Skin and Blond (Blond Noir Mysteries Book 1) Read online

“Oh, definitely,” said Eden. “Just don’t let Ivy here grump you to death. She’s always in a bad mood.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “I’m not always in a bad mood. Hand over the laptop, please.”

  Eden and Brigit both started laughing.

  I put my hands on my hips. “What?”

  Eden, still laughing, gave me the laptop. “I like Brigit much better than the last one. I think she’ll be good for you.”

  I snatched the computer away. “Thanks for this. You want a check or you want me to Paypal you?”

  “I’ll send you an invoice,” she said. “I hate having to go to the actual bank, don’t you?”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so.” I didn’t have strong feelings about the bank.

  Eden gave me a hug. “Have you talked to Miles since?”

  I pushed her away, glancing meaningfully at Brigit.

  “That a no?”

  “Who’s Miles?” said Brigit.

  I shut my eyes, trying as hard as I could not to start screaming.

  “Miles is Ivy’s ex,” said Eden.

  My eyes snapped open. “Jesus!”

  Eden and Brigit both gave me innocent eyes.

  “I don’t want to talk about that, okay?” I said. “Especially not with my assistant. It’s my personal business.”

  Eden rolled her eyes. “Oh, sorry.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “You have no idea how to respect boundaries. Get out of my office.”

  “You’re always overreacting,” she said, turning to go.

  I stalked over to the door and opened it pointedly.

  She left, but she was smirking.

  I shut the door after her. God, I could kill her. Really, I could.

  “You have an ex?” said Brigit.

  “Brigit, I don’t want to talk about that,” I growled.

  She shrugged. “Okay.”

  Taking the laptop with me, I made a beeline back to my desk and slammed the door after me.

  Once alone, I didn’t do anything but breathe for several moments. I needed to calm down so that I could focus. It was one thing for Eden to know about issues with Miles. We were friends. We used to be roommates. But Brigit worked for me, and she was ten years younger than me. She looked up to me, or she would have if I weren’t such a fuck-up. She’d already seen Colin Pugliano one evening. Who knew what she thought about that?

  People might be judging me all the time, but I’d appreciate it if my assistant wasn’t. I needed to work with her, and I needed her respect. Besides, my last assistant had judged me plenty, and that hadn’t worked out.

  I threw myself down in my desk. I couldn’t think about this right now. I needed to focus on something else.

  I opened the laptop.

  No password screen anymore. Instead, it booted right up to the desktop. I got the computer to connect to the wireless in the office and then I opened up the Internet and went straight to her social media sites.

  I combed through her Facebook messages, but I couldn’t find anything too interesting there. She hadn’t communicated much with messages, it seemed. Most of them were months old.

  Twitter didn’t have anything that wasn’t publicly visible.

  So, I began checking the regular suspects to try to find an email client.

  I got lucky first time out and found a Gmail address. I scrolled through her inbox, which was jammed with a lot of unread messages at this point, although most of them were advertisements for places like Amazon and Best Buy.

  Man. That was the thing about email. It could contain all kinds of good information about a person, but it was a pain in the ass to sift through. Generally, I’d pawn off a job like this on my assistant, but I couldn’t handle talking to Brigit right now.

  For about five minutes, I just scrolled through messages, hitting the button to see older ones at the end of every page.

  I scanned each message for something suspicious, something that might help me figure out what had happened to Madison.

  This was getting me nowhere.

  I sat back in my chair and scrutinized the screen.

  On a whim, I leaned forward again and typed Brian’s name into the search box on the email screen.

  The screen filled with search results.

  My heart leapt.

  And then it sank again. It seemed that Brian emailed out the schedule to employees at the restaurant every Monday. These weren’t personal emails. They were just mass messages sent to everyone.

  Except…

  Wait, what was that?

  The subject line was blank, not like the other messages that had the date on them.

  I clicked it.

  Same time tomorrow? it read.

  Below, I could see Madison’s attached response in the conversation. Definitely.

  I kept scrolling.

  Another message without a subject from Brian: You coming tonight?

  Madison’s response: Can’t. Hanging out with my brother.

  The brother that snoops on your phone and won’t stay out of your business?

  Madison hadn’t responded.

  Okay, okay. I didn’t know what this meant, but I did know that it meant that Brian was lying to me when he said he didn’t really remember Madison and that he didn’t know her very well. He clearly did.

  If it wasn’t obvious before, it was obvious now that he was hiding something.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “You knew her.” I had printed out the emails and now I set them all down in front of Brian, who was at a table in the back of Happy’s. He had two cash drawers out, and he appeared to be counting down the money. “She wasn’t some random employee. You were sending her emails.”

  He glanced down at the pieces of paper, his face a mask of terror. “You can’t keep coming to my place of work, lady. You’re undermining my authority here and getting in the way of my job.”

  I sat down on the opposite side of the table. “Talk to me, Brian. What are these about? Why were you emailing her?”

  “Oh God, oh God.” His voice was high-pitched and terrified. He looked around the restaurant as if he was hoping for an escape route to appear before him.

  “What did you do to Madison?” I pushed. This guy had guilt. Big guilt, and I was going to find out what it was.

  “Nothing.” An indignant squeak.

  “Don’t bullshit me. I know you’re hiding something. You and Madison had some kind of relationship, didn’t you? Were you sleeping together?”

  “No, she had some stupid boyfriend that she wanted to be faithful to even though he apparently wasn’t being faithful to her. Got some other chick pregnant or something, and yet Madison still wanted to stand by him. I didn’t get it.”

  “So, you admit that you and Madison were closer than what you said before?”

  “We weren’t close.”

  “You lied to me, Brian.”

  He cringed. “I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to talk to you. Don’t I get a lawyer or something?”

  “You get a lawyer if you’re arrested,” I said.

  “I’m not arrested?”

  “I’m just trying to ask you some questions.” I might have pointed out the fact that I couldn’t arrest him, but I thought that might weaken my stance here, so I left that out.

  He took a deep breath. “Right. Questions.”

  “Why did you send these emails to Madison? What was your relationship?”

  “We were just… friends.” He looked nervous. “We hung out sometimes after work. That’s it. That’s really all.”

  I sorted through the emails. “This. You asked her if she was coming tonight? Coming where?”

  “I don’t know. Could have been all kinds of places. We went out. We went to parties. We went to clubs. It’s all kind of a blur.”

  “You and Madison went alone? No one else came along?”

  “Well, sometimes people did, sometimes they didn’t.”

  “But you weren’t involved. There was nothing romantic going
on.”

  “No.”

  I didn’t buy this. Something wasn’t adding up. “If you and Madison were just friends, why did you go to all the trouble of hiding it from me? And why didn’t anyone at work know you were friends? All I got from the other workers here was that there was friction between you two.”

  He cringed.

  “Come on, Brian, come clean.”

  “Not so loud.” He leaned across the table. “Look, let’s go outside.”

  “You going to tell me the truth outside?”

  “I…” He got up from the table and started for the door.

  I got up too.

  He stopped and turned back around. “Hey! Meg, keep an eye on the money, all right?”

  “Got it, boss!” came an answering call.

  Brian and I stepped outside of the restaurant. He looked from side to side, as if he was worried that people might be listening or watching.

  “Look,” said Brian in a quiet voice, “Madison hooked me up sometimes. That’s how it all got started.”

  “You and Madison hooked up? But you just said—”

  “No, she hooked me up. She got me stuff.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Stuff? You mean drugs.”

  Brian looked around again, making sure there still wasn’t anyone listening. “Yeah. Mostly coke, but sometimes some other stuff too. That was what it was all about, seriously. We weren’t, like, together or anything like that, even though her brother seemed to think we were.”

  That was right. One of the messages had mentioned the brother. “Why’d he think that?”

  “Well, at first, I was just texting Madison, not sending her email. Like a normal person would. But apparently, her brother got hold of her phone, and he started asking her all these questions and calling her names and shit. He did that when he came to the restaurant too. Called her a whore. I didn’t understand why she would even give him the time of day, but she was always making excuses for him. Anyway, she scrubbed her phone, took off all her apps, and she told me to email her instead of calling. That way her brother wouldn’t know.”

  Well, that explained why Madison’s phone didn’t have email on it, then. Huh. “I don’t understand, Brian. You’ve been acting shady about this from the moment I tried to talk to you. Why?”

  “I don’t want it broadcasted out there that I’m doing cocaine to get through my shifts here. I could lose my job. I need this job.”

  “Did you ever give Madison a drug test?”

  “Yeah, I had to do the random ones. She was pissed about it, because she said I was a hypocrite. She wasn’t wrong. Anyway, I told her I’d hold off on it, and that the coke should be out of her system in three or four days. She just needed to stay clean and drink a lot of water. She did. She took the test. She passed. But she was really pissed, and everyone saw us arguing about it.”

  “So that’s why people thought there was friction between you two.”

  “I guess so. Look, I didn’t want my employees knowing that I was doing coke either. Madison promised to keep her mouth shut, and I guess she did.”

  Hmm. Maybe that was a possible motive? Brian wanted to make sure that Madison didn’t talk?

  “You go to visit her at home?”

  “No. I didn’t even know where she lived.”

  “But it wasn’t just her procuring cocaine for you, was it? You guys also went out to clubs and parties?”

  “Yeah, after a while, we started to hang out sometimes. See, at first, she was real secretive about her dealer. Said the guy was twitchy and that he didn’t want any new people brought in. So, if I wanted anything, I had to give her the money and she brought it back. We wouldn’t pass it off at work, so we’d meet at parties or at clubs, and she’d give me what I’d paid for. After a while, we did get more friendly. We’d hang out a little bit, sometimes do a few lines together. And over time, she finally did introduce me to her dealer.”

  “She did, huh?”

  “Yeah, his name was Derek, I think. I never caught a last name, but he was probably one of those O’Shaunessy boys. Had the look, if you know what I mean. Anyway, after Madison disappeared, I tried to get him to sell to me, but he wouldn’t see me. Said that we couldn’t do business without Madison.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Did you tell him that Madison was gone?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But he knew?”

  “Well, maybe. I don’t know. He just said that without Madison, it was no deal. He didn’t trust me alone.” Brian swallowed. “You don’t think that, um, Madison got hurt because of drugs, do you?”

  “The O’Shaunessys have a reputation,” I said. “I don’t know, but it’s something I have to check out.”

  “I liked her,” said Brian. “She was a nice girl, and I never wanted anything bad to happen to her.”

  I narrowed my eyes and looked him up and down. I wasn’t sure if I was satisfied or not. I didn’t have proof that Brian wasn’t responsible for Madison’s death, but my suspicions about him had dampened during the course of the conversation. I hadn’t ruled him out. He was still in the running. But other theories were starting to float to the top of my list as more probable.

  * * *

  “Another High Life?” asked the bartender.

  “Yes, please,” I said, smiling at him. I turned back to Crane. “So, there’s the boyfriend, Curtis. He might have bumped her off to make his life less complicated. He was doing double-time with another girl, Debbie, who he’d knocked up.”

  “Baby mama sounds like she’s got more of a motive.” Crane sucked on his e-cigarette, which glowed green at the tip.

  “Yes,” I said. “She does. However, she’s like five foot three and tiny. I don’t see how she’s physically capable of doing it without help.”

  “You mean her and Curtis together?”

  “Possibly,” I said. “But I’m not real sold on that idea. He seemed to think that she wasn’t aware of his infidelity, and she was pretending not to know because of the baby. But now everything’s blown up in their faces. I saw them arguing, and it seemed genuine. I don’t think they’re murder partners, but I could be wrong. And that would be a great plot for your book, wouldn’t it?”

  He blew out some thick vapor that smelled like dessert. “Fuck the book.”

  I laughed. “You can’t fool me. You might have given up now, but I know that you’ll be back at it in no time. You never quit writing for long.”

  “And I never finish anything either,” he said. “I start and then I quit. It’s pointless. There’s no reason to start again.”

  “There is,” I said. “The reason is that maybe this time you actually finish something.”

  He waved it away. “Let’s get back to you. So far, you’ve named off two suspects and eliminated both of them.”

  “They’re not eliminated, per se,” I said. “They’re just not at the top of the list.”

  “Right,” he said. “So, who’s at the top of the list?”

  “The O’Shaunessys,” I said.

  “What the hell?” He furrowed his brow. “What do they have to do with anything?”

  “Apparently, Madison snorted a lot of coke, and she got it from Derek O’Shaunessy. Who happened to be in this very bar a little while ago. I hung out with him when I was blackout drunk, and I’ve got to get a chance to talk to him again.”

  “Just because Derek was her dealer? How’s that give him a motive?”

  “Oh, there’s always some kind of stupid motive when it comes to drugs. Maybe she couldn’t pay. Maybe she saw something she shouldn’t have seen. Maybe Derek got paranoid that she was telling too many people about him. The possibilities are endless.”

  Crane gestured for the bartender. “Another cranberry and vodka, please?”

  The bartender came over and took his glass. We watched him assemble the new drink, dumping ice in the glass, pouring in the vodka and topping it off with cranberry juice. He tossed it in the shaker to mix it up, poured it back in
the glass, and set it down in front of Crane.

  Crane thanked him and told him to put it on his tab.

  The bartender wandered away.

  “Let’s be honest, here, Ivy.” Crane gestured at me with his e-cigarette. “You’re focused on the O’Shaunessys because you don’t like them.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ve been pissed off at that family ever since you had trouble getting that murder charge to stick years back.”

  “Yeah, well, they’ve got it coming.” I took a swig of my High Life.

  “But does it even make sense for them to have hurt Madison?”

  “I just told you it did,” I said. “I laid out several very likely possibilities.”

  He sighed. “How you planning on getting close to Derek O’Shaunessy, huh? You think he’ll just answer your questions like any other suspect?”

  “Well, probably not. But the good news is that I’ve got an in. I’ve got Colin Pugliano.”

  “What?” Crane slapped his hand down on the bar.

  “You heard me,” I muttered.

  He shook his head is disbelief. “Wasn’t it yesterday that you were in here, practically shaking, saying that Colin Pugliano nearly raped you. You remember that?”

  “Yeah, of course I remember that. But this is too important. I can use him to get close to the other members of the family, and I can get dirt on Derek. If I do my job right, I can get a murder charge to stick against one of those bastards. That’s worth whatever happens. It’s not like I haven’t slept with Colin before, anyway. I can deal with it.”

  “You were terrified.” He glared at me. “You were shaking. I’ve never seen you like that before. And now you want to go back to that guy? Are you insane?”

  “Just for information.” I took a drink of beer, sighing. “Of course, the last thing I said to him was that he had a small penis, so I don’t know how I’m going to salvage this whole thing. I’m going to have to figure something out.”

  “Maybe you should let it alone.”

  “Let it alone?” I said. “I’ve been hired to solve this case.”

  He sighed. “Look, sometimes you get obsessive about things. One of those things is the O’Shaunessys. I think you’re trying to force this case to connect to them when it really doesn’t. Come on, don’t you have any other suspects?”