Bad To The Bone (3 page)

For a second, I thought she might be coming
on to me, but I dismissed the thought. I'd probably just been
watching too much women's golf lately.

"I love Tiffany more than anything in the
world," she was saying. "And I don't want anything from Robert,
except my daughter back. He can keep his alimony and child support.
I have a job selling commercial real estate. I make a good living.
I bought this coat myself."

She thrust a furry arm at me as if she
wanted me to touch it. When I simply stared, she let it fall over
the arm of the chair and began to cry, her tears tracing rivulets
through the heavy makeup that failed to conceal her wounds. "I
can't sleep at night. I keep thinking he might turn on her
next."

I held out a tissue and she took it with her
bandaged left hand, plucking it from my grip with robotlike
precision. "I would do it myself, go out there and find her," she
sobbed. "But I don't know where to begin. Please, I'm begging you,
as one woman to another. Help me out. Find it in your heart to help
a stranger. Look what he did to me. Just look at this." She tilted
her chin up. The scab trailed all the way down her throat, ending
in a small ring of bruises that looked like blurred
fingerprints.

I sighed, mentally running down the reasons
why I ought to take the case, despite my misgivings. There was
nothing else on the horizon to pay my rent next month. It wasn't
very sisterly of me to refuse. Maybe the kid really was in danger.
And it would give me a good excuse for ignoring my ex-husband.

"Okay, I'll do it," I said reluctantly, not
quite sure of my motives, other than that they were green and
involved a lot of zeros.

"God bless you," she cried, her tears
forgotten. She leaned across the desk and grabbed my hand, then
held it up to her mouth and kissed it.

I reclaimed my hand, taken aback by her
excessive gratitude. Desperation is always unattractive, no matter
how justified.

"What else do you need to know?" she asked,
blue eyes fixed on my face.

"Not much. Let's start with your phone
number and address." I wrote it down as she gave me the
information. She was living in one of the more expensive
subdivisions in North Raleigh. I'd seen the address before: on the
list of her husband's former residences.

"You've covered everything else here." I
held up the sheet of paper with her husband's life detailed on it.
"I take it he's not at home right now?" There was an apartment
listed as his current residence.

She shook her head. "I've been calling and
stopping by his place this whole week. No one's at home."

"When did he take Tiffany?"

Her eyes dropped. "Last weekend. I let him
take her to the movies because he begged me. Just for the matinee,
he promised. But he never brought her back."

"Have you checked with the hospitals and
police?"

She nodded. "They haven't been in an
accident. And he hasn't been into his office. His secretary says
he's on vacation. She hates me anyway, she'd never tell me where he
was."

What secretary did like the boss's wife?
"What exactly did the police say to you when you went to them after
your daughter disappeared?" I asked.

"A lot of things, but basically that I
should go home and wait it out. They said Robert would be
back."

"They're probably right," I agreed. It was
rare that a man in power willingly left behind a lifetime's worth
of career-climbing. On the other hand, people can get pretty crazy
when it comes to their kids.

Besides, I realized, Robert Price's career
would pretty much be over if it ever got out that he was a
wife-beater— which was a likely eventuality come the next election.
Maybe he figured he no longer had anything to lose.

"Who's been assigned to your case?" I asked.
"I'll need to talk to them about what they've done so far."

Her voice grew more desperate. "That's what
I've been trying to tell you. No one's been assigned to the case.
The cops aren't doing anything."

"And they saw you in this condition?"

She touched her face again. "I'm not
pressing charges. That's one of the reasons they won't help me.
They don't think I'm serious."

"Why aren't you pressing assault charges?" I
asked reasonably.

"That's my business," she snapped back, an
edge to her voice. Her voice dropped. "Look, I'm afraid, okay? He
has my daughter and I'm not going to provoke him while he has
her."

I sighed. My lack of enthusiasm showed.

"What if the police aren't right?" she asked
me. "Have you thought about that? What if he never comes back? I'll
never see my daughter again."

"Sure you will," I promised. If I was going
to take the case, I may as well give it my all. "I'll find them. Do
you have any recent photographs?"

"I have these," she offered, pulling a stack
of snapshots from her purse and setting them on the edge of my
desk. What the hell else did she have in that pocketbook? Clowns
would start piling out of it next.

I looked through the stack and selected four
to keep. One was a posed preschool portrait of Tiffany, another
showed the child with her mother. They were wearing matching
outfits, which was nauseating, but then I'm not into pink frilly
shit under any circumstances. Another photo showed Robert Price at
a baseball game, holding a hot dog and eyeing it with comical
relish. He looked like a pretty nice guy, but I guess all
wife-beaters do until they cock a fist. The last photo showed
father and daughter sitting together at the end of a pier, holding
fishing poles. Tiffany was a beautiful child, with her mother's
wide blue eyes, her dad's proud nose and skin the color of caramel.
Her hair bunched in tight brown curls that were streaked with
blond, and her smile revealed two rows of perfect baby teeth.
Father and daughter looked pretty cozy in that photograph, snuggled
against each other for Mom's camera. One big happy family. How
times change.

"I'll give the photos back when this is all
over," I promised.

"When do you think that will be?"

"It depends. But with all the financial
information I have on him, it shouldn't be too long. He has to
spend money sometime. Call me in two days. I'll let you know how
it's going. I'll need a retainer, of course."

"Of course." She removed a leather-bound
checkbook from her bottomless purse, along with a Montblanc
fountain pen. "How much?"

"A thousand should cover me for a while. I
charge a hundred an hour and expenses against that. I'll let you
know if I need more."

She wrote the check out without hesitation.
I took it, noticing that the ink in her pen was purple and that her
handwriting was flowery and precise.

"I do have one more favor to ask," she said
softly, unconsciously rubbing the bruised part of her left cheek.
"I just deposited a huge commission check in my bank account, but
it's out-of-state and it might take a few days to clear. Can you
wait and deposit my check on Thursday? It's only three days. I got
wiped out with all my medical bills and all..." Her voice trailed
off sadly, but her face tightened, as if she was afraid I might
back out after all.

What could I do? Strip her of her fur coat
as collateral?

"Sure," I said. "No problem." It was the
first week in January and the rent was paid. I could afford to be
generous.

Her face brightened. "Thanks. I hate to ask,
but with my injuries I've been out of work and it was longer than
usual between commission checks."

"Don't worry about it," I assured her,
shaking her good hand. Her fingers were long and very soft. This
was not a hand that knew hard work.

"Thank you so very, very much," she said.
"Really, I promise you—you won't regret it."

"I'm sure I won't." I decided to show her to
the front door before she got the notion to kiss my feet. Bobby was
in the outer office. He was munching his way through a bag of
boiled peanuts as he watched me usher her to the door. When he saw
she was about to leave, he coughed loudly and held up one of his
ridiculously expensive spy cameras, staring pointedly at her
face.

"Oh, yeah," I said. "Just a minute, Tawny. I
think it would be a good idea to take some photos of you."

"Of me?" She sounded vaguely pleased, as if
I had just suggested she might make a good spokesperson for a
cosmetics company. She pulled her fur coat around her chin and
tilted her head up in a parody of Marilyn Monroe.

Bobby rolled his eyes as he handed me the
camera. We both knew it takes all kinds.

"I need to record your injuries, not your
modeling ability," I explained stiffly. I was not in the mood to
play around. Maybe she was more unhinged than I realized. On the
other hand, she'd been sane enough to sign a thousand-dollar
retainer. Why not give her a chance?

"Should I say cheese?" she asked, posing in
the doorway.

"No," I barked back. "For godsakes, don't
smile. Look like you're hurt."

Her face changed abruptly. "I am hurt," she
protested.

"I know. That's the point."

She obeyed by slumping dejectedly and
looking monumentally unhappy as I snapped about a dozen photographs
of her face and neck from different angles.

"Okay, that's enough," I finally said.

"That bastard," she muttered, almost to
herself. "I keep forgetting what he did to me."

"He did a number on you, all right," I
agreed.

"Could I take a couple of those?" she asked,
reaching for the Polaroids. "My lawyer might need them."

I handed over two of the snapshots,
wondering why the hell her lawyer hadn't thought to take photos of
his own.

"I hope that guy didn't bother you earlier,"
I said, thinking of my ex-husband. I opened the door for her and a
gust of icy wind blasted me in the face.

"What guy?" She seemed oblivious to the
cold.

"The one who stopped to talk to you before
you came in here." I scrutinized her face. She seemed genuinely
bewildered. I doubted they knew each other.

"Oh, him" she finally said. She waved
dismissively. "He was just some loser. Can you imagine? Trying to
pick me up when I look like this?"

Yeah, I could imagine. And she was
right—Jeff was just some loser.

"Thank you again," she said, then pulled her
fur collar up and headed out into the wind. The heels of her
leather boots drummed a staccato rhythm on the sidewalk as she
strode away.

"I don't like her," Bobby D. said gruffly,
not fifteen seconds after she left. "Wouldn't touch her with my
ten-foot pole."

"What do you mean?" I asked, ignoring his
delusions of grandeur.

"She's got a screw loose. Too many blows to
the head."

"Bobby, that's not funny."

He looked up, perplexed. "Who's being funny?
I mean it. I don't like her."

"Someone has to help her. Let's not get into
it, okay?" We fought weekly over which sex in divorce cases most
often turned out to be right. It was a perpetual girls versus boys
debate that neither one of us could ever hope to win.

"What the hell happened to her anyway?"
Bobby asked as Tawny Bledsoe reached the end of our block and
turned, disappearing from sight.

"Husband beat her up," I said. "As in Robert
Price. The Wake County commissioner."

"No shit?" Bobby was interested now. "I
figured it was a domestic thing. Wait'll the papers get wind of
it."

"They won't," I promised. "A kid is involved
and I want to keep it clean."

"Don't blame you." Bobby grabbed his massive
fake fur coat off the back of the closet door and wiggled into it.
He buttoned it up carefully, then jammed a fuzzy hat with flaps on
it over his head and fastened it beneath his chin. He slipped on
heavy black gloves and adjusted the hat so low it nearly obscured
his eyes. When he was done, he looked like a Kodiak bear lumbering
off in search of a cave to hibernate in.

"Where are you going?" I asked. "It's
twenty-seven below out there."

"The Domino's delivery truck won't start,"
he explained. "I'm walking over there for my hot wings."

"My god," I said. "Such dedication."

"You have your causes. I have mine." He
patted his enormous stomach and headed out the door, letting
another cold blast of wind into the office.

The mention of food made me hungry. I
rummaged through one of his drawers and located an unopened box of
Twinkies. I unwrapped a couple and started munching away as I sat
at his desk and dialed Bill Butler's number.

"Butler," a brusque voice answered.

"Answering your own phone? What's the
matter? You get busted down?"

"Casey," he said, making it a statement.
"With a mouthful of Hostess cupcakes, if my detective instincts are
right."

“Twinkies," I admitted. "I'm trying to eat a
more balanced diet these days, so I'm alternating between Twinkies,
Snowballs, cupcakes and fruit pies."

"Nice to know someone else in this town is
at work besides me." He sounded tired and grumpy.

"Coverage light?"

"Yup. Pipes are freezing. Engines won't
start. Furnaces have gone out. Ice on the road. You name it. I've
heard it. The RPD is being manned by a few good men right now. I'm
one of them." He sighed.

"You ought to move to the country," I told
him. "Then you'd have a good excuse not to come in to work,
too."

"I'm a city boy," he said. "Remember? I
can't breathe unless there's at least a fifteen percent share of
carbon monoxide in the air."

We ran out of banter and an expectant
silence filled the line. There was a lot I could have said to him,
but didn't. There was a lot he could have said back, but didn't.
One of us would have to budge.

"You know a woman named Tawny Bledsoe?" I
finally asked.

There was the briefest of pauses. I wondered
again about the exact nature of their relationship. "Yeah, I know
her," he said carefully.