“Fine. I’ll figure out a way for us to be alone together.”
The back door opened and Officer Nast walked out. The air smelled vaguely like the soap I keep on the sink. I couldn’t tell if she had heard what Tex said or not, but the look on her face said she wasn’t happy. I wondered, briefly, if I’d run out of toilet paper. As the two of them climbed into the car, Nasty behind the wheel, I picked up the handles of the duffle bag and backed away from the car. Nasty backed it around in a wide arc, then changed gears. Tex rolled down his window and pointed his index finger at me like a gun.
“I’ll be in touch.” The wheels spun across the gravel and they drove away.
I headed inside the studio and threw the bag on my desk. The scent of fried food wafted out from inside. I opened the industrial zipper and found a white Styrofoam takeout container nested on top of an ivory cashmere dress with tiny pearl buttons by the neckline. Onion rings and a knit dress? Tex’s idea of thoughtful was to be questioned.
I wanted to focus on business, but I couldn’t. Tex knew about the money. How? When? What had he discovered by going to my apartment? Something. His entire tone had changed in the span of an hour. I wanted to know what he knew, only I’d been down that path before. Tex was investigating a homicide. He might want to know what I knew, but that didn’t mean he’d share anything with me.
The last few hours that I’d slept on the floor of Thelma Johnson’s house had been a poor substitute for quality rest, and too many unfamiliar elements had crept into my life to allow me to be completely comfortable, even in my own home. My studio was more than simply a home away from home. I left the Closed sign on the front door, the lights off in the display area, and ducked into my office to try to figure things out.
The file on the fake Archie Leach sat open on the corner of my desk. I scanned everything I had on the man to try to figure out who he really was. Problem was, I ran an interior decorating business, not a crime lab. I couldn’t dust his file for fingerprints or run it through a database of known criminals. There wasn’t a whole lot I could do with the notes in the file. He filled out a questionnaire, let me know brief details about his living quarters, and given me an address I now knew not to be his.
Only, it was his address. Even the real Art had told me the white car that left the parking lot belonged to a long time tenant, Mrs. Bonneville, and that her son was staying with her. He did live there, even if he wasn’t who he said he was. It would be easy enough to find him, if I enlisted the help of the valet attendant who had been robbed of his name. The only problem was the element of surprise.
The fake Archie Leach knew my car.
I rooted around on my desk for a different folder and the phone rang.
“Madison? You’ve been holding out on me!” said Connie.
“Good morning to you too,” I said.
“That boyfriend of yours is a babe. You should have said something.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Connie, where are you?”
“The question is, where are you? I show up at your apartment with two cups of coffee and a file of ideas for my kitchen, and I’m greeted at your door by a tall, dark stranger with a serious case of bed head. Then he tells me he’s your boyfriend. I thought you said you guys were on the outs?”
My concerns about Brad seemed fictional, like I’d fabricated a reason not to trust him. If I hadn’t woken up in the middle of Thelma Johnson’s bedroom floor, I might have believed I’d dreamt the rendezvous behind my building. But I hadn’t.
“This is serious, Con. Where are you right now?” I repeated.
“I just told you I’m at your place.”
“Get out of there. Now. Come to my studio. I’m here.”
“I can’t leave. Ned and Brad just went to the auto store. I said I’d wait here in case you got back.”
“So you’re alone?”
“Yes.”
“And you brought a file of ideas for your kitchen?”
“Yes.”
“And Brad and Ned are out somewhere?”
“Shopping for spark plugs, I think.”
“Okay. Stay put. I’ll be there before you can say ‘Sputnik lamp.’”
I didn’t comment on the fact that regular male bonding rituals transcended the cliques of hipsters. Ned and Brad probably did have a lot in common. The fact that Connie wasn’t alone calmed me. In the cold light of day, I had to accept that I had nothing to back up my concerns.
I had no proof of what I’d seen in Brad’s trunk. A briefcase filled with uncut James Madison five thousand dollar bills, lifted from the trunk of Brad’s car by a man in a mask in the middle of the night? It was crazy, like a dream. Nobody would believe me.
I grabbed my copy of The Glass Bottom Boat and drove home. Maybe my life was a mess, but the least I could do was design Connie and Ned the kitchen of their dreams.
It took about ten minutes to get home. Connie was sitting out back. A purple bandana was tied over her head with the point jutting out in the back. Oversized white sunglasses hid half of her face. The two style elements made her look like a mod hillbilly. Not what she intended, I’d bet.
“You could have waited in the apartment,” I said.
“I think I saw a cat out here. I was trying to make friends with it.”
“You’d have better luck making friends with the resident skunk. Let’s go inside.”
I didn’t tell her about my night or my morning. She didn’t know me all that well outside of the decorating business. She didn’t know me all that well inside of the decorating business either, I realized, and it hit me that here was my target client, a woman who had hired me legitimately. She didn’t deserve to get caught up in my problems. What she deserved was a super-awesome atomic kitchen.
I popped the DVD into the player and cued up the kitchen scene. “I want you to see something,” I said.
Connie sat transfixed while a small robot appeared on screen and cleaned up a mess that Doris Day’s character had made. The six minute scene finished, and I paused the movie. I considered the possibility that I’d gone too far with the inspiration point and took a deep breath to start backpedaling. I’d play off the scene from the movie as a joke.
“Can you do that?” Connie asked in a quiet voice.
The breath was still full in my lungs. My eyes flickered to the TV screen for a second before I looked back at her.
“Is that something you’d be interested in?” I asked tentatively.
She squealed with delight and clapped her hands twice. “Wait till I tell Ned. Oh, snap! That’s so beyond anything I could have imagined! Do you mind if I call him now?” She pulled her phone out of her handbag and punched a couple of buttons.
Connie walked into the kitchen to make the call, and her voice trailed away. I grabbed a sketch pad from the desk and flipped to a blank page. I made a few quick notes. Computer programs for interior design abounded, but I’d always enjoyed the feeling of the pencil on the rough white paper.
I started a list of ideas down the right-hand side: remote control appliances, hidden trash cans, metal cabinets, magnets, Virden lighting, more remote control appliances, yellow CorningWare.
“Ned is stoked,” Connie said. She set her phone on the coffee table and sat in the chair across from me. “They’re planning a cookout, and he wants to know if you can bring the file over later.”
“They—?”
“Ned and Brad. They’re having a bromance. “
I didn’t like that Brad was including Connie and Ned in his temporary Dallas circle. I stood from the desk and sat in the chair opposite Connie.
“Listen to me. I don’t think it’s a good idea for you or Ned to get too attached to him. We’re not 100 percent a couple.”
“He said that. But he said you’re at about 85 percent,
and I totally get 85 percent. That last 15 percent is what makes a relationship have sizzle.”
“Connie, I need you to trust me on this.”
“What did he do?” she asked.
Ignoring everything I’d learned or suspected about Brad since he arrived, I went with the truth.
“Connie, Brad lied to me about something pretty big. He wants me to forgive him, but a lot has happened since then.”
“I don’t know what happened, but he really cares about you, Madison. He told Ned that he came to Dallas to make big money, but I got the feeling that he dropped everything for you. When you weren’t here this morning, he was worried.”
“We’ve got some baggage.”
“No offense Madison, but after twenty-five, everybody has baggage. Did I ever tell you about how I met Ned?”
I shook my head.
“It was at a lame karaoke bar where I worked. He was there with a whole crowd of people from work. I had never, ever sung at the bar even though my boss always wanted me to. Something about connecting with the customers. This girl Ned was with sang something stupid, some Joan Jett number. So I got up there and sang “The Ballad of Billie Jo.” Knocked it out of the park too. I had five date requests by the end of the night but not one from him.”
“So?”
“So instead of totaling his tab, I took a blank receipt and wrote ‘Are you going to ask me out or what?’ on it. He left enough money on the table to cover the tab and left. I couldn’t believe it. I was on such a high and he squashed it.”
“Nice story.”
“He came to the bar four days later. He said he thought the right thing to do was to break up with his girlfriend first.”
“So Ned’s a stand-up guy.”
“Ish. It wasn’t until later that I found out that he hadn’t even been dating the woman. It was all a story to keep me from feeling like I had that much control over him.”
“Doesn’t that make you mad? The fact that he basically lied and made up a story? That the foundation of your entire relationship was based on playing games?”
“No, I thought it was pretty cool. I love that story.”
I’m the first to admit that I have not had the same romantic experiences as other women my age. There’s a narrow pool of men who can justify the Doris Day appearance with the Gloria Steinem attitude. I’ve never been married, never been engaged. Most of my relationships bottomed out somewhere between six months and a year, thanks to the inevitable compatibility/control issues. Brad had been the one who changed all of that.
“You’re coming to the cookout, right?” She turned toward the door.
“I don’t know. I have a lot to do today.” I bit my lower lip and thought for a second.
Connie’s face fell. “Okay, sure. If you want to come, you should, but I’m not going to make you do something you don’t want to do.” She pulled the mod white sunglasses back down on her face and left out the back door.
I gave her a ten minute head start and called a cab. I had two hours to decide what to do about the cookout. The same two hours I had to go undercover. Half an hour later, driving a rented Ford Explorer, I was on my way to the Turtle Creek Luxury Apartments.
EIGHTEEN
I pulled up to the valet stand and rolled down the window. Art Leach scowled at me when recognition hit. “You again. What do you want now, Ms. Night? Or are you not Madison Night today?” he asked, glancing at the plates on the front of my car.
“I’m Madison Night as much as you are Art Leach. You’re still Art Leach, aren’t you?”
“What’s your point?”
“I need to talk to you. Can you take a break?”
The thin man picked up the phone in his booth, said something, then hung up. “Put this on your rearview mirror,” he said, handing me a hanging visitor tag. “Take any available space and meet me by the lanai.”
I drove the Explorer past the valet stand and scanned the lot for the white Lexus. It wasn’t there. I parked close to the building and cracked the windows for Rocky. Art stood under the canopy, shielding his eyes from the sun.
“Can we sit down somewhere?”
“No. I have about ten minutes until I have to be back in the booth. What do you want?”
“White Lexus. You told me one of the women who lives here drives a white Lexus, right? Mrs. Bonneville? And you said her son Grant was staying with her?”
“We don’t spy on our tenants, Ms. Night. We’re a little more formal. That’s one of the reasons Mrs. Bonneville’s been here for so long.”
He checked his watch and looked at the valet stand. The white Lexus pulled in. I strained to make out the identity of the driver, but couldn’t see through the tinted windows. Turns out it didn’t matter. Harry came out of the valet stand and opened the driver’s side door. A small orange Pomeranian hopped down to the side of the car and pranced around Harry’s feet. The handsome woman with the gray frosted hair followed.
“That’s her, isn’t it? That’s Mrs. Bonneville?”
“Don’t get any ideas. My job is to make sure our tenants feel like they’re at home here. If you tell her I told you who she is, she’ll report me.”
“With all due respect, Art, that woman’s son hired me to do a job. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that she knows something about it.”
“No way.” He crossed his arms and moved between us.
Harry waved his arms back and forth from the valet stand, trying to get our attention. Art looked at him. Harry pointed at his watch then held up two fingers.
“Okay, Ms. Night. You didn’t come here to hang around, hoping to chat up one of our tenants, so why did you come here?”
“I know this is an inconvenience, but something is going on around Dallas that is connected to the break in at your apartment complex, and it’s not good. I don’t know the details, but anything you can tell me would help.”
“You’re not a cop. You’re a decorator. Right?”
“Right.”
“So why exactly am I supposed to tell you anything? What are you going to do with the information? Change my light bulbs?”
“I’m trying to piece together information. That’s all. What did the police tell you when you reported the break-in?”
He rubbed his eyes for a sec, and then held his index finger at Harry. He turned back to me and dropped his voice.
“I didn’t report the break-in. There was only one thing missing, and I didn’t want anybody to know about it.”
“What was it?”
“A wad of tip-money. I don’t claim it on my taxes, so I thought it was better not to acknowledge it. Besides, I don’t trust the cops. For all I know, they’d find the money and keep it for themselves.”
It didn’t surprise me that he hadn’t bothered to report the theft, especially if it would possibly draw his high tippers into some kind of investigation. “If I might ask, how much are we talking about?” I needed to establish a frame of reference.
“Eleven thousand dollars.”
I leaned forward and tipped my head slightly. Just last night I’d seen a wad of hundred dollar bills in Brad’s trunk along with the counterfeiting supplies.
“Did you say eleven thousand dollars?” I asked, making sure I hadn’t been imagining things.
He nodded.
“That’s a lot of cash to have sitting around your apartment.”
“That’s a lot of cash to not have sitting around my apartment.”
He had a point.
I didn’t know what else to ask Art, and I sensed our chat was almost over. In the background, Mrs. Bonneville walked her Pomeranian out of the building toward the sidewalk that lined the street, much like she had done the last time I saw her. I waited until she rounded the corner before I spoke.
“I know you have to run. Thank you for taking time to talk to me. Is it okay for me to leave my car parked for a second while I take my dog for a quick walk?” I gestured to the Explorer, where Rocky’s head was peeking out of the opening.
“Sure, just don’t take too long.”
I opened the door and Rocky bounded out. I clipped his leash onto his collar and whispered details about our plan to him. Rocky, I have found, makes an excellent undercover operative.
We headed to the sidewalk. I held my head high and acted like everything was fine. Twice Rocky pulled over to sniff the colorful impatiens that filled the garden beds by the door, but I tugged him forward. We had to hurry. I couldn’t afford to waste a perfectly good pee on flowers outside of Mrs. Bonneville’s range.
As soon as we rounded the corner by the hedge, I scanned the sidewalk for Mrs. Bonneville, surprised she’d gotten away. And then, as if she’d been hiding, she straightened up from behind a wrought-iron bench that faced the street. I imagined I knew what she’d been doing, and I was impressed a woman of her apparent means was responsible enough to pick up her Pomeranian’s poo.
“Let’s go.” Rocky led the way. Mrs. Bonneville was heading back toward us and, as we grew closer, Rocky pulled me to the side while he lifted a leg on the landscaping. When he finished, he trotted back to the sidewalk and stretched his leash so he and the Pomeranian could sniff each other.
“Your Shih Tzu is charming! What’s his name?” she asked.
“Rock. After Rock Hudson,” I added.
“Now there was a looker. And you looking so much like Doris Day, it’s perfect!” she smiled.
“That’s what I like to think. He does make an excellent companion, that’s for sure. And who do we have here?” I asked. I started to bend down to pet her Pom and pain shot through my knee at the deep bend. I felt my face contort with the pain.
“My dear, are you okay?” she asked. She put a hand out onto my arm and touched it ever so lightly.
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