“Yeah, and the horse I rode in on, I know. There, there.” She checks her watch. “Oops, almost missed the deadline.” She returns to the cruiser and resets the timer.
Brett releases a lungful of air and wiggles his hips to find a more comfortable position. Even without his weapons, his belt has enough pouches and compartments to make it awkward, especially lying on the ground in the paved alley.
“This is the point in the story where you’re supposed to ask me to explain everything,” she says once she’s back on the crate again. “Where I reveal all our secrets before the cavalry arrives to save the day.”
“I don’t read much,” he admits. “And you seem to have taken care of the cavalry.”
“You’re not happy with me.”
He can’t remember being madder in his life. Even his ex-wife never managed to get under his skin like this woman has in the past few hours. “No shit,” he says.
“Your very own femme fatale.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“I can see the news tomorrow. Maybe they’ll come up with a nickname for me, like the Ice Princess, in honor of all the diamonds we’re stealing. That would be a good one. Feel free to use it.”
“How many diamonds are we talking about? Out of curiosity.”
“Let’s just say I’ll never have to work retail again. Are those dollar signs I see in your eyes? Looking for a cut?”
He turns his head away. More than anything, he hates the way she seems intent on taunting him. On humiliating him. It can’t be personal, because she couldn’t have known in advance that he’d be assigned to her for the afternoon. Unless it’s because of the way he acted toward her during the shift . . .
“I went out of my way to be nice to you,” he says. Even to his own ears, his voice sounds bitter and petulant.
“Yes, you did,” she says. “You were very sweet.”
Her phone rings again. She looks around the alley. After a car passes, she says, “All clear.” A moment later, her accomplices emerge from the rear of the store. They stay in the shadows, so he never gets a good look at them other than to note that one is about five-six, a hundred fifty pounds, and the other is closer to six feet, two hundred pounds. Caucasian, he thinks, but can’t be sure. He files these details away for later, but he knows he couldn’t pick them out of a lineup or from mug shots.
The black pouch the taller man tosses to Meredith seems absurdly small. It has golden tie cords at the neck. From the way she presses her face against it, he figures it’s made of velvet or satin. She tugs the neck open and sticks her hand inside, allowing the contents to filter through her fingers. Then she reseals the bag and tosses it back to the tall man.
After resetting the dispatch timer one last time, Meredith kneels on the ground beside Brett. “If we had a little longer, I’d show you,” she says. “So you’d understand.”
He doesn’t want to look at her, but he knows this is probably the last time he’ll see her, and he wants to remember her this way, framed in the amber light of a nearby streetlight, her features distorted by shadows.
“And you would,” she continues. “One glance, and they’d steal your heart away.”
He shakes his head, but he wonders if what she says is true. Look how easily she stole his heart.
She plucks the keys to his handcuffs from his front pants pocket. The brief contact is shockingly intimate and unexpectedly arousing. She grins. He knows that she sensed his reaction, but she says nothing.
“I’ll leave these over here,” she says, placing the keys on the ground in front of the trash bins. “Your gun and everything else are on the front seat. We have no need for them where we’re going, and I know how much paperwork you’d have to fill out if you lost your gun.” She winks at him. “You see, I’ve done my research. Maybe I will write a novel someday.”
The two men take the front seat of their car. After Meredith opens the rear door, she watches him for a moment. He strains his neck to look up at her, to meet her gaze.
“Tonight you’ll go home in the same condition as when you arrived at work. Maybe even a little better. It’s up to you.”
With that, she slides into the car and closes the door. A moment later, they’re gone, blending into the Saturday night traffic on Westheimer.
Better? he wonders. What did she mean by that? He struggles to his feet, lurches toward the trash cans on numb legs, kneels, and picks up the handcuff key. Fumbling blindly behind his back, he finally manages to insert the key into the lock, and his hands are free. The next step is obvious but degrading. In succinct, professional language, he describes his location and the vehicle and its occupants to his dispatcher. He even has the license number to give them.
A few minutes later, the first cruiser arrives on the scene. The Investigative Division isn’t far behind. They seal off the alley with crime-scene tape and make their way inside the jewelry store. Brett tells his story to one detective and again a few minutes later to another. His vehicle is part of the crime scene, so he can’t touch it. He rocks his weight from foot to foot and pulls out his cell phone but can’t think who to call. Which friend to share his humiliation with.
He puts the phone away and thrusts his hands into his pockets. Something sharp digs into the back of his right hand. It doesn’t feel like his handcuff key. He gets up and strolls to the end of the alley, which is cordoned off with a yellow ribbon of crime-scene tape.
After ascertaining that no one is paying attention to him, he pulls the item from his pocket. It gleams in the yellow streetlight, a little piece of carbon as cold as fire and as hard as the heart of the woman who placed it there.
What a Wonderful World
By Paul Guyot
In jazz I listen for her.
In rain.
Her laughter sends me to sleep at night and is the sound that wakes me in the morning.
Her name is Kayla Lightfoot. I say is because even though she’s dead, her name hasn’t changed.
THREE DAYS INTO a New Year, I was working the dark — the shift from six p.m. to six a.m. The golfers, Trevino and Woods, had caught a bunny in an apartment building at Broadway and Dickson. Some hopper caught the hiv — the HIV virus — and decided to hang himself instead of waiting for the disease to take him. Don’t hear much about the virus anymore, the celebrities who schooled the country on it have long moved on to their next cause, but it’s still out there, killing people by the thousands, mostly hoppers — heroin addicts — sharing needles, exchanging sex for dope, etc.
A bunny was what we called a TGC, for TV Guide Crossword, and before that, a slam dunk. I can’t remember how or why we started calling them bunnies, but for the past year or two, any homicide that could be solved at the scene — a frozen homeless guy, a hopper hanging himself — was a bunny. Maybe the TV Guide Crosswords had gotten tougher.
So with the golfers out, I was next up. I say I instead of we because my partner at the time, Roland Park, was out with the flu. Every year, Roland gets a flu shot sometime in November, and within a month or so, he’s in bed with the flu. I’ve never had a flu shot in my life and can count on one hand the times I’ve had the bug.
The call came in at just after one a.m. I was finishing up some pork fried rice from Mr. Lu’s I’d found in the Homicide fridge — probably about the worst Chinese food in town, maybe even the Midwest. But it was the middle of the night, it was cold, and I was hungry.
Female DB. Delmar and Jefferson.
Usually it’s an address. This simply said Delmar and Jefferson. A corner I knew well.
A couple of months before, just before Thanksgiving, I had been at an insurance place on Jefferson getting one of those umbrella policies for my home and car. Roland had dropped me off — I was going to walk to the office. I stepped outside the State Farm doors and found it had started to rain while I was signing papers and staring at fake wood paneling. I glanced around, hoping Roland had seen the rain and doubled back. Nope. It had been my idea to walk, and he was goi
ng to let me walk.
I pulled up the collar of my London Fog coat, started to cross Jefferson, heading for Clark, when something — to this day I don’t know what — made me look north up Jefferson. There was a hot-dog cart on the corner of Jefferson and Delmar, the escaping steam mixed with the rain giving the image a surreal glow. And there, in the center of this gray, rainy, ethereal scene, was a girl.
Spinning.
Her arms were outstretched, her head was back, looking up into the rain, and she was spinning.
I’d been a cop for sixteen years, a Homicide detective for nine. I’d seen my share of craziness, and it would usually take a helluva lot more than spinning in the rain to blip my radar. But I suddenly found myself turning ninety degrees and walking up Jefferson through the rain.
As I neared the cart and the smell of bratwurst and onions, I realized that the girl — a rain-soaked blond bob, high cheeks, soft lips with a slight overbite — was not a customer but the proprietor of this cart.
She stopped spinning and said, “Hey, you,” like we’d known each other for years. Looked to be in her early twenties but had the effervescent spirit of a toddler. I responded to her greeting with an eye blink, stunned silent by I don’t know what. The friendliness so uncharacteristic of downtown? The brazen disregard for warmth or dryness?
She said, “Should’ve grabbed you an umbrella policy while you were in there, huh?” and then she laughed.
With her eyes.
A throaty chuckle followed a perfect smile, but it was her eyes that laughed. Blue eyes. Light blue. People call it ice blue, though I’ve never seen ice that color.
“Excuse me?” I managed, now wondering if she’d been in the insurance office and somehow my great detective skills had missed her.
She laughed and said, “You came out of the State Farm place down there, right? It looked like you did. I was making a joke. Insurance places sell umbrella policies, and you’re out here without an umbrella. Hello? Is this thing on?” And there was the laugh again.
“Oh. Yeah. Right,” I said. “Actually, I did get an umbrella policy, but they forgot to give me the umbrella.” I was so witty.
“Bastards,” she said, and her eyes laughed, lighting up the gray day.
“Dog lover?” she asked next.
She must have seen the confusion on my face because then she added, “I got dogs, brats, and Polish sausage. You look like a dog lover.”
“Yeah. A dog would be great,” I said, despite the fact that Roland Park and I had devoured a full breakfast not more than an hour before.
Her tongs grabbed a juicy link and flipped it end over end into a bun. She Grouchoed her eyebrows up and down, mocking her own talent with the tongs.
“You must be a professional” was the wittiest thing I could come up with.
“Not anymore,” she said without missing a beat. “I went pro for a few years, but the hotels and groupies took their toll. I got back my amateur status last spring. Now I just do it for the love.”
I took the hot dog and a coffee, paid her, and, as she handed over my change, managed, “So you like to spin in the rain.”
“Don’t you?” she asked, then proceeded to give me a three-hundred-sixty-degree turn. “Spinning is good for the soul. Especially when it rains. Come on, try it.”
I watched her throw her head back and let the sky shower down on her flawless face, eyes wide open.
“Shouldn’t you close your eyes when you do that?”
“I never close my eyes,” she said. “I don’t want to miss anything.”
I realized — she wasn’t crazy. She was happy.
“I think my spinning days are over.”
“Why?” she asked, still turning circles.
“Too old.”
“Oh, yeah. I’m too old too. I’ve been too old for years. Sucks, doesn’t it?”
“How old are you?” I asked, sure I was about to be labeled a dirty old man.
“Nineteen. You?”
“More than nineteen.”
“Ah, you’re like my aunt. Major hang-up about her age.”
“Forty-two,” I confessed.
She stopped spinning and said, “Holy crap!” Then her eyes, her whole body, laughed. “Just kidding. Forty-two isn’t old. No age is old unless you feel old.”
“I feel pretty old sometimes.”
“You should spin more.”
My cell phone rang. It was Roland, asking me if I wanted him to come and get me. I said no, told him I was on my way in.
“Boss want you back at work?” she asked.
“No, my partner.”
She looked me up and down, laughed, and said, “Must be a cop. If you were a lawyer, you’d have an umbrella.”
I stuck out my hand and said, “Jim Dandridge. Detective.”
“Kayla Lightfoot. Spinning dog flipper of Delmar and Jefferson.”
My hand covered hers. I’m a little over six feet and a lot over two hundred pounds. She was maybe five-two or three and barely over a hundred pounds, including the rain. I let go of her hand, and there was a moment — couldn’t have been more than a second or two — where I just stared into those laughing eyes.
The rain fell harder, and she said, “Your dog’s getting wet. And I don’t mean that the way it sounds.” She laughed, then turned to a pair of city workers who had walked up to her cart.
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I probably ate about six hot dogs a week. Kayla Lightfoot was always there, smiling, spinning, and laughing. She told me about her love of jazz — introduced to her by her aunt — and her favorites, Cannonball Adderley and Louis Armstrong. She asked my opinion as a cop about her theory that if more people listened to the Cannonball Adderley Quintet and Louis Armstrong, there would be less crime. I agreed.
“So, if you like Cannonball, you must like Miles and Coltrane.”
“Who?”
“You know Cannonball Adderley, but you don’t know who Miles Davis is?”
It was the only time I’d ever seen the light go out of her eyes. But as quickly as it went out, the light reappeared, and she was going on and on about Louis Armstrong and his amazing voice, and how, if you really looked around, it is a wonderful world.
IT WAS RAINING as I drove up Clark to Jefferson. Typical St. Louis January — twenty degrees and snow last week, forty-five and rain this. I saw the familiar hot-dog cart as I climbed out of my Impala. The rain was the same drizzling rain like the day I’d met her, but there was no steam coming from the cart. I remembered her telling me that, even though most vendors shut down after dark, she stays out until ten or later because “You never know when someone’s been working late, had no time to eat, and just needs a dog.”
Kayla Lightfoot’s arms were outstretched like I’d seen so many times. Her face was again looking straight up into the rain. But she wasn’t spinning.
And her eyes weren’t laughing.
Her body was sprawled next to the cart, half in, half out of the street. Her legs were up on the sidewalk, her torso hanging across the curb, her head and shoulders on the asphalt of Delmar Boulevard. I don’t know how long I stared at her. Eventually, one of the two patrol officers that were there put his hand on my arm and asked if I was okay.
“Sure,” I told him, not taking my eyes off Kayla’s open, lifeless light-blue eyes. “Yeah, sure.”
“We haven’t checked for ID,” he said. “Didn’t want to touch the body, fuck up your crime scene.”
“Her name’s Kayla Lightfoot,” I said. I knelt down and looked at what appeared to be a fairly deep stab wound, running about four or five inches up the right side of her abdomen. “Where’s all the blood?”
I must have said it out loud because the patrolman offered, “Probably washed down the gutter there. You know, on account of the rain.”
I sprang up. “I want a fucking crime-scene perimeter. From the insurance office down on Jefferson all the way to there. Now!”
The patrolmen shared a glance and moved off. I look
ed back down at Kayla. She was wearing those cargo-type pants she favored — the ones that sit so low on the hips, you think they can’t possibly stay on. She had on a white turtleneck — same one she’d worn four days ago — but where was her jacket?
I looked around the cart. Nothing. She always had that thing on. Said it was from . . . where? Eddie Bauer? L.L.Bean? One of those types of places. It was lavender. Quilted. Hooded, with a strip of fake white fur around the edge. Said her aunt gave it to her. My detective mind kicked in. Was she killed for the jacket? A homeless person, maybe.
I looked up and down Jefferson, then Delmar. Visibility was lousy because of the rain. Was there a homeless person wearing Kayla’s jacket right now? Sitting in some doorway, all warm and cozy, using the rain to wash off their knife blade?
I yelled at the patrolmen to call in more officers. I called the Homicide Squad and said I needed every available body. I wanted the area saturated with cops. Roust every homeless person they can find. Question anyone and everyone within a five-mile radius.
It would be days before I realized how unprofessional and just plain ridiculous I had appeared at the scene.
My lieutenant was a tall, wiry black man named Arthur Kincaid. He had twenty-four years in, the last three as one of the two lieutenants in Homicide. He was a good loot. Knew how to balance the cop work with the administrative and political bullshit that goes with wearing a bar on your collar. He had the respect of his men and the confidence of the brass. Lieutenant Kincaid showed up at the scene around four thirty.
He looked at the huge perimeter that I’d had patrol tape off. He took in the number of radio cars — five — parked in the area. He knew I had called Homicide and requested more men because he was the one who had told me no. He had sent Trevino and Woods to help me when they returned from their bunny — around three — and now he was here, wanting to know just what the hell all the fuss was about.
“She worked this hot-dog cart,” I told Kincaid. “Somebody gutted her for no reason.”