Excerpt from chapter one of Let No Man Put Asunder

How to Impress Her with a Handgun

“That’s just how James Bond would do it,” I said over the roar of the highway wind. “If James Bond drove a Buick LeSabre.”

Leo Finch shot me a look that was both smug and celebratory, having just punched through a hole between converging semis at the Altamonte Springs exchange.

I rolled up my window and pulled down the visor. “Should I have worn lipstick or something?”

“You look fine, Robin,” he said.

I don’t know who he was talking about, but the girl in the visor mirror looked nervous. I was underdressed, my hair was tangled and my lips were pursed in a way that would have aroused the disapproval of my stepfather. (“An under-confident aspect,” he would have called it.)

I dug around in my purse, pulled back my mouse brown hair and applied a black Scrunchy. “You know I didn’t get to eat lunch.”

“We’ll get something,” said my boss. He was not nervous, nor were his lips pursed. He was grinning from ear to ear, chewing his ridiculous sugarless bubble gum, and muscling the Buick through moderate, mid-afternoon, I-4 traffic. We were heading into Orlando’s northern suburbs. And we were late. “So we’re clear on this?” He rolled up his own window, not because it was the third Monday in January. It was seventy-eight degrees. I assumed he just wanted to make sure he was being heard. “I mean, it’s just that this one’s gotten a little sideways on us.” His southern accent was especially pronounced as he emphasized the word “sideways.”

“I understand.”

“Talk as much as you want. This is your case. But I’ll go ahead and take the lead.”

“Fine.”

“But you’re straight on the dos and don’ts?” said Leo.

I looked at him. “Aren’t I? Essentially, you don’t want me to mention anything that’s happened in the last three hours.”

He nodded. “And nothing about last Friday night except what’s actually in the pictures.”

“Right, boss.”

He glanced over at me and pointed to the file on the seat between us. “These pictures,” he said. “Not the other ones.”

“I got it.”

Leo blew a bubble and gunned the LeSabre past a black Porsche Carrera, whipping into the right hand lane just in time to make the Longwood exit. He punctuated the move by popping the bubble hard against the roof of his mouth. “Let’s see you do that in that hotrod Nova of yours.”

“Any time, cowboy.”

That was the first time I’d ridden in the Buick. Not my kind of car, but I was impressed. It was an ‘85, just two years old. It ran smooth and had plenty of guts. On the inside it looked like a private detective’s car – fast food stains on the mauve bench seat, a large, white Steak ‘n Shake bag overflowing with trash, a tattered Yellow Pages between my feet.

He kept the throttle open all the way down the ramp, pumping the breaks only at the bottom. The tires whispered a squeal as we made the left under a yellow light that seemed to wait for the unflappable Leo Finch.

“We won’t tell her we have no idea where the girl is. Let her think we have a line on her. Because we might.” Just in case I was hopelessly stupid he added, “I mean the blonde.”

“The blonde.” I nodded vigorously. “I got it. The girl in the pictures.” I pointed to the file. “These pictures.”

We turned right on Wekiva Springs Road and, two miles later, right on Fox Valley. Leo glanced at his watch and eased down into a suburban residential pace. We twisted and turned past a quarter mile of handsome homes on beautifully landscaped lots until we came to the largest house on the street.

Leo rolled twenty yards past the broad, two-story Country French, made a U, and pulled up to the gutter just about on the property line between the Stiles’ place and their neighbor’s. He’d already tutored me in the practice of anonymous parking for my first turn at surveillance the previous Friday: choose a spot that won’t identify the car with any house in particular. Sounded good to me. But what the hell did I know. I was twenty-two years old and I’d only been working for Finch Investigations since the previous Thursday. Leo’d been in business eighteen years.

We could hear loud music coming from one of the houses. It wasn’t clear enough to make out who it was, or even what kind of music, but it had a heavy bass and jolting rhythm. We rolled up our windows.

“I like this neighborhood,” I said, letting my seat belt recoil on its spring. “I like the way they’ve kept it kind of wooded, you know?”

“You think it’s wooded?”

“Yeah. Don’t you?”

He popped his door, but stopped to look at me before opening it. “It was a lot more wooded when I was a kid. I used to hunt this area.”

“Seriously?”

He pushed his door out and nodded through the windshield. “Eleven years old, killed my first deer right about where that mail box is.”

“Yeah, right,” I said and hauled myself out onto the manicured strip of lawn that ran between the sidewalk and the road. There were a few small white clouds here and there, but the sky was that delicious Florida winter blue. The St. Augustine grass felt coarse and spongy under my feet and I thought about how nice it would be to play touch football out here instead of going into a meeting where I had to keep secrets my boss, apparently, wasn’t sure I could keep.

“Swear to God Almighty,” said Leo as he came around the front of the car.

“Bambi killer.”

“It was a good clean kill. She didn’t suffer.”

As we made our way across the lawn it became obvious that the music, still indistinct, was coming from the Stiles’ house.

“Decided to throw us a party,” said Leo. “How nice of her.” And in the same breath he added, “Watch out for dog crap.” He scanned the grass in front of us.

“Ah. Always the hunter. Looking for signs of life. Maybe we can kill us one of them thare poodle critters. Them’s good eattin’.”

Leo laughed and pulled his suit jacket around him, concealing his gun from the inquisitive breeze. He’d worn the gun for a reason. Once inside the house, he would take the jacket off. Seeing a private detective dressed in a gun was supposed to inspire confidence in a client. Appearances. Very important in our business.

The Stiles house had a small, enclosed front porch, sort of an exterior alcove. In it, the music echoed and vibrated.

“What’s she listening to?” said Leo.

“Billy Ocean.”

The song was “If I Should Loose You,” a non-hit off the Suddenly album. When it had come out a few years earlier, I was dating a Rollins College student named Roget, a French guy who worshiped Billy Ocean and, ultimately, not me.

The door was six inches ajar.

Leo pressed the doorbell then turned to me and grinned. “Did you hear the bell?”

“Are you kidding?”

“I bet neither did she.”

He pushed the door open and tentatively poked his head in.

“We just going to go in?” I said.

“She knew what time we’d be here. I’m guessing she left the door open for us.”

“That way she doesn’t have to turn down the music.”

“Quite the hostess,” he said.

“Real high society.”

We’d already pegged Annette as a major poser. She owned an art gallery on Park Avenue, a trendy neighborhood in Winter Park, a city just across the street from Orlando going north. She ran with a beautiful crowd that didn’t include her husband, Brian, a frumpy mail-order businessman whose gourmet-cooking hobby had boosted him from a wedding night one-seventy to a satisfied two-thirty-five. A little too well nourished for Annette and her waif-chic entourage.

Enter Finch Investigations. This was 1987, before the passage of Florida’s no fault divorce law. In those days it was necessary for a dissatisfied spouse to show cause in the courtroom. Marital discord was still the bread and butter of nearly all the smaller investigative firms in Greater Orlando. And Annette had chosen Finch Investigations to put Brian’s head on the chopping block.

Leo and I stepped into the full blare of the music and he closed the door.

He called out to our client. We got no answer. “If I Should Loose You” ended and the title track began. Roget loved to cuddle to it. That was how I knew he wasn’t my type.

There was a closed door directly in front of us, and an open living room to our left. We took the path of least resistance, making a semi-circle through the living room to the dining room and the dining room to the kitchen and the kitchen to the family room where the stereo was. Leo kept up a steady call to announce our presence.

We went to the foot of the stairs. Leo called up, then swept the room with his eyes and shrugged.

That was when I made my very first investigative contribution of any real gravity. I felt something under the toe of my right Reebok. It was smaller than a marble. A Spanish peanut, maybe. Or an earring. (This is all very clear to me these many years later.) I looked down at my black Freestyle (that morning I’d toyed with the black-left-neon-yellow-right idea, but, hey, I had a client meeting to go to), pivoted on my heel and found a shiny brass shell casing. In those days I knew next to nothing about guns, but I knew the caliber was small. There was another one on the first step. I searched the stairs and counted them. There were six. Like from a six shooter. Like from a TV show. Joe Mannix. Jim Rockford. Tom Magnum, David Addison. There was silence for a moment, then the tape deck reversed and the first song on the album started to play. I backhanded Leo on the upper arm, pointed to the lowest shell casing, then on up the stairs. For a couple of seconds he did nothing. Then he drew his gun. I wasn’t sure whether the pounding I felt in my chest was from the bass in the music, my heart, or both. We climbed the stairs, Leo’s Smith and Wesson leading the way...