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  “Sierra, the club would take a major hit if we lost her right now.” Vincent was actually sweating. “We can’t afford to lose the business.”

  An eerie feeling started squeezing my gut. There was more to it than Marla and the club’s not-so-sterling reputation.

  “Ante up, Vincent. What’s really going on?”

  Vincent’s face paled around his dark glasses. “I’m into some guys for twenty big ones, Sierra. If I don’t pay up by the fifteenth, I’m toast.”

  “You’re into the mob? Vincent, how could you! You know what they’ll do to you!”

  “Sierra, calm yourself. It’s worse than that, actually. I, um, underestimated the club profits. The IRS wants the money by the fifteenth. I’m pretty sure I can pull it off, but you gotta help us. If I lose Marla, I won’t make it. Please, Sierra.”

  What a pretty picture this was. Vincent into legit organized crime and Marla about to do twenty-five to life. All my troubles could be effectively wiped out, but unfortunately my livelihood would go with it.

  While I might make noise like I didn’t care, and on occasion actually quit my job publicly, there was no other club where I’d work. The Tiffany was a class joint. Furthermore, we were family. Good or bad, we dancers had to stick together. After all, people tended to view us with little respect. If we didn’t cling together, we’d sink like rats. I knew what was coming. I could feel it rise up inside myself like bile.

  “All right, Vincent,” I said, “but let me have my fun first.”

  Before he could answer, I whirled around and walked back into the kitchen.

  “So,” I said, standing right in front of Marla and staring her down, “you got a problem, and you need my help.”

  Marla tossed her long black hair like maybe she was looking to debate the point, but fear won out. “Yes,” she said, and swallowed hard. “I really need help.”

  Seeing the pitiful way she knuckled under took all the fun out of toying with her. Shit. She was family.

  “All right,” I said. “Suppose you tell me all about it.”

  Marla looked at me then, her eyes filling with tears. This was pathetic. If we weren’t careful, she was going to end up saying stuff we both would regret later when we were back on a level playing field.

  “Marla, try and rub two brain cells together and come up with a statement, all right?”

  The angry flash was back in her eyes, replacing the sappy gratitude that had threatened to overwhelm her.

  “That bully detective of yours thinks I killed Venus Lovemotion,” she said.

  “Why?”

  Marla looked away from me, glancing nervously at Little Ricky. “Sierra, can we do this in private?”

  Little Ricky didn’t pick up on her tone, that it was somehow about him. No, he was trying to peak through the gaps between the ribbons of my gown, looking for an unobstructed view. Considering he spent every night of his sorry little rodent life sitting in the club, viewing all of us naked, I failed to see why he felt compelled to ogle now, in this time of crisis.

  “Sure, Marla,” I said, grabbing my coffee mug. “Let’s go sit outside on the steps.”

  The sunlight was blinding. Somehow early morning had slipped away and become mid-afternoon. I grabbed my sunglasses on my way out the door and gingerly lowered my aching body down onto the top stoop. It was almost tolerable if I leaned to the right.

  “Okay,” Marla sighed. “It’s like this: Rick, he’s basically a good guy and all, but he can’t help himself; he likes women.” That was one way of looking at it, I supposed. “Most of the time, I can handle it. I mean, the other girls all know he’s kidding. They wouldn’t take him seriously.” No, Marla, I thought, the other girls know he’s a lowlife snake in the grass. “But Venus, I don’t think she knew.”

  Marla looked sideways at me, to see if I was going to defend Venus. I kept my face neutral.

  “Anyway, I caught her and Ricky out on the back stairs. She was all over him! I had to set her straight. I sent Ricky inside so she and I could have a little heart-to-heart.” Marla’s face fell. “I guess someone overheard us and took it wrong.”

  “Took what wrong, Marla?”

  If she squirmed any harder, her black spandex short shorts would snag a splinter from the stoop.

  “Well,” she said, sighing, “if you took what I said out of context…”

  “Marla, what did you say?”

  Her face darkened, and her eyes were hard, flat black disks. “I told her that if I saw her so much as look at Rick, I would kill her.”

  I took a silent deep breath. “Anything else?”

  “Well, I said I had a gun and I’d used it before, so she should be certain that I meant what I said.” Marla sighed at the memory.

  “Did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Did you mean what you said? Did you have a gun?”

  Marla sighed again. “Well, at the time I meant it. And yeah, I have guns.”

  The sun beat down on my head and it started to pound in time with my pulse. This was not what I wanted to hear.

  “Guns, plural?”

  Marla looked over at me, her eyes wide, no longer hard and threatening. “Doesn’t everyone?” she asked.

  “Marla, no. Not everyone has a gun, and certainly not everyone has more than one. How many guns do you own?”

  Marla shrugged. “I don’t know. Four? Five? I’m not a collector or anything. I just have ’em around. You know, I grew up in Alabama.” She said this as if I should understand that in Alabama they do things like this. Now, if she’d said Northeast Philly, I could understand, but Alabama?

  “Marla, you said something else.” Marla raised her eyebrows. The talk of Alabama had pulled her back into her little Southern-belle attitude. I hated that most about her. “You said you’d used your gun before.”

  “Oh, that!” Marla tossed her head and laughed. She sounded as if at any moment she could teeter off the edge of rationality and become hysterical. “I shot my high school boyfriend.”

  “What!” This was a side to Marla that I hadn’t known, otherwise I might not’ve pushed her so hard.

  “Well, Sierra, it was an accident and he wasn’t hurt bad. We were duck hunting and I sort of mistook him for a teal.”

  “Marla, you didn’t!” As I said, Marla isn’t exactly the sharpest knife on the rack.

  “Did.” Marla calmly picked a piece of lint off her spandex sports bra. She sighed wistfully. “He made a full recovery, and of course they didn’t bring charges—around Eufaula that kind of stuff happens now and again. Of course, we were never the same.” Her eyes welled up. “I just loved him to pieces!”

  I’d hate to see what she did to men she didn’t love. Still, this was a pretty flimsy basis for a murder motive, but maybe not in Nailor’s eyes. After all, he didn’t know her like I did.

  “Marla, where were you when the shot was fired?”

  Marla screwed up her face, as if the effort to remember was taxing her very deepest inner being.

  “Oh, I was walking out to my car, out over by the edge of the parking lot, right where I always park.”

  Yes, right by the stand of pine trees, right where the shooter had been if Bruno was any judge of shots, and he certainly knew his gunplay. Marla was in trouble, all right.

  “So, you can clear this up, can’t you?” she said.

  I grabbed the railing and pulled myself up slowly, looking down on her. A queasy feeling that could’ve been painkillers but probably was doubt filled my gut.

  “Sure thing, Marla,” I said. “We’ll have this licked in no time flat.”

  Marla sighed and smiled. “Thank you, sweetie,” she said. “I was just praying you’d know what to do.”

  Well, if that’s what she’d been praying for, God was playing a serious joke. I had no more idea of how to pull her out of this mess than I did of how to find the real killer. But I knew where to start, and judging from the brown Taurus that was rounding the corner onto my street, so d
id John Nailor.

  Five

  Marla, Little Ricky, and Vincent scattered when they saw Nailor’s car come to a slow stop in front of my trailer. Nailor unfolded himself from the driver’s seat of the Taurus and started to walk up the driveway, staring after my departing guests with a puzzled expression on his face.

  “What was that all about?” he asked.

  “Professional courtesy.”

  He frowned, not understanding, then stopped to look up at me. This time he noticed straight off. He looked up and down the street, then back to me.

  “You think you should be standing there like that?” he said.

  “Like what?” I was still in my white gown, my hair down around my shoulders, barefoot and holding an empty coffee cup.

  “You look … well, you’re…” Nailor couldn’t find the words, but he found the steps and mounted them quickly, moving with me inside the door, closing it behind us with only one brief cautious look toward Raydean’s trailer.

  “She’s probably still at the mental health center,” I said. “Probably won’t be home till Pat goes to pick her up. That could be hours,” I added softly.

  “Hours,” he murmured, pulling me toward him and folding me into his arms.

  I would’ve let it go. I would’ve drifted away with him had I not remembered that things were different now. I had a responsibility. Ma didn’t teach me to fool around when the chores still needed to be done. No. Work, then play.

  I pushed back and looked Nailor in the eyes. He saw the change right off.

  “Am I hurting you?” he asked.

  “Not a chance. I just need to ask you a few questions first, that’s all.”

  “First?” He grinned and went right back to running his fingers down my body, trailing them across the fabric of my gown, lingering in all the right places.

  “Yeah,” I said, pushing him away, “first. You want coffee? You should have coffee ’cause this could take a little time, and you should keep up your energy.”

  He gave up. “Yeah, coffee would be nice.”

  He’d gone home and changed since I’d seen him. He was wearing a dark brown suit and another crisp white shirt. His tie was silk. Expensive. He smelled like aftershave, not cologne. Nailor didn’t wear cologne. He always smelled faintly of leather and some spice I couldn’t identify. He was clean-cut, a little more clean-cut than I liked, but then, I’d always had a penchant for bad guys. Nailor was one of those men who straddled the fence, just over the line on the good side, but willing to do whatever it took to get what he wanted.

  I thought about that as I poured his coffee, shivering as he walked up behind me. We were entering a new frontier, him and me. We were closing in on a relationship. I didn’t think either one of us was gonna go down easy on that issue.

  “You’re thinking about something, Sierra,” he said softly. “You scared?”

  Mind reader. “Hell no,” I said, turning to hand him his coffee and sloshing it over the rim of the cup as I did so. “I’ve got something on my mind, all right, but it don’t involve fear.”

  He let it go and allowed me to lead him over to the futon that sat along one wall of my almost empty living room. I sat down, pulling him with me. It was fine, as long as I leaned toward him and tried not to think about my injury. How was I ever gonna dance? I couldn’t afford to take time off. I guessed I’d do it slowly, leaning against the pole and working it to my advantage. But that was tomorrow, today I had business to attend to.

  “What was up with Marla?” I asked.

  Nailor’s face went professional on me, tight and closed. “That’s an ongoing investigation,” he said, his voice deepening as he spoke.

  “Nailor, I’m not a damned reporter. Lighten up and tell me what happened.”

  Nailor wasn’t budging.

  “All right,” I said, “I’ll tell you. Marla threatened Venus. She was in the right place at the right time and she owns a gun. She’s your only suspect.”

  As I ticked off the evidence, I looked at him, trying to tell by his eyes if I was scoring a hit with the truth. He only went flat when I said Marla was the only suspect. Hmm, what could that mean?

  “Sierra,” he said, “are you asking because you hate Marla, or is there something going on?”

  I straightened a little, placed my coffee cup on the floor beside me, and turned back to him.

  “I’m taking a personal interest in this,” I said. “I think with my expertise I might be able to lend a little help to the investigation.”

  Nailor didn’t laugh me off. He knew I could help, but that I would offer to help the police, well, that was new.

  “I don’t want to tread on any toes here,” I continued. “But I think you may be off on the wrong investigatory path. Marla couldn’t plan and execute a murder, no matter how worked up she was.”

  Nailor put his coffee cup down. “There’s things you don’t know, Sierra. Marla may look harmless, but I assure you, she’s not.”

  “Oh, you’re not telling me anything new there. Marla’s capable of all kinds of things, but killing off a rival isn’t one of them. If that were so, I’d have been dead long ago.” I thought of the one or two times Marla and I had engaged in fisticuffs. The look in her eyes had not been blood lust; it was more a look of fear.

  “A killer needs the conviction to do the deed,” I said, quoting him from prior occasions. “Marla ain’t got conviction. Deep in her heart, Marla knows Ricky’s pond scum.”

  Nailor softened. “Sierra, I’ll work it out. If she’s innocent, I’ll soon see that, but it doesn’t look that way now. Let me do my job. You don’t need to go stepping into something that really doesn’t concern you.”

  I was starting to bristle. He was talking to me as if I was Joan Q. Citizen, and I assure you that I am not.

  “I’m in it, Nailor. I’m going to help Vincent and Marla, and there won’t be a thing you can do about it.” There, the glove was down, the challenge made.

  His face reddened and he struggled, torn between his anger and his desire to get into my pants. I felt for him, I really did.

  “Sierra, you’ll only…” He broke off, not wanting to go there.

  “What, Nailor, be in the way? Is that what you think? Well, I can handle myself, you know.”

  He eased up, working hard to control his temper. “I know you can handle yourself,” he said slowly. He reached over and untied the top ribbon of my gown. “But can you handle me?”

  I felt my resolve weakening. I leaned a little closer toward him, my head resting on his shoulder.

  “Have you recovered the gun?” I asked softly, my hands wandering down the length of his body. “What size was the, um, bullet?” My fingers slipped below his belt, teasing him and distracting him, looking for the information I wanted.

  Nailor said nothing, his breathing quickening. He untied the second ribbon, and my gown fell open, exposing my breasts. Oh God, I wanted this man. I’d waited too long for this.

  “Have you found any fingerprints that would link Marla to the murder?” I asked softly, my breath caressing his ear. He moaned.

  “You’re hopeless,” he said softly. “Come here.” He pulled me down until we were lying side by side on the wide futon. He kissed me then, letting his lips form a trail of fire across my neck and down to the tips of my breasts. I moved against him, every bit of my self-resolve disappearing as I gave into the sensations. Now, I breathed silently, now.

  “See,” he whispered, “you don’t need to go spending your time on a boring police investigation. You need this.” His fingers slipped below the waistband of my panties. “You don’t see me dancing at the Tiffany, do you?”

  The haze cleared and I pushed away to look at him. “No, Nailor, that’s not the point.”

  He tried to pull me back, to continue, but I had a point to make.

  “Vincent asked me to help Marla, as a favor to him. Furthermore, she is all alone and you guys will run right over her. She’s not the sharpest tack in the box, Nail
or. You manipulate her and she’ll confess out of confusion.”

  Nailor groaned. “No, Sierra, don’t do this. Just do your job and let me do mine. What do you know about investigating a murder, anyway?”

  “Well, maybe in this particular case, I know more than you.”

  He straightened up, pushed away, and glared at me.

  “Impeding a police investigation is a crime, Sierra. You get in our way and we’ll deal with you accordingly.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean, Nailor? What? I’m fine to roll around with but shouldn’t go thinking I’m an equal?”

  “It means only what I said, Sierra. My job and this investigation come first. I play it by the book and that means I don’t take on amateur partners.”

  Now I was mad and, truth be told, hurt, very hurt.

  Fluffy picked this moment to make an appearance, tapping her way across the wood floor, her sharp nails clicking like tap shoes. She was happy, why weren’t we?

  I tied my gown together and looked right back at him. His pager went off, the sharp tone shattering what was left of our romantic inclinations.

  “Maybe this was a mistake,” I said, my heart sinking like a rock.

  “Yeah, maybe it was. I’ve gotta go,” he said, looking up from the pager, his eyes masked by anger.

  Damn. I knew better. I knew better than to try and have a relationship. This always happened. Sooner or later the guy couldn’t deal with having a woman who was every bit as strong and opinionated as he was. I had honestly thought Nailor was different, but no, he was just like the rest of them.

  From the expression on his face I could tell he was thinking the same thing.

  “I’ll get back to you later,” he said, heading for the kitchen.

  “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass,” I called after him.

  The slamming door answered me. Damn! What was it with us?

  I went to the window and watched him. He sat there for a minute, running his hand through his hair, obviously pissed. Then, with a jerk, the car started off down the road, narrowly missing Pat’s old pickup truck as it passed. Raydean’s hand fluttered out of the passenger side window, waving at the departing detective.