January Juggling The Jentons: A Xara Smith Mystery

By Bill McGrath

Xara Smith, a female private investigator operating in North Texas, takes a job guarding a socialite. As the mystery unfolds our detective finds herself involved in murder, drugs, and white slavery. This is the first book in the Xara Smith series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bill McGrath
• Release date: May 4, 2009
• ISBN: 9781458098344

Bill McGrath

Bill McGrath has lived in the north Texas since 1989. He is married and has raised three daughters and a son. He has had several careers including; Computer Programmer, Cab Driver, Factory Worker, Volunteer Coordinator, and Customer Service Representative. Now that you have bought this book he will also claim that he is an Author.

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January Juggling The Jentons

A Xara Smith Mystery By Bill McGrath

Copyright 2007 Bill McGrath

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Xara Smith Mysteries By Bill McGrath:

January Juggling The Jentons

February At Feldman’s On Fifth

March Of The Mustangs

April At The Antique Alley

May Might Mean Murder

June Jumping the Jaguar

July Jill's Justice

August Avenging Arlene

September Surgeon Shamed

October Octagon Occult

November Naughty Nurse

December Deadly Dolls

Also by Bill McGrath:

Virika - Maiden

Bill McGrath Web Site:

WWW.WIX.COM/WGJM53/BILLMCGRATH

To contact author please send email to [e-mail]

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

CHAPTER-01.

I never intended to become a Private Investigator. It just sort of happened. Life tends to do as it will regardless of what our dreams are. Me? Well I never really had many dreams. Still, for a tough six foot three inch tomboy it is not a bad profession.

My name is Xara (rhymes with Sarah and sounds like it starts with a Z). My mother, God love her, gave me that exotic first name simply because our last name is Smith. I think she expected I would be something special. I guess I am, but it usually doesn’t feel like it. Oh I was special growing up. Quite special. In fact so special that I often fell asleep softly crying about it.

Starting very early in life I was a good deal taller than average. My mother dragged me from one Doctor to another always convinced that I had some sort of special condition or disease that caused me to be so tall. The good Doctor would tell her that I was perfectly healthy, just tall for my age. Of course that would be after he would run a dozen tests that all required poking me with needles and me walking around in my underpants in front of him and his nurses.

Dear Mother, of course, would never accept the answer that I was healthy, just tall, so after a few weeks she would find some other doctor we hadn’t seen yet and we would repeat the process.

My height caused me a lot of problems when I was young. For instance, I was labeled a problem child. I had no problems at all but the adults around me needed some education. I mean when I was four years old I was as tall as an average six-year-old. Every adult would simply expect me to behave like I was six but I wasn’t. I was four, duh!

When I started school, I was not only taller than every girl in class but also taller than every boy in class. You think that made me a target? Sure did.

Of course there were some advantages to being tall. Starting in fourth grade and continuing all the way through high-school I was on the girl’s volleyball team and the girl’s basketball team, was the captain of each team, and let’s not be humble here – the star of each team. Height wasn’t the only advantage I had in sports. God made me tall but I made me strong and fast. I did these with a lot of hard work. I do not know what you spent your allowance and babysitting money on, but I saved up and bought a set of weights with mine. The time other girls spent on the phone or in front of a TV or gossiping with some friends I spent pumping iron or jogging in the hills around our small-town Arkansas neighborhood.

The worst part was that if you could look past my height I was a really pretty and very nice little girl. Like most young ladies I did not consider myself pretty but looking back at the few pictures I can find I have to say that I was a doll. By the time I got to high-school it was pretty clear that I was always going to be taller than most girls, but the boys were starting to catch up. Our high-school had students for four years. As a freshman I was asked out by Junior and Senior boys all the time. Of course I turned down the dates. Surely my parents would not have allowed me to date older boys, but it never really came down to that. I just wasn’t interested.

What really pissed me off though was the girls. I mean practically every girl has a best friend growing up. Even those that move into town half way through high-school were able to join some click or something. I lived in the exact same house from the day I was born till after high-school. I always went to the closest public school to my house, so I graduated with several dozen kids that I had done twelve years of school with yet not a single one was ever my best friend. During the sports seasons I got a lot of respect, but never friendship. I do not ever remember spending the night at a friend’s house. I can remember only three class-mate’s birthday parties that I attended and all three invited everyone in class. I guess with the girls I was just too big and too pretty. At least that is the way I remember it.

About the middle of my junior year I accepted a date from a senior. It was to a school dance. My mother made it a way bigger deal than I did. Yes it was fun to dress up, but I spent all night, I mean every single minute of the date, trying to keep this ass-hole’s hands off me. So much for my first date. I quickly followed that date with three or four other first dates and they all were pretty much the same. My senior year went by rather quickly with college scouts graciously watching the girl’s game at 6:00 P.M. when they were actually in town to scout the senior boys later that night. I did have a date to prom. Lost my virginity that night just because I was tired of guarding against it. The boy was nothing special. I still remember his name but I can’t seem to remember much else about him.

How unfair life is finally dawned on me during the last half of my senior year of high-school. I had just spent the last nine years being the most dominant player in two sports. I had more trophies on my mantle than the boy they named Athlete of the Year at the awards banquette. Without a doubt I was the best athlete in the school and could whip the ass of any student male or female. All of that and I didn’t receive a single scholarship offer. Not one. Several of the boy jocks would escape this dusty little town, but not me because I was dumb enough to be born without dangly parts.

I was eighteen, a high-school graduate, no money for college. There were three choices. Choice one, marriage, ha, ha, ha. Choice two, the wonderful world of community college. I went with choice three. I joined the United States Navy. In our town the recruiting offices are all crammed together on the second floor of a strip mall. Why the Navy? Well, to tell the truth, I had all intentions of joining either the Army or the Marines that day, but when I walked up there the Navy office had a mannequin in the window of a tall blonde woman in a cool blue uniform. Hey, I told you I am a blonde.

So I was actually in the Navy for six years. I won’t bore you with the details of how I got there but I ended up working Shore Patrol in San Diego. This was back in what we refer to as the Reagan years. San Diego has always been a big navy town. The 80’s were no different. What was different was the military itself. It was changing. It was no longer a male only world. Women could now have real jobs. I had taken a few classes on military science and police science and worked my way through a grueling training regimen to become the closest thing the navy has to cops, shore patrol. I was the only woman of my graduating class but there were other female SPs when I got the assignment.

I had been in the Navy for three years, working shore patrol for two, and had just turned 22 years old when I found out I was a lesbian. It actually came as a big shock to me. I mean here I was this big butch looking military cop surrounded by a million men in uniforms when one of my fellow feminine officers hit on me. Surprise, surprise, surprise. I never fell in love with her but I sure did fall in lust. As far as the military was concerned it was Don’t ask, don’t tell, so life as an SP just went on. I didn’t stay with the same girl, but from that time forward all of my very few sexual experiences have been with women.

Of course it ended up costing me a career. Some guy found out, and took some pictures and used them as evidence. He didn’t have anything against me. He was trying to get back at the other girl in the pictures. Oh well. I resigned the Navy before the Navy resigned me. So I moved to Dallas just to get the hell out of San Diego.

I rented an apartment in the suburb called Irving which is right near the airport. I think I chose to live near the airport just in case I had to get out of Dallas as quick as I had left San Diego.

Once in Dallas my first order of business was to find a job. My plan was to find just about any job at all and then start thinking of going back to school. It didn’t turn out that way though. I got a job at a legal firm because I had a lot of law and order type training and I could type fast and accurate. If it had been a great big law firm I never would have gotten out of the typing pool but at the small firm I was working at I got a couple of breaks. The first one was that one of the partners had a son my age who was making a living by doing investigations for the clients of the law firm. He mostly trailed around taking pictures of husbands who didn’t know it yet but were about to get divorced.

The second break was that this investigator liked me. He kept hitting on me and my big beautiful blondeness and I wasn’t quite sure I could tell the son of the boss I wouldn’t date him because I was gay. So eventually I agreed to go out with him if it was just to share take-out while he was on a stake-out.

We got along fine and he found out that I knew more about his line of business then he did. I mean the navy had trained me in all the equipment he was using and given me some very extensive self-defense training and weapons work. Plus, I usually helped him figure out what to do next on a case, and I guessed right more often than guessing wrong.

After about half a dozen take-out stake-out dates I was officially assigned to work with him and didn’t have to spend the day typing. Of course he still thought he was going to get into my pants. I guess it is a good thing he wasn’t too bright.

After a year of playing his assistant I went and got my own PI license. Again my Navy career helped a lot. Because of the Navy I already knew how to fill out tons of paperwork and I knew way more about weapons then the idiot teaching the weapons safety course I was required to take. During that first year with the law firm I stayed in my apartment and had saved up the grand sum of $600.00. Now though, being paid a good deal more because I was licensed, I started really stashing away some cash because I had a plan. I did not want to live the rest of my life in an apartment and I also did not want to live the rest of my life depending on a paycheck from someone else. I wanted a house I could buy and own, but I also wanted to start my own private investigation business. I knew I would never qualify for a mortgage without a steady pay check though, so I continued to work for the legal firm for three more years and lived like a pauper until my bank account was a healthy 25K+.

At that time I bought a house in Irving and moved in. Three months later, after all the paperwork was filed away and the bank lost interest as long as I made the mortgage payment on time, I quit my job and Dallas County noticed a new business registered at the County Clerk’s office called Xara Smith Discrete Investigations.

The house itself was pretty cool. It had originally been built in the 1950s as part of a family oriented block in North Irving. It was originally a three bedroom two bathroom house with a living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, and mud room on the first floor, and three bedrooms and a second full bath on the second floor. In addition it had something few north Texas houses had and that was a full basement. I had heard people talk for a couple of years about the land masses that all come together in the area making a very unstable mix for the foundations that almost guaranteed that a basement would leak a lot if you had one there but I had the basement inspected before I bought the place and the inspector told me it hadn’t ever had any problems.

Over the years the house had changed but not as much as the neighborhood. In the late 1960s the DFW area built its shiny new airport halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth, and they certainly needed some new highways to get too and from it. Highway 183, also known as Airport Freeway, plowed its way through the little neighborhood and the house I would buy had been left facing the highway with a driveway that cut off