Heat Wave (6 page)

Winning was Caleb’s job, just as it was her
father’s, her brother’s and her brother-in-law’s. She wasn’t about
to fall in love with someone who considered winning more important
than divining the truth.

For heaven’s sake, why was she even thinking
about love?

She turned on her car’s stereo. The Dixie
Chicks CD was still in the slot, and she let their sweet harmonies
wash over her as she drove back to Brogan Heights. If she got
tenure, she would sink her roots deeper in the area, perhaps buying
a house. She currently rented a townhouse in the complex, choosing
not to invest in local real estate on the chance that she would no
longer be employed by the high school a year from now. Her unit was
owned by an older couple who’d bought it with the intention of
downsizing in a few years, when the youngest of their three
children left for college. For now, they were happy to rent it to
Meredith.

The Brogan Heights condominium complex had a
few downsizing couples in residence, but most of Meredith’s
neighbors were single. More accurately, most were divorced. The
modest, appealingly landscaped community was where divorced women
who couldn’t afford to maintain a house on their single income
resided, and where divorced men whose ex-wives and children still
lived in the area settled so they could visit their children
easily. Since moving to her townhouse when she’d joined the high
school faculty two years ago, Meredith had dated a couple of those
men. After a few outings, she’d figured out why they were divorced.
They were pleasant enough, she supposed, but self-centered, nursing
grievances against their former wives, and pushy when it came to
sex.

She’d made some girlfriends living here, at
least. Leslie Shumway, two doors down, was a nurse at the community
hospital and surprisingly bubbly, considering that she spent her
days poking IV needles into patients and watching them suffer.
Margie Carerra across the way was a bit older than Meredith, but
she had a self-deprecating sense of humor and a lusty cougar
spirit. If Meredith wound up single when she was forty, she could
do worse than to have Margie as a role model.

If she was forty and single, of course, her
parents would be disconsolate. But then, they were disconsolate
about everything she did: her job, her unmarried state, her living
in New England. “It’s so far away,” her mother would criticize.
“And so cold!”

“I like snow,” she’d tell her mother. “And I
love teaching.”

“You could have been a lawyer,” her mother
would argue. “You had the grades. You could have gotten into any
law school you wanted.”

“Instead, I’m a teacher,” Meredith would
point out, doing her best not to lose her temper. If her parents
were disappointed by the choices she’d made, so be it. They were
good choices, the right choices for her.

Right now, Meredith wouldn’t have minded
some of that icy snow New England was famous for. But the
thermometer she’d hung outside her kitchen window read eighty-two
degrees, so snow wasn’t likely. The Lobster Shack was not the sort
of place for which you dressed up—most diners there wound up
wearing plastic bibs with cartoons of smiling lobsters emblazoned
on them—so once she’d cranked up her unit’s air conditioning, she
climbed the stairs to her bedroom to take a quick shower and change
into jeans. It was hot enough for shorts, but shorts seemed too
casual for dinner with her lawyer. She didn’t want to expose that
much leg.

Not that Caleb Solomon had any interest in
her legs, exposed or otherwise. Not that this was anything more
than her chance to thank him for getting rid of that stupid
citation.

She wondered if he was divorced, if he lived
in a condo a five-minute drive from his ex-wife and children. She
wondered if he would spend their dinner whining to her about what a
harridan his ex-wife was, how much money she’d taken him for, how
difficult she was about letting him see his children. Caleb struck
her as more of a fighter than a whiner. Even if all he cared about
was winning, she’d prefer that to someone who nursed grudges and
resentments.

Not that she had to like him. If he wanted
to whine while they ate, it was nothing to her. Nothing more than a
meal and a thank-you.

With a couple of hours to
kill before her dinner with Caleb—just a dinner, not a
dinner
date
—she
settled at her kitchen table with her students’
The Things They Carried
essays. For
the most part, they were well-reasoned and well-written, addressing
the novel’s wrenching view of the Vietnam War and the soldiers who
fought it. She’d drilled her students well in how to organize and
execute an analytical essay. If Stuart and the faculty council had
any questions about whether she deserved tenure, they ought to read
these essays and see how well she’d taught her students to
write.

Rachel Stafford’s essay was excellent, of
course. Rachel was the kind of student teachers dreamed
about—diligent, disciplined, not afraid to question the status quo
and make her opinions known. She would be heading to Columbia in
the fall, and that fine Ivy League university would be lucky to
have her. Meredith jotted a few notes on Rachel’s paper, a few
lines of praise, and set it aside. The next paper on her stack was
Matt Colson’s.

Unlike Rachel, Matt wasn’t a teacher’s
dream. He was brilliant and funny, cute and cocky in his
Hawaiian-print shirts and his Colby College cap, which he’d been
wearing ever since he’d gotten his acceptance to that school. But
he relied more on wit and charm than on his intelligence to achieve
his goals. A lot of people managed to get quite far on their wit
and charm, but she would rather see Matt rely on his brain instead
of his dimpled smile. His attitude toward her was often almost
flirtatious.

Did he have a crush on her? Stuart
Kezerian’s implication about her supposed attractiveness in the
eyes of impressionable teenage boys unsettled her. She didn’t want
her students to be infatuated with her. She wanted them to learn,
to develop their minds, and—for heaven’s sake—to get crushes on
people their own age.

What if Matt
did
have a crush on her,
though? What if he’d been at the town beach last Sunday? What if
he’d seen her naked breasts? His classroom behavior hadn’t changed
in the two days since that ridiculous incident. None of her
students had mentioned it, and she assumed none of them were aware
of it. Whoever had dumped ice on her back was probably a
trouble-maker, and she didn’t have trouble-makers in her classes.
At least, they didn’t make trouble around her.

But what if…? What if some of her students
had seen her?

Forget it,
she ordered herself. What was done was done. And
thanks to Caleb Solomon, part of what was done had been undone.
Time to move on.

Once her dinner with Caleb was done, her
debt to him settled, she would.

***

Ed Nolan got off his shift at five-thirty,
earlier than expected. Naturally, he headed directly to the Faulk
Street Tavern to see Gus. He’d told her he would stop by around
six, but he doubted she’d mind if he showed up earlier than
expected.

She would be busy. The bar always started
filling up around now, as the locals finished work and wandered in
for a drink or two. Hell, he wanted her busy. Busy meant more money
in her cash register. But he didn’t want her so busy he couldn’t
grab a kiss when she wasn’t pouring wine or mixing a margarita in
the blender.

Entering the tavern, he searched the bar and
spotted her right away, placing a pitcher of beer and a platter of
wings on a tray for one of her waitresses. Ed struggled to remember
their names, but they were all a blur of young, energetic girls in
tight black pants, white shirts and black aprons. They reminded him
a little too much of his daughter Maeve, who was about their age
but was somewhere in California. He hadn’t seen Maeve in years. She
assured him she had a good job designing clothes or some such
thing, but who knew? She could be working as a waitress in a bar,
which wouldn’t be so bad. A hell of a lot better than pan-handling,
or turning tricks, or God knew what.

In any case, a girl the age of his daughter
was way too young for him to notice. He was more interested in
women with a few years on them. One woman in particular.

Turning from the waitress, Gus spotted him
and smiled. Busy or no, she seemed happy to see him.

He sauntered to the bar in time for her to
place a Sam Adams draft in front of him. “You’re early.”

“I decided the station house could survive
without me,” he said, leaning across the bar and touching his mouth
to hers before he took a sip of beer.

“Slow day?”

“Pretty much.” Bar owners might welcome busy
nights, but cops welcomed slow days. No crime. No accidents. No
vandalism or drug busts, no shoplifters or cats stuck in trees. He
settled on a stool and surveyed the room, his gaze journeying from
a booth crowded with burly guys where the waitress had delivered
the pitcher and wings to a booth with three women sipping mixed
drinks, from there to the door, to the jukebox, and up the other
side of the room.

He spotted Caleb Solomon. Damned good
lawyer, which sometimes made Ed’s life harder. That was the way it
went: cops arrested people, and lawyers got people off. Solomon was
good at getting people off. As long as the bad guys wound up paying
for what they’d done, it was a system Ed could live with.

He turned back to Gus. She was wiping down
the counter behind the bar, an enigmatic smile curving her mouth.
“What?” he asked.

“Nothing.” Her smile widened. “Just that
when you think hard enough, your brain makes noise.”

He snorted. “I wasn’t thinking that
hard.”

She nodded, but he could tell she didn’t
believe him.

“That guy over there?” He gestured toward
the table where Solomon sat with an attractive woman in a neat
summer suit and Niall Mullen, a local boy made good. Niall had gone
off to college, then Harvard Law School. He’d returned to his
hometown to practice, and convinced two of his classmates to join
him. Solomon was one. The woman was the other. Ed couldn’t remember
her name. She handled mostly civil suits, so her path and Ed’s
rarely crossed.

“What about him?”

“He’s a big shot, right?”

“He helped you arrest that drug dealer from
Florida,” Gus recalled, tactfully not adding that Solomon had
helped only because Ed had wrongly charged Solomon’s client with
the crime.

“So, he comes into the station house first
thing this morning to contest a public indecency citation.”

“Was there a riot and I missed it?” Gus
asked.

Ed laughed. “Some lady flashed her tits on
the beach on Sunday.”

“And she was cited?” Gus tossed her
dishcloth aside and shook her head. “You cops don’t have anything
better to do?”

“Sulkowski was there. He saw her running
around with her chest hanging out. So he cited her. What was he
supposed to do?”

“Toss a towel over her and tell her to cover
up.”

“He did that, too.”

“My tax dollars at work,” Gus muttered.

“He couldn’t just ignore the situation.
There were a lot of people on the beach. What got me was that she’d
hire a big gun like Caleb Solomon to fight her infraction.”

Gus shrugged. “I guess she wanted the
best.”

“Hmm.” Ed took another sip of beer, savoring
the cold bite of the foam sliding down his throat. “Can’t blame her
for that. I want the best, too.” He leaned across the bar and stole
another kiss. “That’s why I’ve got you.”

Caleb had been back in his office ten
minutes after the press conference ended. Five minutes after that,
the air conditioner had conked out again. Perhaps it was a cat with
nine lives, perhaps a mystic attempting to prove that reincarnation
was possible. Or whatever was the opposite of reincarnation: rather
than having a second life, the building’s AC was enjoying a second
death.

Megan phoned the repair guy, who’d departed
from the office just a few hours ago after assuring her he’d fixed
everything. He’d said there had been a problem with the compressor,
or maybe the condenser. Megan couldn’t remember, and Caleb didn’t
know the difference between a compressor and a condenser, anyway.
All he knew was that, once again, he was being baked alive in his
office.

 
Jerry Felton’s case
was big and complicated. He wanted to map out an initial strategy
with Heather and Niall. He also wanted to be able to think clearly,
and not to wind up drenched in sweat by the time he met up with
Meredith at the Lobster Shack. Fortunately, Heather and Niall were
happy to relocate to the Faulk Street Tavern to discuss the
information Caleb had wrested from the DA and discuss which
accounting firm they should hire to review Felton’s financials and
those of his accuser, Sheila Valenti. Caleb had worked with one
accountant on a few occasions, Heather with another. Niall could
serve as the tie-breaker.

Niall could also serve as the local-boy
resource. He’d grown up in Brogan’s Point. Although he didn’t know
Jerry Felton much better than Caleb did, he knew people who knew
him, and who were familiar with the inner workings of the town’s
municipal government. He could ask around about Sheila Valenti,
find out where her weaknesses lay, learn whether her moral compass
had a faulty compressor or condenser. Heather would oversee the
media coverage. Both she and Niall thought Caleb had done a good
job at the press conference, but there was a limit to how long he’d
be able to keep the jackals from sniffing around Felton and baring
their sharp teeth before Caleb started biting back. His fuse was a
few inches shorter than hers.