The Errant Heiress

Chapter Seven - The Nordic Gambit

Chapter Seven – The Nordic Gambit

I wasn't well-prepared for what followed. For one thing, sleep deprivation was catching up to me (when interrogation by the Ocean City’s finest had soporific qualities all its own; in those cases when it wasn’t far too exciting for my liking), and for another, I really wasn’t keen on alibiing myself for one felony by confessing to another. My reputation was less than squeaky-clean as it was. I was worried I could start blabbering at any moment, and I wasn’t even a little drunk.

I tried getting Burke to reveal something, anything about this shooting from me, but it wasn’t working. Burke had twenty years of police work under his belt, and I was so tired I’d been reduced to incoherent mumbling after half an hour. I remember I told him in brief about the beginning of my evening, and the fact that I had spoken with Vic, but I was careful not to give him any details.

The strategy adopted by Burke seemed to revolve around attrition. He had mostly been asking me over and over, in minutely different ways, exactly what it was that I did last night. It reminded me of something my husband used to say about me in a way I couldn’t exactly define. I was mildly annoyed, and developing the mother of all headaches.

Relief came, as it very rarely does, in the shape of a uniformed officer of the OCPD, who motioned Burke out of the room with a big grin on his face. Burke stepped out, snorted, as he does, instead of laughing, and gave me the eyeball.

“What?” I asked eloquently.

“Get up, you’re free to go.” There was a mixture of disappointment and amusement in his voice.

I stood up to get out, not a little suspicious. “That’s it? Just like that?” I tried not to let on how relieved I was.

“That’s it. You know, you could have said something. We’ve known each other for years.”

And now I tried not to let on how I had no idea what he was talking about. “Well. You know how it is.”

“No, I don’t,” he said flatly. “And I don’t care, neither.”

He looked damn near paternal. I started feeling worried.

“I just wish you’d said something earlier. We could have sorted it out, just the two of us. This way, the whole station house will make your business their business.”

Puzzled, I shrugged and proceeded to act bored: a tactic that, according at least to my unfortunately extensive experience, was all a gal needed to do to appear canny and mysterious at the same time. It worked perfectly. I didn’t even need to rummage through my purse pretending I was looking for my compact.

“Well, all right, if that’s the way you want it. Come on, skedaddle, I got a murder to investigate.”

Burke held the door open for me. As I got out into the squad room, the two dozen or so coppers that were there fell weirdly silent all at once. I maintained my man-proof mask of amused disinterest and had a quick gander around the room. Nobody would meet my eye; everybody was suddenly pretending they were busy fighting crime or something. I could see most of them were suppressing smiles. When the doors closed behind me, I heard the room erupt in cat-calls and laughter.

Sven was outside, waiting. He helped me into my coat.

“What was this all about, Sven?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Nothing, Miss Noire. You got alibied out. Of Vic’s shooting, that is.”

“And how’s that? Anybody see me... elsewhere?”

His eyes got all shifty again all of a sudden, and started hemming and hawing. I got enough “ums” out of him for an average Tibetan monastery’s daily quota.

I decided to press him. “Did you have something to do with this?”

He loosened his tie and undid the top button of his shirt, revealing the tell-tale signs of his nightly exertions. “I may have, um, suggested, that, um, you had something to do with this. I knew you didn’t do it, so...”

I don’t know what kind of a face I’d made at him, but he looked a little nervous. “Well, it got you out of jail, didn’t it?”

I kept quiet, taking the time to compose myself.

“Am I very fired?” he asked, giving me the naughty puppy look with those big blue eyes of his.

I thought I could almost hug him, but we were still in front of the station house, and I was all ethical about these things. I cursed my boarding school upbringing while trying to look impassive.

“I’ll think about it.”