Death by Inferior Design (11 page)

“Sounds good to me.”

I ordered a margarita, and Sullivan ordered a Michelob. To his credit, Steve didn’t rush me. Imbibing some alcohol seemed to take the edge off my shattered nerves.

I watched him take a sip of his beer and teased, “Figures you’d get a macho drink.”

He gave me a small smile. “Beer? Macho?”

“Sure. According to the TV ads, all you guys have to do is get a bottle of suds, and gorgeous women throw themselves at you. Presumably to get at the beer.”

“Is that right?” He peered at his bottle. “Huh.” He gave me a slow, sexy grin, and to my astonishment, I felt myself blush. “Are you trying to hint at something? Making a personal suggestion?”

“Not at all. Just idle conversation.” Although, I admit it, I
was
idly curious about his sexual orientation. Sullivan had told the Coopers he was gay, yet in a crowded bar six months ago, I’d spotted him with a leggy brunette draped over him like a chintz slipcover. Either way, I needed to find myself intrigued by my soulless archrival like I needed to go color-blind. I licked a small clump of salt off the rim of my drink, took a sip, and added, “You’re not my type.”

Maintaining eye contact, he leaned across the table. “So, what exactly
is
your type, Gilbert?”

“Men who don’t say that the name of my business should have my last name spelled with a lowercase
g
,” I snapped, without thinking.

He lost his smile and straightened up again. “So much for our truce.”

“Sorry. It was unfair of me to bring that up right after I’d asked you to bury the hatchet. It’s just that this has been one of the worst days of my life. And I’ve had some real doozies.”

“Seems to me you need to talk, right? So go ahead and vent.”

I took a healthy sip of my drink, then set the glass down. “I’ll just start at the beginning. I was adopted, and I don’t know anything about my birth parents.”

“Wow. That
is
the beginning. This could take a while. Are you sure I shouldn’t order us some lunch?”

Despite myself, I chuckled. “Skipping forward twenty-plus years, yesterday I found my own baby picture carefully framed inside a slat of the tongue-and-groove paneling in the Hendersons’ master bedroom. It was directly over a hole that someone had carved out from the drywall.”

His brow furrowed. “Could you have been mistaken? It’s probably not PC to say this, but
all
babies look alike, especially in those hospital photos.”

My age at the time of my adoption was my Achilles’ heel, and it was excruciating to have to reveal that weakness to him—a professional rival who resented my having set up shop in his town. “It wasn’t a birth photo. The picture was from when I was eighteen months old. Shortly before I was adopted. My mother . . . my adoptive mother, I mean . . . took the photograph herself.” I reached into my back pocket. “Here. I’ll show you.”

Sullivan smiled as he took the picture from me and studied it. “Cute. But what’s that blue-and-green checkered thing in the background? A flowerpot? A waste-basket?”

“I think it’s an umbrella stand. It’s quite a monstrosity, whatever it is.”

“Maybe you were predestined to become a designer . . . to protect future clients from such eyesores.”

“Maybe so.” In a way, that was the nicest thing Sullivan had ever said to me. He must really have been taking pity on me. He handed the picture back, and I tucked it into my pocket and forced myself to continue. “My adoptive mother died two years ago. In our last conversation, she made me promise never to look for my birth parents, no matter what happened.”

“Did she say why?”

I shook my head and slowly swirled the contents of my glass to keep my hands occupied. “It doesn’t really matter why, or if she even
had
a reason. In any case, it was my mother’s dying wish. I can’t go back on my promise.”

“How about your adoptive father? Were you able to discuss this with him?”

“My parents got divorced some fifteen years ago, and my father remarried and moved away. I was always a lot closer to my mother anyway. He did come back for her funeral, though. And I see him once a year or so.”

“Did you ever tell him what your mother said about not looking for your birth parents?”

“No. Frankly, the whole issue just . . . didn’t seem that important. Till now.” I rolled my eyes, thinking that just two days ago I never could have guessed how important my ignorance regarding my birth parents was destined to become. “I guess I always figured that my mother knew some reason for me to feel bad about my gene pool . . . so I was in no hurry to discover whatever that was.” I frowned.
“Now,
of course, I feel as though I’ve been forcibly dunked into the whole putrid mess. There isn’t a single person we’ve come into contact with this entire weekend who anyone would especially
want
to be related to.”

Sullivan snorted. “Yeah, I’m with you there. Debbie seems pretty nice, though. Jill and Kevin have nothing but good things to say about her.”

“Debbie
is
nice, but she and I don’t have a single physical trait in common.” That wasn’t entirely true; although my auburn hair was much darker than hers, we both had red hues. “Anyway, there’s more.” I sighed. “I have a poison bottle in my van, and this—”

“Come again?”

“I happen to have a container of potassium cyanide. It was unopened.” I added under my breath, “Or at least it was, until today.”

“Why would you be driving around with a bottle of poison? Is it rat poison or something? Working some seedy jobs lately?”

That stung. We both knew Sullivan got the better clientele.
“No,
my ex-boyfriend gave it to me, actually.”

He regarded me solemnly over the edge of his glass. “Your ex-boyfriend gave you poison. Well. I can see why he’s your ex. Was this a you-broke-up-with-me-so-now-I-WANT-you-dead-you-bitch present?”

I fought back a smile. “Not exactly, though I hear Hallmark is starting a line of greeting cards for just that occasion. He’s a chemistry student at CU, and he was always searching for various get-rich schemes. We’d been out looking at antiques, and—”

“If this guy’s an undergrad at CU, I suppose I would qualify as an antique myself.”

“He’s a Ph.D. candidate. Anyway, we saw this cast-iron bear-claw bathtub with chipped paint, and he asked me how much it would cost to restore it.” I took another sip of my margarita, and my sip became a couple of gulps. I was going into way more detail than necessary and, if I gave myself permission, would prefer describing that antique-hunting trip to Lyons to this talk of poison and shattered loves. “The long and short of it is, he thought we might be able to invent some sort of metal plating, using cyanide as a hardening agent, and go into business together. So he got me the cyanide as a birthday present . . . this symbolic gesture of our venturing off together in pursuit of the lucrative and fascinating world of bathtub repair, or something. Shortly afterward, we wound up getting into a fight and breaking up.”

He mulled my explanation over and tried to hide his smile, which I appreciated, even if his effort was largely unsuccessful. “Pity you let
that
one get away, Gilbert. It’s not every guy who’d give his girlfriend a bottle of poison for her birthday.” He clicked his tongue. “And they say romance is dead.”

“The point is, this morning I discovered my bottle had been taken out of its packaging and had migrated into Taylor’s work area. Taylor claims he grabbed the poison when he unloaded my materials yesterday afternoon, and that he opened the bottle because he was curious.”

“A man’s in the hospital. He may be dying. And you’re worried that someone could have siphoned off your arsenic.”

“Cyanide, actually.”

“Whatever. And this could all be connected to your baby picture being hidden inside a wall.”

“Nice summation, Sullivan. What’s your point?”

“You have to go to the police.”

“I know. I called the hospital and reported the cyanide before I left the Hendersons’. I told the receptionist that I’d tell the police, and I will, eventually. But Randy seems to have had a heart attack. With any luck, he’ll be treated and released, and finally learn to lose those extra pounds and take better care of himself.”

Steve was staring at me, unsmiling. “At the very least, you should call your father and tell him about this . . . see if he can shed some light on anything.”

“I suppose. My thoughts are so jumbled right now, I’ll have to go home and look up his number in my address book. I only keep business numbers on my Palm Pilot.”

“I have one of those, too. Aren’t they great? They’re expensive, breakable, and less convenient than a spiral notebook.”

Again, I battled back my smile; Steve Sullivan was unknowingly tugging at my weakness for men who could make me laugh. “Yes, but they smack of success . . . of our ability to throw money away on electronic gadgets.” I drained my drink.

Steve polished off his beer, too, then asked, “Should I get us another round?”

“No, thanks. I got so little sleep last night that two drinks would flatten me. Thanks for listening. I’d better get home and get this phone call to my father over with.”

“Want company?”

I raised my eyebrows in surprise.

He lifted his palms. “You said you wanted to bury the hatchet, and you’ve had more than your fair share of trauma the last couple days. It seems to me some company might help. We can go pick up your van, and I’ll follow you to your place.”

If this had been anyone else, I’d have leapt at the offer. Audrey would be in Vail, so only Hildi would be there to greet me, and Myra’s sorrowful wails were still echoing in my brain, taunting me that my birth father might at this very moment be at death’s door. But Steve Sullivan was the man who’d called me three or four times my first year in Crestview and harassed me about how he was losing clients who’d gotten “Gilbert” confused with “Sullivan.” The man who’d ridiculed me in a drunken tirade at a social function last fall. Who’d lied to the Coopers to steal their business out from under me.

“Thanks, but I’m fine.”

He nodded. He looked expectantly at me after he’d set some money on the table to cover our drinks, probably waiting for me to either rise or say that I’d decided to order something else after all. I felt paralyzed. I neither wanted to stay or to leave, but Sullivan was right about one thing: I was definitely not ready to be alone. Babbling, I said, “I live in an amazing house. It belongs to Audrey Munroe.”

“Of
Domestic Bliss with Audrey Munroe?”
Steve’s eyes widened.

“The one and only. Audrey lets me have a room, and in exchange, she uses me for design consultations and services on her mansion. Which is great, because she changes her mind so frequently on what she wants done that it’s a never-ending job. One day she’ll be decorating the parlor to resemble a drawing room from the Château de Versailles, and the next day she’ll be doing it up like the jungle room from Graceland.”

He grinned. “Sounds fun.”

“It is. Except I never know what furniture I’ll have in my home one day to the next. She’s always buying things or giving them away on whims. Two weeks ago, I walked into the den, and the camelback sofa was gone. As it turns out, a friend of hers had visited that morning and praised it to the sky, and
poof.
Audrey got someone with a pickup to haul the thing to the friend’s house.”

“Wow. I’ve got to make nice with this woman. I could use some free furniture.”

I had to resist a sneer. Sullivan
would
want to take advantage of Audrey’s generosity. “I’m sure you already have lots of exquisite furniture.”

“To tell you the truth, Gilbert, I’m into minimalism these days. I lost a lot of my stuff.” He clenched his jaw and his fists and said with unmasked bitterness, “Thanks to Evan.”

He’d said his former partner’s name with pain rife in his voice. Clearly I’d misinterpreted his role regarding that woman I’d seen clinging to him in the bar. So his ex-partner had taken most of the furniture when he’d moved out. “Evan Cambridge?”

Steve nodded. “He cleaned out our accounts and ripped off some of our clients, big time. I had to max out all my credit cards and go way into debt to cover for him. It was either that or lose the business entirely, and I just . . .” His voice had been rising, and now he stopped himself and regained control. “Anyway. That’s your ‘full explanation’ regarding the Cooper account. I’d bid on the Cooper job already, before they called you to get a second designer’s input. Then Mrs. Cooper called me, after she’d agreed to hire you, to say that she’d loved both of our designs but had gone with yours because yours was slightly less expensive. I had to have the money, so I pleaded with them to give me the work at the same price that they’d agreed to pay you. I learned my lesson from that experience. I felt so crappy about the whole thing that it just wasn’t worth it.”

“Jeez, Sullivan. If you’d just called me and explained your predicament, I would—”

He held up his hand. “There are things I know I should have done differently. I was pretty crazed at the time.”

“I’d have been crazed, too. Who wouldn’t be? Did you report this to the police and to the BBB?”

“Yeah. Evan appears to have fled the country. Let’s just say that the odds of my finding him and getting my money back aren’t great.”

“But what about your insurance? Surely your errors-and-omissions policy would cover at least . . .”

He was shaking his head. “Guess who was in charge of supposedly paying the insurance company?” He blew out a puff of air. “I was head over heels at the time, and I trusted Evan implicitly. Meanwhile, he emptied all my accounts and ran everything I’d worked my whole life for into the ground.”

The poor guy! Come to think of it, I
had
heard some murmurings of Sullivan’s having some trouble, but that was right after his drunken vitriol toward me at the party and immediately followed by his stealing the Cooper account, and I hadn’t wanted to listen to a sob story on his behalf, which would have spoiled my perfectly justified indignation. I stared at him, stunned. “I don’t even know what to say.”