Shoots to Kill (5 page)

“Certainly, it’s your choice, dear,” Grace said as I headed for the workroom, “but—”

“Let me tell you about Libby,” I said. “She was a giant pain in the ass when I sat for her, and I don’t want her to become one to me again.”

“Come on, sweetie, she was just a kid when you knew her,” Lottie argued. “All kids are pests. She’s a mature young woman now.”

“Mature? Look at this!” I unclasped the locket and handed it to Lottie. “Do you know what it is? A Best Friends Forever necklace, the kind middle-school girls exchange. She gave it to me as a welcome-home gift. A
welcome-home
gift, Lottie. I didn’t come home—she did!”

Lottie let it dangle from her fingers so Grace could examine it. “It’s kinda sweet.”

“It’s juvenile!” I took the locket, marched into the workroom, and tossed it into a desk drawer. “I don’t want Libby Blume here. Period.”

They didn’t argue. I knew they thought I was being unreasonable, but my gut feeling was very strong. Having Libby around would be nothing but trouble.

Trouble with a capital
D
walked through the door just before closing time. I was in the back, finishing an arrangement of tropical flowers for a Hawaiian luau, when Lottie poked her head through the curtain and said in a whisper, “Delphi Blume is here to see you.” Lottie’s eyes were stretched wide—she was apparently suffering from a bad case of awe.

I put the bird-of-paradise stem in water and followed her to the front, where Libby’s famous ex-model mother waited, tapping the toe of a black patent, spike-heeled boot against my tile floor. I’d forgotten what a striking woman Delphi was. She was wearing a belted Burberry plaid coat and those killer boots, with a black patent leather purse the size of a travel bag over one wrist. Her pale blond hair was still styled in its famous pixie cut, her eyes were still brown and doelike, though with a few wrinkles now, and her lips were still red and bow-shaped, although they looked a little plumper than I remembered. Also a bit on the lumpy side.

“Hello, Abby,” she said in a frosty tone, fixing me with an equally frosty glare.

“Mrs. Blume,” I said with a nod. “Nice to see you again.”

“Just Delphi, if you please. I’d like a word with you.”

I led her into the parlor, passing Lottie—who was having trouble closing her mouth—to a table in front of the bay window. Grace had been at the coffee counter in the back, cleaning the machines, but immediately came to take our orders.

“Would you care for coffee or tea?” Grace asked her, not the least bit awestruck.

“Nothing, thank you.” Delphi’s words came out clipped. Angry.

Grace quietly returned to her duties, though I knew she and Lottie would be listening in. I took a deep breath, feeling suddenly anxious. The negative vibes Delphi emitted were powerful. Putting on a smile, I said, “What can I do for you?”

“Why did you tell my daughter she couldn’t be your intern?”

Nothing like getting right to the point. “I don’t need another employee at this time.”

“You don’t think she’s capable of working
here
?” Delphi’s nose wrinkled as though she’d detected something rotten in the room.

“Her capabilities had nothing to do with my decision. I just don’t need another employee right now. Maybe in the future . . .”

“She needs to work”—Delphi tapped a long, dark fingernail on the table—“now.”

“I’m sure there are other shops in town that are hiring.”

“She wants to work with
you
. She admires you—for some reason.”

Ouch. “I appreciate that, but as I said—”

Delphi leaned toward me, emphasizing each statement with a tap of her fingernail. “She’s an art major. She ranked at the top of her class. She has a minor in business. She’s loyal. She has a winning personality. She’d be an asset to you. I don’t understand your problem.”

At that moment, my problem was sitting across from me. I sat back and folded my arms. There was no way I was going to let her bully me into taking on her daughter. Bullies really pushed my buttons. “I don’t need the help. Maybe some other time.”

Her doe eyes narrowed into feral slits, but I didn’t give her time to reply. I stood up and glanced at my watch. “I’m sorry, but the shop is closing now and I have a dinner date.”

Her eyes widened in disbelief, as if to say,
You’re dismissing me? Do you know whom you’re talking to?
She pushed back her chair, put her bag over her arm (it probably would have crushed her shoulder), and marched out of the parlor, through the shop, and out the door.

I locked it behind her. There went one more reason why I wasn’t going to have Libby in my life. Who needed another pushy mother around? I started to pull back the curtain to walk into the workroom, but paused when I heard Lottie and Grace discussing the situation.

“Poor girl, having to put up with a mom like that,” Lottie said.

“The child really could use our influence, couldn’t she?” Grace said.

“Not gonna happen,” I said, breezing through the curtain. I grabbed my coat and purse and waited for them to do likewise. We left the shop without another word on the subject.

Down the Hatch Bar and Grill was the town square’s local watering hole. Marco had bought the bar about the same time I bought Bloomers. Like my shop, it was housed in an old brick building, but unlike my shop, its old-fashioned charm had been buried beneath dark wood paneling and suspended ceilings typical of the 1960s. The decor wasn’t much better—a fake carp mounted above the long, dark wood bar, a bright blue plastic anchor on the wall above the row of booths opposite the bar, and a fisherman’s net hanging from the beamed ceiling.

When my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, I spotted Marco at the last booth, “our” booth, as I thought of it. I slid in across from him and sighed wearily.

Marco slid a frosty mug of beer toward me. “Bad day?”

“Weird day.” I took a long pull of beer, licking foam off my upper lip.

“Want to tell me about it?”

“Food first. Details to follow. What are the specials tonight? I’m starving.”

Over a meal of hearty veal stew, thick with carrots and potatoes, onions and peas, simmered in a tomato broth, and a mixed green salad and crusty bread, I told Marco about Libby’s strange gift, her even stranger scrapbook, and her offer to intern, topping that with her mother’s annoying visit. Marco found the whole situation humorous and told me not to worry. So I took his advice, enjoyed the food and his company, and was rewarded for it.

“What would you say about working with me on the cheating-husband case?” he asked.

It was the first time he’d ever asked for my help on one of his private investigations, and I was supremely flattered. “I’d love to.”

“It’ll require some evening surveillance, not always in the same vehicle as me.”

“That’s not a problem.”

He sat back. “Great. Can you start tonight?” I nodded. “You take my car and I’ll use a rental. So go home, put on dark clothes, park your Vette down the street, and meet me back here in an hour.”

I was out the door before he could blink and back in forty minutes. Wearing a black jacket, jeans, and boots, with a black knit cap wadded in my pocket, I parked under a streetlight a block from Down the Hatch and got out of the car. At once, a car door closed nearby and footsteps hurried up behind me. Thinking I was about to be mugged, I spun around with my hands balled protectively, my keys jutting out from between my fingers, ready to do some serious gouging.

“Libby!” I cried with relief. “You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

“Sorry, Abby. I didn’t recognize you. I thought someone was trying to steal your car. Why are you dressed in black? Are you working on a murder investigation?”

At that moment, a tall, thin figure in a long, olive drab trench coat and camouflage pants came slinking toward us. I wasn’t sure whether to ignore him or run, but then Libby said, “Here you are, Oliver” as her brother halted beside her. His hair was short beneath his army cap, and his eyes were deep and hollow looking.

I remembered Oliver as a strange, skinny adolescent who loved to play war games in the woods with his friends. He was two years older than me, so I’d had little contact with him in school and none after, yet there was one incident I’d never forgotten: He and several friends had broken into the high school and destroyed the computer lab. Someone had snitched on him, and the conviction had prevented him from being accepted into the army. Judging by the way he was dressed, he hadn’t gotten over that rejection.

Libby looped her arm through mine. “Oliver, you remember Abby Knight. She owns Bloomers Flower Shop.”

He put two fingers to his forehead in a salute. “Ma’am, pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

“Oliver and I are having dinner at Down the Hatch,” Libby told me. “Mummy is busy this evening, so it’s just the two of us out on the town. I hear they serve great casual meals there. Are you meeting Marco? Well, of course you are. You’re working on a case together, right?”

I shrugged. “I really can’t say. It’s confidential.”

Oliver glanced around as if checking for spies, then held his hand to the side of his mouth and whispered, “The coast is clear.”

“I still can’t discuss it,” I said.

He gave me a nod. “I understand, ma’am. Carry on, then.”

How about moving on? “Well, I should be going. Nice to see you. Enjoy your dinner.”

“But we’re going to the same place, aren’t we?” Libby called as I hurried away from her.

No way did I want to walk into the bar with those two. I took the side street to the back alley to reach the bar, where I had to be admitted by a puzzled cook. Marco wasn’t in his office, so I went up front, only to spot him pouring tall beers for Libby and Oliver. I flagged a waitress and told her to let Marco know I was waiting in back. Then I went to his office and sat down.

Ten long minutes later, he showed up. “Have a nice visit with the Blumes?” I asked.

He slouched into his black leather chair, propped his feet on the black metal desk, and shook his head, as though amused. “That Libby is something else. She said she wants to learn the PI business. She asked to be my intern.”

CHAPTER THREE

I sat forward, my hands clutching the arms of the chair. “Your
intern
?”

Marco reached for the shiny black coffee mug on his desk. “She’s interested in learning the investigation business.”

“That’s not why she wants to be your intern, Marco. Think about it. First she asks to be
my
intern, because she just
has
to be a part of Bloomers. Then I turn her down and she asks to be
yours
? Trust me. Libby doesn’t care about PI work. This is merely a way to get even with me.”

“By learning how to be a private investigator?”

“No, by working with you. By taking your time away from me.”

“Do you really think she’d go to all that trouble just to get even with you?”

“It sounds crazy, but I know Libby.”

“You
knew
Libby.”

“A leopard can’t change its spots, Marco. Let me tell you something about Libby Blume. I babysat her at my house after school, and whenever she got there before me, she’d go up to my room, paw through my drawers, read my diary, and eat my private stash of Hershey’s Special Dark—and never bother to hide what she’d done, as if she saw nothing wrong with it.”

“So far she sounds like one of my kid sisters.”

“Just wait. She started tagging after me everywhere I went, and wanted to be included in all my activities. After a while she even began showing up at our house on weekends and holidays, hanging around all day, even when we had company. Then she had her hair styled like mine and bought clothes like mine, too. She figured out my locker combination and left me notes in it. She even called up my friends, pretending to be
me.
I felt like I had a stalker, and that’s what I don’t want to happen again.”

I leaned forward, bracing my hands on his desk. “Do you understand why you have to turn her down? Because we have to nip this in the bud.”

“Take it easy, Sunshine. I told her no.”

I sank back in relief. “Thank you. But just so you know, you might be in for a visit from her mother, the Enforcer. After I told Libby she couldn’t work for me, Delphi showed up and tried to bully me into changing my mind. I almost threw her out on her famous ass.”

Marco grinned that enchanting, quirky grin of his as he came around to raise me to my feet. No one intimidated him, least of all an aging model. He traced a fingertip down my nose. “You’re cute when your Irish temper is up.”

I leaned into him, sliding my arms around his waist. “How cute?”

His arms came around me, and I knew we were seconds away from a kiss, but then he pulled back with a sigh. “Let’s save that for an evening when we don’t have to go anywhere.”

“We don’t
have
to go anywhere now, do we?”

“Yes, we do have to go somewhere now. I have to get this case wrapped up.”

Damn.
I pulled out my knit cap and tugged it on over my hair, tucking in stray strands. “Then let’s do it.”

Marco showed me photos of the target he was tailing— a hefty, forty-year-old man in a navy parka with a Bears logo on it. Marco had photographed him getting out of a black Camry. Now he needed proof that the guy was visiting a woman on the other side of town. He picked up two thermoses of coffee from the kitchen and gave me instructions as he walked me out to his car. I was to keep the front of an apartment building under surveillance and Marco was going to watch the back. I had one of his specially designed cameras that could shoot photos in the dark without a flash, and he had another. We would communicate via cell phone.

I drove to the designated street and found a curbside parking space where I would have a good view of the building. I was glad I’d worn warm clothes. The temperature had dropped into the thirties, and I didn’t want to run the motor all evening. I settled in as comfortably as possible, the camera in my lap, then reached for the thermos.