“Let’s get the record straight,” I said, shifting my bag from one shoulder to the other. “No pun intended, of course.”
He laughed anyway. An accommodating guy, Mike Hammerjack.
“The furniture’s great. No problem there, but I have a place of business, and this isn’t it. So in the future, please remember I do not...not...see clients in my home. My phone is unlisted largely for that reason. That means you are trespassing on my privacy. And I don’t like that.”
“Oh, come on—”
“Secondly, I cannot guarantee anything to the men in prison. If possible I’ll be glad to help, but if you’ve made promises—” he looked so taken aback at that, I knew he had, “—I can’t help it. The next time...” He went to speak, but I held up a finger and he stopped. “The next time you need to contact me, call the shop.”
“I hate to see a beautiful lady like you so mad.” He put a hand on my arm.
As if scalded, I jerked it away. “Our acquaintance is strictly business, and that will end if this scene is ever repeated.”
“You’ve got the wrong idea, Mrs. Dunne.”
“No, you have.” I walked away, heart pounding, fully expecting him to do something nasty—leap on my back, knock me to the ground, hit me over the head. But I reached the Audi unscathed and slipped behind the wheel.
Breathing a sigh of relief, I backed out of my slot in the carport, put the car in drive and headed out of the parking lot. Or so I thought. I’d only gone a few feet when coming fast was the panel truck with Tony’s Tiles on the side and Mike Hammerjack at the controls.
With an ear-shattering crash, the truck struck the Audi head-on. The impact whiplashed me backward and then forward. My head struck the windshield with a crunch, and out I went like the proverbial light.
* * *
The next thing I knew, a man sitting beside me on the passenger seat was patting my cheeks and cooing my name. When his hand slid down my arm, I opened my lids to a narrow slit.
A few inches away, Mike, his jaw tight, gazed at me with big, blue eyes.
“Mrs. Dunne, are you all right?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered. I fingered my forehead. A lump the size of Mt. Rushmore had popped out above my left temple. And my right knee hurt more than my head.
Excited voices floated in the air. The crash must have brought out the neighbors. Someone knocked on the driver’s side window. Chip, my next-door neighbor to the rescue. He yanked the door open and peered in, his round face a moon of anxiety.
“Deva, you all right?”
I gave him a cautious nod—even so, the earth tilted on its axis. “Everybody’s asking me that,” I said, trying to convince myself that the world wasn’t spinning overtime.
Chip bent down and glanced across the front seat. “Who are you?” he asked Mike.
“Hammerjack’s the name.”
“You the driver of that truck?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“Well, you did a number on Deva’s car. This is a private lot, not a speedway. How fast were you going?”
“I’m not sure. My foot slipped off the brake. I guess my driving’s a little rusty.”
“That so?” Chip didn’t sound convinced. I might have moaned, for Chip snapped his attention from Mike back to me. “I’m calling 9-1-1.”
“No, please.” I grasped his wrist.
“From the size of that lump, you have a head injury. You need to get to the hospital and have it looked at.”
“Okay, but no ambulance, please. Let’s not turn this into a big deal.”
Chip frowned, then nodded. “It’ll be faster if I don’t argue, so fine, we’ll do it your way. But first I’m calling the NPD and asking for the lieutenant.”
I definitely moaned that time. Not too thrilled about my association with Mike Hammerjack to begin with, Rossi would be less than thrilled over this accident. The last thing I’d wanted to do was add to his worries, but no way around it, I’d done exactly that.
Mike stirred on the seat next to me. “I better move the truck out of the way.”
Too weary suddenly to talk, I leaned back on the headrest and closed my eyes, aware of a deep throbbing at my temple and a worse pain in my knee. Mike’s hot breath fanned my cheek. “I’m real sorry about all this.”
“I know,” I said. Did I? Was he?
“Before I go, can you tell me something?” he said. “Why’s the big guy calling a lieutenant? This isn’t a crime scene.”
I opened my eyes. Mike’s usually cheerful expression had disappeared, replaced with a scared kind of tension.
“Lieutenant Rossi’s my fiancé,” I said.
“Oh my God.” The color drained from Mike’s face. He took my hand and squeezed it. For emphasis, I guess. “Be sure to tell him this was an accident, will you? Or I could end up back in State.”
My eyes flared open. Mike was desperate...but why? Of course the crash was an accident. My heart skipped a beat. Or had he rammed my car on purpose?
The question was too much for my aching head. With Chip’s help, I eased out of the wounded Audi and slowly limped over to the passenger seat of his Malibu.
Chip’s wife, AudreyAnn, in a pink terry robe and fluffy slippers, waited alongside holding a pencil and a piece of paper.
“Get the truck driver’s information,” Chip told her, nodding at Mike. “License, registration and insurance. Then call a towing service for the Audi. I need to get Deva to the ER.”
Chip slid behind the wheel of the Malibu. If he spoke on the drive to the hospital, I didn’t hear him. I dozed—off and on—as we wove through morning traffic to the Naples Community Hospital. When he pulled up at the ER entrance, Rossi stood waiting with a wheelchair, as grim-faced as I’d ever seen him.
As soon as Chip hit the brake, Rossi yanked open the passenger side door.
“You’re conscious,” he said. No hello. No smile.
“Of course.” I left off “barely.”
He leaned farther into the car. “Chip, you took a chance. Why didn’t you call 9-1-1?”
“This was faster,” Chip replied. “It cut out the argument.”
A wry smile lifted Rossi’s lips. “Say no more, my friend. And thank you. I’ll take her in. The ER staff is expecting her.”
“The ER staff is expecting me? What did you do, Rossi, pull rank?”
“You could say that,” he said, helping me into the wheelchair. Chip gave me a farewell buss on the cheek and waved goodbye. Without wasting a minute, Rossi pushed my chair through the automatic doors.
Though the dizziness had settled over me like fog, I did notice the waiting room held only a single man. Satisfied that Rossi wasn’t wheeling me past a roomful of dire emergencies, I relaxed a little, and once inside a curtained cubicle, I lay on the hospital bed with a sigh of gratitude. My head hurt, dammit, and my knee hurt worse. And over and above those concerns another loomed large—a growing realization that the accident should never have happened.
The ER physician, a young resident from the boyish look of him, examined me and ordered a CT scan of my head and an X-ray of my knee. The upshot, several hours later, was that I had suffered a bone bruise on the knee, but despite the blow to the occipital region of my head, no concussion.
A kind of minor miracle, the doc told me. “You have a hard head, lady,” he said, a medical joke with all the freshness of a stale donut.
Still I sent him a grateful smile and went to get out of bed. The spinning started up immediately, and I fell back against the pillow.
“I suggest you go home and rest for the day. See how you feel in the morning before resuming your usual activities.” He paused. “The knee will take a while. Bone bruises are slow to heal. If it bothers you unduly, I suggest you see an orthopedic specialist.”
I sat up slowly and, to my relief, nothing spun in front of my eyes. “I’m so sorry for all this.” The tears I’d been holding in leaked out onto my johnny. “You have enough to do without worrying about me.”
“Worrying about you is my main occupation. The department is a poor second to that,” he said, kissing my wet cheeks then handing me a fistful of tissues. “Also I do double duty as a ladies’ maid.” He opened the bedside stand, lifted out my clothes and held up my bra and panties. “This’ll be a first, putting them on instead of taking them off.”
“Rossi, give me my clothes and go find a nurse. A female one.”
With a chuckle, he did, and a half hour later, I was back at Surfside, stretched out on the living room couch with an ice pack on my knee and a pillow under my head. Where I needed to be was Fern Alley, running my business but, truthfully, I couldn’t have driven downtown nor functioned normally if I had to. So I lay there, outwardly calm and inwardly fuming, while Rossi went next door for the information Mike had given AudreyAnn.
He also went to have a look at the accident site. With my car towed away for repairs and Tony’s truck gone as well, I didn’t see what good it would do.
I should have known Rossi wouldn’t waste his time. Ten minutes later, he returned to my condo looking none too happy.
“The skid marks from that truck are facing in toward the building, not out toward the street. Where the hell did Hammerjack think he was going? There’s no way out of the lot in the direction he was headed. I don’t believe in accidents, Deva. I think the guy may have rammed you on purpose.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Still flat out on the sofa, I answered Rossi’s questions as best I could and watched his face go from grim to grimmer. After serving me a bowl of canned chicken soup, he was determined to find out exactly what had happened and left for Whiskey Lane, to pay a call on Mike at the Hawkins house. And, I suspected, to scare the daylights out of him while he was at it.
I dozed for a while and awoke with the late afternoon sun streaming through my windows. Restored by the nap, I risked getting off the couch to freshen up. My head ached, but the dizziness had disappeared. The knee was another story. It throbbed as badly as earlier. I hobbled out to the kitchen, put the thawed ice pack in the freezer and took out a bag of frozen peas—Rossi hated them anyway—to lay on the knee.
On the way back to the couch, I plucked my tote off a club chair. At least I could make a few calls and not waste the entire day.
Lee assured me all was well at the shop, which made me feel happy and obsolete at the same time. Actually gratitude quickly took over. I was lucky to have someone as reliable and capable as Lee helping me run the business. She deserved to be rewarded for all she did, and the same thought I’d had for a while popped up again: I should offer her a partnership in the business. A junior partnership to begin with and gradually as her design skills grew, make her a full partner with a client list of her own. Then we could hire someone to work on the floor and keep the shop...Dunne & St. James Interiors...open without interruption. It was a good idea, one that lifted my spirits.
They stayed elated, too, until I called You’ve Been Framed and spoke to Jane Walsh.
“Naomi’s not in today,” she said, “and I don’t know whether she’ll return.”
“How is she, Jane, really? I’m worried about her. She didn’t look well the other day.”
Jane cleared her throat as if weighing what she could or couldn’t tell me, then came out with a shocker: “She’s been given six months.”
“Oh.” I slumped farther down on the sofa. The peas fell off my knee, but I didn’t care. “I’m so sorry. Her lungs?”
“Yes. She said if you called to tell you she wants to talk about some letters of yours. Said it was important. Wait a minute, I have her home phone number around here somewhere.” A thump as the phone hit the desk.
While she searched, I scrambled in my tote for a pen and a scrap of paper. She came back on the line, gave me the number and said, “Mum’s the word on the six months, okay?”
“I won’t say a thing, I promise. Thanks for trusting me with the truth.”
“No problem.” Except, of course, there was.
I took a deep, reinforcing gulp of air and rang Naomi’s number.
Instead of a hello, she answered with a cough.
“Hi, girlfriend,” I said, when she caught her breath.
“Deva?” she asked, her voice a raspy whisper.
“Yes.”
“I’m glad you called. I mailed those Hammerjack letters back to you along with twenty bucks. You paid me too much.”
“No, I didn’t. You deserved every penny.” Another racking cough. “You feel like talking about what you found? If not, it’ll wait.”
“No it won’t. You’ve got quite a dude there, Deva. Oh, he’s charming, all right, but not to be trusted. I wanted you to know—” she stopped to draw in a ragged breath, “—before something happened.”
“Well, something has.”
“Yeah? Not surprising. I saw the prison address, but that’s not what alerted me. When you get his letters, look at his signature. It’s a mile high in comparison with the rest of his writing. You’ll see a lot of fancy swirls around the M in Mike. That’s self-importance, or you can call it an inflated ego. Either way, nothing illegal about it. But take a look at how he writes his y’s and g’s. The guy uses the felon’s claw.”
“The felon’s claw? What on earth is that?”
“It’s coming from a downstroke and immediately going into a claw shape below the line. It’s underhanded, goes against the norm.”
I could tell she was sucking in the air trying to get a full breath.
She mustn’t have succeeded, for she said, “There’s more, but not today. I’m done. Gotta get to my oxygen tank.”
“Thanks a million. You’ve helped me more than you know. And as soon as I get the letters, I’m sending back the twenty.”
“Don’t bother,” she rasped. “If you do, I’ll use it to light a cigar.”
My turn to gasp. “You smoke them, too!”
“Only when forced to. Ciao.”
She hung up wheezing and laughing, but I hung up saddened and troubled. Saddened about Naomi and troubled about Mike Hammerjack. Now that I had some insight into his character, what in the world was I supposed to do about it?
Chapter Twenty-Four
I was still mulling over the Mike Hammerjack problem when Rossi walked in. It was early evening by then, and he carried a frozen pizza and a bottle of Chianti. Dinner. Oh well, his pizza was better than his scrambled eggs, and I really wasn’t hungry anyway.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, eyeing me from head to toe and frowning.
“As you see.”
“I thought so. What’s with the peas?”
“You freeze them and put them on your knee.”
“So that’s the reason people grow them?”
“Exactly.”
“Seriously, you okay?”
“Well enough.”
“Not true. I can see your freckles. That’s never a good sign.”
Freckles. Something else to worry about. “How about you put the pizza in the kitchen and then tell me what happened with Mike?”
“You got it. Be right back.” He returned in a few minutes with two glasses of wine, handed me one, and settled into a club chair across from the sofa.
“So?” I said.
“So, you could say I wasted my time,” he began.
“Really? That surprises me. You never do.”
He raised his glass in a mock toast. “Thank you. However, this was an e
xception to my otherwise perfect record. The guy’s slick as they come. Claims his foot slipped off the brake, his driving’s rusty, blah, blah, blah. I didn’t believe a word he said, but there’s no way to disprove his story, so that’s that. Luckily the owner of the truck, this Tony Pavlich, carries insurance. So repairs to your car should be covered, and we can pick up a loaner in the morning.”
What he wasn’t saying was how much he regretted selling the Maserati. We were down to one set of wheels—the Mustang of voting age. Not good.
“Regrets?” I asked softly.
“Yes!”
About to take a sip of Chianti, I lowered my glass.
“I deeply regret your tangling with this Hammerjack character. Promise me you’ll have nothing more to do with him.”
“But—”
“He had no business being at your door. That alone scares me, never mind this phony accident.”
“I’d love to do as you ask, Rossi, but I said I’d try to sell some of the prison furniture. Not for Mike, for people in need. I have to follow through on my word.”
“You don’t have to, you want to.”
The sofa suddenly felt like a hot seat. As if my pants were on fire, I squirmed before answering. “I need to. That means I have to.”
He sighed, one of those deep, I’m-annoyed-beyond-words type of sighs. “You’re being incredibly naïve. You’ll be selling the work of murderers, pimps, thieves, wife-beaters, addicts. The list goes on.”
I took a good stiff slug of wine. “Just so you’ll know, the furniture they make is excellent. Besides, my grandmother wants me to do what I can in the name of humanity.”
“This the Nana Kennedy who passed fifteen years ago?”
“The very same.”
“I give up,” he said, throwing his hands in the air. Thank God his glass was empty. “Who can argue with logic like that?” He eased out of the club chair. “I’ll put the pizza in the oven.”
“That’s all you have to say? You’re not going to try and talk me out of it?”
“Nope. Do what you must. Besides, I told Hammerjack if he caused you any more trouble, I’d personally see that he went back to State. For good.” A small smile lifted Rossi’s lips. “Even if I had to invent the evidence.”
The Design Is Murder (Murders By Design) Page 11
