Nobody But You

by Julie Kenner

  “So write this to support yourself while you’re working on your novel.”

  Actually, he’d thought about that. With Millie’s property taxes pending and her creditors circling their wagons, his savings account was already dwindling away. And unless he got the IRS off his back, it was going to dwindle away into oblivion.

  But true crime wasn’t the way to go. Hell, if he was going to do that, he might as well go back to work full-time. And he’d rather be broke than tied to a desk job—or worse, covering the city beat.

  “Won’t work,” he said to Marva. “I can’t just make up a crime. I have to get out there and find one no one else has written about. That takes time and energy, neither of which I have right now. That’s why the agency is perfect. It inspires me, but it doesn’t drain me.” No, it only drained his bank account.

  “I’ll never understand you. You say you need money and yet you turned your back on a perfectly good career.”

  “I’m not turning my back on anything. I’m grabbing an opportunity. I need to know if I can make it writing fiction.” He twirled a pencil in his fingers. “If I get desperate, I can fall back on true crime.” He sighed. “And if I’m really desperate, I’ll go get a job that brings in a regular salary. Hell, I’ve got a master’s in journalism. If I have to, I’ll use it.” The pencil snapped in two and he grimaced, dropping the pieces to the desktop. “But I’m not desperate yet.”

  Marva snorted and took a deep breath, probably to tell him why he was desperate but just didn’t know it. Fortunately, the call waiting buzzed and David took the opportunity to hang up, leaving Marva alone in midtown Manhattan, frowning at her phone and cursing her problem client.

  “Anderson,” he said, clicking the switchhook. No voice greeted him, just the steady whine of a fax machine. He flipped the switch, set down the receiver, and waited for the miracle of modern technology to do its thing.

  In less than five minutes, he was holding Finn’s fax. Apparently old Albert had delusions of grandeur. His undergrad grades sucked. Of course, considering how much Al had charmed Jacey, David had the feeling that Al had some pretty sharp street smarts.

  The only issue now was where to look next.

  Fortunately, since David had the guy’s address, that wasn’t too tricky a question. But there was still the whole Jacey thing. Would she even want to pursue the guy once she knew he’d lied about being a Harvard grad?

  He reached for the phone, feeling surprisingly gleeful that old Al was shaping up to be a schmuck. Not fair, not rational, but there you had it.

  Two rings. Three. Then, “Hi. You’ve reached Tasha and Jacey. We’re either screening our calls, or we’re not here. Leave a message and maybe you’ll find out.”

  He rolled his eyes as the long beep sounded, then hung up. He hated cutesy messages.

  After a few seconds, he picked up the phone again. He needed to tell her the news about Al. For all he knew, that would be the end of it. David would be done with the case, done with Jacey, and, thankfully, Millie’s matchmaking would end before it began.

  Of course, if she wanted him to pull the plug, he’d need to find another client. Or sell an article. Anything to bring in some cash. So maybe the thing to do was go give Jacey the news in person. That way, if she wanted to give up the search, he’d be there to talk her out of it.

  The phone in his hand started squawking, followed by the high-pitched prerecorded message, “If you’d like to make a call…” He hung up, scowling at his own train of thought. On the one hand, he wanted Jacey out of his life. On the other, he wanted her to keep him on the case—and that meant keeping her around.

  A damned disturbing proposition. The woman was a menace. Sure, her red hair and freckles were cute in a little-girl-lost sort of way, but the woman had some serious screws loose. Poor Al was about to get saddled with a marriage-minded female he’d only spent a long weekend with. If that wasn’t every man’s nightmare, David didn’t know what was.

  Still, David needed the dough, and that meant he needed the case. Bottom line? He needed Jacey—but only for the money.

  The band around his chest loosened just a tad. He’d go see her, he’d explain about Al, and if she wanted to cut him loose, he’d do his best to talk her out of it.

  Finally with a plan, he dug through the papers, pens, and miscellaneous junk on his desktop searching for his keys, finding them under a T-shirt that he kept forgetting to throw in the wash. Grabbing them up, he headed for the door, and was halfway to the stairs before he realized he was still only wearing a towel.

  Well, damn.

  Jacey stared at the little puddle of water forming under the kitchen sink, fascinated with the pattern growing on the floor. “I don’t know. Maybe we should bang on it with a hammer. That’s what my mom always did.”

  “Did it work?” Tasha asked.

  Jacey scooted backward, somehow managing to get both the butt and the knees of her grungy sweatpants completely soaked. When she was out from under the cabinet, she rocked back on her heels to look at her friend. “Not once. But we moved so often we learned to live with leaks.”

  “Great. This is just great.” Tasha waved her portable curling iron through the air. “I have to meet Bob in less than an hour and I can’t go because our apartment is about to float away.”

  “So go. I’ll stay here and wait for Mr. Lowenstein.”

  “Oh, sure. It’ll be Christmas by the time you hear from him.” They’d left over a dozen messages on the apartment manager’s answering machine. So far, no sign of the man. “Besides, aren’t you driving with me? Or did you get Lucy fixed?”

  “No, she’s still in the shop. But I don’t have to be at the store until six.” Even though she was now gainfully employed in accountingland, her job didn’t start until Monday, and she wouldn’t get paid for two more weeks. In the meantime, her bank account was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by her serious lack of income over the last twenty-nine years.

  So when her friend Gregory had begged her to fill in for a sick salesclerk, Jacey had been more than happy to agree. Gregory owned a studio resale shop—a used clothing store that only stocked outfits that had been worn by the actors in various movies or television programs. The place was relaxed and fun and since Jacey had spent weeks there designing and painting the mural behind the cash register—and occasionally filling in for the sales staff—she knew the routine inside and out.

  Tasha bent over at the waist and fluffed her curls. “If you don’t have to be there until six, why were you planning to ride with me?”

  “I was just going to bum around on the Promenade until I went to work,” she said. “But you go ahead. I’ll wait for Lowenstein, and if he doesn’t show, I’ll call a plumber.” She shrugged. “No big deal.”

  Tasha looked up, one hand still buried in a mass of blonde hair. “But how are you going to get there?”

  A good question. The tread on Lucy’s tires was getting thin, and she’d dropped the car off at Pep Boys on her way home from David Anderson’s. “I’ll take a taxi,” she said. “That’s what I always do when Lucy’s in the shop.”

  “To Santa Monica? That’ll cost a fortune.”

  “Will you just go?” She made a shooing motion. “Unless we want to wear galoshes every time we cook, I don’t think we have a choice.”

  Tasha scowled at the sink and the steady trickle of water dripping onto the ceramic tile floor. “Okay. But let me pay you back for half the taxi fare.” She aimed a stern look in Jacey’s direction.

  Jacey crossed her heart. “I promise,” she said, having no intention of doing any such thing. The doorbell rang, and Jacey held up her hands in victory. “See? Lowenstein got our messages. Go finish getting dressed. If we’re lucky, he can fix it right away and I can still go with you.”

  Tasha looked her up and down. “Hopefully we’ll have time for you to change. It may be a secondhand store, but I don’t think that’s what Gregory had in mind.”

  Jacey ju
st rolled her eyes, then slid past Tasha into the living room. She wiped her hands on her flannel, paint-splattered Winnie-the-Pooh button-down, then pulled open the door. “Thank you so much for coming. We’ve—”

  She stopped midsentence. That was so not Mr. Lowenstein. David Anderson was standing right there, filling the entire doorframe, a pile of mail tucked under one arm as he flipped through a Pottery Barn catalog.

  He smiled, and Jacey clamped her mouth shut. What the hell was he doing there?

  “No problem at all,” David said, then brushed past her to come inside.

  “Do you mind?” she said tartly as she pulled the catalog out of his hand and reached for the rest of the mail, hoping it didn’t include anything too embarrassing—like one of Tasha’s sex toy catalogs.

  “Not at all. By the way, your electric bill is overdue.” He aimed a wicked grin in her direction and her heart started beating faster. She told herself it was because of Al. Surely David had found him and that’s why he was there. David nodded at the pile of mail. “And Eve’s Playhouse is having a sale on fur-covered handcuffs.”

  Jacey’s cheeks burned, and despite a quick prayer, the floor refused to open up and swallow her whole. Well, fine. If that’s the way the universe wanted it, then so be it.

  She stood up straighter and managed to look him in the eye. “It’s a good thing you said that after you were in the apartment. If you’d said it outside, I never would have let you in.”

  He just shrugged. “I’m not stupid. Where can we talk?”

  “Have you found Al?”

  He ignored her question, instead heading across the room toward the couch, not even glancing twice at the seventy-five-pound fertility goddess peeking out from the packing crate. “In here?” he asked, dropping onto the sofa and kicking his feet up onto the coffee table.

  Definitely an overgrown teenager.“Do you mind?”

  “What?”

  She waved her hand in the general direction of his feet.

  “Oh. Right.” He pulled his feet off the table and she immediately moved to straighten the stacks of Metropolitan Home and Art in America magazines. “I forgot. You’re one of those.”

  She looked up. “Excuse me? One of what?”

  “You know. All Good Housekeeping, gotta keep the living room picked up in case the pope drops by, and life will be good so long as no one puts their rubber-soled shoes on the solid-wood-couldn’t-dent-it-with-a-sledgehammer furniture.”

  “What is your problem?”

  “Hey, it’s not my problem, sweetheart.”

  “Fine.” She crossed her arms over her chest and took a deep breath. Then another. She could yell at him, but, really, what would be the point?

  He half nodded toward the wall and the collage centered above the bookcase. “One of yours?”

  She nodded, not at all interested in talking about her art with him, but not about to deny it, either. “My first serious piece. I did it between high school and college. I call it Past Imperfect.”

  She’d combed through her photo albums for pictures of all the places she and her mother had lived over the years, and mixed those images with old news photos of various wars. The three focal elements were happier—photos from her birthday parties, her early childhood sketches, a ticket from the first play her mother had taken her to. Even now, when her technique was much improved, she was still proud of the piece and the way it balanced images of both torment and love.

  “Hmm,” David said after a minute. “Working through a few issues there, huh?”

  “Excuse me?” Her issues were none of his damn business. “Are your only two settings rude and catatonic?”

  “Hey, I wasn’t trying to offend you. I just call ’em as I see ’em.”

  She released a noisy breath. “Why are you here?” She tried, but probably failed, to keep the irritation out of her voice. Definitely not Mr. Congeniality.

  “You hired me, remember?”

  That she had. Not her most brilliant move ever. Still, if he was here about the case…“You found him?” Suddenly, she couldn’t stay still, and she paced in front of the coffee table, trying to work off this unexpected flood of nervous energy.

  “Not exactly.”

  She stopped midpace. “What’s that supposed to mean? Either you found him or you didn’t.”

  “Let’s just say I found where he isn’t. Or where he wasn’t.”

  Jacey rubbed her temples. “Just spit it out. It’s been a hell of a morning, and I’m not in the mood for guessing games.”

  “What’s wrong with your morning?”

  “Other than you showing up?”

  A grin played at his mouth. “Turns out your boyfriend wasn’t entirely straightforward with you.”

  She scowled, wondering if he’d somehow found out that Al had originally given her a fake name. “How so?”

  “Our boy Al never went to Harvard.”

  “Oh.” She dropped down to sit on the edge of the coffee table.

  “Careful,” David said. “You might scratch it.”

  She aimed a dirty look in his direction and stayed put. “Of course he went to Harvard. He told me. He even had a Harvard lapel pin.”

  “That’s what I’m saying, sweetheart. The guy slipped you a load of bull.”

  “How do you know?”

  “What do you mean how? My brilliant investigative skills, remember?” He leaned back and spread his arms wide across the back of the sofa, looking for all the world like he belonged there. “That’s what you’re paying me for, right?”

  “Well, actually, no.” Jacey wasn’t about to let him see how much the news had shaken her. She sat up straighter, trying for an air of authority. After all, he was right about who’d hired whom. “I’m only paying you to find him. I’m not the CIA. I didn’t ask for a background check.”

  “I’m looking, babe. And I started the search at Harvard. The guy never enrolled. They turned his application down flat.”

  “Oh.”

  His face lost some of his smugness, and he leaned forward slightly. “You okay?”

  She nodded. Of course she was okay. Why wouldn’t she be? Just because David Anderson was taking potshots at her best and only candidate for Mr. Right.

  “Maybe there’s an explanation.” He must have been able to tell that the news made her feel rotten, because suddenly the jerk was being conciliatory—and that only made her feel worse.

  “Like what?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  She sighed. “Oh.”

  “So what do you want to do now?”

  Wasn’t that the question of the hour? “I…uh…I need to think for a second.” She swept her arm out to encompass the room. “Wait here, okay?”

  She scurried down the hall, her socks sliding a bit on the wooden floor, then stuck her head in Tasha’s room. Nobody. Damn. Reversing direction, she headed back through the apartment until she hit the kitchen. The second she stepped through the swinging doors, Tasha grabbed her arm and pulled her all the way into the room.

  “Did I hear right? Lowenstein’s morphed into your sexy supersleuth?” She pulled Jacey farther from the door and out of earshot of the living room. “Maybe I should hang out for a while.” She lifted an eyebrow. “Play chaperon…”

  “Not necessary.” Even so, she smoothed her shirt and tightened the drawstring on her sweatpants. Naturally, he’d appeared when she looked like hell. First she’d been soaking wet and now she looked like a college freshman scrubbing toilets as part of some initiation ritual.

  Mentally, she banged her fist against her head. Who cared what she was wearing? Her problem was much more basic—what to do about Al?

  Tasha pulled about a dozen paper towels off the roll and dropped them onto the growing puddle on the floor, moving them around with her foot as they sopped up the leakage. “So what’s he doing here? Does he have a lead?”

  “I, um, wouldn’t call it a lead,” Jacey said. She opened the freezer door and inspected the contents. Nothi
ng interesting on first glance.

  “Well, what would you call it?”

  Jacey rummaged a little more. She finally found a frost-covered pint of Häagen-Dazs macadamia brittle ice cream behind a bag of brussels sprouts. She peeled back the lid, revealing half a carton of frozen solid ice cream covered with little tiny ice granules. “How long has this been in here?”

  “How long have we lived in this apartment?”

  “Three years.”

  “There you go.”

  “Oh.” She sniffed the ice cream, but didn’t smell anything but cold. Whatever. She nudged the freezer door shut with her hip, then grabbed a spoon from the drainboard. Right then she needed ice cream, and if this was the best she could do, then so be it.

  “You’re avoiding my question.” Tasha managed to aim the accusation, curl another strand of hair, and sop water all at the same time. All in all, pretty impressive.

  Jacey tried to drive the spoon into the ice cream, but instead managed only to bend the metal.

  “Jace…” Tasha prompted. “Just tell me.”

  “He didn’t go to Harvard. They turned down his application.”

  “No way!” Tasha shook her head. “A man of mystery, huh?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Maybe he’s a spy.”

  “Oh, please. A spy in San Diego?”

  “Probably not,” Tasha conceded. “Maybe he was married.”

  Jacey frowned, considering. “I don’t think so. He didn’t have a ring line.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  Jacey half snorted. That very question was the reason she’d come in search of her friend. But now…well, maybe it wasn’t that big a deal. So what if Al wasn’t turning out to be exactly the guy she’d thought he was? It didn’t necessarily mean he was leaning toward the weirdo end of her spectrum. And it certainly didn’t change the fact that they’d hit it off. He was still her best Mr. Right candidate.

  “I’m not going to do anything.” She lifted her chin a little. “I’ll ask David to find out about the married thing. But the Harvard thing doesn’t matter. I mean, I didn’t go to Harvard, either.”