Six Pack of Sleuths: Comedy Mysteries Read online

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  Acknowledgments

  To my wonderful fans without whom there would be no Wendy Darlin.

  Once again many, many thanks to Wendy’s godfather, Buck Buchanan who keeps Wendy on her toes.

  ~~~

  My name is Wendy Darlin. I’ve been told my life is like the movie Romancing the Stone but at times I feel more like Indiana Jones with boobs.

  Until last year I was a full-time real estate agent for Miami Beach millionaires. Then I met Roger Jolley, world famous archaeologist, Johnny Depp look-alike, and at times the most irritating person on the planet. My good heart, snarky mouth, and comedic capers keep me in constant peril.

  Chapter One

  An earwax-melting scream bounced off the concrete walls. My Tory Burch sandals wobbled as I stumbled out of my Jag. I crouched behind the door. Either a woman was in trouble or a car had clipped the tail of a cheetah. I punched nine-one-one and took a peek. The Miami Medical Maze garage was empty as King Tut’s Tomb, not unusual at two minutes to five on a Friday.

  The emergency operator answered but the connection crackled so badly I wasn’t sure she heard my plea to send the police. I dropped my cell phone into my Coach bag and ran up the ramp toward the scream. My heels banged like gunshots on the concrete. At least I hoped it was my heels.

  I swung around a pillar and raced toward a petite woman silhouetted by the setting sun shining through the opening in the wall. She renewed her screaming with the vigor of a three-year-old determined to embarrass her parents out of the restaurant. When I got to within a dozen parking spaces of the human air raid siren, I realized with a sinking feeling that the singer was none other than my former real estate client Tippy Henman.

  Two spaces away from her, I started skidding to a stop, ending just short of a dude in a lake of blood lying at her feet. He had black hair, chiseled features, and an obscenely erect knife sticking out of his lower belly. I fumbled in my purse for my phone. Redial got me the emergency operator in a flash, but still with a bad connection. I told her to send an ambulance with the cops.

  Tippy cut her eyes to me and ran a bloody hand through her platinum hair. A line popped into my head. Blondes make the best victims. They’re like virgin snow that shows off the bloody footprints. She swooned and fell against a white Mercedes.

  I launched myself the last few feet catching her before she hit the pavement. I propped her up, patted her face, and admired her Kim Novak eyebrows. I hadn’t seen brows like hers since the Hitchcock film festival on the Beach.

  The front of her cream-colored Chanel was decorated with a fresh bright-red Rorschach pattern. While I held her up I took another look at the body. If he wasn’t dead he was definitely thinking about it. Maybe he was napping with his eyes open. I returned my attention to Tippy Henman.

  She and I go back to our days at Carl Hiaasen High School where she was the class bitch and I was the class smart-mouth. Our last meeting was a year ago in her lawyer’s office, where she closed her ten million dollar purchase of the riverfront Bates Hotel.

  Condo mogul Daddy Henman plunked down the bucks to buy Tippy her own starter-builder set. She planned to demolish the old structure and build a twenty-story luxury high-rise with Daddy looking over her shoulder, sort of a training-wheels project for a debutante developer.

  The rough and tumble world of commercial construction isn’t Tippy. Last time I noticed, the Bates Hotel was still standing. Daddy Henman recently headed to the big development in the sky, compliments of massive heart failure probably brought on by his fifty-dollar cigars, but this wasn’t the time for condolences.

  The blood pooling around the victim’s body was oozing toward my sandals and my new pedicure. I inched behind the Mercedes’s bumper tugging Tippy with me. The sound of sirens almost drowned out her tearful denials.

  “It wasn’t my fault!” she whimpered tucking her head into my shoulder.

  Chapter Two

  Three cop cars squealed into the parking garage, sirens howling and lights flashing. They screeched to a halt within twenty feet of us, mercifully silencing the sirens simultaneously. I had my right arm around Tippy and my left arm in the air to show I was unarmed. Six uniformed officers sprang from the cars. Two stood by their vehicle, a matched set of action figures with one hand on their holstered guns and the other on their radios. Four of them hot-footed toward us.

  They formed a semicircle on the far side of the body. The youngest one had a mustache like an old-time western marshal. He cut his eyes from the body to bloody Tippy to me and said, “Step away from the blonde and keep your hands where I can see them.”

  Was he Wyatt Earp or Monty Python? And he looked so young that I wondered if the mustache was a paste-on. I said, “How can I do that? I’m the blonde. And I’m the person who called nine-one-one.”

  His left eye started blinking rapidly with his hand twitching toward his gun. He jerked his head at Tippy. “She’s the blonde. Step away from her.” His tone grew threatening.

  This guy was getting on my nerves. “I’m the blonde. She’s the platinum blonde.” I fought hard to keep the smirk out of my voice. “Are you trying to say that you want the blonde to step away from the platinum blonde? I can’t do that.”

  Mustache’s face turned dark red. “Why not?” he said through clenched teeth.

  What the hell was I doing antagonizing a cop? Not smart and not usually my style. But this guy was a jerk and I saw the other cops look at each other and roll their eyes.

  I gave him my hardest stare, which included narrowed eyes and a scrunched up mouth. “Because if I let go of her she’s going to hit the ground and sue your ass off.”

  The scene had to be clear even to this imbecile. Two shaken women huddled together and a dead dude on the ground with a knife in his gut. I thought about the blood on Tippy. Hmmm, maybe it wasn’t quite that clear.

  “Step away from the blonde, er, the platinum blonde, er, whatever!” He emphatically put his hand on the grip of his weapon.

  He probably intended to scare me but he just made me madder. “What are you going to do? Shoot me and claim I was armed with a deadly platinum blonde?”

  The tallest of the cops stepped to my side, obviously trying to contain his own smirk. “I’m Officer Friendly. I’ll take her. You did a good job. With everything.” He gave a slight nod toward Mustache.

  “Officer Friendly, really?” He didn’t look all that friendly, more like a good hard-nosed cop that you’d like to have on your side if you were in a pickle.

  His mouth twitched the barest of smiles. “You can’t imagine the amount of grief that’s caused me over the years.”

  I transferred the teetering Tippy to him and stepped away from the platinum blonde. I shot a saccharine smile at Mustache and simpered, “Did I make your day?”

  His red face turned purple. I thought he was going to jump up and down like Yosemite Sam.

  The crime scene investigation van squealed onto the concrete deck releasing a swarm of body inspectors wearing logoed black t-shirts. In perfect sync they snapped on latex gloves. Two of them produced cameras and clicked rapid-fire photos.

  An unmarked Dodge Charger, which was as clearly a cop car as the marked units, rolled in. A plainclothes cop with a Doberman Pinch
er face and a broom up his butt got out and relieved Officer Friendly of Tippy. It didn’t take an Einstein to see she was the star of this event. The forensic paparazzi clicked off a series of unflattering photos of her and her Rorschach top and crimson hands.

  A second detective, obviously fresh off a dumpster-diving detail, walked toward me. He wore a vintage Miami Vice sport coat in a muted shade of pink with a Texas-shaped grease stain on the right front, massively wrinkled khaki slacks, and rubberized orthopedic shoes. Salt-and-pepper hair, a droopy eye, and a serious expression completed his Columbo-goes-tropical appearance. Instead of a Columbo cigar he was chewing something that smelled like cherries. “Your name, miss?”

  “I prefer Ms. if you don’t mind.” I hate when they do that Miss put-down thing. “Ms. Wendy Darlin.”

  A flash of recognition showed on his face. Maybe he recognized me from the news. My market is strictly millionaires, not underpaid officers of the law. I tried to place his face but drew a blank.

  “Okay, Ms. Wendy Darlin, could I see some ID please?” he said through a mouthful of what I now recognized as gummy bears.

  “What’s your name?” I thought I deserved to know in case I had to lawyer-up, besides it was the polite thing.

  “Detective Sargent Farley Stranger.”

  I fished my driver’s license out of my purse. He held the laminated card by the corner. His fingernails were bitten to the quick, his right thumbnail blackened as if crushed in a door. He looked me up and down matching the photo with my face and reading my description. “You’re not near five foot eight.”

  Straightening my posture, lifting my quivering chin, I tried for the missing two inches. “The clerk at the DMV exaggerated.”

  He held a pleather-covered notebook with matching grease stains on the cover. Jotting my personal info with a chewed-up pencil, he chewed his cud and grumbled to himself. As he handed me my license he did a double take.

  There was blood on my right palm.

  “It’s from Tippy,” I stammered.

  Stranger frowned and motioned for a lab tech. A skinny kid with gelled brown hair swabbed red samples from my fingers. I choked back a mouthful of vomit while the scene spun. I fought the urge to pass out. This had to be one of those pregnant lady hallucinations I‘d read about.

  “I was holding my friend,” I said as the tech cleaned under my manicured white nail tips, which had turned an icky shade of pink.

  The tech finished his evidence collecting and handed me an antiseptic wipe. I scrubbed my hand ’til my skin burned. He held out a bag marked Toxic Waste for me to discard the wipe. I swallowed another wad of puke. If this was a dream I wanted to wake up. Now.

  Stranger eyed me suspiciously.

  “That’s Tippy’s blood. Well, I don’t know it’s her blood. I’m just supposing. It’s blood that was on her.” I looked at the detective trying to find a smidgen of belief in his eyes.

  “Why don’t we begin at the beginning, Ms. Wendy Darlin.”

  I already regretted my comment about Ms. and he was just getting started.

  “How do you know this lady?” Stranger nodded his head at Tippy now wrapped in a black blanket and shivering like a new-born kitten. She sat on the trunk of a cruiser with Officer Friendly at her side. They hadn’t ambulanced her so the blood must not have been hers.

  “Ms. Wendy Darlin, I asked you a question.”

  “Hold on. I need to make one call,” I raised my hands to show I was no threat and then reached in my pocket for my cell.

  “You are not under suspicion. No need to call your lawyer.”

  “I’m calling my obstetrician.”

  His eyebrows shot up in double humped arches. “Your obstetrician is your lawyer?”

  “No. This has nothing to do with a lawyer. I want to let him know I’m running late. I’m pregnant.” I patted my flat belly.

  “You don’t look pregnant, Ms. Wendy Darlin,” he snapped.

  “Well, I am.” I think. “I have a five o’clock appointment with Doctor McKenna to confirm my condition. You can verify with his office. He stayed late… just for me. That’s why I’m here.”

  He let me call McKenna’s office. The doctor was one of my mini-mansion clients. He promised to wait until six. My stomach clenched. I hate being late.

  I fought back the nausea and told Stranger everything from the scream ’til his arrival, omitting my repartee with Mustache. He picked my brain for another ten minutes. I tried to ignore the wet slapping noises that accompanied the crime scene investigation as I answered his questions.

  He just wanted the Dragnet facts, not my opinion. But even to a real estate broker and part-time tomb raider, it was obvious this crime was an attempted hold-up or carjacking, the intended victim a diminutive, bejeweled dame getting into her Mercedes in a nearly deserted parking garage. But I had to wonder where Tippy got the knife. She wasn’t strong enough to wrest it from the robber.

  “Don’t leave town. I’ll call you tomorrow if I have any more questions,” Stranger said pocketing his notebook.

  “You can always Skype me.”

  His eyes became two amber slits. “Cut the lip, Ms. Wendy Darlin and don’t leave town, Ms. Wendy Darlin.” He spun a one-eighty and trudged about twenty feet to where the Pincher-faced detective waited. Pincher-face held Tippy’s white leather Gucci bag. It suited him.

  I glanced at the cruiser where Tippy had been sitting. Officer Friendly was gone and Mustache was walking Tippy toward the unmarked Dodge Charger. Two good signs, she wasn’t being put in the caged back seat of a cruiser and she wasn’t handcuffed. I returned my attention to the detectives. Stranger and Pincher-face were engaged in an animated conversation I wasn’t able to accidentally overhear.

  I heard Tippy yell my name. Mustache was trying to guide her into the backseat of the Charger. Tears dripped down her pale cheeks. “I have to give the police a statement. My attorney’s going to meet us there to speed things up.”

  She evaded Mustache’s hand as he attempted to get her to sit down. “I’ll be done in no time. Meet me at Spellbound at eight-thirty.”

  I didn’t know how she expected to get there that fast, attorney or no attorney, but it was a good place to unwind if she was late. And it still gave me plenty of time to go home and get cleaned up.

  Mustache pushed her shoulder but she didn’t budge. His feet slipped out from under him. He started kicking Rockette-style, but a Rockette on an oil spill. He almost went down but managed to increase his pace until he regained his balance. He was panting harder than an English Bulldog on an August day when he finally came to a stop.

  Tippy pointed at me like an Uncle Sam poster. “I need you! Don’t be late if you have hopes of ever being my broker again.”

  She pushed the door to its widest opening, tapping Mustache on the shoulder in the process which sent him into another dancing frenzy. But this time it didn’t save him. He fell on his ass then bounced up. He muttered unintelligibly. Had I slipped into Who Killed Roger Rabbit and was now interacting with Toons?

  Tippy slammed the door and stared straight ahead. Mustache continued to bounce around and mutter.

  I smothered a laugh which sent my brain into the dizzy zone. I imagined my eyeballs knocking into each other as Wile E. Coyote’s often do—after the Roadrunner bests him yet again. I turned toward Stranger. “Can I get an officer to accompany me to my car? The dead guy might have a buddy lurking around.”

  Before Stranger could say No, Ms. Wendy Darlin, Officer Friendly’s voice came from behind me. “I’ll take care of it, Detective Stranger.”

  Officer Friendly and I walked down the ramp to my Jag with my eyeballs knocking and stomach heaving.

  Don’t barf. Don’t barf.

  Chapter Three

  I stayed on Officer Friendly’s left so his right hand was free to grab for his gun. I was glad he volunteered. Not only did he have an air of competence and reliability but also he was a cutie with sandy hair, big muscles, and bright green eyes. About twe
nty-seven, he was way too young for me—not to mention I had my true love, the world famous archeologist and sometimes most annoying man on the planet, Roger Jolley—but adorable enough to be a distraction as we checked out Goldie II, my Jag.

  The car stood alone, unmolested. The backseat was empty. I popped the trunk and the hood. No stowaways and no apparent vandalism. He inspected under the dash and under the chassis. No bombs and no bad guys.

  The motor fired up immediately, assuring me I could make it home. Officer Friendly nodded, waved, and stepped away. Goldie’s soft leather interior embraced me. I felt my body dissolve. My body? My obstetrician appointment!

  I jumped out of Goldie and ran to catch up with him. I batted my eyelashes like a drag queen on a hot date. “Pretty please, could you walk me to my doctor’s office?”

  “Sure.” He smiled. Nice teeth.

  He spoke into this shoulder radio and we were off to the medical center. Walking out of the garage we were almost run over by a medical examiner’s van closely followed by a tow truck. What was the rush? I was pretty sure the guy with the knife in him wasn’t going to run off, nor was Tippy’s Mercedes.

  In the few minutes it took to hoof it to the building that held my future, I learned Officer Friendly was unattached and straight. Hmmm, whom could I fix him up with?

  The lobby was quiet except for a few clattering heels and squeaky rubber nurses shoes as straggling workers headed into the weekend. The elevator was waiting for us and zipped us nonstop to the ninth floor.

  Outside Doctor McKenna’s office, we crossed paths with his receptionist making her get-away. “Door’s open and Doctor’s waiting for you.” She eyeballed the young cop then grinned and gave me a sly thumbs-up. I wanted to say, “He’s not the father,” but bit my tongue.