Dirty Tricks: A Kate Lawrence Mystery (6 page)

BOOK: Dirty Tricks: A Kate Lawrence Mystery
9.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

I joined in. “Anyway, you’d have
to have some kind of bad luck as a vengeance seeker to choose the one woman in
Connecticut who not only isn’t afraid of bats but actually likes them. If this
is the work of a disgruntled aspiring author, he or she is having a lousy week
on a number of fronts.”

May laughed so hard at that thought,
she had to fish around in her desk drawer for a tissue to blot her eyes.

“Oh, it’s not as dramatic as I’m
makin
’ it sound. It’s a simple matter to reject the really
bad submissions. I just express a little boilerplate regret that our beta
readers weren’t sufficiently intrigued by the three-chapter sample to request a
full manuscript and wish them the best of luck placing their titles elsewhere.
Send the
reply,
delete the original submission, end of
problem. It’s the almost-but-not-
quites
that have me
reaching for the Tums.”

“Is that one of them?” I asked,
gesturing at the sheaf of papers she’d been reading when I entered.

She wrinkled her nose. “It is.
Oddly enough, it’s from somebody who lives right around here.” She flipped back
to the first page. “The woman—at least, I assume it’s a woman—is obviously
using a pen name. I mean,
Desirée
L’Amour
,
seriously? But she has a post office box in Rocky Hill. That’s right next door
to Wethersfield, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “She sounds as if she
has an exotic streak, all right. What’s the problem?”

“As I said, it’s almost right, but
not quite. The descriptive passages are lovely, and the dialogue rings true, but
the romantic encounters are a little clumsy and forced. She writes about
passion like someone who’s read about it but never actually experienced it.
I’ll show you what I mean.” She shuffled through the sheets of paper and
selected one to hand to me. “
Here.
Read this, and
then tell me what you think.”

I accepted the page with
reluctance, hoping I wasn’t about to read anything too explicit; but after I’d
scanned a couple of stilted paragraphs, I saw what May meant. I handed the
sheet back to her.

“Hmm, yes, technically correct but
kind of detached emotionally. It’s not likely to fire a reader’s imagination.”

“That’s it exactly. After all, the
whole point of
readin
’ a sexy romance is vicarious
enjoyment, and if you can’t imagine yourself in the heroine’s strappy sandals,
you may as well turn out the light and get a good night’s sleep instead of
staying up late to read.”

“Uh huh, and you definitely want
your customers staying up late to read. I get it. So why are you struggling
over rejecting this one?”

May laughed a bit sheepishly. “The
thing is
,
this lady can punctuate a compound sentence
correctly. She can spell and capitalize proper nouns and use a semicolon in the
right place. She uses ‘me’ instead of ‘I’ as the object of a preposition. Do
you know how rare all of that is?” She groaned and dropped her head into her
hands. “I can hardly bear to cut her loose. This would be one manuscript we
wouldn’t have to spend forty hours massaging into publishable shape. She can
compose a gorgeous sentence. She just can’t
write
,
do you see?”

I sympathized with her dilemma.
“It does seem a shame not to be able to use her considerable skills,” I agreed.
“Say, maybe you could soften the blow by offering her a job as a freelance
editor or proofreader or something. You have those, don’t you?”

“All over the country,” May
acknowledged, “but I can’t see a woman who bills herself as
Desirée
L’Amour
bein
’ thrilled
about editing someone else’s novel.”

Sighing, she tapped the papers in
her lap into a neat stack and tossed them into the blue recycling bin that
stood next to her desk. “Oh, well. Best get it over with.” She retrieved her
computer spectacles from the top of her head and prepared to lower the boom on
poor
Desirée
.

Hearing the office phone ring, I
waved goodbye and headed down the stairs to my own unpleasant tasks waiting in
the Mack Realty office.

Half an hour or so later,
Strutter
returned from her stroll, all smiles
.“
Get
yourself
outside now,” she
said, shooing me out of the desk chair. “It’s one of the ten best days of the
year weather-wise, and this year’s line-up of scarecrows is first rate. Emma
and Jimmy loaned out the Law Suit to Blades Salon this year, and he looks just
fine. Don’t miss the one by Olivia’s nursery school. Just look for the brooms
that don’t have witches on them,” she grinned. “Go along with you now.”

I was happy to allow myself to be
chased out of the office and let myself out of the Law Barn’s big front door.
For years I’d been accustomed to having my daughter Emma share the building
with us. As an accomplished real estate paralegal, she ran the small shop of
her lawyer boss, Jimmy Seidel. Our professional relationship had been good for
us all, but it was the personal give-and-take on a daily basis I so sorely
missed. Since she and Jimmy had relocated to Glastonbury, we’d hardly seen each
other. My summer walks for exercise and my winter walks to feed the local water
fowl and songbirds were now solitary. I missed my girl, although at nearly
thirty years of age, she hardly qualified as that any longer.

The sunshine cheered me
immediately, as did the warm breeze and the sight of happy strollers nibbling
bag lunches from The Cove Deli and Village Pizza, licking ice cream cones from
Main Street Creamery, my destination, and enjoying the outdoor patio at Lucky
Lou’s. I took my time walking down Old Main Street toward Wethersfield Cove,
the better to enjoy the annual display known as Scarecrows
Along
Main Street. It was sponsored by the Old Wethersfield Shopkeepers Association
and had become a beloved event for tourists and residents. Individuals and
community groups alike participated, hoping to win prizes from the judges and
having a lot of fun putting their exhibits together. I welcomed back perennial
favorites such as The Roof Fiddler, who was perched on a house top; Fright
Attendant and Passengers, guaranteed to elicit chuckles from white-knuckle
flyers; a family of stick-mounted
Booligans
along a
picket fence; and of course, our old friend Law Suit, a braying ass dressed
entirely in a suit fashioned out of legal documents. The dozens of
broom-wielding ghosts playing on a lawn were called Baby
Broomers
and had to be the display
Strutter
had been talking
about.

As I strolled along, events of the
past few years crowded my memory, many of them having to do with informal
investigations into which I’d been drawn along with my loyal partners. Some had
involved unexplained deaths, including
one not-so-recent
demise
, all of which had come to light during various real estate
transactions in which Mack Realty represented buyers or sellers. There’s
something about the transfer of property and the circumstances under which it
changes hands that seems to provoke—or sometimes unearth—family dramas.
Fortunately, all had been resolved fairly satisfactorily, and we’d made many
more friends than we’d lost as a result of our investigations.

This train of thought led me back
to May’s story of bats in the night, as bizarre a tale as I’d ever heard. I
walked into the Creamery and waved absentmindedly at one of the volunteer
docents from the Keeney Memorial Cultural Center. I could never remember her
name, but fortunately she was preoccupied with her cherry vanilla double-dip,
so conversation wasn’t required. As I stood in the considerable line of
customers waiting for service, I replayed May’s story of last night’s events
from memory, hoping for an “Aha!” moment that would solve the mystery of the
bats in her house. One bat might have been lured by the warm air seeping out of
the slightly open window, but a dozen? No way.

There was no doubt in my mind that
the incident had been deliberately engineered to frighten May, but why? As she
herself had said, she hadn’t become sufficiently acquainted with any of her new
neighbors to provoke animosity; and no one
else
who
might wish to make life unpleasant for her, such as a rejected author, could
know where she lived as yet. Even more puzzling, whoever had put those bats in
May’s house, either through the unscreened window or before leaving the house
that day, didn’t really know
Maybelle
Farnsworth at
all, if they thought a few harmless bats would give her the willies. I accepted
my single scoop of maple walnut and squeezed past the still-waiting customers
to make my exit, licking contemplatively.

The whole thing simply made no
sense, I thought, lifting a hand to Abby Stoddard, the owner of the Village
Diner, as I retraced my route back to the Law Barn. I wondered if May had
mentioned the prank, if that’s what it had been, to Margo and if so, what she
thought about it. Probably not, since Margo had been at Vista View all day. I
made a mental note to call her this evening, if she didn’t make it back to the
Mack Realty office before I left for the day. I wanted to know what she thought
about Isabelle
Marchand
anyway. Maybe I’d try to get
Emma on the phone, too, although lately my calls went straight to voice mail.
She had a way of cutting to the chase in these matters, and perhaps she could
help us figure it out. It had been several days since we’d spoken, and this
could be my excuse to touch base with her.

Licking the last of the ice cream
off my fingers, I let myself back into the Law Barn with a sigh. I threw May
what I hoped was a cheerful smile as I passed her doorway and headed down the
stairs to give
Strutter
a hand. May was right about
one thing: with no hard and fast suspects at which to point a finger, it was
necessary to suspect everybody, and that was no way to begin life in a new
neighborhood. A second sigh escaped me as I accepted the fact that one way or
another, I was about to be drawn into another investigation. At least this
time, it didn’t involve a dead body.

 
 
 
 

Five

 

Armando worked odd hours, going to
the Telecom offices in mid-morning and returning around eight in the evening,
to accommodate communications with company clients scattered throughout the
world’s time zones. Lately he had been leaving for work earlier in the morning
and returning later, which I assumed meant yet another difficult client in some
far-off corner of the earth. I couldn’t be sure, because he wasn’t talking,
sagging into his favorite seat and reaching for the TV remote in a single
movement. I knew better than to grill him on the latest crisis, trusting that
when he was ready he would let me know what was going on. Latinos operate
differently than men of other ethnicities, and I had learned to bide my time
and hold my tongue. Well, for the most part.

Like the trampy lady in the old
song, I got too hungry to wait that long for my dinner, so I ate mine earlier
and left him a plate in the microwave. We exchanged cheek pecks and a little
chitchat about domestic matters, but once he was settled in his half of our
double recliner with his food and a cup of tea, I dashed up the stairs to my
office and punched in Emma’s cell phone number. Once again, my call went
directly to voice mail. I debated leaving a message. I didn’t want to become
one of those sitcom mothers who stalk their adult children by telephone. On the
other hand, I was beginning to be sincerely concerned about her silence. The
decision was made for me when her voicemail got tired of waiting for me to
speak and disconnected.

“I don’t get it,” I complained to
Margo, who picked up my call after the first ring. “She used to seem to enjoy
sharing things with me, and all of a sudden, it’s radio silence. What could I
possibly have done to offend her?”

“Don’t be silly, Sugar. Whatever
is causing her to
hole
up has
nothin

to do with you. I’m almost sure of it. You two have always been closer than
bedbugs. My honest opinion is
,
it’s a man. That’s the
only thing I can think of that a girl doesn’t always feel like
sharin
’ with her mama.”

“Oh, phooey.
You think men are the reasons behind everything a woman does, but even if
you’re right this time, Emma has shared the details of half a dozen long-term
relationships over the years.”

“Uh huh, relationships that didn’t
much matter, am I right?”

“Well, that’s how they turned out,
but at the time they seemed pretty important to her. Anyway, that’s not why I’m
calling. Have you talked to May today?”

“Not today. I never made it back
to the office. After Vista View, I had a showing all the way over by the
Wethersfield Art Academy. Why, what’s up?”

I filled her in on May’s
bat-filled night and our mutual puzzlement as to the possible miscreant. “She
told me she doesn’t know anybody in the neighborhood well enough yet to have
gotten on their bad side, and none of the disgruntled authors she’s rejected
even know where she lives. All they have is Romantic Nights’ website
information, and the mailing address is a post office box in Atlanta. Mail is
still being forwarded from there until she gets around to setting up a new one
here. She swears she gets along fine with the guys who are working on the
renovations at her house, which are almost finished, by the way, so that
doesn’t make any sense. Do you have any thoughts?”

I could picture Margo idly
twisting a strand of blonde hair around her index finger while she considered
my question. “Hmmm, let’s see. There are no jilted lovers in the picture, at
least, not yet.”

“At her age?”
I squeaked.

“Oh, please, Sugar, grow up.
Maybelle
Farnsworth is one fine
lookin

woman, not to mention smart and funny as hell. She’s an incredible cook, too.
She practically had to beat the prospective beaus off with a stick back in
Atlanta after Uncle Doug passed on. Seventy is the new
fifty,
as she likes to point out, so don’t write off Auntie May’s love life just yet.”

“Wow,” I said, chastened. “Okay,
no jilted lovers.
Yet.
So what else could be going on
here?”

“Neighbors angry
about the noise of hammers and saws and workmen
yellin

at each other over the past few weeks?”

“I thought about that, but
stuffing bats in somebody’s open window seems a bit extreme, don’t you think?”

“I do, but there are a lot of
loonies on the loose. The thing I don’t understand is what this bat person
hoped to accomplish with such a stunt, frighten her into moving out? Why?
Anybody who knows May would be aware that she’d be more likely to make pets out
of the critters than run
screamin
’ out the door,
never to return. So I guess we can say whoever did this doesn’t know May, which
only makes things murkier. How was she by the time she left the office today?”

“Worn out, as you would expect,
but she didn’t seem apprehensive about returning to the house. In fact, she
appeared to be looking forward to enjoying her new digs in peace, now that the
reconstruction work is all done, and the painting will be finished by the
weekend.”

“I’ll give her a call after we
hang up to be sure she’s all right, but I’m sure I would have heard from her by
now if she wasn’t. She probably nuked a Lean Cuisine and fell into bed after
makin
’ sure all the windows were firmly latched, of course.
So what else is new?”

I filled her in on a couple of
paperwork snags
Strutter
and I had run into during
the day. “I know Emma and Jimmy love their new space in Glastonbury, but I
really miss having her right in the same building where I could just run
upstairs and show her something in person. Scanning and emailing are all well
and good, but it’s not the same as having her around.”

“It is not,” Margo agreed. “Let’s
face it, we just plain miss Emma. She’s a terrific person, even if she is your
daughter, and I miss her wicked sense of humor and her smarts. It’s a good
thing May came along to rattle around in that old barn with us, or we’d be
awfully lonely. Did any lookers drop by to check out the upstairs office
space?”

As a favor to our landlord, and a
sneaky way to get a preview of our next upstairs neighbors, whoever they might turn
out to be, we had agreed to take the rental listing for the second floor of the
Law Barn at a greatly reduced fee; but despite the rapidly recovering economy,
prospective tenants had been few and far between to date.

“Not today, but maybe tomorrow.
Between you and me, I’m hoping May gets used to us and decides to take that little
office permanently. It has to be sort of dreary hanging out in your own house all
day, don’t you think?”

“I couldn’t do it, but then, even
when we were operating from our houses a couple of years back, the nature of
our business has us out and
runnin
’ around to show
this property and that, not to mention Vista View duty.”

That was true. Real estate
representation was a profession unto itself. Margo changed subjects again.

“Speaking of Vista View, I had a
chance to visit with Isabelle
Marchand
for a few
minutes today. You’re
right,
she’s not nearly as
frosty as she was last week. I was
puttin
’ together
sales materials, and my stapler ran out, so I went through the lobby and tapped
on her door. She was happy to see someone who had a problem she could solve, so
I plunked myself in a chair and asked her how things were
goin
’.
She’s
doin
’ fine, except that everyone seems to think
she has all the responsibilities Ginny Preston had and expects her to fix
things the way Ginny did. She says she likes
havin

more time to pursue her hobby.”

“Which is?”

“Do you know, I never got around
to
askin
’ her
that.
We just
talked generally about how getting along in years makes you eager to get on
with
doin
’ the things you really enjoy. I told her
about Auntie May
startin
’ up her own business,
bein
’ careful not to tell her the name of it, of course. I
asked her if she’d ever thought about something like that, but then her phone
rang, so I skedaddled. Anyway, Sugar, I’m going to let you get back to that
handsome husband of yours while I give May a call. I’m a little worried, to
tell you the truth.”

“I am, too, but I couldn’t tell
you why exactly. Let me know what she has to say. I think all of us are going
to be at the Law Barn tomorrow, if I’m reading my Outlook calendar correctly.”

“Will do.
See you tomorrow.”

I felt a little better after
talking with Margo. For all of her southern belle affectations, she’s the most
level-headed person I know, and she was May’s family, after all. That thought
brought me back around to Emma and her perplexing silence, which I promised
myself I would end tomorrow one way or another. Thus resolved, I headed back
downstairs to clean up the dishes, sure that Armando would be sound asleep in
the recliner. It seemed to be the only place he slept soundly these days.

He surprised me by being wide
awake, not even clicking through the TV channels with the remote, just staring
vacantly at the screen in front of him with Gracie on a pillow in his lap.
Since I knew he wasn’t a particular fan of
The
Antiques
Roadshow
,
I transferred my concerns
about Emma to my husband and decided now was as good a time as any to find out
what was bothering him.

“Hi, handsome.
Anything worth watching tonight?”
I asked, dropping
into my usual spot next to him. I scratched our spoiled cat on the top of her
head, and she stretched her toes in bliss.

Armando returned slowly from
wherever he’d been and looked at the television in surprise. “I have not looked
at the guide, but I would not think so. All of those expensive premium channels
the AT&T salesman talked us into when we signed our new contract seem to
show the same eight movies over and over, shuffling them among the channels at
different times of the day. We should cancel them,” he said in a voice that
told me the matter was of little real interest to him.

“We could do that, but then what
would you pretend to be looking at while you go inside your head and think your
very private thoughts with a worried expression on your face?” I leaned across
Gracie and punched the mute button on the remote, and he looked at me warily.
“Don’t you think it’s about time you let me in on whatever the problem is?”

He smiled a little to himself but
stayed quiet. I poked him, and Gracie opened one yellow eye to assess the
situation before deciding whether to abandon her position of privilege. After a
few seconds she decided her cozy lap would not be disappearing anytime soon and
returned to her nap.

“I did not want to worry you,
Cara
.”

My heart thumped faster, but I
managed to keep my voice even.
“Why not?
I do it so
well. In fact, worrying is one of my best things, you know that.” I had a
feeling that despite my efforts, my smile didn’t fool him. “Besides, now that I
know there’s something to worry about, I’m going to go right ahead and do it,
so
you may as well tell me what it is.” Please don’t let it
be his health, I begged the universe silently.

“You have a point there,” he
agreed. “Well, you know that
TeleCom
has been looking
to expand …”

“As if you don’t have enough work
to do already,” I interrupted. “Sorry. Go on.”

He shifted in his seat carefully
so as not to disturb Gracie. “I have been assuming that would happen over a
period of a few
years,
and those of us who have been
with the company from almost the beginning would all have an opportunity to
evaluate where we might best fit into the new structure.”

“But?”

He smiled again at my impatience.
“But a different scenario has arisen over the past few weeks, one I had not
anticipated.”

I waited, willing myself not to
jump in with questions. It took Armando an extraordinary amount of time to get
to the point of a story under the best of circumstances, which these obviously
were not. Best to let him get there in his own time.

“It would seem that we are being
acquired by a corporation called
OmniFutures
. One of
the outcomes of the financial shake-up a few years ago was that banking institutions
and other narrowly positioned companies needed to diversify their operations,
buy up small outfits that do other kinds of things, in order to remain viable.
It took several years, but one of them finally made George an offer he couldn’t
refuse.”

I tried to understand the meaning
behind his words. George
Dunphy
was the president and
CEO of
TeleCom
, but the company was publicly held
these days. No matter how much he liked an offer, George couldn’t proceed
unilaterally.
 
He needed the approval of
at least the board of directors and probably the stockholders, as well, but all
that could wait until later. I needed to get to the bottom line here.

“I’m sure there are many steps to
this process, so let’s not jump the gun here. Assuming the acquisition does eventually
happen, which is probably a long shot at this point, what would that mean to
you … us?” I amended hastily.

“That is the problem in a nut,”
Armando assured me, mangling an English idiom in the process as he often did
when stressed. “This is not a merger, where the officers of both companies
would have equal say in the matter.
OmniFutures
, the
company acquiring
TeleCom
, would absorb our entire
operation. That means similar departments, such as personnel and accounting,
would be consolidated. Positions that are redundant would be lost.”

BOOK: Dirty Tricks: A Kate Lawrence Mystery
9.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

For Services Rendered by Patricia Kay
Brightling by Rebecca Lisle
Running Scared by Lisa Jackson
Tempts Me by Megan Hart
God Is Dead by Ron Currie Jr.
Sculpting a Demon by Fox, Lisa
Curse of the Immune by Levi Doone