“Hers was better.”
“By a wide margin. I’m really glad you think this is a good idea.”
“A very good idea,” I said, and meant it.
She said she wanted to get started right away on drafting a proposal, so I left her to it and went back into the living room. And there was Emily, curled up on the couch reading one of Cybil’s Max Ruffe stories in a 1947 issue of Midnight Detective on which Samuel Leatherman had been cover-featured. Modern kid, fourteen years old and raised on computers, engrossed in the mouldering pages of a type of popular culture that had flourished more than half a century before she was born.
I sat down quietly so as not to disturb her, thinking that where women were concerned, I was a pretty lucky guy. All the women in my life, dating back to my childhood, had been special. My mother, and Nana, her mother. Kerry. Emily. Cybil. Tamara. All but one of the half dozen or so I’d been involved with before I met Kerry, even though those relationships, for one reason or another, hadn’t lasted. Smart, caring, loving, every one.
Thank God for women like them. And that there were only a few, a very few, of the ones like Cory Beckett.
Tuesday was not one of my scheduled days at the office. But after I finished a couple of errands I didn’t feel much like rattling around at home, so I gave in to impulse and drove down to South Park. I didn’t expect any new developments on the Vorhees/Cory Beckett matter since yesterday’s trial dismissal of the theft charge against Kenneth Beckett, but Tamara had one waiting for me when I walked in.
“I was just about to call you,” she said. “You’d think Andrew Vorhees would be pissed at us, right? Well, he’s not. He called for another appointment not fifteen minutes ago-the big man himself this time, not one of his flunkies. Seems he wants to engage our services, as he put it.”
“Oh? To do what?”
“Hedged on that, said he’d discuss it in person. Could be something to do with his wife’s death, but I’ll bet he’s after as much dirt as we can dig up on Cory. Chaleen, too.”
“Payback ammunition.”
“Yep.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I didn’t commit us, just said we’d listen to what he has to say. But if it’s Cory and Chaleen he’s after, why not take him on? His money’s good and the dirt is already about nine-tenths dug up.”
“Did he ask for me, Jake, or both of us?”
“You. But I told him he’d probably get Jake instead and he said okay.”
“Why Jake instead?”
“Well, he wants to have the meeting tonight-eight o’clock, on his yacht. Said he’ll be tied up with other matters all day and something to take care of after he leaves his office. Probably true-he didn’t stay on the line long and he sounded hassled. I figured you’d rather spend the evening with Kerry and Emily. And Jake’s up for it-I just got off the phone with him.”
“Fine by me. He’ll get as much if not more out of Vorhees as I would.”
“We’ll know a lot more about what’s happening with Cory and Chaleen when he reports in,” Tamara said. Her smile was wolfish. “And with any luck, a legitimate reason to stay involved in this mess and a fat cat’s fat check for all our troubles.”
At two-thirty I was still at my desk, fiddling with a report on a routine skip-trace. I had written scores like it before, but today, for some reason, I was having trouble getting the gist of it down in coherent English. Committing words to paper, or now to a computer screen, is not one of my long suits; I have to drag them together into intelligible sentences at the best of times. It was a good thing Kerry intended to write all the introductory material for Cybil’s collected works; I’d have been worthless as a collaborator. I was staring off into space, trying to think of a way to frame what should have been a simple statement of fact, when the outer door to the anteroom opened.
Except that it didn’t just open; it thumped and rattled as if it had been pushed in hard. Sharp clicking steps followed. I couldn’t see who had come in because my office door was partly closed. Alex Chavez was in the anteroom, working on his laptop at one of the desks, and I heard the mutter of his voice and then a kind of cat-hiss response. Even before Alex came and poked his head in and said I had a visitor, I knew who it was.
She was standing alone in the middle of the anteroom, straight as a tree with her arms down at her sides and her mouth so tightly compressed it seemed lipless. Dressed in an expensive scarlet outfit today-suit, shoes, scarf, purse-that made her midnight hair seem even blacker, the red color scheme broken only by a white cashmere turtleneck and a gold cameo brooch. This was the other Cory Beckett, the real Cory Beckett. Nothing soft or seductive about her. Hard. Glacial. All the fire burned deep inside-a molten core wrapped in a block of ice.
Chavez stood looking at her from a distance with his mouth open a little, as if he’d never seen anyone quite like her before. Tamara was there, too, standing in the doorway to her office; she glanced at me as I stepped out, but only for a second. Cory Beckett had her full attention. She didn’t have to have met the woman before to know who she was.
Cory’s magnetic gaze was fixed on me, unblinking, as I approached her. Sub-zero cubes of luminous gray-green glittering with venom. Touch her skin, I thought, and you’d burn your fingers. Like touching dry ice.
I said, “Well, Ms. Beckett, this is a surprise,” even though it wasn’t. After nearly forty years in law enforcement, hardly anything surprises me anymore.
“Is it?” Her voice had a brittle quality, as if it, too, were partially frozen. “I don’t think so, after what you and what’s-his-name that works for you did.”
“What did we do?”
“Don’t play games with me. Your lies to Andrew Vorhees almost cost my brother his freedom.”
“We didn’t tell him any lies. Just repeated yours.”
“I ought to sue you for slander.”
“But you won’t because you know you have no case. We never accused you of anything, or even once took your name in vain. Ask Vorhees, if you haven’t already.”
Her mouth worked and puckered as if she were about to spit. Instead she said, “Damn you, you might’ve helped send Kenny to prison.”
“But that didn’t happen. You were confident he’d get off, and that’s exactly what did happen. He didn’t even have to stand trial.”
“No thanks to you.”
I smiled at her. “How’s your relationship going with Vorhees, by the way? Wedding bells in the offing? After a decent period of mourning, of course.”
No reaction. Cory ice.
“More likely he’s getting ready to bounce you out of his life, if he hasn’t already. That’s the real reason you’re here, isn’t it?”
“Fuck you.”
“Such language. Did you know he’s thinking of hiring us?”
She hadn’t known. It was three blinks before she said, “Hire you? To do what?”
“He hasn’t said yet. Maybe to investigate you.”
“What? He wouldn’t do that.”
“Sure he would,” I said. “You and Frank Chaleen. Not very smart of you to try juggling two affairs at the same time with prominent men who don’t get along.”
The icebound venom in her eyes was so intense now it darkened the irises, made them seem like black holes. She said, spitting the words, “My personal life is none of your business.”
“It is if this agency is paid to conduct a legal investigation and what we find out is a matter of public record.”
“I won’t stand for being harassed.”
“No one is harassing you. Except possibly Andrew Vorhees.”
“I’m warning you,” she said. “Leave me and my brother alone. If you make any trouble for us, bother us in any way ever again, you’ll regret it.”
“Threats in front of witnesses, Ms. Beckett?”