Like Pavlov’s dog salivating at the sound of a bell, I automatically raised my head at the fragrance of fried hog fat. I am convinced that heaven is a place where crisp bacon is served around the clock, anytime you want it, and that it won’t clog your arteries or go to your hips. I’ll bet angels sit around eating BLTs all day long. Probably with fries. Gives me something to look forward to.
Guidry gave me a sympathetic look and moved a couple rigid strips to my plate. I didn’t offer any protest. After the last few days I’d had, I damn well deserved bacon.
We ate silently for a while, me taking mincing bites of my bacon to make it last longer, and Guidry chomping down half a slice at a bite. I watched him chew. His lower lip had a teensy sheen of fat on it from the bacon. It occurred to me that I had never kissed a man who’d just taken a bite of bacon.
He said, “Tell me again how you came to overhear Martin Freuland threaten Laura Halston.”
The women in Guidry’s world probably never ate bacon. Probably didn’t eat any fat at all. Skinny anorexic bitches.
I said, “You know that little turtle I found?”
He shook his head, and it seemed to me that he wanted to roll his eyes.
“Well, I found this little box turtle, and I put her by a dock on Fish Hawk Lagoon. While I was there, Laura and that man came walking by on the jogging trail. I could see them through the hedge, but they didn’t see me. The man was telling her that he’d see to it that she paid for what she’d done. He said it was the worst thing she’d ever pulled. Then he said, ‘You owe me.’ She gave him the finger and walked off. He was furious. Got in his car and hauled off.”
He said, “You know what he was talking about?”
“At the time, I thought he was her husband and that he was talking about how she’d left him. Now that I know he was her boss, I have no idea. Her sister says she stole from him.”
Judy skidded to a stop just then and refilled our cups. She looked at the bacon crumbs on my plate, pressed her lips together to keep from saying anything, and went off to other customers.
Guidry said, “You talked to the sister?”
“She invited herself into the Richards’ house last night. She said some nasty things about Laura, what a liar she was, how she had always been a slut and always used men. She also said their father had an incestuous relationship with Laura from the time she was about nine years old. She claims Laura seduced him, which proves Celeste has the mind of a sewer rat. She also said somebody had told her that Laura was a narcissist. That’s really why I went to see Reba Chandler. I wasn’t sure what a narcissist was.”
His gray eyes studied me for a moment. “Are we still on for Saturday night?”
Surprised, I said, “Sure.”
“You get something different done to your hair?”
I touched it. “No.”
He grinned, as if he found me amusing. His fingertips beat a drumbeat on the table, and then he stood up and put money down. “See you later.”
I watched him go and tried to ignore the racket my pulse was making in my ears.
I could understand Guidry’s father wanting him to join his law firm, but Guidry was more cut out to investigate crime than handle legal affairs. Ethan Crane, on the other hand, was great at legal problems but would probably suck at being a homicide investigator. I wondered if Guidry’s father was more like Ethan than like Guidry. I wondered if Guidry’s father would like me, which was really stupid because I’d probably never even meet the man. I mean, why would I?
Judy was beside me almost before he’d got out the front door. “You and that hunky detective got something going?”
“He’s not hunky, and we don’t.”
“Honey, if he’s not hunky, I’m the Queen of Egypt. So what was he doing here?”
“Just wanted to ask me about a case he’s working on.”
“Runaway?”
“Maybe.”
“Poor kids, they don’t know what they’re getting into when they leave home.”
Judy walked away with her coffeepot, looking so sad that I wondered if she spoke from experience.
I slid out of the booth and headed for a post-coffee trip to the ladies’ room, where Tanisha was lathering her plump hands. I pulled out a brown paper towel from the dispenser.
“Great breakfast, Tanisha. Thanks.”
Tanisha said, “I noticed you was with a man this morning. Nice-looking too. ’Course, how a man looks and how a man acts is two different things.”
She shook water from her fingertips, and I handed her the paper towel. She looked sternly at me while she dried her hands.
“You know how to tell what a man’s really like? You watch how he handles his package. If he’s always touching it, like he’s gotta make sure it’s still there since the last time he checked, then you know he thinks he’s got God between his legs. He’ll expect you to get down on your knees to it too. If you don’t, hoo-ha, he’ll get all hurt like you took the Lord’s name in vain. You don’t want a man like that.”
She tossed the wadded paper towel in the basket.
“You want a man that lets his stuff ride easy, acts like he cares more about your stuff than his own. ’Course he don’t, ’cause he’s a man, but at least he’s smart enough to act like he does.” She looked intently at me. “I’m just telling you this ’cause I know you don’t have no mama. A girl’s gotta have somebody warn her about things like that.”
“I appreciate that, Tanisha.”
Her face creased in a deep dimpled smile. “That man you was with this morning, he’s got a big tidy package, but I never seen him touch it once. I was you, I’d keep him around.”
Using her big behind to bump open the restroom door, she left me staring after her.
The whimper I made sounded a lot like Mazie’s sounds of stress.
26
Back in the Bronco, I sat a minute to get my act together, then pulled out my cell and made the call to Hal that I should have made a long time ago. Then I called Pete and told him what I wanted him to do. When I put the phone back in my pocket, I felt as if a thousand-pound load had been lifted from my shoulders.
I was halfway to Fish Hawk Lagoon when I remembered that I hadn’t told Guidry about meeting Frederick Vaught.
At Mazie’s house, I parked in the driveway and looked toward Laura’s house. No cars were in her driveway, and I didn’t see any sign of Celeste. Maybe she had got on her broom and returned to Dallas.
Before I went inside, I called Guidry on my cell. My fist did a victory pump in the air when I got his voice mail. I love voice mail. I didn’t want to talk to him, I just wanted to give him information.
I said, “I forgot to tell you that Frederick Vaught accosted me this morning at the Sea Breeze. I came out to run with Billy Elliot, and Vaught popped out from behind a bush. He played the big bad scary monster, told me to stop asking questions about him, said I’d besmirched his good name. Like he still has a good name. He didn’t threaten me or anything, but I thought you should know.”
Having done my duty, I clicked off and slid out of the Bronco.
A dark sedan slowly passed in the street, the driver looking uncertainly toward Mazie’s house as if he didn’t recognize it. He may not have known for sure which house he was looking for, but I knew for sure who he was—the big muscled man who wore power like a suit, the man I’d thought was Laura’s husband, the man I’d seen her with on the jogging path. The man who may have killed her.
He pulled into Laura’s driveway, the car disappearing behind the trees, and I stood staring at the space he’d left. I thought about the locksmith’s truck that had been at the house the night before. Ordinarily, if locks are changed following a crime, the new keys are immediately put into the hands of the home owner or a member of the owner’s family. But Celeste had left while the locksmith’s truck had still been in the driveway the night before, and unless she’d returned she hadn’t got the keys.