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Breaking into the LeBlanc manor was a mystery all in itself. Perhaps that was why it had taken a second mystery to solve it.
The heavy oak doors that gaped like a sobbing mouth at the apex of the jaundiced white marble stairs creaked when they opened, savoring every inch of the unknown inky black hidden behind them. Vespa wouldn’t have been surprised if that darkness had been more than metaphorical. The couple who owned the estate were away on vacation, having left for their summer home on Venus and brought their staff with them.
However, that didn’t change the fact of the matter, or at least the fact of the matter as it was safest to outwardly state it. There seemed to be trouble in this marble-fanged paradise for the pair of recluses. Vespa knew the both of them were on vacation, but that knowledge had taken weeks of Steel’s trailing and the hacker’s research to figure out. Weeks the local law enforcement didn’t have.
The fact of the matter as far as the police knew was that Monsieur LeBlanc had been murdered, and his wife had hired a certain private eye, one surreptitiously established a week ago, for the investigation. The cops didn’t have to know that Monsieur LeBlanc was too busy sunning himself on an offplanet spa to worry about his tan going to waste in his grave. They also didn’t have to know that Madame LeBlanc’s hair was not a fiery red.
Vespa pulled the trench coat a little tighter around her when the wind outside the door of the manor began to sink its cold, already bloodied fangs into her shoulders and cursed the fact that the only reasonable way the LeBlancs would ever allow any non-staff member behind the doors of the manor was if they had an invitation or a warrant. Vespa, or rather, whichever name was upon the detective’s badge she held in her breast pocket, was lucky enough to have both.
The door finished its tease with the gasped-out groan of underutilized hinges, revealing the lady of the house herself, or rather, the woman posing as the Madame.
“Detective,” Buddy greeted, her tone so soft and simpering that it took the vast majority of Vespa’s self control not to burst out laughing. “It’s terrible to see you.”
“Terrible?” Vespa snorted, raising an eyebrow as Buddy reached forward with an arm draped in the kind of black mourning robe that likely cost half as much as the Carte Blanche itself. “I know I’m a sight for sore eyes if they wanna get sorer, but I didn’t think I looked that bad today.”
“Rather unfortunate circumstances have brought you to my doorstep,” Buddy lamented. “There’s nothing particularly loathsome about yourself, darling, just that making the acquaintance of an individual such as you is the kind of occasion better fit for kinder circumstances.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Steel groaned somewhere a million miles away through Vespa’s comms.
With Buddy flashing a smile as red as blood and as sweet as honey, Vespa didn’t have much trouble ignoring him. It definitely didn’t hurt that Buddy chose that moment to take her by the hand and bring it up for a kiss, leaving a love bite red print to mark Vespa as one who had been haunted by her lips.
“Why don’t you lead me to the crime scene?” Vespa started after taking a moment to shake her head, inhale the cool, crisp air of the planet’s winter, and try to wash the heady smell of Buddy Aurinko donning Madame LeBlanc’s perfume out of her senses.
“I see how it is,” Buddy chuckled coldly, her hand still lingering on Vespa’s fingers. “You want to meet the man of the house.”
“That’s what you paid me to do,” Vespa snorted.
“Perhaps,” Buddy smiled.
Vespa, of course, had no intention of arresting her for anything. However, the sensation of warmth leaving warmth as their hands parted had to have been some kind of crime, and a terrible one at that. Vespa couldn’t be sure what had been stolen from her, but for just a moment, it felt as if Buddy had ripped out something fundamental within her just by letting that patch of air slither between them.
She cleared her throat and shook her head upon crossing the threshold, trying her best to keep up appearances for any law enforcement who might still be taking a look around the scene. It wasn’t too hard to hunch her shoulders and look surly. For as funny as it was to listen through the comms while Steel stole a bag of recently donated blood from LeBlanc’s local hospital and did his best to splash it around the crime scene in a way that would make him look good and dead, Vespa wasn’t any fan of having to keep it off her shoes.
Vespa whistled upon stepping into the study, a room paneled in authentic wood with a thousand gold leaf and faux leather books staring down their noses at her from every angle. However, her eyes were on the mess Steel had made, a fairly authentic looking recreation of someone having been stabbed once or twice, interspersed with a good bit of stumbling for flair.
It wasn’t too difficult to feign focus. She was focused enough already at driving away the memory of Steel’s audio-only gagging and the occasional splatter while he pieced together the crime scene the night before.
“No body,” she wondered aloud, knowing damn well that the body was alive and well in a spa on Venus.
“Well, a few minutes ago, the scene was crawling with officers,” Buddy mused, pausing just a moment to flash Vespa the kind of million cred smile that made her heart threaten to drop out of her chest.
“Don’t really feel like joking around,” Vespa growled, doing her best to stalk the edges of the blood-bruised wood flooring and look interested in the shape. “In my profession, the world does most of the laughing. You just play Pagliacci and wait for the final punchline to hit.”
“I do not sound like that,” Steel groaned through the comms. From the sound of the muffling, Vespa had to guess his head was buried somewhere in his hands.
Buddy hummed thoughtfully, if just to cut him off.
“Sounds dreadful,” she mused, pulling her robe up by the train to take a cross-legged seat on the desk of the study, as if it were a throne, rather than the piece of furniture that contained a safe packed to bursting with enough creds to sustain them through the next three jobs. “Is there anything I could do to alleviate your pains, my darling detective?”
“Why don’t I cut you a deal?” Vespa started, taking a glance around the corner to ensure their conversation wasn’t overheard by anybody but the last of the police detectives, who, by Vespa’s estimation, looked as if he was trying to leave as soon as possible.
“Perhaps you ought to enlighten me about the semantics of this deal over dinner, darling,” Buddy chuckled, leaning back so her gaze, dark and sweet and magnetic, was at just the right height to climb the lines of Vespa’s button down until they reached her lips, as if in a blood-stained room with decor to make most wallets shudder, there was nothing better to look at. “I’ve had quite the terrible twenty four hours and frankly, I think a drink or two with a lady detective ought to calm my nerves.”
Vespa wasn’t sure when she had crossed the room, just that first, it was Buddy’s gaze reeling her in, dragging her through each and every step as if she were the puppeteer of fate, coaxing and tempting Vespa’s every movement as her well-manicured hands curled and arced and flexed around the strings. When Vespa had made it far enough across the room, it was Buddy’s hands that did the rest of the dragging, seizing her by the tie and reeling her in with the last catlike grin a mouse ever saw before taking a few too many sharpened teeth to the throat.
If Vespa were truly the kind of surly, world-worn detective she pretended to be, she might spit out some quip or another about how it looked like trouble had a name, and that name just happened to be Buddy Aurinko, whose lips and thigh-high slit in her robe both did not beg, but rather, demanded, veneration. However, fondness and a certain level of humor had made Vespa cross the room as much as the tugging on her tie, so instead, Vespa merely fixed her wife with a challenging grin.
“I think I’ll run that deal past you right now, thanks,” Vespa snorted.
“Humor me,” Buddy grinned down the barrel of Vespa’s tie.
“You tell me where you were last night, and then maybe we’ll get that drink.”
Buddy raised an eyebrow.
“Is this an interrogation, darling? I’m afraid I’m terribly underdressed for such an occasion.”
“You’re dressed just fine,” Vespa tried her best to hide an improperly warm chuckle.
“Do you like it?” Buddy hissed, leaning closer to hide this particular piece of conversation from the last of the law enforcement in the other room.
Vespa paused to turn off her comms.
“You’d better be bringing this back with you.”
“I thought just as much,” Buddy responded with a grin like a back-alley kiss.
“So are you gonna tell me about where you were or not?” Vespa started again, raising the volume of her voice just enough to smooth over the lull in conversation, just in case any of the law enforcement started to get suspicious.
Buddy’s hands moved thoughtfully around the length of Vespa’s tie, weaving it through her fingers. Despite that, she did not break the self-satisfied gaze with which she paralyzed Vespa to the spot. From the angle of her smirk, Vespa was damn sure she knew exactly what knots she had twisted her internal organs into, and she didn’t doubt the motion was being recreated by her manhandling of the strip of fabric between them.
“I couldn’t have killed my husband, my darling detective,” Buddy mused. “I was in the other room.”
“Doing what?”
Buddy paused as the door from the nearby entry hall creaked shut. The last shadows of the police officer’s presence were the echoes of his footsteps from the cold marble chessboard of the flooring. When the sound was but a memory, Buddy turned back to Vespa with a far more fond look.
Whatever warm feeling bloomed in Vespa’s chest in response was her business.
“You see, detective,” Buddy chuckled. “I was admiring my reflection in the glass of my arsenic cabinet and polishing my gun.”
“Cut it out,” Vespa snorted. “You ready to get the creds or what?”
“I don’t see why we couldn’t linger a few minutes longer, Vespa,” Buddy considered with a tilt of her head that made her curls bounce in a way that shouldn’t have made Vespa’s stomach twist as much as it did.
Vespa hadn’t realized just how much she had missed the sound of her name from Buddy’s lips. As novel as it was to mock Ransom’s gross nicknames for Steel, she had missed those syllables, a hiss and a press and an exhale that bloomed from Buddy’s wine red lips like smoke curling from the mouth of a starlet.
“Found another robe you wanna take with you?” Vespa teased, though the laugh died on her lips when a pair of high-heeled feet closed around her back and her neck was yanked forward by the kind of sharp and loving tug that was worth every bit of shock for the outcome.
Buddy stopped her mere centimeters from her lips.
“Bud--” Vespa protested.
“My comms, darling,” Buddy chuckled, hot and sweet against their almost-met lips as she reached a glossy red fingernail up to her earpiece and switched it off.
Vespa didn’t need the feeling of Buddy’s hands on her cheek and in her hair to tell her exactly where she should direct her lips next.
She’d kissed Buddy a million times before. Though the action would never be boring, Vespa had become comfortable in a certain routine, having learned and relearned the muscle memory required to press her lips to those of Buddy Aurinko and be rewarded with a soft and loving smile when they came to part. However, Vespa had to admit, there was something novel about kissing Buddy Aurinko as someone else’s wife.
Maybe it was stupid to derail a heist just for a kiss or two, but with Buddy reaching to slide the key to the safe into Vespa’s back pocket and the clock on the wall behind them giving them an extra hour to work with, Vespa shoved her nerves off to the side. Besides, certain other crew members did their best to throw heists to the wind and make goo goo eyes at each other at every open moment. Vespa could kiss her damn wife once if she wanted to.
Vespa took her revenge for Buddy’s earlier crime of parting their hands when she parted from her lips, bringing a hand up to her ear to turn her comms back on. From the snippet of conversation she caught, she almost regretted not turning them on sooner.
“My love, I can assure you, I have never spoken to you in such a manner once in my entire life,” Ransom was protesting to some remark or another.
“Sure you haven’t,” Juno snorted.
“You called me a gem upon Mars, Mistah Ransom,” Rita snorted. “And you were being real handsome about it too, so I tried to remember that compliment word for word.”
“My dear detective--”
“Dear detective,” Steel cut in.
“Hush,” Ransom huffed. “Could you do me a favor and check the clock?”
“Yeah, says it’s nine-thirty, ship time. Why?”
“And where on that watch of yours does it say that it’s time to put me through this terrible ordeal?”
“We’re ready for the car now,” Vespa broke Ransom off.
“Ah, yes,” Ransom cleared his throat. “I believe Mister Sikuliaq has headphones in, I’ll be sure to fetch him.”
“I was merely ignoring you.”
“Ah.”
“We have the creds,” Buddy started, her tone oddly formal for the way in which she ran her hands through Vespa’s hair, fixing the pieces that had been knocked astray by the grip of her hands. “As for now, we have a crime scene to flee. Buddy out.”
Vespa wasn’t quite sure if she could still walk after Buddy rendered her knees so weak. However, when Buddy removed her knees from around Vespa’s hips and slid off the desk with all the grace of smoke through the night air, the sight was enough to somehow coax Vespa into standing once more, if just to offer Buddy an arm once she was done retrieving the safe.
Buddy took it, and froze, her gaze still on Vespa.
“What?” Vespa started, though her confusion began to crumble the moment Buddy buckled and began to laugh.
“Darling, that is by far the most ridiculous heist I’ve done in years,” she chuckled.
“Hey, not as bad as that one with the zoo where I kept getting followed by penguins,” Vespa snorted.
“You didn’t kiss me in a room covered in blood,” Buddy pointed out, nodding as she began to walk towards the part of the estate they had agreed to make the Ruby 7’s landing site. “Blood we stole, for that matter.”
“It’s not all bad,” Vespa shrugged. “At least I got to kiss you at all.”
“Bad?” Buddy all but sputtered. “Vespa, that might have been one of my favorite heists of our career. In fact, I think we ought to retry the model again some time.”
Vespa shook her head with a laugh.
“Nothing like accusing your wife of murder.”
“Perhaps you ought to accuse me of homicide next time,” Buddy chuckled.
“I’ll figure something out.”