So did he. She could
feel
it. Equally strong was the sense Jack hadn't lied about last night.
"Left-turn lane," he directed. "See that strip mall? My office is next door to that diner at the end."
Nodding, she downshifted to slow for an oncoming truck and the turn, then wheeled onto the side street.
"Well, I'll be damned."
"What? This is where you meant, isn't it?"
"You made the light." It sounded like an accusation. "Blew right through it, slick as a friggin' whistle."
"It was green," she said. "That means go."
"So I hear. Just pull in beside my carno, make it a space over, so I can open the door all the way."
Jack unlocked the office for her, where she could, as he said, powder her nose in the bathroom. Her mental picture of a real P.I.'s office wasn't clear, but McPhee might as well have been a tax preparer. A very neat tax preparer, who liked maps, but was too cheap to have them framed.
The sofa was almost as ugly as her mother's. Magazines on a side table were years old. The fake ivy and ferns looked wilted, but the air conditioning was set well under eighty.
A call home wakened Harriet from a chair nap, though she strenuously denied it. "Where are you? The box thing on the phone said, 'Private number.'"
The corded desk phone was as quaint as the kitchen wall unit at home. Dina had given no thought to the box thing, otherwise known as Harriet's cordless model's caller-ID screen. Odd, that McPhee Investigationsor in digitalese, "MCPH INVSTIGNS"wasn't programmed into a business phone's menu.
A cordless desk unit Dina hadn't noticed earlier was fed by a separate phone line. A third, detached phone cord inferred he could juggle more conversations than he had ears, as did a multiplug cell-phone charger.
Harriet muttered, "What'd she do, hang up on me?"
"I'm here, Mom. Will you be okay by yourself for a little while longer? An hour, probably less?"
"Well, of course, I will. Stop fussing over"
"Do I need to pick up anything on my way home? Library books, more juice
"
"Oh, for pity's sake." The line clicked and went dead. Dina interpreted it as a "No, thank you, sweetheart, but it's so thoughtful of you to ask."
The office's half bath smelled of cleanser and Jack's aftershave. The commode's lid was down. The spindled roll of toilet paper dispensed from the front, not the back. A wrapped, spare roll was on the tank.
The sink's chrome fixtures were apparently spot proof, and the liquid soap dispenser, drip proof. A motel-style rack held a box of tissues, stacks of trifolded hand towels and facecloths.
Mr. Clean's wastebasket was empty. Dina took out the plastic liner and flipped over the container on its top. The metal base made a
plinkety-pop
sound under her weight, but the medicine chest's mirror was now visible. And snoopable.
And boring, apart from a box of condoms. Two hermetically sealed tampons, a razor, shaving cream, deodorant, toothbrush and paste, mouthwash, comb, a travel bottle of shampoo and first-aid items said Jack was equipped for most emergencies and not prone to floss during office hours.
After Dina washed her face and knees, and fingerbrushed her teeth, she found Jack rifling a wide metal storage cabinet. Several of the desk's previously locked drawers were hanging open.
Her "What are you looking for?" was answered with a curt, "Let's go."
With the cabinet, desk, then front door secured, he stalked to the Taurus and opened the trunk. A camera's long lens was replaced with a stubby one. The trunk's lid, inside and out, was photographed. Moving to the front passenger's-side door, Jack clicked off two shots of the window, adjusted the lens and snapped several more.
"Care to let me in on what you're doing?"
Elbow now propped on the seat, he said, "Not from clear over there." When Dina stepped closer, he informed her that his gun was missing.
The lens whirred forward and backward as the glove compartment was photographed inside and out. "The supply cabinet, a desk drawerI've put it in both a few times. Just not lately. Normally, it's in the trunk."
With a pen, Jack indicated the glove compartment lock's misshapen keyhole. "That, I should have noticed sooner." Of a slit in the passenger window's weather stripping, fine scratches and chips at the top the glass and scuffs on the window ledge, he said, "As for those? Well, I don't ride shotgun in my own damn car."
The Beetle was a one-driver vehicle, too. On occasion, she loaded a bulky or fragile thing in the passenger's seat or floorboard, but usually hoisted them over from the driver's side.
"Your car doesn't have an alarm?" she asked.
"Who pays attention to them, other than getting pissed when they go off? Not real helpful for surveillance, either. A stray cat pussyfoots across the hood and whoop-whoop, I'm the center of attention."
"Can you tell when the gun was stolen?"
Jack shook his head. "No way to determine if the slim-jimmed window is related to the punched glove box. Or the scratched trunk lock, either."
"Common sense says they are."
"Common sense isn't proof." He returned the camera equipment to the trunk. "What I do know is that my .38 was in the glove box a week ago Sunday."
The trunk lid slammed so hard, Dina jumped. "And if McGuire obtains a search warrant, telling him I didn't discover it'd been stolen until an hour after he questioned me about Belle's murder, will make him laugh."
"How many people knew where you usually keep it?"
"It's a pretty easy guess for anyone who knows how I make my living."
Dina did, but hadn't given a gun a thought. Much less, where he'd keep it. "Anyone," she said, "such as that Blankenship guy?"
No answer.
"Okay, then. What are we going to do?"
"We?" He snickered. "Stick with me, kid. I'll get you twenty-five to life on an accessory-to-homicide rap."
"I'm serious."
"You think I'm
not?
"
"Sure you are," she said. "But if I'd never burglarized anyone, the insurance company wouldn't have hired you, you wouldn't have boarded Phil in Mrs. deHaven's name, wouldn't have been at her house last night and couldn't have left your fingerprint on the back door, so it's all my fault you're a suspect in her murder."
She sucked in a deep breath. "That's why it's
we.
"
Jack just stood there, slack jawed, as if someone had slim-jimmed his brain and absconded with it. Presently, he said, "I can't decide which one terrifies me the most. When something you say is a couple of quarts low on logic, or when it kind of isn't."
12
J
ack was trudging up the steps to his apartment when his cell phone rang. If it's Cherise, again, he thought, extricating the cell from his jeans pocket, it's going to voice mail.
He wasn't being ungrateful or mean. There were just so many times you can reassure someone and so many ways to promise not to involve her, before it became white noise.
Dina's name and number flashed on the ID screen. He'd tweaked her original plot to smuggle Phil out of Merry Hills. It put the onus entirely on her, but she had a legitimate excuse to be at the kennel. Jack didn't.
Now either all was well, or shot to hell. "McPhee," he said, and braced for the latter.
The worst-ever Desi Arnez impersonator replied, "Honey, we're home."
He blew out a breath. "No problems?"
"Oh, I'm good," Dina said. "I am
golden.
"
Jack grinned at the smugness in her voice. He leaned against the exterior wall, grateful the breezeway lived up somewhat to its purpose. "Convince me."
"Would you believe, nobody was in the front office or in the kennels when I went in? Kind of disappointing, actually. I had my lines down cold, but it was cake getting Phil out of his pen and into the reception area."
"How's his dermatitis?"
"Much improved, thanks to me." A pause, then, "I paid the fee, checkmarked the register, then I realized that wasn't enough. Not with Mrs. deHaven's name still there for anyone to see."
Jack's back stuttered down the siding, and he sat down hard on the step. Impending doom tended to have a weakening effect on his knees.
Dina went on, "I licked my finger and tried to smudge the ink. All that did was leave a dirty streak on the paper. I was about to tear out the whole page, when I saw this open can of soda on the counter. I figured if it ate through the gunky stuff on my battery cables, it was worth a shot."
Cola dissolves rust off bumpers, cuts through windshield grime and cleans toilets, too, but Jack kept his "Heloise Hints" fandom to himself. Tough guys don't read her column or "Dear Abby."
"I splashed soda all over the page, like it spilled. Everything it touched smeared a little. In one
particular
spot, a dab here and a rub there pretty much wiped you-know-who off the map. So to speak."
"You
are
golden." Jack shook his head, convinced that whatever guardian angels watched over Dina the Calendar Burglar had smiled on Dina the Phil-napper, as well. "Couldn't have done better myself."
"Ah," she said, "but would you have taken Phil's file out of the wall rack, too?"
Yes, he would have, if given the opportunity, but why burst her happy bubble?
Dina went on to say she'd worked similar sleights of hand on the registration books and files at Home Away and TLC. "Now there's nothing to connect you to any of the kennels."
She paused, her hopeful grin nearly audible. "Gwendolyn at TLC might remember you and Fido, but the police would have to know about your whatchacallitsting operationto ask. Right?"
Probably. Jack tried not to think about the law of amateur plumbing repairs: plug a visible leak in a pipe and a new, doubly damaging one is likely to spring in a less accessible place, like behind a solid brick wall.
If McGuire did find out about the loaners and Phil and followed up at the kennels, those vanishing files and vandalized log books would smell worse than Phil's morning breath.
Share that concern with Dina, and his little helper might spring new and scarier ideas to fix them, too. Switching the subject, Jack said, "Our temporary-change-of-address plan. Is Harriet okay with me moving in for a few days?"
She was napping when Jack followed Dina home and parked the Taurus, loaded with essential office files and equipment, in the Wexlers' garage. He'd declined Dina's offer to take him to his apartment and called a cab instead.
"Are you kidding?" Dina laughed. "Mom's thrilled to be harboring a fugitive. And his dog."
"I'm not a fugitive." Jack glanced down at a tenant unlocking her ground-floor apartment and lowered his voice. "Like I told you, the harder it is for McGuire to execute a search warrant on my car, the longer I can stall trying to explain what happened to my .38."
The delaying tactic included Gerry Abramson. Ignoring the insurance broker's increasingly hostile messages demanding a progress report was a lousy way to treat a client, but better than lying to him. Abramson didn't know that the Calendar Burglar had taken an early and permanent retirement.
In a perfect world, Jack could confide to Gerry why he couldn't turn over Dina to the police without implicating them both in a homicide investigation. If the world were anywhere near perfect, a bullet to the brain wouldn't have taken Belle McPhee deHaven from it.
Dina said, "It's me who isn't convinced that your Plan B isn't charity."
"My soon-to-be former landlord calls it rent." Who wouldn't be happy with Jack for hereby opting out of his month-to-month tenancy. "Nothing's in stone yet, kid. We'll talk about it some more when I get there. Then if you or Harriet isn't comfortable with me moving in, I'll check into a motel."
"Phil stays, though. Okay?"
"Whatever." Jack snorted and pressed the end button. Being at least a rung below an ugly mutt with a skin rash on the preferred-roommate list did wonders for a guy's self-esteem.
As he entered his apartment, Sweetie Pie Snug 'Ems yipped and twirled, as though Jack hadn't already made a half-dozen trips to the parking lot and back. Ms. Pearl looked up from the videocassettes and DVDs surrounding her on the floor. Brows knitted in despair, she said, "Are you sure you don't want any of these?"
She'd asked the same question of the CDs, books, linens, a couple of lamps and the weather-band radio he'd carted over to her apartment.
"To tell you the truth, I don't know why I bought most of them."
Her gaze traveled around the room decorated in basic Motel 6, sans the ramshackle-barn-in-a-field-of-wildflowers artwork. "I feel like a home wrecker."
