Current Affairs (Tiara Investigations Mysteries) Read online

  Victoria spoke up. “We don’t do binders.”

  “And the write-up from the background check?”

  “We don’t do background checks.” I was still twisted in my seat to address her. “We stick to who’s, I mean what’s, happening today. And, Mrs. Kent, with your husband being on the police force, he might find out a background check had been run on him.”

  She took this into consideration, but still gave a hrmph.

  Tara continued to pat our client. “We help people.”

  Gina glanced at her handbag containing the photos as if to say, “Oh, yeah, you help people all right.” She shrugged Tara off and huffed out of the car. “I hope I can find my way home from here.” She looked around.

  “Are you going to be all right? We can drive to your house, and you can follow us, just to be sure you get home okay. ” That’s Tara, nice to the end. I had started the car, and Vic was texting someone.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  We watched her pull out of the parking lot and turn in the opposite direction of her house.

  Tara banged her head a couple of times on the headrest. “Arghhh! We really did start Tiara Investigations to help women who can’t afford big-time detective agencies.”

  She paused for confirmation and I gave it right away. “Yeah! When your marriage was all over but the shouting, you paid an ungodly sum to the one you used. A lot of women can’t afford that.”

  I would like to write that achieving a money-making detective agency with a one hundred percent success rate, if I do say so myself, is due to brilliance, courage, and skill. Our little detective agency has all that—well, to some degree—but truth be told, much of our business growth is due to our pricing structure. When we first started, we were cheap. Not value priced. I mean blue light, final clearance cheap. Our billing plan is simple. We charge by the hour, not the day. The client calls us, and we leave immediately for the restaurant, hotel, bar, whatever. This seems to be empowering for her, usually a her, and she saves money. This manner of doing business has also made it possible for us to keep up our double lives as wives, or in Tara’s case girlfriend, and private detectives.

  Victoria turned to face Tara in the back seat. “To be fair, we had another motive for starting our own detective agency. We’re going to be fifty pretty soon, and we knew if we didn’t make some changes we would never have the lives we wanted.”

  Tara reached between the seats to our shoulders. “If I’m honest about it, revenge played a teensy part for me. Infidelity comes with a side order of gas lighting. That’s what hurt the most. If we could spare some woman, somewhere, that torment, we had to go for it.”

  I pulled onto Lawrenceville-Suwanee Road. “Did you see her slip the photos in her bag?”

  “Should we have told her we always give the client the photos?” Victoria looked up from her phone. “And how did she know about binders and background checks?”

  “She’s not new at this.” It was such a nice crisp and clear day that I opened the sunroof.

  “Something tells me, neither is he,” Tara said.

  We left without eating, which is not like us, but giving that kind of news ruins one’s appetite. Anyway, we needed spa therapy in the worst way. With our first few cases we realized we had to do something to let the case go emotionally. High Hill Day Spa fits the bill nicely. I feel myself relax when the hostess parts the ornate walnut double doors. Once inside, where new age music seems to have turned all the walls lavender, you’re escorted to a dressing room and handed your beverage of choice. All the estheticians are friendly. In Hartfield Hills no points (or big tips) are given for pretentiousness.

  We developed a post-case routine of Tara calling her boyfriend and Victoria calling her husband. I e-mail The General. We tell them we love them and hear them say the same. The facials make us look really good, and two of the three of us have sex that night. After Victoria’s comment the day before, I wouldn’t swear on a stack of Bibles that she had continued that part. At the time of this case we drank heavily at the spa. This particular day, Tara’s breakfast had been coffee. You see where I’m going.

  Ronald, our favorite masseur, came in for my deep tissue massage and closed the door. “I can’t believe you three are private detectives. I had no idea.”

  If our own husbands don’t know, how would our rubdown-divine-being pick up that little fact? No one knows but our clients and the jurors in the two cases that went to court. I jerked up, forgetting about my current state, which was naked.

  “Tara just told me about the case with the police detective. Good for you!”

  “Ronald, she should not have told you about that. Please promise me you won’t tell anyone.” He gave me his word, and that was good enough for me. If you can’t trust a masseur, who can you trust?

  From the massage table to the manicurist I went, following in Tara’s wake. The manicurist congratulated me on the case, as did Sherry when I got my pedicure. I didn’t call Tara’s cell phone because I was tipsy myself. In the limousine ride home, I talked to Tara about the need for confidentiality.

  Victoria was scrubbing some kind of exotic oil off her glasses. “You would think it’s okay to drink at a spa but not a tattoo parlor. Anywho, I think our rule should be, no more drinking on spa days.”

  “Ooooh, it wasn’t the drinks, it was the massage. Or maybe the combination. After the first half hour I just started chattering.”

  The combination was lethal and not consistent with real P.I. behavior, besides being inconsiderate to our clients. We agreed to hold each other to our no-drinking-while spa-ing rule.

  The headband the facialist used had left Tara’s bangs sticking straight up, and she started working on calming them down. “No binders, no background checks, no bullets, and now no booze. Got it!”

  We were feeling pretty good about our new, more professional way of doing business. Until we saw the Ford Escort sitting in my driveway, that is.

  Victoria pointed to her gold wristwatch and arched her right eyebrow.

  Tara shook her head, no. There hadn’t been time for him to learn about us from the spa and get over here.

  I tapped my wedding band. They both gave one nod, yes. It hadn’t taken much detective work to figure out that his wife had confronted him, and when he demanded she tell him how she knew, she had sung like a canary.

  We got out of the limo, and I tipped the driver a fifty. Detective Kent walked towards us. He looked mad as hell. “So you three are private investigators?” There was a beat between each word, never a good sign.

  At Buford Dam I had noted his looks well enough to match him up with our photograph. My attention was focused on who he was with. Now I took a closer look. The detective was taller than average, slim build, and every blond hair in place. I would guess mid-forties. He enunciated each syllable, wreaking havoc on his Southern accent. The wind was blowing, and as he spoke he had to keep turning to protect his hair. We three circled to keep up with the pivoting of this human weather vane.

  “I’d like to see your license.” We invited him to come inside and wait while I got the folder with our documentation. Abby was barking and jumping in her excitement to see me, as well as Tara and Victoria. The detective, not so much.

  He started to climb the stairs after me, and Tara stopped him, “We can wait down here while Leigh goes up to get what you want.” The look he gave her and then Victoria would have done Clint Eastwood proud. He was loaded for bear, but so was Tara. He did wait downstairs. When I looked down the staircase from the top he was staring up at me. I loosened the death grip I had on the mahogany banister, went into my home office and closed the door. I leaned back against it and almost fainted. I’m not the kind of person that has to be liked by everyone I meet. Because I don’t talk about myself very much and I don’t walk around smiling like a jackass chewing briars, I put up with a certain amount of being misunderstood. I wasn’t afraid, but I felt dread when I thought about his expression. It fell short of hate but hurt just as much. He was dismissive of Tiara Investigations. Something else occurred to me. If he was mad at what we had learned about him, what if he found out that half of the city’s beauty industry knew it also?

  Holding the folders of test results, certificates and letters, I really wished I had photocopies. I put my ear up to the door and listened. All was quiet in the foyer so I sent the documents through the copier as quick as they would go. I took a deep breath and hurried back downstairs to my friends.

  Detective Kent went through the folder, tossing each sheet over as he scanned. His manner and the looks he shot us said that as much as we disgusted him, everything was in order.

  “I could have told you it would be. Everything this woman owns is alphabetized. She’s the only person I know that has a rental car washed before she returns it.” Though I couldn’t really see the relevance of Tara’s last flattering remark, I started to relax a little because of her confidence in me.

  On his way out he turned to me. “Your problem is you know nothing about romance.”

  I never expected such a personal comment from him. Maybe it’s contagious, because I never expected a personal comment out of my own mouth either. “The three of us have forgotten more about love than you will ever know.”

  “So what case are you working on now?”

  “Oh, we’re looking for Jimmy Hoffa’s baby. Wish us luck.”

  He squinted at me. “Wouldn’t that be the Lindbergh …?” Better late than never, he realized it was a joke and stalked out, leaving the front door open like he was raised in a barn.

  We watched through the living room window, and Victoria spoke first. “A regular fashionisto.” He was wearing stovepipe jeans and a short leather jacket, not a good look for someone so short-waisted.

 
Tara walked away from the window. “He thinks he has a nice butt.”

  I led them to the kitchen and got the tea pitcher out of the refrigerator. “So we’ve learned a second lesson for the day. Number one was, do not get drunk in a tattoo parlor or a day spa. Number two, never trust a scared person.”

  “Scared? I didn’t get the impression she was abused, did you?” Victoria reached for a packet of stevia.

  I handed her an ice tea spoon. “No, afraid of losing him.”

  Tara pointed at me with Vic’s spoon. “If you ask me, it was Stockholm syndrome that made her tell him about us. He’s supposed to be the bad guy, and she sided with him.”

  Since then, either he’s following us, or it’s just a coincidence that we run into him almost daily.

  ~

  That afternoon we played golf and started three new cases. One concerned the subject of this statement, the very dead Mr. Taylor.

  Most Thursday afternoons you can find us on the golf course. We don’t know if we are any good at golf or not because we don’t usually keep score past the first hole. If I had to guess I’d say we’re probably not that good. According to our rules you can pick up your ball if you have to go to the bathroom, if you make a bad shot, if the snack cart comes by, if you’re too hot and you wish the snack cart would come by, if you either get or remember you need to make a phone call and you have to sneak your cell phone out of your bag, if you forget how many strokes you’ve taken, if you have taken too many strokes, if you thought you had taken your turn and you hadn’t, if you just then notice another player is wearing a new outfit, if a famous actress dies, or if the stock market dips. Anyway, it helps us finish nine holes in a reasonable amount of time.

  Kelly Taylor’s call to our business line was transferred to my cell phone as we drove our carts to the third hole. These calls have a distinctive ring that Victoria downloaded onto our phones, so the others knew to, first, hide me from any pesky marshal that might be driving around trying to enforce course rules, and second, only have professional sounding noises in the background. We agreed to meet her at Cracker Barrel at five o’clock. I was wrapping up the conversation, so Tara went to the red marker to tee off. Mrs. Taylor had one more question for me, “By the way, what is your hourly rate?”

  “Fore!” Tara says this each time she tees off just in case.

  “Four hundred an hour? That’s fine. I’ll see you this afternoon.”

  “Wait, I, I …,” but she had hung up.

  And just like that our fee went from one hundred an hour to four hundred.

  Two

  Continuation of statement by Leigh Reed. The three of us arrived at the Cracker Barrel before our client, Kelly Taylor. I found a parking space near the entrance to this little piece of heaven. The asphalt lot was surrounded by contrived landscaping. The trees were mathematically equidistant from each other, and the leaves were burgundy, orange, gold, and salmon. Along the front porch the world’s most comfortable rocking chairs were lined up. I guess management’s afraid they would be stolen, because they’re bolted down. Mingled in with the plain rocking chairs were a few with the University of Georgia Bulldog insignia and two church pews.

  When Kelly Taylor approached the table, I stood up and shook her hand. She was African-American, and I noticed she was about my height. She looked me in the eye, and her handshake was firm. She wasn’t embarrassed to be there. No wife should be; the husband is the one who should be mortified. I liked her right away. Later, looking at her seated, she seemed, well, shorter and smaller. That day her hair was pulled back in a chignon, and she wore tiny pearl earrings. That’s pretty much how the rest of the meeting went, my impression of her switching back and forth. Some of her mannerisms reinforced a demure façade, and some contradicted. One minute she was hard and tough as steel, and then with the next glance you thought she was going to cry. Who was the real Kelly Taylor?

  I started the interview by asking her to tell us about her husband. “He’s thirty-three years old, four years older than me. He’s very intelligent. He owns his own consulting firm.”

  She said she loved him even though he was not romantic or demonstrative. When asked to give a more complete physical description, she had to think for a few seconds. Me, I can describe every hair on The General’s head. Still, she claimed to be in love with him.

  As I went about getting the information we needed to begin a case, I noticed she was pulling back into her chair. This made me wonder if I was coming across like I was grilling her. That was certainly not my intent. I stopped speaking, knowing that one of my colleagues would pick up on this.

  Victoria took over. “What has made you suspect your husband of being up to no good?”

  “Sometimes when I come into a room and he’s on the telephone, he hangs up.”

  “Anything else?” I was glad Vic asked this because I hate wild goose chases.

  “David used to work in his home office about half the time. In the last few months he’s been spending more and more time at his office in Peachtree Corners. Lately he’s been going there at night, or so he says. My husband has changed. That’s all I know.”

  Most of her concern was due to a vague, but unmistakable, feeling that something was altered. We took the case based on that fact. She’d noticed this change a few months after they bought their new house in Duluth, Georgia. This was to be their dream house. We wrote down the license plate number of his car and all the addresses we might need. As we passed around the photo of the black, tall, slender man in glasses, I was pretty sure we were all thinking the same thing, “There is no type.” Anybody can try their damndest to screw up their life, and there’s no better way than infidelity.

  Victoria continued on with the interview. “Might he have clients on the west coast that would necessitate him being at the office at night for teleconferences with them?”

  “I know his biggest client is in Atlanta, that’s why we moved here. But I don’t know where the rest of his clients’ offices are. This one is the only one I’ve heard him talk about.”

  Good, I thought. We try to throw in one easy out in the first meeting. It’s a convenient way for clients to go into, or back into, denial. Kelly could have said or thought, ‘Oh, yeah, clients on the west coast. That’s probably it.’ She didn’t, meaning she was ready to hear whatever we would be telling her. I take that back, no wife or husband is ever ready to hear it. Kelly would be able to hear it.

  Tara picked up a menu. “Want to order something? Tea or a dessert?”

  I ordered apple pie, the no-sugar-added version, with ice cream. Victoria went with the chocolate cobbler, Tara the cobbler of the day, blueberry if I remember correctly, and then we looked at Kelly, waiting for her to say something.

  She giggled, “I’ll have the carrot cake.”

  “A seasonal choice, excellent.” Tara gathered up the menus.

  “And four sweet teas,” the waitress said as she walked away. It wasn’t a question. Like I said, we’re regulars.

  “Can I ask you something?” Kelly really did sound like a little girl when she spoke.

  “Sure.”

  “Where are you from? You don’t sound like you’re from here.”

  “All three of us are native Atlantans. I was born in Crawford Long Hospital. I have an Atlanta accent instead of a Southern accent. Believe me, people up North say my accent is quite pronounced, and I lived outside the country for almost ten years.”

  “Outside the country.” She was imitating me, like I had spoken in a foreign language and she wanted to be sure she got it right. “I’ve always wanted to travel. Are you sisters?”

  “No,” we said together, laughing.

  “Then why do you dress alike?”

  We were wearing jeans and white blouses. Yes, all three of us. The blouses were a little different but not enough to matter. Oh, and our shoes were different. Big whoop. I wore Donald J. Pliner thong sandals, and Tara and Victoria both wore boots, Tara in Stuart Weitzman suede boots laced up outside her jeans and Victoria in Calvin Klein riding boots.

  “We didn’t do it on purpose.” Shit. I had hoped she wouldn’t notice.

  Three

  Continuation of statement by Leigh Reed. On Friday morning I was at Publix buying groceries when I noticed a man following me with his cart. This annoyed me no end, so I turned around and headed his way. This might sound hypocritical, considering what I do for a living, but who did he think he was?