Bait & Switch (15 page)

Epidermis seemed to be teeming with women who got paid to take off their clothes in public, but not in private. If any prostitution was going on, it wasn’t of the organized variety.

Neither was there tangible proof that Gibbs was running a bookmaking operation, which was most puzzling of all. Mitch knew Gibbs was a bookie because of his dealings with Cary and Cooper Barnes, but he’d seen none of the trappings of the business. No separate phone line that always rang. No television tuned in to sporting events. No employee whose job consisted of answering phones.

“Hey, baby doll, how ’bout you do me a favor?” Millie Bellini beckoned to him with a gnarled, long-nailed finger. Her lipstick today was a bright pink that clashed with her leopard-skin top.

“You’re not going to start with the black shirt again, are you?” Mitch tried to inject some of Cary’s charm in his voice. “Because it’s not my color.”

She waggled her thick, dark eyebrows. “Any color would look good on a hunk of burning love like you.”

Think, Mitch told himself. What would Cary say to that?

“Aw, Millie, flattery will get you everywhere. What is it you need?”

She laughed. “Aside from you, I need somebody tall to get down the box of pasties from the high shelf in Flash’s office. Some of the girls say the ones they’re wearing are falling apart.”

“You’ll cover for me?”
 

“I’d let you wear me as a cover if you want,” Millie quipped, then laughed so hard at her joke that some of her pink lipstick rubbed off on her yellowed teeth.

Mitch didn’t waste time in taking the key from Millie and unlocking the door to the office. He knew opportunity and this one was too good to waste. If Gibbs were running a bookmaking operation, there had to be some record of it.

Nearly naked women gyrated to an inaudible beat on the screen of Gibbs’s computer, but Mitch didn’t linger over the images. He pressed the space bar, vanquishing the screensaver, and waited for a prompt to ask for a password.

Instead, the desktop materialized. Mitch swallowed, hardly believing his luck. Gibbs was many things, arrogant certainly among them, but a computer security expert he wasn’t. Mitch hurriedly scanned the desktop, equally surprised at the presence of a folder labeled “records.”

He clicked twice on the icon, again expecting password protection. The screen filled with columns of numbers. It took him a moment to figure out he was looking at the books for Epidermis books instead of a gambling log. The figures, though, made no sense.

Mitch had worked the previous weekend and hadn’t seen anywhere near the amount of money moving through the place that was recorded in the ledger.

It seemed his brother was right. Gibbs was laundering the money from his bookmaking business through the club.

The heavy stamp of footsteps sounded outside the door, which Mitch had thought too risky to lock. He closed the file, wheeled the chair backward and jumped to his feet. He was reaching for a cardboard box when Millie walked in the door.

“I came to see what was taking you so long, sugar buns,” she said.

From the corner of his eye, Mitch noticed that the desktop was showing on the computer instead of the screensaver. If Millie noticed, he was doomed.

He lifted the box off the shelf and stood with it poised over his head, as though he were Adonis holding up the world. As he intended, she focused on his muscles, which he hoped were rippling.

“It’s hard to find boxed pasties.” He held the pose. A minute or so had passed since he touched the computer, but nobody set their screensaver on that short a timer. He had to do something — and fast.

“Next time I’ll model ‘em for you,” Millie said with her familiar leer.

Mitch forced himself to smile at the same time he pretended to lose his balance. He juggled the box in the air while managing to bump the computer screen with his hip.

“Look what you’ve gone and done!” Millie wailed.

Mitch winced. She was on to him. He waited, expecting the worst.

“You turned off Flash’s screensaver,” she said.

Mitch could suddenly draw air into his lungs again. “Darn.” He feigned disappointment. “And those women could really dance.”

“I should have known you were taking so long ‘cause you were ogling the naked women,” Millie said.

“Guilty.” Mitch hoped his smile didn’t look as forced as it felt.

He headed past Millie for the main part of the bar, his brain churning. The computer records indicated that Gibbs was moving so much money through Epidermis that his bookmaking operation had to be extremely profitable.

Mitch needed proof of that illegal operation so he could put Gibbs in jail and return to his old life.

A lump stuck in his throat he couldn’t seem to swallow, because Grant Mitchell’s life didn’t include Peyton McDowell.

The open-air tour train chugged past the colonial-style house where Ernest Hemingway had once lived. The guide explained that the two-story home was constructed with native rock and boasted the first pool ever built on the island.

Lizabeth was more interested in Grant. He, too, was one of a kind.

The short-sleeved shirt and navy shorts he wore were too muted for her taste, but she loved the thickness of his dark hair, the breadth of his shoulders and the cleft in his chin.

She also adored the sparkle that entered his eyes when something interested him, his quick mind and the appreciative way he looked at her.

She frowned, because technically he was appreciating Leeza. Just like it was Leeza he’d kissed the other night. She longed to return to being Lizabeth if only because she was sick of Leeza’s wild outfits. She’d nearly put her eyes out that morning when she’d got a glimpse of herself in the mirror after donning a neon green skort, matching sneakers and a bright yellow tank top.

If she resumed her Lizabeth identity, however, Grant would go back to not noticing her. The way he hadn’t in high school.

“I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want a couple dozen six-toed cats roaming the grounds of my house,” Grant said.

“What?”

“Weren’t you listening?” He gave her an indulgent look. “About half of the sixty cats living at the Hemingway House have an extra toe. They think most of them are descendants of the six-toed cat Hemingway got from a ship’s captain.”

“The Norwegian lundehund has six fully developed toes on each foot,” she blurted out.

“Is that a cat?”

“A dog.”

A smile playing at the edges of his mouth. “Is that right?”

“They’re very rare.” Her mouth was like a faucet with a broken shut-off valve. “They can bend their heads backwards over their shoulders and close their ear canals at will.”

His smile grew, and she was horrified that she’d been babbling on about the lundehund.
Say something
, her inner voice screamed.
Say something or he’ll think you’re obsessed with the lundehund.

“What say you we disembark?”

What say you?
Who did she think she was? The queen of England?

“You mean, get off the train?” Grant asked.

“Yes.” She remembered to toss her head so her hair swung. Unfortunately, it hit him in the face. She pretended not to notice. “It’s a lovely day for a walk.”

She would have preferred hopping off the train, like the rail jumpers of the Old West, but of course cops like Grant didn’t leap off trains.

He waited until the train came to a complete stop at a red light and signaled to the conductor before stepping off and offering Lizabeth his hand. She took it. A burst of shyness prevented her from looking him full in the face.

He swung their joined hands to his mouth and planted a warm kiss on the back of her hand. Her stomach jumped like a ping-pong ball. The departing train emitted a farewell whistle and a car horn blared in response.

“Did you know that most American cars honk in the key of F?”

She’d done it again. Why, oh why, couldn’t she keep the encyclopedia in her head closed? Lizabeth evaded his eyes for fear of what she might see in them but left her hand in his while she prattled on.

“Technically the honk we just heard could have been an F sharp or an F flat. The key of C is the only one with no sharps or flats.”

Grant chuckled. “That’s mighty sharp of you to point out.”

Was he making fun of her gaucherie?
Be calm
, she told herself.
Project poise
.

“I have been blessed with a sharp mind,” she said, then almost groaned aloud.

She started her shoulders-back, head-high walk, pretending the book she’d practiced with balanced on her head. The mechanics of her walk were so complicated it was a full minute before she could concentrate on the scenery.

This part of Key West was a surprise after the tourist-jammed downtown. Paved sidewalks took them past modest stucco houses landscaped with swaying palms, ficus hedges and red-flowering ixora bushes. Tot lots and the occasional soccer field added to the normalcy of the neighborhood.

Although the heat of the day had passed, the temperature still hovered around eighty. Droplets of perspiration formed above her upper lip. She quickly licked them away.

Don’t perspire
, she begged herself. Sweat wasn’t sexy.

Maybe she’d been perspiring the night he’d kissed her, because he’d let an entire day pass without contacting her. She might never have seen him again if she hadn’t adopted her phony bold persona to phone him and set up this day of sightseeing.

“What did you do yesterday?” she asked, even though she’d promised herself not to ask him that.

Just because she longed to spend every minute of her vacation with him didn’t mean he reciprocated the feeling. A strange look she couldn’t decipher passed over his face.
Oh, no
, she thought.
He was seeing another woman.

“I had some business in Miami,” he said.

A relieved breath whooshed out of her lungs. From what she knew about Grant, he didn’t lie. If he had business in Miami, it probably had something to do with law enforcement.

“Did you go up there after a criminal?” she asked.

He scuffed his deck shoe against the sidewalk. “Something like that.”

He opened his mouth as though he intended to say more, then promptly closed it. He was clearly uncomfortable, a state Lizabeth could lay at her doorstep.

“I’m sorry, Grant,” she said. “I shouldn’t have pried. I know you can’t compromise an investigation by talking about it.”

“You’re right,” he said. “It’s best if you don’t know the details.”

They walked along in silence with Lizabeth wondering about what Grant couldn’t tell her. Was he the kind of cop who was married to his job? The type who regularly used his vacation time to hunt down a subject? She realized she knew very little about him.

“Why did you become a cop?” she asked.

Cary massaged his forehead, hoping to stimulate his brain. Why had the Boy Scout become a cop? He’d never asked, but the answer was fairly obvious.

“I wanted to help people,” he said.

She squeezed his hand, as if to show him she approved of the answer. “How did you end up in Atlanta?”

He hesitated. If she didn’t think the Boy Scout was a saint now, the answer would surely convince her.

“Well?” she persisted.

“My great-grandmother didn’t want to leave the city,” he said. “My mom and grandma were worried about her so I applied for a job in Atlanta straight out of the police academy. I moved into her apartment building to keep an eye on her.”

Her eyebrows rose. “You live in a building of senior citizens?”

“Afraid so,” he said.

“Is your great-grandmother still in Atlanta?”

“She died suddenly of a heart attack last year.” Cary felt the familiar pang of hurt that she was gone. “Ninety-two years old and active ’til the end. It’s the way she would have wanted to go.”

“Do you still live in the same building?”

“Yeah,” he said reluctantly. “The neighbors got used to having a cop around.”

She was silent for so long Cary hoped she hadn't heard his answer. But of course she had.

“You’re a good man, Grant Mitchell,” she finally said.

He felt even more like a fraud than when he’d decided to impersonate his brother, because he was not a good man.

While his twin was selflessly pursuing a career in law enforcement and moving to Atlanta to be with their great-grandmother until the end, Cary was chasing the selfish dream of becoming a pro baseball player.

The only person Cary had ever helped was himself. If his busted elbow were any indication, he wasn’t even good at that.

He dropped her hand and shoved both of his in the pockets of his brother’s unfashionable shorts. He no longer felt like talking, and Leeza seemed happy to walk alongside him. And why not? She probably thought she was in the company of some kind of saint.

He kicked at a pebble, watched it skitter crazily out of sight, and then raised his head. The view that greeted him always had the power to lift his spirits: A baseball field chock full of kids.

“Oh, look, Grant,” Leeza said. “I bet they’re on a Little League team.”

From their gangly arms and legs, the boys couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old. Some took infield practice while others warmed up their arms in the outfield. Three of the boys lined up along one of the foul lines with their backs to the street while three others threw to them across the field.

Cary slowed, reliving the pure joy he’d gotten from baseball when he was that age. One of the kids heaved a ball over his partner’s outstretched glove, and it rolled all the way to the sidewalk. Cary picked up the ball, expertly tossing it to the boy who came to retrieve it.

“Thanks, mister,” the kid said, snapping his gum.

“Hey, sport,” Cary said before the kid could turn away. “Tell your buddy over there he’s releasing the ball too high. If he keeps his chin down and lets go of the ball later, you won’t have to do quite as much chasing.”

The kid’s eyes widened. “You know something about baseball?”

“I know enough,” Cary said.

He’d barely got the words out before the kid was yelling, “Hey, Dad. Come over here. This guy knows something about baseball!”