What the Lady Wants (6 page)

"Mr. Peatwick?"

"Call me Mitch, Mabel. It's friendlier. You're going to have to come pick me up."

"All four tires?"

"Yes. I have a sixth sense about these things, and I'm willing to bet you any amount of money that your psycho cousin Carlo killed my tires. I don't think he was listening when you told him to leave me alone."

He heard a sigh on the other end of the line and told his spine to ignore that, too. "I'll pay for the tires," she said.

"Thank you, that won't be necessary. Vandalism is covered by insurance. Now come and get me." He gave her directions and then waited while she wrote them down.

"Uh, Mr. Peatwick?"

"Mitch."

"This is in Overlook."

"Yes, I know."

"Oh. Dangerous neighborhood."

"Actually, it was a nice little place until your cousin dropped by. He lowered the tone considerably."

"I'll be right there."

"Thank you," Mitch said, but she'd already hung up, and he felt curiously bereft for a moment.
This is

just a case,
he told himself.
She is just a client.
Yeah, right, his spine said.

From the corner of her eye, she could see him looking her over from the passenger seat before he closed his eyes and turned away. "You look very nice today," he told her while he stared out the windshield.

Mae glanced down at her flowered black sundress. "Thank you." She felt an irrational glow of pleasure that he liked real Mae clothes on her instead of June's vamp skirt, and then she kicked herself mentally. It didn't make any difference what Mitchell Peatwick liked. Back to business.

"I'm truly sorry about your tires," she began.

"It's not a problem." He made himself comfortable in the leather seat. "I've alerted the neighborhood-watch association, and they'll keep an eye out from now on."

They drove past a parked car just as a spindly teenager put a crowbar through the window and grabbed the radio.

"Should I stop?" Mae asked, checking the rearview mirror as she slowed.

"Why? You already have a radio."

Mae tried to rein in her exasperation. "I thought you might like to make a citizen's arrest."

Mitch snorted.

"Well, you're a private detective. I assumed—''

"Don't," Mitch advised her. "Assuming is always bad. I, for example, assumed that since you were driving an expensive luxury car that you'd like it. Why don't you?" He blinked at her, looking more like a doofus than ever, but Mae wasn't fooled.

Not anymore.

"Why don't you like this car?" he persisted, and Mae sighed.

He wasn't going to quit asking. The thing about Mitch wasn't that he asked such brilliant questions. It was that he asked dumb questions and asked them and asked them and asked them and
asked them,
and eventually you told him everything you knew just to make him shut up and go away. Well, maybe not go away...

"If you didn't like this car, why did you buy it?"

Mae gave up. "I didn't. I bought a beautiful little blue Miata which was more than I could afford, but I loved it so much, it was worth the sacrifice."

"More than you can afford?"

''I told you, I'm not rich. My uncles are rich. I make fifteen thousand a year as the volunteer coordinator for the Riverbend Art Institute."

"You
work
?" Mitch sounded incredulous. "How come you're not working now?"

"Because my uncle just died, and the memorial service is tomorrow." Mae turned out of Overlook and onto the wide boulevard next to the university. "I have to go back to work on Monday."

"Oh." Mitch was silent, evidently digesting new information, and then he asked, "So how did you end up in a car you hate?''

Mae began to smile in spite of herself. "You are incredibly persistent."

"One of my finest qualities. Why did you buy this—"

"I didn't. My Uncle Armand did. He didn't like the Miata, and it was sitting in his garage, and only the best could sit in his garage, so he traded it in for this chocolate shoe box."

Mitch frowned. "That's illegal. The title wasn't in his name."

Mae rolled her eyes in scorn. "If you think that would stop my uncle, you haven't been reading his diaries."

"As a matter of fact, I have. Well, at least you got a great car for free."

"No, I didn't." Mae turned down a tree-lined street of old brick German town houses. "He paid the difference between the Miata and this car. I still have to pay off the amount of the Miata loan, which was more than I could afford in the first place. So now I'm paying it on a car I don't even like, thanks to my Uncle Armand, may he rest in peace." Mae pulled up in front of the last town house on the right. "This is it."

"Maybe he did it for you," Mitch suggested. "Maybe it's safer—"

"He did it for him," Mae said flatly. "My Uncle Armand didn't exist without his labels. Anything near him had
to
be expensive. Anything else caused him real pain. It bothered him that I was driving a car that wasn't high-class enough, so he changed it so he wouldn't be bothered anymore. Then he expected me to be grateful. I wasn't. That, in a nutshell, is the story of our relationship. Any other questions?"

"Can I drive this car on the way back?"

"Pay attention," Mae said. "You're investigating a murder."

"I know that," Mitch said. "I just want to investigate it driving a Mercedes."

Mae gave up and got out of the car, leaving Mitch to follow her.

"What's up there?" he asked.

"I don't know. I've never been here before." She moved to the end of the hall and through an archway into the living room, and then stopped, overwhelmed by envy.

The room was small but cozy, full of soft amber upholstered furniture and pretty crocheted pillows and flower prints, everything washed with the sunlight that came through the French doors at the end of the room. Mae walked to the doors and leaned against the door-jamb, looking out into the tiny walled garden that still bloomed with the last of the summer flowers. Everything was so pretty, so warm. She bit her lip and wondered what it would be like to live in a light-filled place with somebody who listened to her and laughed with her and put his arms around her and told her that he loved her. It was never going to happen to her, but she did wonder.

For a moment, she felt so sorry for herself, she almost cried.

Mitch moved to stand behind her, looking out over her shoulder, and she felt vaguely comforted by his nearness. "When the will is probated, we're going to move to a place on the river," she said to him. "It's going to have big open windows and clean hardwood floors and white gauze curtains, and when the breeze blows in off the river, it will fill the whole house."

"Sounds nice." Mitch's voice was hesitant, and she knew he didn't have the slightest idea what she was talking about, but at least he sounded sympathetic. And he was listening.

She turned to him. "And we're going to have about twelve dogs."

"So much for the clean hardwood floors."

She met his eyes. "It's what I've always wanted. I hate all that velvet and brocade and money at Armand's. All the furniture is too valuable to sit on, and all the books are too valuable to read, and we can't let the sun in because it will fade all the damn velvet." She stopped, aware that her voice was rising. "All we want is a home, June and Harold and I. And that's what this place makes me think of. A home." She gazed at all the comfort in the sunny little room. "Armand wouldn't know how to make a room this nice. Stormy must have chosen this stuff."

A small voice startled them. "I did."

Mitch turned around, and Mae saw past him to the childlike woman standing just inside the archway to the room.

She'd forgotten just how amazingly beautiful Stormy was. Her red-gold ringlets and huge blue eyes were dazzling, but mostly it was Stormy's skin, opal-like in its translucence, that took people's breath away. At twenty-five, Stormy Klosterman was the closest thing to perfect beauty Mae had ever seen.

Mae shot a glance at Mitch and sighed. He had that stunned look that men usually got when they saw Stormy. It wasn't his fault. Even women tended to stare openmouthed at Stormy. But it still hurt, which was dumb because she didn't care who Mitch stared at.

"I'm sorry." Mae moved past Mitch to meet her. "We didn't know you were here, or we'd never have barged in on you. Are you all right?"

Stormy sniffed. There were beautiful bluish shadows under her eyes, and her mouth turned down at the corners. "Yes. It's all right that you're here. I don't live here anymore. Nobody lives here anymore." Her face crumpled and she began to cry, and Mae put her arms around her and led her to the couch.

"I'm sorry, honey." She looked back over her shoulder at Mitch, who was evidently frozen by the combination of beauty and tears. "Get her a drink of water, will you?"

"Sure." Mitch blundered past them, trying a closet door before he found the door to the kitchen, only to return with a glass of water. He looked at the weeping Stormy with no enthusiasm whatsoever.

"Go away," Mae told him.

"Right," he said, and she heard him climbing the stairs a moment later.

"I'm sorry," Stormy said when she was all cried out. She straightened her head from Mae's shoulder, and Mae watched with envy as all the pinkness from her crying jag faded into rose-blushed cheeks.

"Have you been alone all this time?"

"Yes." Stormy sniffed. "I've been mostly at my new place, but I come by everyday, just to say goodbye." Her face crumpled again.

Mae patted her on the back as Stormy's head hit her shoulder again. "I'm sorry, Stormy. I should have called you. I just didn't think."

"That's okay." Stormy's voice was muffled in Mae's shoulder.

"Is there anything I can do to help?"

Stormy pulled back a little and looked at her wistfully. "Maybe we could have lunch sometime. Like we were friends, sort of."

"Lunch?'' Mae nodded, a little confused but grateful to have found something that cheered her up. "Sure. This weekend, maybe?" Friday was the memorial. There was no way she was taking Stormy to lunch before the memorial.

"Saturday." Stormy beamed at her, and Mae blinked again at how beautiful she was and how volatile. In anyone else, the mood change would have been a sign of mental instability. In Stormy, it was childlike and enchanting. And Armand had planned to leave her to go to Barbara Ross? "I'd like that," Stormy finished. "Lunch. Saturday would be good. At the Levee. I like the Levee."

"Oh, me, too." Mae did a quick calculation to see if she had enough money to cover lunch at the Levee. Paying Mitch had tapped her out. Maybe if she sold the Mercedes.

"Why are you here?"

Mae started, but Stormy's voice was still friendly. "Uh, I..." Telling Stormy that she'd hired a detective to find Armand's murderer was probably not going to be a good move at this point. "I'm looking for something."

"Who's the guy?"

Mae blinked at her again.

"The guy you came with. He's cute." Stormy wrinkled her nose in pixie appreciation.

"Cute?" Mae stared at her. "Mitch?"

Stormy nodded. "Like a teddy bear. Is he yours?"

"Uh, no. I hired him."

"For what?"

Mae spoke slowly, taken aback by Stormy's sudden focus. "To find Armand's diary. We thought it might be here."

Mitch's voice broke in from the doorway. "Well, it isn't."

Stormy turned to him and smiled. "I know. All his things are packed up. Harold came and took some of them."

"The diary isn't in the box that Harold brought home," Mae told her. "Is there someplace here he might have hidden it?"

Stormy shook her head, her ringlets dancing in the sunlight. "No. There's no place like that here." She held out her hand to Mitch. "I'm Stormy."

He came forward and took it. "Hi, I'm Mitch. Can you think of anybody who might have wanted to kill Armand?"

"Kill him?" Stormy's voice sounded stunned, and Mae mentally kicked Mitch around Greater Riverbend.

"He died of a heart attack. I was there. We were making love and he died.
In my arms."
She started to cry again on the last words, and then she collapsed back onto Mae's shoulder.

Mae glared up at Mitch, but he just stood there, staring at Stormy with a frown on his face.

"I loved him." Stormy sobbed. "Nobody believed that. They all thought it was for the money. But I loved him."

Mae patted her again. "I believe you."

Stormy stopped crying and sat up, blinking at her. "You do?" She sniffed. "I always liked you."

"Oh. Thank you." Mae stood up before things got any weirder or, worse, before Stormy started to cry again. "If you're all right, we really have to be going." Mae backed away from her and bumped into Mitch. "We'll see you at the memorial tomorrow."

"Oh, will Mitch be there, too?" Stormy stood and drifted after them.

Mitch took Mae's elbow. "Wouldn't miss it." He pulled her through the archway, and Mae waved once to Stormy and then went gratefully, eager to be gone from all the beauty and loneliness and strangeness in the town house.