Heat Wave (9 page)

“Unlike the DA, I don’t want to be a TV
star,” he said. “I just want to clear my client’s name.”

“You’re so noble,” Blanche muttered. She was
sixty. She was an accountant. She was allowed to be sarcastic. “Get
me the financials as soon as possible.”

“Will do.” After saying good-bye, he hung up
the phone, leaned back in his chair and gazed out his office
window, which overlooked the street. A maple dense with foliage
cast a shadow across the building’s façade. When a breeze danced
down the street, the leaves threw mottled, undulating silhouettes
against the window pane.

Staring at the shifting leaves relaxed him.
He’d been poring over documents for most of the day, reviewing the
past five years of Brogan’s Point treasury reports filed by Sheila
Valenti and her predecessor. His eyes swam from all the print, all
the numbers. He didn’t know how Blanche could stand to analyze
spread sheets day in and day out.

He usually had no trouble
concentrating. He loved picking through records and documents. He
loved searching for evidence. He especially loved that
aha!
moment when he found
exactly what he needed to cement his defense.

But he hadn’t been able to throw himself
into Jerry Felton’s case as thoroughly as he ought to. One
significant wedge of his brain was fixated on another case, a
non-case. An almost client.

He should just call Meredith and ask her
out. He should tell her he owed her dinner because she’d treated
last time. He should tell her he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
He should tell her how tempted he’d been to kiss her the other
night, when they’d stood together on the wharf by the Lobster
Shack, gazing out at the ocean. He should tell her she was like a
heat wave burning in his heart.

Why not? She wasn’t
really
his client, after
all. He hadn’t billed her.

Then again, she’d given no
indication that he was like a heat wave burning in
her
heart. What he’d
sensed from her was gratitude, nothing more. Whatever he was
feeling was craziness inside himself.

Maybe he should give Ellen a call. If she
was between boyfriends, she might want to see him. He and Ellen had
been a happy enough couple for more than a year, after he’d
finished law school and taken a job with the Boston firm where he’d
done his internship the previous summer. When Niall had invited
Caleb to join him and Heather in forming a private law firm up on
the North Shore, Caleb had jumped at the opportunity. As a junior
associate in Boston, he’d been boring himself to tears doing
document reviews and stressing out over his billable hours, when
all he’d wanted was to defend clients in court—something he’d be
able to do from the get-go if he, Niall and Heather founded their
own firm. And Brogan’s Point was a beach town, right on the
ocean.

He’d told Ellen he was going not just to
enter into a partnership with Niall and Heather but also to move to
Brogan’s Point. He’d thought she would be excited for him, maybe
even consider moving to the North Shore with him. Instead, she’d
wished him good luck and kissed him good-bye. She was an urban
creature, she’d insisted, and she liked the security big firms
offered. If Caleb wanted to risk his career on a small start-up,
that was his business. But she didn’t wish to come along for the
ride.

It was an amicable, affectionate parting. No
hard feelings. She started seeing other men, and Caleb—when he
wasn’t working his ass off—saw other women. Sometimes, when he and
Ellen were both free, they saw each other, for old time’s sake.

Yeah, he should call her and spend a night
down in the city with her. That would delete Meredith Benoit from
his mind.

He shook his head. He couldn’t use Ellen to
help him forget another woman. That wouldn’t be right.

“Knock-knock.” Annie, the firm’s paralegal,
cracked his office door open and swept inside, her slim laptop
tucked under her arm. “I finally got Jerry Felton to agree to let
the bank release his account records for the past three years. It
wasn’t easy. I think I deserve a raise.”

“Absolutely,” Caleb shot back. “When the
firm gets a gusher of income, we’ll discuss it.” He could have
increased the firm’s income by charging Meredith for taking care of
her citation—but not by enough to bump Annie’s pay. “When can I
access his bank accounts?”

“Felton said he’d go into the bank tomorrow
and sign a release. Let’s hope he actually does.”

Caleb peered up at his trusty assistant. As
always, she looked unruffled, her plain brown hair held back from
her face with a barrette, her crisp white slacks and bright green
polo shirt lending a decidedly preppy flair. “Is there a chance he
won’t?”

“He gave me a song and dance about his loss
of privacy. I told him he’d lose a lot more privacy if he wound up
in prison. I told him he’d have to go to the bathroom in his cell,
without a door. Everyone would see him sitting on the can. I think
I scared the stuffing out of him.”

Caleb grinned, but that stubborn, distracted
wedge of his mind wandered off again. “Did you ever get a song
stuck in your brain?” he asked.

Annie placed her laptop down on a corner of
his broad oak desk and settled into one of the upholstered chairs
facing him. “Are we talking about any song, or a particular
song?”

“‘
Heat Wave,’” he told her.
“I think it was a Motown hit, back in the sixties.”

“Oh, sure—I know that song. Linda Ronstadt
did a cover of it. My mother’s a huge Linda Ronstadt fan. ‘Burning
in my heart,’” she sang.

“That’s the one.”

“How did it get stuck in your brain? Are you
listening to oldies radio these days?”

Caleb shook his head. “I was in the Faulk
Street Tavern the other day, and it played on that jukebox against
the wall there.”

“Oh.” Annie grew serious, her dark eyes
widening with something that could be interpreted as alarm. “The
magic jukebox.”

“What?”

“The Faulk Street Tavern jukebox. It’s
magic.”

Caleb snorted.

“Seriously. They say that sometimes it’ll
play a song that casts a spell on someone in the room.”

Stifling his skepticism, he asked, “What
kind of spell?”

“I don’t know. You can’t control what it
will play, and you can’t control if it casts its spell on you. It
never cast a spell on me.”

Caleb wasn’t given to mysticism or woo-woo
crap. His only interest in magic was figuring out how tricks were
performed. Sleight of hand, distraction, razzle-dazzle showmanship,
special equipment—a sleeve with a pocket stitched into it that held
colorful scarves, or a sword with a retractable blade, or a stacked
deck of marked cards. He could appreciate a good performance. But
he sure as hell didn’t believe in magic.

“Then again,” Annie needled
him, “unlike
some
people, I don’t hang out in bars.”

“I don’t hang out in bars, either,” Caleb
said, hating the defensive edge in his voice. “I was there only
because our air conditioning wasn’t working.”

“And the only place you could think of with
working AC, in the entire county, just happened to be a bar.”

“I wanted to go to Felton’s office, but he
didn’t want to be seen talking to a lawyer there,” Caleb explained.
“He was the one who suggested that we meet at the tavern.”

“Right.” Annie’s lips curved
in a mischievous grin. “They don’t call that lawyers’ organization
the American
Bar
Association for nothing.”

“Ha ha.” As if Caleb hadn’t heard that
joke—and a million other lawyer jokes—plenty of times before.
“Forget about the raise, Annie. You’ve just un-earned it.”

“I wasn’t holding my breath,” she said with
a shrug, opening her laptop and tapping a few keys. “Sheila Valenti
is invoking the whistle-blower law. Do you need to look into
that?”

“She isn’t a whistle-blower if she’s the
perpetrator,” Caleb noted. “If she thinks she’s entitled to a
percentage of the money she’s already embezzled—”

The phone on his desk rang. Annie smoothly
reached across the desk and lifted the receiver. “Caleb Solomon’s
office,” she recited pleasantly. “Can I help you?” She listened for
a moment, her eyes narrowing on Caleb, then said, “If you’d like to
make an appointment to see him… Let me see if he’s available.” She
pressed the hold button on the phone, then addressed Caleb. “A
woman named Meredith Benoit wants to talk to you.”

He smiled, then frowned. Smiled because the
woman dancing to that earworm song wanted to talk to him, and
frowned because she’d called on his office line. She had his
personal cell phone number, since he’d texted her on that phone two
days ago, when he’d gotten Sulkowski to void her citation. She
wasn’t calling him for a personal reason. This was business.

Still, talking to her was better than not
talking to her. He plucked the receiver from Annie’s hand, pressed
the hold button to release it and spoke into the phone. “Hey,
Meredith. What’s up?”

“I’ve got a problem,” she said. Her voice
sounded calm, underlined with that velvety southern drawl, but he
heard something more than just her words in it. A faint tremor,
maybe. An edge of tension.

“Something to do with the citation?”

“Yes. No. The citation isn’t the problem.”
She sighed, then said, “There’s a video.”

Henry had alerted her. He’d
wandered into her classroom after the last students trickled out
the door, clutching their essays on
The
Things They Carried
, which she’d evaluated
and returned
.
“How
are you doing?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Some kids love me. Some kids
hate me. It depends on the grade they got on their papers.”

“Is that what it depends on?” He glanced
around the room, as if checking to make sure no students were
lurking in a corner or beneath a desk. Then he closed the door.

That was odd. As with her one-on-one
meetings with students, she liked to keep her door open when she
met with a colleague so anyone passing by in the corridor could see
that nothing untoward was going on in the room.

Henry’s skittish gaze was also odd. He
always met her gaze—except for now. “What’s wrong?”

“You haven’t seen it, then? No one’s
mentioned it to you?”

A tiny flame of alarm ignited inside her.
“Mentioned what?”

“There’s a video.”

“What video?”

“Of you. At the beach. I reckon there were
some other kids at the beach on Sunday—not just the jackass who
dumped ice on you, but some others. Someone with a cell phone
pressed the ‘record’ button.”

“Oh, lord.” Meredith sank against her desk
and groaned. “Is it making the rounds?”

“Apparently.” Henry gave her a gentle hug,
then stepped back and studied her face. Now that he’d broken the
bad news to her, he had no trouble giving her a direct look. “Did
any of your students act differently toward you?”

“Not that I noticed.” Maybe
she hadn’t been paying close enough attention. There had been a few
groans when she’d returned her students’ essays, and at least one
whispered
Yes!
Gina Costellano had asked how much the paper would count
toward final grades. A couple of kids had seemed fidgety, but
Meredith had attributed that to end-of-the-school-year
restlessness.

And in all honesty, she’d been a bit
distracted. She’d been distracted ever since her dinner with Caleb,
and their stroll along the wharf afterward. She’d been distracted
by her memory of his nearness, and her inexplicable yearning. But
she chalked that up to her own end-of-the-school-year
restlessness.

“Maybe my students didn’t see the video,”
she said hopefully.

Henry gave her a pitying look.

“Everyone saw it,” she groaned, sinking
against her desk and covering her face with her hands.

“I don’t know about
everyone
,” he
said.

“You
saw it, didn’t you.”

He sighed. “I had cafeteria duty today. You
know we try to keep the cell phone use to a minimum during lunch.
When I saw a group of kids clustered around and leaning in, I
figured they were looking at someone’s phone, so I moseyed over. I
don’t know if I saw all of it. But I saw enough.”

She clamped her hands more tightly over her
face. She felt like a toddler playing hide-and-seek—if she could
see no one, maybe no one could see her.

But they
had
seen her. Probably not everyone,
but enough kids had.

“I deleted the video from that kid’s phone.
But I suspect other kids have it. It’s so easy to send that kind of
thing around.”

Covering her face wasn’t helping. She
lowered her hands and peered up at Henry. “What am I going to
do?”

“Hold your head high, darlin’. Don’t let the
yahoos get to you.”

“It doesn’t matter if I hold my head high,”
she groaned. “My bosom is out there. Half the kids in school have
probably seen it. Stuart will decide he can’t give tenure to a
teacher whose bosom has been seen by half the school
population.”

“Your tenure decision is months away,” Henry
said. “By then, this will have all blown over.”

“I doubt it.” She shuddered, realizing that
when she’d removed her hands from her face it was to cross her arms
over her chest—as if to protect her body. Crossing her arms didn’t
help, though. Her body had been violated, thanks to twenty-first
century technology.

That, and a pail of ice.

“I’ll fight this,” she said, pushing away
from her desk. She might not be holding her head high, but she held
it higher than before. “I’ll fight it, Henry.”