A Touch of Minx

by Suzanne Enoch

  “So who locks a door when they’re the only one home, unless they’re paranoid about something inside?”

  “You’re good,” she said with a brief smile, her mind still clearly on her tour. “He puts on this really calm, collected, über-controlled demeanor, and I’m not sure he even realizes what kind of vibe a locked door puts out.”

  “Not to a former thief, anyway.”

  “Yep.”

  “Did he give any reason for not letting you in?”

  “He said he was renovating the room.”

  “Hm.”

  This time she flashed her grin at him. “That’s exactly what I said.”

  “He’s definitely your suspect, then.”

  “I don’t think locking a door in his own house would get him arrested or anything, but something hinky’s going on. I’d put my own money on that.”

  And she meant to figure out what the hinky thing was. She didn’t say that aloud, but he knew it all the same. He’d known her for a year, and he wasn’t stupid, by any means. “And what happens if he catches you breaking into his house after he gave you a personal tour?”

  From the quick flattening of her lips, she realized that she’d been figured out. Good. If she understood that he knew what she was likely to do under given circumstances, it might save him a great deal of worry.

  “Well?” he prompted.

  “Smart ass,” she said easily. “Satsujin, I would guess.”

  “Murder? You think he would try to kill you?” Christ.

  “He actually mentioned that if anybody ever tried to take his things, he would go after them with a daitu. He’s apparently been trained in samurai swordsmanship.” She took a step closer and fiddled with his tie. “But that would mean catching me, which won’t happen.”

  So much for sparing him some worry. Richard wanted to grab her, and he clenched his fists to keep from moving. “One way to be certain it won’t happen is for you to call the police instead of breaking in.”

  She gave his tie a last tug and released it. “I can’t do that, because the statute of limitations has expired and there’s nothing the cops can do.”

  “Samantha—”

  “No. I didn’t have to tell you anything about today, but I know you were worried, and I’m trying to do what’s right and not keep secrets. Sure I could call Viscanti and tell him I found the guy, but the fact is, I’m still not sure. I can think he has the pieces, and I can look into it, but I can’t go around accusing people without proof. I can’t.”

  “I understand that. But do you really think Joseph Viscanti expects you to go in with guns blazing and take back the museum’s property? Especially since the armor and swords technically belong to whoever’s had them for the last ten years?”

  “I don’t know what he expects. But somebody saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I know where your stuff is, now pay me’ doesn’t seem like it would satisfy anybody.”

  “Perhaps you should call him and find out precisely what he does expect. Especially since breaking and entering is illegal.”

  Samantha narrowed her eyes. “How about if I verify that Minamoto’s stuff is in that room, and I’ll take it from there? Figuratively take it, I mean.”

  “Why don’t I believe that?”

  His office door down the hallway opened. “Rick, ANDFA is ready to let the Humanity Project take on the overall supervision,” Tom said.

  “Right.” Richard backed away from Samantha, reluctant to turn away from her in case she decided his exit meant that he’d given in. “I assume you won’t be doing anything questionable while it’s still daylight?”

  She shrugged. “Probably not. I need to check out a couple of other things, anyway.”

  “I’m trusting you,” he said, knowing that wasn’t sufficient and hoping she would accept it until he had time to put together a more compelling argument. At least one of them hadn’t thought this all the way through, and he had the growing suspicion that it was he.

  Samantha blew out her breath as Rick vanished back into his office. What the hell was she supposed to do with something like “I’m trusting you”? Sit in a chair with her hands folded until he was free to chaperone her around the city? Fuck that.

  She pulled out her phone and dialed the Donner residence. A couple of rings later, Olivia picked up. “Donner house,” she said.

  “Hi, Livia. It’s Sam.”

  “Aunt Sam! Do you have any news for me? Our unit starts next week, and it’s going to be so lame without Anatomy Man.”

  “I have a few leads, honey, but I need to check a couple more things out first. In the meantime, is Mike there? I have a baseball question for him.”

  “Hold on a sec.” The sound became muffled, but Samantha could still make out the screech of “Mike!”

  Great. She’d been hoping he would be out, and that Olivia would volunteer the information of where he might be. Now what?

  “Sam?” Mike’s voice came. “What’s up?”

  “Not much. I’m still trying to find that anatomy model for Olivia’s class,” she improvised. “I was just wondering if maybe somebody you know had mentioned anything about it.”

  “You think it was kids?”

  “That’s my guess,” she said truthfully. “A prank or something. Somebody serious about stealing from the school would have taken computers or television monitors or something. Not just Anatomy Man.”

  “Wow. You’re pretty good at finding stuff then, aren’t you?”

  “I try. Have you heard anything?”

  “Not really.”

  She heard the lie in his voice, the hitch of his words, the shift in volume as he lowered his head to answer her. It was kind of reassuring, really; if he’d been hardcore, he wouldn’t have been as nervous or guilty as he obviously felt. “Okay. If you hear anything, would you give me a call? You don’t have to reveal any sources or anything. I just want to get it back in time for Livia’s unit.”

  “It might show up on its own or something. You know, if it was a prank, maybe.”

  “Well, that would make things a lot easier.” On everybody, though she didn’t say that aloud. The school might want somebody to punish, but that wasn’t her problem. A ten-year-old had asked her to get a model back. And so she would. “Thanks, Mike. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Bye, Sam.”

  Okay, did that mean that the Clark the Anatomy Man problem would take care of itself? That would be nice, but she didn’t have much time to wait and see whether Mike’s conscience or Jiminy Cricket or whatever it was would be his guide. A day. Tomorrow was Friday, so she could give him one day. And then she’d have to hunt him down and scare the location out of him—which she really didn’t want to do, because he was a kid.

  Kids had this aura around them that everything was okay and they were bulletproof, and she didn’t want to dispel that from Mike Donner. She only wished she’d had one of those auras when she’d been young. The idea of wrecking somebody else’s felt…icky.

  For a second longer she glared at Rick’s closed office door, then headed for the library. Rick had offered to have one of the upstairs sitting rooms or bedrooms made into a home office for her, but she had an office just two miles or so away, and according to at least one of her coworkers—currently missing—she didn’t spend enough time there as it was. The library worked just as well, and she liked the tall windows and the big work table.

  She snagged a couple of sheets of graph paper from a cabinet there and sat at the table to sketch a layout of Gabriel Toombs’s house as she remembered it. It wouldn’t be as slick as an actual blueprint, but since she had a deadline of next Wednesday to find the armor and swords, she didn’t have time to scam—or even legitimately request—one from the Palm Beach city planning offices.

  Mainly she wanted to figure out the best way to get into that room—and to be able to carry out sixty pounds of ancient armor and two very old samurai swords, if they happened to be in there. Much as she hated to admit it, she could probably use some help
on this one. Which could be a problem if Rick’s “I’m trusting you” was any indication.

  Stoney could probably be wrangled into volunteering, except that he still hadn’t called her, e-mailed her, faxed her, or left her a coded message in the Palm Beach Post or the New York Times. She’d said she wouldn’t start worrying until Friday, but that was a big fat lie. It was strange, but in the old days when she was busy pulling jobs and ducking the heat from the authorities, any of her allies disappearing for a couple of days wasn’t a big deal. Now, when things around her were calmer, when she wasn’t so focused on her own safety, she worried about Stoney’s. And Rick’s. And that of a few select other people.

  Her cell phone rang to the tune of Darth Vader’s theme. The Jellicoe Security office. Frowning, she pulled it free and hit the talk button. “Jellicoe.”

  “Miss Samantha,” Aubrey’s low drawl came. “We just received a fax from Ortiz with his notes from the Glass house review. You said you wanted to know when they arrived.”

  “How do they look?”

  “Like about ten thousand dollars’ worth of work.”

  In the good old days she would have sneezed at a ten-grand job. “Cool. Has he called?”

  “Yes. He told Cynthia we’d have an estimate for her tomorrow.”

  “Okay. I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”

  “I’ll be here, hoping you’re bringing a mocha frappaccino with you.”

  Samantha snorted. “Deal, if you’ll look at the sketches I’m doing of Toombs’s house.”

  “Why, I’d be delighted.”

  She dumped the phone back into her jeans pocket and rolled up the graph paper. On the way out to the garage she found Reinaldo and told him where she’d be in case Rick had doubts about his stupid trusting-her statement.

  A block down the street from her office she stopped in front of the always-busy Starbucks. Because of her own intense dislike of coffee she’d been reluctant to learn the nuances of ordering the stuff, but with Starbucks becoming the center of most peoples’ universe, the knowledge had already come in handy a couple of times. She requested a tall mocha frap, ignoring the looks and the mumblings of “It’s Samantha Jellicoe” from the other customers and the kids behind the counter.

  As she hopped back into the Bentley, a jet black Miata rolled by and made a right at the next corner. With all the traffic on Worth Avenue she wasn’t sure why she’d focused on that car, except that it was very shiny and it had driven past her pretty slowly. Convertible Miatas were pretty common in the environs of Palm Beach, even though they didn’t have the show-off sticker price of a good Mercedes or a Jag or a Bentley.

  She parked in the three-story garage next to her office building and went up the elevator to the Jellicoe Security suite in the far corner of the third floor. “Hi,” she said, walking into reception and handing over the cup of so-called coffee.

  “You are a diamond, Miss Samantha,” Aubrey said with a smile, closing his eyes as he took a sip.

  “Thanks. Where’s the fax?”

  “On your desk.”

  It took her twenty minutes to plug the specifications Ortiz had sent into the contract macro she and Aubrey had set up, customize where necessary, and print out two hard copies for Ortiz to pick up in the morning. That done, she stuffed them into a folder and brought it and the graph paper up front to Aubrey.

  “How close was I?” he asked, filing the folder and then clearing off his desk as she unrolled the graph paper.

  “Ten thousand, two hundred, and eighty-six dollars,” she returned, “and I’ll probably knock off the two eighty-six when she wants a discount for being a fellow member of SPERM.”

  “I’ve often thought I should join the Manatee Society,” Aubrey said with a chuckle.

  “The lunches are nice, and I do like the acronym.”

  “My thoughts exactly.” He sat forward in his chair. “What do we have here? You did this by hand?”

  “It’s a hobby.”

  “I see.” Aubrey glanced from the drawing to her. “Wow. What do you need from me?”

  “I’ve never seen the back of his house. Do you remember anything specific? Patio, pool, lawn furniture, flamingos?”

  “He has a pool, and a veranda that curves all along the back of the house about out to here,” he said, brushing a finger along her drawing.

  “What about trees and shrubs?”

  Aubrey looked up at her. “Are you going to break in?” he whispered. “I thought you didn’t see what you were looking for.”

  “I didn’t. I also didn’t see what was in that one room. I need to take a look.”

  “What if the things aren’t there?”

  If they weren’t, she was back to looking at the Picaults, and she’d have to admit that her instincts were so far off that any wealthy collectors of Japanese antiquities who lived in the eastern half of the United States were just as likely to have the armor. In other words, she was screwed and the Met was screwed and her future in item retrieval was screwed. “I guess I’ll face that if it happens,” she said aloud.

  He unexpectedly took her hand, squeezing her fingers in his larger ones. “I’ve known Wild Bill a lot longer than you have, Samantha,” he said in a tone more serious than she’d heard him use before. “There’s a reason why when he suggested that everybody call him Wild Bill, we all did. His money comes from the two construction companies he inherited from his father. And the rumor is that he inherited his father’s associates, as well.”

  Samantha frowned. “The mob?”

  “The mob, some pushy labor union guys—whoever they are, people just don’t cross him.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”

  “Before your visit was a legitimate one, and I was with you.”

  “Seriously, Aubrey, do you think you could…” She trailed off as he pulled his free hand out of his pocket, revealing a small, shiny, chrome-plated handgun. “Jeez. You had that with you?”

  “A gentleman always looks after the lady in his company,” he said in his soft drawl. “I may not know how you go about your business, but I know mine.”

  Samantha took a second to reassess the way she looked at Aubrey Pendleton. It would actually take longer than a second, but nobody got to catch her flat-footed—or at least looking that way. “So how often do you carry that around?” she asked, gesturing at his pocket as he slipped the pistol back inside.

  “There are occasions.” He smiled. “Usually I rely on my charm and good manners.”

  She snorted. Okay, there were things about him that she hadn’t realized, but nothing here made her want to change her initial opinion of him. “Both also lethal,” she commented.

  He inclined his head. “Thank you, my dear. Do you go in tonight?”

  “I’m not sure yet.” That kind of depended on Rick, and she didn’t want to admit that out loud. Or even to herself, really. Answering to somebody else, being accountable to them—whatever Dr. Phil might call it, she didn’t like it. “Stoney’s still supposed to get a little more background on Toombs for me, and I’m kind of hanging back for that.”

  “Speaking of Walter, he seems to be absent again today.”

  “Yeah, I figure he’s out sowing his wild oats somewhere.”

  “Miss Kim’s been calling. I’ve been telling her that he had to make an unexpected trip to New York to see his brother.”

  She hadn’t realized that Aubrey knew about Delroy. “That’s nice of you,” she said, smiling. “Unless Stoney’s trying to dump her—which would make him a big chicken, so I’m all for the making excuses thing and letting him face the music himself when he gets back.”

  “So what’s next?”

  Leaning in to sketch the layout of the terrace and the pool in Toombs’s backyard according to his recollections, Samantha took a deep breath. “Well, I’ve got a couple of pots on the stove, and now I need to see what starts boiling first.” And hope she had a mitt handy so she wouldn’t get burned.

  C
hapter 15

  Thursday, 8:24 p.m.

  “That was a good dinner,” Samantha said, wrapping her hand around Richard’s arm and leaning into him as they left Chez Jean-Pierre and walked back to the Jaguar. “Did you know they had all of those Dali and Picasso reproductions on the walls?”

  Of course she would know they were all reproductions. “I did. I thought you might appreciate them.”

  “You betcha. I liked the chicken breast more, though.”

  He kissed her hair. Whatever was running through that agile mind of hers, she seemed to be making an effort not to argue, and so for the moment he would be patient about it. “Are you sure you don’t want me to go back for more of the chocolate profiteroles? I could feed them to you in bed.”

  “That might be messy. And if I ate any more of those I’d be too hefty to get out of bed.”

  He pulled the passenger door open for her, but she didn’t move to get into the car. When he looked at her, Samantha’s gaze was down the street. “What?” he asked.

  “Do you know anybody who drives a shiny new black Miata?”

  “Not off hand. Why?”

  “I swear that’s the third time I’ve seen it today.”

  “This is a rather small community, especially in the off-season, and especially on the island here. There are only so many places a car can go in town.”

  She rolled her shoulders. “Right. Okay. Take me home. And it’s your turn to choose a movie.”

  “Excellent. The Guns of Navarone.”

  “You’re such a guy,” she said, chuckling.

  He didn’t know whether that was a compliment or not, but since she was smiling and she’d worn a gorgeous burgundy Vera Wang dress, he let it pass. They pulled out onto County Road, heading for Solano Dorado. “Does this mean you’re staying home for the evening?” he asked, keeping his gaze on the road.

  “I haven’t decided yet,” she returned, fiddling with the CD player in the dashboard. “Aubrey’s supposed to call and let me know if Toombs is going to the Mallorey thing on Saturday. If he is, that would be a better night to get in. If he’s not attending, then the sooner the better.”