Eeny Meany Miny Die (Cat Sinclair Mysteries) (2 page)

"When will he be back?" she asked in a brittle voice.

"Not till late. I can show you everything you need to know."

She followed me around the office as I gave her a grand tour and got her started on the filing. I'd already moved my personal belongings into Carl's old office, directly behind the receptionist's desk where Faith would sit, so I returned there and smiled to myself.

Woohoo, no more filing and fetching coffee! Finally I could get my teeth into some real work.

I checked up on Faith half an hour later. She'd finished the filing and started on cleaning the storeroom. The mess of cabling, spare surveillance equipment, unused stationery and other paraphernalia was enough to break even a neat freak’s spirit, but Faith had already made a dent in one corner. I loved her.

"When will Will be back?" she asked.

"Soon." I beamed at her in encouragement. Obviously she wanted to see her new employer to go over some terms of her contract or something. "So had you been looking for long?"

"Looking?" She turned her dull gray eyes on me. "Oh, for a job. No. Not long." She spoke in a flat voice, her words succinct as if she didn't want to waste breath on an extra syllable.

"The employment agency filled the vacancy pretty quick. Were you already on their books?" I had to find out
something
about my new colleague—what sort of P.I. would I be if I couldn’t?—and that seemed the easiest place to start.

"Employment agency?" She bowed her head as if it were too heavy for her skinny neck to hold up, and wound a cable around her hand. "I wasn't hired through an agency."

"Then how—?"

"Cat, I see you've met Faith." I hadn't heard Will enter. He stood behind me, close enough that I could feel the heat of the day through his shirt. Too close for a boss and his employee. I wondered if Faith noticed.

She smiled at him, a bright, beaming smile as she enclosed his extended hand in both of hers.

"Thank you," she said. "Thank you, Will. You won't regret this." It was almost embarrassing listening to her gush.

Will didn't seem to notice. He surveyed the storeroom and smiled back. "You've already done more work than my last secretary did in her entire employment."

"Hey!" Then I realized Faith didn't know he meant me. "She's an office manager not a secretary," I muttered.

He grinned at me. Jerk.

"Will, can I talk to you for a minute?" I asked.

"Sure, in my office." He led the way up the hall then closed his office door behind me. He grabbed me round the waist and pressed me back against the door. The kiss was just long enough to tell me he wanted me and he would get his way—later.

"I mean it," I said, breaking away. "I want to talk."

"Can it wait? I've got to go out again." He stood at his desk and started rifling through papers, his broad back to me.

"Where did Faith come from?"

"That's a philosophical question for so early in the morning."

"You didn't hire her through an employment agency, did you?"

He turned around, his dark, shaggy hair falling over his eyes as he studied me. "Does it matter?"

"I suppose not, but—"

"You're not jealous are you?" That grin again.

"Of course not. Although you do have a habit of sleeping with your employees."

"I never slept with Carl."

"Two out of three, Will." I was referring to myself and Tanya (pronounced Tarnya), my predecessor as both Will's secretary and lover.

He pulled me closer and kissed me again. I sank into his warmth and forgot my plan of attack.

"I have to go," he said, not letting me go. "I'll be listening in to Clive, thanks to your excellent bugging skills. Not the most fun way to spend the morning."

"Why don't I do it for a while?"

"No. I'll be back after lunch."

"I'm going out for lunch," I reminded him. "I'm meeting my friend, Jenny."

He kissed the top of my head and headed to the door. "Have fun."

He left. A few hours later I left too, unsure if it was a good idea to leave Faith alone on her first day. Will had dealt with embezzlement before—Carl again—but he didn't seem to have minded when I told him I'd be out for lunch. He must trust her, which meant he knew her. I thought as much from their first meeting. I’d have to find out more later. I was pretty sure I could break Faith, but if not, I could always bribe Will with sex, or lack of it.

I drove to The Strip. It was a balmy late summer afternoon, and the shops and cafes were filled with hip young moms with designer-dressed babies in tow or upper middle class ladies married to big paychecks. I settled into my favorite corner booth at Café Mama Lina's. I’d been there so many times the cushioned bench seat had an imprint of my butt in it.

Jenny finally arrived fifteen minutes later wearing oversized sunglasses that she didn’t remove.

"Cat, Sweetie!" she squealed when she saw me.

We hugged and I coughed as her strong perfume cut off my fresh air.

"Jenny, let me look at you."

She took a step back and twirled like a ballerina. What I noticed most was that she hadn’t changed much since I’d last seen her in Hollywood, over six months earlier. She wore tight white cut-off jeans, a hot pink halter neck top, matching high-heeled shoes—Prada by the looks of them—and dangly earrings that brushed her shoulders.

"It’s so good to see you, Cat," she said as we sat.

"Likewise, Jen. My God, you’re a blast from the past. It seems so long since I left behind my life in Hollywood."

"Do you miss it?"

I thought about that before answering. "I miss my friends. I miss the energy and the vibe. And when winter comes, I’ll miss the weather."

I didn’t tell her that was as far as it went. There was so much about L.A. that I didn’t miss. The traffic, the bitchiness, the fakeness, and the dog-eat-dog attitude. She loved the place and I'd never get her to see my side.

Hollywood's a fickle town. One minute you're on your knees begging a fellow waiter to let you serve the Big Name Producer seated in his section, and the next you're hotter property than a stretch of Malibu coastline. That’s if you’re lucky.

I never struck acting gold—admittedly, I never tried too hard—but Jenny did. Big time. She got so popular that crowds mobbed her wherever she went now. She got fan mail by the truck load, and she owned a house in the Hollywood Hills. Not bad for someone who was told to go back to Texas at the end of an audition for a sitcom. We laughed about that after Jenny scored the gig of a lifetime.

Funny thing though, not many people recognize her. Not many without kids, that is. As a member of Play Group, she's huge with the under-fives and probably even more popular with the parents who use their DVDs to steal a few minutes’ peace. Play Group is the all-singing, all-dancing, chart-topping, four-member kids group that stormed the U.S. two years ago with their catchy songs, colorful outfits, and perpetually positive personalities.

The group had come to Renford as part of their nation-wide tour, and Jenny looked me up when she arrived. We ate, drank a bottle of wine, and spent most of lunch catching up on old times, mostly who was doing what and whom. When we’d exhausted that topic, Jenny leaned her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her linked hands.

"Soooo," she said with a conspiratorial twinkle in her dark brown eyes, "is there a man in your life?"

I nodded. It felt good to nod without hesitation at that question after several long months of dating-drought. "His name's Will. He's my boss."

Her arms fell flat on the table and one side of her nose screwed upwards.

"Your boss!" She flicked her long, slick black ponytail over her shoulder. "You're screwing you're boss?" She made a sound in the back of her throat and the look of disgust turned to pity. She clasped my hands in hers and focused earnestly on my face. "Oh, Cat, is that a good idea? I mean, I know people who have affairs with their bosses—"

"We're not having an affair. Neither of us is married." I laughed because I could see how it must look. Then I stopped laughing because a relationship with your boss was still a tightrope. One wobble and you were single
and
unemployed.

"How old is he?"

"Thirty-five."

"Thirty-five! That's
so
old!" When she realized she'd said it out loud she clamped her hand over her mouth.

Good old Jenny. Nice to see she hadn't grown up in the six months since I'd last seen her. Actually, she hadn't grown up in the six years I'd known her. She still seemed like the innocent eighteen-year-old I'd met crying outside Ben and Jerry's on Santa Monica Boulevard after a failed audition. It hadn't been the audition that had set off the tears, though that hadn't helped. It was the fact she couldn't buy herself an ice cream because she had no money. As a fellow actress, I took pity on her and bought her one. We'd been friends ever since, although it was more a mentor-apprentice relationship. Even after she joined Play Group and suddenly became obscenely popular, our roles didn't change much. She still asked me for advice, and I readily gave it to her.

"I'm sorry," she sputtered, shrugging an apology, "I didn't mean he was old. I'm sure he's the perfect age for you. I mean, you're twenty-eight, aren't you? That's only…" She used her fingers and moved her lips as she counted. "Seven years. And I'm sure he doesn't
look
thirty-five."

In Jenny's mind, thirty-five-year-old men probably had comb-overs and listened to The Rolling Stones.

"He looks his age," I said. And Will did. He had fine lines around his eyes and mouth that crinkled when he smiled, and I found a gray hair once. But he was a hot thirty-five-year-old whose clothes I wanted to rip off every time I saw him.

"Oh." She shrugged an apology again. "Sorry." It came out as a whisper. "So he's a private investigator too, huh?"

"He owns the company."

"Cool. You've got such an exciting job, Cat. Have you caught any bad guys yet?"

"Just the one." I still had a slight bruise on my cheek from where Carl Fortune had hit me, but I'd become an expert in cover-up makeup and few people noticed it. "I'm still learning the ropes." Boy, were those ropes long, knotty, and dangling in mid-air. Most days I felt like I was going nowhere and learning zip. Will seemed to be content for me to read piles of boring manuals or tag along after him. Hopefully Faith’s presence would change all that.

"So how's the love life of a mega-star?" I asked.

She blinked at me. "Which one?"

"I'm talking about you, Jenny. How's your life going?"

She giggled at her mistake then suddenly frowned. "My love life's terrible. It's hard to have a long-term boyfriend when we're always traveling. This is our last city on a three-month tour, thank God."

"That's too bad, about the lack of men I mean."

"Not really." She smiled brightly. "I get to fuck a different one in each city."

Spoken like the Jenny I remember. She was never the brightest star in the Hollywood sky, but she was always a lot of fun. Under her influence—and that of a few cocktails—we crashed a number of A-list parties. She always ended up naked in a spare bedroom with a celebrity. I always ended up poolside chatting to his unknown friend. Not that I was complaining. I met a lot of great people that way.

"And the rest of your life? Your family? Your house?"

Her mouth sagged and she lifted one shoulder like it was weighted down with bricks. "My family's good, but my house…I think I'm going to lose it."

"Lose it? How can you lose a house? You own it. Don't you?"

"Kind of." She chewed her lip. "Actually, that's what I wanted to talk to you about. I mean, I wanted to see you too, but I also wanted to ask for your help."

"Sure thing. What about?"

She sighed loudly. "I took out a loan on the advice of my manager. He said he had a hot investment tip and if I wanted in on it, he could take care of everything for me. But he wanted a lot of money and I didn't have it, so I took out a loan. He helped me with the bank, because I've never been very good at that sort of thing. There's
loads
of paperwork to fill in. That was a year ago and I haven't seen any of it since. Now the bank wants to take my house from me to cover the loan repayment."

Alarm bells started clanging in my head. She'd been taken for a ride. It didn't surprise me. Jenny was the perfect stooge for a scam. Rich and dumb. She used to sign up for every get-rich scheme going around Hollywood, despite my warnings.

"When I asked Frank—that's our manager—where the money was, he said I had to be patient. He said it would come, but the investment hasn't…" She snapped her fingers and looked up at the ceiling. "…aged yet."

"Matured."

She pointed a finger at me. "That's right! See, I knew you'd know about this stuff."

Oh boy. I knew
nothing
about money. Spending it, yeah, I could do that with my eyes closed, but making it and holding onto it were a mystery.

"Did Frank ask anyone else in the group to invest?" I asked.

"I don't think so. I didn't want to ask because Angel, his wife, is a member of Play Group too and my closest friend. She has enough trouble at the moment."

"What kind of trouble?"

Jenny shrugged. "She just doesn’t seem herself. Nothing I can put my finger on for sure. Just…different. Anyway, I didn't want to accuse Frank of anything shifty if it was all okay."

"So what do you want me to do about it?"

"Investigate, of course. Ask him questions, check him out, kick his ass."

"Knight Investigations don't kick too many asses."

She pouted.

"I could check out his credit history and see if he's got a criminal record." I knew I could do that, because it was in chapter one of the handbook Will had given me to read. Anything from chapter two onward was still a mystery. I'd get to it—eventually.

She beamed. "You could go in disguise too. Intercept the group—"

"Infiltrate."

"It would be just like being an actress again." She clapped her hands in excitement. "You must miss the biz, Cat."

Not even a little bit. "How about I just pretend to be your friend and hang out with the group for a while."