After breakfast, I rang up the valet and told him to have my Porsche ready to go. For eighty bucks a month, my building offered valet services, which it had done since before I moved in. But the most recent improvement was a policy change forbidding, not just discouraging, tips. Instead, the valets would now receive a standardized percentage of the overall valet fees. This had “opened the door” for me to use their service much more often. Even though I worked for tips myself, I didn’t regard driving a car for two minutes and holding the door open for me as a service worth five bucks, and evidently neither did most of the other residents in my building. But since the new antitip policy came into effect, half the residents had signed up, and the valets were busier than ever. And probably richer, too.
Tommy, my favorite valet, wasn’t working this shift, but there was a new guy who filled in nicely. Martin, a tall transplant from somewhere in eastern Europe, had a toothy grin that made his cheeks dimple, which was the surest way to get me to melt.
“Nice car,” he said, holding the door open.
I soon realized Martin needed some additional training, including a stern lecture about adjusting the car owner’s seat position. He’d moved the seat so far back that I could barely reach the pedals. After pointedly readjusting the seat and flashing him a thin smile, I sped off and headed over to Dan and Laura’s house to do a drive-by.
When I arrived, just after eleven o’clock, a tiny silver SUV was parked in the carport. There was no sign of a teenage girl or a dog. I drove slowly past the house and then parked up the street next to a lot where a house was being constructed. I would hang out for a while to see if anything happened and then move on. From my limited experience, I knew these things were hit-or-miss. You could watch someone for a week and not see anything, or you could learn the universe about a guy in ten minutes. The problem was, there was no way to tell in advance.
Luckily, I was charging by the hour because there was nothing going on at Dan’s house. I had brought a Glamour magazine with me to pass the time, but I’d breezed through it in forty-five minutes. Next time, I’d pack a Russian novel. I knew Dan would be out at his day job as a computer programmer, so I’d figured it would be a good time to catch Laura on her own, possibly with her guard down. But after more than an hour, I was convinced she might just be staying in for the day. It was well past noon, and I was getting hungry.
I gave it ten more minutes and then drove back out of the subdivision, the whole way home resisting the urge to stop and grab some fast food. I knew I had the makings for a megasalad in my fridge, and I wasn’t going to let the lettuce wilt away like I usually did.
I was out of shredded cheese, so I had to hunt down the cheese grater. After all, you couldn’t have a proper salad without cheese. And hardboiled eggs. And walnuts. And ranch dressing. And croutons. And before I knew it, I found myself scarfing down what was probably the calorie equivalent of a Double Whopper and fries. I felt a little bit guilty about it but not much, reasoning that calories weren’t everything. My lunch was much healthier than fast food. At least, until I cut myself a few extra slices of cheese as I cleaned up after myself.
That left the rest of the afternoon. I had a two o’clock meeting with Alex, my bank president client, strategically located at a Starbucks across the street from his bank headquarters. Apparently, I wasn’t the kind of business relationship he wanted clicking her heels across the bank’s gleaming marble floors, but I didn’t take too much offense. I knew my place. I was a forbidden, naughty treat, something to be kept hidden away from the other employees, a bunch of nosey functionaries who might get ideas and report them to Alex’s pesky wife. The funny part was that Alex was such a gentleman there was never a chance that any funny business would go on. And of course, I wasn’t exactly the kind of girl who’d get down and dirty on the boardroom table in the middle of the afternoon. At least, not without a few martinis in me.
Alex was early. He looked drawn, tired, thinner. Always trim and athletic, he now seemed a little too skinny, borderline gaunt, as he stood to greet me. Late forties with a full head of slowly graying black hair, he was dressed in the classic executive “casual Friday” golf shirt and khakis, a brown belt cinched an extra knot tighter around his waist. Unconsciously, I said a quick and silent prayer that he wasn’t ill.
“Alex, hi,” I beamed, trying to mask my dismay at his appearance.
Ever gallant, he pulled out a stool for me to sit on.
“Great to see you again, Raven,” he said. “What are you drinking?”
“I’m not into any of those coffee concoctions,” I said. “I take it black and boring.”
He smiled. “Same here. I’ll be right back.”
I didn’t even bother to protest, knowing he’d take it as an insult if I tried to pay my way. I’d forgotten exactly where he was originally fromâTennessee, North Carolina, something like thatâbut wherever it was, it was somewhere I needed to spend a few months. Most men didn’t get how utterly and embarrassingly easy it was to treat a lady right, but some of these Southern types had it down cold. And Alex was as cool as they came.
“Here you go,” he said, placing a giant cup of steaming coffee in front of me.
I sniffed. “Alex, if I drink that whole thing, I’ll have a heart attack!”
He shrugged. “I didn’t know what size to get,” he said awkwardly. “We’ve never had coffee before.”
I slurped at the piping hot coffee and decided to get down to business. “Your man is thinking about leaving the bank,” I began. I hadn’t done a whole bunch of investigating, to be honest. But Alex would understand. The investigation was just a formality, a bogus excuse to get together with me.
He perked up. “How can you tell?”
“Well, it’s not much, actually. I haven’t tailed him or anything. But I noticed that he updated his LinkedIn page recently. It’s almost like a formal résumé, which is unusual for someone who’s worked at your company forâ¦how long?”
“Nine years,” he said resignedly. He was staring down into his coffee.
“You seem distracted,” I said, choosing my words carefully.
He offered a weak smile and then looked plaintively out the window. “She’s leaving me, Raven. After almost twenty years.”
I almost choked on my coffee. “Pamela?”
“Yes, Pamela,” he sighed. “I haven’t been eating. Not sleeping. I’m sure I look awful. You know what’s funny about it?”
“What?” I asked, relieved that he wasn’t sick.
He winced before speaking. “She’s using you as an excuse. It’s a joke, of course, but she thinks it’ll mean a bigger divorce settlement.”
My eyes got big. “She’s divorcing you because you went to a strip club?”
“It was my fault, I guess. I shouldn’t have been so honest with her. But when she found out, I panicked. So I told her that I’d seen you once, twice a week for years. So it wasn’t just going to a strip club. She felt like I was cheating on her, basically. And of course, she exaggerates everything in her mind.”
I kept quiet and slurped at my piping hot coffee. In private lap dances, especially with good customers, dancers made sure that the “dance” was not just visual but tactile as well. Customers could not touch with their hands, but the dancer would spend a fair amount of effort pressing her thighs onto the customer and occasionally brushing against a customer’s face. But Alex, ever the gentleman, had just wanted to look at me. He would sit in the chair, and I would stand up, facing him from about five feet away. He often wore a kind of goofy aww shucks grin on his face, a remnant of his rural southern upbringing. Recalling his face made me smile involuntarily.
Alex looked at me quizzically.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was just thinking of something.”
“So was I,” he said, looking at me intently.
Our eyes locked, and something inside me quivered. Alex had dark-brown eyes, almost black, and at that moment, they were burning with an intensit
y I’d not seen in any of our countless meetings. They seemed almost to be boring through me, but instead of making me uncomfortable, they lit a fire in the core of my abdomen. Alex was a powerful man, a president of a bank with branches in three states, and at that moment, I felt a glimmer of the power that had driven him to the top.
“Raven,” he began softly.
I knew what he was going to suggest. That it didn’t have to be a fantasy anymore. That he was a free man now, and we could start something bigger and a million times more meaningful. My heart was thumping in my chest in a way it hadn’t in a long time. Then again, maybe he was just going to tell me that I had a french fry stuck to my face.
I shifted in my seat. “Alex,” I whispered, “let’s take this very slowly, all right?” Some deep-seated and ancient panic had kicked in, warning bells going off for reasons I couldn’t fully explain.
He leaned back in his chair, eyes fixed now on his hands, which were cupped around his tall coffee. His gold wedding ring remained on his ring finger, I noticed. When he looked up, his eyes were no longer smoldering and intense but kindly and understanding.
“I get it,” he said, forcing a light chuckle. “I’m old.”
I shook my head vigorously. “No, not at all. Let’s just⦔ I was fumbling for words.
“Get back to business?” he asked, trying to be helpful.
Given his imminent divorce, Alex had probably expected to be the one to be pitied, but now he was the one taking pity on me. For reasons I still couldn’t explain, I had turned a moment of passion between two adults into an avalanche of awkwardness. I took a deep breath and tried to smile.
“So is there anything else you want me to do about your wayward employee? Is he that good?”
Alex straightened up and looked out the window for a moment. “He’s worth saving, yes. I think you can leave him alone, though. We don’t need to go stalking him around town or poring through his trash. I’ll just come up with a reason to give him a promotion. Hopefully, that’ll keep him.”
“Okay,” I said, grateful to be back to business talk.
He sipped at his coffee and then smiled. “But if you need to pad the bill a little more, that’s fine too. I’m the one signing off on the expense reports.”
I shrugged. “We’ll see. I’m actually pretty busy with some other projects.”
“That’s very good to hear,” he said, perking up. “You know,” he confided in a low voice, “I never liked the idea of you dancing for other men. I mean, obviously, that was your job, but it just didn’t sit well with me.”
Back to the personal stuff, I thought, cringing. I decided to go with the flow since it couldn’t be any more awkward than my attempts to avoid it. “And why didn’t it sit well?”
Alex peered out the window again, his thoughts a world away. And then he turned back and faced me, his expression earnest. “Because, Raven, you’re perfect. I sometimes wished I had a talent for art because I would have quit my job and devoted myself to trying to capture your image, painting you over and over again so that God’s perfection would never be lost. The way your cheekbones jut out at the perfect spot”âhe began gesturing at my faceâ“the way your lips have a soft pout to them, the way your eyebrows perfectly frame your stunning eyes. I could go on and on. The point is, I don’t think most people got that about you. Men focus on your body and its obvious attractions, but they miss the fact that you’re art, a piece of walking, talking art. Even your voice⦔ he trailed off and looked out the window again.
My face had turned into an inferno from the tips of my ears down through my neck and into my chest. In all my life, I’d never been spoken to like that, and I had no idea how to process it. Again, my first instinct was to flee, to run away from such feeling, such intensity, the kind of passion I craved but knew I didn’t deserve. But I stayed put.
“Alex, that’s so kind,” I whispered, still blushing furiously.
“Yes, well,” he said softly, tailing off. He might have gotten a bit carried away, and now he was blushing a bit himself. But at least I knew where he stood, and I had no doubt about where I stood with him. He leaned in to peck me on the cheek, and we parted ways soon after, pretending as though nothing much had happened, but of course it had. I danced at my club for about four hours and then spent a mostly sleepless night drifting in and out of bizarre dreams, many of which were about Alex.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Saturday mornings had a way of going by too fast, aided by the simple fact that I usually woke up around eleven after a late night at Cougar’s. Dan had left a text on my phone telling me that his wife was going to the gym after lunch, whatever “after lunch” meant, so I fixed myself a quick brunch consisting of what I called a pizza omelet. Italian sausage, peppers, mozzarella cheese, and tomato sauce, onions, and a few eggs, all thrown together in the pan and flipped a half dozen times. I couldn’t resist frying up some shredded potatoes and dousing them in olive oil and salt and pepper. That would keep me going all day, I figured.
I slid into some gym attire and called down for my car and headed over to Dan’s house where I hoped to catch Laura on her way out. Her car was still in the driveway when I pulled up, so I drove past the house and parked at the same construction site I’d been to the previous day, fixing their driveway in my rearview mirror.
It didn’t take as long as I’d feared before Laura’s car emerged and crept backwards down their driveway. I slowly did a U-turn and kept my distance to a healthy two hundred yards behind her. I already knew she was headed to the gym, so I wasn’t overly concerned about losing her.
I was wrong. Within a minute of starting up my engine, I knew she wasn’t headed to the gym. The gym was west, and she was heading in a decidedly northeast direction. The weird part was that she’d made a westerly turn out of her subdivision but then had circled back to go almost in the opposite direction, almost as though she suspected Dan might be watching her as she pulled out. I decided to ease off the gas just in case she was being extra paranoid.
Eventually, we got caught up at the same stoplight, which caused me to rethink my flashy Porsche. It was the kind of car someone being tailed might notice, I realized, and if she noticed it, she might remember it, too. But Laura seemed perfectly oblivious to me, though, so I continued behind her and eased off the pedal to let a sanitation truck come between us. We were headed into a not so great part of town. Not quite sketchy but not the kind of place a fashionable and fit supermom like Laura would be comfortable.
And then it hit me. She must be headed to their church. That was the only reason she’d be driving where she was, and my suspicion was confirmed a few minutes later when she slowed and turned into the church parking lot. There was no way I could pull in behind her because I would stick out too obviously in the otherwise empty lot. Instead, I continued driving and planned to circle around a few minutes later.
When I came back a second time, her car wasn’t visible from the main drag, so I eased my Porsche into the main parking lot and slowly crept around the various buildings on the church property. In addition to the church proper, where I’d never set foot, there was the annex in which we had our team meetings. Attached to that building was a small residence that jutted off in an L-shape, and it was there that I found Laura’s car. It was parked in a small driveway next to the house, alongside a late model BMW sedan.
A secret rendezvousâ¦at church? Was Laura involved with the minister? I didn’t know much about him except for the fact that the billboard out front said his name was the Rev. Owen Clavette. Was the Rev engaging in some personal ministry with my client’s wife? And if so, did that have anything to do with the missing money?
I drove by slowly, careful to keep my car’s engine from making too much noise. I drove back to the main lot and wound through a driveway to a check-cashing store, where I parked. Walking back to the pastor’s house, I realized it was a gamble. I had no plausible reason for being there, so if they spotted me, my cover would most
likely be blown. But I wanted to get closer, to try to tease out what was actually going on. Simply parking at someone’s house didn’t mean anything nefarious was going on. They could have been playing Parcheesi for all I knew. But then, why the deception?
I snuck up next to the house without being seen. Naturally, the windows were all shut tight, probably hadn’t been opened since April, and the curtains were drawn. The air conditioner hummed along loudly, dimming my hopes of hearing anything inside. I moved as close as I could to the window facing the church parking lot, hoping no other interlopers would arrive and wonder what the skanky woman in gym attire was doing creeping around the pastor’s house. By design, probably, the lot remained deserted. I figured Laura and Owen had probably chosen this time precisely because no one would have any business at the church on a Saturday around lunchtime. There were no meetings, no prayer groups, no child care, and no mass until five o’clock. It was the perfect time for a private get-together.
I had no luck next to the other window, either. The noise from the air conditioner wasn’t as bad, but unless the people inside the house started screaming, I wasn’t going to hear anything over its annoying whirr. Frustrated, I whipped out my phone and snapped a few photos of Laura’s car parked at the house. I made sure to time stamp them, just to drive the point home. Laura was with another man at exactly the same time she’d told her husband she would be at the gym. It was the perfect crime, I realized. Dan, a soft man comfortable in his corpulence, was more likely to get struck by lightning than set foot in a gym, so Laura’s cover story gave her a blank check to do whatever she wanted. Dan would never be the wiser.
Satisfied with a few photos stored on my phone, I did a quick walk back to my car and got out of there before my luck changed. I spent the rest of the afternoon wondering whether or not I could avoid telling Dan about what I’d found. He’d hired me to look into missing money, not to see if his wife was having an affair. But since the affair could be all tied up with the money, it was certainly a relevant fact to report. But I wasn’t going to do it that day. I was going to work myself up to it. By shopping.
Double Down (Raven McShane Mysteries Book 4) Page 7