by Peggy Bird
“No, I just, you know, pull it on over my head.” She’d had to swallow a couple times to get enough moisture in her mouth so she could answer because all the moisture in her body had taken up residence between her legs.
In a low, husky voice he said, “Off the same way, I take it?”
Holy hell, he was not only turning her body to jelly, he was reading her mind. This was not good. At the rate they were going, they’d be making this reunion memorable for everyone there by tearing each other’s clothes off on the dance floor.
Then his pager beeped.
He broke his hold to retrieve it from his jacket pocket. “Goddamn. Figlio di puttana,” he said when he saw the number. She knew he only swore in two languages when he was really pissed.
“Work, I take it.”
“What else? I’m sorry, Margo. I have to answer this. Meet you back at the table.” He pulled out a cell phone and walked away, punching in a number as he went.
When he returned, the expression on his face said their evening was over before he spoke a word. They made their excuses to their classmates and headed for the valet stand to get her car.
Although she protested that he needed to get to wherever he’d been called, he insisted on walking her from the hotel garage to the door of the suite. Much to her relief, nothing was said on the way up to her room about what had happened on the dance floor.
She opened the door of her suite and started to say goodnight.
“Before I go,” he interrupted, “what’re your plans for the rest of your visit?”
“I’m at a conference for most of the week, then a couple days hanging out before I go home.” Somehow, changing her reservation to an earlier flight had slipped off her “to do” list.
“Why don’t I make dinner for you at my apartment next Friday to make up for our short evening tonight?” He reached over and picked something she couldn’t see off the top of her dress where it skimmed one breast. Her skin retained the heat from his fingers when he moved his hand.
“Oh,” she said, “you cook.”
“My mom taught us all to cook, you know that.”
“Right. I forgot.” She glanced down, then back at him. “What about our mothers?”
“I didn’t plan on inviting them, sugar.” His smile almost melted the heels on her shoes.
“I didn’t mean that. It’s just that if either of them knew we were having dinner in your apartment we’d never … I’d never … hear the end of it.”
From the half-smile on his face, he was enjoying the conversation way too much. “As far as I can tell, the neighborhood grapevine doesn’t extend to this part of the city but I appreciate you trying to protect my reputation.”
She gave him what she hoped was a withering look. “It’s not you I’m worried about.”
With an expression still too amused for her comfort, he asked. “So, is that a yes or a no?”
“If you’re sure, I guess dinner at your place would be okay.” She realized how tentative that sounded and backtracked. “I mean, it sounds good. Should I give you my cell number? Or you can leave a message here for me if you have to make a change. I’m at the Convention Center all next week.”
“That’s where your conference is?”
“Yeah, I’m doing a presentation with some police captain on ‘Law and Order’ … ”
He laughed, then asked, “‘Law and Order: The Working Relationship Between the Police and the DA’s Office’? I won’t have to leave a message anywhere. I can hand it to you while we’re standing at the podium.”
“What’re you talking about?” she asked.
“We’re doing that presentation — you and me.”
“How come I didn’t know this?”
“No idea. About five days ago, the captain scheduled to be the speaker had to cancel. For reasons I have yet to be told, I got tagged. But I thought I was with a guy from the West Coast.”
“Jeff Wyatt, my boss, was supposed to do it. But his trial ran long so he asked me to pinch-hit for him. That’s how I ended up with ten days here. What do you plan to say, anyway?”
“Not sure yet. Maybe we should work on it together. How about we have lunch or something tomorrow and figure it out? About ten?”
“Ten sounds good. Don’t push yourself if you have a long night. I’m around all day.”
“Great.” He bracketed her face with his hands and brought his mouth to hers. His lips were soft and warm, the kiss the same. But when he circled her waist with his arms and she sank into his embrace, her muscles seemed to dissolve, out of her control, as she molded herself against him and he deepened the kiss. She didn’t resist when he brushed her mouth with the tip of his tongue, letting him explore the inside of her mouth at his leisure. Then he slowly drew back, until he was kissing her gently again. He ended with a kiss on the tip of her nose.
“See you tomorrow, counselor,” he said as he walked down the hall toward the steps.
Chapter 4
The sound was annoying. How could she stop it? She had to swim up through the music and leave the dance and …
Oh, hell. The bedside clock came into view as she woke. It was ten o’clock. She’d overslept. Again. And she didn’t have to guess who was at the other end of the ringing phone.
After she apologized to him and hung up, she grabbed her robe and drew it on as she ran to open the door where she found Tony putting a cell phone into the pocket of his jeans. From his damp hair, he wasn’t long out of the shower and the clean-guy smell of freshly laundered shirt, some kind of sandlewood-y soap and maybe his shaving gel was almost as sexy as last night’s cologne. A carrier holding two paper cups was on the floor.
He picked up the carrier and walked in. “I brought you a latte. Figured you’re now one of those West Coast coffee snobs. But from the look of you I should have brought Theresa instead.”
“I’m so sorry, Tony. I don’t know what’s going on. This is the second morning I’ve overslept and I never oversleep. Never.” She took the cup he offered and inhaled a slug of coffee. “Thank you for this. It’s just what I … ” She stopped. “Bring Theresa? Your sister?”
“Yeah, the one who owns a salon.”
She put a hand up to her hair and realized that she desperately needed a brush.
“Oh, God, I’m a mess. Here,” she handed the cup back to him and headed for the bedroom. “I’ll be ready in half an hour, I swear.”
“Half an hour would be great. I said I’d be in before eleven to finish up some paperwork from last night before we eat. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Of course not. Make yourself at home. TV’s over … ” she said gesturing toward an armoire, which he was already opening. “Oh, good. You found it.”
As she pushed the door shut, she heard the crack of a bat hitting a ball. If he’d found a Phillies game, she had lots of time.
Fifteen minutes later, out of the shower and wrapped in a towel, her hair brushed and twisted up with a clip, she was pulling clothes out of drawers, trying to decide what to wear. There was a tap on the door and Tony said, “Coffee’s getting cold. Want it while you get ready?”
“Yes, but hold on a minute,” she answered and looked around for her robe. She had only just found it under a pile of rejected outfits when the door swung open and he walked in, her cup of coffee in his hand. She clutched at the front of the towel, holding it close to her breasts.
He stopped halfway across the room. “Sweet Jesus, Margo,” he said. After looking at her for a few seconds, he crossed the rest of the way to where she stood and set the coffee on a table. He’d apparently seen what he wanted to see on her face because he drew her close. As their mouths met, her hands slid up his arms and around his neck.
Margo had tried to confine her memory of kissing Tony to that inaccessible place in her mind where she kept the details of the periodic table of elements and the family tree of Elizabeth the First of England, things she needed out of her consciousness for one reason or another. She always faile
d. The symbol for plutonium or the name of Henry the Seventh’s mother she had to work at recalling. But not Tony’s kisses.
He started soft and slow, and let the kiss build in intensity seemingly without any effort on his part. When he persuaded her to let him explore her mouth with his tongue, her knees slowly melted and sparks showered through her, burning away the memory of any other man she’d ever kissed. By the time he ended the kiss — and it was always Tony who ended the kiss — she had temporarily forgotten how to breathe on her own and needed his arms to hold her upright.
He had just hooked his fingers into the top of the towel she was wearing when his pager beeped.
This time he swore only in English. “Damn it to hell,” he said under his breath. He shook his head, kissed her forehead and walked out of the room to answer the page, firmly closing the door behind him.
Margo stood in the middle of the floor for a long moment, apparently incapable of movement. Eventually feeling returned to her limbs and she was able to gulp down the coffee and get dressed. Ten minutes later, she stood at the closed door of the bedroom ready to go out to the living room. A couple deep breaths and she opened the door.
She didn’t know what she expected to find but it wasn’t a TV on mute and Tony still on the phone, his face all business. He mouthed, “one minute,” and held up his hand.
When he was finished the call he apologized. “Sorry. I asked Isiah Bryant who caught the case to page me if he got anything more about last night.”
“What was last night, anyway?”
“Couple found a body in the Tinicum Marsh.”
“But you’re not working homicide.”
“Yeah, but we think this guy has a connection with someone this task force I’m on has been tracking for months. The vic had his business card in his wallet. What’s interesting to us is that the vic — his name is Frank Jameson — works for Microsoft and we’ve been working on a series of high-tech intellectual property thefts.”
“How the hell did he wind up in the Tinicum Marsh? And what was the couple doing there at that hour of the night?”
“Can’t answer the first question yet. You can guess the answer to the second.” His grin was positively lascivious. “They literally tripped over him under a pile of leaves and tree limbs. We’re sure he was killed there, but didn’t get much else from the scene. There was no luggage. No car. Only thing they found in the leaves was a boarding pass for a business class seat on a flight from Portland to Philly on Friday.”
“That must have been my flight. There aren’t that many flights from Portland. And I was in business class. What’d he look like?”
“Five feet ten, two-hundred-seventy pounds. Light brown hair. License says he’s fifty-one. Navy blue jacket, light blue Polo shirt, khaki pants.”
“Holy shit, Tony. That sounds like the Asshole in the Blue Blazer.”
• • •
The atmosphere at the Roundhouse, Philly’s distinctive double-circle-shaped police headquarters was much like the Portland Police Bureau headquarters, with which Margo was familiar. There were rows of government-issued desks covered in computers, stacks of files and reams of paper, multiple phones were ringing and, most noticeable of all, there was an overwhelming air of testosterone in spite of all the women who worked there. The only thing different was that Philly’s headquarters, like its City Hall and its police force, was much bigger.
Tony walked to a desk next to a window that looked out toward the Parkway and pulled up a chair for her.
“How’d a new detective rate a window, Tony?” she asked as she sat down.
“My boyish charm?” he said.
“You’re still getting the biggest piece of birthday cake, I see. Must have a woman assigning desks.”
“Jesus, you sound like Theresa. We were six years old. Let it go.”
“We were seven and you got a huge slice of chocolate cake and twice the ice cream the rest of us got at Jennifer’s party because you batted your big brown eyes at her mother. Which I’ve seen you do since you were in diapers, Alessandro, and … ”
“If you’ve known him that long, let me buy you a cup of coffee some day,” a baritone voice interrupted from behind her.
“That invitation to tell stories about me, Margo, came from Isiah Bryant. Isiah, Margo Keyes, an old friend from the neighborhood. She knows as many stories about me as my sisters do and since I can’t sic my mother on her, she’s more likely to tell them. This may be the closest I let you two get.”
She swiveled in the chair to find a tall African-American man, probably in his late forties, with café au lait skin, brown eyes, a friendly open face and, she discovered when they shook hands, a good handshake.
“Nice to meet you. Sorry Tony dragged you in here to listen to our shop talk.”
“She’s a DA, Isiah. She loves this shit. And she might be able to connect that boarding pass with our vic. She thinks she got up close and personal with him in the airport.”
“Actually, if it’s who I think it is, I heard him on a cell phone in Portland, we got into an argument just after we landed here, and we ran into each other again at luggage pickup when I bumped him with my suitcase.”
“Any idea what the phone conversation was about?” Isiah asked.
“Sounded like he was negotiating with someone, trying to sell them something. He said, ‘I know someone who’ll buy it if you won’t.’ And, ‘What’re you willing to pay me for it? I’ll call you when I hear what he has to say.’ Or something along those lines.”
“No indication what he was selling?” Tony asked.
“Nope. And whatever it was, I’m not sure he had it with him, unless it was small enough to fit in his briefcase.”
“Briefcase? We didn’t find a briefcase at the scene,” Bryant said.
“Well, he had one when he left the airport. It was sitting in front of me when I pulled my bag off the luggage belt,” Margo said. “He grabbed it and ran to the taxi stand.”
“I’ll have someone go back and hunt through the leaves again. And what you saw confirms what we suspected — there was no car there so we assumed, unless the perp drove him, he took a cab. Been contacting taxi companies. I’ll ask about a briefcase. Maybe Jameson left it in a cab,” Bryant said. “But it’s more likely the shooter took it.”
After she’d identified the body as her guy in the blue blazer, Margo dictated a statement, and then eavesdropped as Bryant told Tony what he’d gotten from a Microsoft contact in Redmond, Washington.
According to the man he’d talked to, Frank Jameson had been in software development for Microsoft since he’d graduated from college. When Bryant contacted Jameson’s wife — or more accurately, he discovered, the wife from whom Jameson had recently separated — she said he had called on Wednesday to cancel a camping trip with their sons for business reasons. She added they should talk to his girlfriend for more information, and she gave him a phone number.
The girlfriend confirmed Jameson was away on a business trip. He’d called after he arrived at his destination, although he hadn’t told her where he was. She’d tried his cell phone a number of times but it always went to voice mail. She planned to give him hell for worrying her when he returned Sunday afternoon.
Chapter 5
Tony and Margo’s presentation was scheduled for late in the afternoon on Thursday, giving them four days to pull it together. During their brainstorming session on Sunday, Tony started off with a couple ideas he “just wanted to throw out.” When he outlined the ideas, Margo decided he just wanted to make her laugh.
First, he suggested using the theme from the television show Law & Order as they walked to the podium, or to imitate the “chung, CHUNG” sound the show used to switch scenes when they changed speakers. She assured him they were great ideas, but unfortunately, she didn’t have time to acquire the rights for public performance and had to veto them.
Next, he moved to a list of specific police and lawyer TV shows he thought they could recommend. Si
nce, he said, he was sure the lawyer shows were as accurate as the cop shows were, watching them would be helpful in understanding how the entire justice system worked. She asked how the hell he had time to watch so much television when he was a working detective. However, she added, since he was headed in that direction, maybe there was a way they could play the opening for laughs and she outlined an idea he readily accepted.
Before she took off for her mother’s, Tony asked if they could spend part of each of the following days working on the presentation. Margo quickly agreed. After all, that would make their speeches better. The fact that it meant they would be together every day was incidental. Wasn’t it?
Monday they got the opening scripted during lunch at the Reading Terminal Market, the mother of all farmers’ markets, and Margo’s favorite source of sticky buns and cheese steaks. Tuesday they had drinks after work at a little neighborhood bar near his apartment where she met several of his colleagues and his favorite bartender. Over glasses of wine, they discussed their personal experiences, developing a list of the points they wanted to emphasize and examples they could use to illustrate them.
When she’d casually mentioned on Tuesday that she’d never ridden on a motorcycle, Tony picked her up at the end of the day on Wednesday so he could take her for a tour of Fairmount Park on the back of his bike. After an hour’s ride, they parked and walked through the sculpture garden, rehearsing. By the time he delivered her back to her hotel, they were both satisfied with the information they were presenting.
All week she looked forward to seeing him, saving up stories and nuggets of information from the conference to share with him. They didn’t revisit the heat they’d generated on the dance floor or in her hotel room that Sunday but he always seemed to have his arm around her, or his hand on hers. He kissed her hello and goodbye, sometimes kissed her just because. And she loved holding him so tight her fingers cramped as they took the corners of the winding roads in the park on his motorcycle. If they’d had more time, she thought, maybe …