Lady Smith Lock and Key Pt. 06

I'd like to thank Lastman for the continued support with editing and giving me a fresh pair of eyes.

-Lady Smith-

Tuesday - April 27, 2021

Grace United Methodist Church has really bad coffee. I should have a greater take-away than the quality of the caffeine at my Gamblers Anonymous Meetings, but I really don't. Honestly, I don't know why I come here. Before the meeting begins, I pour myself a cup of coffee that tastes like this was the third pot these grounds brewed.

A man got divorced because he gambled his wife's inheritance on college basketball. The wife's grandfather had recently died and left her a little money. Instead, he gambled it on Duke, lost, and when his wife discovered a massive hole in their account, she used the rest of the money on a divorce lawyer.

Another man was a Sergeant in the army who illegally charged his soldiers rent to live in the barracks just to recoup losses. He was stationed at Fort Polk in Louisiana and his fix was the casinos in Lake Charles. Of course, he was eventually found out and dishonorably discharged as a Private. The gambling problem still existed, and he's done prison time as well for several robberies.

One woman, who is much older than me, says she prostituted herself to get out of debt. For some reason she looks right at me when she says, "That's probably hard for you all to imagine that?"

I sip my burnt coffee and tell them I got a new job. A good job. And that's really scary.

"Why is that scary?" the old prostitute asks.

"It's easy to not gamble when you're broke," I say.

"isn't that why we all steal and fuck to gamble more?"

"Not the same," the Sergeant says. "The thrill isn't the gamble, it's the size. The bigger the gamble, the bigger the rush."

"Exactly," I say. I'm glad someone understood that. I'm starting to not believe this woman's story. Grief tourist.

"I already make good money. I just never see it," I say, and everyone slowly nods in unison. "Because I'm my own boss, it's not like I get a paycheck that I cash and blow in a day. Because I see it near immediately, I gamble it nearly as fast as I make it. I played Kino recently. Fucking Kino. That's like the drunks in the next room smelling hand sanitizer just to take the edge off."

Everyone laughs, and I chuckle a little myself. It really isn't that funny.

"What's wrong with Kino?" the old woman asks. Ok, boomer.

"Have you gambled since the last meeting?" the leader asks. A guy named Howie with a soy beard and man-bun. Piercings and tattoos. Pants so tight I can see the faint outline of what's maybe a dick and one ball. You picture him.

"I've placed the bet," I admit.

I've gambled everything on the success of a robbery. My debt is cleared in one fell swoop, and I get a decent payday out of it. I'll probably need to permanently vanish though. The police already have me in the crosshairs. Maybe I just stay in Canada. There is no way I'm not a suspect, or a conspirator.

"How much?" he asks.

"Everything," I admit.

"Too late to pull out?"

Is it too late? With this new job, I could easily make highly inflated payments, chip away at my debt, and be done with it. But how soon until I'm right back here again? How soon until I'm making bigger bets, because I can? Even if I could stop it, the only way to hit the breaks is another gamble. Do the police just lie, and arrest me anyway?

"Lisa?" That's my anonymous name.

"I don't know."

The meeting wraps up, and everyone gaggles at the coffee pot and stale donuts. As I walk past on my way to the door, I hear my classmates discussing a good card table. Five hundred dollar buy in. No buy back. It's in the basement of a church across town. The dealer is the pastor. Rumor is he funds the games with the offering plate. The game starts in a half hour. Praise the Lord.

I exit our room, and the AA meeting across the hall is ending as well. Is it fate or bad luck that Bianca Justin walks out the same moment I do? We both freeze, until she realizes she's blocking the exit. She takes a step out of the way, and I remain a statue carved by curiosity.

"Gambling?" she asks, leaning her body around mine to the see the sign next to the door.

"Alcohol?" I ask. She looks behind her, and back to me.

"Sponsor," she replies. Of course she is. "Used to, though. Been sober five years."

"Congrats," I say. I step out of the way and watch my classmates leave for a card game with a pastor. I want to go to that so bad. I don't even want to win; the experience sounds well worth it.

It's so awkward when we start a conversation without hostility. We both want to go back to being bitches to each other, but neither of us wants to cast the first stone right now. I finally caught her outside of her holier than thou bullshit, and she found a different motive for me, so it's a mutual redemptive quality for us.

"You've actually done a lot of good work," she says. Her tone suggests she means it, but saying it is like puking.

"Thanks," I say. Another long pause. "I'm gonna go."

"Yeah, right behind you."

We both start trying to move at the same time, and flinch back in unison. We both gesture for the other to go, both move to leave and stop again.

"Go," I say, and she gives a cringy grin and meekly walks ahead of me. I mumble to myself. "Jesus."

I look both ways before crossing the street and light a cigarette at my car. What was the name of that church again? I sit on my hood with my feet on the bumper and start looking for it on my phone as a car pulls out two spots down from mine. It stops in front of me, and I look up at the person idling.

"What?"

Bianca is debating her next words carefully. Her face contorts in frustration, at what I can only imagine, but something finally gives. "You hungry?"

I can't remember the name of the church, for better or worse. I don't think I even heard them say it. Didn't mean I wasn't willing to knock on the door of every chapel.

"You buying?"

--

Of course I pick the Queen of Hearts. Where else would I go this late knowing it will be open? The stool for the Queen is taken, so I end up sitting much closer to the door than I normally do. Because the only seating in this restaurant is at the bar, that means right next to the door. I end up sitting on the two of hearts. Bianca sits on the three.

Dinah is behind the counter next, waiting anxiously for the moment Bianca decides on her order.

"Dippers, toast, coffee," I say without looking at a menu. Dinah places a coffee mug in front of me and pours from the pot removed from the burner behind her.

"Same," Bianca says and hands the menu back. "You come here often?"

"Part of my religion," I say, and watch Dinah pour for Bianca.

"I think we got off on the wrong foot," Bianca says.

"No we didn't," I reply.

Bianca ruins her coffee with cream and sugar. She's honestly delaying this conversation and doesn't know what to say to me. It shows she hasn't rehearsed this in the slightest. Spur of moment combined with opportunity.

"I started as a driver," I euphemize. We are in public after all. "And then I have an office after a back seat rendezvous with your brother."

"I forgot the first time we met, you were installing a few locks," she says. I almost forgot that was the first time I was there. I was also casing the place out.

"I'm also the girl who took the driving job."

Bianca takes a drink to stall for time.

"You know how girls who used to be fat, really hate fat girls?" she asks. Huh?

"What do you mean?"

"I used to be fat," she says, and I tilt my head doubtfully at her athletic frame with baby ready curves and firm breasts. "So when girls say I have better genes, or they try and try but can never lose weight, it pisses me off. Because I did something, I sometimes forget how hard it was. All I think is, just do what I did."

"You also used to be poor," I say, and she nods with a slight grin. She likes I that I identified her roundabout way of expressing whatever point she's trying to make.

"Lucas is his own worst enemy. He always has been. That's what my job really is. To keep him focused, and to protect him from his worst impulses."

"What about Ryan?"

"Ryan is a fucking leech," Bianca spits out. "But, he's my brother, and Lucas's best friend. I just keep Lucas ignorant."

"Your job is to also protect him from women like me?" I ask. Bianca kind of shrugs to that.

"I protect Lucas, to protect myself." That was an admission. Bianca knows she'd be nowhere without Lucas. Maybe not nowhere, just not where she is. Every woman is a potential ex-wife for her brother, and another attack on her livelihood. She cloaks her selfish motivations as familial concern. "Do you like my brother?"

"Honest?" I ask, and she nods. "I don't think we're a good fit, and believe it or not, I don't like dating where I work. It's why I've been self-employed for so long."

Bianca hides her smile under the rim of her coffee mug.

"Alcohol?" I ask.

"You ever black out drinking?" she asks, and I nod. Who hasn't? "Ever do that every day for five years?"

"Can't say I have. Why did you drink that much?"

"Why do you gamble?"

We're both not ready for this conversation. Not with each other at least.

"A gambling addict and a recovering alcoholic walk into a bar," I say, and she laughs. "I'll let you know when I finish the punchline."

--

-Trixie Kirkpatrick-

After getting back from Scobey, I had to pull my shift at the parking garage. While I sat in a car and counted beans, I kept blowing up Miles's phone. He picked a hell of time to get suspended. The app shows he stopped looking at the messages. He must have turned his phone off. I call again, but it's going straight to voicemail.

The moment I get off shift, I drive straight to his apartment. For the grief this man gives Lady Smith, he doesn't live much different. It's an apartment complex that looks more like a motel. He's on first floor, so his porch is the sidewalk. He must trust his neighbors, because he leaves a chair next to a small table with an ashtray directly outside.

I pound on his door when I can finally get there in the middle of the night. I check my watch while I wait to hear any indication he's inside. Almost midnight. I don't hear anything so start pounding again.

"Miles!"

I turn to the parking lot and look for his car. He's home, or he walked somewhere.

"Miles!"

I twist the doorknob and it turns. I push the door open and slam it shut behind me in case he's home and to wake him up.

"Miles!"

His apartment is dark. The only light from inside is the green digital clock of his microwave. The streetlight is bleeding through his blinds, providing a horror movie ambiance.

"Miles," I say into the darkness. Nothing replies. "What the fuck." I use the flashlight feature on my phone to find a light switch. It's placed an awkward distance from the door, and only turns on a light in the kitchen. Half of the room is illuminated, giving me just enough to see the door to his one bedroom.

Miles is a stereotypical thrice divorce police detective. One bedroom apartment in the same neighborhood as his usual suspects. No food in the fridge aside from two bottles of condiments and eleven cans of beer. Always eleven, because the twelfth can that rounds out a dozen is on the table next to the recliner in the center of the room in front of a television. Maybe he has kids, but he hasn't seen them in at least ten years.

Sad miserable existence. Always wants to be at work, because this is what he has to come home to. There is no balance. It makes me think about Cameron. My son is a smart-ass thirteen-year-old, but I'd rather come home to love that's hard to express than this. Don't ask me about his father.

There is a long-stemmed standing lamp behind the chair with a chain. To get just a little more light, I pull down it. It's one of those cheap bulbs that turns the entire room into sick, buttery, yellow. With that light as my guide, I nudge open his bedroom door. Clothes on the floor strewn around to every corner and a perpetually unmade bed. It doesn't look like he changes the sheets. Ever.

"How do you live like this?" I ask myself.

No Miles yet. Just to clear the entire apartment, I take those last few steps to check his bathroom. Nothing. Only if you don't include more evidence of a sad bachelor.

I hear his front door open and start making my way back. I look through the crack of the door and see Miles. He blows a puff of smoke out the door and flicks the cigarette outside. It looks like he walked to a liquor store by all evidence. Long brown bag with the top of a bottle showing.

"Who's here?" Miles asks. He places his hand behind his waist and steps toward the open door. "I know I didn't leave my lights on."

"It's me," I say, and his ears perk up. "Trixie."

"Trixie? What the hell are you doing here?" he asks and lowers his hand off his waist band. I open his bedroom and lean against the door frame. "I almost shot you."

"Everyone seems to be doing that right now," I say, and he tilts his head in confusion. "Been trying to call you."

"I know. Turned my phone off. Can't help you. I'm suspended," he says.

"When were you going to tell me you already knew Lady Smith?" I ask, and he sighs. He walks into his kitchen to place the bottle on the counter. "Not denying it?"

"I knew her mother, that's not the same as knowing her."

"Still would have liked the heads up. Pretty important detail to leave out."

"How'd you even find out?"

"Talked to Detective Spotted Bear." That name scratches his brain from the inside. He rubs his fingers across his forehead to alleviate the itch on the inside of his skull.

"Why?"

"Her father," I ask, and he tenses up. Like cold water just ran down his back. "You investigated the murder of her father." He unscrews the cap of the whiskey. "While you were fucking her mother."

Instead of pouring a glass, he chucks the bottle across the room. It doesn't shatter. The bottle caves in part of the drywall, falls to the floor, and tumbles before landing on its side against the recliner. My hand reflexively went to my gun, just short of drawing it.

Miles is now breathing hard, fuming, trying to control himself.

"Calm down. I can't help you if you don't calm down," I say, and he grits his teeth. "Jodie Potter killed her husband, didn't she?" I ask. Miles turns away from me and leans against the counter in his kitchen. "Miles."

"She was a suspect," Miles says. I walk halfway across the kitchen and stop at the recliner. I pick up the bottle and place it on the side table. The room already smells like spilled whiskey.

"Did you cover it up?" I ask. He clears his throat and opens the fridge to keep his eyes off mine. He's like a dog avoiding a beating by trying to pretend it never happened. "You swapped the bullets?"

"Prove it," Miles says, and closes the door of the fridge with his foot. "Fucking prove it."

"Miles, this isn't taking a cut of a safe house bust. This is accessory after the fact."

"Fucking, prove it," Miles says defiantly, and cracks open a beer for a little added flair.

"Let me guess Miles," I say, and he sips the beer loudly. "You went into the locker for a different box, swapped the bullets, resealed the box and left?"

Miles doesn't reply, so I know I'm right.

"Is that why you got a stick up your ass with this girl? Not enough to fuck her mother, you gotta fuck her too?"

Miles chucks what's left of the beer at me. I duck under it, but I'm still splashed in the face and torso with sticky, low quality beer. I'm so pissed I pick up the whiskey bottle off the side table and throw it into his kitchen, but away from him. I'm not a psycho. The bottle shatters the glass door of his stove, and he punches his cabinet in anger.

"There goes my security deposit," Miles says sarcastically.

"That's the least of your concern."

"You won't tell. The department with bury it, and you."

"I'll take my chances. Will you take yours?" I ask. Miles stares me down, breathing in hard and fast breaths. I glare back, before walking out his front door and slamming it behind me.

--

Wednesday - April 28, 2021

-Lady Smith-

The first half of my day I'm the Chief of Security of King's Chariot. From eight to twelve I'm checking doors, analyzing matrixes, taking inventory, submitting background checks for new employee applications - and occasionally clients - and everything between. The second half of my day, one in the afternoon to quitting time, I'm taking calls for lockouts and installs.

During my changeover, I stop at the Queen of Hearts for a to-go coffee but find Detective Kirkpatrick in my favorite seat. Like she's waiting for me. I don't even make eye contact as I place a to-go order with Dinah. When she sees I'm not coming, I sense her moving toward me.

"I'm beginning to think you just like me," I say after she leans on the bar a few feet from me.

"You got a minute?" she asks.

"You got a warrant?" I ask. I watch Dinah poorly place a lid on the cup. When she picks it up the lid pops off, the hot coffee spilling onto the gloves she always wears.

"Dang it!" she says, hissing through her teeth. Carrol is up, and patrons are leaning over the bar to make sure she's okay. Carrol has her take off the gloves so cold water can run over the burn. I honestly don't recall ever seeing her hands. Dinah had some kind of life because her hands are covered in tattoos. I think I see the Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland. There are letters I don't recognize as English. Maybe Russian, with rings tattooed as well.

"Damn, nice ink," I say. Something about me saying that, made Carrol step between my line of sight and Dinah's hands.

"I know who killed your father," Kirkpatrick says to regain my attention. What? I turn my head to her, and she nods. "I don't have enough to go after them, but I know who to go after."

I open my mouth to ask who but stop myself before I inquire. No. This is how she gets into my head. She doesn't know shit. It's a trick. All cops do is lie and trick you. I remain silent and look back toward Dinah and Carrol.

"Do you remember the detective who talked to you when you were a kid? Right after it happened?" she asks. No, I don't. I was so shellshocked I hardly ever looked up at his face. The weeks that followed are a daze. "It was Detective Deacon."

Detective Miles Deacon investigated my father's murder? I turn to her again.

"Why are you telling me that? What difference does it make?"

"Was your mother seeing anyone about the time your father was murdered?"

"Probably. She got around, I couldn't tell you any of their names."

"I can tell you one. Miles Deacon." I'm frozen. Deacon was with my mom? And then my father was killed. And no one could solve it? Coincidence, or convenient?

"Did Miles Deacon kill my father?" I ask.

"If you give me a few minutes, I'll tell you what I know," she says, and drops her card on the bar in front of me. "No bullshit."

Kirkpatrick walks out of the diner, the bell announcing her departure. I look at her card, longer than I expected to, and slip it into my pocket. Dinah has put on a new pair of gloves she pulled from God knows where, and hands me a new cup of coffee.

"Where'd you get those tats?" I ask.

Dinah's normal, nervous in a naïve cute way, demeanor dissolves into a near psychotic breakdown. I grab the coffee she nearly drops before retreating into the kitchen with moist eyes. The crashing of pots and pans in the back indicates her location in the kitchen.

"Jesus," I say, leaning over a little to see through the window.

"Lady," Carrol says as she approaches me. "Everyone has things they'd rather forget. Those things are painted on her skin."

"You ever thought of laser removal?" I ask.