Death by Inferior Design (28 page)

Steve and I rushed into the house to help him up. His glasses had gone flying, and while insisting that he didn’t need any help, he lost his balance a second time and mangled the frames. Carl, in turn, accused me of having “blinded” him. I apologized, and after a minute or two of cajoling and being assured that he was fine by himself, Steve and I left.

Partway down the walkway, I hesitated and snapped my fingers. “Oh, darn! I forgot to ask him if he’d mind writing me a letter of recommendation. Think I should go back and ask?”

Steve laughed heartily. Then he accepted my offer to buy him a drink, seeing as he’d paid the last time.

We decided to have dinner, along with our drinks, at a
downtown restaurant. After the plates had been cleared and we were partway into our second round, I said, “I think I know why my mother felt it was so important for me not to look for my birth parents.”

“Because she knew that they and their neighbors were raving lunatics?” Steve asked.

“Exactly.”

Steve fidgeted with his napkin. Then he finally met my eyes and said, “Emily Blaire sure acted strange. She nearly passed out when she first saw you.”

“Yeah, but that’s the same reaction I got when Myra saw me for the first time. Myra claims I’m
her
biological daughter and that my mother was her nanny, which makes sense. Mom always said she knew me from the time I was six weeks old. My hunch is she got to know Myra when she took a class from her at CU.” I took another sip of my beer.

Steve said nothing; his eyes stayed on my face.

“What?”
I asked, annoyed.

“Erin, do I really need to point out to you that you and Emily Blaire look a lot alike? And when I say ‘a lot,’ I mean a
whole
lot.”

I squirmed a little in my seat. So he, too, had detected physical similarities. I scraped at the label on my beer bottle with my thumbnail. “Not so much that Carl Henderson ever noticed. If it was anything other than a coincidence that she and I happen to look a little similar, you’d think her ex-husband would have noticed at some point.”

“He’s not exactly Mr. Perceptive. He seems to have tunnel vision about everything.”

“But Debbie didn’t notice, either. Nor did Jill or Kevin. And they all know Emily. Plus, why would Myra lie about something like being my biological mother?”

“Maybe because she’s nuts or has some evil plan. Maybe she fed her husband a whopping dose of poison and lies about
everything.”

While sipping my Michelob, I mulled over Steve’s words, unable to dismiss the possibility that he was correct. “If Emily Blaire was my birth mother, that makes me Taylor’s sister. Or half sister, at any rate. Yet he and I look nothing alike.”

Steve leaned back and squinted at me. “Hmm. Maybe if you grew a foot, shaved your head, took some anabolic steroids, and went into bodybuilding . . .”

I grinned. “Now,
there’s
a coincidence. Your suggestions for self-improvement happen to be precisely what’s already on my Day-Timer as personal resolutions for New Year’s.”

He laughed.

I widened my eyes and feigned offense. “I’m serious. It’s going to be a whole new me come January. I’ll be six-eight, bald, built like a Mack truck, and competing for the title of World’s Strongest Woman.”

“Far be it from me to object.” His hazel eyes sparkled. “By all means, go for it. My prospective customers won’t have such a hard time remembering if it was Sullivan Designs or Interiors by Gilbert that they want. As of next month, I’ll be able to explain that I,
Sullivan,
am the male, eminently qualified, and highly sought-after designer. Whereas
Gilbert
is the two-hundred-pound, bald, Amazon woman designer who works down the street from me.” He laughed. “Come to think of it, I think I’ll start doing that right away, regardless.”

“Very funny.”

A moment later, though, the humor left me as Steve’s words about Emily Blaire sank in.
Could
Myra have been lying to me after all? Was Emily my actual mother? The sudden awareness of birth parents in my life was all so foreign to me.

“Anyway, the thing is, Steve, when you come right down to it, this is all just genetics. The people I consider my parents are the ones who raised me. They’re the ones who influenced me, shaped me into who I am. I mean, what difference does it make who my biological parents are?”

“Nature versus nurture,” he replied thoughtfully. “They’ve done studies on that, you know, with identical twins separated at birth. A lot of personality traits are actually inherited.”

“Yeah, yeah. And that’s what allows people to feel sorry for themselves . . . to say, ‘This is the way I am, and I can’t change.’ My mom, my
real
mom, that is, was this terrific person. She had a degenerative lung disease, and giving birth would have exacerbated the illness. As it was, she died when she was forty-six. But she taught me that what matters is now—the present. She knew from her twenties on that her life expectancy wasn’t the best, so she made the most out of every day she had. When her marriage fell apart, she was sad, but she picked up the pieces and she moved on. None of us has any guarantees in this world.”

“So your philosophy is to live for the moment? To do whatever feels good now?”

I gave a little shrug, worried that the natural follow-on to that do-whatever-feels-good philosophy might lead me to make some really stupid choices. “It’s that the present is whatever I make it be . . . lemonade out of life’s lemons, and all of that.”

Steve nodded and lifted his glass. “I’ll drink to that.”

I regarded him for a moment, thinking about his own situation. “It’s probably a lot harder for you to move forward than it is for me. After all, I’m not the one whose partner took him for all he was worth.”

He frowned and muttered, “You don’t know the half of it.” He forced a smile. “But one of these days, I might catch up to Evan and get him to give me my money back. If not, I’ll rebuild the biz one more time from the ground up. That’s what I had to do the first time, before he and I hooked up. It’s easier now that I’ve got an established reputation.”

I winked at him. “Especially now that Gilbert of Interiors by Gilbert is going to turn into this bald Amazon who’ll scare the bejeezus out of anyone who wants to hire her.”

“Right,” he agreed with a chuckle.

I had to admit to myself that the more I got to know Steve Sullivan, the more I was tempted to like him. “How did you get interested in interior design?”

Instantly he got a wistful, faraway gaze in his eyes. “I was originally going to be an artist—the next Picasso. And I still paint—that’s my big hobby. I love working with oils, mostly. But maybe it was growing up in such a noisy household that did me in . . . so there’s your nurture factor for you. My artistic bent wasn’t inherited, I can tell you that much. Anyway, being the middle kid of five—two brothers, two sisters—and living in a three-bedroom house, I was always fighting for my own private space. I had to share a room with my younger brothers, so when I was in high school, I built a partition.”

“And it turned out well?”

“Yeah, it really did. It wound up being really cool . . . a makeshift wall, even, with an accordion door. My sisters asked me to do the same thing in their room, and next thing I knew, I was helping them redecorate their entire room with their pooled babysitting earnings. My first semester at Colorado Art Institute, I took a design class just as something of a lark, and by the end of the class, I was hooked.” He shrugged and grinned. “How ’bout you? How’d you get into the field?”

“It’s always been my passion. My mom was a big influence. When my dad moved out, we had to go to a smaller place, a two-bedroom apartment in Albany, New York, and Mom said we were going to make it gorgeous on the inside, since the outside was a lost cause. That became our big mother-daughter activity—for years, actually—looking at textiles and paints, envisioning how this would look with that. There was never a question what I’d study after high school.”

Smiling, he searched my eyes, then averted his and drained his beer. Weird. If I hadn’t known better, I’d think he was battling an attraction to me.

The waitress came to our table to ask if we needed anything else. Steve looked at me, and I shook my head. “It’s time to call it a night, don’t you think? I might be getting a little tipsy,” I said as I threw down a twenty and a ten to pay for the drinks and my dinner.

Steve gallantly offered to pick up the entire tab but finally relented. “Are you okay to drive?” he asked as we got to our feet.

“Oh, absolutely.”

“I’m going to follow you home, just to be sure.”

“There’s no need to—”

“Hey, it’s more or less on the way to my place, anyway.”

“So are
you
okay to drive? I hope you don’t think I’ll be lenient if you wind up rear-ending my van just ’cuz I was the one who bought your beers.”

Steve smirked at me. “I’ll be extra careful, Gilbert,” he promised.

We left the restaurant. The evening air was chilly. I pulled my wool coat closer, but I felt a glow that I knew wasn’t entirely a matter of the two beers I’d consumed. We walked so close together that our coat sleeves occasionally brushed. We discussed the logistics of his following my van, and parted to go to our separate vehicles. I’d managed to find a space on Eleventh Street, and Steve had parked in the outside lot for the restaurant.

As I slid behind the wheel and started the engine, I scolded myself aloud. “Get ahold of yourself, Gilbert. No way are you
ever
going to fall for Steve Sullivan! It would never work out.” I glanced into the rearview mirror and said, “Are you listening to yourself?”

Just then the headlights of an approaching car flashed in my mirror—a couple of points of light appearing on the wall of my van. Thinking my eyes had deceived me, I turned and looked back as a second car headed north on Eleventh. Something was wrong with the side of my vehicle. There seemed to be two holes in the metal.

I got out to look at the holes from the outside, still not quite believing my eyes.

One hole had pierced the letter
G
in
Gilbert,
and the second was dead center in the letter
b.
And I knew without question that they were bullet holes.

chapter 17

Just then Steve’s van was turning the corner of the parking lot, which looped past my car toward the exit gate. I waved frantically with both arms, and he braked and opened his window. “Someone shot at my van!” I called.

He hesitated, said, “Be right there,” and backed up to reclaim his parking space. Jogging over to me, he asked, “Did I hear you right just now? Were you saying that . . . ?”

His voice faded. Then he ran his fingertips over the damaged metal. “This might just be a random prank . . . some teenager, showing off his shooting prowess to his buddies, maybe.”

“No way. Why hit two letters in my last name, and no place else?” My voice sounded odd in my ears. I had to struggle to catch my breath. “I think it’s a message to me from whoever killed Randy Axelrod. I think the killer’s after
me
now.”

Too frightened to think straight, I couldn’t stand the
idea of talking to Detective O’Reilly or Detective Martinez. O’Reilly would probably speculate that, at some point, I could have fired bullet holes into my own van to make myself look innocent. Martinez would probably hint that if I’d simply come to the station house sooner, this somehow wouldn’t have happened. I called the police station and asked for the only officer I knew for certain would be friendly to me—Linda Delgardio. The dispatcher informed me that Linda wouldn’t be on duty again until early tomorrow morning. I left Linda a message and told the dispatcher that I needed some assistance as soon as possible.

A ruddy-cheeked, blond officer arrived fifteen or twenty minutes later. He retrieved two “slugs” from inside my van and determined that the shooter had most likely been standing on the sidewalk directly across the street. He was unable to find any witnesses, and although he combed the area for another fifteen minutes or so— sweeping the steady beam of his flashlight across every inch—he was also unable to find any “spent casings.” He was solicitous in his discussions with me, but seemed ready to simply take down the information and leave until Steve told him about my connection to the ongoing murder investigation. Then he told us to stay put for a minute, and he got into his police cruiser to make a call.

I grew more anxious with each passing minute. The shooter might return to see if my van was still here. I kept looking behind me and to either side of Steve, certain that some stranger was going to pop out of the shadows and end my life here and now.

The officer finally returned and asked if we could come to the station house to make a complete statement. Before I could reply, Steve said, “Yeah,” then looked at me and said, “Let’s go.”

We caravanned to the station house. Inside, Steve was ushered off in one direction, and I found myself back in the same sterile room as before, speaking to the same detective—O’Reilly. He was still in a foul mood and the same cheap gray suit. Maybe his pants were itchy.

Letting me speak my piece about the bullet holes, Detective O’Reilly glanced at his notes, rested an elbow on the table, and said, “Nobody heard gunshots. That seems strange to me. A crowded place like Eleventh and Lincoln Boulevard at eight p.m., and not a single person reports hearing a gun being fired . . . not just once, but twice.”

His routine was missing a cheerful partner to play good cop to his bad cop. I fought back a sigh and replied, “Short of seeing someone actually
fire
the weapon, most people probably would have assumed it was just an engine misfiring, wouldn’t they?”

“You’re absolutely positive that the bullet holes were put there while you were
in
the restaurant?”

“Not absolutely positive, no. I know for sure that the holes weren’t there yesterday, but I guess it’s remotely possible that I just didn’t notice them when I drove downtown this evening.”