Current Affairs (Tiara Investigations Mysteries) (15 page)

I turned to them, “Excuse me, that’s my grandson playing out there. Can I just take a quick photo? No need to move. You’re fine just where you are.”
Click. Click.
The young lady looked up at me. Her open face was unassuming, and I wondered if she knew he was married.

“Huh? What?” Obviously he hadn’t heard me, and I took advantage of the delay. Slowly a light came on in his head, and he realized being in a photograph might not be the best idea. He turned and saw there were no children in the play area.
 

His friend was repeating, “She said her grandson is playing …” How long was it going to take for him to figure out what was happening? Then he looked at me and jumped up. I may have been smirking. Okay, I was smirking. I’m sorry but when you see a dumb person thinking so hard you’re afraid he’s going to hurt himself, you want to help. You know he’ll probably get there sooner or later, but you get bored to tears watching and waiting. He leaned over the booth as if to charge me.

Tara stepped in between us and looked up at him.
“Whoa, big boy.”

I leaned over her shoulder, “Actually that’d be ...”

“Oh, right. Anyway, you better sit back down on your bun. She almost killed a real man this morning.”

I started to deny this but realized it was basically true. We were leaving before we overstayed our welcome when Victoria turned back around. “Just go home. Just go.” She pointed her finger at them. If I’m lying, I’m dying. She was actually wagging her finger at the guy.

We were glad we had parked in the hotel parking lot so there would be little chance of them getting our tag number. “Do you think they’ll take my advice and go home?”
Victoria
 
craned
her neck, trying to see if they were still sitting there.

I hurried her to the car in case he followed us.
 
“I don’t know, but I doubt the meal will be all that happy now.”

Tara was practically trotting. “When you’re in the mood for one hundred percent beef, it’s hard to stop until you get it.”

“He wasn’t letting his meat loaf,” Victoria said and giggled.

“Victoria! Are we in junior high?” I yelled this as we jumped into the car. Once I had the doors locked, we relaxed.
 

 
Vic looked at her watch to get the time for billing. “I think our work here is done and in an hour and change. Cooking on the front burner, I’d say.”

“Why couldn’t Detective Kent see us tonight?” Tara asked.

Victoria turned around in her seat.
“Untrained, ill equipped and incompetent?
Bull puppy! Want to go to Cracker Barrel for a dessert to celebrate?”

I pulled onto Sugarloaf Parkway. “It’s a little late for me to be eating.” It‘d been a long day and I was, for once, in the mood to go home.

“Me, too, but I’ll go with you and sit if you’re hungry.”

Victoria gave a half laugh. “I’m not really hungry. Isn’t it amazing the lengths you’ll go to get out of having sex?”

Tara slipped off her sandals. “Hey, I thought things were better between you and Shorty.”

“Not that much better.
Puh-leez
.”

After a minute or so I said, “I’d rather not tell Detective Kent about Kelly being pregnant.”

“He might already know. I mean, he’s not here, is he?” We knew Victoria was kidding, but we did look around the car before taking up our conversation.

 
“Why not tell him?” Tara nudged one dog or another off her lap.

“He’s not exactly what you would call enlightened, and I think he might try to say her hormones made her do it. My woman’s instinct says she didn’t kill her husband.”

“Mine, too.” Victoria had logged off and was closing down her laptop. “If he’s so sure, why hasn’t she been charged?”

 
“Do you think she’ll be an okay mother?”

Victoria and I looked at Tara. “Are you asking if she’ll pass on this dependency gene?”

Victoria sort of hummed while she got her thoughts together. “She’s dependent on her mother, another woman. I don’t know, but it just seems like that’s okay.
Or maybe just better.
At least the baby will have a strong grandmother.”

“Amen.” Tara pulled her legs up on the seat and enjoyed our success.

Victoria reached into her backpack and pulled out cotton clothes, both pants and tops.

“Are those scrubs?”
 

“Cool. We haven’t used a disguise in a long time. Which case are these for?” Tara inspected hers.
 

 
“Are we wearing wigs? Remember the first time we tried those? ” How could we forget?

Using disguises is harder than you might think. I bought a wig identical to Tara’s hair color and style. She bought one like Victoria’s hair and Victoria bought one like mine. Like I keep saying, we had a lot to learn.

“I was thinking we would go by the hospital to interview our friend from this morning. These should get us by the police officer stationed at his room.”

“Wait a minute. Is this a trick to get me to apologize to him?”

 
“No, hon. Lord, no.
I would just like to know who that guy was. What was his motive? Were these attacks related to David Taylor’s murder?”

I stifled a yawn.
 
“David Taylor’s murderer would assume we saw him, which would be a motive for the attacks on us. And that we have photos. Come to think of it, anyone would assume that.”

Tara handed the scrubs back to Victoria. “I’m an autumn.” Vic exchanged these for another color. “What do we say when we see him?”

“His reaction to seeing us should tell us a lot.” I turned into Tara’s driveway.

 
“I have an idea for finding out more about The Peachtree Group. We need to be carrying large handbags tomorrow when we go to hear their pitch for investing in the company,” Victoria said as Tara got out of the car.

I lowered the window, and Tara talked to us while
Stephie
jumped out and ran to the porch. “Have you noticed that no one seems to have known David Taylor? The people at the memorial service respected his intelligence and admired him, but that was about as far as it went. I know I said all this before our first Peachtree Group meeting, but I want to give it another try tomorrow. Maybe we can find an employee that worked with him.”

Victoria leaned over me toward the window. “I would like to know more about the company’s financial footing. If I can see what projects the employees are working on and what kind of hardware they use, I’ll have a better idea of the company’s profitability.”

“And I would like to know more about the Backpack UAVs they produce,” I said. “
It’s
boots on the ground time, folks.”

“Good night, ladies,” Tara turned to go in her house, swishing the scrubs behind her.

“Wonder what made me think of this?” Victoria asked herself mostly.

Before I knew it Abby and I had dropped Vic off and were in the garage.
“How
ya
doin
, girl?
Water?”

She mouthed my hand as if to say, “I need to find a spot!
Now!”

We went out onto the deck off my kitchen and she scurried down the steps to the backyard to find just the perfect place. My floral gardener's smock was hanging on one of the three antique door knobs lined up on the wall by the door to the family room, and I put it on over my clothes.

 
I looked up at the night sky, breathed and tried to see a path through the constellations like I did when I was a little girl. My father, a physics professor at Georgia Tech, had taught me to read the night sky like a map. We dark-adapted our eyes and carried red-filtered flashlights to keep that night vision.

We would stand together, and he would say, “Begin with the Big Dipper.”

I would recite with him, “Arc to
Arcturus
, Spike to
Spica
then leap to Leo.” My favorite star was the North Star, which is directly over your head at the North Pole but on the horizon if you’re at the Equator. The nearer a star is to us the more it appears to move. Even in science sometimes things are not what they seem.

My father would say, “We are on the Earth.”

I would respond, “In our solar system.”

Then he would say, “In the Milky Way Galaxy.”

To which I would respond, “In the Local Group of galaxies.”

He would add on, “In the Virgo
Supercluster
.”

And I would finish with, “In the Universe.”

Sometimes I would start the phrases. The one who said “universe” had to say the ending, “To the Universe you are small, but to me you are big.” Then one day, he was gone.

Why was I all of a sudden digging up these bones?
 
I wanted clarity on my feelings about attacking James Goody, whoever he was, sure, but I didn’t want to make this more complicated than it was. I would have to talk to Tara and Victoria about all that.

I returned to the flower arrangement I had started. I added rosemary for remembrance and lavender for devotion to it. Then I trimmed the three box trees on the deck. They were in different topiary shapes and planted in large, but simple, Terracotta pots.
 
I hadn’t made much progress, at least not enough to tell, when the telephone rang, and Abby and I went inside to the kitchen desk.

“Leigh, this is Paul Armistead. I apologize for calling so late, but I really need to talk to you.”

“No problem
.” Oh, how sweet, he probably wants to surprise Tara with a gift. Hmmm, what would she like?

“I think Tara is in danger.”

“No-o-o-o!”
You think?

“I found a threatening note on her floor Saturday afternoon. It said for her to stay out of Cracker Barrel. Now that’s a restaurant chain that advertises home cooking.”

“Oh?”

“I kept hoping she would confide in me about this, but she hasn’t, so I’m going to call the police.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that! I mean, not just yet.”

“Then what do you think I should do?”

Other than minding your own business?
“How about Victoria and I keeping an eye on her?”

“Would you? That would really ease my mind. You three do spend a lot of time together. And call me if you need me.”

If we need a big, strong man?
“Sure thing.”

Eleven

C
ontinuation of statement by Leigh Reed.
Early Tuesday morning we were sitting in my car in front of the Cracker Barrel, meeting with one furious Braves fan.
“That lying sack of shit!
He’s not even good in bed. He’s hard of hearing. I used to talk dirty while we were having sex, but I had to repeat everything three times.
‘Oh, yeah, harder, harder.
Oh, yeah, harder, harder.
Oh, yeah, harder, harder.’
How much do you think I got out of that?”

She opened the door to get out of the car but stopped. “And something else, our friends don’t like him. There’s nothing worse than having a husband that makes people feel sorry for you. My marriage inspires pity!” She walked away, but after just a couple of steps she turned around again. We three jerked up like we were at attention.

“By the way, I like your uniforms.”

Shit, we had done it again. We were all wearing winter white pantsuits.
 
Off came the jackets, revealing different color silk blouses. Mine was black and white striped, Tara’s a hot pink, and Victoria’s beige.

I watched her walk away. “Whatever. Anybody want ice tea to go?”

“Sure.”
This from both colleagues.

“How mad do you have to be to reveal information about your sex life to strangers?” Victoria held the door open.

Once inside Tara turned around. “I think it made her feel better. You know what I hate? I hate it when the client asks us for advice for preventing this. We’re not marriage counselors.”

I nodded in agreement, “I don’t have any advice to give.”

“Neither do
I
. Most women are too busy to follow their hubbies around, and they shouldn’t have to, anyway,” Vic said.

“No, they shouldn’t, not when you can have a
GPS
unit installed on his car,” I was reaching for my ringing cell phone in my handbag, but I missed the call. “As for advice, there’s always the tried and true, ‘spend all his money and make him beg for sex.’”

We had the time, so we enjoyed the tea there instead of in the car. I took the opportunity to return that call I had missed.

“H-a-a-a-l-o-w,” poured out of a toddler’s mouth.

I hung up.

Victoria put a ten dollar bill on the table. “Did hubby answer?”

“Nah, a kid.
I don’t want to do business with anyone that lets a kid answer the phone. I really hate that. It’s like biting down on a piece of aluminum foil with a filling.”

“You are going to be some auntie to my grandchildren.” Victoria shook her head at the thought.

“Are they going to be allowed to answer the phone?”

Then it was back to my house so Victoria and Tara could leave their cars there. I drove to The Peachtree Group for our second meeting with Randall Valentine. As requested, Tara was hauling a large handbag, Victoria had her Prada backpack, and I had my Louis
Vuitton
backpack.

 
“Victoria, why didn’t you say anything about me being an auntie to the twins?”

“Oh, hon. I thought you had gotten quiet. You like kids, Leigh doesn’t. I don’t have to worry about you. You really will be a wonderful aunt.”

“Thanks. I’m overly sensitive this morning, and I’ve been having one hot flash after another. Leigh, you still don’t like kids?”

“The problem I see is people over-raising their kids.” That was something you could not accuse my mother of, and for a second I wondered what it would have been like.

“That’s my only true regret in life, not having kids. We tried, but it never happened for us. I’m sure I would have over-raised them, to use Leigh’s term, like crazy.”

 
I needed to lighten the mood. “Oh, Tara, Paul called me last night around eleven.”

“What did he want?”

“It wasn’t to give me the time and temperature. He found the note with the
stay out of Cracker Barrel
warning.”

“You couldn’t have told me that before? We were just there.”

Victoria shook her head. “You remember we wrote the note, don’t you?”

“Oh-h-h, that note. He found our note. What’d you tell him?”

“I told him Victoria and I would keep our eyes on you.”

“That’s so sweet,” she cooed.

“No problem, we’re happy to do it,” Victoria answered dryly.

“I meant
,
he was sweet to be worried.”

“Yes, he was. I wonder if my husband ever worries about me.”

“You’re not the kind of woman men worry about,” Victoria said.

“I guess you’re right.” I filed that away. “I wonder if the kid at the security gate will have our names.”

Fifteen minutes later we were with Randall Valentine, CEO.
“Ladies.”
Was he being sarcastic? Valentine tilted his head.

“Gentlemen.”
I tilted mine.

“Nice to see you.
You’re all looking lovely this morning.” As he said this I happened to look over at Tara. She had perspiration above her upper lip. Then I saw the pink neck. She was having a hot flash.

Randall Valentine followed my gaze, “I believe you’re blushing, Tara. It’s not often you see a woman blush these days.
Charming.
Just charming.”

Victoria and I bore our eyes into her.
Leave it alone! Just go along with it!
We knew we were fighting a losing battle. We had lost control of her. She had gone over to the light side.

“It’s a hot flash.”
Why, Tara why?

“Can we get you anything?
Coffee?
Bottled water? Oh, I forgot. If you’re native
Atlantans
you’ll probably want Coca-Cola, right?” He shoved his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels and started chuckling. Too late, he realized that we weren’t. The three of us gave him a dead stare. That stone-faced routine is a little something we like to do to pompous people. He cleared his throat and led us to a pretty darn impressive conference room. Kerry Lee, CEO Junior, was already there and stood when we entered. The table had a dark mahogany finish and inlaid marble top. The chairs matched the mahogany of the table and had rose wool upholstered seats and backs. The perimeter of the room was elevated about a foot, sort of like stadium seating. Chairs for underlings were up there. If I had an underling, that’s where I’d park him.

Tara started in right away. She’s great with money and investing. "I have a couple of questions off the top of my head. How many funders do you have so far? And what will the total number be?"

 
We sank down into chairs by which all other chairs must be measured. It was all I could do not to go, “
Ahhh
.” At the end of the table three fancy leather binders sat.

"Those are important questions since they do determine distribution of profits. We currently have five, and not all of them are individuals. We will stop at ten." He fawned over Tara, looked at Victoria and scowled at me. What were we, the three bears?

Tara tilted her head. "Fifty million isn’t what I would call a staggering amount of money."

"Kerry, do you want to take that one?"

"Sure. First of all, we’re very lean, which is a function of both our youth and our management philosophy. We don’t have the overhead of companies that have been around longer. For instance, we don’t have high salaries for longer tenure employees, that kind of thing. And we have our traditional businesses, mostly defense contracts, which are our bread and butter."

Valentine took control again. "We have a short video to give you more background."
  
The video was projected on a bank of four monitors, two by two. We swiveled in our chairs to face the back of the room. I admit that here I got bored, and my mind wandered, but there didn’t seem to be much of substance being said.

When it ended Mr. Lee pressed the button on the table to return to overhead lighting. “That’s hot.” Victoria and I slowly turned our heads ninety degrees to look at Tara. She cleared her throat. “I love videos.”

Valentine looked down, not smiling, as she spoke. As he raised his gaze he took the opportunity to check out my legs. I uncrossed them and turned back to face the conference table.

“What are we being asked to invest in, other than freedom's future?" Victoria’s question meant he had to get his eyes front and center.

“The Peachtree Group is a surveillance technology firm. Our success as a manufacturer of Backpack UAVs has positioned us to successfully compete with many larger companies. That same success, however, has labeled us as a Backpack UAV manufacturer, only. We intend to diversify while staying true to our core which is,” pause for effect
,
 
“
situational awareness.”

“What other products do you want to develop?” I had learned they manufactured the physical UAV, not just the software.

“Software and hardware for components for video links used on any size UAV is one example. Drones to be used by police departments
is
another.”

“Who supplies materials for the hardware?”
 
This was from Victoria, and Valentine had to swivel to face her, but before he spoke he was interrupted.

“We have a number of sources, domestic and abroad.” It was Kerry Lee, and a touch of annoyance had crept into his voice, just a tad.

“How much control do you have over the flow of significant parts? Are any of these sole sources? Do you have backup sources?” I gave Victoria a telepathic,
you go, girl
. She had been in upper level management in a multi-national corporation when she left the corporate life, but she should have been running the whole
dadgum
place.

“We have a good bit of information that should answer all your questions. Should we have it couriered?" This time Valentine addressed me.

"We’ll just take it. Thank you." My answer clued Tara and Victoria to get ready to leave, and we stood. “Can we talk to our financial advisors about this and call you in a few days?”

Half a beat later Valentine stood. I’d swear on a stack of Bibles he was looking at my butt. I either saw or sensed a hint of a grin from Kerry Lee. Then he handed the binders to us one at a time. There was so much ceremony in the way he did it, for a second there I felt like I had graduated from some place.

“Certainly, I’ll look forward to hearing from you.” Then he gave me a double take. What the hell? Had he recognized me? Did he know my history, or had he met me at a dinner with my husband? Or maybe he had finally noticed I have a face.

Kerry Lee walked us out. Once in the corridor Tara sniffed the air. “Is that coffee I smell? The employee lounge must be around here.”

“No, the employee lounge is in the east wing. Over here we have private kitchens.
 
Would you care for a cup?”
 

“No, thanks, I was just commenting.”

As soon as we left the tinted double doors of the executive office area Tara glanced back. “Well, that went well,” she laughed and shook her head.

“Really?”
Victoria’s face lit up.

 
I leaned against her. “Yeah, hon.
A
lot of men don’t mind getting their asses kicked by girls.” She had no idea how good she was.

“Sure.
Just a myth.
Don’t worry about it.” Tara stifled a laugh.
 

I walked between the two of them, and we hooked arms. “We learned a lot. If The Peachtree Group was on a strong footing, Valentine and Lee would not have gotten defensive with Vic’s questions. We did
good
.”

Victoria stuffed all three binders in her bag. “Time for the real reason we’re here. Are we ready to see more of this place?”

“Are you sure this will work?” Tara looked up and down the hallway as she spoke.