I blindly searched the counter for a new weapon, which was when my hands closed on a handle I would have recognized by feel even in the pitch dark.
My mother’s favorite crepe pan.
I drew my knees to my chest, waiting until we got close enough to a wall to plant my feet on it and shove away as hard as I could.
The unexpected momentum sent him reeling backward, his hand letting go of my wrist to steady himself against a fall.
At that moment, I visited my Teflon-coated vengeance upon his person with all the strength I had left, fortified by the memory of the many excellent breakfasts the pan had provided me.
My attacker lost either the will or the ability to arrest his earthward trajectory. We fell backward together in a heap of limbs and curses among broken dishes and cooking utensils on the kitchen floor.
I rolled sideways off him, grabbing the first thing I could and pointing it at him as I scrambled to my feet.
By the time I looked down at my hand and discovered I’d only managed to snag a wooden spoon, he was already on his way to standing as well.
I quickly inverted the utensil so at least the stick end was pointed at him.
“Stop right there, or I swear on my mother’s name, I will shank the shit out of you.”
At the word mother he froze, turning to look at me.
And I looked at him.
Trouble was, he didn’t look like a bad guy at all. He looked like a friendly lumberjack.
He wore a red flannel shirt over a chest only beginning to lose some of its breadth and depth. Good jeans. Timberland boots. An ensemble that complemented the long silver hair drawn back in a ponytail at the base of his neck. Heavy rectangular brows shadowed eyes the color of good French roast.
But what chased the fight right out of me were the laugh lines cutting deep grooves into the sun-weathered skin around his eyes and mouth.
The man I’d just beaten about the head with a frying pan was grinning at me.
“Goddamn,” the man said. “You’re the spitting image of Alex.”
“That’s because I’m her daughter. Who the hell are you, and what are you doing in my mother’s house?”
“Daughter?” Frank surprise migrated across his Marlboro Man features. “Alex didn’t tell me that she had a daughter.”
“Then she probably didn’t tell you she taught her daughter six different ways to castrate intruders with a wooden spoon.” I jabbed the spoon shank toward his nether region but mostly just to make sure he understood I was perfectly willing and able to give him dick splinters.
Wisely he lifted his hands skyward. “You’ve got your mother’s spirit, I see.”
“But not her charming personality nor disappointing lack of homicidal tendencies. Answer my question.”
“My name is Paul Gladstone. I’m a private investigator and a friend of your mother’s. If you’ll allow me to reach into my pocket, I’ll show you my license.”
“Just exactly how stupid do you think I am, Paul Gladstone?”
“With all due respect, you’re threatening me with a wooden spoon.”
“My apologies,” I said. “I’m afraid I didn’t have time to search out a proper weapon while I was being strangled to death.”
“I wouldn’t have killed you,” he said. “Just choked you out and handcuffed you to a chair or something.”
“And they say chivalry is dead.”
“What would you have done if you got to your girlfriend’s house to find the door wide open, the alarm disabled, and some strange woman with a bulgy eye wolfing down baked goods at her kitchen table?”
I felt my blood pressure rise to about 140 over garden hose. “Look, my eye is—wait. Did you say girlfriend?”
“I take it you didn’t know about me either.”
“No, Willie Nelson, I did not know about you. She never mentioned you. Never once. I mean, it’s been at least a decade since she even had condoms in her nightstand.”
“That’s because they’re in her sock drawer.” Paul retrieved a plastic bag from the drawer next to the fridge and proceeded to fill it with ice from the freezer, moving with the ease of a man who had clearly been in my mother’s kitchen many times before. He pressed the makeshift ice pack to the pale goose egg of flesh erupting from his forehead.
My wounded eye began to jerk like someone had decided to brush away a stray eyelash with a cattle prod.
“Wait.” I held up a hand and walked over to the counter to retrieve the whiskey. “Wait.” Paul watched as I downed a few swallows. I snorted fire and whiskey fumes from my nostrils in a sound that was vaguely horselike . . . if the horse had galloped face-first into a street sign.
“Better?” Paul asked.
“That remains to be seen. Let’s start small.” I paused to inhale through my nose and exhale through my mouth. “How long have you been nailing my mother?”
If I’d had to describe Paul Gladstone’s expression at that moment, it would have been something like “what happens when all your features suddenly discover they’re allergic to each other.” Eyebrows shooting upward, jaw fleeing downward, mouth ricocheting between shock and dismay.
“What the hell is wrong with you, asking a question like that?”
“Don’t tell me you call it making love. I could never see Mom going for that kind of sick-making sentimentality.” But then, I could never have seen Mom going for a guy like Paul Gladstone. A man who almost certainly cultivated a graveyard of fast-food wrappers in the back of his car and probably had never made a list in his life.
“Two years,” he said. “Your mother and I have been . . . together for two years.”
“Two years?” I pressed a finger to the vein pulsing rhythmically in my forehead, lest I stroke out before I could get the information I needed. “Two years. How could she hide something like this from me for all that time?”
“Looks like your mom is pretty good at hiding things.” His glance darted around the kitchen in a way that suggested he too might have noticed the gentle wrongness of this place. “Speaking of which, where is your mom, exactly?”
I sank back into a chair at the kitchen table and exhaled so violently I thought I might have collapsed a lung. “Damned if I know.”
Paul eyed me from beneath the ice pack. “You don’t know?”
“She disappeared from my graduation earlier today. One minute she was making rude faces from the audience during the valedictorian’s address; the next minute she was gone. Her car was still in the parking lot, but the front window had been busted out. Cops wanted to wait twenty-four hours to look into it, so I came here.”
“City-paid pricks.” Paul ran a large rawboned hand through his silver hair, winced, then moved the baggie of ice to the injury. The murky blue-green ink of an old tattoo peeked from beneath the cuff of his flannel shirt. “Did they find anything?”
“Just this.” I plucked the business card from the glass baking dish where it had landed during our struggle.
As Paul examined the card, I examined his face.
I had learned to read people on rainy Saturdays when my mother and I used to go to the local mall to people watch. From our station at the edge of the unimpressive fountain smelling of chlorine and old pennies, we would pick random passersby and ask each other the question.
What about that one?
“That one,” my mother would say, “is meeting his mistress later this afternoon.”
“How do you know?” I asked around nibbles of my face-size cookie and slurps of white cherry Icee.
“First of all, he’s got a Zales bag already on his arm, but he’s stopped to buy jewelry at the discount kiosk. The real stuff is for his wife. The cheap stuff is for his mistress. Second, see how he keeps looking over his shoulder? He’s afraid someone will spot him. Third, he’s paying in cash, and fourth, I can smell his cologne all the way over here.”
Small signs, these, but taken together, they made for a pretty vivid picture.
Paul Gladstone was pro
ving far more difficult to decipher.
A subtle twitch of the lips. A slight eyelid tic.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Shit.” Paul seated himself in the chair next to mine, maybe because it was closest, maybe so we wouldn’t have to look each other in the eye. “Have you heard of Front Range Contractors?”
“Construction company, right?”
“Yeah. Well, a guy named Dexter Fairburn working on behalf of Front Range’s owner approached me wanting to dig up dirt on Valentine. They thought if they could muddy him enough in the papers, he’d lose the bid for the million-dollar University of Denver building project they were competing for. Offered me a fifty-thousand-dollar retainer to get started. I told them to take their money and shove it.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I’m not in any hurry to end up as aggregate material in the concrete for Valentine’s next building.”
“Valentine would do that?” I tried to reconcile this information with what I knew of Valentine, which, after today’s commencement ceremony, now included ocular confirmation of the aforementioned bazillionaire’s legendary ass.
From the prime vantage of the salutatorian’s seat, I’d spent the better part of his keynote address creating a topographical map of gluteal perfection concealed beneath a $43,000 Brioni suit.
It was an ass I could easily imagine cheating with a hooker, but not necessarily a homicidal ass.
“Not directly.” Paul scrubbed a leathery palm over his chin. “Valentine’s not the kind of guy to get his hands dirty. But he could certainly arrange to have it done.”
“I’d bet he can buy henchmen by the gross.”
“Which is exactly why I warned your mother off when Fairburn approached her. But this,” he said, tapping the business card on the table, “this is a bad sign.”
“But if my mother was trying to turn up dirt on Valentine, why would she make an appointment to meet with him? Isn’t it sort of counterproductive for her to research him on the down-low if he knows who she is?”
“For most private detectives, yes.” Paul’s smile warmed the room by several degrees. “But your mother isn’t most private detectives. The stuff she’s pulled off over the years, even my best guys can’t get away with.”
The compliment brought me a dram of relief. I knew my mother to be as capable as he described, and more. She always had a plan. A backup plan. A backup plan to her backup plan.
If she met with Valentine, she had a reason. Likely a damn good one.
So what was her reason for never telling me about Paul? And for never telling Paul about me?
“How did you know to come here?” I asked.
Paul pulled at a thread dangling from the sleeve of his shirt. “I tried texting Alex earlier to see if we were still on for tonight and never heard back. I decided to stop by and make sure she was okay.”
“Still on?”
“Your mother and I have a standing . . . appointment on Saturdays.”
My eyelid resumed its grand mal seizure. “Nope. Still not okay with the fuckbuddy thing,” I said.
“What? You don’t think your mother has needs?”
My eyebrow attempted to leapfrog from my face. “Words are still coming out of your mouth. I need them not to be.”
The same strange prickles that had broken over my neck when Officer Bixby handed me Valentine’s business card returned, this time traveling down my arms to raise the fine blonde hairs like small antennae.
I thought my mother and I knew each other better than any two people in the world.
What if I didn’t know her at all?
“Paul Gladstone,” I said, wanting to try on a name my mother supposedly knew. “How do I know you’re who you say you are?”
“You have a cell phone?” he asked. “Look up PI Denver dot com and go to the ‘About Us’ page.”
I pulled my cell phone from my bra and did as instructed. Sure enough, Paul’s face hovered above the name Paul Gladstone, call sign . . . “P-Ripple?”
“Yeah, I know. It was a navy thing.”
I scanned the short, blocky paragraph detailing his experience: navy seal, twenty years an investigator for the DA’s office of Arapahoe County, specialist in campaign finance irregularities and police misconduct. To my mother, the words I read would have been as good as a love letter.
I put my phone facedown on the table between us and met his eyes.
“How do we find my mother?”
His hand landed heavy on my shoulder, warm through the fabric of my shirt when he squeezed. “Kiddo, finding people is what I’m best at. I’ll give it everything I’ve got.”
“Where do we even start?”
“First, I’m going to pay a call to Dexter Fairburn. Seems like he and I might need to have a chat.”
“Good. I’ll come with you.”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
“Look, spare me the ‘I work alone’ bullshit, okay? This is my mother we’re talking about, and I’m not going to be sidelined just because you have some outmoded macho idea of yourself as Sam Spade.”
“Actually, it’s your face.”
“Bite me,” I said, not entirely without malice.
“No, seriously. You look like a walking poster for domestic abuse. I take you anywhere, and no one in their right mind will talk to me.”
“I could wait in the car,” I suggested.
“So people could think I was kidnapping you? No. The best place for you is somewhere safe and out of the way where I can call you the minute I get any leads.”
“What will you do after Fairburn?” I asked. It was as near to acquiescence as I was willing to stray.
“One of the guys down at Denver PD owes me a favor. I’ll put in a call and see if we can find out which towers your mom’s cell has been pinging. I’ll also need to get over to the University of Denver to see if I can get a peek at those parking lot security tapes.”
“I already asked Officer Bixby about that. He said that requires a metric ton of paperwork.”
“Or a little creativity,” Paul said.
I was familiar enough with the private eye lexicon to know creativity was generally code for “tricking someone into giving me information they’re not supposed to.”
I had been a very creative child.
“What about Valentine?” I asked.
“I think it would be good to keep eyes on him from a distance. I’ll call my top surveillance guy. He goes by—”
“Let me guess. Slamfactor? Gunsablazin’?”
“Shepard.”
“Ahh, I get it. Because he keeps an eye on the flock, right? The one man standing between the wolf and the sheep.”
“Because that’s his last name.”
“Right.” Not for the first time, I mourned the fact that there was no default self-destruct mechanism that could fry my ass into a pile of powder before I humiliated myself one more time in a twenty-four-hour period. “So what do I do?”
We had come to the part of the conversation where the dean or the principal or the police officer usually told me what I wasn’t allowed to do and I quietly figured out a way to do it.
Out of habit, I had already begun nodding with the gravitas of the recently reproached.
“You wait to hear from me,” Paul said. “I know it’s not the answer you want, but it’s the right one. Do you have somewhere safe to stay?”
“My apartment is only a couple of blocks from the college. It’s safe enough.”
“You have roommates?”
“No, thank God.”
“I don’t like the idea of you staying anywhere alone. Is there someone you can call to come over?”
“Of course,” I said without thinking. “Melanie Beidermeyer. We’re like sisters.”
“Good.”
We exchanged cell phone numbers on the front porch after Paul locked up with his very own key.
Really, Mom?
“Straight to your apartm
ent, right? And you’ll call me when you get there.” Something in the stern but warm cast to Paul’s expression made me wonder if he might not have a daughter of his own. Grown, probably. My age or older.
“That’s the plan,” I agreed.
“And you’ll stay there?” he asked.
I held up two fingers at an angle that felt trustworthy and resourceful. “Scout’s honor.”
As I watched the gray Jeep Renegade—not too new, not too old—pull away from the curb, it occurred to me that I might actually have made a pretty decent Girl Scout.
If my mother hadn’t shot my troop leader twice in the chest.
Chapter Five
In the slim rectangle of the rearview mirror, I watched Valentine exit the side door of his modest skyscraper in downtown Denver and stride toward the custom Rolls Phantom limousine parked at the curb.
Valentine made it about halfway to the car before television news anchors and a few second-rate paparazzi caught up with him, only to be swatted away by the security guards flanking him on either side. This unexpected distraction was an added bonus really. His recent tabloid coverage had already been kind to me.
From the video clips on local gossip blogs, I had discovered that Valentine’s regular driver—a small silver-haired man named Louis—had a penchant for smoking Turkish cigarettes and waiting outside the limo while Valentine climbed aboard. I had also learned there was a precious thirty-eight-second interval—yes, I counted—between the time Valentine’s entourage got him settled and the moment Louis flicked his brown cigarette butt toward the curb and got in himself.
This pocket of time proved more than enough to cozy up to Louis and bum a light. While he held his flame to my Virginia Slims cigarette, I held a pocket Taser to his leg.
I’d come a long way, baby.
He was slight enough that bodychecking him into the limo’s passenger’s seat and peeling him out of his jaunty little hat, coat, and gloves took no more effort than wrestling myself into my Spanx for the graduation ceremony earlier that morning.
The fine sheen of sweat on my lip helpfully melded with the spirit gum on the back of the cheap silver mustache I quickly tacked down while the security dudes opened the door for Valentine.
Private Lies (Jane Avery Mysteries Book 1) Page 4