Excerpt #4: ‘The Last Case’

I went to the newspaper office to collect some information and was referred to the City Hall reporter, a very attractive Asian-American woman named Lucy Lee. Lucy was 24 years old, about five-foot-two in good shoes and appropriately proportioned in a small person kind of way. She had dark eyes, flawless Asian skin the color of an early summer tan, a pouty lower lip and slightly imperfect teeth that were white enough and bright enough but weren’t all perfectly straight. The lips and teeth combined with her smooth tan cheekbones to give her a very happy, playful and seductive smile.

The day I met her she had come to the office early to work on a story for the Sunday edition. She was dressed casually in a pair of low-rise distressed blue jeans; a slightly pink scoop neck t-shirt that exposed two inches of her midriff; and a long, camel and brown shirt-jacket, unbuttoned, with sleeves that were pulled up and held in place by straps that were sewed on as part of the shirt and buttoned at the elbow. I think it had epaulets, too. Or maybe not. The shirt wasn’t the focus of my attention.

Her jet black hair was pulled up high in a long ponytail that made her look like another Lucy, the actress Lucy Liu. She wore long dangling earrings with a turquoise butterfly at the top and a tiny gold ball at the bottom, a locket on a short gold chain around her neck and three or four longer chains of varying lengths…. She wore several bracelets on her left wrist and a garnet-studded ring on the middle finger of her left hand which told me she wasn’t married. When I sat down at her desk and she leaned forward to shake my hand, her hair smelled like apricot shampoo. That was when I started liking apricots.