In her office, Giulia set up pen and paper before picking up.
“Ms. Driscoll, I’ve heard so much about you. What can I help you with?”
Volubility and perkiness ran in Sidney’s family. Neil’s story was the opposite of the nuns’ experience.
“Remember the strip mall out toward Oakdale? It hadn’t been renovated since Elvis hit number one with ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ I had a core of loyal clientele, but I was squeaking by every month. Eagle called all twelve of us into a meeting and showed us what they wanted to turn the mall into. Then they offered us about three-quarters of the assessed value for our businesses.”
“Did you consider the offer fair?” Giulia wrote and talked at the same time.
“Most of us did. The antique shop and the yarn shop kibitzed, but their bank reps had long talks with them and they caved within a week.”
“Wait a second. Didn’t construction on the new build come to a screeching halt last spring?”
“I heard it did. Something about zoning restrictions. Eagle paid us sixty days after we signed the agreements, which is all I cared about. You might have heard rumors about them. Oh, and there was that investigation when the Attorney General for our fine commonwealth was up for reelection.”
Giulia allowed her voice to convey her smile. “Would you be implying the Attorney General’s motives weren’t pure?” She tore off a new sheet and wrote in big letters: AG investigation of ED.
His answering smile came through. “Perish the thought.”
When Giulia hung up from him, she drove to the coffee shop one block over from the convent. If there had been a morning rush, it was over. Two older men and one woman sat one per bistro table, scrolling through their phones. A thirty-something man behind the counter was wiping down the aerators.
“Welcome to the Coffee Break. What can I brew for you?” White lettering on his brown apron proclaimed: “Powered by caffeine.”
“A large dark roast with…” she scanned the syrup bottles. “I’ve never seen Baked Alaska syrup before.”
He smiled, revealing hockey teeth. “It’s my own creation. So are the Bananas Foster and Baklava.” His smooth brow furrowed. “I never noticed all my signature syrups begin with the letter B. My shrink is going to have a field day.”
“My assistant’s husband is a psychologist. I’ve picked up several useful terms. I’d like to try the Baked Alaska, please.”
The first sip demanded she close her eyes to appreciate the taste without distractions. “I will post a glowing review on Yelp when I get back to the office.”
The hockey teeth reappeared. “I appreciate the offer, but there isn’t much point. I’m not sure we’ll be here long enough for a review to make a difference.”
Giulia savored another sip. “Coffee this perfect deserves honesty in return. I’m a private investigator looking into Eagle Developers’ buyout of the neighborhood.”
A humorless laugh. “The nuns in the next block and my place are the last holdouts. Eagle’s people are strong-arming me to sell. The little old nun who walked her dog at dark o’clock every morning said they’re getting the same treatment.”
One of the men set his cup and saucer on the dish cart and left. The other began a too-loud conversation on his phone: “I don’t care what she said yesterday.”
Giulia leaned on the counter. “I’m sorry to tell you she was found dead late Tuesday night.”
He nodded. “I know. The police were on the stoop when I opened on Wednesday. Wanted to know if I’d seen anyone suspicious, heard anything out of the ordinary, the usual.” He tossed the towel beneath the counter. “She was a fun old lady. Her scenery-chewing dog was the star of the neighborhood.”
The one-sided conversation at the corner table heated up. “She’d sell her mother’s organs for the chance to go viral. Triple-check anything she says. Then check it again.”
“I wouldn’t want to interview with him,” the owner whispered. “One applicant lied on their resume two years ago and now he says there isn’t an honest person in the state.”
“And people think only bartenders get their customers’ woes poured into their ears.” She sipped again. “Not even an unwanted public conversation can detract from this coffee.”
“You give me hope. Eagle upped their game last week and I’m tired of fighting. The neighborhood was emptying out slowly but surely even before Eagle swooped in.” More hockey teeth. “See what I did there? I don’t have the money for this month’s mortgage payment or to renew the service contract on my steel mistress here.” He patted the coffee machine.
“I’m sorry your business won’t make it.” Giulia inclined her head toward the cell phone over-sharer. “Any objections if I wash his mouth out with soap?”
“His vocabulary has been circling the drain since I opened, but he’s one of my most loyal customers.”
“I’ll close my ears. What will you do next?”
“Spend a few years working for The Man. Eagle’s offer plus what I’ll net for selling the equipment and fixtures will pay off most of my debts. My goal is to have my own place again in five years.”
The woman glared at the over-sharer and left without bringing her cup to the dirty dish caddy.
“I’m not sure what else I can tell you about Eagle. I don’t like them much, but their offer is fair. Do you know what the nuns plan to do?”
“They’ve dug in their heels for now.”
“Good for them.” He made a wry face. “In principle, I mean. In reality, what chance do any of us have against the Eagle juggernaut?”
The over-sharer set his cup and plate in the caddy and walked past them, still on the phone. “Don’t waste your time on him. Trust me. I golf with his last employer.”
Giulia threw up one hand in defeat. “I should learn to golf.”
“Business clichés exist for a reason. You know what I’ll miss the most? Talking to the little old nun while I opened up every morning and closed every night. They’re all living below the poverty line, so I invented a discount smoothie for her. She refused to take a freebie. I’d fill a medium cup halfway with the day’s flavor and charge her a buck fifty. We pretended she was my unofficial taste tester.”
Three old men entered the shop together.
“Here’s my card.” Giulia passed one across the counter. “Let me know when you’re in business for yourself again. I have to try your other syrups.”
Twenty-Three
Giulia sat in her car to record a voice memo of the conversation, and to give herself some quality alone time with her coffee. Frank called as she dictated her summary thoughts.
“Hey, babe. How did you make out at middle school NASCAR this morning?”
“Thanks to my aggressive driving, I only committed two venial sins. The other drivers will need to go to confession as well.”
His laughter mixed with his partner’s.
“Dear, please tell me when you have me on speaker.”
“Right. Sorry.”
“Sorry, Giulia,” his partner said. “Make Frank pay for it later.”
“Please don’t corrupt my wife.”
Giulia said in a thoughtful voice, “No one’s tried to corrupt me…yet.”
Nash said, “That thumping sound you hear is your husband beating his head against the dashboard.”
“Dear, before you knock yourself unconscious, why did you call?”
A long-suffering sigh. “Autopsy results. There’s no evidence to contradict what we all thought. She died of a heart attack. It might take an act of God to discover proof the attack was caused by an attempted mugging. However…”
Giulia opened the Notes function and typed while he talked. “There’s a however?”
“When I interviewed the nuns yesterday morning, I asked about the dead nun’s habits. Shut up, Nash. I’m not making a joke. She wal
ked the dog early and late every day no matter the weather. She never changed her pattern, which could give weight to a planned attack.”
“A desperate junkie?”
“For example. Everyone knew the nuns were barely scraping by, so the chance she had more than ten bucks on her was slim.”
Nash’s voice: “When you gotta have a fix, you gotta have a fix.”
“How desperate do you have to be to think a little old nun is going to have enough cash for heroin, meth, or crack?” Giulia sipped coffee, recognizing the irony of her own obsession. “Have there been any similar muggings in the area?”
“That would be the however. Eleven in the three-block radius in the past eight weeks. The neighborhood ought to have a poor return on investment for crime, but the statistics indicate there’s something we don’t know yet.”
“You know the nuns think someone from Eagle Developers did it to scare them into selling.”
Nash started his own phone conversation in a low voice. Frank took Giulia off speaker. “They told me so at great length.”
“What does your gut say?”
“It says you make a great breakfast.”
“Frank.”
“Okay. Chances it was a random junkie or an organized band of junkies: Ninety-five percent. Chances it was Eagle: Five percent.”
“So low?”
“Yes.”
Giulia tapped her steering wheel. “I’m not going to argue with your experience.”
“But you’re not happy.”
“More like I was allowing the client to influence my ideas. I know better.” She set the coffee in the cup holder. “I think it’s time to lie.”
Twenty-Four
At twelve fifteen Giulia locked herself in a bathroom stall on the first floor of Cottonwood’s biggest glass office building. Every business with an excellent opinion of itself fought for space in the five-story reflector mirror. Eagle Developers occupied one-quarter of the top floor.
Before Giulia could don her persona of web reporter, she had to work magic with safety pins. Her navy-blue interview suit, the only suit she owned, did not accommodate little Zlatan. A trip to a department store’s maternity section could no longer be postponed. She opened the pack of safety pins she’d bought en route and hooked four together. When she pinned them to the waistband of the skirt and turned it around, she could almost sit. She added two more and tried again. There. The skirt fell in unattractive lines, but she could breathe.
“Zlatan, you are cramping my style.”
The baby didn’t even kick in response.
She stood at the bathroom mirror to refresh her makeup. First she reapplied bubblegum-pink lipstick and checked her pink-glitter eye shadow and overdone mascara. Next she took a plastic baggie from her pocket and inserted narrow rolls of cotton against her bottom gum lines. Last she pulled her blonde wig back with a pink band and set heavy-framed glasses with clear lenses on her nose. Thank you hipsters for this useful trend.
The elevator repeated the solid glass theme, this time with spiderweb-thin gold lines meandering through the glass. The gold threads in the maroon carpet of the fifth-floor hall led her feet to Eagle Developers’ main door, also glass.
The large open space accommodated three desks with enough room in the center to drop Driscoll Investigations’ entire office. A discreet printer stand was nestled behind the desk furthest form the door.
As expected, Giulia’s safety-pinned skirt tried to drag her bodily out of the room in humiliation at the sight of the clothes of the two women and one man at the desks. But after surviving the spectacular Dahlia dress creations last month, Giulia would never again be intimidated by designer garments.
“Welcome to Eagle Developers.” The receptionist’s glasses were the real thing.
“Good afternoon. I’m Maria Falcone. I have a twelve fifteen appointment with Mr. Eagle.” For this character, she pitched her voice a little higher in addition to the vocal distortion of the cotton rolls.
The receptionist typed and read her screen. “Yes. Mr. Eagle is finishing up with his eleven thirty.”
The door facing Giulia opened as she spoke. A young female photographer with a real camera, the kind with detachable lenses, exited with a bearded man pocketing a micro cassette recorder.
A round man shorter than Giulia was shaking their hands. Bald on top, a brown ponytail reached halfway down his back. “Thanks for coming. Always happy to talk to the press. No bad publicity, that’s my motto.”
“We’ll let your office know when the article will run.” The reporter didn’t pause on his way out. Giulia caught him wiping his hand on the shirt beneath his jacket.
Eagle advanced on Giulia, hand outstretched. “Come on in. Ms. Falcone, right? Perfect timing, perfect. We’ll treat the local interview I just finished as dress rehearsal. I’m Victor Eagle, of course, CEO of Eagle Developers. This is my right-hand woman, Barbara Beech. Barb, this is Ms. Falcone from the online division of USA Today.”
Next to Beech, Eagle could’ve posed for Mr. Potato Head. This though Beech was an inch shorter than Eagle. Her upswept platinum hair gave the illusion of height. Her shadow plaid suit had the indefinable lines of expert personal tailoring. Her eyes, like Eagle’s, were blue. But hers were was the color of glaciers. His were Smurf-skin blue.
Despite the glacier, Beech’s welcoming smile reached all the way to her eyes. “Good afternoon. We’re pleased to meet you.”
Giulia held up her phone, already recording. “Thank you for fitting me in. To be honest, I don’t actually work for USA Today yet. I’m still a freelancer. I’m pitching a series on influential women in up-and-coming businesses to break into USA Today. My photos won’t be as perfect as the ones from the last photographer, but I’m a solo operator.” The cotton rolls were sucking all the moisture from her mouth but she didn’t dare ask for a glass of water. For all she knew, the rolls would absorb the liquid and floomp her cheeks into twice their size.
Eagle beckoned her to the wall behind his simpler than expected desk. “We all started out somewhere.” The small framed photograph showed a younger Eagle in front of a real estate agent’s sign—Salesman of the Month: Victor Eagle. “This is me at age eighteen. First real job. Forced to find one because I had to get married to the ex, if you know what I mean. But I wasn’t going to let one mistake sabotage my life plan. In six years I opened my own branch. Five years after that we were the top sellers in the state. By the time the ex and I called it quits, I’d saved enough to start Eagle Developers. While putting two kids through Catholic school, I might add.” He walked her past a series of photographs arranged like an artist’s gallery show. “Here’s my favorite: Barb and me on the day we formed our partnership.”
Beech stepped into Eagle’s performance as though on cue. “I was managing my own satellite office for the competition. Victor approached me because I was cutting into his sales.”
A belly laugh from Eagle. “I will categorically deny those words ever came out of my mouth.”
“If it makes you happy, Victor.” The look they shared indicated a level of comfort seldom achieved between two alpha personalities. “Victor proved his salesmanship when he convinced me we could take over the world as partners. I sold my office and we set up shop together.”
Eagle winked at Giulia. “More shops than one, if you get my meaning. But you know what? We discovered we’re better in the boardroom than the bedroom. So here we are, twelve years after we started our joint venture, poised to make Cottonwood the jewel of Pennsylvania.”
Beech’s wry expression also conveyed affection. “It’s true. I believe the current term for it is ‘adulting.’”
At first Giulia wondered what type of reaction they wanted from their unnecessary revelation. There was no profit in telling intimate details to a nobody freelancer. “I’ve seen a lot of your redevelopment work. You know how to design li
ving spaces people want to own.”
Eagle picked up his phone. “Amy, write this down: We create living spaces you’ll want to own.” He hung up. “Great slogan. Think of this interview when you see it in our ads.”
Giulia played along. “I won’t even ask for royalties.”
She catalogued their body language. They stood too close in this day of no physical contact whatsoever in the workplace. They slipped into the occasional “couples” gesture: A hand touching an elbow. Beech straightening Eagle’s collar. Much better to explain their level of intimacy outright than let Giulia speculate à la The Scoop.
“I will ask what first gave you the idea to focus on older, run-down neighborhoods.”
Eagle grinned like a carnival barker. “Would you believe me if I told you it was my dear, sweet grandmother?” When Giulia gave him an “I didn’t fall off a turnip truck yesterday” look, he held out both hands, still grinning. “You can’t blame me for trying out heartwarming copy on a cub reporter.”
Beech cut in. “It was my ex-mother-in-law. She could have been on the Hoarders TV show. Of the many reasons I divorced my ex, the way he ignored his mother was in the top five. The charmer got in a fight with an entire motorcycle gang about a year after we split and somehow his Dynasty Green 1964 Mustang failed to negotiate a turn in the West Virginia mountains. His lawyers tracked me down for the reading of the will, and when his mother showed up, I saw the equivalent of a leprechaun riding a unicorn—a lawyer rendered speechless.”
Giulia murmured “Oh, wow,” which served its purpose of encouragement.
“The poor woman looked like Miss Havisham’s skeleton and kept demanding the keys to her son’s house.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Two days later my ex-brother-in-law called and begged me to meet him at his mother’s house. Half the houses on the street were boarded up. None of the others had a complete set of windows. This was a neighborhood once known for its antebellum-style architecture.”
Eagle appeared not to like being out of the spotlight for too long. “She called me. I contacted some of my people and we swooped to the rescue. After the chaos she shared her inspiration: Buy up these blocks and turn them into prime living spaces again.” He flung his arms wide. “And Eagle Developers began its journey to greatness. No, to legendary status.”
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