by Joanne Fluke
“Of course,” she promised. “I’ll get the message to him right away.”
Not two minutes after I hung up, the phone rang.
Wow, that was fast. Miss Perky really had gotten the message to him right away.
I answered it eagerly.
“Mr. Roberts?”
“No, this is not Mr. Roberts,” a no-nonsense woman replied. “Am I speaking with Jaine Austen?”
“Yes.”
“This is Elizabeth Drake from Century National Insurance Fraud Unit.”
Gulp. I smelled trouble ahead.
“Ms. Austen, we received a call from a Mrs. Libby Brecker, inquiring about a Century National investigator named Jaine Austen.”
Damn that Libby.
“The only Jaine Austen we have on our records is you, and you’re a customer.”
“A loyal customer, too,” I hastened to assure her.
“Be that as it may, I must insist that you cease posing as a Century National representative or we shall be forced to terminate your policy.”
After much groveling and promising to behave myself, I finally got off the phone.
Oh, well. It served me right for trying to pawn off my insurance card on Libby. I should’ve known that a woman who spent her days Windexing reindeer noses would turn out to be a sniveling tattletale.
Somewhat shaken from my brush with the formidable Ms. Drake, I settled down on my sofa to work on my Christmas cards while I waited for Peter Roberts to return my call.
By the time I’d XOXOXO’d my way through my address book at five P.M., I still hadn’t heard from him.
It wasn’t until later that night when Prozac and I were in bed watching Roman Holiday (Prozac has a thing for Gregory Peck), that he finally called.
I launched into my theory about Garth’s roof being sabotaged and asked him if he had any idea who might have done it. I wasn’t the least bit surprised to learn he had no idea, none whatsoever.
But then I got down to why I was really calling.
“By the way,” I said, trying to sound casual, “I hear that you and Mr. Janken were on the verge of dissolving your partnership.”
“As a matter of fact, we were. We’d been together fifteen years, and we decided it was time to call it a day. It was an amicable parting of the ways.” Accent on the amicable. “Garth and I were very good friends.”
He sounded about as believable as a congressman running for office.
“That’s not what I heard. I heard your break-up was pretty ugly.”
“Whoever told you that was wrong,” he said, daggers in his voice. “Dead wrong.”
And then he did a little casual questioning of his own.
“My secretary tells me you’re an insurance investigator. Exactly who do you work for?”
“Oh, no,” I said, eager to stay out of the clutches of the Century National Fraud Unit. “Your secretary must’ve misunderstood. I’m a private investigator.”
“Is that so? Got a license?”
“Of course,” I lied, and got off the phone before he could grill me any further.
That was no help at all. Peter Roberts would go to his grave, or possibly mine, insisting that he and Garth Janken were best buds. How the heck was I going to find out the truth behind their split up?
And then I remembered his perky secretary, and thought of an idea.
Chapter Nine
The next afternoon I got gussied up in a bizgal pantsuit I keep around for job interviews and IRS audits, and headed downtown to pay a little visit to Peter Roberts’s secretary.
Peter’s office was in a glass-and-steel high rise right off the freeway. A glance at the directory in the lobby told me the place was a veritable beehive of attorneys.
I took the elevator up to the twelfth floor and made my way down the hallway to The Law Offices of Janken and Roberts. I was happy to see that Peter hadn’t gotten around to taking Garth’s name down from the door. It would make it that much easier to bring it up in conversation.
I checked my watch. Ten of five. Right on schedule.
Launching Phase One of my plan, I took a deep breath and poked my head in the door. Peter’s secretary, a pert Latina in her early twenties, sat at her computer, biting her lower lip in concentration as her fingers flew over the keyboard.
“Oh, hi!” she grinned, when she noticed me. I was relieved to see that she was as friendly in person as she had been over the phone. “I’m afraid Mr. Roberts isn’t in right now. He’s away in court all week.”
Just what I’d been counting on.
“Actually, I wanted to talk to you.”
“Me?”
“Yes, I just had a job interview down the hall and I’m wondering if you can tell me what it’s like working here in the building. I’m trying to scope the place out before I make a decision.”
“No problem,” she said, waving me in. “Give me a sec and I’ll be right with you. I was just finishing up for the day.”
Exactly why I’d waited till late afternoon to drop by.
I sat down across from her, gazing enviously at her creamy olive skin and eyelashes thick as velvet. I really had to start moisturizing more often.
“Finito!” She closed out her program with a flourish and swiveled to face me.
“So which attorney did you interview with?”
“Allison Whittaker,” I said, reeling off a name I’d seen on one of the offices down the hall. “Of Whitttaker and Wertz.”
Her lush lashes blinked in surprise.
“Allison’s secretary is leaving? Betty?”
“Yes, Betty,” I nodded.
“I wonder why she didn’t tell me. I guess her husband must’ve landed that job in Bakersfield.
“Hold on a sec,” she said, reaching for the phone. “I’m gonna call Betty and congratulate her.”
Acck. This was definitely not part of my plan.
“You can’t do that!” I cried.
“Why?”
“Um. Because Betty just went home. I saw her get on the elevator.”
“Oh, well,” she shrugged. “I’ll talk to her tomorrow.”
Much to my relief, she put down the receiver and began filling me in on the doings at Whittaker and Wertz.
“You’ll like working for Ms. Whittaker. Once in a while she’ll ask you to pick up her dry cleaning, but that’s about as bad as it gets. Watch out for Wertz, though. Their office is known around here as Whittaker and Flirts. The man comes on to all the secretaries. Which is pretty nauseating, considering he has a wife and three kids and a gut the size of the Goodyear Blimp. He made a pass at me my first day on the job. My boyfriend was furious when he found out. Correction. I should say, my fiancé. Hector and I just got engaged last month.”
She thrust out her left hand, beaming with pride. A tiny diamond sparkled on her wedding finger.
“How lovely,” I cooed.
“It’s a whole half-carat. I told Hector I didn’t need a real diamond. I said, Hector, cubic zirconia is good enough. But he insisted. Nothing but the best for my Sylvia, that’s what he said. That’s my name, incidentally. Sylvia Alvarez.”
“I’m Charlotte,” I lied, just in case she remembered my name from my earlier phone call. But her mind was miles away from office business.
“Hector and I are getting married in June!” she announced proudly.
“How wonderful. Congratulations.”
“Hey, let me ask you something.” She opened her desk drawer and pulled out a copy of Modern Bride.
“Which dress do you like better?” she asked, pointing first to a picture of an elegant Vera Wangish A-line and then to a frilly traditional nipped-at-the-waist model.
“They’re both really nice.”
“But if you had to choose.”
“I guess I’d go with the A-line.”
“Really?” Her brow furrowed in doubt. “I like the clean lines, but I’ve always dreamed of getting married in a Cinderella dress.”
“With a figure like yo
urs, you’re bound to look great in either one.”
A little shameless flattery couldn’t hurt. And besides, I wasn’t lying. The fattest part of her body were her eyelashes.
“You don’t think I need to go on a diet?”
Why do the skinny ones always want to go on a diet?
“Absolutely not,” I assured her. “You look amazing.” And then I added, in what I must confess was a brilliant segue: “I guess you stay thin working for two attorneys. They must keep you hopping. What are they like, anyway?”
“Oh, I only work for Mr. Roberts. Mr. Janken is deceased.” She lowered her voice to a confidential whisper. “A horrible accident. He fell off his roof putting up Christmas decorations! Did you ever hear of anything so gruesome? I told my father, ‘Papi, don’t you dare put Christmas lights on the roof this year. You could fall and hurt yourself. A tree in the window is good enough.’”
It looked like little Sylvia was a bit of a chatterbox. Now all I had to do was get her to chatter about Garth and Peter.
“What about Mr. Roberts? What’s he like?”
And just like that, an invisible screen slammed down between us.
“Oh, he’s a very nice gentleman,” she said, stiffly.
Although perfectly willing to share the details of her wedding and her parents’ Christmas decorations, she wasn’t about to badmouth her boss, not yet, not until she knew me better. Clearly I’d have to win her trust.
Which was where Phase Two of my plan went into effect.
“So,” I asked. “Is there a place to have lunch here in the building?”
“Oh, sure. There’s a coffee shop downstairs. The food’s pretty good.”
“Any place to unwind after work?”
“There’s The Legal Eagle, right next door. They have a fantastic happy hour. People from the building go there all the time.”
Just what I wanted to hear.
“I love their buffalo chicken wings. I’ve tried to make them at home, but I can never get the spices right. I think I’m adding too much cumin. Or maybe it’s chili powder. I always get the ‘c’ spices confused.”
“Hey,” I said, as if I’d just thought of it on the spur of the moment. “Want to go there right now? I’m sort of wiped out from that interview and I could really use a margarita.”
“I don’t know,” she hesitated. “I really should get home.”
“My treat. For helping me out.”
She flashed me another grin. “Okay, what the heck? Hector’s working late tonight anyway.”
She locked up the office and off we trotted to The Legal Eagle, Phase Two of my plan now in full swing. With any luck, I’d get Sylvia tootled enough to dish the dirt about Garth and Peter and their “amicable” split up.
Sylvia was right about those buffalo wings. They were scrumptious. Spicy, but not too spicy. I absolutely could not allow myself to eat more than two. Three, tops. Okay, five at the outside.
Happy Hour had just begun when we showed up and the place was doing a brisk business. It was one of those ersatz turn of the century pubs with a massive mahogany bar and mock gaslight sconces on the walls. We managed to snag two seats at the bar, in grabbing distance of the buffalo wings, and I quickly proceeded to order us two frosty margaritas.
I was thrilled to see Sylvia suck hers up like a Hoover.
This was going to be a piece of cake. She’d be tootled in no time, and dishing the dirt with a trowel!
Or so I thought.
She got tootled all right, but all she wanted to talk about was that dratted wedding of hers.
“So do you really like the A-line?” she asked, the minute we were seated.
It took me a minute to realize she was still talking about her wedding dress.
“Oh, yes,” I assured her, “it’s lovely.”
“I’m afraid it’s too plain.”
“Then maybe you should go with the Cinderella dress.”
“I know, but that might be too fussy.”
I took a healthy slug of my margarita. Yes, this was definitely going to be tougher than I thought.
No matter how much I tried to deflect the conversation away from her wedding, she kept coming back to it like a well-trained homing pigeon. I learned every detail of her floral arrangements (violets, to match her bridesmaids’ lilac gowns), her deejay (Hector’s cousin Ricardo, aka “Little Ricky,” who, in case you’re interested, does a dynamite Elvis impersonation), and the cake (an agonizing fifteen minute dissertation on the merits of yellow cake with chocolate cream frosting versus white with strawberry preserves). I thought I’d died and gone to Wedding Planning Hell.
“The thing that’s really got me worried,” she said, starting in on her second margarita, “is Estella.”
“Estella?”
“Hector’s mother. What a witch. I can’t tell you how awful she’s been.”
Oh, yes, she could. And she did. Another excruciating half hour dragged by as I heard each and every one of Estella’s many character flaws.
By now I’d long passed my five-Buffalo-wing limit and was inhaling them faster than the speed of light.
“She’s always criticizing me,” Sylvia whined. “Nothing I ever do is good enough. The first time I cooked dinner for Hector and his parents, I made a roast chicken. Okay, so I was stupid and didn’t know anything about cooking, and I forgot to take out the plastic bag with the liver and gizzards and stuff.
“Well, you’d think the world came to an end. That was three years ago, and to this day, Estella tells anybody she meets about the time I cooked the chicken with the plastic bag inside.”
I tsk-tsked in sympathy, desperately trying to keep my eyelids propped open.
“I just know she’s going to ruin my wedding. Somehow she’ll think of a way to screw things up. I wouldn’t be surprised if she interrupts the ceremony to tell that stupid chicken story.”
“I’m sure she won’t do that.”
“Don’t bet on it,” she said, polishing off her second margarita and signaling the bartender for a third. “The woman is capable of anything. Did I ever tell you about the time I caught her going through my underwear drawer?”
“Yes, I believe you mentioned that about ten minutes ago.”
“Let me tell you, it’s been utter hell to live through.”
And listen to, too.
“At least there’s no stress at your office,” I said, gamely trying to steer the conversation back to Garth and Peter. “Your boss sounds like a really nice guy.”
“He’s okay, I guess,” she said, licking the last of the salt from the rim of her margarita glass. “Although he can be awfully fussy when it comes to his coffee. He swears he can tell the difference between Equal and Sweet ’N Low. Heaven forbid I make a mistake and get him Sweet ’N Low—”
Enough, already! I had to be firm and nip this Artificial Sweetener Tangent in the bud.
“I guess you must really miss Mr. Janken.”
“Are you crazy? He was one nasty S.O.B.”
“Really?” I sat up straight, finally interested in what she had to say.
“Thank goodness I wasn’t his secretary. He ran through them like water. Couldn’t keep one to save his soul. So demanding. He made Estella look like a saint.”
“How did he get along with Mr. Roberts?”
“He didn’t. Peter put up with him for years, but finally he had enough. He wanted to dissolve the partnership. At first Garth didn’t seem to care. But then when he learned that his biggest client was switching his account over to Peter, he hit the roof. Garth stormed into Peter’s office, screaming at the top of his lungs.”
At last—after packing away three margaritas and two $12 shrimp cocktails—she was finally on a roll!
“I was sitting at my desk, and I heard him clear as day: If you think you’re taking The Great Litigator with you, he shouted, you’re crazy!”
“The Great Litigator?”
“That’s what Garth called his client, because the guy was con
stantly suing people. You’re not taking him or anybody else with you, he told Peter. I know what you did back in Ohio, and I’ve got evidence to prove it. I intend to report you to the bar association. And when I do, you’re going to lose your license so fast your head will be spinning.”
“Ohio? What did Peter do in Ohio?”
“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. “Little Ricky called to talk about wedding music then and I got distracted.”
Darn that Little Ricky.
Oh, well. I’d still gotten quite an earful. Garth had been threatening Peter with disbarment. Which sounded like a viable motive for murder to me.
“Gosh, look at the time,” I said, making a big show of checking my watch. “It’s been fun chatting, but I really should be going.”
“Thanks for the margaritas, Charlotte. And the shrimp cocktails. I can’t believe I ordered two of them.”
Neither could I. But I assured her it had been my pleasure and waved to the bartender for the check.
He brought it over with impressive speed, and just when I was stifling a gasp over the total, I heard someone say:
“Hey Sylvia, how’s it going?”
I looked up and saw a tall well-dressed black woman heading toward us.
“Betty!” Sylvia blinked, confused. “What are you doing here? Charlotte said she saw you leaving hours ago.”
Oh, crud. It was Betty, the secretary I was supposed to have met this afternoon.
“Do I know you?” she asked me, puzzled.
“Sure,” Sylvia piped up. “You guys met when Charlotte interviewed for your job today.”
“What are you talking about?” Betty said. “I’m not leaving my job. And I didn’t go home hours ago.”
Uh-oh. My cue to exit.
“Well, see ya round.”
And without any further ado, I slapped fifty bucks on the bar, grabbed a chicken wing for the road, and got the heck out of there.
I drove home, filled with a sense of accomplishment—and enough Buffalo wings to stock a chicken farm.
Thanks to my successful, if costly, rendezvous with Sylvia, I now had a new suspect to add to my list.
