Free Skinny-dipping by Claire Matturro

had just about the best speakers, had ’em special installed—Bose, I think— and that car rocked, and the leather seats, those leather seats...” Jennifer glazed over for a minute. “That car, I . . . those leather seats. Then I . . .” Jennifer seemed to have lost her place. I know I had.
    â€œBaby,” Ashton said in a soft tone, almost endearing.
    â€œAnyway,” she said, suddenly beaming her baby blues across at me with a quick-change giddiness that made me suspect psychogenic drugs, “you are just so cool, and Ashton’s always telling me how smart you are, how you don’t miss a trick.”
    I was so this and so that, she continued, winning back my interest. The vodka teased my brain into believing her. I might forgive her for being blond, blue-eyed, and stacked.
    But I wasn’t sure I would forgive Ashton for spreading a tale that I’d had the hots for him.

Chapter 9
    Bonita knocked on my door and stuck her head in to tell me that Newly was on the phone. So, okay, I thought, and waited for the maternal postscript I could tell was coming.
    â€œDon’t you break that man’s heart again,” she said, and closed the door gently behind her. Because Newly had represented her in litigation after her husband’s fatal encounter with an orange juice bottling machine and didn’t charge her a dime, letting his office eat even the expenses, Bonita had a special affection for Newly. “My five children have a college trust fund, thanks to that man,” she had told Jackson to his face once when he was thunderously cursing Newly for some sleight-of-hand nonsense in a case.
    Notwithstanding Bonita’s rare regard for Newly, I thought, Break his heart, my ass—he’s a pretty tough guy—and I picked up the phone. That morning I’d asked him to find out what was going on with the Trusdale investigation. But Newly’s sources in the police department apparently were more attuned to auto wrecks and industrial accidents and didn’t have a clue as to why Sam Santuri might be investigating me in connection with Dr. Trusdale’s death.
    So I called the hunky detective, not to ask him that directly, but to ask about the autopsy.
    Before he answered my question, he asked me how the Trusdale malpractice case was coming along, now that my client was dead.
    â€œSettled it,” I told him and lied when he asked, “How much?” Frankly, I was embarrassed that the figure was so high, and maybe just a bit afraid the amount might make him think I was in cahoots with the bum-knee guy’s attorney or something.
    You know how paranoid you get driving in traffic when a police car pulls in behind you? It doesn’t matter if you’re going the speed limit, seat belt fastened, and no illegal contraband or not—a cop on your tail makes you nervous. Basic human nature.
    So, yeah, I lied to Detective Santuri because I was paranoid.
    But he let it go and told me what he’d learned from the autopsy.
    Dr. Trusdale had died of smoking the highly toxic but common flowering oleander. There were dried oleander leaves in the joint, along with some skunk-hybrid marijuana, a green marijuana particularly adapted for growing in the South, the detective explained, of a color that would blend with the oleander leaves.
    â€œDamn,” I said, not owning up for a moment that I knew what skunk sativa was, had weeded, watered, and fertilized plots of the stuff myself for summer work between my freshman and sophomore years in high school. Moderately mold resistant, with a kick-ass high. But not mixed with oleander leaves. “That would have been an ugly way to go.”
    Yes, Detective Santuri agreed it would be.
    And all those kids at college laughed at me because the only marijuana I’d ever smoke was that which my one outlaw brother grew in his back forty, strictly organic skunk-hybrid, a rural southwest Georgia “u-pick” with a