Glass Houses

by Stella Cameron

  Well, Olivia still thought staying here was a good idea.

  “Aren’t I always on my own—when I’m not with Vanni these days? Sure I miss Chris, I’ll always miss Chris, but he didn’t want to be a cop in this city anymore.”

  Was he saying he was going on this trip alone? Olivia stung at the thought that he’d dismissed her like that. Let him dismiss her. If he was so intent on going, he’d be better off alone. And it would make it easier for her not to have to tell him she’d changed her mind and intended to go her own way.

  “Actually, I’m taking a friend with me. She’s in the same trouble I am. We were going to fly, but we weren’t quick enough to beat the stakeout. I’m going now, Bo. Hi, Roy. Good to hear you. No, I’m not hiding a mad, passionate affair from you guys. Get back to serving beer and oysters. And give my love to Key West. I miss it.”

  He hung up and didn’t look in Olivia’s direction. Instead he darted around a trestle table piled high with more black and oily paraphernalia, and with the air of a conjurer revealing the lady he just sawed in two, whipped a filthy tarpaulin off a vehicle.

  Olivia knew a beautiful old Rover when she saw one. This looked as if it might be about a 1970. Perhaps ’68. The bonnet was long, and turn lights sat immediately above each front wheel. All the lines were elegantly curved. The silver-gray body gleamed, and she caught the flash of a red-leather interior.

  She got up and went closer, and winced. The paint, so perfect at a distance, showed numerous cracks, and in some places tiny chips had fallen off to reveal metallic bronze paint beneath. This must be what Aiden had been telling his friend about.

  Aiden hadn’t wanted to look at the Rover 100 for a week or two, until he’d recovered from the disappointment of having the paint blister and then crack for no reason he was aware of. The choice had been taken away. At least he knew the 1960 sedan was in perfect mechanical order and capable of getting him out of a tight spot if the need arose.

  “Who are Bo and Roy?”

  He hadn’t forgotten Olivia was there, just wished she weren’t. “Friends. Very good friends. Roy is Chris Talon’s brother. Bo’s Roy’s partner. This is Bo’s car. I’m renovating it for him. We’re going to use it to get to Seattle. No one’s going to think to look for me in this.”

  “So why did you ask Bo to tell all those lies?”

  “I didn’t.” He looked at her. “I made suggestions just in case someone gets smarter than I think they will. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this one, but who knows?”

  “Bo’s right. It’s pointless to race off across America, supposedly to hide from bad people, when we can hide from them right here in New York.”

  Aiden bundled up the tarp and set it aside. “When did you get to be the expert in logic?”

  Words couldn’t be taken back, and he wished he hadn’t spoken them, but she was the woman who had probably become infatuated with a man she’d never met. And she had traveled halfway across the world to meet him. He stuffed his hands in his pockets. Olivia looked away. She held her mouth firmly shut, but it still trembled. Her hands hung at her sides.

  His mother’s hands used to hang just like that when she felt completely helpless—usually when Aiden’s father had disappointed his small family yet again.

  “Don’t blame Flynn,” his mother would say. “He should never have married. He doesn’t set out to hurt me, he just isn’t interested in the way I feel. He’s only good at taking care of what matters most to him—Flynn.”

  How long had it been since he recalled his mother talking about his father? She’d invariably gone on to tell Aiden that having him had been her idea, not his father’s, and that it was ironic that the child she’d borne to become the companion she’d never found in her husband had inherited so much more from that husband than from her.

  “I’m not logical at all,” Olivia said, her voice sounding unused, “I’ve known that most of my life. I’m sorry if I sounded presumptuous, but I think I’m a little angry. I’m not very often. Angry, that is. But I’ve been drawn into something really horrible for no better reason than my having taken some photographs. Honestly, I can’t imagine why anyone would get upset about them. They’re nice, or I presume to think they are. Of course, that’s purely subjective and many, possibly most, people wouldn’t think they were—”

  “Olivia. For God’s sake, stop putting yourself down every other word. If you’ve got something to say, spit it out.” Oh, great, she’d gone into her “I’m useless” mode because he’d scared her into it, and now she had the same just-kicked look all over her. “What I meant—”

  “You meant, get to the point. I will. I took shots over two days. For Penny Biggies. They’re of the interior of a beautiful old Notting Hill terrace house. Two terrace houses made into one, actually. Penny was the interior designer for the renovation.”

  Aiden slapped the heel of a hand to his brow, and Olivia jumped. He was being perfectly awful, or perhaps he was being himself after putting on a show of good behavior. “What is it?” she asked. “What have I done now?”

  “You haven’t done anything,” he told her. “I have. Where are the frigging pictures? I can’t believe I’ve been dragging you around since yesterday and I haven’t asked about the pictures.”

  Dragging her around. “I should have remembered to show them to you,” she said coolly. “I’d prefer not to take them out here.”

  “Why?”

  “Well—” She searched for a clean and clear place to spread them out. “There isn’t a good spot to set them. I don’t want to get anything on them. Sorry.”

  For a moment he just stared at her. Then he said, “Why? No, don’t answer that. Fine. You’re sorry. We’ll get on the road as fast as we can. Tell me more about the photos while we finish up here. See that refrigerator over there? There’s soda and some beer. Apples. Clear everything out into a cardboard box.”

  The refrigerator wasn’t like any she’d ever seen. It reminded her of a pink sarcophagus standing upright. It sounded like a cement mixer filled with gravel. “Penny did a fabulous job.” She emptied plastic cases of new drill bits from a box and began filling it with cans and food—mostly cans. “If you like really contemporary interiors. I don’t, but I appreciate when they’re well done.”

  “Hurry up.”

  Olivia paused. Had she actually said she was going with him? “The shots for London Style are of the most important rooms. The conservatory at the back is fabulous. The whole top floor—third floor—of the two houses is an art gallery. That’s quite a lot of space. The people who own the place collect post-World War II paintings.”

  “Paintings?” Aiden shouted from beneath the raised hood of the Rover. “The paintings you stole?”

  Olivia slammed the refrigerator door. “I’ve never stolen a thing in my life. Well, there was a pencil once in infant school, but—”

  “I was thinking aloud.” Fuck, fuck, fuck, everything that came out of his mouth made the situation worse. “I mean I was remembering what Vanni said about you supposedly being an art thief—which I know you aren’t. Maybe the stolen paintings are the ones in your photographs.”

  Unable to lift the box, she dragged it toward the car. “If I were going to steal art, it wouldn’t be Abstract Expressionism.”

  “Really?” He was one of those people reduced to saying, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like,” when asked.

  “Really,” Olivia said, dusting off her hands. “Do you like Gorky and Jackson Pollack and that group?”

  He shrugged.

  She said, “Well I might if I understood them. I don’t, any more than I do nonobjective stuff. I guess my intuitive responses are missing. Abstracts in general are hard for me.”

  He could, Aiden thought, learn from Olivia FitzDurham. She wasn’t afraid to be wrong, or to admit ignorance. “Whatever. Those photos are key, I know that. This is ready to go. Boy, is she ready. What a beaut. Okay, the box goes in the trunk. Put your bag in the back seat. The m
ore room up front, the better. What the—” Boss was doing his roadkill impersonation on the company couch. “Where did you come from, you big dope? Boss, you’re gonna be the death of me. Damn Vanni. Did you see Boss come in here, Olivia?”

  “Yes.”

  “For—” Shut it. Just control it. “O-kay. We have a problem, a big problem. This is a sedan, but I just don’t see it as a family car.”

  “Do you have a family?”

  He worked his lower jaw. So the lady with the innocent brown eyes thought she could be funny. “This is wasting valuable time. I’m going to have to contact Vanni and tell him to come get Boss when he can. I don’t want anything extra to think about.”

  “I’m not leaving Boswell here.”

  “He likes it here.”

  “How do you know? He’d pretend anything to keep you happy.”

  “This is wild. That’s my dog. He can’t come with us because it isn’t convenient. He’ll be fine here until Vanni can pick him up.”

  “No,” Olivia said. “You won’t stay here because you’re afraid bad people would find you here, but you’re prepared to leave a helpless animal. What does that say about you?”

  “That is the least helpless dog you’re ever going to meet.” He slung the box in the trunk, marched to pick up Olivia’s bulging bag and cameras, and put them in the back. “Those teeth are steel and titanium. He could bite through bricks with the things.”

  “You exaggerate. He absolutely could not. And he certainly couldn’t catch a bullet with them, unless it was on the way to his brain. There’s plenty of room for him in the car.”

  “Omigod. I’d have thought photographers needed good special skills. Get in. We’ll take him to Brooklyn, dammit.”

  He issued commands for Boss to go to the car while he opened the doors to the street.

  By the time he got back to the Rover, Olivia was in the passenger seat, crammed against the door, with Boss wedged between her hip and the gears.

  Both stared straight ahead.

  He approached, picking up his fedora and the jacket Olivia loved so much on the way. He opened the driver’s door. Ducking down, he peered inside before tossing his jacket behind the seats. The hat he slapped on his head.

  They still stared straight ahead.

  Aiden got in and started the engine. “Listen to that,” he said.

  No response.

  “Traitor,” he said into Boss’s ear, and drove into the street. Leaving the engine running, he hopped out, closed and locked the warehouse, and got back in.

  “There’s plenty of room,” Olivia said, aware that she wasn’t being entirely truthful, but they could manage. Men could be so stubborn, so difficult.

  “No, there isn’t,” Aiden said. “In the back, Boss. Back! Now!”

  Boswell’s eyes and jowls drooped, but he crawled slowly between Aiden and Olivia, sat behind Aiden, and stared out the window.

  “In case you’re interested, we’re now about to head in the opposite direction from Interstate 80, which is the route we’re taking on our way to Seattle.”

  That was another thing about men, Olivia decided, they fixated on unimportant details so they could avoid what really mattered. Once again she was going to ask a question she thought mattered. “Are you absolutely sure we should ran rather than stay and hide here?” No guts, no glory. That’s what Daddy always said.

  “Yes. I’m still convinced we need to put distance between us and Manhattan.” A Pontiac, gray rather than green like the one Vanni had been driving, turned off 11th Avenue and crawled toward them. “I don’t believe this,” he muttered.

  Olivia looked at him, but Boswell pushed his head between them and watched the Pontiac.

  He said, “Back and get down,” to Boss and shoved the dog to the floor behind Olivia. To Olivia he said, “Kiss me, dammit,” through his teeth and pulled her face beneath the brim of his fedora.

  There wasn’t even time for Olivia to take a breath before Aiden was kissing her. At first there was just the pressure of his mouth on hers, and the discomfort of being hauled across the shift and the hand brake. Within seconds he was doing it again, sucking her bottom lip between his teeth, repeating the process with her upper lip, licking all sorts of sensitive places and making sounds that suggested he really liked what he was doing.

  She really liked it.

  Aiden took his mouth slowly from hers. Touching her was incredible. She was nothing like any woman he’d ever dated or wanted to date, or even imagined existed, and he couldn’t get enough of her. He kissed her brow lightly and rested his cheek there.

  “Don’t look over your shoulder,” he told her, watching the Pontiac through the clouded-up back window. “We won’t be going to Brooklyn.”

  Olivia opened her eyes slowly, more slowly than goose bumps sprang out all over her body. “What’s happening?”

  “You’re getting a lesson in knowing when to take directions from a professional. An ambitious cop just passed us and parked. Name of Fats Lemon. You’ve already heard the name. Good old Ryan Hill’s partner—probably in crime as well as on the force. I think he was too busy checking the numbers along here against what he’s got written down to notice there’s anyone in this car.”

  She wondered if he always resorted to, kiss me, dammit, as a diversionary tactic.

  “Fats is no big brain, but he’s found out about my warehouse, gotten the address, and he’s about to force his way inside. Does that give you a hint of how good an idea it would be to hide in New York?”

  This was one time when he would not get the last word. “It gives me a hint of how long Boswell would have had before he was catching bullets with his teeth.”

  Thirteen

  “You should never have got us involved with a New York policeman, Rupert.”

  “I didn’t. You did. And this car’s a bleedin’ boat.” Still in a stall at the Budget rental agency, they sat in a rather splendid black Cadillac with dark-tinted windows. “Let’s exchange it for one of those nice little things over there.”

  “You don’t even know what those nice little things are. But they look cheap.” Winston intended to make absolutely certain there was no question about the chain of command here. “And none of this was my fault from the beginning. From the day you lost your nerve—right here in this city, at The Dakota. If you’d been more careful, we’d never have been seen going into the apartment there.”

  “You panicked. Ryan Hill was a dolt, anyone could have seen that. A so-called detective doing security work at a New York apartment building. Anyone knows a good American detective should be able to find a less arduous way to augment his income.”

  “You are not to mention that man’s name again,” Winston roared. “I thought you understood that. And what the devil are you talking about? An apartment building? It’s The Dakota, Rupert. Central Park West. Doing security work at one of the most salubrious addresses in New York could hardly be called anything but a highly intelligent manner of putting oneself in the way of good opportunities. In case you’ve forgotten, some very rich people live at The Dakota—including our very good customer, the one who wrote the checks you chose to give to the FitzDurham woman.”

  “What does that have to do with anything, Winston? That a lot of rich people live there, I mean?”

  “You know very well. There’s so much money in that building, it’s a wonder it doesn’t sink. That’s why we have done a good deal of business there. Those people have so much, they simply can’t keep track of it all. So, if one borrows a painting here and there from them, why should they complain— particularly if we only choose paintings that were previously stolen? Those greedy, underhanded people know they have no right to them anyway, so they can hardly report theft, can they?”

  “You said it,” Rupert agreed. “We like the pieces they keep hidden away the best, don’t we? The really valuable stuff. Greedy farts. Owning for owning’s sake and getting their jollies from private viewings of what doesn’t belong to them anyway. Cr
ooks.”

  “Yes,” Winston said. “I didn’t panic, you know.”

  “You did. Ryan—sorry—the detective said he’d seen everything, and he’d turn us in if we didn’t give him a share, and you agreed to whatever he asked for. The crook.”

  “They’re everywhere,” Winston said. “One begins to wonder how many honest people are left in the world. But you were the one who asked him not to report seeing you go into that apartment—even if it wasn’t your apartment. Those were your words. You as good as told the man you were planning to—well, borrow something.”

  “You didn’t have to dissolve into a blubbering heap and promise him everything but our souls. Look what you accomplished with that.” Rupert indicated the Cadillac and pointed toward the exit where vehicles on East 43rd were so tightly crammed, they could have been welded together. “Nothing but trouble ever since.”

  “We weren’t to know he couldn’t be trusted, or that he wasn’t working alone and intended to turn on us.” Very soon, Winston knew, he would become miffed enough with Rupert to resort to less gentlemanly behavior. But then, Rupert was no gentleman. “Hurry up and drive. If we can believe the latest report, your Miss FitzDurham and friend have a good start on us by now.” Winston landed a smart cuff on Rupert’s ear. It made him feel better to see the lout cringe.

  Rupert clutched his reddening ear and said, “You’ll regret that.”

  “I doubt it,” Winston said. “Ought to give you comfy, familiar feelings. After all, when your mummy and daddy did that, you thought they were showing how much they loved you. Get on with it. This car is costing hundreds a day.”

  “I know.” Rupert edged the Cadillac gingerly forward, repeatedly reaching for gears that weren’t there and feeling for the clutch, which also wasn’t there. “We could have saved a bit if you hadn’t insisted on an automatic transmission. Bloody awful nuisance, if you ask me.”