Читать книгу Bluer Than Velvet - Mary McBride - Страница 9

Oh, good one, Laura!

Jones! She felt like smacking the heel of her hand to her forehead. If she intended to make up a different surname for Artie, couldn’t she at least have come up with something a little bit more original? Jones! She might as well have said Smith. The only thing the fake name had going for it was that she’d probably be able to remember it if Sam Zachary asked her again.

He probably would, too. She was sure of that. The private investigator had gone a little thin-lipped and slit-eyed when she’d answered his question, but there was no way on earth she was going to tell him the truth when the mere mention of the name Hammerman tended to make people sweat and develop uncontrollable tics. Even people as big as Sam Zachary.

For every one of his reputable businesses, Art “the Hammer” Hammerman probably had two or three disreputable ones. He was a landlord whose buildings often inexplicably burned down. He was a land developer whose notion of eminent domain included threats, poisoning family pets, and if necessary a well-aimed rifle shot through a kitchen window. A labor leader who had an endless supply of thugs to do his bidding and just enough cops and judges so he never got caught, or if caught, he certainly never went to jail.

But worst of all right now in Laura’s view, the Hammer had a son who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

She was following Sam into the house now after he’d told her it would be a good idea if she stayed here at least for a day or two until he could come up with a more suitable plan. That had sounded reasonable to Laura. She was even relaxing a bit, having come to the conclusion that if Sam had intended to assault and rape her, the man had already had ample opportunity and hadn’t made even a remotely devious or lecherous move. At least none that she was aware of.

Anyway, she wanted to stay.

The inside of the house turned out to be even more inviting than the exterior. The ancient hardwood floors had been lovingly cared for. So had the lace curtains at the windows, although they did look as if they could use a quick little dip in some bleach. There was a Victorian sofa with a carved mahogany back and fabulous claw feet, which was heaped with at least a dozen plump tapestry and needlepoint pillows into which Laura could’ve done an immediate swan dive.

Everywhere she looked were wonderful knickknacks and gewgaws and bits of kitsch. They sat on shelves, on crocheted doilies atop tables, on the antique what-not in the corner. Paperweights and porcelain figures. Vases and glass animals and Kewpie dolls. They marched across the mantel and formed chorus lines on all the windowsills. It was a collector’s paradise.

“I feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven,” Laura heard herself saying. “Look at all this magnificent stuff!”

Sam, with one foot already on the bottom step of a staircase, came to a standstill, then slowly turned to face her. “What? All this junk?”

“It’s not junk,” she said, almost indignantly. “What a marvelous place. It’s like living in…”

He snorted, interrupting her. “Secondhand Charlie’s Garage and Used Furniture Outlet.”

Laura shook her head. “No.” Her voice sounded disembodied, almost dreamy, even to her. “No, it’s like living in my Nana’s house. It’s perfect.”

“Perfect,” he muttered. “You’re kidding, right?”

She shook her head again. “It’s wonderful, Sam. How long have you lived here?”

“All my life.”

Edging back one sheer lacy curtain, Laura lifted a small white pot of violets from the sill and inspected its five, no, six deep purple blooms. She had a sudden vision of her grandmother’s fingers, stiff with arthritis and freckled with age, poking into the soil below the dark, velvety leaves of African violets. She could almost hear Nana’s chirpy voice. Don’t let their little feet dry out, Laura, honey.

Only then did she notice that there was moisture in the saucer attached to the pot. Sam Zachary, Private Eye, watered African violets! Why that pleased her so much, Laura couldn’t have said. It was just…well…sweet somehow and far more domestic than she ever would have given him credit for, especially considering his ratty, run-down office in the city.

“You should probably feed this little guy, too,” she said almost to herself, putting the pot back on the sill, then turning to the man who was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs. “All your life here. What a lucky, lucky man you are.”

Sam started up the stairs, listening to each familiar groan and creak, testing the give in the banister, thinking that he’d never felt like a lucky, lucky man. Ever. Well, not lately anyway. Not since Jenny Sayles’s car had slid through a guardrail on Highway A-14 and then crashed in the icy underbrush along Cabin Creek. When Jenny died, all his luck, both good and bad, had perished with her, and Sam had lived in a sort of luckless limbo ever since.

He turned left at the top of the stairs, then opened the door of the spare room which his mother had also used as a sewing room. The clutter inside rivaled that of the living room downstairs. Laura McNeal ought to be in hog heaven up here, he thought.

“This should be fairly comfortable,” he told her. “As far as I know, the bed’s hardly ever been slept in.”

She made a beeline for his mother’s ancient Singer sewing machine, still parked on a card table, and ran a hand over its worn black surface. He’d seen women look at diamonds or fur coats the same way, their eyes a little glazed, their faces touched with an ineffable longing. But a sewing machine? Sam was half tempted to tell her to take the damned thing with her when she left, but then he was leery of whatever form her expression of gratitude might take.

“Well, I’ll just let you get settled in,” he said. “Bathroom’s just on the right. I won’t be in your way.”

“Thanks. I’ll try to keep out of your way, too.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m going to go take a look in the freezer and see if I have a nice little steak I can thaw out.”

“I really don’t expect you to feed me, too,” she said.

Sam lifted his index finger to touch his eye. “A medicinal steak.”

“Oh. Does that really work?”

“Couldn’t hurt.”

He winked at her as he stepped back into the hall, and then descended the stairs muttering to himself. Winking! Good God. He never winked. Guys in polyester suits with gold chains around their necks winked. So he convinced himself it was just a sympathetic twitch, brought on no doubt from the pitiful sight of the woman’s purple shiner.

Laura only meant to test the bed. She woke up three hours later, startled at first by her strange surroundings, then comforted by the sight of the sewing machine. She stretched beneath the soft warmth of the granny afghan, then stopped midstretch, suddenly realizing that Sam Zachary must have come in and covered her with it while she was sleeping.

The Big Ben clock on the nightstand told her it was almost six o’clock. Her stomach reminded her that she hadn’t eaten since Artie Hammerman smashed his fist into her half eaten glazed doughnut this morning just before he’d smashed it into her face. She lay there for a moment, refusing to even contemplate her predicament, while from somewhere downstairs came the clattering of pots and pans and the metallic rattling of silverware and the occasional thud of a refrigerator door.

She smelled coffee, too, and lay there imagining the beguiling fragrance wafting up the staircase like wavy banners in a cartoon. Her stomach growled. Hadn’t Sam Zachary said something about a steak?

For lack of a comb, she ran her fingers through her hair, at the same time deciding not to get anywhere near the oval mirror above the antique dresser for fear of sending herself into a deep depression. If her eye looked anything like it felt, which was awful, she didn’t even want to see it.

Laura had trotted halfway down the staircase, still listening to kitchen noises, when it suddenly occurred to her that it might not be Sam Zachary who was making all that decidedly domestic racket. He had inquired about her marital status, she recalled, but she hadn’t asked him if he was married, had she? Instead she’d just assumed—maybe even vaguely hoped—he wasn’t.

“Stupid,” she muttered, wrenching her tight skirt into line and tucking in her chin to check for any undue exposure. She did the best she could to disguise her cleavage, then sighed. It probably didn’t matter. As a private investigator’s wife, Mrs. Sam Zachary had no doubt seen her share of weirdos and woebegone people. Laura was feeling a bit of both when she reached the bottom of the stairs and turned left, past the dining room, in order to search out the kitchen.

Sam was standing at the sink, his back to the door while his wide shoulders almost blocked out the light from the blue gingham-curtained window. Gingham apron strings from a big floppy bow in the center of his back dangled over his decidedly iron buns. Sam Zachary in an apron! If there was a Mrs. Zachary, Laura thought, the woman definitely belonged in the matrimonial hall of fame.

“Hey,” she said, stepping into the room.

“Hey.” He turned sideways just enough to give her a glimpse of the ruffles on the apron’s bib. “You fell asleep.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t plan to.”

“No problem. Are you hungry?”

“Famished.”

“Good,” he said. “You’re in charge of the salad.” He picked up a white plastic colander and held it out in her direction. “The garden’s out the back door to the left. There are tomatoes and onions and radishes, a couple of early peppers, and maybe even some endive left.”

Laura grasped the colander, trying not to let her expression betray the fact that she hadn’t the vaguest idea what endive looked like. Especially on the hoof, so to speak. Jeez. Didn’t they have supermarkets around here?

“Back in a jiffy,” she said as she pushed open the screen door and stepped outside where she inhaled a long draught of the clean country air ever-so-slightly tinged with roses. It was nice, she thought, not to breathe bus fumes and three-day-old garbage. She was going to enjoy this little vacation.

The well-tended, rectangular garden was easy enough to find, even though her three-inch heels had an annoying tendency to sink into the ground. She pulled two red tomatoes from a tall vine, then bent forward and plucked a little clump of leaves from the dark soil.

“What do you know? A radish!” she murmured, shaking off some of the dirt before plopping it into the plastic bowl and proceeding to pick several more of its mates. The onions weren’t all that difficult to identify, and she tugged up four of those. Then she straightened up and gave the rest of the garden the once-over, searching for the mysterious endive.

Spying something green with curly leaves on the far side of the little plot, she made her way on tiptoe around a pinwheeling plastic sunflower and several wire cages. Then—“Oh, please, please, don’t let this be anything poisonous.”—she reached down to pluck a leaf just as something sprang up into her face.

She jerked upright. The thing, the horrible thing, was in her hair, so she batted at it, only to have the creature take a flying leap down the front of her dress.

Then Laura did what any normal, self-respecting city girl would do. She screamed bloody murder.

Sam dropped the potato peeler in the sink, picked up the 12-gauge shotgun behind the back door, and was out in the backyard in mere seconds expecting to find his client fighting for her very life with a bruiser named Artie. Instead she was hopping around the back of the garden, flapping the front of her dress, screaming “Get it off me! Get it off me!”

He put the gun down in the grass and headed toward the garden, trying to wipe off the grin that he knew would only irritate her.

“Get it off me,” she shrieked as he neared.

“Hold still.”

Apparently she couldn’t, so he grasped her shoulders, turning her toward him. “Will you hold still? It’s probably just a grasshopper. It’s not going to hurt you.”

“Get. It. Off.” Her eyes squinched closed in her already squinched face.

“Okay. Okay.”

He looked at her hair and scanned the blue velvet on her shoulders and neckline. “I don’t see anything. It must’ve taken off.”

“It’s down my dress,” she said.

“Down…” Sam’s gaze dropped to the pale skin bordered by a hint of black lace. “I can’t…”

“Get it,” she shrieked.

“Hold still.”

He closed his own eyes a second, letting out a kind of heaven-help-me sigh, then eased his fingers into the front of the dress, down into black lace and blue velvet and warm, firm flesh. Lucky little guy, he thought, as he gently pinched the ends of a pair of frantic wings, then eased the insect as well as himself up and out. The grasshopper shot away in a single, ecstatic leap.

“You can open your eyes now,” Sam said.

She did, but just barely. “I hate bugs.”

Sam retrieved the colander that Laura had apparently flung off into space when she was attacked, and now he was picking up scattered vegetables and at the same time trying not to think about the heat his hand had so recently encountered beneath all that blue velvet. He started to say something, but she sliced him with a glare.

“And don’t you dare say they’re more afraid of me than I am of them, Sam Zachary, because it isn’t true.”

“I wasn’t going to say that,” Sam said, reaching to break off a few tender leaves of endive and laying them on top of the tomatoes and radishes and green onions. “I was only going to ask you how you like your steak and what kind of dressing you prefer on your salad.”

“Oh.” She gave a little shrug. “Medium, I guess, and Thousand Island. French would be fine, too.”

“Okay.”

He shouldn’t have asked, Sam thought, since he had every intention of grilling the rib eye black on the outside and a perfect, medium-rare pink inside, and tossing the salad with a tarragon vinaigrette.

All of a sudden he felt irritable, curmudgeonly, like a doddering old bachelor too set in his ways to even listen to anyone else’s preferences. Or worse. Too comfortable with the familiar to appreciate something new and different. Someone new and different.

“Better get back inside,” he grumbled, “before the praying mantises start to swarm.” He handed her the colander. “Here. Take this. I need to get my shotgun.”

She shivered. “Not for the praying mantises, I hope.”

“No.” He picked up the gun. “I only use this on the wolf spiders.”

“You were kidding, right, about the wolf spiders?” Laura asked halfway through dinner.

They were sitting in the kitchen on opposite sides of what she considered a very retro aluminum-and-plastic dinette set. The whole room, in fact, was fabulously retro. It looked as if it had been lifted from another era with its white metal cabinets, its fake marble linoleum floor, and almost boxcar-sized white enamel stove.

“Yes, I was kidding,” Sam answered with a subdued little chuckle. “How’s your steak?”

“Fabulous.” She took another mouthwatering bite. “It would’ve been a waste to use it on my eye. The salad’s great, too. You made the dressing yourself?”

He nodded.

Sam Zachary was still wearing his apron, but the blue gingham and ruffles couldn’t make even the slightest dent in his masculinity. In an odd way, Laura decided, they seemed to accentuate it all the more. God, he was gorgeous. Not that that was any big deal. Not that she cared.

“So, where’d you learn to cook, Zachary, S. U.?” she asked, putting her knife and fork down to pick up the cold bottle of beer he’d put at her place.

“Right here. After my mother died last year, it was a case of either learning how to cook for myself or wasting away to skin and bones.”

Laura nodded. She knew what that was like. She’d been in a similar situation a few years before when her grandmother passed away, but she’d solved the skin-and-bones problem with pizza deliveries and salad bars and take-out Chinese.

“I meant what I said, Sam. About not having to feed me. I’m sure I’m not paying you enough for…”

“I’ll put it on your tab,” he said, pushing his empty plate away, then taking a swig from his own bottle of beer. He put the dark brown bottle down, returning it precisely to the wet circle it had made on the tabletop, before he leaned back and crossed his arms. “You want to tell me a little bit more about this Jones guy so I have a better idea what I’m dealing with?”

“Jones?”

“The slugger?” He gestured to her eye.

“Oh. That Jones.”

She shifted in her chair, but the vinyl seat had such a good grip on her thighs, it felt as if she’d ripped off a layer of skin. It didn’t help, either, that she could almost hear Nana chanting Oh, what a tangled web we weave.

“Artie, you mean.”

He gave her a long, silent, steely-eyed stare which seemed to translate as yes, that was exactly what he meant and not to confuse the blue gingham apron with a blue gingham disposition.

“Artie’s, um, well…persistent,” she said.

“How long have you been seeing him?”

Laura blinked. “Seeing him?”

“Dating him,” Sam clarified.

“Dating Artie?” She almost laughed, then shook her head. “No, you don’t understand. I’ve never gone out with him. He’s my landlord’s son and for some reason he’s been giving me presents the past few weeks. Flowers. Candy. Stuff like that. I thought it was, well, kind of cute in the beginning.” She reached out, tracing a finger along the label of her beer bottle, frowning now. “It stopped being cute this morning.”

“So you’ve never gone out with him?”

“Never. Not once. Come to think of it, he never even asked me out.” She quit staring at the label and lifted her eyes to Sam’s. “Pretty weird, huh?”

More than weird, Sam was thinking. He could well imagine, once having met Laura McNeal, wanting to shower her with gifts, but he couldn’t fathom not asking her out on a date, as well. Unless, of course, this Artie guy knew that she was already involved with somebody else. If she was, though, why hadn’t she gone to that somebody else for help?

“Do you live alone?” he asked her, not quite hitting the target of his curiosity dead-on, but edging close.

She nodded. “I live in an apartment over my shop.”

“Your shop?”

“I told you. Remember?” She gestured to her dress. “I have a vintage clothing and jewelry store. Nana’s Attic.”

“Ah.” He had forgotten, which didn’t say a lot for his ability to process information at the moment. He wanted to blame the beer, but he knew it was that damned grasshopper down the front of Laura’s dress. The backs of his fingers still felt warm from their brief contact with her flesh.

Abruptly, he picked up his empty plate and carried it to the sink.

“I’ve got a job tonight,” he said over his shoulder, over the splash of the water from the faucet. “I need to drive back into the city around midnight. Just for a few hours. You can stay here if you want. You’ll be safe. But if you feel uncomfortable, you can come along with me. It’s up to you.”

“What kind of job?” She picked up her plate, too, and headed toward him at the sink.

Sam had forgotten about her legs during dinner while those long and lovely limbs were concealed beneath the table. He remembered them now, so vividly he almost forgot what she had just asked him. Oh, yeah. The job.

“Surveillance,” he said. “It shouldn’t take more than an hour or two.”

One of her finely shaped eyebrows arched a bit more. Her blue eyes twinkled and a smile played at her mouth. “Ooh, surveillance. Sounds dangerous. Real private eye stuff, huh?”

“Right.” He took her plate and rinsed it under the faucet. “But it’s not dangerous. Don’t worry.”

“Oh, I wasn’t worried. It’s kind of exciting, actually. Who are we spying on? A murderer returning to the scene of his crime? A robber casing a bank? A big drug deal?”

“Not quite.”

“Well, what then?”

She was standing so close that he could see tiny golden flecks in the blue of her eyes as well as the true line of her lips, even fuller than her pink lipstick implied. A mouth made for kissing if ever he had seen one. Suddenly his brain was ticking off the months it had been since he’d kissed a woman. Not just a woman. Jenny. He’d really never kissed anyone else.

“You’ve seen too many movies,” Sam said more gruffly than he intended, slapping their dishes and utensils into the dishwasher. “We’re going to sit on a hot, tarred rooftop adjacent to the parking garage of the Metropole Hotel, waiting for a sixty-six-year-old man to finish his weekly tryst with his twenty-year-old receptionist, then watch him walk her to her car and kiss her good-night.”

“That doesn’t sound too exciting,” Laura said.

“Told ya.” He wiped his hands on one of his mother’s cross-stitched dishtowels and returned it to its metal bar beside the sink.

“And then?” she asked. “What happens next? You call the police and have him arrested?”

“Nope. Then I take a picture of the lovers, have it developed, and I give the print to a sweet little old lady with blue hair who’s still ninety-nine percent convinced that her husband of forty-two years is playing gin rummy every Wednesday night.”

The playful light in Laura’s eyes went out like two candles being snuffed, and for a second, Sam regretted his candor.

“Well, you asked,” he said. “Cases like that are the bulk of my work. Rescuing dames in distress is just a sideline.”

He had hoped she’d laugh at that, lame as it was, but she didn’t. Suddenly she looked less like a dame in distress than a sad little girl, playing dress up in her mother’s clothes.

Reaching out, she straightened the dishtowel on its rod, then sighed. “You’re right. It’s not like the movies.”

“You don’t have to come along, you know. You really will be all right here if you want to stay.”

She shook her head. “I’ll just stick with you for a while, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind. It’ll be nice to have company. Only…”

“Only what?”

“Well, the last time I saw a private eye’s assistant dressed like this…” He dropped his gaze to the soft drapery of blue velvet sloping from her delicate collarbone. “…it was in a movie. Maybe there’s something in one of the closets upstairs that might be a little bit less, um…”

“Vintage?” she suggested, the twinkle returning to her eyes.

“That, too.” Sam stepped away from the sink, blaming the current spike in his temperature on all that humidity from the hot rinse water. “Come on. Let’s have a look.”

Sam leaned against the wall outside his mother’s bedroom, listening to the distinctive sounds of a woman dressing and undressing, to the slide of hangers across a metal rod, the slithering of fabrics over skin, the puttings on and the peelings off, the snapping of snaps and the long glide of zippers opening and closing.

When he’d suggested that Laura might find something to wear in his late mother’s closet, he hadn’t expected her search to take so long, much less to take on the proportions of a Broadway production number. He needed to get back to the city to set up his surveillance.

“Are you about done in there?” he asked through the crack in the door.

“Just about,” Laura called out, her voice slightly muffled by what sounded like crisp taffeta. “How long ago did you say your mother passed away?”

“Last year.” He heard more rustling, more zipping or unzipping before she spoke again.

“White Shoulders,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Her fragrance. She wore White Shoulders, didn’t she?”

Did she? Sam didn’t have a clue, and he said so just as Laura suddenly appeared in the doorway.

“Some detective you are,” she said, coming out into the hall while adjusting the shoulders and the neckline of her dress, which, to Sam’s amazement, just happened to be the same, skimpy blue velvet getup she’d been wearing all day.

“I thought you were going to change,” he said. “What happened? Didn’t anything fit?”

“Just about everything fit.”

“Well, what then?”

She was quiet a moment, standing with her hands on her hips and staring down at the floor. Then she sighed and gave a small shrug. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, Sam, when I tell you. Promise me you won’t, okay?”

“The wrong idea? About what?” he snapped.

“Don’t be so angry.”

“I’m not angry,” he said, sounding more baffled now than angry. “I’ve just been hanging out here listening to you try on enough outfits to clothe the female population of a small city. And then, after all that, you come out in…” He stabbed a finger at her dress. “…in this.”

“This,” she said, jutting her chin into his face, “doesn’t smell like White Shoulders.”

“So?”

“So?” Her volume increased to match, if not drown out, his. “So, if it’s all right with you, Sam Zachary, I just didn’t want to smell like your mother.”

She flounced past him to stomp down the stairs, as much as anyone could stomp in stiletto heels, leaving Sam standing there shaking his head and wondering why it made any difference who she smelled like when he had no intention of getting close enough to tell.

And even if he did get close enough, say, to kiss her, there was no way he was ever going to confuse Laura McNeal with his mother.