Laura Caldwell - Red Blooded Murder

I peered at it. “Do the pearls…?”

Nina laughed, a sweet, burbling laugh. “Yeah, the pearls are the thong part.”

“Wow.” Dumbfounded, I couldn’t say anything else. Though I’d wear just about anything to look sexy, I couldn’t imagine having small pebbles running along my ass.

“Lexi is new.” Josie gave me a withering look. She took the bras out of my hand, pulled out a few different ones. She told me to go to the storerooms and steam a box of robes.

In the back, I poked around the farthest rooms, which seemed to serve as storage for display equipment, hangers and signs. To me, it all seemed like standard retail stuff. I was flipping through some of the signs when I heard a sound behind me and I jumped.

“Oh, hi, Josie!”

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for the steamer.”

“I showed you where the steamer was. You already used it.”

This was an excellent point. “I thought maybe there was a smaller one for the bra straps.”

She considered this. “That’s not a bad idea, but we just have the one steamer.” She peered around the room. She looked me up and down. “You can go now.”

“Are you sure?”

She nodded.

“You know,” I said, wanting to make her like me, wanting to chase away any suspicion. “I think I’d like to buy one of those pearl thongs, so that I’m aware of all the merchandise and how it fits.”

She said nothing for a second. She looked me up and down. “You’re a medium?”

“Yes.”

“They’re extremely hard to find, and we’re out of the kind that Nina just bought, but I do have another brand in your size.”

“Great.”

“They’re seventy dollars.”

“Oh.” I definitely didn’t have seventy bucks for a pair of undies, even to get me on my boss’s good side.

“But you do get your discount, and I could take it out of your first paycheck.”

“Great!” I’d chalk it up to research. Maybe I could get Mayburn to pay for it.

“Stay here.” She left for a few moments and returned with a silver-gray box tied with a silver ribbon. She handed it to me. “There you go. I’ll see you in a few days.” As a part-timer, I’d be working weekends and one or two nights a week.

“You’re sure you don’t want me to finish the robes?”

She gave me a curt shake of her head, then took my elbow and propelled me to the front room.

My first day on the job was over.

I love a good dive bar-the dusty golden lighting, the rickety stools, the scarred wood bar top, the white wine served from a jug (or sometimes a box or tiny airplane bottles), the lingering smell of wood smoke (though there’s no fireplace in sight), the cranky but kind bartenders, and, if you’re really, really lucky, the hard kernels of popcorn from a machine that hasn’t been cleaned since 1971.

I love all those things about dive bars. Tragically, there are few left in the city. Chicago, once the land of a million dives, had gotten glitzy since the years of my childhood. When I first turned twenty-one and was home from college, I was full of disdain for the old neighborhood bars, the ones with the tiny windows that showed nothing from the street, the ones with the sign out front that read only Pabst, when everyone in the neighborhood called it Nick’s. Back then, I wanted the nightclubs, the glamour, the sleek. And I was glad when the neighborhood bars started closing up, replaced with fake Irish pubs boasting Crab Louie salads. But now, nearing my thirties and carrying a dogged tiredness from the weight of the last six months, I’d fallen in love with the dying breed that was the dive bar. I appreciated the casual and the quiet, punctuated occasionally with a few selections from an old jukebox. I loved the history of them. After so many people in my life had come and gone, I liked that a good dive bar had survived for decades and gave the impression that it would last another fifty years.

Which was why I picked the Old Town Ale House to meet Mayburn on Sunday night.

“How did it go?” he answered without any other greeting when I’d called after leaving the store.

That was one thing I liked about Mayburn-little bullshit and the ability to cut to the chase. “Fine. I guess. I mean, I didn’t find anything crazy or suspicious.”

“When are you working again at the store?”

“Tuesday.”

“Good. We’ll talk about it all tonight. Where are we meeting?”

“The Ale House?”

“Fine. Do you mind if Lucy comes?”

I thought about the last time I’d seen Lucy DeSanto-I’d posed as her friend so I could make a copy of her husband’s hard drive. The thing was, somewhere along the way my posing had turned into actual friendship. But I hadn’t seen her since. “I’d love to see her, but is she okay with me?”

“I told you. She’s glad of everything that went down with her ex.”

“All right. But this is business, right? Can we talk in front of her?”

“Lucy knows everything.” I had never heard Mayburn sound so proud.

“Why do you get to talk about investigations when I don’t?”

“A couple of reasons. One, I’m an investigator, and everyone knows that. Two, we’ve gone over this before.”

Mayburn’s stipulation was that if I worked with him I couldn’t tell anyone. He said I’d be no help if word got around I was a part-time P.I.

“You’ll swear them to secrecy,” I remember him saying, “but they might let it slip to one person, and that person slips to just one person, and then another and another. The whole reason I need you is because you’re a typical, normal North Side Chicago woman. If there’s any inkling that’s not the case, if anyone knows you do P.I. stuff on the side, it won’t work.”

“And three,” he added, “I’m not working some cover.”

“Cover? Do I have a cover? I love that.”

“Don’t get too excited. P.I. work is grunt work, and you’re doing mine. See you at the Ale House.”

Now I pulled open the bar door and poked my head inside. A typical night at the Ale House. A guy in his seventies sat near an antique lamp, reading one of the dusty books from the shelf. A pretty woman, probably a mom looking to escape her family, gabbed with the bartender and socked away red wine. A couple about my age, who appeared deep in discussion, sat in the back.

I took a seat at the bar.

“White wine,” I said when the bartender reached me. There was no perusing a wine list at the Ale House. White or red, and that was it.

After he gave me the wine, which tasted a little like fermented lemonade, I studied the artwork on the walls-a bizarre mix of Halloween masks, drawings of Second City alumni and paintings of a guy, reputedly the owner, in various compromising positions with some bawdy-looking women.

Ten minutes later the door opened, and in walked Lucy DeSanto, a wispy blonde with a huge smile.

“Izzy!” She launched herself into my arms, squeezing me around the neck. If there were any hard feelings about how we’d left things, Lucy didn’t show it. Over her shoulder I saw Mayburn beaming. Love had definitely softened the guy.

“Hey,” he said when we finally pulled apart. He gave me a pat on the arm.

“Hey,” I said back. With Mayburn, I was definitely one of the guys.

Lucy and Mayburn pulled up bar stools near mine, both of them somehow managing to continually touch each other in the process. A brief discussion about what kind of beer to order ensued. In that little conversation, taking all of twenty seconds, Mayburn and Lucy lost themselves in each other, the warm circle around them almost palpable.

Hon, look, Mayburn said, pointing at the taps, they have a Hefeweizen.

Do I like that? Lucy’s eyes didn’t leave his.