Steamed (A Maid in LA Mystery) (2 page)

 
Personally, I didn’t want to know why there was a bra under the sink.  Maybe Mr. Banning had a dishwashing fetish and the mystery naked woman helped him out?  The mental image was disturbing.

 
I knew walking into the place that Mr. Banning liked women.

 
It said so on his file.  Right after BWP/wL it said
DOG.

 
That’s our code for he liked women a lot and liked a lot of them.

 
Yes, Mr. Banning is a dog...a letch.

 
But he never bothers the staff, so it didn’t bother us.

 
Mac’Cleaners is an equal opportunity employee.  We stake our reputation on good service and discretion.

 
This job was going to require a lot of discretion on my part. I wondered if Theresa’s illness had anything to do with knowing that Mr. Banning’s place was this bad and that she’d have to clean it up?

 
Kitchen done, I moved onto and finished the bathroom as well.  Then I folded a load of laundry and put another one in the dryer.  With the job almost done, I was getting excited about shoe shopping, which in LA is a unique treat.  So many shoes, so few feet.  I headed to Mr. Banning’s bedroom.

 
If his living room was a pit, I really didn’t want to know what condition his bedroom was in.  Knowing that all that stood between me and some Santee Alley bargain shopping was this bedroom, I opened the door, took all of one step in and...screamed.

 
It wasn’t a frustrated scream.

 
It wasn’t even a this-guy-is-such-a-pig sort of scream.

 
No, it was more like a there’s-a-bloody-dead-body-on-the-bed sort of scream.

 
Loud, long and more than a little crazed.

 
I wanted to keep screaming and run right out of the house, but I managed to get myself under control.  The killer had to be long gone, or else he—or she—would have attacked me as I cleaned.  I was safe.  I couldn’t say the same for poor Mr. Banning.

 
I reached in my back pocket, pulled out my cell phone and called 911.

 
“You’ve reached Los Angles emergency dispatch.”

 
“I need help,” I blurted out.

 
“What is the nature of your emergency?” the man on the other end of the phone asked.

 
“Mr. Banning’s dead.  There’s blood on his head and his eyes are open.” 

 
Those eyes were going to give me nightmares for the rest of my life.

 
“Your address ma’am?”

 
“I’m at, he’s at—” I had to think a moment, but then I somehow pulled his address from the fog that was my mind and blurted it out.

 
“Who are you?” the operator asked.

 
“I’m the maid.  Quincy Mac.” 

 
Now, some people prefer the term domestic engineer, or some fancy title.  I call it like I see it.  I’m a maid.

 
I had no idea why I thought of what to call myself at that moment.  Maybe it was nerves.  After all it’s not every day I find a dead client. 

 
Thinking about my job description was easier than thinking about those eyes and all that blood.

 
“Ma’am are you sure he’s dead?”

 
“I don’t think there’s any way someone could look that bloody and blue and still be breathing.”

 
This was the ultimate topper to my day from hell.

 
A dead man in the bedroom.

 
As I talked to the operator, I walked outside.  Not really walked, trotted.  I moved fast.  I mean, no way was I staying in a house with a dead guy.

 
I was thankful for my cell phone as I stepped out onto the bright sidewalk. 

 
Perfect.

 
All that LA sunshine made it hard to believe that someone was dead a short distance away.

 
The emergency operator continued asking me questions.  The company’s name, my name and address, etc...

 
Personally, I sort of zoned out.  I think I answered him all right but couldn’t be sure.

 
Actually, I didn’t want to be sure.

 
I just wanted to go home. 

 
The police arrived, followed by an ambulance.  They stopped and talked to me a minute, then hurried off to check on Mr. Banning. 

 
I wondered how long I had to wait around.

 
I wanted to go home now.

 
I mean, I didn’t even want to hunt for the perfect pair of bargain shoes or stop for Ben and Jerry’s.  That just shows how hard I’d been hit by this.

 
Anytime a woman passes up Ben and Jerry’s or new shoes...well, it’s moved beyond a bad day and turned into a found-a-dead-body-on-the-bed sort of day.

 
I was wondering if I could just sneak out.  The authorities had my information already, so they didn’t need me.  But then
He
walked up to me.

 
He
was tall, lean and oh-so-yummy.  Dark hair with just a touch of grey at the temples.

 
Not one of LA’s boy-toys who are a dime a dozen.

 
No, this was a real man walking toward me like some hero out of a movie.

 
Maybe he was here to take me away from all this.

 
Maybe he’d seen me from across the street looking fragile, yet still beautiful.

 
Okay, so beautiful was a bit unattainable.  I’d settle for fragile and cute.  Yeah, I could pull off cute on a good day and I felt very, very fragile at the moment.

 
Ah, my hero.

 
I sucked in my baby-pooch, pulled out my old acting class skills and concentrated on looking even more fragile and cute.  It worked.  He walked right up to me, shot me a concerned look, then...he flashed a badge. 

 
I realized that his concerned look was more of an assessing look.

 
My hero was a cop.

 
Okay, so maybe
He
was a cop who was concerned because I looked so fragile?

 
“Ma’am?  You’re,” he flipped open his little notepad in a very Adam-12 sort of way, and that particular mental-analogy really dated me I realized morosely as he finished, “Quincy Mac?”

 
“Yes.”  I thought about fluttering my eyelashes but decided to give up before I embarrassed myself. 

 
“You’re the one who found Mr. Banning and called 911?”

 
“Yes.”  I wanted to say more, so much more.  But even a gorgeous knock-out cop couldn’t make me forget I’d just found a dead body, at least not for long.  And thoughts of Mr. Banning, sitting on his bed, covered in blood with his eyes open, well, that sort of froze the words in my throat.

 
“The officer over there said that the house has been pretty much wiped clean.”

 
I had professional pride in my job well done.  “Not
pretty much
, all the way.  Other than the bedroom, which I didn’t clean for obvious reasons.”

 
The cop quirked his eyebrow.  “He said the bedroom was wiped clean as well.”

 
I think the hunky cop just called me a liar.  

 
Actually, I didn’t just think it, I could see it in his eyes.  The man actually thought I’d gone into a room with a dead body in it and cleaned it up?

 
My attraction to him slipped more than just a notch.  It evaporated.

 
“Not by me,” I assured him.  “I took one look at the body on the bed, called 911 as I got the heck out of there.  I guarantee that I didn’t stop to clean the room first.”

 
“But you admit you cleaned the rest of the house?” the cop asked.

 
“Of course I admit it.  I’m the maid.  That’s what they pay me to do.  Don’t you think that if I’d have known someone had died, I’d have simply called the cops first?  If you’d seen what a state the house was in when I arrived, you’d know I’d have welcomed an excuse not to clean it. But I did clean it and I did a fine job of it.” 

 
Cleaning houses is an honest profession.  I might have been a bit befuddled, but even in my present state I wasn’t going to let some cop make me feel less than the professional that I am.

 
He didn’t answer my question.  He simply asked, “And the other officers said there were footprints you steamed off the carpet?”

 
“Yes.  I’m good at what I do.  When Mac’Cleaners cleans a house, it’s totally clean.”

 
“Ma’am, the coroner says that Mr. Banning probably died sometime last night.”  He paused a moment and sort of gave me a hard stare with his charcoal grey eyes.

 
That stare did things to me...my knees felt rather weak and my heart rate sped up.  I don’t think it was shock. 

 
Lust.

 
That’s what it felt like.

 
I hadn’t had a good case of lust in a while.  But I was pretty sure that I remembered how if felt and this was it.

 
“Quincy,” he said, soft and low.

 
Yes
, I wanted to say. 

 
Oh, yes
.

 
I’ve read that when someone experiences death they want to make love just to prove they’re still alive, to prove that they can still feel something.

 
I think my lust for this cop went deeper than just a need to prove I was alive.  It might have been a need to prove I still had a libido, but mainly I think it had something to do with a long, hard orgasm.

 
I was almost forty and I’d read enough magazine articles to know that meant I was reaching my sexual prime.

 
Only it had been a long time since I’d been primed.

 
This guy was making remember how much I enjoyed a good priming.

 
“Yes,” I said out loud.  Hoping he’d say,
let’s forget about the dead body and get you home to bed
.

 
Oh, yeah.  I wanted him to tuck me in, then tuck himself right next to me.

 
Naked.

 
“Quincy,” he said again, “by any chance you have an alibi for last night?”

 
“An alibi?” I squeaked, all lust-filled thoughts fleeing from my head.

 
Alibi?

 
Rats. 

 
I knew what that meant.

 
I watch
Law and Order
,
Law and Order SVU
, and
Law and Order Criminal Intent
.  Is that all?  I might be forgetting one, but that’s understandable, given my circumstances.

 
Oh, and I watch
CSI
. 

 
All that television meant I knew that cops didn’t ask witnesses for alibis.

 
They asked suspects for them.

 
I was a murder suspect.

Chapter Two

 After confessing that I didn’t have an alibi, super cop—who finally had introduced himself as Detective Parker—let me go with a warning not to leave town.

 
I felt like a teenager who’d been grounded.

 
Grounded to the city of Los Angeles.

 
I’d lost the desire for shopping or ice cream, and I couldn’t face my empty, messy house, so I went back to the office to find Tiny. 

 
She’d know what to do.

 
Tiny was level-headed, plus she had Sal.

 
Sal, in addition to being perfect, was a lawyer.

 
Okay, so he did a lot of corporate, paper sort of law, but still, he had to have some idea what I should do next.

 
“Quincy,” Tiny said, excitement in her voice as I hurried into her office, “You’ll never believe what I did today—”

 
She stopped short, gave me one long look, then hurried forward, leaned down and wrapped me in her arms.

 
Tiny didn’t let go as she asked, “What happened?”

 
“My last stop of the day…the man, a Mr. Banning?” I paused, hardly able to bring myself to think the words much less say them.

 
“Mr. Banning?” Tiny prompted.  Her voice sounded very concerned, as if she knew something terrible had happened by some sort of best-friend ESP. 

 
We were that close.  Closer than I’d been to Lottie in high school, and Lottie and I had practically lived in each other’s back pockets.

 
Tiny and I were even closer.  We knew things without being told.

 
I pulled back and said, my voice barely a whisper, “He was...dead.” 

 
“Dead?” she asked weakly, pulling us both onto the couch.  “Dead?”

 
“Not just dead...murdered.  And the cops think I’m a suspect.  I’m grounded to LA until further notice.”

 
“You?” she asked weakly.  “You’re a suspect?  Why would they think you killed him?”

 
“It seems I cleaned up all the evidence.”

 
“You what?”  She shook her head.  “Okay start at the beginning.  No wait,” she said before I could utter a word.  “You don’t want to tell this more than once.  Let me call Sal, then tell us both the whole story.”

 
Sal’s office was conveniently located just across the street.  That’s how he and Tiny had met, bumping into each other day after day.

 
One morning the bumping led to smiles, then the smiles led to morning greetings, then eventually those morning exchanges led to a coffee and coffee...well it led to their upcoming wedding.

 
“Yeah.  Call Sal,” I said.  “That would be good.”

 
I’d known I could count on Tiny.

 
Ten minutes later I spilled out the whole story.  Tiny and Sal, being such good friends, didn’t interrupt or pepper me with questions.  They just sat quietly and listened. 

 
Just listened.

 
A true friend is the kind of person who can simply listen to you tell a macabre tale like mine and not interrupt.  Not exactly a greeting-card sentiment. 
Good friends don’t interrupt when you talk about the dead body in the bedroom
.  No, I doubt they’ll make one of those, but if they do, I’d buy it for Tiny and Sal.

 
“Oh, Quincy, I’m so sorry,” Tiny said softly.

 
I felt better having shared it all. 

 
And I felt better yet when Tiny gave me another hug.

 
“So what do you think, Sal?” I asked.  “Am I in trouble?”

 
He was seated across from us in Tiny’s desk chair.  He leaned over, took my hand and gave it a quick squeeze as he offered me a reassuring smile.  “I think the police are just being thorough.  They’ll need to check out your story, but you didn’t kill him, so you’re fine.  And you had no way of knowing you were cleaning up a murder scene so I can’t even begin to think of anything they could charge you with.  If they tried
accidental cleaning
, the D.A. would laugh them out of his office.”

 
“So, you think I’m okay?”  I wasn’t so sure.  “My Uncle Bill spent two years in prison because the cops said he robbed a local market.  He didn’t.  But he spent those two years behind bars anyway.”

 
I didn’t want to spend two years behind bars until they figured out the truth.

 
I had three sons.

 
Granted, they were older now, but they still needed me, even if they didn’t need me as much as they once had.  Jerome was a weekend and summer sort of dad at best.  He’d never handled the day-to-day boy stuff.  And his latest wife was practically a teenager herself.  Peri would never be able to cope with my three.

 
Oh, they’re good boys, but they need discipline.

 
I simply didn’t think their father and stepmother were up to the task.

 
Plus, there were graduations and proms to witness.  Embarrassing pictures to take.  There were birthdays and holidays.

 
Thinking about all I might miss out on, I felt more and more morose.

 
“I simply can’t go to jail,” I declared, as if saying it out loud would make it so.

 
No, I couldn’t go to jail because I cleaned the wrong house on the wrong day.  I’d never done anything in my life to warrant that kind of karma.  Okay, there was that whole Allie Mays incident in high school, but even that didn’t warrant dead-body karma.

 
“It will be fine,” Sal assured me.

 
I wasn’t so sure I could afford to believe him.

 
I wasn’t sure I could trust the cops to find out the truth.  Oh, they eventually figured out my Uncle Bill didn’t rob that market, but he spent those two long years in jail anyway. 

 
He got a tattoo.

 
My father was so embarrassed that his brother had a tattoo. His twin brother. No one in the Mac family had ever gone to jail or permanently disfigured themselves on purpose.

 
The Mac family had high standards.

 
They were doctors.

 
Every last one of them. 

 
My parents, my older brothers, even my grandparents...on both sides.

 
They were all doctors except Uncle Bill and me.

 
We were the black sheep in my white-coat-wearing family.  I cleaned houses and Uncle Bill was an ex-con with a tattoo.  I might be used to being a black sheep, but I didn’t want to go to prison and get a tattoo in order to become any blacker.

 
My skin wasn’t as tight as it used to be, and at thirty-eight I knew it would be getting looser by the year.  What if I spent decades in jail? 

 
I’d come out saggy, pruned-up and sporting a wrinkled tattoo.  “I just can’t go to jail,” I said again just to be sure Tiny, Sal and the universe understood that jail wasn’t going to happen.

 
“Oh, honey, there’s no way you’re going to jail,” Tiny said, giving me another hug.

 
Sal patted my knee.  “They let you go, after all.  They’ll do some checking and find out you had nothing to do with the murder.  You have no motive.  You’ll be in the clear.  This will all be over before the boys get home from their summer vacation.”

 
I wanted to believe them both.

 
Really wanted to.

 
But I was left with a sinking feeling that this was trouble.

 
Big trouble.

 
Sal and Tiny wanted me to stay with them, but I just wanted to go home and pretend that this day hadn’t happened.

 
I assured them I was fine—that Sal had made me feel better.

 
In fact, the only thing that was going to make me feel really better was if the cops found the real killer.

 
I got home and looked at the mess the boys had left as they packed for their vacation.

 
I should have cleaned it up last night, but I was exhausted from getting the boys out the door with their dad.  I’d thought I’d clean tonight.  Normally the mess would be driving me nuts.  But nothing was normal today and I just couldn’t bring myself to start.  It felt like too much of an effort.

 
Instead, I kicked a bunch of the boys’ clothes off the couch, pulled out an afghan and curled up under it.

 
I felt cold, despite the fact it was August in LA.

 
I spotted the remote under a blue sweatshirt and turned on the television.

 
It was a news report.

 
And there, behind the reporter was Mr. Banning’s house.

 
“...Steve Banning was a respected Hollywood insider.  His credits include his Mortie award-winning television series,
Dead Certain
, as well as...” The reporter rattled off an impressive list of shows and movies that I recognized.  He ended with, “...Mr. Banning was found by a maid this afternoon.  The police said they have a preliminary list of suspects and are confident they’ll have the murderer in custody soon.”

 
How could they have a list of suspects already?  It had only been a couple hours.  I know they’d talked to me.  But could they have interviewed anyone else?

 
Not likely.

 
Visions of tattoos flashed in my mind.

 
Maybe it wouldn’t be too bad if I picked a pretty tattoo.  Maybe a unicorn...a symbol of purity and innocence.  I pictured a wrinkled, pruned unicorn and decided that wasn’t the way to go.

 
So, there was no option.  I couldn’t go to jail.  No way I was going to let the cops pin a murder on me just because I’m good at my job.

 
Quincy Mac was not going to be a patsy.

 
Their fall-guy.

 
Fall-woman.

 
I wasn’t like my uncle, willing to wait to be cleared.  I was going to clear myself. 

 
But how?

 
Thoughts of all those Law and Orders,
CSI
and
Castle
flashed through my mind.  Oh, too bad I didn’t have Nathan Fillion, aka Rick Castle, here helping me out like the cops did in
Castle
.  Yes that wise-cracking author and pseudo-detective would be on the case.  He’d prove my innocence by dinner.

 
Since I didn’t see Mr. Fillion knocking on my door, I’d simply have investigate Mr. Banning’s murder myself.  I’d prove I didn’t do it.  Yes, in order to save myself, it looked as if I was going into the private investigator business.

 
Okay, so where did I start?

 
I’d never hunted for a murderer before.

 
Paper.  I’d start a file.  It seemed to me all the best cops on televisions had files. 
Hand me the file on the Banning case,
one would say to the other, and a manila folder would be tossed across the desk. 

 
I went back into my bedroom and rooted through the desk until I found an old manila folder that one of the boys had used for a report.  It said
Oral Hygiene
on the tab. 

 
I scratched the words out and wrote
Banning
across the tab.  I had to write small because the crossed out Oral Hygiene took up most of the space.

 
But I felt rather official.

 
I was investigating a case.  Quincy Mac, Private Detective.  I even had a file.   Of course there was nothing in it.

 
I wonder if Matlock started out like this?  Remington Steele.  Now, there was another great television detective...very pretty to look at, as well.  I love Pierce Brosnan. 

 
I realized that fantasizing about fictional detectives and their real-life actor counterparts wasn’t going to solve this case, but I didn’t have any better ideas. 

 
I went back to the couch, sat down and stuffed some loose-leaf paper in the file.  It wasn’t empty any more.  Of course, I hadn’t written anything on any of the loose-leaf.  I didn’t know what to write.

 
The phone rang.

 
I picked it up—an automatic response—and wished I hadn’t.  I didn’t want to talk to anyone.  But I said, “Hello?”