Chapter 2
Two
My late husband, David Kelly, before he left me for Jackie-with-a-q and then got himself murdered, was one of two partners in a financial firm that had its offices on Music Row in midtown Nashville.
David and his business partner Farley started the company a few years before David and I got married, while David was still married to his previous wife Sandra, although when you walk into the lobby, you’d swear that the place has been in business for more than half a century.
It was an impression David had gone to great lengths to cultivate, mainly by lining the walls with framed, signed photographs of some of country music’s greats, many of whom had died while he and Farley were in diapers.
Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, Hank Williams Senior, Johnny Cash, all smiled—or in Johnny’s case, glowered—down from the walls of the lobby.
All of them—save Johnny—dead before David had started grade school.
Not one of them had ever been a client of either David’s or Farley’s.
Rachel looked up from arranging an array of magazines on the table in the corner. “Gina. How did it go?”
I dropped my purse on the nearest chair and walked over to inspect the magazines. “Tailing someone is harder than I thought. Why do we suddenly subscribe to Guns & Ammo and Shooting Times?”
“We don’t,” Rachel said, aligning the corners with razor sharp precision. “Zachary brought them in. They’re from his personal collection. He said they’d set the tone for any walk-in clients.”
“I guess they would. If any clients happened to walk in.”
And I wasn’t holding my breath.
Our current case was a favor for a friend.
Diana Morton had handled my divorce from David, the one he had died in the middle of, and it was thanks to her that I still owned the house in Hillwood (that I would sell, as soon as the damage from a recent fire was repaired), the luxury penthouse in the Gulch (David’s love nest, that I lived in now), the Lexus I had gotten when I traded in my convertible, and the building we were standing in.
She’d offered to pay me for stalking Steven, but I was more than happy to do it gratis.
It seemed the least I could do, and anyway, once I proved myself, I hoped she’d refer clients my way.
A lot of wives, when they first suspect their husbands of straying, are willing to pay to have that suspicion confirmed.
Just look at Jaime Mendoza’s ex-wife.
“Any new calls?”
Rachel shook her head. “We’ve only just started, Gina. It takes time to build a business.”
Of course it did. But in the meantime, I had two employees and no income.
Actually, Rachel wasn’t so much employee as partner.
And she had a severance packet that she could live on for a couple of months, until we—hopefully—got some money coming in.
But Zachary had quit his job at the Apex—the building where David’s penthouse was—and he was working for Fidelity Investigations full time.
And he had to eat and put gas in his car.
Unless we got some actual paying clients through the door in the next couple of weeks, I’d be paying Zachary’s salary out of my savings account.
“Is Zach here?”
“He’s working on the website,” Rachel said, with a glance toward the rear of the building, where the offices were. “Search engine optimization, he said.”
Excellent. “I need him to do something for me. Steven left the university and drove to a house in Crieve Hall. He spent almost two hours inside, and then he drove home.”
Rachel nodded.
“I want a look at whoever lives there. So I want Zachary to deliver a pizza.”
“Pizza?”
“It’s a classic ploy. Private Investigating for Dummies says so.
You knock on the door with a pizza and say you have a delivery.
They tell you they didn’t order a pizza.
You double check the address. They insist they didn’t order the pizza.
You offer to give them the pizza anyway, since your boss will be angry if you bring it back.
They open the door and take the pizza, since nobody turns down a free pizza, and. ..”
I broke off. “You know, never mind. That’s for process servers. But I bet it would work for us, too.”
“Can’t hurt to try,” Rachel agreed.
“Can’t hurt to try what?” Zachary asked. He must have heard us talking, and come in from his own office. Now he was lounging in the doorway, looking from one to the other of us.
He’s adorable, in a very young, freckled way. Barely taller than me—I’m five-nine—and as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as the proverbial squirrel. I think he was as excited about working for a PI firm as I was. Maybe more so, since he didn’t have any of the financial worries.
I told him where Steven had gone this afternoon. “We need someone to get a look at who lives there. You’re our best bet. You can deliver a pizza.”
Nobody would believe that I, at my age, was a pizza delivery person. And Rachel was even older than I was.
Zachary flushed excitedly, from the neck of his blue T-shirt all the way up to the roots of his carroty hair. “You mean I get to go undercover?”
Rachel opened her mouth, probably to tell him not to get carried away, and I got in first.
“Yes! Exactly. You’d go undercover as a pizza delivery person.
I’d need you to bribe someone at the pizza place to let you borrow a uniform shirt or hat and one of those lighted signs they put on their roofs.
And then I need you to go to the house and see if you can get someone to open the door.
Most people will open the door for a free pizza. ”
Zachary nodded. “I’ve read the book.”
“Then you know what to do.”
“Now?”
“Finish up what you were doing first. And give me a chance to go to the bathroom. I’ve been in the car a long time.”
“You’re coming, too?” It sounded like he wasn’t entirely sure whether he was excited or the opposite about going out in the field with the boss.
“Just in the car,” I said. “If you get them to open the door, I want to see what they look like. And try to get a photograph. You can’t do that if you’re holding the pizza. But you’ll be on your own at the door. And inside the pizza parlor.”
He nodded. “I’ll go shut down the computer.”
“I’m going to the bathroom.” I headed down the hallway while he went back into his own office.
By the time I came back out to the lobby, Zachary had finished what he had to do, and was waiting for me, twitchy with excitement. Rachel was there, as well, twitchy with worry. “Do you want me to wait until you come back? Just in case?”
“In case of what?” Zachary wanted to know. “We’re just delivering a pizza!”
I was less impatient—and less cocksure. “I don’t think that’s necessary, Rachel. It’s almost five anyway. And Zachary’s right. Even if somebody in the house is having an affair with Steven Morton, nobody’s going to come after Zachary with a shotgun. He’s just a kid delivering a pizza.”
Rachel nodded, but was clearly not convinced. “Will you call me and tell me that everything went well?”
“Of course,” I said. “But I don’t expect any trouble.”
“Still.” Rachel headed out the door. Zachary followed, and I brought up the rear so I could lock up behind us.
“Which pizza place would you like to work for?” I asked when Rachel had gotten in her car and was pulling out of the parking lot. “Little Caesar’s? Papa John’s? CiCi’s? Domino’s?”
“Michelangelo’s,” Zachary said, maybe in hopes that he’d end up eating the pizza after this was over. When it came to eating, Michelangelo’s pizza was far superior to anything else. Twice the price, too, of course, but tasty. “I have a buddy who works there. He’ll let me borrow a shirt and hat.”
“I’ll meet you there.” I got into my Lexus. Zachary got into his beat-up Honda and led the way.
At Michelangelo’s, I stayed in the car and let him take the lead.
I figured he’d appreciate it, and that I’d probably just be in the way while he sweet-talked the girl behind the counter.
He came out five minutes later with a pizza, wearing a black shirt with Michelangelo’s stitched on the chest, and a black baseball cap, ditto.
“No car light,” he told me. “The real drivers need them.”
No problem. “The uniform will be enough. Let’s take your car.”
Mine was five years old and not in perfect shape, but his still looked more like something a pizza delivery guy would drive.
“Sure,” Zachary said. “Um... it’s sort of messy.”
“That’s all right. I’m only going to be in it for a few minutes.
” And I really wasn’t old enough that he needed to treat me like his honored grandmother.
I was only... well, twice his age. Old enough to be his mother, technically.
Although not with David. But still. “And I’ve seen it before.
You drove me back to the Apex three weeks ago, remember? ”
“Sure,” Zachary said, although he sounded less than sure. “Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
I promised I wouldn’t, and got into the passenger seat, while he gently placed the pizza box on top of a pile of what might be laundry in the back seat. It looked like every piece of clothing Zachary owned.
He got behind the wheel. “Where’s this place we’re going to?”
I told him it was in Crieve Hall, and gave him directions for how to get there.
Ten minutes later, we took the turn into the driveway on two wheels and came to a shuddering stop.
Zachary drove like a twenty-year-old on speed, the perfect camouflage for pretending he was a pizza delivery guy to whom time was money.
I was grateful we hadn’t mowed down any pedestrians on the way.
And while the pizza box had shimmied on top of the mountain of clothes, it hadn’t slid down the side.