Snoops in the City (A Romantic Comedy) Page 3

  “It was an accident,” he murmured, his attention on the khaki-clad figure hurrying toward the parking lot. As he watched, she grew smaller and smaller.

  “They happen.” The mayor lowered her voice to a whisper. “But if you’re not careful, I know a guy named Guido who breaks legs for a living.”

  Her words registered and he turned from the woman in the distance to Mayor Black. She winked at him before walking away.

  Morrison sidled up next to him. A quiet, unassuming guy, the Tax Assessor had wire-rimmed glasses and dark-brown hair that fell into his face. Grady suspected his office was dirtier than a pigsty, but hadn’t managed to get close enough to Morrison to determine whether the Assessor accepted bribes for tax breaks.

  Grady dredged up his I-want-to-be-friends smile. Morrison failed to return it.

  “If you’re smart, you’ll stay on the mayor's good side,” he advised in a soft voice.

  Morrison moved away as quickly as he’d appeared, sending Grady's thoughts off to the races. What did that mean? His gaze shifted to the parking lot, but the woman was gone. He rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  Was his part in the sting operation making him paranoid? Morrison could simply have been warning him that the not-so-benevolent mayor of Seahaven held grudges.

  Even if Mayor Black had gotten suspicious of all the bribe money he'd handed out, it seemed too much of a stretch to conclude that the woman in the floppy hat was connected to her. Then again, the mayor had prevented him from interrogating the woman by stepping in front of him.

  Grady headed for the eighteenth green, trying to put the woman in the floppy hat out of his mind. She wouldn’t go.

  Neither would the thought that the mayor or somebody else in City Hall had hired the woman to find out if Grady were as corrupt as he seemed.

  CHAPT ER FOUR

  Careful to keep the front door of Grady Palmer's house in view, Tori crouched low in the driver’s seat of her silver Volkswagen.

  Thanks to chapters two and three of So, You Want to be a PI, she had a better handle on what it took to be a good snoop.

  Appearing innocuous topped the list.

  She'd failed on that account at the golf course, but she couldn't blame herself for emerging from the cover of the fat man to save the mayor from the golf ball.

  She'd made up her mind to become a good PI, not a bad samaritan.

  She took heart that her covert operation had been successful up to that point. Stumbling across the newspaper item about Grady Palmer participating in a charity golf tournament had been a stroke of luck of which she took full advantage.

  She'd thought on her feet when there had been a handful of fans following Grady and company around the course rather than the legion she'd imagined. She hadn't joined the gallery until Grady's foursome teed off on the seventeenth hole and then kept carefully out of sight.

  She'd meant to get a sense of how he conducted himself in a competitive situation, but the errant golf ball had ruined that opportunity.

  So she was back to surveillance, applying the same see-but-not-seen principle she'd used since she began following him. Instead of parking in front of the subject's well-tended house, she'd set up down the block and across the street.

  He lived in a modest neighborhood of older single-family homes in the southern part of Seahaven, about a dozen blocks from where the bay wound around a finger of land and merged into the Intracoastal Waterway.

  She found it interesting that he lived here when he could afford something in one of Seahaven's pricier communities. With some digging into public records, she'd discovered that Palmer Construction was thriving. But maybe his little white house, with its surrounding ficus hedges, palmetto trees and flowering plants, charmed him. It certainly had that effect on her.

  She pulled out her notebook.

  Either Grady has a gardener or a green thumb, she wrote. She frowned, crossed out Grady and substituted Palmer. So, You Want to be a PI strongly advised against getting too close to a subject.

  A ring sounded, startling her so much her elbow bumped the car horn. It pealed in concert with what she realized was her cell phone. She jerked her elbow back from the horn and fished the phone from her purse, nervously looking up and down the still-deserted street. All clear.

  “Hello,” she whispered into the phone.

  “Hey, doll.”

  “If anybody besides you called me that, I’d have to hurt them,” she told her cousin Eddie.

  He laughed. "How's it going?"

  "I've decided to be the best PI I can be," she announced. "Who knows? Maybe I have a knack for this. Maybe this is the career I've been waiting for."

  "Stranger things have happened," he said, "So, listen—"

  "Want to know where I am?" she interrupted. "On the subject's street. I have him under surveillance."

  "As long as you're driving a rental car instead of that conspicuous Beetle of yours, sounds like you've got it covered," he said. "Now as I was saying—"

  Tori barely listened as she took stock of the Volkswagen Beetle her father had bought her six months ago. He'd done it over her protests, insisting he'd sleep easier knowing she had a car in good working condition. Surely Eddie was wrong. Yeah, it sported a yellow smiley face as an antenna topper but the car was silver, not red or yellow.

  "—so don't be surprised if you get a call," Eddie finished.

  The front door to Grady Palmer’s house opened and the man himself stepped out. He’d changed into khakis and a cream-colored shirt that complemented his coloring better than the yellow one he’d worn on the golf course.

  He strolled rather than strutted, as though nothing were so important that it couldn’t wait. He seemed to look in her direction as he walked to the black SUV parked in his driveway. She sank lower behind the steering wheel.

  "A call from who?" Tori asked.

  "The client. She's going to call you for an update."

  “But I told her I’d call her,” Tori protested.

  Grady — no, Palmer — had disappeared inside the SUV. She heard the engine turn over and the vehicle roar to life.

  “She says she can’t wait," Eddie claimed.

  The SUV pulled away from the curb. Tori cradled the phone against her shoulder and started her car. “I can’t—”

  “Gotta go. Busy, busy, busy,” Eddie said.

  “Eddie, don’t you dare hang up on me!” she shouted into the phone, but he'd already rung off.

  No sooner had she disconnected than the phone rang again. Tori answered while being careful not to follow too closely behind Palmer’s SUV. Her paperback advocated keeping two car lengths behind the subject at all times.

  Tori answered the call. “Hello.”

  “Hello, Jane. Ms. M here,” the caller announced.

  "Who's Jane?" Tori asked.

  "You are. You told me I could call you that," Ms. M said, and Tori remembered with an internal groan the older woman comparing her to Jane Bond. “What have you found out?”

  She’d discovered quite a lot. She knew that Grady Palmer was twenty-eight years old and that he’d never been married. He'd grown up in Seahaven the son of Paul and Beth Ann Palmer and had a 21-year-old sister Lorelei.

  He’d gotten a traffic ticket for going sixty in a 45 mile-per-hour zone five years ago and purchased his home for nearly two hundred thousand dollars three years ago. As far as Tori could determine, he lived alone in that home.

  But she didn’t know anything pertinent except that Grady Palmer's life centered on work. He’d gone back to the office today after the golf tournament even though it was Friday. In the five days she’d followed him, this marked the first time he’d stepped out for the evening.

  “This isn’t the best time for me to talk,” she said as Palmer took a left turn down another residential street that featured more swaying palmetto trees and unpretentious but well-kept homes.

  She turned too, trying to keep her distance.

  “Why not?” Ms. M asked.

&
nbsp; An ambulance siren blared in the distance, growing louder, then fainter.

  “You’re following him, aren’t you?” Ms. M asked excitedly. “You’re following him right now!”

  Palmer turned left and so did Tori. Where was the man headed? They’d probably traveled a mile and he’d yet to leave the neighborhood.

  “That ambulance you heard, that was the television,” Tori fibbed. “I’m watching. . . an ER re-run.”

  “You are not,” Ms. M said indignantly. “ER isn’t on Friday nights.”

  “Okay. You’re right." Tori followed suit as her subject made another right turn. “I didn’t want to tell you I was following him because the investigation is in the preliminary stages. It’s better if I wait until I can give you a full report."

  Ms. M ignored her rational plea to be left alone. “What’s he doing?”

  He was stopping his SUV and getting out. Tori slammed on her brakes, which squeaked in protest. Only then did she realize the last road they'd turned down ended at a seawall.

  “I’ve gotta go,” she told Ms. M.

  “But—”

  Tori rang off, desperately trying to figure out what to do. Leave. Yes, she should hightail it out of there. She was about to put the car in reverse when Grady Palmer tapped on the glass of the driver's-side window.

  For a man who looked like he never hurried, he sure moved fast.

  Her hand gripped the automatic gear shift, and she positioned her foot to stomp down on the gas pedal. What should she do? Stay and face the subject of her surveillance or make like the wind? She simply couldn't decide.

  When he settled one hand on the roof of the car and tapped more insistently on the window, he made the decision for her. If she pulled away now, she might run over his foot.

  Swallowing her nervousness, she hit the button that automatically lowered the window. He leaned down so that his face was only a foot or so from hers.

  His photographic image didn’t do the flesh-and-blood item justice. His hair was a more interesting shade of brown, his eyes a richer blue and his mouth was to kiss for. Really, the man had a ridiculously sensuous mouth. His upper lip bowed in the center and his lower lip was plump and lush.

  She tore her gaze from his mouth before her own started salivating. She reminded herself she'd never been a sucker for a handsome face, even if it did contain a killer mouth, and forced herself to concentrate on getting out of her predicament.

  “May I help you?” she asked good-naturedly, the way she used to at the bar before she'd been fired.

  “You'll want this,” he said in a voice so low and rich it could have belonged to a late-night disc jockey. He handed her a piece of thick white card stock.

  She automatically took it, turning it over to see embossed printing and a flowery script her nerves prevented her from reading.

  “It’s an invitation to Mayor Black’s party,” he supplied. “It's a thank you for participating in the golf tournament. The directions to her place are on the back.”

  She examined the card more closely, discovering that it was indeed a party invitation. She felt her brows knit. She

  couldn’t think clearly. Not with him so close. It wasn’t yet full dark but felt that way with him positioned by the window, blocking what little light remained of the day.

  “I don’t understand why you gave me this,” she said.

  “That’s where I’m going.”

  Tori's heart hammered but she concentrated on sounding blasé. “Why would I care where you're going?”

  His dark eyebrows, which were of an ideal shape and thickness, rose.

  “I’m being considerate,” he said. “You're not very good at following. Sooner or later, you were going to lose me.”

  That could be true, but he didn't have to rub it in. Couldn't he see that she was trying here?

  “What makes you think I would have lost you?” she asked indignantly. He cocked an eyebrow. Whoops. “I mean, why would I be following you?”

  “You can explain at the party. No reason we shouldn't go together since we're both headed to the same place."

  Her mouth gaped open. This was bad. Very, very bad. Private detectives did not attend parties on the muscular arms of their subjects.

  “I can't go with you," she protested. "We're strangers."

  "Then maybe you should tell me your name."

  “Tori Whitley,” she said before it occurred to her that she should have exercised her right to remain silent. Or at least used an alias.

  “I'm Grady Palmer, but you already knew that."

  Even if her denial hadn't stuck in her throat, she doubted he'd believe it. He'd gotten six feet from her car when he called over his shoulder, "I'll see you at the party. If you lose me, you have the directions.”

  CH APTER FIVE

  Tori spent the drive to Mayor Honoria Black's house trying to dream up a legitimate excuse for following Grady Palmer. She came up with a big blank.

  Okay, then. An excuse might not be the way to go. Outright denial sounded like a better strategy.

  "Me, follow you?" She placed her hand on her breastbone and affected a fluttering laugh. "You're sadly mistaken, sir."

  Like that would work, she thought with a roll of her eyes.

  She hadn't come up with anything better when cars parked on the street and in the circular driveway of a sprawling contemporary alerted her they'd arrived at their destination.

  Located in a pricey enclave of homes that hugged the Intracoastal Waterway, the Mediterranean-style house had a multi-level stucco exterior in pale coral and a barrel-tile roof in a slightly darker shade.

  Dramatic ground-level spotlights highlighted the forty-foot-tall palm trees in the front yard and shone on the covered, double-door entry. Every arched window was illuminated from within, attesting to a party going on.

  Tori had heard homeowners in this part of Seahaven acquired older waterfront houses, demolished them and replaced them with pricier versions.

  Although she thought it a shame to tear down history, she couldn't help admiring the dynamic, resourceful, self-made mayor.

  A recent profile in the Seahaven Gazette told of the killing the mayor had made investing commissions she earned as a Realtor into property she later resold at a substantial profit.

  If private investigation didn't work out, Tori thought as she parked behind Grady's SUV, maybe she should consider a career in real estate.

  She wiped her damp palms on her slacks. She needed to stop this nonsense about taking up an alternative career and concentrate on convincing Grady he had it wrong.

  She might even manage to turn a negative into a positive. Taking a man's measure had to be easier face to face instead of in the shadows observing from afar.

  Besides, by process of elimination, she had to be good at something. Why not PI work?

  “You're full of surprises," he said when she joined him in front of the house. He'd jammed his hands in the pockets of his khakis, lending him a deceptively casual air. "I didn't think you'd come."

  Not coming had been an option? She'd been so rattled that hadn't occurred to her. But fleeing would only have made him more suspicious.

  "I'm not exactly dressed for a party." Her slacks and blouse were of good quality but were both brown. She would have worn the more correct black, the better to blend into the surroundings, but the color caused her to look washed out.

  “You look great to me." His eyes skimmed over her, and her pulse skittered. “That’s not what I meant. I wasn’t sure you’d come now that I know you’ve been following me.”

  Her time of reckoning had arrived.

  "I need to set you straight about that." She only had to tilt her head back slightly to meet his eyes, which surprised her. He seemed larger than life but probably fell just shy of six feet. "I wasn't following you."

  “Is that why you took off at the golf course when you saw me coming?”

  Oh, no. She'd thought the floppy hat and sunglasses had kept him from recognizing h
er. Start bluffing, a shrill voice inside her head screamed. Now.

  “That had nothing to do with you.” She airily waved a hand. “I left because the event was almost over.”

  He didn’t reply. She nervously chewed her bottom lip, thinking she should elaborate to make her story more believable.

  "There wasn’t much more to see," she said.

  Still no response.

  “And I remembered something else I had to do.”

  Was that suspicion she saw in his beautiful eyes?

  “Something vitally important,” she clarified. There. That should allay his distrust. Except he still looked puzzled. “I needed. . . to feed my cat."

  Oh, great. Had she really said that?

  “She gets hungry if she’s home alone too long.”

  He tilted his head quizzically. “Why don’t you leave food out for her?”

  “Because. . . I don’t want her to stuff herself. You know what they say about a number of small meals a day being healthier than one large meal.”

  “I thought cats stopped eating when they were full.”

  “Not this cat.” She spread her hands wide. “This is one fat cat.”

  “As interesting as all this is,” he said slowly, “we were talking about you following me.”

  Adrenaline rushed through her like river water after a storm, and she recognized it as the fight or flight instinct. Flee, her mind screamed.

  She nodded toward the etched glass front door. The muffled laughter and music behind it sounded like salvation. “We should go inside so we don't miss out on the fun."

  “Not until we straighten this out,” he said, and she looked wildly about for help. A car door slammed somewhere down the block, but they were alone on the front lawn. “I want to know why I’ve seen you four times in the past few days.”

  “You couldn’t have,” she cried. She’d adhered to the instructions in the paperback to a T, donning dark glasses, being careful not to get within twenty yards of him, sticking to the shadows.

  “Let’s count them." He held up one hand, then raised his thumb before unfolding his fingers one by one. “At the post office, across the street from Palmer Construction, at the golf course and in my neighborhood. How do you explain that?”