Hot Property Page 3

  Let’s see, today was a dog-walking day, she remembered. Before she got out of the van, she consulted her electronic organizer: Mrs. Frazier’s Pomeranians, Mr. Damian’s rottweiler. She could probably delegate the poms to one of her employees, but the rotty was hers alone. No one else could deal with him.

  A tap on her window distracted her. She looked up. Her heart gave a jump of recognition, then sank. Michael Taggert was scowling at her through the closed passenger window. Idly she wondered what that gorgeous face of his would look like graced with a smile.

  She ran the window down. “I just got out of jail an hour ago,” she snapped. “If you want to take me back, you’ll have to catch me first.” She put her hand on her keys, still stuck in the ignition, and glared at him, daring him to whip out his handcuffs.

  “I’m not here to arrest you.”

  “Then why—”

  “Can we go inside, maybe have a cup of coffee?”

  He sounded almost … what, hopeful? Wendy found that hard to believe. Where was the arrogance, the superior attitude?

  “If you want privacy, my office isn’t the place,” she said cautiously. “Besides, I don’t want to advertise my predicament to my employees.” As dear as they all were to her, like her own family almost, they were as prone to the temptations of gossip as anyone. She couldn’t afford for any of her clients to find out she was a jailbird. They trusted her with their cars, their housekeys, sometimes even their children.

  She unlocked the door. Without hesitation Michael climbed into her van, filling it with his overwhelming presence. Funny, she’d thought the van extraordinarily roomy until now.

  “I saw a convenience store around the corner,” he said. “I’ll spring for the coffee.”

  She considered turning him down flat. But her curiosity overcame her. Why was he suddenly making nice? She restarted the van’s engine and pulled out of her parking space. “The Exxon station down the block has better coffee, and it’s only seventy-nine cents.”

  He nodded. “Then by all means, the Exxon station it is.”

  As she turned out of the parking lot, she sensed a restlessness beside her, something she couldn’t put her finger on. Maybe he didn’t like her driving. Some people, some men in particular, were nervous passengers. James, the macho jerk, she recalled with a frown, had refused to let her drive even when they took her car.

  “I’m a good driver,” she said. “You don’t have to worry. I’ve never had an accident.”

  “A few parking tickets, though,” he quipped. “But your driving doesn’t bother me.”

  So. He’d checked up on her.

  She pulled into the gas station. Neither she nor her reluctant host said anything as they entered the attached Snack Shop. Michael poured them two large coffees and paid for them at the window. Wendy doctored hers with cream and sugar. The silence continued until they returned to her van.

  Wendy had never been known for her patience. “Okay, what’s up? Why are you being so …” She struggled for the right word. Nice didn’t cut it. “… so nonconfrontational?”

  “As opposed to yesterday? Yesterday I was trying to browbeat a confession out of you. Today I’m not.” “Then what do you—”

  “I want your help. I need your help. And you may not realize it, but you need mine. My testimony in a courtroom could make or break you.”

  She considered this. Mondell had warned her that Michael Taggert was a formidable opponent, particularly in open court. His performance at the arraignment was just a warm-up. What jurist could fail to be intimidated into believing anything he said? She decided Michael had a point.

  “So you’ll temper your testimony in exchange for …” She let her voice trail off as a series of X-rated thoughts crossed her mind. Surely he wasn’t suggesting that! She’d heard such things happened all the time, but Michael didn’t seem the type to have to manipulate a woman into … well, he wasn’t suggesting that, was he?

  She was horrified to discover that she didn’t find the possibility as repugnant as it should have been. In fact, a telling warmth was spreading through her like butter on warm toast.

  “You’re blushing,” Michael said. One corner of his mouth turned up in what might pass for a smile. That foreign expression on his face so disconcerted her that she couldn’t respond for a moment.

  He filled the silence. “I’m merely suggesting that you lead me to the person you work for. The D.A. isn’t interested in prosecuting you if he can get the person responsible, the brains behind—”

  She snapped back to reality. “I’ve told you a million times, I’m not working for some crime boss. Much as it pains me, I’ve come to the conclusion that sweet little Mr. Neff set me up to take the fall. So I’ll do what I can to help you find him.”

  Michael sighed. “That would be a start.”

  “But you have to believe I’m innocent.”

  “No, I don’t. I can’t. I believe what the evidence tells me.”

  Now it was Wendy’s turn to sigh. She supposed on the surface she looked guilty as hell. She’d have to settle for the fact that Michael was willing to believe she hadn’t acted alone. “Did you check out the utilities for the house on Monty?” she asked.

  He nodded. “The gas and electric were under the name Pat Walters. Whoever he or she is, they never called in a disconnect order or gave a forwarding address when they left.”

  “Pat Walters,” Wendy repeated thoughtfully. “Maybe Mr. Neff rented, and Walters is his landlord.”

  “My partner is trying to track down this Walters person, but no luck so far. Can you give me a description of Mr. Neff?”

  “Oh, yes.” She’d thought hard about this during the long, sleepless night in jail. Thank goodness she had a good power of observation. “He was about five ten, in his mid-sixties, gray hair, thinning on top. He had bushy eyebrows, hazel eyes, a kind of sunken mouth—he didn’t have many teeth.”

  Michael made notes. “What about his weight?”

  “He was too thin. I’m not good at guessing weight, but he was frail and stooped. He had arthritis, so he had trouble getting around, and he was on oxygen. How far could a guy like that get?”

  Michael looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, then shook his head. “Maybe you’re more innocent than I thought,” he murmured.

  “Pardon me?” She didn’t think she’d heard correctly.

  “You. Innocent. Did it ever occur to you that your Mr. Neff might have been faking the illness? If he lied to you about his mother’s jewelry, he could lie about anything.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” she admitted. She liked to think of herself as a hardheaded businesswoman, but more than one customer had led her down the garden path, rooking her into loads of work with no intention of paying her.

  Suddenly she remembered how, when she’d seen him the day before, he’d seemed to be feeling great until she reminded him he had a cold. Then he’d abruptly started coughing. “He might have been faking the glasses too. And the gold tooth.”

  “Gold tooth?”

  “Didn’t I mention that?”

  “No. You said he didn’t have many teeth.”

  “He didn’t. But one in front had a gold cap.”

  Michael made more notes in his pad. “What about scars and tattoos?”

  She couldn’t tell whether he was being facetious or not, so she answered him honestly. “Not that I recall.”

  He paused, thinking, and scratched his head with the end of his pen. Wendy watched in fascination as the black waves of his hair danced, then fell back into place.

  “Would you be willing to work with a police artist?” he asked.

  “Sure. When and where?”

  “Now. She works downtown in the Physical Evidence Division. I’ll drive you over there.”

  “I’d rather take my own car,” she said. “I have a couple of errands I can run after I finish with the artist.” She could pick up Mrs. Glover’s restored painting from that little gallery in the Arts District.
And Yoda the rottweiler was in Oak Lawn, which she could hit on her way back uptown.

  “Do you need directions?” Michael asked, pulling her back into the present.

  “Just an address. I’ll find it. She held up her battered, beloved map book. Then she grabbed her electronic organizer from the dashboard, opened it, and turned it on.

  “Seven eighteen Cantegral Street,” he said as he pulled the door handle to let himself out. “I’ll meet you there.”

  “Detective?”

  He paused. “Huh?”

  “Don’t you want me to drive you back to your car?”

  “Oh. Right.” He slammed the door and managed, somehow, not to look foolish.

  Wendy liked that about him. He was the most self-possessed, confident person she’d ever met. Still, she almost wished she’d let him get out and walk. Another five minutes so close to all that manliness, and her screaming hormones would become audible.

  Michael felt like an idiot as he sat silently, finishing his coffee, while Wendy drove back to her storefront. How had he managed to forget that they’d driven three blocks from his car to get coffee? That was the problem. When he was around Wendy, his brain short-circuited.

  He’d known it was a mistake when he’d climbed into the close confines of her van. The van smelled like her, a light, breezy fragrance as fresh as a spring morning and twice as intoxicating. He didn’t know if it was perfume, soap, or just Wendy, but he couldn’t seem to get his fill of it.

  He’d tried to concentrate on his note taking, but every so often he had to look up at her. Even in the direct light of the morning sun, her face was as smooth as a child’s, not a line or wrinkle in sight. Her auburn hair was pulled back in a youthful ponytail with a purple ribbon, showing off a long, slender neck.

  Today she was wearing a short denim skirt and matching sleeveless vest, revealing enticing amounts of smooth, tanned arm and leg. Her dainty feet were encased in flat multicolored sandals. Her toenails were painted purple.

  He’d never made love to a woman with purple toenails, he mused. And why in hell was he thinking about making love to this one? It wasn’t as if that were even a remote possibility.

  She pulled into the same parking spot, beneath a green-striped awning, that she’d left a few minutes ago. “I have to run inside and spend about ten minutes covering all the bases,” she said. “Then I’ll meet you there.”

  “You’re not going to change your mind?” he asked warily, having been burned too many times by too many promises from suspects, witnesses, victims, and snitches alike. In general, he’d discovered, people didn’t like dealing with police.

  “No, I’ll be there. If the artist can come up with a reasonable likeness of Mr. Neff, I’ll pay to have it plastered all over town. I’ll be ten minutes behind you.”

  With that she hopped out of the van, grabbed a tote bag and the organizer, and scurried inside.

  Michael returned to his own car, shaking off a feeling he’d decided to label the “Wendy Thayer Effect.” Had he been fantasizing about her toenails? One would think he’d never sat close to a beautiful woman before.

  His ex, Faye, was beautiful, but she had a totally different look. Faye was polished, like a high-maintenance showhorse that had been freshly groomed. Wendy had a natural quality about her, as if she’d just been swimming in a mountain lake. Nude.

  Oh, hell, he had to stop this—now. He climbed into his car and turned the key. The coughing and sputtering started up again, but the engine didn’t. Start up, that is. Michael cranked and cranked for a good five minutes, but the damn thing just wouldn’t catch.

  Wendy peeked out the door, perplexed. After waving to someone inside, she walked out and headed straight for him. He rolled down the window.

  “Problem?” she asked.

  “Won’t start,” he admitted. “I’ll have to radio in for someone to come get it.”

  “Oh, but we’re still going to the police artist, right?” she asked. “You can ride with me.”

  “I can’t just leave the car here. I’ll have to turn over the keys, sign papers—”

  “Jillian, my office manager, can hold the keys for you and give them to whomever. She’s bonded and insured. For that matter, Fritzie, one of my drivers, is a great mechanic. You should let her take a look at that engine.”

  Michael wasn’t about to turn over his car keys to the associate of a suspected felon. That was strictly against policy. But if he didn’t get Wendy to the police artist now, while she had enthusiasm, he might lose the opportunity.

  He climbed out of the car and pocketed the keys, then grabbed his cellular phone. He’d deal with the car later. “Let’s just go,” he said.

  Wendy looked relieved as they both climbed back into her van. It wasn’t until they were well on the road that she sprang the news that she had to make a couple of “quick stops” on the way downtown.

  “I allocated as many tasks as I could to my staff,” she explained, “but Bobbie’s still out with the flu, and a couple of my customers won’t let anyone but me handle their business. Then there’s Yoda.”

  “Yoda?”

  “You’ll see,” she said with an enigmatic smile that caused his objections to die a-birthing. She was breathtaking when she smiled, which wasn’t all that often, at least not in his presence. Then again, he hadn’t given her much to smile about.

  He kept silent during the trip to the dry cleaner’s to pick up some senator’s daughter’s clothes and deliver them to her town house. The stop at an art gallery where they restored paintings was educational. How did Wendy make such contacts, anyway? And had they come across any of the material stolen from the Art Deco Museum?

  They stopped at Eatzi’s, a gourmet restaurant/grocery store, for pistachio nuts, sirloin tips, and a cheesecake ready for the table. Wendy seemed to know everyone, and she whizzed in and out with unbelievable efficiency.

  “Put it on my tab,” she called over her shoulder to one of the white-aproned employees as she walked out without paying. As she stored everything in specially designed compartments in the back of her van, which prevented fragile items from rolling around and smushing or breaking, she explained, “It’s much easier to shop at places where I have an arrangement like that. Standing in line to pay wastes loads of time.”

  The gourmet comestibles were delivered to the apartment of some yuppie, out to impress his date for that evening. Michael wondered if he’d ever been that young or that eager to please a woman. He didn’t think so. He used to barbecue hamburgers for Faye out on the patio and open a bottle of Chianti. That was about as fancy as it got.

  On the way to the next stop, his curiosity overcame him. “This is a helluva strange way to make a living,” he said. “How did you get into it?”

  She smiled. He imagined she heard that question a lot.

  “I didn’t set out to become a personal shopper,” she explained. “It just sort of evolved. The truth of the matter is, I love to shop. I can’t pass up a white sale. I read the inserts of the newspaper the way a financial analyst reads the stock quotes. My favorite place in the whole wide world is a shopping mall the day after Thanksgiving.”

  Michael’s blood ran cold. Wendy’s enthusiasm was just a little too reminiscent of Faye’s for his comfort.

  “And money’s like a river, right?” he couldn’t help commenting. “You just dip in and take whatever you need for whatever you want, ’cause there’s lots more coming down the pike.” That was how Faye had described it to him during one of the rare instances she had admitted she had a problem.

  But Wendy looked appalled at his suggestion. “Heavens, no. My clients usually put me on a strict budget. One of the lures of hiring a personal shopper is that you can actually save money because I hunt down the bargains you don’t have time to find.”

  That was a revelation to him. “So these rich people you shop for actually pay attention to how much you spend?”

  “You bet. For each client, I have to render an accounting down to t
he penny, complete with receipts.”

  That practice would have been alien to Faye, Michael admitted silently. She used to have clothes, shoes, and purses delivered to the office where she worked part-time as a secretary, so that he wouldn’t know how much she actually spent. She never remembered to record checks in the register, so they were continually overdrawing the account no matter how much money he put into it. She hid the credit card bills from him or “lost” them.

  “How long have you been in business?” he asked.

  “Officially five years. But I did it unofficially for years, starting when I was in high school. I went to Hockaday—you know about Hockaday?”

  He knew. Hockaday was a private girls’ school in North Dallas. Only the richest of the rich sent their kids there. But Hockaday was no fluffy finishing school. Academically it could compete with any prep school in the country.

  “I’m familiar with the school,” he said.

  “I went there ’cause I could play a mean game of tennis,” she admitted. “I wasn’t one of those brainy kids, though I wished I could have been. Straight A’s could have gotten me a scholarship to college as well. Tennis got me some nifty trophies and ribbons, and an elbow that still swells up in cold weather.”

  “You didn’t go to college?”

  “Just junior college. A couple of years. I thought I wanted to go into fashion merchandising, but I couldn’t afford any of the colleges that offered those kinds of programs.”

  Couldn’t afford? Those were words he hadn’t expected to hear from a shopping addict. Certainly they’d never passed Faye’s lips. Faye’s rich parents had never denied her anything. It just simply never occurred to her that something she wanted to buy didn’t fit into the budget. “I thought you grew up rich,” he said.

  “Far from it, I’m afraid.” She stopped for a red light. “I went to high school on a scholarship. My father …” Her voice trailed off as she leaned to look at herself in the rearview mirror. “My father died when I was three. My mom had to struggle. She had me clipping coupons from the time I was in kindergarten.”