Royal Flush (12 page)

He rolled his eyes. "Um, that's even scarier. What are you going to get me?"

"My little secret. One hint, though. You won't find it on the menu up there."

He frowned, now more concerned than ever.

"Why don't you just go and find us a table. I'll treat," I said.

He cocked his head, considered the proposal, and disappeared. Five minutes later, I found his table and plopped a big tray down in front of us. His reaction was exactly what I was hoping for.

"What the
hell
is this?"

I smiled. "Settle down, you're making a scene. This is called an animal-style burger. It's not on the menu."

He looked at it skeptically. It wasn't so much a traditional hamburger shape as it was a globe of gooey goodness, which happened to have a hamburger and a bun somewhere in the mix. "Extra sauce, grilled onions, pickles. And then they fry that right onto the burger itself," I explained. "Same with the fries."

He was shaking his head. "How do you know all this?"

I smiled, grabbing my tray. The fries were extra crispy today. "It's common knowledge," I said. "Among food aficionados, anyway."

He sighed, eyeing the burger with a mixture of skepticism and horror. But then he surprised me by not whining anymore and taking a hesitant bite.

"This shit is
good
," he said.

My eyes got big. "Did you just use profanity? I've never heard you say anything even remotely dirty before."

He shrugged, wolfing down another bite.

"You're growing on me," I said. "I like when a man is willing to admit he's completely wrong."

Mike smiled back at me, still chewing. He grabbed a couple of French fries, which were also doused in sauce and ketchup. "When in Rome," he said, his mouth still full of food.

I joined in the frenzy, adding a few fries to my burger just for overkill. Five minutes later, we were both stuffed. My Diet Coke wasn't going to be enough to stave off the food coma I felt coming on, so I picked up a large coffee for the road.

We were waiting for a fresh pot of coffee to finish. "So have I converted you yet?" I asked.

Mike grinned. "Close. I could see doing that maybe once, twice a year. Just as an indulgence."

"Well, it's a start," I said, slurping at my coffee as we headed outside and basked in the California sunshine. Mike offered to get the car and pick me up, so I whipped out my phone and dialed the number Commander Chung had given me. Detective Weakland answered with a gruff "yeah," but softened when I explained that Chung had given me his number. Weakland was out of the office, but he said I could meet him on scene. I etched the address in my memory bank and then typed it into my phone after I hung up.

Mike swung by with the car, and I hopped in.

"Where are we headed?" he asked.

"913 North Laurel Avenue," I said. "Wherever the hell that is."

Mike fiddled with the GPS and got directions. It turned out we were only about a mile and a half northeast of there, so we found the place in no time. The house was one of those small but oh-so-cute Mediterranean jobs, with white stucco all around the outside and curved red tiles on the roof. The black iron gate was open, and a squad car was double-parked out front. Mike carefully squeezed my car into a tiny non-spot about a half a block up the street.

A couple of uniforms were lollygagging around in the front parlor, and almost in unison they put up their hands and tried to shoo us away. I explained we were sent by Chung, and they backed off and pointed to the rear of the house, where Detective Weakland apparently was doing all the work.

We found Detective Weakland enjoying a cup of coffee at the kitchen table, where he was punching feverishly at his smartphone. He paid us no attention until he finished, and when he finally looked up he cocked his head to the side and contorted his face into a crinkled mess.

"You're the girl I talked to on the phone?" he asked, brimming with skepticism.

"Yeah." I decided to let the "girl" comment slide.

He peered long and hard at me, glanced at Mike, and then turned his attention back to me. "Just give me a minute," he said, waving us away with his hand.

Mike and I exchanged looks and then backed out of the kitchen. Eavesdropping, we heard him talking in hushed tones to Chung, or someone on Chung's staff. When he hung up, he yelled at us to come back in. Apparently we had passed the test.

"Chung says you're on the level. And he's my boss. Actually, he's my boss's boss. So what can we talk about here? Want some coffee?"

I had left my cup in the car, so I accepted. Weakland found me a mug and filled it. He was an all-business kind of guy, with light brown hair thinning on top, and pretty fit for his age, which seemed about fifty.

While he was delivering my coffee I looked around the room, which opened into the small living room. My blood turned cold, and I elbowed Mike. He looked in the direction I was pointing and cringed. Next to the sofa, a human figure lay on the floor, draped in a white sheet. Detective Weakland sensed our alarm.

"She was ninety-eight," he said, as though that made it any better. I wondered what the poor old woman would think about us casually helping ourselves to her coffee while she was lying under a sheet in the next room. "Anyway, you wanted to know about young Miss Melanie, right?"

I nodded, taking a sip of coffee. I cringed involuntarily at the bitterness.

"Yeah," Weakland confided, "it's pretty bad, isn't it?"

"I suppose we can't be picky," I said. "It's
her
coffee."

He flashed me a thin smile. "So, what can I tell you? We got a call from her husband saying he hadn't been able to reach her. We told him to be patient, but he was pretty insistent. So we sent a squad out there to her apartment, about a half a mile from here. Nobody answered, but they were able to get in through an open window. And there she was."

"Dead?" Mike asked.

Weakland nodded. "She was long gone. We didn't even call an ambulance. Just like here," he said, tilting his head over at the corpse in the next room.

"Did you speak to the husband?" I asked.

Weakland slurped some more coffee. "Of course. They lived apart, so it was a little suspicious, at least at the outset. But we didn't think anything of it, really. He was going to school in Vegas, and they visited each other all the time."

"Was he surprised?" Mike asked.

He thought for a moment. "Well,
yeah
. I mean, she was twenty-three years old."

Mike smiled impatiently. "I mean was he surprised about the drug use?"

Weakland shook his head. "No, not at all. He told us about the clubs they used to go to and all the stuff she'd gotten into over the years. He was a little surprised she'd gotten back into heroin, though."

I piped up. "So you think it was heroin? The tox report isn't in yet."

He nodded. "Almost certainly. No needle marks, but there are lots of ways to ingest heroin. And of course, there was the little packet of the stuff we found in her kitchen." He spread his hands, as if to say it was a sure thing. The tox report was just a formality.

My brain was running on overdrive trying to think of anything else to ask him. He seemed very nonchalant about the whole thing, as though Melanie's death was one of the least interesting cases he'd worked in years.

Mike beat me to the punch. "So nothing about her death seemed out of the ordinary, or worth digging any deeper?"

Weakland choked down another gulp of the deadly brew and then tried to shake it off. "Not that I can think of, no. No sign of foul play. No reason to suspect it either. Unless you have a reason you're not telling me."

I smiled faintly. "No
good
reason, no. It's just that when someone hires a private investigator and then
dies
unexpectedly, the investigator might get a little, well, I don't know…" I trailed off, not sure where I was going.

"Paranoid?" Weakland asked.

"Yeah, I guess that's it. I know it's self-centered, but it's human nature to try to find a connection between two events, even if they're not related at all."

He nodded. "I used to be that way. Trying to out-sleuth the whole department, even when the death was some ninety-four-year-old guy on life support. I'd ask myself, who had something to gain here? But ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a death is just a death. Or, as the doctors say, if it looks like a horse and neighs like a horse, it's a horse. It ain't a zebra."

"Huh?" I wasn't following.

He smiled. "My brother's a gastroenterologist. He says that it's very common for medical students and young doctors to always search for the exotic disease or tumor that's afflicting their patient, when in fact it's usually just a common virus, or bad eating habits, or poor posture, or a vitamin deficiency or something boring like that. In other words, if it looks like a horse, it probably
is
a horse and not some exotic animal like a zebra."

 "Got it," I said. "Anything else, Mike?"

He shook his head, and we stood up to leave Detective Weakland to his unfortunate work and bitter coffee. I asked him for his card in case anything else came up.

On our walk back to the car, Mike started groaning a bit.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"As soon as we stood up, I felt a little queasy. My stomach isn't used to that kind of greasy food. I'm not sure I'm going to—"

I cringed and turned away as Mike keeled forward and retched up his lunch into a cute little hedgerow of shrubs in front of an adorable, pale blue bungalow. An old woman with a visor was kneeling in the dirt directly in front of her house. She turned to look at us at exactly the wrong moment. A look of horror crossed her face as she realized what was going on, then she put a hand to her own mouth and scampered inside the house, presumably to reprise what Mike had just done.

Mike shook his head back and forth, clearly in agony. "Let's get out of here!" he hissed.

Not having any better idea, I joined him as we bolted the last half a block to my car. He handed me the keys, and I vroomed us out of there, as though we'd just knocked over Fort Knox. Both of our faces were beet red.

Safely stopped at a light about three blocks away, I exhaled a deep breath. "Well
that
was exciting."

Mike grimaced. "I hope that was it."

Once the excitement faded, guilt began to set in. "I feel bad for that lady," Mike murmured. "She was just minding her own business, and then…"

"Thanks," I said. "Now I'm replaying the image in my mind. Don't worry—it's probably like fertilizer. Imagine how nice those shrubs will come in this year!"

He chuckled. "You're really awful, you know that? You could rationalize just about anything."

"It's not rationalizing, it's finding the silver lining," I protested, even though I knew he was dead right. I
was
awful. And he didn't even know how funny I thought it was.

"And it's not fertilizer. I've never heard of putting regurgitated mystery meat and processed cheese on plants to make them grow."

I shrugged. "I bet that secret sauce will do wonders for those roses, though."

He sighed and slumped back into his seat, eyes closed. I hoped he wasn't going to start round two of the heaving.

"Let's get you back to the hotel," I said. Mike didn't put up a fight. "I guess we need to take baby steps. No more gorging on delicious food. Just have a few French fries and half of a burger next time."

He cringed. "No more burgers and fries for me.
Please
."

I shook my head. "Baby steps, Mike. We will get you through this."

He sighed again and closed his eyes for the rest of the drive back to the hotel.

I left Mike in his room to deal with the aftereffects of his lunch in privacy. I couldn't help smirking at the image of this tall, muscular man being taken out of commission by a lowly hamburger. If he wanted to spend any more time with me, he was going to have to learn my ways and get with the program. I set out for a brisk walk to enjoy the non-stifling California sun.

Despite his absence, I could faintly hear Mike's chiding voice telling me that Melanie's death was nothing but a plain old plow horse, not a zebra. I was half expecting something inside me to disagree, to express some faint, inexpressible doubt based on my womanly instincts, but instead I found myself agreeing to the point I was ready to drop the investigation, such as it was, and move on. Detective Weakland was no sucker, and he'd seen nothing unusual about the circumstances of Melanie's unfortunate death. As I made my way past countless cute little bungalows and low-slung Mediterranean homes, and palm tree after palm tree, I found myself admitting the possibility that I had set out on this investigation merely to rationalize my keeping the rest of Melanie's retainer. There wasn't really anything to investigate, but (my theory went) if I exerted my efforts on her behalf I'd be entitled to the money. Mike was right about one thing: I could rationalize
anything
.

As luck would have it, my feet had inadvertently taken me down into the fashion district, a kind of heaven-on-earth agglomeration of hair salons, spas, and upscale designer boutiques. Given the fact that my stomach was still distended from lunch, I didn't feel much like shopping, which would require trying things on. But the allure of the spa was impossible to resist. I walked into the first one I passed, but they were booked all afternoon. The waif-like attendant recommended their "sister" spa across the street, which was called Eclipse.

Eclipse looked almost the same on the inside—dim lighting, curved beige walls—but it had different aromatics. A hint of ginger or coriander hung lightly in the air, with a lone candle flickering on the shelf behind the two attendants staffing the front desk.

The one who wasn't talking on the phone looked up at me and smiled. "Appointment?"

"No," I said. "Just walking in. I went across the street and they told me to try here."