Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You (v1.2) (19 page)

“Yes, ma’am,” Grady said, walking around to sit down behind his desk, then pulling a face at Ruth’s back as she sashayed out of the room, holding the putter as if it might turn into a snake at any moment.

He hit the button on the speakerphone and sat back in his chair, resting his feet on the desk. “Grady’s Bar and Grill,” he said, glaring at the towering paperwork. “How may we help you?”

Quinn’s voice came through the speaker. “For starters, you can get me the hell off the speaker. You know I hate that.”

Grady sighed, dropped his feet to the floor, and picked up the receiver. “There. Happy now?”

“Tell me I’m not a louse.”

Grady took the receiver away from his head, then stared at it for a moment before putting it to his ear once more. “Come again?”

“I said, tell me I’m not a louse. That’s why I’m calling you, damn it, so you can tell me I’m not a louse. So tell me.”

Grady shrugged. “You’re not a louse.”

There was a short silence at the other end of the phone, then: “You can’t say it with any real meaning, can you?” Quinn asked. “And you know why, Grady? It’s because I
am
a louse. A board-certified, card-carrying louse.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, man. All right, so you left me in the lurch here, in paperwork up to my eyeballs. I can live with that. Dealing with auditors, hunting for forms I didn’t even know existed. Trying to figure out your accounting system and those faxes you keep sending me. And all so you can go off and romance an heiress who also happens to be beautiful, with long legs, a killer figure—and I’m not just talking about her bank balance. Hey, wait a minute. You
are
a louse.”

“I kissed her last night.”

Now, at last, Quinn had Grady’s full attention, and he knew it. He sat back in his chair, automatically unfolded the bent doily on the arm, and waited.

“And… ?” Grady responded at last. “I mean, that can’t be it You kissed her? That’s all? Hell, Quinn, that story wouldn’t even have me turning back after the first commercial. Can’t you give me more than that?”

“The word
ethics
never really meant a hell of a lot to you, did it, Grady?”

“What has ethics to do with anything? You gave them back their money, didn’t you? This is purely on your own, with no connection to D and S. Of course, if you haven’t yet told her that you were originally hired to baby-sit her while she played at real life…” Grady frowned at the desk calendar. “You
have
told her, right?”

“No, Grady, I haven’t told her. She was in my apartment last night, snooping around the living room while I got out of my wet clothes—”

Grady interrupted, as his internal radar had gone on red alert. “Wet clothes? How did your clothes get wet? We’re in the middle of a drought here, you know, and the weather isn’t any different in East What-the-hell-you-call-it You’re skipping parts, aren’t you? That isn’t fair.”

“Just try to stay with me, okay?” Quinn asked, getting up, beginning to pace the flowered carpet. “I came out of the bedroom and there she was, just about to pick up the file on her. Stupid! How could I have been so stupid as to leave that lying around?”

“Been out of the field for over a year, bucko. Sounds like you’re losing your edge. I, however, haven’t. So let me hazard a guess here. You saw her, saw the file. Grabbed her, kissed her, took her mind off the file. That’s what I would have done. So, how am I doing so far?”

Quinn pushed his fingers through his hair. “Not as well as I was doing, until I realized what a louse I was. How in hell am I going to tell her now, Grady?”

Grady pushed the speaker button and hung up the phone as he stood, began to pace in Philadelphia just as Quinn was pacing in East Wapaneken. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Grady, get me the hell off the speaker.”

“I can’t I have to pace. You know I have to pace. Besides, if you’re worried that Ruth has her ear at my office door, I wouldn’t worry about it. She’s probably just sitting in her office, feet on her desk, eating chocolates, and recording all of this somehow, so she can hand out copies to everyone in the office tomorrow morning. You know she’s the only one who really understands how to work these phones.”

There was a slight click, and the line became clearer.

“Oh, God,” Quinn said, plopping into the chair once more. “Just what I needed. You know she’s going to call me later, ream me out, and then tell me what I should do.”

Grady grinned. “Which would mean you don’t need me. Isn’t it great how all this is working out? But if you could explain the really rather nice bump in our second-quarter earnings, I’d really—”

“Good-bye, Grady.”

“Good—” Grady looked at the speakerphone, listening to the dial tone. “He hung up on me. Son of a gun. Damn if he didn’t hang up on me.” He headed for Ruth’s office, poking his head out the door to get his secretary’s opinion. “So?”

“He’s in love,” Ruth pronounced flatly, then grinned. “And he’s in a hell of a mess. This ought to be fun.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Grady said, withdrawing his head, then poking it front once more. “Can I have my putter back now?”

“Only if you want it somewhere you really wouldn’t want it,” Ruth warned, laughing.

“Forget I mentioned it,” Grady said, wincing, and headed back to those leering, leaning stacks of paper as, in East Wapaneken.

Quinn frowned as his doorbell rang with all the melody of an electronic pig stuck in a fence.

He walked into the hallway and looked down the stairs, to see Gary Mack standing there, looking more than a little lost. “What’s up, Gary?”

Gary looked up at him and motioned for him to hit the buzzer that opened the inner door. A few moments later, having climbed the stairs two at a time, he was heading for 2C. “She wouldn’t let me up,” he told Quinn shortly. “We had a fight last night. A big one. Now she won’t answer the phone, won’t answer the buzzer.” He raised his fist, ready to beat on the door, when Quinn grabbed him, turned him around, pushed him through the open door of 2B.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Gary asked as Quinn closed the door and locked it

“Saving your life, it sounds like,” Quinn said, motioning Gary to the chair he’d just vacated. “Never run after a woman, Gary, especially when she doesn’t want to be run after. It’s in the code.”

Gary, who had spent a nearly sleepless night and had actually snapped at his mother when she commented that he hadn’t eaten all his breakfast, looked at Quinn questioningly. “The code?” He shook his head. “Never heard of it.”

Quinn sat himself down on the couch and smiled at his confused friend. Lots of muscle on the boy, with a fairly good proportion of it lodged between his ears at the moment. “It’s simple, Gary. Never go after a woman who doesn’t want you going after her. And, in section two, part A, never go after a woman who
wants
you to go after her. Either way you’re going to lose. Now, which do you think applies to Brandy this morning?”

Gary hung his head. “She doesn’t want to talk to me?” He looked up at Quinn. “I mean, she threw me out last night. Threw me out! She wouldn’t answer the phone, won’t answer the buzzer. So, yeah. She doesn’t want to talk to me.” His homely face rearranged itself in an attitude of what, for Gary, had to be deep thought. “Unless she really wants me to come crawling back, like I just tried to do. She could be doing that, too, couldn’t she?”

“Ah, and there’s your dilemma, Gary,” Quinn told him. “Which is what she wants? Why don’t you tell me what happened, and we’ll see if we can sort this out, okay?”

Quinn didn’t know why he was doing this, but it did keep his mind off Shelby. Off how she had felt in his arms. How her mouth had tasted. Of how much he wanted her, probably needed her. How much she’d hate him when she found out the truth.

Gary bit his bottom lip, then nodded. Gary was good at nodding. Explanations, however, were not his forte, as Quinn learned in the next few minutes.

“Okay, we were in the apartment, doing just great,” he began, his brow creased. “I was rubbing her feet. Brandy loves when I rub her feet And I was telling her about this great idea my buddy at work had. We were working on a renovation project out on the parkway. Big house, big addition. Two bedrooms, a sitting room, three bathrooms, if you can believe that.”

“Gary? All of that is very interesting, but is this getting us anywhere?”

“Well, yeah,” Gary said, a little insulted. “Because that’s when Jim—he’s my plumber buddy on the job site, you understand. Subcontract that stuff out, we do, because it’s cheaper that way, and there’s city codes and all, so you have to use a real plumber. Well, that’s when Jim told us how the lady of the house was really piss—Um, that is, she was really
upset
about these low-flow toilets we were putting in the bathrooms. They are a pain, you know, but it’s federal regulations. All new toilets have to be these low-flow kind, and they’re a real pain, like I said. Like Jim says, what’s the sense of using less water if you have to flush twice, maybe three times? But that’s the federal government for you, Jim says, and I—”

Quinn jabbed his fingers through his hair. “Focus, Gary. Focus.”

“Oh, right.” Gary cleared his throat and began again. “So I tell him that Canada doesn’t have these regulations about toilets. They’re still making the same damn ones. Damn good ones. One flush and you’re done. So Jim says to me, he says, ‘You know, Gar, there’s a fortune to be had, if we work it right,’ and I say, ‘What are you talking about, Jim?’ and he says we could go up to Canada in my truck, buy us a couple dozen toilets, bring them back here, and sell them for about a thousand bucks apiece to people like this lady who’s really piss— Er, really upset about these low-flow pieces of junk.”

Quinn rubbed his forehead, thinking about illegal toilets and border guards and jail terms and, in general, Brandy’s reaction to this piece of brilliance. “Brandy didn’t like the idea?” he said, hazarding what he thought was a pretty good guess as to Brandy’s reaction.

Gary began picking at the lace doily on the arm of the chair. “She said she wants to go to Niagara Falls on our honeymoon and that the only water she wants to see flowing is that on the Canadian side of the falls.” He found a loose thread in the doily and began tugging at it, and Quinn quickly rescued the thing before Mrs. Brichta could see it and then probably murder him.

“And that’s when we had the fight,” Gary ended, sighing theatrically, or at least as theatrically as a man built like a brick house could muster.

Quinn nodded knowingly. “About the contraband toilets.”

Gary looked up, clearly puzzled. “No,” he corrected. “About the wedding. Weren’t you listening?”

“Obviously not,” Quinn said, deciding it was time for a couple of cold ones from the fridge. “But keep talking, Gary. I’m listening now.”

It took another ten minutes, but at last Quinn understood the whole of it. “You’re screwed,” he said at last, draining his beer as he looked at Gary. “I mean, you are royally screwed.”

“Yeah. I know,” Gary said, putting his empty bottle on the table, so that Quinn found himself getting up yet again, this time to locate a coaster and slip it under the bottle. Mrs. Brichta sure did have him trained, he thought, then returned to the couch and stared at Gary, who stared back at him.

“What am I going to do?” Gary asked at last.

Quinn didn’t have the faintest idea. “What do you want to do, Gar?”

“I want my mama and Brandy to be friends,” he said at last, “but that’s not going to happen. Oh, I don’t blame Brandy; I really don’t. Mama can be a little difficult, I guess, but then she’s a widow, and lonely, and I’m her only child. She needs me, you know? But Brandy can’t see that.”

Quinn, who was also having a lot of trouble seeing that, carried the empty beer botdes to the kitchen in order to give himself time to think. What he thought first was that, considering his own predicament, he was probably the last person in the world who should be trying to hand out advice to the lovelorn.

Still, looking at Gary’s problem was easier than spending any more time examining his own. He returned to the living room and sat down. “Tell you what, Gary. Give Brandy a couple of days to cool down; then ask her if maybe she wants the two of you to get tickets for this same cruise, then get married at sea. That would work, wouldn’t it?”

Gary seemed to choke on his own spit. “Have Mama and Brandy together on the same boat? Are you
nuts?
They’d be screaming ‘Man overboard’ every ten minutes. Jeez, Quinn, I thought you said you could help me, but if that’s the best you can do…”

Quinn looked at his watch. “It’s eleven o’clock. The Phillies are playing at home. What do you say the two of us drive down to the Vet and catch the game?”

“Go to the ball game? But Brandy and I always go food shopping on Sunday’s. I take Mama in the morning, and Brandy in the afternoon. We’ve been doing it that way ever since I can remember.”

“But Brandy isn’t answering the phone, Gary; she isn’t answering the buzzer. Maybe if you left her alone today to get her own grocery shopping done, she’ll be more willing to talk to you next time you call. Or are you planning to hang around her front door like some whipped puppy until she forgives you?”

“Well, yeah. That’s how we usually work it,” Gary said blankly, then straightened his shoulders. “You’re right, Quinn. You have to know if they want you to come around or if they don’t want you to come around. And I always come around, and Brandy knows it” His resolve seemed to weaken for a moment. “Of course, she always let me
in
before today.”

Quinn walked over and patted Gary’s shoulder. “She’s pretty angry this time, Gar, I’ll bet on it. I know how much she was looking forward to the wedding. Don’t you think it’s best that you leave her alone awhile, to cool down? Come on, Gar, the game starts at one. Interleague play, with the Yankees. I happen to know someone who has season tickets in one of the super boxes. We’ll stop at his place, I’ll run up and get the tickets, and we’re all set.”

“Cool down? You think she’ll cool down?” Gary said, standing up, hitching up his pants. “Yeah, that’s what she’ll do. She always does. Yankees, you say? A super box? And we could drive down in your Porsche? Damn, Quinn, what are we doing here? Let’s go.”