“The phone.” Jae held up the piece of paper so I could see the numbers he’d written down. “A man named Arthur Brinkerhoff called about an hour ago. He’d like you to find out who killed his wife and why the cops are accusing her of stealing two million dollars in diamonds.”
Three
“WAIT. BRINKERHOFF.” Claudia hovered at the edge of my desk, holding my coffee cup hostage, just out of my reach. “We know that name, right? Wasn’t that the name of the spanking dominatrix grandma who nearly popped your head off with a shotgun a few years back?”
“I don’t know about dominatrix,” I grumbled, grabbing at my cup as it wove closer. “Okay, maybe.”
“She sure as hell beat your ass,” my alleged surrogate mother shot back as she set my coffee down with a firm thump. “And now she’s dead, and somehow it’s your problem?”
“Well, I did kind of find her.” The coffee was strong. At some point in Claudia’s past, someone taught her how to make paint thinner out of coffee beans, and she’s been perfecting her toxic brew ever since. I was surprised I still had nostril hairs, but I was grateful for the punch to my heart, since I’d gotten so little sleep the night before. “I feel like I owe this guy. I haven’t thought about them in years, but it’s the case I was working on when Mike dropped Hyun-Shik’s case into my lap.”
The look I got from Claudia was a stern reminder of how she raised eight sons to a steady, responsible adulthood where they all made a good living and treated their significant others with love and respect. We’d both come a long way since the day she walked into my office, resplendent in her Sunday-go-to-church best, and subsequently took over my life. She became the mother I never had, a strong, bighearted Southern woman who told me when to pull up my socks and when to shut my mouth. Unfortunately for Jae and me, Claudia was also now best friends with Jae’s adopted aunt, a Filipino kathoey lounge singer named Scarlet who spent most of her life as a woman and a voice of reason alongside of Claudia’s already brimming sea of knowledge. The two of them together kept us wrapped up tight, doted on and loved but also subjected to their extremely strong opinions about practically everything under the sun.
I got a lot of sympathy from Claudia’s sons and their children, but mostly I believed they were just happy to have someone else take the occasional hit.
Judging by the contemplative expression on Claudia’s face, I was about to take one helluva hit.
I just didn’t know when.
My neighborhood in Brentwood wasn’t filled with châteaus, castles, and McMansions, but rather with vintage Craftsman- and Victorian-style buildings. The homes here were large, some nearly big enough to serve as small hotels, except zoning regulations frowned on that kind of thing. I’d barely gotten permission from the city to run my business out of the bottom front of my restored Craftsman, but since a few people had already converted smaller carriage houses across the street from me to a coffee shop run by hippies and a couple of other storefronts, I’d been able to leverage my way in. There were other little cottage industries half a block down the street from us, including a pizza parlor with pies so delectable angels wept every time one was pulled out of the oven.
Sipping my coffee, I stared out of the large wooden-sash windows looking out onto the street and watched the odd foot traffic flow in and out of the tree-hugging, otter-scrubber coffee shop that had once been the bane of my existence. Its owners and I had come to an agreement. They would make sure their customers didn’t dump their trash onto my lawn or piss in the hedges along the side of my property, and I wouldn’t shoot the next person I found watering the stunted bush at the front of my house. It already suffered from almost being blown up and had become almost a pet of mine. I’d fought hard for it to survive and didn’t appreciate the golden showers it occasionally had to suffer through. I didn’t care if the coffee shop was pretty much an illegal pot dispensary or that they committed an act against all humanity by serving a rock-hard vegan carrot cake I could’ve used to build a brick wall, but disrespecting my poor blast-victim bush had been my breaking point.
The coffee shop settled down into the neighborhood, its customers skewing as much soccer mom as Coachella attendees. Floridly painted Schwinn bicycles were now kept company by strollers large enough to transport a baby yak, and the outside patio usually sported a healthy canine population—one that was sometimes gifted with the angelic presence of Honey and her favorite caretaker, Jae. She’d been Rick’s dog and subsequently dumped by his family, but she did remember me when I came to get her. While she adored me, she fell in love with Jae, and I didn’t blame her one bit.
I was about to head across the street to grab some of the dog biscuits the coffee shop bakers whipped up for their canine customers when Claudia cleared her throat.
I sat my ass back in my chair before it rose more than two inches off its padded cushion. Judgment Day was coming, and I was going to have a front-row seat.
“Seems to me that getting involved in that woman’s death is only going to give you a headache. Probably the stupidest things you’ve ever considered doing, and boy, you don’t need me to tell you how many really stupid things you’ve already gotten into so far in your life.” Claudia’s rich voice was soft, but its steely point was made. “It’s been a long time since you ended up getting shot at, and I don’t know if my blood pressure can take sitting vigil for you at the hospital chapel again.”
“Actually I got shot at last night.” There were times when I swear to God, my mouth was installed by a pack of demons, because I never seem to be able to swallow words that would get me into trouble. If I thought the look Claudia gave me earlier was glaring, the one she gave me now was hot enough to cook my skin off my flesh.
“Best start talking, boy,” she murmured.
It was a gentle, sweet rejoinder, but I’m sure many a child riding her bus over the years pissed in their pants when they heard her say it. The only thing more terrifying would have been if she pulled the bus over to the side of the road, turned around in her seat, and said it. Since the office wasn’t moving and she was already facing me, I was probably experiencing a nightmare more than a few full-grown adults still dreamed about, even after leaving Claudia’s bus for the very last time.
She was a large woman, built to have large children, and with a personality big enough to rest the world’s weight on. I briefly thought about telling her it was nothing, but one did not lie to Claudia Dubois. So I gave her the whole story, not leaving out one thing, including the flappy man bits poking out of the sheep costume.
“Huh,” she finally said when my story ran down. “I’m not saying people don’t have the God-given right to do anything they want in their bedroom or with who they want, so long as no animal or child is hurt, but you’d think they’d have the common sense to not get caught flying their perversions out in the open.”
“That’s funny,” Bobby said as he came through the office’s wooden screen door. “People still say that about guys like me and Cole.”
“Tell Bobby about the sheep thing and see what he says then.” Claudia sniffed, patting a stray curl down. “I’ve got some billing to do. You figure out if you’re going to go meet that man about his dead wife, but mark my words, Cole, you take that case and this nice quiet life that you’ve had over the past couple of years is going to blow up into a mess of trouble like you haven’t seen in a long time.”