Читать книгу For Just Cause - Kara Lennox - Страница 10
ОглавлениеCHAPTER TWO
“A MILLION BUCKS’ WORTH of old Spanish coins?” Billy said once they were safely back in his truck. “It better be Jean Lafitte’s treasure.”
“If they’re gold,” Claudia said, “they could be pretty pricey just based on the meltdown value alone. Historical significance would add to their value. She could be right.”
“I guess it doesn’t really matter what the coins are worth,” Billy said. “The question that concerns us is, does she really believe Eduardo is alive? If so, is she deluding herself?”
“She seems sincere to me.” Claudia sounded tired. “I’m starving. Can we stop somewhere and eat?”
“Sure. Any suggestions?” Billy didn’t recall seeing much in the way of classy restaurants in the closest town, Gatesville. Though it was the county seat and “the spur capital of the world,” it was definitely a small town.
“Any place is— Oh, look, a Tubby’s. Let’s go there.”
“Tubby’s? You’re kidding, right?” Claudia Ellison wanted to eat lunch at a greasy spoon with a gravel parking lot filled with beater cars and trucks?
“I have…fond childhood memories. But if you’d rather eat someplace else—”
“No, this is fine.” Billy tried to picture what Claudia’s childhood might have been like. He assumed she’d come from wealth. She had an aristocratic bearing and a way of speaking that he associated with old money. No Texas twang, so he doubted she came from around here. Maybe she’d eaten at Tubby’s while on a family vacation?
He had a hard time picturing little Claudia with her upper-class family, dining on ribs or chicken-fried steak. The mental image wouldn’t gel.
“I thought you’d be more of an upscale-French-restaurant sort of person,” he said once they were inside and seated at a booth with a faded green Formica table between them. Out of habit, Billy had selected the table and placed his back toward the wall, where he had a good view of the front door and a plate-glass window into the parking lot.
“Mais oui, I love ze French food. But this place…they have the best banana splits here.” She opened one of the plastic menus the waitress had dropped in front of them and gravely looked over the offerings as if about to make a decision of importance.
After a minute or two she looked up at him. “What? Why are you smiling?”
“I just never expected a Tubby’s restaurant to delight you, of all people.”
She suddenly became self-conscious, and he wished he hadn’t ribbed her about her lunch choice. “I guess I needed something happy to focus on after being in that prison.” She shivered delicately. “What an awful place.”
“And Tubby’s is a happy place?”
She looked around, perhaps assessing it through her adult eyes. The restaurant was half-filled, mostly with men in work clothes and a couple of tables of boisterous teenagers.
“Yes, it’s happy,” she declared. “These men are so relieved to sit in the air-conditioning for a few minutes’ break from their construction jobs. And those kids—blowing their allowance money on burgers and ice cream, flirting, away from parental control—yeah, happy.”
But her smile was slightly bittersweet.
“You ready?” the waitress asked.
“Yes, I’ll have the chicken finger basket and a Diet Coke.”
Billy ordered a standard burger and fries and the waitress left.
“No banana split?”
“It probably wouldn’t be as good as I remember. Now. About Mary-Francis.”
“I think she’s a lying schemer. Please, can’t we write this one off? No way could her husband be alive.”
“Ah, sorry. She was telling the truth—about some things, anyway. The coins exist. She believes they’re worth a million dollars, and her daughter did visit. She believes Eduardo has been in contact with Angie. All that’s true. She was lying about one thing, though.”
“What?”
“She didn’t merely ‘forget’ to tell Eduardo about giving the coins to her sister. I think she deliberately kept the information from him. Their marriage was on the skids. But she couldn’t just divorce him—he was violent. She might have wanted to keep those coins for herself, so she could escape and make her own fresh start.”
“Forgive me for pointing this out, but a million-dollar coin collection is a nice motive for murder.”
“She believes he’s alive,” Claudia said flatly.
“Then she’s delusional. The blood evidence was clear-cut. Maybe she had some sort of psychotic break and she forgot she murdered him.”
“Give me some credit. I think I would notice if the subject was psychotic.”
Their food arrived, and for a time they didn’t speak, focusing on filling their empty stomachs. Once Billy had taken a few bites to dull the edge of his hunger, he sat back and observed Claudia as she devoured her chicken fingers, coating each one with a few dribbles of ranch dressing. She took small bites, closing her eyes to savor each one.
He again wondered why this place was special to her. He tried once more to picture her as a little girl. Long blond hair in pigtails, maybe. She had such a slight build now, she’d probably been thin as a child, all knees and elbows. Had she been a tomboy, or a Little Miss Priss? Probably the latter.
“You’re smiling again.”
Billy quickly schooled his features. Damn, that was careless of him, letting his musings show on his face. His life no longer depended on hiding his true self every waking minute. But he still preferred to keep his feelings out of public view, and the one person he ought to be more careful around was Claudia Ellison. He might not believe in her body-language junk science, but she was perceptive.
They finished and paid with a company Visa, then headed back into the sizzling hot afternoon. Claudia removed her pale blue suit jacket. Her blouse was damp, clinging to her breasts in a way that made Billy’s mouth go dry despite the huge soft drink he’d just sucked down.
“So you’re going to recommend Project Justice not take on this case?” Claudia asked.
“It’s kind of fantastical.”
“Yes…but don’t you think we should at least check a few things out? For example, let’s sic Mitch on Eduardo. If the guy is alive, he’s leaving signs of his presence somewhere in cyberspace. Mitch is so amazing when it comes to that, and we have that list of friends and associates Mary-Francis gave us.”
“I guess that would be okay, if Mitch doesn’t mind.” Mitch Delacroix was Project Justice’s resident computer geek and missing person locator. “I can put Daniel off about a decision for a few days.”
“And I want to visit Theresa and see what she has to say about this illustrious coin collection.”
“Yeah, I’ll admit I’m curious. If Theresa has some supervaluable artifacts in her home, we should advise her to take them to the bank and put ’em in a vault. Especially if her drug-addict niece wants them.”
As Claudia climbed into the passenger seat of Billy’s truck, she offered him a healthy flash of thigh, and his heart leaped into his throat…was that her panties he just saw? Then he realized she was wearing a lacy-edged slip.
How Victorian. How…intriguing.
“She was definitely concealing something,” Claudia said once they were back on the road. “She gave at least a dozen signs of it.”
“A dozen? Come on.” No one could give themselves away that thoroughly.
“You knew she was lying. How did you come to that conclusion?”
“’Cause she told a stupid story about a million-dollar treasure and a dead husband come back to life. Doesn’t take an expert to figure out it’s a crock.”
“My hunch is, you read all the body-language signals on a subconscious level—the direction of her feet, the angle of her body, voice inflection, how fast she talked, where she looked, what she did with her hands, nostrils, lips, whether she swallowed a lot—”
“It would take me a year to catalog all that. Isn’t it easier just to listen to what a suspect says?” Yet merely listening to the words someone spoke hadn’t always told him what he needed to know. He’d missed some vital clues during that last operation with Sheila.
Just thinking about Sheila filled him with a profound sadness. “Hey, Claudia, can you tell what I’m thinking now?”
“I read body language, not minds,” she said tartly.
“What’s my body language telling you?”
She actually took him seriously, studying him from head to toe in a slow perusal that made him hot—checking him out the way a woman does at a bar when she wants you to return the favor. If he was as good as he thought he was, though, Claudia would have no idea how badly he’d like to kiss those moist, full lips of hers and muss up that elegant blond hair.
“You’re bored,” she finally said. “You don’t like this assignment, you don’t like Mary-Francis, and you’d rather be working on something else.”
“Uncanny,” he said as relief washed through him. He still had it. He could still hide his true feelings.
“I’m not so ready to wash my hands of Mary-Francis,” Claudia said, abruptly returning to business. “I’m going to talk to Angie. If she’s in contact with her supposedly dead father—”
“Whoa, wait, Claudia. You probably shouldn’t confront her. She could be dangerous.”
Claudia seemed insulted. “I know how to deal with addicts, even violent ones. I’ve had clients come at me with knives, try to choke me with drapery cords—”
“In a clinical situation, where I’m guessing you have a panic button, or people waiting in the next room who’ll come running if you scream.” Jeez, and he thought his job was dangerous.
“I know a little something about dangerous people,” she said. “I wouldn’t be dumb enough to confront her in an unsafe environment.”
“I’ll go with you,” he said, surprised at how happy it made him to have an excuse to spend more time with Claudia. Now that he knew for sure she couldn’t see inside his head as though it was a fishbowl, he wouldn’t be so irritated if he caught her studying him again. In fact, he might not be irritated at all. Did she always wear lacy slips? What was that about?
“I’m sure you have better things—”
“Once Daniel makes up his mind to check out a potential client, he wants it done right. It’s my job to run around interviewing people connected with the case. It’s what I’m being paid to do.”
“I’m on a hefty retainer,” Claudia reminded him.
“Then we’ll confront Angie together,” he said, settling the matter.
* * *
“GOOD MORNING, CELESTE,” Claudia said as she entered the Project Justice lobby the next morning. “I’m here to meet Billy Cantu.”
Celeste Boggs, Project Justice’s office manager and self-proclaimed head of security, looked up from her Soldier of Fortune magazine with a stern expression and pointed to a clipboard. “Sign in there, please.”
“Oh, but I’m not—”
Celeste tapped the clipboard with one impatient finger and glared, daring Claudia to complete her argument.
Claudia signed in. It was hard to defy Celeste. Though the former Houston cop was in her seventies, she was one scary mama who claimed to know fourteen ways to kill someone with her bare hands. Celeste dressed as if she were auditioning for the role of World’s Most Eccentric Senior Citizen, but Claudia wasn’t fooled by the flamboyant red, ostrich-feather-trimmed shirt or the huge earrings made from shotgun shells.
Celeste meant business, and no one got past her into the rest of the building unless she let them.
“Billy,” Celeste said into the phone, “your date is here. I hope you bought a corsage for her.”
Is that how Claudia appeared to Celeste? she wondered with some alarm. Like a high-school girl all primped for a date with the quarterback? She’d opted for a more casual look today, a pale peach linen sundress with a wide brass belt. The skirt was one of her shorter ones…had she subconsciously dressed provocatively for Billy’s sake?
The possibility was troubling.
A loud clanging of metal and a snort coming from the vicinity of Celeste’s feet interrupted Claudia’s uncomfortable musing. “What’s that noise?”
“Oh, that’s just Buster.”
“You have a dog down there?”
“No, not a dog.” Celeste tried and failed to hide a mischievous smile. “Want to see him? He’s a beauty.” She leaned down and grabbed on to something that turned out to be a metal cage. As she hefted it up, Claudia saw that inside the cage was a large, furry, fierce-looking…pig? It was excitedly trying to dig its way through the steel bars with sharp, cloven hooves.
Claudia took an instinctive step back. “Oh, my God, what in the hell is that thing?”
“It’s a javelina! Haven’t you ever seen one before?”
“In a zoo, maybe. What’s it doing here?”
“It was in my backyard, and it kept digging up my vegetables. I caught it. My grandson’s school mascot is a javelina and their previous one died—or maybe they ate it. So I’m donating this one to the school.”
“You’re donating a vicious wild animal to a school?” That did not sound like a wise plan.
“He’s not vicious. I’ve been taming him down. Watch, he’ll let me pet him now.”
“Uh, are you sure that’s a good idea?” Claudia took a few more steps back.
Celeste opened the cage door. “Don’t worry, he’s really rather sweet. Aren’t you, Buster?” Celeste petted the animal on the head, then scratched it behind one ear.
The beast didn’t look as if it enjoyed the attention. In fact, it was frozen in a classic defense posture designed to make it invisible. Its next move would be to bolt for freedom. Freeze, fight or flight.
A frosted glass partition separated the lobby from the rest of the building. Just as Celeste withdrew her hand and was about to close the cage, Billy burst through the glass door like a freight train.
“Good morning, Claudia!”
The wild animal bolted out of the cage at the speed of light, sliding across the polished surface of the reception desk, plopping to the floor and wiggling right past Billy’s feet and through the door before it closed.
Claudia screamed just from the sheer surprise, and Billy backed up against a wall, his right hand automatically reaching under his jacket for a weapon.
“Holy crap, what was that thing?”
Celeste was the only one who didn’t look perturbed. “A javelina, what did it look like?” She calmly picked up the phone and pushed the intercom button. “Attention, all staff. Please be advised there is a small, hairy, piglike animal loose in the building. If you see it, would you mind calling the front desk so I can catch it?”
“You brought a live javelina to work?” Billy asked, as if wanting to be sure he’d heard right.
“It would have been fine if you hadn’t scared it.”
Billy looked at Claudia. “Now would be a good time to leave.”
“Sign out! Both of you.”
Once they were out the door and heading for Claudia’s car, they burst out laughing.
“What the hell was that about?” Billy asked. “Celeste’s new pet?”
“She caught it in her yard,” Claudia said, “and she’s donating it to her grandson’s school because they need a mascot.”
“Her grandson? Celeste doesn’t have any children. She never married. You must mean her great-nephew.”
“She said grandson. I’m sure of it.”
Billy shrugged one muscular shoulder. “She must have misspoken, then.”
Elderly ladies didn’t normally speak of grandchildren they didn’t have. How odd.
As they approached Claudia’s silver-green Nissan Roadster, she used her remote to unlock the doors.
Billy whistled appreciatively. “Sweet ride.”
“Thanks.” She’d insisted on driving for two reasons. First, it gave her something to do with her hands, somewhere to focus her attention besides on Billy so she wouldn’t give away her roiling emotions. And second, she wanted—no, needed—to have control of something. Relinquishing the driving all day long yesterday to Billy had been a tough challenge, particularly since she hadn’t felt she’d had a strong grip on anything else, especially her own feelings.
She glanced over at him as he fastened his seat belt. A lot of men would balk at allowing a woman to drive them anyplace. But Billy was obviously secure enough in his masculinity that it didn’t bother him. Or maybe it bothered him and she wasn’t able to tell.
Why wouldn’t he be secure? Lord, he was handsome in a striped button shirt and a lightweight summer jacket, worn to disguise the fact that he carried a sidearm in a shoulder holster. A crisp pair of boot-cut Levi’s, the ostrich-skin boots to go with them and a white straw Stetson completed the picture.
He took his hat off and settled it on his lap, then donned reflective mirror sunglasses.
One reason cops wore mirrored sunglasses was so they wouldn’t telegraph their actions with their eyes. Was it possible he deliberately hid behind those opaque lenses to make it harder for her to read him? Did he really not want her to know who he was?
She supposed that was only fair. She didn’t exactly go out of her way to broadcast her true self, either. She punched Angie Torres’s address into her GPS, then slid her car smoothly into downtown morning traffic.
Angie Torres lived in a run-down area of Harrisburg Boulevard in Magnolia Park, a hundred-year-old neighborhood of Houston in the early stages of rehabilitation. But this block hadn’t yet been gentrified; the apartment was above a strip of white-brick stores, most of which were boarded up.
Mary-Francis had said her daughter worked in a medical office, leading Claudia to believe she was a functional addict, but this looked to be the sort of place where the near-homeless, prostitutes and other victims of society ended up.
Claudia and Billy climbed a dark staircase into an equally dim hallway, alive with roaches and smelling of urine. Billy placed his body between Claudia and the door as he rang the bell. Though it was a simple display of caveman machismo, it had an undeniable effect on her. His protectiveness made her skin tingle with warmth. Few people in her life had ever put her safety and well-being above their own, even casually.
No one answered. Billy knocked, then pressed his ear against the door and listened.
“I don’t think there’s anyone inside. I don’t hear voices or a TV, not even sounds of a pet. Let’s check around the back. There’s probably a fire escape or something.”
Once outside, Claudia was grateful for a breath of fresh air. She tried to follow Billy on his quest to find a back door, but the tangled, thorny brush behind the small, two-story building proved a bit much for her leather sandals and bare legs, so she waited for him in the shade of a tattered store awning, welcoming the small breather. Being around Billy was a lot of work.
She couldn’t even tell whether he was attracted to her. Normally she could discern in a heartbeat if a man was interested in her, at least on a physical level. The signs were so obvious—the covert studying of her body, the way an interested man leaned in when speaking to her, the length of eye contact, the way his gaze would move from face to breast to legs, then back, and that unique male shifting of weight to accommodate a burgeoning erection.
Billy had flirted with her, but flirting was automatic with him. He’d have probably flirted with Celeste if he hadn’t been so surprised by the javelina. But Claudia absolutely couldn’t tell if anything lurked behind the flirting.
With Billy, she was drowning in a sea of unknowns, confused about where she stood. For the first time in years, the ball of fear in her stomach just wouldn’t go away. Her built-in alarm system was warning her of Danger! in flashing red letters.
Unfortunately, the same thing that made Billy a mystery also made him undeniably exciting. What if he could read her attraction to him? How awful would that be?
She had some control over the physical signals she broadcast to the world, but she couldn’t do anything about the pheromones that were undoubtedly wafting from her body in waves.
As she waited for Billy, a young, skinny Hispanic man covered with tattoos exited from the door that led upstairs.
He noticed her as he walked toward a beat-up truck, and did a double take, this time perusing her up and down, his expression at first hostile, then more curious.
Claudia slid her hand into her pocket where she kept a small device that, with the push of a button, would emit a piercing siren. She never went anywhere without it.
“¿Qué pasa, mama?”
“Hola, señor.” Her Spanish was limited, but she knew enough to have a stilted conversation if necessary. “Do you speak English?”
“You want me to speak English, I speak English,” he said with almost no accent.
“My partner and I are looking for Angie Torres.” She hoped the use of the word partner would cause the man to think she was a cop.
He smiled slowly. “Police? You?” He laughed and shook his head. Then he continued in perfectly good English, “No cop I know dresses like that.”
“Do you know Angie?” she persisted.
The man leaned against a post and crossed his ankles as he lit a cigarette. The signs said he was flirting, not dangerous. She slipped her hand out of her pocket.
“Yeah, I know her.” And didn’t care for her, apparently, judging from the way he flashed a slight sneer. “She moved out. She inherited a house. Her mom murdered her dad and went to prison for it. She was a piece of work, that girl.” The man closed his eyes and shook his head.
“Why do you say that?”
“Always carping about how selfish her parents were, that they were rich and never gave her a dime. But who could blame them? Any money they gave her went up in smoke. I wouldn’t put it past her to kill her dad and blame it on her mama so she could get hold of their money.”
An alarming possibility, one they should probably look into, though Angie’s only criminal record consisted of a couple of misdemeanor possession charges.
“What kind of drugs did she use?”
The young man took a long drag on his cigarette and blew it out slowly—a classic move someone took to collect his thoughts before speaking. “Anything she could get her hands on. Got fired from her last job for stealing Vicodin.”
That would explain why she wasn’t working at the medical office anymore.
“Thanks. I appreciate the information.”
“No problem.” He flicked his ash into the breeze. “You busy later?”
Lord, she hoped so. She cast a glance toward the back of the building. “Um, my partner is really jealous. You probably don’t want him to see us talking.”
The man gave her a regretful look, then turned and sauntered away.
Billy reappeared around the corner. “No fire escape. This building is a code inspector’s nightmare. Who was that guy you were talking to?”
“A neighbor. He says we’ll find Angie at her parents’ house, which she now considers hers.”
“Probably at least half of it is. Mary-Francis wouldn’t have been allowed to keep the profits from her crime—in this case, her half of the community property. Was there a will?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s check out the house.” He paused just before getting into the Roadster. “There’s no reason you have to waste your whole day running around checking out leads. You can drop me at the office and get back to your work. I can do this on my own.”
“I want to meet Angie,” Claudia said firmly as she opened the car door. It had sat in the sun only a few minutes, but hot air wafted out, and she waited for it to cool off slightly before she climbed inside. “I want to see for myself how she acts when we bring up the coins…and her father.”
Billy’s eyebrows lifted. “You don’t trust me. You don’t think I can handle it.”
“Oh, no, Billy, it’s not that. I just…I feel so responsible for Mary-Francis ending up on death row. The prosecution used certain parts of my evaluation to make things worse for her. If there’s any chance of saving her…I just want to do my part, that’s all.”
“You did your part. You drew the case to our attention. We can take it—”
“Billy, don’t be difficult. I want to go with you to interview Angie.”
“So you can do your hocus-pocus on her.”
“My assessment could be of value to you. Why don’t you just accept my help?”
“I work better alone.”
“If I hadn’t been here, if I hadn’t talked to that neighbor, you wouldn’t even know where to find Angie.”
“I would have figured it out.”
“We don’t have all day. If Angie finds the coins—”
“If the coins even exist.”
“They do. Mary-Francis was telling the truth about that, though not necessarily about the particulars.”
He rolled his eyes. “Fine. You can come with me. But I don’t want to have to look out for your safety all the time, okay? I almost had a heart attack when I saw you talking to that lowlife just now, and I realized I shouldn’t have left you alone.”
“I was fine. That guy was not dangerous. Just because he’s poor and has tattoos doesn’t mean—”
“Save me from a lecture about stereotypes. I’m a former cop and I can smell trouble. That guy was no angel.”
“We won’t be going anywhere dangerous,” Claudia persisted. Even though she was the one with the car keys, Billy had taken firm control of the reins.
“Angie could be dangerous. She has something to lose, if she thinks we might be challenging her right to her parents’ stuff. Addicts do desperate things when they’re cornered.”
Claudia couldn’t argue about that.
She should have just climbed behind the wheel, rather than debating with Billy over the roof of her car. But she felt compelled to make him agree with her. “It’ll be fine.”
“If I sense any danger, we’re getting out of there. You’ll do what I tell you to do. Is that clear?”
“Man, who pushed your macho button?” But she had to admit, he looked magnificent making his male dominance display. He leaned against the roof of the car, arms widespread, muscles tense, jaw firm. Any second now he would start beating those impressive pecs of his.
Her heart gave a flutter. At least that wasn’t on display for anyone to see.
“I can call Daniel,” Billy said. “He’ll back me up.”
“All right, I get it. Your word is the law where our personal safety is concerned. This is your case. I’m along to observe and assist. Is that good enough?”
The split-second expression of triumph on his face made her grind her teeth. But at least he’d shown her something.
