Another hard installment at first, I think this really started to sing towards the end. The first half was essentially a way to fulfill the expectations set in the previous installment, while not really dealing with a character a plot point I don’t have figured out yet.
The second part, though, I like. I seem to do best, or at least have the most fun, when I’m introducing new characters that I find interesting. That’s why the scenes with Emmett and Dante are my favorite so far. It’s wonderful to toss in a new character, with a different past, and see how Nick reacts to it.
As for Carolyn herself, well, I needed a femme fatale (a requirement in detective fiction), but I wanted to do something different about it. Nick isn’t the type to get swept up in some fancy dame in distress, or a dangerous woman who uses her wiles to get her way. No, he’s the type to fall for a strong woman with practical tastes who won’t take any of his crap. That’s probably why his relationships never work out.
For Idle Hands (working title) - Day 11
After Derrick stopped laughing at me, the punk, we reached an arrangement. Since I needed to stay mobile, to keep following the lines of inquiring I’d discovered so far - and since Derrick had was going to be taking an exam that would likely last the better part of two hours - I would borrow his car, drop him off at UMI, and pick him up when he called to say he was done. In all likelihood, Bertha would be ready to go by then.
Neither of us liked it much, but it seemed the best all around solution. I dropped him off at the campus cafeteria so he could spend the last half hour before class studying - or more likely sleeping on his books, I figured - and then I headed to the home of Charlie Dyer.
Dyer lived at the edge of town, near the Standish border, in one of those obnoxious new developments that seemed to be popping up in every open space in the last few years. The kind where the distance between houses was measured in single digit feet, rather than the hundreds of yards, if not miles, that seemed more pleasant to me. Every street looked like every other in here, and I counted a grand total of three different house designs. How people could stand to live like this, living in their neighbor’s houses, having nothing to differentiate their own dwellings from the others aside from the overpriced cars in the driveways, and the exact pattern they used to cut their tiny little lawns. It didn’t seem like any kind of life to me, but then I lived in a tiny apartment above my office with little more than a couch and an ancient TV to my name, so who was I to judge?
I found Dyer’s house easily enough. Apparently, knowing how banal and unimpressive this suburban nothing was going to turn out, the designers made sure that the numbers on the buildings were easily visible from the road… Which was, after all, only ten feet from the buildings. Unfortunately, he wasn’t home. There was no car in the driveway, and no answer at the door. It was only seven thirty, so there was a high probability that the neighbors were still at home. There’s no alarm system in the world like a nosy neighbor, and giving Gunn a reason to lock me up was the last thing I wanted right now, so I didn’t even dare to look around. This might not be a total loss, however.
I picked one of the neighbor’s houses at random and knocked on the door. A short, stocky woman holding a baby who she had apparently been trying, and failing, to feed answered the door. I thought the cigarette hanging out of her mouth was a particularly attractive touch.
“Good morning ma’am, I’m sorry to bother you…”
“Get to the point,” she interrupted, in a voice like nails on a chalk board. As she spoke the smell of cigarettes filled my nose. “Junior here’s got to eat and go down for a nap so I can watch my stories.”
I forced the most trustworthy smile I could as I choked back everything I was thinking at the moment.
“This should just take a moment, ma’am. I’m actually looking for your neighbor, Charlie Dyer. I was expecting to find him at home, but he isn’t here. It’s vitally important that I talk to him, would you happen to know where I could find him?”
“Who’s asking?”
“I’m a private investigator, ma’am, my name is Nick Shamus.”
“Oh yeah,” here she coughed out a laugh, and the acrid stick of cigarettes assailed me again, “he in some kind of trouble again?”
“Again?”
“Sure, middle of the blessed night the cops showed up and hauled his sorry ass off. Fine by me, he’s a miserable neighbor, always bitching about the kids’ toys being on his lawn.”
I forced another smile. “So, the police were here, arresting him, last night? Do you know about when?”
“Oh, ‘bout two thirty in the morning, give or take. Woke half the damn neighborhood I imagine. And I don’t know if he was being arrested, exactly. Didn’t see no cuffs, but maybe that was just a thing to not embarrass him.”
“Did they tow his car as well?”
“I don’t think so, least not while I was watching, and I watched until they left in case something interesting happened. Least they could do after waking a body at two in the morning is shoot someone or something,” she blew a cloud of smoke out the door, directly into my face once the wind caught it.
“There’s nothing entertaining about people being shot in real life, ma’am. Only ignorant people who lack education and culture say things like that.”
As her mouth dropped open I snatched the cigarette out of her gaping maw. I dropped it on the asphalt walk and stomped on it.
“The same goes for people who smoke around their children, ma’am.”
“Why, I oughta!” She yelled as she tried to slam the door. I grabbed it and held it where it was.
“And ma’am, if I find out that your children are less than perfectly healthy, you’ll be hearing from me again. I’ll be watching.”
I let go of the door. She snorted and slammed it in my face. I reflected that that had probably been a stupid move on my part, technically she could probably charge me with threatening her, but I can’t abide people who are that stupid. It had felt good, too.
I checked with the neighbor on the other side of Dyer’s house, and with a few neighbors across the street, and heard basically the same story from each. Dyer had been escorted away by police around two thirty that morning, but no one saw him in handcuffs, and couldn’t say for sure if he had actually been arrested or not.
One of the people across the street, a little old lady who took being a nosy neighbor to new heights, had actually watched the whole thing through her second floor bedroom window with a pair of binoculars. Being, she said, a light sleeper, she had also woken up when a lone patrol car had brought Dyer back to the house an hour later. She said that he hadn’t even gone inside, he’d simply gotten into his car, a late model blue Subaru Forrester, and taken off. She even had the license plate number written down, saving me from having to look it up.
Now I was definitely glad I hadn’t done any snooping. Doubtless she had a camera on her night stand nest to those binoculars, and had the Idle PD on speed dial.
As I turned to leave, she called after me, “one more thing, young man.”
I turned back, “ma’am?”
“I saw that little tiff you had with Mrs. Shefton.”
The woman with the baby and the nicotine habit, though I hadn’t actually gotten her name. I raised my eyebrows to ask where she was going with this.
“That woman is a slob, a first class boob, and a terrible mother. Give her hell.”
I smiled, a genuine smile this time. “Yes ma’am.”
I hated everything about driving Derrick’s car, half because I liked it so much. It was a brand new Mazda Speed3 Sport model, silver, with a stupid looking spoiler on the back. It was everything Bertha was not, zippy, responsive, fun to drive, comfortable, and all of the controls and things inside the car seemed to work. I’d forgotten what it was like to drive a car with working heat. Or a radio.
Of course, there were things I was missing about Bertha. The way the driver’s seat sloped to the left after years of use, so that I could just slide in and out of the car. The fact that it felt like driving a tank, like you could take that car to war and come out the other side intact. And the odd thrill that happened when that little “Turbo” gauge hit the red and you were finally able to charge ahead faster than the old girl had let on at that point. That moment always surprise people, even if it didn’t impress them, and I knew that in a car like this that moment would be lost forever.
When I got back to the office, the front door was unlocked. I know I’d locked the door, and I was the last one out. I drew my gun and put my other hand on the door knob, my shoulder against the door itself. If there was a burglar in there, they’d picked the wrong address, and the wrong day, to pull this crap. And if Derrick had skipped out on his exam and come back early, I was going to kill him, so the gun worked out either way.
I turned the knob slowly, being careful not to make a sound doing it, then in one motion slammed the door open and scanned the room through the pistol’s sights.
A slender woman with straight red hair, in tight fitting blue jeans and a purple sleeveless shirt, was sitting on my couch, drinking my coffee and looking at me with eyes that dared me to shoot her. She knew darn well I couldn’t shoot her, and that little smile on her face gave her away. God I’d missed that smile, even now it melted me and left me feeling like a stupid school boy with a crush.
“Hey Nick, long time no see,” Carolyn, my fourth and final ex-wife said, smiling brightly. That smile was even worse, and she knew it.
I put the gun back in underarm holster and closed the door, locking it behind myself. I threw my coat on the coat rack, next to Carolyn’s zippered cardigan.
“What do you want, Carolyn. You haven’t spoken to me in over three years, why the social call?”
“This isn’t a social call, Nick, this is strictly business.”
I snorted, “you always hated this business, that’s why you left me isn’t it?”
“I hated how much you loved this business, Nick. You left me for your work long before I ever left you.”
I winced, she was right. I’d had the apartment upstairs since I’d opened shop, in case I had to work late, and over the final year of our marriage I’d spent most of my time there. I don’t know why, exactly, there just always seemed to be something more to do, always some excuse to work late and start again the next day bright and early. I’d become obsessed with my work and grew to almost resent the little of my time that Carolyn still occupied. She solved that problem for me when she told me not to come home one night. The papers arrived by courier the next day, and we hadn’t spoken for more than five minutes since then.
“Fair enough,” I said as I sat down behind my desk. “I’d offer you some coffee, but I see you’ve already helped yourself. I’m sorry it’s not any fresher.”
“It’s better than you used to make. your new assistant’s doing I presume?”
“It’s the only reason I keep him around. So what do you want, Carolyn?”
“I heard about what happened to Yadira.”
I stiffened. Yadira had always been a sore spot with Carolyn. I don’t think she ever quite believed me that Alyson wasn’t my daughter, and I know that Yadira being my closest contact in the Idle PD always bothered her. Though I tried not to, I had to admit that she had a point.
“So what, now you’re here to dance on her grave a bit? You always hated her when she was alive, it must be great to know that you won’t be running into her anymore.”
She looked at me hard. That had been unfair, I knew it, but damn it, I didn’t need the drama right now.
“I never hated Yadira, Nick. I hated that she represented a part of your life that you refused to let go of. Even after we met, and you had a chance at a real life with a woman who genuinely loved you, you couldn’t just let her go. You had to just keep picking at that wound.”
“What the hell are you talking about?! She was a friend, and she was a cop, both of which are essential to have around in this line of work.”
“That’s exactly it, Nick, everything was always about your work, never about me, or us, or even about yourself. Every case you worked, it was like you thought that solving this one would make up for all the things you screwed up in Boston. Yadira was just a part of that. It’s admirable what you did for her, taking her away from all of that. And your mother’s a saint for taking in her little girl, but at some point you should have been able to let go. She was a grown woman, Nick, and she pulled herself back together and that should have been your cue to fade back. But you couldn’t do that, you had to keep rescuing her every chance you got, and…”
“And now she’s dead!” I screamed, standing. “And I could have saved her if I’d been there a minute earlier, or two, but I wasn’t, and she died with a huge fucking hole in her gut, and there’s nothing I can do for her now except find out who did it and make them pay!”
Carolyn just looked at me with those steely grey eyes of hers. She never had been intimidated by me, which was part of why I’d fallen in love with her. It also pissed me off something fierce.
“And that’s why I’m here,” she said quietly. “I know you Nick, this thing is going to kill you if you’re not careful.”
“And what’s it to you?”
“That’s not fair, Nick. I still care about you, and I don’t want to see you get hurt.” She stood, set her half empty mug on a side table, and went to the door. As she pulled the cardigan on, she said, “watch your back out there Nick. Don’t get so wrapped up in the hunt that you forget yourself.”
She opened the door to leave.
“Carolyn?”
She turned back, “yes Nick?”
“The keys?”
She smiled again, that sly intoxicating smile, and tossed the key ring to me before leaving. What a woman, if I didn’t want to strangle her so badly I’d swear I was falling for her all over again.
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