White Hot (5 page)

Don’t think. Don’t remember.

But she couldn’t stop herself.

She’d spent previous spring breaks in Boston, playing flute in dingy, windowless, sound-proof practice rooms. That week, she’d indulged in Florida sun and sand…and a young, hungry, impossibly sexy reporter. Their relationship was improbable from the start, a future together impossible.

He’d used her to get his drug story, not realizing, until it was too late, that she didn’t even smoke or drink, much less use drugs, and barely knew anyone who did. Her life was music. Hours and hours of daily practice alone and in ensembles and orchestra. Classes in music theory, music composition, music history, all in addition to her regular academic classes.

And, of course, there was her family. Her parents were violinists, her older sister a cellist, her godfather a world-famous tenor. Mollie remembered trying to explain the nuances of Lavender family life to Jeremiah in the predawn darkness after they’d made love, when he’d seemed so attentive and empathetic, so certain of himself. The rivalries, prejudices, expectations of classical musicians—their drive and ambition—mystified him. “Your family and friends back in Boston sound like a bunch of flakes to me,” he’d pronounced, inoffensively.

They were. They were loving, tolerant, devoted to their work and their families and friends, but not tuned into the world in any conventional way, in the way, Mollie finally realized, that she wanted to be.

She smiled, thinking of them.

After Miami, after Jeremiah, she could no longer pretend she shared their passion for music. She was different. She’d packed up her flute, quit the conservatory, and entered the world of communications, expecting never to see her ex-lover again.

She realized she was trembling.
Damn.
Thirty years old, trembling over a man she’d known for only a week and hadn’t seen in a decade. She’d convinced herself Palm Beach was well removed from the world of crime and corruption in which Jeremiah operated, that she needn’t worry about running into the
Miami Tribune
’s star investigative reporter.

So why had she?

Why had he been parked outside the Greenaway Club last night?

She frowned, not liking the direction her thoughts were taking. He had to have his share of ex-lovers. Why such curiosity about her?

Jeremiah Tabak, she remembered, didn’t do things for personal reasons. Not ten years ago, not now.

And that could mean only one thing: he was on a story.

3

J
eremiah arrived at his desk at the
Miami Tribune
wondering how many women had his picture on their dartboards. He supposed he should have told Mollie the truth about himself ten years ago. But she did seem to enjoy thinking of him as scum.

Which, as far as she was concerned, he was. Twenty was young, but twenty-six wasn’t old, and he’d tried to do the honorable thing, even if it had, in retrospect, been awfully damned dumb. Now he had a blonde-haired publicist up in Palm Beach firing darts between his eyes.

“Son,” his father liked to tell him, “remember that more than anything else, what a woman wants from a man is the truth.”

In his twisted logic, Jeremiah had thought because what he’d told Mollie made him look like a snake, he was off the hook as far as telling the truth. He’d acted honorably, in his estimation, trying to soften the blow of ending their weeklong affair by telling her he’d used her to get his drug-dealing story. The truth was, he’d fallen for her just as hard and fast and incomprehensibly as she had fallen for him. Yet he’d known—and saw it before she did—that they couldn’t last.

So he’d lied to her then, just as he’d lied to her two hours ago. Both lies had been expedient. The first, because he’d thought it would be easier to have her hate him than to try to explain the complexities of why they couldn’t be together. The second, because he’d thought he could get out of there without a dart somewhere on his person if he let her believe simple, human curiosity had driven him to her doorstep rather than a story.

“God, what a chickenshit,” he muttered, hitting the space key on his computer, just to interrupt the image of her trim legs and pale, straight hair, her natural, incongruous elegance, apparent even in her sweaty exercise clothes.

He tried to concentrate on the task at hand, namely ferreting out information on Croc’s jewel thief. He was, as his skinny young friend had so accurately pointed out, between stories. In fact, his editor had been urging him to seize the moment and take a vacation, his first in two years. He’d even contemplated where he might go. But it seemed silly to leave south Florida in the dead of winter, and then Croc had approached him with tales of Mollie Lavender as a jewel thief.

Ten years ago, he recalled, trouble had swirled around her, leaving her untouched, like the lone tree standing after a hurricane. Although innocently on spring break and as committed and driven in her life as a musician as he was in his as a journalist, he’d sensed a restlessness of soul and spirit. She was more uncertain and unformed than any twenty-year-old would willingly let anyone know or see, and he’d been drawn to the secret parts of her that she hadn’t yet explored or even admitted existed. Ultimately, he’d let her sort through those complexities herself, without him.

Could she have turned into a jewel thief in the meantime?

Possibly. Why the hell not?

But he could also imagine her right there in the thick of things, oblivious.

Yet the woman he’d seen that morning hadn’t seemed oblivious or airheaded or anything but sharp, professional, and in control.

Except for that picture of him on her dartboard, of course.

Jeremiah grinned, feeling better. How, he wondered, had Croc landed on her as his chief suspect? There had to be more than his common denominator theory. Croc liked being mysterious and in the know. He wouldn’t be above withholding vital information.

Hurling himself to his feet with sudden energy, Jeremiah made his way through the sea of desks and reporters in the big, open
Trib
newsroom and down the corridor to the separate offices of the arts and entertainment and leisure sections. Helen Samuel had her own office, one, because no one could stand her smoking, and, two, because no one could stand
her.
Her abrasiveness aside, she was an old-style gossip columnist who prided herself on knowing what was fair game and what wasn’t. A jewel thief on the loose in Palm Beach was right up her alley.

“This is too good, Tabak,” she said when he appeared in her doorway. She stuffed out a cigarette in an already overflowing ashtray. “You sucking up to me for information two days in a row is worth a line in my column, except you’re too goddamned boring. If you kept company with something besides reptiles, I could work with it.” She flashed dark, incisive eyes at him. “You don’t sleep with your lizard, do you?”

“Helen, you make most of my informants seem downright respectable.”

“They’re cockroaches. I’m a professional. Close the door and sit down. I presume you don’t want anyone listening in on our conversation?”

“I’m not hiding my interest—”

“Sure you are.” She waved a tiny, bony hand. She lied about all her personal stats, but she had to be seventy, she couldn’t be over five feet, she weighed at most a hundred pounds, and she prided herself on never having gone “under the knife.” Jeremiah couldn’t imagine what a face-lift could do for her. Rumor had it she’d looked like Loretta Young in her youth. He couldn’t picture it. She pointed at the door. “Shut it. Sit.”

Jeremiah shut the door and sat.

Helen tapped another cigarette out of a sequined case. If lung disease or heart disease did her in, she would only say it saved her from a lonely retirement. She’d been declaring she planned to go out of her office on a gurney long before Jeremiah had arrived at the
Trib
eighteen years ago as a college student working part-time. Most of her colleagues thought she’d simply ossify first. One of the janitors swore she didn’t go home at night. “She’s really a mummy,” he liked to tell Jeremiah. “You just think she’s alive.”

Jeremiah eased back in the ratty vinyl-covered chair. The tiny office reeked of stale smoke. Helen sat with an unlit cigarette expertly tucked between callused forefinger and middle finger. “So,” she said with a hint of victory in her hoarse voice, “you’re on the cat burglar story.”

He grimaced. “I’m just nosing around. I’m supposed to be on vacation.”

“I haven’t taken a vacation in ten years. Don’t believe in ’em. Of course, I can plant my fanny on a cruise ship and call it work. You and me, Tabak, we’re not so different.” She grinned at his stricken expression. “Ha, scares the shit out of you, doesn’t it? This work’s either in your blood or it isn’t. It’s in yours.”

“I have a life, Helen.”

“Yep, and it’s the job. Might as well make your peace with it now, save you a lot of heartache in the future. Don’t worry, you won’t end up like me.” She grinned, a hint, indeed, of Loretta Young in the sparkle of her dark eyes. “You don’t smoke.”

Jeremiah reined in any impulse to argue with her. He was not like Helen Samuel. He would never be like Helen Samuel. Thirty years from now, he would not be sitting behind a crummy desk in a crummy office talking Gold Coast gossip with a young investigative reporter. He would be…what? He didn’t know. He didn’t have to know. But damned if he’d be an aging, chain-smoking, cynical gossip columnist with a warped sense of humor.

“If you don’t object,” he said, “I’d like to hear what you know about this jewel thief.”

“Know? I don’t
know
shit. But I’ve heard a few things.”

She stuck her cigarette in her mouth and fumbled for a lighter as ancient as she was. Jeremiah waited impatiently. When she had the cigarette lit and had taken a deep drag and blown what smoke didn’t get sucked into her lungs into his air space and
still
didn’t go on, he groaned. “Helen, if you’re going to make me beg for every word…”

“Beg? You, Tabak? Wait, lemme get a photographer in here. We’ll print it on page one.”

He glared at her.

She waved her cigarette at him, ash flicking off onto her blotter. “Oh, you love it. Playing the big, bad reporter. Anybody who hasn’t been around as long as I have is scared shitless of you. Which means everyone else in the goddamned building. Okay, here’s the poop.” She laid her cigarette on her ashtray, getting down to business. “So this little bastard’s hit eight, ten times in the last couple weeks.”

“Seven times in fourteen days, including last night at the Greenaway.”

“Yeah, whatever. Facts are your department.” She grinned, but he didn’t rise to the bait. “Okay. At first, nobody thinks anything. Maybe it’s robbery, or maybe it’s some daffy socialite who forgot to put on her jewels and would rather cry cat burglar than admit it, or maybe it’s an insurance scam. You know, all these baubles are insured. Pretty convenient, if not suspicious, that none of the victims has been hurt or has seen a thing.”

“No witnesses?”

“Nope. None that are talking, anyway. It wasn’t until the fifth or sixth hit that people starting admitting they’ve got a problem on their hands.”

“The police?”

“They’re investigating. The different departments involved are coordinating. I mean, that’s what I hear. I make a practice of not talking to the police if I can help it. But the modus operandi for each hit is the same—the guy strikes at parties, not sneaking into an unoccupied home or hotel room like your typical cat burglar, and takes advantage of the least little mistake. I guess people are regarding him as a cat burglar because he hasn’t been seen—he’s not sticking people up, just slipping into their pockets and handbags unnoticed.”

“Bold,” Jeremiah said.

“And observant as hell.”

“So he must be in a position to watch the crowd without drawing attention.”

“He or
she,
” Helen amended pointedly.

“You think it’s a woman?”

She shrugged, plucking her cigarette from its position on her ashtray, taking a quick drag, and replacing it again, a half-inch of ash dropping into the mound. “Something about this jewel thief’s different. Maybe it’s gender, I don’t know. You were at the Greenaway last night?”

He nodded.

Helen rocked back in her chair, thinking. Jeremiah could imagine her applying her decades of experience with people, with the Gold Coast, with a world, he thought, with which he was largely unfamiliar. “Okay,” she said. “We’ve got a socialite wearing a diamond-encrusted salamander brooch. She notices the clasp is loose and tucks it into the pocket of her Armani jacket and forgets about it. When it gets a little warm, she takes off the jacket and hangs it on the back of her chair. Later in the evening, she puts the jacket on, remembers the brooch, dips her hand into her pocket, and, lo and behold, it’s gone. She gets security, they search everywhere, but no salamander.”

“That doesn’t mean it was stolen.”

“Two weeks ago, probably no one would have thought a thing of it. Now, it fits the pattern.”

“How much was the brooch worth?”

“Thirty grand. It’s covered by insurance.”

“Has anyone else come forward who lost jewelry before the last two weeks and now thinks it might have been the work of our thief?”

Helen shook her head, iron-gray wisps dripping out of the mass of bobby pins she used to keep her hair up. “Not yet.”

Jeremiah ran the slim set of facts through his mind. “People scared?”

“Not enough to leave their good stuff in the vault.”

“Have the police landed on any common denominators?”

“Not that they’ve shared with me.” Her eyes narrowed suddenly, and she leaned across her cluttered desk. “Why? Have you?”

But Jeremiah was already on his feet. If he mentioned Mollie, Helen Samuel would eat him alive. Then she’d eat Mollie alive. She wasn’t hard news, but she was a hell of a reporter. “Thanks, Helen. I owe you one.”

She snorted. “Yeah, yeah. Put me in your will.”

Now that Jeremiah was real to her and no longer a ghost of her misguided past, Mollie hoped her nightmares would subside. She buried herself in client meetings and on the phone until mid-afternoon, then headed down to Leonardo’s pool for a long break before tackling another couple hours of work after dinner. Tonight she was staying home. No battered brown pickup for her.