Cirba had warned Harry about his wife’s cooking but Harry hadn’t believed him. After his first bite Harry wished he had taken the trooper’s advice and eaten before he came. Even more, he wished it was the weekend so he would be free to lie.
The night started pleasantly enough. Mrs Cirba, Grace, met Harry at the door of their country split-level home. She was a very tall, very attractive woman in her thirties. Harry extended the bottle of wine and said: “It was a toss-up between booze or flowers.”
“Wise choice,” she said.
The Cirba house was decorated in the typical Pocono basic. Wood panelling with wood furniture, a mounted deer head, and a giant flat-screen TV. Harry made chit-chat over a glass of wine, while Cirba glared at him wordlessly, threatening to hurt him if he spoke about anything on the cop’s list of unmentionable topics.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Grace said.
“All bad, I’m sure.”
“On the contrary,” the trooper’s wife replied, “he came back from Las Vegas quite taken with you. I’d almost call it a man crush.”
“I assure you there is nothing going on between your husband and me, Mrs Cirba.”
“So I hear,” she said with a sly smile. “If there was then there would be no time for wooing MK.”
“Oh,” Harry said, looking to Ed. “I see this is one of those relationships where you tell your wife everything.”
“Not everything,” Grace said. “I still haven’t received a full accounting of your trip to Vegas.”
“Speaking of MK,” Ed said, changing the subject, “she should be here by now.”
“You invited MK?”
“I did.”
“Does she know I’m going to be here?”
“I didn’t mention it to her.”
As if on cue the doorbell rang.
Cirba pointed to Harry then the front door and said: “You might as well answer it and get it over with.”
MK wasn’t surprised when the door opened.
“Hi,” Harry said, “I’m really sorry about last night but—”
“Don’t be. It’s me who should be sorry. It’s just I don’t do… what we almost did very often and was—”
“I didn’t want to answer the phone.”
“Yeah, yeah,” MK sighed. “I know, I’ve been kicking myself for that.”
“You two friends again?” A voice called into the hallway.
MK smiled, nodded yes, and said: “Hi Grace,” to her eavesdropping host.
Grace gave MK a hug and said: “I’m sure all Harry’s faults are due to Ed’s bad influence.”
“We blaming it on the fuzz?” MK asked.
“I always do,” Grace replied.
* * *
Dinner was a beet salad followed by a tofu roast. Harry cut the food into very small pieces and swallowed each bit as though it was a pill. He noticed that the family dog sat in the corner ignoring them, knowing that this food was not worth begging for. Dessert was a cheesecake from a recipe that was “un-poisoned” by sugar.
“You are every bit the cook your husband says you are,” Harry equivocated as he pushed himself away from the table trying to look full. This seemed to please the chef and allowed Harry to avoid the direct question: “Did you enjoy your meal?”
“Do you smoke cigars, Harry?” Grace asked.
“On occasion.”
“Well then would you care to join me in the garden? I have some very nice Nicaraguan panatelas.”
* * *
The sun was down but the night was still warm enough to be without a jacket. Harry and Grace sat next to each other in the backyard and lit their cigars from the mosquito candle on the table between them.
“I imagine it’s awfully sexist of me but it’s not often I share a cigar with a woman.”
“If the truth be told I actually hate these things. I’d so much rather be smoking a cigarette but I gave them up. I allow myself two of these a week.” She got a faraway look in her eyes like a homesick foreigner. “I so miss smoking.”
Harry leaned back in his chair and marvelled at how clear the sky was and how close the stars looked.
“So, did you enjoy your trip to the strip club?”
Harry almost tipped over backwards. “You do realize that we went there in the line of duty?”
“Was the club in Vegas duty too?”
“I… have been to Vegas many times.”
“That’s not what I asked,” Grace said. “Ed tells me you never lie, so I’ll ask you direct. Did you and Ed go to a strip club in Vegas?”
“I really would prefer not to get into trouble with your husband.”
“That’s answer enough for me.”
Harry sighed. “There was a lot of us and it was nothing but frivolity – I swear.”
“I know what goes on in a strip club, Mr Cull. I used to work in one.”
“As… an accountant?”
Grace chuckled. “You’re sweet. No, as a stripper. I remember when I first started, one of the girls said to me, ‘The punters come in here to get laid but they don’t get laid – they only get fucked’.”
Harry clinked wine glasses with her and asked: “How did you and Ed meet?”
“I used’ta live with a mean son of bitch who knocked me around. Ed came to the house and busted him twice but I wouldn’t press charges. My father had been a drunk and I didn’t know any better. I just thought that was the way it was. The third time Ed comes to the house he arrests me. In the car he stops into a 7-Eleven and buys a bottle of aspirin, takes off the label and puts them into my purse. When we get back to the station he insists I’m held until the drugs get analysed. That gave him time to hook me up with a woman from an organization called Balance. She taught me that life could be better and got me into a halfway house. Ed periodically checked in on me.”
“Until?”
“Until nothin’. I practically had to rape the rule-following lunk.”
“I could see that.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell him you snitched about the Vegas titty bar. I couldn’t care less about that. I know bad men and I thank the Lord every night for my Ed. But I’ll use it against him next time he disses my cooking.”
Harry tensed up at the mention of her cooking and she noticed. “And don’t worry, Harry, I’m not going to ask you what you thought of the meal. I saw it on your face.”
“Did you ever consider a career in interrogation?” Harry said. “You’d be good at it.”
* * *
“Oh God, I needed this,” MK moaned as she chomped into her cheeseburger.
Harry was just as enthusiastically devouring his eggs, scrapple, and potato pancakes. “I always thought Ed was exaggerating about his wife’s culinary radioactivity. Jesus, now I see why he eats those big lunches here so often.”
They were in an almost empty Oaktree Diner. Harry looked out the window periodically, expecting Trooper Cirba to pull up outside and join them.
“I should have waited for you to come back last night,” MK said, locking her eyes on Harry.
“Hey, for you it was a work night.”
“It wasn’t that, I was… frustrated, if you must know, and that made me mad. It took me all day to remember that you have an important thing to do here. You’re working on finding Big Bill’s killer.”
“Officially, I’m not – not anymore.”
MK looked confused.
“Technically, I guess I never was working on the case. Ed needed help and he hired me out of his own pocket. He was hoping we would find something by now, but we haven’t and he can’t afford me anymore.”
“So you’re leaving?”
Harry didn’t look up. “At the end of the week.”
“Well, if that’s the way it is,” MK said, “then we had better test out that squeaky bed tonight.”
Harry looked up and watched as a beautiful smile overtook her face. “CHECK,” he yelled.
* * *
The passion started as soon as they walked outside. MK didn’t even consider driving her car home. They unclenched long enough for both of them to get into Harry’s car but then MK threw herself at him before he could get a key into the ignition. Finally, by mutual agreement, they separated long enough for Harry to start the car and get moving. On the Five Mile Road Harry said: “Keep your hands to yourself, lady, unless you want to die on the Drunken Indians.” MK was giggling like a schoolgirl – until they reached the roadblock.
On the hard shoulder of the road that led off to the Dew Drop Inn was a pickup truck surrounded by three police cars – two from Oaktree, one a statie – and an ambulance. All of them had their lights flashing.
Harry’s phone rang as an Oaktree cop directed him onto the gravel fringe and around the emergency vehicles. It was Cirba.
“I just got a report of a shooting on the Five Mile Road.”
“I’m here now,” Harry said.
“Is Chief Barowski there? I’ve been trying to call him but he’s not answering.”
Harry pulled over, got out and searched the crowd for the local police captain. He spotted him but had trouble convincing a spotty faced junior officer that speaking to his boss wasn’t a federal offence. Harry finally got through and handed the phone to the captain.
“Hey, Ed,” Barowski said into the receiver. “Shotgun to the face. No, he was in his car. Haven’t found anybody who saw anything. Yeah, he had a wallet on him. Says he’s a lawyer from Jim Thorpe named – Sweeney.”
* * *
Harry dropped MK back to her car at the diner.
“Jesus, a girl just can’t catch a break.”
“I don’t know what you’re complaining about. I’m going to be spending the rest of the night with a bunch of cops and a dead guy.”
“Yeah, I shouldn’t joke. Poor Sweens.”
MK had grown up with Kevin Sweeney and had even dated him once in high school, she told Harry. She had introduced herself to the emergency crew as an ER nurse and offered any assistance, but was informed that Mr Sweeney wouldn’t need anything from anyone other than a skilled mortician. After that news, any possibility of an evening of hot passion was well and truly doused.
* * *
When Harry got back to the crime scene the boys and girls of the Forensic Services Unit were combing the area wearing shower caps over their shoes. Ed was there too and bear-hugged him when Harry presented the trooper with a tuna club sandwich he’d picked up at the diner when he returned MK to her car.
“I warned you, didn’t I?” the cop said as he ripped open the wax paper and devoured a quarter of the sandwich with one bite. “It’s not unusual for me to fake an emergency call from the station just so I can go out in the middle of the night and get one of those cardboard burritos from the gas station.”
“Ed,” shouted a voice about fifty yards away, “are you throwing burger wrappers on a crime scene?”
“Sorry, Amy,” Cirba shouted back, making a face like a guilty preschooler.
“Do we know what happened?” Harry asked.
“It looks like Mr Sweeney was parked on the hard shoulder and another car pulled in behind him. There’s a set of tyre tracks, but with this gravel we can surmise that it was a car and nothing else. The other driver must have come out of the other car with a shotgun. Perhaps the high beams obscured that the perp had a gun. Mr Sweeney was probably lowering his window. The first shot blew out half the window, and the second to the right ear killed him. Then there was another shot, probably with both barrels, that made sure he was dead and that he is going to have a closed casket. They are taking pellets back to the lab to see if metallurgy matches the shot used for Big Bill’s death.”
“I’ll bet it does.”
“I’m sure of it,” Cirba said. “We found Sweeney’s cell phone on him. The last call he got came from the payphone behind the supermarket. Same phone that the killer used before he shot Big Bill.”
“We should’a put a camera on that phone.”
“I will now but it’s probably too late.”
“We need access to Sweeney’s files,” Harry said, then grimaced thinking back on how messy the lawyer’s office was.
“Yeah but the problem will be finding a judge who will let us root through his files.”
“Surely attorney client privilege is void when both parties are dead.”
“Bill is dead but all of Sweeney’s other clients aren’t. I imagine they won’t be crazy about cops combing through their cases.”
“Anything else I can do?”
“Na, go get some sleep. Hell, you’re not on the payroll, you sure as hell don’t have to stand around in the woods in the middle of the night doin’ nothing. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Harry started back to his car when Cirba said: “Hey, you and MK seemed to be talking OK by the end of the… I have problems calling it dinner.”
“Yeah,” Harry laughed. “We re-bonded over post-dinner burgers – but a corpse has a tendency to kill a mood.”
Cirba nodded and said: “I can see that.”
* * *
Harry took the Drunken Indians at speed, figuring that all of the Oaktree police force was a mile to the east. When he got home he looked to MK’s house but it was pitch-dark. If he had seen a light on he would have taken it for an invite, but there wasn’t even a flicker.
In his kitchen he started to make a pot of tea but realized he was too worked up for that. Sexual frustration and murder can get one’s adrenaline flowing. There were a couple of shots left in MK’s bottle of grappa, so he knocked one back and followed it with a beer chaser.
After brushing his teeth he went to his bedroom, flicked on the light and let out a girlish squeal at the shock of seeing someone in his bed.
The form rolled over and shielded her eyes. “I hope you don’t mind,” MK said as the bed squeaked. “I never gave Frank back his keys.”
“I… a… no.”
“I’m not looking for anything, I just need a cuddle.”
“I can cuddle,” Harry said, turning off the light and stripping down to his shorts.
He climbed in and wrapped his arms around her. She didn’t turn but pulled his arms tight in front of her. They both said they were only going to cuddle – but that didn’t last long.