Scottsdale Heat: a romantic light-hearted murder mystery (Laura Black Mysteries Book 1) (15 page)

The waitress came over with the Coke and Reno handed her a five. He picked up the coke and took a long drink, draining most of the glass.

“Did you shoot the dead guy with the Glock I gave you?” Reno asked, setting down his glass, a slight smile forming at the corners of his lips.

“I didn’t mean to. Alex’s girlfriend, Danica, came up behind me and it just went off.”

“Well, I’m glad you at least found a good use for the gun.”

“That’s not funny,” I said. “I’m never going to live this down, plus it’s giving me the creeps. When I walked into the bedroom he was just staring at me. Did you hear his hands had been hacked off? Why would anybody do that to somebody?”

“Cutting off the hands is usually associated with an organized crime ritual,” Reno said. “It could signify he was killed because he took something that didn’t belong to him. Of course, the hands could also have been used as proof the job was done. Or, maybe the killer just likes to collect trophies, who knows?”

“Did you get anything on Arizona Security Enterprises?” I asked.

“Turns out ASE is a private security company affiliated with the Tropical Paradise, so maybe they just decided to have Alex followed after he made the sale to Reinhardt. Of course, Tony DiCenzo ultimately controls the Paradise. It may mean nothing, or it may mean he’s involved too.”

I took a drink on my Scotch and Reno took a drink of his Coke. We both sat there for a moment in silence.

“So why did you dump me?” he asked, looking up. “I know all of this happened a long time ago, but it still bothers me. We were getting close, and then you disappeared. You were going to come over to my house on Christmas morning for breakfast. You were also going to let me know if you wanted to move in with me or not. You left me that lame phone message, but I assumed you not showing up was just your way of saying no.”

“It wasn’t like that,” I said. My mind raced. I wanted to say more, to tell him I had planned to move in with him, I had wanted to be with him, but I couldn’t form the words.

“I spent days wondering what I’d done wrong,” Reno continued, ignoring me. “I asked around and started looking for you. I thought if I could talk to you, maybe we could work things out. But nobody knew where you were. I called Gina and she said you were out of the country, but I wasn’t sure I believed her. After a couple of weeks, I just figured I’d scared you away and you’d gone off to greener pastures. I ended up with Cynthia, for a weekend, but that was my way of trying to forget about you. I think I told you she had this foot fetish thing going on. It was all just too much.”

“You slept with another woman to forget about me?” I asked.

“Then, a week after Cynthia, you called me up just to yell at me and tell me I was a jerk.” Reno said, still ignoring me. “That wasn’t easy for me.”

“No,” I said, trying not to get pissed off. “You’ve still got it all wrong. After we were together on Christmas Eve, Lenny sent me to Italy with Gina, very hush-hush. I ended up busting a leg and had to spend a couple of weeks in a clinic in the middle of nowhere. At first I was too doped up to even remember my name. Then I was going to call you, but I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t even sure you’d believe me. I got back to Arizona in the middle of January, but by the time I got the nerve see you again, I found out you were sleeping with Cynthia. You blame me for being upset? OK, so maybe I didn’t call you when I was supposed to, and maybe I was a little late in coming over, but it didn’t take you long to forget about me and find somebody else. After I thought I was over being upset about Cynthia, I called you. I had planned to ask you if we could start over again. Then I started thinking about you sleeping with her and I got upset all over again. So, yeah, I ended up yelling at you and I called you a jerk.”

“But it wasn’t serious with Cynthia,” Reno said. “I went on a total of two dates with her.”

“You slept with her after only two dates?”

“I was trying to get over you.”

“We didn’t sleep together until we had three dates.”

“I respected you.”

“So,” I said. “Sounds like we had a little bit of a misunderstanding.”

Reno gave a little shrug. “Sounds like.”

“What do you want to do about it?” I asked.

“What do you mean, do about it?” Reno asked. “Like, do you want us to start dating again?”

I smiled my sexiest smile at him. The one that always softened him up when he was annoyed with me.

He paused, and then got a horrible look on his face. It was like he had just tasted something awful.

“Are you insane!” he said, almost yelling at me.

Oops, wrong reaction.

“Do you know how many shitty sleepless nights I’ve had because of you?”

People at nearby tables stopped talking and turned to look at us.

“I would lay there, worrying about you and blaming myself for whatever I did to make you go away. I lost almost fifteen pounds because I didn’t feel like eating for a month. Now, I find out you put me through that hell because you had of some kind of weird ‘misunderstanding’ and you want to do it to me all over again? Are you nuts?”

This definitely isn’t going well.

“Look,” he said, standing up. “Don’t get me wrong. This has been a lot of fun, but I have to relieve the team in a few minutes. I’ll see you around.” He got up and made his way through the tables and then walked into the hotel.

Maybe I should have been depressed, but somehow I wasn’t. Sure he was pissed, but I saw how he looked at me when he first saw me. I could tell he still wanted me. He wanted me bad, he just didn’t know it yet.

~~~~

I finished my Scotch, walked back to my car, and then drove back to my apartment. The only lead I hadn’t followed up yet was the CD in the yellow case I had found in Alex’s car. I had no idea what was on it, most likely just music. But all of my other leads had dead-ended and I was running out of options.

~~~~

I was up for another burst of exercise, so I walked up the three flights of stairs to my floor. By the time I got to the top, my heart was pounding and my breathing was coming in short gasps. I unlocked the door to my apartment and went inside.

Marlowe was asleep on the floor in front of the window. He had positioned himself so his body was lying in a shaft of sunlight while his head was in the shade. He’s not so dumb.

I went to the closet and from my coat pocket I pulled out the disk I had found in Alex’s Jaguar. I put it in my DVD player, but when I pressed the play button nothing happened. I took the disk from the DVD player and slipped it into my computer.

After a few seconds of whirring sounds and flashing lights, I was able to learn the disk contained a computer file. I clicked on the file to open it and after a few more seconds of whirring and flashing, a message popped up. The message said the file was locked and to unlock it I needed to enter the password.

OK, so what would Alex use as a password? I typed in
Alex
. Nothing. I tried
Danica
. Still nothing. I tried
Sit-on-my-face
. None of these were the correct password.

OK, I thought, who knows about these things? The answer popped into my head right away. There was a woman who lived on the second floor named Suzie Lu. Suzie was a professor of Computer Science at Arizona State University, about five miles to the south in Tempe. I didn’t know her very well, but we had talked a few times at parties and we were on a friendly
hello
basis on the elevator. I figured if anybody could figure out how to read the computer file, it was Suzie Lu.

I walked down the flight of stairs and knocked on her door. No one answered. I walked back up the stairs to my apartment. I looked up her number and called, but only got her answering machine. I was going to leave a message, but at the end of her greeting she gave out her cell phone number. I wrote down the number and gave her a call. She answered on the third ring. Suzie said she was downstairs in the apartment atrium watching TV with a friend. She said she’d be glad to meet with me. I took the elevator down and went over to the TV area.

Suzie is a slender Asian woman, a few years older than I am. She has long black hair, intense dark eyes, and big fake boobs. Today she was dressed in black leather pants and shiny black boots with five-inch stiletto spike heels. Instead of a shirt, she only had on a red leather vest, unbuttoned almost down to her navel. She was seated in the middle of the large couch sitting directly in front of the big screen TV.

Suzie’s friend was a man, about fifty years old. His face was round and pleasant-looking. He was dressed in a conservative navy blue suit, with a white shirt and red silk tie. On his fingers he wore some expensive gold rings, including a wedding band. Around his neck he wore a black leather dog collar. The collar had long silver spikes and a leash attached to it. Suzie was holding the other end of the leash in her right hand. The man was on the floor in front of Suzie, on his hands and knees. She had her boots resting on his back, as if he was a footstool.

The only other person the TV area was Mrs. Nottingham, a woman who lives on the fourth floor. Mrs. Nottingham’s is a tiny woman with short curly silver hair and thick glasses. She’s about two hundred years old and spends most of her afternoons watching TV in the atrium.

On the TV was an episode of a reality TV talk show. From the caption, I saw the show was about a teenage boy who was having a secret affair with his girlfriend’s mother. As I watched, the mother and daughter got into a catfight while the boyfriend looked on. He had a big smile on his face, watching the two women fighting over him. For some reason, this didn’t strike me as being especially weird. Maybe it had something to do with the man on the floor redefining weirdness for me today.

I walked around to the front of the couch. “Hi Laura,” Suzie said in her soft and velvety smooth voice. She saw me eyeing the dog-collar man. “Oh, don’t worry about him, he’s in training.”

“Training for what?”

“Training to be in my stable. He thinks he’s worthy, but he’s wretched and quite pathetic. I doubt he’ll even last the afternoon.”

The man shifted his position. I’m not sure how long he had been there, but his knees were probably getting sore.

“I didn’t give you permission to move, bitch,” Suzie said to the man, now with a menacing undertone to her voice.

“So, this is sort of like an audition?” I asked.

“You could look at it that way. I’ll see if he has the ability to obey and serve me without question. If so, then perhaps he’ll become one of my boys.”

“What happens then?”

“Then I’ll let him come over to my apartment and perform menial tasks for me. He’d be allowed to clean my bathroom, to do my laundry, or maybe clean my kitchen. If he is especially obedient during our session, I might even let him paint my toes.”

As soon as Suzie described the chance for the man to paint her toes, the potential slave let out a nervous giggle. Suzie cast a stern glance at him and with her left hand picked up a long, leather-wrapped, wooden paddle. She then swung it down hard. With a
whoosh
it landed with a loud
slap
across the man’s ass. He let out a surprised yelp, like a frightened small dog.

“Listen slut,” Suzie said to the man. “You’re on thin ice here. I won’t tolerate any further disobedience from a worthless little turd like you. Today, you are nothing but a piece of my furniture. Shut your hole, don’t move a muscle, and let me have a quiet conversation with my friend. Got it?”

Dog-collar man hung his head down. “Forgive me, Mistress McNasty. I’m not worthy.”

A small smile spread across Suzie’s lips. I was amazed at this. I turned back to Suzie.

“
Mistress McNasty
? Do you pay them to act like this?”

Suzie’s eyes opened wide and she laughed a deep laugh that made her whole face light up. She used the spiked heel of her boot to give the man a firm poke in the ribs.

“Slug, tell this woman how much you pay for the privilege of serving me.”

“I gladly pay one hundred dollars an hour, Mistress McNasty. I am grateful you have allowed this lowly one to serve you.”

“
Damn
,” I said. “You’re kidding, right? Why would anyone pay you to abuse them?”

Suzie again prodded the man with her heel. “Slave, explain your sick perversions to this woman, be quick about it.”

“My deviancies include submissive behavior, masochistic behavior, and I also enjoy public humiliation.”

“Eeeeyuuuw, yuck,”
I said.

“Disgusting, isn’t he?” Suzie said with a giggle. “Have a seat and we can talk. If you would like, you can use him as a footstool too. It’s quite relaxing.”

I sat, but my stomach was twisting at the idea of putting my feet on the man. He looked clean enough, but I didn’t know where he’d been.

Mrs. Nottingham looked up from the TV. “Dear, would you mind if I used your young man? When you get to be my age your feet hurt all the time. I always thought they should put in a footrest down here.”

Suzie nodded and waved her over. Mrs. Nottingham got up and tottered over to the couch. As she sat, she slipped off her loafers and lowered her feet on the man’s back. She then leaned back on the couch and smiled.