Nina Wright - Whiskey Mattimoe 07 - Whiskey, Large (24 page)

“Cut the crap. Odette already phoned me. I’ve been tracking Mattimoe Realty online. You’re up to your big fat gut in social media shit.”

“I have a contract with Ben Fondgren,” I said, choosing to play hard-to-get.

“Yeah, well, he’s not doing his job, is he? Odette says he’s not returning your calls. You need me.”

I opened my mouth to object and then snapped it shut. This was turning out better than I had dared to hope. Now I didn’t have to ask Avery for help. She was volunteering.

Before I could formulate my next move, Avery added, “You are so lucky I’m available.”

“I thought you worked full-time for Cassina.”

“Cassina Multi-Media, Inc.,” Avery corrected me. “She’s incorporated. I thought you knew that.”

“So you’re not busy?”

“I’m a professional, Whiskey. I know how to manage my resources.”

An unfortunate image from Chester’s half-birthday bash came to mind: Avery perched on MacArthur’s lap jamming her tongue down his throat. I tried to focus on business.

“What are your rates?”

Avery rattled off several fee options, depending on whether I wanted to hire her by the hour, the day, or the project. We haggled for less than a minute before reaching an agreement. I laid out my requirements, she responded with a plan, and we sealed the deal. It almost sounded like she knew what she was doing.

“Do you know what’s up with Ben?” I said.

“Am I his keeper now?” she retorted.

“You both work for Cassina Multi-Media, Inc.”

“Ben works for Cassina Enterprises, Inc., her catch-all company.”

“‘Catch-all’?”

“Miscellaneous services. Cassina Enterprises does mostly maintenance and security, virtual and real, both here at the Castle and wherever Cassina tours.”

I thought about that. “Does MacArthur work for Cassina Enterprises?”

Avery snort-laughed. “Hardly. My Big Mac works for Cassina. Personally.”

Although I wasn’t sure what that meant, I was sure I didn’t want to pursue it.

“So you don’t know why Ben dropped the ball, or why he doesn’t answer his phones?” I asked.

When she didn’t reply, I pictured Avery shrugging her doughy shoulders and sticking out her serpent tongue.

“It’s his day off from here,” she said finally. “He might be with his boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend?” The word sprang from my mouth without judgment. I was simply surprised.

“Ben’s gay. You didn’t know that either?”

I didn’t, and I prided myself on having four-star Gaydar. Had late-stage pregnancy scrambled that, too? Ben’s phone voice seemed not only solidly heterosexual but also seductive. While less sexy in person, he had still seemed straight to me.

“Is he with anyone I know?” I said lightly.

“Do you know the gay community?” Avery said.

“Is he dating the gay community?” I countered.

For sure Avery’s tongue was flicking now. She said, “I seriously doubt you know gay people.”

“I know gay people,” I protested and went on to name several, including our police chief, her partner, a mother at Chester’s school, and the owner of a Main Street art gallery.

“You don’t know gay people,” Avery said smugly. “You know a few gay people. Hell, you really don’t know much of anything.”

Through clenched teeth, I said, “I hired you, didn’t I?”

She snort-laughed again. As usual, my ex-step was as annoying as a carbuncle.

“Just get to work,” I snarled.

“F.Y.I.,” Avery said, “Ben spends most of his days off with the same guy. I’ve seen them together lots of times.”

“What’s his name?” I said.

“Why do you want to know?”

“Clearly you don’t know his name either.”

“I don’t care, but I think it begins with ‘R.’”

My ears perked up. “Like Randy?”

“Randy begins with ‘R,’ but I don’t think that’s his name. Who gives a shit?”

She was half-right. Ben’s sexual orientation had nothing to do with me, and I didn’t know why Randy Dupper had come to mind except that neither he nor Ben made sense to me. Could they be connected?

I remembered Ben talking about his nightly run and Chester asking him if he was running solo or connecting by GPS with another runner.

“Ben’s boyfriend—is he a runner?” I asked Avery.

To my amazement there was no nasty comeback. Only silence.

“Are you there?” I said.

“I was trying to figure out how you knew that,” she said. “Congrats on one wild-ass lucky guess.”

So Ben did run with his boyfriend. The night I met him, he had said he was running alone but he didn’t stick around long, and Chester knew he didn’t always go solo. Moreover, MacArthur sniffed fresh human piss in the field. Most runners stick to paths and roadways. I wondered if there was a path through that field.

Avery interrupted my musings with a few quick business questions. She was anxious to get started, and I needed her to do just that. For better or worse, she already had the passwords to my social media accounts. Chester had entrusted them to my mother, who in turn passed them on to Odette, who, moments earlier, had given them to Avery.

I wondered if I were still essential to my own business. I remembered Dani Glancy’s insistence on seeing me and decided that I was.

Just for the hell of it, I asked Avery if Dani Glancy had a social media presence.

She snort-laughed yet again. I really hated that.

“Everybody has a social media presence,” Avery said. “You want to know what her social media status is.”

I supposed I did, but I didn’t want to say so. In any case, Avery would tell me.

“Dani Glancy’s all over your virtual ass. She posts every day about Mattimoe Realty’s ‘bad business practices.’ Personally, she despises you.”

“Dani Glancy doesn’t know me well enough to despise me,” I said. “What does she mean by ‘bad business practices’?”

“She says Mattimoe Realty steals leads and listings, misrepresents properties and hijacks sales commissions.”

“Mattimoe Realty doesn’t do any of that,” I said.

“Plus Dani says you’re a skank.”

I had been called many things, but that was a new one. It seemed especially inappropriate in my current state.

“I am not a skank,” I said.

“Well, you did sleep around after my dad died,” Avery said.

“I slept with three guys in two years,” I protested, “and one of them was Jeb.”

Why the hell was I defending my virtue? I was paying Avery for her time. Worse, if I stayed on the line, she was bound to remind me I had lusted after—and lost—two guys who preferred her.

I made the usual noises one makes when ending a call, but Avery cut in. “Dani Glancy is tweeting right now about your unfortunate incarceration.”

“I was never incarcerated,” I said. “I spent a half-hour in Jenx’s squad car as a volunteer deputy called back from maternity leave.”

“What the hell were you thinking?” Avery said. “Here’s my first advice as your newly contracted consultant. Start practicing safe social media.”

“How do I do that?”

“Before you do anything, think how it might look to people with their fingers on their phones.”

“Yeesh,” I said and clicked off.

Baby banged his or her head against my nether parts. At any other time it might have been a show of support, but just then it felt like a contraction. Possibly not a practice contraction.

“Are you panting?”

I looked up to see Helen’s wrinkled face in my open car window.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Dogs pant.”

“As do women in labor.”

I took a moment to evaluate my condition. I felt okay.

“I’m not panting,” I said with certainty. “Have you recovered from the wobblies?”

She swore that she was fine, and she would never have the wobblies again. I asked how she could be sure.

“It’s a simple matter of monitoring my blood sugar.”

Chester had said that was true. We all had issues. Who was I to judge Helen, even if my mother did?

“I’m ready to drive you wherever you need to go,” she declared.

As if to prove the point, she donned a black chauffeur’s cap with a red logo that looked like a capital C and E woven together. I had never seen it before.

Indicating her cap, I asked, “Cassina Enterprises, Inc.?”

Helen nodded. “Mr. Chester designed the logo.”

I asked her to stand by while I made a phone call. If I’d been completely truthful, I’d have asked her to stand by while I summoned the courage to make a much dreaded phone call. I foresaw my conversation with Dani Glancy being brief but painful and necessitating an immediate follow-up in-person visit.

I was right on all counts. Dani wasn’t interested in anything I had to say on the phone. She immediately blasted my “lack of business integrity” and insisted that unless I appeared on her doorstep with a “satisfactory plan of remediation” before three o’clock today, she would file her formal complaint with the Board of Realtors. Although she mentioned something about calling her attorney, I was reasonably sure she had insufficient grounds to litigate me.

However, trouble with the Board was way more woe than I wanted. Even if they didn’t take action against Mattimoe Realty, they would investigate, and that would become a matter of public record. Trust me, nobody in the business of buying and selling real estate wants a history of consumer complaints.

I promised Dani I’d show up at her door as requested. As ordered.

I reached into my bra for my notes from attorney Bill Noury and promptly realized that I was wearing a different bra. A clean bra sans legal advice. Jeb had removed the instructions from my other bra before sleep two nights ago. While I could probably account for the location of the undergarment—in the laundry hamper—I wasn’t at all sure what had happened to the slip of paper, and Jeb was unavailable to tell me.

I took a deep breath, debating between paying Bill Noury to repeat his counsel or cajoling my mother into looking for it in my bedroom.

I called Mom.

Having the kind of mind she did, Irene Houston needed to understand why I’d ever store vital information in my brassiere.

“Why not use your day planner? Or, better yet, your smart phone?” Mom argued.

I closed my eyes and tried to imagine a tropical beach free of phones, mothers, and Dani Glancy.

“I put the paper in my bra because I wanted to make sure it would always be with me,” I explained.

“Well, that didn’t work, did it?” Mom said.

She traipsed upstairs to the site of my previous undressing. Although I tended to leave articles of clothing wherever they fell, Jeb liked to tidy things up before he left for the day. And this day was no exception.

“There’s no scrap of paper or dirty brassiere,” Mom reported.

“The brassiere wouldn’t be dirty,” I said.

“Well, it wouldn’t be clean.”

I suggested she open the clothes hamper.

“Hold on,” she said, setting down her phone. “Okay, I dumped everything out. There were two dirty brassieres in there and a lot of other clothes but no piece of paper. Could you have thrown it away?”

That was a fair question. While I wouldn’t have discarded the paper, Jeb, who was the last person to handle it, might have.

“Could you check the waste basket?” I said.

“I’ll check both waste baskets,” she said. But she found no magic paper.

“Could you have put it in a pocket?” Mom asked.

Jeb was the last person to handle the paper. He had been naked when he undressed me. No pockets.

“Would you look around on the floor, please?” I said.

She complied, lifting throw rugs and moving small pieces of furniture. Nada.

“I don’t get it,” I fumed. “Things don’t just dematerialize. It’s got to be there somewhere.”

Mom theorized that if it wasn’t in a pocket, purse, or briefcase, it was in one of my bureau drawers. I didn’t think so.

“Do you want me to keep looking, or are you going to call your lawyer?” she said.

“By ‘keep looking,’ do you mean go through my drawers, purses, and briefcase?”

“Only if you ask me to,” she said. “I have better things to do than snoop in your room.”

That hadn’t always been true. I recalled catching my mother going through my various private stashes back in the day.

“You were a teenager,” Mom balked when I brought it up.

“Yeah, but what about my right to privacy?”

“You didn’t have a right to privacy. You were a minor living under my roof. When Baby’s a dope-smoking teenager, we’ll talk.”

That shut me up. I hadn’t got past thinking about labor, delivery, diapers, and formula. Thanks to a couple baby showers, I had managed to stock mysterious items like a womb-shaped baby bathtub and a nasal aspirator kit, but I hadn’t let myself imagine Baby during his or her teen years. Thinking about living with a teenager was probably the best possible form of birth control.

“Hold on,” Mom said, and I heard the unmistakable clatter of dog claws on a hardwood floor. “Guess who just solved your mystery?”

“Is she inclined to fart and snore?”

“She’s inclined to be helpful.”

I knew Mom was patting Sandra on her square head.

“Are you sure it’s the paper I need?” I said.

“ ‘Admit nothing. Offer nothing. Say almost nothing. Do not—.’ ” Mom stopped. “Oops. Sandra drooled so much she dissolved the last part.”

Well, maybe that wasn’t as important as the rest. I typed what I had into my smart phone notepad.

“Sandra’s a good dog. Yes, she is,” Mom said in a voice directed at the Frenchie. To me, she added, “You should thank Sandra for her assistance.”

“Thank her for me,” I said, now in a hurry to get off the line.

“Whitney, do the right thing.” Mom’s voice rang with a moral righteousness I hadn’t heard since high school. “I’m going to hold the phone by Sandra’s ears while you thank her. She’ll recognize your voice, and it will mean the world to her.”

“It’s only me,” I told the Frenchie. “Thanks for retrieving my paper. Well, most of it.”

Sandra moaned in tones so plaintive they could have come from an Italian tenor.

“I feel your pain,” I said. “I’m waiting for Jeb’s call, too.”

When Mom got back on the line, I fretted about the missing piece of what Bill Noury had ordered me not to do.