I visualized Artie’s disapproving eyes. “Yeah, that sounds risky enough. That would qualify.”
“How long since you’ve seen her?”
“Ten, twelve minutes.”
We were both staring at the house. My eyes were plastered on the window wells that led to the basement. That’s where I figured they’d be, Holly and Sterling. In some room down there. For some reason I decided that it was the laundry room. An image of Holly propped up on the dryer began to develop in my consciousness until I shooed it away like some aggravating insect.
But like a yellowjacket in late summer, it came right back.
I was ready to move, to go inside the house, but I wanted Carmen to arrive at the same conclusion herself. While I waited for her to come around, I hit a speed-dial number on my phone. Lucy. “Hey, Luce. I just have a second. The feds ever find Brian Miles?… No?… Thanks… Yeah, fine. Seriously. I’ll call you in a bit.” I hung up. “Miles is still missing.”
Carmen nodded as though she expected the news. “You think they’re together? Sterling and Miles?”
“Can’t rule it out.”
She said, “What about the car? Maybe they’re doing it in the car. Have you checked the garage?” She nodded at the wall I was leaning against.
I felt stupid. I was so focused on the basement that I hadn’t even considered the detached garage. And no, I hadn’t checked the garage. I shook my head in response to Carmen’s question, suddenly not wanting to risk having my voice carry through the bricks.
“Shall we?” she whispered.
I stood. My balance problems were gone. My headache wasn’t.
Carmen hopped the three-foot fence as though it were the height of a curb. I stepped over using a more conventional scissors maneuver. Carmen’s revolver was in her hand when she got to the side door of the garage. I pulled my gun, too.
I don’t like my handgun. Some cops do. Some don’t. I’ve never felt right with the damn thing in my hand. I’m a pretty good shot; that’s not it. It’s something more intrinsic that I’ve never understood. I’m more comfortable with a rifle or a shotgun pressed against my shoulder.
Carmen, on the other hand, held her Smith amp; Wesson with the comfort of a good cook holding her favorite knife over an onion. No ambivalence there at all.
Holly’s vehicle was a late-nineties GM sedan. Through the hazy glass pane in the side door, I couldn’t have identified whether it was a Pontiac or a Chevy or an Olds if my life depended on it. I could tell that it didn’t seem to be moving-moving, as in rocking side to side.
Carmen turned the doorknob and entered the narrow garage in a single fluid motion that reminded me of a ballroom dance move. I was right behind her. Despite my adrenaline surge, I was thinking that I wouldn’t want to be screwing in that car and have us burst into the garage with our guns drawn.
It could change a person’s view of sex forever.
We covered the perimeter of the little rectangular space and the interior of the car in seconds and came to the same conclusion at the exact same time: The garage wasn’t Holly’s love nest.
“Okay,” Carmen said. “I’m convinced. Let’s go ruin a lot of people’s Thanksgiving supper.”
SIXTY-THREE
As an actress Adrienne was a little over the top. I shouldn’t have been surprised.
“Thanks for coming in to see me on Thanksgiving,” she began. “I know it’s a terrible inconvenience. The reason I needed to see you is that… I did something last week that… well… I can’t get off my mind.”
“I assumed it was important for you to have come all the way in from Denver.” I realized my role in this drama was going to be entirely ad-libbed. And with Adrienne as the person responsible for hitting the ball over the net for me to return, I knew I was going to need to stay on my toes.
“I’m having trouble living with it, with what I did. And I don’t know exactly what I should do next.”
“Yes?”
If Jim Zebid was sitting outside listening, he was-thus far-hearing a pretty convincing presentation. If he was somehow watching, however, he wouldn’t believe a word of it. When she wasn’t choking down some laughter, Adrienne was leaning over, talking into the couch pillow like Maxwell Smart with his shoe phone.
“I was doing a vasectomy on Tuesday in my Cherry Creek office-I do a thousand of them, they’re no big deal. First a little poke, a little cut, snip-snip, burn-burn-”
Burn-burn?
“-stitch-stitch.”
“Stitch-stitch” I understood just fine. I was still stuck on “burn-burn.”
“Burn-burn?” I asked. I shouldn’t have asked-it wasn’t germane to the trap I was setting-but I really wanted to know.
“Cautery,” she explained with a frown.
“Cautery,” I repeated. A rapid personal inventory didn’t reveal any pieces in that vicinity that I would be eager to have fried during the “burn-burn” segment of her operation.
Adrienne went on. “During the procedure I cut one of the guy’s nerves.”
“You cut a nerve?”
“By accident, just after the first little cut. One of my snips? My hand slipped a little.”
“Your hand slipped during a snip?”
“Are you just going to repeat everything I say? Is that all you’re planning to do? I say ‘my hand slipped,’ and you add a question mark? I could go talk into a tape recorder and just play it back and add my own question marks, save myself a lot of money.”
I glared at her. My nonverbal admonishment didn’t faze her, though; she was having a great time.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“He doesn’t know. I didn’t tell him. How the hell would he know? You think guys watch while I do vasectomies on them? There are some things a guy likes to see done to his genitals, but that isn’t one of them. You’re going to have to trust me on this.”
I almost said,“You didn’t tell him?”but thought that another repetition might be too much provocation for Adrienne to ignore. Instead, I said, “It was an important nerve?”
That question cracked her up. She took five seconds to compose herself before she was able to say “Down there? They’re all pretty important. That’s what I hear, anyway.”
It was my turn to swallow laughter.
“Is he going to be… impotent?”
“It’s possible.”
“Likely?”
“Maybe likely.” She rolled her eyes.
“Won’t he know you did it?”
“I’m sure he’ll suspect I had something to do with it. But it’ll be hard for him to prove. He’s had trouble raising the flag before. And he knew the risks going in.”
Raising the flag?
She ruffled a piece of paper. “You know what this is?”
I did, of course, but I said, “No.”
“His phone number. I know I should call him. That’s what I should do. That would be the right thing. To let him know what happened. But then the next thing I know I’ll be getting served some stack of incomprehensible papers by some damn bloodsucking lawyer who’ll make one little mistake seem like the assassination of King Ferdinand.”
That last line-the World War I allusion-was pure ad lib. It was definitely not in the script. Not even close. I was tempted to ask Adrienne to defend Francis Ferdinand’s posthumous promotion from archduke to king, but restraint was indicated and discretion ruled.
She leaned directly over the pillow and made a great show of ripping the paper into shreds.
“So you’ve decided not to call him?” I asked. That line was in the script.
“I’ve been staring at that number for two days. I have it memorized.” That’s when she recited the phone number in a lovely, melodic little singsong. She couldn’t have delivered the line any better if she’d rehearsed it for days.