Medium Well (9781101599648) (13 page)

He tried to smile at her.
Come on, Biddy, look at me. Tell me this is bullshit.

“His wrists stuck out,” she blurted.

His stomach clenched. “What?”

“His wrists stuck out beyond his cuffs. It was like the sleeves of his coat weren't quite long enough. I remember because his wrists were so white against the dark coat.”

Nothing. Trick of the light. Power of suggestion. Shit, shit, shit.
He closed his eyes.

“That's it, isn't it?” Her voice was soft. “Your guy had the same thing.”

“He's not ‘my guy,'” he snapped and saw her flinch. “Sorry.”

“It's okay. Come on, Danny,” she murmured. “Please. Tell me the truth.”

He rubbed a hand along the side of his face. “All right, yeah, that sounds like the same guy. I wish to God it didn't, but it does.”

She sighed. “I figured as much. Not that I have any idea what all this means.”

“I'm sorry, Biddy. It's my fault. If you hadn't come with me to that place, you wouldn't have gotten involved in all this.”

“You can't know that. Who knows how long he's been waiting for somebody to come in there?”

“And he chose us. Wow. Talk about luck.” He wondered what his mother would say about all this, but he had no intention of sharing that part of his family history with Biddy. At the moment.

She sighed again, resting her head against the back of the chair. Her hair was dull silver in the dim light of her kitchen. Danny wished he could see her eyes. “So now we come to today. The phantom kitty.”

“Which probably has nothing to do with this.” He leaned forward to grab his wineglass. “It may sound weird to say it's a coincidence, but that's how I see it. The big house has a ghost cat, and the carriage house has a murder. Two different orders of magnitude.”

She shook her head. “Not that I'm a conspiracy freak, but I hate coincidences. And that's a big fat one.”

“Right.” He started to take another swallow of wine, only to discover he had an empty glass.
When did that happen?
He poured himself another. “However, for the moment, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.”

“So what happens now? What's our next move?”

He started to object to the
our
and then decided the hell with it. At this point, like it or not, Biddy was in. “Like I said before, we need to find out more about the house. That's got to be our next move. I've got a list of the owners. I was going to go to the Historical Society to see what they have on each of the names, if anything. Gracie said their records are computerized now.”

Biddy shrugged. “I can do that easier than you can. You've got appointments, but I don't. If Araceli asks, I can say I'm doing some research for you, which is the truth.”

“Okay. We'll split the list of names. Each of us can do half.” He started toward his jacket, draped over one of the living room chairs, and staggered slightly until he found his balance. He paused for a moment, staring at the table. The second bottle of wine was almost empty.
Second bottle?
He didn't remember them finishing the first one. Okay, time to pull it together. He still had to drive home.

He dug the list of owners out of his jacket pocket. “Here. You can keep this. I'll make another copy for myself.”

She ran her finger down the page, frowning. “Do you think it's odd that there are so many? Looks like around fifteen by my count.”

He shook his head. “Not necessarily. The house is over a hundred and twenty years old.”

“But Mrs. Steadman had it for fifty of those hundred and twenty. That means the others probably had it for five years or so, tops.”

“Ghostly manifestations?” He gave her a dry smile. “The Steadman house doesn't show up in any of the district ghost-story collections I've seen.”

She stared at the ceiling, thinking. “If I wanted to sell a house, I might not want to broadcast the fact it was haunted—not everybody thinks that's a selling point. Plus, there's no telling which of these people is connected to the ghost. The murder might have happened sometime after the original owners sold it.”

“Which means we're going to have to spend time with each of these people. You up for this?”

She shrugged. “Sure. Why not? At least it'll get me out of the office. Let me take the first ten or so. You can do the rest if we need to.”

“If we need to?”

Her slow smile started a flush of warmth low in his body. “Maybe I'll get lucky early on.”

Thoughts of getting lucky merged with the growing pool of heat in his groin. Okay, definitely time to head for home, before he did something really, really stupid. He made a great show of checking his watch. “We can get this set up tomorrow. I'd better take off.”

For a moment, he thought he saw some emotion flash through her eyes, maybe regret.
Wishful thinking, Danny!

She dropped her gaze. “Okay. I'll see you tomorrow.”

He paused for a moment. His brain was telling him to walk out the door, but all of a sudden his brain didn't seem to be in total control anymore. He bent down to slide two fingers under her chin, tipping her face up so that her turquoise eyes met his, like two mountain pools. Water for a man dying of thirst. He lowered his mouth to hers.

She tasted of wine and fruit, something rich and warm. He slid his tongue between her lips, tasting her more deeply, feeling the warmth spread to his toes. His arms went around her waist, pulling her up against him, feeling the softness of her breasts against his chest.

Her hands rested lightly on his shoulders, then her fingers glided along his neck to tangle in his hair, feathering across the back of his head.

He deepened the kiss, pulling her closer, one arm around her shoulders now, one around her waist so that she could feel him, know how much he wanted her. Know how good it would be between them.

Between them.
Between him and his assistant. Whose sister would have his balls for a bolo tie if she found out. And she'd be absolutely right. Bosses did not screw their assistants.

Shit. Shit, fuck, goddamn!

He pulled back slightly, raising his head and trying not to pant. “We really shouldn't do this. I'm your supervisor. Jesus, Biddy, I'm sorry.”

Those limpid glacial pools gazed up at him. “Sorry for what?”

“This. I mean, I just lost it. Again.”

Her lips curved slightly.

His groin turned to granite.

“I'm not sorry,” she murmured. “It's cute that you're being all noble and principled. About how long do you think this phase will last?”

Danny sighed. His body screamed for release, no matter how hard his brain was leaning on the brakes. “I don't know. My ethics are crumbling away as we speak, sort of like corn bread in milk.”

She ran her fingers lightly across his cheek. “You will notify me when they break down completely, right?”

He closed his eyes, trying not to feel the prickles of heat left behind by her fingers. Then he managed to push himself away gently, grabbing his coat as he stumbled toward the door.

“Believe me, ma'am,” he muttered, “you'll be among the first to know.”

Chapter 13

Gracie DeZavala was one of the most colorful characters Biddy had ever run into—which she considered a very good thing. During the months she'd been working at Vintage Realty, trying to keep herself from being flattened by sheer boredom, she'd begun to look forward to her occasional forays to the Historical Society, mainly because she'd get to dish with Gracie. In a place like the King William District, where most people wore either business suits or haute
couture, it was always refreshing to see a woman who favored Hawaiian-patterned muumuus and flip-flops, to say nothing of hair the color of Orange Crush.

Gracie glanced up at her as Biddy walked toward her desk, sticking her pencil in her bright orange topknot. “Well, well, the Vintage Realty songbird. How long are you going to let that barracuda of a sister keep you behind a desk instead of behind a microphone where you belong?”

Biddy didn't pause to wonder how Gracie had found out about the Chalk Creek Changelings. She figured Gracie knew just about everything about everybody in the district one way or another. She just hoped Gracie hadn't found out about her and Danny.

Not that there was much to find out. Yet.

“Morning, Gracie. I need to do some research on people who owned the Steadman house and the carriage house out back. I've got a list.” Biddy pulled the sheet with the names out of her file folder, hoping her voice sounded bored rather than apprehensive.

Gracie picked up her glasses, which were framed in bright green plastic, with rhinestones across the top, and suspended on a chain around her neck. “Let me see.”

Reluctantly, Biddy handed her the list. For some reason, she felt like restricting the number of people who saw it. Maybe being haunted was catching.

“Marcus Templeton.” Gracie made a face. “He's a non-starter. Nineteenth-century developer. Built a lot of houses around town but didn't bother to live in them. He had a mansion on Main that burned to the ground in the twenties.”

“So he built the house. Would he have built the carriage house, too?”

Gracie nodded. “Probably. It would have enhanced the property. Let's see if I recognize anybody else.” She glanced down the page, shaking her head. “Nobody famous. Or infamous. So far as I can tell.”

Biddy figured as far as Gracie could tell was farther than just about anybody else. “Nobody related to Sam Houston or Davy Crockett?” She tried to sound like a hopeful innocent.

Gracie snorted. “Not on this list, anyway. Of course, by the time that house was built, half the people in San Antonio claimed to be descendants of one or the other of them, preferably both, with Jim Bowie and Travis thrown in as bonuses and Sam Milam as a distant cousin.”

It took another ten minutes of chat before Gracie was willing to set Biddy up at a computer terminal to access the records. After she'd demonstrated how to boot up the database that listed the society's documents, she shook her head.

“Some of this stuff has been scanned, but a lot of it's still in paper. The entry for the name will tell you the format.”

Biddy had a sinking feeling. “Where's the paper?”

Gracie's smile turned slightly nasty. “Upstairs. Most of it in banker's boxes. But at least the reading rooms are air-conditioned.”

Biddy sighed, closing her eyes. She had a feeling she'd be digging through those boxes sooner rather than later.

After half an hour, she decided Gracie was right about the builder, Marcus Templeton. She couldn't find anything in the records that showed he'd ever lived in the Steadman house, but he'd certainly built it, along with the one across the street. They both had that same bland, gray look.

She glanced at her list of names again, wondering how many of the other fourteen she could eliminate. Each name had the date of the deed next to it, the date when the person had taken ownership of the house. Beatrice Steadman had taken possession in the sixties.

Biddy thought about the man in her dream, his dark suit with its too short sleeves. His heavy boots. She wished she knew more about the history of clothes and what people wore when, but she was fairly certain that suit wasn't modern. Of course, the sixties weren't exactly modern, either—Biddy hadn't even been born then. Then again . . .

She studied the list and began to count back. Eliminating the first six names took her back to 1932, which was the earliest date she felt confident about. The suit her dream man had worn might have come from the 1920s, but Biddy would bet it hadn't come from any time later than that.

Of course, that still left her with eight names, even if she omitted Templeton. Biddy sighed and went back to the database.

After two more hours, she figured she'd done all she could do without risking serious eyestrain—the computer terminal at the Historical Society wasn't exactly high-res. Including the names she'd dropped because of the suit, she'd managed to eliminate about half of the list, though, and found some interesting details about a couple of others.

She headed back toward Vintage Realty, feeling a faint glow of satisfaction.
Good job, Biddy!
Her faint glow lasted until she walked through the door and saw Araceli's assistant regarding her with narrowed eyes.

Biddy smoothed a hand across her hair, surreptitiously tucking a couple of strands behind the clips at the side. “Hi, Lois, what's up?”

Lois nodded toward Araceli's door. “She's waiting for you.”

“Why?”

Lois shook her head, turning back to her computer. “Not for me to say.”

Biddy fought the urge to grind her teeth. Lois was fanatically loyal to Araceli—she wouldn't say anything she wasn't authorized to say. She opened her sister's office door, making her eyes as wide as possible, Pollyanna's second coming. “Hey, Araceli,” she chirped as she walked into the office. “Did you want to see me?”

Araceli was seated behind her desk, flipping through a stack of papers as if they were personal enemies. “Want to see you?” she snapped. “No. It's more like a nasty chore. Sit down in that chair and don't move.”

***

Danny had two showings in the morning, neither of them, praise be, the carriage house. For a moment, he wondered about that. Why had he only shown the carriage house in the late afternoon? Would it be any different earlier in the day?

Or at night?

He shuddered. He definitely didn't want to show the carriage house at night!

The first couple, married lawyers, were very interested in the Tobin Hill house. Danny didn't blame them. The price was a steal since the owner lived in Santa Barbara now and he needed the money yesterday. The couple said they'd think about it, but Danny figured it wouldn't take them long.

The second client was less interested in the Olmos Park mansion a couple of blocks from Trinity University than she was in Danny himself. Her husband apparently worked in a profession that provided lots of cash but little time for his wife. His wife wanted payback.

“Lovely layout,” she purred, looking at Danny's crotch. “What's upstairs?”

Danny kept his gaze on the moldings around the fireplace. “Five bedrooms, two baths. There's also a pool, of course, out back, with a guesthouse. I think you'll like what they've done with the grounds.”

“Later.” The wife's smile made him think of a lioness spotting a limping zebra. “Let's check out those bedrooms.”

An hour later he headed back to the office, feeling like a Victorian heroine who'd been forced to protect her virtue. He wondered if he would have fought so hard before he'd met Biddy.

Before he'd met Biddy?
Oh, do not go there, you moron!

He'd intended to spend only five minutes or so in his office, checking for messages and making sure the San Diego deal had closed. But when he walked in the door, he saw Araceli hovering at the front desk in a bright yellow suit with black accessories, looking like a bad-tempered bumblebee.

“Ramos,” she snapped. “Come into my office. Now!”

She actually looked more like a yellow jacket, Danny reflected. Her temper completed the effect. Wordlessly, he followed her through the paneled oak door.

Biddy sat in the visitor chair, her expression blank.

He forced himself to unfist his hands, to make his voice sound calm. Whatever was going on, grabbing Araceli by the throat wouldn't help. “Okay, what's up?”

“What the hell were you doing in the Steadman house?” Araceli sounded like she was talking through gritted teeth. “That's my goddamn house, Ramos. You've got no business there. I told you I'd give you a walk-through later, at my convenience, not yours. Stay the hell away from my properties!”

He glanced at Biddy. He'd bet the farm she hadn't told her sister anything beyond her rank and serial number.

“Don't you look at my sister,” Araceli erupted again. “She's in enough trouble for taking that key without telling me. Lucky for me, my assistant noticed her hanging around the keyboard. Did you tell her to do it? Why am I even bothering to ask—of course you did!”

Danny shrugged, trying for George Clooney, relaxed, devil-may-care. “I needed to see the house, Araceli. I just wanted a walk-through and you weren't around. I figured the main house is connected to the carriage house.”

“Which you can't seem to move,” she sneered. “So now you're trying to move in on my sale? Over my dead body, Ramos!”

He bit back all the immediate responses that leaped to his tongue. “Look, I'm not trying to sell the Steadman house. I know it's yours. That's why we looked at it in the late afternoon, when we knew you wouldn't be showing it.”

Araceli paused, studying him with narrowed eyes, then turned to Biddy. “And you! Why wasn't this little visit in your report for yesterday? Didn't you think it was worth mentioning?”

Biddy winced. “It didn't seem necessary. It didn't have anything to do with sales. We just did a walk-through.”

His stomach clenched. “What report is this?”

Biddy's gaze became fastened on the floor.

“I told my sister to keep me informed about your activities.” Araceli's voice dripped acid. “After your run-in with Herman Zucker, I didn't want any other surprises.”

Danny stared at Biddy. She raised one trembling hand to her phony glasses, pushing them up her nose. “Biddy?”

She drew a shuddering breath and looked up. “It was just information about business. Nothing else.”

“And speaking of business,
Mr.
Ramos, as I believe we were earlier, what have you done about that carriage house lately? I sent you Zucker and Henderson. Have you tried any of your own contacts?” Araceli folded her arms in front of her, raising an eyebrow. Now she looked like an angry ladybug. “You're supposed to be this big hotshot salesman, or so I've been told. So why haven't you brought in anybody on your own?”

Danny did a quick mental inventory, wondering if any of the real estate investors he knew had pissed him off enough to deserve the carriage house. “Offhand, I can't think of anyone who'd be interested. The place is in lousy shape and it's not on one of the good streets. The renovation's going to be expensive. Our best bet might be someone from out of town who sees it as an investment. Or some innocent who doesn't realize what he's taking on.”

“Have you posted the description at the usual places?” Araceli's eyebrow was still raised. He wondered if it might freeze there.

“Of course I have. But it may take a while before anything happens. You know what the market's like right now. I assume Petrocelli isn't interested in paying for any renovations or cleanup himself.”

“No. Of course not. He's concentrating on the big house.”

“Well, then.” He shrugged. “I'll keep pushing it, but don't expect miracles.”

Araceli took a deep breath, nostrils flaring. Her mouth was still a thin line. “Believe me, I don't. But no more funny stuff. I'll be watching you from now on. And you.” She turned to Biddy, eyes narrowing. “I expect you to turn in accurate reports. I don't care if you are my sister. Screw around with me, and you'll be out on the street.” At least her eyebrow wasn't up anymore. Now both eyebrows were clamped together.

Biddy kept her gaze on the floor. Danny fought the urge to tell Araceli that her sister would actually be better off singing on the street than stuck in this hellhole of an office.

“That's all!” Araceli snapped. “Now get out of here. Both of you.”

Danny held the office door for Biddy, hoping she'd at least look at him, but she kept her eyes down, scurrying up the hall toward her cubicle. He stepped in front of her before she could escape.

“My office. Now.” He managed not to bark at her—he figured she'd had enough harassment for the morning.

She still didn't look at him until she stepped through the door. Then she raised her gaze. Behind her meek-girl horn-rims, her eyes shot napalm.

Okay, so she wasn't bothering to pretend to be something she wasn't. At least not around him. Fair enough. He closed the door behind them.

“How long have you been spying on me for Araceli?” He leaned against his desk.

She folded her arms, staring at the wall. “Just since Zucker. She threatened to go to Big Al if I didn't. It seemed like the lesser of two evils.”

His jaw clenched. “And you bought in? Daily spy reports?”

“It was a daily activity report, supposedly. Araceli claimed it was standard in the other offices. There was even a form to fill out. She claimed it was a way to keep track of what was going on. Not that that was the real reason she wanted me to do it.”

He narrowed his eyes. “And that would be?”

“To keep tabs on you, of course. She figures you're up to something, but, being Araceli, she assumes it has more to do with cheating her out of a commission than with being haunted.”

His jaw was clenched so tightly it almost hurt. “Why didn't you tell me, Biddy?” He leaned forward, grasping the edge of his desk, as he tried to stare her down.