The Brush Off by Laura Bradley Read Free Book Online Page B

his mouth again in the morning.
    I watched Scythe walk over to the desk table and use the butt end of his Bic to shift around the papers on the glass top.
    “Know this stiff’s last name?”
    Crandall’s insensitive question startled me out of falling deeper into some kind of hormone-induced trance.
    “Yes,” I answered cautiously as I racked my brain for his surname.
    “Yeah?” Crandall snorted. “Everybody but me and Jack here knows about this guy, but nobody knows his last name.”
    “He liked to go only by his first name,” I responded distractedly.
    “Like Madonna, that nutso?”
    Cocking my head, I considered his comparison. I hadn’t thought of Ricardo as aping Madonna before, but you couldn’t look anywhere for a better miracle marketer, that was for sure. I nodded. “Yeah, like Madonna. Or Cher, I guess.”
    He flapped his notebook within an inch of my nose. “Hey, don’t go knocking Cher. I like her.”
    “Uh, okay.” I tried to imagine this gum-smacking, insensitive, foul-mouthed, paunchy, redneck tough guy as a Cher fan. Go figure.
    “So, you gonna tell us his last name, or we gonna have to pull it out with tweezers?”
    “Speaking of tweezers,” said another plainclothes cop who walked through the office door, opening and closing the tweezers in my direction like mini crocodile jaws. I didn’t want to think of what he was going to do with those.
    “His name was Ricardo Montoya,” I blurted.
    The tweezer cop joined Jackson Scythe at the desk, plucked up a few hairs, and put them into a plastic bag before walking out.
    “Know anybody who had a beef with Ric?” Smack. Smack.
    “No.” I shook my head. “But I wasn’t as close to Ricardo as I once was. We were old friends, we ran into each other occasionally, by accident or when one of us wanted a favor…” Scythe appeared to be ignoring us, reading over the papers in front of him. But I knew he was listening closely. I could feel that intense focus. He thought he was tricky, but he couldn’t fool me.
    “Favor? That wouldn’t be sexual favors, would it?” Crandall asked with a leer that compressed his face into layers of gray-brown fleshy folds.
    Guess I didn’t remind him of his daughter anymore.
    “No, it wouldn’t,” I snapped a little too vehemently. Scythe looked up, met my eyes neutrally, and looked back down.
    “Why? Was Ricky here a hoto? ” While looking askance at the body, Crandall emphasized the Tex-Mex word for homosexual in such a way that he thought was cool and I thought was ignorant.
    “No,” I said too forcefully. “He was not. He had lots of…” What would be accurate while not too telling here? Sex? Girlfriends? Female bed partners? “Dates. With girls. I mean, women.”
    “You one of those ‘dates’?” Crandall put in knowingly.
    “No.” I kept to myself that it wasn’t for lack of trying on Ricardo’s part. I was getting smarter. Surely, the cops would’ve seen somewhere in my rebuff a motive for murder. I had enough trouble having apparently furnished the murder weapon.
    “What’s this ‘old friend’ sh…uh…stuff, then? I mean, was he your old man’s bud or something?”
    “Yes, perhaps Claude knew him,” Scythe offered from across the room. I wondered why the Claude farce seemed to bother him so much. His verbal shot flew on past Crandall, who wrinkled his forehead for a moment and decided figuring it out wasn’t worth the effort.
    “I don’t have any old man,” I retorted, ignoring Scythe’s comment.
    “So.” Crandall smirked. “You and Ricky here really weren’t old friends, then, were you?”
    His point was slowly beginning to dawn on me, like the sun through a foggy day in Transylvania.
    “Why? Do you think a woman can’t be friends with a man unless she knows him by association through a husband or she goes to bed with him?”
    “Right.” Crandall double-smacked with pleasure at his universal wisdom.
    “Then you’re an idiot.”
    Jackson Scythe emitted a heavy