The Bayer was full, never opened. The ibuprofen wasn’t as conclusive, but it appeared to be untouched. One bottle was turned the wrong way, however, label side in. I made a point of facing the labels out. Not that I’m compulsive; it just makes more sense to read than to grope. So, ah-hah! K had moved that bottle.
I took it off the shelf, knowing this private-eye thing tomorrow at Greg’s was going to work out great. The bottle held valerian root, a mild herbal sedative, the nearest thing I had to sleeping pills. The stuff smells abominable, like vomit in a capsule, but Dallas swears by it. She’d put me onto it. It seems to work, not in a big way, but enough.
I opened it. Last time I looked there’d been a dozen tablets left, give or take. Now there were five. Unless I’d had a parade through the house, not something I could readily discount, K had taken about half a dozen. Not enough to harm a medium-sized cat, but enough to put her under farther than normal, whatever that was for her.
It also meant she knew her herbs, which put her somewhere in Dallas’s league. I wondered if that also implied homemade bread, StairMastering, crosswords, mid-level Sudoku, yoga, meditation, aromatherapy, and mega doses of antioxidants as well.
As I put the bottle back, I realized that curiosity had edged out my anger. I even caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror with a silly half-grin on my face. The old PI charm was already in high gear, even before day one on the job.
My toothbrush was damp. Sonofabitch! For a moment I stared at it, anger returning full force. Like clockwork, I put that thing in my mouth every morning and night. That, by God, was mine, if nothing else on this sorry, intrusive planet.
Now I felt violated.
Then the thought dawned—and at this point my moral compass did a three-sixty and then some—that K might be hurt. How would I know? She was warm, but under those covers she might be slowly bleeding to death, might have a knife stuck in her back, might be any number of things requiring a more or less immediate response from someone, presumably me.
Having showered, brushed her teeth, swallowed a large but nowhere near lethal dose of valerian, and tucked herself into bed?
Not likely, but…how would I know?
Which hinted at my next move, which I thought I might be able to justify if it ever came to that. I returned to the bedroom, then paused in the doorway…figuring, with all this brain power at my disposal, that, come tomorrow at nine, I would make a damned fine gumshoe. I would make my bland young nephew enormously proud of his Uncle Mort.
Still, I hesitated. K had turned my bed into her bed. As I saw it, people have an inalienable right to privacy.
Usually. In their own goddamn beds, yeah.
I stormed over to the bed and threw back the covers, all the way back.
She wasn’t bleeding or bludgeoned. She wasn’t missing any body parts, and I consider myself an expert. She wasn’t hurt in any way that I could see. But as I’d hoped and feared, she was certainly naked, right down to those last few critical square inches that told me this wasn’t any bottle blond, but the real thing.
I stared for a full second longer than necessary, maybe two—okay, five, but who’s counting? Some sights just take hold. Whoever this K was, she was a very healthy girl, every ounce of her as work-hardened as a gymnast or ice skater. If I hadn’t been distracted I could’ve counted ribs. At least she wasn’t underage. Finally I lowered the covers and stood there, mulling over an assortment of half-assed facts and conclusions.
Fact: Girls do not crawl into strange beds, no matter how tired they are. Not mine, not anyone’s. It simply doesn’t happen.
Ergo: I knew her, or she knew me. And since I didn’t have a clue, I assumed she did, or would once she regained consciousness.
Fact: Since I didn’t know her, she couldn’t know me very well. At best, she was the most distant sort of an acquaintance.
Ergo: She was a bold one, possibly even dangerous. Not that the two are mutually exclusive.
Fact: In about nine hours I was going to begin a new career as a private investigator.
Ergo: In fewer than those same nine hours I had to figure out who K was, or at least wake her up and ask, or lose all credibility as a budding shamus.
Fact: The beers weren’t helping.
Ergo: I ought to go to bed and puzzle it out in the morning with a clear head. Or ask her then, when she woke up.
Fact: I no longer had a bed to go to.
* * *
Of the fifty or so guys I’ve known well enough over the years, at least forty-nine would dispute that last. They’d be in bed with K like the Flash. She was there, and she’d put herself there. It wasn’t likely she’d made some fantastic mistake. She couldn’t expect to remain alone in there. After all, the bed was mine, at least in theory. There was no possible conflict, right? No moral dilemma.
Well, in theory.
But all the Wicked Ales I’d downed that evening couldn’t take me that far, which was too bad, so I set about rustling up clues.
Like…who was this girl? How did she get into my house?
The first I couldn’t answer, try as I might. I found a wad of stinky clothes in a corner of the room, right where I would have thrown them if they’d been mine. White slacks, button-up-the-front shirt, pale-blue string bikini undies, a matching bra. And as I said, stinky, which probably meant she’d been wearing them for some time. No ID of any kind anywhere in the pile, but at least the ripeness of the garments explained K’s shower.
No purse, and I looked all through the house, in closets, cabinets, under the bed. I even looked
