“It’s me, Momma. Come to make sure you eat your supper.”
“Well, come on in, then. Don’t just stand there where I can’t see your face.”
Hanging his dripping jacket on the coat rack, LaShawn kicked off his Nikes and stepped into Etta Mae’s pristine living room. The volume on the TV set was so loud that it was nothing short of miraculous that she had heard the door open and close. LaShawn knew about his mother’s worsening vision problems, but this was something else they needed to discuss-the possibility of Etta Mae’s having her hearing checked. LaShawn didn’t hold out much hope on that score. The first time he had brought up the subject, it hadn’t gone well.
“What did Meals-on-Wheels bring you today?” he asked.
“Mac and cheese and green beans,” Etta Mae replied. “At least that’s what that nice Mr. Dawson said when he was putting it in the fridge. I do like their mac and cheese. Not as good as mine, but then I don’t have to fix it, do I.”
He went over to where she sat and kissed the top of her head. Her hair was still wiry and springy, but he was surprised by how thin it was. And how gray. He was pleased to see that she was wearing her button, the emergency alert necklace he had bought for her. That way, if she needed help all she had to do was press one button to be connected to an emergency operator.
“I’ll go heat up that mac and cheese,” he said. “You want to eat it here or in the kitchen?”
“That depends,” she said. “Will you eat some, too?”
LaShawn shook his head. “You know better than that, Momma. Those Meals-on-Wheels are for
“Then I shouldn’t eat them, either.” Etta Mae sniffed. “You’re only as old as you think you are.”
“I’ll eat at the mission,” he assured her. “The nice ladies in the kitchen know that I’m over here feeding you, so they hold back a little something for me.”
“Well,” Etta Mae said. “In that case, since you won’t join me, I could just as well eat on a tray here in the living room.”
Out in the kitchen-also built to be wheelchair-friendly-LaShawn put the macaroni and cheese into the microwave and began counting out the evening’s supply of pills. With morning and evening visits from him, they were making this work, but at some point there would be another decision to be made. LaShawn was hoping to hold that one off as long as possible. Etta Mae had told him that she’d rather die than go live in one of those awful assisted-living homes, and he knew she meant it.
He put the pills, silverware, and a napkin on the tray along with a bottle of Snapple. He was waiting for the microwave to finish reheating the food when the doorbell rang. “You stay where you are, Momma,” he called. “I’ll get it.”
Expecting to find a missionary on his mother’s doorstep, an annoyed LaShawn hurried to the door ready to send whoever it was packing. As he flung the door wide open, the first bullet, muffled by a silencer, caught him full in the gut. He never saw it coming. As he fell, the second bullet scored a direct hit on his heart. He was dead before he ever hit the surface of his mother’s newly Pergoed floor.
“Shawny?” his mother called a little later. “What was that noise? And I feel a breeze. Did you leave the front door open?”
A good five minutes after that, Etta Mae Tompkins used her emergency alert button for the very first time.
“Good evening, Mrs. Tompkins,” a disembodied voice called from somewhere behind her. “How can we help you?”
It took a moment for Etta Mae to realize it was the emergency operator speaking to her from the box in the living room. “My son!” Etta Mae wailed brokenly. “My poor baby son Shawny is dead. Somebody’s murdered him. They shot him right here in my front door!”
CHAPTER 1
I was standing in my own bedroom minding my own business and knotting my tie when Mel Soames hopped into the doorway from her room down the hall. She was wearing nothing but a bra and a pair of panties, and she was doing a strange ostrichlike dance as she attempted to put one foot into a pair of panty hose.
“So what are you going to do about a tux?” she asked. “Buy or rent?”
Some questions posed by half-naked women are more easily answered than others. This one had me tumped. What tux? I wondered.
Since I quit drinking, I find I’m in fairly good shape when it comes to remembering things. For example, we had spent most of the weekend on the road, driving down to Ashland, Oregon, to see my month-old grandson, Kyle Roger Cartwright. I remembered the eight-hour ride down, including our post-midnight arrival at the Peerless Hotel in the wee hours of Saturday morning.
I remembered spending all of Saturday alternately having my picture taken with and taking pictures of a month-old blanket-wrapped round-faced little kid who looked like he would have preferred sleeping peacefully to being passed from hand to hand during a nonstop day-long photo shoot. I clearly remembered having to explain to my precocious four-year-old granddaughter, Kayla, that Mel was
And I also remembered the eight-hour drive back to Seattle on Sunday afternoon, especially the part where I had managed to keep my mouth shut when Mel was pulled over by an Oregon state trooper for doing seventy-seven miles per hour in a posted sixty-five. (It could have been much worse. The alabaster-white S55 Mercedes sedan I bought used from my friend and lawyer Ralph Ames has five hundred horsepower under the hood, a top speed of 184, and is deceptively quiet.) But the motorcycle cop was a young guy. Mel gave him the full-press blonde treatment complete with a winning if apologetic smile and managed to talk her way out of the ticket. But then, that’s Mel for you.
However, nothing in all those bits of memory even hinted at my needing a tux. For any reason whatsoever.
“Buy,” I said.
It was a desperate gamble, but I came up winners. Mel shot me a radiant smile. “Good answer,” she said. “We should probably plan on doing that at lunchtime, or maybe right after work. That way, if there’s tailoring that needs to be done…”
Snapping her panty hose in place, she disappeared back down the hall to finish dressing. I finished knotting my tie and then went out into the kitchen to drink coffee and contemplate my fate. Tux or not, Mel Soames brought something to the table that wasn’t half bad.
We had met working for the Washington State attorney general’s Special Homicide Investigation Team, the SHIT squad, as it’s derisively known in local cop-shop circles. I had gone there after bailing out of homicide at Seattle PD. My former partner, Sue Danielson, had died in a shoot-out, and I had wanted to find a way to keep my hand in law enforcement without having to deal with the emotional stress of a partner. Ross Alan Connors, the A.G., had offered me just such a position. Mel, it turned out, had come to Washington State and to SHIT for a similar reason, only the partnership problem she was leaving behind was a bad marriage and a worse divorce. But then we got turned into partners anyway-unofficially and without either one of us necessarily meaning for it to happen.
In the course of several memorable days, Mel had ended up watching my back in not one but two life-and- death situations. It turned out she was damned good at it, too. And then when someone ran me through a greenhouse wall, cut open my scalp, and filled me full of tiny glass shards, she had brought me home from the ER and had stayed on to look after me. (Months later, little slivers of glass still pop up occasionally when I’m shaving.)
To begin with, Mel camped out in the guest room down the hall, but over the course of time that had changed, too. The only parts of the guest suite she now uses are the closet and the bathroom. We call it her dressing room.
It goes without saying that we’re both well beyond the age of consent and old enough to know that working
