$200 and a Cadillac - By Fingers Murphy Page 0,125
woman a man found difficult to take seriously as anything but an object. I traced the curves of her firm, tan body with my eyes, not wanting to disturb her, feeling intimidated and overwhelmingly attracted at the same time. Finally, she must have felt my stare because she turned to see me lingering near the doors.
“Hi.” She smiled. “Something I can help you with?”
I cleared my throat and walk toward her, trying to make it look like I hadn’t been standing there watching her. “Yes. I’m Oliver Olson,” I said, crossing toward her with my hand outstretched. She’d taken off the T-shirt and wore a black bikini top barely big enough to cover her nipples.
She shook my hand and smiled up at me from the deck chair. “Nice to meet you.” Her blue eyes glowed in the daylight. She smelled of tanning oil. I tried to keep my tone serious, which only made me feel ridiculous.
I tried not to stare at her tight stomach muscles as they rippled with her movements. “I’m an attorney. We’ve been called to look into the possibility of a lawsuit against the police department stemming from last night’s events.” I realized I didn’t have a note pad or anything to write with and I felt a sudden urge to do something with my hands to keep them from fidgeting like a schoolboy. “I understand from Mr. Vargas that you live here and that you helped arrange last night’s party. I would like to get a list of who was here and how I can get in touch with them, to the extent you know.”
She was quiet for a minute. She sat with her hands in her lap and her shoulders slumped, staring out into the light blue sky. Even somber, she exuded a pure, objectified sexuality. Just the sight of her made me want to climb on top of her right then.
Finally, she shook her head and said, “I’ve tried not to think about it all morning. You know, just get up and go about my business like nothing happened.” She looked up at me with sad, crystalline eyes. “But it’s stupid, y’know. I mean, Don was everywhere. Everything reminds me of him. I can’t stop wondering what the hell’s going to happen now.”
“Are you a relative? Miss … ?” I realized I didn’t know her last name.
She looked up at me with a quick, genuine grin. She almost looked amused. “Jones.” She shielded her eyes from the sun with her hand to get a better look at me. “I’m Brianna Jones.”
She spoke in a way that said she was used to people knowing who she was. I didn’t. So I just nodded and said, “It’s nice to meet you, Ms. Jones.”
She giggled at being addressed formally. “No. I’m not family. Well, you know, Don was the kind of guy who had a loose definition of ‘family’—a lot of people were either in or out of it over the years, from what I understand. Tiffany was his wife. Ed’s his son. I heard he was married once before. But beyond that, Don didn’t have much real family. But he was Uncle Don to a lot of people. Like me, I guess. People he took under his wing. He really wasn’t a bad guy, despite what some people said about him. He was like a father to me.”
There was a strange mixture of innocence and weariness in her voice, and it made me wonder how old she was. She could have been seventeen, but her body said twenty-five. I asked the only thing I could think of. “So how long have you lived here?”
She thought about it for a second. “About three and a half years. I moved in on my eighteenth birthday. Don said I couldn’t move in until I was eighteen.”
I did the math quickly and tried to process her comments. The whole thing made me want to ask a million questions that had nothing to do with why I was there. I took my hands out of my pockets and really wished I had something to write with. A list of names wouldn’t do me a damned bit of good if I couldn’t write it down. Rather than stand there like an idiot, I asked, “What about your family?”
She smirked and rolled her eyes. “If you saw the shithole I grew up in out in Northridge, you’d move into a place like this the first chance you got. Believe me.”