Fast Women (20 page)

"Try it," Suze said, adjusting Marlene's pumpkin costume while Marlene glowered. "There, doesn't she look cute?"

Marlene looked like a rabid orange marshmallow peanut.

"Gabe looks like that every time I improve something," Nell said.

Still, he let her get away with small things, and the place started looking a lot better. The only effective opposition she encountered was from Riley when she moved the ugly bird on the filing cabinet to the basement. "This," Riley said when he brought it back, "is the Maltese Falcon, and it stays."

"Oh, please," she'd said, but when she appealed to Gabe, he said, "Leave the bird alone, Eleanor," so she gave up and it brooded over her once again from the filing cabinet.

The rest of the agency work went well, the background checks and routine divorce work that both Gabe and Riley did so well that they turned away jobs because they couldn't handle it all. Even the decoy work with Suze was a success, although Riley made her wear suits after the first one. "It is just not fair to send that woman into a bar in a sweater," he told Gabe and Nell. "It's entrapment." So the next time Suze went out, she wore one of Nell's gray suits, her pale hair pulled back in a chignon, and, if anything, looked even sexier. "It's that Grace Kelly thing she's got going," Riley said, but all Suze said was, "I love this look," and Nell gave her all her old suits, the grays and grayed-blues and charcoal blacks that made Suze look like a sophisticated and potentially dangerous woman instead of a college kid. Suze said Jack hated them, but she seemed to feel that was a plus, so Nell didn't worry. In return, Nell inherited Suze's electric wardrobe and woke up every morning to a choice of cashmere sweaters and silk T-shirts in every color of the rainbow. Gabe didn't notice that, either.

Nell also woke up every morning to Marlene who, while still milking her traumatic past for every biscuit she could get, had given up moaning and rolling over as a way of life and occasionally even broke into a fast trot if food was involved. Nell had meant to leave her in the apartment while she was at work, but the first day she tried it, Marlene had complained the entire day, and Doris had not been amused, and she was already unamused from Nell's carefully worded inquiries about any of Lynnie's leftover stuff. So Marlene now walked to work with Nell, clad in the tan trenchcoat Suze had bought her, investigating the six blocks of concrete and ground cover between the apartment and the agency with the same pessimistic suspicion with which she viewed the world in general. Once at the agency, she stayed with Riley if he was in, fluttering her eyelashes at him while he fed her dog biscuits and scratched her stomach with his foot. "Women," Riley would say as she fluttered, and she'd whimper a little in return. "That's a really sick relationship," Gabe said once, but he didn't bar Marlene from the office, and since Farnsworth had never called again in search of her, Nell felt fairly safe bringing her to work, if a little guilty that she'd taken the dog. "If he really wasn't mistreating her, I stole his pet," she said to Riley. "Now you think of that," he said.

In the meantime, and in spite of Budge's opposition, Margie was loving the teashop, which meant that Chloe could leave without worry, so she did, flying to France with Lu's Eurail pass. "She went where?" was all Gabe said, and Nell wondered at first if maybe he wasn't hiding his despair at losing her as she put postcard after postcard on his desk. They all said, "Having a wonderful time" and burbled something about whatever scenic wonder was on the front of the card, and none of them said, "I miss you." That had to hurt, Nell thought, but after working for him for six weeks, she realized he wasn't the type to hide anything. If he was mad, she knew about it; if he was depressed, she knew about it; if he was on the track of something, she knew about it. It was exhilarating to work for somebody that direct, and the days went by on high octane, occasionally revved up by the inevitable clashes as she fixed his agency for him.

"Don't think I don't know what you're doing," he told her in November when she stuck the old Oriental from the reception room in the closet under the stairs and put down a new gold and gray Morris-patterned rug.

"It looks nice, doesn't it?" Nell said.

"No," Gabe said. "It looks new and we didn't need it."

"Now about the business cards-"

"No," he said and shut his office door in her face. A day later, trying to move the wood filing cabinet to a different place so the damn bird wouldn't be looming over her shoulder, Nell got a splinter in her right hand and couldn't get it out with her left. She went in to Gabe with her tweezers and said, "Help."

"How the hell did you get a splinter?" he said, putting his pen down.

"The filing cabinet," she said. "The back edge was rough."

"The back edge was against the wall," he said, taking the tweezers.

"Yes, it was," Nell said brightly. "Now if you could get that piece of wood out of my palm…"

He took her hand in his and stuck it under his desk lamp, and she held her breath.

"There it is," he said and used his thumb to draw the flesh of her palm tight so he could see it better. "Brace yourself, Bridget." He drew the splinter out carefully and let go of her hand. "Now keep your mitts off my filing cabinets. They've been there for sixty years and they're staying there."

"Bridget?"

"What?"

"Brace yourself, Bridget?" Nell repeated.

"Old joke." Gabe gave her the tweezers. "Go and move my furniture no more."

When Riley came back, Nell said, "Do you know a joke about 'Brace yourself, Bridget'?"

"That is the joke," Riley said. "It's the answer to 'What is Irish foreplay?' "

"Irish foreplay," Nell said. "Oh. Never mind."

The phone rang as Riley went into his office, and when she picked it up, it was Trevor Ogilvie. She tried to give him Margie's number at The Cup, but he wanted to talk to her.

"Jack says you're overqualified for that job, my dear," Trevor said. "With your background, you shouldn't be just a secretary."

I'm not just a secretary. "Oh, it's a little more complicated than that."

"Well, we still think of you as family," Trevor said. You never thought of me as family, Nell thought and began to wonder what the hell was going on.

"So we'd like to offer you a job here," Trevor went on.

"We could certainly use your organizational skills."

"Well, thank you, Trevor, but I think-"

"Don't be hasty, Nell. Gabe can't be paying you that much."

The certainty in his voice annoyed her. "Actually, the pay is pretty good," she lied. "And it's a very interesting working environment. But I do appreciate the offer." When she'd hung up, she went in to see Gabe.

He looked up and said, "What did you try to move this time?"

"Trevor Ogilvie just offered me a job."

"What?"

Nell sat down across from him. "I swear to God. He said Jack said I was overqualified for this one, and they could give me something better. He promised me more money, too."

Gabe's face was impassive. "What did you say?"

Nell was indignant. "What do you mean, what did I say?

I said no, of course. What is he up to?"

Gabe leaned back. "He said Jack talked to him?" Nell nodded.

"Maybe Jack's upset about Suze working and thinks if you quit, Suze'll quit."

"Jack doesn't know Suze is working. She tells him she's going out with me."

Gabe was quiet for a moment, and then he said, "Thanks for not quitting."

"Quitting?" Nell said. "I'm just getting started. I'm tearing apart the basement next."

"Oh, good," Gabe said. "We don't have enough upheaval around here."

But for the first time, he didn't sound exasperated, and Nell went back to work feeling positively cheerful.

Gabe's life was not as tidy.

For one thing, he couldn't find Lynnie or any evidence of where she'd gone or who had broken into her apartment, and he considered that a personal affront and a professional failure. Riley's canvassing of the back records of jewelers and pawnshops wasn't getting anywhere, either. "The damn diamonds could have been pawned anywhere," Riley told him. "In fact, if the guy who had them had any brains at all, he'd have gone out of town. Give it up." But Gabe couldn't, even though he had other problems more pressing.

Budge Jenkins, for example, called regularly, miserable about Margie taking over The Cup. "It's not safe for her," he said, the only man Gabe had ever known who could fidget over the phone. "She could get robbed." Gabe had said, "Budge, it's a teashop not a 7-Eleven. She's closed by six every night," but Budge continued to fuss and nag until Gabe thought seriously about kicking Margie out just to get Budge off his back.

Then there was Riley. "Suze is a menace," he told Gabe after the first decoy with Suze. "She walks in a bar and everybody comes on to her."

"Considering her line of work for us, that's a plus," Gabe said. Suze herself was a complete professional, and Gabe saw her in the office most days, either helping Margie close the register at six or aiding and abetting Nell in her ceaseless efforts to transform an agency that didn't need it. He'd decided to let Nell have her way on the rest of the place as long as she left his office alone, a decision reinforced by her matter-of-fact refusal of Trevor's offer of a job and a pay raise, but in the second week in November, she made her move.

"Your furniture needs work," she told him, facing him down across his desk, blinding him with her red hair and an orange sweater with a bright blue stripe across the bust. "It'll only be for a day, two at most."

"Stay out of my office," Gabe said, trying not to look at the stripe. "You can have the bathroom and the outer office, but this is mine. I know it's out of date, but the fifties are due to come back any day now."

"This stuff isn't fifties, it's forties. And it's already back. I don't think you should get rid of it, I think you should have it cleaned and repaired." Nell sat down, aiming the stripe right at him. "But you've got to clean the leather and the wood on the furniture, and some of it's wobbling and needs to be reglued." She looked at the ceiling. "There's even one with a broken arm."

"I know," Gabe said. "You broke it."

"And we need to replace the blinds in here-" Nell said brightly.

"Damn it, Nell," he said, "could you please leave something here alone?"

"- but it wouldn't be a change at all." She smiled at him. "It'd be a restoration." She looked cheerful but tense, and he realized she was braced for him to yell.

He'd been yelling a lot lately. He took a deep breath and waited until he was calmer. "All right," he said finally. "If it doesn't cost too much, and you're not changing anything, go ahead with the furniture."

"And the blinds."

"And the blinds."

"And the rug."

"Don't push your luck, Eleanor."

"Thank you," Nell said and headed back to her desk to start phoning repair people.

"But you can't change anything," Gabe called after her, and she stuck her fiery head back in the door to say, "I'm not changing anything around here. I'm improving it." Then she disappeared again.

"Why is that not reassuring?" Gabe said to the empty space that vibrated with her afterimage.

When he came in a week later, all his office furniture was gone.

"Nell!"

"The restorer came," she said, materializing in his doorway in a violet sweater this time. There was a red heart knitted into the fabric above her left breast. Why doesn't she just wear bull's-eyes? he thought. "He said the wood just needed to be cleaned and waxed," Nell went on, chipper as hell, "but that restoring the leather upholstery and reinforcing the loose joints might take longer."

"Restoring the leather? That sounds expensive."

"It is, a little, but not like buying new," Nell said brightly. "And think of what a difference it'll make."

"Nell- "

"And when that's done we have to talk about the couch in the reception room-"

"The couch is fine."

"- because it isn't period, it's just ugly and falling apart. We-"

"Nell," Gabe said, and something in his voice must have gotten to her because she stopped and looked at him warily, a redheaded, wide-eyed Bambi in purple cotton knit. "Stop it," he said and felt guilty for saying it.

"A new couch and I'm done," Nell said. "I swear. That and the business cards and the window, but the new couch first. Somebody's going to fall through the old one and then where will we be? Sued, that's where. Really, I know what I'm doing."

"I never doubted it," Gabe said. "I'm just not sure you know what we're doing. That would be running a detective agency. We do not have the kind of clientele that notices the decor. By the time they get to us, we could be meeting in Dumpsters and they wouldn't care as long as we got the answers they needed."

"The couch will be the end of it," Nell said and crossed her heart, both of them. "I swear."

"No couch," Gabe said. "I mean it."

Nell sighed and nodded and went back to her desk as the phone rang and then stuck her head back in. "Riley's on one and your phone is over there on the floor by the window."