Power to the Max (6 page)

Ladybird smiled. “Oh, that’s a lovely tune.”

Max agreed. “What is it?”

“‘Laura,’ I think.” As she walked, Ladybird swayed to the music.

Being only a little after eight, the tables were mostly empty. Three older couples had taken to the dance floor while two younger men in business attire nursed cocktail, one a lanky blond with a white band of skin where his wedding ring should have been, the other a dark-haired brooding type a la Heathcliff of
Wuthering Heights
. She and Ladybird sat at a small round table in a back alcove, and Max ordered Ladybird’s champagne cocktail. She splurged on one herself. One was her limit, she being the designated driver for the evening.

“Who are we looking for, Max?”

Max weighed how much to tell Ladybird. So far, she’d only said she needed to see the bar itself. Ladybird, while patient, wasn’t bad at mathematics, easily putting two and two together and leaping ahead to five. “It’s your latest murder case, isn’t it?” As if Max were truly a detective instead of a psychic with nothing more than visions and guesses.

Max answered with equal seriousness. “A man was murdered this time. In the dream, I saw a dark-haired woman. I’m not sure who she is or how she fits in, but I saw the two of them here together. She’s a little taller than me, maybe five-seven. Unless she’s wearing high heels.” Which Max was almost sure she would be. “I’ll know her when I see her.” She hoped.

Of course, there was Witt’s description of the blocky, no-neck man seen lurking nearby on the night in question. Max would be on the look out for him as well. Too much of a coincidence for the mysterious man to be hanging about aimlessly in the vicinity of a murder.

A candle decorated the center of each table. Runner lights edged the carpet and guided the way to the restrooms and the dance floor. All three older couples, now joined by a fourth, moved smoothly around the twenty-four foot square of hardwood.

“Isn’t dancing the most beautiful thing,” Ladybird murmured dreamily, chin in hand, attention rapt. “Horace and I took ballroom dance classes, but...” She shrugged. Horace had died.

At this point, the average age of the room’s occupants was somewhere around sixty-five. The Lawrence Welk crowd, they were defined by their music. All that was needed now was the bubble machine.

It came in the form of their cocktails. Ladybird took a sip and giggled. Hard for a woman of seventy-eight to giggle, but Ladybird managed it without appearing silly.

“Oh my, isn’t that good? Witt never allows me a real drink, not even on Sundays.”

“What about your sherry?” Max clearly recalled a glass of sherry in the little woman’s hands the first time she’d had dinner at Ladybird’s house.

Ladybird flapped a hand. “Oh, that’s my cooking sherry.” Not that she’d actually cooked that night. No, she’d passed around a tray of TV dinners.

“Boy, that Witt’s mean, huh,” Max commiserated, her gaze alternating between the dance floor and the front entrance of the bar, the only entrance as far as she could detect.

“I love our little Sunday dinners.” She turned a baleful gaze to Max. “Why haven’t you ever come with him?”

Max had not been invited. Not that it really bothered her. She wasn’t really Witt’s girlfriend despite the way he liked to joke about it. She’d been invited to dinner once, a Wednesday, not a Sunday. “That’s family time. I’m not family.”

“Not yet.” Ladybird flashed her a particularly innocent smile, then went back to swirling the bitters and sugar in her champagne. “Of course, maybe you don’t want to spend time with a wacky old lady.”

“I don’t think you’re wacky.”

Ladybird gave her best imitation of a scowl. It didn’t quite reach her eyes. “That Debbie Doodoo did.”

Debbie Doodoo, Witt’s first wife, now his ex-wife of three years. “Yes, well, she’s long gone, Ladybird.”

Debbie Doodoo had aborted Witt’s child without even telling him. He’d left her without a backward glance. Of course, that story had come from Ladybird. Witt’s version was something about Debbie telling him to sit when he took a leak. Max believed the sit command had come first, but the terrible thing Debbie did had been the unforgivable.

Max shuddered thinking about it.

Ladybird rolled her Witt-blue eyes. “Thank God. She even stopped him from coming to see me when they first got married.”

“B-i-t-c-h,” Max muttered in commiseration.

Ladybird giggled again. “I knew when they were close to getting a divorce without Witt even telling me. He started Sunday dinners again. And he came alone. It was only a matter of time after that. Nothing is coincidence, you know.”

Ah, another Witticism.

A half-hour ticked by, and the dance floor began to thin out, the Lawrence Welk dancers either leaving or favoring a drink and a respite. The music changed, moving from the forties and fifties into the seventies and eighties, though still of the Musak variety.

A few more conventioneers, presumably from the nearby
Moscone
Center
, trickled in to fill up the tables. One guy, in particular, caught her attention. Greek God came to mind at that first glance—though she couldn’t have said exactly what a Greek God looked like—late twenties, dark hair, longish, waves struggling against the length, a shadowed chin as if he’d forgotten to shave before coming to the bar. Wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers, Sutter would have said, though why Sutter Cahill should come to mind now was beyond Max, except that Sutter would have drooled over this guy.

And so probably would Max’s quarry, the woman with inextricable ties to Lance La Russa’s death.

Max sucked in a breath. “Oh my God, I forgot.”

“What?” Ladybird took her arm in a bird-like grip.

“I forgot to ask him about the bracelet and the key.”

“You forgot to ask who about what bracelet and key?”

“Witt. The man had a sapphire bracelet in his pocket. And a key to an apartment he’d furnished.”

“You think Witt knows what happened to those things?”

“He can at least ask someone.”

“Why don’t you call him?”

Max snorted. “Yeah, right. He’d want to know where I am and why I want to know.”

“You mean you didn’t tell him we were coming here tonight?”

Max drummed her fingers, still watching the door. “No.”

Ladybird clapped her hands lightly. “Then this is our little stakeout.”

“Yes. Witt wouldn’t like it if he knew.” Hint, hint, Ladybird.

“Oh, I won’t tell. But let’s call him to find out about the bracelet and key.”

Max tried to curb the little woman’s excitement. “Ladybird, I just said—”

“I’ll call. Do you have your cell phone?” Ladybird Long held out her hand expectantly.

Max hesitated.

“Trust me, Max. I can help. Witt doesn’t even know I know how to lie.”

She had a point there. And it was Witt’s cell phone anyway; he’d given it to Max. She dug in her purse for the thing and handed it over. “The number’s already in memory.”

Ladybird punched a couple of buttons and held the gadget to her ear like a pro. That was odd, too. Little old ladies didn’t have the knack for cell phones. They were supposed to be gadget-illiterate. Except for Ladybird.

Her eyes sparkled. Witt—or someone—answered immediately. “This is your mother.” Definitely Witt.

“Yes, she’s here with me.” She patted Max’s hand for reassurance. “We’ve got a fire going ... no, no, no, we aren’t going to burn the house down. And yes, it’s cold enough now that the sun’s gone down ... we’re sitting here having a cup of tea and a question’s come up.” She winked for Max’s benefit. “Well, Cameron was saying ... no, I can’t hear him, Horace told me what he said ... no, there’s no whiskey in my cup ... there’s nothing but tea in Max’s either, will you listen ... All right. Cameron says there was something in the pocket of that poor man’s—” She stopped and raised a brow at Max. Max mouthed jacket. “Jacket ... a sapphire bracelet and an apartment key ... did they find anything like that?” She stopped, listened, cocked her head as if Witt could somehow see the action. “Oh that’s too bad. Max—I mean Cameron was so sure ... well, maybe you can confirm tomorrow ... wonderful ... I love you, Sweetie-boy.” She held the phone away and pushed the end button.

“Sweetie-boy?” Max couldn’t resist repeating.

“Oh, that really ticks him off.” Ladybird’s laughter tinkled across the room.

Max laughed, too—Witt’s mother would never stop shocking her—then got back to the matter at hand. “He doesn’t know anything about it?”

“No.” Ladybird leaned forward onto her elbows, hands clasped above her half-empty champagne glass. “Why don’t you tell me everything you know?”

“He had those things in his pocket. If they’re gone now, someone took them. Either the wife to cover her tracks—”

“Or the girl to stall the police in finding her.”

Max considered. “Could be either.”

Ladybird leaned closer and whispered, “But if it was the wife, it could mean the girl’s body—”

“Is in the apartment,” Max finished for her.

“Oh my dear”—Ladybird patted her hand—“we think so much alike.”

“Oh my goodness, we do,” Max agreed in horror—Ladybird’s Jessica Fletcher to her Lieutenant Columbo. Witt would skin Max alive for this.

Ladybird asked one more conspiratorial question. “How do we find out where the apartment is?”

Max glanced up as someone entered the bar. A tall woman, sable hair, wearing a tailored cream suit over a muted red blouse. “We’re not going to find the girl’s body there.”

Ladybird’s lips became a round O of wonder. “How do you know so quickly?”

“Because she just walked in.”

Max got a sudden vision of shooting stars, angels, and a sweet, ripe moon. Angels and rockets? Angela Rocket. That’s who the woman was. Or who she wanted to be. She sent a man to the moon with the first touch of her lips on his joystick.
Blast off, baby
. Max read it all with one quick stroke of telepathy, if telepathy is what the intuitive flash could be called. She no longer questioned the things that popped into her head. She’d learned to accept them as significant.

Angela was younger than Max had first thought, early twenties. Wearing a double choker of pearls and gold studs in her ears, her taste obviously ran to the expensive. Unless the pearls weren’t real. The suit was tailored, Evan Picone or Anne Klein. Max did know her department-store designers. Tasteful and well-turned out, Angela had left her hair, her best feature, loose. Breezing through, signaling subtly to the bartender as she passed him, she settled in at a table two over from Max and Ladybird’s. Wine list in hand, bartender now patiently at her side, she perused the choices, asked a question or two, then pointed. No cheap house wine for her, Max was sure. The bartender tugged on his brocade vest, nodded, smiled, and rushed to do her bidding. When he returned, the drink she ordered shimmered golden in the soft glow of the candle. She brought the glass to her lips, sniffed gently, then took a sip, closing her eyes in appreciation. The bartender beamed. Max saw only the soft red stain of lipstick she left on the edge of the glass.

Alone once more, the woman’s gaze flashed from table to table, finally coming to rest on the lanky blond minus the wedding ring, whose fingers twisted on the whitened, empty spot. His eyes had fallen on her the moment Angela entered the bar.

Hmm, Max thought, so she wasn’t going for the Greek God. Perhaps it was the blond’s look of helpless excitement, almost like a puppy first let out of its crate. The woman looked from her watch to the entrance of the bar and back to her glass. Only someone looking for it would have noticed the quick glance she gave Blondie. Max noticed everything, right down to the brief, exultant smile that curved the man’s lips. She also noticed Ladybird, her face to the dancers while her gaze slid to the action two tables away. While the little lady pretended to be fascinated by the dancing sixty-five-year-olds, there was no pulling the wool over Ladybird’s eyes.

They both knew Angela Rocket had found her next shooting star.