He Was Her Man Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  My thanks to:

  “…Some day, somewhere, a guy is going to come to you..."

  He Was Her Man

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  He Was Her Man

  By Sarah Shankman

  Copyright 2014 by Sarah Shankman

  Cover Copyright 2014 by Untreed Reads Publishing

  Cover Design by Ginny Glass

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in print, 1993

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Also by Sarah Shankman and Untreed Reads Publishing

  First Kill All the Lawyers

  Impersonal Attractions

  Keeping Secrets

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  For Dallas Murphy

  My thanks to:

  the tireless booksellers, especially mystery booksellers, who do such a marvelous job for us all; the kind and helpful people of Hot Springs, particularly the staffs of Oaklawn Park and McClard’s BBQ, which isn’t open on Sundays, but ought to be; Ann Culley and the many other long-suffering friends who cheer me on; everyone at Pocket Books, especially Jane Chelius, my editor; and as always, my agent, Harvey Klinger. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Dallas Murphy, whose advice saw me home.

  “…Some day, somewhere, a guy is going to come to you and show you a nice brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is never broken, and this guy is going to offer to bet you that the jack of spades will jump out of this deck and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not bet him, for as sure as you do you are going to get an ear full of cider.”

  —Advice given to young Sky Masterson in Damon Runyon’s “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown”

  He Was Her Man

  Sarah Shankman

  1

  SAM ADAMS WAS running away from home. She’d been driving since dawn, mostly on rain-slick two-lane. You couldn’t take the interstates from New Orleans to Hot Springs, Arkansas. There were none.

  On the other hand, the narrow roads threading through the little burgs gave her something to look at, to take her mind off the notion of shooting her boyfriend Harry, her songwriting barbecuer who’d done her wrong.

  Harry, Harry, boy toy, Harry, why’d you do what you did? Didn’t your sweet Sammy make you moan? Ain’t that what you said, son? Said, Sweet Sammy, nobody’s ever been as good, nobody, nobody, nobody ever gonna come along, make me kick you out of bed, darlin’ one. Lay lady laid up in my big brass bed while the rains drip drip honey, musk, sweet sweetwater over the patios of the French Quarter, cooling everything but the love I feel for you, old lady, sweet lady, lady who steals my heart, bends my mind, melts my bones.

  Bull.

  In St. Francisville she’d passed moss-dripping live oaks. Hush-my-mouth antebellum houses in Natchez. The skies had cleared and the sun peeked out near Ferriday, where she’d stopped for three chocolate-covered doughnuts and a cup of not-bad coffee which had picked up her spirits, sugar and caffeine being medicine for the blues. Feeling as bad as she did, she’d grab at almost anything—except, please God, not the booze—to blunt the pain. Then she looked from her doughnuts and spied the photos on the coffee shop wall of Ferriday’s three infamous cousins: Mickey Gilley, Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Lee Lewis. Maybe Mickey wasn’t so bad, but the other two… Child, don’t get her started on the perfidy of men.

  Why else was her rearview mirror showing her a face that looked like 20 miles of bad road? And no matter what was playing on the radio, what she heard was a mean low-down version of the My-baby-done-stepped-out-on-me blues.

  Finally, four hours, three Cokes, two brownies, and a box of Cracker Jacks later, a road sign announced Hot Springs, 10 miles. But the red light flashing on her dash laid odds she wasn’t going to make it.

  Well, wouldn’t you know? Samantha Adams—former crime reporter, 41 years old, running away from home, running away from a gut-stabbed ego—had managed to run out of gas, too.

  But, yo, girl. Heads up. See that red-and-yellow promise of deliverance just up the road? Gas ’N Grub said the sign over the one-stop convenience store. Olive Adair, Sole Proprietress. Beneath that, Pearl Adair, Top Dog. Sam managed the first smile of her long grim day, then wheeled into the Gas ’N Grub.

  *

  Inside Olive Adair was saying to her hound, Pearl, “Those girls don’t know what they’re talking about. Do you think they know what they’re talking about?,” snapping off the TV, Donahue and the three bottle blondes perched on the edge of their seats like canaries, saying how being a call girl was fun.

  Pearl sat back on her haunches and said, “Aooo, aooo,” which is what she was supposed to do, and Olive reached behind the counter of the Gas ’N Grub for a package of Cheez Doodles, the big redbone hound’s favorite snack. While she was at it, Olive snagged herself a Delaware Punch from the cooler. Pearl, impatient, barked twice.

  “Hold your horses,” Olive said to Pearl, tearing open the bag. “I’ll tell you what, dog, way back when I was living the life, no matter what those Donahue girls say, not a single minute of it was fun. Living in town in Hot Springs, yes, but not the work. ’Course maybe it’s a little different, the way those girls do it, calling on the johns, you have some control, instead of them walking right in off the street, pointing a fat finger in your face like you was supposed to be thrilled to pieces, you’d won some kind of beauty contest. ’Course, you get down to it, no matter who does the traveling, you close that bedroom door, it’s all the same thing.” Olive lifted a blue-veined hand and smoothed at the gray curls that had popped loose from the knot atop her head. She was wearing a purple-and-green muumuu she’d bought when she was in Hawaii with her friend Loydell, nothing under it but rolls of pink flesh and a pair of lilac step-ins. “That was the fifties,” she said to Pearl, “when I was practicing my profession up at Lola’s behind the bank on Bath, right off Central Avenue. Which reminds me, Pearl, we need to figure out what I’m going to wear to Jinx’s party this evening. My blue? What do you think?”

  Pearl gave her a puzzled look like she wasn’t sure. Just about then the bell
sounded as a silvery-blue BMW pulled up at the gas pumps. A tall curly-headed brunette wearing a red sweat suit jumped out and reached for the do-it-yourself unleaded supreme. She filled that tank right up, slapped the nozzle back on the pump, and stepped inside to pay.

  “Hi!” Olive said. “How you doing this afternoon? Have you ever seen prettier? I was just saying to Pearl here that I didn’t think I’d ever seen a more beautiful afternoon, once that rain cleared off. Kind of day makes you think, well, Lord, you finished with me here, I’m about through, ready to come on home to Glory, it looks anything like this.”

  It was then that the pretty brunette broke into a big boo-hoo.

  *

  “Jesus, I’m so sorry,” Sam said for the tenth time, sitting on the stool Olive had pulled out from behind the counter. She blew her nose on one of Olive’s pink Kleenex, feeling like a fool.

  “Honey.” Olive patted her on the knee. “You don’t need to be apologizing to me. I think that’s what’s wrong with the world, folks go around holding everything in. Letting it fester. Next thing you know, there’s some sucker, been chewing on a world of hurt, somebody flunked him, fired his butt, stole his honey, whatever, he rolls out, climbs up in a tower, jerks open an office door, one of those, pulls out a shotgun, starts blasting away. Usually kills a whole bunch of folks, sometimes even the main one did him dirt, before he puts himself out of his misery. Whole thing could have been avoided, he’d just given in to his feelings, said what was on his mind. ’Course, it’s mostly men that does that.”

  It was those last words that made Sam start up again. “I wish he hadn’t,” she sobbed.

  “Hadn’t what?”

  “Said what was on his mind. I wish he’d just kept his damned mouth shut.”

  “Uh-huh.” Olive settled her rear up against the counter. “I see. Was he one of those, it made him feel soooo good, sharing his doo-doo with you? Laid a big pile of it in your lap, then walked away, wiping his hands, like Whew! I feel a heck of a lot better. Meanwhile, you’re sitting there trying not to shoot him. Tell me now, was it another woman?” Sam nodded. How tired her situation was. A lover fooling around, well, it wasn’t like that page-one news, was it? Olive shook her head and tightened her lips. “Never ceases to amaze me. Wouldn’t you think somebody had a woman as nice and as fine-looking as you, he could keep it zipped? But they don’t. They never do. It’s the testosterone.” Olive slapped the counter. She had dainty hands with a petal pink manicure. “Same thing that causes football, strip-mining, shoot-outs, wars, most of the world’s miseries short of the rheumatiz. We’d all be better off they flushed that stuff out of ’em on a regular basis. I say, give them the monthlies.”

  Sam was thinking she’d like to give Harry the business end of a .38.

  “Now, you tell Olive all about it. You want a drink? It’ll make you feel better. I’ve got a bottle of bourbon stuck back here, or would you rather have a beer?”

  “Neither, thank you.”

  “Cause it’s against your religion?”

  Sam shook her head.

  “Well, if you’re an alkie, that don’t bother me none. I got a whole raft of friends used to have some serious problems with the booze.”

  Sam stuck out her hand and said, “I’d be proud to join that club.” For she’d been sober 12 years and had grown awfully fond of Olive Adair in the past 15 minutes.

  “Let me get you a soda pop. How about a Delaware Punch? Or you got the sugar, too?”

  “Nope.” Sam grinned. She didn’t have diabetes, and she hadn’t had one of the dark red sodas, so sweet they made your face squinch up, since she was in pigtails back in Atlanta. “Delaware Punch used to be one of my all-time favorites. I didn’t know they still made it.”

  “They ain’t quite run off everything’s that good.” Olive plopped a can on the counter. “Now tell me all about this son of a bitch. What’s his name?”

  Sam took a long swig and shuddered at the sweetness. “Harry. Harry Zack.”

  “Is he cute? I was always a fool for cute ones myself.”

  Oh, Harry was a looker all right. The next thing she knew, she was telling Olive about how he was only an inch taller than she was, but he had this slow grin, broad shoulders, strong legs, neat butt, a head of dark curls much like her own, gray eyes. The left one drooped a little.

  “Is that sexy?”

  Everything about Harry was sexy. Her 10-years-younger boyfriend she’d met at Mardi Gras two years earlier visiting her friend Kitty Lee. She’d spotted Harry at the airport, the minute she stepped off the plane. With that first glance, he’d set her hormones in an uproar. They’d do-si-doed around one another, chased up and down blind alleys searching for a killer, Harry being an insurance investigator at the time. They’d ended up in the big brass bed in Harry’s French Quarter apartment, and from then on it seemed they were compatible in most of the ways that are important between a man and a woman.

  “So you wanted to settle down and he didn’t?” asked Olive.

  “Nope. Turn it around the other way.” Sam had had her heart squashed one too many times and had decided that semipermanent was the best one could hope for in that game. Certainly all that she could ever commit to. “But I did what I could. I took a leave from my job reporting for the Atlanta Constitution. Moved over to New Orleans. Well, almost to New Orleans. I’m renting a house on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, about an hour away from Harry.”

  “So you’re close, but not too close?”

  Sam nodded. Olive had her number, all right.

  “And everything was just hunky-dory, until when? Yesterday, he told you about the blonde?” Olive handed Sam a package of peanuts, which she ripped open with her teeth.

  Then Sam said, “Young blonde. Pretty young blonde. I’ve met her a couple of times. She was working on the advertising for his restaurant, Harry and his friend Lavert have this barbecue business.” Sam took another long swig of the Delaware Punch, then held out the can and looked at it. “Very young. Very cute. Very skinny.”

  “Did you suspect something right away?”

  Sam nodded. “Hated her on sight.”

  “Any woman’s got an eye in her head knows. If she says she don’t, honey, she don’t want to. You Twelve-Steppers call that denial, don’t you?”

  “Olive, you sure you’re not in the program?”

  “Nawh. But I been a couple of times. Those friends of mine seemed to be having too much fun at them meetings, I said let me in on this thing. So they did, or Loydell did. She’s my best friend. So I saw what y’all are all about. Folks sitting around, telling the most godawful stories about what they did when they was drinking, and everybody else laughing their fool heads off because they’d been there, too, done exactly that same thing. Or worse. That’s the reason the thing works, I figured it out. Being with a bunch of folks know exactly where you’ve been and not condemning you for it, helps you stay clean.”

  “You got it,” said Sam. She most definitely had to get herself to a meeting or three this weekend. Stop pretending she wasn’t trying to run away from the pain, driving 500 miles in one day.

  “So,” said Olive, “you up here in Hot Springs looking for a Rent-A-Shooter to kill her, him, the both of them, vacationing, or just passing on through?”

  Sam wiped her salty hands on the pants of her red sweat suit. “I’m following my friend Kitty, who flew up for a party. I need the use of her shoulder.”

  “Well, that’s good. That’s what friends are for. I don’t know what I’d do without my friend Loydell. We talk to each other first thing every morning, make sure we want to go to the trouble of living that day. The day we decide we don’t, we’re riding up to the top of that tower on Hot Springs Mountain, hold hands, jump off.”

  Sam laughed. The old lady was a great kidder. Wasn’t she? Then she backed up to the Rent-A-Shooter. “I really hadn’t thought about hiring somebody to kill ’em, but now that you mention it…”

  “You’re too late by 30 years. Hot
Springs used to be a wide-open town till Bobby Kennedy got his drawers in a twist. You name it, we had it. Gangsters, killers, colorful characters out the wazoo, gambling casinos, bookie joints, hot and cold running houses of ill repute.”

  Having said that, Olive stood up straight. Sucked her stomach in. Pushed her chest out. The pounds and the years melted away. Oh, yes, thought Sam, Olive had been a looker in her day. She wondered what exactly Miss Olive had done for a living in Sin City?

  But before she could ask her, the old woman was off on her two-dollar lecture. “It’s the waters that first brought folks here. One-hundred-and-forty-three-degree springs, coming right out of the rocks, Indians knew about them. Healing waters, they say, but I think back then it was a relief just to loll around in a big old tub of hot water that you didn’t have to fell the trees, chop the wood, build the fire to heat. But once you’d bathed, you needed something else to do.”

  “Wine, women, and song?” Sam reached for a Hershey’s bar with almonds, peeled it, and stuck it in her mouth.

  “And gambling, which brought your criminal element. Why, back in the olden days, Jesse James used to hold ’em up right at the edge of town, and that’s the truth. There were racketeers fighting over territory, shooting up each other and innocent bystanders in the middle of Central Avenue when it was still a mud trough full of pigs. Then later, we had the Capones. Lots of Chicago mobsters came for the waters. Owney Madden, a bootlegger from New York, he settled here, ran his gambling operation out of the old Southern Club. Now it’s the Wax Museum. But, oh, it was something, all right, the old Hot Springs.” Then Olive leaned closer. “Though even today, if you want a little action, take your mind off your troubles, there’s still some gambling—and I don’t mean the Oaklawn track—you know where to look.” Then she patted Sam’s hand. “You want another pop? How about a sandwich?”

  “No, thank you. I’ve consumed about five thousand calories since I came through that door, and I still have a party to go to.” She patted her stomach. “I’d better be getting on.” She was feeling a lot better. Nothing like a good cry and a bunch of sugar and salt to improve your spirits.