Swift Justice (30 page)

When it became clear that they weren’t going to take a
break anytime soon, I decided to take matters into my own hands. Swaying my hips to make the satin skirt swish against the net underskirt, I strolled up behind Johnson and slid my arms around his neck. “Seth, honey, I’m here to bring you good luck!”

He practically choked on his drink, jerking his head around to look at me. His brows snapped together. One of the other male gamblers, a Wilford Brimley look-alike, gave me a big grin, but two of the men frowned, obviously irritated at having their concentration broken.

“You can bring me some luck, sugar,” Wilford said, patting his lap.

I sent him a saucy smile but remained draped over Johnson’s shoulders. Leaning close, I whispered in his ear, “We need to chat about some fingerprints the police found in Elizabeth’s apartment. A little birdie told me they might be yours.” I smiled brightly at the other players.

He stiffened and then folded his cards together, tossing them on the table. “Gentlemen, Maggie, I’m going to sit out a round or two.”

Wilford chuckled knowingly as Johnson rose, clamping an arm around my shoulders, and walked me back into the gallery behind the table. I waggled my fingers at the poker players as we turned a corner. We stood in a small square gallery, with huge abstract canvases, one per wall. Each was lit to show the play of colors and texture. For some reason, they struck me as angry.

“What the hell do you think you’re playing at, Miss Swift?” Johnson said, swinging me around to face him, his hands on my shoulders.

“I could ask you the same question.” I wrenched away from his grip. “I’ve learned a lot about you in the past couple of days. I have to admit I thought you might have fathered Elizabeth’s baby—maybe raped her—but rumor says that’s a virtual impossibility, so what took you to her apartment this summer?”

His face went white at my veiled reference to his impotence, and his eyes blazed with a fury that knocked me back a couple of steps.

“I believe I warned you when you came out to the ranch,” he said from between clenched teeth. “You only get one warning.”

Quick as a rattlesnake, his hand flashed out and grabbed my upper arm. He jerked hard, twisting me as he pulled so my back thudded against his chest, and clapped his hand over my mouth before I could do more than squeak.

I bit his finger hard and jabbed my elbow back into his gut. He let out a small “oof,” and his grip loosened slightly. Ripping the unsecured gun from the holster at his side, I ducked under his arm and spun to face him, the gun leveled at his stomach. My hair flopped into my face, and my heart thudded in my chest.

Johnson raised one hand to shoulder height and held the other one up to inspect the damage I’d done to his finger. His posture was relaxed, and I sensed that the ungovernable fury that had seized him had faded. Pulling a hankie out of his pocket and dabbing at his finger, he said, “You don’t really think I’d keep an antique like that loaded, do you?”

No, I didn’t really. My reactions had been reflex. I popped the cylinder and inspected it. No bullets. Well, the revolver was heavy; I could use it as a club if he came at me again.

“What’d you think I was going to do, woman? Shoot you here in the museum and bury your body in a shallow grave at the ranch?” He laughed unpleasantly. “Not my style.”

My thoughts had been running along those lines, but I didn’t admit it. I stayed silent, letting the gun drop to my side but remaining alert.

“No, killing is messy. Besides, I don’t fancy ending up in jail over a no-account nuisance like you. No, I’ve got other methods.”

Although I tried to keep my face impassive, he must have caught the stiffening of my muscles, because he laughed again. “I understand your business isn’t doing so well, and that your lease is coming up for renewal. You’ve also got a partner who’s in desperate need of money, if my sources are accurate—and I’m sure they are. I’m sure she’d be amenable to a buyout offer. I could be your new partner.”

Gigi, heretofore the bane of my professional existence, was suddenly looking like Abbott to my Costello, Ginger Rogers to my Fred Astaire, Cagney to my Lacey, the queen of partners. “You don’t seem like the investigator type,” I said calmly.

“Oh, I’m not. I’d sell off the assets, unless you could afford to buy me out?” When I stayed silent, he nodded. “Didn’t think so. I’d say you’ll be out of business in a couple of weeks. You’ll have to leave the state to start up again because I’ll make damn sure no one in this neck of the woods will hire your sorry ass. Say—don’t you own a house you’ve been renovating? I sure hope you’ve been pulling all the correct permits, darlin’, because every building inspector in the county is about to descend on you. And if I ever see so much as the tip
of your snoopy little nose again, I might just have to find out who holds your mortgage and buy it up. If you’re ten minutes late with a payment”—he snapped his fingers—“I foreclose.”

I felt the ground slipping out from under me, like sand on an unstable dune. All I could think about was getting to Gigi, begging her not to sell out. I locked my eyes on his. “Money can accomplish a lot, but it can’t stop rumors. And if I don’t have a business to run, I won’t have much else to do with my time besides investigate your business dealings and look into your wife’s death a bit more closely. They may all be on the up-and-up—which I doubt—but you know how people are. ‘If there’s smoke, there’s fire.’ You may find the governor isn’t quite so eager to be your buddy once word of your obsession with young girls gets out—and I’ll make sure it gets out.” I was proud of myself for keeping my voice hard and level. It didn’t tremble with the fear threatening to overwhelm me. I had nothing without Swift Investigations, my house . . .

Johnson’s eyes narrowed. We stood facing each other like two gunslingers at either end of a dusty cow-town Main Street. If we drew, we’d both end up dead.

“Charlie, I thought you’d ditched me.” Dan stood just inside the doorway, his black-clad figure silhouetted against a canvas of swirling reds and purples and golds. He spoke easily, but his hands were balled into loose fists at his sides, and he moved like a lion ready to pounce. His eyes flashed to the gun in my hand. “Trying to steal her away, Sheriff?”

We made an uneasy triangle. Johnson’s eyes jumped from Dan to me and back again. He and Dan were about the same height, but Dan outweighed him by a good twenty or thirty pounds, all of it muscle.

Johnson faked a laugh. “Hell, no, Father. Just having a little conversation about law and order on the frontier. I can’t let the action at saloons and gambling parlors get out of hand, but I’m not against a little free enterprise, either. Keeps the cowhands happy, if you know what I mean.” He winked.

I kept my eyes on him, wondering if he’d just agreed to a standoff. Dan put his arm around my shoulders, but I couldn’t relax.

“My gun?” Johnson held out his hand.

After a moment’s hesitation, I put the gun in it. My palm was damp with sweat where the butt had rested.

Ostentatiously wiping the gun off with his handkerchief, Johnson restored it to the holster. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a poker game waiting,” he said. He spun on his booted heel and left.

I stayed still until I could no longer hear his footsteps clomping down the hallway. Then I collapsed against Dan, shivering. He held me against his chest, not saying anything until I regained some control.

“Want to tell me what that was all about?” He leaned back just far enough to study my face.

I blurted out the entire scene. I summed up with “So I learned nothing, and now he’s out to destroy my business.”

“This is what happens when you poke a rattlesnake with a stick,” he said.

“Very helpful.” I pulled away and glared at him.

“Do you think Gigi would sell to him?” he asked, ignoring my temper.

“Of course! She doesn’t really want to be an investigator, and he can afford to make a tempting offer. And I’ve been a
bitch to her,” I added, almost as an afterthought. In reality, awareness of my less than welcoming treatment of her had been haunting me since Johnson first hinted at buying her out. It would serve me right if she sold her share of the business.

“Maybe she’ll surprise you,” Dan said, nudging me toward the doorway. “Look, unless you want to gamble the night away—”

“I’ve already gambled too much.”

“Let’s go home.”

“What’d you do with my chips?” I asked.

“Turned them into a fortune, of course,” he said, one corner of his mouth quirking up. “Isn’t that what you told me to do?”

“Really, how much did you win?” If he’d turned my fifty dollars into a hundred, I’d be impressed.

“About five hundred.”

“Dollars?” I stared at him.

“Uh-huh.” He grinned at my astonishment. “I might have learned a thing or two about gambling in my misbegotten youth.”

“And just where would this have been?”

He tapped his forefinger on my nose. “That’s a story for another time.”

On our way out the door, he dribbled the chips—all except my original stake of fifty dollars’ worth—into the kettle set up to receive donations for the museum. Oh, what the heck . . . I tossed my chips in, too.

(Thursday)

I woke the following morning, heavy-eyed and worn-out, after a night of tossing and turning. I’d wanted to call Gigi as soon as I walked in the door, but it was after midnight. With the sun promising another hot day, I pulled on dark green twill slacks and topped them with a yellow silk-and-cotton-blend top in an effort to add some light to my tired skin. I tried phoning the office before I left the house, but Gigi wasn’t in yet. I debated between heading straight to the office to wait for her and pursuing the case. Reluctantly, I opted for following up with Jacqueline Falstow.

A VW Beetle painted in the green and yellow of a local cleaning service blocked the Falstows’ driveway when I arrived a little after eight. A fortyish Hispanic woman wearing green uniform slacks and top and a utility belt laden with feather duster, spray cleaner, paper towels, and other tools of the cleaning trade was lugging a vacuum from the car to the house.

“Mrs. Falstow is not here,” she said when I asked. She set
the vacuum down and tweaked her short ponytail to tighten the elastic. “She volunteers at the Humane Society every Thursday morning, and Fridays, too, I think.”

Good for her. Maybe abandoned animals were a baby substitute for her. “Is her husband here?”

She stared at me as if I’d asked if the sun rose in the west. “No. Of course not. I’ve never even seen Mr. Falstow. He is always at work.”

Jacqueline it was, then. I returned to my car and pointed it in the direction of the Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region, west of 1-25 off the road to Manitou Springs. Made of a warm reddish wood and lots of glass, the Humane Society facility looked more like an upscale medical or dental building than a home for unwanted or abused pets. Glass doors gave way to neutral-colored tile and pale walls in the lobby. A bulletin board and a rack of flyers sat on the right, and an information desk dominated the left half of the reception area. Despite the antiseptic effect of the tiles and clean walls, an animal odor lingered, not completely obscured by a lemony air freshener. A slight young man with hair in a braid down his back looked up as I approached the desk.

“I’m supposed to meet Jacqueline Falstow here,” I said with my winningest smile.

“In the kitty condos,” he said, jerking his head toward a hallway. His eyes dropped back to the ledger he was studying.

“Thanks.” I strode down the hall as if I knew where the hell I was going, enjoying the view of trees and grass through the huge plate glass windows that marched down one side of the hall. Pushing through a door, I found the cat area easily by following the mews. The ammonia scent of used kitty litter
grew stronger as I opened another door into a room lined with what I guessed were the “kitty condos”: wire cages stacked one atop the other with slide-out pans containing the litter. The room was well lit and cheerful, not depressing as I’d thought it might be. A glassed-in play area with carpeted steps and platforms held a variety of kittens busy pouncing on each other, leaping from level to level, or chasing their tails. A gray-striped kitten saw me and came to the glass, reaching up a paw as if to invite me in. Cute, even tempting, but I didn’t need a pet.