Rod's mouth twisted. "You have no idea. Thanks to her, if we had a million-dollar budget, we'd have to factor in a loss of twenty-five percent right off the top. That'd be like you going from a hundred-dollar food budget down to sixty."
It wasn't anything like that. And I didn't have a food budget. My staples were cereal and milk and cat food. Oh, and a frozen turkey named Elmer who had a home in my freezer for as long as he wanted it. Elmer might have gobbled on to that great turkey farm in the sky, but he'd saved my life once, and he didn't deserve to be roasted too. "You mean seventy-five," I said.
He looked at me. "Seventy-five what?"
"Dollars," I said. "Twenty-five percent of a hundred is twenty-five, not forty."
"Did I say forty?" He grinned at me. He had no dimples. Curt had dimples. "Of course I meant twenty-five."
And I thought my math skills were questionable.
Rod lifted his bottle in a toast. "Well, back to the grind. Good seeing you, Jamie."
I nodded and watched him get up off my satin sheets and walk away, just another pretty face.
I found Howard lingering in the hallway outside Kay's office, checking email on his phone while pretending not to eavesdrop. I didn't believe in pretense. I hung on every word, because I'd learned that it was the information I didn't have that could hurt me the most.
"To be fair," the agent was saying, "that money was only a loan. Anyone else would have taken you to court for it."
"You'll get it when I see fit to give it to you," Kay snapped. "And you should be grateful to get it at all. If you were any kind of decent agent, I wouldn't be stuck on this backwater program to begin with."
Tweak the words and that was what she'd said to Howard about her case.
"I need that money," the man repeated. "I have bills, too, you know."
"Bills!" Kay snorted. "You mean bookies, don't you?"
"That's none of your business."
"It's also none of my concern." Kay made a shooing motion. "This conversation is finished. I'll see if I can get you a couple hundred by Friday. Good-bye, Millard."
"But you owe me four thousand!" he protested.
She shrugged. "It's enough to buy you crutches if you get your legs broken."
Geez. Vito Corleone had nothing on this broad.
Millard stood, pointing a shaking finger across the desk. "You'll be sorry for this, Kay. You can't treat people this way." He stormed out without noticing us.
"Let's get this over with," Howard said. He must have been listening after all. I had to give him credit for showing no reaction. He was starting to impress me.
Kay tossed a paper across the desk when we came in.
Howard left it there. "What's that?"
She leaned back, looking pleased with herself. "A letter to the Office of Attorney Ethics. About you and that three-ring circus of a firm you own."
I sucked in a breath. Howard's reputation meant everything to him. It was why he'd butted heads so often with Doug Heath over Doug's loose interpretation of legal ethics. When you got down to it, Howard was an old-fashioned barrister, the kind who went strictly by the book and didn't play hide-and-seek with documents or promise clients multimillion-dollar settlements.
"You have no basis for an ethics complaint," Howard said. "I told you there are no guarantees. You can't predict what a jury will do."
"Of course you can!" She snorted. "Juries will do whatever you want if you pay them enough."
"You expected me to buy off a jury? I could be disbarred!"
"You could be disbarred anyway," she said. "Why don't you take a peek at the letter. You might find it interesting." She inspected her nails. "In fact, I sent a copy to your wife. I thought she might find it interesting too."
He snatched it up, his eyes growing blacker by the paragraph as he scanned it. I sat there gnawing the inside of my cheek, wishing I had the nerve to just get up and leave. The last thing I wanted was to be in the middle of whatever this was. It seemed highly personal. I didn't want to know anything personal about Howard, and I certainly didn't want to know it about Kay.
"I'm heading out," Petal Peterson said from the doorway.
Kay barely glanced at her. "So go, then."
Petal blinked a few times, and her eyes flitted my way. I wondered how much she'd heard.
"By the way," Kay added, "I won't need you next week. I'm not taking those vacation days."
"Of course you're not," Petal said evenly. "Good-bye, Kay."
Kay ignored her. Petal glanced at me once more and disappeared.
Howard slapped the letter onto the edge of the desk, face up. I tried to read it from a distance, but my myopia had other ideas. It was time to give in to a pair of reading glasses if I had any hope of seeing things that were none of my business. I could only read one ugly little phrase, because Kay had thoughtfully bolded it, and that was enough to get its gist: "…Inappropriate level of intimacy…"
I felt sick. There was absolutely no way Howard had a level of intimacy with Kay, inappropriate or otherwise. She was lying to the ethics committee out of vindictiveness because she'd lost her trial. She must know that sleeping with a client could easily get Howard disbarred. It was one of those verboten behaviors, like misuse of client funds and failure to sue.
Then it struck me. Kay had copied the letter to Howard's wife. In effect, she'd told Ellen Dennis that Howard was cheating on her. Bad enough she was putting his career at risk. She'd jeopardized his marriage too. And she'd done both on purpose.
Howard stood to glare down at Kay with flinty eyes. "If you pursue this, you will regret it."
Kay waved him off. "Empty threats from a paper tiger. Run on home to Ellen. Maybe she'll feel like hearing it." Her mouth quivered in a nasty grin. "But I doubt it."
I glared down at her with all the disgust I could muster, and I'd had a lot of practice since my sister dated a tattooed goblin who reviewed porno movies for a living. Kay didn't even flinch.
Unaware of my intimidation tactics, Howard gave me a shove, and we left, not even bothering to acknowledge the staffers who'd gathered to stare. He didn't say anything for most of the drive back to Parker, Dennis, but I could tell a volcano was boiling beneath the surface. Mostly because I heard him mutter "I could kill her" a half-dozen times before he screeched to a stop in the parking lot. This time I kind of wished he meant it. But Howard's method of ending someone's life was tying them up in litigation for years on end. He was far too genteel to actually shoot someone. I was pretty sure.
He hit the automatic door unlock button. "Get out."
Like I said, genteel. I got out and watched him roar away, probably heading home to do damage control. I let myself into the office, wishing there was some way I could help him take revenge on Kay short of supplying a weapon and an alibi
MOTION FOR MADNESS
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Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
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BOOKS BY AIMEE GILCHRIST
SNEAK PEEK
Aimee Gilchrist, Digging Up Bones (Birdwell, Texas Mysteries Book 1)
Digging Up Bones (Birdwell, Texas Mysteries Book 1) Page 26