Compromising Positions

by Beverly Bird

  She had stepped into their world today because she’d thought everything would be under her control. She had gone to John and Tessa’s wedding, and she had pretended, for sweet, short moments in Jesse Hadley’s arms, that pride and strength were enough. But now, as then, Wendell Glowan had looked right through her.

  No, nothing had really changed. She laughed a little wildly, a little giddily.

  The limo stopped in front of her row house. She scrambled from it without a backward glance and rushed inside, barely making it to the bathroom before she was ill.

  Chapter 4

  It took Angela the better part of a week to put the whole wedding fiasco behind her. She was angry at herself for running out, even as she knew she’d been incapable of doing anything else.

  The Shokonnet case was a lost cause, but there were others that needed her attention. They kept her occupied, and by the following weekend, she felt like her old self. If there were vulnerabilities inside, if there were fears, then she buried them deeply enough that none of her colleagues knew they were there.

  She did not encounter Jesse Hadley again. She made sure of it. Unfortunately, not seeing him did not mean that he was off her mind. So on Sunday morning, she jogged.

  It always helped. The physical punishment, the thud of each of her steps on Philadelphia’s concrete, tended to clear her head. She tuned everything out but the quivering strain of her muscles, focused on the labored burn of her breath. She pushed herself harder than was comfortable, and it was purging.

  She headed west across Oregon Avenue toward the Italian Market, a significantly long run. Halfway there, she finally forgot—again—those few special moments in Jesse’s arms. She forgot that, for a while, he had seemed to genuinely enjoy her company. She forgot everything but Wendell Glowan’s intrusion, because that was all that counted.

  She ran on, and she thought about Jesse’s eyes.

  If he was high-handed and as purely arrogant as he seemed, how could he possibly have eyes like that? Then again, maybe they weren’t as startling and as deep as she remembered. Maybe they hadn’t backed up his every word with honest emotion. She’d been rattled at that wedding from start to finish. It was hard to tell, she decided, just how much of what she thought she’d seen had been real. It was impossible to say how much was simply a product of her imagination.

  She reached the Italian Market and put him firmly out of her mind. Again.

  She bought flowers and half a dozen perfect peppers. She found the deli vendor she liked best and got some excellent Genoa salami. She swigged a cup of coffee at a corner market and headed home.

  She was just getting breathless when she reached her stoop. She snagged the newspaper as she bounded up the steps and thrust her key in the lock. Her phone was ringing. She hard it pealing even before she stepped into the foyer.

  She hurried into the kitchen to grab it, opening the newspaper as she went, her purchases tucked under her arm. She scanned the headlines as she dropped everything on the breakfast bar and grabbed the phone. “Hello?”

  “Jesse Hadley.”

  Something hot, then cold, scooted through her blood. It was a simple, unapologetic announcement of his identity. Not “good morning,” no “hello to you, too.” She thought he would have used the same tone if he had said, “This is God calling.”

  She put the paper down. She tucked the phone against her shoulder to bend over, her hands on her thighs, trying to get her breath. Her muscles were spent and twitching.

  “What do you want?” she demanded.

  There was a pause. “Did I interrupt something?”

  Yes. My sanity. Every boring, mundane aspect of my life I’ve worked so hard to achieve and that I cherish. “No.”

  “You’re breathing hard.”

  She decided to let him wonder about that. It was probably best all the way around if he didn’t think she was available, if he thought that maybe he’d caught her in the midst of hot, lurid passion. The idea was so ludicrous, she gave a strangled laugh.

  Not that she was his type anyway. Every time she’d seen his picture in the paper, he was with a starlet or a model, someone stunningly beautiful and—Angela had always thought privately—with drugged-out eyes.

  “Are you angry?” he went on after a moment.

  “More like resigned. I can’t seem to get rid of you.”

  He hesitated, then ignored that. “You haven’t seen the paper,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.

  Angela straightened slowly. She looked over at it. “Why?” she asked warily.

  “Check front and center.”

  It would have to be at the bottom half of front and centre, she concluded. She’d only looked at the top. She picked up the newspaper again and her breath snagged.

  Negligence Charged In M.E.’s Office

  She moved around to the other side of the breakfast bar and sat hard. “That’s not true!” But as she said the words, they echoed in her head with a familiar ring. Not true, I didn’t. Not true. She had said those same words fifteen years ago in a courtroom, too, and it hadn’t done any good then, either.

  Panic began to build inside her, old and habitual and not entirely reasonable.

  “Negligence?” she retorted. “Who? With what? Nobody’s charged me with anything!”

  “They have now.” His voice was flat. “Unofficially and only through the media, of course.”

  “What did I do?” she demanded tensely. She was too careful for anything to have gone wrong.

  “Nothing.”

  Suddenly she was angry. “Hold on.”

  She slammed the receiver down on the breakfast bar. She hoped the cracking sound hurt his ear. She spread the newspaper flat and read fast and furiously.

  It was the Shokonnet baby.

  The report said that the case had fallen apart because she’d dropped the ball, had let the body go too soon. Specifically, a Detective Carlton O’Donnell was saying so. Her heart started hammering hard. She took a careful moment to stick a cup of water in the microwave and get control of herself, then she picked up the phone again.

  “I didn’t release that body,” she said with exquisite calm and care. “You did. And who’s Carlton O’Donnell? I’ve never heard of him!” Her voice started rising in spite of all her efforts.

  “My point exactly,” Jesse said. “Calm down.”

  She realized that he said that to her a lot. “Calm down?” she shouted, just to be contrary. “Someone’s accusing me of something I had no part in!”

  “I know. have a copy of that release form, if you’ll remember.”

  “With your signature on the bottom of it!”

  “I had nothing to do with this,” he said in that flat, cool tone that she was beginning to loathe. She’d much preferred his laughter when he was dancing with her.

  Don’t think about that.

  “Angela,” he said, and his voice changed, softening.

  Something happened inside her, something ticklish like the time when he had admired her legs. He had never called her by her first name before.

  She knew she had to correct him, but she couldn’t find her voice. “What?” she demanded instead, her voice thin as a wire.

  “I didn’t sign that release form.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “No. I didn’t.” There was something unequivocal in his tone now. “I never use the initial M, and my name was signed with an M. Look at your own copy.”

  As though that alone made it true, she thought wildly. As though no one would dare doubt his word. They probably wouldn’t.

  “I don’t have my copy here,” she returned. “So just tell me what you’re saying.”

  “Someone forged my signature.”

  “That’s convenient,” she snapped, wanting to believe him, unable to. “Why didn’t you tell me this before? You let me blast you that day and you didn’t say a word!”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. She knew the reason. He was a Hadley. He wouldn’t trust
anyone with anything that could affect his position, his reputation. It occurred to her that that almost made it seem as if they had something in common. But why was he confiding in her now?

  “On Thursday, I thought somebody was setting me up for a fall,” he explained. “I would say, based on this article, that it’s not me they’re after.”

  “Then why are you getting involved?”

  “Because I am involved.”

  That she could accept. He would cover his own backside. Nobody had forged her signature.

  “I’ve already been in touch with the newspaper,” Jesse went on. “The reporter claims that the leak came from O’Donnell himself. He allegedly told the reporter that he was upset because you’d released the body prior to any and all evidence being obtained, and now we can’t possibly prosecute. Ergo—negligence.”

  “Who is this O’Donnell?”

  “A new guy, just transferred from CAP to Homicide.”

  Crimes Against Persons. Okay. “How’d he get involved?” she persisted.

  “He didn’t,” Jesse said flatly. “I’ve talked to him, too. He says he never spoke to the paper.”

  “So...who?” Her heart was beating hard again. “Who called the paper trying to make me look bad?”

  “Someone who knows that O’Donnell caught the case.” Jesse stated the obvious with reasonable patience. “Someone pretending to be him. Carper—the reporter—said the interview was done over the telephone. Nothing unusual in that, but he claims not to have taped it. I also have to wonder why he didn’t interview you for your side of the story.”

  “Well, he didn’t,” she stated flatly.

  She was in trouble, Angela thought sickly. And then she was furious.

  She had done everything by the book for eight months! She had done a damned fine job! And now somebody, somewhere, was making up things to hang on her. Who? Why?

  “The paper’s going to print a retraction in tomorrow’s edition,” Jesse responded.

  “What are they supposed to retract?” she snapped. “The Shokonnet baby was cremated.”

  “But no negligence has been charged.”

  “Oh, God,” she said again. Jesse was silent. “Did you tell this Carper guy that it was your signature that was forged?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You—”

  His voice cracked back over the phone line, angry now. “We’d look like fools, damn it. I won’t have the public knowing about this. I won’t add fuel to the fire. I won’t give the Inquirer another juicy tidbit to print.”

  “Spoken like a true politician,” she mocked.

  “What do you want from me, Angela? I am a politician.” This time there was nothing gentle about his voice when he used her name.

  “And this is an election year.”

  “Get off your high horse, damn it! You’ve got as much at stake here as I do.”

  She could feel his anger throbbing over the phone line. And then she realized that it didn’t particularly frighten her, not in the way a simple glance at his uncle’s face had frightened her. And that made her head swim all over again. It amazed her and alarmed her.

  She did not want to trust him. She couldn’t.

  “So you want to sweep this dirt under the carpet?” she accused.

  “Publicly? Yes. Privately, no. I’m working on it.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean, why? Because I want to find out who the hell is doing this! It’s my job.”

  “It’s my problem.” Her beeper sounded. It was probably her office, calling about this mess, but the timing was perfect. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Then call me back. We’re not finished with this.” He barked his phone number at her before she was ready for it. She didn’t write it down.

  “Goodbye, Counselor. I’ll deal with this myself.” She hung up the phone hard.

  After a long moment, she carefully got up to take her cup out of the microwave. She made her coffee. Her hands were shaking.

  She sipped, then raked her fingers through her disheveled hair. Jesse had gotten the paper to print a retraction. She had a little bit of time to try to find out who would want to accuse her of something she hadn’t done, and why. And she would do it on her own terms.

  My God, she realized, even John Gunner was gone this time, off to Australia on his honeymoon. She was really on her own.

  Her first hour at work on Monday revealed that no one in her office had spoken to a reporter named Carper. At least, she didn’t think they had. She knew that she could expect the guilty party to lie, but there were no sliding glances, no telltale signs when she called a meeting of all her staff. Even Ed Thackery seemed perplexed by her questions, and of all her deputies, he was the one she would most suspect of trying to undermine her to get her job.

  She didn’t hear from Jesse again until the following Sunday morning. He called her at home again.

  “Hear anything?” he asked. This time he didn’t even identify himself.

  She realized with a sinking heart that he didn’t have to. She knew his voice now. And as soon as she heard it, her pulse rioted with far too many emotions for comfort. Alarm, certainly. Wariness and expectation. But the worst was pleasure.

  It made her voice sharp. “About what?” she snapped, deliberately vague.

  “Shokonnet. O’Donnell. Carper. Negligence.” His voice was businesslike and abrupt. He might have been working his way through a list of to-do things on his desk, ticking them off.

  “Nothing, Counselor,” she said shortly. “Besides. I told you—it’s not your problem.”

  “Like hell it’s not,” he argued.

  Her beeper went off. She had never heard anything so sweet in her life. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Do you do that on purpose?”

  “What?”

  “Make that thing sound off whenever I’m talking to you.”

  “There’s a thought.” She disconnected before he could answer. She collected herself, made sure her breathing was even, then she dialed her office.

  He got to her, she realized. He really got to her.

  “Medical examiner’s office,” a thin male voice answered. Ed Thackery. Well, wasn’t this her day? She wondered why he was handling phones. She wondered where the dispatcher was. Another Sunday zoo, she thought. Everything happened on weekends when people were partying, drinking and driving, fighting with their spouses and friends. The hospital ERs got them on Saturday night and passed them on to her office on Sunday morning.

  “It’s Dr. Byerly,” she answered. “What’s going on?”

  There was a deliberate pause. She’d come under fire for using the professional title among her own colleagues. But she’d known that she was going to have a hard enough time garnering respect—being a thirty-six-year-old female—without making it easy for anyone by allowing them to chat with her on a first-name basis. Ed didn’t like it. He never had.

  “Well, Doc, we’ve got a hot one on our hands,” he answered finally. “Figured you might want to handle it yourself.”

  No, Angela thought with a sigh, if it’s that hot, he doesn’t want to touch it for fear of something going wrong and besmirching his own reputation. For one dismal, horrible moment, she tried to remember what it had been like, long ago, to trust people.

  “It’s Lisette Chauncy,” Ed went on.

  The name rang a bell. “Who is she?”

  “Macademy Steel? Railroads?” Ed’s voice was almost but not quite sneering as he refreshed her memory. “Daughter of Gwen and Abe Chauncy? He’s the big daddy patron saint of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.”

  The floor seemed to shift beneath Angela’s feet. “Oh, my God.” The woman at the wedding two weeks ago, she remembered. The woman she and Jesse had been laughing about....

  Angela shot a hand out, bracing herself against the breakfast bar. The M.E.’s office performed maybe eight thousand autopsies a year. But not once, not yet, had she been forced to look down into the still and lifel
ess face of someone she had known or met while they were alive.

  “How?” she asked, her voice faint.

  “I don’t know the details. The Homicide guys are on their way up there now. They’re waiting for one of us to come do our thing.”

  “Call them back and tell them I’m on my way.”

  “Better you than me, Chief. Big Daddy Chauncy is screaming for justice.”

  Angela didn’t doubt it. And being who he was, he would get it.

  She wrote down the address and went to get her bag.

  Jesse was as angry as he could remember being in a good, long while. And that in itself amazed him—the slow, hot burn of temper in the pit of his stomach. Irritation he was familiar with—he felt that often. But at no time in recent memory had anyone ever dared to make him truly angry.

  Trust this woman to do the job.

  He’d extended a helping hand, and she had slapped it. Dr. Angela Byerly had a major attitude problem, he decided. He didn’t know what bone she thought she had to pick with his uncle, but it was paranoid and prejudiced of her to hold it against him. The hell of it was, Wendell didn’t know what bone she had to pick, either. Jesse had asked him about it. Wendell didn’t remember ever having laid eyes on Angela Byerly before in his life.

  Which should have been enough, Jesse figured, for him to put the crazy doctor out of his mind. It was possible she was unstable. He looked again at the unbelievable hat sitting beside him on his desk. He’d rescued it from the veranda when she’d fled without it. No stable woman he knew would ever wear such a thing.

  It really was the most atrocious piece of feminine attire he had ever seen in his life. And he could still see it on her, her blond curls tumbling beneath it.

  “Damn it,” he said aloud.

  Granted, he had phoned her on a reasonably flimsy pretext. The Shokonnet case was getting colder and colder as the weeks went by. Homicide had put the file aside. There was really nothing either he or Angela could do now but tighten security and make sure that such a thing didn’t happen again. It had, no doubt, been nothing more than a prank by someone disgruntled over her hiring. The days since then had been quiet.