Winters & Somers (5 page)

Probably just adding to the attraction by playing
hard-to-get. What a pity guys like him took their own myths so seriously, that
their attitude extended to helping themselves to other men’s wives.
Despite the funny little quiver that ran on hot
feet up her spine, she knew the man was no good. No one who understood women
well enough to fulfill such feminine needs in his writing yet willingly
jeopardized marriages like good, decent Frank O’Keefe’s could be worth a
moment’s thought.

            Dismissing
J.V. Winters and the slight unease she felt about the man, she returned to the
convention schedule. She was looking for an evening get-together where she
could observe her prey in a social environment and see how he interacted with
other people involved in a similar line of work. Tonight she intended to just
watch – tomorrow, Saturday, there was to be a real knees-up dinner and party at
the hotel for the conventioneers, followed by breakfast meetings Sunday morning
and then it was home time for everyone.

            She
dug her phone from her bag and lying back on the soft, comfortable bed, pressed
a familiar number. Granny Somers answered after a few rings, demanding to know
what her darling girl was doing out of the city and down south, where everybody
knew there were only savages. Cíara grinned at the feisty old woman’s sharp
tongue, explained that she was on a case and expected to be back in Dublin late
Monday if all went well, Tuesday otherwise.

She repeated the name of the bed and breakfast
she was staying in – which brought a hoot of laughter from the other end of the
phone – and waited as Granny wrote down the phone numbers, admonished her to be
sure to eat her roughage and not talk to strange men unless they were really
rich and attractive.

Grace Muldoon and Granny Somers would probably be
the best of buddies, Cíara thought and then shuddered at the prospect of having
the two of them running her life, and she made a mental note to never let the
pair meet.

            Next,
she phoned the Walters agency and left a message for her client that she was in
Waterford and the investigation was underway. Lying back on the bed was a
mistake. The comfort level was too high, the siren call of a quick nap too
strong to resist. Two hours later she awoke with a start, the room in
semi-darkness and her limbs chilled as the temperature dropped. Two sounds had
brought her back to consciousness – the irritable clanking of elderly radiator
pipes warming up as hot water traveled through them, and another, less
comforting sound that froze the blood in her veins.

 Grace Muldoon was an opera fan. At least, when
she was singing herself. Her rendition from La Bohême jolted Cíara into full
and ungrateful wakefulness. Checking her watch, she had just enough time to
tart herself up and head back to the Tara Bay Hotel to join a bunch of wealthy
jewelers in a night out on the tiles.

            She
slipped quietly down the darkened stairs, not wishing to interrupt her landlady
in full flow of an aria, when a sudden silence made her pause on the bottom
step. The silence didn’t last – a voice bawled: “And where do you think you’re
going, all dolled up like that? What would yer mother say if she could see her
girl child going out half-naked?”

            And
suddenly Cíara felt like a fourteen year old sneaking out for a first, illicit
date. She slowly turned to face a glowering Grace Muldoon.

            “Well,
girl?”

            “It’s
all the fashion rage at the moment, Mrs. Muldoon – and it’s really quite
decent,” Cíara said, twirling around to show off the more modest of the two
evening dresses she’d brought with her. This one was a little black number –
with the emphasis on little – with tiny cut-out triangles at strategic places
and a tight skirt with a side slit that stopped decently just below her
high-cut briefs.

            “That’s
all the rage? It’s positively indecent, it is. And where would you be going?”
the older woman demanded, eyes still flashing.

            Cíara
considered making a story up on the spur of the moment. Something nice and
safe, involving a fiancé and a clutch of protective friends and maybe future
wedding bells. But looking at her landlady, now dressed in shocking pink silk
with a green baseball cap turned around on her orange hair, she gave up. Most
women would find her real mission incredible and would settle for the fairy
tale security. Not Grace Muldoon.

            “Listen,
Grace,” she said. She moved closer to the other woman and conspiratorially
slipped one of her Somers Private Inquiry Agency cards from her purse. She
watched in silence as Grace speed-read the words on the beige card. “I’m here
on a case, you see – there’s a guy that some people think may not be all he’s
cracked up to be, and he’s at the Tara Bay Hotel at a jewelers' convention….”
She let the words trail off; hoping that she could make her escape while Grace
digested the information.
Fat chance.

            “You’re
on an undercover assignment? Never did have much truck with jewelers, so I hope
you get him dead to rights. Me wedding band turned me finger green, it did, and
my Joe, God rest his soul,  had to go in and threaten to knock the jeweler down
before he’d replace it with something proper, and for the same price, too.  A
bunch of feckin’ crooks, they are.” Grace paused, her eyes widening with
excitement. “If you wait a minute, I can be ready and come with you – backup,
like they say on the TV. It’s not right for a young girl like yerself to be on
a nasty job like this unprotected….”

            Cíara
gulped and quickly assured Grace that she would be in crowded public places at
all times and there was no question of danger. She had to leave right now or
she’d be late. Then she whizzed out the door and literally ran to the Beast to
make her getaway before Grace could come up with any further arguments. Not
that she would have the last word.

            “You
make sure you wear a coat over that dress, young lady – you’ll catch yer
death.” Grace’s voice rang out over the roar of the Beast, the lecture trailing
her down the bumpy driveway like exhaust fumes.

            The
Tara Bay Hotel had lots of style, lots of class, and lots of very wealthy,
beautiful people gliding around its marble-floored foyer. Cíara hovered on the
edge of the crowd, wondering how to slip unnoticed in to the ‘Get to Know You’
social evening that the jewelry trade convention was hosting.

Grace
had
been right about one thing – her
outfit was a problem, but not in the way the outspoken landlady had meant. The
sexy little dress was missing one vital accessory – a wealth of genuine jewels
that seemed obligatory. The women here were walking showcases for the jewelry
trade and she felt positively naked by comparison.

But her momentary pang of jealousy was followed
by a big gust of relief not to be walking around with thousands of Euros around
her neck, wrists, ears, and anywhere else expensive jewelry could be displayed.
She grinned as she imagined strolling along to her favorite pub in North
Dublin, dressed like that – she wouldn’t get five yards before all that lovely
shiny stuff was in someone else’s greedy paws!

            Still,
the difference in dress code was going to make it a little harder for her to
blend in and sashay into the main room where the social event was taking place
– especially as she had to cross the broad foyer under the watchful eyes of the
desk staff and, she suspected, a crowd of gimlet-eyed security people. She
stood out like a sore thumb without all those shiny baubles.

             “Dah-rling!
Where have you been all my life!”? Cíara jumped as a big, bear-like young man
threw his arm around her as if they were long-lost lovers. Exclaiming in a
decidedly foreign accent, he risked his life as he pinched her bottom and
breathed whisky into her face. On the brink of a Vesuvius-type explosion, she
held in check her impulse to punch him on the nose as she realized that here
was her ticket to the ball.

Despising herself but saying it was just this one
job, after all, she gushed: “Oh, honey, I’ve just been waiting around for you!”
Then she firmly linked her arm with his, grinning to herself at the slightly
bemused expression on his face as they strolled towards the party.

            His
companions proved to be a good-natured enough crowd, if well on the rocky path
to inebriation. She sat with them for a few minutes, gracefully accepting the
champagne the young man toasted her with. But when he seemed to think that
theirs was the budding romance of the century instead of a two-minute stand,
she worried that he would be too hard to dislodge when her real prey showed up.

So she announced that she simply had to visit the
little girls' room. He stood up politely as she left and, with a good-humored
shrug, turned to chat to the woman on his other side, leaving her just a little
peeved at being so quickly replaced in the dating game. A game that was
beginning in earnest for her.

Over by the bar she caught a flash of rich blond
hair, shoulder length on a dark, silk-mix dinner suit. The price of the suit
alone would have provided multiple exhaust transplants for Cíara's sporty
little car. She opened her purse and took a surreptitious look at the
photograph, fixing the face again in her mind, before gliding closer and closer
to her quarry.

Slender, almost delicately built, the young man
was shorter than she had imagined but his face was every bit as attractive as
in the photograph, with an intense, green-eyed sensuality. Seeing the pretty
girl to whom he was chatting, she thought perhaps Serena McLaughlin was a lot
shrewder than she’d given her credit for in wanting to know how the man she
loved might cope with a barrage of temptation. Watching Anton Wallace flirt
with the wide-eyed redhead at the bar, she reckoned his temptability quotient
was pretty low.

            She signaled the
barman and ordered a mineral water with lemon, keeping a beady eye on her prey
from beneath sedately lowered lashes. She was close enough to see the fine
lines around his mouth and appreciate the impact his green gaze was having on
the woman. Not much resistance there, she thought, wondering if she shouldn’t
just let nature take its course. If the couple left together, she could follow
them, see if they went to his or hers, or if they parted very formally at the
foot of the stairs.

           
Yeah,
and maybe you could shin up the ivy outside and take photographs of them in
flagrante delecto,
a mocking voice piped up in her head. ‘Cos, short of
actually being in the room, there was no way she could prove that anything
other than a business discussion took place between the two. And Walters had
stressed it had to be concrete proof, or firsthand testimony of intent….

            Cíara
briefly wondered if she wouldn’t be happier in another line of work.
Any
other line of work.

            Then
her cheeks warmed as she realized Wallace and his companion were looking right
at her, returning her stare. There was nothing else for it but to lower her lashes
delicately and flutter them around a little in a minor come-hither way. Maybe
she could report that her advances had been ignored, not mention the other
woman who had her claws into the man, collect her check and walk away?

           
But
you were hired to get the truth….oh, would you ever shut up!
She snapped at
her conscience, and wondered if holding two-way conversations with one’s self
was a sign of stress or an indicator of incipient madness. Either way, when she
raised her eyes again it was to see Wallace smiling at her and raising his
glass, while the woman next to him had lost her pretty pout as she glared
daggers at this unwanted competition.

            Then
the woman’s glare turned murderous as her companion, without a word in her
direction, smiled winningly at Cíara and strolled the short gap that divided
them to come to rest directly in front of her.

            “Surely
you’re not here all alone?” he asked, his voice a soft purr with a distinctive
South African roll to it. She lowered her eyelids again as indecision flooded
through her - everything was happening faster than she’d expected and with a
lot less effort on her part. Should she cool things off or, as her Granny
Somers often advocated, go with the flow?

            She
looked up again to see her beau was quite charmed by her apparently modest
confusion and lowered eyes.
Chauvinist bloody pig,
she thought, all the
while smiling shyly. “Yes, I’m all alone. I guess my date didn’t show,” she
improvised, mentally promising to drop some hard cash into the church poor box
by way of contrition for all her lies.

Sometimes it disturbed her that she could lie so
easily.

            “Well,
I guess his stupidity is my good fortune.” Her new companion smiled sexily.

Ooooh, this one was a smooth one, a real charmer.

“Shall we see if we can
find a seat away from this mob?” Anton asked, grasping her elbow and
maneuvering her towards a table in a shadowed corner of the room. As she
allowed herself to be pulled in his direction, she caught a quick glimpse of
the face of the woman he’d abandoned. If looks could kill, Cíara would be
knocking on the pearly gates right about now.