Rough Trade

irrationally in love with it.”
    “Who says there’s anything rational about love?” said Elliott, reaching up and tucking a stray hair that had come down from my French twist back behind my ear. With the simple intimacy of this gesture I suddenly felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. The quiet emptiness of the apartment, my growing irritation with Stephen, the unrelenting loneliness of these last months spent pouring myself into the Avco deal all mingled together. I don’t remember deciding to kiss him, only that I did.
    And then I heard all the other voices, the practical ones that are either women’s salvation or their downfall, the one that said that the floor would be hard and that we’d end up covered with plaster dust and feeling ridiculous. I took a step back.
    “We have to talk,” said Elliott. “Is there someplace where we can sit down?”
    I nodded and led the way into the solarium where Mimi had stacked the discarded fabric samples on the deep ledge that formed the long window seat that circled the room. Inside I felt a sense of foreboding, afraid that I was about to be handed a kind of emotional ultimatum.
    “What do you want to talk about?” I asked.
    “Last night, after you and I got off the phone, I called my friend Marty. He and I were in the corps together. He was originally from some little town in Wisconsin, but he’s with the Milwaukee PD now, working vice. Anyway, Marty owes me a favor.” Elliott had served three tours of duty as a marine helicopter pilot, years spent plucking the wounded from the battlefield until his luck ran out and he was shot down himself. He came home with a Purple Heart and a long list of guys who owed him favors. “I wanted to know what he was hearing around the department on this Rendell thing.”
    “And?”
    “As you’d expect, it’s the talk of the department.”
    “Why? Just because he owned the Monarchs? Old men drop dead of heart attacks all the time.”
    “That’s true, but this old man didn’t.”
    “What?”
    “According to Marty, the medical examiner says he didn’t die of a heart attack.”
    “So it was the fall that killed him?”
    “He was already dead when he went down the stairs.”
    “How do they know that?”
    “Postmortem fractures bleed much less than ones sustained before death. Also, bruising that occurs after the victim’s blood has stopped circulating has an orangy look, not red like you’d expect if the victim had been alive when they suffered the trauma.”
    “Then if it wasn’t his heart and it wasn’t the fall, what killed him?”
    “According to Marty, his hyoid bone was fractured.”
    “Okay. I give up. Where’s your hyoid bone, and how did Beau’s end up broken?”
    “The hyoid is a small bone, very well protected, at the base of the neck,” replied Elliott slowly. “In ninety-nine percent of cases where it’s been broken, the victim was strangled.”
     

CHAPTER 11
     
     
    “Are you saying that Beau Rendell might have been strangled?” I demanded in disbelief.
    “Not might have, was. Word around the campfire is that the medical examiner has already ruled asphyxia as the cause of death.”
    “By what means?”
    “There were no signs of a ligature or anything mechanical, so my guess is they’re thinking it must have been manual strangulation.”
    “Meaning homicide?”
    “It’s pretty hard to choke somebody to death with your bare hands by accident—unless you’re talking about kinky sex that got out of hand and went too far—”
    “I don’t think there’s any chance of that, not at the stadium in the middle of the day—”
    “So then it’s homicide.”
    “I just can’t believe it,” I said, shaking my head.
    “Why not?”
    “Why not? Because up until two minutes ago we were all shocked and saddened by the suddenness of his heart attack. Now you’re telling me that he was murdered!”
    “The cops thought it was natural causes at first, too. You sound surprised that somebody wanted to strangle him.”
    “Are you kidding? I’m sure there was no shortage of people who’d mentally had their hands around his throat. I had a meeting with him this past Sunday, and I wanted to strangle him. No, what surprises me is that somebody apparently went ahead and actually did it.”
    “You know, everything I’ve ever heard about Beau Rendell made him out to be a real hard-nosed son of a bitch.”
    “That may be true, but it still doesn’t tell us why somebody