Sex, Murder And A Double Latte

“Sophie, I know you just stopped in briefly to say hello, and I wouldn’t want to keep you….” Dena took her attention away from the condoms long enough to stop an impending conversation about the existence of Rudolph.

Jason didn’t seem the least bit perturbed. It probably wasn’t a stretch that he had met up with other people who had difficulty accepting his creature-of-the-night theory. “Okay, I’ll get going. Dena, I’ll see you later, and Jason…it’s been interesting. Have a good lunch—or are you on a strictly liquid diet?”

“For now I’ll settle for sucking the juice out of a red grapefruit.”

He could laugh at himself. That was good. Dena rewarded him with a light kiss and then turned her triumphant smile on me. “I’ll see you later, Sophie. Oh, I almost forgot, I have to do inventory Sunday. Can we move movie night to Monday? I’ve already cleared it with Mary Ann.”

“No problemo, I’ll see you Monday.” I turned to leave.

“Hey, Sophie,” Jason called after me.

“Yeah?”

“You’d make an awesome vampire. Exotic features with supernaturally white skin…that would be cool.”

“Thanks, but I’m kind of digging the whole mortal thing right now. I’ll see you two later.”

I left the store and looked both ways down the sidewalk as I tried to remember where, exactly, I had parked. There was a man sporting a scarred face and a rather obtrusive gold chain peeking into the store window, clearly hesitant to enter.

“You should go in, it’s a good store,” I assured him.

Glazed eyes stared silently back at me. He used his finger to pick some food out of his teeth. Lovely. That was the problem with owning a sex shop. Most of Dena’s customers were fairly respectable, but at least once a day she had to deal with some heroin-loving scumbag looking for a public place to whack off. I considered going back in and warning Dena, but the man turned around and wandered off before I had a chance. Gross, but harmless. I left to find my car. If he did go back, Dena could handle it. After all, she was now being backed up by the power of the living dead.

By the next morning I was physically in much better shape than I had been twenty-four hours previous, but I was also intensely anxious and confused. I approached the mirror and turned from side to side, then turned my back to it and tried to do some kind of contortionist move with my neck so I could review every angle. In a half hour Anatoly would come to pick me up and I had just changed clothes for the eighth time. I was now wearing black boots, jeans, a black V-neck shirt and a leather jacket. “I don’t know, maybe this neckline is a little too low,” I mumbled to myself. I struck a couple of poses to ensure that my boobs would be contained in any position I might need to assume. “What do you think, Mr. Katz? Does it look like I’m trying too hard?”

Mr. Katz was busy making a nest out of a discarded wool sweater. I picked up the fitted gray turtleneck that I had tried on three tops earlier. “But what if he wants to kiss my neck?” Mr. Katz licked his fur suggestively. “I didn’t say I’d let him kiss my neck, but it would be closed minded of me to completely eliminate the possibility.” I looked in the mirror again. This was just going to have to do. My hair couldn’t take another shirt change.

There was a knock at the door. Mr. Katz lifted his head in alarm.

What kind of jerk shows up a half hour early for a first date? I didn’t even have my makeup on yet. I should have trusted my first impression of him. I had a date with the last living caveman.

The knock came again.

“All right, I’m coming.” I gave Mr. Katz a “why me?” look and headed for the entryway. “Which one of my idiot neighbors let you into the building anyway?” I asked before throwing open the door.

“Oops.” It was one of my idiot neighbors.

“Sophie, I didn’t know you had such a high opinion of us.” Theresa Conley wasn’t going to let that one slide. But then again, letting things slide wasn’t really her forte.

“I honestly didn’t mean it, Theresa. You just caught me at a bad time. You see, I was just talking to my cat and… You know what? Never mind. Fresh beginning. Hello, Theresa, what can I do for you?”

Theresa sucked in her cheeks in a manner that made me think of the fish I had had for dinner the night before. “I came because I’m trying to be a good neighbor. Not that you make that an easy task. Nonetheless, I feel it’s my duty to inform you that while looking for parking I saw your car, and it seems someone has broken into it.”

“Oh, God damn it!” This was the second time someone had broken into my car. “Did they break the window?”

Theresa smiled. “Driver’s side.”

“Damn it!”

“Well, I just thought I should tell you. And say hi to your cat for me.” Theresa left in a considerably better mood than she had arrived in.

I slammed the door and turned to see Mr. Katz looking at me questioningly. “I don’t have time for this. I have a date in—” I checked my watch “—twenty minutes.”

Mr. Katz swished his tail and headed back to the bedroom to see if he could do more damage to my sweater collection.

“Argh!” I grabbed my keys from the small table in the entryway. Something was missing. When I came home I always put the face to my CD player on the table next to the keys. Except when I forgot it in the car. If I tried a little harder, could I be a bigger idiot? Defeated, I went out to inspect the damage.

I had parked a little more than three blocks uphill from my apartment, somewhere around five o’clock the day before. I really needed to get an alarm system—although what were the chances I would hear it when I was parked ten miles away? Thanks to an inordinate number of SUVs blocking my line of sight, I wasn’t able to spot my car until I was less than ten yards from it.

I stopped breathing for a second. It was unlike Theresa to understate things, but even from a slight distance it was clear that my Acura hadn’t just been broken into, it had been vandalized. The hood and the trunk had been popped and remained open. When I got closer, I could see that the driver’s side window had indeed been broken, but the biggest damage was to the interior. Not only had they dumped everything out of the glove compartment, but they had also slashed up the interior of both the front and back seats and pulled the stuffing out in several places. There were slashes all over the floor, as well. Hesitant, I looked in the trunk and found that they had also slashed the carpeting in there, along with the spare tire. My hands started trembling and I gripped the top of the trunk to steady them. Who would do this? I pressed my lips together and went to the front of the car to see what else had been destroyed or taken. I forced myself to peek under the hood. The engine was intact.

Why was that? If the object was to cause as much damage as possible, shouldn’t they at least have cut a few wires or something? I peered through the broken glass to get a second look at the mess inside. My CD player was still there. Last I had checked, the main reason people broke into cars was to steal their stereos. My stereo wasn’t state-of-the-art but I was pretty sure it was theft-worthy.

“I thought I was supposed to meet you at your place.”

I jumped at the sound of Anatoly’s voice. He was standing in the doorway of an apartment complex parallel to my car. His eyes traveled behind me to the Acura. “Looks like somebody made an enemy. You know the owner?”

“What are you doing here, Anatoly?”

“What do you mean, ‘what am I doing here?’ I live here.”

“In that building right there?”

“The one I just walked out of. Your powers of deduction are staggering.”

“And you didn’t hear anything when some lunatic was ripping apart my car?”

“Your car?” Anatoly’s eyebrows shot up. He walked closer for a better look. “I don’t understand, are you a drug dealer or something?”

“Excuse me? Someone messes with my car and you want to know if I’m a drug dealer?”

“Look at the car, Sophie. Whoever did this was looking for something, and when they didn’t find it in the glove compartment or the trunk they assumed it was valuable enough for you to hide it inside the seats.”

“Well, if they were looking for drugs they got the wrong car.”

Anatoly was examining the trunk now. “Well, they were looking for something.”

“Oh, for God’s sake! I wouldn’t even know how to hide something in the upholstery of my car without ruining it. Let alone in my spare tire. What the hell could I possibly possess that I would even want to hide that well?”

“Could be a number of things. Do you have some compromising photos of the mayor and the latest Playboy bunny that you were planning on blackmailing him with? Although I think Willie Brown proved that San Franciscans aren’t concerned with such things.”

“Give me a break. I’m not blackmailing anyone. This is real life, not one of my books….” I looked at the car again. In what seemed like slow motion, I opened the passenger side door and touched one of the fresh cuts in the seat.

“What’s wrong?” He stepped behind me and put a supportive hand on my arm.

“Nothing. Look, I don’t mean to blow you off, but I think I should go report this.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“It’s really not necessary. I’ve had my car broken into before. You just go to the police station, file a report, and when the SFPD has a slow day they’ll look into it. That will be right around the time the sun collides with the earth.”

Anatoly just stared at me.

“I’m trying to be funny.”

“I can see that.”

“Well then, laugh and go away.”

Anatoly didn’t move. “Are you going to drive the car to the police station?”

“Now you’re the one trying to be funny. I can’t possibly drive this thing.”

“Why not? The engine seems to be intact,” he pointed out while checking under the hood. “And the only tire they slashed was the spare.”

“The police station is only a few blocks away, I’ll walk. It’s not like they have to look at the car. All I have to do—”

“This isn’t a normal break-in Sophie. The police should see the damage in order to know what they’re dealing with.”

I wrinkled my nose in disgust. The last thing I wanted to do was sit in the seat that only hours ago some creep had been merrily slashing away at.

“Here’s what we’ll do,” Anatoly said. I rolled my eyes but chose not to interrupt. “I’ll go upstairs, get my camera and take some pictures of the damage before we move it.”

“Like I said before, we don’t need to do anything.”

“Here’s my cell phone.” He pulled his Nokia out of his jacket pocket. “Call the police and tell them we’re coming over.”

I pulled my hair back with enough force to damage some of the weaker strands. The guy was asking to be smacked. “I’m going to say this one last time—”

“Why don’t you call them as you walk down there? I’ll meet you with the car after I’m done with the pictures.”

Okay, there was something appealing about that. At least I wouldn’t have to get in the car. Of course the plan did have a few flaws. “That means I’d have to trust you with the keys to my car.”

Anatoly grinned. “And I’ll have to trust you with my cell. Considering the condition of your car, I think I’m taking the greater risk.”

No arguing with that one. “Okay, here’s the key. I’ll meet you at the station. Do you know where it is?”

“I’ve passed it a few times. This will be good. Our first stop on my tour of San Francisco.”

I shook my head and started downhill toward my destination. Having my car vandalized was a lot more than a minor annoyance, but my insurance would take care of it. What was really bothering me had little to do with my actual vehicle.

What was really bothering me was that for the second time in three days I was reliving a scene from one of my books.

The cop let out a low whistle as he considered the car. Anatoly, who had magically found a parking spot on the same block as the police station, was now standing aside as the officer, a big burly guy with a furry mustache going by the name of Gorman, studied the slash in the spare tire. He looked up from the damage and his eyes bore into me. “Do you have any history of drug use or dealing?”

“No!” I tried to ignore Anatoly’s laughter.

“Well, they were looking for something,” Officer Gorman stated as he slammed the trunk closed.

“Yeah, we’ve established that. I don’t own anything that would be worth hiding in my upholstery.”

“Uh-huh,” Gorman said. He looked me over, then turned back to the car. “Anyone who might be after you?”

Anatoly took a step closer to me. How much should I say? After all, most of my fears were based on nothing more than an overactive imagination, right? My fingers automatically began to fiddle with my necklace. “I can’t think of anyone offhand.”

“Uh-huh.” Gorman eyed Anatoly. “Who are you again?”

“I’m just a friend of Sophie’s.”

“Uh-huh.”

I bit my lip. If only the cop could say something useful. Hell, I’d settle for a completed sentence.

“Come inside, we’ll finish the report.”

That was probably as close as I was going to get. “Anatoly, will you wait out here for me?” I asked. “Make sure nobody else messes with it?”

“There’s not much left to mess with.”

“Just stay with the car, okay?”

I followed Gorman inside to his desk. This was embarrassing enough without Anatoly standing over my shoulder. Gorman gestured for me to take a chair. I remained standing. “I thought we were done with the report.”

“Just a couple more questions.”

I hesitated for a moment before sitting across from him. I wasn’t relishing the idea of being interrogated in a police station, even if I didn’t have anything to hide.

“Sure you’re not hiding anything?”

Oh my God. I was being interrogated by the police department’s resident psychic. Maybe I could just visualize the events of the last week and I wouldn’t have to say anything at all.

“Miss Katz, did you hear me?”

Okay, so he wasn’t a very good psychic. “A little over five weeks ago I got a typed note in the mail. No return address. It just said, ‘You reap what you sow.’”

“‘You reap what you sow’? Anything else?”

“Nope, that was it.”

“Know who might have sent it?”

“No, like I said, no return address.”

“Uh-huh.” Gorman made a note at the bottom of his report. “Do you still have the note?”

“Well, here’s the thing. I wanted to have a fire that night and I didn’t really like the note, sooo…I burned it.”

“You…you burned it?” Gorman shook his head. “Smart.”

“Well, I didn’t know I would be needing it.” I scooted my chair forward. Gorman may not be Mr. Personality but maybe he could help me make sense of some things. All I had to lose was my dignity, and that was going pretty cheap these days. “I’m a writer. I write murder mysteries.”

“Uh-huh.”

“This last Thursday, the same day that woman Susan Lee was killed, I received five prank phone calls. The caller didn’t say anything—there was just silence and a click.”

“Any calls since Thursday?”

“No.”

“Uh-huh.” I noticed that this time Gorman didn’t write anything down. He probably found my account so riveting that he knew he’d never forget it.

“So, that same night I came home from an art opening at Sussman Gallery and I found a broken glass.”

“A broken glass?”

“Yes, a broken glass on my kitchen floor.”

“Any idea how it broke?”

“Well…I do have a cat.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But the thing is, the glass was in the middle of the floor. I don’t have a big kitchen, but it would be hard for Mr. Katz to knock a glass that far off the kitchen counter.”

“Mr. Katz?”

“My cat.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay, so here comes the really weird part. In my second novel, Sex, Drugs and Murder, my protagonist, Alicia Bright, well, she sometimes gets prank phone calls and in one scene she comes home and finds…a broken glass!” I sat back in my chair and waited for Officer Gorman to react.

“Uh-huh.”

Not the reaction I was looking for. “Okay, I know, glasses break all the time, right? That’s why I decided not to call the police.”

“Good decision.”

“But now there’s the car thing. In my book, Alicia Bright’s roommate’s car is vandalized in almost exactly the same way mine was. You see, the bad guy, Jeremy Spaulding, knows that Alicia’s roommate, Kittie, has a cassette tape that could prove that his father was involved in a political scandal. Kittie’s father produced X-rated films, so she had all these contacts to the pornography underworld.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay, that’s probably not all that relevant. Besides, you could always read the book, right?”

Officer Gorman just stared at me. Apparently that one wasn’t even worth an “uh-huh.”

“The point is…” The point. What was my point again? “Oh, yes. The point is that things are happening to me that happened in my book. I am living Sex, Drugs and Murder!”

This time it was Officer Gorman’s turn to sit back in his chair. He put his fingers together steeple-style, furrowed his brow and was silent for what seemed like an hour. Finally, he looked up and made eye contact. I knew he had formed his theory. He leaned forward and I did the same. I could feel my heartbeats increasing in speed.

“You sure you don’t do drugs?”

CHAPTER 6

“Before she met him she had assumed that being sexy and obnoxious were mutually exclusive traits.”

—Sex, Drugs and Murder

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