Shadowed Paradise (6 page)

“
You’re having supper with Brad Blue?
Tonight?” Vicky hissed, leaning over Claire’s desk on her way back
from lunch. “Are you out of your mind, girl? Diane will slit your
throat.”

Claire gulped. “Who’s Diane?” She longed to
be blasé, but she had to ask.

“
Do you watch Channel 50?” Vicky
inquired sweetly. “The evening news with Diane Lake, anchorwoman
extraordinaire?”

“
That Diane?” Claire winced.

“
That Diane,” Vicky affirmed. She
leaned closer, eyes alight with gossip. Jody Stevens and two agents
who had desks nearby scooted closer, unabashedly eavesdropping.
“You’ll never guess how they met,” Vicky said in a husky stage
whisper. “She
bought him
at a
charity fundraiser!”

“
You’re kidding.”

“
On my sainted mother,” said Vicky,
placing her hand over her heart. “Golden Beach doesn’t go in for
that kind of thing, but Brad was asked to be part of the bachelor
auction at some big fundraiser in Manatee Bay. Diane Lake was the
MC, but when Brad went on the block she joined in the bidding. Cost
her a mint ‘cause Brad sure isn’t the least well endowed bachelor
in the county.

“
Anyway,” said Vicky, stopping only
long enough to draw a deep breath, “the way I heard it, Brad
figured that was it—one night of dinner, dancing and God knows what
else with a celebrity. Hi, thank-you-ma’am, and goodbye.” Vicky
paused dramatically. “It didn’t work out that way.”

Several other agents, sensing the tale must
be a good one, joined the huddle of figures around Claire. “My
husband is friends with Brad’s foreman,” Vicky continued.
“Incidentally, that’s probably what he was doing in your part of
town last night. The foreman lives on Heron Creek. Anyway, that’s
how I heard all this. It seems Diane sent him flowers, boxes of
candy, tins of nuts. Just like some old-time Romeo courting a girl.
Picture it! A bunch of men working out of a trailer on a
construction site, and these gifts keep getting delivered. Daily.
Can’t you just see a dozen long-stemmed red roses on an old pine
desk in a beat-up trailer?” Vicky rolled her eyes, savoring her
moment in the spotlight. “Believe me, Brad took the greatest
ribbing of his life.”

Vicky raised her eyes to the circle of avid
listeners around her. She shrugged. “Well, you didn’t actually
expect him to tell her to get lost, did you?” She turned back to
Claire. “They’ve been an item for about three months now.”

“
She didn’t get where she is by being
Miss Nice,” warned Don Anderson, T & T’s top listing agent.
“Diane’s a bitch. Possessive as hell. If you’re smart, Claire,
you’ll buy the man dinner and wave goodbye.”

“
You know her?” Claire asked,
surprised. The cable television channel that served Calusa County
was situated in the neighboring city of Manatee Bay. Golden Beach
was barely large enough to sustain a mini radio station.

“
For one thing,” said Don, “I know the
Realtor who sold Diane her condo. And what he said about her is
definitely not repeatable with children present.” He rolled his
eyes toward Jody Stevens. “And, if you’ll pardon my mentioning
anything so politically incorrect,” Don Andersen continued,
“there’s an Old Boy Network among those of us who grew up here.
Brad’s one of
us
. We like to
keep track of each other.”

Vicky heaved an elaborate sigh. “I suppose
you like him,” she said to Claire. “Who wouldn’t? But don’t say we
didn’t warn you,” she added as the crowd began to melt away,
reluctantly returning to the day-to-day routine of real estate in
Golden Beach.

He’d been a bad boy. His mother would be
angry. If he still had a mother.

She was always mad at him for something.
Which was one of the reasons he’d killed her. Only nobody knew. He
was much too clever. He told them she’d gone up north to take care
of her father who was ill. And, finally, that she’d decided to
stay. Beyond a casual question or two, nobody cared.

That was the nice thing about Florida. People
came and went so much, nobody gave a damn.

The first one had been an accident. He hadn’t
meant to kill her. He’d had a fight with his mother, after telling
her he was thinking of getting a place of his own. Hell, he’d
stayed at home only because she begged him to. Swore she needed his
help around the house.

Wanted to keep an eye on him was more like
it.

Mothers were smart. There’d been that time
he’d hung the row of frogs across his window. Of course he’d had to
flatten them so they wouldn’t jump around, but the design was much
better than some old poster, or so he’d thought at age twelve.
She’d grounded him for a week. No TV. Then there was the cat . . .
and the Barclay’s dumb mutt . . .

God, how she’d screamed at him. And whaled
him good with the fly swatter. Until he took it away from her.

A long time since the fly swatter—he’d
definitely lived at home too long. He was entitled to a life of his
own, wasn’t he? So he’d made an appointment to see this house after
work. Nice house. Nice neighborhood. Vacant. Ready for him.

As Kim Willis was. Young and ripe, she was
there just for him, he knew it. Why’d a Barbie doll like that agree
to meet a strange man in a vacant house if she wasn’t looking for a
little something extra?

When he put his hand on her hip, she jumped
away like she’d been shot. Nice come-on. Women were always faking.
The ball-teasing bitches.

He smiled at her, and she’d looked so damned
relieved. As she caught her breath and tried to smile back, her
boobs bounced. She told him it was time to leave and started for
the door.

He grabbed her from behind, one hand over her
tits and the other over her mouth. The bitch bit him. She squirmed
and kicked and fought. There were neighbors. He couldn’t let her
scream, now could he?

Fortunately, it was January and dark within
the hour. He’d pulled his car into the garage, dumped her into the
trunk and headed for the woods east of the Interstate. But he
wasn’t stupid. No way. He’d wiped every surface he touched,
including the button for the automatic garage door and the key to
the house. He even locked the front door and returned the key to
the Realtor lockbox. There were lights on in the neighboring
houses, but they must have been eating or watching TV. There wasn’t
a sign of life.

There wasn’t a sign of life in Kim Willis
either. Too bad, he’d thought at the time. He’d never done it with
a dead woman before.

Later . . . later he rather thought he liked
it.

Heads rose in T & T’s Realtor bullpen as
Maggie McKinnon and Jake Spanos burst through the office door. One
look at Maggie’s face, and they all sensed a story. Jake lounged
back against Jody Steven’s desk and gave Maggie the floor.

“
You won’t believe it!” she exclaimed.
A shuffling of chairs as everyone gathered around. “It was a
single-wide up on cement blocks with nothing but weeds for a yard.
No air conditioning of course. We could see the owner through the
screen door, just sitting there in this big old chair with the
stuffing hanging out.”

“
So was his stomach,” said
Jake.

“
He didn’t even get up, just told us to
come in.” Maggie sucked in a breath, making them wait. “He had this
huge salt and pepper beard--”

“
And a Harley out back,” Jake
deadpanned.

“
If Jake wasn’t with me, I’d have
chickened out for sure,” Maggie confided, “but he gave me a boost
up the steps and there I was, so what choice did I have? Except . .
.

“
You know all that stuff I’ve been
practicing—
What a pleasure to market your
beautiful home, Mr. and Mrs. Homeowner?
Well, what a
crock! There I am, scrambling to improvise without tripping over my
tongue, when I happened to look down.” Maggie, eyes huge, drew a
deep breath. “You’re not going to believe it, you’re really not. On
the floor next to his chair, not six inches from his right hand,
was a shotgun! Really. I swear it.”

“
She turned green,” said Jake
cheerfully. “I have to admit I didn’t see the gun until I noticed
Maggie’s face. I thought it was going to be a snake or one of those
big spiders or something. I sort of craned my head around, and when
I saw the gun, I almost told him T & T didn’t take mobile home
listings and to hell with getting brought up on ethics charges . .
.”

“
But Jake didn’t say a word, he let me
finish,” Maggie cut in, “though I haven’t the slightest idea what I
said.”

“
Then I suggested, in my best
professional manner,” Jake added, “that he should always get market
analyses from two or three different Realtors before making up his
mind. And we got the hell out of there. Can’t you just see the MLS
description if we’d taken the listing?
WARNING. OWNER MAY BE ARMED AND
DANGEROUS.
”

“
Claire, you saved me!” Maggie
declared, sweeping Claire into a big hug. “If I hadn’t had Jake
with me, I would have been terrified.” She gave Vicky DelVecchio a
weepy embrace as well.

Vicky patted Maggie on the back. “Just
another day in the life of a Realtor. Though I admit we probably
won’t have this much excitement again until Diane Lake finds out
Claire is taking her man to dinner. Uh-uh-uh, Realtors, don’t touch
that remote. Stay tuned for the continuing saga of Brad Blue and
his warring women.”

Definitely a conversation-stopper. Wearing a
variety of expressions from salacious grins to sympathy for
Claire’s embarrassment, T & T’s Realtors scooted back to their
desks.

Late that afternoon, when the summons came to
Phil Tierney’s office, Claire realized she’d been expecting it all
day. With the speed of office gossip it was inevitable that her
little adventure would reach Phil’s ears. Philippa Tierney, who had
inherited T & T while only in her mid-twenties, was everything
a professional Realtor was expected to be, from the sleek coiffure
that made the most of her rich brown hair to her tall trim figure
superbly dressed in a summer suit of cream linen. Her nails were
always perfectly manicured. Claire suspected Phil’s expensive pumps
hid a perfect pedicure as well.

Phil Tierney had made the most of her name.
Many a tourist made an appointment to be shown a property, only to
be astonished to discover they were dealing with a woman. Even many
local residents who had seen “Phil Tierney” on signs for years,
thought T & T’s broker was a man. Phil had, in the end, broken
the male stranglehold on real estate in Golden Beach, turning a
modest family business into the most successful, most prestigious
real estate agency in the area. Owners of expensive properties
wanted nothing but T & T’s exploding fireworks logo on their
front lawns.

Dynamic, sleekly attractive, successful,
powerful. Brad Blue’s ex-wife. That was her boss, Claire thought
glumly as she made her way to Phil’s office. And then there was
Diane Lake, spreading her gorgeous golden girl image nightly into
every home in Calusa County. Brad Blue had been married to one of
these two professional paragons and was sleeping with the other.
Two giants poised to step on the little ant named Claire if she
dared move into their territory.

Phil surprised her. After asking her to be
seated, Claire’s boss said, “I hear you’re responsible for
distributing the Board’s warning to everyone this morning, Claire.
I want to thank you. You saved Maggie from a very nasty experience.
And, hopefully, this will make all our agents think carefully
before putting themselves in a potentially dangerous situation. You
may have saved a life, and I’m grateful. Thank you.”

Relief. Somehow Claire managed a suitable
reply.

“
I hear you had a problem last night. I
trust no one was hurt?” Phil lifted a carefully plucked
eyebrow.

Claire hid a wince. Quickly, she recapped the
evening, abbreviating and downplaying the drama as much as
possible.

After appropriate murmurs of shock and
sympathy, Phil moved straight to the point. “Is it true you’re
taking Brad to dinner tonight?”

So much for the forlorn hope that part of the
tale hadn’t reached Phil’s ears. “Brad paid for the tow truck, and
he wouldn’t take a check,” Claire babbled, “so we settled on
dinner. That’s all it is, just a payback for the tow truck.”

“
My dear Claire, no need to get
excited. I’m sure you’ve been told I was married to the man, but
that was in another lifetime. We were both children. Nothing for
you to be concerned about.” Phil frowned, her long dazzling red
nails clicking against the desk in a rare sign of unease. “There
are, however, a couple of things I feel I must say. I like to think
I would have said them anyway, but at the moment I feel I owe you
and, believe me, that’s all this is, a very friendly
warning.”

Claire clenched her hands in her lap. Her
luck was running true. She’d met the man of dreams she didn’t even
know she had, and he turned out to be a modern version of “mad,
bad, and dangerous to know.”

Idly, Phil picked up a gold pen, slid it
through her fingers, tapped it on the desk. She put it down
carefully, resting her long slim hands on the desktop. “Knowing
office gossip, Claire,” she said, “I’m sure you’ve been told about
Diane Lake.” Claire nodded. “Well, believe everything you’ve heard,
and then some. I have occasion to see her socially, as well as the
fact that Channel 50 gets a healthy portion of our advertising
budget. Diane Lake wanted Brad Blue, she got him, and she intends
to keep him.”