Motion for Murder (12 page)

I pushed the gruesome images aside and asked, "What's the Black Orchid?" When he didn't answer me, I asked Paige. "What's the Black Orchid?"

"Ask your landlord," she snapped. "He seems to have all the answers."

"Haven't you heard?" Curt said. "It's the digital age. A camera in every cell phone. I wouldn't be surprised if the cops show up looking for you."

Paige smirked. "Let them come. I'm sure I'll break the case wide open for them."

"By the way," he said, "the guy in the feather boa was a little old for you, wasn't he?"

"That is a bad man," Paige snarled at me when Curt and his good bones had left. "I hope you don't intend to bring him back here again."

I didn't bother pointing out that I hadn't brought him in the first place. I followed Paige back to our desks, puzzled by her hostility toward him. Usually she saved it for her co-workers. For some reason, the mention of the Black Orchid had made her sprout fangs, and I intended to find out why when I talked to Curt later. The more I learned about Paige, the more layers she seemed to have. Seemed there was more to her than a rainbow of lip pencils.

Of course, "later" was hours away and I was the curious type, so I pulled out the phone book and flipped to the business pages. There was no listing for the Black Orchid. I checked the nightclub listings in the Yellow Pages and found nothing there, either. It was possible I was looking in the wrong phone book, but it was hard to be discreet with a dozen of them piled on my desk, and Paige sitting across the room, so I let it go for the moment.

For the next hour, no one came or went except for the mailman, who mumbled something sympathetic and fled, in case whatever had offed Dougie was contagious. Paige pouted at her desk, occasionally glancing at her watch but not saying anything and not going anywhere. My stomach began to growl after about forty-five minutes, so I headed to the kitchen for another snack. I didn't taste a bite of my Ho-Ho, but that didn't stop me from eating three of them, just for something to do. I really wanted to go home to bed, where it was safe and comfortable, and lawyers never got murdered. Even if killing Dougie had been something we'd all considered at one point or another, none of us was actually capable of it. We were just regular people, after all, with ill-fitting suits and unbalanced checkbooks and overdue dental appointments. Murderers were dark and menacing and full of malicious intent, like the silhouetted figure on those Neighborhood Watch signs. Except there was no one skulking around Parker, Dennis, and Heath fitting that description, and yet Dougie was dead.

Which gave me a rollicking case of the willies. To calm myself down, I slapped together a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, poured a glass of soda, and helped myself to a few cookies from Janice's private Oreo collection in the cupboard above the fridge. I had no fear of being discovered by Janice. Well, I had a little fear, but I hadn't seen her for a while, so I assumed Howard had her whitewashing the accounts to accommodate Hilary's payday, thus leaving me free to commit petty larceny.

But once I sat down to eat, even with Oreos and Ho-Hos, I found I couldn't stay there. Bad enough being in the room where one of my bosses had died; impossible, knowing he'd been murdered. In fact, I wasn't even comfortable in the building. I knew that Dougie excelled at pushing people's buttons and had instigated his share of fights in and outside the courtroom, but I couldn't imagine any of the people I worked with killing him. Firing him, yes. Quitting on him, sure. Divorcing him, of course. All those things were a long, long way from murder.

I stared into space, thinking. When I didn't come up with any answers, I got up to wrap my sandwich and put it in the fridge. Then I returned Janice's cookies to the secret stash and went back to my desk. I didn't have the stomach for work, but I had less of it for lunch. Things had changed around the office, and I was one of them.

"Tell me about the people you work with," Curt said later that night, after we'd both changed into jeans and were in his Cherokee on our way to my parents' for dinner. Because he hadn't wanted to arrive empty-handed, we had a huge tray of cookies from Leonetti's on the back seat, wrapped in green plastic wrap with a big green bow. I sat angled in my seat like I was giving Curt my full attention
him being all shaved and after-shaved and everything
but those cookies were looking just a little better than he was. Probably because it was seven o'clock, and I hadn't eaten all day. I'd spent a lot of the afternoon thinking about what I'd seen, what I'd heard, and what I might have seen or heard that I didn't realize I had. By the time I was done thinking, I felt like the fossil on an archaeological dig, with its details being unearthed bit by excruciating bit.

He was waiting for an answer, so I said, "What do you want to know?" to the cookies.

"Whatever you think is worth telling." He put on his turn signal and swung a tight right onto Station Road. "Any of them ever fight with Heath?"

"All of them," I said. "But it wasn't their fault. Dougie had that effect on people."

"One more than others, it seems," Curt said. Which implied one of the office staff had killed Dougie. Which is what I'd been considering all afternoon. Which gave me the willies all over again. "What about you?" he asked.

That got my attention. "I got along with Dougie most of the time," I said. "The times I didn't, I stayed away from him."

"That couldn't have been easy in a small office." He hooked a left onto my parents' street. I pointed to the house up on the left, and he slowed and parked at the curb.

"What are you not saying?" I asked when he'd killed the engine. "You think I murdered Dougie? Let me save you some time. I didn't."

"I didn't think so," he said.

"Then why'd you ask?" I wasn't trying to be smart with him. I genuinely disliked being accused of something I didn't do.

"It's the way it works," he said. "I want to know something, I ask."

"Well, I'll give you five bucks to knock it off," I grumbled.

"If that's a bribe, you'd better up the stakes a little," he said.

I think he was kidding, but I was in the mood to pout, so I slouched down and stared at my parents' house. It was the house I'd grown up in, a white Cape Cod with blue shutters and a blue front door. My mother had planted impatiens and gladiolas and tulips along the front of the house and the walkway, and a series of small wooden cats all painted black scampered across the lawn toward the dogwood tree. They reminded me of the Neighborhood Watch silhouette, and that reminded me of Dougie, and that got me moving, out of the Jeep and up the walk before Curt had the cookie tray out of the back seat.

"You're late!" Sherri met me at the door with a hug. She was decked out for a night of lane swapping in skintight black jeans and a pink midriff T-shirt. I took a closer look and noticed the ring in her belly button. I pointed. "When'd you do that?"

"Better question is why." She winced. "Don't ever pierce body parts. It hurts like hell."

Not to worry. I fainted if you pinched me too hard.

She was staring over my shoulder. "I thought you were kidding about him."

"Don't worry. He's not going bowling with us."

Curt nudged me in the back with the tray. "Why not? I like bowling."

I took a step sideways. "Because Sherri's looking for a husband, and she doesn't need a man hanging around her."

"Gonna make it kind of hard," Curt said. "Maybe I should've brought handcuffs."

Sherri stared at me. I shrugged. "His brother's a cop. I guess men gossip."

"Good." Sherri yanked Curt inside by the forearm. "Then you can sit next to Frankie Ritter and gossip all you want."

"Oh, my God, he's here?" I said, and Sherri nodded and gave me an eye roll meant, I presume, to infer my mother's insanity.

"Who's Frankie Ritter?" Curt asked me.

"What's the Black Orchid?" I asked him.

"What do we have here?" my mother asked both of us. I bent to give her a kiss on the cheek. My mother got shorter and rounder and softer every year. "Curtis, how nice to see you again." She stretched up, and he bent down, and they met in the middle for a quick hug. "What did you bring me here?" Her cheeks flushed with pleasure. "Cookies? Aren't you a doll? Isn't he a doll, Jamie?"

"A doll," I said, craning to look for Frankie Ritter. I wanted to see for myself if he looked like Marilyn Manson.

"I hope you didn't make dessert," Curt said, handing the tray over.

"Certainly not," my mother said, although she didn't cook dinner without fixing three different desserts to go along with it. In about an hour her dining room would look like a bakery.

"Come with me." My mother passed the cookie tray to me and took Curt's hand. "I want you to meet our guest."

"He's not a guest, Mom," Sherri said. "It's Frankie Ritter."

"If he doesn't live here, then he's a guest," my mother said firmly. "You could be nicer to him, honey. He is an eligible bachelor, after all. I'm sure his sperm is perfectly fine."

Curt's jaw slackened, and he shot me a look. I mouthed, "Grandbabies," and he nodded and tightened his lips in a grim line. I knew how he felt.

"Mom!" Sherri flushed a rich burgundy. "We are not discussing Frankie Ritter's sperm over dinner!"

"Of course not, honey." My mother smiled over her shoulder at Curt. "It wouldn't be polite. I'm sure Curt's sperm is fine, too."

I ignored Curt's stare as we entered the dining room, where my father was sitting with Frankie Ritter. I put the cookie tray on the sideboard and focused on Frankie. He looked sort of like Marilyn Manson, if Marilyn Manson had weighed three hundred pounds and had blond tips. Other than that, Frankie looked pretty much the same. Tattoos, piercings, pathetically hopeful expression.

"You're looking good, Jamie," he told me, pulling out the chair beside him with a little eyebrow wiggle. I immediately sat down on the opposite side of the table. Sherri caught on fast and rushed to take the seat beside me, leaving Curt to buddy up to Frankie. He had it coming.

"So, Jamie." My father passed a glass of wine my way. He'd been passing wine my way for fifteen years now without noticing I never drank it. "How're things at the office?"

"Could be better." I pushed my wine glass subtly toward Curt. Curt subtly ignored it. Payback, I guess. "Dougie Heath was murdered on Tuesday."

My father set the wine bottle down heavily. My mother dropped her bowl of mashed potatoes on the table with a crash.

"Smooth," Curt said to me as he lifted the potato bowl off the breadbasket.

"Shut
up
!" Sherri said, slapping my arm.

"Cool." Frankie plastered a squashed dinner roll with butter. "What happened? He eat some lead?"

Curt gave him a sideways look.

"No, he didn't eat some lead," I said.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Sherri asked. "I called you just the other night, and you never even told me!"

"Well, you had your problems," I said. "What with the whole wardrobe thing and all."

"That poor man." My mother tsk-tsked her way through several slabs of meatloaf, plopping them on each of our plates in turn and adding a generous splat of mashed potatoes. "Take some vegetables," she admonished Curt, and he dipped into the green beans with a pained expression. "You're quitting that job," she told me. "I'm signing you up for cosmetology school tomorrow."

"I'm not going to cosmetology school," I said, looking to Curt for help. He was staring at the green beans on his plate. Fearless.

"So what happened?" my father asked.

I kicked Curt under the table. He jerked and said, "I hear he may have been poisoned, sir."

"Poisoned!" My mother dropped into her seat, fanning herself with her hand.

"I don't like the sound of that," my father said.

Neither did I. I did a quick mental inventory of the things I'd eaten at the office and decided they'd be the last things I'd eat at the office.

"Cool." Frankie nodded his approval. Bread crumbs tumbled off his lower lip onto his plate. "What, someone pass him some bogus narcotics?"

"You know," Curt said to him, "I know someone might want to have a talk with you."