Current Affairs (Tiara Investigations Mysteries) (14 page)

“Chesney,” she answered.

“Black.”

“Jackson.”

“Keith.”

“Strait,” they said in tandem.

The two of them laughed, and Victoria and I chuckled. All we were missing was the guffaw. So they could both name all the singers of the song, big deal.

What the hell
,
indeed.

“How are you doing with the case?” He put the phone in his pocket, and we were walking again.

When we got to Victoria’s ball, she appeared to be looking through her bag for the best club to use, but seeing her tightly pursed lips, I knew better.
“Case?
What case?”

“Have you figured out who killed David Taylor yet? I mean, it’s been almost three whole days.”

I looked at his shit-eating grin. “I thought the police always warned private detectives to stay out of cases.”

“The angle I’m pursuing is the about-to-be-jilted wife, and I take it you three do not agree with that.”

“No, that dog won’t hunt.”

“So what do you have?”

Victoria approached her ball. “Not much. We have learned a little about his business, and everything seems to be on the up and up. He was a subcontractor for a manufacturer of products for DOD.”

Kent stopped in his two-timing tracks. He raised his sunglasses and looked at us.
“The Department of Defense?
As in, defense contracts?”

I saw the look on Victoria’s face and put my hand on her arm. It was too little, too late, and she lit into him. “Wait. You’re the police. You don’t know what kind of work he does? What have
you
been doing for three whole days?”

“We know he’s the owner of a computer systems company. We don’t have the manpower to go ...”

“Staffing.
You don’t have the staffing,” I corrected.

Kent ran his hand over his head, and no longer was every hair in place. “For the love of ... we use our
manpower
to go down roads that have the greatest likelihood of leading to something.” Then he turned to Victoria. “You said he works on defense contracts. If this murder investigation leads that way, I’ll have to turn this over to the FBI or to Homeland Security, and I would hate to do that. I would
really
hate that. If it’s related to his business, you find out and let me know.” Here he stopped and looked at me. “Remember, your business license is at stake. What did I have on that hole, four?”

“Six,” we said together.

He looked at me. “The thug that attacked you is named James Goody. He has a history of doing that kind of thing for hire, and that was probably the case this morning.”

“And Sunday.
Did you hear about that?” I was still staring at his hair.

“I read the report. You sure that was him?”

“Yes, I told you this morning it was.”

“You might have been hysterical.”

I gripped a club (a three wood, I believe it was) and lowered my head, but before I could take even one step toward him I felt Victoria’s hand on my arm and Tara’s on my back. I knew I wasn’t going to do anything but rant a little. My one foray into aggression this morning was still gnawing at me.

“Okay, look, he’s in the hospital. He’s not going anywhere.”

 
“Who hired him?” Victoria returned to the cart path, and we walked to Tara’s ball.

“He’s not talking.”

“What’s the matter, Detective? Can’t you make him talk?” cooed Tara.

Kent looked down at her. He and I and the horse we came in on wondered if she was taunting or flirting. “He’s in intensive care.” Then back to me, “In your line of work, it could be any of the husbands you’ve gone after.”

I looked down at the club I was twirling in my hand.
“Hmm.
It’s probably just a coincidence that it started after David Taylor’s murder.”

“Hmm,” repeated Detective Kent. He looked into the distance, “For the love of Pete.” He pocketed his golf ball and said, “Good luck, ladies. Enjoy your game. I’ll try to get Goody’s whereabouts for Friday evening.” With that he shouldered his bag and walked back to the club house. Then he turned around. “Your statements are ready to be signed. Come by this afternoon.”

I was headed to my ball but stopped. “You didn’t bring them?”

“Why couldn’t you have brought them to us?” He paused when Tara spoke but still didn’t turn around.

“I mean, really, wouldn’t that have made more sense?” Victoria asked as we watched him saunter off in his little golf outfit.

I said as low as I could, “You look like your mother dressed you.”

“You look like your daddy dressed you.” I may have blushed, and I tugged on my shirt.

“Bless his heart,” we said in unison. Then I made a thirty foot putt.

Under our rules that feat allowed Victoria to pick up her
ball.
“I don’t know what his problem is, but I bet it’s hard to pronounce. Leigh, do you want me to ask Frank to let us know when that guy is discharged?”

“Still Frank?”

“Yep.”

“No, don’t tell Frank, the surgeon once known as Shorty.”

“Are you sure?” Tara picked up her ball also.

“I’m sure. First of all, I think that would be hard to do without telling him why you want to know, and second, we have round-the-clock police protection.”

“It seems like he’s always around.” Victoria pushed her cart toward the next hole.

Tara followed her. “Like a fat kid on cake. Don’t you think it’s cute how he won’t use God’s name in vain?”

“Yeah, cute.
He’ll cheat on his wife, but he won’t use God’s name in vain.” Victoria turned and looked toward the club house. “How did he know we were here playing golf?”

Tara and I shrugged our shoulders.

 
“Do we know any more about David Taylor’s business?”

“We know he developed interoperability software for The Peachtree Group’s Backpack UAVs, and I found a lot of the same information, with a few modifications, in the China files.”

“Was he working on Chinese Backpack UAVs?”

“Actually, I can’t tell what he developed for them. It could be an application for Backpack UAVs or ...” She began again, but still in a lowered tone, “Remember, most of the information was about a satellite system. I don’t know yet, but it’s possible it had to do with that.”

We pulled out our drivers, and I walked up to the tee. “The Chinese tested an anti-satellite weapon in 2007. They shot down an old weather satellite. They were criticized by the US and several other countries for doing it.” By the time my body uncoiled from the swing, my ball was bouncing on the fairway.
 

“How do you know all that?” Tara replaced me at the tee.

“We were stationed in Europe at the time.”

After Victoria’s drive we were walking again and headed for her ball, the one closest.

 
“Let me see, what else? They’re believed to be working on a number of anti-satellite systems. One is a ground-based laser system to disable satellites. Another is a radio frequency weapon that targets satellites in orbit.”

We were at Victoria’s ball.
 
“According to that second file in his home office, his software was for communications interoperability, like at The Peachtree Group. There was something about the Chinese contract that concerned him, but it wasn’t in there.”

“How do you know what he was feeling about the contract, or possible contract?” Tara shielded her eyes from the sun and waited for Vic’s answer.

“His doodling became
x’s
and question marks. Some almost tore through the paper.”

“The Chinese have been adamant in their opposition to the
weaponization
of space, so the anti-satellite test seemed out of character. Until then the US and Russia were the only nations to shoot down an object in space. That might be what his panties were in a wad about.” I continued talking once we were walking toward Tara’s ball. “Without knowing what he was working on for the Chinese government, it’ll be almost impossible to tell. And it
would
be the government, not a primary contractor. Remember, Beijing doesn’t use military contractors the way we do.”
 

I was walking the cart path toward my ball and realized they weren’t following. “What? I never said I spent the last ten years knitting.” Man, oh man, was that ever the truth.

Victoria was still chewing on the problem. “It seems implausible that his China project had anything to do with satellites.
First, a one-person company contracting on space operations projects?
I don’t think so. Next, a radio wave is a radio wave, but because of conditions in space that business has little in common with the way a backpack UAV works.”

Tara had picked up her ball and followed me to the putting green. “Even so, since the call that brought him out of his house was from The Peachtree Group, we’re working on the assumption that his killing was work related. Maybe not related to China, satellites, or any of that, but related to The Peachtree Group.”
 

Victoria walked to her ball on the other side. “We’ve seen his home office. Let’s go to his other office.”

“It’ll have to be tomorrow. It’s a three dog night.” I told them about the frantic text message I’d received on the way over. It was from a client we had taken on the week before. “Let’s go sign the statements, and then I’ll pick you ladies up at six to go turn someone getting lucky into someone getting unlucky. Oh, Victoria, can you join us tonight?” I remembered the dinner her husband had mentioned.

“Mr. Benz and I will see you at six,” was all she said.
Clunk.
She had sunk her putt.

Ten

C
ontinuation of statement by Leigh Reed.
It seemed our client’s hubby had left the office early, supposedly to attend a Braves game. Just think, the guy had always thought he was so lucky to be married to someone who followed Atlanta baseball. The way our client put it was, “You know the expression, ‘Go Braves?’ Well, they went. The Braves are playing in Boston tonight.”

Around five o’clock I called Tara to say I was leaving the house. “I’ll be wearing black jeans. What are you going to wear? I don’t want us dressing alike again.”

“I’ll wear my jean dress with an empire waist.”

“Oh, good
cop,
bad cop?”

‘No, good cop, fat cop.
We have really eaten a lot these last few days. If I don’t cut back I’m going to have to go back to wearing one of those body shapers, aka girdle.”

“I hated those things. I felt like I should be wearing a First Alert bracelet that says in case of accident call for Jaws of Life immediately.”

“I need a few minutes. Can you pick Victoria up first?”

“Sure, I’ll call her.”

I changed into a white tee-shirt, tucked into my jeans and belted, with tobacco brown leather flats. The man’s tee-shirt was too thin, so I was wearing two of them and a double-strand pearl bracelet.

Once I had Abby hooked up in her seat belt, I put in a new CD by
Celso
Fonseca
Feriado
. Victoria and her dog were waiting at the end of her driveway. She didn’t know how I would be dressed, so she didn’t want her husband to see me. When Shorty came home to change for the dinner, she told him we were taking the dogs for a walk on the Greenway. Would I look like I was about to walk my dog
,
 
or
would I be clad in suburban-nonthreatening-housewife-at-the-mall duds? Also, she knew I would be taking the turn on two wheels.

Maybe it was the power of suggestion, but there was something luxurious about Mr. Benz. Vic had a backpack hanging off her shoulder. “So-o-o, we’re off to see the Braves play in Boston.”

We turned into Tara’s driveway and waited for her to come out. “Where is she?” Victoria asked.

With Tara nothing is simple. “She’s having a date with her Jacuzzi.”

“So we are waiting for her to take a bubble bath?”

“No,
hon
, she’s not taking a bubble bath.”

“You seem to think I know what you’re talking about.”

“Let me put it this way. She’s having sex with her Jacuzzi.
Also known as self-love.”

“Oh-h-h, now I get it. Leigh, sometimes you and Tara mistake me for someone I once was,” she said slowly. “That’s why Tiara means so much to me. You’ll never know how much this is helping me.”

“Oh, I know, all right.”

“Sometimes you two make me feel like a married spinster.”

Tara came out of the house with sort of a glow about her. “Sorry I’m late.” She and
Stephie
climbed in, joining Mr. Benz and Abby.

“You’re late, and you can’t blame it on one of those erections lasting three or more hours sending you to the hospital. By the way, who are they saying should go to the emergency room, the woman or the man? Victoria, ask Shorty about that.”

Tara put on her seatbelt and settled in. “Victoria, you’re here!”

“Yeah, I wish I could say I put my foot down and told him he shouldn’t have committed me to an engagement without asking, but that’s not what happened. He got a call from the hospital and went in to work. He’ll make it to the dinner in time for dessert. We did have a few minutes together before he left. I tried to tell him all the ways I had made myself powerless in our marriage and in life, like gaining all that weight and not having my own money, even though I was working. He’s seen changes in me this last year, and I think he was happy when I started talking.”

“Okay, how much of this talking do you plan to do? Are you going to tell him about Tiara Investigations?” I took my eyes off the road to check the navigation system and glanced over at Victoria.

“Hell, no.
By the way, Leigh, do you remember why we didn’t tell our husbands about Tiara when we started?”

“We just didn’t want to.”

“Oh, yeah.
Well, I still don’t want to hear his opinion of it or get any advice on it. And I want to see how he follows up on this talk. I want it to be the start of a new way for us to be. I realized how angry I am at him. I mean, all the time. I’m angry with him for disappointing me. When we were dating and falling in love, I thought he was perfect. Sometime over the years he disappointed me, and all along I felt disappointed with myself.”

“Now that’s just crazy talk.” I glanced at the GPS thingy and continued. “If there’s anyone in the whole world that should not be disappointed in
herself
, it’s you.”

“And my job disappointed me. I thought I wasn’t cut out for it. Again, I thought it was me, but it was the corporate environment that wasn’t cut out for me. This is so much better.”

“I’m so happy for you. I have a good feeling about your talk with Shorty.” Tara rubbed our friend’s shoulder from the back seat.

“For us, this was progress. He can’t have a normal conversation. He has to process information and then come back and pick it up again. I’ll see if he does that.”

I looked over at her smiling, happy face and she caught me. “I saw that look. I know I sound like Pollyanna, but I promise to keep my eyes wide open. For once the state of my marriage is not the most important part of my life. At work I was passed over by younger employees with more flash and less knowledge. That started the downward slide of my confidence level. Add to that the way Shorty talks to me.
And menopause.
I’ve thought a lot this year about what I would be like if I ever got my pride back, and now I’m starting to get glimpses of it.”

“You love him, don’t you?”
 
In our line of work we’d learned love can’t be assumed in any marriage.

“I told him I would rather withhold sex from him than anyone in the world.”

“It’s good to know someone that well, isn’t it? My husband knows my secrets better than I do. Oh wait, I’m lying! Except for what I do for a living, how much money I’ve banked this year, and that somebody’s trying to kill me. Other than those things, he knows everything there is to know about me.” I was laughing right along with them, but on the inside I was feeling a little funny about how natural this had become.

Tara touched Victoria’s shoulder and waited for her to turn around. Looking her in the eye she said, “Just tell him, ‘
Don’t
worry about my hair, and don’t worry about my lipstick. Just kiss me.’”

“I would sound like a country western song. Even though I didn’t know what Leigh was talking about when she said you were having sex with your Jacuzzi, I have picked up some language from you. Shorty wanted to have sex tonight. I told him it would just be mercy sex. He said that he didn’t know what that was, but he wouldn’t turn it down. Then I said, ‘you know, a charity ball.’ He said, ‘What?’ I told him it was the same as duty booty. That’s when he asked where I learned language like that. I told him from friends, and he said ‘I bet I know which ones’.”

“Your mid-term will be next week, so bone up. Pardon the pun.” After Tara said this I started humming Elgar’s “March No. 1 in D,” commonly known as “Pomp and Circumstance.”

I didn’t mention that Victoria had called her husband Shorty, instead of Frank, because I didn’t want us to go any further into this. I asked Tara to call our subject’s office and see if he was still there.

“That wasn’t tonight’s follow-
ee
, was it?” I pulled into a parking lot until we decided where we were going.

 
“No, that’d be too easy. His secretary said he had gone to the Y. So since we can’t follow him from the office, I guess it’s on to Plan B.”

 
Victoria read over my notes on the case. “My first guess, I mean deduction, is that if he does indeed work out, he’ll meet his friend, euphemistically speaking, afterward. That has to be the YMCA on Sugarloaf Parkway, the one closest to his office. There are only two hotels in that area. But then they might go to her home.”

 
“I asked the wife what type of restaurant he would most likely choose.
A steakhouse, seafood?
 
She said they’re vegans.”
 
We had the make, model, color and tag number of his car and his food preference, so we were off.
 
I pulled into traffic, and we circled back to Sugarloaf Parkway to head southeast.

 
“By the way, Tara, you look great.”

 
“I’ve gained three pounds, and I want to nip it in the bud. I just don’t want to have to wear a body shaper again.”

“I do remember going to a wedding, afraid if I squeezed my knees together I would squirt out the top and hit the ceiling. However, I thanked the Lord for them.” Victoria had her laptop open and logged the case on our Google Doc.

 
Tara reached in her handbag and pulled out a magazine. “I was just looking at a chart to see what my ideal weight is.”

“Look me up. I’m six feet four,” I said. “I don’t worry about it anymore. I thought we decided the problem wasn’t obesity, it was hunger. I don’t feel empty or unsatisfied anymore. Aren’t you enjoying our work?”

Tara looked out the window before answering. “I would if I wasn’t nervous so much of the time. If the tough get going when the going gets tough, where do the rest of us go?”

“Then let’s work on that. We can’t all be like Leigh, but you and I can do better.”

“I think people have the courage they need when they need it.”

“Did you know you would need it this soon after we changed our business plan on Saturday to include catching David Taylor’s killer?” Tara closed the magazine.

“No, I have to say I did not know I would need it the very next day.”

“Then there was that guy this morning attacking you right in the Cracker Barrel parking lot. I can’t stop thinking about that.”

“Tara, I’ve thought about it, too. How did he know he would find us at Cracker Barrel?”

“Have we been going there too often?
 
Maybe we should go to other restaurants,” Victoria suggested.

“Is someone telling him where we intend to go?” I put on my sunglasses to show I was ready to get to work.

We struck out locating the F-250 Ford at the Holiday Inn and sat there talking. I made a suggestion, “Let’s go on to the other hotel and then to the restaurants around there that sell alcohol. That’s usually a productive avenue.”

Victoria nodded. “We all know you cannot have an affair without alcohol. It’s the same old
story,
drinking makes some people see double and feel single.”

“You can bet the barn and the Buick on it.” I happened to glance in the rear view mirror. “
Waaait
, that’s
them
pulling in behind us.”

I put the car in gear and drove around the building. When we came back around they were getting out of the truck. We parked and waited a minute. She was smiling like she had not a care in the world. He, however, looked around before he leaned in to kiss her. I got out the digital camera and handed it to Victoria.
Click. Click.

Instead of going into the hotel, they crossed the parking lot walking toward the McDonalds next door.
 
Victoria followed their movement in the side mirror. “Where is he going? Remember, he’s a vegan.”

“Uh oh.”
This had taken Tara’s mind off her nerves. “This is getting good.”

I opened the sunroof for the dogs, and then we piled out. We hung back, scrutinizing the menu until they had their food and were sitting down. This is something we learned the hard way. If we sat down first, the couple might sit in a completely different section of the restaurant.

Sitting close to one another in a circular booth and more than likely playing
footsie
, they were
eating,
you guessed it, double-decker hamburgers. There was a large window behind them, and through it you could see an indoor playground filled with about a thousand brightly colored balls. We walked by like we were on our way to the bathroom but stopped.