Kiss The Ladies Goodnight: (Jake Legato Private Investigator Series 1) Read online

KISS THE LADIES GOODNIGHT

  COPPER SMITH

  Copyright 2016 By Copper Smith All Rights Reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of very brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Bonus: Free preview

 

  Prologue

  Nice life you’ve made for yourself, Cassandra. Beautiful girl from a family that raised you well. You came from money, from educated people who taught you better. And this is what happens? Shaking your ass for a crowd of horny drunks at Bootsie’s?

  But that’s just your way, isn’t it? You do what you want. Always too wrapped up in your own needs to notice the hearts you break along the way. But that independent streak is going to cost you. Sooner than you think.

  You’re a smart girl, but there’s a lot they didn’t teach you in that upper crust prep school you went to. But don’t worry. I’ll teach you.

  I’ll teach you what happens when you break the wrong heart, Cassandra. I’ll teach you why it’s not a good idea to brush aside somebody who cares, somebody who’ll give everything for you. Kiss the world goodnight, sweetheart. Tonight your time is up.

  Guess who

  Chapter One

  Legato needed a job. That was his excuse for loitering outside Bootsie’s strip club at one-thirty in the morning.

  But first he needed a cigarette. So before stepping inside, he lit up and watched the circus of East Lake street unfold. Range Rovers bounced through red lights. Underfed hookers flagged down cars that belonged in safer neighborhoods. Winos howled wounded serenades to nobody. And it all made Legato’s life seem a little less shitty.

  Nothing left to do but gulp down his pride and step into Bootsie’s.

  Inside, the place throbbed like a migraine. But the threat was empty. No knife fights in progress, no menacing glares greeting him. Mostly men in tattered suits happy to gawk at bodies besides their wives.’

  Legato moved to the bar, took a seat and watched everything. The drowsy dancer on the main-stage, the frat boys wrestling on the floor. Nobody dangerous, just plenty of loud, drunken stupidity.

  He was scanning the place, detecting, forgetting for a second how hard he’d fallen: Detective days long gone. No more badge, no more job. And now this shit. Applying for a bouncer gig in a strip club.

  The bartender – bald brother, too cool for the room – bopped up to him. “What we drinking tonight, doctor?”

  “I’m good. Not here for a drink.”

  The bartender’s face warmed into an illicit grin. He leaned forward, a secret eating at him. “Oh, we here to talk business?” He jerked his head toward a dancer.

  “Diamond’s on the menu tonight if you like brown sugar. If you dig redheads, you just missed Kitty, but if you need the digits, we can talk. She’s got a mouth like a motor, baby, hand on the heart. And since you a first time customer –“

  Legato cut off the barkeep’s sales patter. “Not here for that either. I’m looking for a Cicely. She told me to come in right before closing.”

  The bartender nodded to a door down the hallway. “Knock twice to let her know everything’s cool. She gets a little antsy past midnight. You here for the bouncer gig?”

  He nodded.

  The bartender reached out, gave Legato’s fist a bump. “A word to the wise, my man...” He leaned forward, voice hushed. “If you got anything in your past, keep it on the low. She’ll ask, but with the right sweet talk, you don’t have to answer.”

  Legato smirked. “What makes you think I have something in my past?”

  The barkeep shrugged. “Some cats just have that look. Like somebody who just walked in from a street fight.”

  Stealing a glance in the mirror across the bar, Legato straightened his collar. “I suppose I should stop into the can, wipe that street fight look off.” With a fist bump, he stepped away. “Name’s Legato, and you?”

  “They call me Big Trick. Good luck to you, doctor.”

  After a quick stop in the men’s room, Legato found the office, knocked twice and heard an uneasy chirp. “Yes?”

  “I’m here for the interview?”

  “Come on in,” she said, voice relaxed now.

  The detective in Legato had Cicely pegged seconds after strolling inside. She was the girl every guy sat next to in high school but never noticed. A sweetheart, eager to please. Always does her homework and yours too if you ask nicely. Yearbook committee, school dance planner, honor roll. But you forgot her name days after graduation.

  He took a seat, gave her timid hand a shake. “Jake Legato, nice to meet you”

  “I’m Cicely Russo, the manager here,” she answered, eyes aimed at the desk. She forced a grin and asked, “So, what do you think of Bootsie’s so far?”

  “I could handle working here, if that’s what you mean. Don’t know much about it.”

  “Not much to know, I suppose. It’s a… strip club,” she said, kind of embarrassed by it all. “I got in touch because Andy told me you needed a job.”

  “Yeah, tells me he’s had enough of Minnesota weather and would love to get back to San Diego.”

  With Cicely reaching into a stack of resumes, Legato stole a glance. Her thick, jet-black eyebrows reminded him of the olive skinned Greek girls from Astoria he’d see working in diners and run-down family owned coffee houses.

  But Cicely gave off a different vibe. Her Maria Callas eyebrows slashed against pale Minnesota skin like skid marks in the snow. And she seemed to be hiding behind somebody else’s face. A gawky introvert in disguise.

  “Legato. That’s a nice name,” she said. “Puerto Rican? Dominican?”

  “Italian.”

  She lifted her gaze from the papers, eyes narrow. Maybe aimed at his wide nose – or focused on his mocha-tinted skin. “Italian? Really?”

  He choked back a groan and answered the question she was too polite to ask. “Half-Italian, half-black.”

  Cicely grinned the awkwardness away. “Andy speaks highly of you. He says you're a good friend. Somebody he could always trust."

  "I like to think so."

  But her face curled a little, signaling more awkwardness on the way. "He also says you left the police force under… complicated circumstances.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Could you tell me more?”

  “I could. Or I could tell you about growing up in a Brooklyn neighborhood with bars on the windows and a school with metal detectors at the door.”

  “That’s nice, but what I wanted –“

  Legato leaned forward, time for the sweet talk Big Trick recommended. “What you want is somebody who speaks the language your customers understand. Am I right? Somebody who can keep this place safe even if that means slapping around a little. I’m guessing that matters more in this place than a spotless record.” Playing the tough guy New Yorker role to a Minnesotan was always an option. Sometimes it even qualified as sweet talk.

  The lady fought off a schoolgirl’s blush and said, “Can you start tomorrow?”

  “What time do you need me?”

  “Ten in the morning. We’ll train you for a while, start you as so
on as you’re ready.”

  Legato reached for a handshake, but three bangs at the door froze them both.

  Cicely’s eyebrows lifted. “Yes?”

  A woman’s voice aimed for a scream, but couldn’t get there. “The police need you! It’s… they need you.”

  She gathered Legato’s papers. “Just a second, Tammy. Jake, I look forward to –“

  Three more knocks, louder, almost angry. “Cicely, it’s… Please!” Now the voice was soaked in sobs. Cicely raced to the door, opened it to find somebody crouching there like her legs had given out. A stripper clad in a robe, crying.

  Cicely kneeled, mouth stretched wide. “What is it, Tammy?”

  Tammy sputtered words that almost made a sentence. “Cassandra. Because the… police and. They called and she’s…”

  Cicely turned to Legato, her face now slack. “We’ll… talk tomorrow,” She gave him a flaccid handshake then repeated, “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  Knowing a thing or two about the delivery of bad news, Legato recognized her shattered look. And he knew that too many words was always a bad idea at those moments. “Thank you,” he said, warm hand on her shoulder, another move he’d learned from his detective days. Contact always made the news less awful.

  But Cicely pulled away from the contact, shuddering, eyes scanning the hallway for answers. And Tammy didn’t move at all.

  So he slipped away, took a seat at the bar and nodded to Big Trick. “Whiskey, neat.”

  And he drank. With every sip, the tortured squeals coming from Cicely’s office slowly faded into somebody else’s problem.

  Legato tried to piece everything together. Was Cassandra a dancer? Was she dead now? And who killed her?

  He was detecting again, a habit he needed to break. That’s why he had to take off, pull himself away from the bar – even if it meant leaving behind a half-full glass of whiskey on a night he really needed it.

  ***

  Sleep didn’t come easy that night. A heating duct’s rattle didn’t help. Plus too many thoughts and none of them restful. The dead stripper. The new job. Mounting bills. The past he couldn’t drink away. Legato spent the first few hours in bed staring at the backs of his eyelids. Maybe a little TV would settle his nerves.

  Or maybe not. “… the victim was a twenty-two-year-old exotic dancer named Cassandra Strickland, known to friends and co-workers as Krissy Sweet. Her body was found with multiple lacerations and –“

  Getting away from talk of bodies and lacerated victims seemed a good idea at two am. So Legato gave his legs a stretch and went to the building’s back steps for a smoke. But he forgot to leave the detective memories behind.

  He’d always had those days when early retirement seemed like a good move. He’d get sick of the Northside grind, sick of delivering bad news to mothers who could always see it coming before he got out of the car. He grew sick of paperwork, sick of the fried chicken and linguini sauce jokes the boys at the station never got tired of telling. So he made a move toward early retirement, a boneheaded move really, like nobody would notice half a million dollars missing from a crack peddler’s duffle bag.

  When the bag seemed light to somebody in the evidence room, they made a phone call…

  Legato took the least awful option. That meant no admission of guilt, but no pension either and good luck getting another job in law enforcement. The toughest part was the phone call to Mama, long-distance to Brooklyn explaining why she could no longer tell all her friends her son was a detective out there in that cold-ass Minneapolis place. But then the email came from some woman named Cicely, saying Andy was leaving and recommending him for the gig.

  That cigarette on the back steps took forever to die. No sense chasing after sleep now, he was up for the day. He climbed to his feet and spent the morning’s early hours reciting a new mantra: A job is a job. A job is a job.

  Chapter Two

  Without the maddening pound of a bass-heavy beat, the club just seemed wrong. And it lacked menace. Legato sat in his 91 Mazda across the street until the clock hit ten. Laptop perched on his dashboard, he gave the online classifieds another chance to rescue him. There had to be something, anything. But no. After having no luck, he left the car, jiggled the lock shut and crossed the street to Bootsie’s.

  Just inside the front door, Cicely greeted him with a well-rehearsed grin. “Are we wide awake and ready for our first day?” she asked. Not a hint of the previous evening’s nightmare on her face.

  “Sure. Everything’s… okay?”

  Her grin tightened, determined to give away nothing. “Everything is fine. We… lost a friend last night. It was horrible. But everything is fine.”

  It started with a tour of the club. Cicely showed Legato the front bar area, the main-stage, the dressing rooms, the restrooms and supply closet like nothing had happened. Apart from a quaver in her voice when listing the names and shifts of the dancers, nothing in her demeanor would have announced that somebody she was close to had been slashed to pieces less than a day earlier.

  Andy showed up, smiling that slanted smile that could always brush the tension away. With a gentle nod, Cicely ducked into her office, happy to have help. “Andy! Can you… give me a hand and show Mister Legato the ropes a little.”

  And she was gone.

  Legato gave his buddy a hug and said, “Change your mind about going back to San Diego?”

  Andy Chuckled. “Never. Seriously, I’m done with Minnesota winters. Just came back to check on you, see how you’re getting adjusted here.”

  “I’m trying. It’s a little different than detective work, but I’ll get it.”

  Andy’s stare lingered, his smile fading. “I’m glad you didn’t have any issues over… the incident. I told Cicely you were cool. I’m like, ‘he’s a good guy, he just made a bad decision.’”

  “It’s fine. Thanks for helping out.”

  More staring, enough to make Legato feel like a caged animal. Sympathy was one thing, but from Andy? A dumpy fat guy without much going for him, part-time police station janitor, for fuck’s sake, looking at him like he was coated in dog shit. “So… about those ropes,” Legato said. “The ones you’re showing me?”

  “Yes. Here’s the thing to remember about a bouncer’s job: You’re not paid to handle things when they get out of control. You’re paid to keep things from getting out of control. You’re the best friend, a nice guy until they give you a reason not to be.”

  Legato studied his friend’s face, wondered what it would look like for him not to be a nice guy. He never saw that side in five years at the station. Just good old affable Andy.

  Andy then moved to the bar, lifted a bowl of popcorn. “This is something to use if guys get a little out of hand – and I’m not talking about bashing them over the head with it.” Then came that corny laugh, complete with a snort. “No, but really what I’m talking about is using it to keep a guy’s temper down. You can be all like, ‘Dude, have some popcorn, chill.’ Then he’ll chill usually. The popcorn gets him thirsty, so he’s buying drinks again and that makes Cicely happy. Plus he’s not pissed at you now so you get no fight. And that means you get no lawsuit. That’s something else that makes Cicely happy.”

  A dancer entered the club, rail-thin body, stern face, clad in an overcoat. “Hi, Andy!” she said, slinking past them and down the hallway.

  A dorky grin crept onto Andy’s face and stayed for a while. “Hi, Raven.” He said to Legato, “That’s Raven. Nice girl and all. They’re mostly nice, the dancers. Even Cassandra was.”

  “Cassandra was that dancer who…?”

  “ Yeah. The one you heard about. Probably on the news and all. That was sad and stuff.”

  Legato’s inner detective itched at him. “You know anything about what happened?”

  “I don’t know, things happen to these girls, you know. I mean, they’re just dancers but sometimes they get into other stuff. Uncool stuff.”

  “Such as?”

  Andy leaned in, v
oice low. “Stuff happens in the back room. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Reminding himself that he wasn’t a detective anymore, he closed the conversation with a smile.

  “There’s paperwork in the office that Cicely wants you to do and stuff.”

  They stepped into the office and the three of them did the paperwork and lightened the lead-heavy mood with small talk. Nobody mentioned the dead girl.

  ***

  But leaving the office was weird. At a booth in the corner, new a dancer – redhead with hair stacked high – talked to a guy that snagged Legato’s attention. He knew the look: rigid posture, blank face like he’s studying something, a suit his mother would love. The guy was a detective.

  Worse yet, the face was familiar. And when the handsome man shared a smug grin, the name came to Legato without delay. This was Chad Phillipson, not somebody he wanted to see.

  Hoping to slip past the two, Legato turned to face the bar and quietly sidestepped to the door. But the conversation between the dancer and Phillipson ended too quickly.

  “Is that the Half Italian stallion?” the detective shouted, voice laced with frat boy bravado.

  Legato turned slowly, forcing his lips into a grin. “Half-Italian, all stallion!”

  They shared a handshake and a man-hug, bumping shoulders but nothing else. “Had a feeling our paths would cross sooner or later, Legato!”

  He put his hands up, a mock ‘surrender.’ “You got me.”

  Phillipson chuckled. “Slow down, Stallion. Let’s wait till you get charged first. How the fuck you doing! You holding up okay since… you know, leaving?”

  “Things are cool. Miss you guys, but yeah, I’m doing okay.”

  Awkwardness intruded as Phillipson’s eyes gave the place a quick sweep. “Working here, huh?” He made no effort to hide his sneer. “The new gig looks… interesting. Nice scenery, maybe some fun benefits?”