Mrs. Jenkins patted me sympathetically on the arm. “He’ll be back, baby. Don’t you worry; he can take care of himself.”
I nodded. “Thank you, Mrs. Jenkins. I’d better be on my way. Do you need anything else while I’m here?”
Mrs. Jenkins shook her head. “Marquita’ll take care of me when she gets back tonight, baby. Meantime, I’ll just eat cookies and watch the TV.” She closed one of her little black bird-eyes in a wink. I smiled back.
“Have a good time. I’ll stop by again in a few days. Just to make sure you’re all right.”
Mrs. Jenkins said that that would be fine, and I headed back home, where I spent the rest of the night curled up on the sofa with a romance novel and a bottle of wine. Let Mrs. Jenkins have her cookies and her TV; I’d take a bottle of Chardonnay and the florid prose of my favorite author Barbara Botticelli any day.
Barbara writes what is affectionately known as bodice rippers, and in this latest release, the blonde and beautiful Lady Serena—Barbara Botticelli’s heroines are always blonde and beautiful—was doing her best to avoid being kidnapped and put in the harem of the dastardly Sayid Pasha, while falling hard for the dark and dangerous Sheik Hasan al-Kalaal, who was out to bring Sayid down. The Egyptian setting was exciting, and Sheik Hasan was equally so, with his melting, dark eyes and to-die-for physique. When he rode off into the sunset on his Arabian stallion, his robes flapping in the wind, my girlish heart went pitter-patter.
I continued the book the next afternoon, while hosting an open house for Timothy Briggs. Tim was my boss now that my former boss, Walker Lamont, languished in prison. I had put him there, and sometimes I wondered if it might not be better for me to go to work at a different real estate company. But Lamont, Briggs & Associates was located right down the street from my apartment, and nobody seemed to hold it against me that I’d been responsible for getting Walker arrested. The two women he killed had worked for what used to be Walker Lamont Realty, too; that may have had something to do with it. Anyway, Tim was far too busy to host his own open houses these days, and since I wasn’t busy at all most of the time, he often asked me to stand in.
This week’s open house was a small and uninspiring mid-century ranch in a settled area full of old people and unmarried spinsters, and it was a rainy day to boot. Hardly anybody came, and I had plenty of time to read. I stayed by the front window, ready to hide the book whenever anybody pulled to a stop outside, but although a few people came by, nobody seemed to want to buy the house, at least not right at the moment. I had my hopes pinned on a small white car, a Honda or Toyota, that drove by a few times, slowing down to a crawl whenever it got alongside the house, but whoever was inside never actually pulled up to the curb and stopped.
At 4 o’clock, I closed up shop and headed home. On the way I stopped at the grocery store and did my shopping for the next couple of days, and then I headed to my apartment to cook dinner.
Ten minutes after I walked in, the phone rang. I picked it up with one hand and tucked it under my chin while I continued to chop tomatoes. “This is Savannah.”
For a second I couldn’t hear anything, then I became aware of breathing. Not heavy breathing; just the usual kind.
“Can I help you?” I added. Maybe he or she hadn’t heard me the first time. Sometimes there’s a second or two of lag-time on cell phones.
A pause, and then a muffled voice whispered, “Look out the window.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Was this some kind of joke? I didn’t recognize the voice; couldn’t even tell whether it was male or female. High-pitched man, low-pitched woman, someone hiding his or her voice behind a handkerchief…
“Who is this?”
I got no answer, but the breathing continued. Eventually I gave in to curiosity and wandered over to the double doors to the balcony. Maybe something exciting was going on outside. Maybe Todd had hired a mariachi-band and a dancing bear and a stretch limousine with the words ‘Will you marry me?’ spray-painted on the roof. Or a hot-air balloon or a blimp or at least a megaphone with which to serenade me.
Or maybe, a treacherous voice in my head suggested, it isn’t Todd at all.
Maybe Rafe was back, and was waiting downstairs. There was no reason why he wouldn’t have come upstairs to the door, or why he’d bother to disguise his voice when he called, but what the heck, I was in the mood to be hopeful. I opened the doors and stepped onto the balcony.
In my ear, the phone clicked off, and outside, nothing at all was happening. There was no balloon, no blimp, no limo, and no mariachi-band. Certainly no dancing bear. Nor did I see anyone I knew. Rafe’s Harley-Davidson wasn’t anywhere on the street below, and Todd’s green SUV wasn’t there, either. There were cars parked at the curb, sure—a shiny, black Cadillac with tinted windows, a white compact, a lemon yellow VW Beetle with a sunroof, and a red pickup truck with a load of mulch in the bed—but they didn’t belong to anyone I knew.
Nothing happened—nobody waved, or shot at me, or made themselves known in any other way—so after a few seconds I went back inside the apartment and back to my tomatoes. Unless it was a prank call, someone yanking my chain for the fun of it, they’d call back and tell me what they wanted.
* * *
By nine the next morning, nobody had called, and I had put the whole incident out of my mind. I was on my way to the office for our weekly staff meeting, and then I was planning to check the Memphis papers online, just in case something big had broken in West Tennessee since Saturday morning.
Every Monday at 10 o’clock sharp, the sales staff at Lamont, Briggs & Associates gets together for a meeting. We discuss our new listings, our new sales, any new buyer prospects under contract, how successful our open houses were the day before, and so on and so forth. I very rarely have anything to contribute, unless I just happened to have hosted an open house for Tim or someone else the previous day. In my almost four months in business, I’d only had one client—actually two, but they were a couple, buying the same house—and at the moment, we were waiting to close. In other words, they had found a house they liked, I had negotiated a contract acceptable to both buyers and sellers, and now the sale was pending. After I had detailed my experiences at the open house yesterday—minus the fact that I had spent most of my time vicariously enjoying Sheik Hasan al-Kalaal—Tim looked from me to Heidi Hoppenfeldt. “When is the appraisal for the townhouse scheduled?”
Heidi looked at me, chewing. Tim had brought in a box of donuts, and she was working her way through them.
“As far as I know it’s tomorrow,” I said.
Tim and Heidi were co-listing the townhouse Gary Lee and Charlene Hodges were trying to buy. It was Brenda Puckett’s originally, and when she died, all her listings got divided between the two remaining members of the Brenda Puckett real estate team: Tim and Heidi. Tim got all the high end, expensive stuff and Heidi the smaller, cheaper starter homes. But when Walker went to jail and Tim took over as broker, he got so busy running the office he couldn’t keep up with his work, and so he talked Heidi into becoming his assistant, the way she’d been Brenda’s.
“Excellent!” Tim said, showing all his capped teeth in a blinding smile. Before coming back to Nashville to become a Realtor, Tim spent a couple of years in New York City, trying to get on Broadway as a song-and-dance-man. He’s light in the loafers and has a brassy tenor voice, and although I doubted it, he might have been the person who called me yesterday and told me to look out the window of my apartment.
No reason why he would have, of course; plus, I hadn’t seen his car down below. And seeing as he’s driving an eye-catching convertible Jaguar in baby blue with matching leather interior, I think I would have noticed.
When the meeting was over, I headed into my office, a converted coat closet just off the reception area. There’s not much room there; just enough for a desk, a chair and a standing lamp in the corner. While I waited for my computer to boot up, I looked through the mail that Brittany, the receptionist,
had put in my box. A circular from Hewlett-Packard offered special discounts on office equipment to NAR-members; NAR being the National Association of Realtors. A circular from Dell did the same thing. There was a reminder that I hadn’t paid my office fees yet this month, which Brittany had snuck in among the real mail. A couple of postcards from other agents showcased their new listings or sales. Following that was this month’s edition of Realtor Magazine, with a cover story about mortgage scams.
The Memphis Daily News had nothing new about the unrolling of the cargo gang, but a whole slew of other crimes had taken place over the weekend. Shootings, robberies, rapes, burglaries; you name it. I was scowling at a sidebar of statistics—Memphis and Nashville both have twice the crime of New York City, proportionally—when I felt someone looking over my shoulder. When I turned around, I got a heady whiff of Tim’s aftershave, and felt my head spin. After a moment, I managed to croak out a question. “What’s that you’re wearing?”
“This old thing?” Tim flicked a manicured finger at his emerald green satin shirt.
“I was thinking of your aftershave. Or cologne.”
“Shower-gel, darling.” He told me the name and added, coyly, “Remind you of someone?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe.” I turned back to the computer.
Tim glanced from me to the screen and back. “Any word from the scrumptious Mr. Collier?”
Tim has a crush on Rafe, and since Rafe is happy to flirt with anyone, man or woman, they get along famously. The fact that Rafe doesn’t bat for Tim’s team doesn’t seem to bother either of them, nor does my presence slow them down at all.
I said no, I hadn’t heard from Rafe.
Tim added, “You know, Savannah, you could go buy yourself a bottle of gel and take a shower.” He waggled his perfectly plucked eyebrows. I’d gotten so used to his suggestive remarks by now that I didn’t even blush.
“No thanks. And I didn’t say that’s who it reminded me of.”
“You forget,” Tim said, “I’ve had the pleasure of smelling your boyfriend, too.”
“He’s not my boyfriend. And for all you know, I may have lots of friends who use that same shower-gel.”
Tim giggled. “Your other boyfriend doesn’t. Not that he smells bad, of course. Or looks bad, either. He’s more your type anyway, isn’t he?”
“Todd? I suppose he is.” Loyal, devoted, flatteringly attentive, not to mention gainfully employed in a legitimate profession. And if he can’t quite claim to have Rafe’s knock’em-dead sex-appeal, he’s certainly handsome enough in his well-dressed, well-coiffed, professional way.
“Although he doesn’t have much of a sense of humor,” Tim added.
Tim and Todd had met for the first time last week, at Fidelio’s. Tim had stopped by our table to say hello, as was his wont when we crossed paths outside the office. He’d done it before too, when I’d been there with Rafe. Except this time, my date wasn’t into playing games with Tim. When Tim batted his eyelashes, Todd just stared blankly at him, and Tim’s sly reference to Rafe had been remarkably ill-received by Todd. It had taken the rest of the night for me to calm him down, and he still wasn’t entirely settled in his mind, as evidenced by him bringing it up again on our next date.
“He wants to marry me,” I said. “It’s understandable that he wouldn’t think it’s funny when you ask me suggestive questions about other men.”
“There was nothing suggestive about it,” Tim retorted. “I just wanted to know when that megalicious hunk of manhood is coming back to town.”
“And you didn’t think the words megalicious hunk of manhood—if megalicious is even a word—might be offensive?”
“I thought it might offend you,” Tim said innocently, “since it isn’t every woman who can handle it when we confirmed bachelors look at her man, but I had no idea it would offend your date.”
“Yes, well, Todd is touchy when it comes to Rafe.”
“And you’re not?”
“Of course I’m not,” I said, and then excused myself when the phone rang. “This is Savannah.”
“Miss Martin.”
“Detective.” No problems recognizing this voice.
“Are you busy? Something’s come up that I’d like your help with.”
Uh-oh. The last time I heard that statement, she had wanted me to come to the morgue to identify Lila Vaughn. “Is… um… nobody’s dead, I hope?”
Tim gasped theatrically.
“Not this time,” Detective Grimaldi said. I thought for a second.
“Does this have anything to do with... um... Rafe?”
This may seem like a major leap of deduction, or maybe it seems like everything in my life revolves around Rafael Collier, but in actuality, nothing could be further from the truth. Most of the time, I go through life without thinking much about him at all. In fact, during the twelve years between the end of my freshman year of high school and when I saw him again two months ago, I don’t think he crossed my mind once. In this case, however, it seemed like a logical question. Tamara Grimaldi was a cop. Rafe was a criminal. It made sense that she’d be calling to talk about him.
“In a way,” Detective Grimaldi said.
“Has something happened to him?”
Tim squeaked again, clasping his hands in front of his chest, his baby-blue eyes round. I turned away, not needing that kind of distraction at the moment. My own heart was thudding hard and loud enough.
“Not as far as I know,” Tamara Grimaldi said. “Look, Miss Martin, could we cut this short? I have a situation I have to take care of. When can you be here?”
“Where’s here?”
She made an impatient noise. “My office. Downtown.”
“No offense,” I said, “but the last time you called me like this, you wanted me to come to the medical examiner’s office to look at crime scene photos. Fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll see you then.” She hung up before I had the chance to say anything else.
I arched my brows, but didn’t waste time standing on ceremony. Instead I got up from the desk, grabbed my purse from the floor, and brushed past Tim. “Duty calls.”
“But what’s wrong?” Tim called after me. I glanced at him over my shoulder. He looked worried.
“I don’t know. All she said was that she had a situation. I guess I’ll find out when I get there.”
I swung through the door out onto the sidewalk and headed for the parking lot across the street.
Chapter Three
“Spicer and Truman found her walking down the street in her housecoat and slippers,” Detective Grimaldi said twenty minutes later.
I had driven hell for leather into downtown, found a parking space a block and a half from Police Plaza, and hoofed it up to her office with five seconds to spare, only to find her entertaining Tondalia Jenkins, who was drinking Diet Pepsi and eating peanut butter crackers from a vending machine, in front of a TV in the lounge. Her fuzzy slippers were dirty and worn through on the bottom—clearly not meant for walking long distances outside—and her hair stood out at weird angles to her head, the way it had back when she was living in an old folks’ home where nobody cared for her.
“They drove her back to the house, but no one was there. Since they didn’t feel good about leaving her by herself, to wander off again, they brought her to me.”
“And you called me,” I said. She shrugged unapologetically.
“I figured you’d be the most likely person to know how to get in touch with her grandson.”
We were standing in the doorway to the lounge, keeping an eye on Mrs. Jenkins, but far enough away that she couldn’t hear our conversation. Or so I thought.
“You figured wrong. I have no idea how to get in touch with Rafe. I haven’t heard from him since he left. For all I know, he’s been dead for the past five weeks.”
Mrs. Jenkins glanced up at that, her beady eyes concerned. I mustered a smile. “Sorry, Mrs. Jenkins. I’m sure he’s not. I just haven’t heard from him, is all.�
��
I lowered my voice again, and added, for Detective Grimaldi’s benefit, “And I have absolutely no idea how to get in touch with him.”
“He didn’t tell you where he was going? Give you a phone number to use in case of emergencies? Call or write?” Tamara Grimaldi’s voice was disbelieving. I shook my head.
“He mentioned Memphis, in a throwaway sort of way, but he didn’t actually say he was going there. And the only phone number I’ve ever had for him, is the one I gave you back in August, after Perry Fortunato’s… um… death. You said it had been disconnected.”
“And you have no other way of getting in touch with him?”
“None at all,” I said firmly. “Have you tried asking Julio Melendez? You’ve still got him locked up, right? Or what about Ishmael Jackson? Doesn’t one of them know how to find him? What would Julio do if he had another job for Rafe?”
“According to Julio,” Detective Grimaldi said, with a wolfish snap of strong, white teeth, “Mr. Collier was the one who approached him, not vice versa.”
I opened my eyes wide. “You don’t believe that, do you?”
“It doesn’t matter what I believe. It doesn’t matter what he says, either, because he can’t prove it. We can’t even prove that Mr. Collier was involved. He left town before I had the chance to ask him about it, but all he’d have to do, would be to say that he knew Julio and Ishmael and the others socially, but that he wasn’t involved in anything criminal. There’s no law against playing pool, even with known felons.”
I hid a smile. “Sorry to hear that.”
“No, you’re not. But that’s neither here nor there. Right at the moment, I need to get in touch with him because his grandmother is all alone and wandering around. If we can’t find him and get him to make alternative arrangements, we’ll have to put her back into the Milton House for the time being.”
[Cutthroat Business 01.0 - 03.0] Boxed Set Page 56