Wendy Delaney - Working Stiffs 02 - Sex, Lies, and Snickerdoodles Read online

  Depositing my tote on the kitchen table, I headed for the wine cupboard and found an old bottle of burgundy—not my favorite, but it was here and I was here—a good enough pairing.

  I held up the bottle. “Would a little wine help you sleep?”

  Gram gave me a nod. “Wouldn’t hurt. And what’s this ‘little’ stuff? Make it a double.”

  My kind of girl.

  “Oh, goody, you’re home,” Marietta sang out as she bounded into the kitchen. “Because I have big news!”

  She grabbed the bottle of burgundy out of my hands and put it back in the cupboard. “I also have something better than this because …” She pulled a magnum of Dom Perignon from the refrigerator, her eyes sparkling as if they’d been infused with the champagne’s bubbles. “We’re celebrating!”

  After the heated glares Barry Ferris aimed across the table at me when I asked him question after question from the list my mother had passed me like a note before class, I couldn’t imagine that we had anything to celebrate.

  Gram’s gaze shifted between me and my mother. “What are we celebrating, dear?”

  “Right after lunch, I received a call from my agent … with a movie offer!” Marietta squealed, raising the bottle like she’d just won an Oscar.

  “Well, that’s wonderful, Mary Jo.”

  “Wonderful?” With a smile that lit up her face, she shook her head. “Oh, Mama, this is freakin’ fantastic. This is big, huge … the biggest role of my life in a major motion picture!”

  “And they just happened to think of you?” It wasn’t like Marietta Moreau had been a blip on any casting director’s radar for years. There had to be more to this story, like her agent having some pictures of the guy with a goat.

  Pursing her glossy red mouth, she shoved the bottle at me with a little more force than necessary. “Be a dear and open this for me, and allow me to finish my story if you would please.”

  I forced a smile. “Sorry.”

  Marietta glided across the kitchen floor in her stilettos, joy oozing from every pore. “They happened to think of me because Jody Haver announced she was pregnant a week before filming was supposed to start and they needed a replacement tout de suite.”

  I remembered Marietta bitching about losing a few plum roles to Jody Haver, a younger, honey-haired body double, back in the 90s, so the reason that this opportunity suddenly dropped in my mother’s lap was starting to make some sense. Plus it wasn’t like she had other commitments and couldn’t start right away.

  Still, I couldn’t discount the goat theory.

  “Ooooh, she was good in that western—what was it called?” Gram said, looking at me like I could help her play Name That Movie. “You know, that one with what’s his name.”

  That narrowed it down. “Can’t help you, Gram.”

  “Well, she’s not gonna be good in Loving Lucian because the role of his mother is now all mine!” Jumping up and down like a bouncy cheerleader, she clapped. “And so is her salary.”

  Since I had been peeling the foil from the champagne cork and not looking at my mother’s face, I couldn’t be sure that she’d lied about getting the same money as Jody Haver. But I strongly suspected the production company would want to save some dough on her replacement, especially since Marietta wouldn’t have the same box office cache. “Did your agent tell you that you’re getting her same salary?”

  She sniffed, jutting her chin. “Not in so many words, but the advance is very good money.”

  Gram leaned forward in her chair. “What kind of money are we talking about?”

  My mother grinned. “Let me put it this way—I already called my real estate agent to take my house off the market, at least until after the wedding. There’s no reason to rush into any big decisions, and I certainly don’t have any time to think about moving right now.”

  Then this was truly good news—a turn of events that would allow her to keep her home, possibly revitalize her career, and get her out of my bed. And I’d happily toast to all three, especially if it meant that she wouldn’t be rushing into that wedding.

  Gripping the champagne bottle, I opened it with a soft pop and quickly filled three wine flutes. “Mom, Gram,” I said, handing them each a glass. “Let the celebration begin.”

  Lifting her glass, Gram winked at her daughter. “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

  “To me and Lucian! I don’t know who you are yet, but I love you!” Marietta announced with a giggle. “Now drink up and get dressed for dinner because we’re going out.”

  “Out?” My grandmother’s shoulders slumped. “When?”

  “Barry made reservations at the Grotto for seven.”

  I glanced at the clock. Since it wasn’t yet five o’clock, Gram and I had plenty of time to have another glass of wine, and given the fact the Barry wouldn’t be overly thrilled to see me again so soon, I had a feeling I was going to need one.

  Gram took a sip of champagne. “What does he think about you leaving to make this movie, Mary Jo?”

  She stared down as if she had a sudden fascination with the bubbles in her glass. “We haven’t really talked about it. We’ll do that later tonight, when we’re alone. Then tomorrow, I want to drive by the gallery property that Lance showed me and talk to Barry about that, too.”

  Cripes, now that she was feeling flush, that investment deal seemed to be back on the table.

  With concern etched in her eyes, Gram met my gaze. “Surely there’s no rush with the investment that artist was proposing. Wouldn’t that be a bit like counting your chickens before they hatch?”

  “Mama, you don’t understand how these things work. If the investment group comes together and this thing moves as quickly as Lance suggested it might, I’ll need someone there to represent me.”

  My mother was doing me a favor by naming Barry instead of me to that honor, but that didn’t give me any warm fuzzy feelings about her handing over a chunk of her advance money to Lance Greenwood.

  Marietta knocked back the last bit of bubbly in her glass. “But this isn’t the time to talk business. We need to celebrate!”

  She held out her empty wine flute for a refill. “Barry made the reservation for five in case his son wanted to join us, but he had to catch the four-thirty ferry, so tell Steve to come join the party.” She leaned into me as I filled her glass. “Truth be told, I’d rather spend my time with Stevie any day.”

  Me, too, but I couldn’t guarantee he’d feel the same way.

  Almost four hours later, since Steve kept signaling me by tapping his watch under our table’s white tablecloth, I was quite sure that he didn’t feel the same way.

  While Marietta savored her crème brulee, insisting that Gram take a bite, I took the opportunity to pull out my cell phone and selected Steve’s name from the top of my contact list.

  “Excuse me for a moment,” he said, pulling his chirping phone from his jacket pocket.

  The second he made a show of leaving the table to answer the call I hit End and politely declined my mother’s offer to try her dessert. The only thing I wanted to top off this evening was a short hike to the nearest exit.

  Moments later, Steve returned to the table. “Sorry, but I have to go.”

  Not quite the “we have to go” line I was expecting to hear since we had driven over together in his pickup. If he wanted any future rescues from my mother, he had better think about returning the favor and soon.

  “Oh … what a shame,” Gram and Marietta said like a chorus.

  Going counterclockwise around the table he shook Barry’s hand. “Always a pleasure.”

  Stepping between Barry and my mother, he squeezed her shoulder. “Congratulations again and thank you for allowing me to join in the celebration.”

  She patted his hand. “It wouldn’t have been the same without you.” She smiled across the table at me. “After all, you’re almost part of the family.”

  Also a line I hadn’t been expecting to hear and one that had me cringing at the insinuatio
n that a ring would soon be back on my finger.

  Moving to Gram, Steve kissed her cheek. “See ya, beautiful.”

  While she tittered, he shot me a lopsided smile. “I feel badly about asking you to cut your evening short, so if you’d rather stay—”

  “No!” I slowly eased my chair back so I wouldn’t appear as eager as I’d just sounded. “After all the champagne and wine with dinner, I’m ready to head home.”

  Feeling like a traitor with the way Gram was scowling at me, I said my goodbyes, and Steve and I headed for the Grotto’s lobby.

  “Thanks for helping me get out of there,” he said, his palm warm against the small of my back. “I don’t know how much more I could take of your mother’s giggling.”

  “I know. She’s giddy about being cast in this movie and all the wine only made her giddier.”

  “She mentioned that this would allow her to take advantage of other opportunities. Was she referring to that investment deal you told me about?”

  “Yeah, now that she’ll have money at her disposal I’m even more nervous about her getting sucked into that.”

  Steve turned to me as he held the Grotto’s heavy wooden door open. “What do you know about the pitch that Greenwood gave her?”

  “Not much other than the fact that it sounds expensive.”

  “Hmmmm …”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, trying to read him in the shadows of the parking lot.

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re lying.”

  He took my hand. “Hopefully, she’ll ask someone to study the plans for this performing arts center before she writes him a check.”

  Since my mother seemed to want to seal this deal prior to flying back to Los Angeles later in the week, I knew that would be an unlikely possibility at best. “Yeah, but she tends to be a little more impetuous than that.”

  “Must be a trait that runs in the family.”

  “Bastard.”

  “Such language. Keep it up and you won’t get any dessert.”

  My heart danced a little jig at his implication. “You have dessert waiting for us at your house?” I asked, feigning innocence.

  He squeezed my hand. “Not yet, but she should be there in about thirty minutes.”

  Yum.

  * * *

  “Well, what do you think?” Aunt Alice asked the next morning, hovering over me as I sat at her butcher block table and crunched a cinnamony-sweet snickerdoodle.

  I thought that she was going to give my grandmother some serious competition for that blue ribbon. “Sweet, chewy perfection. Really buttery, too. What can I tell you? It tastes like a winner to me.”

  She smiled with satisfaction. “We’ll see if the judges agree with you.”

  “Gram mentioned that the judging will start at nine.”

  Alice arched her eyebrows. “Did she also happen to mention what divisions she entered?”

  “Oh no. Don’t you drag me into the middle of your bake-off. It’s bad enough that all these cookies I’ve been taste-testing are going straight to my hips, so until those ribbons get awarded, my lips are sealed.”

  “You’re no fun.”

  Exactly what my mother had said five hours earlier, after we polished off the bottle of champagne and I told her I had to go to bed. It was either that or open up another bottle of wine and listen to more of her big plans for the performing arts center carrot Lance Greenwood had dangled in front of her nose. And then she would have had to shoot me.

  “I’m lots of fun.” I just didn’t feel like it at the moment because I needed to think of a good reason for Marietta not to bite on that carrot. First things first, I needed a caffeine recharge to get my brain in gear.

  On my way to the coffee station, I said hello to Stanley, who had his nose buried in Sunday’s classified section.

  Since Lucille was busy with another customer, I poured fresh decaf into his empty cup while he perused the want ads. “You looking for a job, Stanley?”

  He snorted with laughter as I expected he would. “Don’t have the time. Gotta keep this barstool warm.”

  “What are you looking for then?” I knew Stanley was a former aerospace engineer and a woodcarver, but other than the fact that he was a widower, I knew very little about what he did with his time when he wasn’t here at his post.

  He turned the page of the newspaper. “Just lookin’. You never know what you might find that you need.”

  Maybe so, but I doubted I could find the answers I needed in the classifieds. However, the salty guy taking breakfast orders at the grill had never been shy about dispensing his opinion about money matters and could probably point me in the right direction.

  I swung open the kitchen door. “Would you scramble me a couple of eggs?”

  “You got it.” Duke pointed his spatula at me. “You want some bacon with that, don’t you?”

  Heck, yes. But if I ever wanted to stop wearing my stretchy yoga pants to work I needed to put an end to my cookies and bacon diet. “Nope, just the eggs, thanks.”

  Standing next to him I breathed in the aroma of sizzling bacon and cursed my thunder thighs.

  Duke glanced at me. “Something on your mind? Besides the bacon?”

  “Yeah, something I heard regarding the Benoit Gallery. Are you familiar with it?”

  He cracked two eggs on the grill. “Sure, I buy all my fine art there.”

  Right. His so-called fine art hanging in the cafe consisted of a half dozen vintage soft drink signs, two art deco telephones, several antique coffee tins and posters, and the singing big mouth bass mounted next to Aunt Alice’s eighty gallon fish tank.

  “Have you heard any scuttlebutt about it?”

  “I know the old man died a while back, and his son’s been trying to unload it for almost a year,” he said, scrambling my eggs.

  “Tucker,” Stanley chimed in. “The younger Benoit is Tucker, and it’s been listed with Mirabelle Realty for seven months.”

  Duke looked at Stanley through the cutout window. “How would you know that? You moonlighting over at Mirabelle when you’ve had your fill of my decaf?”

  With a glance over his horn rims, the white-haired ninety-year-old straightened his newspaper. “I read.”

  “I stand corrected,” Duke said. “Seven months.”

  Still, seven months was a long time, and in a small retirement community like Port Merritt I doubted that Tucker Benoit’s real estate agent had received many inquiries about it.

  “The old furniture store next door probably isn’t helping the place sell.” Duke slid my eggs onto a plate and handed it to me. “It’s been empty for years and is gonna need some major renovation.”

  “Same goes for that warehouse across the street,” Stanley added. “Been empty since the store closed.”

  If the key to success in the real estate game was location, it sounded like selling Benoit’s Gallery could present a serious challenge. Unless, of course, there were an investment group with some big plans to renovate the area.

  Maybe I’d go over there during my lunch hour and check it out. Maybe right after I paid a visit to Kelsey.

  * * *

  Two hours later, I was deep in thought and on my knees in front of a filing cabinet when I noticed a pair of black oxfords by my side. I looked up to see Ben Santiago smiling down at me.

  “Praying or filing?” the Deputy Criminal Prosecuting Attorney asked, his hooded eyes crinkling at the corners with amusement.

  Straightening so that we were almost eye to eye with the aid of my two-inch wedge heels, I knew I’d better act like I hadn’t already heard that line from a couple of his junior staffers. “Just tidying up the never-ending paper trail you guys are so good at creating.”

  “And don’t think for a minute that we don’t appreciate it.”

  Sure. Ben hadn’t wandered back into the bowels of the third floor to blow me kisses. “May I help you with something?”

  “I hope so. Will you let me steal you a
way for a half hour?”

  Was he kidding? “Gladly.”

  “We’ve got a fraud case coming to trial in a couple of weeks,” he said as we walked down the hall. “I thought it was a pretty strong case, but there’s something about it that isn’t passing the sniff test.”

  His sniffer was almost as good as mine. If he thought something didn’t jive, he was probably right.

  Ben slowed as we approached the conference room. “Brett will be taking the plaintiff’s deposition in a couple of minutes, but I’d like you to sit in to get your read on it.”

  “No problem.” But I doubted that the junior assistant prosecuting attorney, who hadn’t acknowledged my existence in the department until we ran out of coffee, would be quite as agreeable to have my company.

  When Brett Kearney entered the room three minutes later, he leveled a gaze at me that felt like a warning shot. The message couldn’t have been clearer—I don’t want to hear anything out of you.

  Stifling a sigh, I pasted a smile on my face and turned my focus to the willowy brunette taking the seat across the conference table from me.

  Standing to my right, Brett waved his pen at me. “Ms. Tomlin, this is my … colleague, Charlene … uh …”

  Good grief, he didn’t know my name? I extended my hand. “Charmaine Digby.”

  “How do you do,” she said, her upper lip slightly puckered like she had a perpetual sour taste in her mouth.

  Since Junior wasn’t offering her anything to drink, I figured he wanted me to handle the hostess duties. “May I get you a cup of coffee or water, Ms. Tomlin?”

  She folded her hands on the tabletop. “No, nothing.”

  “I’ll take a water,” Junior said, thumbing through several pages of notes.

  I felt like telling him that he could reach the pitcher of water at the opposite end of the table more easily than I could, but I held my tongue and poured him a glass.

  Looking up from his notes he smiled deferentially at Ms. Tomlin and proceeded with some opening remarks as if he were already trying the case.