Tina Whittle_Tai Randall Mystery 01

by The Dangerous Edge of Things

  I retrieved my cell phone and dialed Garrity’s number. He’d barely answered when I started in on him.

  “Trey is sick, really sick.”

  “What do you mean, sick?”

  “He’s lying on the floor, he won’t answer me, he’s shaking all over. Damn it, Garrity, I need his doctor.”

  “Hold on.” I heard him rummaging through papers. He found the number and gave it to me. “I’ll be right there, okay? Stay with him.”

  I hung up the phone. Like I was going anywhere.

  I went to Trey and brushed the hair from his forehead. At my touch, his eyes flew open. They were glazed with pain and exhaustion.

  “Go away,” he said.

  “Not a chance.” I brushed back another piece of hair, and he reached up and knocked my hand away.

  “I have to get up.”

  “Not now.”

  “Now.” He pushed to standing and buckled, catching himself before he hit the ground. I grabbed him, and he put one arm around me, no argument this time. He was almost deadweight, but his legs still worked, so with one arm around his waist and the whole of his upper body leaning against me, I carried him to bed.

  “Talk to me, Trey, what happened?”

  He mumbled something. It was pretty incoherent, but I got enough to understand that there had been nausea and vomiting and other debilitating stuff.

  I sat beside him. “I’ll get a bucket or something. And some more towels. Be still while I call the doctor.”

  He babbled a weak protest, something completely incomprehensible, but I caught the last part as I got out my phone.

  “It’s too late anyway,” he said. “Too late.”

  ***

  The doctor diagnosed him with probable food poisoning and said the same things doctors always said—watch for fever, keep him in bed, small doses of fluids when he could hold them down. She was calling in a prescription for promethazine, but it wouldn’t do much good until Trey could keep it in down. The worst would be over in six hours, she said.

  I called Garrity back and asked him to drop by the pharmacy. He arrived an hour later with the prescription. I took it from his hands without touching him and wouldn’t let him in the door.

  “Look, it could be food poisoning, or it could be a virus, in which case, I’m doomed. Which means that the least I can do is not doom you too.”

  Garrity gave me that cop look. “So what happened to make you think you’re doomed?”

  “Why are you asking me this now? You’re breathing in pathogens as we speak. Go away.”

  He crossed his arms and looked at me, hard, but didn’t step over the threshold. “Did you two—”

  “No, and stop looking at me like you’re the one who can read minds.” I started to shut the door. He put his foot in it.

  “We’re going to talk about this,” he said.

  I shoved the door closed, locked it too. And then I went to take care of Trey.

  Chapter 39

  Eventually he fell asleep. It wasn’t good sleep—he tossed his head and mumbled nonsense into the pillow—but if he was asleep he wasn’t vomiting, and if he wasn’t vomiting, he was getting better. I curled into a ball on the sofa and eventually fell asleep too, somewhere around four.

  His phone rang at seven. I answered it in a daze. “Yeah?”

  “Who the hell is this?”

  I scrubbed at my eyes. “It’s Tai, Marisa. How are you this fine morning?”

  “I’m calling for Trey.”

  “He’s sick.”

  “He didn’t call in sick.”

  “He’s really sick, like too sick to call in sick.”

  If she was the least bit curious at my being there, she didn’t show it. “There’s a press conference this morning—ten o’clock at Beaumont Enterprises. Tell Trey to bring back the files on the meeting last night.”

  “Listen to me—Trey is throwing-up-delirious sick. He’s not coming in.”

  “Then you need to bring them. Wear something suitable for the camera, not that purple thing.”

  I sat up and my head throbbed. “You’re not getting this, are you? He’s sick, and I’m not leaving him. Besides, Landon fired my ass yesterday, so forget you or him or anybody else at Phoenix bossing me around anymore.”

  A long pause. “You have a point. Landon will be over to pick up the materials in an hour.”

  “I’ll meet him in the lobby,” I said, then hung up.

  I heard Trey stirring in the bed and went to see if he was awake, but he’d just turned to his other side, wrapped himself around a different pillow. I ran my hand over his forehead. Still cool, which was a relief.

  I sat on the edge of the bed. “You need to wake up, Trey. They all think it’s over, but I know better, and you do too.”

  He didn’t reply. Even though the night had been a cycle of garbled dream-talk and throwing up, every time I touched him, I felt this surge of tenderness, which completely unnerved me. It reminded me too much of taking care of Mom, the helplessness and the frustration. But he needed somebody, and there I was. Somebody.

  So I got up and wet the washcloth one more time.

  ***

  I figured I had about thirty minutes before Landon arrived, so I got to work looking for the files. Trey’s briefcase was an uncharacteristic mess, as was his deck, so I rummaged through the drawers and found a stack of empty folders. And then I sat on the floor and started putting things back where they belonged. Or seemed too. I figured Trey would rearrange everything the right way once he woke up.

  Going through his desk—this time with no ulterior motive—was fascinating. He’d managed to get his gun put away—that drawer was locked up tight, as usual. The tarot deck was still in the desk drawer, as were the usual prescription meds and emergency folders, plus the GQ magazine. Only now I noticed that it was over two years old, and that it featured a black Armani suit on the front cover.

  So that was where he got his fashion sense.

  I put it back in the drawer—interesting, but not pertinent. What I needed to do was get a handle on Trey’s notes before Landon absconded with them.

  The biggest part of the jumbled paperwork was mostly familiar, but I occasionally ran into new material, like the meeting notes from the night before. Eliza’s file now had a sticky note on the cover in Trey’s handwriting: Blackmailable? I smiled, but he had a vital point. All this time, we’d been looking at Eliza as a blackmailer, but what if she’d been the one whose secrets were on the line?

  Of course, that didn’t explain why she’d been hiding so much cash in a shoebox. Trey hadn’t speculated further. He had, however, taken a yellow highlighter to the forensic analysis of the murder weapon. Another sticky note: why not disposed of?

  Another excellent point. How stupid was it for Bulldog to stash the murder weapon and her purse in his truck? Why not toss it all in the Hooch? And why hadn’t he used any of her credit cards? Admittedly, that would have made him easier to trace, but he hadn’t impressed me as a big-picture kind of felon.

  It was all damn confusing. I didn’t have a criminal mind; how was I supposed to comprehend the whacked-out functions of such a thing? I couldn’t even figure out Trey’s head, and I had brain scans on that one.

  Okay, I thought, what if Eliza had been taking hush money. And if the money alone hadn’t convinced her, what if someone had dropped hints that her own secrets would be exposed to the Beaumonts?

  And what if she’d decided that, finally, she’d had enough? That would explain why she’d come to Eric, asking questions about client confidentiality. It would explain her nervousness, her frantic pull between speaking out and safety. I remembered the bruises that had been inflicted on her two days before her death, long before Bulldog admitted to getting rough with her on Thursday night. Apparently, she’d been right to be afraid, but it hadn’t been Bulldog alone who inspired that fear.

  As for Bulldog, he claimed to know nothing about Dylan
Flint. I was betting Dylan had known nothing about Bulldog. And the Beaumonts knew nothing about anything. They occupied their own rarefied penthouse far above such sordid goings-on, and yet everywhere I looked, the Beaumont name ran though the mess like a fault line.

  I paged through the rest of Trey’s notes and found another police report, the one on the discovery of Dylan’s body. It gave me goosebumps. He’d been yelling at me on the sidewalk and dripping-wet-dead less than ten hours later. He hadn’t made it in to talk to the cops.

  Which made another fact even more alarming—Nikki had disappeared. When police went to question her about Dylan, her apartment was empty, with evidence of a hasty packing job. I felt a cold splotch of dread. Would they be pulling her from the river next?

  The rest of Trey’s stuff was mostly security data for the Senator’s reception—floor plans, security rolls, perimeter breakdowns, plus lots of promotional material, all of which featured a smiling Mark and Charley. I paged through the guest list, discovering a veritable Who’s Who of Atlanta’s monied elite. A separate roster catalogued Beaumont Enterprise employees who would be attending. I noticed Jake Whitaker’s name—nothing surprising there, considering his penchant for sucking up. Still, I doubted he’d show, not after getting fired.

  I also found a hefty file on Senator Adams, another knot in the incestuous tangle of Beaumont World. Everyone connected to everyone else by less than six degrees of separation—more like two and three-quarters. This wasn’t the usual political fluff ’n’ stuff, however. This was a well-researched dossier with a lot of background data, most of it irrelevant to the current situation.

  Except.

  And it was one hell of an except. I took up the highlighter and marked the name, then I underlined it. Then I drew an asterisk beside it. And then another.

  And then Trey’s phone rang. It was Landon.

  “I’m coming up,” he said.

  “No, you’re not. I’m coming down.”

  “Don’t start.”

  “This isn’t starting. Starting would be loading whatever gun I can find and waiting for your ass to show up at this door.”

  There was silence at the other end of the phone. He wasn’t happy, but couldn’t find a way around the situation.

  “In the lobby then. Ten minutes. And I want all of it. If there’s a single sheet of paper missing, so help me, I’ll—”

  “Shut up, Landon. I’m not in the mood.”

  “Just bring it.”

  “Oh, I’m bringing it all right.”

  ***

  Landon had planted himself in the lobby like a bad-tempered hill. “This had better be everything,” he said, looking through the folders.

  “It is. Including this bunch of stuff here about you and Senator Adams, how he was your partner at the company you sold before you became partners with Marisa.”

  He looked at me hard, the folders fanned in his hands. “You say that like you’re discovered something, Ms. Randolph.”

  “Why’d he leave?”

  “To start his own law firm. Can’t you read?”

  “I read fine, especially the part about the illegal wiretaps. Your old firm was about to get into hot water thanks to Adams—spying on the wrong people, it seems.”

  “The charges were dropped.”

  “Lots of charges got dropped during the nineties—Atlanta was famous for it. People got rich from it.”

  “I wasn’t one.”

  “No, Adams was the money, you were the talent. Mr. Air Force Special Services. Luckily, Marisa swooped in with her trust fund and bailed you out. Adams leaves, she’s the new partner, the name gets changed to Phoenix, and everything blows over. And now he’s running for governor.”

  “And this means what exactly?”

  “It means you’ve got a personal stake in this campaign. Quid pro quo. Adams kicks a little influence your way, you toss a little top secret information his. A nice partnership.”

  Landon looked at me—pleasantly, it seemed. I’d never noticed how malleable his expression was, how like a layer on top of another layer on top of something hard and fixed and smooth.

  “We don’t have to like each other.”

  I crossed my arms. “Good thing.”

  “So cut the crap. Nobody appreciates it.”

  “Eliza might have.”

  When Landon spoke, his voice was not argumentative. “One thing everybody at Phoenix has in common—me, Marisa, Trey too, especially Trey—is that the work is the most important thing in our lives. Sometimes it’s the only thing. And it’s never personal. We do what we have to do.”

  He turned to leave, then paused. “Ask yourself this—if you’d been the one upstairs sprawled out sick, would Trey have stayed with you? Or would he have made sure you weren’t dead, then left you there to fend for yourself while he did his job?”

  He didn’t wait for a reply. Which was just as well, since I didn’t have one.

  Chapter 40

  The minute I walked back into the apartment, I heard noises in the kitchen. Trey, I assumed.

  Boy, was I wrong. It was Gabriella, dressed once again in her white baby-tee uniform, only this time she carried a picnic basket. Her hair fell loose about her shoulders, and she smelled of sandalwood.

  I shut the door behind me. “Could have sworn I locked that.”

  “I have keys.” She gestured toward the stove, where a small cast iron pot simmered. “Do you like miso soup?”

  “I prefer donuts. You know, the ones with the little sprinkles.”

  She turned the stove eye on low and wiped her hands. “I came to get my tarot cards and check on Trey. I didn’t mean to intrude.”

  “You’re not intruding—I’m glad you dropped by. I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

  She cocked her head, her green eyes clever. “Of course. Would you like to join me on the terrace? I’m dying for a cigarette.”

  ***

  So I stretched out once again on the chaise lounge, cigarette in hand. I was done by the time Gabriella joined me, having stopped at Trey’s desk to gather her tarot deck. She brought it and her picnic basket onto the terrace, placing both beside her as she dropped into a half-lotus. Then she extracted a pack of Gitanes blondes from the basket and tapped one out.

  “My least interesting vice,” she said.

  I offered her the lighter. She lit the cigarette and inhaled luxuriously, almost sexually. “You said you had questions?”

  “A few, just to fill in some backstory. Like how you met the Beaumonts.”

  She pursed her lips to blow out a smoky tendril. “I was Charley’s massage therapist—we met soon after she and Mark moved here. We became friends, and they invested in my shop.”

  “How did Phoenix get involved with them?”

  “Phoenix is visible and well regarded, of course. But mostly because of Marisa. And her connections.”

  I remembered what I’d read about her in the files I’d returned to Landon, how she came to Atlanta with a stack of money and an impressive Old Charleston family tree. “She’s not one of the Good Old Boys, is she?”

  “No. She’s properly respectful, but she is an outsider and always will be.”

  “Which is why she threw her lot in with Senator Adams. He is a Good Old Boy.”

  Gabriella smiled. “It was a risky investment. Less so now. Adams has an excellent chance of winning.”

  “Which means Phoenix wins too. And the Beaumonts.” And Landon, I thought, since I was sure he’d brokered the Beaumont-Phoenix-Adams partnership. But I didn’t share this with Gabriella, who dropped her still smoldering cigarette into the Pellegrino bottle from last night. She picked up her tarot deck and cocked her head.

  “Have you seen the Beaumonts’ new resort property, on Lake Oconee?”

  “No. They’re holding the reception there, I know that much.”

  “The boat dock is especially nice—slips for the yachts, a gorgeous view. It’s
the water that makes the place, you know, especially now, after the drought two years ago.”

  I waited for her point. There wasn’t one. “So?”

  She shuffled the cards in her hands, smoothly. Not like a poker player. Like a magician.

  “If you do your research, you will notice that the wife of Senator Adams has a sister who has a husband on the water board of Greene County. Not yet, of course. He begins his term next year. But he has a reputation for protecting the commercial interests of property owners.”

  “Friends tend to have friends in high places.”

  “Yes, in high places you can always find some friends for sale.” She was cutting and restacking the deck now. “This is the nature of business.”

  “What about Eliza? Was she starting to make noise about this business?”

  She looked at me with puzzled amusement. “You think this is a secret? Don’t be naïve. As for Eliza, I’m afraid I can’t help you—I’ve told you everything I know about her. Ask Trey if you don’t believe me. He knows I don’t lie.”

  She pulled a card from the deck and laid it face-up at my feet. A woman on a throne, some clouds, butterflies.

  “The Queen of Swords,” she said. “Intensely perceptive. Quick and confident, independent and clear-thinking, sometimes rashly so. She has suffered loss, but has the strength to bear her sorrow.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t believe in that stuff.”

  “That hardly matters.” She pulled another card and laid it down at a right angle to the first. It was a man this time, also on a throne, also armed with a formidable piece of steel.

  “The King of Swords. A card of power, of strength, of a man who holds life and death in the palm of his hand. He is firm in both friendship and in enmity, but often over-cautious. Usually solitary. And sometimes ruthless.”

  I regarded her carefully. She was playing me, yes, but I was curious enough to play along. “So what are you and Trey? Friends? Lovers?”

  “Both. But only because he isn’t in a relationship…is he?”

  “You’re the one with the cards, you tell me.”

  “That’s not how it works.” She turned over one more card. “This is the final outcome—The Magician, the card of creative archetypal energy. Whatever you choose to do, you will have the power to do it. Because there will be a choice, an important one—for both you and Trey.”