White Hot

by Sandra Brown

  She watched a bead of sweat trickle down his temple, then diffuse in the starburst pattern of faint lines at the corner of his eye. “I’m curious. How much am I worth, Beck?”

  “What?”

  “Huff would compensate you well for marrying me and fathering his grandchild. Was a dollar figure agreed upon, or are you leaving the amount to his discretion? Did he give you a down payment?”

  “How do you think I’m paying for this dinner?” he quipped. Standing, he came around to help her from her chair. “But please limit your order to the left side of the menu.”

  • • •

  Each of their three courses was sumptuous, but none outdid the chantilly-drenched chocolate soufflé they shared for dessert. The dining room had no more than a dozen tables, set with white damask cloths, sterling, crystal, and antique china. Above the wainscoting, the walls were covered with pink moiré, which matched the window drapes that pooled on the gleaming hardwood floor. The room was subtly illuminated by tapers on the tables and a crystal chandelier that hung from a plaster medallion in the center of the ceiling.

  As they moved back outside to have their coffee, Sayre said, “My compliments to the chef, as well as to the interior decorator.”

  “I’ll see to it that they’re both commended.”

  “How did you find this place?”

  “I didn’t. My mother did. She brought me here to celebrate my graduation from law school.”

  “Is she from New Orleans?”

  “Born and bred.”

  “Is she the one who taught you French?”

  He smiled. “While I was still in diapers.”

  The waiter poured their coffee, then left them alone. Beck added a dollop of Grand Marnier to the coffee and passed a dainty china cup and saucer to her. “It’s not quite the Destiny Diner, but they try.”

  Smiling, she carried her cup and saucer to the railing. Music from an unseen source could be heard above the rooftops. The courtyard below was meagerly lighted, most of it remaining deeply shadowed, creating an atmosphere of mystery and intrigue.

  The fountain in its center burbled lethargically. The carved angel was missing part of one hand, and her feet were covered with moss. A flowering plant sprouted incongruously from a crack in the pedestal base. Like all the shrubbery and vines, the wayward little plant had been allowed to grow where it would.

  Sayre liked these imperfections. The intimation of decay and neglect throughout the French Quarter contributed largely to its beauty and enhanced its mystique.

  Speaking into the hush of the courtyard, she said, “Last night, Chris told me that he didn’t kill Danny. His denial was quite earnest.”

  Beck came to stand beside her. “Maybe we’ve been chasing our tails. Danny may have pulled off the perfect suicide.”

  She finished her coffee, returned her cup and saucer to the silver tray on the table, then rejoined him at the railing. “What’s sacred to you, Beck?”

  “Why?”

  “I want to tell you something, but you must swear to me that you won’t divulge it. Because by telling you, I’m betraying a confidence.”

  “Then don’t tell me.”

  “I think it’s important that you know.”

  “All right. Hire me as your lawyer. I’ll take a five-dollar retainer. Then I’m bound by professional privilege not to reveal anything you tell me.”

  “I thought of that,” she admitted. “But you couldn’t take my retainer. It would be a conflict of interest.”

  “So what you want to tell me concerns Chris?”

  “Specifically Danny.”

  She looked at him closely, watching the flickering light from the gas lamps play across his face. The day they met, she had called him her father’s henchman, and he’d done little to convince her that he was anything other. He claimed to have set her up at McGraw’s place in order to watch Chris’s reaction to the old man. But was that true?

  Clark had cautioned her to be wary of him. Mere hours ago she had pondered how he could be so disingenuous. She even questioned the motivation behind his generosity to the Pauliks. Had he been grandstanding for her benefit?

  But he hadn’t known Sayre would be at the hospital when Alicia Paulik opened the packet of mail. Nor could he have planned for her to open his card first of all the cards in that manila envelope.

  Taking a leap of faith, she said, “I’m going to tell you something that no one else knows.”

  “Remember, I’m Chris’s attorney, Sayre. Be careful what you entrust to me.”

  Well aware of the risk she was taking, she said, “Danny was engaged to be married.”

  She could tell that he was genuinely stunned. “Engaged? To who?”

  “I won’t tell you her name.”

  “How . . . how did you—”

  “I met her by chance in the cemetery. She was visiting his grave and introduced herself to me.”

  He relaxed a bit. “A woman walks up to you, Danny’s well-to-do sister, and introduces herself as the dearly departed’s fiancée, and you took her word for it? She could be someone trying to cash in—”

  “Give me some credit, Beck. I’m a better judge of character than that. She isn’t a gold digger. She loved Danny with all her heart. He loved her, too. She has a diamond ring.”

  “Which she could have got from the last guy she blackmailed.”

  “If she were an opportunist with extortion in mind, wouldn’t she have contacted Huff by now? Neither he nor Chris knew about the engagement when Danny was alive, and she doesn’t want them to know about it now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they would jump to the immediate conclusion that you did. They’d think she wanted something from them.”

  He had the grace to look chagrined.

  “She said they would make something ugly of the love she and Danny had for each other, when in fact it was beautiful.”

  “This could have been the news Danny wanted to share when he called you.”

  “My conscience would love to think so. And quite possibly that’s right. In any case, I’m convinced they were devoted and terribly in love. He intended to marry her, create a future with her, which makes her absolutely certain that he did not take his own life.”

  “Maybe he wanted to break off—”

  “No. I asked her that, as gently as I could. She denied even the possibility that he wanted to back out. But it was she who told me that Danny was going through a . . .” She hesitated to say the word spiritual, afraid that would be a dead giveaway that Danny’s fiancée was someone in his church. “He was going through a personal crisis that he wouldn’t share even with her.”

  “The matter of conscience he was wrestling with.”

  “Yes. She called it an emotional struggle that Danny felt must be resolved before he committed his life to her.”

  “It could have been anything, Sayre. He could have had a gambling debt, a bad habit he kept secret, a pregnant girlfriend in another town.”

  “Or knowledge of something he could no longer live with.”

  “Obviously you’ve thought about this and have an idea of what that something was.”

  “My first guess was that it was an illegal practice at the foundry. Now I’m thinking that Danny knew what became of Gene Iverson.”

  Beck slowly went to the table and set his empty cup and saucer beside hers. The waiter started toward them, but Beck gave a firm shake of his head and the waiter disappeared into the background.

  Beck returned to the railing and placed his hands on it, leaning forward, letting it support his weight. His shirt was stretched tightly across his back, delineating each vertebra and emphasizing the musculature.

  “Danny had become religious,” she said. “Confession is part of it. Isn’t it possible that he knew something about Iverson, and that it was weighing so heavily on his conscience, he had reached the point where he didn’t think he could go on with his life until he had unburdened himself of the guilt?”

&
nbsp; He turned only his head toward her. “Which is a solid reason for killing yourself.”

  “It’s just as solid a reason for someone to commit murder. Especially if a damaging public confession was in the offing.”

  Looking forward again, he swore into the darkness. “You’ve just handed me what Wayne Scott’s case against Chris has been missing.”

  “His motive.”

  He stared down into the courtyard for the longest time. Finally, he roused himself and turned around. “We should be going.”

  “It’s a long drive back to Destiny.”

  “Yeah, and it just got longer.”

  The ubiquitous maître d’ thanked them profusely, kissing Sayre on both cheeks again and urging Beck to bring her back very soon. Carefully they made their way down the spiral staircase.

  Halfway across the courtyard, Beck stopped. Puzzled, Sayre turned and looked up at him. He didn’t smile or explain why he’d stopped. He didn’t have to. He began taking backward steps, drawing her into the shadow of the wisteria clinging to the wall. She let herself be drawn.

  A sweet lassitude laced her blood as the orange liqueur had laced her coffee. She felt sleepy with satisfaction, yet never more alive. Her eyelids felt heavy, but her nerve endings tingled with awareness and anticipation.

  As Beck drew her closer to him, she could see the blood vessels of his throat just beneath the damp skin. She wanted to feel his pulse beating against her lips but resisted the urge to place her mouth there.

  He slipped his hand beneath her hair at the nape of her neck and brought her face to within inches of his. His breath was as soft and warm as a morning mist that hovers above the bayou.

  “If I touch you, you’ll think it’s because of Huff’s offer.”

  Going up on tiptoe, she whispered against his lips, “I don’t care. Touch me anyway.”

  He kissed her. She reached for him with her entire body, pressing herself up into him as his arms tightly encircled her. His kiss was possessive and willful. On her hips, his hands were hard and insistent, holding her lower body firmly against his sex. Bending his head down, he nudged aside the strand of Mardi Gras beads with his lips and kissed her breasts through the cloth of her dress.

  Then he clasped her to him again and, cupping the back of her head in his wide palm, pressed her face into his neck while he spoke directly into her ear. “There’s not enough money in the world to shackle me to a woman I don’t want. You must know that, Sayre. The hell of it is . . .” He moved against her intimately, provocatively. “The hell of it is, I do want you.”

  He could have had her. At that moment, she was tasting him with all five senses. She was drinking him up, wanting him with the same mad, blind, impossible passion that he wanted her.

  “But damn the irony,” he said, his voice rough. “Huff’s green light to take you stops me.” He began releasing her by slow degrees until he set her away from him and they were no longer touching. “I want you. But I’m damned if I’ll have you doubting the reason why.”

  chapter 27

  Huff’s head was wreathed in smoke. Mechanically he puffed on the cigarette anchored in one corner of his lips. Feet planted wide apart on the loading dock, hands on his hips, he scowled at the pickets.

  About forty men, carrying inflammatory signs, were marching slowly and silently in an oval pattern along the shoulder of the highway just outside the main entrance gate of Hoyle Enterprises.

  “How long have they been at it?”

  The group of men huddled around Huff included Chris, several plant foremen, and a few middle management personnel, all of whom had been called from the comfort of their homes, some from their beds, and alerted to this latest critical development.

  Fred Decluette had had the misfortune of having to notify everyone when the pickets arrived, so answering Huff’s question also fell to him. “They began assembling about ten o’clock and were in place by the time the shift changed.”

  “Get Red over here and have them arrested for trespassing.”

  “He can’t, Huff,” Chris said. “As long as they stay on that side of the fence, they’re on public property. But unfortunately, everybody reporting to work, or leaving, passes through that gate. There’s no way our employees can avoid seeing them. They practically have to drive right through them.”

  “Plus, they have a permit to picket.” This from George Robson. “They’ve covered their bases.”

  “Will somebody please give me some good news?” Huff snarled.

  “The good news is that their permit is valid only if the demonstration remains peaceful,” Chris said. “I think our job is to see that it doesn’t.”

  There were chuckles from the group. Huff looked over at Fred. “You got some boys ready?” He gave his boss an affirmative nod, but Huff sensed reservation behind it. “What, Fred? Talk to me. Do I have to pull information out of you?”

  “We might meet with some resistance from our own men.” Fred glanced around uneasily. “There’ve been rumblings that some of our employees might join them.”

  Huff threw down his cigarette and ground it out beneath his shoe. “I’ll take care of that right now.”

  The group entered the plant and within five minutes had reassembled inside Huff’s office. They lined up along the wall of glass that overlooked the shop floor. Work was continuing as usual, but not very energetically. A pervasive tension could be sensed.

  “Is the sound system on?” Huff asked.

  Chris flipped several switches on the public address system console. “It is now.”

  Huff picked up the microphone, blew into it to test it, then said, “Everybody, listen up.” His voice boomed into every corner of the factory, reaching every worker on that shift no matter where they were. Some ceased what they were doing and stood still but kept their heads down. Others looked up, but it was difficult to gauge a man’s mood when he was wearing safety goggles.

  “All of you know about what’s going on outside. By now you’ve probably heard the name of the man who sent those clowns to hassle us, and you’re probably asking yourself, ‘Who the hell is Charles Nielson?’

  “Well, I’ll tell you. He’s a troublemaker who hasn’t got a damn thing to do with Hoyle Enterprises. Those pickets are wasting their time and looking ridiculous in the process, but that’s their choice.

  “If we stick together and ignore them, they’ll eventually give up and crawl back under the rocks they came from. We know their sort, don’t we? We’ve had agitators like this before. They breeze into our town, poke their noses into our business, and try to tell us how to run it. Speaking for myself—and I think I speak for most of you—I hate like hell for somebody to assume they know more about what’s better for me than I do.

  “And that includes the federal government and the labor unions. Those folks can’t even agree among themselves,” he shouted. “So why would we want them voting on how we do things here in Destiny? I say we wouldn’t.”

  He paused, took a breath, and continued in a softer voice. “What happened to Billy Paulik was tragic. Nobody can argue that. He suffered and he’s going to continue suffering for a long time. We could give him all the money in the world, and it still wouldn’t make up for his loss, would it? We’re going to do our best for him and his family, but at the end of the day, Billy’s future is really up to Billy, because none of us can roll back the clock and undo what’s been done.

  “The truth is, the work we do is dangerous. Accidents happen. Men have been hurt and men have died, but I’d like for some bureaucrat from Washington, D.C., to show me how to melt metal and cast iron pipe without risk. It can’t be done.

  “And you can bet that when that same bureaucrat flushes his crap through his sewage pipes, he’s damn glad that pipe is there, and he doesn’t give a rat’s ass who might’ve got hurt while making it.”

  He paused to measure the effectiveness of this speech. No one on the floor had moved. They could’ve been statues. He could envision those in the Center, sitt
ing at tables, hunkered over bologna sandwiches, packages of Twinkies, and thermoses of coffee, listening.

  He had their attention, all right. Their futures were at stake as much as his, and that was what he needed to impress upon them.

  “Those nitwits out there will urge you to strike. You know, I wish I didn’t have to work for a living. I wish all I had to do was parade around other places of employment and encourage men to walk off their jobs. Never mind about the work ethic or the paychecks that won’t be there come payday.

  “If I told hardworking men to leave their jobs, I would expect them to call me a damn fool. I’ve got bills to pay. Groceries to buy. A family that’s depending on me to provide for them. Am I right?”

  There were a few reluctant nods of agreement from the men below. Others looked around warily to see how coworkers were responding.

  “Now, I know we’re far from perfect here at Hoyle. We’ve had our share of mishaps over the years. George Robson and I are investigating the accident and why it happened.”

  He saw George react with surprise to that lie, but he hoped that no one else had noticed. “We see the need for longer and more thorough training periods before a new employee is put on the floor. It’s also time you all had a pay increase.

  “But, frankly, whining disgusts me. I remember a time when a man would willingly give up his right arm to have a job. Before I became boss of this outfit, I was one of you. Don’t forget that I worked and sweated right down there on that floor, so I know about the heat, and the grit, and the danger.”

  He pushed up his sleeves to bare his arms and thrust them out in front of him. “I’ve got scars that remind me every day how hard and hazardous this work is.” He replaced his sleeves and mollified his tone. “But I’m also reasonable. I’m willing to listen to your grievances. So make a list of things you’d like to see happen, and we up here in the offices will review them.

  “But.” He paused to emphasize the qualifier. “If any of you agree with this bunch of rabble-rousers outside, go join them. Hear me? Go! Leave right now. If you think this is a rotten place to work, you know where the door’s at.