Sex, Murder And A Double Latte

“Come inside, we’ll finish the report.”

That was probably as close as I was going to get. “Anatoly, will you wait out here for me?” I asked. “Make sure nobody else messes with it?”

“There’s not much left to mess with.”

“Just stay with the car, okay?”

I followed Gorman inside to his desk. This was embarrassing enough without Anatoly standing over my shoulder. Gorman gestured for me to take a chair. I remained standing. “I thought we were done with the report.”

“Just a couple more questions.”

I hesitated for a moment before sitting across from him. I wasn’t relishing the idea of being interrogated in a police station, even if I didn’t have anything to hide.

“Sure you’re not hiding anything?”

Oh my God. I was being interrogated by the police department’s resident psychic. Maybe I could just visualize the events of the last week and I wouldn’t have to say anything at all.

“Miss Katz, did you hear me?”

Okay, so he wasn’t a very good psychic. “A little over five weeks ago I got a typed note in the mail. No return address. It just said, ‘You reap what you sow.’”

“‘You reap what you sow’? Anything else?”

“Nope, that was it.”

“Know who might have sent it?”

“No, like I said, no return address.”

“Uh-huh.” Gorman made a note at the bottom of his report. “Do you still have the note?”

“Well, here’s the thing. I wanted to have a fire that night and I didn’t really like the note, sooo…I burned it.”

“You…you burned it?” Gorman shook his head. “Smart.”

“Well, I didn’t know I would be needing it.” I scooted my chair forward. Gorman may not be Mr. Personality but maybe he could help me make sense of some things. All I had to lose was my dignity, and that was going pretty cheap these days. “I’m a writer. I write murder mysteries.”

“Uh-huh.”

“This last Thursday, the same day that woman Susan Lee was killed, I received five prank phone calls. The caller didn’t say anything—there was just silence and a click.”

“Any calls since Thursday?”

“No.”

“Uh-huh.” I noticed that this time Gorman didn’t write anything down. He probably found my account so riveting that he knew he’d never forget it.

“So, that same night I came home from an art opening at Sussman Gallery and I found a broken glass.”

“A broken glass?”

“Yes, a broken glass on my kitchen floor.”

“Any idea how it broke?”

“Well…I do have a cat.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But the thing is, the glass was in the middle of the floor. I don’t have a big kitchen, but it would be hard for Mr. Katz to knock a glass that far off the kitchen counter.”

“Mr. Katz?”

“My cat.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay, so here comes the really weird part. In my second novel, Sex, Drugs and Murder, my protagonist, Alicia Bright, well, she sometimes gets prank phone calls and in one scene she comes home and finds…a broken glass!” I sat back in my chair and waited for Officer Gorman to react.

“Uh-huh.”

Not the reaction I was looking for. “Okay, I know, glasses break all the time, right? That’s why I decided not to call the police.”

“Good decision.”

“But now there’s the car thing. In my book, Alicia Bright’s roommate’s car is vandalized in almost exactly the same way mine was. You see, the bad guy, Jeremy Spaulding, knows that Alicia’s roommate, Kittie, has a cassette tape that could prove that his father was involved in a political scandal. Kittie’s father produced X-rated films, so she had all these contacts to the pornography underworld.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay, that’s probably not all that relevant. Besides, you could always read the book, right?”

Officer Gorman just stared at me. Apparently that one wasn’t even worth an “uh-huh.”

“The point is…” The point. What was my point again? “Oh, yes. The point is that things are happening to me that happened in my book. I am living Sex, Drugs and Murder!”

This time it was Officer Gorman’s turn to sit back in his chair. He put his fingers together steeple-style, furrowed his brow and was silent for what seemed like an hour. Finally, he looked up and made eye contact. I knew he had formed his theory. He leaned forward and I did the same. I could feel my heartbeats increasing in speed.

“You sure you don’t do drugs?”

CHAPTER 6

“Before she met him she had assumed that being sexy and obnoxious were mutually exclusive traits.”

—Sex, Drugs and Murder