07 Uncorked - Chrissy McMullen Mystery (15 page)

“Sure. Sure there are. About a thousand fucking commuters flying by at a hundred miles an hour over the speed—” He stopped, frowned, seemed to try to think. “Yeah,” he said, relief lightening his tone. “Yeah, I have a witness. A guy from some towing company stopped.”

“You called a tow truck?”

“On my god damn salary?” The words were a sneer. “He wanted fifty bucks just to drag the piece of shit off the interstate.”

“Who was he?”

“How the hell should I know? You thinking we were pen pals or something?”

“I’m not a patient man,” the captain warned.

Coggins stuck out his jaw, but there was caution in his eyes now. Caution and enough fear to make him seem sane. “Hey,” he said. “He gave me his card.”
Chapter 15

You’re only given a drop of madness. Don’t piss it away.

—Dagwood Dean Daly, who may have been granted more than his fair share
It took forever for the captain to contact Sure-Fire Towing. Longer still to get connected with the right man. But finally he did. And that right man collaborated Coggins’s story.

Ten minutes later, I stumbled out of the station like a chimpanzee on opium, mind buzzing with possibilities. Maybe the 'right man' was lying. Maybe Coggins had hired someone to attack me. Maybe I was on the wrong track entirely and Andrews had been released from the hospital. It was entirely possible, if not probable, that he still held a grudge and was-

“Ms. McMullen?”

I jumped at the sound of my name and spun toward the speaker in a kind of pseudo-kung fu stance.

Officer Eric Albertson stepped back a pace at my weird-ass reaction, then straightened and sobered at the sight of my face.

“Who did that?” he asked, voice low.

I stared at him.

“I mean…Jesus!” He said the word on a harsh exhalation.

I shook my head. “I doubt it was him.”

He gave me a look that suggested he thought I might be two scoops short of a banana split. For a licensed psychologist, I get that more than one would think probable. “Are you all right?”

“Never better,” I said, and turned toward my car.

He followed. “What happened?”

I didn’t answer.

“Hey, that’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it. Just…” He lengthened his strides to catch up. “Just let me buy you a drink.”

“I don’t need a drink,” I said. My voice was petulant, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“Then buy me a drink.”

I snorted. It was better than crying.

“Dinner. Let me buy you dinner.”

He’d followed me to my car. I gazed into the tiny backseat, hunting for perverts, thieves and guys who like to jump defenseless psychologists in car washes. All I saw was fingerprint dust sticking to every possible surface. They'd left enough of the stuff to build sandcastles but had come up empty. The perpetrator, they said, had probably worn gloves.

“Ms. McMullen?”

“It’s three o’clock in the afternoon,” I said, and turned fuzzily back toward him. My backseat seemed to be empty, but one can’t be too cautious. Rivera had once suggested that I check my trunk. I believe that at the time I had maligned his mental capacity. The idea didn’t seem quite so ludicrous now. In fact, I found myself contemplating checking the inside of the Saturn’s tires.

“Pie, then? A scone? A cup of coffee?” he offered.

“It’s a million degrees out here.” I tried to scoff the words but they came out a little wobbly.

“Ice cream. How about a hot-fudge sundae?”

Maybe he knew I was about to cry. But to my credit, the thought of ice cream often makes me cry. It may have had nothing to do with the fact that I’d been attacked in a car wash. I mean, for Pete’s sake, who gets attacked in a car wash?

I wiped my knuckles roughly beneath my nose.

“Would you prefer butterscotch?” he asked, leaning around me a little as if to catch a glimpse of my reaction.

I shook my head. “Listen, I really appreciate your concern, Officer…”

“Call me, Eric. Please. And we’ll go all out. Hot fudge with cashews or something.

Just wait here one minute,” he said, and left me alone in the parking lot. To his credit, his mission really did take sixty seconds or less. He was back before I got up enough nerve to enter my traitorous vehicle and leave without further conversation, which was just as well because I would have hated myself in the morning if I had missed out on the free-ice-cream offer.

“Want to take my car?” he asked.

I shrugged. He touched his hand to my back in that protective way that men sometimes have and ushered me toward a late-model Toyota. It was still cool inside. Air conditioning, I knew, was contributing to the global-warming problem, but just then the irony failed to either horrify or amuse me.

“Where to?” he asked.

I wanted to simply shrug again, but that seemed infantile and a little bit dumb. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I should be getting back to work anyway.”

“When’s your next appointment?”

“Four thirty.” It was a decent lie. I didn’t have any clients for the rest of the day, but it’s often a dynamite idea to have an end time to a date. Mostly because if you sit around too long sometimes men will attack you. Not that I was still obsessing about the car wash incident or anything.

He glanced at the digital clock on his dash. It was three twenty-seven. “How about Dairy Queen?”

I may have made a childish face. He grinned.

“Okay. No,” he said, and listed off a couple other mediocre suggestions before coming up with Cold Stone. Maybe he recognized the adulation gleaming in my puffy eyes, because we were walking through the door of that esteemed establishment in less than fifteen minutes.

I considered getting something modest like a small vanilla cone, remembered the car wash, and ordered two scoops of cake-batter ice cream with caramel, chocolate and almonds. At the last second, I added bananas, in case I was low on potassium.

The very first bite made the world a better place. The second made it almost bearable.

Eric stared at me from across the table. He was a good-looking man with cleanly etched features, heavily lashed eyes and a dimple in the exact center of his chin.

“Aren’t you going to get anything?” I asked, which was a small miracle, because generally when I’m communing with ice cream there’s no time for chitchat.

“I don’t really care for dessert.” To his credit, he did look a little chagrined, but I didn’t cut him any slack.

“Were you dropped on your head as a child or something?” He grinned and shook the aforementioned head, still watching my eyes. I licked the edge of my waffle cone.

“Did you suffer from some sort of frozen food trauma?” He smiled at me. It was a pretty good smile. “What happened?” he asked.

I considered not telling him, but I really couldn’t think of any reason reticence would improve the situation.

“When I returned to my car after getting gas…” My hand shook a little and I resented the hell out of that. If I lost a droplet of ice cream, someone was going to pay in blood. “…a man was in the backseat of the Saturn.”

“Fuck it,” he said.

“Yeah.”

His eyes sparked with anger. His mouth was pursed into a hard line. “Did you get a description?”

I took a deep breath and held it. I didn’t want to tell him about my suspicions, but it wasn’t as though he wouldn’t find out.

“I thought it was your partner.”

“What?”

I winced. “Do you want to confiscate the rest of my cone?”

“Coggins? You thought it was Coggins?” He sounded incredulous.

I scowled at the ice cream, though it had done nothing wrong. “I know Rivera is innocent.”

He shook his head. “That doesn’t make Joel guilty.” I exhaled carefully, keeping all the tension inside like I tell my clients never to do.

“Tell me about Stacy.”

“Stacy?” he began, then scowled. “Oh yeah.” He gave me a guilty glance.

So it was true. There had been something between her and Rivera. I shouldn’t have been surprised. But I was. Surprised and wounded. Still, I told myself I had bigger fish to fry.

Eric sighed and glanced toward the table. “Yeah, Coggins was pissed about that, but sometimes he’s just a loose…” He paused, shot his attention back toward me and shook his head. “It wasn’t him.”

“He called me by name.”

“The bastard in the car wash?”

My throat was freezing up. Not from the ice cream. It was innocent of all crimes.

“He called me McMullen.” I tried to relax the muscles around my larynx and slanted a glance in his direction, going for casual, almost achieving better-than-totally-freaked.

“Any idea why that makes it worse?”

“That he knew you?”

I nodded.

“Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he just knew of you. I mean…” He shrugged.

“Considering your profession, I have to assume some of the people you know aren’t the most stellar examples of sanity.”

I gave that a moment of consideration, then, “I hardly ever associate with my brothers anymore.”

He stared at me, then laughed, relaxing a little. “You’ve got an amazing attitude.” I licked the edge of the cone again. It was getting a little soft, which was okay. I like soft for ice-cream cones and porn. “And a pretty good vocabulary,” I added.

“Rivera is one lucky son of a bitch.”

“Probably true,” I said, then pursed my lips and refused to cry while I was holding ice cream. It was my one incontrovertible rule. “We broke up. Months ago.” He studied me. “For real?”

“Why would I lie?”

“Jesus. I mean…” He glanced out the window. On the far side of the street, a lone man in what looked to be a Jedi costume was holding up a sign that read Don’t be a douche. L.A. has its moments. “If you’re that aggressive for old flames, what are you like with current lovers?”

I cleared my throat.

“I didn’t mean it quite like that,” he said, but he didn’t retract the question. In fact, he reached across the table and took my hand. “I’m so sorry this happened.” His palms felt good encasing my fingers…not so rough it was scratchy, but not girly either, and God knows I was in need of some well-meaning attention. But really, eating ice cream is a two-handed job for me. I pulled from his grip. “I’m seeing someone else.”

“Shit,” he said, and grinned a little as he leaned back against the booth. “Another lucky bastard.”

“The city is full of them.”

“I bet he’s ready to kill someone.”

I scowled, unsure of his meaning.

His gaze never moved from mine. “That’s an awfully good-looking face to mess up.”

“Oh,” I said, and almost forgot about the ice cream for a moment. “He hasn’t seen it yet.”

“What? You’re kidding.”

“He’s out of town.”

“Well, if it was me, I’d get my ass back in town,” he said, and leaned forward again, still holding my gaze.

I fidgeted and pulled back a little. Ice cream dripped onto the table.

Dammit. First the car wash attack and now this.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and lifting his hands palms forward, shifted away again.

“Really. It’s just that you’re so…” He shrugged, seeming to be laughing at himself. “I’ve always been a sucker for a damsel in distress.”

“Wish you had been there last night.”

“Me, too,” he said, and there was something in his eyes that suggested he wasn’t kidding. I have to say just about then that something was almost preferable to ice cream, but I cleansed my head with the memory of my boyfriend’s IQ.

“Is that why you became a police officer?” I asked. “For damsels?”

“Maybe,” he said. “There's not much money in it. But my old man was a cop and he always made it sound so damn romantic…fighting crime, saving—” He chuckled and shook his head. “Listen to me. You really are a therapist, aren’t you. Here I am yapping away about myself when your poor face…” He paused, seeming to need a second to collect himself. “Tell me what you know about the asshole. Tell me everything you can remember.”

I kind of wanted to play it cool and ask what asshole he was referring to. I mean this was L.A. But I didn’t think I could pull it off. Besides, I had been through this routine enough times with Rivera to realize it could really help me remember things I didn’t realize were in my gray matter.

The half-catatonic attitude of the woman who had taken my statement on the previous evening had left me little hope that the cops would find the perpetrator. She’d asked for his height and weight: A hundred eighty pounds. Approximately five ten. He could be any one of about ten million people. In fact, there were more than a few house pets who would fit that same description. Harley included if he stood on his hind legs to take hamburger off the counter. But I was pretty sure he was innocent.

“Did you get a look at his face?”

“It…” I tried to remember, but the memories came at me pretty hard and I winced.

“No. I think he was wearing…” I shook my head. “I think he had pantyhose or something over his face.”

“Okay. Well…just think back, Christina. Was he white or black?”“I can’t say. His features were obscured.”

“How old was he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think about the voice. He said something.”

My hands were shaking on the ice-cream cone. “He told me not to do anything stupid.”

Eric nodded encouragingly. “Deep voice, quiet, hissy, prissy, accented?” The memories were visceral. “Deep. Guttural.”

He nodded encouragement. “Any smells that you can remember? Body odor?

Shaving cream?”

I gave it a moment while trying not to hyperventilate. “No. Nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

I nodded.

He sat back, seeming to relax. “Okay.”

“But I kicked him.”

He leaned forward and clenched his right hand into a fist atop the table. “Good girl.” It was sad really how much I needed an atta girl, but I tried not to press my head against his palm and pant for more attention. “I think I caught him in the face with my elbow. And maybe…maybe in the crotch with my heel.”

“Jesus, I’m almost orgasmic,” he said. “Was there any blood left at the scene?” I shook my head. “Not that they found. The door popped open a second later. He fell out of the car and then he was gone.”