We pulled away from the almost empty parking lot heading back towards the loop and the Memorial Causeway. The streets were quiet, not much traffic of any kind, and no sign of Billy Ray or his buddy, Sammy. Mia drove by Crabby Bill’s restaurant and the marina docks and continued north along Mandalay Avenue past about ninety-four souvenir shops selling everything from suntan oil and bathing suits to jewellery and assorted sizes of hollowed out alligator skulls. We had not talked. Mia seemed to have become absorbed in her own thoughts which might have explained her reckless driving—but probably not. It was as if I wasn’t there.
Finally, she snapped out of her trance and cleared her throat. She made a wide right hand turn and another left and stopped on Poinsettia in front of what was once a Tru-Value hardware store—now an empty space for rent. The whole friggin coast of the Gulf of Mexico to park, and she picks the front of a former Tru-Value hardware store to park. I knew there wasn’t any romance in the air tonight.
Mia turned off the Honda’s ignition. The old car chugged a few times and died noisily. Before the car’s last wheeze, she had pivoted in her seat to face me. There was no light from the hardware store shell and the streetlight on the lamp post across the road made it relatively difficult for us to see each other. Maybe Mia wanted it that way.
“Do you still want to hear the rest of my friggin’ pathetic life story?” she asked quietly. There was a sense of urgency in her voice that had not been there before. Her frustration was almost palpable.
“Sure,” I replied. I knew that I was soon going to have to make a decision. The information about her murdered sister that she left out for me earlier was the reason I was sitting here now.
“In the time that I kind of skipped over,” she smiled weakly, took a deep breath, and started uncertainly, “I did some pretty trashy stuff and a lot of stupid things. Things I’m not proud of. I am not a good or even a nice person. Even as a kid, I did things, and things were done to me, that should never have happened. I’m not going there, so please don’t ask me to. But you have to know, right from the get go, that I’m not a nice person.”
“I usually make those kinds of judgments for myself,” I interrupted. “and I don’t usually judge too harshly. Life sometimes bites you and you bite back. Even as a cop there were things I did then I might not do now. You have to learn to forgive yourself—and as a sideline I write for a Chinese fortune cookie company.”
Mia laughed lightly, and that was a good sign. “Okay, to me you are a good guy, and I don’t want to see you get hurt. I don’t like seeing anyone get hurt. Anyway, when I contacted my family—that was maybe just a bit more than three years ago—I was about to bottom out. The dancing that I had started out doing in strip clubs had gone to escorting and then, finally, just outright hooking. I was drinking and partying too hard. I wasn’t happy. In fact, I couldn’t even remember what happy felt like. Killing myself seemed like a reasonable solution—the only solution. I even had enough pills to do it I think. But when I talked with my sister, Vickie, she sounded like I did when I was her age. I decided that I wanted to come back here when I was feeling better and help her to avoid the mess that I had fallen into. Maybe even get her to move in with me and I could take care of her. I felt that if I could do that, my life would have served some purpose. Does that sound weird?”
I shook my head—no. To tell me these things was not easy for her. The inner conflicts, the fears and memories could be read on her shadowed face. Her blue eyes were dark and shiny as they looked quickly at me and then hastily strayed back down towards the floor.
“Okay, so when she was found dead, I came back home for the funeral. I talked with the police a lot. At first, I felt like it would only be a few days before her killer was caught. Now, here it is three years later, and they’re not even trying anymore. The head detective in the investigation, a gruff old cop named Langdon, has retired. No one cares about what happened back then except for me—and maybe my mother. Everyone else has gone on as if nothing ever happened—as if Vickie had never been on this earth. That’s not right. My sister was a real person. She may not have been real smart, but she had dreams and hopes. She deserved to have a real life. I can’t just throw her out with yesterday’s garbage. So when I found out you were an ex-cop, I kind of developed this plan in my head to seduce you into helping me find whoever murdered Vickie.” Mia stopped abruptly and raised her eyes to look at me. “Does that make any sense to you?”
“I guess,” I said, “but I must have slept through the seduction part unless you thought the encounter with Billy Ray and his bud, what’s his name, took care of that.”
She laughed again. That sounded good. “No,” she smiled at me and captured my eyes. “The Billy Ray thing was an unforeseen and unfortunate accident. In my original plan, I allowed a couple of weeks to find out if you were smart enough to be able to help me. I wanted to get to know you. I thought that maybe after you fell for me a bit, I’d ask you to help me find Vickie’s killer.”
“Pretty sure of yourself around the ‘falling for you stuff’ there, Sweet Cakes. What if it turned out that I was a gay caballero and not turned on by your clever little seduction slash manipulation plot?”
“It never crossed my mind,” she said as she dropped her small tanned hand onto my thigh. “But I guess I might have asked someone like Billy Ray to seduce you then. Are you?”
“Are I what?” I was suddenly having trouble concentrating on our conversation as her hand moved softly toward my knee and then gently back up my inner thigh.
“Gay?”
“Certainly not. Who told you that?” I said finding my deepest voice.
Mia laughed and her eyes lit up. She took her hand away. I tried to get focused again on her proposal about what I thought she expected me to be able to do. It wasn’t easy getting focused on that.
“So you think, because I got away with my life when we met Billy Ray, that I am the ex-cop for the job?—and that is EX-cop? Mia, you don’t need muscle; you need brain. Three years after the fact with no co-operation coming from the local cops and no status to approach anyone for information, you’ll also need an incredible amount of luck—which from the sounds of it, neither of us has in any quantity.”
In spite of my effort to keep it light and yet sound reasonable, Mia cowered back into the driver’s seat of the Honda as if each of my words was a stick hitting her. Her blue eyes had started to fill when I had started my reply. Now, they were flowing freely. I silently cursed myself for always having been a sucker for tears. I sat there and watched her. I didn’t know what she would do if I reached out to comfort her, so I did nothing. I waited.
Finally, she stopped crying. Well, not quite, but the odd sniffle can’t be counted against her. She slowly reached towards the car key still in the ignition. “So you won’t help,” she stated quietly. It wasn’t a question; it was a statement of fact. “I’m sorry I bothered you Joe. I’ll take you home.”
I sat there feeling like a total waste of skin. She had bet on me, and I had failed her.
Mia must have found out more than my name and where I sometimes worked. She drove unerringly towards my rooming house. As she pulled to a stop at the curb in front of the old bungalow I share with my crazy landlady, I gave up.
“Mia, I didn’t say I wouldn’t help you. I said to be successful, to even stand a chance of finding out who killed Vickie; we would have to have an incredible amount of luck. Up front and to be honest with you, I don’t think we’ll be able find the killer. But if you want to try, I guess I could help—for a little while. I mean it isn’t as if my social calendar is crammed with events. But, and I’m telling you this right now, if this gets too hairy—you know—dangerous—we go directly to the cops. Pass go; do not collect two hundred dollars. Do you agree?”
She turned towards me and said nothing. She stared at me with glassy eyes that were penetratingly sharp. I guess the deep stare was her form of bullshit detection. I knew right then that her life had taught Mia the importance of cynicism.
How many times had men lied to her to get what they wanted from her? Had I just capitulated because I wanted this relationship to develop? Yes! I tried to hold her stare. I wondered if there was a chance in hell that I could do something here—probably not. She must have sensed my self-doubt.
“Okay,” she said quietly and leaned forward to kiss me gently on the cheek. “Thank you. What do we do now?”
“We do nothing just yet. It’s late, and I have to catch up on my beauty rest,” I replied. She smiled and then laughed. I was beginning to love that laugh. “I will go to the library tomorrow and do a search on the Internet and the stacks. I’ll put together a list of the information we’ll have to find. I’ll also create a whole batch of questions that we’ll need answers for. Once that’s done, and as soon as you can get free from work, we’ll sit down and figure out where we go from there. Does that sound fair?”
“Yes, and thank you,” Mia said simply.
“No problem,” I said. Who was I kidding? There was nothing but problems. “Are you okay to get home on your own?” I added as I reached for my door handle.
“I do it every night Bub,” she replied lightly. “Tell me tomorrow at the restaurant when you want to meet again.”
“Yeah, okay, but listen—don’t tell anyone about what we’re doing just yet. It could be dangerous, and we don’t know who the good guys and who the bad guys are.” Prophetic me.
Mia looked a bit confused. But she promised that she would keep this whole plan our little secret. Then, she put her junker in gear and drove off leaving me beside the curb watching her taillights flicker from view. “I must be nuts,” I said as I turned to go to my room. I believe I may have had a big smile on my face.
I’m A Cop Again—Well, In A Way