Any other eatery would be begging for business on a Tuesday evening, but this was Jimmy’s and it was high summer. The place wasn’t jam-packed, but it was busy. I scanned the folks sitting at the counter for Daniel Craig— I mean Roger, without success. He must not have arrived yet. I started moving toward the counter. Maybe I could grab a couple of empty barstools, or persuade someone to move over so I could get two seats—
Just then a dark-haired man turned toward the door and spotted me. He smiled. I stopped in my tracks.
What was Dom doing here? Well, this was going to be awkward, me with a date while my ex...
No. No, he didn’t. He couldn’t have.
Dom waved me over. He patted the empty barstool next to him, still grinning.
I made my way to him but refrained from hoisting my heinie onto the stool. “Explain.”
“Sit first, Janey.” He patted the seat again. “You don’t want to know what I had to go through to save you a seat in this place. It’s dog eat dog.”
I sighed. I sat. “Speaking of dogs, a wire-haired dachshund, Dom? Where’d you come up with that?”
“I’m actually thinking of getting one. Jumbo hot fudge sundae,” he instructed the young fellow behind the counter. “Butter pecan, mint chocolate chip, and coffee, with three cherries and cookie crumbs and coconut instead of nuts.”
“You got it.” The server grabbed a jumbo sundae dish and started scooping. Meanwhile Dom sat nursing a single scoop of mango sorbet.
So he remembered my favorite sundae combo. So what.
Okay, it was sweet. This whole stupid charade was sweet, but I wasn’t letting him off that easy. “If you tell me that was an actual picture of Daniel Craig,” I said, “I will hate you forever.”
“Of course it was Daniel Craig. That was the weak link in my cunning plan, but knowing how hot you are for him—”
“It’s just Casino Royale,” I objected. “It—it’s a very good film.”
“That you’ve seen at least ten times,” he said. “It’s not that good. If it makes you feel better, I chose a picture that’s not so instantly recognizable. It has the essence of Daniel Craig without the immediate aha factor of: Hey! That there’s Daniel Craig.”
“I still can’t figure out how you engineered this thing,” I said, watching carefully as the young man behind the counter added dollops of genuine whipped cream—as in not the spray variety—to my concoction in progress.
“You don’t think I’m capable of orchestrating something like this?” he asked.
“I think you’re capable of thinking up something like this.” My mouth was watering. I dragged my gaze from the three cherries being lovingly positioned. “I know you don’t have the computer skills to pull it off.”
“Ah. Well.” He took a bite of mango sorbet. “Maybe you underestimate me.”
“And maybe you had help.”
“All right, Martin helped me with the technical details—with the dog-loving web site and all, and creating a false persona.”
Wait a minute. Martin was helping Dom woo me? I didn’t know how I felt about that.
Oh, who am I kidding? I knew darn well how I felt about it. “Well, wasn’t that nice of him,” I managed to say. “I thought you two despised each other.”
“I wouldn’t put it like that,” Dom said as the server set the embarrassingly large and elaborately festooned sundae in front of me. “We’ve been getting to know each other better these past few days. He’s not all bad.”
It had been five days since Martin and Dom had moved into my house. While Martin slept in the maid’s room on the first floor, Dom had positioned an air mattress at the foot of my circular staircase. The idea was that if the padre ever got it into his depraved head to try to skulk upstairs to the sanctum sanctorum—otherwise known as my bedroom—in the middle of the night, Dom would leap up and protect my honor.
I thought it unlikely that a guy who could sleep through a twenty-one-gun salute thought this particular strategy had a prayer of working. Every morning I padded barefoot with SB down the thickly carpeted stairs in my sleep shirt and boxers, tromped across Dom’s air mattress as he limply rolled this way and that, and shuffled to the kitchen, where the padre had, by all indications, been up since dawn, doing the Times crossword and working his way through a second pot of java.
After having, you know, not even attempted any middle-of-the-night skulking. Just imagine my relief after having lain awake most of the night with minty breath and freshly shaved legs, listening intently, just to make sure he didn’t try any funny business.
He did, however, cut a swath through my precious stash of Fruity Pebbles. He’d purchased his own groceries, as ordered, but couldn’t keep his mitts out of my gaily multicolored breakfast cereal. He yammered on about the importance of protein for breakfast, but did he crack one egg? I rest my case.
Dom, naturally, wouldn’t swallow a Fruity Pebble if it sprouted wings and flew straight into his cake-hole. Too much sugar and artificial color for him. A committed vegetarian, he’d laid in steel-cut oatmeal, tofu, and other so-called healthful foodstuffs too hideous to recount.
I had to get on their cases to fill and empty the dishwasher, pick up after themselves, and do their own darn laundry, but otherwise they weren’t bad houseguests. I mean boarders.
The night before, I’d come home after a job at Ahearn’s Funeral Home—videotaping a wake for some reason known only to my client—and found Dom and Martin in the kitchen cooking dinner together. I repeat, they were cooking together. As in collaborating on preparing a meal in a friendly and cooperative manner.
I promptly shoved the pizza I’d picked up into the fridge, poured myself a beer, and watched Dom prepare a delicious spinach salad with oranges, candied walnuts, and goat cheese while the padre seared a pair of porterhouse steaks on the indoor grill, an activity Sexy Beast observed with lip-licking fascination. Fresh farm-stand corn boiled away in a pot, and one of them had swung by Patisserie Susanne for assorted pastries.
So yeah, I guess they were getting along a little better than before. It had all been too strange. Not being one to turn up my nose at a free porterhouse and chocolate croissant, however, I’d shut up and eaten.
I swallowed the first orgasmic spoonful of ice cream and hot fudge. “So now that you and the padre are such good pals, you’ll be happy to know I’ve started throwing some jobs his way.”
“I know,” Dom said. “He told me. Seems you have more new clients than you can handle. Eleanor Storch is bragging to anyone who’ll listen that she hired you to plan her memorial service.”
“Meanwhile she’s the healthiest eighty-year-old I ever met,” I said, “but if it makes her happy, who am I to turn down her cash deposit?”
I’d been so busy with work that Dom and I hadn’t had a chance to chat much lately, even though we were, for the first time in seventeen years, living in the same house. “For the first time ever, I’m turning away jobs,” I said. “Who knew that gaining a reputation as a devil-worshipping sexpot would have people clamoring to hire me?” Well, Porter Vargas had known—a savvy businessman through and through.
“Those are sound qualifications in someone’s book, I guess,” he said.
“Yeah, well, some of the jobs, I’d never consider taking.” I told him about Kyle Kenneally and his ex-tortoise, Romeo.
My meeting with sleazy Kyle at the Harbor Room Sunday evening had been blessedly short, but that wasn’t due to the timeworn ploy of a faux emergency call. Oh, Martin had made a phone call, all right, but rather than dialing my cell as requested, he’d called in a bomb threat to the restaurant. Claimed the Harbor Room had poisoned him with an off mussel and he’d rigged the place to blow in five minutes. Which had not only me and Kyle but about two hundred paying customers and staff practically trampling one another to escape the place.
At least I’d had time to check in on Romeo, get Kyle’s signature and deposit, and toss back a couple of glasses of Cristal, so no complaints on my end.<
br />
“I heard a rumor,” Dom said, “that there’s now a Death Diva fan club.”
I nodded, wiping my mouth. “They have a web site and Facebook page. I’m trending on Twitter. Never thought I’d say those words. Naturally, my devoted followers have concluded that Ernie was one of my ritual satanic sacrifices. Forget that I was, what, seven when he died.”
“But a precocious seven,” he said.
“Thank goodness my phone and address are unlisted. But that doesn’t stop them. They address the letters to ‘Death Diva, Crystal Harbor, New York,’ and sure enough, they get to me.”
“I know, I’ve seen the envelopes at the house,” Dom said. “Plus a few packages. Dare I ask what’s in those?”
“Gifts. Let me ask you. What am I supposed to do with a table runner hand-embroidered with pentagrams and horned devils?” More accurately, horny devils. Use your imagination.
“For when you serve devil’s food cake?” he suggested.
“Har.”
“Deviled eggs? That’s all I got. What else did they send you?”
I groaned. “Do I have to say?”
Dom removed the sundae from in front of me. I was left holding an empty spoon.
“All right, all right,” I said. “Panties.”
He replaced the sundae. “This is getting interesting. What kind of panties?”
“What kind do you think?” I said. “Granny panties.”
“What are granny...? Oh.”
“My devoted fans have decided that big, white, full-coverage briefs do indeed have special magical powers,” I said.
“Yeah, the power to wilt a guy’s... interest.”
“They’re already coming up with Halloween costumes, not so loosely based on that getup I’m wearing in the Ramrod News segment. Oh, and? You’ll like this. There’s a Death Diva video game in the works.”
“Yes!” Dom shot his fist. “Now I’ll get to see how you look with triple-D boobs.”
“Paired with an eighteen-inch waist, no doubt. And sexy lingerie.”
There was that irresistible grin of his, like a caress, those dark espresso eyes crinkling at the corners. In that charmed moment, the divorce never happened. The past seventeen years never happened. We were just Dominic Peter Faso and Jane Angela Delaney, two kids from Mr. Bender’s eighth-grade Spanish class hoping not to embarrass themselves on their first date ever.
Dom leaned in to me, and he smelled even better than the ice cream tasted. His breath felt like sun-warmed silk as he murmured, “It’s been an awful long time since I’ve seen you in any kind of lingerie, Janey.”
My face heated as memories crowded in on me. Those first tentative gropings in my parents’ finished basement. Our active sex life as young marrieds. We couldn’t get enough of each other. His hands, his mouth, the weight of him...
I looked away to compose myself. The teenage girl on my other side chatted animatedly with her friend. Our server scooped cones for the large family that had just come in.
I turned back to Dom and affected a lighthearted tone. “Not true. I know you saw me in that lovely outfit on TV.”
His half smile told me he wasn’t falling for the diversion tactic. “I’ve missed you, Janey,” he said with heartbreaking sincerity. “I miss you every day. Let’s undo our mistake.”
He wanted to marry me again, to have the family we should have had all those years ago when he’d said no to kids—and then proceeded to father three of them with two subsequent wives. While each month my aging ovaries said to the departing egg, Maybe you’ll meet a nice sperm, you’ll bring him home, yes? And would it kill you to wear a little lipstick?
“Dom, I—”
“I know what you said. You’ve changed. So have I,” he said. “Maybe we needed this time apart to find out what’s really important. To mature.”
“Seventeen years?” I couldn’t conceal my hurt.
He took my hand in both of his. It felt so perfect, no natural, my eyes stung and I had to look away again.
I’m not going to give up, Janey, he’d said back in April. Somehow I’m going to prove to you that we belong together.
“It was my fault,” he said. “I accept full responsibility for our breakup. I didn’t know my own mind. I didn’t appreciate what we had, the once-in-a-lifetime bond.”
My phone trilled. And yeah, my ring tone’s still “Tequila.” Why mess with a good thing? But talk about lousy timing. I gave Dom an apologetic look and pulled the phone out of my purse, prepared to dump the call. Until I saw who it was.
“Sorry, Dom, I have to take this.” I greeted Ben Ralston, the private investigator who was now living with Martin’s mother, and whom she’d sweet-talked into doing a free favor for yours truly.
“Is Martin behaving himself over at your place?” Ben asked.
“He’s been a regular gentleman,” I said, and watched Dom go on the alert. “Puts the seat down and everything.”
“Maye we’re talking about different guys. So.” I heard him thump his desk, his way of announcing an end to small talk. “You want to know the identity of the anonymous client who’s been hiring you every year to place flowers on Timothy Holbrook’s grave.”
“That’s about the size of it,” I said. “Were you able to find out?”
His rude pffft! was answer enough. “You owe me a free Death Diva job, Jane. I’ve got one in mind. You ever see Weekend at Bernie’s?”
“Ben, cut the crap and tell me who it is already!”
10
The Ballad of Tim Holbrook
Porter was swimming laps in his backyard pool. Lacey had answered the door and, when I told her Dom and I were there to speak with her husband, directed us through the ultramodern house and out the sliding doors to the multi-tiered deck and the big, rectangular pool beyond. Someone in one of the nearby McMansions was grilling chicken. The smoky aroma mingled with the scents of cut grass and a garden full of blooming roses. Lacey’s project, I assumed. I couldn’t imagine Porter Vargas on his knees trimming rosebushes.
It was a balmy night and fully dark by then, but the subtle outdoor lighting combined with the underwater lights lent a warm elegance to the space. Chaises and umbrella tables dotted the teak pool deck. I remember thinking they must have some kick-ass parties back there.
We stood at the head of the pool and watched Porter execute a neat swimmer’s turn at the far end and perform a graceful, flawless crawl, eating up the distance between us in seconds. “Hey, guys,” he said as he hoisted himself out of the pool with the agility of a monkey. Porter was in exceptional shape for his age, kind of what you’d expect from the CEO of a multinational sporting-goods empire.
He dried his face and hair with a yellow towel, slung it over his neck, and lifted a water bottle for a long swig. “Did Lacey offer you something to drink?”
“Yeah, thanks, we’re fine,” Dom said. The two of them knew each other from business and social functions.
I decided to launch right in to it. “I need to talk to you about Tim Holbrook.”
Porter’s eyebrows rose in mild surprise. “All right, though I don’t know what I can tell you that’s not a matter of public record at this point.” He gestured to a cluster of cushioned teak chairs surrounding a small table, and we all sat. “Why are you interested in Tim?”
Dom had insisted on accompanying me, against my strident objections. I have to admit, at that moment I was grateful for the silent strength of his presence, not knowing what direction this conversation would take.
Does that make me a helpless little female, looking to the big, strong man to keep her safe?
Thanks a lot. The correct answer was no.
I said, “I want to know why you’ve been hiring me anonymously for the past twenty years to deliver flowers to Tim’s grave on the anniversary of his death.”
Porter stared at me for a moment, then gave a little shake of the head. He opened his mouth to object, but I cut him off.
“I know it was you, Porter,” I s
aid, “so let’s skip the part where you pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
He held my gaze for a long, charged moment, then slumped a bit. He gazed across the dark lawn beyond the pool. “Ernie felt terrible about what happened to Tim... about what he did to him. It would have looked kind of odd if I’d personally brought flowers to the grave of my wife’s dead boyfriend, but I wanted to do it for Ernie. Because he wasn’t around to do it himself.” He shrugged. “So when I found out about the types of services you perform for people, I decided to hire you anonymously. That’s all. No big mystery.”
“It takes a good friend to do something like that for his dead buddy,” I said.
“Yeah, well.”
“The thing is, you didn’t do it for Ernie.”
His eyes narrowed. “What are you saying?”
“You’re the one who felt guilty,” I said, “because it was you, not Ernie, on the boat with Tim that night.” Porter’s incredulous gaze shifted between me and Dom, as if seeking an explanation for this madness. I continued, “You’re the one who thought it would be great fun to leave Tim in the ocean and make him swim to shore.”
“I don’t know where you got a crazy idea like that.” He slapped his towel angrily onto the deck, and I sensed Dom tensing, his protective instinct on high alert. It gave me the courage to plow ahead.
“I got it from Ernie himself,” I said. “Sophie was looking through some of his old notebooks today, where he worked on songs he was writing. She found the draft of a ballad. It lays out the whole story. About how Tim died, and how Ernie took the blame so you wouldn’t be kicked out of school.” I ignored Dom’s look of confusion.
“Bull,” Porter said, but he looked uncertain.
“He named names in this song,” I continued, “including yours. I don’t think he ever intended for anyone else to see it. I think it was kind of a cathartic exercise. He was the true friend, the friend who was willing to risk expulsion and possibly prison to protect you.”
Uprooting Ernie (Jane Delaney Mysteries Book 2) Page 11