My Hero (25 page)
She picked up the carry-on and nudged the big suitcase forward with her knee, a few inches at a time.
“Watch it, lady.”
“Jesus H. Christ.”
“Some people! Sheesh!”
Six men entered the Media Arts building while she was negotiating her way across the sidewalk, one of them just a foot ahead of her.
“That's okay,” Holly muttered under her breath, grabbing the door as it was closing. “No. Don't hold the door. I can manage.”
Inside the lobby, she cast a baleful glance at the brass elevator doors, then she sat on her suitcase, took out her cell phone, and called Mel upstairs.
“Hey, kid, welcome back. You
are
back, right?” he asked.
“Sort of,” Holly said, leaning to her left to avoid losing an eye to a passing umbrella.
“Where are you?” Mel shouted. “This is a lousy connection.”
“I'm down in the lobby. Could you send Sammy or somebody down to help with my luggage?”
“Who?”
“Sammy. Anybody.”
“Sammy quit yesterday. The ungrateful jerk. What do you want with Sammy, anyway?”
“Never mind, Mel. I'll be up in a minute.” Holly sighed, dropped her cell phone back in her purse, and stood up.
Yee-hah.
Ramon's didn't just look dark this afternoon. The place looked downright dank and sleazy to Cal as he settled on a stool at the bar. Funny how a steady diet of Dr. Heineken could alter a person's perceptions, he thought.
Young Rick with his ponytail and pierced ears was on duty today, and Cal stopped him as the young bartender automatically reached for a green bottle.
“Give me a club soda, will you, kid?”
“'Scuse me?”
“I said let me have a club soda. Lots of ice.”
The boy actually blinked, which didn't do a whole hell of a lot for Cal's self esteem. “You want a club soda? Seltzer, you mean?”
“Yeah. That's what I mean.”
“Oh. Okay. Sure. With a shot of Johnnie Walker or what?”
Cal sighed. “Just the soda.”
After Rick poured it and set the glass in front of him, Cal asked, “You know anything about a suspicious fifty-dollar bill that Ramon had last week?”
“Sure. That's practically all he talked about.”
“Did he take it over to the bank?”
Rick shook his head. “I don't think so.” He punched open the cash drawer. “Seems to me it's still in here. Yeah. Right here under the tray.”
Cal held out his hand. “Let me take a look at it, will you?”
“Sure. You think it's a phoney?”
“Nah. I just want to see it again. You don't see too many bills in that condition. Like it's been through the wringer and back.”
The kid slid it across the bar and Cal picked it up. Through the wringer. Hell. This sucker looked like it had gone down on the
Titanic.
He turned it over, studying Grant's face. The old guy didn't look all that bright-eyed this afternoon. He'd been hoping that the bill Holly had given him was the same one Ramon had shown him, that there was just a single funny fifty floating around town, in which case he would have just put it away until he got back to Washington this fall.
But now there were two, dammit. He couldn't ignore a pair of bogus bills.
“So, Ramon doesn't remember how he got this?” he asked Rick.
The kid shook his head.
Cal put Holly's fifty next to Ramon's on the bartop and stared at them while he finished off his drink. Twins. Identical twins. The serial numbers were even the same. Shit.
He'd been hoping for something to make him forget about Holly twenty-four hours a day, but this wasn't exactly what he meant in the way of a distraction.
“Tell Ramon I'm borrowing this,” he said, putting both bills in his wallet. Standard operating procedure called for bagging them, but it was a little late in the game for prints and he wasn't even sure what his status was as an investigator while he was on medical leave.
“Borrowing it? Hey, I dunno, man. He's not going to like that,” Rick said.
“Yeah, well, I'm not crazy about it myself, kid.”
Mel was going to be tied up in a production meeting until four o'clock, so Holly settled in at her desk where she found a good-sized stack of pink while-you-were-out messages in addition to a week's worth of mail and eighty-seven email messages on her computer. She felt as if she'd been gone a month rather than just a week. And somebody—probably that jerk Sammy—had left a half-filled coffee cup on top of her calendar and spilled Sweet 'n Low all over her keyboard.
Not quite ready to dive back into work, Holly took the rank coffee cup to the ladies' room, where she flushed the moldering dregs and then washed the cup with hot water. While she was rinsing it, Maria Bianchi from research came in to freshen her makeup.
“Hey, Holly. When did you get back?”
“Just a few minutes ago,” Holly said.
“You were where?” Maria leaned toward the mirror over the sink and studied her bronzed eyelids. “Arizona? Oklahoma?”
“Texas.”
“Ha. Same difference,” the researcher said as she reached into her handbag and came up with a tube of mascara. “So, how was it?”
“Oh, fine. Nice, actually.” There wasn't a shred of sarcasm in her tone, but Maria seemed to hear otherwise.
“Yeah. I'll bet.” While she stroked more black gloss on her lashes, her gaze strayed to Holly in the mirror. “What's that say? On your shirt. The Lohengrin Café?”
“Longhorn. The Longhorn Café.”
“Gawd,” Maria moaned. “You must really be glad to be back.”
Not as glad as I thought I'd be,
Holly almost said. She gave the coffee cup a final swipe with a paper towel. “Well, I better get back to my desk. There's a week's work waiting for me.”
“I noticed. I put a copy of that pool tape you wanted, the one of the assassination attempt, right by your phone. Did you see it?”
“No. I'll go take a look. Thanks, Maria.”
“Sure.” She managed to talk at the same time she was dragging lipstick across her lower lip. “I'm still trying to come up with some more footage for you. There was a guy there with a video cam but he's jerking everybody around over the price. If CNN comes up with it in the next week or two, maybe I can get you a sneak peek. I'll let you know.”
“Great. Thanks.”
When Holly got back to her desk, she saw the tape right where Maria said it was, next to her phone. Other than the film from the private citizen's video cam, this pool tape was the only visual record of that day in Baltimore. A cameraman from CBS had been on duty then for what was supposed to be an uneventful afternoon. Then Thomas Earl Starks and his M-16 had changed all that.
Holly sat down and just stared at the black rectangular box. She'd seen the footage dozens, maybe even hundreds of time. It was practically all any station showed for a couple weeks last September in the media's typical overkill of a big story. She'd watched it almost clinically, wishing the cameraman had been just a little closer, that he'd remained standing throughout the incident instead of hitting the pavement like everybody else in the line of fire.
Except for Cal, of course.
Oh, God. All of a sudden she could hardly breathe. How was she going to be able to watch the man she loved get shot again and again? It would kill her. It would be like taking a bullet herself. It would…
Whoa, Nellie. Where did that come from? The man she loved? Had those words actually passed through her brain?
The man she loved. Holly tried out the thought once more. It made her stomach flip and her mouth kind of slide into a grin she couldn't control and her heart almost tickle inside her ribs. She glanced at her watch, wondering where he was right now, deciding he was at the track with Bee while the sun beat down on him and bounced off the chrome of the T-bird parked nearby. She pictured the stupid roses in her room at Ellie's and the big bed, empty now, maybe freshly made up for another guest.
She wanted to cry, but that was the last thing she should do, so instead she reached for the stack of pink messages. None of them struck her as earth-shattering or in need of immediate replies. Several of them intrigued her.
There were five—no, six!—messages from a Diana Koslov. One of them was written with three names. Diana Koslov Griffin. All of them were marked
Urgent.
That had to be Cal's ex-wife, but why in the world, Holly wondered, would the woman be calling her? And what the hell was so damned urgent? Then, just as she was sitting there, literally scratching her head, the phone on her desk chirped. She answered it with her usual greeting.
“This is Holly Hicks.”
“Oh, thank God you're back,” a husky voice exclaimed.
Holly didn't recognize it. “May I help you?”
“I hope so, Ms. Hicks. This is Diana Koslov. Well, actually Diana Griffin. I want to talk to you about this biography you're putting together on my husband.”
Husband.
The word sort of ricocheted inside Holly's head.
Husband.
“Your husband?”
“Yes. That's right. My husband. Cal. Calvin Griffin. I don't suppose you're aware of it. Well, actually hardly anybody knows. Not that it's a great secret or anything.”
A husky, sexy, supremely self-confident laugh filtered through the phone. It struck Holly as the way a lioness would laugh. Well, if lionesses laughed.
And then the woman stopped laughing and said quite clearly, “Cal and I are back together.”
I
t's nice having you back at the dinner table, Cal,” Ruth said, setting a final serving bowl on the table before she sat down herself. “I mean that. I really do. Maybe we should open a bottle of wine.”
With Holly gone, Cal didn't feel much like celebrating, but then neither did he want to announce his newfound sobriety only to be reminded—at length—of his father's major sins and shortcomings. He gestured toward the tall glass beside his plate. “Iced tea's fine with me, Ruthie.”
“Yeah, honey,” Dooley said. “I just poured myself this great big glass of milk.”
“Oh, all right.” Not bothering to hide her disappointment, she helped herself to some rice, and passed the bowl to Cal. “Those are fresh peas in the risotto. From the MacCauleys' garden. Bev brought them over this morning. And here, Cal. Take some broccoli now. There's just butter and lemon juice on it. Nothing fancy or scary.”
Actually he liked broccoli, but his sister seemed to have more fun if she thought she was force feeding him veggies, so Cal winced and fidgeted and grimaced a bit as he let a few bright green florets tumble onto his plate, then passed the bowl to Dooley at the other end of the table.
He could almost hear Holly's voice asking him what kind of vegetable he'd want to be. God, he missed her. He didn't even have her phone number, but one call to Washington after dinner would soon remedy that.
Ruth's chicken, with its stuffing of sharp cheese and ham and fresh herbs, practically melted in his mouth. Having lived in Washington so long, and having circled the globe with the president, Cal was no stranger to fine cuisine, and Ruth's cooking ranked among the best he'd ever had. She really should have her own restaurant, he thought, but refrained from saying it out loud for fear of setting her off.
“How is Bev MacCauley?” he asked, not that he cared about their neighbor so much as he felt obliged to add a bit of good conversation to Ruthie's good meal.
“She's fine. Still talks up a storm,” Ruth said. “In fact, she told me something pretty interesting this morning. Seems like that Bingham fella—you know, the real estate guy—is snooping around her place, too. He's even been out wandering around Charlie Cutler's place, if you can believe that.”
“Well, he can't be too interested in ranching then,” Dooley said between bites of chicken. “Ol' Charlie hasn't cleared any brush in the past fifteen or twenty years. It's a damned paradise for javelinas and wild turkeys over there.”
Although Cal had been largely focused on Holly's pretty face the day they'd encountered the real estate agent, he suddenly recalled something Bingham's client had mentioned. “They're not looking for ranch land,” he said now. “I think they're trying to put together some acreage for a hunting preserve.”
“He told you that?” Ruth asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Doesn't surprise me all that much,” Dooley said. “They've done that with a couple places over in Kleberg County and down in Kenedy County. Pretty successfully, too. They're importing all kinds of livestock from Africa. Springboks. Nilgai. Hell, even wildebeests, I hear.”
“Wildebeests.” Ruth snorted.
“Well, honey, people are willing to pay a lot of money to hunt exotic critters, I guess.”
A little glimmer of an idea flickered to life in Cal's brain. It was probably stupid and pretty misguided, considering the source, but he decided to mention it anyway. What could it hurt?
“You know, you might want to think about consolidating with the MacCauleys and Charlie Cutler and some others. Why let all those easterners have all the fun and reap all the profits? You could put together your own ten or twelve thousand-acre hunting preserve and still keep enough fenced pasture for Dooley's bulls and the MacCauleys' long-horns.”
“You know how I feel about hunting,” Ruth said dismis-sively, putting an effective damper on the discussion.
But at the other end of the table, Cal noticed that Dooley looked a little more contemplative than usual. Maybe he wasn't a complete lame brain. Maybe his idea wasn't such a bad one after all.
It was after nine when Holly finally got home to her apartment. She and Mel had stayed late at the office to go over her ideas for her script and to finalize the shooting locations. In addition to returning to Honeycomb in July, Holly was going to have to visit the site of the assassination attempt in Baltimore, the Secret Service's headquarters in Washington and their training facility in Glynco, Georgia. They decided that would give them plenty of background footage.
When Mel dropped her off in front of her building on 59th, he had playfully punched her arm and said, “No rest for the wicked, kid.” Holly had searched his face intently then, wondering if her boss was implying something in “wicked” above and beyond the usual cliché. Did he mean she was just going to have to work hard, or could he tell somehow that she'd broken a cardinal rule of journalism by going to bed with the subject of her piece? Had the logo on her Longhorn shirt suddenly transformed itself to proclaim, “I slept with Cal Griffin and all I got was this lousy T-shirt”?