Compromising Positions

by Beverly Bird

  Her head hitched. “Why?”

  “What is it, Angela? Why the hell are you so leery of me?”

  She didn’t answer. There were too many answers to allow her to give him any single one. She shook her head, feeling lost and confused.

  “Look,” he said slowly, “it’s been a horrible day. It’s been a pretty bad couple of weeks. Someone besides me released that Shokonnet kid’s body—”

  “So you say,” she countered desperately.

  Jesse swore. “All right. Forget Shokonnet. Someone’s trying to frame me for murder.”

  She made a strangled sound.

  “I’m scared,” he admitted. “And I’m very, very angry. They killed a woman I’ve known all my life. They did it in an exceptionally cruel way, preying on the poor woman’s weaknesses. She’s in there—” He thrust a thumb toward the hallway that led to the autopsy rooms “—and I don’t even want to know what condition she’s in right now. This is ugly. It’s more inherently painful than anything I’ve had to deal with in a long while. And I don’t have a flowered dress.”

  As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he knew that that was exactly why he wanted this dinner. Angela Byerty—and her dresses and shoes and hats—shook up his cold, orderly world. He needed desperately to be distracted for a while. And no one could do that quite like this woman seemed to.

  “Please,” he said more quietly.

  “I can’t,” she managed to respond helplessly.

  “We’ll go somewhere where the lighting is low. And candles. I need civility and good wine. I want to go somewhere where people talk quietly and no one gets killed. I need to balance this mess, Angela. And you’re available. Aren’t you?”

  She let out a choked sound of laughter. “At least you’re honest.”

  “In most cases, and always with myself.” He moved toward the door. “I’ll pick you up at seven.”

  “You don’t even know where I live.”

  “I can find out. My limo picked you up the day of the wedding.”

  “I can’t—” she began again.

  The sound of the door closing cut her off.

  She had to run after him. She had to tell him no. It wasn’t just him. It wasn’t just that she had learned never to get too chummy with any man she didn’t fully intend to sleep with. It wasn’t just that.

  She didn’t trust herself. Even if she wanted to get to know him better, spend time with him, she knew that disaster would follow.

  She had to catch him and straighten this out. She stood rooted to the spot.

  Chapter 6

  There was a good fifteen minutes’ worth of voice mail waiting for him when Jesse got home. As he began to listen to it, tension tightened his muscles again. He heard Angela’s voice. As long as the killer didn’t leave any other little goodies lying around...

  But none of the calls were from Kennery or the P.P.D. Most of them were from social acquaintances expressing horror at what had happened to Lisette, but probably, Jesse supposed, just wanting the inside scoop from the D.A. himself. The only call he returned was his mother’s, and that was more from a sense of obligation than anything else.

  “Horrible!” Isobel cried. “I just shudder. Poor Abe. Poor Gwen.”

  “Poor Lisette,” Jesse murmured, suddenly tired.

  “Do you want the guest list?”

  “What guest list?”

  “Lisette was here for the wedding. And all those horrid people...”

  “And you think one of them killed her?” he asked incredulously.

  “Where else would poor Lisette encounter the sort of person who would...who would do what was done to her?”

  Crazily, out of the blue, he heard Angela’s voice yet again. Meaning that the people she knew don’t kill each other? Anyone can be incited to murder....

  “I tried to do right by your sister,” Isobel complained, “but I don’t understand why she insists upon doing the things she does with her life.”

  Going to the Police Academy after law school had been the worst of it. Jesse reflected. Isobel had still been recovering from that when Tessa had gone to work for the police department and married a detective named Matt Bryant. Then a year and a half after she’d been widowed, she’d married Gunner, another detective.

  “Most of those people Gunner invited were cops,” Jesse stated levelly.

  “Well, of course, but that doesn’t preclude—”

  “Goodbye. Mother.” He took a page from Angela’s book and hung up quickly.

  He wasn’t sure why he was so aggravated with his mother. She had not behaved any differently than she ever did. She had been lamenting Tessa’s choice in men for years. But today she made him feel a little wild, as if he would actually enjoy punching something.

  Sweatpants and a Grateful Dead T-shirt popped into his mind. as though by way of explanation. That shook him a little, too. But he couldn’t deny that the contrast between Angela’s volatile idealism and Isobel’s icy propriety was great.

  He reached for his briefcase. deliberately clearing his mind. He worked for a while, dictating and sorting through paperwork. Then he went upstairs to shower and change. By the time he came down again, his footsteps were moderately lighter.

  He drove his Mercedes to the garage where he kept his cars. Society Hill didn’t leave much room for parking. And even there, if he left a car long enough at the curb, he would eventually find it missing pieces.

  He changed the Mercedes for the old Cobra, telling himself that it had nothing to do with the fact that something about Hadley money seemed to set Angela off. It had nothing to do with the fact that the Cobra was a quirky car that was due for a paint job and needed a few hard-to-find parts, while the Mercedes was new and all Hadley elegance. The Cobra was a hobby car, all rumbling power, and he told himself that the growl of the engine matched his mood.

  Except his mood continued to lighten the farther south he drove. He grew more and more confused, as well. He was surprised by Angela’s neighborhood. He knew that she could also afford to live in Society Hill if she chose to. He parked, then stood on the curb for a moment, eyeing the teenagers who were loitering just down the block. It was a clean street with neat homes, but it had always been his experience that kids loitering anywhere spelled trouble, and this really wasn’t the best of areas.

  Then Angela’s voice rang out. “If so much as a chip of paint is missing when we come out, just remember I know all your names!”

  Jesse looked sharply up her stoop to her door. She was leaning outside, looking at the boys herself.

  “A limo and now these wheels?” one of them shouted back. “You’re traveling high class, Angie! La-di-da!”

  Jesse was impressed. Despite its condition, they knew the Cobra was nothing to sneeze at. Then his attention turned again to Angela.

  “Don’t you forget it,” she hollered. She laughed, then sobered abruptly as she looked at Jesse. “Come in,” she said stiffly.

  He got as far as her foyer before he allowed himself to stop and stare. Oh, yeah, he decided, she was just what he needed tonight.

  He had seen her looking cool and provocative in that short red dress at the wedding, while her eyes had said she was scared to death. He had seen her looking young and innocent in sweats and no makeup at Lisette’s home, while her eyes had shown she was fiercely determined to find out what had happened to the woman. He’d seen her draped in protective equipment with a haunted look in her eyes; and now she was heat and smoke and fire.

  Now she could make a man imagine wild and incredible things with just a glance. There was nothing—absolutely nothing—outrageous about her tonight, except perhaps her impact, her sheer beauty.

  She wore midnight blue that shimmered. Her dress was short again, revealing those miles of legs. It was sleeveless like the one she had worn to the wedding, but this had a loose, scooped neckline. It clung and slid and shifted over her skin when she moved. He wondered what, if anything, she wore beneath it, and he felt like someone had
punched him.

  Her hair was caught up over one ear with something silver, and tonight her eyes were golden again. She wore silver shoes.

  She made him think of a treasure chest, of opening one up to find a thousand glimmering jewels inside. He wondered what was inside her, what was going on behind those eyes that watched him warily, defensively.

  She stepped back to let him into the foyer, then she planted her hands on her hips. “We need to be clear on something here,” she said immediately.

  “What?” He realized his voice was surprisingly hoarse.

  “This is not a date. It’s a...” Her voice trailed off and she looked vaguely confused for a moment, as though trying to figure out exactly what it might be. “Maybe I needed something like this, too,” she finished on a breath.

  “Then why can’t it be a date?”

  Because if we call it that, you’ll ruin everything. And I’ll fall apart. Because if she deluded herself, played games with herself, maybe they could both enjoy a respite, she hoped. If he thought it was a date, he would expect too much from her. He would think he had the right to touch her.

  She was out of her mind. She shouldn’t be doing this.

  “I just wanted to make sure we understood each other,” she said awkwardly, And there was certainly safety in that. “I just figured...well, what could I have done? You’d have been here at seven o’clock whether I liked it or not.”

  Whom was she trying to convince? “Probably. Let’s go.”

  “Yes. Sure.” Still, she hesitated a moment, and Jesse thought she swallowed carefully.

  He followed her outside. The car was intact, paint and all. One of the kids on the corner gave a wolf whistle. Angela winked at them.

  “They like you,” he observed when they were in the car. He watched out of the corner of his eye as she crossed her legs and he felt something shudder deep inside him.

  “Well, I’m safe as far as adults go,” she returned. “I fall into a gray area. I went to school with most of their parents. But by the same token, I’m nobody’s parent.”

  “Do you want to be?”

  She looked at him, startled. “What?”

  “A parent.”

  “Oh.” Something, maybe just her breath, seemed to go out of her. “I haven’t really considered it in a very long time.”

  “How long?” he asked, curious. “And why?”

  “Maybe fifteen years.”

  She said it casually, but there was an undercurrent of something there, he suspected, some tremor to her tone.

  “When exactly would I have time to be a mommy?” she rushed on. “In the wee hours of the night when I actually get to sleep if I’m lucky, if no one important has had the audacity to die at such an inconvenient hour?”

  She was talking too fast. Nervously, he thought.

  “I’m on call twenty-four hours a day,” she reminded him.

  “But you don’t take every autopsy, visit every crime scene yourself.”

  “No, of course not. That’s what my deputies are for. But my schedule is still very iffy. At any given moment, something could happen that would demand my personal attention.”

  “That’s what daddies are for, right? To pick up the slack?”

  She made an odd sound. He glanced over at her. Her face was expressionless.

  “You’ve never married, either?” he pressed, not even sure why he was doing it. He already knew all the rumors that said she hadn’t.

  “No,” she said shortly. “Same thing. No time.”

  They pulled up at the restaurant. Angela looked quickly at the facade. It was one of those small, low-key places in the center of the city, on the corner of a block that abutted a residential neighborhood. Even the awning shouted understated elegance—hunter green, with just a hint of gold trim. There was a doorman.

  Jesse turned his keys over to the valet. By the time he got around to Angela’s door, another employee had opened it for her. He noticed with some chagrin that the kid paid a hell of a lot of attention to her legs.

  He was surprised by the possessive surge that hit him. He moved impulsively to take her hand and help her to her feet himself before they went inside.

  After they were seated, she counted only twelve tables. They were all occupied, but there were no startling bursts of sound or conversation. Everyone seemed to lean toward each other, talking urgently and quietly. There was a lot of dark wood, and the hunter green color scheme extended to the interior—wallpaper, tablecloths, all with just a hint of gold. It was a place that suited him, she decided.

  The maître d’ unfolded her napkin onto her lap. Angela jerked back to give him ample room to do so without inadvertently touching her. When she looked up again, Jesse was watching her closely.

  Her heart skipped. “What?” she asked warily.

  “You never answered my question. Do you want kids? You told me all the reasons you shouldn’t, but not what you feel.”

  “Oh. Are we still on that?”

  “We never changed the subject.”

  “I’m happy the way I am,” she said finally.

  He got the impression that she was merely closing the conversation rather than being entirely honest with him this time. He let it go for the present, but he sensed more stories left untold.

  The wine steward took his order. A flashbulb went off somewhere, and Jesse swore.

  Angela looked around, confused, then she understood. “Oh,” she murmured as the photographer retreated through the restaurant door. “How do they do that?”

  Jesse’s face was grim. She thought she saw something tick at his jaw.

  “I made reservations,” he said.

  “So?”

  “So they keep on top of things like that. They check periodically. ‘Anybody interesting dining with you this evening?’ That sort of thing. And when the answer is yes, they hang around outside and take their picture. Don’t worry about it. Nine times out of ten they don’t end up using mine. I’m mostly fill.”

  “Fill?” she repeated.

  “If someone more important or more colorful hasn’t done anything worth mentioning recently, and they have space to kill, they might use that picture.”

  She thought she’d seen him in the newspaper—and magazines—a lot more often than that. He was rich, attractive, single—American royalty, and a bachelor to boot. Angela began to get an odd, disassociated feeling, as if she was wearing something, doing something, that didn’t really fit her. What in the world was she doing here with this man?

  “Traveling with you is certainly interesting.” she said at length.

  His eyes seemed to narrow on her face. “Where would we be tonight if the choice had been yours?”

  One corner of her mouth quirked. It seemed a self-mocking reflex. “I wouldn’t be with you at all.”

  “But you are. Why?”

  “I told you earlier.”

  “Ah. the old he’ll-show-up-whether-I-like-it-or-not excuse.”

  Her heart skipped. Suddenly, she was no longer comfortable—not that she really had been even once since he had appeared on her sidewalk. But now there was something too provocative about his voice. He watched her as if he genuinely wanted to know every little thing there was to know about her. Those eyes again, she thought. Damn his eyes. They said he would challenge her to tell the truth.

  “We’d be in Gunner’s hunting cabin in the Poconos,” she blurted.

  Something in his eyes flared. She regretted her honesty even as something in her belly curled at that look.

  “Interesting. And what might we be doing there?”

  She had much more sense than to think about that in too much detail.

  “We’d be roasting hot dogs in the fireplace,” she managed to answer finally. “We’d have a six-pack of beer on ice.” She sipped the wine the steward had brought, then couldn’t help but close her eyes in appreciation. “Oh, but this is good. too.”

  She found, wildly and improbably, that it reminded her of him—deep an
d rich, dark and smooth. When she looked at him again. she had to wonder if her thoughts showed in her eyes because there was something that fairly simmered in his own now.

  Oh, God, what was happening here? She couldn’t let this happen. She drank again quickly because her mouth went dry.

  Jesse leaned back in his chair. “I have a country place.”

  “You do?” Then she realized she wasn’t surprised. She remembered the calluses on his decidedly un-white-collar hands. Maybe they came from chopping wood or some such thing. She found herself able to believe that he’d want to do those chores himself. “And do you rough it there?”

  “Sort of. I don’t have servants.”

  She startled herself by relaxing enough to laugh aloud.

  “Why do you live where you do?” he asked suddenly.

  She looked into his eyes, taken aback. “On Oregon Avenue? Because I’m home there.”

  “You could afford better.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t want better.”

  “Why not?”

  “What would I do with it?” She looked genuinely bewildered, then her eyes cleared. She threw the question back at him, deliberately, he felt. As though to steer the conversation from herself.

  “Why do you live where you do?”

  “I—” He broke off. He honestly didn’t know.

  She watched him, waiting.

  “It’s—” He stopped again. What? he asked himself. “Quiet,” he finished.

  “Ah, so we’re back to that again.”

  “I like peace. Orderliness.”

  “Do you? Or are you just inured to it?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s human nature to gravitate toward that which a person is most accustomed to. Change rattles all but a few reckless, outgoing personality types.”

  “You’re a psychiatrist, too?”

  She gave a wicked smile. Somehow, she realized, she was rattling him.

  “Rotations,” she explained. “In medical school. They give you a little taste of everything. Are you most accustomed to order?”

  He thought about it. He could not remember one single instance where a voice had been raised in his childhood home. “We lived as though the voters were always peering in our windows,” he heard himself say.