I left Samantha’s house and drove back downtown, mulling over my not-so-pleasant conversation with her. Either Samantha had changed after Ned divorced her, or he had definitely been blinded by love because I couldn’t see how Samantha’s personality would woo anyone.
I spent the remainder of the day preparing a file for the Jack Healy case, paying some bills, working out, and practicing at the gun range. Last Christmas, while working on my first case, I’d been shot in the rear. The embarrassing incident made me acutely aware of how vulnerable I’d been, so I felt it would be prudent if I bought a gun. Bogie had a gun, I rationalized. Having bought one, I felt it would be even better if I knew how to use it.
When I finished at the practice range, I took the gun back to my office and placed it back in a locked box on a high shelf in the closet. Hey, I didn’t say I was ready to actually carry it around yet. My errands done, I decided to head home.
I own a third-story condo in the Uptown neighborhood east of downtown. Since the Goofball Brothers, who were anything but party animals, lived below me and we were the only tenants in the newly constructed building, living here was peaceful.
I parked in the alley garage and walked around the side of the house to the stairs that led up to my place.
“Hey, stranger,” I heard a sultry voice call out.
“Hey, yourself.” I turned to see Willie Rhoden walking over to me.
“You’re just getting home?” I nodded. “Have you eaten? We could order a pizza or Chinese.”
I smiled. Willie, real name Wilhelmina, was my neighbor, and I’d had a crush on her since she moved into the building across the street a year ago. She had recently broken up with her longtime boyfriend, Alan, and I had tried more than once to get Willie to go out on a date with me, only to be politely rebuffed. I assumed that she needed time to get over Alan.
“Dinner sounds great,” I said. “My treat?” Willie was an emergency room admissions nurse at nearby St. Joseph’s hospital, and I was so enamored of her that I thought her petite frame looked great in her medical smock. Even her sturdy walking shoes gave her just the right amount of boost to her height. She tucked her short blond hair behind her ears, her mischievous green eyes twinkling.
“No, we split the cost.” Willie linked her arm in mine and I could smell jasmine in her hair. “That way things don’t get complicated.”
“How is my paying for dinner complicated?” I asked as we strolled across the street to her building.
“Are you working on a new case?” she changed the subject.
“Just started something. I’m not sure where this one is going yet.”
“I hope you’ll be careful. I’d hate to see you get shot again.”
I laughed, but her emerald eyes sliced through me. “I’m sure this isn’t as dangerous.”
Willie stopped at the door. “Reed, I like you. A lot. Even before I broke up with Alan, I was tempted to go out with you. But you want to know why I won’t?”
“Because you need time to get over Alan?”
She shook her head. “That’s only part of the reason. I don’t want to get involved with you and then find out that you’ve been hurt or killed.”
If she’d thrown ice water in my face, I wouldn’t have been more surprised. I forced another laugh. “C’mon. I got shot in the rear as I was diving to the floor. An inch higher and the bullet would’ve gone right over me.” An inch in another direction, and I might not be able to have kids, but I didn’t think Willie would appreciate the humor, so I left it unsaid.
“But it could’ve gone any number of ways,” Willie pointed out. “I’ve seen it happen before. You were lucky it was only your ass.”
“And what a cute ass it is.” I grinned at her.
Willie stared at me, her cute lips turning into a frown.
“You also were attacked right here on the street,” she said, referring to the same case, in which a bat-wielding female vigilante assaulted me on the sidewalk outside my building.
“And I lived through it.” I beamed at her. “Besides, you even helped me out on that case. Why did you do that if you’re so concerned about me?” Willie had helped with a deception by pretending to be my client and luring the FBI after her so my client and I could get to a rendezvous undetected.
“I thought that it would be fun. And it was. But it never seemed dangerous.” She paused, biting her lip. “I know that sounds naïve, but it seemed harmless at the time. Then when you got shot, the reality of what you do for a living hit me.”
We lapsed into silence.
“Look,” I finally broke the tension between us. “I’ll be careful. You’ll see. Besides, you can’t resist me.”
She resisted, but then smiled. “How about that pizza?” she said, changing the subject again.
*****
The next morning I was up by seven, early for me. I hadn’t slept very well after leaving Willie’s place. I had no idea that she felt the way she did. We had been playing a flirting game for some time, but I really never thought that I’d been making any headway. Not only was I wrong about that, it never occurred to me that if she did like me, she wouldn’t want to date me because of what I did for a living. I thought only my parents hated my being a detective.
I pondered the previous evening while I went for a jog. Things had gone okay. We had decided on Chinese instead of pizza, and had a local restaurant deliver Moo-Shu chicken and garlic pork. We added an inexpensive white wine, and dined by candlelight on her back balcony while we watched the sun disappear behind the downtown high-rises. I told her a little bit about my latest case, she told me some of her hospital stories. But we never touched on what she shared earlier. It was like an emotional wall had been erected, and neither of us was sure how to break it down.
As I ran, my frustration built, and not just on a physical level. I enjoyed spending time with Willie, and as I inched ever closer to my mid-thirties, I was becoming more conscious of wanting to share my life with someone. And when the one woman who cranked my chain finally came along, my job was getting in the way.
I went five miles, and by the time I rounded the corner of my block, my legs were burning. I slowed to a walk, cooling down. Maybe Willie would cool down a bit, too, and I could make her see what she was missing. What could be more appealing than a financially secure, recently-employed-as-a-detective male?
I took the stairs two at a time up to my condo, ate a quick breakfast, and showered. I threw on a pair of jeans and a white Izod shirt and drove to the office. I tackled a few mundane work things, like checking through my mail, mostly bills, returning phone calls to two potential clients, watering the two hanging vines in the front reception area, and responding to emails.
In every batch of emails that I received, I could count on one from my parents. My mother, retired in Florida with my father, loves the usefulness of email. She’s quite the typist, having spent a number of summers working as a secretary in a huge law firm before she met my father, who took her from average Jane to wealthy Jill. Since those long-ago workdays as a transcriber, her skills are used to email friends and relatives. And I am one of the lucky few who receives at least a weekly update from her, long diatribes on her every moment since the last time she either wrote or called on the phone. I love my mother dearly, but I wish she could only type a few words per minute. Then maybe I wouldn’t have to read about each card game with the Smiths and Joneses, their close retiree friends, or about my father’s health issues, which always amount to nothing more than a slight case of gas or indigestion.
Just as sure as ice cream melts in the Florida sun, there was an email from Mom. I wrote a quick note back to her, lamenting with her about Dad’s pending visit to the doctor for his yearly exam, assuring her that everything would be fine, telling her that my job was indeed going well, and that I was working on a new case. My parents had not been enthused when I launched my detective business. Dad thought it didn’t qualify as real work unless you worked with a Fortune 500 company and earned a steady paycheck, and Mom worried constantly that I would get hurt. She and Willie would have to battle for the rights to that, I thought, as I typed her assurances that I was safe and sound.
Once that was done, I searched the Internet to see what I could find out about Ned Healy’s death. One article gave me the facts of the discovery of Ned’s body, and another two follow-up reports shed light on the investigation into his death.
Ned Healy’s body had been found outside of Buena Vista, off County Road 162 where the Mount Princeton to Raspberry Gulch ride begins. A pair of riders first reported his abandoned car at the trail head. It had been parked overnight on the side of the road. Three days later, a different set of riders on the trail spotted Ned’s bruised and torn body, along with his dented mountain bike, at the bottom of a thirty-foot ravine. He hadn’t been wearing a helmet, and his shirt and shorts were not specifically designed for mountain biking. An autopsy performed on the body determined that Ned had trace amounts of Seconal, a barbiturate, in his bloodstream, and he had a blood-alcohol level more than twice the legal limit. The official cause of death was a broken neck caused by his fall. With the help of witnesses who remembered when the car appeared at the trail head, authorities believed that Ned was riding late in the evening while very intoxicated, and that he lost control of his bike and went over the ledge, falling to his death. Ned’s death was ruled an accident.
I had never ridden that trail, but had heard of others who had. It wasn’t a very difficult trail, overall, but there were a couple of more technical areas to traverse. A novice rider could get off and walk through those parts with no danger of personal injury. But anyone on a mountain trail could succumb to an accident – that was one of the risks in the sport. Ned’s death may have been nothing more than an inexperienced rider trying to tackle too difficult a trail.
I found another article discussing potential risks of mountain biking, which referenced Ned, and obituary listings. That was all. Nothing suspicious. I sat back and stared at the poster from The Big Sleep. Bogie looked so tough in that poster, so sure of himself. He had it so easy, though – the plots already had an ending, and Bogie always won.
My phone rang, breaking me out of my reverie. It was Jack Healy.
“Reed, I’m glad you’re there. Do you think you could meet me at Ned’s house?” His voice sounded like a tuning fork, ringing with apprehension. Or fear.
“Sure,” I said, glancing at the clock. “What’s going on?”
“I stopped by Ned’s house on my lunch hour, and it looks like the place has been broken into.”
“I’ll be right over.”
I hung up the phone, grabbed my keys and rushed out the door. I had just found something suspicious.