No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (No Such Thing As...: A Brandy Alexander Mystery) (17 page)

“Is that all she’d do is watch him dance? Do you remember if they had any contact outside of the club?”

Joe cut me a look. “This is a legit business here. We don’t promote anything except some good, clean fun for the patrons. Whatever arrangements Danny made with this chic were off the clock, y’know what I mean?”

“Does Danny still work here?”

“He quit about eight months ago. Listen, Danny’s a good kid. I don’t want to make trouble for him by implying there was anything improper going on between him and this Laura girl.”

It was a tad late for that, but I kept my mouth shut. “Do you know how I can get in touch with Danny?” I asked instead.

“I’ve got his home phone number.” He hesitated. “Look, I don’t feel right just giving it out to you. How about I take yours and ask him to call you?”

I routed around in my bag for my business card and handed it to him. “I don’t mean to put you on the spot, Joe, but this is important. Tell him either he talks to me or he talks to the police.”

I thought about Laura all the way home. Her friends, the few she had anyway, had described her as quiet, shy and reserved, while David Dwayne Harmon insisted she was an insatiable sex addict with an appetite for kink. This was confirmed tonight by what Joe had told me. For all I knew, this guy Danny was the one who killed Laura.

Damn! I just couldn’t believe that no one had thought to follow up on Harmon’s claim that Laura had pursued him. It was an automatic assumption that he’d been lying. Granted, the guy was pond scum, but it’s the constitutional right of every American citizen to have adequate council, even the grossly unlikable.

I would have pondered this some more, but at that moment my cell phone rang. I pulled up to my street and parked one handed while I answered the phone with the other. It was Bobby. Oops. I’d forgotten to call him. “Hey, what’s up?” I said.

“I’m about to make your day, sweetheart. I got a call this afternoon from a buddy at the Pennsauken precinct. The autopsy results are in.”

“And?”

“And it looks like you were right. They’ve turned it over to homicide.”

“I knew it!” I yelled.

“Okay, calm down,” Bobby said. “There’s more.”

Having turned off the car engine, I was rapidly turning into a Popsicle. “Listen, don’t go anywhere. I’ll call you right back.”

I flew into the house, almost tripping over Adrian who was sprawled on the living room rug like a tiny beached whale. He looked up at me with baleful eyes, his tummy distended beyond normal capacity. Lying next to him was half a meatball. The poor little guy was seriously in need of an Alka Seltzer. “Didn’t I warn you to stay away from my mom’s cooking?” I whispered.

I dashed upstairs to call Bobby back when I heard my mother’s voice calling to me from the kitchen. “How was your book club meeting?”

I stopped mid-dash. “Fine. Great. We all cried when Mr. Darcy finally declared his love for Elizabeth. Mom, I’m really tired, so—”

My mother walked into the living room, ladle in hand. She’d been hard at work lovingly creating tomorrow night’s meal which sadly, was bound to be inedible. “Honey, a friend of yours called tonight. A Nicholas Santiago.”

“He did?”
Omigod! Omigod! Stay calm. Don’t give anything away.
“Did he happen to leave a message?”

“Well, naturally he was calling to speak to you, but somehow we got to talking and—”

“You talked to him? What exactly did you say?”

“Oh Brandy, don’t be ridiculous. How am I supposed to remember every word of our conversation?”
My mother has a mind like a steel trap. She can recall conversations she had in the 4
^th
grade
. “The point is he seems like a very nice boy, so I invited him to join us for dinner tomorrow night.”

“You what? He’s not coming, is he?”

“He most certainly is. In fact, he insisted on bringing the wine.”

Nick can’t be serious about coming over tomorrow night… or can he?

I sat closeted in my room fruitlessly dialing Nick’s number. The phone kept going to voice mail, finally forcing me to give up and leave a message. “Nick, it’s Brandy. I’m sorry I haven’t called you back, but I’ve had, um… pink eye… It can be very debilitating.”
Oh God is there any way to erase this?
“Anyway, I just wanted to say that it was very nice of you to humor my mother by telling her you’d come for dinner, but it’s totally unnecessary. I’m sure you have better things to do, so—” BEEP.
Shit.
“Hi, it’s me again. Anyway, we’re not even
having
dinner tomorrow night. My mother drinks a lot and she gets mixed up. So, uh, I’ll talk to you later. Bye.”
Unhhh!

I dialed Bobby next. He picked up on the first ring, his voice a soft blend of Philly and his Chicago roots.

“Did I wake you?” I climbed into bed and snuggled under the covers. Rocky and Adrian had beat me to it and were fast asleep at the foot of the bed.

“Nah,” he yawned. “I was just lying down with Sophia. Sometimes she gets scared at night, so I stay with her until she falls asleep. What took you so long to call me back?”

“My mother. Don’t ask. So what did the autopsy report show?”

“I wasn’t able to get the specifics,” he said. “Something about chloroform in the blood stream, cardiac arrest. Whatever it was, it was enough to convince the D.A. that foul play was involved.”

Bobby breathed out a slow puff of air. It was the sound he made when he was trying to keep his cool. But I knew him too well and braced myself for the worst. “The autopsy showed something else, Bran. At the time of her death Tamra was pregnant.”

A shock ran straight through me. “How far along was she?”

“I don’t know. A couple of months I think. Like I said, I don’t have all the details. I just thought you’d want to know.”

I was quiet for a minute as I digested this new information.

“Hey, you still there?”

“Yeah.” Something had been nagging at me and now it worked its way to the front of my brain. “Bobby, do they know who the father is—I mean was?”

“I assume it was her husband’s. Why?”

“When I was at their house I noticed an open box of condoms on the nightstand. Why would they have condoms around if they were trying to have a baby?”

“Maybe they
weren’t
trying. Maybe they were using protection but she got pregnant by accident. Rubbers aren’t foolproof.”

I knew he was speaking from personal experience. Even though Bobby loved his little girl more than life itself, the pregnancy wasn’t planned and, given the choice, it’s not the path he would have chosen.

“Okay, here’s a thought,” I said. “What if it turns out Jeff wasn’t the father? Jeff thought Tamra was having an affair. What if he knew she was pregnant and suspected the baby wasn’t his—”

“That would be one hell of an incentive for him to kill her,” Bobby cut in.

“Are the cops going to run a DNA test on the baby? I should call and tell them to.”

“Great idea. Cops love being told how to do their jobs. Look, Brandy, you were right all along about Tamra and I’m sorry I gave you such a hard time about it. But I want you to promise me that from here on in you’ll let the professionals handle it.”

Yeah? Well, David Dwayne Harmon left his fate up to the “so-called” professionals and look where he ended up. I wasn’t about to drop this. Not by a long shot.

“So,” Bobby said, not waiting for an answer, “I haven’t seen you on-air the last couple of days. Are you taking some time off while your parents are in town?”

“Um, no, actually, I’ve been re-assigned. My boss thought I’d be more useful in another department. I’m doing a little investigative work.”

“Yeah?” he said, his voice guarded. “What kind of investigative work?”

“Oh, I’m just following up on a story for a colleague. Nothing too eventful
.
”
Not exactly a lie. Nothing’s happened to me in at least twenty-four hours. That’s uneventful given my track record lately.

“Oh. Well, I’m glad to hear you’re taking it easy. I’ve been worried about you.”

“No need to be. Really.”

I didn’t know whether to be touched by his concern or pissed at the vote of “no confidence.” At any rate, he wouldn’t be happy with the news that I was taking on Tamra’s case. I figured I’d better hang up before guilt took over and I ended up confessing everything to him. Hell, he probably knew I was lying anyway.

I lay in bed, unable to sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about Jeff and Tamra. Could the mild mannered biology professor really have killed his pregnant wife? I wondered if the police had been able to track down the illusive Richard. Was he Tamra’s secret lover? Was he the father of her unborn child? And what was it Bobby had said about chloroform?
It was found in her system.

Chloroform is what the kidnappers used to drug me with when they thought I was Tamra. That had to have taken a lot of pre-planning. Assuming Jeff killed her in a moment of unbridled jealousy, he wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble to have her kidnapped, taken to some unknown destination and then drag her dead body back to their house.

The more I thought about it, the less possible it seemed that Jeff had murdered his wife. It was just too coincidental that Tamra was investigating Laura Stewart’s death and the next thing you know she winds up dead.

Oh crap. I’d forgotten to mention to Bobby that Craig had access to Tamra’s house before she died, although I doubted that he had anything to do with her demise either. The poor guy had the mental acuity of a cantaloupe. He didn’t seem capable of pulling off something like this. Plus, Craig’s affection for Tamra was genuine. I couldn’t imagine him doing anything to hurt her.

I tossed and turned for about an hour, making a “To Do” list in my head.
Track down Danny Lang. Talk to Laura Stewart’s brother. Find the guy who tried to kill me. Find the other guy who tried to kill me. Round up a suitable date for Paul’s bar mitzvah. Solve Tamra’s murder. Solve Laura’s murder. Learn to tap dance.

At four a.m. Adrian hopped off the bed and began whimpering and scratching at the bedroom door. I opened it and he made a beeline for the hallway, bounding down the steps so fast he looked airborne. Chalking it up to the meatball he ate earlier, I followed him down and let him out the front door to do his business.

Adrian paused on the porch, head cocked, ears straining forward. Cautiously he took a step down and sniffed the ground around Mrs. Gentile’s Azaleas. He was after something, the neighbor’s cat probably, but I was freezing my butt off and just wanted to get back in bed. Suddenly he slipped around the side of the house and disappeared.

“Damnit, Adrian,” I whispered, stepping off the front porch. Suddenly, my frozen body turned into a sweaty wreck as I realized I wasn’t alone. But before I could invite the scream that was stuck in the back of my throat to come forward, I felt the imprint of large hands on my back and with one swift movement I was knocked head-first into the azalea bush. As I struggled to right myself I slipped backwards on the icy pavement, my feet sliding out from under me. “This is going to hurt,” I remember thinking, just before my head crash-landed on the sidewalk.

S
omething not quite heavy was weighing me down. I tried to open my eyes but the effort it took was more than I could afford to expend. My head felt like it had been split wide open. I checked for a crater and found instead a goose bump the size of a fist located behind my right ear. I groaned just to hear the sound of my own voice.

The weight on my chest shifted and soon I felt moist, heated breath followed by a soft, wet tongue on my mouth. “Oh please don’t let it be human,” I thought, completely grossed out and in a good deal of pain. Forcing my eyes open, I came face to face with Adrian. He was planted on top of me, his paws kneading my chest, his furry little muzzle clamped down on mine as if he were trying to perform CPR.

I nudged him off me and sat up. Someone had dragged me off the sidewalk and onto the porch. My head was throbbing and I was cold to the bone but, hell, I wasn’t dead, trapped in the trunk of a car or in the process of being strangled so, all things considered, I was in pretty good shape.

As I rolled over onto my knees, my hand brushed against an envelope that had been stuffed under my hip. I had trouble making out what was written on the front of it.

You’d think with double vision I’d be able to see twice as well, but such was not the case.

I had a whopper of a concussion and had to get to the E.R. fast.

I considered my options. Wake my parents. Oy. Neither one of them is very good in a crisis. Once when I was a little girl I got my finger stuck in the sliding glass door of our beach house down in Jersey. My mother began screaming at the top of her lungs and my father fainted. I had to pull it out by myself and then I sealed the cut with Elmer’s Glue… I could take a cab, but I already felt like I was going to vomit and cabs smell funny. I finally settled on the one person I knew would be awake at this ungodly hour and be cool enough to handle it. I grabbed Adrian and went back inside the house to call my Uncle Frankie.

Uncle Frankie understands me. He’d spent enough time being the black sheep of the family when he was a kid to recognize a kindred spirit. He was already at the gym but he came and got me. I stood outside, decked out in my Hello Kitty footsie pajamas and my dad’s old pea coat. I’d stuffed the envelope into my coat pocket. I figured whatever was inside wouldn’t be good news, so I’d wait on opening it until I got back from the emergency room. I was kinda hoping Dr. Sanchez wouldn’t be there. It was just too embarrassing.

Uncle Frankie didn’t ask a lot of questions on the ride up, but on the way back, when he knew I wasn’t in imminent danger of dying, he demanded full disclosure.

“…so you can see why Bobby can’t know about this. He thinks I’m too ‘fragile’ right now, which is so ridiculous. Oh, and let’s not mention anything to Paul either. At least not until his car comes back from the body shop.”

Uncle Frankie cut me a look. “What happened to Paul’s car—never mind. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know.” He let a minute pass and then he said, “What’s up with you and DiCarlo anyway?” His voice had taken on a slightly macho Italian edge that belied the casualness of his question. But it was an honest question and it deserved an honest answer.