Think Before You Speak (8 page)

“Well, when do you expect him to return from
his appointment?” I asked in my best debutante huff.

“Oh, you know Reginald. He returns when he’s
ready. Perhaps around lunchtime?”

“Doesn’t he have other appointments
today?”

“Yes, but he doesn’t always return to the
studio between them unless he needs me as a tagalong. Thursdays are
usually follow-ups to make sure all projects are on track before
the weekend arrives,” Han continued, his voice dropping to a whine.
“Those visits don’t include me.”

Okay, so the guy was milking the sympathy
card for all it was worth. I didn’t care how much it sucked to be
Han right now, I just needed to touch base with my friend.

I took a deep breath and tried again. “Can
you at least leave a message for him and ask him to call me
ASAP.”

Something in my voice must’ve sounded
desperate. Han’s voice ticked up with a measure of concern – or was
that excitement? “Is there a problem with your remodel? The bedroom
furniture is still on backorder. Perhaps I could come by and
consult with you.”

“No, everything’s fine with the remodel,” I
said, then faltered. Then why was I calling? What excuse could I
offer that wouldn’t give anyone the impression I needed to talk to
Reggie about anything other than business? “Uh…it’s just that I’d
like to talk with him about…pillows. Yes, I was thinking about
adding a few more decorative pillows for when my bedroom furniture
arrives.”

When in doubt, go with pillows
, my mom
always said. She was a big fan of throw pillows as an easy fix to
change up the seasonal décor throughout the mansion. Pillows on the
sofa. Pillows on the chairs. In the window seat. Mounds across the
beds. Pillows billowing from every nook and cranny. Pillows
everywhere you looked.

I’d really come to hate pillows over the
years. Thank God Reggie had gone easy on them when redecorating my
place. Thus far, I’d only counted two in the window seat and two on
the couch, as long as you didn’t count the two on my bed. Those
were for actual function and not mere decoration.

Han’s voice fairly dripped with longing. “I
tried to tell Reginald we were going too light on them around your
apartment.”

“It’s just that…”

“I have all of the swatches here, so all you
have to do is tell me which ones to order. Or did you want to add
some additional colors? Patterns? Maybe some floral to offset the
stripes.”

Was Han channeling my mother right about now?
I took a deep breath and thanked the stars above that Reggie had
held strong on design choices against not just my mother but, from
the way things sounded, his assistant too. Made me want to help my
friend clear up this blackmail mess all the more.

“Just have Reggie call me when he touches
base,” I instructed.

Disappointment echoed through the connection.
“I will do so, Miss Bohanan.”

I thanked Han and hung up as fast as I could,
then set a fresh pot of coffee brewing and jumped into the shower.
I’d barely wrung the water from my long, ebony hair when a loud
thunk
thudded through my apartment. That new door was gonna
destroy plenty of knuckles. Maybe I should check with the building
superintendent about what it would take to wire up a doorbell.

A quick wrap of towels around my head and
body, then I dragged the front door open to a loud and boisterous
greeting.

“
Mein liebchen
!” Reggie cried and
barreled into me with a hug before pulling back and giving me the
once over. “Victoria could turn a man with one glance in that
outfit, no?”

I shut the door. “Cut the act, Reggie. It
doesn’t work on me anymore, remember?”

The pursed lips fell and the hands slid from
his skintight red leather pants and matching bolero jacket to hang
at his sides. “It’s the clothes,” Reggie said in a deeper voice
sans accent. “They help set the mood.”

“And the scene,” I replied, taking in the
fluorescent orange and pink silk shirt cascading with ruffles.
“Momma’s gonna need sunglasses with you in that getup.”

“It’s the one nice thing about this persona,”
he said with a flounce. “Getting dressed in the mornings can be a
real riot. It’s the clothes I’ll miss most when I retire.”

His smile lit up the room until his gaze fell
to the notepad on the coffee table where I’d spent the better part
of last night and this morning making notes. A few moments was all
he needed to plop on the couch and scan the list of potential
suspects.

“Your mother?” he asked, his tone heading
toward the rafters.

I sat down beside him, grabbed the notepad
and picked up a pen. “One thing I’ve learned the hard way is that
anyone…even those closest to you…can be a suspect.”

With typical Reggie flourish, he snatched the
pen from my fingers and summarily crossed off
Bohanan
from
the list. “I’ve known your mother since you were a toddler. She is
not capable of such deceitfulness.”

“But you don’t know my dad,” I countered.
“The
real
side of my dad. He’d skin you alive if it made him
a buck or two. Even for as little as a dime.”

“All highly successful businessmen have their
dark side,” Reggie admonished.

“Yeah? For the sperm donor, it’s become less
a side than an art form learned from the mob.”

“Well, I won’t have suspicion directed toward
your family. It’s ridiculous.”

“Fine.” I took the revolving pen again and
made a show of thoroughly scratching the family name from the list.
“Happy?”

“Much.”

That didn’t mean I had to scratch the sperm
donor from my mental list. As far as I was concerned, he was always
at the top of one or the other of my lists. He’d take top honors in
a myriad of prizes if I was handing them out. The winner of
Best
Dad
goes to Frank Bohanan in the categories of
How to
Manipulate to Get Your Way
,
How to Torment Your Family
,
How to Blame Your Daughter for Everything Wrong in Your
Life
, and my personal favorite
How to Use the Church to
Discover Your Next Hook-up
.

Remember that photographic evidence I
mentioned? Yep, applies to that last one specifically. The photos
I’d discovered in the Galveston vacation home were safely tucked
away in a place only I knew. Everything else I simply carried the
scars for.

Though again, it niggled at me that here I
was trying to help a friend throw off the veil of blackmail while I
was kinda, sorta, but not really using the same practice against my
dad. In my defense, I’d never once asked for money.

Unlike Reggie’s predicament.

“Do you have the letters?” I asked.

Reggie nodded and reached into his bag. Most
businessmen carry briefcases. Interior designers carry enormous
totes that yawn open for miles, revealing like a magician’s hat a
myriad of color swatches, fabric sample rings, hardwood and tile
flooring options, photos, sketchpads, folios and files with client
information – you name it. One time when I’d suggested he input all
of it into a laptop to make it easier to lug around, you’d think
I’d said he was a thousand year-old, hunchbacked has been.

The current favorite was a huge Prada tote
that probably cost upward of eight-thousand dollars and looked like
it could hold information on at least half the Dallas population.
With all of this, Reggie was still able to reach right in and pull
out two letters without having to dump and sort through the
contents. Talk about organized.

“Here,” he said, handing over the letters.
“And before you ask, no. I don’t recognize the handwriting.”

I gingerly held the envelopes. “Maybe we
should wear gloves so we don’t disturb the fingerprint
evidence.”

Zeke would be proud of me for thinking that.
Too bad we’d already marred the paper handling them.

Reggie stared at me as if I’d sprouted
antennae from my head and my skin had turned a vile shade of green.
“And why would we need to worry about fingerprints?”

“To help lead us to the culprit, silly.”

“And how are we going to get fingerprints?”
Reggie asked. “We’d have to turn these over to the police, who
would then open an investigation, about which the topic would be
available for public consumption when it hit the papers, which
would bring about the ruin of my life, which is what the
blackmailer is threatening to do anyway.”

“Gee,” I muttered after that long soliloquy.
“Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Now who’s silly?”

The present discussion took me back to the
car conversation with Nick on the way to San Antonio, and his
little V-8 juice comment when I’d been trying to discuss engines.
Made me want to slap my own forehead right about then. Maybe
hanging out with Nick so much had dulled my brain cells.

See ladies? This goes to show you that even
good sex isn’t enough to justify staying with someone who brings
you down instead of up. Mentally, that is.

I opened the earlier postmarked letter then
the second and studied the calligraphy. Such handwriting style
wasn’t widely known these days but still taught in cotillion
circles. Same nice, heavyweight linen paper. Not cheap. Dallas
postmark, so the culprit was someone local, or at least someone who
had access to the local postal service.

This didn’t mean the San Antonio girlfriend –
or date – was off the hook. Might be the blackmailer’s first
mistake or a clever ploy to focus more on the local populace. The
conversation I’d had with Detective Dingbat about the two simple
motives of a blackmailer had me leaning more toward the former –
for now.

The first letter referenced the demand for a
hundred grand or they would release Reggie’s juvie record to the
media. The enclosed copies of the New York court documents showed
the legal name change accompanied by the design school admissions
forms, neatly tying the pieces of Reggie’s past and present
together.

After my experience in June of obtaining
copies of Amy Vernet’s vital statistics records, color me impressed
with the blackmailer’s resourcefulness. But then that threw a
wrench into my supposition the culprit was local. Maybe he or she
wasn’t
in the Dallas area or even Texas, for that matter. Or
perhaps he or she had friends in or near New York willing to help
in this scheme. Yeah, I was gonna get a monster headache if I
didn’t reign the brain in. For now, I’d keep it simple and work
from the local angle.

The second letter included reference to a
post office box key and the location of said box for delivery of
the cash. At least that was pretty straightforward. The envelope
had a faint outline puckering the corner, but no key.

“Okay,” I said, after studying the letters
and settling in for the long haul. “These appear to have been
written by the same individual. First one postmarked four weeks
ago. The second two weeks after. Do you have the post office box
key this one mentions?”

“Yes,” Reggie affirmed, producing the key
from his bag. “I’ve spent the better part of the last few weeks at
the bank, going from branch to branch every couple of days to
withdraw cash since I couldn’t do it in one transaction without
some document reporting the withdrawal to the Feds. The last bit I
obtained Tuesday morning before leaving San Antonio.”

“Ah,” I replied. “A currency transaction
report.”

“You know about them?”

I nodded. “Anytime my dad dealt with a bunch
of cash in hand, he’d spend the next week running around the house
just grousing and grumbling about how the government should keep
their nose out of taxpayers’ business.”

Reggie’s eyes widened. “Do you think someone
was blackmailing him?”

“Probably just the opposite,” I grumbled.

Wisely, Reggie left that alone.

I continued, “It says here you were supposed
to leave the cash in the box this past Tuesday by midnight. Did you
already do that?”

“Yes, shortly after returning from my trip.
I’ve spent time day and night since, watching the building to see
who comes in and out to determine if I recognize anyone. However, I
still have a business to run…for now. If I canceled all of my
appointments and camped out there twenty-four-seven, I’d either
start losing clients or my staff might get suspicious.”

“No one then?”

Reggie shook his head. “Ridiculous of me to
do that, considering most of my clients have staff who run their
errands. But I did go inside this morning before coming over here
and the bag of cash was still there.”

“Whoever it is may wait awhile before
collecting,” I mused aloud. “Wait until the furor dies down.”

“Or they know my car,” Reggie supplied.

I picked up the notepad and scanned the list
I’d started. “Okay, so who among your clientele have been unhappy
with your work?”

Reggie waved his hand about and slipped back
into the accent. “Not a soul vould dare be displeased vith a
Reginald von Braun design.”

“Still, I’ll need a client list.”

“Proprietary information, darling.”

“You want my help? This is me helping.”

He snorted, returning to full-on diva mode.
“It’ll have to be a print-out. I can’t have any of the staff
discovering an email.”

“That’s fine. What about the girlfriend in
San Antonio?” I asked, returning to the local versus non-local
conundrum like a hamster racing in the wheel to nowhere.

“We just started sharing identifiable
personal information once we started talking on the phone. That
would’ve been about two weeks ago,
after
the letters
arrived.”

“The timing of your meeting with her is
interesting,” I surmised with a tap of the pen against my lips.
“She might’ve gleaned more hints from you earlier than you
realized. I need a name and any history you know on her.”

“There goes my private life,” Reggie
muttered.