Thugs and Kisses (12 page)

“Ah, yes, the reunion where the man was killed.”

Sally and I nodded in unison, like a couple of bobbleheads.

Karen started to say something more but hesitated, as if choosing her words with care. Then she simply added, “I saw the story on the news.”

After studying Karen for a quick moment, I cleared my throat and tried go back to the task at hand. As much as I’d like to comment on it being a small world, the facts were that Steele was missing and Donny was dead. With Steele’s existence still up in the air, I wanted to concentrate on the possible living.

“Back to Steele,” I announced. “Karen, before Steele left to go to Ojai, did you iron out things about the board?”

Karen shrugged. “Not really. According to the bylaws, we’d both have to agree to it, and Mike told me he would not agree to Tom being on the board until after we’d been married awhile. He said he wanted to get to know him before making up his mind.”

Sally softly cleared her throat. “How long have
you
known Tom?”

Karen blushed. Quickly, she got up and walked to her desk, where she busied herself with some papers. Sally and I both got up and joined her. Her body language was telling me the discussion was over, but Sally was persistent.

“I don’t mean to pry, Ms. Meek, but it sounds as if Mr. Steele was trying to protect you. He must have had some concerns about Tom.”

Karen looked up, her eyes narrowed. The hand sporting the diamond went to rest on one hip. While Karen and Sally faced off, I dropped my eyes down and did a quick scan of her desk. Something caught my eye on the edge, but I didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that I was snooping, so I looked back up at Karen.

“Look,” she told us, “Tom is
my
business, not Mike’s, and certainly not yours, even though you all knew each other way back when. He has nothing to do with Mike disappearing.” She sat down at her desk and opened a file. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to prepare for a meeting in a few minutes.”

That was our not-so-subtle signal to leave. Sally started for the door. I went back to the settee and retrieved my tote. Karen ignored us both. Just as I was about to pass Karen’s desk, I turned.

“Karen, would you answer one last question … please?”

She looked up at me with impatience but waited for me to speak. We had definitely hit a nerve by prying about the length of time she’d known Tommy. I put my heavy tote bag down on the edge of the desk.

“What kind of mood was Steele in when he left your house Monday morning?”

“As I recall,” she said in a very professional voice, “Mike was quite cheerful. He was looking forward to his time at the inn and some golf.” She hesitated briefly. “But like I told you on the phone, he was preoccupied with something at the office.” She shrugged. “I asked about it, but all he would tell me was that something was fishy, and he couldn’t put his finger on it.”

There was something
fishy
about the Silhouette trial? My mind wanted to pore over every tidbit of information I knew about the case right then and there, but I didn’t have the time.

“When Steele left here Monday morning, would he have gone to Ojai via 150 or head south to meet up with 33, then north?”

“That’s a different question, Grey.”

I flinched inwardly at the use of my last name. Karen Meek might be a granola do-gooder, as Tim Weber said, but something suddenly told me not to cross her if at all possible. But then, she’d have to be tough to be an advocate for abused children. I had lost sight of that, disarmed by the pearls and Laura Ashley.

Pushing ahead anyway, I rephrased my question. “Which route would he have taken to Ojai?”

Karen Meek released an exaggerated sigh. “Mike would have definitely taken 150. He knew it like the back of his hand.”

During a brief lunch at a place called Ruby’s on State Street, I showed Sally the small piece of paper that just happened to get stuck to the bottom of my tote bag when I placed it on Karen’s desk. It was a telephone message, the white top of a carbon copy set. It noted a call to Karen from Tim Weber and was marked urgent. The call had been made yesterday just after I had seen him at his office.

“This looks pretty suspicious,” Sally commented.

“Absolutely.” I drank some iced tea. “I got the feeling he wasn’t in contact with Karen much, except through Steele. But maybe I got the wrong vibe. Thinking back, he did say something about his hopes for Steele and Karen reconciling not happening now.”

“Do you think he knew about the engagement? Even before she told Steele?”

“Could be. She might have been asking for input on how to tell Steele, but I doubt it. The fact that he made the call to Karen just minutes after I left him makes me think he might have been giving her a heads-up about something.”

Sally mulled it over before speaking. “Or he could have been asking her his own questions about the last time she saw Steele.”

“Could be,” I said again. “There’s no law against Tim Weber calling Karen Meek. After all, they’ve known each other a long time. But the timing of the call and the fact that it’s marked urgent is not sitting well with me. And she seemed awfully fidgety, didn’t she?”

Sally nodded. “Like a cat in a room full of rockers.”

After lunch, we gassed up the Jeep and followed the Mapquest directions through Santa Barbara, Montecito, Summerland, and Carpinteria, until we finally hooked up with 150, heading for Ojai. The road led us past numerous nurseries, farms, and ranches, and wound through groves of various trees—avocados, oranges, lemons, even persimmons hanging like heavy orange orbs in the October sunlight. But it was quite awhile before I spotted any area where a car might have gone off the road and not been noticed.

“How about here?” I asked Sally. She slowed the Jeep down. Fortunately, there was no one behind us.

“I don’t think so, Odelia.” She reached in front of me and pointed out the window. “Look along the road—there’s a fence a few feet back, hidden by the shrubs. If he went off here, he wouldn’t have been able to go far and would have been spotted quickly.”

She was right. We kept moving slowly along Route 150, occasionally pulling into turnouts so that faster-moving vehicles could pass us. Here and there, I made her slow down so we could scan the road and embankment for any sign of skid marks and broken vegetation—but there was nothing. On one stretch of the road, the right side disappeared down into a deep ravine. I had Sally pull the car over so I could get out and check it out more closely.

I walked along the side of the road for a few hundred yards, often walking a few steps into the heavy growth to see if there were any signs of a crash—again, nothing. I was both disappointed and relieved. I also had the beginnings of a sore throat and runny nose. Sally pulled the Jeep up alongside me.

“Even though it’s farmland,” she said through the open window, “it’s still pretty populated and the road too well-traveled for no one to have spotted an accident, especially in the daytime.” Reluctantly, I agreed and climbed back into the vehicle.

“You feeling okay? You’re a little flushed.”

I shrugged. “I might be getting a cold, that’s all.”

I wasn’t in the Jeep long when my cell phone rang, but when I answered all I got was static. Looking at the display, I saw that the call was from Woobie. I tried calling back, but the call kept dropping.

“Wait until we clear this hilly area,” Sally advised. “We’re almost to Ojai.”

The 150 intersected 33 here, and we turned left in the direction of the town of Ojai and, according to the map, the location of the Ojai Valley Inn & Spa.

There was a voice mail on my cell. I quickly connected to it and listened. It was Carl Yates, asking me to call him as soon as possible. His voice didn’t sound excited or upset, just tired. I dialed Carl’s direct line. He picked up on the second ring.

“Hi,” I said into the phone. “It’s me, Odelia. What’s up?”

“It’s Mike Steele,” Carl said, his tone as tired as on the voice mail.

“Did he finally come in?”

“No, Odelia, he didn’t.” He paused, and I stopped breathing, waiting for the worst-case scenario. “But they found his car.” I started breathing again.

“But no Steele?” I grabbed a tissue from my tote bag and wiped my drippy nose.

“No, not a trace of him. The car was found in a parking lot at LAX. His BlackBerry was in the glove compartment.”

“LAX? They found his Porsche at LA International?”

“Yes, in the long-term parking lot for the international terminal. Looks like Mike took a trip.”

After I finished talking to Carl, I turned to Sally and told her about the conversation.

“Do you think maybe he was upset by his ex-wife’s news?” Sally asked. She had pulled into the parking lot of Starr Market while I was on the phone and parked, leaving the car to idle.

I shrugged. “I know a lot about Steele, but I have no clue about his long-term relationships. In fact, I just found out about Karen Meek. All I knew before was that he’d been married once. Steele is hardly the type who wears his heart on his sleeve.” Leaning my elbow on the edge of the car window, I looked out across the parking lot and watched the people walking to and from the store. I thought about what Karen told us: about her upcoming marriage and her desire to put her fiancé on the board of Family Bond. Without turning back to Sally, I said, “Karen said Steele seemed okay with the marriage. She said it was the board appointment of Tommy that got him riled up.”

“It’s definitely puzzling.” Sally paused to take a drink from her bottle of water. “Tommy has built himself a corporate empire. You’d think that would be exactly the type of board member you’d want for a nonprofit—someone who brings experience and good business sense to the table. There must be something else that set your boss off. I got the feeling Karen hasn’t known Tommy long. Maybe that’s it.”

I turned around and faced Sally. “Especially the way she became cold and snippy when you asked her how long she’d known him.” I shook my head in wonder. “Tommy Bledsoe and Steele’s ex-wife, can you believe it?”

Suddenly, remembering something, I reached for my cell phone, punched redial, and once again found myself connected to the office. Ani answered Carl’s extension this time, but Carl came right on the line when she told him it was me on the other end.

“Sorry to bother you, Carl. But when I met with Steele’s ex-wife today, she said Steele told her there was something fishy going on at the office regarding a case. She didn’t say, but I’m assuming it’s the Silhouette matter.” I listened a minute. “Yes, fishy; that was her exact word, not sure if it was Steele’s or not. She said he was preoccupied with it but couldn’t put his finger on the problem. Anything you can think of about Silhouette that you would call
fishy
?” Again, I listened while Carl hemmed and hawed and processed my question.

“Hold on, Odelia, let me shut my door.” I waited. In a few seconds, Carl Yates was back on the phone with me. “There
was
something odd going on, a lot of discrepancies in the information we had initially and the information we have now; almost as if documents had been removed from key files and replaced with documents that are similar but not quite the same.”

“But aren’t those Bates stamped?”

Bates stamping is a form of sequential numbering done to documents produced in litigation cases. It keeps the documents in order and assures the parties that nothing has been omitted or added, and it provides a number for referencing certain documents or pages of documents in other documents.

“Of course, but the strangest thing is, the believed discrepancies stopped as soon as Mike went missing.”

I froze. “Carl, are you telling me you suspect Michael Steele of tampering with trial documents?”

“I don’t know what I’m telling you, Odelia. I just know that Mike is missing, and the documents ready for production seem to be different from when they were initially prepared. Even Joan and Fran are perplexed about it.”

“And now Steele’s car has been found at the airport.” It was a thought I said out loud.

“Exactly. I don’t know yet what’s been going on, but many of the documents we were counting on to prove our case are no longer helpful, and a lot of the originals have gone missing. These were corporate originals, Odelia, sent to Mike by the client, who didn’t have the sense to make copies first or the sense not to send the originals in the first place. With Mike’s sudden disappearance, it isn’t looking very good right now.”

“First of all, Carl, I may not be Steele’s biggest fan, but one thing I know: he’s not crooked, not in the least.”

“I’m not saying he is, Odelia, just that I wish he were here to discuss this with me.” He hesitated. “Odelia, there’s something else; some of the missing documents were found in Mike’s car.”

The information floored me for a second, but I quickly recovered. “Maybe he took them with him to review. Maybe he was making sure no one tampered with them further.”

Carl said nothing, but I could hear him breathing on the other end.

“And secondly,” I said, not waiting for a response, “I don’t buy for a minute that the fastidious Michael Steele parked his beloved Porsche in the general long-term parking lot at LAX. When Steele travels from Los Angeles, he uses a very pricey special garage for his car, and they chauffeur him to the airport and pick him up when he returns.”

“But, Odelia, would Mike care about his car if he wasn’t coming back?”

He had a point.

On the way back to Orange County, I sat silently on my side of the vehicle and mulled over everything Carl had said. The case documents had been tampered with; some of them had been found in Steele’s car at the Los Angeles airport—in the international terminal parking, no less; Steele was missing, now thought to have hopped a plane out of the country. I didn’t buy Steele’s involvement in the fishy business for a heartbeat. If he had those documents in his car, he had a good reason. And, just in case Steele has me fooled and his ethics are as sketchy as the rest of his personality, I don’t think he would have said something to Karen about his concerns about the pending trial. And what about motive? If Steele did tamper with the documents, what would be his purpose? What would he gain to help the other side win and his firm, the firm he held an equity interest in, lose?

“This is just not adding up,” I said to Sally, finally breaking the silence.

Sally nodded in agreement. “It is really odd; much odder than Donny being killed. At least we know the killer’s motive—anyone who knew Donny wanted to kill him.”

Donny—in all the mystery surrounding Steele, I had forgotten about Donny. The scratchiness in my throat had grown. Remembering I had a couple of breath mints in my bag, I pulled them out and popped them in my mouth, hoping they would soothe the dryness.

“Not a good thing, Odelia, especially considering both you and I are still being scrutinized by the police.”

Sally was right, we were still under suspicion; not primary suspects maybe, but not totally out of the woods yet either. I was just about to say something to her when, as if by magic, my phone rang—it was Dev Frye.

“Where are you?” he asked as soon as I answered. “I went by your place, saw your car, but got no answer when I knocked.”

“We’re on 405 south, just passing Long Beach. We went to Santa Barbara today to meet Steele’s ex-wife.”

“We?”

Uh-oh. Dev knew that I was going to investigate Steele’s disappearance, but he had no idea I had teamed up with Sally Kipman to do it.

“Yes, Sally Kipman and I went to Santa Barbara together.”

Silence. I waited it out.

“I didn’t know you and Sally Kipman were pals,” Dev finally said. “I got the definite idea from you that the two of you couldn’t stand each other.”

“We’ve patched things up.”

“I see. So why is she helping you find Steele? I know your firm asked you to check things out, but doesn’t she have a family and a job? Did she know Mike Steele?”

Why did the men in my life ask questions I didn’t want to answer? It was annoying.

“Odelia, are you and Sally Kipman teaming up in the Oliver matter?”