Kickout Clause (Savannah Martin Mystery)
Page 26
“I’ll take you home,” Rafe said. “Then you can stay there or take the car somewhere. To the office or something. It’s still early.”
It was. Not even ten o’clock. I could go to the office and sit there for a couple hours in case the phone rang. Or I could go somewhere else. Like Green Hills to see Shelby and Bradley.
I knew it was none of my business what Bradley did. He wasn’t my husband anymore, and nothing he did would reflect on me. But Shelby had asked me for help in figuring out what was going on, and although I didn’t really owe her anything either, I wanted to tell her the truth. If nothing else, I could let her know that I didn’t think Bradley had been cheating. That’s what she’d been worried about, I fancied. She’d denied it, but that had to be it. If she’d really suspected that he was breaking every ethics law he’d sworn to uphold, she certainly wouldn’t have asked for my help in exposing him.
So I let Rafe drive me home, which took a matter of two minutes to zoom across the bridge and up the road, and then I stood on the sidewalk and waved until the bike had disappeared around the corner or South Fifth Street before I fished my own keychain out of my purse and got into the Volvo.
The drive to Green Hills was also quick and easy so early on a Saturday morning. Green Hills traffic is usually difficult any time of the day or night, but early on a weekend, when people are sleeping late, it’s easier to navigate than during the day or evening on a weekday. I pulled up in front of Shelby and Bradley’s townhouse less than thirty minutes after I’d left home.
I had hoped to find Shelby alone, so I could talk to her privately. I didn’t want Bradley to know that she had asked me to investigate him, and that I had agreed.
But when I drove up to the house, the garage doors opened and Bradley’s navy blue Escalade started backing out.
By then it was too late to disappear. He recognized my car and stopped, rolling down the window. “Savannah?”
“Hi.” I managed a weak smile.
He looked suspicious. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh. Um...” He was dressed in what looked like a yellow golf shirt under a windbreaker. “Going golfing?” I asked.
He nodded.
“With whom? Nathan? Or maybe Dale Vandervinder?”
Those cool gray eyes turned a shade colder. For a moment they reminded me uncomfortably of Walker, until I shook it off. This was Bradley. The man I’d shared my bed with for two years. Not very successfully, admittedly, but still. No reason to worry.
“Ferncliff & Morton represent Mrs. Vandervinder in the settlement,” Bradley said, which was the equivalent of saying nothing at all.
“That didn’t stop you from getting together with Mr. Vandervinder earlier this week, though, did it?”
He flushed, and then turned even paler. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he told me, but his voice was half-choked.
I glanced at the door to the house. “That’s fine. I didn’t really come here to talk to you, anyway. I came to see Shelby.”
That did it. Bradley pulled the car back into the garage and stalked toward me. If I hadn’t seen it with my own two eyes, I wouldn’t have thought he had it in him.
Meanwhile, I parked the Volvo and waited for him to get close enough to attempt to loom. After having been loomed over by Rafe in the early days, I must say I wasn’t impressed with Bradley’s effort. He was a couple of inches shorter than Rafe, and nowhere near as menacing, even though he tried to sound stern.
“What do you want to see Shelby about?”
“To tell her you aren’t sleeping with Ilona Vandervinder,” I said.
That took some of the wind out of his sails. “What?”
By now I figured we might as well just take it inside. He clearly wasn’t going to leave, and he’d probably prefer going inside to taking the risk of one of the neighbors overhearing. I glanced at the door again. “Is Shelby home?”
Bradley nodded.
“How about we all just sit down and talk about it?”
He hesitated.
“Inside.”
A door opened on the other side of the parking lot, and Bradley saw my point of view. He grabbed me by the arm and hustled me into the semi-seclusion of the garage before anyone could see me. From there, we went through the interior door into the downstairs hallway. Bradley didn’t bother to ask whether he could take my coat, just let go of my arm to put his head back. “Shelby!”
There was a clatter of noise from upstairs, and then the slow and steady thumping of Shelby making her way down the stairs to the first floor. “What?... Oh.” She wrinkled those perfectly plucked brows. “Savannah?” She shot Bradley a quick glance. “What are you doing here?”
“She says she came to talk to you,” Bradley said before I could open my mouth. I’d forgotten about that, his habit of answering questions for me.
“Really? About what?”
She played innocent very well, I have to say.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I figured Bradley would be out somewhere. And I realize you’d probably prefer to keep our arrangement between the two of us.”
“Arrangement?” Bradley said.
Shelby threw her hands up and waddled toward the kitchen. “Since you’re here,” she told me over her shoulder, ungraciously, “you may as well sit down. My feet are killing me.”
I eyed her butt as she moved away down the hall, doublewide in the pair of stretched-beyond-hope-of-recovery yoga pants she had on, and managed to bite back a retort. “Thank you,” I said instead—taking the high road—and followed, leaving Bradley to bring up the rear. For once, I wasn’t at all worried about how my derriere in the tight jeans stacked up, since there was no way I could look worse from behind than Shelby.
We arranged ourselves around the kitchen table, with Bradley still staring expectantly—and a bit worriedly—at me. “What’s going on?”
“Shelby contacted me a few days ago,” I said.
Shelby rolled her eyes and got up from the table. “I’m starving. I need something to eat.”
Bradley and I watched as she waddled to the fridge and pulled out a plate of chicken wings and legs. Bradley had developed what looked like a permanent wrinkle between his brows. It deepened as he watched her peel back the plastic and attack the chicken. “Honey...”
“I’m eating for two,” Shelby said, through a mouthful of chicken.
I raised my voice. “Shelby contacted me a few days ago. She was worried about you. She said you didn’t look well and you weren’t acting right.”
Bradley turned his attention back to me, eyes wide.
“She wanted me to help her find out what was going on.”
“Shelby...!”
Shelby shrugged, her mouth too full to respond.
“I tried to follow you from work on Monday,” I told him, “but you recognized my car.”
“So that’s what you were doing in Germantown.” He sounded a little bit triumphant, as if he had suspected I hadn’t really been there for the reason I’d given him. Guilty conscience, if you ask me.
I shrugged. “Eventually I figured out that you were representing Mrs. Vandervinder in her divorce from her husband. You spent a lot of time at her place the other morning.”
“We were working!” Bradley blustered.
Shelby stopped chewing, with a chicken leg halfway to her mouth, to stare at him.
“I’m sure you were. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Nathan is sleeping with Ilona Vandervinder, isn’t he?”
“What?” Bradley said. Shelby started chewing again.
“Someone I know went to see Nathan yesterday. To ask about the Vandervinders. See, on Monday, when I realized I couldn’t follow you myself, because you’d recognize my car, I asked someone else to follow you on Tuesday.”
Bradley went still. Very still. The only sounds that could be heard were the ticking of the clock on the wall and Shelby masticating.
“He followed you to a bar in Tusculum called the Shortstop. He w
atched you meet with a man at a table in the back, and have a conversation with him. And then he followed you home afterwards.”
Bradley looked ready to pass out.
“The man who followed you gave the TBI a description of the man you were meeting.”
Bradley’s eyes looked like they were about to roll out of his head. Or roll backwards, into his head. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
“TBI?” Shelby said.
“The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.”
She tossed her head. “I know what it stands for, Savannah. Why was the TBI following Bradley?”
Probably best not to say anything about the fact that it was all my fault. I turned back to Bradley. “They took a bunch of photographs to the Shortstop the other night, to see if the waitress could identify the man you were with.”
“Why is the TBI interested in Bradley?” Shelby insisted.
I opened my mouth, but before I could say anything, Bradley croaked, “Don’t tell her!”
I turned back to him. “She has to know, Bradley.”
“Know what?” Shelby asked. By now, she’d become interested enough in what I had to say that she’d forgotten all about the chicken wings and legs.
“Bradley’s been meeting with Dale Vandervinder.”
Bradley sagged on the kitchen chair, like all the air had gone out of him.
“Bradley?” Shelby said, puzzlement mixed with a hint of displeasure on her face.
And Bradley must not be able to handle the disapproval, because he pushed the chair back without meeting her gaze—the legs scraped loudly against the tile floors—and fled with an incoherent apology. We both watched as he practically ran down the hallway and out the door into the garage. Off to take his feelings out on a golf ball, I guess. And leaving it up to me to put his wife in the picture, the coward.
“What’s going on?” Shelby said, an edge to her voice now.
I took a deep breath. “The waitress at the Shortstop identified the picture of Dale Vandervinder as the man Bradley met with on Tuesday night. Dale is Ilona Vandervinder’s soon to be ex-husband.”
I didn’t have to spell it out in any more detail than that. Shelby was a paralegal before she married Bradley. She was his paralegal. She knew, probably better than I did, just how illegal it was for Bradley to be meeting on the sly with his client’s husband. I could see her jaw clench as she realized the implications.
“Sorry,” I said. “When you asked me for help in figuring out what was going on, I had no idea it was going to be something like this. I figured he was just cheating again.”
“I told you he wouldn’t cheat on me.” The reminder was half-hearted, as if her thoughts were elsewhere. As I’m sure they were. And besides, what he’d actually been doing, in its own way, was a lot worse than adultery. At least it isn’t illegal to sleep around, horrible as it may be for his doting—and pregnant—wife to deal with. But when this got out, it might—it would probably—mean that Bradley would be disbarred. He’d lose his job, they’d lose their sole source of income, maybe they’d even lose the townhouse, and with a baby on the way, too.
The world as Shelby knew it had just taken a deathblow, and I could see her struggle to recover from the knowledge.
“I still don’t understand what the TBI has to do with this.”
I squirmed. “That’s my fault. My boyfriend works for the TBI, remember? When I realized I couldn’t follow Bradley myself, because he’d recognize my car, I asked Rafe for help. He assigned one of his rookies to follow Bradley on Tuesday night, as sort of a training exercise.”
“So the TBI aren’t really interested in Bradley.” She sounded relieved.
“They weren’t. But then—”
“What?” Shelby said, obviously alert to the sound of my voice. She pulled out a chair and sat down, with an unladylike grunt. “Tell me.”
“The man who followed Bradley was named Manuel Ortega. He was shot later that night.”
There was a beat of shocked silence. Then her voice rose. “How dare you accuse Bradley of shooting someone?!”
“I’m not,” I protested. “Nobody thinks that.”
She looked relieved until I added, “Besides, he has an alibi, doesn’t he? You can verify that he was home on Tuesday night, right?”
“Of course,” Shelby said. She was looking down at her empty ring finger, touching it. If there’d been a ring there, she would have been rotating it. Since there wasn’t—she had probably gained too much weight for her rings to fit anymore—she was just rubbing nervously.
My next words didn’t help. “It’s the Tennessee Bar Association that will be interested in Bradley.”
“He was really meeting with Dale Vandervinder?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to Mr. Vandervinder. I don’t expect I will. It’s none of my business. I just know what the waitress said. That the man Bradley was meeting, looked like the picture of Dale Vandervinder.”
“So you don’t know for sure that it was him.” The relief in her voice was palpable now.
“Bradley didn’t deny it,” I reminded her gently, and watched her face cloud over again.
We sat in silence for a minute or two while Shelby thought the situation over. “What will happen to us?”
“I have no idea,” I admitted. “I assume Bradley will lose his license if this comes out. And I don’t see how it won’t.” Especially since Rafe had spoken to Nathan Ferncliff yesterday and planted the seed that Bradley might be doing something unethical.
Then again, if Nathan was doing something unethical too, in sleeping with Ilona Vandervinder, maybe he wouldn’t want to pursue it.
On the other hand, if Nathan was sleeping with Ilona Vandervinder, he certainly wouldn’t want her husband to get away with bribing Ilona’s counsel into jeopardizing Ilona’s case.
Yes, Nathan would be going after Bradley for sure. The least of it would be Bradley losing his position with Ferncliff & Morton. At the most, Nathan would have him disbarred and possibly prosecuted.
“What will happen to us?!” Shelby wailed.
Well, they’d lose their income, to start. They might have to sell their house. As Rafe had advised Brian Bradshaw last night, they might have to trade in their fancy, very expensive to maintain, luxury SUV and van in favor of something more economical. Shelby might have to go back to work after the baby was born.
I didn’t think she’d want to hear me detail any of these items, though, so I didn’t. She was probably just venting, anyway.
“I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. I just wanted you to know what I discovered. You came to me for help.”
“I didn’t want to know this!” Shelby shrieked.
Obviously. I pushed my chair back. “I should probably just go. Let you deal with this on your own.”
“Don’t you dare!” She pinned me with a furious blue gaze. “Who knows about this?”
“I do,” I said. “Rafe does.” Which meant the rest of the TBI did, even if I didn’t say so out loud. “Nathan Ferncliff knows.”
Her voice rose. “You told Nathan?!”
“I didn’t. The TBI did.”
She looked speechless, so I added, “One of their agents was shot. They’re doing everything they can to find who killed him.” And if Bradley and his career were casualties of that, then that was just too bad. But it was Bradley’s own fault for doing something unethical in the first place.
Shelby still didn’t look like she had found her voice again, and as far as I was concerned, there really wasn’t much more to talk about. I had told her what I came here to tell her. She knew that her husband hadn’t been cheating, at least not on her. Now it was up to the two of them to deal with this knowledge, and the knowledge that Bradley’s boss knew what Bradley had done. As for me, my job was done and I just wanted to get out of there. I didn’t regret telling her what I’d learned—she deserved to know—but it’s never fun being the bearer of such awful news.
&n
bsp; I got to my feet. “I should go. I’ll see myself out.”
Shelby nodded, so I guess she didn’t have the wherewithal to bully me into staying one more time. I took off down the hallway, and looked back over my shoulder as I reached for the door to the garage. Might as well go out the way I’d come in. Shelby was sitting there at the table staring straight ahead, looking at a no doubt bleak future, with one hand protectively splayed on her stomach.
And I know I had no reason for fond feelings toward the woman who’d slept with my husband, but damn Bradley for doing this to her.
I ducked through the door into the garage and closed it softly behind me. And turned—to find myself face to face with Bradley and a gun pointed straight at my diaphragm.
Chapter Twenty Three
Guess Bradley hadn’t gone off to take his frustration out on whacking golf balls after all.
Nor had he gone to talk to Dale Vandervinder or Nathan Ferncliff. He was right here, and so was his car. Beyond him, I could see the parking lot and the tail end of my own Volvo.
“Back inside.” He twitched the gun in the direction of the door.
I hesitated. The garage doors were open, and not that far away. I might be able to make a break for it. But I was at the top of a tiny staircase of three steps, while he was at the bottom. I’d have to make it past him, and past the car. And while I never would have guessed, in my wildest dreams, that Bradley would ever point a gun at me, he looked serious. Or at least he looked panicked enough to be willing to use it.
I decided to play it safe. I reminded myself that this was my ex-husband, not some crazed murderer, and that my chances of survival were probably better if I didn’t give him an excuse to shoot.
So I turned around and went back into the house.
“What do you want?!” Shelby demanded when I walked back into the kitchen. “Haven’t you done enough—?”
She stopped when she saw Bradley behind me, her eyes bugging out of her skull. “Bradley?”
Bradley didn’t bother with more than a brief glance at her. Maybe he was afraid I’d try to jump him if he looked away. “Sit.” He jerked the muzzle of the gun in the direction of the table.