“Not the Rottweiler. Teresa’s brother. Oh, your uncle called. He said he needs you to unclog his drain or something. Have you already found a new profession?”
I snorted, then mentally repossessed that snort and replaced it with an epiphany. “You know what? That’s not a bad idea. How would you feel about us becoming plumbers? I have a nice crack.”
“I’ll take a rain check.”
“Are you sure? They have wrenches.”
“Positive. So, how are you doing?” she asked. I could tell by the tone in her voice she’d switched back to our earlier conversation about Reyes.
“I’m okay. That meeting left me with enough fodder to fuel a thousand lonely sleepless nights.”
“Damn it, Charley, will you never learn to document these things? I need visuals, flowcharts.”
“Hey, I’m going to Super Dog for a quick bite and to pass along a message from a dead guy to his girlfriend. You should come with me.”
“I can’t go with you.”
“Is it because of my questionable morals?”
“No, it’s because it’s three o’clock in the afternoon and I have to pick up Amber from school.”
“Oh, right. So the morals thing doesn’t bother you?”
She laughed and hung up.
I called Ubie, my hemorrhoidal, hypertensed uncle and a detective for the Albuquerque Police Department, wondering about his message. Thanks to him, I’d been hired by APD as a consultant and helped him with cases on a semi-regular basis. The pay wasn’t bad. The access to their databases was better.
“What is this about your drains?” I asked when he picked up. “’Cause that sounds almost incestuous.”
“Oh, that was code for call me ay-sap.”
“Really?” I squinted in thought. “You couldn’t just say call me ay-sap?”
“I suppose I could’ve. I was trying to be cool.”
Suppressing an inappropriate giggle, I said, “Uncle Bob, why don’t you just ask her out?”
“Who?”
“You know who.” He’d recently developed a crush on Cookie. Disturbing? Absolutely. On several levels. But he was a good guy. He deserved a nice girl. Unfortunately, he might just have to settle for Cookie.
“What are you working on?” he asked.
“I have a missing wife.”
“I didn’t even know you were married.”
“Smart-ass. What do you know about this Dr. Nathan Yost?” I asked as I scanned the signs along Central for a giant hot dog. I could never remember if Super Dog was by the adult toy store or the Doggie Style pet grooming boutique. I just remembered it was something sexual.
“I know his wife is missing,” he offered.
“That’s it?”
“In a nutshell.”
“Well, bummer, because he did it.”
“Holy shit, are you positive?”
“As a pregnancy test a month after prom.”
“This is big. Who are you working with on it?”
“Cookie.”
He blew out a heavy sigh. “Well, I’m about seventeen months behind on my paperwork, but I can look into this for you, see if we have anything on the guy.”
“Thanks, Ubie. Can you get a copy of the statements for me, as well?”
“Sure, why not.”
There it was, next to the law offices of Sexton and Hoare. “You should come eat with me at Super Dog.”
“No.”
“Is it because of my questionable morals?”
“No, it’s because I’d have heartburn all night if I ate a Super Dog this late in the day.”
“So the morals thing doesn’t bother you?”
“Not as much as my heartburn.”
That was good to know. At least the people in my life weren’t completely appalled by me.
I pulled up to Super Dog and walked inside, keeping a weather eye for a name tag with JENNY on it. As luck would have it, she was my cashier. I ordered my food first, knowing that once I gave Jenny the message from Ron, the departed clown I’d found in my living room that morning, I’d be bombarded with questions and my dreams of eating a chili dog would die a sad and lonely death.
In the interest of all things romantic, I decided not to repeat Ron’s message word for word. Jenny was a pretty girl with dark blond hair and supermodel eyebrows and probably deserved better than a quick bite me, the message from Ron.
After she handed over my chili dog and fries, I said, “Jenny, my name is Charlotte Davidson. I have a message for you from a friend.”
She refocused on me. Grief had moved in and set up shop, seeping into every nook and cranny of her being. “For me?” she asked, not the slightest bit interested.
I could hardly blame her. “Yes. This is going to sound really odd, but I just need you to work with me a minute.” She laced her long, thin fingers together and waited. “Ronald said that he loved you very much.”
She swallowed as my words sank in, slowly, methodically. Then her eyes filled with tears that pushed past her lashes and streamed down her cheeks like the floodgates of a damn opening, only her expression didn’t change. “You’re lying,” she said, her voice suddenly edged with bitterness. “He would never say that to me. Never.”
She turned and walked to the back room as I stood there dumbfounded. All in all, the experience rated somewhere between the Bedouin woman who crossed when I was twelve and wanted me to take care of her father’s camels and the wannabe porn star who’d refused to cross until I called him Dr. Love. So not too out there, but not too in there either. I walked around the counter and headed for the back room.
Someone yelled, “You can’t be back here!” just as I spotted the break room. Jenny sat huddled in a plastic chair, staring at a cat poster encouraging its readers to hang in there, her cheeks wet with grief.
“Jenny, I’m so sorry,” I said.
She wiped her face on a sleeve and looked up at me. “He would never have said that.”
Damn, I hated to be caught in a lie. I much preferred my lies to go unnoticed, like a movie star’s career who’d been arrested and sent to rehab. “He didn’t.” I lowered my head in shame and vowed to self-flagellate later.
Her mouth opened as if to ask me something, her expression suddenly filled with hope.
“He said, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, ‘Bite me.’”
Her face transformed just as slowly, just as methodically as before, and she threw her arms around me. “I knew it!” she yelled as a couple of coworkers came into the cramped room to see what was going on. “I knew that’s what he said.” She leaned back and tried to explain past the lump in her throat. “He couldn’t speak well at the end, and I could barely understand him, he was just so weak.” She stopped and leaned back for a better look at me. “Wait, you’re the light,” she said, realization dawning in her eyes.
“The light?” I asked, all innocence and myrrh.
“Of course. When he was … right before he died, he said he saw a light, only it was coming from a woman with brown hair, gold eyes, and—” She cast a quick glance at my feet. “—motorcycle boots.”
“Really?” I asked, stunned. “He saw me? I mean, he should’ve gone into the other light. You know, the main one, the direct route. I’m mostly reserved for those who’ve passed and didn’t go up immediately.” I glanced down at myself, annoyed that I couldn’t see what the departed saw. My brilliant, come-hither beacon. “I totally need to check my wattage.”
“He said bite me?” she asked, already over the fact that I was a light the departed went into. It would hit her later.
“Yes,” I said with a wary grin. “What did he mean?”
A smile that resembled those searchlights on cop cars flashed across her face. “He meant he wanted to marry me. It was kind of our code.” Her long fingers picked at a thread on her Super Dog shirt. “We never liked to argue in front of people, so we made up codes for everything, even the good stuff.”
“Ah,” I said, understand
ing her earlier outburst, “and ‘I love you very much’ was code for—?”
With a sheepish smile, she said, “I would rather suffer the sting of a thousand fire ants on my eyeballs than look at your face another minute.”
“Oh, wow, so you came up with a code for that, huh?”
She giggled, but soon the grief caught up with her again and her smile faltered. She caught it and pushed it back up for my benefit.
“No,” I told her, placing a hand on her shoulder, “you don’t have to pretend for me.” In an instant the tears reappeared and she hugged me again. We sat like that a long time as boys and men alike passed by the room to look in, mostly for a glimpse of the girl-on-girl action.
6
Ask me about my complete lack of interest.
—T-SHIRT
The minute Jenny started putting two and two together and asking me questions about how I got the message from Ronald and could I communicate with the other side, I suddenly had to be somewhere. Thankfully, she understood and offered to buy me another chili dog before I left, as mine had literally become chilly, but by then, I was out of the chili dog mood and had careened into hankering for a guacamole burger from Macho Taco. Plus Macho Taco had excellent coffee. Which would explain my presence there.
I decided to call the FBI agent who’d been assigned to the Yost case, see what I could dig up. “Yes, is this Agent Carson?” I asked as I sat at a booth and piled jalapeños onto my guacamole burger.
“This is her,” the woman on the other end of the phone said.
“Oh, awesome.” I plopped the bun back on, licked my fingertips, then groped through my handbag for a notepad. Instead, I came up with a napkin that had some long-forgotten phone number on it. It would have to do. I flipped it over and clicked my pen. “My name is Charlotte Davidson and I’ve been hired by Teresa Yost’s family to look into her disappearance,” I said, lying a little.
“Well, then, you must be in contact with them. You probably know everything we do.” Her tone was sharp and brooked no argument, but there were few things I liked better than brooking arguments. I’d dealt with the FBI before, and not just those annoying Female Body Inspectors. I’d dealt with the real FBI on several occasions. Apparently, one of the prerequisites to becoming a federal agent was the inability to play well with others.
“Oh, I’m sure I do, about the case. I was actually wondering about Dr. Yost.”
“Really?” Her interest piqued. “Didn’t he hire you?”
“Well, yes and no. Let’s just say I haven’t accepted any money from him. I’m out to find Teresa Yost, not to make friends.”
“That’s good to hear,” she said, a smile in her voice. “But I’m still not sure—”
“Nathan Yost was arrested in college. While going to medical school, in fact. Surely, you’ve checked into that.”
After a long silence where I tried really hard not to ogle a transvestite in the most beautiful ruby stilettos I’d ever seen, she said, “It’s nothing you can’t find out on your own.”
“True, but this is faster. I’ll make a deal with you.”
“This should be good.” I heard the squeak of a chair as if she’d leaned back in it, possibly to put up her feet. “So?”
“I’ll call you the minute I find her.”
It was odd. She didn’t scoff, bark with laughter, grind her teeth in annoyance, at least not that I could hear. She just said, “And I get partial credit?”
“Of course.”
“Deal.”
Wow.
“The arrest in college was due to a complaint by an ex-girlfriend.”
Okay, way too easy.
“She said Yost became agitated when she tried to break up with him, told her one stick was all it would take. Her heart would stop in seconds, and no one would be able to trace it back to him. She got scared and moved in with her parents the next day.”
“I can see why.”
“They convinced her to press charges, but it was all hearsay. No concrete evidence, no other reports of abnormal behavior on file, so the DA’s hands were tied.”
“That’s really interesting. One stick and her heart would stop, huh?”
“Yeah, he probably learned something in medical school and decided to use it for evil instead of good.”
“Have you questioned her in light of the more recent developments?”
“Nope. But she still lives here, as far as I know. Guess I could give her a shout.”
“Do you mind if I talk to her?”
“Knock yourself out.”
Marveling at how smooth this whole conversation was going, I asked, “Can I get a name?”
After some rifling of papers, she said, “Yolanda Pope.”
“Wait, seriously?” I asked. “I went to school with a Yolanda Pope.”
“This particular Yolanda Pope is … Oh, here it is. She’d be twenty-nine now.”
“That’s about right. Yolanda was a couple grades ahead of me.”
“Then you two should have a lot to talk about. Saves me from swallowing a hefty dose of wasted time and energy.”
Okay, I really liked her, but I couldn’t help myself. FBI agents just weren’t this into sharing. “Can I ask what’s going on here?”
“Excuse me?”
“Why share?”
She chuckled. “You think I haven’t heard of you? About how you helped your father solve crimes when he was a detective? How you’re helping your uncle now?”
“You’ve heard of me?”
“I’ll take success where I can get it, Ms. Davidson. I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday.”
“I’m famous?”
“Though I did actually fall off a turnip truck when I was nine. Just make sure you put me on speed dial,” she said before hanging up.
Score! I had an in with the local FBI. This day was getting better and better. And the guacamole burger didn’t hurt either.
* * *
Cookie had yet to track down Teresa Yost’s sister. She lived in Albuquerque but apparently traveled a lot. Still, with Teresa missing, I couldn’t imagine she’d be out of town. I gave Cookie the name of Yolanda Pope with instructions to get whatever she could on her, then spent the rest of the afternoon interviewing friends of both the good doctor and his missing wife. And according to every single person I talked to, he was a saint. They loved him, said he and Teresa were perfect together. In fact, he was a little too perfect. Like he’d used some kind of glamour, cast a spell.
Maybe he was magic. Maybe he was supernatural. Reyes was the son of Satan. Maybe Nathan Yost was the son of Pancake, a three-legged pigmy goat Jimmy Hochhalter used to worship in the sixth grade. Pancake was a lesser known and often misunderstood deity. Most likely because he stank to high heaven. Jimmy didn’t smell too hot either, which didn’t help the goat’s rep.
I stopped off at Della’s Beauty Salon and stepped inside to the sound of an electronic bell. Either that or the ringing in my ears was back. Della was a friend of Teresa’s and one of the last people to see her the night she disappeared.
A woman with spiky hair and fantastic nails asked if she could help me.
“Absolutely, is Della in?”
“She’s in the back, honey. You have an appointment?” She glanced up at my hair and made a sympathetic face.
I ran a hand over my ponytail, suddenly self-conscious. “No, I’m a private investigator. I was wondering if I could ask her a few questions.”
She stammered in surprise. “Of-of course. Go on back,” she said, pointing a zebra-striped nail toward the back room.
“Thanks.” After another glance at her hair—I could do spikes—I stepped to the back and into a room lined with cabinets on one wall and shampoo sinks on another. A portly woman with a messy bob stood leaning over a sink, washing a client’s hair. I’d always loved the distinct smell of hair salons. The way the chemicals mingled with the scents of shampoos and perfume and the pounds of hair spray applied each day to clientele. I br
eathed it in, then walked forward.
“Are you Della?” I asked.
She turned a half smile on me. I could feel the weight of depression on her chest as she said, “I sure am. Did you bring the perm solution?”
“No, sorry,” I said, patting my pockets. “Must have left it at home. I’m a private investigator.” I pulled out my PI license to make it look official. “I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about Teresa.”
My statement surprised her and she nearly drowned the woman beneath the spray. “Oh, my goodness,” she said, turning off the water. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Romero. Are you okay?”
The woman sputtered and turned bright eyes on her. “What?”
“Are you okay?” she asked, really loudly.
“I can’t hear you. You got water in my ears, mi’ja.”
Della turned a patient smile on me. “She can’t hear me anyway. I’ve told the police everything I know.”
“I’ll get your statement from them as soon as I can. I was just wondering if you noticed any unusual behavior. Did Teresa seem preoccupied lately? Worried about anything?”
She shrugged as she towel-dried Mrs. Romero’s hair. The elderly woman had been swallowed by a massive turquoise cape, and only her shoes peeked out from underneath it. “We don’t go out that much anymore. Not like we used to. But she did seem a bit off that night,” Della said, helping Mrs. Romero to her feet, “nostalgic. Said if anything should happen to her, she would love us always.”
Sounded like Teresa knew her husband was up to something. “Did she give you any specifics?”
“No.” She shook her head. “She wouldn’t elaborate, but she seemed sad. I was surprised she’d called us. It had been so long, and then for her to be so depressed.” Her eyes glistened with sadness. “If we hadn’t gone out, none of this would have happened.”
“Why do you say that?” I followed her as she led Mrs. Romero to a salon chair.
“Because she never made it back to the house.”
That surprised me. “How do you know?”
“Nathan told me. He said the security system had never been disarmed. If she’d come in the front door, there would have been a record.”