Chapter Sixteen #2
at the midriff,” she answered.
“Structured ruffle at the hip?” he pressed.
“You got it.”
“De la Renta?”
“You got that too.”
“Saks?”
“Yup.”
“Excellent choice.”
I’d lost Toni, so I turned to Jet. “What’s happening?”
She smiled her dazzling smile and urged, “Don’t fight it.
Tod’s crazy, but he’s really good at it. He won’t do that first thing you don’t
want. And swear to God, he works his ass off so all you have to do is show up,
get your hair done, your face done, put your dress on, drink champagne, marry
your guy and be happy. He’s a miracle worker.”
“But Darius and I aren’t engaged,” I pointed out.
“Excuse me,” Tod called me.
I looked to him.
“It’s been what? Three years? Not even that. Two and a half,
at most,” he said then pointed at Indy. “Married and pregnant.” He pointed at
Jules. “Married and has a kid.” His finger bopped between Roxie and Ava.
“Married. Married.” Then to Sadie. “Engaged.” Then another bop between Stella
and Ally. “Shacked up.” Then Jet. “Married, new baby.” He looked at me. “Any
questions?”
“Holy crap,” I whispered.
“Yeah, strap in, sister. The Hot Bunch don’t fuck around. Comprende?” Daisy declared.
“The Hot Bunch?” I asked.
“Lee, and Eddie, and Vance, Hank, Luke, Hector, Mace, Ren
and Darius,” she explained. “The Hot Bunch.”
Oh man.
But, I was seeing this.
And there was me, packing my own damned bags, doubling up on
toiletries and essentially moving myself in before day three.
“Holy crap,” I repeated.
Tod waved his hands beside his head. “I can’t work like
this. I need a season. What’s it gonna be? Spring? Summer? Winter? Fall? I
don’t see you as a fall. Maybe a summer. So? What’s it going to be?” he
demanded of me.
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” I admitted.
“The season you’re going to get married,” he explained.
“Again, I’m not engaged.”
“Leave it to me, my man,” Toni told him. “I’ll get you what
you need. Give me a day or two.”
What?
“Are you free Tuesday?” Tod asked Toni.
“I can be,” Toni answered.
“Martinis at the Cruise Room. Stevie and my treat. Get a
season. And thoughts on venue. And a theme. I’ll bring swatches.”
“You got it, brother,” she said, clicking her teeth,
squinting her eye and pointing at him.
Tod snatched up the scrapbook and turned to his partner.
“Come on, honey. We gotta go get some swatches.”
And with that, he swanned out, the bell ringing his exit.
“’Bye, girlies,” Stevie called, all smiles, clearly used to
this crazy. “Lovely to not quite meet you Malia and Toni,” he finished as he
followed.
The bell rang again, and Stevie was gone.
“Drink the coffee,” Stella advised. “It helps.”
I took a sip of coffee thinking, after all that, she’d be
wrong.
After the sip, I realized she was very right.
Even so, when I dropped my mug, I asked, “Is a man I don’t
know planning my wedding to a man I’m not engaged to yet?”
To this, for some bizarre reason, Annette threw her head
back, whooped to the ceiling, then dropped her chin and looked at me. “This is
sofa-king phat! It’s been a long time. Too long. This is gonna be
awesome.”
“It’s been five months,” Ava pointed out.
“That’s too long. God, I hope there’s another car chase,”
Annette said and again looked at me. “Do you think there’s gonna be a car
chase?”
“Um, I hope not,” I replied.
“Snipers?” she asked.
Oh my God!
“Lord, no,” I said.
“Well, I hope Darius’s house doesn’t get bombed. I haven’t
partaken, but I heard about that wine cellar, and it’d be a shame that went sky
high,” she shared.
Good Lord.
Regrettably, Annette wasn’t done.
“At least I won five hundred bucks off you. Thanks for that.
I didn’t know you, but I thought, things came to a head when the dude was in a
hospital bed. You needed to let him heal before you started the Rock Chick
Sex-a-thon. And I was right.”
I was speechless.
Annette continued not to be. “You gotta give me something to
add to the tour. We need new blood.”
I turned my attention to Ally. “Can you explain what’s
happening?”
Ally was fighting a smile. “First, don’t get offended, we
all went through it starting with Ava. But we take bets on when the Hot Bunch
wears a sister down and the Rock Chick starts getting the business.”
I heard Toni’s chuckle.
I was sure I’d find it funny.
Someday.
“Second, after the books started coming out, Annette started
doing Rock Chick Tours, taking fans around to all the places everything went
down,” Ally went on.
“Cheese and wine in the Reserve would be a good place to end
a tour,” Annette noted.
I considered for a nanosecond how I’d feel about Rock Chick
Fans in Darius’s house.
I then considered for less than a nanosecond how Darius
would feel.
Then I said, “That’s not gonna happen.”
Annette looked to Daisy and said, “Worth a try.”
Daisy laughed her tinkly-bell laugh.
“Last,” Ally carried on, “I asked you here to talk about
what you and Toni were doing in that office building.”
“Oh,” I mumbled. Then I glanced around and said, “I kinda
can’t talk about that in company. This is a client. I’m bound by
confidentiality.”
“Got a dollar? Or a quarter, a quarter would work,” Daisy
put in.
“I got one,” Toni said, digging in her purse.
She fished it out and Daisy treated us to a bird’s-eye-view
of her cleavage when she leaned forward and took it, and I had to admit, my
eyes started burning.
She shoved the bill in her cleavage then said, “Right. You
just hired Rock Chick Investigations. And we got confidentiality too. Carry
on.”
“Okay, but…” I slid my gaze through the crew.
“I hear you,” Daisy said. “And Ava’s our graphic designer.
Roxie is our website coordinator. The rest you can consider associates.”
“It’s okay,” Ally cut in. “No one is going to breathe a
word. Honestly. Shoot.”
I looked to Toni.
She nodded in encouragement.
I returned to Ally. “Right, so I got this folder on my desk.
Except, when I opened it, there was nothing in it but a Post-it that said ‘Remostros Engineering,’ and that address we were at.”
“The vacant offices?” Ally asked.
“What?” I asked back.
“I did some preliminary checks. On that floor where you
were, there were four office suites. Three taken. One by an accounting firm.
One a data processing organization. The last, an architect. The only other
suite of offices, the one around the corner from where you two were lurking,
was vacant.”
Again, Toni and I exchanged a glance before I went back to
Ally. “That should be an engineering firm.”
“Well, it isn’t. I went in. There’s nothing there. Not even
a desk. But there is a listing for it on a commercial rental site, and it’s
been vacant for twelve months.”
“Whoa,” Toni whispered.
My skin started feeling funny.
“That’s it, child?” Shirleen spoke for the first time,
watching me carefully. “An empty folder?”
I shook my head at her. “No. I didn’t know what was up, so I
typed the number on the tab into our system, thinking maybe the paperwork had
been misplaced. It’s the case file number. And it came up locked. The message
said I had to ask the network engineer for access. I’ve never run into that
before. We have three named partners, four senior partners, six junior
partners, and four associates. I do work for all of them. I have all access to
everything because I need it.”
“Okay, we’re getting fishier,” Ally said. “What else?”
“I asked the network administrator for access,” I told her.
“And he was acting all kinds of shifty and said that only Jeffrey, one of the
named partners, has access to that file.”
“And let me guess, you got curious, and it didn’t stop
there,” Ally deduced.
I nodded. “Especially since it was a named partner. They
don’t do any of the grunt work. They pass it off to the paralegal pool. Or an
associate. So I looked up Remostros Engineering. And
it exists, and I’m no forensics accountant, but from what I can tell, it’s a
shell company.”
“Well, damn,” Daisy whispered.
“And that’s owned by what appears to be another shell
company, that’s owned by another one, that’s owned by yet another, and that
last one is owned by a tiny LLC with only one director,” I went on.
“This Jeffrey,” Ally concluded.
I nodded again.
She turned to Daisy. “Extortion?”
Daisy shrugged. “Maybe.” She gave her attention to me. “This
Jeffrey married?”
Oh my God.
Why hadn’t I thought of that?
“Office gossip has him banging one of the junior partners,”
I shared.
“Yup,” Daisy stated. “Hiding assets. He’s gonna scrape off
the wife for the side piece.”
He totally was.
“After I talked with our network administrator, Jeffrey
called me into his office,” I told them. “He asked me to bring the file, the
one with nothing in it. He’s usually very professional. Friendly, but a
be-a-good-team though work-is-work, get-the-job-done type of guy. Except, when
I brought the file, he was being super outgoing in an oily way that felt dirty,
telling me the Remostros deal was highly
confidential, they were important clients, would mean a ton of billable hours,
and the firm had promised them his individual attention.”
“And you didn’t buy it,” Ally said.
“That was when I started digging deeper. But my bad feeling
was helped when he ordered me in no uncertain terms not to speak to anybody
about it. Not anybody. Not even the other partners.”
“Well, stop digging,” Ally ordered. “I’ll get Brody on it so
we can make sure this isn’t extortion, and your firm isn’t going to be
vulnerable to whatever he’s doing. But if he’s preparing to fuck over his wife,
you got a decision to make. That being, does she somehow learn, anonymously,
he’s screwing around on her at the same time setting her up just to screw her?”
“That would be my vote,” Ava said.
“Me too,” Sadie put in.
“Totes,” Roxie added.
“Malia, you do any of that research on a work computer?”
Shirleen asked me.
More shaking of my head. “No. I did it at home.”
She nodded once. “Smart girl.”
I smiled at her.
“I think we all know everyone’s vote, but it’s gotta come
from you,” Ally said to me. “If it’s him ramping up to fuck over his wife, do
you want her to know?”
I thought about Jeffrey.
I didn’t really know him. The underlings didn’t pal around
with the partners, but he was even more removed.
Though I did know he was in his early fifties, he and his
wife had three kids, all of them in college. They’d been married since college
themselves. The junior partner he was possibly sleeping with was in her
mid-thirties, smart, gorgeous and a shark. And Jeffrey’s wife planned all of
our office parties.
She was the perfect attorney’s wife. She didn’t work, except
the onerous jobs of making his life and family run smoothly so he could make
his mark, and she bent over backward to make him look good to colleagues, staff
and clients.
I didn’t really know her either.
I just knew she didn’t deserve to be screwed over while her
husband lived the high life with the next young thing.
“Yes,” I answered. “Definitely.”
Ally pushed up from her chair, muttering, “We’re on it.”
She walked away, putting her phone to her ear, now all
business.
Wow.
She was kinda badass.
“This isn’t gonna amount to anything.” Annette sounded
disappointed. “This Jeffrey guy gets it in his head to kidnap you or car bomb
you, and he gets one look at Darius, he’s gonna tuck his tail between his legs
and move himself and his fuck buddy to Panama.”
“Good riddance, I say,” Jet muttered.
It was then, I caught movement across the way, at the
entrance to the shelves.
Duke.
My heart warmed, my lips formed the words, “Excuse me,” and
I put down my coffee mug and got up.
He turned around and disappeared into the shadows of the
stacks.
I followed him in.
But he’d vanished.
Except, he hadn’t.
The books were in three sections, the middle one containing
tables with milk cartons on top, filled with vinyl.
On the edge of the one closest to the aisle was a
plastic-covered album.
Bridge over Troubled Waters.
On it was taped a note.
I picked up the album and read the note.
My Boxer,
I know Darius has a turntable.
You did good.
Proud of you.
Duke
I closed my eyes to fight the sting in them and hugged that
album to my chest.
Once I got myself together, still hugging the album, I
walked back to my coffee.
And my friends.
The old.
And the new.
It was a couple of hours, and a couple of coffees,
later, when I was hoping we’d have enough time to get hangers and a new outfit
for Darius before we had to head home and get ready for the party, when Toni
and I were walking to my car.
Before I opened my door, though, she was suddenly in my
space.
Surprised, I turned to her.
Her arms closed around me.
Shirleen’s hugs were the best, truly.
But Toni’s gave them competition, partly because she put her
all into them, mostly because she was choosy about doling them out, and they
didn’t come often.
“Happy for you,” she whispered in my ear, and as fast as the
hug started, it ended, and she headed to the passenger side.
I had to fight the sting of tears again, but I was getting
good at it.
Anyway, I had hangers to buy and an outfit to pick out for
my man and a party to get ready for.
There was no time for tears.