Worst In Show: A Jamie Bravo Mystery Read online

  This is a work of fiction; names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Square Pegs Ink

  Text copyright © Layce Gardner & Saxon Bennett

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without the authors’ permission.

  Editor: Kate Michael Gibson

  Katemichaelgibson.com

  "Laugh, and the world laughs with you;

  Weep, and you weep alone..."

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox

  One

  When I wake up, the sun is streaming in through my bedroom window and Veronica is sitting on my face. Before you get the wrong idea I probably should explain that Veronica is my cat. I carefully extract Veronica’s claws from my scalp and drop her to the floor. She screeches and runs from the room.

  She was named after my ex-girlfriend. Veronica is a total bitch. Veronica the woman, not Veronica the Cat. Although Veronica the cat can also be a total bitch.

  I get out of bed with less groaning than usual. Today is a special day. It’s the first day of my new job, in my new office, with new clients (other than Mrs. Friedman—more about her later.) I should explain why I have a new job. I got fired from my old job because I was “extraneous.” I sold ads for the Lakeland Press. Print ads for a paper that was shifting to an online site. I am a luddite when it comes to computer stuff. A whiz kid straight out of college got my job.

  So, while I wait on my coffee, I work on my introduction. It’s necessary in my new line of work to not only know your stuff but to have a tough character to go along with it. I look into the shiny black enamel fridge at my shadowy reflection, pop the collar on my pajama top, squint one eye and say, “The name’s Bravo. Jamie Bravo. Martini. Shaken not stirred.”

  Nah, that isn’t working for me. Imitating James Bond isn’t really my style. He’s too debonair and suave. Plus, I sound stupid when I do a British accent.

  I picture myself as more of the Bogart type. I look at my reflection and tried again. This time I let my imaginary cigarette dangle loosely on my bottom lip and I lisp, “Jamie Bravo. That’s my name, see. I’m a private dick.”

  Okay so… private dick doesn’t really have the right ring to it.

  This time I look into the fridge, stare into my own eyes, point my gun menacingly and say, “The name’s Jamie Bravo. I’m a private investigator. You talkin’ to me?”

  Nope, no good. I was doing great before I started channeling Bobby De Niro. I feel like I’m never going to get this thing right.

  The truth of the matter is that being a private investigator wasn’t my first choice as a job. I’ve been either fired or downsized so many times that I finally figured the only way not to get fired was to be my own boss.

  My sister signed me up for a three week online course—Everything You Need To Know About Being A Private Detective. I got my license and a cheap paper diploma to prove it. I hung out my shingle as a P.I., rented office space in a strip mall of dubious repute and had some business cards made.

  I handed out several hundred flyers then swallowed my pride and put an ad in my former employer’s paper—a print ad. I wasn’t going to give the Whiz Kid the satisfaction of using an online ad. Today is my first day self-employed. My plan is simple. I’ll hotfoot it over to my office and wait for the phone to ring.

  Sidebar: I must remember to use the word ‘hotfoot’ more often. It makes me sound like an authentic P.I.

  “Are you sleep walking?” a voice behind me asks.

  The voice belongs to Travis Tilden, my roommate. He is holding Veronica and lazily scratching her behind the ears. Veronica hates me, but for some odd reason she loves Travis.

  “No,” I say quickly. I’m embarrassed at being caught practicing my tough guy act.

  Travis puts Veronica down on the floor and she hisses at me before walking out of the room. “Why are you pointing a banana at the fridge?” he asks.

  I look down at my gun. Okay, so it isn’t a gun, it’s a banana. The truth is that I’m scared of guns. I’ve been practicing with a banana instead. I figure once I get used to the banana, and, you know, gain some confidence by carrying it around with me then I can take the next step and use the real thing. And if I get hungry, I always have a snack in my pocket.

  “Uh… I was trying to decide what to eat for breakfast,” I answer.

  Travis rolls his eyes, grabs the banana out of my hand and peels it.

  “Don’t do that! It’s my last gun!” I shout.

  He bites.

  Damn. Now I’m going to have to run by the grocery store for more banana-guns before I go into the office.

  “Why are you staring at me like that?” Travis says.

  “I’ve never seen a fruit eat a fruit,” I say.

  “Ha-ha,” he deadpans.

  I can joke around with Travis like that because he’s my best friend. I can also beat him up. I know because I’d been beating him up since kindergarten.

  This is the part where I need to tell you about Travis. First off, he’s Gay. He’s not just plain gay either, he’s gay with a capital G. He puts the flaming in gay. He’s fabulous and if you don’t believe me, you can ask him.

  Travis is a whole head shorter than me. He has tall blondish hair that he highlights every Tuesday night with lemon juice. His hair sticks up in that ‘do that Bob’s Big Boy made famous.

  Travis has a tiny butt, slim hips, naturally pouty lips, and plucked eyebrows. Now that I think about it, he looks a lot like Brooke Shields during her Blue Lagoon days. He has a constant stream of men who want to date him. I’m gay, too, but I have a constant stream of women who want to kick my ass.

  I haven’t had good luck with women. My last lover, Veronica—the woman, not the cat—won’t let me break up with her. I tell her all the time that we’re not together anymore, but she ignores me.

  I look at Travis and say, “You shouldn’t ever eat a banana in public. You could get arrested for lewd and indecent acts.”

  He tightened the sash of his silk Kimono. “You know what you need?” he asks, pouring us both a cup of coffee.

  I get the milk out of the fridge. “No. What do I need? And don’t say a new girlfriend.”

  “You need a trench coat.”

  “I have a coat.” I put milk in each coffee and watch Travis pour sugar into his cup.

  He stirs his coffee, licks the spoon and points it at me. “You don’t have a trench coat. All private investigators need trench coats.”

  He might be right. I picture myself wearing a trench coat. It would cover up my ass and hide blood spots. Plus, it’s roomy enough you can put a banana in its pocket and nobody would know you were packing.

  “I’ll think about it,” I say. “Did you see my new business cards?” I proudly pull one out of my pajama pocket and hand it to him.

  “You carry business cards around in your jammies?” he asks. He pulls out a stool and sits at the kitchen bar. He crosses his legs. He has gorgeous gams for a man. Or a woman for that matter.

  I shrug. “You never know when you might need one.”

  He looks at the card and smirks. “You have a cartoon dog on your business card?”

  “Sure. He’s a bloodhound. He’s sniffing, see? He has his nose to the ground and he’s sniffing those footprints. He’s finding the trail of clues.”

  “This is the dog from Blue’s Clues,” Travis says, handing the card back.

  I wave the card away. “Keep it. I have ten thousan
d of them. Who’s Blue’s Clues?”

  “Never mind,” he says with a giant sigh that tells me he thinks I’m hopeless. “Don’t you think ten thousand business cards might be overkill?”

  “No, I think I’m being optimistic.”

  “Okay.” He blows on his coffee. He takes a sip and them spits it back into the cup.

  “That was charming,” I say.

  “What the hell?” he says. He looks at me.

  “You have coffee grounds in your teeth,” I say, stating the obvious.

  “You can’t even make coffee right,” he says. “Did you not press it?” He dumps his cup of joe in the sink, fills the cup with water, takes a drink and swishes the water around in his mouth in an attempt to dislodge the grounds.

  “I don’t know why we have to have that French press anyway. Mr. Coffee’s good enough for me,” I say. “French pressing coffee is pretentious.”

  Travis narrows his eyes. “Well, excuse me for trying to give us have a better life. I don’t want just coffee. I want good coffee. No, I take that back. I want great coffee. I don’t settle for second best. Like some people I know,” he says.

  I’m shocked. Is he talking about me? Does he think I like to settle? “Why do I have the feeling we’re not discussing the coffee anymore?”

  He grumbles something I can’t make out while he dumps the rest of the coffee in the sink and mixes up a new batch. Mornings like this make me wonder if inviting Travis to live with me is worth it. He says he moved in with me to add some much needed fabulousness to my otherwise drab life. I say I invited him to move in because I needed his decorating skills.

  See my Uncle Cheech died and left me this old two-story warehouse. It’s decrepit and needs a lot of work. I don’t have to pay rent because I’m the landlord only I don’t have any tenants. The first floor is a disaster zone. It’s full of dusty equipment and old sewing machines. It used to be a sweat shop that made men’s neckties. Travis fixes up the sewing machines and sells them on eBay, that’s how we finance the redecorating.

  Travis works as a bartender at Burt’s Burlesque. I love burlesque. And now I have an open invite to go and hang out at the bar as much as I want. Plus, now that I have Travis living with me, my home is more gorgeous every day thanks to his gay decorating genes.

  Despite the cliché of gay men as fashionistas and interior designers it usually is true. Travis’s dream is to be an interior designer and my loft is his first attempt because now he has the space to do it. He did this design-on-a-dime thing on my place using scarves, paint, duct tape and tinfoil. He also put throw pillows everywhere. Before Travis moved in I had no idea that macramé was making a comeback.

  While Travis presses the coffee, I unplug my cell phone from the wall charger and check my voice mail. There’s one message. An older woman’s voice squawks, “Hello, Jamie? This is Louise Friedman. Leo has gone missing again. He was here one minute and Poof! Gone the next. Please call me as soon as you get this message. Poof! Poof! Poof!”

  Those last three poofs came from Mrs. Friedman’s bird. Mrs. Friedman owns one of those parrots that can talk. It’s an excellent mimic and according to her, it has a vocabulary of over one hundred words. Pretty impressive considering I’ve dated women who didn’t have a vocabulary that large.

  Mrs. Friedman always calls me when her husband goes missing. And I always find him. Eventually. I text Mrs. Friedman that I’ll come over to talk to her as soon as I get dressed. She texts me back while I’m brushing my teeth, “Pokey.” I figure that means okay. Mrs. Friedman isn’t too good at the texting thing. She says her thumbs are too big.

  I’ve always been good at deciphering codes and finding lost things. In fact, it was Mrs. Friedman who first suggested I use my natural ability to become a private investigator. I was able to locate her car keys in the supermarket produce department. They were hiding in the yellow squash. I’ve been looking for her lost things ever since—including her husband.

  “I got a new case,” I say, hanging up the phone.

  “Let me guess,” Travis says, handing me a fresh cup of coffee. “Mrs. Friedman has lost her husband again.”

  I slurp the coffee. It does taste pretty good. “Yep. He’s lost again. I’ll find him, though. I always do.”

  “Has it ever occurred to either of you that Mr. Friedman isn’t lost? Maybe Mr. Friedman is running away from Mrs. Friedman?”

  “All I know is that it’s my job to find him.”

  Travis sips from his cup that has a picture of Bette Midler as the Divine Miss M on it. He closes his eyes contentedly and sighs. He is always so dramatic about everything—even a cup of coffee. He opens his eyes and he asks, “Toast and marmalade?”

  “Sure,” I answer. Only Travis would have marmalade instead of jelly. I let him have his way in the kitchen. I am hopeless in that department. One time I even burned Jello. I still don’t know how I did that. Travis makes breakfast and lunch. I am on my own for dinner because he works nights. That’s why one entire kitchen drawer is full of take out menus. And once or twice a week, I go home to my folks and have dinner with them.

  I grab my toast and marmalade, pour my coffee into a to-go cup and head for the door. “I’m off to Mrs. Friedman’s. Maybe I’ll catch up with you later at the club.”

  “Fine by me,” Travis replies. He opens the newspaper and scans the obits. He’s the only person I know who starts their day by finding out who died. When I asked him why he said, “I find it motivational. I’m alive and they’re not.”

  “See ya later,” I say, opening the front door.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” he asks from behind the paper.

  “I don’t think so,” I say. I’m wearing my coat. I pat its pockets. I have my phone. Coffee. Toast. Keys.

  “You might want to rethink your wardrobe choices,” Travis says. “Unless you’re trying to make a new fashion statement.”

  I look down. I’m still wearing my pajamas under my coat. “Whoops.”

  Two

  My prized possession is my car. It’s a 1971 Volvo 1800e. It’s the kind of sporty car that James Bond would drive. It eats up the road and has a menacing growl. Most importantly, I look cool behind the wheel. I wish it had one of those secret agent ejector seats, but then I’d probably be in prison for ejecting my ex-girlfriend every time she launched into her back seat driving routine, which happens every time she’s in the car.

  I named my car Silver. Because she’s silver. And also because I like to say, “Hi Ho, Silver!” as I peel out. Real original, I know, but it’s the little things.

  I wipe a smudge off the hood with my coat sleeve before I pull open the large warehouse doors. I keep Silver in tip top shape. I promised Uncle Cheech that I would change her oil every three thousand miles and make sure she's shiny and clean.

  Uncle Cheech left me the car in his will too. This car was his baby and he knew I’d take good care of her. Did I mention Uncle Cheech is my favorite dead relative?

  I pull out of the warehouse and head uptown to Mrs. Friedman’s. If I am going to track her husband I need to know where he was last seen. That’ll at least give me a starting point. As I drive past the lake with its choppy white caps I know winter is coming on fast and hard. The winds have already stripped the leaves from the trees, leaving the bare limbs looking like a closet full of empty hangers. There’s a reason they named this city Lakeland—we are surrounded by a series of big lakes. That might make for some pretty scenery, but let me tell you, it’s brutal in the winter when the wind comes howling across all that water.

  I’ll admit the idea of moving to warm and sunny Florida has crossed my mind more than once. I could go down there, start up a P.I. business, bask in the sunlight and slurp on fruity drinks served with tiny umbrellas. There’s only one problem with that scenario. Lakeland is my home. I’ve lived here all thirty-seven years of my life and as much as my parents are a pain in the kazoo I know I’d miss them too much if I moved. Plus, I can’t picture myself in flip
flops and silky shirts with big flowers all over them. It isn’t in my enclothed cognitive powers to go there.

  Sidebar: ‘Enclothed cognitive powers’ is a term I read while I was researching how a wardrobe makes the person. I gave up on the book halfway through. The best I can do is wear all black. Black T-shirts, black jeans and black boots. I like to think that people see me as mysterious—the woman in black. In reality, it’s the only way I can match clothes. It’s the adult version of Garanimals.

  Sidebar: Regarding the word sidebar. That’s a term I picked up from Veronica. She’s a lawyer. She’s always saying “sidebar this” and “sidebar that.” She thinks it makes her look smart. Just so you know, when I use the term side bar, I’m really making fun of her.

  But back to the moving somewhere warm thing. I could take my parents down to Florida with me. But my mother would die before she’d ever pack a suitcase. She doesn’t even like to go to the other side of town.

  Bella Bravo is a force to be reckoned with. Even my father, Edward, bows beneath her mighty power. It’s his fault for falling in love with an Italian girl. He says he fell in love with her ziti and their marriage was inevitable. The truth is that he came in her family’s deli every day and ordered a pound of prosciutto and mozzarella until she finally told him to ask her out already. It was either hurry up and ask her out or open his own prosciutto and mozzarella deli, he had so much of the stuff. So he asked and she’s been telling him what do ever since.

  I love my mother, but it’s my dad I’m most like. People say I got his good looks. Which is probably just a nice way of saying I inherited his big hands and tiny feet. I remember when I was a kid and he’d take me to the lake shore—I’d spend hours burying him in the sand and studying his feet and hands. I’d been spared his knuckle hair, thank God, but even back then my hands were freak show big. They looked like snow shovels on the ends of my arms. And my feet turned out to be a size six—not too bad, except I’m five foot eleven inches tall. Just like Dad.

  I pull Silver into the parking lot of the Freidman’s townhouse. I have to get out of the car to remove the orange traffic cone Mrs. Friedman always puts in a vacant parking spot when she knows I’m on my way—otherwise it can be a five mile trek to find a place to park.