Chill Factor (7 page)

“Marty Pine!”
You
didn’t know, she wanted to shout.
What does that say about you as a son?
But she bit back the reproach. “Except for today, I haven’t seen your mother in nearly a year.”

“A
year
.”

“A busy year,” she added lamely.

“You’re some sort of investigator, aren’t you? Since you dropped out of law?”

Dropped out?
He made it sound like skipping school.

Dixie shrugged. “I look for people, sometimes runaways, mostly bail jumpers.”

“Naw, I saw it on television.” He nodded at the TV, playing mutely, a
Matlock
rerun. “You found out who murdered that friend of yours. That attorney.”

“A special case. I’m not a licensed investigator.”
But I do want to know what happened.
The month after Dixie arrived at the Flannigans’, forbidden to climb the pecan trees, she’d
climbed anyway and fallen. Aunt Edna had gingerly run her hands over Dixie’s arms and legs and head.

“Don’t tell,” Dixie’d begged tearfully. She couldn’t bear Barney’s disappointment that she’d disobeyed.

“Shhh. The important thing is whether you’re hurt.” Edna scooped her up—twelve years old but scrawny—and carried her into her own house. “Why did you climb up there? You know better.”

“I was Robin Hood, on lookout.” With her blood mother, Dixie had rarely felt young enough to play childish games. She was so embarrassed she longed to die.
“Please
don’t tell.”

“Shhh-shhh-shhh. Our secret. As long as you never climb those pecan trees again.”

“Special case?” Marty demanded now.
“Special
friend? Exactly how long did you know that friend? Long as you’ve known me? Long as you knew Mom and Dad?” He looked at the photograph he still held.

“There’s no mystery to how Edna died, Marty. There were witnesses.”

He stared up at her, pain bracketing his lips. When he finally spoke, his voice was a whisper.

“Doesn’t anybody care
why
she died?”

Yes. But four local law enforcement agencies and the feds will be all over this case. No way I can get close.
“The police—”

“The
police
gunned my mother down in the street—a sixty-six-year-old woman who never hurt anyone in her life.”

A woman with a ready smile for any kid, who loved roller coasters and pitched in at fund-raisers … and—

“She wounded a police officer,” Dixie said quietly.

“She
never
would’ve done that!
Never!”
he shouted, squeezing the wineglass so tightly Dixie thought the stem would snap.

Carl cleared his throat self-consciously and rescued the glass. Then he motioned to Amy and they slipped out of the room, leaving Dixie to steer Marty’s emotional warpath.

“Somebody changed her,” Marty blurted. “That Lucy Ames woman, maybe, and … Dixie,
you were right next door.”

Dixie knew he’d laid the guilt on her because it hurt too much to shoulder it himself. Marty loved his mother, yet,
caught up in his own life, he’d lost touch. And how could Dixie blame him for asking the same questions she’d asked herself all day?

“Why would she steal money?” he demanded miserably. “She didn’t need money. Dad left plenty, and I gave her a gold Amex card. I took care of her. I did. I swear, I took care of her.” His voice broke.

Dixie coaxed him back to the recliner. In his grief, Marty hadn’t asked the one question dominating every newscast: Where had the stolen money gone?

But another question niggled its insidious way into Dixie’s mind.
Who was the one person a mother might steal money for?

In a quiet neighborhood, in the back bedroom of a three-story house on Houston’s historical registry, Philip Laskey raised himself off the floor with the help of a steel pull-up bar mounted overhead. He had finished fifty push-ups, twice as many sit-ups, four sets of reps with the free weights, and twenty minutes of t’ai chi after a forty-minute run. His slender body glistened with sweat in the floor-to-ceiling mirror.

He could hear a television playing in another part of the house and his mother humming as she puttered in the kitchen. Philip liked the sound. It meant she was healthy and happy.

The only one of her six children living in town, he felt responsible for making sure his mother stayed healthy and happy; so far it hadn’t been a burden. Sixty-three years old, forty-four when Philip was born, Anna Marie Laskey had more fortitude than most. But bearing him at such an advanced age had been a sacrifice, and Philip understood that.

Finishing his reps on the bar, he reached for a sports bottle filled with distilled water. The compact gym was one of Anna Marie’s concessions to Philip’s exacting disciplines; another was meal preparation. He ate twenty-four ounces of protein a day—beef, fowl, or fish—and drank six glasses of fresh-squeezed vegetable or fruit juice plus six glasses of water, distilled. Nothing else. Ever. Food was fuel.

The hot shower reddened his freckled skin. He soaped his close-cropped red-blond hair, then rubbed the same bar of Dial soap over a vegetable brush and scrubbed from his hairline to his long, thin toes. After rinsing, he turned the shower from hot to skin-tingling cold.

Seven short-sleeved, crew-neck shirts, in various shades of blue, and five pairs of khaki trousers marched precisely one inch apart across the clothes rod in his closet. He selected one of each, adding blue socks and running shoes. The leather belt he slipped through his belt loops contained a narrow pocket with a thirty-inch length of piano wire inside, handles neatly taped. Philip had never used the wire to kill a man.

He removed a Sig Sauer Pistole 75 from a locked drawer, checked the nine-round magazine already in place, and slipped it into a quick-release holster at the back of his belt. In the mirror, he looked like any other nineteen-year-old, especially when he smiled.

“That smile could melt the heart of a hangman,” Anna Marie often told him, and Colonel Jay encouraged Philip to use it. “Our most secret weapons,” Colonel Jay instructed, “are the most valuable. An enemy expects guns and knives and explosives. But he’ll always underestimate the force of a smile.”

Philip shrugged into a loose, lightweight khaki windbreaker to cover the pistol’s bulge. From a polished wooden box, he extracted a triangular lapel pin, blue and red enamel with a gold letter “P” in the center: blue for loyalty, red for the blood of the enemy, and gold for the golden future of The People. He pinned it to the jacket, above his heart.

Then he closed off the gym by sliding two floor-length panels in place and locked his bedroom on the way out. In the kitchen, he popped a stick of sugar-free gum in his mouth—his only vice—and kissed Anna Marie on her left cheek.

A ten-minute drive and a three-minute elevator ride brought Dixie from Amy’s house to the forty-seventh floor of the Transco Tower and the offices of Richards, Blackmon & Drake. She found Belle Richards staring out her spacious corner window. Most of Houston stretched below like a giant Monopoly board, the most expensive properties dotted with skyscrapers, but the tiny segment holding Belle’s interest lay directly below the tower, at the base of the Water Wall.

Brave the Galleria area traffic, find a legal parking place within walking distance, plant yourself in front of the sixty-four-foot, semicircular wall of cascading water, and you escaped city bedlam instantly into absolute tranquility. Each minute, eleven thousand gallons spilled over the gabled surfaces, playing a symphony of splash and trickle. Dixie had spent many late-night hours on the pebbled walkway in front of the Water Wall when a knotty problem held her thoughts hostage. Right now she found Belle’s composed presence plenty soothing enough after the range of emotions she’d dealt with all day. Dixie was glad she’d stopped by instead of phoning.

“What’re they doing down there?” she asked Belle, referring to a half-dozen people milling below.

“Brainstorming the Mayor’s Memorial Day bash. Blackmon’s on the committee. He got the harebrained idea
that some of the festivities should take place in that minuscule park. Guess what that will do to traffic.”

Belle wore her red power suit today—Austin Reed, Bill Blass, or Donna Karan—Dixie couldn’t recall and couldn’t tell the difference, but she’d helped Belle’s husband shop for it as an anniversary gift. Standing on a stool to offset the defense lawyer’s three-inch height advantage, she’d even modeled the suit—looked darn good, too, but not as classy as Belle did today—then helped him choose accessories. With the amount Belle’s husband spent on one outfit, Dixie could’ve stocked up on jeans, shirts, and boots to last a decade.

“What traffic?” Dixie asked now. “Isn’t Memorial Day a national holiday?”

“How soon you forget. What lawyer with a heavy caseload doesn’t spend the holidays catching up? And all the retail stores around here will have major sales.”

“Oh.” The Galleria Mall attracted shoppers like a mud puddle attracts tots. “You paged me earlier. What’s up?” In a roundabout way, some of Dixie’s most lucrative jobs came from Richards, Blackmon & Drake. Their clients jumped bail, skipped town, and Dixie hauled them back.

“In your two seconds of TV fame today, I noticed an absence of your usual mule-headed, media-scorning composure.” Belle turned from the window, and her wide gray eyes made a slow study of Dixie’s face. “In fact, you looked upset.”

“I did come across pretty spacey, didn’t I?”

“What were you doing there?”

“Identifying the body—oh, you must’ve seen an early newscast, before they released the name.” Edna and Bill Pine had been clients of Belle’s partner Ralph Drake, who handled all the firm’s estate and property law. Dixie had recommended Ralph years earlier, when the firm was struggling. When Marty opened his gallery, Ralph handled some paperwork. A year ago Ralph had probated Bill’s will; now he’d have to probate Edna’s. “Maybe we’d better sit down,” Dixie told Belle.

Over coffee, she walked the defense attorney through the morning’s disasters, beginning with Dixie’s overdraft problem and ending with Marty’s accusation that she should’ve been a better neighbor.

“You aren’t buying that, are you?”

Dixie shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable in the red leather guest chair. She stretched her legs out and studied the scuffed tips of her boots.

“How is it that months can zip past while we aren’t looking?” she grumbled. “When you and I were in law school, a year lasted forever. Now a year lasts fifteen minutes.”

“Dixie, you aren’t responsible for every old chum who decides to go postal.”

“Even you?”

“Trust me, when I go it’ll be by aneurysm during an ingenious closing argument. No mystery. No gunning down cops.”

“That’s the part I can’t get a grip on. I saw Edna rob that bank—calm as a rock, everybody on the floor, poor old Len handing over the money. I saw Edna take the bags out to the car. Unless she’s lost a bundle in the stock market, I know she didn’t need that money, so it had to be some bizarre sort of suicide scheme, and I can even understand that, in a way. It would account for her being as spruced up as I’d ever seen her, wanting to go out looking her best. But Edna Pine never even raised her voice to one of us kids, never hurt anybody. I can’t believe she intentionally shot that officer.”

“She fired at you, didn’t she?”

“She shot the
chair,”
Dixie said firmly.

Belle’s scrutiny became more intense. “Loss, grief, loneliness, shame, despair—Flannigan, if people could handle their emotions better, I wouldn’t have so many clients.”

Dixie polished the top of one boot against her other jeans-clad leg as she considered Belle’s comment.

“Is there any chance Edna was about to lose her home and property? For tax liens, maybe?” Perhaps Carl was closer to the truth than she’d given him credit for.

Belle punched a button on her desk phone. “Not my department. But we can ask Ralph.”

Ralph Drake, Dixie’s least favorite of the three law partners, had lustrous silver hair that undoubtedly came from a bottle and sported a tan so dark he could pass for a swarthy Italian—an image he promoted by tossing Italian phrases into every conversation. Tall, thin, moderately attractive, he’d recently married for
the seventh time in his forty-six years, and was rumored to be window-shopping already for
numero ocho.
For any woman under thirty, Ralph revved up his relentless Casanova act; any client who wasn’t rich, female, or famous he managed to royally piss off. Nevertheless, he supported his share of the corporate overhead by being damn good at civil law. He also was superb at attracting clients, mostly female, who were occasionally somewhat famous and always somewhat rich.

He flashed his swarthy Italian smile at Dixie.

“
Cara mia
, Ms. Flannigan.” He actually kissed her hand in greeting. “Che
bella sei oggi—how
beautiful you look.”

Dixie looked as ratty as she had on entering the bank that morning, possibly worse. Yet, even though she knew Ralph was ladling bullshit, the sincerity in his voice made her feel
engagingly
ratty.

“Thanks, Ralph.” When he sat down in one of the uncomfortable white sling chairs Dixie always avoided, she repeated a shortened version of what she’d told Belle earlier. At the part where she mentioned identifying the body, Dixie underscored the overwhelming transformation in Edna’s looks.

Ralph and Belle exchanged a glance.

Dixie sat up straighter. “Why do I get the idea you two aren’t as shocked as I am?”

Ralph’s gaze flitted from Belle past Dixie to the expanse of sky beyond the windows. “Evidently, you hadn’t talked with Mrs. Pine in a while.”

Dixie shook her head.

He glanced at Belle again, who nodded.

“Mrs. Pine came to the office in … February,” Ralph said guardedly. “To redraft her will. And the transformation, as you say, from the last time I’d seen her, during the probate of her sister’s will—”

“What? Edna’s sister died?” Her
younger
sister, if Dixie remembered right. Divorced, she’d turned her home in the Galveston historical area into a bed-and-breakfast. The one time Dixie stayed there, she’d been impressed. Her neighbor’s sister was gregarious … and very different from Aunt Edna.