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Breaking Routine

Michael Bracken

Stella Johnson met me on the veranda wearing nothing but a white cotton sundress gathered at the waist with a simple tie. She offered sweet iced tea from a silver pitcher and when I declined, she poured a glass for each of us, garnished each with a sprig of mint, and then placed mine on the table near my elbow.

She settled into a white wicker rocker and used her iced tea glass to cool her forehead. Condensation dripped from the glass onto her sundress and the white cotton quickly absorbed the moisture. Where the damp fabric clung to Stella’s left breast, I saw her swollen nipple as clearly as if she’d worn nothing at all.

“Have you news?” she finally asked.

I shook my head. Two weeks spent following her husband had failed to confirm suspicions of philandering.

Stella sipped from her tea, then rocked slowly forward and back. “Do you need more time?”

I had no other clients, and had a rapidly sinking bank balance. “It’s your money.”

“Yes, Mr. Boyette,” she said with no trace of irony, “it certainly is.”

I waited while Stella rocked forward and back, watching the damp spot on her sundress dry and her nipple disappear once again.

“Perhaps another week, then,” she said. She removed a previously prepared check from a paperback romance where it had been marking her place and she laid it on the table between us. As I reached for the check, Stella covered my hand with hers. A tingle surged up my arm and I felt blood rush to my groin. “You will look hard, won’t you?”

I slipped my hand free of hers, the check firmly in my grasp. “As hard as you want me to look.”

She smiled and withdrew her hand.

After folding the check in half, I slid it into my jacket pocket. Then I stood, bid my client a good afternoon, and left her sitting in her rocking chair staring at the expanse of her well-manicured back lawn.

I returned to my office behind Millie’s Tattoos and Piercings and down the hall from Big Mac’s Bail Bonds. The place wasn’t big--room for a desk, a couple of chairs, and some filing cabinets--but I didn’t need much. I booted up my Macintosh, checked my accounts receivable and accounts payable, and shook my head. I’d need a couple thousand dollars more just to call myself dead broke.

I pulled Stella’s check from my pocket, unfolded it, and was preparing a deposit slip when my office door opened. Millard Wayne Trout--Millie of Millie’s Tattoos and Piercings--stuck his shaved and tattooed head inside. “Lunch?”

I motioned him inside. “I need you for another week.”

“Same guy?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s a waste of time, Moe Ron,” Millie said. “He’s not doing anyone.”

“The lady’s paying,” I said. “So let’s play the hand she’s dealing.”

He shrugged. “What about lunch?”

***

Stella and her husband had a two-story home on Chateau Avenue, in a neighborhood where old money and new money lived side-by-side--a place where an unfamiliar car can not remain long without a visit from local police, and a place where Millie did not blend well with local gentry.

So, I sat in my car and watched the Johnson home through a pair of field glasses. I could see Stella through an upstairs window and I watched as she peeled off her cotton dress. I only saw her from the waist up as she turned to face the window, but I couldn’t take my eyes from her. She stared back as if she knew I was watching her and she did nothing to cover her nakedness.

A white-haired gnome of a woman rapped her knuckles against my window. When I rolled it down, she demanded, “Who are you?”

I handed her my card. Neatly thermographed on the front were my name--Morris Ronald Boyette--and my contact information.

“And what is it you do?”

“Investigations,” I explained. “Investigations of a private nature.”

“And what are you investigating now?”

I smiled. “It wouldn’t be private if I told you, would it?”

She glanced the direction I had my car pointed, saw at least a half dozen homes I could be watching, and returned her attention to me. “You be here long?”

“Why?”

“You’re still here when I get inside, I start calling the houses down that side of the block, then I start calling the ones on this side. Somebody who doesn’t know you’re here might get spooked.”

A silver Lexus turned onto Chateau Avenue from 38th Street and I watched as it pulled into the driveway of the Johnson home. A moment later a 1965 Mustang drifted past with Millie behind the wheel. The old lady turned to watch it, then returned her attention to me.

“Well?”

I keyed the ignition of my Chevy, dropped it into gear, and eased away from the curb. The old lady watched as I drove away, and I watched her in my rearview mirror until I turned the corner.

I felt certain that Stella’s husband had checked in for the evening, so I returned to my little brick two-bedroom home just off New Road. Stella knew to phone if her husband left.

He rarely left.

***

Millie left his shop in the capable hands of Alice Frizell, a wisp of a tattoo artist who wore a silver chain connecting one pierced nipple to the other, and we alternated our surveillance of Gordon Johnson. He left home at the same time each morning, drove downtown and spent most of his day in a cubicle shuffling paperwork for the state, and returned home each evening at the same time. He left the office building for lunch only twice during the week--on Tuesday for Italian buffet downtown with a man we knew worked in the cubicle next to his and on Thursday for a greasy burger and fries he ate alone while sitting in his car.

Nearly ten years older than Stella--a man not much older than me--Gordon had lost much of his hair and his pale flesh had turned doughy. He did nothing significant, and followed a routine so predicable that I had already settled into a booth at the Italian restaurant before he arrived and Millie’s lunch order duplicated Gordon’s even though he placed it ten minutes before Gordon’s arrival at the drive-in.

***

At the end of the week, I visited Stella on her veranda. She wore a loose cotton top and a thin wrap skirt over a bikini bottom, and held a glass of iced tea in her hand.

“Do you carry a gun Mr. Boyette?”

“Most days.”

Stella wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. “Is it a big gun?”

“Big enough,” I said. “But, it’s not the size of your gun, it’s what you do with it.”

Stella leaned forward in her rocker and placed her hand on my leg, just above my knee. The top of her blouse gaped open and I had a clear view of her breasts. I tried not to look.

“And do you know what to do with your gun, Mr. Boyette?”

I looked deep into her pale blue eyes. “I pull the trigger when I need to.”

She patted my leg once, and then leaned back in her rocker. “That’s what I needed to hear, Mr. Boyette.”

A mystery featuring a cat detective had replaced her romance novel of the previous week. She slipped a prewritten check from between the pages and placed in on the table.

“You’re wasting your money,” I said. “He’s not doing anything.”

She considered for a moment, but didn’t touch the check. “If I need you, will you come?”

“Just phone,” I said. “You know the number.”

***

Two nights later, she phoned. When I answered, she said, “I need you.”

She met me at the door, wearing her white cotton sundress. The bright light of the foyer shone through it, silhouetting her lithe figure.

“He’s left town for the evening,” Stella said. Once each month Gordon drove to Austin for a meeting with the Regional Director of his department.

“He won’t return until late.” She wet her blood-red lips with the tip of her tongue. “Very late.”

I stepped inside and closed the heavy wooden door. I didn’t need to ask, but I did anyhow. “Why do you need me?”

My former client reached up and wrapped her hands behind my neck, pulling my face down to hers. She kissed me, kissed me hard, and when she forced her tongue into my mouth I didn’t resist.

I wrapped my arms around Stella, pulling her body tight against mine, feeling her breasts flatten against my chest. When our kiss finally ended, I used my tongue to wipe cherry-flavored lipstick from my teeth.

Stella stepped away, lifted the sundress off in one smooth move, and dropped it on the black-and-white tile floor. Barely-visible tan lines from the bottom half of a string bikini were all that marred her smooth bronze skin.

She took my hand and led me up the broad staircase to a second-floor bedroom--a guest room since it had all the personality of a home decorating magazine photo spread. The bed covers had already been turned down, revealing crisp white cotton sheets, and a silver iced tea pitcher and two ice-filled glasses topped with mint sprigs waited on the dresser for afterward.

Stella turned and helped me strip off my clothes. My summer jacket landed on the floor, followed by my shoulder holster, T-shirt, and the rest of my clothes.

I hesitated. Holding Stella’s face in my hands, I stared down into her pale blue eyes. I’m not sure what I saw staring back at me, and soon it didn’t matter.

I lifted Stella and carried her to the bed. What we did next happened hard and fast. After we finished, Stella slipped from the bed and padded silently to the bathroom. I watched the sway of her hips until she snapped on the bathroom light, then I closed my eyes.

I opened them a few minutes later when Stella said, “Is this your gun?”

She stood at the end of the bed, my .38 in her hand. She had it aimed at my chest.

“Yes.”

“It feels--” She licked her lips with the tip of her tongue. “--powerful.”

Stella walked to the bed, and then straddled me. She pressed the barrel of my gun against my jaw.

I reached up smothered the gun with my hands. I twisted until Stella grimaced with pain and released her grip. Then I dropped the .38 to the floor and grabbed her hips, holding on so tight I left fingertip bruises in her skin.

***

A few days later I received the check Stella had tried to give me when she wanted me to follow her husband for a fourth week. I had the check and the envelope it had arrived in laying on my desk next to two shot glasses and an open bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

“So what’s her angle?”

Millie shrugged and said, “Follow the money.”

“She has it,” I said. “He doesn’t.”

“Insurance policy?”

“Hundred thousand on each, double indemnity, not even a tenth of her net worth.”

“Prenup?”

“Not that she’s mentioned.”

“So he gets half in a divorce.”

“Not if she has a good lawyer,” I said. “And she can afford a good lawyer.”

Millie scratched his left arm and all of his tattoos danced. “You planning to run to her the next time she phones?”

“If I do, and she sends me another check, what’s that make me?”

Millie laughed before he finished his own joke. “A rich fucker.”

***

Stella phoned again a month later.

When I arrived at her house, the front door stood open and she stood at the top of the stairs. She wore a diaphanous white negligee spattered with blood, and she held a snub-nosed .38 in her right hand. “I killed him, Mr. Boyette.”

I ascended the stairs two at a time and took the revolver from her hand, dropping it into my jacket pocket before gathering Stella into my arms. She buried her face in my chest and wrapped her arms around me, but she did not cry.

Later, I phoned the police, and I held Stella until they arrived and separated us. I sat in the drawing room with a uniform until a pair of plainclothes officers from the Waco Police Department arrived to take my statement.

The tall one held up two evidence bags, each one containing a .38. One had come from my jacket pocket, the other from my shoulder holster. “Care to explain this?”

I told them everything except Millie’s participation in the surveillance of Stella’s husband.

“So why’d she shoot him?”

I shrugged.

They took me downtown, where I repeated everything I’d already said. Then I waited while the short detective typed the report. I read it, corrected a couple of details, and signed it.

When I finished, the tall detective stepped into the room and pulled his partner aside. After a moment of consultation, he turned to me. “Mrs. Johnson doesn’t tell the same story.”

“Didn’t think she would.”

They held me overnight, and then kicked me loose the following morning.

***

Over a basket of hot wings and fries, I told Millie everything I had told the detectives. Then I told him the rest of the story, the story the plainclothes officers had told me before they kicked me loose.

“She killed her husband, all right,” I said. “She just didn’t pull the trigger.”

“How’s that?” Millie licked ranch dressing from his fingers.

Carbon tattooing around the entrance wound under Gordon Johnson’s jaw indicated that the gun barrel had been less than an inch away when the gun was fired, and he had both trace metals and gunpowder residue on his right hand. I didn’t tell Millie about the lab tests. Instead, I said, “They found Gordon sitting in an easy chair facing a television screen filled with snow. He’d been watching a videotape, and when the cops rewound the tape they saw what Stella and I had done in the guest room.”

“Why did she pick up the gun?” Millie asked. “Why did she call you?”

I shrugged. I hadn’t spoken to Stella since that night, afraid of what she might say, afraid of what I might do.

***

Late one night, a few weeks after Gordon Johnson’s death had been ruled a suicide and my .38 had returned to its place in my shoulder holster, I answered the ringing phone next to my bed.

“Do you know what to do with your gun, Mr. Boyette?” Stella asked. Her voice had a sexy, sleepy quality to it, and the sound of it aroused me. I heard ice rattle in a glass, and I imagined her sipping iced tea. When I didn’t respond, she said, “I do.”

I quietly disconnected the line, closed my eyes, and didn’t return to sleep until dawn.

Copyright(c) 2007 by Michael Bracken

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