“Before we go in, there’s something I need to give you,” I said.
I dug into my purse and pulled out two plain gold bands. One I slipped onto my ring finger. The other I gave to Victor.
He looked at it as if I’d just dropped a scorpion onto his palm.
“Oh, come on,” I said, rolling my eyes. “We’re supposed to married, remember?”
Victor pinched his ring in his fingers and held it up to give it a better look.
“Where’d you get these?”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’re not hot.”
Not anymore, anyway. I’d taken the rings from my mother’s stash of jewelry in the White Magic Five and Dime, so their previous owners—whoever they were—hadn’t had them for a while. That made them lukewarm at best.
“Just put yours on and try not to act like it’s giving you cooties,” I said. “And let me do all the talking. You’re the strong but silent type, okay?”
“I’ll do my best. But I wouldn’t say acting is my best skill.”
Victor slipped on the ring and tried to smile.
He was right. He was a terrible actor. But it was too late to change partners now.
I got out of the car and headed for the sales office.
Show time.
A pretty young blond at a reception desk greeted us when we walked in. Behind her was a wide room filled with low-partitioned work cubicles. In each one a salesperson sat huddled with a couple, talking intensely.
A presentation had just wrapped up—probably a video playing to an audience lured out to Oak Creek by the promise of gift cards or free meals. Now, if they wanted to collect their freebies, they had to hear the rest of the pitch face to face—and resist the hard sell.
“I’m so sorry. You just missed the presentation,” the blond said with a smile. “The next one’s not till five.”
“Oh, we’ve already been through all that,” I said. “We came back to see the salesman we talked to last time.” I went up on my tiptoes to scan the room. “I hope he’s here today. Bill Riggs?”
The blond’s smile stiffened.
“I’m afraid he’s no longer with us,” she said.
“Oh, no! We’d already worked out most of the details with him.”
I turned to share a look of disappointment with Victor.
“Uhh…bummer,” he said.
I reached out and took his hands in mine and squeezed them. Hard. Really hard.
Victor got the message. He pinched his lips together tight.
“You can talk to another sales representative as soon one’s available,” the blond told us.
“No,” I said. “We want to talk to Bill.”
The blond’s smile was so stiff by now it looked like rigor mortis had set in.
“That’s not possible,” she said.
“Anything’s possible…especially if you want to close a deal,” I said. “We’ll be waiting right over there.”
I put a smug look on my face, as if I were pleased with myself for pulling off a negotiating trick I’d just read about in an Internet article called “10 Ways to Knock 10 Percent Off Your Down Payment.”
“Come along, Jonathan,” I said, tugging Victor with me as I walked away.
“Jonathan?” he whispered once we were settled on a pleather couch near the sales office’s front door.
“You’re not happy with your alias?”
“Why do I even need an alias? Why did you just lie to that woman? What’s going on?”
“Shhh. Watch.”
I nodded at the work cubicles.
One of the couples was getting double-teamed. An older man—fiftyish but looking fit in a sleek, well-tailored suit—had joined the salesdrone for the full-court press. I could see he’d resorted to an old salesman’s trick: writing a bunch of jargon down on a notepad and forcefully underlining and drawing arrows toward the selling points. The end result:
And it worked. The couple looked at each other with wide, cowed eyes, exchanged a few words, then nodded.
The older man grinned and turned to the blond receptionist.
“Sophia,” he said.
She hopped up and hurried off around a corner. When she returned a few seconds later, she was carrying a silver tray with glasses and a bottle of champagne balanced on it. She delivered it to the work cube where the couple was now signing form after form after form.
“Congratulations, Paul and Shari Rodes!” the man boomed. “And welcome to Oak Creek Golf Resorts and Estates!”
He popped open the champagne, and the other salespeople applauded.
As the man poured glasses of bubbly for a beaming Paul and Shari, a different couple—this one looking confused and embarrassed—was quickly hustled toward a back door by a stone-faced salesman. No one else would look at them. The salesman didn’t give them a kick in the pants as he practically shoved them out the door, but that was only because they weren’t worth the trouble.
They were nobodies. Losers.
Because they were smart. They’d said no, so they had to go.
It takes a special kind of person to thrive in a business like this—coddling and manipulating the gullible while coldly discarding the uncooperative and unprofitable. “Assholes,” I think they’re called. Or “sociopaths,” if you want to be more scientific about it.
In my case, “Mom” also fit the bill.
The older man moved on to another cube. He leaned in over the couple there and put his hand on the husband’s back in a way that was supposed to seem friendly but was really assertive and domineering. Everything was a power play with this guy. A battle for dominance he had to win.
I didn’t have to wonder how someone like Bill Riggs would get along with him. I knew.
“Alanis—you need to tell me. Now,” Victor said. “Why are we really here?”
“To see him.”
I nodded at the man. I knew another name for him.
Harry Kyle. Bill’s boss.
And perhaps suspect #2.
Presented for your consideration: a king upon his throne. Why does he keep it outside, where every passing lizard will feel free to crawl around on it? So that he can measure everything in his kingdom against his royal rod. (And if that sounds Freudian…well, it is.) His authority isn’t just a tool for maintaining order. It’s a license to judge. He likes his lands and subjects just so, this king, and anything that doesn’t measure up is going to bring down his wrath.
Miss Chance, Infinite Roads to Knowing
It took the Oak Creek sales force thirty minutes to clear the room. In the end, it was fifty-fifty—six couples got the bum’s rush out the back, six got champagne—which is an amazing sell-through percentage. These guys were good.
Harry Kyle was on hand for every score, always managing to materialize just before a couple broke down and said yes, always the one to turn and signal for the Korbel. Did that make him a control freak who didn’t trust his team to do its job or a glory hog who had to muscle his way into every success?
My verdict after watching the man work: both.
Sophia, the young receptionist, seemed to know better than to get in his way while there was blood in the water. But once the prospects had all been properly sorted—profitable over here, unprofitable out the door—she sidled up to his side and spoke to him softly.
His gaze darted our way. When he saw me watching him, he smiled.
I smiled back.
This was going to be interesting.
“I’m so pleased you decided to come back,” Kyle said as he ushered Jonathan and Jennifer Hart—Victor and me—into his office. “Can I get you anything? Water? Coffee?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
Victor wasn’t taking any chances. He just grunted and shook his head.
I did a quick scan of the room and didn’t see anything I didn’t expect.
Mahogany desk—check.
Plush office chair big enough for Captain Kirk on the bridge of the Enterprise—check.
&
nbsp; Shelves lined with large leather-bound books that looked impressively official (and had no doubt never been opened)—check.
Framed inspirational poster featuring a soaring eagle and a drippy sentiment (“daring: You’ll never know how high you can fly until you spread your wings”)—check.
Kyle seating himself and gesturing for us to sit in the chairs on the other side of his desk—check.
“It must have been a while since you were in for a presentation,” he said as we sat.
“I think it was two or three months back,” I said. “Right, dear?”
Victor looked surprised to be addressed.
He grunted and nodded.
“Well, that explains it,” Kyle said. “Otherwise, I’m sure I’d remember you. And Bill left us weeks ago.”
“Where’d he go?” I asked.
Kyle shrugged and gave me a non-answer answer: “Oh, it was just one of those things.”
“One of what things?”
“It didn’t work out for Bill here.”
“Why not?”
“I probably shouldn’t talk about it, Jennifer. Now this deal you and Bill were discussing—”
“Why shouldn’t you talk about it?”
Kyle really was smooth. He only clenched his jaw and gritted his teeth for half a second.
“There are legal implications,” he said blandly.
“Oh. I get it,” I said. “You’re afraid he’ll sue you.”
“No. I’m not afraid Bill will sue me,” Kyle said. And the little smirk he allowed himself told me something extremely important.
He knew Bill Riggs was dead.
“Look,” he said, “wouldn’t you rather talk about Oak Creek? You must be excited about coming here. Who wouldn’t be, right? Five pools, four restaurants, thirty-six holes of USGA-rated golf, a four-star day spa just steps away from—”
“Yeah, yeah—we know all that,” I cut in. “That’s why we’re here. But you have to understand: we had something special with Bill. A real bond. We trusted him, you know?” I turned to Jonathan/Victor. “I don’t know about you, dear, but I’m a little nervous about doing this without him.”
My “husband” took a chance and spoke.
“Umm…me…too?” he said.
I’d been right to tell him not to talk. A natural actor he was not. Compared to him, Keanu Reeves was Sir Laurence Olivier.
I turned toward Kyle again.
“Bill being gone so suddenly…I think it just makes us wonder what’s going on out here.”
Kyle’s chair let out a little squeak as he leaned forward and hit us with his best super-sincere “let me level with you folks” look.
“I understand. And let me assure you: Bill’s departure had nothing to do with the quality of the Oak Creek lifestyle or the value of an Oak Creek home. It was simply a case of a square peg in a round hole.”
I cocked my head and gave Kyle a look of squinty-eyed puzzlement. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Victor trying to copy it. It looked like someone had squirted lemon juice in his face.
“Bill wasn’t what you’d call a team player,” Kyle said. “There were…disagreements. With me, with the other sales associates. Sometimes even with prospective vacation club members or buyers like yourselves.”
I turned the dial on my puzzled look up to eleven: complete and utter bewilderment. I didn’t dare peek over at Victor, but I could only assume he was still trying to look stupefied, too.
Kyle’s expression didn’t change, but his face was starting to flush just the teeniest bit pink.
We were getting to the guy.
“Bill had a hard time keeping interactions professional,” he said. “Eventually there were legal repercussions, and we had to let him go.”
“Oh!” I said, sitting up straight in my chair. “He got in fights.”
The pink on Kyle’s cheeks deepened to red.
“Not fights. Disagreements.”
“About what?”
The red deepened to purple.
“About everything,” Kyle grated out. “Bill Riggs was an…”
He stopped himself just in time.
Mustn’t speak ill of the dead. Or call the dead an asshole.
“…an extremely opinionated man,” Kyle said.
“That’s so hard to believe. He was always sweet as pie to us,” I said. “And I know we weren’t the only ones who got along with him. He was tight with one of the guys on the construction crew, am I right?”
The purple vanished, with no red or pink in between. Kyle’s face just went straight to bleached-sheet white.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“It’s just something Bill mentioned when he was telling us how well the houses here are built. The construction company only uses the best this and the strongest that and the most dependable other thing, and he knew because he was buddies with…oh, what was his friend’s name again, dear?”
“Uhhh,” Victor said.
I circled my hands in the air as if the name was right on the tip of my tongue. “You know. The guy from Higgins or Huggins or Muggins Construction?”
Victor gave me another “uhhh.”
“Jack Schramm?” Kyle suggested, his voice quiet and quavery.
I snapped my fingers and grinned.
“Jack Schramm! That’s the name I was hunting for!”
“Oh, yes,” Victor said woodenly. “That was it.”
Kyle was more than wooden. He suddenly looked petrified.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’ll have to excuse me for a moment.”
And he stood stiffly and lurched swiftly out of the room.
“Where do you think he’s going?” Victor said.
“If the movies have taught me anything, that is a man who’s about to splash his face with water from a bathroom sink, then give himself a long, hard look in the mirror.”
“But why? What are you up to here, Alanis?”
“Please. Don’t break character. It’s Jennifer.”
I hopped out of my chair and leaned over Kyle’s desk. Apparently, Kyle was a traditionalist: he still used a real paper appointment book. It was sitting beside his phone, spread out to show the week’s schedule.
I scanned it for highlights or lowlights or anything interesting, but the only standout was staff/member mixer picnic!!! blocking out a three-hour chunk of the next day. I reached out and flipped back a page to see the previous week’s appointments.
“He’s going to be back any second, Jennifer,” Victor growled.
“Much better, Jonathan,” I said.
Harry Kyle was a busy man. His days were packed with meetings, presentations, and conference calls. But only one, I noticed, took place after six o’clock.
It wasn’t clear what it was or where it was, but I had a hunch who it was with.
It was scrawled on the line for 9 pm Friday night.
J.S.—#235
“Are you all right, Harry?” I heard a woman say. “You look—”
“I’m fine,” Harry Kyle snapped.
When he walked into his office two seconds later, I was in my seat, legs crossed.
“God, could you stop going on about that, Jonathan?” I was saying. “I swear, all you ever do is gab, gab, gab.”
Victor just gaped at me.
“Sorry about that,” Kyle said as he walked around his desk and sat down again. “I just remembered something I had to take care of.”
His face looked moist.
“So,” he said, rubbing his hands together with unconvincing enthusiasm, “shall we get down to business?”
My phone started playing “The Jean Genie.”
Good timing. My business in Kyle’s office was done, and now I could give myself an excuse to leave before I had to start faking my way through a bogus real-estate deal.
I dug out my phone.
“It’s from Sabrina,” I said to Victor.
“Oh. Okay,” he said blankly.
“The babysitter,” I expl
ained to Kyle.
I put the phone to my ear.
“What’s going on, sweetie? I hope Reggie didn’t get into the liquor cabinet again.”
“Alanis?” Eugene said.
“He did what?” I said, bulging my eyes wide.
“Alanis, is that you?”
“Is it still on fire?” I said.
“Is this some kind of joke?”
I hopped out of my chair.
“Well, how did he get a lawn mower into the house in the first place?” I cried in horror.
“Stop playing games, Alanis,” Eugene growled. “I’ve got something important to tell you.”
“Just hang on! We’ll be right there!” I lowered the phone and faced Kyle, who was staring at me with a dazed look on his face. “I’m sorry, Mr. Kyle, but Jonathan and I need to leave immediately. Thank you for your time. You’ll be hearing from us again soon.”
Victor followed as I scurried out the door, the phone pressed to my ear again.
“For god’s sake, don’t touch it if it’s still running, Sabrina!” I barked. “The firemen can figure out how to get it out of the bathtub!”
“I’m just going to sit here quietly until you can knock off the nonsense,” Eugene said.
A few seconds later, Victor and I were out in the parking lot, headed for the black Caddy.
“All right. Nonsense knocked off,” I said. “What’s going on, Eugene?”
“Marsha’s being charged with the murder of William Riggs.”
I came to such a sudden stop that Victor actually bumped into my back.
“What?” I said.
“She’s already in jail,” Eugene told me. “Burby took her in about half an hour ago.”
“That smug, overeager rookie dipshit.”
“Maybe not.”
“What do you mean, ‘maybe not’?”
“He had his ducks in a row. More than enough probable cause for an arrest warrant.”
It was a warm, dry Arizona evening…and suddenly I felt very, very cold.
“What could Burby possibly have on Marsha?” I asked.
“Well, he claims he has proof she hired a hit man to kill her husband,” Eugene said. “And the thing is, Alanis—she’s not denying it.”
Part 2
Reversals
Suddenly everything’s been turned on its head—including you! It’s a wonder your crown hasn’t fallen off. At least you’ve got your rod to cling to; instead of being a symbol of mastery, now it’s a lifeline. Keep holding onto it—and the skills and confidence that got you that crown in the first place—and maybe, just maybe, you won’t drop head-first into oblivion.
Fool Me Once: A Tarot Mystery Page 12