No Hiding Behind the Potted Palms! A Dance with Danger Mystery #7 (11 page)

Gloria recoiled at that, as
if I had struck her across the face. She did, after all, pride
herself on her public image as the gracious bearer of all things
warm and kind at Dynamic Productions.

“I just don’t want you
causing trouble for Ralph by going behind his back,” she told me.
“He’s been very good to you over the years and I would hate to see
you repay him by causing trouble with the other
employees.”

“Anything else, Gloria?
Because if not, I’d like to get back to work,” I announced, my tone
frosty. I picked up the phone, my hand poised to dial.

“No...no.” For a long
moment, she stared at me, as if searching for the right words. I
kept my gaze steady, which seemed to disconcert her. With a
“hrrump!”, she turned abruptly and left. I watched her blow out the
door like an angry wind, her gauzy black dress swaying with her
hips.

Gloria didn’t realize it,
but she had just given me a good kick in the seat of my pants,
waking me out of the lethargy of the last few years. It happened in
a flash. One minute, I was the victim of a horrific plot to ruin me
and the next, I threw on my armor, picked up my lance, and got my
battle plans in order. In that instant, time and space converged,
and I suddenly realized that all this time I spent running away
from the truth about what happened to Kevin was what allowed Ralph,
Gloria, and the Winks to destroy my life. I was so afraid my son’s
death was my fault, I was so afraid I could have protected him and
didn’t, I let people walk all over me. I didn’t dare blame anyone
else for making a mistake, lest I have to accept the blame for my
own failures. But as I sat there, staring at Gloria, it suddenly
occurred to me that I was a good person. I taught Kevin as much as
I could about how to stay safe. That drunk driver killed him, not
because he had one too many, thanks to a momentary lapse in
judgment, but because he chose not to accept responsibility for his
actions over years. He and his addiction to Canadian Club killed my
little boy, and I was damned if I was going to continue to let the
bastard off the hook because his widow was tearful, begging me to
forgive her at Kevin’s funeral. I could still remember her sad, red
eyes as she gripped my hands. Bosco had walked away, angry, and at
the time, I had thought him wrong. But now I was beginning to
understand.

There were other people all
around Matthew Horner, who knew that he was impaired the day he got
behind the wheel. He had six drunk-driving arrests and two previous
crashes, one that injured another woman. He had a history of being
a dangerous man.

I thought about the people
who didn’t stop him that day when he was at the Humpback Bar, the
letters and cards I got from people who were sorry they didn’t take
the keys away, sharing their guilt. Somehow, I let them off the
hook, too, and I took their burden as my own. Even the insurance
company was dragging its heels on the settlement. They tried to
claim Matthew Horner lied when he applied for auto insurance,
putting the car in his wife’s name, and therefore, he was an
uninsured driver. We were still waiting for the trial to
begin.

As I sat there at my desk,
reviewing my own actions, I saw that I was no different than the
people around Matthew Horner, allowing George in my life because I
saw myself as a powerless victim. I didn’t want to be perceive as
mean or unmerciful, so I went out of my way to embrace the
unembraceable, the unworthy. If I hadn’t cared so much about being
kind, I would have been enraged. All the anger that I felt at
Kevin’s unnecessary death suddenly surged up in me, and I decided
once and for all that I was going to stand up for myself. That was
my money that helped Ralph build this company. That was my house
that was destroyed. That was my heart that George trampled. I was
not going to take it any more. No more being the victim. I made up
my mind I was going to take back my life, get what was mine, and
the hell with the guilty. They needn’t bother sending me an
invitation to their pity party. I had more important things to do
than attend.

I put down the receiver and
quickly forwarded the emails from Mary and the others to my
personal account and to Bosco before deleting them from my Dynamic
account. I went into my computer and cleared my history, emptied
the cache, and deleted the cookies. Once all that was done, I
picked up the phone to call the Prop Shop.

“Hey, Harry. How’s it
going?” I said loudly into the receiver. Seconds later, I heard the
click as Gloria listened in from the outer office. I spent a few
minutes chatting about Roger’s love life, and how frustrating it
was for Harry to see his ex out and about town with his latest
paramour. Then I got down to business.

“Do you still have those
disco balls? I’m going to need them. I just got an offer from
another company that wants us to do a ‘Saturday Night Fever’ retro
thing for their chiropractic office.” Even as I spoke, I was making
notes on my tablet. “Can you give me a price on them?”

“Do you realize those things
are almost antiques now?” Harry laughed. I shared a couple of ideas
with him about some other items that might work and then listened
eagerly to his suggestions of possible sites to use for filming the
retro dance scenes.

When I got done on the
phone, I signed up for a couple of new email accounts on my tablet,
inventing four new companies looking for video production services.
Dr. Evans Ranger was the non-existent chiropractor located just
over the border, according to the email I sent myself at Dynamic.
The White Gardenia was a restaurant down in Greenwich, in the
process of getting their liquor license and remodeling their
restaurant space, hoping to open in three months with a media
blitz. The owner, Jonathan Valenti, wanted to know if we also
handled other services, such as social media. The third company I
invented was Hawthorne In-Home Care, a Kentucky company with three
branch offices opening soon in the area. The fourth was for
Venerable Jewelers, inquiring if we had any experience in shooting
short educational pieces for trade shows. They wanted to run looped
footage on how to properly clean silver, jewelry, and crystal at
their booth at the Montreal convention. I made sure all the faked
emails showed up in my Dynamic email account before I picked up my
briefcase and headed out to a fictional meeting with a prospective
client. I told Gloria I would be back in an hour. She didn’t even
bother to look up as I passed her desk. Would she open them in my
absence? Would she mark them as unread, as if she hadn’t snooped on
me? I remembered the handful of times I returned from lunch after I
first met George and found my computer screen lit up. Gloria had
claimed that she accidentally brushed the keyboard when she left
paperwork for me, but now I understood. The girly conversations we
had in the office were a reinforcement of George’s efforts to
romance me. Gloria had read his emails to me. It wasn’t a
coincidence that she mentioned thingsin George’s communications
that echoed my feelings. She was reading the script, word for word.
She was George’s eyes and ears on the ground, confirming for him
what I liked and didn’t like about him, so he could adjust his
seductive techniques. For a brief moment, I felt like a complete
idiot. But then I reminded myself that I been deceived, and if I
was going to survive this beating, I was going to have to stop
feeling bad about making mistakes and get on with fixing the
problem. That gave me focus. As my head began to steer me in the
right direction, I felt a renewed strength. My heart felt lighter
as i glimpsed the light at the end of the tunnel. I thought about
Kevin, my little boy, and how he would have wanted
justice.

“Make it fair, Mom,” he once
said to me after his bike was stolen. “I know that kid took
it!”

The look of devastation on
his face drove me to journey four blocks with my son, to Danny
Abrams’ house, where I knocked on the door and waited to confront
his mother. At first, Monica hadn’t believed her son was guilty of
stealing Kevin’s bike. She wanted to believe that it was someone
else’s problem.

“It’s in the garage,” Kevin
had insisted. “I saw him put it there.”

Sure enough, Danny had
tucked Kevin’s bike in the corner, behind the lawnmower and the
leaf blower.

“That’s Danny’s bike,” she
replied.

“No, it’s not! It’s mine!
Danny’s is over there!” Kevin had pointed to the second bike, now
resting in the opposite corner of the garage, by the lawn
furniture.

“Well, I don’t know,” Monica
Abrams had said. “He might have two bikes.”

At the time, I had
commiserated with her, understanding how mortified she was that her
only son had stolen a bike. Kevin was appalled.

“Mom, I want my bike back!”
He stood in front of me, pleading. That’s when I marched over to
that bike by the lawnmower, grabbed the handlebars, and wheeled it
out into the open. Kevin’s stickers were all over the handlebars. I
recognized the seat that we had bought at Mike’s Mountain Bikes
three weeks before. I had looked Monica steadily in the eye and
told her we were taking Kevin’s bike back, that she would have to
deal with her son’s bad behavior. She had started to protest, but I
knew the bike was Kevin’s. At the time, I felt sorry for her
because she so clearly didn’t want to confront her son’s bad
behavior. She hadn’t wanted to believe her little boy capable of
being a thief. Looking back, I realized I should have kicked her
lame ass and told her to be a real parent. Real parents not only
protect their kids, they protect people from their kids when they
get out of line. People are human. We all have made mistakes that
need real fixing.

I headed for the Lucy B.
Tongren Public Library, two blocks away, where I signed onto a
public computer. I created web pages, two on Blogger and two on
WordPress, for the fictional companies. On the Hawthorne In-Home
Care page, I typed in “website under construction”. I wanted the
companies to look legitimate enough to be attractive targets for
Ralph and his criminal cohorts, but not established enough to seem
overly sophisticated. I used the same email addresses and vague
contact information that I had used in the emails to myself. I sent
myself a couple more inquiries, asking for prices on the
prospective jobs. The beauty of being in the commercial business
was that I had no problem being creative and quick. In less than an
hour, I set my trap. It was time to go back to the
office.

I ran into Dom in the
parking lot as he was loading equipment into the van. He rolled his
eyes and nodded in Ralph’s direction. The door to Dynamic
Productions was open and the animated conversation looked anything
but romantic between the lovebirds. Gloria looked like she had
rained all over his parade. I squeezed past the pair of them as
they stood by the doorway and headed into my office, where I
printed out the latest emails from the fictitious companies. I left
them on my desk.

Kendall was finishing her
first run-through on the Red Dragon Garden footage. I popped my
head into the editing room, to see how things were
going.

“So far, so good,” she told
me. “I think we have what we need. Any chance we can start putting
things together tomorrow?”

“Absolutely,” I
promised.

“Dori!” I heard Bosco’s
voice in the outer office. “Sorry I’m late. Any chance you’re
ready? I’ve got to get back to work. I have a crisis!”

I stopped in my office to
retrieve my briefcase and purse before following him out to his
car. He was making a phone call as I climbed in. Reaching over, he
squeezed my hand.

“Right. Right. Yes, I know.
As soon as I have anything for you. Okay.” With that, Bosco hung
up. “Let’s get the hell out of here before Ralph tries to corner me
again. I have no intention of raising the white flag yet. How was
your day?”

It took me ten minutes to
fill him in, including my trap to catch Ralph and Gloria. He drove
as he listened, his eyes forward, barely glancing at me. I couldn’t
tell what his reaction was to my plan, but I knew he was thinking
about it. Suddenly, with his blinker on, he pulled into the parking
lot of Holcomb’s Surf and Turf.

“What are we doing here?” I
asked nervously. If we were going to argue, I preferred not to do
it in public.

“What are we doing here?
What are we doing here?” He turned towards me, his voice rising.
“Are you kidding me? I am buying you the biggest lobster and the
tenderest filet mignon they have in this joint!”

“You are?” Bosco wore a huge
grin on his face.

“I am. That was absolutely
brilliant, my love. What a stroke of genius. Let’s hope Ralph takes
that bait. That will move this along nicely. After dinner, we’ll
stop at Walmart and pick up a few disposable phones, so Ralph and
Gloria can call their new prospective clients. Let’s work this like
a real sting and get the evidence for the prosecutors.”

Chapter Twelve
--

Two hours later, we were
sitting in the living room of Bosco’s apartment, sprawled on the
sofa. I was filling in the details of the phony websites. We
activated the new phones, recorded voicemail messages in our
altered voices, and then I added the phone numbers to the blog
sites. I concentrated on loading stock photos and doing some
graphics, to jazz up the visual appeal, and then I designed logos
for the non-existent companies and added them. Bosco was reviewing
credit reports on Ralph and on Gloria.