Nick raised his gaze to hers. “Is it really necessary to drag that to the breakfast table?”
She shrugged. “Probably not. But wouldn’t I feel stupid if Hubby’s thugs broke in here and I’d left it over by the couch.” She considered how to carry both the pistol and mug, and still keep her blanket on. She set the mug back on the counter and turned her back on Nick to wind the blanket around her torso, tucking the corner in beneath her left armpit. Then she turned back for both the weapon and coffee. “I’ll go get ready.” Sipping at her coffee, she headed for the bathroom.
“You’ve got thirty-three minutes.”
Without looking back, she made a small circling motion with the barrel of the gun to indicate she’d heard.
“I mean it, Daisy. You’re not gonna make me late.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
She was out in fifteen minutes, dressed, teeth brushed, and her wet hair sporting fresh comb tracks where she’d slicked it back from her face. She didn’t know why women got such a bad rap. Reggie and the rest of the guys she hung out with took much longer to get ready than she did. Of course, to be fair, most of them were woman wannabes.
She’d taken note of Nick’s silk-blend T-shirt, flannel slacks, and unstructured linen jacket, and she carried her gold wool blazer to dress up her own jeans, boots, and white T-shirt. Before donning it, she strapped a knife on her forearm and tucked her gun into its inside holster.
“You’re a regular walking arsenal, aren’t you?”
“I like to be prepared, just on the off chance that telling the bad guys to quit being such big ole meanies doesn’t do the trick.” Then she added sincerely, “It really would be better if you didn’t go out. Are you positive your appointments can’t be postponed?”
“Most of them. But I did start rescheduling the few that can be, while you were showering.” He picked up his keys. “Are you ready to go?”
“Are we taking your car?” At his nod, she said, “Then let me grab one more thing.”
“Let me guess—you forgot your bazooka.”
“You’re such a comic, Coltrane.” She ran to the bedroom and dug something out of one of her bags. Returning to the living room, she removed a velcro strap from around the tool’s two parts and screwed them together, leaving her with a long pole with an angled mirror on one end. As Nick hefted a large duffel bag, she raced to squeeze ahead of him, brushing up against him when he didn’t immediately give way. She tried to ignore the fact that for someone who led such a soft life, he felt awfully hard beneath his nice clothing. “Let me go ahead of you.”
“Hey, by all means, doll face, ladies first.”
“It’s not the gender aspect we have to consider here, Coltrane; it’s the professional.” Hand on her gun, she stepped out onto the stair’s tiny landing and scanned the yard and the drive, paying particular attention to the shadows. “Okay. It’s all clear.”
Nick came out, hauling his bag. “I feel like an idiot.”
“Well, don’t. How’s your arm today?”
He clenched and unclenched his left hand. “It feels stronger.”
“Yeah?” She started down the steps. “Wanna arm wrestle?”
“I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer.”
“Afraid I’ll pin it to the table, huh?”
“You’re really an obnoxious little twit, you know that, Blondie?” He practically tromped on her heels as they entered the garage.
She stopped short and shot out her arm to keep him from barreling past her as she peered into the shadows. His diaphragm felt muscular and warm, and she was glad to drop her arm a moment later. “Okay, which car is yours?”
“The Porsche.”
“Figures. Let me check it out and then we can go.” She swept the mirrored end of her pole beneath the car from stem to stern.
“You’re looking for a bomb?”
“Yes.” She pulled the mirrored section out from beneath the vehicle and broke down the tool, tying the parts back together with its velcro strap. “Pop the hood.”
He did as requested, and she went over the engine compartment, then climbed in the car and leaned to look beneath the dash. Finally she straightened up in her seat. “Okay, it’s clean.”
“Holy shit,” he muttered as he fit the key in the ignition.
She had to grin at his disgusted expression. “You know, there’s one sure way to avoid this sort of thing in the future, Coltrane.”
He gave her a wary look. “I’m terrified to ask.” Several seconds of silence ticked by. “Okay, what the hell. How do I avoid this sort of thing in the future?”
“The next time you find a married woman who thinks you’re just cuter than a bug’s ear? Keep your pants zipped.”
Mo waved goodbye to her clients, locked the key box on the Pacific Heights mansion she’d just shown them, and walked down to her car. She opened the door, then simply stood for a moment with her hand on the car’s roof, staring down the hill at the planetarium and the fog-enshrouded bay beyond.
You had no business butting in, she heard Reid’s voice for what seemed like the hundredth time. You should have left it the hell alone.
God, how she wished she had. But, no, she’d had to jump right in and solve Reid’s problem for him—never mind that the manner in which she’d done so was criminal and he would certainly not thank her for it if he knew. And that, of course, was another problem entirely. Perhaps even the biggest problem.
She should have told him what she’d done. She’d meant to tell him, but then her pride had reared its ugly head and she’d let him walk out of the study without trying to make him understand. No, she’d done worse than that. She’d driven him out.
I want to be treated like a contributing member of this family, not some incompetent teenager who needs his mom to get him out of a jam.
“Oh, shut up, Reid,” she muttered, and climbed into the car and shut the door. She didn’t do that. Did she?
It was true she worried about money. Dad had kept them on the bare edge of solvency when she was growing up, despite the opulent lifestyle of the circles they moved in. And that was a worry Reid, with the weight of the Cavanaugh banking fortune behind him, simply did not comprehend. Perhaps she had nagged him, but he’d been so damn cavalier about tossing his trust fund away on anyone with a sad story to tell. That was the reason she’d started up Cavanaugh Realty, and she would not apologize for needing the security.
If he’d truly cared about her, he wouldn’t have put her in that position in the first place. But his response, anytime her fear had caused her to nag him about fiscal responsibility, had been to withdraw into his own pursuits. It had left her with no choice but to hone her own skills to the highest level she could attain. Only then could she be certain of never again having to worry about keeping a scant step ahead of the creditors.
Mo laughed without humor. That was pretty ironic, considering. Because just look where her much-lauded efficiency had gotten her now.
She reached for the ignition key but then sat back in the driver’s seat without turning on the car. Looking out through the passenger window, she watched as the fog over the bay began to burn off and weak spring sunshine broke through.
She and Reid had drifted so far apart that the strength of her desire to settle his debt had caught her by surprise. The truth was, though, she couldn’t stand the thought of anything bad ever happening to him.
She made a rude sound deep in her throat. Somehow she doubted he would consider having his name dragged through the mud a good thing. She really did have to tell him what she had done to pay off the debt, before the warrant for her arrest was delivered to their door.
But not just yet.
The couple to whom she’d just shown the mansion had been very enthusiastic about it. She would hang on a couple of days longer, and maybe, if she was very lucky indeed, the need to tell Reid how badly she’d messed up would become immaterial. Please, God, let it be immaterial. Let me never have to tell him how fo
olish I’ve been. Just two or three days more—that wasn’t so much to ask.
Then, if she couldn’t come up with the money, she’d tell him everything.
J. Fitzgerald Douglass admired his reflection in the mirror. His steel-gray hair was barbered to perfection and his cheeks shone with the closeness of his shave. He tweaked the silk handkerchief in his breast pocket until it was arranged just so, then gave his matching tie a minute adjustment. Not until he was completely satisfied did he close the cupboard door that housed the mirror and turn to greet the two men awaiting his attention. Their presence displeased him.
“The agreement when I hired you was the same as always: that you would contact me by phone,” he said. “Don’t come here again. If it’s necessary to meet, we can always make arrangements to do so elsewhere.” His glance traveled beyond them. “However, as long as you are here, where’s Jacobsen?”
“We left him keepin’ an eye on Coltrane’s crib.”
“Excellent. What do you have to report?”
The bigger of the two, who was built along the lines of a Sherman tank, offered, “Some blond babe entered the estate yesterday. She came on foot and doesn’t look like the type to be visitin’ the main house. We think she moved in with Coltrane.”
“I don’t care about his sex life, Autry. Where’s my film?”
“We came up empty on the darkroom, Mr. Douglass. And someone called the cops before we could make Coltrane talk. He went to the hospital, though.”
J. Fitzgerald took a seat behind his desk. He did not invite his employees to do likewise. “Is he still there?”
“No, sir. He’s back home. We haven’t been able to get a bead on him this morning, though, ’cuz it’s become impossible to hang around his place. The people at the main house seem to be on the lookout for outsiders loitering around the joint.”
J. Fitzgerald looked from one thick-necked man to the other. “And it never occurred to either of you, I suppose, to set up surveillance at the cross streets on either end of the block.”
“Huh?”
He suppressed a sigh. There was no percentage in getting angry. It wasn’t as if he’d hired them for their brains.
They had damn well better do the job he’d assigned them, however, and do it soon. He wasn’t about to let the fruits of what he’d labored a lifetime to achieve be spoiled by one impoverished blue-blooded photographer.
He’d found out some things about Coltrane since he’d hired these two Sunday afternoon. The most important thing he’d discovered was that he may have been a bit precipitous in bringing out the dogs. That was unfortunate, but it was too late to do anything about it now.
The die was cast. Coltrane might have destroyed the negatives Sunday night if he’d been left alone, but he wouldn’t do so now. “All right, here’s what you do.” He outlined a circumspect method in which his hired guns could keep tabs on Coltrane without being observed. “Do whatever it takes,” he said as he dismissed them. “I want those photos.”
5
AN accident and men working on a gas main tangled the traffic between Pacific Heights and Nob Hill, so what would normally be a five- or ten minute drive turned into nearly thirty. They arrived at Nick’s first appointment fifteen minutes late.
Daisy could tell Nick was tense about it, but although she was normally a fool for punctuality herself, she wasn’t particularly stressed. Of course, it was his client and not her own, and that made all the difference in the world. She grinned. In any case, the horn-happy drivers had been left behind, no one appeared to be tailing them, and she decided with mellow optimism that a fifteen minute delay was hardly likely to make or break anybody’s day.
She was wrong.
Nick had mentioned while they sat in traffic that the Morrisons were scheduled for a reshoot. And the second thing Mrs. Morrison let them know, after her maid had ushered them into the morning room, was that she wasn’t happy about it. Her first complaint was for their tardiness.
“You’re late,” she said before Nick and Daisy had even cleared the door. Dressed with yacht-crew sportiness, her breezy look was belied by the scowl marring her elegant brow. “I cannot abide tardiness; I find it utterly unconscionable.” She gave Nick’s faultlessly turned out appearance a displeased up-and-down. “Perhaps if you spent a little less time blow-drying your hair and fussing with your wardrobe, Mr. Coltrane, you might actually arrive for your appointments at the time you specified.”
Daisy felt her jaw drop. Though she had her own bones to pick with Nick, not even she would suggest vanity was one of his shortcomings. He did have gorgeous hair and a sense of style that was his alone, but she had never seen him spend an excess moment in front of the mirror.
“I hired you in the first place, sir, because Maria Beauchamp said you’re not only the best, but the most professional photographer in San Francisco County.” The look Mrs. Morrison gave him was too well-bred to be called a sneer, but it conveyed her displeasure equally well. “Professional is the last attribute I would ascribe to you. We were forced to rearrange three busy lives in order to reschedule something we had taken the time to do once already—and now you’ve kept us waiting on top of it.” She turned a disapproving eye on Daisy. “And who is this? The last time you came by yourself.”
Nick paused in the act of pulling his equipment from his duffel. “This is Daisy Parker,” he said with easy pleasantness. “She agreed to give me a hand today to help expedite your sitting. Daisy, this is Mrs. Helena Morrison, her husband Herbert, and their son Donald.”
Mama, Papa, and Baby bear. Except Donald wasn’t really a baby. He was probably thirteen or fourteen years old—old enough to look mortified by his mother’s snotty behavior. Daisy gave him points, however, for not commenting on it. Most boys that age would have been sitting there whining, “Maaawm,” in counterpoint to every embarrassing sentence out of their mother’s mouth.
Nick explained about the traffic, but Mrs. Morrison clearly wasn’t interested in his excuses. Daisy half expected to hear him tell her to kiss off, but instead he just kept blathering on and on.
Helena Morrison suddenly turned her fish-eye on Daisy, her gaze lingering on her hair—tendrils of which Daisy could feel springing erect as they dried. “And is she exempt from dressing professionally for some reason?”
Unlike Nick, Daisy didn’t feel like sitting back and taking it. She stepped forward. “You might consider being a little more consistent, ma’am. It’s difficult to track your logic when with one breath you accuse Nick of vanity because he dresses nicely, then—”
“Say he’s a fool for having a friend who won’t take a minute on her own appearance?” the older woman finished coolly.
“Precisely.” She glanced down at her T-shirt, jeans, and blazer, then met Mrs. M’s disapproving glare head-on. “I’m clean and I’m decently covered. What gripe, exactly, do you have with that?”
“Daisy, don’t.” Nick’s sudden grip on her forearm was firm, and he held her back as he stepped forward.
Her first inclination was to yank free of his hold. She refused to give Mrs. Morrison the satisfaction of seeing her shake him off, though, and besides, there was something in his eyes when he looked at her, some sort of sadness, as he put himself between the two women, that managed to defeat her ire. She stood quietly within his grasp.
Without releasing her, Nick turned to Helena. “I am sorry about the necessity of making you repeat the sitting, Mrs. Morrison,” he said gently. “But as I mentioned on the phone, my darkroom was broken into Sunday night, and all the work that was still in progress from last week was ruined.”
“And why would anyone want to destroy anything as insignificant as a family portrait?”
“There’s nothing insignificant about a Nicholas Coltrane photograph,” he said with quiet arrogance. “All I can tell you is that it was an act of vandalism. I doubt the vandals even looked at what they were destroying.”
“Hmph,” was all she had to say, but it was loaded with skeptici
sm and Daisy marveled at Nick’s forbearance. She wouldn’t have been nearly so polite if their positions had been reversed. The woman was a battleax. Not only did she insult his work, but it was ludicrous to think the trashing of his darkroom was something over which Nick had the least control. Beyond perhaps staying away from married women in the first place. But that, as she’d been reminded often enough, was not up to her to judge.
“Having to redo an entire week’s worth of work for free isn’t exactly the best use of his time, either, ma’am,” she heard herself say. Nick’s hand had slid down to her wrist and he squeezed it in warning, but she added, “This truly is an unfortunate imposition on everyone involved.” Then she gently extricated her arm from his hold.
Helena pinned her in place with cool blue eyes. “As you say, young woman. But this sort of thing doesn’t happen in my neighborhood, I can tell you.”
Daisy laughed; she couldn’t help it. “Pacific Heights is hardly the slums, Mrs. Morrison. And as someone who spent four years as a police officer, please believe me when I tell you that crime happens in every neighborhood. I have yet to see one that’s exempt.”
The woman looked pointedly at her watch. “May we begin sometime before the sun sets?” she demanded. “I have a twelve forty-five appointment.”
Well, hell, Daisy thought in disgust. What a shame if you had to skip a fitting for your newest gown. She wondered why the woman didn’t simply reschedule, if an extra fifteen minutes was such a hassle.
She wondered, too, how Nick would get anything remotely usable when one of his subjects was so obviously hacked off.
She seriously underestimated him, however. He talked quietly to the Morrisons and used an understated sort of charm to relax them. The males loosened up first. Then, when Nick started talking about the way he could touch up certain portions of today’s photographs that would make them just as good as what he’d taken last week, Helena, too, relaxed.
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