Kickout Clause (Savannah Martin Mystery)

by Bennett, Jenna

  “I can’t leave work again!” Mr. Important shrieked. Rafe rolled his eyes and left, presumably to hold the ladder while the inspector climbed the three stories to the roof. The guy’s wife put her hand on his arm to try to calm him down. He shrugged it off and added, viciously, “I’m not even sure I want this house anymore. You didn’t tell me this was a bad neighborhood!”

  Of course he hadn’t. Real estate agents aren’t allowed to refer to neighborhoods as ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Those are relative terms anyway, but we’re not legally free to offer our opinions on whether a neighborhood is safe or not. We can recommend that our clients check the crime statistics and determine for themselves whether it’s somewhere they’d be comfortable living, but beyond that, we have no recourse. Obviously this particular client hadn’t bothered to take that particular step, because if he had, he’d have known that the area around Potsdam Street was transitional at best (and high-crime at worst) before he drove here this morning.

  He might not even know that Brenda Puckett was murdered here. It isn’t considered a material fact, not like a leaking roof or a propensity for water intrusion in the basement, so we hadn’t been required to disclose it when we listed the house for sale. And since no one had flat out asked, we hadn’t mentioned anything about it.

  I could only imagine what would happen when these potential buyers found out.

  I squinted at the grungy agent. Maybe he didn’t know, either. I had assumed he did, since the murder of one real estate agent by another just six or seven months ago seemed like it should have been of interest to him. But maybe he was so new he hadn’t had his license to practice seven months yet.

  I certainly wasn’t about to tell him. Things were bad enough without that. The little blonde watched the locksmith and glazer with an expression sort of like Bambi watching the forest burn. She was a wispy, ethereal, fae-like girl, with soft, floaty hair and enormous eyes. Her significant other, meanwhile, tall and severe in his suit, gave the impression of being set at a constant low boil.

  Now, I’ve had my own experiences with macho men, and not just from reading bodice rippers. Rafe is about as domineering as they come, and so, in his own understated and chivalrous way, is Todd. Bradley, not so much. I was fairly sure Shelby wore the pants in that relationship, and Bradley would do whatever it took to keep her happy. Maybe that was why our marriage hadn’t been better. He was a follower at heart, same as me, so neither of us had taken charge the way we should have.

  But I digress.

  Rafe is strong and forceful and dominant, but he’s also a born protector. So is Todd, in his overbearing, wrap-her-in-cotton-wool-and-put-her-on-a-shelf sort of way.

  This guy didn’t strike me as protective at all. He seemed to have all the bad qualities of the raging alpha, and none of the good. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he hit her in secret. Or if he didn’t, he at least made her feel like she had to walk on eggshells around him so he wouldn’t raise his hand to her.

  I didn’t like him. I’d already been upset because my own sweet little couple—the ones with the condo to sell—weren’t going to be able to get Mrs. J’s house. Now his behavior made me take against him further.

  Of course I didn’t let it show. My mother taught me better than that. Or rather, my mother taught me to let me feelings show only when I wanted them to. In this case, I didn’t. Much.

  “I’ll let the three of you figure this out,” I told the agent, just as Rafe came back around the corner of the house.

  “Darlin’.”

  We stepped aside to talk privately while the agent and his clients kept whispering.

  “I gotta get to work,” Rafe told me.

  “Of course.” He had a murder to solve. “You can take me to the office now. Everything seems to be up and running.” I glanced around, at the glazer, the locksmith, and the inspector, plus the agent and his clients conferencing on the porch.

  He shook his head. “Just stay here. Make sure everything gets done that’s supposed to get done. There are plenty of people around to keep you safe. I’ll just come back for you at noon. Take you to lunch and to the office.”

  That would work, too. “If you prefer.”

  He tilted his head. “You ain’t afraid of being here by yourself, are you?”

  I wasn’t. Not with so many people around. “I won’t be alone. The inspector will be here. Just go find out what happened to Manny.”

  A shadow crossed his face, and he nodded. “I’ll see you at twelve.”

  He leaned in to drop a kiss on my mouth. I tilted my face up, recognizing as I did it just how far I’d come in six or seven months. The first Saturday in August, when we’d stood here in the graveled driveway outside Mrs. Jenkins’s house, the thought of him kissing me—in broad daylight, in front of an audience—would have given me heart palpitations—and not the way his kisses made my heart beat faster now.

  Hell—heck—the first Saturday in August, I’d been afraid that someone I knew would see me talking to him, that’s how neurotic I’d been.

  While now I closed my eyes, and swayed toward him, and did my best to make what had been intended as a quick peck last as long as possible.

  By the time his lips—reluctantly, I thought, or hoped—left mine, my stomach had turned to liquid, and so had my knees. So, for that matter, had his eyes, but he still managed a chuckle. “Hold that thought, darlin’.”

  “No problem,” I managed, knowing it wouldn’t be.

  “And maybe you should go sit down before you fall down.”

  Maybe I should. “I’ll see you at twelve. Hurry back.”

  “You know it,” Rafe said. He ran his knuckles down my cheek—a tender caress that never failed to turn me to mush, the very few times he’s used it—before turning to straddle the Harley. “Stay inside where you’ll be safe.”

  “Just as soon as you’re gone.”

  “Now,” Rafe said. “I don’t need you waving me off, darlin’. I ain’t going to war.”

  “If you prefer.”

  “Please.” He pulled the helmet over his head. I turned and walked up the stairs and into the house without looking back. At least not until I heard the roar of the engine fade down the street, and then I did turn around for a last look at him driving away. No, he wasn’t going off to war. He wasn’t really even going off to pit himself against bad guys the way he used to. Chances were he’d be perfectly safe and would be back to pick me up for lunch when he said he would. But it was a hard habit to break. Every time he drove away, I felt a stab of that old fear that I wouldn’t see him again, and I always made sure I took one last look, just in case it really turned out to be the last time, even when I was fairly certain it wouldn’t be.

  I spent the next three hours prowling Mrs. J’s house. The buyers left shortly after Rafe did, the husband striding to his second-hand BMW with barely-concealed impatience while the wife scurried in his wake. He didn’t even open the car door for her, just threw himself behind the wheel and cranked the engine over. They drove off down the driveway with a spurt of gravel.

  I approached the agent, who looked put out as he watched them disappear in a cloud of dust. “Everything all right?”

  He snorted. “What do you think?”

  “They seemed a bit upset.”

  He shot me a look. “Wouldn’t you be?”

  Maybe. Coming here to the house they wanted to buy to see a glazer replacing broken windows and a locksmith changing the locks, must have been disconcerting, but between you and me, when I discovered what had happened, I wasn’t happy, either. His clients should have made sure Potsdam was a neighborhood they would be comfortable in before making an offer to buy the house. Now it was too late. Although of course if they were reconsidering, they could withdraw based on the results of the inspection. We wouldn’t have a choice but to give them their earnest money back.

  “This is a neighborhood in the midst of gentrification,” I told him, exaggerating more than a little. The neighborhood wasn’t in th
e middle of gentrification so much as our renovated house was in the middle of the neighborhood, none of the rest of which had been gentrified. “If your clients aren’t comfortable in a transitional neighborhood, you should have steered them to the areas on the other side of Gallatin Road.” Where the prices were double but the people were less likely to have spent time in prison.

  He looked at me down the length of his nose. “We wouldn’t have been able to get anything in this price range over there.”

  I resisted the temptation to say “No shit, Sherlock.” It would have been juvenile and unladylike.

  Even if it was how I felt.

  “Didn’t it occur to you to wonder why? This house would be three quarters of a million in Edgefield or Lockeland Springs. Here it’s under four hundred thousand.”

  The agent shrugged, pouting. I guess maybe it really hadn’t occurred to him to wonder why.

  “I’ll be here until noon,” I informed him. “You don’t have to stay unless you want to. If your clients come back before you do, I’ll let them in.”

  It was a not so polite dismissal, and he caught it, because he snorted and took himself off, down the stairs to his Jeep Wrangler. It had an ‘my other ride is a Fender’ bumper sticker attached to the spare tire, so I’d been right about the music thing.

  I waited until he’d left, and then I went back inside the house to find something to do.

  I started by remaking Rafe’s bed, since we’d rumpled the sheets in our quickie session of lovemaking earlier. That done, I ventured back downstairs. The glazer was doing his thing in the front parlor and library, so I couldn’t stay in there. The locksmith had the front door hanging wide open while he was messing with the lock, so it was cold in the front of the house. And the inspector was crawling around on the roof. I’d heard the scraping when I was upstairs. Hopefully he had tied himself to the chimney, so he wouldn’t accidentally roll off and plummet to his death. It was a long way down. Granted, he probably crawled around on roofs all the time, and he’d survived so far, but we were having a rather spectacular run of bad luck right now, and it would just put the icing on the cake.

  I ended up in the kitchen, at the table where Rafe and I still hadn’t gotten around to having sex. I could have suggested it earlier, I guess, but it had slipped my mind in the rush of getting inside and undressed.

  I hadn’t planned to spend all morning at Mrs. J’s house, so I hadn’t brought any work, or even the laptop. I ended up sitting at the table with a pen and a pad of paper I dug out of a drawer, jotting down notes old-school to try to restore some semblance of order to my life.

  I had a lot on my mind. Between Manny’s murder, and Bradley’s possible affair, and Walker’s escape from prison, and Garth Hanson slashing my car tires, and now the possibility—or more likely probability—that this set of buyers were going to walk away from buying the house, my plate was full.

  So I made lists.

  First things first. Manny’s murder. There was nothing I could do about that. Rafe and Grimaldi—the TBI and the MNPD—were both working on it, and were a lot better equipped to handle it than I was. As far as I was concerned, they were both the best at what they did, and they’d find who did it and punish that person accordingly. There was nothing I could do to help. They thought it was connected to Manny’s past, and they were probably right, so I was out of that one. No need to even think about it anymore.

  I drew a line through Manny’s name on the page.

  The police were on the lookout for Walker, too, and now that we’d determined that Garth Hanson was alive and kicking, for him as well. He was probably waiting for Walker’s delivery of cash, before getting out of town. Tim should know about that this afternoon, and the exchange would probably take place tonight, under cover of darkness—that’s the way it happens in the movies—so by tomorrow, Walker and Garth Hanson would be out of my hair, too. No need to think about either of them anymore, either.

  I drew a line through Walker’s name, and then through Garth Hanson’s, below.

  Bradley.

  I found it hard to believe he was sleeping around on Shelby, and not only because Ilona Vandervinder seemed like an unlikely candidate for wanting anything to do with him. He could be sleeping with someone else, I supposed, but when we spoke at Christmas, he’d seemed genuinely happy and excited about the baby.

  No, I was still inclined to think something else was going on.

  Something having to do with the man he’d met at the Shortstop.

  A man who wasn’t Nathan Ferncliff. Marsha the waitress had been adamant about that. And it hadn’t been Walker. Nor Garth Hanson, I assumed, since Hanson had been sitting right next to me during the conversation—up until the moment we started talking about Walker, and then he had left, abruptly. Surely she would have realized it, if it was the same guy.

  A guy who looked like Dale Vandervinder, but who couldn’t be Dale Vandervinder, because Bradley meeting with Dale Vandervinder would be a huge breach of ethics when Ferncliff & Morton were representing Ilona Vandervinder in the divorce.

  Except...

  That would certainly explain the secrecy, wouldn’t it? Why Bradley and his well-dressed companion hid away in a dive bar in a part of town as far from their usual haunts as possible?

  The possibility took my breath away for a moment, before I sucked in another mouthful of air and tried to look at the situation rationally.

  Was it even a possibility? Could Bradley have compromised his ethics so badly that he’d have dealings with his client’s husband, the person represented by opposing counsel?

  It was hard to believe. In the time I’d known him, before and during our marriage, he hadn’t struck me as particularly unethical.

  Then again, he was a cheater, so that argued for a certain amount of underhandedness. If he was willing to cheat on his wife, he might be willing to cheat in other ways too.

  Dale was wealthy, or so I assumed. He was a music producer, and in Nashville, such people live high on the hog. Just look at Ilona’s—formerly the couple’s—home. It made Mrs. Jenkins’s house look like a shack.

  Tennessee is an equitable distribution state, so unless they had come to an agreement themselves on how to divide the marital assets, the divorce court would do that for them. Bradley and I had made our own decision. I’d given him everything we owned jointly except for a few items I’d brought into the marriage with me or bought during the time we’d been married, plus my car. He’d kept the townhouse and everything in it, including the wedding gifts, and had given me a nice settlement I had lived on for the past almost three years. It was running low, incidentally. My sister Catherine had wanted me to take him for everything he was worth, but I’d just wanted out of the marriage, so I’d been happy with the money and the few things I couldn’t live without.

  Dale and Ilona were probably not in the same boat. If I had to guess, I’d say that Ilona wanted as many of the marital assets as she could get, while Dale wanted to keep as much as he could for himself. Chances were they were waiting for the court to decide for them.

  And it was possible that Dale had somehow bribed or blackmailed Bradley into helping him. If he knew about something Bradley had done—if, for instance, Bradley really had slept with Ilona, and Dale knew about it—he might have prevailed upon Bradley to throw his own case just so Dale wouldn’t tell Shelby. Or maybe it was about the money. Bradley made decent money, but he was still just a junior partner, and Shelby did like to spend. She’d totally redecorated the townhouse since marrying Bradley, and not with cheap furniture, either. My old kitchen had been ripped out and a new one installed, one shiny with chrome and marble and bling. None of that had come cheap. And with a baby on the way, the expenditures were about to increase tenfold. Babies are expensive, or so my brother and sister keep telling me.

  Much as I’d like to insist otherwise, I couldn’t totally dismiss the idea that perhaps Bradley had gotten himself involved in something professionally iffy.

  Chapt
er Sixteen

  Rafe came back at noon, as promised. By then, we had new locks, new keys, and new windowpanes. And I had a distinct feeling we’d soon be looking for a new contract on the house as well. The potential buyers were not happy. Mr. Tall, Dark and Disgruntled had managed to drag himself away from work to return for the denouement, and so had his long-suffering wife. And since the results of the inspection weren’t anything to worry about, not in my opinion, I think the low-slung Buick that drove by, the one with all the chrome on the wheels and the woofers thumping so loud and low it rattled the fillings in my teeth, had something to do with it. Mrs. TD&D flinched when one of the youths leaned out the window and catcalled.

  The same thing had happened to me last August, on these very steps. Rafe had taken a step closer to me, to make it clear that anyone bothering me would have to deal with him. The car had sped off.

  In this case, Mr. TD&D didn’t move. I’m not sure he even noticed his wife’s reaction. I did, and she knew it. Her cheeks turned pink when she noticed me looking at her. The gaze she turned on the car was fearful. I couldn’t imagine her agreeing to buying a house here, one that maybe her unobservant husband would expect her to stay in on her own while he was out doing other things.

  Not that I thought there was any chance that was going to happen, because Mr. Disgruntled was certainly very put out with this whole situation, and made sure both the agent and the inspector knew of his displeasure.

  At any rate, Rafe drove up a few minutes later. By then, the glazer and locksmith were long gone, and the agent, inspector, and soon-to-be-former-buyers were huddled at the foot of the steps.

  When Rafe pulled up behind the line of cars parked in the circular drive, they started making leaving-noises.

  “Take your time.” He brushed past them and headed up to the porch to slip a hand around my waist. “Hi, darlin’.”

  “Hi,” I said, tilting my face up for a quick kiss.

  “Everything OK?” He glanced around.