Heat Wave (14 page)

“And that would have been a
major bummer,” he’d argued. He was
glad
this had happened. Meredith was
amazing. Sex with her had been amazing. At this point, he
considered that bouncy old rock song amazing.

One of the things that made Meredith
amazing, he contemplated more than once during his long, lonely
weekend without her, was that she hadn’t wanted to spend the night
with him. In his experience, it was the woman who believed having
sex equaled having a relationship and expected that if you’d
indulged in the former, you’d better be on your way to establishing
the latter.

Not that Caleb had anything against
relationships. He was certainly willing to explore relationship
possibilities with Meredith. More than willing.

But she only wanted him to be her lawyer?
What the hell was that all about?

So instead of having dinner with her Friday
evening, instead of returning to his place afterward, sharing a
bottle of wine on the terrace, with the soothing tidal rhythm of
the ocean for background music, and then tumbling back into his bed
for a night of tender lovemaking or raunchy screwing—whichever she
preferred, perhaps a bit of both—he’d driven her back to her parked
car, kissed her cheek, and watched her cruise away.

And then he’d spent the whole weekend with
that damned song blasting through his mind. He’d spent two long,
empty days suffering from an inner fever far steamier than the hot
June weather.

He’d stomped into the office Monday morning,
carrying a jumbo cup of coffee from Riley’s, the diner a couple of
blocks from his office. When Megan gave him a cheery smile, he
grunted.

“Bad weekend?” she asked.

“Weird weekend.”

“Blanche Larson called about two minutes
ago,” Megan reported. “I left you a voice-mail message.”

“Thanks.” He took a sip of coffee through
the slit in the plastic lid, then forced a smile for Megan. “Maybe
she’ll cheer me up.” There were times, he acknowledged, when a
sixty-year-old accountant who looked like a bulldog could do more
to lift a man’s spirits than a gorgeous, leggy Southern belle
suffering from qualms he couldn’t even begin to comprehend.

In his office, he tossed his briefcase on to
his desk, fired up his computer, pried the lid off his coffee, and
lifted the handset of his desk phone. In less than a minute, he was
connected to Blanche. “Have you got good news for me?” he asked
hopefully.

Blanche didn’t say yes quickly enough. In
fact, she didn’t say yes at all. “I’ve been going through Jerry
Felton’s financials,” she told Caleb. “And there was a blip.”

“A blip?”

“A chunk of money had a six-hour layover in
one of his bank accounts.”

“What do you mean?”

“Less than a day. He deposited about two
hundred thousand dollars, then withdrew it six hours later. I can’t
find where it was transferred to.”

Blanche wasn’t cheering him up. Not at all.
“In your opinion,” he asked, “what might explain something like
that?”

“Lots of things.” Blanche sounded way more
upbeat than Caleb felt. “Let’s say he sold a piece of property.
He’s planning to sink his profit from the sale into another
property. He deposits his profit into his bank account until he
finishes closing on the new property.”

“Did he buy any property?” Caleb asked.

Another disheartening pause before Blanche
said, “There’s no evidence of that.”

“Okay. Give me another reason this might
have happened.”

“An inheritance. He might have been named
executor of an estate, and he needed to set up a separate account
until the estate went through probate. So the money sat in his bank
account until he’d opened the estate account. No,” she anticipated
Caleb’s next question. “I found no evidence that he’s an executor
of an estate. Maybe he was buying a used car in a private sale,
cash only. But two hundred thousand dollars is an awful lot of
money to pay for a used car. Even a used Lamborghini.”

“How about his wife?”

“How about her?”

“Maybe
she’s
an executrix. Or she’s
investing in property or collecting rare cars. It’s a joint
account, isn’t it?”

“I suppose it’s possible his wife did
something sleazy. But I’ve found no—”

“No evidence of it,” Caleb joined in. “I
should talk to Jerry about this.”

“That would be a good idea. In the meantime,
I’ll keep investigating.”

“Please do,” Caleb said. “You’re so cute
when you investigate.”

Blanche snorted and hung up the phone.

As Caleb lowered his handset back to the
base, he became aware of how unnervingly quiet his office was. Not
completely silent—he could hear the murmur of Niall’s and Annie’s
voices drifting out of Niall’s office, next door to Caleb’s. No,
this was a different quiet, a muffled quiet. The absence of white
noise. The absence of…

Shit.

He lifted his phone, punched Megan’s button,
and blurted out, “I’m not hearing the air conditioning. Did it
break again?”

“I don’t know. It’s cool enough here in the
reception area.”

Cool enough for Megan was nowhere near cool
enough for Caleb. Merely noticing the absence of the air
conditioner’s hum was enough to launch his sweat glands into
overdrive. The heat in his office seemed to soar. He was
suffocating. He was going to die. “Call the landlord,” Caleb told
Megan. “Tell him that every day we don’t have working AC in this
effing building is a day we won’t be paying his effing rent.”

“I’ll rephrase that when I reach him,” Megan
said.

“Whatever. Just…whatever.” He hung up the
phone, loosened his tie and stared at the tree on the other side of
his window. His face was growing damp, his shirt limp. If it was
this hot at nine-thirty in the morning, what would his office be in
the afternoon, assuming the AC hadn’t been fixed by then?

Well, one good thing had come out of this
morning. The broken AC was a disaster, and Jerry Felton’s
mysterious two hundred thousand dollar “blip” was another disaster.
But together, the two things offered a nice distraction from his
thoughts about Meredith—her lovely face, her lovely body, her
lovely, infuriating mind.

He lifted the phone handset again, this time
to call Jerry Felton. He summoned Jerry’s file on his computer and
tapped the buttons for Jerry’s home number. When Jerry answered,
Caleb heard a babble of voices and laughter in the background.
Television noise. The poor guy was probably going crazy with
boredom, exiled from his office while he was on leave from his
job.

The not-so-poor guy. If he was blipping
around with two hundred thousand dollars, he wasn’t exactly
destitute. “We need to talk,” he told Jerry after identifying
himself. “Do you have some free time today?”

“Um…sure,” Jerry said. Apparently the
television show was so interesting, he had to think about whether
he could spare a few minutes for his lawyer. “Do you want me to
come to your office?”

“No.” Caleb wedged the phone
between his ear and his shoulder, freeing his hands to roll up his
sleeves. “Our air conditioner conked out again. Why don’t I come to
your house?”
And see if I spot a
two-hundred-thousand-dollar pile of cash lying around.

“No,” Jerry shot back. “The house is a mess,
and my wife… I mean, she doesn’t like me conducting business
here.”

“Why don’t we meet at the Community Center,
then?”

“Jeez. That place smells of chlorine.”

The center had a pool, but the smell wasn’t
bad. On the rare occasions Caleb had a free minute, he liked to
work out at the Community Center’s gym, just down the hall from the
pool. It was less expensive than a private club and well equipped.
His property taxes were subsidizing it. He might as well make use
of it.

“Why don’t we meet at the Faulk Street
Tavern?” Jerry suggested.

Which smelled like beer, but Caleb supposed
that was preferable to chlorine. “It’s a little early in the day
for that.”

“Three o’clock. We can meet then.”

“All right.” By three o’clock, maybe Jerry’s
favorite daytime shows would be over. Caleb said goodbye,
disconnected the call, and gazed once more at the tree outside his
window. On a muggy day like today, even that tree’s shade wouldn’t
offer relief.

It really wasn’t
that
hot, he told
himself. At least not yet. If Megan couldn’t get the landlord to
send a repairman over ASAP, though—a competent one, not the bozo
who claimed to have fixed it last week but clearly hadn’t—his
office was bound to get worse.

He hoped the rest of his day wasn’t bound to
get worse, as well. But when he yanked a tissue from the box he
always kept on hand for distressed clients and wiped the film of
sweat gathering in the hollow of his neck, he recalled presenting
the box to Meredith last Friday. He remembered her tears, her
worry, and her steely certainty despite her agitation. He
remembered her anger. Her tantalizing blend of vulnerability and
determination, her passion.

He remembered her insistence on leaving
him.

Dead air conditioning. Mysterious six-figure
blips. Meredith. Yeah, his day was bound to get worse.

***

An Escalade reported stolen up in
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, that morning wound up parked on Atlantic
Avenue with a flat tire, a cracked windshield, and a crumpled front
bumper. Ed Nolan took some photos, then had the vehicle impounded
for further evidence collection. Nice vehicle. Too big for his
tastes and too expensive for his wallet, but the New Hampshire
owner would be happy to hear his car had been located. Ed was more
concerned with locating the dipshit who’d lifted the SUV, driven it
south over the state line, dinged it up and left it
parked—illegally, blocking a hydrant—in Brogan’s Point.

Once he was done with a preliminary check
and the SUV had been towed away, Ed strolled across the avenue and
up Faulk Street, deciding to stop into the tavern for a cup of
coffee. It never ceased to amuse Gus that Ed could not only drink
caffeinated beverages day and night without risking jitters or
insomnia, but also enjoy steaming hot beverages on steaming hot
afternoons. “Indians drink hot tea all the time, even though the
temperature in India rises to a hundred-twenty in the summer,” he’d
told her once. “They say the tea cools them off.”

“They also say cows are sacred,” Gus had
pointed out.

Three-fifteen on a Monday afternoon, the
place would probably be empty. He pushed open the door and stepped
into the cool, dimly lit pub.

Not quite empty, but close. Gus was behind
the bar, dressed in a crisp, tailored shirt, her eyes glinting with
what he hoped was pleasure as she glanced at the door and saw who
had just entered her establishment. Carl Stanton sat on a stool at
one end of the bar, nursing a drink. By now, Gus ought to have
engraved Carl’s name on the stool. It was his. He sat there every
day, drinking something hard until Gus commandeered his keys and
insisted that he switch to something soft. Two fishermen occupied
one of the booths, a pitcher of pale, sudsy beer on the table
between them. Across the room, in another booth, Ed spotted Jerry
Felton, the temporarily dethroned town manager, and his lawyer,
Caleb Solomon.

The two of them were
engrossed in what appeared to be an intense conversation. Hell, it
was way too early in the legal process for them to be sharing a
celebratory toast—not unless Sheila Valenti, the town treasurer,
abruptly stepped forward and confessed to having embezzled all that
money from the town’s retirement fund. Her confession wouldn’t do
the Ed any good unless she also returned the stolen money. Ed was a
town employee. That was
his
pension that had been stolen. He couldn’t help but
take the theft personally.

He sauntered over to the bar, reaching it as
Gus slid a freshly poured mug of coffee in front of an empty stool
a good distance from Carl’s. Ed leaned across the bar to kiss Gus’s
cheek, then mounted the stool and inhaled. He loved the aroma of
coffee almost as much as he loved the taste.

“What’s going on over there?” he asked,
tilting his head in the direction of the booth where Felton and
Solomon sat.

She shrugged. “Jerry’s drinking bourbon. The
lawyer’s sticking to lemonade.”

“Hell of a place for a lawyer to meet his
client,” Ed remarked. “Doesn’t Solomon have an office?”

“He told me the air conditioning is on the
fritz. He said if he’d sat in his office a minute longer, he would
have died from heat stroke.”

Ed grinned. “Lucky for me he didn’t. I hate
having to deal with bodies.”

She grinned back at him. “You want anything
to eat? Manny convinced me to try this new bar mix. It looks like
something hikers might eat while climbing a mountain.”

“Healthy?”

“Please,” she scoffed. “Who comes into a bar
to eat healthy food?” She set out a small bowl filled with a jumble
of nibbles: peanuts, mini-pretzels, raisins, and a few unidentified
things. He plucked one out of the bowl and bit into it. Crunchy,
with a sort of cheesy, salty taste. Not bad.

“If Felton stole my pension,” Ed muttered,
“I want ten minutes alone in a holding cell with him before they
cart him off to Walpole.” An embezzlement conviction probably
wouldn’t warrant incarceration in the state’s maximum-security
facility, but Ed could dream. Anyone threatening his chances for a
comfortable retirement didn’t deserve medium-security, let alone
minimum.

“Justice will be done,” Gus assured him,
giving Ed’s hand a reassuring squeeze. If she worked on the force,
she wouldn’t be so sure of that. But he let it ride.

The bar door swung open and a woman entered.
She was alone, nicely dressed, pretty, with golden-blond hair and
an open, fresh face. Minimal make-up. A simple blouse, a straight
skirt and flat-heeled sandals. If Ed had been twenty years younger,
he might have given her a second look. He’d never been interested
in younger women, though. For one thing, they reminded him of his
daughter, Maeve, and the notion of finding a woman his daughter’s
age attractive freaked him out. For another, who had the energy to
keep up with someone so much younger?