The first thing Renee saw when she woke the next morning was bright sunlight streaming through the blinds. The second thing was sunlight glinting off the metal bracelet she wore.
Bracelet?
She blinked, trying to focus. No. Not bracelet.
Handcuffs.
She squeezed her eyes closed, the events of the past twenty-four hours whipping through her mind. She really was handcuffed to a bed. John’s bed. Which she was sharing with John.
She turned over, expecting to find him there. He wasn’t.
She glanced at the clock. Ten forty-five. She’d slept until ten forty-five?
No wonder. She’d been so tired after all that had happened, it was amazing she hadn’t slept around the clock.
She sat up slowly, looking around. John wasn’t in the bedroom, and she didn’t hear him in the bathroom. Finally she called out to him tentatively.
No response.
Louder.
Nothing.
She lay back down and closed her eyes, her arm shielding her eyes from the bright sunlight. His absence worried her. Where could he possibly have gone?
“Oh, my God!”
The voice out of nowhere made Renee’s heart leap right into her throat. She jerked her arm away from her eyes to see a woman standing at the bedroom door.
With a strangled scream, Renee yanked herself up and scooted against the headboard, hauling the covers up over her with her free hand, her heart beating frantically. Who was this woman, and what was she doing in John’s house?
The answer was obvious. Girlfriend.
She looked the part. Tall, long legged, and amply endowed, with a headful of dark hair pulled into a ponytail at the crown of her head. She wore a pair of jeans, a purple crop top, and flip-flops. Her half-baffled, half-astonished expression was asking a whole lot more questions than Renee was prepared to answer.
“Wh-who are you?” Renee asked.
“Sandy DeMarco,” the woman said, her eyes still big as golf balls. “John’s sister.”
His sister? Was that better than a girlfriend, or worse? It was weirder, that was for sure.
No. It was better. A baffled sister was definitely better than an irate girlfriend.
Sandy continued to stare at her with dumb disbelief. “And you’re…?”
Embarrassed as hell? At a total loss to explain this? Going to kill John for leaving me handcuffed? All of the above?
“I’m Alice. I’m a…a friend of John’s.”
Sandy zeroed in on Renee’s handcuffed wrist, looking perplexed, and in that instant Renee knew she couldn’t explain this scenario if her life depended on it. Except, of course, to say that she was a fugitive John just happened to have hanging around. What was she going to do now?
Then it occurred to her. There was one other way to explain it, but…good Lord. Could she actually say it out loud?
“John’s a cop, you know,” Renee said, her voice shaky. “The handcuffs. I guess it’s k-kind of…well, you know…kind of a…” She exhaled. “A turn-on.”
Sandy blinked with disbelief. “What?”
Oh, no. Did she have “liar” scrolling across her forehead like stock-market figures?
“You’re telling me my brother, Mr. Conservative, goes in for the kinky stuff?”
“Uh…yeah. I guess he does.”
Sandy’s perplexed expression slowly gave way to a smile of pure delight. “Well, I’ll be damned. There’s hope for him yet.”
Renee felt a rush of relief. Not only had Sandy bought the idea that her brother was having wild, deviant sex, she also applauded it, which meant she probably wasn’t going to be calling the Depravity Squad.
“I guess this means he’s back early,” Sandy asked. “So where is he now?”
“Uh…I’m not sure.”
Sandy planted her fists on her hips. “You mean he left you handcuffed here and took off?”
“He probably didn’t want to wake me.”
“Why didn’t he take them off last night?”
Good question. With only one answer Renee could think of. “He fell asleep.”
Sandy rolled her eyes. “Then you should have given him a swift kick to wake him up!” She strode over to the bed. “Where’s the key? I’ll get those things off you, and then I’ll kill him for you when he gets home.”
The key.
Hope gushed through Renee like water through a broken dam. If the key was here, this woman could find it. She could unlock the handcuffs. And then Renee could get the hell out of there. Where she’d go, she didn’t know. First she had to get free. Then she’d think about how to disappear.
“I don’t know where it is,” Renee said. “Do you suppose you could look around a bit?”
“Sure.” Sandy poked around the bedroom. When it didn’t appear to be lying around there, Renee suggested she look in the rest of the house, but after a few minutes of searching, Sandy came up empty-handed. Renee slumped with disappointment. Her best chance for escape was undoubtedly sitting in John’s pocket right now.
“I can’t believe this,” Sandy said with disgust. “He must have the key with him. Do you have any idea where he went?”
“I don’t know. To get donuts, maybe?”
“He’s got you in his bed, and he goes out for donuts?” She made a scoffing noise. “And I thought there was hope for him. I hope you kill him for this, Alice. Or the offer’s still open for me to be the hit woman. It’ll be no problem proving justifiable homicide, believe me.”
Renee would have settled for proving she was innocent of armed robbery.
“Now, don’t you worry. I’ll keep you company until he gets back. Being handcuffed to a bed all by yourself would have to be a real bore.”
“No,” she said quickly, forcing a smile. “It’s okay. I’ll be fine by myself. Surely you have better things to do than hang around here.”
“And what if he’s gone for another hour or two? I’m not leaving you handcuffed here. What if there’s a fire or something? No. I’m staying right here until he gets back.” She sat down on the corner of the bed and gave Renee a woman-to-woman look. “I know this sounds kind of weird, but I’m really glad this happened. I don’t get to meet many of the women John dates.”
This was getting stranger by the minute. There she was handcuffed to John’s bed in the apparent aftermath of a really hot bondage scene, yet Sandy was acting as if they’d just run into each other at the mall. Somehow she would have thought any relative of John’s would have been quite a bit more…well, appalled.
“Of course, he has to actually ask a woman out before I can meet her,” Sandy went on, talking away as if they were chatting over a cup of coffee. “Most of the time he eats, sleeps, and works. That’s about it.”
“Uh…yeah. He seems to take his job pretty seriously.”
“Too seriously.” Sandy pulled her legs up onto the bed and crossed them, resting her elbow on her knee, her chin in her hand. “So. How long have you two been seeing each other?”
Ever since he almost arrested me two nights ago.
“Not long,” Renee said.
“Tell me about yourself,” Sandy said. “What do you do for a living?”
Well, if your brother would let me go, I’d have a promising career as a professional fugitive.
“I work at a restaurant. Assistant manager.”
“Perfect! John loves to eat. You’re a match made in heaven.”
Renee had the feeling that if she’d mentioned she was an undertaker, Sandy would have said John liked dead bodies.
“How about you?” Renee said, thinking maybe she should hold up her end of the conversation. “What do you do?”
“I own a flower shop. I think it’s a backlash against all that testosterone I was around growing up. One father, three brothers, no mother.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. What happened to your mother?”
“Cancer. I don’t suppose John got around to telling you any of the details of his personal life yet.”
Renee knew precisely nothing about John’s personal life. But given Sandy’s inclination to talk, she was learning more every minute.
“No,” Renee said. “He hasn’t. His mother’s death must have hit him hard.”
“Yeah, well, it hit me harder. Try dealing with three younger brothers who fought like gladiators and had to be threatened with their lives to pick up their underwear or take a plate to the kitchen once in a while. Even now…” Sandy ran her fingertip along the nightstand and held up a finger full of dust. “Look at this, will you? And that fridge of John’s. Alexander Fleming might have discovered penicillin years earlier if he’d had access to that.” She made a face of disgust, then brushed her finger off on the leg of her jeans. “That’s why I dropped by today. I thought he was still out of town. See, if I don’t clean up for him occasionally, any woman he brings around is going to throw up and leave, and when will that workaholic brother of mine ever get married?”
Ahh. Sandy’s goal: to marry off her brother. John’s goal: to make sure that never happened.
“I mean, what do you think of this place, Alice? It’s a mess, isn’t it?”
Actually, it didn’t look so bad to Renee. She personally never knocked the dust off anything until she couldn’t recognize the shape of the object beneath it.
“I’ve seen worse,” she said.
Sandy smiled. “A forgiving woman. My brother could use one of those.”
Renee didn’t know how to respond to that, except maybe to laugh out loud at the thought of her and John together. As a couple. The cop and the fugitive. Opposites did attract once in a while, but that was ridiculous.
“Actually, I think John took it harder when our father was killed,” Sandy said, jumping back and forth between subjects like a kid playing hopscotch. “He was shot in the line of duty. It happened about eight years ago.”
“Your father was a cop?”
“Uh-huh. It was a routine traffic stop. He had no way of knowing that the guy he pulled over had a dead body in the trunk that he didn’t want discovered.”
“That’s awful. So both of your parents are gone?”
“Yeah. It’s just us kids now, and aunts and uncles and cousins. And grandparents.”
“Are your other brothers married?”
“Dave was. He lost his wife in a car accident about a year ago, when their daughter was six months old.”
“That’s terrible!”
“He’s doing okay. If anybody can handle it, Dave can. It’s a struggle with the baby, but we all help out. He’ll get married again. It’s just a matter of time. Now, as for Alex, he never has a shortage of women around, but the idea of marriage rubs him the wrong way. And John’s too wrapped up in his job to even think about dating, much less getting married.” Sandy gave her a sly smile. “But they can’t hold out forever.”
Renee couldn’t help smiling back. The longer they talked, the less weird it seemed, and the more she forgot she was there under false pretenses. Just for a little while it was nice to relax a bit and let herself believe that she was John’s sex toy rather than an undercover fugitive. Sandy’s nonstop chatter made her feel like one of the family when she hadn’t even met the family.
As if she ever would.
But even as they talked, John’s imminent return was never far from her mind. Where was he, anyway? And what was he going to say when he came back and found her talking to his sister? Surely he’d put on that cop face of his and play it cool until he found out what lie she’d told to cover things up.
Surely he would.
Wouldn’t he?
John told himself as he drove to the south side of town that he had one goal, and it was a simple one: he was going to check out the convenience store where the robbery took place. But he wasn’t going as a cop, because the last thing he wanted was for word to get out that he was nosing around in this case. Somebody might ask why, and he didn’t want anyone to eventually associate him with Renee. He had no business even being back in town right then. If Lieutenant Daniels found out he hadn’t finished the term of his exile, he’d pay hell for it.
He decided he’d just poke around a little. Ask a few questions. Talk with the woman who’d gotten shot, if she was there, and find out her take on the night in question. And he was sure that when he was finished doing that, he’d see how mistaken he’d been. He’d see that nobody but Renee could have committed that crime, and once he was convinced of that he wouldn’t have a bit of trouble taking her to jail.
Ten minutes later he pulled up to the Handi-Mart, one of those tacky little convenience stores with hand-drawn ads in the window advertising cheap cigarettes and milk for two-ninety-nine per gallon. A barefoot woman in a long flowered dress stood outside talking on her phone while a toddler wearing only a diaper and a Cookie Monster shirt hugged her leg.
John went inside the store, bells clinking against the grimy glass door. A geeky-looking Middle Eastern kid wearing wire-rimmed glasses stood behind the counter. According to his badge, his name was Ahmed.
John browsed the store nonchalantly for a moment, then came to the counter with a bag of Doritos and a bottle of 7UP.
“Hey,” he said, looking around questioningly as Ahmed rang up his purchases. “Isn’t this the store that was robbed a little while back?”
“Oh, you bet!” Ahmed’s face broke out in a huge, toothy grin. “And the owner got shot right in the arm.” He made a gun out of his thumb and forefinger. “Pow! Just like that!” Ahmed had clearly watched one too many action-adventure movies.
“An older lady, I hear. That’s a shame.”
“Nope,” he said, shaking his head. “No shame. Mrs. Bunch is a tough old broad. That’s what she says.”
John heard the shuffle of feet and turned to see someone coming out of the back room, a tiny, gnome-like woman he estimated to be somewhere between eighty and eight hundred. Her sparse white hair lay against her scalp in wispy ringlets, and her face had the deep, fissured look of a dried-up river basin. She wore stretchy pink pants and the same kind of cheap red cotton coat worn by every convenience-store employee in America. Her name tag read Trudy.
“Now, Ahmed, you’re talking about me behind my back again,” she said. “What kind of crap you dishin’ out?”
“No crap, Mrs. Bunch,” Ahmed said, his hand over his heart. “I tell the truth.”
“You tell the truth, huh? Then tell me what you were doing in the bathroom all that time yesterday right after the Hustlers came in.”
Ahmed gave her a crafty smile. “This is America. Constitutional law. Fifth amendment, you know?” Then he turned his smile to John and added a furtive thumbs-up. Harley and Ahmed. Appreciation for the naked female form knew no cultural boundaries.
Trudy shook her head. “You’re a smart-ass, you know that, Ahmed?”
“Yes,” he said. “I am told I have a very smart ass.”
“Are you the lady who was the victim of the robbery?” John asked Trudy.
“Yep. You must have read about it in the paper like everybody else.” The old woman cackled. “Nothin’ like getting robbed to make you famous. I was almost this famous when I got robbed back in ’82, but I didn’t get shot then. Gettin’ shot, now, that’s what really gets people talkin’.” She leaned over the counter. “Wanna see my scar?”
Before John could answer one way or the other, she hauled up the sleeve of her red jacket. “Looky here,” she said, pointing to the remnant of stitches on her upper arm, circled by a faint ring of black and blue.
John felt as if he’d entered a carnival freak show. He gave a low whistle. “Pretty nasty.”
“Yep. Took ’em half an hour to dig out the bullet, it being deep in the muscle and such.”
John nodded with as much awe as he could muster. “I read that it was a woman who robbed you. What did she look like?”
“Well, first off, she was pretty tall.”
“How tall?”
“Maybe five-eight. Or ten.”
“Wow.”
At the expression of awe in John’s voice, the old lady immediately upped the ante. “Maybe six feet. Or I don’t know—maybe even six two. It’s hard to say.”
Just pick the most impressive number, John thought, as Trudy added even more credence to what cops generally believed—eyewitness testimony could be some of the flakiest evidence of all. In this case it was especially true. From Trudy’s vantage point, just about any woman who walked into her store would look like an Amazon.
“And mean looking, too,” she went on. “She wore these big, dark glasses and all this fire-red lipstick. And she had this deep voice, kinda like Bette Davis in Dead Ringer, where she killed her twin sister and assumed her identity. That’s what the robber sounded like. Couldn’t forget that.”
John thought about Renee’s voice, middle range, and relatively soft when she wasn’t shouting at him about something. But a person’s voice was just one of many things that could easily be disguised.
The woman crinkled her nose. “And something else. Now, I know I’m a fine one to talk, being as how I buy most of my clothes down at the Walmart, but that woman had a bit of trouble puttin’ a look together, you know?”
“Oh? How’s that?”
“She was wearing this god-awful leopard-print blouse. And these black spandex pants. And white shoes. Big white shoes. That woman had some good-size feet on her.”
Renee wasn’t exactly petite, but her feet weren’t in the gargantuan range, either. Another exaggeration? Probably. If Trudy could make her perpetrator grow six inches in six seconds, how accurate was her shoe-size assessment? Also, Renee’s fashion sense seemed a bit tamer than animal prints, although there was the matter of disguising oneself to commit a robbery. It wasn’t unusual for a robber to dress outlandishly, then dump the disguise somewhere and walk away looking normal to take the heat off.
“And gloves. Black ones. Oh! And her earrings! Huge, dangly things shaped like rainbows. All those gaudy colors with a leopard-print shirt.” Trudy’s face crinkled like a raisin. “Never seen anything so ugly in all my life.”
“You must have a really sharp eye to catch all those details,” he told Trudy.
The old lady cackled again. “Nah. Not really. A blind man in the dark couldn’t have missed that getup.” She leaned toward John and dropped her voice. “Just between you and me, I been having a little problem with cataracts lately. Things are a little blurry around the edges.”
John’s heart skipped. The woman who’d fingered Renee was telling him she couldn’t see? “But the newspaper said you positively identified the woman who robbed you.”
She waved her hand. “That was a piece of cake once I saw them all standing there in that lineup, even though none of them was wearin’ them ugly clothes. All I had to do was pick out the tallest blonde.”
John couldn’t believe it. Even the most brainless defense attorney would have this woman discredited the minute she took the stand.
“Pretty smart, huh?” Ahmed said with a smile of admiration. “She picked right, too.”
“Yeah,” Trudy said. “Found out later that the one I fingered was the one they arrested. They found her with my money and the gun she shot me with. Am I good, or what?”
Suddenly the open-and-shut nature of Renee’s case seemed even fuzzier than before. It had taken him only two minutes of casual conversation to come to the conclusion that this particular eyewitness was loony. Why hadn’t the detective on the case made the same call?
“I have a few cop friends who work around here,” John said. “Do you remember the name of the officer on the case? The one who interviewed you after the robbery?”
Trudy got a thoughtful look on her face. “Started with a B, I think. Borstad, Botsdorf…”
Oh, God. Not him. “Botstein?”
“Yep. That’s the one. Real nice fella. You know him?”
“Yeah. Good old Botstein.”
He knew him, all right. Leo Botstein was a detective out of the South Precinct who’d been counting the days until retirement for approximately the last thirty-two years, and he hadn’t put in an honest day’s work in the last five. And now he’d finally made the leap. If John remembered right, his retirement party had been last night.
“Hey!” Trudy shouted. “You kids over there! Don’t you pick up those magazines unless you’re planning on buying them!”
John turned to see two young teenage boys standing at the magazine rack, dripping with streetwise attitude. They wore ragged, oversize jeans that hugged their hips and baseball caps turned backward. The shorter of the two shot Trudy a practiced sneer.
“Aw, go to hell, you old bag! We’ll read whatever we want to!”
Trudy sauntered up to the kids and pulled her coat to one side, revealing something that looked suspiciously like a semiautomatic pistol.
“Meet Harry,” she said. “Would you like to get to know him better?”
The kid’s eyes widened. Clearly he hadn’t expected a woman who was the approximate size and shape of a troll doll to be packing enough firepower to blow his head off. He slapped his buddy on the shoulder. They backed away, then turned and peeled out of the store. Ahmed gave Trudy a big grin and held up his palm, and Trudy high-fived him. Then he turned his grin toward John.
“Mrs. Bunch. She takes no crap.”
“So you have a license to carry concealed?” John asked her.
“You betcha. And I go to the shooting range twice a week. Can’t be too careful these days.”
“Now, ma’am, you wouldn’t go shooting a couple of kids just for reading the magazines, would you?”
“Aw, heck, no.” She snickered. “Sure scares the daylights out of them, though, don’t it?”
Looking at a gun like that would pretty much scare the daylights out of anyone, particularly when the person who owned the gun appeared to have a very large screw loose.
“You know,” Trudy said, “this used to be a really nice neighborhood. Kids had respect. Now they got nothin’ but smart mouths, just like Ahmed here.”
“Ah, but you would never show me your gun for reading the magazines. It’s what you call a…perk?”
“Perk, my ass. If you stay in the john with one of them today as long as you did yesterday, I’m blowing a hole right through the door.”
John tossed a five down on the counter to pay for the soda and chips. “You know, Mrs. Bunch, that armed robber almost made a big mistake messing with you. She’s lucky she didn’t get her head blown clean off.”
“You can say that again. If I’d been carrying my gun at the time instead of having it under the counter, there would been blonde-bimbo brains all over the potato chip rack.”
John couldn’t wait to dig into those Doritos now. “So what made the robber actually shoot you?”
“I went for my gun. I’m a little slower than I was a few years ago, but I still figured I could take her.” She patted the bulge under her coat. “That’s where my baby stays these days. I’d sooner walk around without my underdrawers.”
John had no desire to dwell on that mental image. “Now, why do you figure someone would want to rob a nice lady like yourself?”
“Probably to get herself some new clothes, considering the ones she was wearing looked like something out of a hooker’s garage sale. Course, I guess now she’ll have all the new clothes she needs, courtesy of the state of Texas.”
Trudy laughed raucously at that, and Ahmed joined in with another high five, and pretty soon all the frivolity was just about more than John could stand.
He left the convenience store and went back out to his Explorer, tossing the 7UP and the Doritos into the back seat. He made a few notes on the pad he’d brought with him, then pulled a notebook out of his glove compartment. He flipped through it, then grabbed his phone and dialed Leo Botstein’s home number. The man answered with a drowsy, hung-over voice.
“Leo. It’s John DeMarco.”
A loud, painful groan. “Man, stop yellin’ into the phone, will you?”
It appeared that John had remembered right about Botstein’s retirement party. Right now even a ticking clock would sound like a jackhammer to him.
“DeMarco,” he said. “What the hell do you want?”
“I need some information. You had a robbery at a convenience store down on Griffin Street. Elderly lady got shot. Perp was a blonde woman. How solid is the case?”
“News flash. I retired seventeen hours ago. That means I don’t give a shit.”
“Gee, Leo, that must also mean you don’t give a shit if I tell everyone about the New Year’s Eve incident with the hooker and the Doberman.”
Silence.
“You’re an asshole, DeMarco.”
“Just tell me about the case.”
John heard a heavy, drunken sigh. “It’s rock solid.”
“Who were the other suspects you interviewed?”
“No other suspects. I had the loot from the robbery, an eyewitness, and a smoking gun. I don’t go looking for something I already got.”
“Motive?”
“Why are you asking me all this crap?”
“It’s my aunt Louisa. One of her friends is the daughter of the old lady who got shot. She’s been bugging the hell out of me, wanting me to check up.” He really did have an aunt Louisa, so at least that part of the story was true. “Who was the case assigned to when you left?”
“Henderson. He’ll take it to court.”
John slumped with disgust. Oh, that was just great. If there was anybody who could beat out Botstein for the Apathetic Cop of the Year award, it was Henderson.
“Assuming somebody finds the suspect,” Botstein added.
“She missed her court date?” John said, feigning surprise.
“Yep. Jumped bail two days ago.” He coughed a little, then burped. “Shoulda been at my party, DeMarco. Farnsworth sprang for a stripper who could pick up a dollar’s worth of quarters with her hoochie.”
“Gee, Leo. Sorry I missed that.”
“Hell of a table dancer, too.”
“And me with all those dollar bills last night, wondering what to do with them.”
“Bullshit. When you worked South, I don’t remember you so much as going out for a drink after work, much less stuffing a stripper’s G-string.”
“Crawl back into the bottle, Botstein.”
“Get a life, DeMarco.”
John disconnected the call. Well, it was pretty clear now that no help would be forthcoming from official sources, even if he could find a way to disguise his real motive for nosing into the case.
He sat there a long time in his car, thinking about Renee’s repeated professions of innocence, about the fact that the victim was half-blind and half-nuts, about how a creep like Botstein had held people’s fates in his hands for the past thirty-two years. How many cases had he just tossed off because he was too lazy to dig deeper? How many people had gotten screwed to the wall because he just didn’t give a damn?
Was Renee going to be another one?
John thought about some of the arrests he’d made over the years. Were there times when he’d been so intent on putting somebody away for a crime that when a pretty good suspect presented himself, he put the full force of the law behind the arrest without digging any deeper? Had he been responsible for innocent people going to prison?
Maybe he wasn’t so different from Botstein after all.
He told himself that at least his motivation was to see justice done, while Botstein had been trying to do the least amount of work possible and still draw a paycheck. But in the end, the result was the same.
John decided to check out a couple of other suspects—the two women in Renee’s apartment complex she thought might be hookers.
A few minutes later he pulled into the parking lot of Timberlake Apartments. The place needed a paint job and some landscaping attention, but otherwise it was clean and neat. He parked his car near the building where Renee’s apartment was. As he was getting out, a balding man in a tan windbreaker and brown slacks came from the building across the parking lot and went straight to the late-model Chrysler parked next to John on the left. A cigarette hung out the side of his mouth, the smoke wafting up into his squinty little eyes.
John knew that face. Harold Pinsky, hired heat for a loan shark John had busted a few years ago. What was he doing there?
John leaned over the Chrysler as Pinsky stuck his key into the lock. The man looked up with surprise, then turned away with disgust.
“Shit. DeMarco. Thought you moved uptown.”
“What are you up to, Pinsky?”
“Just visiting a friend. Last I checked, there was no law against that.”
“There isn’t, unless you break your friend’s legs because he owes you money.”
“You’ve been watching too many cop shows. I’m a businessman. Strictly aboveboard.”
“So who were you here to see?”
“None of your damned business.”
John sighed. “Now, here I ask you such a simple question, and you’re having such a terribly hard time answering it.”
Finally Pinsky shrugged. “Fine. I was here to see the lovely ladies in 317. Would you like the details?”
Three seventeen. Just where he’d been heading. Only he’d seen Pinsky coming out of another building across the parking lot. “Would those lovely ladies happen to be working girls?”
“Oh, yeah. They work really hard. Funny thing—the more you pay them, the harder they work. And before you get to thinking maybe you’d like to bust a couple of working girls, you might check out their client list. You wouldn’t want to embarrass any of your superior officers.”
“You’re full of shit, Pinsky.”
“Why don’t you go see them, DeMarco? I hear they’ve got a special rate for cops. Maybe they could work the kinks out of that tight ass of yours.”
“The day I have to pay for sex, I’ll consider it.”
Pinsky gave him a “go to hell” look and got into his car, flicking his cigarette butt across the parking lot before closing the door.
Okay. Renee was right. They were hookers. But were they hookers who also robbed convenience stores?
A minute later he was knocking on 317. The door squeaked open and a woman peered through the crack. “Good morning. Do you have an appointment?”
“I hear you take drop-ins.”
“Not generally,” she said, eyeing John up and down.
“Harry Pinsky referred me.”
The door closed. John heard the chain rattle, and then the door swung open again. “Come on in, honey. Harry’s one of our best customers.”
John entered the apartment, which was furnished in reds, greens, and golds in an unexpectedly tasteful manner. His blonde hostess wore a demure negligee of cream-colored lace, and when the other woman came into the living room, she was similarly dressed.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” he told them.
“Only for two more weeks,” the first woman said. “We’re moving uptown.”
The other one smiled sardonically. “And to think our families said we’d never amount to anything.”
After a few minutes of conversation, John could tell he’d hit a dead end. With the business these women had going, they could probably turn a couple of tricks in a single night and make far more money than had been stolen from that convenience store, which convinced him that this particular pair of blonde hookers probably had nothing to do with the robbery. They also appeared to be independent businesswomen without the assistance of a pimp, which meant they weren’t under the thumb of anyone who might be directing them to do grossly illegal things. He also learned that Harry Pinsky hadn’t been there in over three weeks, which convinced him that there was probably some poor schmuck hobbling around his apartment right now with a broken face or shattered kneecaps.
John gave the women a pair of twenties for their trouble, then left the apartment complex feeling more confused than ever. He’d just eliminated two suspects, which did nothing to help Renee’s case, but there was still the matter of the old lady’s eyesight problems.
He sighed. If he was out to make himself feel better about taking Renee to jail, he’d just failed miserably.