Dead to the Max (21 page)

Footsteps echoed in the tiled entryway on the other side of the door. Standing on the pebbled porch, she was at a good six-inch disadvantage when he opened the door. Hal stared for a long moment, then a smile split his face, a purely raptorial grin that raised goose bumps along her arms.

Not that the man came even close to frightening her. He was a weasel, and she knew how to handle weasels.

“Max, how nice. Bud and I were just talking about you.”

“Bud?”

There were weasels, and then there were evil monsters like Bud Traynor, a force that even a man like Witt Long might not know how to handle. Max didn’t think she stood a chance.

Sweat slicked her palms, and her one and only thought was to run. Hard, far, and fast.

Chapter Eighteen

Bud Traynor. Not good. Max wasn’t prepared to deal with Wendy’s men in tandem. Wrong. She wasn’t prepared to deal with Bud on any level, alone or otherwise, at least not now. She needed more time to analyze her own feelings, her own reaction, not just Wendy’s.

Hal pulled her inside. The house was cool and air-conditioned musty, the air fetid as if something green and alien grew in the ventilator. Sick-house syndrome. Her heels clattered on the tile.

A sudden waft of peppermint floated beneath her nostrils, a soft sigh caressed her nape.
Give ’em hell, Max.
Cameron. She should have known she’d never be alone. She straightened her shoulders.

She’d wanted Hal’s reaction to Lilah’s death. Now she’d see Bud’s as well. Too bad the detective had tipped them off. It would have been a coup to see their initial surprise. No matter, Max was at least as good at battering them as Witt could be. Especially because they wouldn’t be expecting it.

They rounded the edge of a paneled wall, and Max followed Hal down two steps into the most gorgeous room she’d ever seen. Of course, it wasn’t the room itself, but the floor-to-ceiling windows, the sparkling blue of the sun on the water in the kidney-shaped pool outside, and the rhododendron bushes. Wendy loved their brilliant color in the spring. The room screamed of life, of Wendy. She’d sat on the soft leather couch with a steaming cup of tea, morning light bathing her face. She had renewed her energy in this very room and thought many times of leaving Hal.

And of leaving the man sitting on that same camel-colored leather sofa.

Love, duty, and fear. Wendy had wanted the first. Bud Traynor had inspired only the latter two.

Max shivered in the too-cold atmosphere. Hal’s fingers on her back urged her into the room, closer to Wendy’s father. Her skin shrank from the light touch.

Wendy hid inside her as Max marched into that emotional dungeon with each step she took, deeper into the Gregory home where Bud Traynor waited like a poisonous snake ready to strike, ready to immobilize and swallow her whole with minimal effort, as if she were a terrified mouse. The way he’d done with Wendy.

Bud was about to find out that Max was of a different ilk. Wendy, too, was going to find out just exactly who was in control of Max’s body.

“Mr. Traynor.” She nodded. “I hope I’m not intruding.” She didn’t care if she was.

“Of course not,” they both chimed at once, Bud with a reptilian gaze that Hal, his back to his father-in-law, couldn’t see. Without a doubt, they’d been discussing her. She knew it through Bud’s dark, assessing gaze. She wondered if she’d bitten off more than she could chew, then immediately quashed the thought. She would not let this man get the better of her before she even started.

“Would you like a drink?” Hal asked, his shoulders slightly rounded. He seemed to shrink in significance when in the same room with Bud Traynor.

“No,” then, after a slight but definite break, “thank you.” She added it merely for politeness, and the pause was for Bud, to let him know it meant nothing more. Not fear, not trepidation, simply choice.

“But we can’t drink alone.” Bud held his glass up. Sunlight shone through the ice cubes and the colorless liquid. Gin and tonic in the summer. Rye and ginger in the winter. Even at the age of eight, Wendy’d always had his drink ready when he got home from work. God help her if she hadn’t.

Bud Traynor was a functioning alcoholic. He got nasty on his third gin and tonic. Wrong word. Sadistic was better. His pleasure in causing pain, and, strangely, his control of himself, rose exponentially with the level of alcohol.

“Just a glass of wine perhaps,” Hal coaxed.

“Yes, wine would be fine,” she agreed, merely to move the conversation forward.

Inside her, Wendy curled into a fetal ball. Max looked Bud Traynor over dispassionately. He was a good-looking man, mid-to-late fifties, thick, graying hair, eyebrows several shades darker. He obviously prided himself on his physique; a well-toned chest and muscled arms lay beneath a hunter-green polo shirt.

For an old guy, he was sort of doable. As Wendy’s father, he made her want to puke. No finger down the throat necessary for that.

As Hal’s footsteps receded, Max did what she’d come here to do: test reactions. “Detective Long told me about Lilah Bloom’s murder.”

“Ah, the Bloom woman. Please, have a seat, Max.” Not an ounce of regret nor any other discernible emotion in Bud’s voice.

He patted the sofa beside him. When he smiled at most women, he set out to charm. When he spoke, he gave a woman his full attention. When he looked at Max, she only saw the relentless predator in his almost black eyes.

Max sat on the matching loveseat, out of his reach. Hal returned, approaching silently across the Berber carpet, set her glass on the coffee table, then moved to perch on the arm of the sofa opposite Bud. A pale shadow in her periphery.

With them both now present and accounted for, Max plunged ahead. “The detective believes the motive for Lilah’s murder could have been blackmail.”

“The detective has a lot of theories he’s discussed with both Hal and I. But what do you think, Max?”

It was a smooth maneuver, turning the question back on her. It didn’t fail her notice that neither Bud nor Hal questioned her interest. She decided to tell him exactly what she’d seen in her dream and hoped it would cause a flicker of apprehension.

“I think Lilah was supposed to meet a blackmailer at a restaurant, but he showed up at her shop and took her by surprise.”

Hal said nothing. Bud answered with another question. “So you believe Lilah’s killer was a man?”

“I could have said
it.
”

He raised his hand; the ruby ring glinted. Taking a mouthful of gin, he rolled it round his tongue before swallowing. “I’m so glad you’re looking out for my daughter’s interest, Max. I can see how much you care.”

The man was a master of deflection, and his emotions were too closely schooled to reveal a thing, especially guilt. Still, she tried more shock tactics. “Lilah had a gun. She missed using it by a fraction of a second.”

“Blackmailers usually get what they deserve, don’t they?” This time he waited for her reaction.

“Even if Lilah was a blackmailer, she
didn’t
deserve a death sentence.”

“What could Wendy’s nail woman know to use as blackmail?” Hal spoke this time, his voice harsh with anger. Was his emotion prompted by fear? Or by the very idea that Lilah Bloom might well have known more about his wife’s life than he did?

Max sipped her wine. “Wonderful bouquet,” she remarked, politeness all around. “The detective thinks Wendy might have told Lilah a lot of things about herself.”

“Only her hairdresser knows for sure,” Bud quipped. An uncaring remark for a man who’d so recently buried his daughter. Asshole.

“Something like that,” she agreed.

Hal moved then, took a spot on the loveseat beside her. She felt surrounded. Trapped. A chill shivered along her backbone. “So you think my wife spilled her guts to a woman who painted her nails for fifteen bucks an hour?”

Thirty-five. Wendy had lied to him about that, too. “Detective Long seems to think so.”

There she went again. She felt like a puppet citing Witticisms. Her fingers tensed on the stem of her wineglass, and she wondered where her usual snappy comebacks had flown to.

The answer stared at her from a pair of eyes black enough to give her heart palpitations. Maybe they were Wendy’s palpitations? Bud Traynor made her mouth go dry. His concentrated gaze, as palpable as a touch to her nipple, made her suspect he saw every secret inside her head. Wendy had never been able to hide a thing from him. How the hell had she hidden her affair with Nick?

The answer: she hadn’t hidden it at all.

Bud took control once more. He’d never let his son-in-law take over for too long. “Let’s assume our esteemed detective is correct. Lilah Bloom blackmailed Wendy’s killer.” Bud swirled the ice cubes in his glass. He tugged on the leg of his pants and crossed his ankle over his knee. “Perhaps Wendy told her the name of the man with whom she was conducting her adulterous affair.”

Hal’s lips tensed, but he said nothing.

Traynor said it so matter-of-factly, and yet she felt far more derogatory words hovered on his lips. She remembered the dream, knew exactly what it meant now. Wendy’s father had known she’d been with another man, had punished her for it and beaten her to extract the mans’ name.

It hadn’t worked. For perhaps the only time in her life, Wendy’s will had been stronger than her father’s. Nickie’s name never crossed her lips.

Neither would it cross Max’s. Not that it mattered. Max was pretty damn sure Bud knew everything Wendy did and with whom.

“His name. Now there’s a motive for murder, Max. Her lover killed them both to keep his secret.” Hal’s nostrils flared. “To think I encouraged her to go in at five in the morning so she wouldn’t feel so overworked.”

She wondered if Hal had figured that out before or after Wendy’s murder. Had someone at Hackett’s told him? The ever-willing-to-blab Theresa? Remy himself?

God, she felt sorry for Wendy. Hal surely had more than enough money to allow his wife to stay home. Instead he’d sent her to work at the crack of dawn so she wouldn’t feel overworked? How ass backwards was that? “I’m sure she still made it home in time to have your dinner ready.”

“There were some duties Wendy never forgot,” Hal said with an air of righteousness.

Yeah. Was blowing the beanpole one of them? Gross.

“I taught her well.” Bud Traynor smiled.

Bile rose in Max’s throat. Jesus, oh Jesus. He was a man of double meanings, and the thought of all the things he’d taught his daughter turned her stomach.

Worse yet, he was proud of it.

The man leaned forward, touched Max’s knee, and squeezed, his fingers cold through the material of her pants. Her leg shriveled. She wanted to run screaming from the room.

Buck up, Max. Don’t let him get the better of you.

Cameron was right. She looked from Bud’s fingers to his face, recognized the challenge, and met him head on. “I don’t know you well enough to allow you to put your hand on my knee, Mr. Traynor.”

He mimicked her actions, looked from his hand on her knee to her face. The pressure on her knee eased. He sat back, but his eyes gleamed. She could have sworn it was with admiration.

“Forgive me,” he said. “Forgive us both. This is such an emotional subject for Hal and I. Wendy told him she was leaving him. That was very hard on him.”

Harder than Wendy’s death? Of course. Death would have appeased Hal’s ego.

Hal sat like a rock, watched, probably even missed Max’s victory in that subtle skirmish.

“When did she do that, Bud?” With his name on her lips, she almost gave in to her gag reflex. Better to have stayed with Mr. Traynor.

Neither man asked why she directed the question to Wendy’s father instead of her husband. Nor did Hal try to usurp his father-in-law’s position.

Bud answered. “I believe, Max, that would have been sometime on Sunday.”

“The day
before
Wendy died?” Sunday, not Monday.

That was the reason why Hal had never reported his wife missing, the reason for the fury she’d witnessed that first day in Wendy’s office. Maybe even the reason Wendy was dead. Hal would have had plenty of time to plan a murder.

“We all knew my daughter was having an affair, that she was probably leaving Hal for this other man.”

“That would also be a motive for murder, wouldn’t it?” She looked at Bud as she said it. He ran the show, she was positive on that.

Hal opened his mouth to speak, to rage, to God knows what, but Bud held up his hand. Hal subsided against the cushions of the loveseat and let Bud speak for him. Again.

“We only want to know who killed her, Max. We want justice. Hal can’t move on without it. Do you understand that?”

She understood the inability to move on. She also understood the origin of Hal’s words the other night at the bar. The anger was his, but the phrasing had been all Bud Traynor’s.

Bud smiled, folded his arms. It was the same smile he used when he beat Wendy. “Of course, we know it could be a motive. For Hal. But he was with me when Wendy died.”

She raised an eyebrow. “So I’ve heard.”

He shot her an assessing look. “Are you suggesting a conspiracy in my daughter’s death?”

Noting Hal’s immobile features as his father-in-law defended him, Max went on, “I suppose it could be coincidence. And the night Lilah Bloom died?”

“Alas, we were again drowning our sorrows.”

She looked from one to the other. “How convenient for you both.”

Hal cleared his throat then. Bud Traynor ran a hand across the not-unattractive day’s growth of stubble on his chin. “She was my daughter, Max. I might not have agreed with everything she did, but I couldn’t possibly lie for a man if I thought he’d murdered her.”

Couldn’t possibly. The chill never left his eyes, and she knew there was nothing Bud Traynor wouldn’t do if it suited his purpose, even manipulate Hal Gregory into murdering his wife. Even if she was Bud’s own daughter.

“We need your help to find the man who killed Wendy,” Bud went on, his voice low, mesmerizing. “You know the people down at Hackett’s.”