Unscrewed Read online

  “That’s illegal. Even in L.A.,” I said, and stuffed whatever I was holding in the top cupboard.

  He stared at me. The noose of tension tightened a notch. “You actually fell for it, didn’t you?” he asked.

  I felt itchy. “Fell for what?”

  “Oh, yeah.” He laughed. “You swallowed his act whole. Hook, line, and fucking Evinrude.”

  I stayed calm. Go, new Chrissy. “Was he instrumental in your release?”

  He stiffened, and he hadn’t exactly been Mr. Softy before. “He’s a charming bastard, isn’t he? Well dressed, manicured, articulate?”

  Funny, but that was almost exactly what I’d been thinking. “It must be in the genes.”

  “You like him.” It was nothing short of an accusation, tantamount to high treason. Possibly punishable by death. What did I really know about this guy?

  “Maybe if you’d define ‘asshole’ for me—”

  “She’s dead. That definition enough?” His voice was clipped. I kept mine charmingly melodious. Taming the wild beast and all that.

  “You didn’t see anyone at his house when you got there?”

  He shook his head, brows scrunched over brooding eyes. “Door was unlocked. Security disarmed. I went in.” He was reliving it in his mind. “Called her name. No answer.” He drew a slow breath, seeing her. “Fuck.”

  “She was already dead?”

  There was a moment of horrible silence, then, “I don’t know. I’m a damned cop and I don’t know. Funny, huh?” He didn’t look amused. “She was lying there. I could see her from the hallway, looking at me. Eyes so big they could swallow a man whole. I thought maybe she was still breathing. Maybe there was a chance. Ran toward her.” He closed his eyes, exhaled carefully, shook his head. “That’s the last I remember. After that, nothing.”

  “What? What do you mean, ‘nothing’?”

  “Nothing. One minute I was moving toward her, the next I was surrounded by cops yelling at me to stay down. Hell, I didn’t even know I was down.”

  “Nothing in between?”

  “I think I hit Trank in the eye. Might have busted Pensacola’s nose.”

  I gave him a look, but he didn’t continue. “Any particular reason?”

  He shook his head, scowling, lost. “I just…I don’t remember coming to. I just remember…”

  “What?”

  “Her eyes. Dead. I think I went a little crazy.”

  “Before or after?”

  “What?”

  I swallowed the question, reached back into the bag, blindly searching for normalcy. It wasn’t in there. Just a bottle of something or other. “And you don’t remember anything else, before you went unconscious?”

  “No.”

  “There must have been something. A noise, a shadow…”

  He gritted his teeth. “I don’t know.”

  “Did someone hit you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then—”

  “I don’t know! God damn it!”

  The room echoed into silence.

  He crunched his hands into fists and paced. “I should have used my head. Should have called for backup. Should have…” He breathed deeply and let his shoulders droop.

  I fought the effects of his vulnerability. I didn’t want to see him this way. Didn’t want to empathize with him. Didn’t want to like him. “You couldn’t have foreseen the circumstances,” I said. “No one can blame you for—”

  “Don’t say it, McMullen.” He turned slowly toward me. “Don’t say no one can blame me, ’cuz I’m pretty damned sure you might be wrong.”

  The guilt was there, throbbing in his eyes like a raw wound.

  I shook my head, searching for words. “People react differently when they’re emotionally involved.”

  “I don’t get emotionally involved.”

  Feelings ripped across his face like an electrical storm.

  “Good to know,” I said, still holding the forgotten bottle. “Does he have an alibi?”

  He tried to force himself to relax, failed, laughed. “He’s Miguel Geraldo Rivera, McMullen. An alibi comes with the name.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means he’ll come out of this smelling like a flower garden. Hell, he’ll probably make a fortune on it.”

  “But you think he did it.” I watched him, waited, breath held. He didn’t answer.

  “And you’re sure he’s innocent,” he murmured.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Because he wears silk ties and pays a hundred bucks for a haircut.”

  “You’re putting words in my mouth.”

  “Looks good in Armani.”

  I turned toward the cabinets, controlling my temper with stunning aplomb. “I never said—”

  “Has a nice fucking tan.”

  “God damn it, Rivera, grow up!” I said, and slammed the cupboard door with all the force of terrified frustration.

  The noise reverberated through the room as I stared at him.

  Rivera raised a lazy brow. Romance novelists would call it sardonic. I call it his arrogant, son of a bitch expression. “Grow up?”

  “Okay, so you hate him. Half the men in the known universe want revenge on their fathers. Long to live out their adolescent fantasies of retribution. That doesn’t make their dads murderers. Ever hear of Oedipus?”

  He turned toward me and suddenly, in the flash of a thought, I was pinned against the counter, my back bent over it.

  “Oedipus?”

  “Greek,” I said. My mouth felt like it had been scoured with beach sand. My larynx was frozen, but I managed to babble. “It’s when a man falls in love with his mother and—”

  “What do you call a man five times older than his fiancé?”

  He wasn’t actually touching me, but I was curved away from him like a Bowflex machine. “Well preserved?” I murmured.

  Uncertainty shone through the anger on his face.

  “You’ve got to admit, he looks pretty good for a hundred and fifty,” I rasped.

  If I’d been attempting to reduce the tension, I maybe should have tried another tack, but he eased away an inch. I straightened the same amount, daring to breathe.

  He nodded, drew back, inhaled a breath. “Maybe you should marry him, McMullen. Now that there’s an opening,” he said. Then he stalked out of the house, leaving the door open behind him.

  8

  Opportunity may only knock once, but temptation’ll knock down the damn door and drag you out by your hair.

  —Lily Schultz, Chrissy’s first employer and lifetime mentor

  I ATE THE CARROTS raw, stowed the celery, burned the chicken, and delved beneath the crystallized sweetened condensed milk to carve out the bottom with a spoon. The old Chrissy was firmly back at the helm. But who could blame her? She was obviously dealing with a deranged personality. Rivera’s, not mine. And his was very possibly deranged and murderous.

  I felt jittery and confused. The clock on my nightstand said 12:48 when I got out of bed, paced into the bathroom, and peered under the sink. But I’d gotten rid of my Virginia Slims stash weeks ago. Pattering into my office, I checked the bottom drawer of my desk. That was empty too. So I plopped into my swivel chair and stared at the blank screen.

  “Why don’t you marry him, McMullen?”

  It was like a taunt from my childhood. “If you like peanut butter so much, why don’t you marry it?” Rivera had officially reverted back to grade school.

  But, to be fair, lots of people did when they were thrust into familial turmoil. I, for instance, broke out in acne when I got within a fifty-mile radius of my roots.

  On the other hand, maybe Rivera had some grounds for his accusations. If I remembered correctly, there had been a scandal involving the good senator, something about a young intern. But it was a big step from fornication to felony.

  Absently clicking on my computer, I tapped into the Internet. As far as I knew I was the only person in th
e civilized world still using dial-up, but it saved me five dollars a month. I could buy half a gram of free-range chicken for that. Or a buttload of fun-sized Snickers.

  The thought of all that peanutty goodness brought me up short.

  Swiveling my chair about and stepping over Harlequin, I paced into the kitchen and opened the freezer. It contained two black bananas, a Mars bar, and a bag of green beans harvested before the new millennium. I took out the Mars bar. I’d already eaten a gallon of crystallized sweetened milk. A little candy was just hair of the dog.

  Masticating thoughtfully, I leaned back against the counter and ruminated on the last two days. Okay, so Rivera was a jerk. No surprise there. Most men are jerks. So I still found him attractive. That didn’t mean anything. I found Spider-Man attractive, too. And pirates. Damn, I love pirates. Didn’t mean I was going to delve into their family histories, try to figure out why they despise their fathers, and expose their former love lives. That would be asinine. And I was through being asinine. Well, except for the sweetened condensed milk debacle. I felt a little sick to my stomach as I finished off the candy bar, but starting tomorrow, the new Chrissy was going to be firmly back in charge.

  Tonight, though, I craved cigarettes like a death row convict. Toddling back into my pea-size office, I sat down at my desk and sighed.

  By 1:15 I knew that the senator looked good in a tux and hobnobbed with the rich and famous. He was also a major stockholder in half a dozen companies that were out to change the world as we know it. Mindtec, for instance, was working on a computer small enough to adorn its owner’s wrist. New Age would soon have a product on the shelves that cut UV rays while allowing your skin to tan, and a company called Sharpe Pharmaceuticals was perfecting a revolutionary cure for baldness.

  By three in the morning, I’d read enough business news and political garbage to make my head feel as sick as my stomach. By 3:04 I was dead to the world, dreaming of pirates and politicians, with a dog the size of a minivan drooling on my sleeve.

  Running three miles the next morning was like doing chin-ups with my tongue. Not easy. A smutty haze was trapped between the San Gabriels to the north and the Santa Anas to the south and east, keeping the air quality just above lethal.

  By the time I reached home I felt like throwing up. Might have been the distance, or maybe it was the fact that I’d eaten my weight in complex carbohydrates the night before. Dropping Harlequin’s leash, I bent at the waist and watched him bound up the stairs like Tigger. I’d obviously worn him out.

  Ten minutes later, the shower was spritzing erratically against my backside. When I won the million-dollar SuperLotto, I was going to have the plumbing redone. That’d leave me a couple thousand to spend on free-range chicken.

  The drive to work was unusually civil. If you don’t count the guy in the convertible who was sporting pencils in his nostrils and belting out show tunes at the top of his lungs, the trip was completely uneventful.

  By the time I reached the office, I couldn’t get “Oklahoma” out of my head. Elaine was standing behind the reception desk.

  “Greetings!” she rumbled.

  I stopped to stare at her. I wasn’t particularly surprised by the guy in the convertible, but this was something new. “Is that a broadsword?” I asked, eyeing the weapon at her hip as I tossed my purse onto a nearby chair.

  “Rest assured, I shall stow it behind the file cabinet before Master Fennow arrives, my mistress,” she said.

  I narrowed my eyes. Elaine’s an aspiring actress, which is why she left Illinois for L.A. My reasons for following were a little foggier and had to do with adolescent bastards who fornicate in the backseats of Buicks with other women. Unfortunately, after three plus years in the City of Angels, my boyfriends were still adolescent bastards, and Laney still couldn’t act. But she was tenacious, and there was always Pamela Anderson’s unlikely rise to fame to keep her optimistic. “Xena: Warrior Princess?” I guessed.

  “Close,” she said, using her own voice and slamming the file drawer shut. “Queen of the Amazons. I should really have a longbow instead, but Jeen didn’t have one of those lying around his house.”

  Maybe I should have wondered what Solberg was doing with a broadsword, but the question that surfaced was “You were at his house again?” The thought made me feel a little queasy. It might have been my sugar binge from the night before, but I didn’t think so. I mean, if Brainy Laney Butterfield was settling for the Geekster, I might as well hang up my diaphragm.

  “Let’s focus here,” she said, spreading her fingers on the desktop and scowling. “What do I need to change to become Hippolyta?”

  “The ummm…” I took a stab in the dark. “The Amazon queen?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well…” I shuffled my purse aside and sat down beside it. “What’s she like?”

  “She’s tough. Aggressive. Hates men. In fact, I think she might eat them.”

  “Eat them? Literally eat them?”

  “And some legends suggest that Amazon women removed their right breast so as to leave their bowstrings unimpeded.”

  “I’m not sure that’s what’s meant by suffering for your art.” I glanced at her boobs. Thirty-four D. They’re unenhanced. Whoever said life is fair should be shot in the ass with an Amazonian arrow.

  “I don’t think they’ll ask me to go that far.”

  “Probably not,” I guessed. When Laney put on a swimsuit, men in the next county fainted. Hollywood is weirder than ape shit, but I was pretty sure they had figured out that sex sells. “What does Hippolyta wear?”

  “I’m not sure. What do you think I should audition in?”

  “Have any deer-hide thongs?”

  “Not on me.”

  “There’s a load off my mind,” I said, and rummaged in my purse for lip gloss.

  “What do you think a man-eating Amazon woman would be like?”

  “Why are you asking me?” I asked, abandoning my search. A penny was stuck to the lining of my handbag by something I didn’t care to contemplate.

  She grinned sheepishly.

  I scowled. “Solberg’s an idiot,” I said. “And he’s wrong. Men are not afraid of me.”

  “He is.”

  I snorted. “Me and dust?”

  She laughed. I’d found over the past few months that she was impervious to insults on his behalf. I figured that meant one of two things: Either she didn’t give a crap about him, or she was so infatuated she didn’t care what I thought. I had a bad feeling which one it was.

  “Showtime,” she said, and suddenly the sword was gone, disappearing without a noise under the desk. She straightened, smiled. The door opened behind me. The first client of the day stepped inside. He was five foot nine and weighed in at well over two hundred pounds. His hair grew in wispy little tufts out of his shiny pate. He had fat mumbly lips, and in all the time I’ve been counseling him, I’ve never understood more than three consecutive words.

  Elaine beamed at him like he was the king of Prussia. “Good morning, Mr. Patterson.”

  He mumbled something under his breath, not quite able to meet her eyes.

  “Is that a new jacket?”

  Another mumble. It sounded like “Rasum frazzle muddle pump” to me.

  “Really? At Burlington’s. Well, you have great taste. It brings out the color of your eyes. You look like a young Paul Newman.”

  Mr. Patterson straightened slightly, and in that moment some sort of strange metamorphosis seemed to take place, because for an instant I could actually see the resemblance.

  Rising to my feet, I turned on my heel and slumped into my office. The truth was out. I would never be the therapist Laney was. No matter how many diplomas I treated to hundred-dollar frames and hung on my wall, she had a gift that neither education nor psychotherapy could reproduce. It might have been called kindness.

  Nearly three hours had passed when Elaine opened my door with a snap. “Mistress.” The sword was missing, but the attitude was not. “Th
ere is a person of the male gender wishing to converse with you.”

  “A man?” I’d seen three clients since I’d spoken to her. The last one was prone to washing his genitalia in bleach three times a day. Laney’s rumbling accent and odd phraseology seemed apple-pie normal in comparison.

  “On the calling horn.”

  “The…Oh.” I glanced toward the phone. “Who is it?”

  “He claims to be Miguel Rivera.”

  “Miguel—holy crap!” My brain did a somersault in my head. “The senator?”

  She closed the door behind her and hurried to my desk, making a face and whispering as if she didn’t want her alter ego to catch her out of character. “I think so.”

  “What does he want?”

  “I didn’t ask. Thought I’d act casual. Should I ask?”

  “Yes. No. I…What do you know about this guy?”

  “Not much. He only served two terms, so he was still relatively young after his twelve years. There was a bit of scandal about him and an aide. But the press loved him, good projection, photogenic, that sort of thing. Still, he only won the second term by a sliver. And then there was talk of a payoff. I think he’s got a horse running in the Derby.”

  “Seriously?”

  “And stock in Fablique.”

  “The lingerie company?”

  “That’s what I heard. I might be wrong.”

  I stared at her. She had boobs like missiles and brains like a Rhodes scholar. Life sucks. “I did a two-hour search on the Internet,” I whispered. “All I know is that he looks good in a tux and maybe our children’s grandsons won’t have to worry about male pattern baldness.”

  “Should I tell him you’re otherwise occupied?” She grinned. “Counseling a shvetambaras or something?”

  “If I knew what the hell a shvetambaras was, I might say yes. As it is, I think I’m going to pee in my pants.”

  She looked at me. “You don’t have to know what it is, Mac,” she said. “You’re Christina McMullen.”