Homicide My Own - Anne Argula [40]
“Jeez, don’t you ever chill out?”
“No.”
“I’d just as soon hitchhike home as be stuck here with you, lady.”
“I’d just as soon you did that too.”
“Girls, girls…,” said Houser. “Can’t we all just get along?”
She was a spirited girl, I’ll give her that, and I wondered what she saw in Houser. My mother always used to say, there’s a lid for every pot. Even she would have to admit some matches are better left unmade. I had to remind myself this was neither a match nor a mismatch, it was a felony.
“I don’t know why you guys are staying here anyway,” she said. “If you came here to bust Charlie, what’s holding you back?”
I took one of the bar stools from the other side of the counter and brought it around to my side, in the kitchen proper, and sat down. I drank my Molson’s. I planned to hit her over the head with the empty when I finished.
“They’ve got something else going,” said Houser.
“Shaddup.”
“You are so rude,” said Stacey.
“They’re working on some murder case, and that’s why they have to stay ‘til tomorrow.”
“Really? Cool! Who got murdered?”
“Her partner. Odd.”
“That’s pretty odd, all right, because the dude is still alive.”
I was too tired to shut them up. I wanted to push her off the bed, lie down, and sleep for about a year.
“Odd is the dude’s name. Now. But it used to be Jeannie, and as near as I can tell, that’s who got murdered.”
Stacey was unable to grasp it. Join the crowd. My head got heavy, and down it went, click by click, into my folded arms on the counter. She said something, and he said something back, but it sounded far away, and I could care less, if I cared at all, which I didn’t. I was out.
It could have been a minute, it could have been an hour. Let’s say longer than a minute, because what woke me up was Gwen crying out, “Stacey!” She was standing in the doorway, her arms full of freshly laundered clothes. Her fourteen-year-old daughter was on her knees in front of the wicker rocker, her blonde head bobbing rhythmically between Houser’s legs. Startled at the sudden appearance of her mother and my awakening, she bounded back into bed, wiping her mouth with the bottom of her t-shirt. She wasn’t wearing any bra. Houser, one-handed, struggled to stuff his glistening and quivering thing back into his pants and zip up. It was not a pretty sight.
Gwen, defeated all over again, dropped the clothes on the foot of the bed and started sorting, shaking her muddled head in unhappy disbelief.
I don’t know if it was the mother in me or the menopausal madwoman. It sure wasn’t the cop. I kicked the barstool out from under me and I was on that bed in a nanosecond. The bedspread fell off me and for the second time in one afternoon I was publicly naked. Stacey fought back and cursed, but she was no match for me. There are druggies on Sprague Street who would rather be brought down by a canine officer than by me.
I pinned her arms behind her and got her over my knees and gave her the mother of all spankings. She regressed from a garbage-mouthed teenager to a spastic pre-pubescent, to one of the terrible two’s, to a whimpering infant. Somewhere along that reverse psychic catapult she promised me the largest lawsuit known to man and the sure end to my career as a police officer. I could care less.
I retrieved my wrap and pulled it around me. Nobody said a word. The only sound now was Stacey’s sniffling. Gwen had the shadow of a grateful look. Houser was aghast and maybe a little scared that I’d now get to him, which I might have, except my fury was spent, and he was, after all, a man manacled to a rocking chair. He didn’t go to her, she came to him. All right, he was supposed to say no, but he’s only a man and they’re all dogs. I gave him the old one-two with my eyes. That was enough.
By then, Odd pulled up in the car. I decided not to burden him with a briefing of what had happened in his absence. No one else was eager to tell him. That way, at the hearing, he could deny all knowledge, etc.
He came inside, a grocery bag in one arm, and said,