A Cutthroat Business

by Bente Gallagher

  “All right, then.” I thanked him again and hung up. And thought to myself as I got ready for bed that if I had known who had been with the sheriff when I called, whoever had scurried out of there so rapidly when she heard that Todd was on his way back, I would have thanked her for her assistance. Her presence must have rattled the sheriff’s brain sufficiently that he hadn’t even had the wherewithal to tell me to stay away from Rafe, let alone to question why I was so interested in the events of so long ago.

  14.

  Every Saturday morning since I got my real estate license, I had gone down to the office to hang out for a few hours, answering phones and keeping my fingers crossed in the hope that someone would call who wanted to buy or sell something. Finding clients had so far proven to be a challenge, made worse by the fact that the entire real estate market was in a slump. After last week’s fiasco, I had considered staying in bed this week—the last thing I wanted was for someone else to call me with another dead body—but when the rubber met the road, I ended up going to the office after all. Call it greed, or desperation, or whatever you want, but with both Brenda and Clarice gone, the chances of my finding a client were better than ever, and I wasn’t about to let the opportunity pass me by. And before you judge me too severely, keep in mind that I was only about two months away from having my lights and water cut off for non-payment. Bradley’s settlement had kept me afloat since the divorce, during the lean times when no one had bought much makeup, but with the start-up costs of becoming a realtor, I had exhausted most of my resources. I had to make a sale soon, or ask mother or Dix for help, and I wasn’t looking forward to it.

  Unfortunately, the office phones didn’t ring that much on Saturday mornings. Home buyers are just as fond of sleeping in as the rest of us, and I’m sure they had better things to do between the sheets on a lazy weekend than worry about finding a realtor.

  My own sheets have been empty—of anyone but me—since I left Bradley, and now I sat for a second and processed the thought that I could have asked Todd in last night. He hadn’t hinted—was too much of a gentleman to hint—but he probably wouldn’t have said no if I’d suggested it. He found me attractive—at least he said he did—and he was only human, after all.

  I had never slept with Todd. When we’d dated back in high school, we had both had enough sense to know that it was a bad idea. Plus, like I mentioned before, we dated more because it made our parents happy than because Todd and I were all that much in love with one another. At least I hadn’t been in love with him, although if he had truly married his ex-wife because he couldn’t have me, I must have made more of an impression on him than I realized.

  The idea of going to bed with him still didn’t hold much appeal for me, though. He was good-looking enough, certainly, and had all the other attributes a girl should be looking for in a mate: good manners, a nice car, enough money to provide for one in the manner to which one was accustomed, antecedents that dated back to the War Between the States. There just wasn’t any spark there. Plus, he’d probably expect me to want to marry him—a gentle-born Southern Belle doesn’t sleep with a man she wouldn’t want to marry—and I didn’t. At least not right now. It was much safer just to continue to live vicariously through the last in a long line of panting heroines in genre fiction.

  I sighed and turned my mind to business, which in this case was making sure that the phones were turned on and operational, and then sitting back and waiting for them to ring. For something to do, I pulled out Tartan Trystagain, and dove in. But for once, the perils of the heroine at the hands of the dark and dangerous highwayman failed to hold my attention. After a few minutes, I put the book down and decided to finish my search from the other night while I had the office to myself.

  I wish I could tell you that I found a really spectacular clue, something that the police had overlooked, but I didn’t find a blessed thing. I put Brenda’s Stor-All key back in the drawer, after making sure I wiped any fingerprints off on the hem of my skirt, and that was pretty much the long and short of it. The 101 Potsdam Street file was nowhere in Brenda’s office, or Clarice’s and Heidi’s shared office, or Tim’s office, or on Brittany’s desk, and if Clarice’s special drawer had ever contained anything of interest, the police must have taken it. All that was there now was a half-empty package of Italian biscotti and a few magazines, an open box of tissues, and some other odds and ends. The only interesting thing was a romance novel of the bodice ripper variety, which gave me a guilty feeling—Clarice and I had had something in common after all, even if it was just a shared passion for Barbara Botticelli’s rogue heroes!—but there was nothing anywhere that explained why she had done what she did.

  If she had done it, that is, and hadn’t been murdered, too. That explanation was looking a lot more likely, now that I was standing here. Everything about the office was a mute testament to Clarice’s devotion to Brenda. A photograph of the two of them, lovingly framed, stood on the desk. All of Brenda’s files were conscientiously labeled and filed in the numerous filing cabinets. Clarice’s desk calendar kept meticulous track of all of Brenda’s appointments. Alexandra dentist 4:00 PM. Closing 1457 Carteret 11:00 AM. Conference Montgomery Bell Academy 2:30 re Austin. GNAR luncheon 11:30. P/u red suit from cleaners first!

  Clarice herself didn’t appear to have had a life outside the office, for none of the notations applied to her. There was nothing written down for Thursday night, so either the appointment had been personal rather than business, or she just hadn’t wanted a record of it. On a whim, I flipped back to the previous weekend, to see if Clarice had made a note of Brenda’s appointment with Rafe, and maybe even of whom Brenda was taking with her. There was a notation that read, “7:30 101 Potsdam, R. Collier,” plus a phone number. Rafe had said that their appointment was for eight, so either Brenda wanted to be early, to open the draperies and make sure things looked as good as they could, or he had lied. Or she had arranged to meet someone else there at seven thirty, killing two birds with one stone, as it were. I took hold of the desk phone and dialed the number.

  A couple of rings went by, then a gruff male voice answered. “Car lot.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Um . . . Rafe?”

  The voice grunted a negative.

  “Rafael Collier?”

  “Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry. He also didn’t sound like Rafe, so I apologized and hung up, feeling stupid

  The phone rang again before I had even gotten up from the desk. I picked it up, putting the perkiness back into my voice. “Good morning. Thank you for calling Walker Lamont Realty. Savannah Martin speaking. How may I help you?”

  “Savannah Martin?” a male voice said. I rolled my eyes.

  “Speak of the devil.”

  “That sounds promising.” I could hear the grin in his voice, and ignored it.

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “I figured.”

  “What do you mean, you figured? How did you . . . ? Oh, God.” I resisted the impulse to knock my forehead against the desktop. It would rearrange my hair, and probably give me a bruise, too. “That was your number I called.”

  “As near as makes no difference. So what can I do for you, darlin’?”

  “I want to talk to you,” I repeated.

  “Yeah, I got that. You wanna know what I found in Brenda Puckett’s storage unit, right?”

  “Among other things. And I don’t want to do it over the phone. Especially not the office phone.” I glanced over my shoulder. Nobody was there, but it didn’t hurt to be careful.

  “I hear McDonald’s is having a sale on cheeseburgers.”

  I shuddered. “I think I’ll pass, thank you.”

  “Fine. We can go someplace else. Be ready at six.”

  He hung up before I had a chance to tell him I didn’t want to go to dinner with him. I also didn’t want to wait until tonight to get answers to my questions. So, of course, I tried to call back, but this time there was no answer at all. Gritting my teeth, I added another item
to the list of questions and gripes I had, and put it on the back burner until later.

  There was one more thing I could do to track down the elusive paperwork for 101 Potsdam Street, and that was calling Detective Grimaldi. It had occurred to me that maybe the reason why the file wasn’t here in the office was that the police had confiscated it. Since 101 Potsdam Street was where Brenda’s murder had taken place, it made sense that the police would have wanted a look at the file. I dialed.

  “Detective? This is Savannah Martin.”

  “Good morning, Ms. Martin,” Tamara Grimaldi said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I just wanted to ask a question. Do you by any chance have the paperwork that Brenda Puckett filled out for the sale of the house on Potsdam Street? I need to have a look at it, and I can’t find it here in the office, so I thought maybe you had taken it.”

  I crossed my fingers, hoping that the intricacies of real estate were such that she wouldn’t realize I had no business wanting to see the paperwork for someone else’s listing.

  Apparently she didn’t, because she answered readily enough. “We did, yes. But as it wasn’t pertinent to the murder—the papers themselves, I mean—we just made a copy and gave the originals back to Mr. Lamont.”

  “Oh,” I said, looking around as if I was hoping to see the file waving at me from somewhere. “I can’t find them.” Walker might have the file in his office, but I wasn’t about to look there. There are limits to my snoopiness, and digging through my boss’s files is firmly on the other side of that line. Plus, he usually locked his door when he wasn’t around, anyway.

  The detective hesitated for a moment. “I can fax you a copy if you’d like.”

  “You can?”

  “Sure. It was yours to begin with. No reason why you can’t see it again. Maybe you’ll notice something we didn’t.”

  “Great,” I said. “I’m at the office.” I gave her the fax number. We hung up, and I went over to the fax machine to wait. It rang less than two minutes later, and the first page of a Walker Lamont Realty Exclusive Right to Sell Listing Contract approved by the Tennessee Association of Realtors started making its slow progress through the machine. I gathered all three pages and took them back to my desk, where I proceeded to look them over.

  Five minutes later I was breathing hard and having a problem controlling my emotions. I had hoped that maybe Mrs. Jenkins had had an attorney-in-fact, someone who had been looking out for her interests and advising her on what to do, or even signing for her. If such was the case, there was no mention of it in the contract. Tondalia Jenkins had put her own shaky John Hancock to the fact that she was competent to make decisions and not under coercion when she agreed to let Brenda Puckett market and sell her house under an illegal net deal, which gave Mrs. Jenkins the first $100,000 from the sale, and Brenda everything else.

  I should probably explain. In a regular right-to-sell or exclusive-agency sale, the listing broker receives a percentage of the sales price as compensation. It can be anywhere from 4 percent up to 12 percent, with the average around 6 or 8 percent. The broker then turns around and shares his or her proceeds with the selling broker, who is the broker representing the buyer. (Confusing, I know.) In a net listing, however, the owner receives a specified—net—amount from the sale, with the excess going to the broker. This is done instead of giving the broker a certain percentage of the sales price. The broker can offer the property for sale at any price he or she wants, and pocket the difference. In this case, Brenda had listed the property for five times what she owed Mrs. Jenkins. She stood to pocket four hundred grand, or would have, if she hadn’t been dead.

  Net listings are illegal in most states, Tennessee among them. The Real Estate Commission might have looked through their fingers with the dementia thing—all Brenda would have had to do was say that Mrs. Jenkins had acted perfectly lucid and sane at the time of their meeting, and she had had no idea that the woman suffered from Alzheimer’s—but they wouldn’t have let her get away with the net listing. Lucky for her that she was already dead, and beyond the reach of the long arm of the law.

  At noon I gave up the vigil and went home. And not because I wanted to have five hours to primp for my date with Rafe. Every time I thought about it, I couldn’t believe I had let him con me into going out with him. I’d never live it down. And with my recent run of luck, we were sure to meet someone I knew, who would tell everyone else where I’d been and with whom, and my family would have a collective heart attack before they had me committed and disowned.

  All the same, I did get dressed up for dinner. Not in a sexy little black number, like I had for Todd, but in my most crisply sedate blouse, with French cuffs and a prim collar, and an equally sedate, mid-calf-length skirt. I pulled my hair back in a tight chignon, and even wore glasses instead of contacts. When I stepped back from the mirror, I looked like an old-fashioned school marm. Todd would have approved, but personally, I wasn’t so pleased. It wasn’t that I wanted Rafe to find me attractive—goodness, no!—but no woman likes to go out on the town looking less than her best. So with four minutes to go, I replaced the glasses with contacts and swiped some more color across my mouth. It was a poor effort, but better than nothing, and it took up all the time I had.

  The downstairs buzzer sounded at six o’clock on the dot. I didn’t bother answering it—he hadn’t shown me the courtesy of allowing me to cancel, so I didn’t feel I owed him any consideration in return—I just locked the door behind me and headed down the stairs to the first floor, where I was met, not by Rafe, but by a middleaged African-American man with a military haircut. “You Miss Martin?” he asked. I nodded. “I’m your driver. Get in.” He opened the door of a Lincoln Town Car doubleparked at the curb.

  I hesitated, and not only because his manners were atrocious. In mystery novels, the heroine always gets abducted when she gets into a cab she hasn’t ordered herself. Then again, if Rafe had wanted to abduct me, he could have done it himself yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that. Plus—and the thought only now occurred to me—he might not have any vehicle other than that monstrous Harley-Davidson, and if so, it was really quite considerate of him to send a car instead of expecting me to ride pillion.

  So I climbed into the Town Car and sat back against the leather upholstery, enjoying the feeling of being chauffeured and wondering where I’d end up for dinner.

  “Where are we going?” I inquired when the car circumventedthedowntownrestaurantdistrictandheaded for the snobbier west side instead. A pair of flat, brown eyes, as expressive as pebbles, met mine in the mirror.

  “Can’t say.”

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  He shook his head. “I mean I can’t say.”

  “You know, but you won’t tell me? Why not?” I kept my eyes on him in the rearview mirror.

  “Rafe told me, ‘get the lady in the car and drive. No talkin’, no detours, no answerin’ questions. Just drive.’”

  I arched my brows. “So you can’t talk to me?”

  “Nope. Sure don’t wanna upset the man.” He turned his attention back to driving. I leaned back, looking out of the window at the cars moving past and thinking dark thoughts.

  When we turned into Murphy Avenue and I saw a familiar red, green, and white canopy up ahead, I knew wherewewereheading,andIadmitit:Iwouldalmosthave preferred McDonald’s. Almost. Still, I made an effort to smile graciously when I approached the maitre d’. “Good evening. I’m meeting someone for dinner.”

  That distinguished gent inclined his gray head and murmured, “But, of course, signorina. I’m afraid the gentleman signorina was with yesterday has not arrived yet, but . . .”

  “Never mind.” I had spotted Rafe over in the corner, carrying on what looked like a flirtation with all three women at an adjoining table. “I see him.”

  I left the maitre d’ in the dust and headed in that direction.

  I got a few glances from male patrons as I walked through the restaurant tonight to
o, but none from Rafe, who was much too busy to notice my approach. The three women were keeping him occupied, and he didn’t seem to mind one bit. Not very flattering, I must say. It wasn’t until I was standing across from him that he looked up and saw me. I could see his eyes light with amusement when he took in my primly buttoned blouse and tight chignon, but he didn’t comment, just grinned as he got up to pull out the chair for me.

  He had made an effort to clean up for the occasion himself, which was considerate of him. (Of course, the maitre d’ would have refused him admittance had he been dressed the way he usually was.) Tonight’s dark slacks and plain, button-down shirt wouldn’t win any awards for sartorial elegance, but the women at the next table didn’t seem to find any fault with him. The blue shirt made the most of his dusky complexion and dark eyes, and when he walked back around the table, I couldn’t help but notice that the slacks set off his posterior very nicely. Naturally I didn’t comment. Instead, I folded my hands demurely in my lap and waited until he was seated again before I smiled sweetly. “It was nice of you to send a car for me. I wasn’t looking forward to riding on the back of the bike.”

  “I figured.”

  “Although, if you had told me where we were going, I could have met you here.”

  “Stood me up, you mean.”

  “No, just . . .” He didn’t say anything, but a grin was tugging at his mouth. “Oh, all right,” I admitted. “I wouldn’t have stood you up—I have better manners than that—but if you had given me the opportunity to cancel, I would have.”

  “Why d’you think I didn’t answer the phone all afternoon? Drink?”

  “I beg your pardon?” He nodded toward the waiter, hovering next to the table. “Oh. Yes. White wine, please.”

  “And you, sir?” The waiter turned to Rafe. The “sir” seemed to be an afterthought, but if Rafe noticed, he didn’t let on.

  “Just a beer.”