Steamed (A Maid in LA Mystery) (9 page)

Chapter Seven

 
Now that I was fairly certain Tessa didn’t kill Mr. Banning, I wasn’t sure what to do next.

 
I thought about going home, but I knew if I did, I’d stare at my stupid whiteboard.  What would the cops on
The Closer
do?  Or the new spin-off,
Major Crimes
?  (Confession: I loved Mary McDonnell in
Battlestar Galactica
.  I have three boys who love science fiction, so I watched the whole series and she’ll always be the President to me.  Bet Detective Parker didn’t find that fact as he investigated me.)

 
Anyway, I didn’t know who the girlfriend was and the only new thing to add to my whiteboard was another X through a suspect’s picture.  I didn’t have a clue what to do next.

 
Frankly, I didn’t have a clue what
CSI
or
Law and Order
would do either. 

 
I drove past a small bar. The Bit Part Bar.  I decided I wasn’t going back to the office or home.

 
It wasn’t much of a solution, but it was better than staring at a whiteboard for hours. 

 
I went around the block and pulled into the parking lot.  The bar wasn’t exactly seedy, it was simply under-loved.  I don’t think anyone had done anything to update it or even clean it thoroughly in years.  Maybe whoever named it should have gone with The A List Bar.  It was as if calling itself Bit Part was dooming itself to mediocrity. It was definitely not a bar frequented by Hollywood’s beautiful people.

 
Good thing I wasn’t that.  I found a seat at the bar and waited to order. 

 
There were some basic truths about the Mac family.  Except for my Uncle Bill and me, the Macs were all overachieving doctors.  The Macs were beautiful people.  My mom had three kids and was still wore a size eight….and sometimes size eight  was baggy.

 
And another quality of the Mac family, Macs were Guinness drinkers.  Even my Uncle Bill and me.  I glanced at the tap and saw the one I was looking for.

 
The bartender was working on a computer at the far end of the bar.  He glanced at me, sighed and shut the laptop’s neon orange case with more force than necessary.  He slid it onto a shelf and ambled down to me.

 
“Guinness, please,” I told the bartender. 

 
He was a tall man.  Not an overly good looking man.  If I were a casting director, I’d cast him as the best friend, or even better yet, a villain.  And if I were here in my housecleaning capacity, I’d encourage him to hire Mac’Cleaners to come give the bar a complete cleaning.  He was as mediocre as his bar.

 
The bartender was silent and stared at me a bit too long to be comfortable.  It felt intrusive.  Ominous even. 

 
“Is there a problem?” I asked.

 
He smiled and he didn’t look nearly as ominous.  He was back to a best friend.  That’s what I’d cast him as in my imaginary movie. 

 
“Sorry.”  He smiled broadly now.  “You’re new here.”

 
“I was driving by and…” I shrugged.  I didn’t know how to explain the fact that I was sitting in a bar in the afternoon.  That was definitely out of character.

 
“Yeah, we don’t get many lookers like you,” he said again with a grin.

 
I couldn’t help but smile.  “Thank you.  That’s a lovely compliment.”

 
“Willy,” he said.  “My name’s Willy.”

 
Politeness would require me to respond, to tell Willy my name, too.  But despite the fact he’d paid me a compliment, I wasn’t sure I wanted to, so I simply smiled.

 
Willy brought me my Guinness a couple minutes later, and then went back to his computer. Its garish case was almost blinding, so I stared at a mural on the wall as I sipped my drink.  It was a red carpet scene with a lot of recognizable Hollywood stars.  A List stars.  A List Bar would really have been a better name.

 
I stared at my drink.  The Guinness made me think about my family.

 
My mother was a lady.  If white gloves came back into fashion, I could easily see her getting a pair.  She listened to classical music.  She read literary fiction if she read fiction at all.  Mainly she read medical tomes.

 
My mom and I had very little in common.

 
But my mom loved Guinness.  For my twenty-first birthday, she’d come into town I’d left Hunter with Jerry and gone out with my mom.  We hadn’t stopped at a neighborhood bar.  No, my mom was not a neighborhood bar sort of person.  We’d gone to an upscale bar on Hollywood Boulevard.  But sitting here in The Bit Part Bar with a sheen of dust on its light fixtures, I couldn’t help but think of her.

 
I missed her.  We tended to drive each other nuts if we were in the same room for too long, but I did love her and right now, I wished she were here.

 
“Quincy.”  I turned.  Detective Cal Parker obviously had some sort of tracking system on me because everywhere I went, he turned up.

 
I sighed.  I’d forgotten about Mr. Banning.  I’d forgotten about how many times I’d disappointed my mother, and simply been reveling in a memory of one night where we’d simply had fun together.

 
Now here was Cal to bring me back to the unpleasant realization that I still hadn’t found out who’d killed Mr. Banning.  Not only had I cleaned his murder scene—accidently—but my best friend had been blackmailed by the rat. 

 
“I was at Tessa Compernalle’s and she said she’d
won
a spruce-up from a certain cleaning service.  I thought I’d warned you to stay out of my investigation?”  He pulled up the barstool next to mine.

 
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said as I took a sip of my beer.  Maybe Cal didn’t have some tracker on me.  Maybe I was simply that good.  I mean, I seemed to be a step ahead of him in this investigation.  The thought made me smile.

 
He wasn’t smiling.  He was staring at my drink.  “Guinness?”

 
“With a last name like Mac, would you expect me to drink anything else?”

 
“Is Mac short for something?”

 
There was something in his eye that made me say, “You already know, right?”

 
“I am a detective, and you did clean my murder scene.”  It wasn’t really an answer, but I knew he knew my family’s original last name.

 
The bartender left his computer and came toward us.  Cal pointed at my Guinness and nodded. 

 
Willy gave him a long hard stare-down.  “You’re a cop, aren’t you?”

 
“Yes.  Detective Parker.”

 
“Yeah, I saw you on the news.  You’re investigating that guy who died.”

 
“The guy who was murdered,” Cal corrected.  “Yes.”

 
“I’ll get your Guinness.”

 
“Now about your last name.  MacLean,” he said.  “Mac’Cleaners.  Cute.”

 
“Thanks.”  I remembered how Tiny and I had gone round and round, trying to find a name for our new business.  Mac’Cleaners won out.  Tiny’s TurboClean didn’t have the same ring.

 
“Don’t think I forgot you’re still investigating the murder,” he said conversationally.  “You’re impeding my investigation and it’s got to stop, Quincy.”

 
“I didn’t impede anything.  I cleaned a house.  You can’t stop me from making a living,” I said just as conversationally.  “Go ahead and ask Tessa if I grilled her. She’ll tell you I didn’t.  I cleaned.  That’s my job.”

 
He stared at me.  It was the kind of look I vaguely remembered from my pre-kid days.  The kind of look where a man is mentally undressing you.  It could be creepy when the wrong man did it, but Cal was the kind of man I wouldn’t mind undressing me in real life—well, if he wasn’t trying to put me away for murder. 

 
I don’t know what he saw as he mentally undressed me, but he smiled, a slow, seductive kind of smile that had probably made women drop their guard or their drawers, depending on the circumstances. 

 
“Do you give all the men in your life this much trouble?” he asked, his voice a low, gravelly sound that probably hastened the dropping of guards or panties in the past.

 
I couldn’t afford to drop either with this man.  And since I wasn’t immune to his come-hither looks or voice, and didn’t feel like throwing cold water on myself, I did the next best thing.  I pictured Cal and I in an intimate embrace, then pictured my boys walking in.  That mental image was better than cold water. 

 
I almost felt giddy with my well-squelched attraction.  “I have three sons, Cal.  I give them far more trouble than I’ve been able to give you, I swear.  And I have an ex-husband.  I give him more trouble than you and the boys combined.  And I sometimes do it just for the fun of it.”

 
He looked slightly confused by my unswoonish reply.  As if he couldn’t understand how his personal charisma had left me unaffected.  I wasn’t about to tell him that having three boys was Kryptonite to lust.

 
“Heaven help your ex,” he muttered.

 
“Someone should help him.  That man has a penchant for young girls.  Nothing illegal,” I hastened to add.  I didn’t want to see Cal arresting Jerry.  Like I said, Jerry’s a pig, but he’s a good dad.  “But younger than a man his age should like. Once they’re approaching their mid-twenties, he’s done with them.  I’m thinking of adopting his current wife.  She’s only two years older than my oldest and really is the sweetest girl.”

 
Cal gave me an odd look.  “You like your husband’s current wife?”

 
“I’ve liked all my ex-husband’s wives, both the current one and those that came before me and after me.  He’s got good taste in women.  He married me, after all, didn’t he?”

 
Cal laughed.  “So, does he have kids with all those other wives?”

 
“No.  My boys are his only kids.  I don’t think he intended to have three kids in three years with me, but it turns out, I’m a fertile Myrtle.  Seriously, when it became apparent we were going to separate, I didn’t even want to be in the same room with him.  I was terrified he’d sneeze, and I’d be pregnant with baby number four.”

 
Cal took another long, slow sip of his beer, then asked, “Was that a warning?”

 
To which I gave the eloquent response, “Huh?”

 
“Were you cautioning me that you’re fertile so that when we get together, I know we have to be careful?”

 
I sputtered Guinness all over the bar.  And inhaled a bit of it which caused me to literally choke.  When I could breathe, I managed, “You are not only the most arrogant man in the universe, you’re…deluded.  You and I are never going to find ourselves in any sort of position that would require us to be careful.  Plus, I’m thirty-eight and my eggs are old now.  They’re tired.  They’re fried.  Yes, I’ve got fried eggs, so I’m sure fertility isn’t as much an issue now that I’m in my late thirties, as it was when I was in my teens and early twenties.”

 
My response was obviously not what Cal expected.  Mr. Come-hither-charcoal-grey eyes looked confused.  “I thought you brought it up because you’ve been thinking about me like that.”

 
“Detective, you can be sure, I’ve thought about you a lot since I cleaned Mr. Banning’s place.  But in terms of us getting together like that?”  I shook my head.  “Not in your dreams.  You’re trying to arrest me. You’re trying to put me in jail and I still haven’t looked up if California is a death penalty state, so maybe you’re even try to kill me. No matter what, let’s be clear I don’t sleep with men who want to put me in handcuffs.”

 
“Duly noted as well.”  He took a long sip of his beer, then added, “Quincy Mac is not into kink.”

 
“I didn’t say that,” I assured him.

 
“Oh, so you’re saying that you are into kink?  I mean, I know a lot of women like cops because of the uniform, or the handcuffs.”

 
What the heck?  I’d put him in his place and assured him in no uncertain terms his normal tactics were not going to work on me.  He couldn’t charm me into submission.  I didn’t have a thing for men in uniforms.  “You don’t have a unif—”

 
He cut me off.  “I have one, I simply don’t wear it to work anymore.  But if that’s your kink thing, I can wear it for you.”

 
I drained the rest of my Guinness because no one in the Mac family wasted Guinness.  Then I stood.  “There are many things in the world that are uncertain.  Right now, the biggest uncertainty for me is, who killed Mr. Banning.  But there is one absolute certainty you can bank on.  You and I, kink or not. Are.  Never.  Going. To.  Happen.”