The Dangerous Edge of Things

CHAPTER 24

Rico wore a red flannel shirt and Doc Martens, and he’d turned his baseball cap around the right way for a change. No medallions. He kept the nose ring though.

I shook my head. “This is your idea of blending in with the Waffle House crowd?”

He shrugged. “I do the best I can.”

Across the parking lot, Boomer’s Adult Entertainment Emporium indeed boomed. I could hear its thumping rhythm even over the prehistoric grind of the eighteen-wheelers constantly coming and going. Rico held the door at the Waffle House, and we went inside. It smelled of cigarettes and syrup and hot strong coffee. A booth of upstanding male citizens gave me The Look as we passed, and I pulled my jacket tight in front.

“Don’t bother,” Rico whispered. “They’re not looking at your chest, they’re deciding you’re a race traitor. Here, let’s take this booth. It’s by the exit.”

I sat down, grabbed the least sticky menu. “It could be my chest, you know.”

The waitress took our order, giving Rico a slow smile in the process. He returned it with equal smolder. I kicked him under the table.

“What is up with you? You’re not turning hetero on me, are you? Because you can’t do that, you know. I can’t be a girl detective without a gay best friend.”

“Nancy Drew didn’t have no gay best friend.” He looked around the restaurant, then leaned across the table. “Where’s your mystery chick?”

“She said she’d find us.”

He stirred his coffee. It was only a prop to him, just like the pecan waffle he’d ordered and then ignored. I pulled out my cigarettes, then put them back and got a piece of gum instead.

Rico jutted his chin. “Don’t look now, but I bet that’s your girl.”

I looked anyway. A young woman walked to the cash register and ordered a coffee to go. She looked barely twenty, a tawny-skinned creature with a mane of ebony hair almost to her butt. She carried herself like a dancer—head up, stomach in—and her body was lush and full, with a thrust of cleavage. She slanted her gaze our way.

“Uh huh,” Rico said. “Bingo.”

The woman sat down next to me without a word of greeting. I recognized her as the woman who’d been lying by the pool when Trey and I had visited Beau Elan. She looked very different now, with tight shiny clothes and heavy but expert make-up. She also smelled of strawberries.

Definitely the stripper friend, I decided. For some reason, all strippers smelled like strawberries.

“No cops?” she said. Her voice held a slightly Hispanic lilt.

“No cops. Just Rico here.”

Rico’s favored her with his slow molasses smile. She hesitated, then smiled back. And then we got down to business.

Her name was Nikki. She was a friend of Eliza’s. And she had some very definite ideas about who killed her.

“That bitch sister of hers,” she said. “She hated Eliza, and she hated me worse. Said I was a bad influence.”

I didn’t argue since I remembered Janie saying those exact words. “Were you?”

“Shit, no! I didn’t get Eliza back into the drugs—that was Bulldog. She used to buy from him in the parking lot over at Boomer’s until the manager called the cops. But Dylan was the real problem.”

“Dylan Flint?”

“Yeah.” She rolled her eyes. “Jerk off. She met him at some club one night and thought he was the shit. I told her he was using her, but she didn’t care.”

“Using her for what?”

“To get the stuff.” She rummaged in her pocketbook and pulled out a pack of Marlboros. She didn’t ask, just lit up and blew out a fierce stream of smoke. I chewed my gum harder.

“She was selling drugs?”

“No, trading drugs. He took pictures of her.”

“What kind of pictures?”

“What kind do you think?” She looked at me like I was an idiot. “She sent them to Playboy. Playboy did not call back. She didn’t seem to care, though, just cooked up some new shady something.”

“Which was?”

“I dunno. She hauled that boy’s ass everywhere, to all these parties. I’d go too, and he’d take our picture with all these rich white people, and she’d laugh her ass off. It was stupid.”

“So why do you think Janie killed her?”

Nikki shrugged. “She hated her. Isn’t that enough?”

And that, I thought, is a lie. There was something Nikki wasn’t telling me.

“You have no idea?”

She shrugged again. “Sister shit, I dunno. You done askin’ about it?”

Rico watched our conversation from his side of the booth. He’d been silent the whole time, letting me ask all the questions. It was unusual behavior for him, so I wasn’t surprised when he finally joined in.

“You got the sister, the creepy photographer dude, the meth man,” he said. “Anybody else hanging around your girl?”

She sucked on her cigarette. “That manager. Always sliding up to us at the pool. Eliza told me she caught him looking in some woman’s window once. But he was easy to work for, didn’t crack whip, you know what I’m saying? So she didn’t worry about him too much.”

Rico nodded. “I hear you. That it?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“So why you got us here? You feeling particularly civic tonight?”

She stubbed out her cigarette, blew one last flume of smoke into the air. “The cops asked me a bunch of questions and told me a whole lot of nothing back. Don’t return my calls. They still haven’t pulled Bulldog in. That fool could show up at my place any minute now.”

She looked at me. “Then I saw you and that other guy, the one in the suit, saw you write your phone number down. I waited until the manager wasn’t looking and took it. I figured you weren’t a cop, you might be willing to let me know stuff and not expect me to put myself out there, you know what I’m saying?”

I knew what she was saying. “Yeah. I’m willing. But if you want me to tell you stuff, I need some way of getting in touch. This ‘meet me at the Waffle House’ crap is crap.”

She shrugged and gave me a business card. Sinnamon, it read, available for private parties, lingerie shows, etc. My grits had congealed into one solid mass, and the eggs were cold. I pulled off a piece of Rico’s untouched waffle and dipped it into the butter.

“You were her friend?” I said.

Nikki didn’t look at me, but she nodded.

“You cared about her?”

She stood abruptly, snatching at her purse as she did.

“Wait, one more question. I heard that Eliza had a bunch of cash in a shoebox. You know where all that money came from?”

Nikki shouldered her purse. “She told me she had a cake daddy. I didn’t ask about it anymore.”

She picked up her coffee and took it with her. The truckers at the first booth watched her rear end as she left. I looked at Rico.

He shrugged. “Even racists can appreciate a fine piece of dark meat.”

I kicked him hard under the booth. “Stop trying to piss me off. You’re still stuck helping me.”

We left as soon as I picked all the pecans out of Rico’s waffle and he explained what a “cake daddy” was, which was exactly what I thought it was. As we drove past Boomers, the club’s lights striped the car interior with pink and purple neon bands. The crowd had thickened, and there was an Oldsmobile cop car pulled up at the entrance. I squinted at the figure standing right beside said cop car, hands on hips, looking mean and official.

Garrity. And he was staring right at me.

“Oh crap!” I turned my face away and hunkered down in the seat. “Get outta here!”

“What? Why?”

“Just do it! I can’t let him see me!”

“Who?”

“The cop! I’m not supposed to be investigating, and he’ll be pissed as hell!”

So Rico drove. I stayed on the floor. He turned the music up. “Hate to break it to you, baby girl, but I think you’re busted. Cop dude’s still watching, and you’re right—he looks pissed as hell.”

***

Back at the Ritz, I sat by the phone like a guilty teenager, waiting for Garrity to call and chew me out. But he never did. And since I wasn’t about to call him, I went to bed around two, feeling like I’d temporarily dodged a bullet.

The call came at three-fifteen, and the dread returned. Only it wasn’t Garrity—it was an officer with the Kennesaw Police Department.

“Ms. Randolph?” he said. “We’ve got a problem.”