Swift Justice (4 page)

A half-smile stretched across Dan’s face, crinkling the crow’s feet that showed as white lines penciled against his tan. He watched me pace the deck. “Give her a chance, Charlie. If you’re stuck with her, you might as well make the best of it. Maybe her society contacts will bring in a new class of business for you.”

“You have to look on the bright side,” I grumbled, secretly taken by his idea. “You’re a priest.”

Swallowing the last glimmer of Scotch in his glass, Dan rose, towering over me. “I’m going to turn in. I’ve got a parishioner having surgery first thing in the morning, and I need to be there before they put him under. You going to be okay?”

“Go.” I shooed him away. “Thanks for listening.”

“I live to serve.”

From anyone else, it would’ve been a joke. He clomped down the deck stairs and I tracked his progress across the thin strip of woods that separated our houses by the sound of rustling leaves and snapping twigs. His door creaked open a hundred yards away—I really needed to go over there with my WD-40—and a faint “good night” drifted to me.

“ ’Night,” I called back.

The night seemed darker in the silence after his door banged shut. I collected Dan’s glass and my bottle and took them inside, carefully bolting the deck door behind me. I didn’t want the bear helping himself to my Oreos.

(Tuesday)

Make the best of it, make the best of it
, I chanted to myself at seven the next morning as I parked my Subaru outside the
office next to Gigi’s Hummer.
Make the best of it.
I pushed the door open.
Make the
—

“Oh, my God!” I stared in dismay at my office. A ficus tree in a pink ceramic pot sat to the right of the door, its leaves tickling my face. The smell of coffee wafted through the room, emanating from the pot perched on a crocheted doily atop the file cabinet. Two mugs—one with Garfield the Cat and the other embossed with blue stars and the slogan
REACH FOR THE STARS
!—sat beside the pot. For clients, no doubt. A poster of kittens in a basket of yarn balls simpered from the wall behind the desk I’d have to get used to thinking of as Gigi’s. Framed family photos, a potpourri bowl filled with stinky mulch, a dish of pink M&Ms, a foot-high plaster rooster wearing a necklace of linked paper clips, a three-tier in-box of lavender acrylic, and a small stereo spewing New Agey–sounding woodwinds obscured the desk. Gigi smiled at me from the chair she’d customized with a beaded seat and a cream-colored cardigan draped across the back.

“Good morning!” Her voice and smile were as happy as the short-sleeved yellow blouse and matching slacks she wore. She looked like a giant canary.

“What the hell is all this?” I asked, my arm sweeping out to embrace the entire office. I started toward my desk, an oasis of simplicity and bareness in this gift shop hell, and tripped over an area rug frolicking with parrots and jungle foliage.

Her smile faltered. “I just moved in a few things to make it feel more homey.”

“This isn’t home. It’s a place of business where our clients expect professionalism, not ducklings,” I said, spotting a duckling planter sprouting wheatgrass on the windowsill.

“It’s my philosophy that customers feel more comfortable in an atmosphere that reminds them of home,” she said, the southern accent thickening.

“Well, no one would feel at home in this unless they lived in a Hallmark store,” I said. “Get rid of it.”

“No.”

The single word took me aback, and I stared across the room at her. Her pleasant face wore an obstinate look, and her mouth was set in a mulish line.

“It’s my office.”

“It’s
our
office,” she returned, “and since we’re going to be working together, we have to learn to compromise, reach consensus.”

Screw consensus. That was probably the word du jour at her charity committee meetings. I bit back the profanities that threatened to spill out and tried reason. “Look, Gigi, you might know best what works in a beauty parlor, but you’ve got to understand that people looking to hire a private investigator are looking for a different . . . aesthetic than women wanting acrylic nails or a perm.”

She folded her own manicured nails into her palms. “I can accept that,” she said after a full minute of thought. “Maybe if I put the duckling planter in the bathroom?”

Gaagh. She wasn’t getting it. I felt like I was wrestling an eel. “That’s a start,” I choked out. “I’ll help you put the rest back in your car after work.”

She held my gaze for a moment, then bent her head to continue reading from the open file folder on her desk.

“What’s that?” I grabbed a Pepsi from the fridge and took a swallow.

“I thought I should familiarize myself with our cases,” she said without looking up. “I’m starting with the
A
’s and working my way through the alphabet.”

Pepsi went down the wrong pipe and I choked. A flame of pure anger burned through me. This was
my
business, damn it, and I’d worked my butt off to get it off the ground, sacrificing a salary the first few years until I built my customer base, putting in eighty hours a week, cultivating a network of sources, honing my skills with classes and professional reading. Where did she get off redecorating the office, rifling through my client files, taking over? Resolve hardened within me. Forget making the best of it. If I couldn’t dissolve the partnership, or force her out, I’d have to make her want to leave.

Taking my half-drunk Pepsi with me, I left the potpourri-scented office to drag in deep breaths of mingled fresh air and exhaust from the rush hour traffic streaming by on Academy Boulevard. Grinding gears, screeching brakes, and the thud of heavy metal music from a low-rider provided welcome relief from the strains of Zamfir or Yanni tinkling in my office. I did several laps around the shopping area at a brisk pace, startling the cats in the alley and a couple of sparrows taking a dust bath on the sidewalk. Caffeinated and calmer, I returned to the office and settled myself cross-legged on the floor to inspect the infant seat and effects Melissa Lloyd had dropped off yesterday. In my haste to meet with my lawyer about keeping Gigi Goldman out of Swift Investigations—for all the good that had done—I hadn’t taken time to look them over.

Nothing was embroidered with Olivia’s full name, worse
luck. The car seat had nothing distinctive about it, although the loden-colored lining and molded black handle were classier than most.
PEG PEREGO
was stamped on the bottom, but that meant nothing to me. I pulled the Onesie with feet from the plastic grocery bag. Yellow terrycloth with a giraffe appliquéd on the chest, it also told me nothing. I examined the labels, hoping to find initials at least, but no luck. Without much hope, I pulled the blanket from the bag. It was pale pink, woven from something wondrously soft, maybe cashmere, with a two-inch-deep satin binding embroidered with white lambs. I rubbed it against my face.

“Ooh, a Delicia Furman.”

Gigi’s voice startled me. I looked up, self-consciously lowering the blanket from my face, to find her staring at it with delight. “A what?”

“A Delicia Furman. I ordered one for my goddaughter’s baptism present, but there was a two-year waiting list.” She came around her desk and asked, “May I?”

I handed her the blanket. She inspected the embroidery. “It’s definitely a Delicia. She raises her own cashmere goats, shears them, and spins the yarn herself. I met her once when she donated a blanket to a charity auction I was organizing. She looks more like a goat-herder than an artist, but there’s no mistaking her embroidery. Look how tiny the stitches are, and how the lambs all seem to have different expressions on their faces.” Gigi stroked the blanket reverently.

“What does a Delicia Furman go for?” I asked. “A hundred, hundred fifty?”

Gigi laughed. “Oh, honey, you’re not even in the ballpark. Try twelve to fifteen hundred, minimum.”

Eep. For a baby blanket that was going to get drooled on and peed on? At least this told me that baby Olivia had rich relatives or friends. A thought struck me. “Do you think Delicia’d know who bought this?”

“I don’t know what kind of records she keeps, but this is definitely a one-of-a-kind, so she might remember. She doesn’t do duplicates or copies of anything, ever.”

I tucked the giraffe outfit into the plastic bag and folded the Delicia, snorting as I realized I was thinking of it the way one would “a Goya” or “a Rodin.” I placed both inside the car seat and maneuvered it behind my desk. “Thanks,” I told Gigi, who had returned to her desk and was staring at her computer screen, nails clicking across the keyboard.

She wrote something on a lavender sticky note and handed it to me. “Delicia Furman’s phone number and address,” she said. “From her Web page. She’s outside Larkspur.”

“Thanks,” I said again, studying the note. At least Gigi knew her way around a computer and the Internet. She even had a little initiative. “Do you want to come with me to talk to her?” The words popped out before I could stop them.

“And learn PI interrogation techniques?” Her eyes lit up.

“Think of it as an interview, or better yet, a conversation,” I suggested, already regretting the invitation.

“Gotcha.” She made a note on a steno pad, then tucked it into her mailbag of a purse. “Now?”

I sighed. “Might as well.”

Gigi automatically headed for the Hummer after I collected the blanket, set the answering machine, and locked the office door.

“No way,” I said. “We can’t go visit an artist, a woman
who raises goats, for heaven’s sake, in a vehicle that looks like a Sherman tank and burns more gas than small third-world nations. She’d run us off with a shotgun.”

“I never thought of that,” Gigi said, dropping her keys back in her purse—how did she ever find them in there?—and following me to the Subaru. “It was Les’s, you know. The Hummer. He sure loved that thing when he first got it—waxed it every weekend, wouldn’t let the kids eat or drink in it. I guess he couldn’t figure out a way to get it to Costa Rica, so he left it. Maybe he just didn’t want it anymore.”

I ignored the wistful note in her voice, wondering if she saw the parallels between Les’s relationship with the Hummer and with her. The bastard. My anger toward Les Goldman surprised me, and I tamped it down. If I was angry, it was only because his disappearing act had foisted Gigi on me, landing me with a partner I did not need or want.

My annoyance kept me silent throughout the twenty-five minute drive to Larkspur, a small community northwest of Colorado Springs best known for the huge Renaissance festival it hosts every summer. We drove past the festival grounds, where permanent walls, shop fronts, and castles loomed among the lodgepole pines like ghosts of medieval England. Delicia Furman’s farm was ten minutes farther on, wedged into a small valley guarded by hills on three sides. The morning sun lit up a small house, a barn, several outbuildings, and fenced enclosures full of goats. A sign at the roadside announced
FURMAN’S
in elegant gray script on white. We bumped down a rutted driveway, and I parked the car by the first paddock. As I opened the door, the scent of dung, warm animal, fresh hay, and clean water drifted in. The smell pulled me back to
the farm outside Spokane where I’d spent several years off and on with Grandy and Gramps, my mom’s parents, while my parents missionaried in all sorts of godforsaken crannies in South America and Africa. Grandy and Gramps had raised a small herd of Barzona cattle, big red animals with the smarts of a teaspoon, but the farm smell was the same. I breathed it in.

Gigi murmured, “Aren’t they just the cutest?”

“Cute” wasn’t the word I’d’ve chosen. The goats were as tall as my thigh in an array of colors—tan, white, brown, gray, black—but they had long horns that swooped back from their brows and twisted to nasty-looking points. The shaggy black goat in the pen closest to me eyed me suspiciously as he chewed his cud. “You’re a handsome fellow,” I told him. Unmoved by my flattery, he scratched the side of his head against a fence post.

Just as I was wondering where to start the search for Ms. Furman, a woman strode out of the barn fifty yards away, trundling a wheelbarrow full of what I suspected was goat poop. Thick gray hair streamed almost to her waist from beneath a blue bandanna. Stained overalls hung loosely over a white henley shirt. Knee-high galoshes enveloped her feet and calves. She stopped when she saw us and stripped work gloves from her hands as she approached.