around the side until I saw Diane in the kitchen, looking through a drawer. There was a pistol on the counter near the microwave. She didn’t take it as she left the room.
The back door was unlocked and I slowly opened it. I slipped inside and moved to block the entry to the kitchen before I cleared my throat. “I get you a nice room at the Vanguard and you come here?”
She turned around. She turned on a smiled like a low-watt bulb. “I just needed a few things,” she purred. “Didn’t want to show up at the police station wearing clothes from two days ago.”
“At least put them in a bag,” I said. “They’ll want to test them for evidence against Romy.” Or gunshot residue. I didn’t know yet what killed Wright, but I doubted that piece in the kitchen was for starting off a road race.
She entertained that notion for at least a few seconds. I had to stall her for at least 20 minutes, long enough for at least a couple of cops to show up with the cuffs. “You said everything is at your office, right?” I asked. “Are you sure?”
“There’s a folder upstairs,” she said. “Under the mattress. I can go get it, if you think we’ll need it.”
There could also be another gun upstairs. I couldn’t take any chances of letting her out of my sight, not again. “What’s in it?” I asked. “Anything we can use against Wright and Romy?”
“A couple of contracts,” she said. “But some of them have Romy’s signature.”
I pretended to think it over. “We’ll get them later,” I said. “In the meantime, that bar cart is too pretty to resist. If I make a drink, will you have one with me?”
“Help yourself,” she said. “I’ll have whatever you’re having, but make it portable. I’m going upstairs to finish packing.”
I went over to the bar cart. “Bombay or Hendrick’s?” I asked, picking up the blue bottle. “I’m a Bombay man myself, but it’s lady’s choice.” I was never much of a gin drinker, but it needed to be clear, needed to be something I could fake with a fistful of ice and a lime wedge.
She was starting to get irritated. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“You see, it does,” I said. I gripped the neck of the bottle so hard I thought it might shatter in my hand. “Because we’re going to toast to our new venture.”
“And what new venture is that?”
I didn’t have ice. Didn’t have tonic water either. They were likely both in the kitchen and I couldn’t make the move just yet. Fifteen minutes. I just hoped they didn’t use the sirens when they roared up in here. “Romy’s out,” I told her. “Or at least he will be when you talk to the cops. But no sense letting them shut down the whole operation. We put everything in my name, temporarily, and six months from now when everything is clear, we form a new company.”
“I told you it was all Wright’s idea,” she said.
“You did,” I said. “But it’s a good idea, and there’s no reason it needs to dissolve just because one investor dropped out. Between you and me and Wright, we should be able to piece it back together.” She didn’t need to know that I knew Wright was dead. Better, in fact, that she didn’t.
She smiled. She moved to the bar cart, took the bottle from my hands and put it back. She picked up a new bottle of scotch and took two glasses and went to a wet bar in the corner I hadn’t noticed. I heard the crack of the seal and the rattle of ice before she returned with two drinks, pressing one into my hand. “And what can you bring to the table?” she asked, taking a seat on the wide white leather couch.
Ten minutes. I just had to stall her for ten more minutes. But there were weapons more deadly than a gun and I was holding one of them in my hand. I made a show of taking a sip I didn’t let past my lips. “A lot of my clients are on the verge of a divorce,” I said. “That means houses for sale. Nice houses too. About like this, and lot less work than trying to turn slums into condos.”
“And why would they choose a public defender to represent them?” she asked.
“Because you’ll go into private practice,” I said. “Specializing in divorce. Like I said, we need to wait for everything to cool off, but that just gives you time to put phase two in motion.”
She sipped her drink. I’d been here before, backstage and hotel rooms with tattooed punk girls and plenty of booze. The girls I could always resist. Hell, I could even pass up the bottle if the needle was an option. But I was long out of practice and she might get suspicious if I didn’t give into one temptation or another. I took one swallow and tried not to taste it. If I did, I might not put it down. It didn’t occur to me until afterwards that she might have put something other than ice in my glass. That was enough to make me leave it dangling.
After a minute she set down her own half-emptied drink. “I have to leave town for a few days,” she said. “Going to visit my sister in Cincinnati. Let me finish packing, and we’ll talk when I get back.”
I heard cars on the street and hoped they were coming for me. I didn’t know how much longer I could stall her, stall myself. "You can finish packing in a few,” I said. “And I’ll drive you to the airport after you call Wright and sell me to him. I can’t let you leave town until I know I’m a full partner.”
“Carl is out of town,” she said. “Said he was taking his nephew to the Baseball Hall of Fame. I don’t want to bother him.”
“For this kind of money he can take a few minutes,” I said. “I won’t play around with amateurs.” I might make a pretty good criminal if this PI thing didn’t work out.
I heard the slam of a door. Then a second. My backup was here. But she must have realized it too, because she was on her feet in an instant and trying to run upstairs. I ran around the coffee table just as I heard them come in the door and climbed halfway up the stairs to grab her arm. She slipped out of my grip and made it up a few more steps before I got her again. I hated being that forceful but I didn’t know if she had another weapon up there. Better to risk a bruise than a bullet.
Liam and a few officers crowded at the bottom of the staircase. I handed her over to them. “There’s a gun in the kitchen,” I said. “And she said there was paperwork related to the case upstairs.”
I thought she might try to tell them about my proposition. But she knew better. Roland and Rue were waiting in the living room when we all came back down. Roland gave me a look that should have left a second-degree burn.
Liam clapped me on the back as an officer handcuffed Diane and lead her to the blue and white parked in her driveway. “Not bad,” he said. “Of course, we’ll need a statement from you about what happened here.”
“Happy to help,” I said.
I went to the wet bar and filled a tumbler with water. I drank it down, trying to wash the phantom kiss of scotch out of my mouth. If there was something in my drink, there wouldn’t likely be enough to incapacitate me, but I wasn’t about to take any chances. When I got home I would eat, drink more water, maybe hit the treadmill to try and sweat it all out. To remind myself what was forbidden, what was toxic, what was no longer allowed to cross my threshold.
“Don’t tell me you’re just going to leave that beautiful scotch unattended,” Liam said.
“I’m afraid I have to,” I said. “I think she might have slipped something into it.”
Liam didn’t know. Nobody did except a few first-name faces in the recovery group I went to a couple times when I first got to town. I debated going to the next meeting. I decided I’d stop in, just to prove to myself that I could hold myself accountable for even the smallest of slips.
***
Diane was indicted for Wright’s murder, charged first with incapacitating him with GHB in his drink, then shooting him and leaving him dead in the woods after she returned to the lake house just a few hours after I watched her leave. I turned my photos over to Jack for time stamp evidence; he told me quietly that the lab techs found the same drugs in the scotch she poured for me. Being in recovery saved my life once again.
Romy resigned from the bench after the papers tied him to the scandal. I turned all my notes over to my friend at the Courier in thanks for the names on the legal notice. I went back to my regular case load, recovering wayward spouses and stolen jewelry. At Charlie’s Pawn I noticed a copy of Sidewinder in among the rest of the CDs he’d never sell. I left with my client’s diamond bracelet.
***END***
Hell of a story, isn't it? If you're as thrilled with it as we are and want more Martin Wade in your life, make sure you check out Negative Girl right away. I'll be back tomorrow with a cover reveal. Until then, please share this post with anyone who likes excellent PI fiction. As you can tell, this, and Libby, are special, and we're lucky to have Martin and Libby as friends.
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