She shook her head. “He’s too polite to, you know that. But I can see it in his eyes every time I show up.”
“Annoyance?”
“Disappointment. Like he’s waiting for you to trust him.”
Well, if that wasn’t a sucker punch. I knew Baba meant well, but after the night I’d had this was the last discussion I wanted to have. “I’ll think about it,” I lied.
“All right,” she said softly. The woman hadn’t lived to the ripe age of seventy-two without picking up a thing or two about dealing with people. She knew I was lying, but she also knew pressing me about it wouldn’t convince me to see her side. “Anyways, I brought ya something.” She dug a gnarled, arthritic hand into the large pocket of her housecoat. From it she lifted a glass jar—the kind used to pickle vegetables—and shook it. The liquid inside was disconcertingly red, like fruit punch, and kind of oozed inside the glass instead of sloshing.
“What is it?”
“It’s that tea I was telling you about.”
I shook my head. Baba talked about a lot of stuff and I found sometimes it was best to zone out a little. “Which one?”
She sighed. “Remember? The other day you complained that you hadn’t had a date since that horrible one with the mortician.”
I nodded. Barry Finkleman had been nice-enough-looking, but his idea of a fun time was taking a girl to the funeral trade show to check out the latest in embalming equipment. Not exactly the recipe for romance. “What about it?”
“I said you were attracting the wrong kind of men because you had lost touch with your feminine side.”
That brought me up short. If Baba had ever said that to me, I would have remembered it. “Baba, are you sure we had this conversation, or did you just make that snarky comment to yourself?”
“Doesn’t matter.” She waved an impatient hand as if I’d mentioned an insignificant detail. “Anyway, when I was a young girl, my mama made me this special tea on my wedding night. I think I’d told you that Mr. Nowiki was a little light in his loafers?”
Mr. Nowiki was Baba’s deceased husband, whom she loved more than cop shows and smoking combined. I spoke carefully to make sure I understood her correctly. “Baba, are you saying Mr. Nowiki was gay?”
She reared back. “Bite your tongue, girl!”
“But you just said—” At her horrified look, I raised a conciliatory hand. “Forgive me, I misunderstood.”
She cleared her throat. “As I was saying, Mr. Nowiki was very shy when we got married. When we started dating it took him two months just to hold my hand. I swear I tried to rip the man’s pants off more than once, but he said we had to wait until our wedding night.”
The image of Baba trying to seduce Mr. Nowiki made my skin break out in hives, so I decided to hurry her along. “Where does the tea come in to all this?”
“Oh, so I told my mama I was worried my loving husband might be too nervous to do the deed. She said sometimes men are intimidated by strong women so they need a little help.” Baba lifted the mason jar. “So she made up a batch of this tea for me to drink before the ceremony.”
I decided not to mention that the stuff didn’t look like any tea I’d ever seen. Instead it looked more like red slime. “Did it work?” I asked instead.
“Did it ever!” She threw back her head and laughed. “Right after the ceremony, he threw up my skirts and took me in the rectory!”
“Um.” I blinked at her. Cleared my throat. “What’s in it?”
“A little rosemary, coriander, rose petals, some cinnamon for spice.” She waggled her snow-white brows at me. “The rest is a family secret, but I brewed it with water collected from a full-moon rain shower for extra potency.” She held the jar up to the light as if she could see her past inside it. “Mama called it her ‘Love Brew,’ but I prefer to call it ‘Sexy Juice.’”
“Baba—”
“Hmm?”
She was always trying to press this stuff on me. She came from a long line of kitchen witches who brewed home remedies from things in their gardens and passed their folksy wisdom down through the generations. I’d tried a million times to explain to her that I didn’t use any sort of magic—folk or otherwise. She always blustered and explained that her teas and tinctures weren’t the same as “the devil’s handiwork” I chased down in the Cauldron.
But that morning, I couldn’t muster up the energy for another discussion about respecting my boundaries.
“I—” She looked so excited about the prospect of helping me end my romantic dry spell that I couldn’t hurt her feelings. I sighed and accepted the jar she pressed in my hands. “Thanks, Baba.”
She beamed, showing off her slightly crooked front tooth and the gold crown that adorned her left incisor. “My pleasure, doll. Just remember to heat it up first. It also wouldn’t hurt to mix in a little nip of bourbon. If you don’t have any”—she reached into the collar of her housecoat and removed a flask from inside, presumably from her bra—“you can borrow some of mine.”
I definitely drew the line at drinking another woman’s bra hooch. “That’s all right.” I held up a hand and tried to look grateful. “I’m sure I can manage.”
She nodded decisively, like her work here was done. “On that note, I gotta go get ready for bingo at the senior center. If I don’t get there early enough that bitch Harriet Krauss steals all the good dotters.”
I nodded as if this were a problem I often dealt with myself. “Good luck, Baba. And thanks for the tea.”
She winked saucily and said, “You can thank me after some hot stud gives you a ride on his spitting kielbasa.”
After that gem, I quickly extracted myself to go enjoy some quality time with junkie snitches, who were much less disturbing to be around than horny septuagenarians.
Chapter Four
A lot of people believe police work is all shoot-outs and high-speed chases. Truth is most of our hours are filled with paperwork or sitting on our asses in shitty city-issued cars waiting for something suspicious to investigate. That day, however, I was in my own shitty Jeep, since Eldritch’s suspension meant I wasn’t officially on duty.
However, if Gardner let me on the task force, I wanted to arm myself with as much information as I could find about this new potion. That’s where the third part of police work came in—working informants.