“I was wrong, okay? I should never have done it. I just wanted him out of the way for a while, not dead.” There was a pause. When Tim continued, his voice cracked with emotion. “Mike has always been there for me. He doesn’t deserve this.”
“My, my, what have we here, a lawyer with a conscience?” Mother’s voice was laced with sarcasm. “Not something you see every day.”
“Please, release him. Do it tonight. Let me take him with me. I promise you: whatever consequences I face, I won’t involve you.”
“You bet your ass you won’t.” It was the kill-happy woman again.
With the sun down, the night was getting cooler by the minute. My body was chilled and my nose was running like a man trying to catch a bus. I pulled my sweater tighter around me and wondered if instead of more listening I should be inspecting the garage and outbuildings for Steele. After all, I now knew who was behind Donny’s murder and Steele’s kidnapping. The next order of business was to find Steele. With a big stroke of luck, I might be able to spring him and get down to the car without much fuss.
I didn’t really believe that, but I had to at least make an effort to convince myself to take some action. Something told me that no matter how much Tim begged, he was never leaving here tonight with Mike Steele. And if that one crazy broad had her way, none of us would be leaving unless it was in the back of a hearse.
Now I was really worried. Sally and Greg, and possibly Dev, were all heading this way. I didn’t want any more people in the line of fire. Dev at least was a professional, but Sally and Greg had no idea how to defend themselves against killers. I wondered if I should steal back to my car and wait for them, flag them down, and stop them from coming in closer contact with these nuts. But what about Steele? I couldn’t just let them kill him off as collateral damage without taking some preventative action.
The people inside the house were still talking, each considering the pros and cons of doing away with the three of us. Like a true legal beagle, Tim continued to argue his case, his voice growing more desperate with each sentence. My nose at this point was now running a marathon. I dug into the pockets of my trousers, hoping to find some tissue, but only came up with the keys to my car and the cell phone. I wiped my nose on the back of my hand and tried to sniffle quietly while I poked in a message to send, but I was all thumbs. Hitting redial, I tried to call Greg, but the call kept failing. Frustrated, I jammed the phone back into my pocket and went back to trying to figure out what to do next.
A few seconds later, I knew the shit, or rather the snot, was about to hit the fan.
A sneeze started building deep inside my head. It rolled and rolled and rolled around in my sinus cavity, gathering strength like a pressure cooker about to explode. I desperately tried to quell it; I was willing to blow an eardrum, if necessary, rather than get caught spying on Mother and her gun-happy companions.
Pressing my fingers against both sides of my nose, I managed to let out a tiny poof of a sneeze without blowing the lid off my hiding spot. I bent down, hoping to stifle what little noise I was making, thankful the breeze was causing the trees in the yard to rustle. Looking down the driveway, I wondered if I could get far enough away to not be heard but knew any fast departure would make too much noise for even the trees to cover. Again I bent down in an effort to stifle smaller sneezes, hoping they would take some of the pressure out of my sinuses. Finally, I felt in the clear. The pressure subsided, and I was able to breathe with relief.
I straightened up and turned back, ready to start my inspection of the outbuildings. Instead, I found myself nose-to-nose with the muzzle of a gun. For a brief moment, I was sure I’d black out from raw fear. In all my worry about sneezing, I hadn’t heard anyone sneak up on me. The weapon was at the end of an arm owned by a petite but sturdy woman wearing jeans, black Doc Martens, and a plain black sweatshirt. On her head was a black cap with the Raiders logo. In the shadow of the house, I couldn’t see her face under the cap. Waving the gun in the direction of the back of the house, she told me to get moving. From the voice, I determined it was the woman who wanted to kill me and everyone else on the planet.
And that’s when the sneeze from hell broke loose, and the sneeze, and everything repulsive about it, hit her dead center in the chest.
I had to hand it to her, she never lost her concentration for an instant. Cool as a cucumber, she remained steady, and the gun remained trained on me. I, on the other hand, would have yelled that’s disgusting! and done a dance of revulsion.
Again she waved the gun toward the back of the house. This time I obeyed and started walking ahead of her. At the back of the house was a short flight of concrete steps. On her instructions, I mounted them and entered a screened-in porch. Beyond that was an open door leading into the kitchen.
“Odelia!” Tim shouted with great surprise as soon as I entered the kitchen.
But the real surprise was mine. Seated at the table, doing her best to avoid my barefaced stare, was Rachel Keyo; no doubt the owner of the familiar voice I couldn’t place. It also didn’t take me long to notice that in the two weeks since she’d disappeared from her temp position at the firm, her swollen belly had become flat and trim.
“You!” I pointed at her. “You’re part of this?”
Rachel scowled at me, then turned away, saying nothing.
“Well, well, look what Lisa dragged in.” The comment came from a stocky older woman with short, gray hair standing at the stove. She was a few inches taller than me and a few pounds lighter, and she wore polyester pants and a sweater that said Bingo Baby on the front in rhinestones. She stirred something in a large pot as she spoke. “So you’re Odelia Grey. I’m Mother. I believe we spoke on the phone.”
I ignored her, keeping my attention on Rachel. “You must’ve been the one who referred Let Mother Do It to Steele.” I hesitated. “But who planted you?” I was digging through my brain for that answer when the gun dug into my back. Then it came to me. Fran Evans had referred Rachel to our office. Fran had said a friend of hers highly recommended Rachel as a temp. It was all coming together.
“You’re the one who changed the documents, aren’t you?” I said to Rachel, making a guess that I knew I could defend. Rachel had the skills to expertly change the documents, and, as Steele’s secretary, she had unlimited access to them. “You and Fran Evans changed the Silhouette documents, then helped Tim set up Steele’s disappearance so he’d take the fall.”
“Enough,” Lisa barked, poking me harder with the gun. “Sit your fat ass down.” As soon as I obeyed, she handed the gun to Rachel. “Keep an eye on her,” she ordered, then made her way to the sink, where she took off her cap and proceeded to wash off the front of her sweatshirt.
Outside, I would have guessed Lisa to be about the same age as Rachel. But here in the kitchen, under the glare of the overhead light and with her cap off, I could see that her short, dark hair was laced with gray, and her makeup-free face bore fine lines around her mouth and eyes. The new age estimate was late thirties or early forties.
Saddled with the duty of holding the gun, Rachel now had to look at me.
“What did Mike Steele or I ever do to you?” I asked her.
She briefly cast her eyes down, then back up to meet mine. They were hard and sad at the same time, like an apology delivered with a backhand. “This isn’t personal, this is business.”
Why do people always say that just before they shaft you?
I slowly ran my eyes over Rachel’s svelte body. “Did the baby come early?”
“There was no baby, you fool.” She spit the words out.
Mother approached the table, wooden spoon in her hand. She was grinning. “After what we were told about that Mr. Steele, we couldn’t take the chance of Rachel being side-tracked by charm. We didn’t think he’d go after a pregnant lady, and we were right.”
I stared up at Mother. “But why go through the ruse of the cleaning company if you had a plant in the office?”
“Who said the
cleaning company isn’t real?” Mother chuckled, and I remembered what Willie had said about a legitimate business covering for illegal business. “We had hoped to nab him at his home, but that didn’t work out. He was never around when the cleaning crew was there. Would have made things much easier for us.”
Tim sat there staring at me, his mouth open. Finally, he found his tongue. “How in the hell did you get here?”
Mother rapped him on the head with the spoon. “How do you think, lame brain? She followed you.” She looked at Lisa. “Which means that you never noticed her when you were following him.”
“Told you she was smart,” chimed in Rachel.
Mother put the spoon down and wiped her hands on a nearby dishtowel. “Maybe you should come to work for me, Odelia, seeing as you’re so sharp.”
Oh boy, I thought, I am being recruited by a professional killer.
“Pay’s great and the hours are flexible,” she continued as if talking to a bunch of kids on career day.
Lisa approached the table, the front of her sweatshirt wet. “A minute ago we were discussing killing her, and now you’re offering this dolt a job?”
“If there’s a dolt at this table, it’s not Odelia, it’s this fool here.” She indicated Tim, and everyone, including me, turned our eyes on him. He sat there, no longer huffing and puffing and intimidating as he had been in his office a few hours ago. Now he appeared shrunken and lost. His eyes, darting between each woman in the room, had the look of a rabbit trapped by a pack of hungry wolves. Finally, they settled on me.
“Tell them, Odelia, tell them to let Mike go. We’ll take him home and never mention this to anyone, right?”
I turned to Mother. “Is Steele okay?”
“He’s more than okay, he’s a royal pain in the ass.” Mother took the spoon and went back to her pot. “Humph, there were days I wanted to shoot him just on principle alone.”
“Trust me, I know what you mean.”
Mother chuckled and studied me. “Sure you don’t want to work for me? We do a lot of good in this world.”
“Good? Killing people is good?”
“Now, now, don’t go getting all high and mighty with me. Some people are just too mean, greedy, and nasty to live, bringing more pain and suffering to this world than good. Take that Oliver guy, for instance. People merely pay us to clean up the two-legged vermin in their lives, just as they would pay a pest exterminator to get rid of the other kind.” Mother stopped stirring and faced me, smiling. “I like to think we’re doing our bit to clean up the world we live in—our own Keep America Beautiful program. We may kill people, but we have our standards. If we didn’t, you wouldn’t still be alive.”
I swallowed hard and thought it best to move the conversation away from the topic of death, especially mine. Besides, if I could keep people talking, maybe I’d find out more about Steele’s whereabouts and give Dev and the others time to find this place.
“Why?” I said to Tim. Again, everyone’s eyes turned to him, this time in expectation. “Why would you have a close friend kidnapped and risk disbarment and jail, all for a partnership in a law firm? If that was why you did it.”
Tim Weber looked only at me when he spoke. “I’m so sorry, Odelia. I was desperate. My wife left me, said I was a loser. It’s tough being married to money.”
“Yeah, right,” Rachel scoffed.
Tim looked at all of us. “It is, especially for a man. I kept trying to make my own fortune, but the only thing I made was a mess. Got involved in a lot of deals that went sour. Ended up owing a lot of people money. People who’d think nothing of harming me or discrediting my wife and her family to make a point.” He swallowed hard. “Finally, Roxanne said enough. She wasn’t going to bail me out anymore. She paid off the last bunch of thugs and kicked me out.”
“What about Goldberg-Rawlings?” I asked. “Rumor is you’re on probation at the firm. Is that tied in to your bad business deals, too?”
“Partially. But mostly it’s because I’m not a very good attorney. I’m not a rainmaker or brilliant like Mike. But I thought maybe if I landed a big client, it could change things for me at the firm. I had heard that the new CEO at Silhouette was looking for new representation and was thinking of going public with the company. Without Roxanne’s money as a safety net, I was desperate to keep my job.”
“And Fran?”
“We met a couple of years ago at another law firm. I knew she was pissed at Mike for dumping her and not helping her make partner.”
“So she did it for revenge?”
“Mostly, yes. But she was also hoping that Walker would name her Silhouette’s new general counsel. They don’t have one, and it would be a natural move, with them going public soon and her familiarity with their work. Ben Walker was almost on board with it.”
“But not quite, so you doctored documents and made Steele disappear to make it look like he was shady and Woobie incompetent, paving the way for Walker to make a decision.”
Tim nodded.
I shook my head in wonder. “And you two really didn’t think you’d get caught?”
Mother pointed her wooden spoon in his direction. “Like I said, he’s a lame brain.”
Tim ignored her. “When Mike disappeared in the middle of the fight with Sweet Kiss, Walker was adamant that Goldberg-Rawlings be their new counsel. The only thing that stopped it from happening was the longtime loyalty Silhouette’s board felt toward your firm.”
I thought about Carl and how haggard he had been looking. No doubt he had been working in high gear to keep the client. Everything was coming together. It was still a harebrained scheme with lots of holes, but desperate people do desperate and stupid things. And so do people blinded by their need for revenge.
“I saw those tampered documents.” I glanced at Rachel, and she looked back with a cocky smile, all earlier traces of sadness gone. “They were pretty convincing. Had they been produced, it would have tilted the case in favor of Sweet Kiss, and no amount of loyalty would have saved Woobie. And Steele would have had a lot of explaining to do, especially since he held the originals.” I sighed.
Tim Weber dropped his face into his hands. “It was a stupid, stupid mistake.”
“No, Tim. A mistake is putting fabric softener in the dishwasher instead of soap. A mistake is debiting fifteen dollars from your checking account when it should have been fifty-one. Those are mistakes. This was planned and calculated, right down to planting Rachel in our office and a cleaning company in Steele’s home weeks before you actually had him snatched. This wasn’t a mistake, Tim. This was premeditated.”
“Actually,” Mother piped up from her spot by the stove, “it took us weeks to figure out how to grab him without witnesses. If we’d just been allowed to kill him,” she said, looking at Tim in disgust, “it would have been over and done with a long time ago.”
Mother and I were both harping on Tim, but for different reasons. I certainly hoped she didn’t think I was on her team on this issue.
“But fortunately, or unfortunately, as the case may be,” I continued, “Rachel supplied you with his travel information for that weekend. All you had to do was find a way to waylay him between Santa Barbara and Ojai, then plant his car at the airport. Is that how this went down?” I looked at Rachel, then at Mother.
Mother smiled. “Pretty much.”
“And Karen Meek, how does she fit in? I mean, besides being engaged to Tom Bledsoe, who I’m guessing is the good client of Let Mother Do It who convinced Mother to take on this job.” I looked at Tim. “Did you, Fran, and Karen split Mother’s fee?”
“Hey, just how long were you standing outside, and how much did you hear?” Mother stood looking at me with a hand on one thick hip. Lisa and Rachel both narrowed their eyes.
Uh-oh. Where in the hell was Dev?
“A lot of what I know I learned long before getting here—like that Karen Meek wanted Steele out of the way so that she could put Tom Bledsoe on the board of Family Bond without h
is interference.”
Tim shook his head. “Actually, Fran knew nothing about the kidnapping. That was just Karen and me.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Truly, she didn’t. I’m sure she suspected something when Mike disappeared, but she wasn’t actually in on it. She did help plant Rachel, and she did coordinate the tampering of the documents, but she knows nothing about Mother or the kidnapping. She thought Rachel was a friend of mine willing to help us out with the documents.”
Tim looked down at the table. “But neither Karen nor I want Mike dead. That’s Bledsoe’s idea. Karen came to me and said Bledsoe wanted Mike gone permanently. That’s why I’m here: to make sure that doesn’t happen.” He looked at Mother. “We didn’t pay you to kill Mike Steele.”
Lisa took the gun from Rachel and waved it around. “This whole thing is out of control. Let’s just kill them and get out of here.”
Mother approached the table, crossing her arms in front of her Bingo Baby slogan. “I think Lisa’s right,” she said in a calm, matter-of-fact voice. “This is out of control, and I don’t see any way to resolve anything without killing all of you. You two know too much, and Mr. Steele is simply an inconvenience at this point.”
Mother started laughing, giving off a deep cackle. “But I want you both to know first that little Ms. Meek isn’t that meek at all.”
Tim and I looked at each other, both with open mouths and wide eyes. The looks were not lost on Mother.
“That’s right. Now that she’s gotten a taste for our services, she’s put in an order for the extermination of a particularly nasty bit of business—an abusive husband and father of one of her clients. Though I’m not sure we’ll be able to handle it until all this fuss blows over.”
“That was the promised new business, wasn’t it?” I asked, my eyes still wide as saucers. “Family Bond is going to start rubbing out abusers—with your help.”
Thinking back on some of the things Karen had said, it made sense. She had grown tired of trying to work within a broken system and was now going to embrace vigilante justice. Let Mother Do It would be her hired gun. In a sick way, both shared the same philosophy of the end justifying the means.
Thugs and Kisses Page 24