Free Fatally Flaky by Diane Mott Davidson Page B

verses. If he even sniffs this is an interrogation, he’ll lawyer up faster than you can say, Glory Be.”
    I gritted my teeth and reached for my trench coat in the hall closet. While Tom waited for me on the porch, I felt a pang of guilt that we were going over to Jack’s with the intention of…well, what ever it was we were intending to do. I dashed back into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of Sauternes, a little seventy-five-dollar-a-bottle number that a grateful client had given me. So far, I hadn’t had the heart to open it.
    “What do you think you’re doing?” Tom asked me when I appeared on the porch with the wine.
    “I’m taking Jack this bottle—”
    “Put it back.”
    “Can’t I just—?”
    “Absolutely not. Y’ever hear of the old saying, ‘Beware the gift giver’?”
    “I can give Jack something if I want to!” I retorted. “I just brought him bread this morning!”
    “He sees us coming? With you holding that? He’ll think, Here comes Tom the cop with his wife, my godchild, and she’s holding a bottle of wine that she thinks she’s going to pimp me with, so I’ll tell them all the dirt on Doc Finn. ”
    “Tom!”
    “You trust me on this, or not?”
    Well, of couse I did. I put the bottle back. But I felt my nerves becoming even more frayed…and they’d been unraveling ever since Tom had arrived home.
    “Tom, Gertie Girl, come in.” Jack’s tone was grateful as he opened his massive door, a large sculpted oak number that he had picked up at a salvage yard.
    And so we entered Jack’s Jumble, as Arch called it. My godfather kept saying he was renovating, but as yet, there were few visible signs of improvement, either on the exterior or the interior. I could see why the persistently rainy weather would have prevented him from putting up new cedar-shake shingle siding, which was what he claimed he intended to do. But on the inside, he had no excuse that I could see. Fishing and carousing tended to derail motivation, in my view.
    As we stepped into the gray-walled foyer that still showed the rectangular outlines of the previous owner’s pictures, it was clear Jack hadn’t made much progress. He’d gutted the first floor, so that instead of having a parlor, dining room, and who-knew-what-all Victorian-type rooms, he now had a big, open space. In the far-left corner, he’d put state-of-the-art appliances into what was going to be an open-plan kitchen…but he still had no cabinets or countertops. My feet gritted across the hardwood floors that Jack had uncovered when he’d torn up the old green-and-brown shag carpeting. As far as I knew, Jack had not made a move to refinish the floors, or even to call someone to get an estimate to have them done.
    “Thanks for coming over.” He was trying to sound cheerful, but his voice was as forlorn as the long, high-ceilinged room that, he’d told me, would eventually double as both living and dining room. The whole area contained only a few pieces of furniture that Jack had bought from the local secondhand store, while his “good furniture,” as he called it, stayed in storage.
    “Sit,” Jack invited us, sweeping his hand toward a threadbare, Victorian-style maroon velvet couch that had seen better days, I guessed, in a brothel. On each side of the couch, and in front of it, stood out-of-context teak Danish-modern tables that, more than the couch, had seen much better days. And then there were the two director’s chairs that looked as if they’d been fished out of a well, back when Orson Welles had been a director.
    Tom sat in one of the director’s chairs, while I took my place at the far end of what I affectionately thought of as the johns’ couch.
    Tom grinned. “I can see you’ve been keeping your nose to the remodeling grindstone.” He liked Jack, and the feeling was mutual.
    “Can’t rush these things,” Jack commented. He gestured to an open bottle of scotch on the table, where there were also, I noted, three glasses, a