Free The Night Before by Lisa Jackson Page B

ever since she was a kid. Off and on. I don’t know what the diagnosis is, or if there is one. It could be anything from dealing with slight depression to being manic, or, what do they call it these days? Bipolar. Maybe she was traumatized as a kid or got into drugs; some of those can end up makin’ ya effin’ paranoid. But I have heard that mental illness runs in the family. Neuroses lurk like catfish on the bottom of the Montgomery gene pool.”
    “So—has our estranged widow ever been violent?”
    Morrisette lifted a slim shoulder as she spat her gum into a trash can near her desk. “Not to the point of getting arrested, obviously.”
    “Where do you get your information?”
    “A friend of a friend.”
    “Gossip,” he guessed, a little disappointed.
    “Yeah, the kind of gossip we pay stoolies for every day of the week.”
    “Hearsay doesn’t hold up in court.”
    “We aren’t even sure we’ve got a homicide. I’m just giving you some information I gathered. I’ll check it out and see what’s what with the missus.” She smiled, her faded lipstick darker around the edges of her lips. “In case we do go to court.”
    He glanced at her spiked hair and a few dark roots that deigned to show. “You didn’t hear this at the local beauty shop?”
    “Shit, no.” One side of her mouth inched up. “I don’t go to the ‘beauty shop.’ God, I hate that term. ‘Salon’ isn’t a whole lot better. This”—she motioned to her stiff blond hair—“it may surprise you to know, isn’t a professional job. Oh, you may think I paid forty, sixty or even a hundred dollars to some hairdresser with a name like Claude or Antoine, but hell, no. This here ‘do’ is compliments of good old Lady Clairol and a pair of shears I inherited from my grannie. I give myself a couple of hours every six weeks or so and voila, the piece of the damned resistance!”
    “I think that’s piece de resistance, you know, complete with French accent.”
    “Yeah, I do know.” She motioned toward her head as she stood. “It’s cheap, it’s fast and it’s state of the art!”
    “If you say so.”
    “I do,” she said, scrounging in her purse and coming up with a pack of Marlboro Lights. “Time to have myself a little break. Wanna come?” she asked as she shook out a cigarette.
    “I’ll take a rain check. I think I’d better do a little more checking on the friends and relatives of Josh Bandeaux since you seem to think he was so detested and unrespected.”
    Grinning, she motioned to the image of Josh Bandeaux visible on her computer monitor. “Some people even called him Josh ‘The Bandit’ Bandeaux.”
    “Cute.”
    “It fit. He was always taking something from someone. I think one of his ex-partners dubbed him with the name and the press loved it.”
    “They would.”
    “No love of the Fourth Estate, eh, Reed?”
    “None,” he growled.
    She asked, “So you think I can sell this picture?” In the shot Josh Bandeaux was as they’d found him, slumped over his expensive desk, blood drizzling down his fingers to pool on the carpet. “Anyone who pays the price can put this little pinup on their own PC . . . you know as wallpaper or a screen saver or something.”
    “Funny,” he said without a laugh.
    “Thought you’d appreciate the humor.” But any trace of a smile that had lingered on her thin lips had faded. Reed guessed Morrisette had been closer to “the prick” than she’d ever admit.
    Which was par for the course. In Reed’s estimation Sylvie Morrisette hadn’t gotten over any of her ex-husbands or lovers. Brittle as she tried to appear, she wasn’t as tough as she feigned. Just had bad taste in men. The way he’d heard it, she’d grown up without a father. Rumor suggested her old man had left her mother for a younger woman the day Morrisette had been brought home from the hospital. But that was just talk. Speculation by the local rednecks who couldn’t handle Sylvie’s tough-woman attitude.
    Reed