Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [54]
I was trying to lay the clothes on the backseat, but they kept slipping off and there were too many to hang. The Nextel was suddenly as unrelenting as she. Two calls in a row from Rick. Now the pager, too. My arms were full of sticky plastic bags.
“Can you open the trunk?”
“Nobody helps,” she said. Then: “Don’t help me!”
“Fine. Whatever you want.”
I dropped the whole pile on the ground. Now she looked at me, appalled.
“Why did you do that?”
“You said you didn’t want my help.” I bent to lift my briefcase.
“Don’t go!” She grabbed my forearm. “Please don’t go,” pleading desperately. “He’s leaving us, Ana.”
These sudden shifts were scaring me—the tossing blur of shining hair and scrabbling fingers seemed out of place and vulgar in the remorseless sun. Was this a hissing fit on a bad hormone day, or could the woman be delusional?
“Who is leaving? Not your husband.”
“No, Andrew!” she cried shakily, on the verge of tears. “Believe me, he won’t stick around while the crap hits the fan.”
“What crap?”
“He’s going up north, to Fresno.”
“Fresno?”
“The Fresno Police Department. I saw a request for a recommendation he passed on to the chief. He wants to get a job up there and—just—never come back.”
She covered her mouth with her fingertips and stared at me with a look of alarm.
What sense did this make? My first thought was, no, he would never leave his father’s house. Not quit the department this close to retirement.
“You seem awfully upset about Andrew leaving. If he’s leaving.”
And what about us moving in together?
“You don’t know,” she breathed.
Margaret’s eyes were small and wounded with an aggressive kind of deprivation. Her arms were folded and her shoulders pinched as she peered out from a nest of resentment. She was hurting and would find somebody to blame—me, the dry cleaner, Andrew. She would gather her powers and punish us all.
“There’s no way you could know,” Margaret said. “You’re not inside the department. Andrew is the greatest guy on earth, but he’s fickle, very fickle, so be forewarned. He was the exact same way with me, after my husband died. I needed the comfort, understand what I’m saying?”
I did, all right.
“Andrew was the only one who really, really knew me.”
Watching her. His best buddy’s sexy and ambitious wife. Margaret had retrieved a water bottle from somewhere and was taking a drink, keeping watch on me over the glinting plastic.
“I’m not going to apologize for it. You’ll be happy to know, he dumped me, too.” She kicked at the dry cleaning. “He thinks he’s angry, but my anger is bigger than his. Ha! I am the Thunder Goddess!”
“Is this a joke?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, are you a joke, Margaret, or just unbelievably cruel?”
The thing I resented most was how Andrew got us to fight over him in a parking lot.
“No, it’s terribly, terribly sad. I’m sad for you because you’re going to get hurt.”
“Enough.” I gripped the briefcase. “I don’t want to hear it.”
“Woman to woman? You’re not the only one on his plate. It’s that Oberbeck bitch-and-a-half, too, but that’s the way they are. Senior detectives, I love them to death, but they think they’re God’s gift.”
This was something else. Not just lunacy, but lunacy with a barbed point.
“Time-out. Are we talking about Andrew Berringer and Sylvia Oberbeck?”
“Why?” she asked, terrifyingly coy. “Who wants to know?”
I turned around and walked back to my car, making sure to grind my heels as deeply and destructively into as many of Margaret Forrester’s slithery garments as possible.
Which way—the freeway, or the streets? Where was I going? To the office. Why? To talk to Rick. Rick had called me, right? He had seen the posting on Richard Brennan and wanted to pursue the lead. It was hard work thinking these thoughts, like lifting fifty-pound boxes, stacking one on top of the other. I was in some kind of a wind tunnel. A hallway. I was doing this work of thinking, stacking up the awkward facts (Margaret was jealous, crazy, unreliable), and at the end of the hallway there was Andrew.
There was Andrew