Hot Property

by Jenna Bennett

  “And you have no idea where or when they’re going to strike again, or how to catch them?”

  “Not a one,” Detective Grimaldi said cheerfully.

  I bit my lip. “Can’t you set up a sting, or something? Stake out the open houses to see if they show up?”

  “If we had some idea of where they’d be, we could. But it’s too early to predict trends. Chances are the next open house will also be in the seven hundred thousand to million dollar range, and have something in it worth taking. In one case it was paintings, in the other electronic equipment. But there are a lot of houses that fit that bill, and unfortunately, the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department doesn’t have unlimited resources at its disposal. We can’t put an undercover cop in every single open house in South Nashville on Sunday afternoon. Or even in the two or three dozen that fit the criteria.”

  I nodded. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help. Lila Vaughn is a friend of mine, and until they’re caught, we’re all jumpy.”

  Detective Grimaldi said she’d keep me in mind, and we said our goodbyes and hung up.

  No sooner had I put the desk phone down, than my cell phone rang. I glanced at the display before I answered, and had to work on making my voice sound chipper when I answered. “Hi, Mother.”

  “Good morning, Savannah,” my mother’s soft Southern voice said. “How are you, darling?”

  “I’m fine, thank you. And you?”

  “Just wonderful, dear. Thank you for asking. I’m just making a quick call before meeting your aunt for lunch. I wanted to make sure you got home all right last night. After your dinner, I mean.”

  “If I’d had an accident between Sweetwater and Nashville,” I said, “you would have been the first to hear about it. You’re the emergency contact in my cell phone. My ICE number. And I didn’t have much to drink with dinner. Just a single glass of Sauvignon Blanc. It wouldn’t have registered on a Breathalyzer test, let alone have made me run off the road.”

  “That’s good, darling.” I could hear her draw breath, and I held my own.

  All of this had been small-talk, testing the water before taking the plunge, and now we came to the real conversation. What would it be this time? That I wasn’t getting any younger and should marry Todd Satterfield before it was too late? That I shouldn’t have divorced Bradley to begin with? That – God forbid! – my brother Dix had told her I’d had dinner with Rafe Collier once, and she was calling to tell me I was disowned?

  She said, “I hear another Realtor was robbed this weekend.”

  “Oh.” I breathed out. That wasn’t as bad as it could have been. “Yes, her name was Lila Vaughn. We’re friends.”

  “That young woman they interviewed on the news? She seemed very…” Mother hesitated delicately, “forward.”

  “She’s not shy and retiring,” I admitted, “but she’s nice.” If a lot more aggressive than I was brought up to be.

  “You’re being careful, aren’t you, darling?”

  We’d had this exact same conversation just a few weeks ago, after Brenda Puckett was murdered. And then again after Walker had tried to shoot me. “Yes, Mother,” I said. “Of course I am. Tim has already talked to us about taking special precautions when we’re showing houses, and I’m thinking about getting a weapon of some sort. A can of Mace or pepper spray to keep in my handbag.”

  “That sounds like a good idea,” Mother agreed. “Maybe I can ask Sheriff Satterfield if he has some advice he can give you.”

  “That would be nice,” I said politely, although I didn’t really need the help. Many Realtors carry some sort of weapon for protection, so there were people right here in the office I could ask, and if I wanted a truly professional opinion, I could call Tamara Grimaldi for help. Or Rafe, who would, at least, be able to tell me which weapon he himself would most prefer not to be faced with. While Sheriff Satterfield would tell his son what I was doing, and then Todd would worry about me shooting myself in the foot or accidentally frying my brain with nerve gas.

  I knew from experience that nothing would derail my mother once she’d gotten an idea in her head, however, so I didn’t bother to try to talk her out of it. “Thank you.” If I went along quietly, maybe she’d decide it wasn’t such a big deal, and would forget to talk to Bob Satterfield.

  “It’s no problem. I’m happy to help. I hope you and Todd had a nice time last night?” She sounded optimistic.

  “Very nice,” I answered demurely. “Thank you. Todd is good company.”

  When he isn’t lecturing me, or going on and on about Rafe, at any rate. Somehow he has gotten this idee fixe that Rafe is a danger to my virtue – correct as far as it goes – and he feels that it’s up to him to protect me. So he’s harping rather obsessively on Rafe’s baser qualities and my need to be careful. The real problem, from my point of view, is that Todd doesn’t think I’m capable of handling my own affairs, although telling him so would only make him believe something is going on when it isn’t, so I hadn’t.

  “That’s good. Well, darling, I guess I should go. Regina and I are discussing the plans for this year’s Christmas Tour of Homes.” Aunt Regina is my late father’s sister, and also the society columnist for my hometown newspaper.

  “That’s it?” I blurted.

  Mother’s didn’t answer, and I added, “I mean, was that all you wanted? You just called to make sure I had a good time with Todd?”

  “And to tell you to be careful. You do seem to be quite a magnet for trouble, darling, with discovering Mrs. Puckett’s body and being held at gunpoint by that nice Mr. Lamont. A mother just worries, that’s all.” The tail end of the statement hung in the air, unspoken: Especially when her daughter is all alone in the world and ‘are you sure you shouldn’t remarry, Savannah; you’re not getting any younger, you know.’

  “Right,” I said. “Thank you, Mother. I’ll be careful. No more dead bodies for me, I promise. And no more murderers, either.”

  And I believed it. I honestly did. I just didn’t realize how quickly another dead body and another murderer were going to be littering my path.

  But the thing is, had I known, I doubt I would have acted any differently anyway. I did what I had to do, and that’s really all there is to it.

  Chapter 2

  Fidelio’s Restaurant is located off Murphy Road, on the snobby west side of town.

  I don’t have fond feelings for the place. My ex-husband took me there to celebrate our first (and last) wedding anniversary, and invited his paralegal assistant (and future wife) to join us. I spent my anniversary dinner twiddling my thumbs while my husband and his mistress talked shop. Our marriage didn’t last long after that, and Bradley married Shelby a week after our divorce was final. Todd knew the story, but still insisted on taking me to Fidelio’s whenever he was in town. And as Tim had pointed out, it was also where Rafe had taken me last Saturday, on our date-that-wasn’t-a-date. Although, to be fair to Rafe, he didn’t know my history with the place; he was just determined not to be outdone by Todd. At least I assume that had been his motivation, as it was hardly the kind of place he himself frequented.

  Today, I was there to meet Lila Vaughn, who had chosen it because it was close to her office. She had called me back later in the day on Monday, and had agreed to go to lunch. But because her phone had been ringing off the hook since the robbery, and because she had more to do than she could handle, she couldn’t get away until Thursday.

  She swept in ten minutes late, air-kissed the gray-haired maitre d’ and sailed through the restaurant while men of all ages stopped with their forks halfway to their mouths to stare at her. She air-kissed me, too, before she sank onto the chair opposite and grinned.

  “Hi, girlfriend. Sorry I’m late.”

  I smiled back. Lila is outgoing, effusive, and even a little brash. I was brought up to be ladylike and polite. In spite of our differences, we get along amazingly well. “No problem. I know you’re busy. And you look great. As always.”

&nb
sp; Lila dresses to attract attention. Today, she was wearing a bright red sundress with practically no back and her long hair was tumbling over her shoulders in calculated disarray. Men all over the restaurant were ignoring their companions to look at her.

  “I work at it, babe.” She leaned back on the chair and crossed one impossibly long leg over the other. Her already short skirt rode up another few inches, exposing a perfectly toned thigh. I’d kill for Lila’s figure. “So how are you?”

  “I’m doing better, thank you. What about you?”

  “I can’t complain. It’s amazing what a little publicity can do for a person’s career. I’m working with several buyer-prospects, and just after I got off the phone with you on Monday, someone called and wanted me to do a listing presentation today. I had to put them off, just so I could be here.”

  “That was nice of you,” I said, not sure if I would have been able to be as magnanimous. I really, really needed to make some money, and sooner rather than later. The divorce settlement from Bradley was dwindling almost daily, and if I didn’t make a sale soon, I’d have to go back to the make-up counter at the mall.

  Lila shrugged. “They’ll keep till tomorrow. So how about you? Are you working with anyone?”

  “A few people.” One young couple, to be exact. And our association was in the very early stages; we hadn’t gone out to look at any properties yet. “Nobody special.”

  “Maybe you should arrange to get tied to a chair and robbed,” Lila said. She drew breath to go on. But just then the waiter appeared, and saved me from what would probably be a bracing lecture on ditching my ladylike upbringing and going after what I wanted more aggressively.

  She ordered a Diet Coke, while I asked for water with lemon. Water is free, and a penny saved is a penny earned. The waiter disappeared, and we scanned the menus until he came back a minute later with our drinks. Lila asked for a Cobb salad with low-fat dressing on the side while I ordered a Chicken Caesar. The waiter departed and we got back to business, but by then Lila had either forgotten what she was going to say, or thought better of it. “So how’s everything at the office?” she asked instead.

  I gave a shrug. “I guess it’s all right. Different, with Tim at the helm. Although he’s doing an OK job, I suppose. Everything’s getting done that needs to get done, and we’re still making money, although I don’t know how long that’ll last. Brenda Puckett was our biggest income producer, and she’s dead. Tim was our second biggest, but he doesn’t have much time to go out and make sales now that he’s in charge. He’ll probably miss it. I’m not sure he has quite the right personality for leadership, either, bless his heart.”

  Proper, sophisticated Walker would never, ever have made the comments about my personal life that Tim had made at the meeting on Monday morning. And although I hadn’t said anything to him about it, I thought he had spoken rather inappropriately, especially in front of everyone else. It would have been bad enough to talk that way to me privately, but at a sales meeting with the whole staff present...!

  “What’s he done now?” Lila asked.

  I made a face. “Oh, he just told the whole office that I’m dating Rafael Collier. At the staff meeting on Monday morning. Just because he saw us having dinner together last week.”

  “Is this the guy you were telling me about, the one who was with you when you found Brenda Puckett’s body? So you are dating him!”

  I shook my head firmly. “It wasn’t a date. It was just dinner.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, of course I’m sure. I’m not interested in him that way.”

  “Right.” Lila didn’t even try to hide her amusement. “I don’t know, girlfriend. Have you even had a man since you got divorced? He asked you out, so he’s obviously interested, and if I remember the way you described him, he’s not repulsive. Are you sure you shouldn’t go for it?”

  “It’s not that easy,” I answered.

  Lila didn’t speak, just arched her brows questioningly. I added, “You don’t know my family.”

  “Aren’t you allowed to date anyone? Or is it just him?”

  “Mostly just him. Or anybody like him. Or maybe just anybody but Todd.”

  “Who’s Todd? Oh, wait. He’s that guy you dated in high school, right? The one your mother keeps throwing at you?”

  I nodded. “Rafe went to school with us too, but I never had anything to do with him. He was the boy my mother always warned me about. The boy all the mothers warned their daughters about.”

  “So what’s wrong with him?” Lila asked.

  I hesitated, before settling for the general, “He’s just very different from me.”

  “Different, how?” Lila said. She was relentless; it was one of her biggest strengths as a Realtor. Unlike me, who was brought up to be polite and courteous, Lila took every ‘no’ as a challenge, and wouldn’t back down from anything. Tenacious to a fault.

  “Different in every way. I grew up in a mansion. One of the antebellum ones south of Columbia, on the Antebellum Trail. He grew up in a mobile home, in a trailer park on the other side of town. I can trace my family tree back to the Civil War; he only learned who his father was two weeks ago. I went to finishing school after graduation; he went to jail. I drive a Volvo, for God’s sake, and he rides a Harley-Davidson!”

  Lila thought for a moment. “So he’s what people down here call white trash?”

  Lila’s from Detroit, where I guess they call it something else.

  “His mother’s family was.” I’d certainly heard the Colliers described that way often enough. Not by anyone in my family, of course. We don’t use words like those. Think them, perhaps, but don’t utter them out loud. “His father was black, so mostly what people called him was that colored boy.”

  Or more often, LaDonna Collier’s good-for-nothing colored boy, but I didn’t think I should say that to Lila.

  “Oh-ho!” Lila said.

  “I grew up in a very small, very segregated town. There were black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods, but very few that were mixed. Black people go to black churches and white people to white churches on Sunday morning, and there were no black children in my elementary school. They all went to the other elementary school, on the other side of town. It wasn’t until high school that we all ended up together.”

  “I don’t imagine your daddy would be best pleased if you brought home a black boyfriend, then.”

  Lila took a sip of her Diet Coke. Each long fingernail was painted as red as her dress and decorated with a tiny flower.

  “It’s not my daddy who’s the problem,” I said, inspecting my own ladylike French manicure. “He’s in heaven, where I’m pretty sure they’re beyond petty concerns like skin color. My mother, however, is still here.”

  “Is she a racist?”

  I bit my lip while I tried to form the words. I didn’t want to make Lila angry, or worse, hurt her feelings, and we hadn’t known each other long enough yet to get to the point where we could say just about anything to each other without giving offense. At the same time, I wanted her to understand what it was like being a Martin. “She has nothing against black people. She deals with them – you – every day, and she does it politely and courteously. It’s not like she puts on a white hood and rides out at night to burn crosses on people’s lawns. Or chases people off her land with a shotgun, the way Rafe’s grandfather did. It’s more a case of...”

  I hesitated, searching for the right way to explain things, “...them and us. Heck, my brother-in-law Jonathan was given a terrible time when he first started dating my sister Catherine, and he isn’t even black, just a Yankee. My mother is just very aware that not everyone is up to her standard.”

  “Hunh,” Lila said.

  I shrugged. “She can’t help the way she was brought up, any more than the rest of us can. She’s not a bad person, really.”

  Lila didn’t answer, though I don’t think she was convinced.

  “All right,” she said, “so I don’t su
ppose you can really get too involved with this guy, then. Not if you want to avoid trouble. But didn’t you tell me that your family lives an hour or more away? What’s to keep you from jumping in the sack with him? They’d never know.”

  “They’d find out. Somehow, my family always finds out. Besides, I don’t really want to jump in the sack with him. I wasn’t brought up to sleep around.”

  Lila arched her brows. “You’ve been divorced for how long, again? Almost two years, isn’t it? Girlfriend, I don’t think indulging yourself for once would count as sleeping around.”

  “Maybe not,” I admitted. “But I don’t really want to.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, of course I’m sure. Why?”

  “Oh, no reason. I was just thinking…”

  Her voice was too innocent, and I narrowed my eyes. “Thinking about what?”

  “Well… you know what they say about black men, don’t you?” She smirked.

  “I’m not sure I do,” I said.

  She told me.

  I blushed.

  It wasn’t until the waiter had arrived with our salads and we were both busy shoveling lettuce into our mouths that she glanced over at me. “Aren’t you going to ask me about what happened this weekend?”

  “I don’t want to pry…” I began.

  Lila snorted. “My phone’s been ringing off the hook all week, and I’ve talked myself hoarse. So don’t be shy. You want to hear about it?”

  “If you don’t mind telling me,” I said.

  She grinned. “Not at all. It was... interesting.”

  “Don’t you mean scary?”

  “Not as much as you’d think. You’ve probably read the stories, right?”