Swift Justice (3 page)

The note Melissa reluctantly produced from her purse gave few clues. It was hand-printed on a page ripped from a steno pad.
Please take care of Olivia. She’s your granddaughter. I can’t trust her with anyone else. Her father will do the right thing, I know. Tell Olivia I love her. I’ll be back. Beth.
As I pointed out to Melissa, the note told us Beth was literate and planned to come back for her daughter, and not much more than that. When I asked if there was anything else with the baby, Melissa pointed to the car seat and said there’d also been a blanket and a different set of clothes. I asked her to leave the car seat, but she had no other way of getting Olivia home safely,
so she promised to drop off the seat and the other items early in the afternoon. I had scant hope of digging up a useful clue from them, but I couldn’t afford to overlook the possibility. I’d also put a note on a PI bulletin board I used, asking if anyone had been hired to find the mother of a baby born at Boulder Community Hospital seventeen years ago. Melissa’s daughter had found her somehow; maybe she’d hired a PI. I’d call the hospital—not much chance of finding anyone who remembered the birth after all this time—and some private adoption agencies. I knew damn well I wouldn’t get anything out of the state.

With a plan of action in mind, I dusted off my slacks and headed back to my office. Getting on for ten, there were a few more cars scattered in the parking lot. A yellow Hummer sat outside my office. I figured the owner was picking up a bushel of ecologically sound toys for his grandkids, maybe the banana plantation set with its little wooden trees, cute monkeys, and authentically dressed workers. I’d suggested once to the store’s owner, Lucinda Highmoor, that she sell some Agent Orange with the set to let kids replicate the experience of defoliating the jungle to plant crops, but she’d closed her eyes as if in pain and ordered me out of the store with a pointing finger. I wasn’t really an eco-nazi; it just gave me joy to bust Lucinda’s chops because she took it all so seriously and overlooked the irony of her customers driving gas-guzzling behemoths to pick out eco-sensitive toys for their Ritalin-pickled children.

A shadow moving in front of the window in my office distracted me from the Hummer. I didn’t have another appointment scheduled until the afternoon. Hot damn, maybe I had a
walk-in client. Swift Investigations’ business had been slow this summer; I could use a cash infusion, above and beyond the retainer Melissa Lloyd had given me. I needed a new assistant, too, so my being away from the office for a few minutes didn’t result in lost business. Wiping the sheen of sweat off my forehead with the sleeve of my aqua blouse, I floofed my bangs and pulled open the door to find a woman of a certain age staring at me, looking like Dirty Harriet with a large-caliber revolver cradled in her ample lap.

Gun! My training kicked in, and I leaped back onto the sidewalk, swinging the door mostly shut and standing off to the left, my back pressed against the wall. I
really
needed to start carrying the H&K 9 mm I kept locked in the safe—and locking the door even when I left for two minutes.

“Hey!” A startled voice with a southern accent that gave the word three syllables followed me out the door.

“Put the gun on the floor and your hands over your head,” I called out. My hand slid into my pocket to retrieve my cell phone.

“I didn’t mean . . . it’s not . . . I’m Gigi Goldman, Les’s wife.”

I couldn’t think of a reason why my silent partner’s wife would be in my office with a gun. I’d never slept with the man; hell, I’d only met him twice. He’d invested some money in Swift Investigations when I was first starting out, and I sent him quarterly statements. That was the sum total of our interaction. I was hoping to be able to buy him out by next summer. I peered through the door crack. Mrs. Goldman had
done as I asked. The gun lay on the floor to the side of her chair, and she was holding her hands at shoulder height. She waved at me as I cautiously poked the door wider.

“Hi. I’m sorry if I gave you a scare. I just—”

“Kick the gun over here.”

She swept one plump calf to the side of the chair and nudged the gun my way with her foot. I bent to retrieve it, checking to see if it was loaded. It was. The hair on my arms prickled up.

“Jesus, don’t you even know enough not to brandish a loaded weapon?”

“It’s loaded?” Wrinkles creased her brow.

My God. Carrying the gun with two fingers, I walked around her to my desk and closed it in the top drawer. Then I jerked open the fridge, pulled out a Pepsi, and drank half of it, relishing the tickle of the carbonation. Leaning back in my chair, I ran the cold can across my forehead and focused on my uninvited guest. “Want one?” It seemed only polite to offer my partner’s wife refreshment.

She scootched the chair around to face me and said, “Maybe an iced tea? With lemon?”

“This is a private investigation firm, Mrs. Goldman, not a restaurant. I have Pepsi, Pepsi, or Pepsi.”

“I’d like a Pepsi, thank you,” she said.

I handed over a can and watched her decide not to ask for a glass. Instead, she drew a handkerchief out of her purse and wiped the top of the can thoroughly before using a metal can opener, also pulled from her capacious bag, to lever open the flip-top. “Nails,” she explained, wiggling her manicured fingers at me.

I studied her as she took a genteel sip. In her early fifties, she had jaw-length hair of that ashy blond color so many well-off women over fifty seem to affect, held in place by a quart of mousse and a can of Aqua Net. She carried an extra thirty pounds or so on her tall frame—I suspected she’d be at least five-eight standing—and wore a pink and cream knit suit that shrieked “expensive” and hugged her curves a shade too tightly. Her leather bag was large enough to hold supplies for a weeklong camping trip and hung from a strap over her left shoulder. I caught a whiff of floral perfume that made me want to sneeze. I could see she’d been pretty in her younger days, but time, too many fund-raising balls, and a spa-to-Saks-to-dinner-party lifestyle had stamped her with a matronly air. The closest she got to exercise was probably box seats at a Rockies game.

With my breathing returned to normal, I said, “Let’s start over. I’m Charlotte Swift. Was I expecting you?”

“Oh, no. I wouldn’t think so.” She shook her head. “I’m Gigi Goldman. Well, it’s really Georgia, but I started going by Gigi when I married Les. Georgia Goldman. G. G. Get it?”

I got it. “What can I do for you, Mrs. Goldman?” I willed her not to tell me she thought Les was having an affair and she wanted me to catch him. Talk about conflict of interest.

“This is so awkward—”

She was going to try to sic me on Les. I could feel it. I shut my eyes in anticipation of the blow.

“Well, Les ran off with his personal trainer—”

Damn, right again!

“—and I’m afraid I need money, so I’m here to learn how to be an investigator.”

My eyes popped open. “Say what?”

“When Les left for Costa Rica with Heather-Anne, he closed out all our accounts and transferred all our assets. The police say he even took some money that rightfully belonged to investors.” Her soft blue eyes clouded over.

“He embezzled?”

She nodded. “I’m afraid so. Anyway, my lawyer and I have been through all the papers, and the only assets he left me are the house, the Hummer, and a half interest in Swift Investigations.”

She pulled some legal papers from her purse, and I recognized the partnership documents Les Goldman and I had signed. I had a matching set in my file cabinet.

“So you’re saying—”

“I’m your new partner.”

At eight o’clock that night, I poured an inch of peaty Lagavulin single malt Scotch into a glass and handed it to Father Dan Allgood. With the morning’s headache in mind, I grabbed a bottled water and leaned against the deck rail, looking out on my partially xeriscaped backyard. Father Dan, the Episcopal priest who lived next door in the rectory belonging to St. Paul’s, took a sip of the Scotch and sighed his appreciation. This late in August, dusk had settled gently on the foothills, and only a thin line of light rimmed Pikes Peak to the west. I wondered idly if the bear, a three-hundred-pound cinnamon-colored creature with a taste for garbage and sunflower seeds, would wander by tonight. I hadn’t had a chance to repair and
refill the bird feeder, so maybe he’d skip my yard on his nocturnal rounds.

“Nectar of the gods,” Dan said, setting his glass on the chair’s arm with a click. “So, what’s this new partner of yours like?”

I turned to face him, thinking as always that, at six foot five, he looked more like a lumberjack than a priest with his barrel chest, muscled legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, and perpetual tan. Still, there was a quiet strength in his stillness, and the sense of a powerful intellect behind the slightly hooded brown eyes. He never talked about what he’d done before becoming a priest about ten years ago, but something about him made me think of a sniper rifle wrapped in a quilt. The outer covering seemed cozy and warm, but the man underneath might be lethal.

I propped my elbows against the deck rail. “She’s a demon in human form.”

He took another sip of Scotch and kept his gaze fixed on me.

I sighed heavily. “Oh, all right, she seems nice enough, but so helpless it makes me want to slap her. She’s in her early fifties, I’d guess, a zaftig blonde. She probably spent more on the
ensemble
she had on today than I spent on my entire wardrobe last year. Her whole life revolved around Les and the kids and doing the charity dinner circuit until Les dumped her for a twenty-two-year-old. Now, according to her, Swift Investigations is all that stands between her and her kids and the bread line. I’m sure she’s exaggerating.”

“What are you going to do about her?”

“According to my lawyer, there’s not much I can do.” My
fingers tightened around the water bottle, and it protested with a crunching sound. “We went over all the paperwork this afternoon, and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do except take on this woman as my partner or buy her out—and you know I can’t afford to do that.” I gestured at the house, a “fixer-upper” I’d bought a couple of years previously and had poured all my savings and a lot of sweat equity into renovating. “Not without selling the house, at least.”

“You were saying just last night that you needed a new assistant—”

“An assistant, damn it, not a partner.” I ground my teeth. If my time in the Air Force had taught me anything, it’s that I like autonomy, that I like making my own decisions and being responsible for the outcome. It’s one of the reasons I’d set up as a PI rather than join the police when I separated from the military; cops have partners. Now, irony of ironies, it looked like I had one, too. “Where Goldman was content to let his money ride, finagle it as a tax loss somehow, she’ll be drawing a salary. She’ll be taking money
out
of the business, which’ll make it that much longer before I can afford to buy her out.”

“Maybe she’ll be an asset.”

“Hah! D’y’know what she did before she married Goldman? She was a beautician!” I’d learned that much from Gigi in the hour-long discussion that had followed her bombshell of an announcement. “When I suggested she’d make more money in her old line of work, she told me she wanted to try something new and thought being a PI would be exciting. Did I tell you she brought the .357 with her because she thought PIs all ran around with guns? I think she’s watched too many
Spenser: For Hire
reruns.”