A Quarter for a Kiss (5 page)

As for me, I tried to get as close to the action inside as I could, finally convincing the police officer manning the door that I was both a private investigator and a friend of the Golds, and that I needed to know what had happened for the sake of my own investigation into the matter. He didn’t ask for my PI license, which was fortunate since I didn’t have one for Florida. Chances are, one of the other states I was registered in had reciprocity, but I hadn’t had the time to find out. The officer
did
ask if I had a permit to carry a weapon, and I told him that I did not, that I was primarily a business investigator and that I never carried a gun.

In any event he finally let me come inside and observe the goings-on there. The police seemed to be processing the break-in very slowly, which I supposed was good, considering the sniper shooting earlier in the evening. Though the detective handling the attempted murder didn’t actually come to the scene of the break-in, he did communicate by telephone. I was glad to see they were taking fingerprints of the whole place, and though Tom and I hadn’t touched anything inside, Jodi had, so the cops rolled a set of prints for her merely as an elimination.

The sun was coming up by the time the police decided they were finished at the scene. They gave us the telephone number of a service that specialized in crime scene cleanup and suggested we call later in the morning. They also requested that Stella come home as soon as possible to look through everything and file a report on whatever might be missing.

Tom agreed to stay at the condo while Jodi and I drove to the hospital to get Stella. I wasn’t too worried about leaving him there in any danger because, now that it was daylight, half the neighborhood was clustered on the lawn. Any criminal who might choose to return to the scene of the crime would have to make their way through a squadron of agitated senior citizens to get there.

I hadn’t talked much to Jodi at the scene, but once we were alone in the car, she peppered me with questions about all that had happened. I tried to answer her as thoroughly as I could. She said she didn’t know Eli all that well, but he seemed a nice enough guy and it was a shame he’d been shot.

“Now I wish I’d taken the time to get to know him better,” she lamented. “I wasn’t very nice to him at the wedding.”

“How long has it been since you were home?” I asked.

“Last fall,” she said. “I went to France to do some graduate work. Then I kind of got sidetracked.”

“Sidetracked?”

“There was this guy. He wanted to tour Europe, wanted me to go with him…you know how it is.”

“I see,” I said, not really knowing how it was at all.

From what I recalled of Jodi, she was a sweet person but rather immature for her age. She was somewhere in her mid-twenties, the kind of woman who looked quite striking when she was all done up with fancy hair and makeup—and quite plain when she wasn’t. I met her at her loveliest, at Eli and Stella’s wedding several years before, and when I saw her the next morning in her housecoat and glasses, with no makeup and her hair askew, I barely recognized her.

She more closely resembled that person now, wearing dirty jeans and a faded button-down shirt, her hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. She seemed very tired, and as she described the hours and connections it had taken her to fly back home to the States, I understood why.

“I had been thinking about coming home for a while,” she said, “and yesterday there was a flight available, so I took it. I didn’t think I’d miss Franco at all, but I do.”

She wiped at her face, and I realized she was crying.

“Franco?” I asked gently.

“My boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. We broke up yesterday.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“He just wanted me for my money.” She shifted in her seat, leaning her head against the glass of the passenger window and closing her eyes. “I just had my twenty-fifth birthday, and that means now I can have access to the trust fund my daddy left me. I’ve been thinking a lot about the money and what I’m going to do with it. When I told Franco that I’ve decided to give it all away to charity, he went nuts. He was like, ‘I’ve waited all this time for you to get your inheritance, and now you tell me you’re just getting rid of it? You’re just giving it all away? I’ve been wasting my time.’”

“Wow.”

“I’m such a sucker when it comes to men. I have always made bad choices.”

We reached the entrance to the hospital, and I slowed to turn in.

“I thought I was getting older and wiser,” she added, “but once all this happened with Franco, I realized I’m still making the wrong choices. I decided I needed to come home, get back into therapy, and maybe let Mom take care of me for a while.”

We were silent as I parked the car, but before we got out, I turned to look her in the eye.

“You understand that that’s no longer an option,” I said. “At least not right now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your mother’s husband has been shot. Her home has been destroyed. If anyone needs to be taken care of, Jodi, it’s her.”

She looked back at me, rather startled, and then she finally nodded.

“Of course,” she said softly. “Of course.”

As we walked into the hospital together, I warned Jodi that her mother would be wearing a fur costume thanks to hug day at the nursing home.

“That sounds just like her,” Jodi said, rolling her eyes. “She once picked me up from school in a full beekeeper’s uniform. I nearly died of humiliation.”

“A beekeeper’s uniform?”

“She had been helping a friend with the bees in his orchard, and she didn’t take time to change clothes.”

“That’s funny.”

“The problem with my mother,” Jodi continued as we rode up in the elevator, “is that she lives in her own little world most of the time. She just doesn’t realize how nutty her actions look to other people.”

I thought about the way Eli and Stella first met. Stella’s two sons had wanted to have Stella declared mentally incompetent, so they hired Eli to investigate their mother and provide proof. And though Eli had followed Stella around and snapped photos of her doing things like break-dancing in the park and spontaneously picking up trash along the highway, he also found himself falling head over heels in love with her. In the end, he gave the sons back their money and told them their mother wasn’t incompetent, just eccentric. Afterward, Eli began courting Stella, and a year later the lifelong bachelor married the eccentric widow. As far as I knew, things had been wonderful between them since.

We found Stella in the intensive care waiting room, right where I had left her, though now she was speaking with two police officers. I was afraid that, after the shooting, learning of the break-in might just send her over the top, but she seemed perfectly calm.

“I’m so sorry, Stella,” I said, giving her a hug after the cops were gone. “It looks like they got into everything.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she replied. “Compared to what’s happened with Eli, it’s nothing. It’s less than nothing.”

She saw Jodi hanging back behind me and gasped.

“My baby!” Stella cried, reaching for her daughter and pulling her into a tight embrace.

I stepped away from them for a few minutes while they shared tears and words of love. I could hear things like “missed you so bad” and “gone too long,” and I was glad to see that the two of them seemed to be very close despite the daughter’s eight-month absence. Stella would need Jodi now more than ever.

Finally, I suggested that perhaps I could stay at the hospital while Jodi drove her mother home to change clothes and to assess the damage to her home. They agreed, and Stella cleared me with the security guy before walking with me to the nurses’ station.

“Yes?” the nurse asked, looking up at us.

“Kathy, I’m going to run home for a bit. This is Callie Webber. She’ll be here if Eli wakes up.”

“I’m sorry,” the nurse said. “Only immediate family can go in.”

“My dear,” Stella said defiantly, standing up straight. “Callie
is
immediate family.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the nurse amended, checking her watch. “I didn’t realize. That will be fine. Next visit is from six to six-oh-five.”

I walked Stella and Jodi to the elevator, thanking Stella for her little fib.

“That was no fib,” she replied softly, tapping her chest. “In Eli’s heart, Callie, you are his family.”

Four

Eli didn’t look like himself. The five minutes I was allowed next to his bed were half wasted on simply gazing at all they had done to him, trying to find the man I knew under the equipment.

His skin was pale, his bald head splotchy in the fluorescent light. I finally found his hand among the tubes and squeezed it, though of course he didn’t squeeze back. Then I knelt there on the floor next to the bed, still holding his hand, and prayed that God would please, just please spare this one soul from heaven a while longer.

“I need him more than You do, Father,” I whispered. “Please don’t take him away now.”

The nurse made me leave at 6:05 on the dot, and as we walked out, I asked her when she thought he might regain consciousness.

“Oh, honey,” she said, one hand on my arm. “Let’s just get him through the next twenty-four hours. Then we’ll worry about that.”

Her words were sobering. As I sat in the waiting room staring into space, I thought about the life of Eli Gold. He had grown up in New Jersey, the only son of doting parents. His father was an attorney, though Eli passed on college in favor of joining the Navy. Military testing landed him in the Navy’s radio training program, where he worked in signals intelligence.

Parts of Eli’s life story were a bit fuzzy to me now, but I knew he had left the Navy at the end of his two years and then lived for a time in the Florida Keys. Eventually, he had settled in Virginia, gone to the police academy, and become a cop. He and my dad were partners for ten years, until Eli grew tired of the bureaucracy and decided to quit the force and open his own detective agency.

The Gold Agency was a mere five years old when Eli heard I was looking for a part-time job. He offered me a position after school and on weekends, typing and filing for him. I was 16 at the time, too young to legally work in a detective agency in the state of Virginia, so he employed me under the facetious title of “personal social secretary.”

Luckily for me, Eli had several very fascinating, very complicated cases going on that summer, and my duties began to expand as I helped him handle all of the paperwork that went with them.

I recalled the time he puzzled over a cheating spouse case. The wife was absolutely certain her husband was fooling around with someone. Eli had followed the husband for several weeks with no results before turning to the man’s paper trail, desperate to find some kind of proof that the guy was cheating. Despite his searching, everything seemed squeaky clean—that is, until the day I noticed a discrepancy between his household financial records and his tax return. A number of his credit card bills showed a $50 charge to a place called “Helping Hands.” And though in his household records he had earmarked those charges as charitable deductions, he hadn’t taken the deduction from the corresponding tax return, even though he had itemized every other item in that category.

I pointed that out to Eli, who followed up on the lead and found out that the husband was driving once a month to Tennessee, where he would spend the afternoon at the Helping Hands Massage Parlor in the company of a certain red-haired “masseuse” named Brandy Flambeaux. The man had falsified his records to hide his indiscretion from his wife, but he hadn’t dared to commit fraud on his tax return.

“You have the gift!” Eli proclaimed to me a few days later as we celebrated his hefty paycheck over Chinese takeout.

After that, he began to involve me more in his cases, and it really did seem as if I had a knack for detecting. It wasn’t long before Eli was using me as his sounding board, asking me to play devil’s advocate as he worked out different facets of his cases aloud. The fact that the work I did for him was mostly confidential taught me to keep my mouth shut and my eyes open. For the next few years, Eli seized every opportunity to give me on-the-job training on all he knew about detecting.

By the time I turned 18, the Gold Agency was thriving. Eli hired a real secretary and officially made me his assistant. I worked with him all through college, and though I knew he hoped I would stay with him once I graduated, I decided to go to law school instead. I loved detecting, but I was also fascinated with the law, and I wanted a career that didn’t include hanging upside down from a fire escape to get good photographs of errant spouses. Eli’s graduation gift for me was one-third ownership in the agency, but I tearfully turned it down and told him to give me a “retirement” watch instead.

Of course, life never quite goes as we plan. My career in law went well for the first several years but then ended once my husband was killed. After Bryan’s death, I resigned from my job and basically from life, moving to Maryland’s Eastern Shore and entering a self-imposed exile from the world. It took the gentle, constant prodding of Eli to finally get me out of the house and back into the workforce again—this time in a job that combined my detecting abilities with my legal skills. I loved working as the director of research for Tom and the J.O.S.H.U.A. Foundation, and I had Eli to thank for talking me into taking a second chance on life. Though Eli had no business connection with Tom or the foundation, he was the mutual friend who put us together. Now, I realized, not only did I have Eli to thank for telling me about an amazing job opportunity that was a perfect match for my skills and experience, I also had him to thank for bringing me to the man who showed me I could love again.