One Way to Succeed (Casas de Buen Dia Book 1) (4 page)

Or maybe his CEO title was just a front. Maybe his parents helped him hire good people and set him up with enough cash and credit to make mistakes that would have sunk a less-well financed trust funder. The unsophisticated way business was reported in the local press, there was no way to know just how successful he really was, or whether he was still being supported by his parents.

Amy’s cellphone vibrated, making the desk where it lay buzz, and she realized she hadn’t taken it off of vibrate since she left work. During the day, she always turned off the sound so she wouldn’t be distracted. Customers hated to see their waitress catering to her own affairs when she could have been warming up their coffee or removing a dirty soup bowl from their table.

Amy picked it up and didn’t recognize the number. She debated whether to ignore the call, as she usually did after five at night, knowing that it was probably a telemarketer getting around her “no-call” designation. But, it was a local caller, and she hoped it might possibly be someone responding to one of her job applications.

“Amy?”

“Yes. Who is this?”

“Rick. I hope it’s okay to call after business hours.”

First, her heart jumped. Yes, she admitted again, she really was attracted to him. Whatever his business success. Whatever money he got from his parents. Probably all women were moved by him, given his physique, his pretty face, and his natural charisma.

But why wouldn’t it be okay to call her at night? she wondered. If he was going to ask her out, it would have been more inappropriate to call
during
business hours, wouldn’t it? But then, why had she jumped to the conclusion he was going to ask her out? Maybe he was calling to see if she wanted to adopt Busker. Or whether she wanted to help him pay for Busker’s vet bills.

“Amy? Are you still there?”

Amy forced herself to concentrate. “Of course. No, no problem. You can call anytime. What’s up?”

“Uh, I know this is going to sound a bit funny, but I was thinking about your job situation and I just wanted to run something by you. Don’t feel like you have to say yes, okay?”

“Well, I don’t know why I would. What are you talking about?”

After leaving the café, Rick headed back to the office, slipped past his receptionist to avoid whatever small talk he would be obliged to engage in, and closed his office door. He looked for Kent’s contact on his cell phone, and let the phone do the dialing.

“What can you find out about someone if all I know is where they work and their name?” he asked the only PI he knew. Kent was certifiably a genius. He and Rick had been roommates for the first two years at Stanford before Kent dropped out—out of boredom more than anything—and spent the next few years traveling the world. About five years ago, he let Rick know he was settling down in Sacramento and taking up the sexy pursuit of personal investigations. Since then, he’d helped Rick uncover financial truths about potential partners. Occasionally, he had uncovered financial troubles that sellers tried to hide so they could drive harder bargains. Knowing someone was about six months in arears on their child support payments was very helpful when that person was insisting “I don’t need the money and I can wait for a better offer.”

Rick was worried that his friend was wasting his brains, but Kent said he loved the serendipity of it, the unpredictability of his assignments, and the thrill of discovering things people thought they had hidden very well. 

“Well, it depends.” Kent answered his question.

“On what.”

“How high their profile is, what kind of trouble they’ve been in, how much money they’ve borrowed over time,” Kent said. “If someone has never had a mortgage, never been arrested and arraigned, never run for mayor, it can be as little as their high school diploma and maybe their best friend’s maiden name. If they’ve made news, made a lot of money, or made a lot of enemies, I can find out a lot. Why do you ask?”

“I am thinking of hiring someone and I just want to have some idea of what I’m getting into if I do,” Rick said.

“Really? You found that COO candidate you’ve been looking for? Didn’t he give you a resume?”

“Ah, no,” Rick said. He suddenly realized how silly his request would sound. “It’s for my admin. I’d like to offer the job to someone, but I know nothing about her.”

“Then why do you want to offer her the job?”

“I’m not sure.” Rick paused, and Kent—like any wise PI would—waited to let him hang himself filling in the void.

“I met her the other day, and I can’t get her off my mind.”

“Ah, Christ!” Kent nearly yelled into the phone. “You know how stupid that is! Ask her out, Rick. For Christ’s sake, don’t hire her! You’ve kept sex and business separate for years, to good effect. Why would you mess with success?”

Kent was one of the few friends who knew why he had never hired a woman for more than an administrative function. Rick didn’t think of himself as sexist, although he’d been accused of it often enough. His business had been one singled out as one of the most successful local enterprises with no women in executive positions by the Desert Sun. He’d taken the criticism mutely. The analysis was correct, but he was damned if he was going to explain himself to some newspaper reporter who’d take his reasoning and blow it up into some sordid family drama.

The reason he kept women out of the company was the same reason he had nothing to do with the business his father had started when he was in kindergarten. It was because by the time he was in high school, his mother had weaseled her way into the family business, taken it over, and literally pushed his father out.

Women, he decided, especially those you sleep with, should never get involved with your business. And the best way to prevent that was to hire men.

In a way, he wasn’t proud of it. He knew it was merely a couple of degrees of absurdity from there to a belief that all women should stay home so he wouldn’t be tempted to sleep with him. But, seeing what his father went through—finally giving up, moving across the country, and dying young— he couldn’t shake his conviction that it was for the best.

“Yeah, I know,” he finally answered Kent. “It’s just that she really needs a better job, and I feel a little sorry for her. She’s obviously working for minimum wage, and clearly, she’s better than that. I’m thinking of calling it a temporary position. That way, if things get too complicated, I’ll just tell her it’s time to move on.”

“What are the chances it will get too complicated?”

“I don’t know. She seems pretty disinterested in me, so I guess that’s good. But, yeah, I’ll have to admit it. I think she’s special.”

~

It didn’t take Kent long to come up with some pretty interesting facts.

He called back mid-afternoon with his report. Amy had grown up in a lower-middle-class household, lost her father when she was young, and lived with a grandparent when her mother moved to L.A. with a new husband. She got a business degree from the University of Denver, where she attended on a full scholarship, but seemed to make little professional progress despite her academic success. She’d worked as an accountant in Pueblo, a small industrial town south of Denver; and then in marketing for a downtown hotel in Billings, Montana. For some reason, she moved back to Denver, where she went back to accounting for a small hotel chain for a while, and finally, she moved to Palm Springs.

“That’s when everything starts to make sense,” Kent said.

“What do you mean?” Rick asked.

“Well, she starts to be referred to in news stories and local gossip blogs as the girlfriend of one Rob Martin, who was, at that time, a TV anchor at one of your local stations. Now, it appears he’s in L.A. So I followed Mr. Martin back in time, and guess what?”

“He lived in Pueblo and Billings and Denver, too.”

“Right-oh, good friend of mine. So maybe she’s not that available anyway. Maybe you don’t have anything to worry about!”

“Were they married?”

“Apparently not. No marriage license in any of the counties where they lived.”

“I’m sure I met that guy a few times at charity events,” Rick recalled. “I don’t remember her being with him.”

“Maybe she doesn’t like to go to those things much,” Kent suggested. “I didn’t find any pictures of him with her in old
Palm Springs Life
issues.”

That was good news and bad news, Rick thought after hanging up with Kent. He sat and thought through the information. It was a lot of “on the one hand, on the other hand, and back to the first hand ...”

If she hated society events, maybe they had more in common than a soft spot for injured dogs. But on the other hand, perhaps her separation from Mr. TV Anchor was just temporary, and when she said she was looking for a job, maybe she meant in L.A. Maybe they were still an item. But if they were still an item, then there would be no harm hiring her and calling it temporary. But if they were still an item, what real motivation did he have for helping her out?

Rick shook his head and headed out the door. He’d have to figure this out on the job. He had three construction projects underway, and as the general contractor, he never let a week go by without spending a few hours on each site, making sure things were moving along and no one thought he wasn’t watching what they were doing.

~

The first project was a single-family renovation he’d taken on for the property’s owner. It wasn’t his usual gig; usually he bought the properties he wanted to renovate, and then either sold them for a nice profit when they had been remodeled to L.A. hipster standards, or turned them over to his small hotel management company to operate.

He’d taken on this house, though, when all of the hotel properties he wanted were unavailable. The high prices paid recently for some properties by L.A. investors around town were exorbitant, and now anyone with four shabby rooms under a leaky roof with an asphalt slab of off-street parking thought their little gem should bring them enough money to move to Cozumel and never have to swipe someone else’s credit card again. Eventually, their expectations would return to earth, and Rick could get going again, but in the meantime, he could wait them out.

The house project was progressing fine, although as he toured the construction site, he was worried for the owner. The young man, a Silicon Valley techie with more money than any thirty-something should ever have, had asked him to take the three bedrooms of the small, mid-century ranch house and turn them into one huge master suite. That made sense for him and his partner now, Rick agreed, but it was going to make it really hard to sell the house when the time came. And, in his experience, ninety percent of homeowners, regardless of their best-laid plans, ended up having to sell sometime before they died.

He had tried to convince the owner to leave at least two bedrooms and closets in the final design, to no avail. It wasn’t his problem, to be sure. Still, he liked to think that the people he worked with in this small town would remain friends and satisfied business associates for a long time. If the owner someday regretted his decision, he was unlikely to remember whose decision it really was.

Rick stepped up into his pickup truck and headed back down to the south edge of downtown, an area bordering what was known as the Warm Sands neighborhood. Still a little sketchy in places, and with much higher crime stats than many areas, the neighborhood was getting better as more money was coming into town. As stomach-turning as the crowds of hipsters could be to full-time Coachella Valley residents, at least they were bringing their money along. And Rick was one of those plenty happy to rent his little boutique inn rooms for twice what they might have brought just five years before.

Driving down Palm Canyon in his F-150, Rick always felt a little bit like he was on display. Most of the big pickup trucks—especially the shiny new, clean ones—weren’t headed down to the Builders Supply to pick up two-by-fours or a load of electrical cable. They were testosterone boosters for those not wealthy enough for a Porsche or tall enough to telegraph their virility without a big truck. While Rick wasn’t an imposter—and his Casa del Buen Dia logo on his front doors should have made that clear—he knew his looks didn’t help separate him from the young male hotties trying to attract chicks or dudes with four-wheel-drives. He didn’t obsess about his looks, but he knew they had an effect on a lot of people who did.

Would he be off the radar if he had a nice looking woman like Amy sitting up on this high perch with him? Or would it make matters worse?

He thought through the information Kent had relayed. Certainly, with a business degree from Denver University, Amy could handle the admin position he had open. But would she be too ambitious to be satisfied with that? Would she turn into an emasculating control freak like his mother?

Well, she couldn’t if he set boundaries early on, he decided. And, if he made it clear the job was temporary, he could get rid of her at any point if she either caused problems in the company, or he decided he’d rather pursue a different kind of relationship. He could help her find another job at that point; he had plenty of contacts in the business community.

Rick chuckled. He hadn’t even shared more than ten minutes with her yet, and he was already imagining the varieties of potential relationships. What was it about her that was so magnetic?

Hell if he knew. He would call her as soon as he was done with his site visits.

~

Things weren’t going quite as swimmingly at the first hotel project, the Corona Hotel where Amy had once worked, now redubbed the Corona Inn. The framing subcontractor he had hired for the project wasn’t his usual choice. His usual guy was too busy with a bevy of larger projects. It was becoming more and more of a problem as the economy plugged along, interest rates stayed low, and Palm Springs real estate in particular had caught investors’ attention.

He had a feeling that the new framing guy was dragging his heels because he didn’t have another job to move on to. Tom was good, quite the perfectionist in fact, but he and his small crew were new to town and didn’t have enough contacts to have jobs lined up.

“So boss, where’s the billboard you said you’d put up?” Tom accosted Rick as soon as he stepped out of the truck. Tom had been begging for a sign that identified him as a contractor; it seemed that he was more concerned with getting the next job than he was with getting this one finished.

“Well, if you’d get your ass in gear, we won’t need a sign,” Rick said. “Not only that, but this isn’t a very busy street.” Rick waved his arm at the quiet lane that ran in front of the building. “A sign won’t get much visibility here.”

“But, dude! I need some publicity.” Tom slapped Rick on the back as they walked together into the gutted building. 

“You’re not the only one wondering what’s coming next,” Rick assured him. “There just isn’t a lot of stuff available at the right price right now. We’re both going to have to be patient.”

“But at least you know everybody in town,” Tom said. “Can you make some calls for me?”

Rick looked at Tom’s pleading face. It reminded him of what he had felt the first couple of years he was in business: panic, hope, fear, optimism, pessimism, all spinning off of one big bouncing ball of emotions.

“Sure, I’ll do that Tom,” he said. “But promise me you’ll pick up the pace here. Interest rates might be low, but they’re not zero. I need to get this hotel running and start paying off these loans soon.”

“I’m just trying to hang onto my crew, boss,” Tom said, lowering his voice so his two employees framing out one of the new bathrooms wouldn’t hear him say it. “I’d appreciate anything you can do to help me with that.”