“Still or sparkling?”
“Wet,” I said. “Beyond that, I don’t give a shit.”
“Should you like a lime or lemon with that?”
“I would not. And just so you know, there’s nothing fancy about incorrect grammar.”
That pea-size shadow returned to the corner of Valentine’s mouth. Barest evidence of a smirk.
“Very good.”
“So, you know about your mother’s residence,” Valentine said when the waiter had gone. His tone told me in no uncertain terms that this was something he hadn’t wanted me to know. Something he’d hoped I’d never find out.
“I know that my mother’s house and my mother’s car belong to companies that all somehow belong to you. I came here tonight hoping you might be able to shed a little light on that in addition to a couple of other things.”
“What is it you want to know?” he asked.
Oh, he was careful.
I hadn’t realized exactly how careful until I reached for my pocket and every man standing around the table went for a firearm.
“Relax, guys.” I waved the yellow sticky note I’d retrieved like a surrender flag. “It’s just a list.”
Valentine looked both pleased and irritated, an exceedingly strange combination for someone who rarely managed more than casual disinterest.
“You brought a list?” he asked.
I raised an eyebrow at him. “Is that a problem?”
“Not at all.” That amused smile was back. The one that never quite made it all the way to his eyes. “I just wouldn’t have pegged you for the list-making type.”
“Well, you pegged me wrong.”
Lie.
My mother had always been the list maker, but showing up with the assorted napkins, scraps of paper, and bits of fast-food wrappers I’d jotted all my thoughts down on over the last couple of days seemed like it might hurt my credibility somehow.
The waiter returned with my water and set it down on the table.
When he was gone, Valentine turned to Shepard. “I think it’s best if Miss Avery and I speak privately.”
“I’ll wait outside,” Shepard said, rising. “I’ll take her home when you’re done.”
“That won’t be necessary.” Valentine didn’t look at Shepard but at the various implements on the table, which he’d begun sliding into a more comfortable spatial arrangement.
“What are my orders?”
“Your orders were to keep her at the safe house, and you failed. Three times she’s gotten away from you now. There won’t be a fourth.”
“But—”
“You may go.”
You may go. Our equine-visaged waiter could’ve learned a thing or two from Valentine about grammatical warfare.
Shepard stood still, staring at Valentine.
Valentine stared right back.
I could have toasted marshmallows on the heat of the masculine energy clashing and crackling between them.
If only I’d had a bucket of popcorn.
Shepard jerked the chair out from behind him and turned to go. Every female eye followed as he passed, just as every male body gave him a wide berth. I doubted if this was a conscious gesture on either side.
And then Valentine and I were alone behind the Japanese screen.
“How shall we do this?” was what he asked, but what it sounded like was How do you want it? The correct answer being something like Rough or From behind. “Would you like me to spin this tale from the beginning, or do you want to ask me your questions and put the pieces together yourself?”
I assessed him for the space of a breath. Long inhale. Long exhale. Eyes a shade too shiny. High cheekbones pinked from the improved circulation lent him by the scotch. He was just lubed enough to slip up and tell me something useful. I took a sip of my water, hoping he hadn’t noticed the slight tremor in my hand. “Tell me,” I said. “From the beginning.”
“Story time, then. Are we comfy? Cozy?”
Cozy, yes. Comfy, no. The lighting was all wrong, for one thing. Romantically dim and ambient. Much better suited to the kind of underneath-the-table shenanigans that left movie characters shouting for the check rather than learning potentially damning secrets. Also, it made Valentine’s cheekbones and jaw look especially rough and masculine, which helped me focus on the task at hand not at all.
“Once upon a time there was a man named Valentine.”
“He sounds like a dick.”
“He was,” Valentine said, his expression grave. “Like his father before him. And when Valentine was still not much more than a boy, his dick father liked to spend his days not going to work and his nights drinking and cheating on his wife.”
“Wait, are you sure we’re not talking about Valentine himself? Because these guys sound eerily similar.”
“I’m positive,” he said, giving me the full smolder of his hooded eyes. “Valentine is much, much worse.”
“I see.”
“Now Valentine’s father, let’s call him Archie, for sake of clarity—”
“Wait a minute. Your father’s name was also Archard Everett Valentine? Are you a junior?”
“Technically, I’m a third.”
“Just when I thought you couldn’t get any more insufferable . . .”
“Insufferable is interrupting a story you asked to hear.” He slid an ice cube out of his drink and collected it with an unnatural twist of his tongue. “Where were we?”
“Archie.”
“Yes. Archie. Archie liked to gamble when he wasn’t drinking and whoring, so there were all kinds of bookies and loan sharks dropping by the house. Well, young Valentine got to be pretty good friends with some of them, and they told him how he could make some money running errands for an associate of theirs. Valentine knew how hard his mother worked and thought maybe if he could bring in some money of his own, she wouldn’t have to. So he agreed to meet with one of these associates.”
Here, he paused to slurp down the last of his liquid courage. No sooner had the bottom of the glass hit the table than the server came by to replace it with a fresh one. No wonder everyone around here was so goddamned nice. They were probably all loaded to the neck.
If he kept going at this rate, I was going to have to get both of us home.
“Well, young Valentine did such a good job for the first associate that he got introduced to another associate, and another, until by the time he was ready to graduate from high school, he had enough money to help his mother leave his father for good.”
“Touching,” I said. “When do we get to the part about Valentine owning my mother’s house?” Jesus. Now he had me talking about him in the third person.
“So impatient.” The booze began to work on his smile, loosening it like a tie. “I wonder if you’re this eager in all your endeavors.”
“You mean you’re wondering if I’m as eager for cock as I am for answers? Or is this just that vague sexual hinting thing you do when you’re trying to distract people?”
“Yes,” he said. One answer for two questions.
“Keep wondering. Can we move this story along, Aesop?”
Valentine picked up his drink and swirled it, ice clinking against the sides of his glass. “By the time Valentine graduated from high school, certain people had gotten used to him running their errands and weren’t all that eager to let him stop, so they offered him even more money to do even more things.”
“Like break into houses and steal shit?”
His forehead creased as his dark brows pushed together. “Have you heard this story before?”
If pressed, I might have had to admit that drunk Valentine was just the tiniest bit adorable. Luckily, no one was pressing. “No, but I talked to your buddy Jeremy yesterday. He acquainted Sam and me with some of the finer points of your career as a petty criminal.”
“Sam?”
“Sam Shook. Of Dawes, Flickner, and Shook.”
“Ohhh. That Sam. Good guy. He’s my divorce lawyer.”
“I did?” He was squinting now, maybe to try and press the two or three of me he had to be seeing into one solid image.
“Jesus, Valentine. Are you going to be able to hold it together to finish this story or what?”
“I’m good,” he said, reaching for and missing his drink, which I’d quietly slid away from him. “What was I saying?”
“You were talking about your enterprising career as an up-and-coming b-and-e artist?”
“Right. It started with the houses. Figuring out ways to get in without anyone knowing we’d gotten in. Small ones. Then bigger ones. Then it was the businesses. Mom-and-pop shops. Then the ones with security systems. Before long, Valentine earned a reputation as a guy who could figure out how to get into all kinds of places just by looking at the building schematics.”
“Your interest in architecture is suddenly making more sense.” I took a sip of his scotch instead of my water, the amber liquid seeming a hell of a lot more interesting at the moment.
“Soon, Valentine’s reputation caught the attention of one very powerful man with a reputation of his own.”
“Better than magically getting himself into buildings?”
“Much. This man had a reputation for making people he didn’t like disappear.”
An inexplicable chill traveled up my arms despite Valentine’s miming a poof with his fingers.
“And what did he want?”
“Same thing they all wanted. For Valentine to get him into a place he wasn’t supposed to be to get something he wasn’t supposed to have.”
“And you did it?”
Valentine’s face screwed itself up in a look of boyish exasperation. “You did hear the part where I said this man had a reputation for making people disappear, right?”
“So, you got the man into the place . . . ,” I said, not wanting him to lose track of his story once again.
“Have you ever heard the saying ‘be careful what you’re willing to do well, because then people will want you to do it all the time’?”
“I have.” In truth, this very saying had contributed in no small way to my dire commitment to being an underachiever when it came to skills useful to other humans.
“Well, this man wanted Valentine to recreate his little trick again and again. And each time, for a bigger score. He wasn’t happy with just middle-range businesses anymore. He wanted Valentine to get him into banks. Into government buildings. But see, the feds didn’t like how this man was getting into banks and government buildings.”
Feds.
If cops had been a dirty word in our home growing up, feds had been the equivalent of an unforgivable curse. The kind of thing you’d say before you spit through forked fingers.
“But as much as they didn’t like this man getting into banks and government buildings, they liked the man’s ability to make people disappear even less.”
“Understandable.”
“The trouble with building a case against a man who can make people disappear is—”
“That no one is willing to testify against him.” Three years of memorizing precedence cases and reviewing the outcome of complicated criminal defense strategies had helped me foresee this particular twist. “They offered immunity?”
“They offered immunity,” he confirmed. “But the people closest to the man knew what he liked to do to people who displeased him. So even with the offer of immunity, only one person was willing to turn state’s evidence and testify against him.”
“And young Valentine was that person?” A guess, but a decent one, I thought.
“Yes.” Valentine, who had been swimming in the depths of memory, surfaced to pin me with the intensity of that green-eyed gaze. “So I testified. My criminal record was expunged. But the one thing I had really wanted, the feds were unable to deliver.”
“An endless supply of hookers and coke?” My ill-timed joke failed to draw his usual smirk.
“Safety,” he said. “Safety from the network of associates I betrayed when I testified.”
“But what about the witness protection program? Couldn’t they—”
“They found me anyway. Every. Single. Time. A new place. A new name. A new start. It didn’t matter.” He stared at the candle’s refracted flame in his cut-crystal glass, making it dance around the rim as he swirled the contents.
Signs I had attributed to a life lived in excess screamed at me anew. His red-rimmed eyes. The hollows beneath them. In the same face I had seen so many times now, I read new volumes of pain. The aftermath of too many years lived hand in hand with fear.
“I got tired of running,” he said. “Tired of hiding. So I got creative. I started researching different ways to protect myself. Word got out after a while. And soon, different people started to seek me out.”
“What kind of people?”
“People whom the system had failed, generally. People whom the witness protection program couldn’t protect. People like your mother.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Mom and I used to do puzzles.
When the nightmares were the worst, she’d let me crawl into bed with her. After I was good and snuggled in, she’d drag the biggest cookie sheet from the kitchen and set it on the bedspread between us. Together we’d pick pieces from the upended puzzle carton until daylight bled through the blinds and I could finally sleep.
Me? I’d always gone straight for the pieces in the center. Those with the brightest colors or most recognizable shapes.
Not Mom.
Mom patiently sorted through the box until she located each and every piece with a straight edge. Then, meticulously, she assembled the border around whichever random section I happened to be laboring over.
You have to see the big picture before you can understand its parts, Janey.
The big picture.
Valentine had sketched the border for me, and now the pieces began falling faster, clicking into place.
The frenetic energy that had driven us state to state. House to house. The reason why my mother would have done her best to erase all evidence of her existence. In order to protect mine. The nightmares. The memory of my mother’s screams. Her insistence that I know how to defend myself. How to shoot a gun. How to disappear. How to hide.
My entire life. Every word she had ever said.
All to protect me. Not from everyone, but from someone.
I forgot how to breathe.
How to speak.
So many words I’d learned in the course of a lifetime. Plenty to form the million questions battering my brain. And yet, I sat there saying nothing. My face going numb and my fingers turning cold and my stomach tightening into a little ball directly below my heart.
And my heart.
My stupid, foolish heart began bleeding out wishes.
I wish I were at home, with my head in my mother’s lap, her fingers sliding through my hair. I wish the goose bumps on my scalp had been put there by her.
I wish Carla Malfi’s face didn’t appear on the backs of my eyelids every time I blink.
I wish.
“Who?” I asked. “Who was my mother running from?”
Some steel doors slid shut behind Valentine’s eyes. “That’s a question you’ll have to ask her. It’s not my place to say.”
The pain in my chest flamed into anger, settling low in my belly. “And how am I supposed to do that? She’s gone! Or have you been too busy swilling booze and boffing whores that you hadn’t noticed?”
“Yes.” Valentine smoothed the crease in his linen napkin, bringing it to a precise 90-degree angle with the silver-embossed placemat. “She’s gone. And the way I see it, she’s gone for one of two reasons. Because of her own secrets, or because of someone else’s. We won’t find out which until we know what she knew. Since I obviously can’t prevent you from trying to find out what that was . . .” He paused, glancing at the chair formerly occupied by Shepard. “I will
tell you what I know, and we’ll go from there. Fair?”
“Fair,” I said.
“Your mother reached out to me a few years ago—”
“Years?” My chair scraped the parquet floor as I leaned across the table. “You’ve been protecting my mother for years?”
“This will go a lot faster if you don’t persist in interrupting me. Do you think we could try that?”
“Maybe.” I sat back in my chair and tucked my hands beneath my thighs. “I make no promises.”
Valentine took a deep breath and began again. “Protecting is the wrong word.”
“It was your word,” I pointed out.
A muscle tightened in Valentine’s jaw.
“Sorry,” I said. “Go on.”
“Protecting makes me sound like some noble, steed-riding knight. I am not.”
“I’ll say,” I snorted. When his eyebrow ascended his forehead, I bit my lower lip. “My apologies. I thought I said that in my head.”
“As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a businessman. Anyone who comes to me needing my services must provide value in return. Sometimes that value is a simple cash transaction. Sometimes not. Your mother was a not.”
I nodded my silent encouragement for him to continue.
“When you decided to come here for law school, she knew you couldn’t afford to pick up and move again halfway through. As your mother most likely taught you, there are lots of ways to track people down, and most of them begin with where you call home. Creature comforts. Cell phones. Car registration. Utilities. She needed these, but needed them not traceable back to her.”
I raised my hand and waited.
The ghost of a smile haunted one corner of Valentine’s mouth. “Yes, Jane.”
“Explain something to me?”
“If I can.”
“Why is it that you help other people disappear, but you yourself are on every damn tabloid from here to Vegas? I mean, even with the security detail, wouldn’t it be harder for the people who want you dead to find you if you weren’t a gajillionaire architect who’s constantly in the public eye? You’re not exactly making yourself a difficult target.”
“The way I see it, there are two ways to keep yourself from getting killed.” He held up two fingers bunny-ear style by way of a visual aid. “Make sure no one knows where you are, or make sure everyone does. Your mother chose the former. I chose the latter.”
Private Lies (Jane Avery Mysteries Book 1) Page 21
