Eileen Wilks – With Private Eyes (страница 4)

Stacy broke into her brooding. “You can’t fix everything, ’Dia.”

Claudia’s chin came up. “I can try.”

A muffled ringing announced a phone call. Claudia muttered at herself as she conducted a quick hunt. She managed herself quite as ruthlessly as she did everyone else, and did not understand why this one quirk of hers refused to vanish on command. The phone was never where it was supposed to be.

This time it turned out to be in the pantry. “Hello?”

“Cute trick with the photo. I’ve decided to accept your deal.”

The voice wasn’t one she could forget. Not this quickly. Not when it set up such a delicious resonance inside her. “I hadn’t expected to hear from you this soon.”

“It seemed better to call and capitulate than to pout and drag things out. I have to be able to speak with Baronessa personnel to complete my investigation.”

“I see. A commendable attitude. Ah, I do want to make sure we’re talking about the same deal. This is not about me sleeping with you, correct?”

Stacy’s eyes went barn-owl wide.

“That’s no longer a requirement.”

“Good. About your client—”

“That’s not part of the deal, either.”

“How shall we begin our collaboration, then?”

“I’ll pick you up at nine tomorrow morning.”

“All right. I’ll be waiting downstairs—the parking is impossible here. I assume you have my address in that file of yours?”

He chuckled, agreed that he did, and told her to look for a nondescript gray Buick.

A dangerous man, Claudia thought as she disconnected. That deep, rumbly chuckle had vibrated right out of the phone and into her belly. She tapped the phone with one finger. “That was too easy. He turned belly-up in less than six hours.”

“So? You got what you wanted. Not that I’m surprised. Or are you disappointed that he wasn’t more of a challenge?”

“Of course not. I don’t want him to be difficult to handle. That would be counterproductive.” Claudia put the phone down, a frown tucking a small vee between her brows. She had gotten what she wanted. So where was the slick, greasy feel in her stomach coming from?

The pizza, obviously. And maybe she was a teensy bit worried about what Ethan Mallory might be cooking up…and how she’d react the next time she saw him. She sighed. “I think the challenge is still to come.”

Two

At nine o’clock the next morning, Claudia stood in front of her apartment building reading a grant application and making notes in the margins. Her fingers were freezing, but she hated fumbling with the pages through gloves. The rest of her was comfortable enough, though she did hope Mallory wouldn’t keep her waiting long.

She’d been up since six, but that was nothing unusual. She always got up at six. Claudia believed in the discipline of routine. Yoga first, then yogurt, cereal and coffee followed by her shower. She’d dressed, dried her hair, applied makeup, placed a sell order with her broker, answered e-mail and spoken with the manager of a women’s center.

The only chore that had presented a problem was dressing. What did one wear to go detecting?

She’d spent ten minutes trapped by indecision, pulling out one thing after another. Claudia hated indecision even more than she hated being dressed inappropriately, so in the end she’d opted for casual. Black blended in almost anywhere. Of course, her electric-blue leather coat didn’t exactly blend in, but unrelieved black was so boring. She’d pulled on her oldest pair of boots in case they went tramping around the burned-out plant.

The problem was, they might be going anywhere. She hadn’t asked. Claudia tapped her pen against her bottom lip, irritated. She’d allowed herself to be distracted by Ethan Mallory’s low, rumbly voice. Or possibly his chuckle. Or the memory of his shoulders.

A horn honked. Claudia woke from her reverie to see a dirty, gunmetal-gray, four-door sedan stopped in the traffic lane. She stuffed the grant proposal into her satchel and darted between the parked cars.

Mallory leaned across the bench seat to open the door for her and she slid in, her arrival trumpeted by the horn of the driver behind the Buick. Some people had no patience.

“Good morning,” she said brightly, eyeing his tie with fascination. It was blue with green squiggles and didn’t go with his suit, which was the same color as his car, but cleaner. About the best thing that could be said for the tailoring was that it had the proper number of sleeves and trouser legs. He’d tossed a khaki trench coat in the back seat that would look perfectly ghastly with the gray suit. “Where are we going first?”

“Huntington Avenue.” He accelerated smoothly.

“Baronessa headquarters, in other words.”

“Yep.”

Her heartbeat had no business speeding up. And her tummy was going to have to get over that lurch of anticipatory joy, because nothing was going to happen.

What was it with her, anyway? He wasn’t even good-looking—not the way Drake had been, at least. Or Charles, for that matter. His hair was a nondescript brown, his lips were too thin and his nose was crooked. Aside from the to-die-for body, he looked quite ordinary.

Ordinary, that is, for a tough guy. She’d bet he developed five o’clock shadow by 4:00 p.m. But his eyes didn’t fit the image. The irises were a cool dun color speckled with green that, at a distance, blended into hazel. Speckled eyes, set off by lashes too dark and long for either his hair or his gender. And…and she was staring, blast her, and he was smiling, blast him, an irritating little quirk of those thin lips announcing that he’d noticed her attention.

Claudia switched to a safer visual inquiry—the debris on the seat, the back seat and the floorboard. Her eyebrows lifted.

He noticed that, too. “I use my car as a rolling office sometimes. Things accumulate.”

“I see. No, I don’t. That would explain the files, books and calculator. Possibly the newspaper, candy wrappers and empty soda cans, too, if we allow for a degree of slobbiness. But not the Slinky, the Rubik’s Cube or the empty mayonnaise jar.”

“Those are for stakeouts. They can get pretty boring.”

Okay, so the toys were just toys. She wouldn’t ask about the handcuffs. “What do you do with the jar?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t.”

He flashed her a grin. “Emergency urinal.”

Oh. It didn’t look used…. Hastily she mentioned traffic. Traffic was the Boston equivalent of talking about the weather. Often it segued into a discussion of the Big Dig. Would the underground highway ever be finished? Was it an enormous boondoggle or an engineering feat to rival the Great Pyramids?

“Traffic sucks,” he said. “Why were you the appointed family member to deal with me? You aren’t connected to Baronessa, except by dividend checks. Seems like someone like, say, your cousin the corporate president would swing a bigger stick.”

“I believe the size of my stick was sufficient to get me into your car this morning. Who do you want to see at headquarters? My cousin the corporate president?”

“Him, yes. Also your cousin, Gina.”

“Why?”

“I’m looking into the tampering that occurred last Valentine’s Day, too. It was almost certainly the same person. Gina ran that show. I’ll need to talk to your brother Derrick, as well.”

“Why Derrick?”

He gave her a sardonic look. “He’s in charge of quality control. Seems like having your new flavor tampered with was a pretty major failure in his department. And his office was at the plant, before it burned.”

Yes, it was. He’d complained about that often enough. Derrick was ever watchful for a slight, worried that his cousins were achieving more than him, getting more perks, more recognition.

Claudia chewed on her lip. Derrick had been especially difficult ever since the fiasco at the gala held to promote the newest Baronessa flavor—which had now been scrapped. Someone had adulterated the passion fruit gelato with habanero pepper juice. If that hadn’t been bad enough, one of the guests had suffered an allergic reaction and had to be rushed to the hospital. Derrick seemed to think the whole thing was a personal attack on his effectiveness.

“You can get me in to speak with these people, right?”

“Oh, sure.” She flapped a hand in a vague affirmative. The traffic was living up to his pithy description, creeping along at a snail’s pace. At this rate she’d be trapped in this car with him for another twenty minutes. Claudia resolved not to look at him too often. “You have any ideas about the culprit yet?”

“Yeah.” He slid her a look out of those sneaky, two-toned eyes. “It’s someone who’s real unhappy with you Barones.”

Claudia unbuttoned her coat, wondering again who had hired this man. “You think it’s personal, rather than a business competitor who has lost his sense of proportion?”

“I’m not ruling out the possibility of a competitor. There’s Snowcream, Inc. And there’s Anderson Enterprises. Baronessa has taken over several of their markets in the last two years.”

Uh-oh. Did he know about Drake? She studied him warily. Yes. Too much of a coincidence for him to mention Anderson otherwise. Of course, he couldn’t know everything. Just the more public portions of what had turned out to be an all-too-public romantic debacle.