CHAPTER-11.
Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday dear Xara. Happy birthday to me.
Thursday night had ended with a big jug of wine and a platonic hour with Jill in my hot tub. Friday morning started with a big cup of coffee and a mild headache. It is sort of funny, but I remember from my childhood being able to sleep late and having my mother working hard to get me out of bed early enough each day to get to school on time, and sleeping till noon on Saturdays, but then I joined the navy. I was actually a sailor for a total of six years and the one habit I had picked up in all my training was to wake up at five o’clock every morning. Didn’t matter what day of the week it was, didn’t matter how late I went to bed the night before. My internal clock just woke me up at five A.M. It was rather annoying, especially on days like this. Sometimes, if I tried, I could get back to sleep, but today I didn’t even try.
I was getting nowhere on my case. My only charge was to find the next of kin for a recently deceased business owner. It should have been quite simple. Now the funeral was all planned and I had spent several days with absolutely no luck at all. In addition I kept getting bogged down. I mean I had agreed to check out the thrift store for Eric Samuels, and they didn’t open until ten, so I had five hours to wait with nothing to do and my lover was not here and my partner was deep asleep like I should have been, and to top it all off I was no longer a youth in my twenties.
I have a full length mirror in my bed room so I climbed the stairs and shut the door. I took off my bathrobe which left me bare and stood in front of the mirror for a long time with the lights on and took a good look.
I was no taller and no shorter. My long blond hair was the exact same color, and it too was no longer or shorter than I remembered it from the day before. My shoulders seemed big and square, but they had been all my life. I was happy to see that my boobs were not sagging any more now that I was an old hag in her thirties, but to be honest they had never been very big so I really had not expected them to sag. Embarrassingly I noticed for the millionth time that my nipples drew unwanted attention to themselves by being the darkest of all the skin on my body. My arms, as always, seemed longer than they should have been. My belly not as flat as I wanted but not bad for a girl no longer in her twenties. My hips still flared and my blond pubic hair still hid nothing. My thighs were thick but long enough to hide it giving me my height. My belly button was still an innie.
I turned and looked over my shoulder to look at my back side. All of my life I had garnered compliments, some wanted and most unnecessary and even inappropriate, about what a fine ass I had, but I could never tell by looking over my shoulder in a mirror and this time was no different. Briefly I thought of taking a picture so I could study it but then thought just how pathetic that sounded.
The piteous self examination done I stepped into a hot shower and stayed there almost an hour unsuccessfully trying to wash away the years. I was never one to keep calendars but the way I was feeling I fully expected mother nature to ruin this day so I checked my supply of maxi pads.
Three aspirin, two cups of coffee, and an hour later I felt much better. I looked through the supplies in my kitchen and found them woefully short of anything I might wish to eat for breakfast so I hopped into the Taurus and headed down the road to my favorite donut store.
Jill was just getting up when I arrived home with my goodies and we had a pleasant breakfast and, of course, more girl talk about Donald and Jana.
There were exactly two items on the day’s agenda. One was to check out the Salvation Army store and the other was dinner at Feldman’s on Fifth at seven. That would leave a lot of day left over so Jill and I started talking about how else we might be able to get a line on Lola’s family. At this point the best lead I could think of was the tax records check I had asked Eric Samuels to do. Jill suggested that we also look through the other boxes in Lola’s dining room because there might be a box of important business records buried amongst the stack of junk, but we had not yet been cleared to look through that stuff yet.
I called my detective and caught him at his desk. He did not yet have the IRS records sorted out but did tell me that Lola’s house had been cleared so we could look through her boxes but told me to be careful. We, of course, would go packing heat just in case. Just as we were about to hang up Samuels suggested we come by his office the next morning and he promised he would have the tax info by then.
Before the Fort Worth and Dallas area had pooled some money and built their shiny new airport the best way into or out of Dallas by air was Love Field. It still operated as an airport and is, in fact, the home base of Southwest Airlines, which was the first American air carrier to show a profitable year after the tragic attack on New York city back on that famous September eleventh.
On Lemon avenue not far from Love Field you will find the biggest Salvation Army resale store in the area. For all I know it may well be the biggest in the country but I have never asked them about that. It is a store that I am not unfamiliar with. Inside they have acres of floor space crowded with row after row of racks stuffed with used clothing. They make an honest effort to keep the clothing in some sort of order but every single day the crowds of people shopping there mess it all up. In addition to clothing they have a section that has old records and tapes with a few new CDs sprinkled in, and right next to that they have a room for used books that is actually larger than any used book store in town. Unfortunately they really don’t have the staff to organize the books very well so they are basically sorted by putting all the hard backs on one side and all the paperbacks on the other. I personally have gone into that book room on more than one occasion and spent hours at a time digging out treasures for pennies on the dollar. They have a complete toy store that would make any kid smile but in truth a lot of the toys are busted up a bit.
All of this did not matter to Jill and I today because we were there to investigate the operations of their furniture department.
From a cashier we were directed to the furniture manager on duty. He was an old man who had probably been saved from the evils of alcohol by the Salvation Army when in his twenties and had worked for them ever since. He was kind enough to look at the photos I showed him and he actually remembered the furniture. He did not remember selling it but by looking through a box of old cash register print-out he as able to narrow it down to the specific cashier who had sold the stuff. Our luck held as the cashier in question happened to be in the store at the moment.
Our luck continued to hold as the cashier even claimed to remember the sale and the person she sold it to. I asked her how she remembered these details and she claimed that virtually every single big furniture sale is done on a delivery basis so once a sale is written up the cashier has to write up a delivery ticket. The particular sale had been an exception as the man had insisted on taking the furniture with him. He even had a rented truck outside waiting for him. According to our cashier and the cash register tape the man had paid cash for the furniture. The cashier also reported that the man had then gotten help from another man who was with him and they loaded up the furniture themselves.
I asked the cashier for a description of the men and the best she could do was tell me two small Hispanic men in their twenties with gang tattoos. I looked around and that description fit almost every male customer in the store at the time. About the truck she was a little more help because she remembered what rental outfit it had come from but she did not have the license plate number or anything like that.
As it turned out though the furniture manager offered that they had security cameras that covered the parking lot. He took the cashier and I into a cluttered office and looked through VCR tapes until he had the one for the appropriate day. The cashier pointed out the rental truck and the footage showed the two men both coming and going so I talked the furniture manager into giving me the tape to help in a criminal investigation and then Jill and I warned the two store employees to keep quiet about it.
Almost as an afterthought I asked if they remembered any other sales similar in the recent days. Not surprisingly they could not think of any other example that fit. That was a bit depressing. I mean if the bad guys always bought their stash of furniture at the same store it would have been a lot easier. There are hundreds of stores in the Dallas area where one might buy a truck load of old furniture. I was not about to make a long list and investigate each one.
We locked the incriminating security tape in the trunk of my car and Jill and I sat there in the Salvation Army parking lot discussing our next move. Where we sat we were about two miles from Lola’s house and the 45 boxes that desperately needed our attention, on the other hand we were about six miles from the Dallas PD where we could hand the tape over to Detective Samuels so he could start the process of mining good information from it.
I was not sure which to give a priority to but Jill reminded me that our assignment was to find Lola’s next of kin which is why we wanted to examine the boxes. Looking through the security tape to find the license plate of the rental truck and from there checking with the truck rental company might lead us to the killer, which would be good, but that was Detective Samuels assignment. Besides, she suggested, we might just as easily bring him the tape in the morning when we were scheduled to meet with him anyway.
I parked the Taurus in Lola’s driveway. Before we got out Jill and I checked our armaments. I was still pretty cautious about giving Jill a gun because she had not yet taken a gun safety class, and she did not have a permit to carry, but she had helped me out on a couple of cases in the past and I did not want her walking into trouble without an equalizer.
Even though we had to go through crime scene tape we still checked every room of the house to make sure we were there alone before we started going through the boxes.
Just to do it in an organized fashion we first cleared some space on an opposite wall so we would have a place to stack the boxes when we went through them.
Going through the boxes was a long and laborious process. We sort of took turns with me opening a box and looking through it and telling Jill what all I had found, and as I did she would poke information into a spreadsheet on her lap top. As I started each box I would give the box a number and I would write that number in big black ink on each side of the box so that in the future no matter how the box is stacked the number would always show on one surface.
After I opened five Jill and I switched places. We were at it probably five hours and had found very little. We had stacked forty-three of the forty-five boxes against the opposite wall after finding them just full of junk. The other two boxes were filled with papers that had been important at one time but were probably worthless now. We could have gone through the papers there but we knew it would take a while and since there were just the two boxes we loaded them into my Taurus and took them back to my house/office to go through them.
When we got to my house we had a choice to make. I mean I knew we were supposed to be at the restaurant at seven o’clock, but officially it was not a birthday party and I had heard nothing about any surprise. On the other hand, if Jill had made some sort of effort I did not want to spoil any planning she had done by making us late. So the choice when we got to my house was that we could either work an hour or so on the contents of the two remaining boxes, or we could each take a shower and change clothes before heading out.
Therefore Jill and I each took one of my two bath rooms and we fought over the meager amount of hot water my old system provided.
The party actually was pretty cool. The restaurant is owned by Joe Stepho who is the father of my partner Jill, so Joe reserved us a nice large table in the back. Jill, of course, was there and joining her was her new play toy Donald Smith. Also there when we arrived was my good friend Senior Detective Eric Samuels. I was happy to see also there were my very best friends AJ and Dutch, so I introduced them to all the others there. Juana de la Garza, who worked at the restaurant and had been a previous client of mine, came out of the kitchen long enough to wish me a Happy Birthday and give me a quick update on her husband and son.
AJ finagled the seat next to me and we were in a heated discussion about my new love interest and we were, you know, sort of whispering to each other so looking at each other a lot while we were talking and there I was telling AJ about how much Jana Little meant to me and how much I was falling for her and making a big old fool of myself doing it, and just as I was divulging all this hot dirt I noticed Jana standing right behind me leaning in so she could hear the conversation. Oh how embarrassing!
AJ slid over a chair which allowed Jana to sit between us but then I could not hear what AJ was whispering to Jana and even worse what Jana was whispering back. Fortunately the food arrived so we all had to sit up straight and hush up our private conversations.
The dinner was fabulous and there was so much of it. Somehow Joe Stepho had found out that I really liked Filet Mignon so there was about five-hundred dollars worth of beef on the table. We all chowed down and while we were eating conversation was a little weird. I mean Samuels and Jill and I could not talk about the cases we were working on because we not only had civilians at the table but technically we had two of the prime suspects there with us. AJ and Dutch couldn’t speak too much about our other friends because nobody else at the table knew them. Jill and I really couldn’t talk much about our new love interests simply because they were the suspects. To break the silence somebody, I think it was Jill, offered a toast in honor of my birthday. Fortunately the restaurant was crowded and noisy so the silence while we chewed didn’t become a problem.
Finally the main eating ended and we were all socially permitted to our hushed little side conversations again. I do not know how they pulled it off from such a diverse group but instead of each buying me a birthday gift they had pooled enough money to buy me a three day visit to a spa in Colorado for a make over including air fare. Jill told me she was going to go with me and had her ticket already and then she offered information to the others at the table in case any of them wanted to go as well. At this point I was hoping Jana would want to consider it but we were too early in the relationship for an out of town trip, and I really did not know enough about her finances to expect her to afford it.
AJ of course had the advertising pamphlets to pass around so all the contributors could see what they had sprung for. The party ended with a rousing rendition of the birthday song and a large cake with way more than thirty-one candles.
Later, back at my house just four of us; myself, Jill, Jana, and Donald gathered on my back porch. Officially we were there to sip wine and gossip but we all knew we were on the back porch so we could get into the hot tub.
Jana was the first to get naked and get wet but she was followed closely by Jill. Together they started chanting “Birthday Suit, Birthday Suit” so I shed my pride and my clothing and joined them. That left only Donald, the only one of us with dangly parts which all three of us were quite curious about at the moment. I do not know if it is a guy thing or not but it took very little convincing to get him to join us.
We consumed a little wine, splashed around a little, and just sort of relaxed.
Later, up in my bed room I found myself alone with Jana not curious at all about what Donald and Jill might be doing. Jana had another present for me and she more or less directed me to open it. It was a beautiful box wrapped nicely in dark purple paper. Inside were things I would never show my mother; a leather dog collar, a bundle of rope, a lifelike plastic battery-filled tube shaped device that approximately matched in length and girth the dangly part Donald had earlier revealed, and a blindfold.
Jana leaned over and softly kissed me then she whispered in my ear “Happy Birthday love. I am going to give you a safe word. You can say anything that you want and no matter what you say I will continue but if you say the safe word I will stop immediately and release you. Do you understand?”
“Yes” I whispered.
“The safe word is ‘red’” she said softly, “repeat it once for me out loud so that I know you understand, and then we will begin.”
“Red” I whispered.
She reached into the bundle of new toys and picked up the blindfold which she slipped on me depriving me of sight. I then felt something being slipped around my neck and understood that I was wearing her dog collar.
“Lay on your back” Jana told me.
“O.K.” I said, but as I was turning to lay down she gently grabbed a handful of my hair stopping me.
“You are my bitch now Xara. When I command you say ‘Yes Mistress’ and then obey.”
“Yes Mistress” I whispered happy to be playing along.
“Do you remember what the safe word is?” she asked.
“Yes Mistress.”
“Do you wish to use it?”
“No Mistress.”
“Lay on your back slut” she commanded.
I whispered “Yes Mistress” playing along and already feeling a heat I would not soon forget.
Using the rope she tied my wrists to my headboard. I heard the battery jump to life in the new plastic device. You readers will have to use your imagination for the rest because it is a little too personal for me to write but I will tell you that I never used the safe word that evening.
All in all it was not a bad way to enter my thirties.