“Oh my God.” The color drained from Mike’s face. He took my hand and squeezed it. For emphasis, I guess. “Be sure to tell him this was an accident, will you? Or I could end up back in State.”
My eyes flared open. Mike was desperate...but why? Of course the crash was an accident. My heart skipped a beat. Or had he rammed my car on purpose?
The question was too much for my aching head. With Chip’s help, I eased out of the wounded Audi and slowly limped over to the passenger seat of his Malibu.
Chip’s wife, AudreyAnn, in a pink terry robe and fluffy slippers, waited alongside holding a pencil and a piece of paper.
“Get the truck driver’s information,” Chip told her, nodding at Mike. “License, registration and insurance. Then call a towing service for the Audi. I need to get Deva to the ER.”
Chip slid behind the wheel of the Malibu. If he spoke on the drive to the hospital, I didn’t hear him. I dozed—off and on—as we wove through morning traffic to the Naples Community Hospital. When he pulled up at the ER entrance, Rossi stood waiting with a wheelchair, as grim-faced as I’d ever seen him.
As soon as Chip hit the brake, Rossi yanked open the passenger side door.
“You’re conscious,” he said. No hello. No smile.
“Of course.” I left off “barely.”
He leaned farther into the car. “Chip, you took a chance. Why didn’t you call 9-1-1?”
“This was faster,” Chip replied. “It cut out the argument.”
A wry smile lifted Rossi’s lips. “Say no more, my friend. And thank you. I’ll take her in. The ER staff is expecting her.”
“The ER staff is expecting me? What did you do, Rossi, pull rank?”
“You could say that,” he said, helping me into the wheelchair. Chip gave me a farewell buss on the cheek and waved goodbye. Without wasting a minute, Rossi pushed my chair through the automatic doors.
Though the dizziness had settled over me like fog, I did notice the waiting room held only a single man. Satisfied that Rossi wasn’t wheeling me past a roomful of dire emergencies, I relaxed a little, and once inside a curtained cubicle, I lay on the hospital bed with a sigh of gratitude. My head hurt, dammit, and my knee hurt worse. And over and above those concerns another loomed large—a growing realization that the accident should never have happened.
The ER physician, a young resident from the boyish look of him, examined me and ordered a CT scan of my head and an X-ray of my knee. The upshot, several hours later, was that I had suffered a bone bruise on the knee, but despite the blow to the occipital region of my head, no concussion.
A kind of minor miracle, the doc told me. “You have a hard head, lady,” he said, a medical joke with all the freshness of a stale donut.
Still I sent him a grateful smile and went to get out of bed. The spinning started up immediately, and I fell back against the pillow.
“I suggest you go home and rest for the day. See how you feel in the morning before resuming your usual activities.” He paused. “The knee will take a while. Bone bruises are slow to heal. If it bothers you unduly, I suggest you see an orthopedic specialist.”
A handshake and he was gone. A moment later, the cubicle curtain parted again. “Rossi chauffeuring at your service. You’ve been sprung.”
I sat up slowly and, to my relief, nothing spun in front of my eyes. “I’m so sorry for all this.” The tears I’d been holding in leaked out onto my johnny. “You have enough to do without worrying about me.”
“Worrying about you is my main occupation. The department is a poor second to that,” he said, kissing my wet cheeks then handing me a fistful of tissues. “Also I do double duty as a ladies’ maid.” He opened the bedside stand, lifted out my clothes and held up my bra and panties. “This’ll be a first, putting them on instead of taking them off.”
“Rossi, give me my clothes and go find a nurse. A female one.”
With a chuckle, he did, and a half hour later, I was back at Surfside, stretched out on the living room couch with an ice pack on my knee and a pillow under my head. Where I needed to be was Fern Alley, running my business but, truthfully, I couldn’t have driven downtown nor functioned normally if I had to. So I lay there, outwardly calm and inwardly fuming, while Rossi went next door for the information Mike had given AudreyAnn.
He also went to have a look at the accident site. With my car towed away for repairs and Tony’s truck gone as well, I didn’t see what good it would do.
I should have known Rossi wouldn’t waste his time. Ten minutes later, he returned to my condo looking none too happy.
“The skid marks from that truck are facing in toward the building, not out toward the street. Where the hell did Hammerjack think he was going? There’s no way out of the lot in the direction he was headed. I don’t believe in accidents, Deva. I think the guy may have rammed you on purpose.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Still flat out on the sofa, I answered Rossi’s questions as best I could and watched his face go from grim to grimmer. After serving me a bowl of canned chicken soup, he was determined to find out exactly what had happened and left for Whiskey Lane, to pay a call on Mike at the Hawkins house. And, I suspected, to scare the daylights out of him while he was at it.
I dozed for a while and awoke with the late afternoon sun streaming through my windows. Restored by the nap, I risked getting off the couch to freshen up. My head ached, but the dizziness had disappeared. The knee was another story. It throbbed as badly as earlier. I hobbled out to the kitchen, put the thawed ice pack in the freezer and took out a bag of frozen peas—Rossi hated them anyway—to lay on the knee.
On the way back to the couch, I plucked my tote off a club chair. At least I could make a few calls and not waste the entire day.
Lee assured me all was well at the shop, which made me feel happy and obsolete at the same time. Actually gratitude quickly took over. I was lucky to have someone as reliable and capable as Lee helping me run the business. She deserved to be rewarded for all she did, and the same thought I’d had for a while popped up again: I should offer her a partnership in the business. A junior partnership to begin with and gradually as her design skills grew, make her a full partner with a client list of her own. Then we could hire someone to work on the floor and keep the shop...Dunne & St. James Interiors...open without interruption. It was a good idea, one that lifted my spirits.
They stayed elated, too, until I called You’ve Been Framed and spoke to Jane Walsh.
“Naomi’s not in today,” she said, “and I don’t know whether she’ll return.”
“How is she, Jane, really? I’m worried about her. She didn’t look well the other day.”
Jane cleared her throat as if weighing what she could or couldn’t tell me, then came out with a shocker: “She’s been given six months.”
“Oh.” I slumped farther down on the sofa. The peas fell off my knee, but I didn’t care. “I’m so sorry. Her lungs?”
“Yes. She said if you called to tell you she wants to talk about some letters of yours. Said it was important. Wait a minute, I have her home phone number around here somewhere.” A thump as the phone hit the desk.
While she searched, I scrambled in my tote for a pen and a scrap of paper. She came back on the line, gave me the number and said, “Mum’s the word on the six months, okay?”
“I won’t say a thing, I promise. Thanks for trusting me with the truth.”
“No problem.” Except, of course, there was.
I took a deep, reinforcing gulp of air and rang Naomi’s number.
Instead of a hello, she answered with a cough.
“Hi, girlfriend,” I said, when she caught her breath.
“Deva?” she asked, her voice a raspy whisper.
“Yes.”
“I’m glad you called. I mailed those Hammerjack letters back to you along with twenty bucks. You paid me too much.”
“No, I didn’t. You deserved every penny.” Another racking cough. “You f
eel like talking about what you found? If not, it’ll wait.”
“No it won’t. You’ve got quite a dude there, Deva. Oh, he’s charming, all right, but not to be trusted. I wanted you to know—” she stopped to draw in a ragged breath, “—before something happened.”
“Well, something has.”
“Yeah? Not surprising. I saw the prison address, but that’s not what alerted me. When you get his letters, look at his signature. It’s a mile high in comparison with the rest of his writing. You’ll see a lot of fancy swirls around the M in Mike. That’s self-importance, or you can call it an inflated ego. Either way, nothing illegal about it. But take a look at how he writes his y’s and g’s. The guy uses the felon’s claw.”
“The felon’s claw? What on earth is that?”
“It’s coming from a downstroke and immediately going into a claw shape below the line. It’s underhanded, goes against the norm.”
I could tell she was sucking in the air trying to get a full breath.
She mustn’t have succeeded, for she said, “There’s more, but not today. I’m done. Gotta get to my oxygen tank.”
“Thanks a million. You’ve helped me more than you know. And as soon as I get the letters, I’m sending back the twenty.”
“Don’t bother,” she rasped. “If you do, I’ll use it to light a cigar.”
My turn to gasp. “You smoke them, too!”
“Only when forced to. Ciao.”
She hung up wheezing and laughing, but I hung up saddened and troubled. Saddened about Naomi and troubled about Mike Hammerjack. Now that I had some insight into his character, what in the world was I supposed to do about it?
Chapter Twenty-Four
I was still mulling over the Mike Hammerjack problem when Rossi walked in. It was early evening by then, and he carried a frozen pizza and a bottle of Chianti. Dinner. Oh well, his pizza was better than his scrambled eggs, and I really wasn’t hungry anyway.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, eyeing me from head to toe and frowning.
“As you see.”
“I thought so. What’s with the peas?”
“You freeze them and put them on your knee.”
“So that’s the reason people grow them?”
“Exactly.”
“Seriously, you okay?”
“Well enough.”
“Not true. I can see your freckles. That’s never a good sign.”
Freckles. Something else to worry about. “How about you put the pizza in the kitchen and then tell me what happened with Mike?”
“You got it. Be right back.” He returned in a few minutes with two glasses of wine, handed me one, and settled into a club chair across from the sofa.
“So?” I said.
“So, you could say I wasted my time,” he began.
“Really? That surprises me. You never do.”
He raised his glass in a mock toast. “Thank you. However, this was an exception to my otherwise perfect record. The guy’s slick as they come. Claims his foot slipped off the brake, his driving’s rusty, blah, blah, blah. I didn’t believe a word he said, but there’s no way to disprove his story, so that’s that. Luckily the owner of the truck, this Tony Pavlich, carries insurance. So repairs to your car should be covered, and we can pick up a loaner in the morning.”
What he wasn’t saying was how much he regretted selling the Maserati. We were down to one set of wheels—the Mustang of voting age. Not good.
“Regrets?” I asked softly.
“Yes!”
About to take a sip of Chianti, I lowered my glass.
“I deeply regret your tangling with this Hammerjack character. Promise me you’ll have nothing more to do with him.”
“But—”
“He had no business being at your door. That alone scares me, never mind this phony accident.”
“I’d love to do as you ask, Rossi, but I said I’d try to sell some of the prison furniture. Not for Mike, for people in need. I have to follow through on my word.”
“You don’t have to, you want to.”
The sofa suddenly felt like a hot seat. As if my pants were on fire, I squirmed before answering. “I need to. That means I have to.”
He sighed, one of those deep, I’m-annoyed-beyond-words type of sighs. “You’re being incredibly naïve. You’ll be selling the work of murderers, pimps, thieves, wife-beaters, addicts. The list goes on.”
I took a good stiff slug of wine. “Just so you’ll know, the furniture they make is excellent. Besides, my grandmother wants me to do what I can in the name of humanity.”
“This the Nana Kennedy who passed fifteen years ago?”
“The very same.”
“I give up,” he said, throwing his hands in the air. Thank God his glass was empty. “Who can argue with logic like that?” He eased out of the club chair. “I’ll put the pizza in the oven.”
“That’s all you have to say? You’re not going to try and talk me out of it?”
“Nope. Do what you must. Besides, I told Hammerjack if he caused you any more trouble, I’d personally see that he went back to State. For good.” A small smile lifted Rossi’s lips. “Even if I had to invent the evidence.”
I nearly dropped my glass. “You didn’t!”
“Damn right I did. I won’t act on the threat, of course, but Hammerjack doesn’t know that. Not for sure.” Halfway to the kitchen, he swiveled around to face me. “I’d do anything to keep you safe.”
Wow. The man of integrity had lied. For me. My elation at being loved so much quickly turned to guilt. Once more I’d caused a problem for Rossi, but this time I’d placed him on the horns of a moral dilemma, and that made me feel terrible.
His evaluation of Mike Hammerjack was most likely correct, but if I told him my phone conversation with Naomi tended to verify his findings, that would only disturb him all the more. So I’d keep what I learned to myself and be extremely wary around my Help-a-Con contact. Bottom line, I didn’t want to believe that when Mike crashed into the Audi, he meant to harm me. Or maybe even kill me.
Chapter Twenty-Five
My concern about Mike and his motives took a back seat the next day when James Stahlman dropped into the shop with Charlotte in tow. I’d just settled down behind my desk with a cushion under my sore knee when in he came.
To my delight, Charlotte wriggled out of his arms and scampered over to me, licking my ankles and woofing her head off.
“Are we friends?” I asked, picking her up. A lick on the cheek erased the question and most of my Tropic-Glo blush. I took that as a yes.
“I’m so glad we caught you in,” James said. “We’re on our way to Klaus and Hartmann to select a new suit for the wedding. While we’re in the neighborhood, I thought I’d better stop by and alert you.”
Uh-oh. “Alert me about what?” I put Charlotte down in case James’s answer caused me to tense up and grip her too tightly.
“Kay and I are tired of waiting.” Just like the guys in the state pen. “Last night we decided to stop all these postponements and set a date. It’s etched in stone, Deva,” he said, his voice stern of a sudden. “Two weeks from today.”
“Well, congratu—”
“We’re getting married in the house.”
“Your house? The one with painters swarming all over the inside?”
His pale eyes rounded. “What other house could I be referring to?”
His question required no response, but I gave him one anyway. A groan. “I can’t possibly have the house ready for a wedding. Not in two short weeks.”
“Of course you can, and you will. I insist.” He reached into the breast pocket of his double-breasted linen jacket, removed a check and laid it on my desk. “In anticipation of your objections,” he said with a smile. A smile of supreme confidence, as if he were convinced money solved all problems.
I sighed and then my peripheral vision spotted the amount on the check face. A hefty five figures. Well, money didn’t solve everything, b
ut this money would help to swell the Rossi-Dunne building fund.
I picked up the check and, tapping it with a thumbnail, stared at James with what I hoped were steely eyes. “Say I agree to your time constraint. It will have to be with the understanding that every detail won’t be in place on your wedding day. The tradespeople and workrooms have other clients to consider, other orders to complete. All I can do, with or without this check—” which I was holding onto tightly, “—is my best.”
“That will more than suffice. I trust you completely,” James said. “Please send any further bills to my financial advisor. This is his address.” He placed a business card on my desk and then snapped his fingers at Charlotte. “Come here immediately, young lady.”
Woof!
“I insist.”
To her credit, Charlotte ignored him and kept right on sniffing the table skirts, especially the one topped with a display of aromatherapy candles. Then, bored with that, tail on high, and not letting James intimidate her for a second, she disappeared around the corner to explore the back storeroom. I felt like clapping. Or making her an honorary member of NOW.
As for me, I wasn’t quite so independent. I put James’s check in a desk drawer for safekeeping and stood, not without difficulty, to shake his hand. After which he chased Charlotte all over the place, finally managing to nab her in a corner. “Naughty girl,” he said, kissing her.
“One thing puzzles me, James,” I said as he was about to leave.
“Yes?”
“Since the house is undergoing a rehab, wouldn’t it be simpler for you and Kay to be married elsewhere?”
“Simpler yes, but not as satisfying.”
Ah! How could I have forgotten? Having the wedding at 590 directly across the street from 595 meant that they could marry and torment Stew Hawkins at one and the same time. Not nice. Not nice at all.
After James left, I took another peek at the check. It was real, all right, with a tidy Palmer Method signature and big clear numbers. I was no Naomi when it came to handwriting, but I sure did like what I saw, especially those numbers. So why did I feel as if I were aiding and abetting a crime? All I was doing was my job. Wasn’t I?
[M. by D. #5] The Design Is Murder Page 11