Protection for Hire (5 page)

The sooner she moved out of her mom’s house, the less likely she’d turn Michael-Myers-crazy herself.

T
he Michael Meyers case was going to kill him. Not just the ribbing he got from his colleagues about his client’s name, but because the man had the organization of a monkey. In the wild.

“Abby, did the interrogatory responses from Meyers’ lawyer show up yet?” Charles entered his legal secretary’s office and glanced up from the documents he was reading.

Abby, normally efficient and unruffled, had a deer-in-the-headlights look as she looked at him while on the telephone with someone. “Yes, ma’am. Right away, ma’am. No, ma’am. Yes, you are correct, ma’am.”

Only one woman in Charles’s life would warrant four ma’ams from his Oregon-born secretary. Charles held his hand out for the telephone headset, and Abby almost hurled it at him in her haste to pass the buck.

“Hi, Mama,” he said.

“Charles! Did you know that Macy’s has
eight floors
?”

Alarm shot through him, and it took icy thoughts of the North Pole to keep him calm. “Really, Mama? Shreveport is really stepping up these days.”

“Shreveport?” Mama’s light laugh tinkled on the phone. “Charles, honey, I’m in San Francisco.”

The Eagle has landed. Alert all battleships.

“Mama, you’re in Union Square all by yourself?” What if something happened to her? He needed to go pick her up right now.

“Charles, you worry too much. I’m having a great time.”

Sure, alone in an eight-story Macy’s store with thousands of strangers around her. “Where are your suitcases, Mama?”

“Oh, I had the taxi take me to the Hilton, and I asked the bellman to hold my bags for me. Then I headed to Union Square.”

“Mama, you’re not staying at the Hilton.”

“Well, if they didn’t bother to check that before they took my bags, that’s their fault now, isn’t it?”

Outrageous. As always. “You’re early,” Charles said carefully.

“Your Aunt Coco helped me pack.” The words were bitten out.

Uh, oh. “That’s … nice of her.”

“That woman could skin a deer with just the sound of her voice,” Mama snapped. “When she first invited me to stay, all she could talk about was the wonderful times we’d have together and how she was looking forward to eating my cooking, but in the last few weeks, it was ‘Vivian, we might need your bedroom soon,’ and ‘Vivian, your trunks are taking up so much space in the garage.’ And Charles, she had the gall to tell me my Thai-Italian fusion lobster fingers were too minty! The nerve! Why, I almost threw her precious African violet into my frying oil.
That
would have made it less minty, let me tell you.”

“Mama, Aunt Coco has other strengths besides … hospitality.”

“Well, I had already planned to come out to San Francisco, so here I am!”

Charles covered the mouthpiece and told Abby, “Reschedule
all my appointments this afternoon. I have to go pick up my mama. I’ll come back to the office tonight.” He had to if he wanted to catch up on all the work he wouldn’t be doing this afternoon. When Eddie had called Abby to make the appointment with Charles for the indoor climbing wall — without telling him — he should have said no yesterday, but he had never rock climbed, and it had only been for an hour …

Well, he’d be paying for it now. He’d never make partner otherwise.

“And Abby, the next time my brother calls to make an appointment with me, tell me right away.”

Abby nodded, but her gray eyes reproached him gently. “You hadn’t seen him in over a month because you canceled the last lunch appointment you made with him.”

That’s right, he’d forgotten about that. One of the senior partners had wanted to speak to him, so he’d canceled his lunch with Eddie to squeeze the meeting into his packed schedule. But really, Eddie understood, right? After all, it had been the head of Charles’s practice group.

Mama’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “Oh, Charles, they have a cannoli making kit! That’s exactly what I need!”

She had said the magic word. If Charles had a downfall, it wasn’t the beignets he grew up with; it was the cannoli he had discovered when he first moved to California. There was a great restaurant in North Beach that made the dessert, with a crispy shell, decadent mascarpone cream filling with chocolate chips, and smothered in homemade chocolate sauce. “Mama, you’re making cannoli now?” He tried to keep the excitement out of his voice. At least it wasn’t gumbo sushi.

“And what a fantastic espresso maker. It foams your milk for you. Excuse me, how much is this?”

He needed to get to Macy’s before Mama started borrowing on next quarter’s income check.

But he’d make sure she bought the cannoli kit first.

“I’m here for the food,” Mama told him.

“The food?” Charles followed her around Macy’s, holding the things she wanted to buy and surreptitiously putting some back when she wasn’t looking. “You already had the clam chowder and sourdough bread bowl on Pier 39 the last time you were here.”

“No, not tourist food. Oh, this is a nice whisk.” She held up something that looked like a satellite for communicating with aliens. “Do you have a whisk?”

No, he didn’t. “Yes.”

She handed it to him to put on top of the pile and continued down the aisle. “I want to eat the different ethnic foods in San Francisco.”

He “accidentally” dropped the whisk back into the bin it had come from. “North Beach has good Italian food.” And cannoli.

“And I want to take cooking classes. Oh, now I definitely need this.” Mama brandished a stainless steel snail that had instead of a sluggy body, four wicked-looking circular blades.

Charles ducked. “Mama, be careful with that thing. What in the world is it?”

“An herb cutter. For mincing fresh herbs.”

She handed it to him, and he gingerly took it from her. He’d have to be careful about dropping this one back on the shelf. He might slice off a finger.

“Anyway, cooking classes. I’m too late to register for the cupcake class at Sur La Table —”

“Sir La-who?”

She shook her head. “And you’re part French. What am I going to do with you? Sur La Table. It’s a kitchen store. Anyway, the cupcake class isn’t given again until next month —”

Shucks.

“ — but I signed up for the Brazilian cooking one next week.” Her blue eyes were brighter than Xenon headlights.

“Mama, all next week I’m in court.”

She pffft-ed away his objections. “I’ll just drive to the store myself.”

“In San Francisco?” He had a horrible vision of his NASCAR-fan mother going bumper-to-bumper with northern California drivers. Worse,
city
drivers.

“I’m a very good driver,” she said, her eyes wide and daring him to disagree.

She wasn’t a bad driver — she was a crazy driver. “You’re a good driver, Mama, but parking at Union Square is something like $25 per half hour.” He only exaggerated a little. Like eight times. “Maybe Eddie can take you.”

“Charles, I’m not a Royal Doulton teacup. I can find my way around a city. If worse comes to worst, I’ll get a cab.”

Before or after being mugged? Knowing Mama, she’d give the mugger her handbag, invite him to church, and promise to cook supper for him afterwards.

“But there’s another reason for me to be in San Francisco,” Mama said. “I want you to help Elizabeth St. Amant.”

“Who?”

“My goddaughter. She used to live in Louisiana, but now she lives in San Francisco. You used to play with her at church picnics. Do you remember her?”

“Not really.” He had a vague memory of a chubby little girl with dark frizzy curls.

“She didn’t change her name when she married. But the St. Amants had wanted her to marry some boy they picked out for her — his family owned a million acres of land or something like that — and when she married Heath Turnbull instead, they had a conniption fit.”

“People still do that? Arranged marriages?”

“It wasn’t arranged, really, but they’d been
strongly encouraging
a match since Elizabeth and the million-acre boy had been friends all their lives. Anyway, Elizabeth moved to San Francisco with her husband, but she called me a few days ago. She told me her husband Heath had hit her son.”

Charles’s hands dug into the cardboard of the cannoli maker box he was carrying.

“She didn’t say so, but I think …” Mama looked away, her hand dropping from the shiny colander on the shelf. The two last knuckles of her right hand were abnormally swollen, and the pinky and ring fingers stuck out at odd angles, the way they’d been for fifteen years.

Charles still remembered clearly the day Daddy had broken those.

“Elizabeth had tried calling the St. Amants, but they’d cast her out when she married Heath and they refused to do anything for her. But Elizabeth’s
mama’s
family, the Tolberts, had been good friends with my mama’s family for years. None of the Tolberts are alive now, so Elizabeth called me as the next best thing.”

“What does she need? A restraining order? Divorce papers?”

“I’m not sure, but I have the number of where she’s staying,
and I said I’d talk you into helping her. She told me she needed a lawyer. Poor girl was crying and hysterical.”

“Sure, I’ll help her,” he said, ignoring the clamoring in his head about the mountainous workload he had. He really couldn’t afford to take on a pro bono case unless he dropped one of the cases he already had. And any of his colleagues would be only too happy to pick up more billable hours in their race to make partner.

But the bastard had hit her son. Had probably been hitting her for years. Charles wasn’t going to sit around and let that happen.

He had vowed he’d never do that again.

W
hat in the world are you wearing?” Elizabeth demanded when Tessa walked into Wings domestic violence shelter.

Tessa looked down at her dark gray pantsuit. “What? Are there creases on my shirt?”

“You look like a gangster.”

Not the look she’d been aiming for. “I thought I looked professional.” As opposed to the yakuza she knew, who tended to be a bit flashy.

“I guess I was expecting more
Alias
and less Secret Service,” Elizabeth said. “Here, take off your suit jacket.”

Good, because she didn’t like how it constricted her shoulders. Tessa shrugged it off and dropped it over the back of a nearby couch. The two women sitting on the couch looked up at her and scuttled away.

Elizabeth’s dark eyes flashed after them. “I don’t understand why they do that every time you come in here. You watch the children, for goodness’ sake.”

“And they watch me when I’m with them. Probably afraid I might get hungry and start snacking on one of them.”

Elizabeth laughed, then returned to studying Tessa. “Take your hair out of that bun — it’s already falling down anyway.”

“Oh, man. It took me forever to do it up this morning.” Tessa pulled out all eighty-one bobby pins and finger-combed her straight, slippery hair. She had considered using hair spray to keep it in place but hadn’t wanted to ask Alicia to borrow hers. Her sister might have given her mace instead, just for kicks.

Elizabeth frowned at Tessa’s white button-down shirt. “Okay, now roll up your cuffs a little. You have such beautiful slim wrists.” She sighed.

Tessa stared at them. “Really?” She had just thought they were … well, wrists.

“I always wanted skinny wrists,” Elizabeth said. “I thought I looked so disproportional.”

Tessa eyed Elizabeth’s hourglass figure. “Come again?”

“Look at them.” She thrust her graceful hands out. “I have wrists like tree trunks. What’s the point of suffering through a personal trainer to keep your figure when you can’t do a thing about your man hands?”

Tessa stifled a giggle. “Most men aren’t as shallow as the guys on
Seinfeld.
”

“But I’m that shallow.” Elizabeth winked. “Now you look better. Too bad we don’t have a cute scarf we can give you to lighten that outfit.”

“But I don’t look like a bodyguard.”

“You’re only sort of my bodyguard. Until I pay you, you’re my friend. So you may as well look the part.”

An unfamiliar feeling washed over Tessa, something warm and liquid, pleasant but strange.

“What’s wrong?” Elizabeth asked.

Tessa shook her head. “It’s nothing.” Plain silly was what it was.

Elizabeth gave her a stern look. “It’s not nothing.”

“I just … I realized I have never really been friends with a girl before.”

Elizabeth’s eyes opened almost as wide as her mouth. “What?”

“I’ve always been a tomboy. I got along better with my male cousins, and I’ve never gotten along with Alicia, who always criticized me. The girly-girls at school thought I was strange because I liked playing sports and being outdoors all the time, and the other tomboys didn’t like how I always said what I thought. I definitely flunked tact in the school of life.”

“Your male cousins — were they all, you know … mobsters?”

“Most of them are yakuza.”

“They just let you hang out with them?”

“My uncle was their
oyabun
, their boss, and so they didn’t mess with me because of him. But they treated me like a younger sister, and I felt like I belonged.”

“Bless your heart,” Elizabeth said, reaching out to take Tessa’s hand.

“Hey, I may be from California, but I heard that in the South, that’s an insult,” Tessa said, trying to lighten the mood.

“Honey, if I wanted to insult you, I’d make sure you knew it.” But Elizabeth squeezed her hand.

How odd it felt, to have this woman to talk to.

“Daniel’s with the other children,” Elizabeth said, “so it’ll be just the two of us meeting with my lawyer.” But she cast a worried look at the back door of the living area, toward the rooms where the children were playing together.

“Think of this as a girls’ day out,” Tessa said as she steered her toward the side exit.

“I feel guilty.” Elizabeth wrapped a scarf around her head and put on a pair of borrowed sunglasses. The effect partially
masked the bruise on her face. “Poor Daniel hasn’t left the shelter since we came, but I’m going out for coffee.”

“You haven’t left the shelter since you came either, and it’s not coffee — it’s a meeting with your lawyer that happens to be at a coffee shop.”

Tessa hustled Elizabeth into the 1981 Toyota Corolla parked in the alley next door to the shelter and after babying it through a rough engine start, they headed out toward Market Street.

“Did you buy a car?” Elizabeth asked.

“I borrowed this from my cousin Ichiro.”

“That was nice of him.”

“He didn’t need much persuading. This is an extra car he has, it used to belong to his dad.” When her uncle was in
college.

They parked in the parking garage, and on their way to the coffee shop, Tessa kept a close eye on the cars driving past them and the people walking around them. Elizabeth seemed to be enjoying the brisk November air but cast occasional nervous glances when a man in a business suit came into view. Tessa studied him too, but he didn’t even glance their way — two women out for coffee on a cloudy fall morning.

The coffee shop was only halfway full, so they ordered — Tessa paid with some cash she had borrowed from her mom — and got a seat in a corner near the back.

“I don’t know why I’m so nervous,” Elizabeth said. “Heath doesn’t know I went to the shelter. He can’t have known we’d be here today. And I don’t have his son with me either.”

“He might have somehow discovered you went to the shelter,” Tessa said, staring hard at a gray Nissan Sentra that passed by the shop. Had she seen that car behind them on the way here? “And even though Daniel isn’t with you, he can still grab you to make you take him to his son or tell him where he is.”

“I feel so paranoid. If I went to the police talking like this, they’d say I was neurotic.”

Tessa was the last person to want to become BFFs with a policeman, but even she thought Elizabeth should have gone there when Heath hit Daniel.

“I think that’s him.” Elizabeth sat up straighter as a tall man in a sharp suit entered the coffee shop, looking around. “I remember his curly hair from when we played together as kids.”

“No way!” Tessa said.

“What? What’d I do wrong?”

“I mean, I can’t believe it. It’s the dishy rock climber from OWA.”

“You’ve met him before?”

Dishy Climber met Elizabeth’s eyes and smiled, and an unseen choir from
Hair
sang out, “Leeeeet the sun shine in!” in the tiny shop.

Then Dishy Climber saw Tessa sitting next to Elizabeth, and the smile morphed into horror.

First a cold, lonely chill squeezed her heart, then fire engulfed her limbs. What was up with that? It wasn’t like
she’d
been the one to fall on
him
.

Dishy Climber trudged toward them and sat at the table next to Elizabeth, and across from Tessa. “Elizabeth? I’m Charles. Vivian Britton is my mama.”

They shook hands. “This is my bodyguard, Tess —”

“She’s your bodyguard?” He eyed Tessa like she was
yagijiru,
goats’ innards soup, and his nostrils flared as if she smelled like it too.

She discreetly tried to sniff her armpits.

“She’s much tougher than she looks,” Elizabeth said. “She knows Tie-Kwayan-Do and Gee-you Jeets-you.”

Tessa winced as Elizabeth’s accent decimated her favorite martial arts.

Dishy — er, Charles, however, only frowned more. “She’s an ex-convict, and she’s involved in the Japanese mafia.”

The words were like the Hiroshima bomb dropped on the table. Tessa and Elizabeth had been stunned speechless.

Then they both spoke at once.

“I know exactly what she is, and she’s been nicer to me than —”

“I am not involved in the yakuza anymore, and who are you to —”

“
Sure
you’re not involved with the yakuza,” Charles said, “what with your uncle being head boss in San Francisco.”

“If there’s one thing my uncle did, it was never judging me before hearing my side of the story,” Tessa shot back.

A spasm crossed Charles’s (rather muscular) throat.

Tessa glared at him. “Besides which, I never tried to kill someone by flattening them like a pancake.”

“My brother dropped me —”

“You’re the one who fell.”

“What in the world did you do to her, Charles?” Elizabeth demanded.

He looked decidedly harassed. “It was an accident.”

“Then a gentleman apologizes to a lady rather than accusing her of illegal doings.” Elizabeth’s voice could have sliced his head off.

His mouth worked as if he’d eaten something nasty and was trying not to spit it out. Then he grunted, “Again, I’m sorry for falling on you. I hope you’re okay.”

She noticed he didn’t apologize for wrongfully accusing her, but Elizabeth said, “See, now we’re all friends. Tessa’s going to
protect me from my husband, and Charles is going to get me my money back.”

Talk about dropping a bomb. A nuclear bomb.

Years of debate in high school, top marks at Tulane, and years of experience in a courtroom, and he couldn’t keep his gigantic mouth shut about Tessa Lancaster, right in front of her?

What was it about her that set his back up? He’d seen her sitting next to Elizabeth — whom he’d recognized right away, despite the purple bruise over her eye — and been stunned to see a gorgeous woman with her light brown hair curling around her shoulders, glowing in the soft light from a nearby wall sconce. She was looking at him with a sparkle in her eyes and a slight smile on her lips.

But as soon as he realized who she was, her smile faded, and the light in the room dimmed.

He hadn’t been able to shake off his jitters — or stop looking at her — except by making some cross remarks.

She glared at him now, noting his non-apology. Something deep inside him had to feed her animosity, to remind himself of who she was.

Man, he wanted to kiss her.

Dork.
He had to focus. “Elizabeth, tell me what happened.”

She looked down at her coffee cup and swallowed hard. “You know how my family didn’t want me to marry Heath?”

He nodded.

“It was mostly the St. Amants — my daddy’s family. They wanted me to marry some idiot with more land than brains. So
when I eloped, they cut me off. I didn’t really care because I had my inheritance from my maternal grandmother, and Heath had plenty of money too.”

“What does he do?” Charles asked.

“He works for a private equity firm, Stillwater Group. They’ve been very successful in the past few years, making investment deals with very wealthy clients. He said they were getting twenty percent returns every year.”

Charles knew that those types of firms didn’t need to register with the SEC and were largely unregulated. They worked with the ultra rich. Even if Heath were a minor fish in that pond, he probably made at least twice more than Elizabeth’s inheritance.

“We were so happy the first few months,” Elizabeth said sadly. “He was so romantic — showing up unexpectedly with roses, or to take me out to dinner. He was so gentlemanlike — he never complained about holding my purse or opening my door for me. He loved telling me what clothes looked good on me, and always told me how beautiful I was. He praised me to his friends all the time, talking about how I was such a good hostess, I made people feel welcome, I helped him do his job … although in private he would sometimes tell me if I had said something that might have sounded ignorant to his colleagues.”

Tessa’s brow lowered at this innocuous list of actions. Her reaction confirmed Charles’s own gut instinct, that the man sounded controlling rather than romantic.

“But then, he started criticizing me more and more,” Elizabeth said. “He would get suspicious if I went to the ladies’ room for too long, and if I went out with my girlfriends, he’d ask if I met anyone interesting — as if I’d had some secret assignation. It got so bad that I stopped going out to lunch with friends. That seemed to make him happy for a while.”

Her home sounded like a gilded cage.

“But he began getting angry with me all the time over stupid things. He’d physically hurt me — at first it was just grabbing me too hard, but he always apologized so much afterward until I forgave him. And then he started hitting me.”

Under the edge of the table, Charles’s hand clenched hard. His entire arm trembled with the tension in his muscles. Relax. He had to relax. He had to get a hold of himself.

Tessa reached out to touch Elizabeth’s hand, and pain was written in her expression. Seven years ago, she hadn’t shown any emotion in her eyes. She’d heard her sentence from the judge with a face like a stone statue.

This change, this foreign Tessa Lancaster, unnerved him.

“Heath said it was always my fault, that I had made him do it. I believed him for a time. And then after a while, I just didn’t feel anything. His emotions became the only thing I felt.” Elizabeth’s eyes had become dull like black stones, but now he saw a spark. “Until he hit Daniel.”