3:28 P.M.
I had plenty of time after my afternoon fling to accomplish a few things in my day before having a late dinner with Matthew. Ted Burk, my editor at the Independent, wanted a dozen or more pics on his desk of the Mellnor Reece Mansion, which sat on the corner of Rush and Needle streets in downtown Vanmer. Beth Harriday was doing an upcoming story on the building since it was turning one-hundred-and-fifty years old. Burk wanted photographs of the Victorian mansion’s hidden stairwells, underground rooms, and secret doors. The article would come out at Halloween, which would depict how eerie the mansion was, and possibly haunted.
* * * *
5:19 P.M.
110 Chess Street
I wanted to talk with Tad Dossner’s landlady, a Miss Julia Lullaby, who lived a block away from Tad in a brick duplex with seven cats.
Binky, Dixon, Bachman, Desdemona, Bradley, Davido, and Britanny were all white short-haired felines with green eyes. I didn’t know how Julia could tell them apart, but she could. Two were on the radiator in the kitchen. One sat on top of a bookshelf and stared down at me, perhaps ready to attack. Three sniffed at my ankles and twirled around my Nikes as I sat in Julia’s dining room and enjoyed a mint iced tea.
Julia looked like her kitties. She had white hair that was cut short, green eyes, and long nails. I placed her at maybe sixty-seven and the widow of three men, all of which she probably poisoned, murdering the trio over four decades.
The first thing out of the thin woman’s mouth was, “You smell like you’ve just had sex.”
I didn’t know how to respond and kept silent while taking a drink of the mint iced tea in front of me.
“I can always smell that on a queer man. Don’t ask me how or why, but I can. Now, sweetheart, who have you been diddling?”
I didn’t lie to her, attempting to build her trust. “A football player.”
“Where?”
“In his condo. The first time was against a wall. The second time was in his shower.”
She giggled, staring at me with a look of intrigue in her feline-like eyes. “I love to hear stories about men having sex together. One of my husbands was queer, which I sort of enjoyed. Wenton would bring his gentlemen friends home and I liked to watch them have sex together. I’m a voyeur by trade, Sweetheart. Some women are like that, of course, which I completely understand. If you can tell me how a woman can’t enjoy two cocks instead of one, please do.”
I was caught off guard by her, but entertained at the same time. Perhaps to attempt to shock her, which was a complete failure on my part, I said, “I prefer two cocks in my life as well, Miss Lullaby.”
She giggled again, savoring my company. She stood from the walnut table, which was a gift to her from her second husband, Benjamin Pooney, and fetched something from her kitchen, which connected to the small dining room. In a matter of seconds she returned with a joint, set it ablaze, took a long drag, exhaled, and said, “Oh, Sweetheart, I used to grow marijuana with my third husband, but the city frowned upon it and we had to stop. Damn them for ruining that income for me.”
She sat down again at the table between us and passed me the joint, which I took, dragged, and then returned to her. I exhaled a plume of blue-gray smoke inside the room and felt the shit hit my head in a good way.
While waving the joint at me, she said, “You’re here to talk about that murder in one of my buildings, aren’t you?”
I nodded, knowing she had owned a dozen properties throughout the city, always in real estate, which just happened to be the means of her income since she had probably spent her demised husbands’ life insurance policies.
“I’d rather talk about your sex with the football player, if you don’t mind.”
“We could talk about the gym owner I’m diddling instead.”
She giggled. “I love beefy men. They have such tiny cocks sometimes, though. Does your gym owner have a tiny cock, Sweetheart?”
“On the contrary,” I said. “And he knows how to use it. But redheads usually do.”
She lit up with interest and asked, “The gym owner is a redhead?”
“From head to toe.”
Julia waved a hand in front of her like Elizabeth Taylor in A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, took a drag of the joint, exhaled, and added, “Oh my God, I could never have too many redheads, Sweetheart. Benjamin was always bringing such men home.”
The woman was a lunatic, fun, and liberal. I wanted to keep her as my own and call her my beloved aunt, but she probably had a lot of queer nephews who she smoked pot and talked about cocks with. Too bad for me.
“There is murder to get down to, I suppose, Sweetheart,” she said, passing me the joint like a lady. “So let’s talk murder.”
And so we did.