A Cutthroat Business

by Bente Gallagher

  The service itself got underway shortly thereafter, and the speeches were alternately bearable and agonizing. Walker was dignified and the real estate commissioner and association president more so, while Steven was composed, at least until he started talking about his and Brenda’s children, and then a single tear rolled down his cheek and trembled on his chin for a moment before plunging to its doom on the expanse of his doublebreasted suit. And Clarice Webb was a blubbering mess who had to be escorted off the podium by Tim, who patted her hand solicitously while grinning offensively at the rest of us. Heidi was apparently not considered important enough to be allowed to speak.

  I left the service as soon as I decently could, without stopping to talk to anyone, and high-tailed it across the parking lot barely ahead of the TV cameras. I was just about to get into my car when someone materialized next to me. I jumped backwards like a flea on a hot griddle, with a little shriek.

  “Goddammit!” I added, after I had caught my breath. “Can’t you knock or something? You’re scaring a year off my life every time you do that.”

  Rafael Collier smirked. His eyes were covered by mirrored sunglasses, and he didn’t say anything. He just stood there looking at me. At least I assumed he was looking at me; it was hard to be sure when all I could see was my own reflection.

  “Would you mind taking the glasses off?” I asked peevishly. “I like seeing people’s eyes when I speak to them. They’re the mirrors of the soul and all that.” “In that case my soul’s black as sin,” Rafe said wryly. He removed the glasses. I gasped.

  He wasn’t kidding. The skin around his left eye was puffy and tight, and a lovely purple-black. I use that color (sparingly) for evening eye-shadow sometimes. It didn’t look as good on him as I fancy it does on me. I grimaced. “Put them back on, please. It hurts to look at you. What happened?”

  “Had a disagreement with someone,” Rafe said. When the dark glasses were in place, he looked back at me, but now I could no longer see his expression. I narrowed my own eyes.

  “It wasn’t Marquita, was it?”

  He grinned. “Would that sweet lil’ gal do something like this?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” I said. “She could probably take you in arm wrestling, too.”

  “I doubt it. No, darlin’, it wasn’t Marquita. I had a runin with the law.”

  Oh, God. “Did Sheriff Satterfield do it?” Was this Bob Satterfield’s idea of a ‘talk’?

  “One of his deputies got a little carried away,” Rafe said. “Had a score to settle, seemingly. I took care of it.” He shifted his weight slightly.

  “Sounds painful.”

  “Was. Can’t a’been pleasant for him, neither.”

  “I can imagine.” I looked around. There was a TV camera pointed our way, and I turned my back to it before I added, “I didn’t expect to see you here.” “Came to see you,” Rafe said, with a glance at the TV crew. He turned away as well.

  “Oh.” Gosh, he wasn’t going to ask me out too, was he? “Um . . . what can I do for you?”

  He didn’t answer, but his lips curled, and I realized— too late—what kind of response I had let myself in for. To make reference to it would be unladylike, however, so I kept my mouth shut, although I could feel my cheeks heat up. Rafe chuckled. “Got a favor to ask.”

  “What kind of favor?”

  “Not that kind.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that kind.”

  “Course not,” Rafe said blandly.

  I bit my lip. He didn’t say anything else, though, and finally I asked again, with what dignity I could muster, “What kind of favor?”

  “You ever find out anything about the owner of that house on Potsdam?”

  Whoops. I flushed. “Sorry. With everything else that’s been going on, it totally slipped my mind. I’ll do it later today, I promise.”

  “No problem. You got any free time in the next couple days?”

  “For what?”

  “I wanna go back there.”

  I looked up at him, dismayed. “Are you sure?”

  Going back to 101 Potsdam Street was at the bottom of a very long list of things I wanted to do. Especially after what had happened last time I was there.

  Rafe smirked. “If you’re too scared, darlin’, I’m sure I can find someone else.”

  I didn’t doubt it. Heidi Hoppenfeldt would jump at the chance to work with him, and Tim would be all over him at the first opportunity. In more ways than one. And whereas that didn’t bother me—either of them was welcome to him if Marquita was willing to share—I hated the idea of missing out on the commission in the event that he actually could buy the place.

  “I’ll do it. But not today. I’ve still got the reception to go to.”

  “Tomorrow’s fine. Eight?”

  I agreed to meet him at the ungodly early hour of eight, then watched him walk away. The TV cameras zoomed in on him as he went past, but nobody pestered him for an interview. I wasn’t surprised.

  6.

  The reception was depressing, mostly because—and this probably won’t make much sense—it wasn’t. It was more like a party than a funeral; there was happy music playing, and people were eating and laughing and talking shop. Everyone seemed to have a good time. Austin locked himself in the den to play video games, and Alexandra went off to her room with a girlfriend. I barely had time to tell her how sorry I was for her loss before she disappeared.

  Steven was smiling when he made the rounds. “Thank you, Savannah.” He took my hand and looked deeply into my eyes. “I know you and Brenda didn’t always get on well . . .” Brenda must have told him that, because I certainly hadn’t. “. . . and I really appreciate your low profile over this whole business. There are a lot of people who would have taken the opportunity to further their own career with all the publicity, but you didn’t, and I’m grateful.” “You’re welcome,” I said. “I’ve always believed it

  wrong to take advantage of someone else’s misfortune for my own benefit.”

  Steven smiled. “You’re a nice girl, Savannah.” He nodded, squeezed my hand, and moved on. I turned, and found myself face to face with the girlfriend. Or neighbor, to put a more charitable spin on it. She was standing a little too close for comfort, and watched me a little too narrowly. “Hello. I’m Maybelle Driscoll.” She offered her hand.

  “Savannah Martin,” I said. She had a surprisingly strong grip for someone so dainty. “I worked with Brenda.” I moved back a fraction when she let go of my hand.

  “I live across the street.” She waved in what I guessed was the direction of her house. “I’ve known Steven and Brenda for years.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, since the situation seemed to call for it. She opened her hands in an apologetic sort of fashion.

  “Brenda and I were never close. I used to baby-sit occasionally, when the kids were younger. My husband and I weren’t blessed with any of our own, and she was always so busy, bless her heart, making those poor, dear children sit in the car while she met her clients. And then, after my husband died, Steven would come over occasionally to give me a hand. With dripping faucets and things like that, you know. Things which are hard for a woman by herself to manage.” She smiled. I smiled back. I’m no whiz with dripping faucets either. Although I’d never stoop to using it as an excuse for seducing someone else’s husband.

  “I’ve been thinking about selling,” she added pensively—my God, I thought; is she moving in already?—“but I’m not sure.”

  I nodded sympathetically. “It’s a big decision.” She nodded fervently. “Oh, yes! But with Brenda gone, Steven is going to need someone to manage things. Maybe he’ll finally be able to make some strides in his career, if he doesn’t always have to play second fiddle to Brenda!”

  Her voice was quite remarkably poisonous when she said Brenda’s name, especially considering that our conversation took place at Brenda’s funeral. I smiled politely and refrained, with an effort, from showing my reaction. />
  “If you’d like to talk to someone about selling,” I said instead, “I’d be happy to tell you everything I know. Just give me a call.”

  I handed her my business card. Maybelle smiled sweetly and tucked it into a pocket of her almost—but not quite—too celebratory dress. I excused myself and disappeared toward the buffet, feeling as if I had just escaped with my life. Maybe it was Maybelle who had followed Brenda to Potsdam Street on Saturday morning to slit her throat. At least Steven had shed a tear during his speech, but Maybelle Driscoll gave me the impression that she could have killed Brenda and square-danced on the remains without feeling a single moment of remorse.

  It was just before seven, and I was curled up in a corner of the second-hand faux-suede sofa, dividing my attention between a paperback romance and the TV, when the doorbell rang. While vicariously enjoying the sexual tension between the blonde and beautiful Lady Shannon and the dark and dangerous highway robber, Mac the Black MacTavish, I was keeping an eye on the news for footage from the memorial service. Channel 5 had, for reasons known only unto themselves, decided to include a five-second segment of Rafe Collier and myself in their coverage, and if that doesn’t sound like a big deal, I can tell you that five secondsis a lot longer than it seems. We looked very furtive, skulking in the parking lot with our backs to the TV cameras, and he stood a lot closer to me than I had noticed at the time, too. I was flipping between networks, trying to determine whether anyone else was airing a similar segment and crossing my fingers, hoping to God that my mother wasn’t watching Channel 5, when the doorbell startled me.

  I rent an apartment in a complex on East Main Street. It’s gated and for the most part pretty safe, but I made sure I peeked through the spy hole before I answered. What I saw outside made me take an involuntary step back. “Todd?”

  Todd Satterfield smiled at the door, over a big bunch of roses. Pink. I guess red would have been too presumptuous. “Good evening, Savannah.”

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “Taking you to dinner, I hope. You said any time I was in Nashville, we’d go.”

  “I didn’t expectyou today!” I protested. Todd shrugged.

  “I told you I wasn’t busy. Come on, Savannah, let me in.”

  “I’m not dressed,” I hedged. If it had been Rafe outside, he would have made a suggestive remark, but Todd played it straight.

  “I’ll wait here, then. But don’t take too long. I made reservations at Fidelio’s at eight.”

  Fidelio’s is one of the nicest restaurants in Nashville; the kind of place where the CEO of Sony Music wines and dines his top artist, and where the director of the Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital takes his daughter for her sixteenth birthday. I hadn’t been there for several years—couldn’t afford it anymore—and the last time had been while Bradley and I were still married. I didn’t have great feelings about the place. Then again, the food was good, the stuff in the fridge was depressing, and if Todd wanted to impress me by taking me to Fidelio’s, who was I to demur?

  It took me a few minutes to get dressed—all right, ten or maybe even fifteen—but as all you girls know, that’s actually pretty good. Todd was very complimentary when I finally emerged. “You look beautiful. And you did it so quickly, too!”

  I lowered my lashes coyly, and snuck a peek at myself at the same time. The dress was my equivalent of Marquita’s hot pink number: not as bright, tight, or short, but with thin straps and enough of a plunge to show off what cleavage I have. I can’t hope to match Marquita in that respect, either, but really, who would want to? So we went to dinner at Fidelio’s and had a nice time. The food was excellent, the company good, and there were only two instances when the conversation was less than pleasant. The first came when Todd discovered that I had been to Fidelio’s before, and what the circumstances had been.

  “I think it was our first wedding anniversary.” I pushed a mushroom around my plate with my fork. “Our onlywedding anniversary, because we never made it to our second. Bradley took me here to celebrate. But then this woman showed up, someone he worked with, and he asked her to join us . . .”

  “On your anniversary?” Todd was cutting his Veal Marsala into bite-size pieces.

  “He talked to her the rest of the night, while I twiddled my thumbs. When I brought it up later, he told me I was being silly, and that it was just business.”

  “But it wasn’t?”

  I shook my head. “He married her a week after our divorce was final.” I speared the mushroom and ate it.

  “I’m sorry,” Todd said. I shrugged. It was in the past; it didn’t bother me anymore. Much. I wasn’t even sure it had bothered me that much at the time. My feelings had been hurt, my ego bruised, and I’d been mad as a hornet, but I wasn’t sure I’d really cared.

  “Did you love him?”

  I looked up, surprised. “I beg your pardon?”

  Toddrepeatedit.Itsoundedexactlythesamethistime.

  “Oh.” I finished chewing and swallowing while I thought it over. “I don’t think so. I thought I did, I guess. Or maybe not. I married him because it seemed like the right thing to do. Youknow. He was good looking, well off, and from an old Mississippi family. He was studying law, so he fit right in with my relatives. Mother liked him because he was always polite and proper. It was the first proposal I got. I was twenty-three and not getting any younger.”

  “I proposed,” Todd reminded me. I smiled.

  “Yes, but you were eighteen and going away to college. I was sixteen and still in senior high. I didn’t think you meant it.”

  Todd nodded.

  “So what about you?” I added. “I’ve told you my story. How about yours?”

  Todd’s story turned out to be quite similar to my own. He’d moved to Atlanta shortly after I married Bradley. If there was a connection, he didn’t mention it, and I didn’t ask. A few months later he’d met a woman whom he thought would make an acceptable Mrs. Todd Satterfield. He had proposed and been accepted. They’d gotten married. But Jolynn hadn’t turned out to be the perfect wife after all. She went through Todd’s money almost as fast as he could earn it, and apparently she wasn’tmuchof anassettoanupcomingyoungattorney’s reputation. She flirted with his boss, drank too much at company gatherings, and didn’t keep his house looking the way he wanted.

  “She looked like you,” Todd said, “so I thought she’d be like you, as well. But she wasn’t. She colored her hair, and didn’t dressright, and didn’t really care about anything but herself.” He stabbed his veal with suppressed force, then looked up at me. “Sorry.”

  “No problem. Bradley wasn’t what I thought when I married him, either.”

  When we dated, he’d been charming, generous, and a perfect gentleman. Once we were married, he turned out to be manipulative, shallow, and lousy in bed.

  Of course, he had blamed mefor his lack of success in that area. I was undersexed. Frigid, even. Impossible to please. Which was why he’d had to go to someone else to get his needs met. It’s a bunch of baloney, but I didn’t bother to say so; at that point I was just happy to get rid of him. My sister Catherine, who represented me in the divorce, wanted me to broadcast his infamy far and wide. She wasn’t happy when I accepted the Volvo and a fair, though hardly extravagant, settlement in lieu of alimony, in an attempt to keep everything on the QT. Very few people knew why my marriage had failed, and that’s exactly how I wanted it. I knew that Bradley’s infidelity was his fault, not mine; still, the fact that my husband had been dissatisfied with me wasn’t something I wanted the world to know. Naturally I didn’t tell Todd any of these details; the conversation had been personal enough without that.

  The other unpleasant discussion came over dessert, when I informed Todd that I had seen Rafe Collier again. “And he had a black eye. He said he’d had a run-in with the law.” Try as I might, I couldn’t keep a note of accusation out of my voice.

  “It was his own fault,” Todd grumbled.

  “I don’t see you spo
rting a black eye,” I retorted.

  “You think I’mstupid enough to hit him? It was Cletus. Deputy Sheriff Cletus Johnson. Apparently his ex has been hanging around Collier. They used to get into it all the time in high school, too.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Cletus’s ex-wife is a big black woman named Marquita?”

  Todd nodded. “How did you know?”

  “I met her out at the Bog yesterday. She seemed to think that Rafe had brought me out there, and she was quite alarmingly possessive of him. Poor man.”

  “Cletus?”

  “Rafe. Have you ever seen her? She’s as big as a barn. She’d squash him like a bug.”

  Todd muttered something. It wasn’t complimentary. To Rafe or Marquita.

  “So how does Cletus look today?” I added maliciously.

  Todd grimaced. “He has a black eye and a split lip, not to mention sore ribs. Collier’s not the kind of guy I’d want to tangle with.”

  I shook my head. Me, neither. In any sense of the word.

  It was late by the time I got home. I was alone; Todd didn’t suggest coming in, and if he hinted, the hints were too subtle for me to pick up on. He did kiss me, but it was a friendly, non-invasive kiss, and I didn’t hold it against him

  “I had a good time,” he said, clutching my hand and looking deeply into my eyes. I nodded. I’d had a good time, too. Or as good as can be expected, considering that I’d had to dwell on my ex-husband and the failure of my marriage. “I’d like to do it again sometime.”

  “I’m available,” I said brightly. “Anytime you’re up this way, just give me a call.”

  Todd said he’d take me up on that. I smiled and pecked him on the cheek. “Thanks, Todd. Drive carefully.”

  Todd promised he would. “You be careful, too. Don’t go into any empty houses with anyone you don’t know. I’d hate to see you end up like Brenda Puckett.”

  “That makes two of us. I’ll be careful.” I ducked through the door and into the apartment before my face could give me away. I’m not a good liar, and I was pretty sure Todd wouldn’t consider going back to 101 Potsdam Street in the company of Rafe Collier being particularly careful.