Unplugged

by Lois Greiman

  He studied me for a moment, as if I were an interesting form of lower life—the middle-income species. “The truth is, Ms. McMullen, J.D. has been working very hard for a long while. He deserves a vacation. If he feels it necessary to take that vacation now, I’m more than happy to give him some leeway.”

  “That’s very generous of you.”

  He smiled. “Generous, I am not. But I am highly intelligent, and I know what my employees need. J.D. and I have worked extremely well together in the past and will again in the future. So if he wants a couple more days on the strip, that’s perfectly acceptable.”

  I let his words sink in. They permeated my skin like toxins, pushing up new suspicions in their wake. “Is he with someone?” I asked. Was he gay? Was Will & Grace all a lie?

  He shook his head, looking almost regretful. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.”

  Anger shot through me. “Who is it?” I asked.

  “It’s been nice meeting you,” he said, and opened the door. “I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful, but I assure you, our J.D. is perfectly safe.”

  I jerked to my feet. “Is it someone he met in Vegas?”

  Impatience ticked in his jaw. “I take my employees’ privacy very seriously, Ms. McMullen. I hope you will respect that,” he said, and practically pushing me out, closed the door behind me.

  I saw the world through a red haze. Damn Solberg’s worthless hide! He was cheating on Laney. What the hell was wrong with men? Four months ago he couldn’t get a date with an organ grinder’s monkey, and now . . . Well, now it looked like he could, didn’t it?

  I glanced around, wanting to hit something.

  Glass cubicles marched away in every direction. On the far side of the floor were more offices. Maybe one of them was Solberg’s. Maybe, if I happened inside, I might learn the organ grinder’s monkey’s name and address.

  I eased across the floor toward the offices on the far side of the building. Nonchalantly, like I had some sort of business that was neither illegal nor unethical.

  A little guy with wire-rims glanced up as I walked by. I gave him my “I’m supposed to be here” smile. A woman wearing red pants two inches too short said hi, but other than that I was pretty much ignored.

  I wondered vaguely about Hilary Pershing. Was she here somewhere? Maybe grooming a cat and plotting my demise? Maybe thinking of past nights of bliss with the Geekster?

  I could see that each door on the far side of the room had a name etched into the glass, and wandered in that direction. “Jeffrey Dunn” was engraved into the first one. The second said “Kimberly Evans.”

  I hit paydirt on the third. It said “J. D. Solberg” in the same utilitarian font as the first two. Maybe I should have felt guilty about trespassing. I didn’t. The glass handle felt cool against my palm.

  “Can I help you?”

  I jerked toward the speaker while simultaneously trying to keep my heart in my chest. “Yes!” I snapped, then eased my tone toward something short of panic and tried again. “Yes. I hope so.” I cleared my throat. I had no idea where to go from there. “I had an appointment with J.D.” I said his name like we were old pals, chums from nerd school.

  The man who stood in front of me was only a few inches taller than myself, but they were nice inches. He stared at me for a moment. I did my best not to shuffle my feet. Feet should not be shuffled when crammed into leather sandals that cost more than your monthly house payment. Even if they do pinch like hell.

  “J.D. always did have the luck,” he said.

  I realized I had been holding my breath. “What?”

  He thrust out his hand. “Ross Bennet,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Oh, ummm . . .” I took his hand, then glanced guiltily toward Solberg’s office. “Isn’t J.D. in?”

  He leaned sideways to look past me. “Not unless he’s worked out that invisibility formula,” he said, and grinned.

  I literally stepped back. Turns out he had a smile bright enough to drop a Lakers Girl at fifty yards. Whoa. Be still my rampaging heart. I shut Solberg’s door.

  “Was this a professional visit or . . . ?” He paused, waiting for me to fill in the blank.

  “No. Well . . .” I laughed a little. Silly ol’ me, causing no trouble for no one, certainly not perpetrating a misdemeanor. “Yes, sort of. We’re friends, I suppose you could say.”

  “Yeah?”

  “We’ve . . . ummm . . . known each other for years.” I flipped my hand. “And sometimes we like to . . .” I wobbled my head. “Toss ideas around. You know.”

  He waited for me to go on.

  “Like the invisibility problem,” I said. “That’s a stickler.”

  He watched me for a moment longer, then laughed. “I’ll make sure to tell him his accomplice was here to see him. What’s your name?”

  I gave him the real deal.

  “Well, it’s his loss, then, isn’t it, Christina?”

  “What is?”

  “That he wasn’t here to see you.” He smiled again. Down girl.

  “Oh. Huh-huh.” That was a laugh. It sounded like I was about to barf. Maybe I was. I glanced toward Black’s glass-fronted office. He was nowhere to be seen. “Do you happen to know where he might be?”

  “J.D.?” Reaching up, Ross rubbed the back of his neck. He wore a rolled leather bracelet and no other jewelry—such as a band of gold on his left ring finger. “Now that you mention it, I haven’t seen him for a couple weeks. Not since the convention.”

  “Oh?” Black’s door opened. He stepped out. I shifted my gaze back to Bennet. “What convention was that?”

  “Big do in Las Vegas,” he said, and shook his head as if weary of the whole thing.

  I studiously ignored Black, though he was making his way between the workstations toward me, like a beefy spider on the move. Casual. Casual. He probably hadn’t called security yet.

  “You don’t like Las Vegas?” I asked.

  “J.D.’s better at that sort of thing than I am.”

  Had they been there together? “Really?”

  “Yeah. You seen one gorgeous topless dancing girl, you seen them all,” he said, and smiled again.

  I forced a laugh.

  “Ms. McMullen.” Emery Black had arrived with his scowl.

  I considered bolting, sure he was going to fling me from his building by my hair, but he just lifted a hand. My purse dangled from it.

  “You forgot this,” he said.

  Bennet shifted his gaze from me to Black. “You two met?”

  “Oh, well . . . thank you,” I said, and slipped my purse from his fingers. “It was nice meeting you, Mr. Bennet.” He gave me a boyish smile. “You, too, Mr. Black.” The CEO scowled. I coolly examined them both for an instant, but meanwhile my internal cocktail waitress was duking it out with my psychologist in residence.

  “Don’t be obtuse,” warned the shrink. “Bennet’s too pretty to be as innocent as he looks.”

  The barmaid snorted. “And I suppose you’d trust Black, seeing’s how he uses dumb-ass terms like ‘significant other’ and has an office the size of a Neptune.”

  “Well, the size of a man’s office is a far better calibrator of his character than the size of his—”

  “Come again,” interrupted Bennet.

  “Thank you,” said the shrink and the barmaid in unison, and turned away with quiet dignity. But inside, we were both pretty much wondering if our hips looked wide in taupe.

  I wrestled with a hundred questions during the next twenty-four hours. Why had Black been so eager to get rid of me? Who was the guy in Solberg’s house? Why did Tiffany Georges have a three-foot hole in the back of her manicured lawn? And was Bennet’s smile as tantalizing as it had seemed?

  I researched each question thoroughly and came to the conclusion that Black had a multimillion-dollar conglomeration to protect. I had no idea who the guy in Solberg’s house might have been. And Tiffany Georges’s odd digging habits were her own secret.
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br />   I leaned back in my home office chair and stared out my pea-sized window. Papers cluttered my battered desk, but I was comfortable with clutter. It was unanswered questions that made my skin itch.

  I’d struck out on all counts regarding my ongoing investigation. Except the Bennet question. I was pretty sure his smile was the real deal.

  But maybe I’d better check into that. I mean . . . Not his smile. I didn’t care about that, of course, but it would make sense to talk to him again. After all, he’d seemed willing to converse. In fact, compared to Black, he won Mr. Congeniality hands-down. And they were nice hands. Good shoulders, too.

  Not that I would have cared if his neck was directly attached to his nipples, but I had to find Solberg before Elaine did something stupid and . . . Well, what the hell, I already had the receiver in my hand.

  I stared at it in some surprise and dialed.

  “NeoTech.” The woman on the other end of the line had a voice that would make Minnie Mouse giggle.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’d like to speak to Mr. Bennet.”

  “Mr. Bennet. Of course,” she squeaked. “Can I tell him what this is concerning?”

  “Umm. Sure. Tell him it’s about a secret formula.”

  There was a blip of silence, but then she found her Minnie perkiness. “And who shall I say is calling?”

  “The invisible woman.” Don’t ask me what was wrong with me. It could have been anything. Lack of sleep. Insanity. Nicotine deprivation. Okay, I admit I’d lit up a couple Slims on the way home from NeoTech, but I was pretty sure they didn’t count for at least forty-eight hours after scampering across the lawn in front of a hairy guy with a gun the size of New Mexico.

  “Very well,” said Ms. Mouse. “Can you hold for a minute?”

  “Christina.” Ross’s tone was smooth when he answered the line.

  “How’d you know it was me?”

  He laughed. “Most women I know are fully visible. I was hoping you’d call.”

  “You were?” I tried to hide my surprise, but my luck hadn’t been exactly phenomenal for the past, oh, thirty years or so.

  “Yeah, I . . .” He paused, sounding flustered. “I was just chastising myself for failing to get your phone number.”

  I stopped myself from saying, “Really?” in that squeaky tone I remember from adolescence. “Well . . .” I said. “Chastise no more. I can give it to you now.”

  He laughed. “Maybe I’ll just ask you out while I’ve got you on the phone.”

  “Really?” My voice squeaked. Damn.

  “Are you busy Saturday night?”

  I’m afraid my mouth may actually have dropped open. Generally, if a guy asks me out, he’s legally prevented from traveling more than five hundred yards from his trailer house.

  “Saturday night?” I resisted shouting “Yes!” and noisily thumbed the pages of the romance novel I was reading. The beautiful thing about romantic fiction is the girl always gets her guy. And what a guy. He’s handsome, intelligent, and neat, and never ever owns a trailer house. “I’ll have to check my schedule.” More shuffling as I counted to fifteen. “Saturday the nineteenth?”

  “Yeah.”

  I happened to know that Saturday stood out like a glaring rectangle of nothingness on the planner I’d shoved into my purse. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’m busy that day.” It was the memory of a man named Keith Hatcher that made me lie. I’d dated Hatcher for almost five months. He’d been a real estate agent and an amateur photographer. I thought we might be able to cohabitate quite congenially together until I saw pictures of myself on his office bulletin board. I’d been asleep. My mouth was open. My hair was smashed up against the left side of my face. And I was naked. Naked as a jaybird.

  “All day?” Bennet asked.

  Seeing oneself naked between photos of condominiums and fixer-uppers tends to make a woman kind of jumpy. “Yes. It looks like it.”

  “How about Sunday?”

  “Ummm . . .” I closed my eyes. The photo was still stuck pretty firmly in my mind. My thighs had looked pudgy. But then, it had been taken at a bad angle. Like within fifty feet. “I’m sorry,” I said. If someone’s going to be photographing me, I like to have six months’ notice, and clothes. A boatload of clothes.

  “Listen, Christina, I know us techno types come off pretty nerdy, but I’m a decent guy.” He paused. “Really.”

  A sliver of guilt sliced through me. It was wrong to judge men by others’ mistakes, but I’d been so absolutely, incredi-bly naked. “It’s not—”

  “I trim my nose hairs,” he said.

  “I really am—”

  “And I hardly ever watch anime anymore.” He paused. “Unless it’s Sakuru. She’s smoking.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Friday night,” he said. “If you don’t have fun, you can Taser me and dropkick me into East L.A.”

  I tried to resist, but the man seemed spectacularly . . . normal. A rush of pleasure pulsed through me. I mean, I had to try to find Solberg—for Elaine’s sake. And Ross, Mr. Bennet, might be able to give me some clues. Or mouth-tomouth resuscitation.

  Still, memories of my past boyfriends trickled through my mind like so much rotting sewage.

  “You’re thinking too hard,” he said.

  “Well . . . I have plans,” I countered, then closed my eyes and took the plunge, knowing with every fiber in my being that the impact was going to hurt like the devil. “Oh, what the hell. I suppose I can have dinner with Clooney another time.”

  He laughed. It sounded nice. “Good point. Six o’clock okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Want me to pick you up?”

  “No thanks, I’ll meet you somewhere.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Uh-oh what?”

  “That’s the sign of a woman who’s been wounded.”

  Well . . . I had been, and on more than one occasion. But he probably meant emotionally. That was true, too.

  9

  There are lots of fish in the sea. Some are sharks, some are angels, and some are bottom-feeders.

  —Elaine Butterfield

  on dating

  Y OU DOING OKAY, Laney?” I asked. It was four o’clock on Thursday afternoon. I’d just escorted my last client out of the office. Collette Sommerset was the mother of two toddlers. Personally, I think any woman who’s the mother of two toddlers should seek help, but Collette needed it more than most. Her husband was a nasty drunk . . . and he was short. My first thought was that she should can Mr. Sommerset’s ass and sue for alimony, but I was trying really hard to nod and ummm-hummm and help her connect with her own wishes.

  Elaine flopped down in the chair behind the reception desk and gave me a shrug. “Sure. I’ve got a date tonight.”

  Alleluia! “You do?”

  She nodded. “Guy I met at an audition.”

  “An actor?” Okay, most guys should be subjected to polygraph tests and multigenerational probes into their heredity before being allowed to date Elaine, but actors . . .

  “Producer,” she said.

  I tried to put the Geekster out of my head, but I couldn’t quite manage it. He stuck like an eye booger. “So . . . you’re over Solberg?”

  She shrugged again and leaned back in her chair. Oh-so-casual. “If he wants to get ahold of me, he knows where I live.”

  “Yeah, that thought keeps me awake nights, too.”

  She laughed. Her eyes were too bright. Guilt crept along my nerve endings. Maybe I should have told her about my trip to Solberg’s sterile mansion. Maybe I should have told her about the guy with the gun. And maybe that would make her march off to Vegas, armed with nothing more than stunning good looks and the foolish idea that Solberg was worth a skinny minute of her time.

  Creepy images darkened my thoughts. When she and I had first escaped Schaumburg, I’d promised Laney’s dad I’d take care of her. I know it sounds kind of funny, since we’re the same age, and supposedly the same gender, though one couldn�
��t be too certain if one compared our cup sizes. Still, it had seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

  “So you’re all right?” I asked.

  “Sure.” Digging her keys from the bottom of her purse, she stood up and headed toward the door. “I guess I’m not the first girl to get dumped.”

  I ground my teeth and reminded myself that this was what I deserved for lying my ass off, so I simply retrieved my handbag and followed her outside. “When I’m reincarnated as a gorgeous, nubile blonde with big boobs and a stratospheric IQ, I’m not going to be so humble,” I said.

  “Promise?” she asked.

  “Count on it,” I told her, and left the building.

  Thirty minutes later I was at Tiffany Georges’s house. Well, actually, thirty minutes later I was stuck in traffic and conversing, via sign language, with a guy who’d missed my rear bumper by a curse and a hair. Twelve minutes after that I was parked in the Georges’ driveway.

  I took a deep breath and steadied myself. Okay, maybe Tiffany really had identified me as the prowler in her backyard. Maybe she would take one look out her window and call the cops. Maybe Rivera would come charging through her front door and haul me off by the hair. But I was willing to bet that none of those things would happen. In fact, I was willing to bet Rivera had been lying through his teeth. For while I was certain Tiffany had reported seeing someone perched on her fence, I was pretty sure she couldn’t have seen my face.

  Which meant that Rivera had jumped to that outrageous conclusion on his own. Why the hell would I be scampering across Solberg’s lawn in the middle of the night?

  Anyway, it was now or never. Carting up all my moxie and lifting my chin like a Marine on a mission, I stepped out of the Saturn and marched up to Tiffany’s front door. I could hear the bell chiming in the interior, then nothing. I tried again. Waited again. Still nothing.

  I took an abbreviated step to the left. Maybe she wasn’t home. In which case I could probably take a little stroll through her backyard and . . .

  “Can I help you?”

  I actually squealed as I jerked toward her. The little sneak was standing behind me. I clasped my hand to my chest and considered having my heart attack right there on her cobbled walkway.