myself joining Samantha on the bed, where she gave me a long sensuous kiss.
“How’d I do tonight? Were you jealous?”
“You were wonderful,” I replied as Samantha began to unbutton my shirt. “As for being jealous—I don’t get jealous. I’ll admit I was a bit envious when plumber boy wanted to take a shower with you.”
“Do you want to take that shower with me now?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
As the room was already paid for in full, we decided to use all the amenities provided for a few more hours. The in-joke was I would then bill the client for the time it took to debrief the other investigator on the evening’s events. Some female clients actually praised me for such a thorough job and said the other woman’s comments had been very enlightening.
If only they knew just how enlightening those sessions were for Samantha and me.
Around ten–thirty, I offered to make a quick dessert run, as we were both hungry after our very physical interview session. I drove the van off the lot, hoping to find the ice cream stand up the road open. I thought a banana split would hit the spot. Bananas, whipped cream, three scoops of ice cream, two spoons and one Samantha.
What I hadn’t counted on was having the tables turned and now being the one under surveillance. Like most of my targets, I was completely oblivious to being watched. I hadn’t noticed that our jilted plumber friend had returned in his dark green Saturn rental car and saw me exit the room kissing Sam in the doorway on my way out.
Apparently, he had been waiting to make his move for some time, seething over our little deception. A taxi driver would come forward to say he had driven the former Plymouth resident—who appeared agitated at the time—to the Holiday Plaza Hotel around 7:45 p.m. “He was, you know—frustrated,” the driver was quoted in the newspaper the following morning.
What this scumbag cabbie failed to mention was he’d told Peter the Plumber about our $40 arrangement outside the restaurant. Mr. Plumber, always good with numbers while on the job, had no difficulty putting two and two together.
When I returned fifteen minutes later with the banana split on the passenger seat, the only thing left for the police officers to do was fill out the proper paper work. They had already responded to a 911 call about an enraged couple screaming at each other in a cheap motel room. They had already shot and killed a man covered in blood and brandishing what looked like a gun (but turned out to be a hammer). And they had already determined the naked woman on the bed inside Room 215 had been bludgeoned to death with the aforementioned household tool.
As I looked up to our room and then at the plumber’s dead body on the pavement below, I could only think of the question Samantha had posed to me earlier:
Now what would your significant other say about us hanging out together under these circumstances?
Of all the questions I would have to answer, that would be the toughest. I could handle the cops, the lawyers and even Samantha’s family, but I had no clue how my lovely Linda would react. Her move from our small hometown to the big city was meant to be a fresh start for us. Now I had royally and tragically screwed things up.
As the media would play up for weeks, the irony of this whole debacle was that my mistress, Samantha, had been killed due to a suspicious wife. I wondered how Linda would feel knowing a homemaker from Plymouth had suspected her husband of cheating, yet she hadn’t suspected me.
Or had she?
I figured I’d never find out. If I were in her position, I knew I would hit the road and never look back.
In life there are certain lines you should never cross: as a kid, you’re programmed to colour inside the lines. In wartime, there’s always a line drawn in the sand. And in committed relationships, the line you never step over is to cheat on your partner.
Devoid of any meaningful emotion, I got out of the van and started toward the officer in charge, inadvertently stepping under yet another taboo line: the yellow police tape that surrounds a crime scene. In that instant, I knew that morally I was no better than Peter Plumber.
Pathetic.
“What’s your business here, sir?” the officer asked as I approached.
“My name is Steve Cassidy. I’m the P.I. and resident dirt bag responsible for this mess.”
TWO
After a night of questioning at Police Headquarters, I arrived home to find Linda gone. On the coffee table I found a note and her set of keys.
As the old song goes: Life is made up of Hellos and Goodbyes.
This is Goodbye.
Linda
I made a pointless tour through the house, hoping to find something that would confirm Linda had once lived here. Sadly, no traces of our relationship had been left behind. Gone were the pictures of us together, as well as her clothes and makeup. Most disheartening was the loss of a packet of love letters we had exchanged prior to Linda’s move to Darrien. My letters to her were still neatly stacked on the fireplace mantle but her notes to me were missing. She had been so thorough in her departure the only personal item I found, aside from her note, was the start of a grocery list in her handwriting: Milk
Good old wholesome milk. If that was all I needed, my life would certainly be less complicated, or so I imagined.
I took a seat on the living room couch and tried to collect my thoughts. I badly wanted to believe I had been the perfect cheater; that prior to last evening, no one had been hurt by my lack of control; that no one knew about Samantha and me, right up to when the “Breaking News Report” aired.
Who was I kidding? The dapper plumber believed he was invincible and look where it got him: a one-way ticket to the morgue.
I figured I could locate Linda in three phone calls, but decided against such a plan for the moment. She wouldn’t want to talk and I doubted the words, “Oops, you caught me,” would restore my credibility in her eyes. I was also too exhausted to attempt such calls. Instead, I unplugged the phone and collapsed into bed. When I awoke a few hours later, I found I had missed fifty–six calls, most of which I believed would be from media outlets, looking for a comment to accompany their scandal-tainted storylines.
With pen in hand, my expectations were soon met, as an astounding forty–three of the calls were from TV, newspaper, magazine and radio reporters. Even the great local columnist, Jeremy Atkins of the Darrien Free Press, made an impassioned plea, leaving me his personal cell number for twenty–four hour access. He’d written a nice piece on me in his “World According To Me” column, after the successful conclusion of a missing person case in my old hometown. I wrote down his information for future reference and erased the others.
Of the thirteen remaining calls, five were hang-ups and six were from male jokers wanting to hire me. “Is it possible to get my wife to a hotel room to get laid and then have her killed?” one smart aleck asked. “I heard that was your specialty.” Not surprisingly, none of these comedians left return numbers.
The final two calls intrigued and worried me.
“Ah . . . hi . . . Linda, are you there?” an older female
