Feeling Hilde’s eyes on me, I went to the window and smoked. Below, the city blinked through haze and exhaust, the airtight as a sealed vault. My hand shook a little on the glass.

It was always this way with a job: the stillness, the feeling that something had already happened, and it was your job to find the pieces and glue them back together.

Down on the street, a black Chrysler rolled by slow. The driver’s window stayed up, the interior a black hole.

 

Chapter 1

Wednesday June 1st, 1966

Denver, Colorado

It’s the first day of the month, and I knew when I stepped out of my apartment building that the day was going to turn nasty. The temperature was 78 degrees, with a light breeze from the north. But that pleasant, soft wind would shift and bring hell with it. Over the Rockies hung a massive, stationary band of smooth, thick lens-shaped clouds. Altocumulus lenticularis is what they’re called.

The oven door was about to be flung open.

Above the shroud, a layer of hot, dry air would rush down the slopes and pound the Mile High City. Windows would rattle, nerves fray, tempers flare, and heat would climb by 20 to 25 degrees in less than an hour. It might hit 100 before sundown.

If it broke at sunset, so be it. If not, it could last days. The nights wouldn’t find any relief if the wind didn’t break. The patrons of the bars would have to keep the jukebox blaring to drown out the howling. Only you can’t play music loud enough to do that. The bell on the door would ding, ping, and ring nonstop as the door blew open and sucked closed.

Someone would say the wrong thing, and they’d riot. Fists would fly, noses would be smashed, lips would be cut, and people would end up in jail. Wives and husbands would quarrel. Out of nowhere, her face was begging to be slapped, and his head needed an adjustment with a Coke bottle.

Man alive, don’t call the cops. They’ve been run ragged from the get-go.

By the time the client gets to my office, it’ll be over ninety degrees, and the AC’s on the fritz. It’ll go somewhere near the following.

Question: Is she cheating?

Answer: Yes, she is.

Question: Did you catch them in the act?

Answer: Yes, sir, and let me tell you, they can do the horizontal Colorado Cha Cha, four strokes, four strokes, all night long.

Question: Did you get the money shots?

Answer: Yes, but you don’t want to see them.

Yes, I do.

No, you don’t.

In the end, he’ll see them. Maybe he’ll go to a divorce lawyer. Perhaps, and this is the one that worries me, he’ll find them and fill them with lead. I’m a lowly PI, and it isn’t my business. But I’m also a woman and can’t stand the thought of me getting another woman killed.

This time, the chinook was a tad later than I expected, and he was a bit earlier than scheduled. Turns out he only wanted the pictures to force her to admit the affair. That, and if she lets him, he’ll tag along to watch the fun. Willing cuckolds, who can figure out people and their relationships?

Not me.

My name is Honey Lintz, and I’m a Private Investigator. At 38, I left the DPD and hung out my shingle. Well, there isn’t a shingle. There is a painted sign on a pebbled-glass door: Honey Lintz Investigations. For three years, my bread and butter were cheating spouses, nasty divorces, and an occasional detour into more interesting ventures.

By 11:00 am, the temp climbed to 93, my windows rattled, and my phone hadn’t rung. The receptionist/secretary/personal assistant busied herself with a Raymond Chandler novel. Appropriately, it was Red Wind. Sometime between 93 and 95 degrees, a new client walked in.

A young woman with long legs, dark as midnight skin, and a face that would knock a thousand men on their asses in a single night. Have I mentioned I’m a lesbian? Guess not. Well, I am. When Hilde shooed her in, she introduced her.

“Miss Lintz, this is Vera Monroe; she says she has a problem.” Hilde’s from New York City, clips the ends of words off, chews gum, snaps it while she talks, and eats pussy like it’s kosher, despite my not being so. “She thinks you can help her, so do I.”

“Thanks, Hilde,” I said as Hilde left the room, swishing her ass for my pleasure, and returned with Dictaphone and pad to write on.

Standing, trying not to ogle my client, I held out my hand. The lady, ever so lightly, took my fingers, pinched them, and released them. A hoity-toity black woman. The dress she wore was a week’s worth of gumshoeing. While mine was off the rack at J.C. Penney’s.

“Miss Lintz?” The voice didn’t match. Not Southern, not colored Midwestern, either. Each syllable landed with enunciated upstate New York consonants. Not something that would be natural for a negro in 1966.

I nodded, gestured her in, and took her to the only chair not occupied by paper or crime novels. She brought her own scent, floral and thick, cut with something sharper—maybe nerves. Hilde closed the door and fell silent.

“Sit,” I said.

While she didn’t relax, she did sit. With her knees pressed together, hands folded in a lap that hadn’t carried laundry or bus fare for years.

“You come recommended,” she said. “I require discretion.”

“Nobody comes to the fourth floor for the view.”

Coughing a bit too loud, Hilde arranged pens into a straight line on her blotter.

“Your name?”

“Monroe,” she said. “Vera Monroe.”

The name scraped something in my memory, but I let it slide. “You said on the phone—”

“I’d rather speak in private, sans notetakers and recording devices.” Her eyes slid to Hilde, back to me.

“Anything you say to me, you say to her.” I jerked my chin toward the secretary. “She’s the better liar.”

Dipping her head in close imitation of politeness, for once, Vera offered no argument.

Pulling a legal pad from under the stack, Hilde clicked a pen and waited, while I did likewise.

“First, let me say, I’m being followed,” she said. “I believe it’s to do with my past. Or my marriage.”

“Which?”

“I’m not sure.”

Writing the words “PAST” and “MARRIAGE” in capitals, I stacked them and drew a line between them.

“I’m an actress,” she said. “I work for Monarch Pictures. You’ve probably never heard of us.”

“You’re right,” I said, which was a bald-faced lie. Monarch is one of only two movie studios in Colorado, both headquartered in Denver, and both earn a lot of bread by distributing stag productions for an underground market, along with B-movies for wide distribution.

Taking her for a B-movie actress and not the other kind, I waited for the problem to be revealed.

Pulling her mouth tight, smile gone, she pressed on.

“My husband—Oscar Monroe—runs the studio. He’s in Los Angeles this week, but I’m here. There’s a man. I don’t know his name. He’s waiting at the curb every day, watching me at the Brown, sometimes outside the Market.”

I leaned in. “Describe the fella.”

“Average height. Red hair, going gray. Drives a black, hearse-sized Chrysler, four years old, Colorado plates.” She gave me the number, and I wrote it down. The whole damn thing sounded rehearsed. After all, she’s an actress.

“What do you want me to do, Mrs. Monroe?”

Long and slow, she contemplated her response. As if she didn’t expect the question. “Find out who he is. If my husband hired him, I’d like to know. If it’s someone else, I want him gone.”

“Gone,” I said as I ran the possibilities through my mind.

“Off my back. Out of my life. I don’t care how.”

“Umm, you don’t care how. I’m a gumshoe, not a cheap gunsel.”

“Well, I didn’t—”

“Of course you didn’t.” But both Hilde and I assumed she did mean it that way. My dismissing it let her off the hook, but it didn’t improve her mood. The glare in her eyes could melt steel. The office air got tight, the way it does when money and fear show up together. Hilde’s gum snapped behind me and went silent. A massive gust of the chinook wind rattled the windows.

“Any enemies? Anyone you left behind in New York?” Glancing at the thermostat, I could see the needle flirting with 95.

Shaking her head, she said, “No one who would follow me here.”

“Ever been arrested? Anything I should know about?”

“Well, if I’ve done anything, I’ve never been caught,” Vera said, and smiled, but the grin hit as phony as her story.

I tried a different angle. “What about the job? Anyone you work with who might want to get close?”

She shrugged, one shoulder, the fabric of her suit creased and returned to normal. “I’m not important enough.”

A lie—she might’ve believed it, but it was a lie, nonetheless.

“Retainer’s seventy-five, against 75 a day plus expenses. If you want a week, it’s five hundred.”

Reaching into her clutch, she came out with a check already filled out for $500. The signature curled across the bottom. How did she know my rates? Her hands didn’t tremble. I took the check, held it to the window, and filed it in the drawer under “pending.”

“Where should I reach you?”

Hesitating, she said, “Here,” and handed Hilde a card. “But I don’t answer the phone at the hotel. Leave a message.”

Hilde wrote down the number for the Brown Palace, the switchboard extension.

Rising Vera was taller than me, even in flats, pushing five eleven.

“Thank you,” she said, and left as quiet as she arrived.

The door clicked. The wind battered the glass, and the office creaked as though it wanted to come apart.

Dropping the act first, Hilde flopped back into her chair, crossed and uncrossed her legs, and yanked at her hem.

“Bet you a sawbuck she’s trouble, falshe,” Hilde said.

“What?”

“She’s deceitful,” Hilde said, translating Yiddish for my benefit.

“The rich ones always are,” I said, and pulled a ten out of my pocket, handing it to her.

“The dress she wore cost more than my rent.”

I didn’t disagree.

The rest of the day went slow. I made some calls, checked the plate, and found nothing I didn’t already know. By five, Denver’s shadow stretched from the statehouse to a block east on Colfax, and most of the city went quiet. The wind blew harder. A new kind of heat seeped in, the kind that made you want to peel your own skin off and hang it in the icebox.

Feeling Hilde’s eyes on me, I went to the window and smoked. Below, the city blinked through haze and exhaust, the airtight as a sealed vault. My hand shook a little on the glass.

It was always this way with a job: the stillness, the feeling that something had already happened, and it was your job to find the pieces and glue them back together.

Down on the street, a black Chrysler rolled by slow. The driver’s window stayed up, the interior a black hole.

I watched it until it turned the corner and vanished.

At seven, the Trinity went dead quiet. No click-clack from the typewriters, no phones ringing down the line, no one in the corridors but the cleaning crew and the ghosts from the bank that used to own the building. The city outside settled into a low, fevered buzz. The day’s heat pressed in from every wall.

The last of the light pooled in the outer office, spread out over Hilde’s hair. Claiming she needed to finish typing up the notes, but the dictation machine was off, and the only things getting typed were the lines she made up as she went.

“Done for the day?”

“Not hardly.” I poured a splash of bourbon and set the glass on her desk.

Dropping the act, her hands danced over the keys, slow now. Chewing and snapping her gum, jaw moving a beat behind her fingers. Stopping, she gazed up at me, with her hazel eyes searching for something.

“What’s up, Boss?”

She only used “Boss” after hours, and only when she wanted to remind me who paid her salary, not who she let inside.

“Thought you left already,” I said.

“Didn’t feel like waiting at the bus stop. Cops pulled a drunk out of the alley on my way in.” She kept typing, but it was for show.

At the door to the inner office, I paused. Hilde stopped typing and let her hands drop into her lap.

She didn’t move.

“You gonna finish that drink, or what?” she said.

Letting my hands settle on her shoulders from behind her. Warm, damp, the muscle tense as violin strings. Closing her eyes, her head tipped back, mouth slack with anticipation or boredom—it was always the same with her.

“I’m not a lesbian, you know,” she said.

“I know.”

Long and slow, she exhaled. “Just bored. Don’t know any guys worth knowing.”

I didn’t answer.

The hallway was dark, but the couch in my office caught the last sunlight and held it. With her legs parted, Hilde sprawled, and I sat next to her. We didn’t speak.

She unzipped her dress, tugged it down off her shoulders, and balled it up in her hands. Her skin was paper-white, slick with sweat, and she smelled faintly of soap and the peppermint gum she chewed, as if it were her job.

“Don’t look at me,” she said.

But I did, taking her by the chin, tipping her face to me and forcing her to meet my gaze.

Fumbling for my blouse, she yanked at the buttons until one shot off and hit the floor.

We went at it on the couch, the cracked leather sticking to her thighs. She was fast, slow, all nerves. I let her set the pace, let her believe it was the last time, the only time, whichever story she needed tonight. Her fingers shook on my belt buckle, but once she unbuckled it, she didn’t stop. Pushing me flat, she straddled me and bit my collarbone hard, desperate for what we shared.

Afterward, once we both went to nirvana twice, she rolled off and sat hunched, head in her hands. The silence grew heavy. I reached for the bottle and offered her a drink.

She shook her head, already half dressed, hair wild.

“That’s it?” she said.

“That’s it.”

She stood, zipped up, and started for the door. She didn’t glance back.

At the threshold, she paused. “You ever get tired of being alone?”

“No,” I said. “You?”

“Sure do.”

“Does this help?”

“Sure does,” she said. “Weird, being I’m not the same as you are.”

So desperate to say, aren’t you, but I held my tongue. While I had no use for men, she made no effort to meet them and turned down every offer to be with one. Ashamed to admit it, but I hoped she wanted only one thing in the world as much as I do. To be with me, the way I wanted to be with her, forever. But strong bitches can’t admit that.

Because I’m one tough bitch, I never questioned her reluctance to admit what she was.

Her shoes made no sound on the carpet. The latch clicked behind her, and the whole building seemed to breathe out. I put my blouse back together as best I could, found my French-cut panties, pulled them in place, tugged my skirt down, and poured another drink.

The city turned to full dark. I smoked a cigarette at the window; the glass burned if you touched it, the heat failing to drain away with the sun. Down on Stout, a Chrysler idled at the curb. The driver waited beside the empty sidewalk and drove off slow. At that moment, Hilde walked out, and a cab came down the street and stopp