Though I had yet to be Kato Kalened by the defense, it was only a matter of time after my FBI interview before both sides would start pulling my story apart like a rotisserie chicken, leaving only my bones for the press to pick over.
My testimony would focus on Rita blinding me with her stupid permanent false eyelashes. I spent three days on her couch missing my mouth with spoonfuls of Yoplait and listening to re-runs of "I Love Lucy" -- though even under hypnosis I couldn't recall exact flavors and story lines. Nor did I remember seeing much of Rita around, since I wasn't talking to the dumb bitch anyway, not to speak ill of the dead.I peeked into her room the morning I went back to work to see if she had anything for the laundry I might want to wear myself. She was lying there out cold as I fumbled around to snatch a few things. The case pretty much rested on whether that was her dead body I was tiptoeing around, since Dr. Hollister had been in surgery for thirty-six straight hours before taking a break to swing by and pick her up for dismembering. Had someone else already killed her? Had that person been standing there, lurking in the shadows -- and watching me? If so, Hollister had a watertight alibi -- unless I turned out to be the leak.
"Hey, don't be tossing out any of her stuff," my low rent paparazzo friend Atti advised, snatching a half canister of Chocolate Slimfast I was about to chuck onto a pile of moving rubble. "How'd you like to be accused of evidence tampering?" Just in case, he paused to photograph me in the act."I told you the cops already carted away everything important -- her phone, her computer." Atti rescued a pair of clear lucite stripper shoes with plastic goldfish trapped inside. "You know how much this kind of stuff goes for on eBay?"
"Those are mine, dumbass, bought them to audition for a Marilyn Manson video." I foisted a cardboard box on him. "There's nothing of hers left, alright? The place looked like it got hit by a tsunami after that greedy excuse for a trailer trash mother got through with it."
It was good for me to get out of that skeevy place. The whole enclave had been seized by the Feds a few months after its totally gross owner was killed in some kind of mob hit. "What's up with the Mo K investigation?" Atti asked, photographing the mailbox with Rita's ominous street address before prying it off the wall with a screwdriver.
"How would I know?" It's not like the Organized Crime Unit upstairs was exactly consulting with some little clerk down in Records. All I'd been told was that the fat, foreign loan shark who dubbed himself Mo K had been born Moustafa Khalil somewhere or another in the Middle East. He met Rita at Starbutt's, where he was a regular -- as well as a lousy tipper -- and offered her a bungalow for rent. "Who knows, maybe I was the last person to see him alive -- but they can't seem to find a connection between him and Rita getting offed at the same time. Just my luck hanging out with a couple of dumbasses whose number was up."
"Nope. Gotta be something more to it." He snatched a cosmetics bag I was tossing. "This was hers?" "It's a bunch of junk." I dumped out the chewing gum wrappers and congealed, dime store make-up -- then noticed a BMW key attached to a keyring shaped like a pistol. "Look, some poor bastard gave her his spare car key. She probably wrecked it."
"This isn't a car key," he said, pulling it from its casing and waving it like a magic wand. "It's a flash drive. That Rita was smarter than she looked."
"Smart? She's freaking dead!" One by one, he demonstrated a "lipstick" that was actually a camera, mascara doubling as a microphone and a fountain pen that turned into a gun. "The cops seriously missed all this when they turned the place over?"
I thought for a minute. "I must have grabbed her make-up case that night instead of my own. It's been in my purse ever since." He got his MacBook out of his knapsack and plugged in the flash drive. "It's clean, at least on the surface. Not sure about the rest of this stuff," he said, unscrewing pieces to examine mysterious microchips."Good, because I don't want to know anything more about that chick than I already do." I grabbed everything back from him and put it back in the bag, zipping it shut. "I don't trust the guys at work. You saw the big shots coming out of her funeral right along with the low lifes. Just one big happy family."
"Why would I need insurance?"
"You just said you don't trust those guys."
"I trust one. She isn't a guy. But she is married to one. It's complicated." I relieved him of my goldfish stripper shoes and re-claimed Rita's mailbox. "Why are you still here? I've told you a hundred times we're not partners. We're not even friends.""Be smart, blondie. Who else do you really have?"
"I'll give you a week," I said, handing him the cosmetics bag. "Do your thing."
Everything's complicated, I started thinking, that first night alone in my new place. I took a walk up to Trader Joe's and got lost in a maze of aisles -- realizing nobody knows what's going to happen from one moment to the next. Okay, so I hadn't come to Hollywood to be certain of anything. But all this? I missed my granny, and my pops, and boring old Petaluma. I missed the captain, and the way he refused to be my hero just when I really needed one. I even missed Rita, that crazy stripper who'd gone and gotten herself killed, leaving me to clean up the whole deadly mess alone.
Sensing another shopper close on my tail as I rounded the corner to the produce aisle, I stopped short -- bracing for someone as tall and solid as a brick wall to plow into me. I wheeled around to look up at that familiar, angular face -- at a crisp, blue uniform and that big, shiny badge I'd know anywhere. "Officer Muñoz," I said. "Are you following me?" He looked me up and down like an interesting new snack item worth taking home for a nibble. "I will if you need me to," he said. "It's Cherry, right?"I smiled. "Just like the tart."
