Tote Bags and Toe Tags

by Dorothy Howell

  “Haley Randolph?” the guy asked, looking at me.

  A few of the men standing in the lobby gave him the eye also.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “This is from Ty,” he announced. He picked up a guitar from a case lying on the floor, and started singing “Close to You.”

  What the heck?

  He sang—loud.

  He played his guitar—loud.

  All the men in the lobby stopped and stared. The FedEx guy turned to look. Camille leaned across the reception desk to get a better view.

  Oh my God, what was this guy doing?

  Heat swept up my back—and not because he looked so hot.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw three more men venture out of their offices down the hallway and stare.

  Tuxedo guy kept singing.

  I felt my cheeks turn red and—and, oh, jeez, what if I perspired in my new suit?

  The song dragged on with tuxedo guy belting out lyrics about birds showing up, stars crashing down, moon dust and starlight—or something. I don’t know, it was all too humiliating to comprehend.

  Finally—thank God—the song ended. The singer whipped a single red rose from inside his guitar case and presented it to me with a flourish.

  “Ty wants you to know he’s thinking of you,” he said.

  “Great,” I mumbled, then snatched the rose from his hand and hurried back to my office.

  When I got there, I dashed inside and slammed the door, ready to—oh, jeez, not again.

  A large arrangement of red roses sat on my desk, wedged between the white and yellow bouquets Ty had already sent. Good grief, my office was starting to look like a mortuary.

  I shoved the single red rose into the bouquet and plopped down at my desk. The whole incident had been more embarrassing than anything. I knew Ty meant well, but, jeez, couldn’t he do something more private?

  I knew I should call and thank him for the flowers and the singer, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it yet. Then my office door burst open and I wished I had.

  Darth Vader—I mean Ruth—stomped over to my desk.

  “I received your memo on the memorial service,” she said, and pursed her lips as if she’d just tasted something bad. “It is adequate—barely.”

  Before I’d left for lunch, I’d taken a copy to her office. She was gone so I had left it on her desk. I’d thought about e-mailing it to her, but even though I’d heard she had a laptop, I wasn’t sure she used it all that often. When I saw her desk I figured I’d done the right thing. No sign of the laptop, but I did see Mr. Dempsey, who gave me triple-stink-eye, like he thought I might steal something.

  Now, with Ruth being such a snot, I wished I’d held onto it a little longer.

  “Since getting this information was so difficult,” Ruth said, “I’m going to have to follow up more closely with you on Mr. Dempsey’s event.”

  Mr. Dempsey was having an event?

  “Absolutely nothing can be left to chance,” Ruth declared. “Every aspect of the event must be carefully orchestrated. It is the premier moment in Mr. Dempsey’s entire career and must be treated as such.”

  Oh, crap. His retirement party. I’d forgotten all about it.

  No way was I telling Ruth that, though.

  Instantly I channeled my mom—thank goodness she’s occasionally useful for something—and shifted to you-can’t-out-bitch-me mode.

  “First of all, Ruth,” I said, “you aren’t my supervisor, so you have no business insinuating yourself into anything corporate events does.”

  Her eyes bulged and her face turned red.

  “Second of all,” I went on, “everything involving Mr. Dempsey’s retirement party is being handled with the care and attention it deserves. When—and if—I require anything from you, I will let you know.”

  Ruth narrowed her eyes at me and squeezed her lips so tight I thought her face might implode—which, by the way, would have improved her looks considerably.

  “See that you do,” she hissed, then stomped out of my office.

  I collapsed in my chair.

  Oh my God. That stupid retirement party. How was I going to pull it off? I had no idea what Constance had or hadn’t done because everything was still locked in her office, sealed shut by the LAPD crime scene tape.

  Oh, crap.

  CHAPTER 19

  “Haley? Haley Randolph?”

  I looked up from my desk and saw a guy in a sharp looking suit standing in my doorway. I put him at late twenties, maybe thirty already, tall, with dark hair spiked up above a Homer Simpson forehead.

  My Holt’s training kicked in and I wanted to bolt for the door, but he was blocking the way, trapping me in my own office.

  I hate it when that happens.

  “Yes,” I mumbled.

  “Haley! Oh, good gracious! I heard the singer mention your name. It’s so great to meet you—finally!” He rushed toward me, his hand outstretched. “I’m Jerry Spicer. Sarah’s friend.”

  Thank goodness. Somebody who was genuinely friendly.

  I rose from my chair and shook his hand.

  “You’re Sarah Covington’s friend,” I realized. “You got me the job here.”

  He modestly waved away my words. “Oh, shoot. All I did was recommend you to H.R. after Sarah contacted me. Your qualifications got you the job!”

  “Well, thank you,” I said.

  “I can’t believe they brought you on board so quickly,” Jerry said. He chuckled. “You’re leading the force, my dear. Forging ahead, changing the face of Dempsey Rowland—which it desperately needs, of course.”

  “Wow, I didn’t know I was doing all of that,” I said.

  “You sure are. Out with the old, in with the new—or the young, I should say,” he declared. “And, listen, don’t you give a thought to all those lawsuits. All that’s coming to an end now. Everybody says so.”

  “Lawsuits?” I asked.

  Jerry waved away my words. “Hey, listen. The company is finally moving into the twenty-first century. With all these old folks heading for retirement, we will actually have a staff that can send an e-mail—with an attachment!”

  Jerry laughed at his joke and I laughed, too. Not a lot of funny moments here at Dempsey Rowland.

  But I doubted the staff here at Dempsey Rowland was quite that bad with computers. Sure, many of the women I’d seen here were older. While I doubted many of them were downloading iTunes or checking out You Tube, I was sure they were all comfortable enough with the technology it took to do their jobs.

  “I’ve got to run,” Jerry said. “We’ll have lunch sometime. Promise.”

  Thanks to Jerry, I skated through the afternoon in a pretty good mood. I ordered cakes and balloons for next week’s birthday club recipients, and made reservations for three upcoming luncheons. Since I was in such a generous frame of mind, I decided the contracting department ought to have lunch on Dempsey Rowland tomorrow, and since I hoped to one day work over there, I figured it wouldn’t do any harm to ingratiate myself to them. I sent out an e-mail announcing the luncheon, then phoned the deli down on 8th Street and ordered sandwich trays, salads, drinks, and three kinds of desserts.

  Yeah, okay, all of that was good for office morale, team spirit, and the other b.s. management was always yammering on about. But the real reason I did all that was because I didn’t want to come out of my office.

  What if somebody saw me and asked about the singing tuxedo guy Ty had sent? I just didn’t want to get into it with anyone. Honestly, it wasn’t the type of incident I wanted to have define my role here at Dempsey Rowland.

  Not that I didn’t appreciate Ty’s efforts, of course. But still.

  I sat at my desk breathing in the scent of three dozen roses, the refrain from “Close to You” still stuck in my head.

  Ty claimed he would devote himself to being the kind of boyfriend I wanted, the kind I deserved. Did he really think flowers and a singer were me?

  Something else kept rattlin
g around in my head. Lawsuits.

  Jerry had mentioned them earlier, so had Dale. So what was going on that the company kept getting sued?

  A lot of big companies were the target of frivolous lawsuits. It kept law firms in business. But from what I’d heard, this seemed like more than your usual petty grievances.

  There was one way to find out what was going on. From my days at Pike Warner, I knew attorneys had access to every lawsuit that had ever been filed. Just why such a database existed, I didn’t know. Maybe it was a we’re-already-suing-so-back-off warning, or it could have been a hey-the-more-the-merrier-let’s-all-pile-on sort of thing.

  Jack Bishop could find out for me. Jeez, I owed him so many favors now. I wondered when he’d expect me to repay him.

  I mean that in the most platonic way, of course.

  I pulled out my cell phone and called him. He answered on the first ring.

  “You need a favor,” Jack said.

  I heard soft music and highway noise in the background and figured he was in his Land Rover somewhere, doing something way cooler than planning luncheons and buying birthday club balloons.

  “So you’re a mind reader now?” I asked.

  “Good thing you’re not,” he said, using his Barry White voice.

  A little tremor went through me. My toes curled.

  “I’ll catch up with you later,” Jack said, using his business voice once again.

  “Okay, I’ll be at the—”

  “I’ll find you,” Jack said, and hung up.

  I sat there for another minute holding my phone—which seemed to have heated up a few thousand degrees or something—then glanced at my watch. It was 4:45.

  Close enough.

  I got my purse and left.

  Visions of the Temptress bag danced in my head as I got off the elevator in the parking garage and headed for my car.

  Thanks to my disregard for the established hours of operation at Dempsey Rowland—which I’m sure were flexible; well, kind of flexible—I could get to Nordstrom at The Grove ahead of everyone else ending their workday and get the jump on those Temptress totes waiting in their stock room to be claimed.

  Yes, I knew they were intended for other women higher up on the waiting list than me. Yes, I knew I should wait my turn. And, yes, I knew that would be the decent thing to do.

  But it wasn’t going to happen.

  If Dale could get a Temptress bag, so could I.

  As I got in my car, I noticed that I wasn’t the only one slipping away a little early today. About a dozen parking spaces down, I saw Max Corwin get into his minivan. Not a flashy ride, but I figured he needed the seats for all those kids of his.

  I backed out of the space and followed Max out of the garage.

  Of course, the sales clerks at Nordstrom were highly trained and excellent at their jobs. For me to waltz into their handbag department and lay claim to a Temptress would take some finesse on my part.

  I’m not great at finesse.

  But I’m great at confrontation and, really, most of the time that worked better than finesse.

  As I approached the freeway entrance, I noticed that Max’s blue minivan was a couple of cars ahead of me. I intended to pull up alongside of him, give him a little toot and a wave, and be gone.

  But Max took the northbound entrance ramp, which was odd. He should have headed south to get to his home in El Segundo. Maybe he had a doctor’s appointment or something equally dull.

  Tina flashed in my mind. I’d thought she was seeing family or shopping when I’d followed her down the 5, then turned back. Maybe that’s exactly what she’d been doing, but since she’d lied to me about spending her weekend at home with sick kids, it had made me suspicious.

  Immediately I shifted into private detective mode, swung onto the northbound freeway entrance, and followed Max.

  Traffic was bumper-to-bumper, creeping along at the usual L.A. afternoon slow crawl. I kept thinking Max would exit the freeway at any moment, but he kept going, putting The Grove, Nordstrom, and the soon-to-be-mine Temptress bag farther behind me. Following him was really boring—maybe I should limit tailing a suspect to twisting mountain roads in a vintage Mustang Shelby, somehow—but I didn’t want to give up, as I had with Tina.

  Yet this hardly needed my full concentration. I plugged in my Bluetooth and called Marcie.

  “You’re not going to believe what Ty did,” I blurted out as soon as she answered.

  Marcie didn’t even respond. She knew there was no reason to, as a best friend would.

  “He sent a guy in a tuxedo to the office today who played the guitar and sang ‘Close to You’ to me,” I said.

  “He did—what?”

  “In the lobby. In front of dozens of people,” I said.

  “That sappy old Carpenters’ song?” she asked. “Not good.”

  “And Ty’s already sent me three huge bouquets of roses,” I said. “My office looks like the American Idol green room.”

  “Sounds like he’s trying to be a good boyfriend,” Marcie said, sounding reasonable.

  I hate it when other people are reasonable.

  “Yes, I know,” I agreed. “But what on earth made Ty think I’d want my boyfriend to do this kind of thing?”

  “Did you tell him?” she asked.

  Okay, now she’d completely lost me.

  “Tell him what?” I asked.

  “Did you tell Ty what kind of boyfriend you want?”

  “Well—” I stopped, realizing she was right.

  I hate it when other people are right.

  “Ty never asked,” I told her. “He just assumed he already knew.”

  “You still should have told him, Haley, a long time ago,” Marcie said.

  Okay, now she was starting to get on my nerves.

  “You have to admit,” Marcie said, “that you seldom really talk to Ty. You never tell him what’s going on with you.”

  Yeah, now I was really irritated.

  “You should ask yourself why that is,” Marcie said. “I mean, if you and Ty are meant to be together, like you think you are, why wouldn’t you tell him everything that’s going on with you? He should be the first one you tell. The one you run to when things go bad.”

  Marcie was making way too much sense at the moment.

  “Your call is breaking up,” I said to Marcie. I killed the connection and yanked the Bluetooth out of my ear.

  I know that was a crappy thing to do, but, jeez, you call a friend for a little sympathy and she ends up telling you the truth—which was the very last thing I was prepared for.

  I changed lanes, just to distract myself from my own thoughts, and saw that Max’s minivan was about four cars ahead of me. No way would he get out of my sight, with traffic chugging along at jogging speed.

  I switched on the radio and tried to sing along with Madonna’s “Material Girl,” but even that couldn’t keep me distracted from my own thoughts.

  My chest felt heavy—kind of like when someone dies—and tears threatened. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, Marcie was right—Marcie was almost always right. Ty and I seldom talked—really talked. I kept things from him. I didn’t share much of anything more than my desire for the latest handbag. I never ran to him when I was upset. Most of the time I even forgot to tell him when something good happened.

  This definitely said something about our relationship. But what?

  Well, really I knew what.

  Ahead of me, Max started working his way over to the right-hand lane so I did the same. I figured his exit was coming up. I followed as we transitioned to the westbound 118. Traffic lightened up a bit as we headed toward Simi Valley.

  My spirits lifted a little when I followed Max onto the Tampa Avenue off ramp and turned left, because I knew the Northridge mall was nearby.

  Maybe Max was going shopping. Maybe he intended to do nothing more incriminating than hit a couple of stores, then go home. That meant I could do a little shopping myself—plus check out
Macy’s for a Temptress.

  But Max turned right into a residential neighborhood before we got to the mall.

  Darn. I hate it when that happens.

  At this point, I figured Max was just visiting a friend or relative and the chances of me pulling up to the place and seeing evidence of Violet’s murder lying on the lawn were pretty slim. Still, I’d come this far so I stuck with it.

  A couple of blocks later, Max hung a left, then swung into the driveway of a house halfway down the block. The minivan paused, then the garage door rolled up. Max pulled inside. The door came down.

  Okay, that was weird.

  My wanna-be private detective instincts kicked into high gear. I drove slowly past the house. At the corner, I hung a U and drove back, then pulled against the curb on the opposite side of the street.

  The house Max had entered looked just like all the other homes here. The neighborhood was well established, the houses probably thirty years old, the kind of place where couples hunkered for the long haul of raising their kids. SUVs and minivans lined the street and filled driveways. Bikes, tricycles, and toys were scattered across the front lawns.

  I watched the windows, thinking maybe I could spot Max or someone else and figure out what was going on there. But the blinds were closed so I figured he’d gone into the kitchen on the back of the—

  Wait a minute.

  Hanging by the front door was one of those wooden signs with the names of the family members carved into it. I’d seen one of those before, just recently, I realized. It was hanging by the front door of Max’s house in El Segundo. This one looked just like it except that the names were different.

  I locked my gaze onto the sign. The names read Max, Melanie, Misty, Mace, Miles.

  I fell back in my seat, trying desperately to come up with some reasonable explanation. But I couldn’t. All I could figure was that—oh my God—Max had two families.

  That sure as heck was a good reason to change jobs every year or so, as Detective Shuman had told me Max had done. It was one whale of a reason to be concerned about a background investigation.