Karen Olson - Driven to Ink

It was dark; I didn’t see any sign of Tim’s Impala, so I figured he was off doing cop stuff. I wanted to pick his brain about Flanigan, but it would have to wait.

I stuck the key in the door and pushed it open. Tim had left the screen door open to the back porch and the air inside was cooler than out. I shed my jacket, threw it over one of the kitchen chairs, and opened the refrigerator, looking for some seltzer and maybe a late-night snack. The Johnny Rockets burger was hours ago now.

I leaned into the fridge to grab the seltzer off the bottom shelf. As I stood back up, a hand reached around me and shut the door, trapping me against the counter.

Icaught my breath and twisted around.

Jeff Coleman took the bottle from me.

“Nothing stronger, Kavanaugh?” he teased as he pulled a couple of glasses out of the cupboard.

“What are you doing in here? How did you get in?”

He handed me a glass of seltzer. “I have my ways.”

A few months ago he was going to pick a lock, but we got interrupted so I never saw him actually do it. But because I lived with a cop, I wouldn’t think it would be quite so easy for him to get into our house.

“What did you really do in the Marines?” I asked. “Were you some sort of covert operative?”

“You’ve been watching too many movies,” he said, taking a long drink from his own glass. He put it on the counter, then said, “You really don’t have anything stronger?”

“We’ve got some red wine.”

He snorted and made a face. “I knew I should’ve brought my own bottle.”

“What are you doing here? I thought you were going to the Grand Canyon. You couldn’t have made it there and back in the time since I talked to you.”

We walked over to the living room, where I plopped down on the leather couch and he settled into Tim’s leather recliner.

“I didn’t go after all,” he said. “After I talked to you, I called the park, and they said the state cops had taken the car. I knew I wouldn’t get anything from them, just some more grief about where I thought my mother was, so I came back.”

“Why did you come here?”

“Maybe I wanted to pick your brain. And I knew you wouldn’t come to me.”

He had that right.

“Who’s in your shop?” Jeff’s shop, Murder Ink, was open ’til four a.m.

“I closed down. I didn’t want the distraction of thinking about it.”

I studied his face. If he’d closed his shop, then he was seriously concerned about his mother, but his expression didn’t reveal his worry. Jeff Coleman was about ten years older than me, I guessed, in his early forties. He had close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, and the lines in his face told me he’d lived hard. He was a little shorter than me, and wiry. Although in the last months I’d noticed he’d started to bulk up slightly, as if he had started working out. I wasn’t going to ask, though. He’d probably give me grief for noticing.

So instead I leaned back and told him about Dan Franklin and that I suspected Flanigan thought Sylvia and Bernie might have been witnesses to Lucci’s murder.

“He said Sylvia asked specifically for Lucci at the wedding chapel,” I said. “Did she ever mention him?”

Jeff chuckled. “My mother knew a lot of people. She had that shop for a long time and met a lot of crazy characters. So maybe she did know him. Did he have any tattoos other than the spiderweb and the one Joel did?”

“I don’t know.” But it was worth asking Flanigan. I made a mental note to remember.

Jeff had closed his eyes, and for a second, I thought he was drifting off to sleep, but then he sat up straight and stared at me.

“I’ve got an idea, and I hope you’ll keep an open mind.”

Immediately, I knew I shouldn’t agree to anything.

“Listen, Kavanaugh, it’s a good idea. So hear me out, okay, before you make up your mind?”

I didn’t have much choice, so I nodded.

“Tomorrow, you and I should go over to that wedding chapel.”

On the surface, it didn’t sound like a horrible idea. I’d toyed with the very same thing all day since talking to Dan Franklin. But I wasn’t prepared for the next proposal.

“We can pretend we’re getting married. We can ask specific questions, then, maybe meet this Dan Franklin. Find out more about Ray Lucci.”

My brain was still two sentences behind. “Pretend we’re getting married?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

“They’d probably be more willing to talk if we pretend we’re giving them business,” he argued.

“And Dan Franklin? I already talked to him.”

“But you never met him, right? He doesn’t know what you look like.”

I held out my arms, decorated with Monet’s garden and a koi pond. “I’m the painted lady, remember? He may have heard about my tattoos. He may have seen the Web site.”

Bitsy had set up a Web site for the shop in the last month. I hadn’t been totally on board with it. I liked that we were more exclusive. Bitsy argued that we’d get more business, and since we were in a recession, it wouldn’t hurt. Business hadn’t slacked off at all, but she was hedging her bets. I told her she couldn’t put an e-mail address on the site, just a phone number, because I didn’t want to have to keep checking e-mail. She’d set up a page with some of our designs and photos of Ace, Joel, and me to “give the shop a face.” I hated to admit it, though, Bitsy was right: We had gotten some clients who’d found us on the Internet.

“It’s not the best picture of you,” Jeff said flatly. “It doesn’t show those glints of gold in your hair.”

He was teasing me, and I rolled my eyes at him.

Jeff gave me a sly smile. “If Franklin figures out who you are, say you were intrigued by the idea of getting married there after you talked to him. I’ll go along with it.”

“So now it’s my idea we’re getting married?” I asked.

He snickered. “It doesn’t matter whose idea it is, as long as it works.”

Despite my better judgment, the idea was growing on me. Not marrying Jeff Coleman, but going to That’s Amore to poke around a little. I knew Tim was on the outside on this case, and Flanigan certainly wasn’t going to be very forthcoming. I told myself I was helping a friend find his missing mother. Sylvia was my friend, too, and didn’t I owe her that?

I stood up and took our empty glasses into the kitchen.

Jeff followed. “So, Kavanaugh, what do you think?”

“I think we’d better do this before I change my mind.”

“You want to go tonight?”

I looked at the clock. It was one in the morning. While the chapel was probably still open, I figured I needed a good night’s sleep before I took on this ruse.

“No. In the morning. I don’t have to be at the shop until noon. Maybe we should meet at ten?” Now that I was on board, I was even organizing our adventure. Go figure.

Jeff opened his mouth to say something, but the door swung open, and Tim came in. The look of surprise on his face probably matched mine.

“Hey, well, what do you say?” he asked as he shook Jeff’s hand. Tim looked at me, his eyes asking me what was going on.

“Jeff has been looking for his mother,” I said. “He came by to see if I’d heard from her.”

While I’m not usually a good liar, this lie slipped easily off my tongue. I figured I’d rather lie than have Tim think something was going on.

But from his expression, he knew we were up to no good.

“Don’t mess in police business,” he said sternly, his eyes moving from me to Jeff. “The best thing you can do for your mother is to let the cops take care of everything.”