“-Well, you call me before I go to sleep so I don’t worry. It is still eight o’clock, well, four minutes after. Wait. Wait a minute. I’ve got five after on my watch.”
I could hear she had put her hand over the phone receiver to yell, “Michael, what time do you have?” Daddy was probably asleep, so she took her hand away and said, “I go to sleep at nine sharp, Pauline.”
As if I didn’t know that. Creature of habit Stella Sokol had gone to bed at nine sharp and woke up at six sharp my entire life. I only hoped that as a baby, I woke her up a few times during the night.
Mentally I chastised myself and stuck my finger on the stop button-
“Meet me at our spot at ten…”
Shoot! I stopped the message before it finished, but knew full well whose voice that was and where our spot was.
Ah…
As I’d stripped off my beach outfit to don dark clothes, I knew Jagger had called to work on the case. My case. Our case, as it so often became. I appropriately had stuck on “investigating” clothing, along with stuffing my pockets with work tools like gloves, my camera beeper and a tissue (okay, that was mother induced, like don’t leave home without going to the bathroom first or wearing clean undies).
Once dressed, out the door and into my car, I pulled into the Dunkin Donuts parking lot and into a space near the back. Soon Jagger’s SUV drove up beside me. Without a word I got out and hopped into his car, and we were off without any explanations needed.
Before long, we had come to the intersection where TLC Land and Air was located. My heart started to race in anticipation of finding something, some clue, no matter how tiny, that would jump-start this case.
Because right now we had nothing.
One murder, one attempted murder and medical insurance fraud being committed. The only guarantees so far.
I looked at Jagger. “Anything on Pansy?”
He parked on a nearby side street and said, “She’s in a coma.”
“Damn. I was afraid of that. Her body must be in shock after the blood loss and trauma of surgery.”
He looked at me, and I ignored how damn good he looked. “What are the chances she’ll pull out of it?”
“Geez, your guess is as good as mine.”
“I’m not guessing, Sherlock. I’m asking your medical opinion.”
My shoulders stiffened. “I know that, Jagger. What I meant was that no one can really say. I doubt even the surgeon would give you decent odds.” With that, I got out and stood on the sidewalk.
He followed me and took my arm to lead me toward our destination. “Someone’s a little testy tonight.”
I pulled my arm free. How I wanted to shout something about Airbrush Lady, but was too smart to say anything. “All’s fair in love and war” came to mind, and then I told myself we were not lovers, but coworkers. So I said, “Long day. Sorry.”
He nodded, took my arm again and before I knew it, we were at the back door of the building where Pansy lived. The Tudor house was built amongst the other buildings as if it had been there first and everything else sprung up around it.
“B and E?” I whispered.
“Don’t touch anything. Don’t take anything,” Jagger said as he placed something in the lock and fiddled with it. In a few moments it popped open, he turned the handle, looked over my shoulder and waved me through the open door.
Talk about eerie. I felt as if Pansy and Payne were standing in the hallway looking at us.
Something touched my face! I started to scream but found a gloved hand over my mouth. I swung around and found Jagger looking me in the eye. “Cobweb,” he whispered. “And no great surprise,” he added as he shined his flashlight across the foyer.
It looked like something out of The Munsters. Dark, dank, and medieval in appearance, the place looked like a Tudor house, all right-only one that was centuries old and not cleaned since the day it was built.
“Geez,” I mumbled after Jagger took his hand away.
“I’ll say. But not surprising.”
I was surprised, I thought as we made our way into the living room-which was as colorful as Payne’s office, including fifties décor. “I love that old television,” I said, looking at a pine-console TV that had to be very old. “These two were really nuts. His office taste, yet her living room. Let’s go see the kitchen.”
No wonder we’d all come in a different way for Pansy’s after-memorial-service gig.
I followed Jagger down a dark hallway to a swinging door. He held it open so it wouldn’t swing back and smack me in the face (or maybe so it wouldn’t swing back and make any noise) and I walked in. “Wow.”
The kitchen looked like Mother Goose had decorated it. Country/nursery rhyme was an understatement. Pots and pans hung from the ceiling. Braided rugs covered the hardwood floors and dried flowers hung from every nook and cranny possible. And if I had a nickel for every duck, goose and chicken in the room, I could quit my job.
We could only shake our heads. How sweet! Simultaneous head shaking.
Usually we’d get right down to the business of snooping, but both of us had our curiosities so piqued that we made a tour of this “fun house” before starting.
The bathrooms were decorated like the ocean, complete with real water inside the windows, which bubbled constantly (I felt a bit seasick). Upstairs, the master bedroom was done in monochromatic black and red this time. If it weren’t for the rest of the house, I would have thought Pansy had no imagination until Jagger opened the door to a spare bedroom.
Junglemania.
The entire room was done in animal prints, including a bear rug. I could only whisper, “Goldie would kill for this place,” and then caught myself. “Oops. Bad choice of words.”
“Yeah,” Jagger said, but I noticed he was as intrigued with the place as I was and nearly speechless too. A real rarity. “We need to get going,” he warned once he obviously came to his senses.
I followed him down to the living room, where he motioned for me to start looking on one side of the room. “Gloves on?”
I curled my lips at him and held my gloved hands up, wiggled my fingers and started to put all of them down except the middle one-then caught myself and made a fist instead.
“Good girl, Sherlock.”
I smiled despite myself and started to open drawers-not even sure what the hell I was looking for-but knowing I’d realize it when I saw it.
After several minutes of snooping, we came up cold and headed to the other rooms. Despite the very interesting objects we’d found, including a horse’s bridle and whip in her bedroom-neither of us wanted to go there-and scented soaps in male fragrances in the bathroom, we ended up in the hot African-style spare bedroom. And hot it was.
My face burned each time Jagger or I discovered some sexual device. That was what I termed everything we found. H…O…T.
Pansy was no wallflower. That was for sure.
Jagger stood in the center of the sexual jungle while I tried not to blush. He shook his head, which looked like a pissed expression in my book. Maybe he was embarrassed with all the “toys” we’d found.
Then again, this was Jagger.
If anyone would come out of this embarrassed, it would be me.
I started to walk toward him and tripped over a “toy” on the floor. No way was I even going to imagine how that thing worked. However, on the way to falling, I reached out and grabbed onto a handle on the wall.
A vine-covered, fur-covered (black leopard, I assumed) swing came out of the ceiling and smacked Jagger right in the back.
“Oh!” I shouted, steadying myself.
“Damn it,” Jagger mumbled, pushed the swing to the side and went to the wall where he jiggled with the handle until the thing disappeared back into the ceiling like some snake retreating into a hole.