Pushover (Iris Thorne Mysteries Book 5) Page 15

  “I love you, too, pumpkin.” He picked up her hand and kissed it. “I’m sorry I stormed out like that. Your motives for getting involved are honorable, but I don’t trust that Weems farther than I can spit. People like him prey on nice, well-intentioned people like you. Call me jaded, but I think people in law enforcement are one step away from being crooks themselves.”

  He placed her hand against his cheek. “The thought of something happening to you or someone hurting you makes me nuts.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to me. It’s going to be fine. And soon, it’ll all be over.” She looped her arm in his and they walked to the car.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Iris lay in bed listening to Garland sleep. It was still dark, early on Sunday morning. She didn’t want to get out of bed this early on principle, and she didn’t want to wake Garland, a light sleeper. She’d carefully pulled the goose down comforter up to her neck, lay on her back with her hands folded across her chest, and gazed at the wooden blinds over the French doors. Beyond the doors was a redwood deck with steps down to her small backyard.

  She made plans to get quotes to have the deck refinished. She’d also look into having all the windows reframed. After decades of earthquakes and land erosion that had torqued the house and its foundation, none of the windows worked properly. She should have the chimney cleaned. She wondered about her mother and sister and two nephews and her darling niece and felt an overwhelming desire to see them. She’d call them today and make plans. She thought about her dad and what she and her sister called his new family. She thought about all kinds of things as she listened to Garland’s deep, even breathing, wishing she could be where he was. Finally, she heard the first bird of the morning sing, bright and sharp. Soon, it was joined by a second voice. Then the blackness visible through the blind slats turned pale gray and the birds began singing in earnest. She watched and listened and made more plans and tried to think about anything but Todd Fillinger and the fox.

  Slowly, she slipped from the bed, the cool air raising goose bumps on her nude skin. She padded to a boudoir chair in the corner, grabbed the sweats she had tossed there the previous night, and pranced from the room, the hardwood floor creaking with every other step. She quietly closed the door behind her, spying Garland, still asleep, creeping into the warm spot she had left.

  She shivered as she put on the sweats. She started the coffee brewing and went outside to bring in the newspaper. It was foggy, the air dense and white. It would break up by ten in the morning and the late September day would be bright and sunny.

  Her tennis shoes were on the front porch next to Garland’s. She banged hers against the side of the steps, knocking off most of the sand from the night before when they’d crossed the bridge that spanned the four busy lanes of Pacific Coast Highway and went down the long, spiraling staircase on the other side to Casa Marina Beach. They’d taken a long walk on the sand, stopping at a local joint for beer and a platter of fried calamari, clams, and shrimp. By the time they’d started back, the tide was coming in, submerging the sand, forcing them to scale jagged rocks. The froth from the waves splashed them and they were halfway drenched but laughing by the time they got back.She rubbed the tennis shoes against the dew-covered grass, removing the rest of the sand, put them on, and walked to the flower bed where the newspaper was on top of her pansies. She’d have to call and complain again. A snail’s slimy track meandered across the brick path. She followed it to where it disappeared into the flowerbed, pulled the snail from between the pansies, took it to the street, and stepped on it, the shell crunching wetly under her tennis shoe.

  Back inside the house, she filled a mug with coffee and started gathering the contents of Todd’s portfolio that were still spread across her dining room table. She sat and looked through his scrapbook. There was the article about Death Valley featuring Todd’s photos that his sister Tracy had noticed. She’d commented that Todd had loved Death Valley. Iris had not known that about him. She admired a sweeping vista of Zabriskie Point, captured in a wide-angle photograph.

  She looked at other magazine articles with Todd’s photos: an Art Nouveau hotel in Prague; stars making the scene at Manhattan’s Studio 54; antique shops in London, with one of Rita Winslow in front of her place; a lavish wedding reception for the daughter of a wealthy Russian at his country dacha; Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.

  She smiled at photos of French celebrities, including one of the French Madonna, signed “Pour Todd, avec love.” Iris remembered when the singing star had stopped by the café and Todd had introduced her. Lots of people came to see Todd at the café, many of them well-to-do. Iris had thought it odd at the time, since it was a ramshackle old place in an unfashionable neighborhood, but didn’t question it.

  There were studio shots of attractive young women, apparently taken for their modeling portfolios. Shots of nude women were mingled with traditional family portraits. An elderly woman posed with her two cats.

  She closed the scrapbook and began digging through the zippered portfolio. The photos in it were loose at the bottom of the large case. There were proof sheets of wedding photos, more shots of pretty girls, both clothed and in various stages of undress. There were Polaroid snapshots. Here was Todd arm and arm with a group of people. Here he was arm and arm with another group of people. And yet more people. He had moved so frequently, leaving everything behind, she wondered whether any of these people could have meant anything to him. He was alone.

  The photographs covered five countries on two continents. What was Todd looking for? What was he running from?

  She smiled at a fading Polaroid of the husband and wife who owned Le Café des Quatre Vents. They were an older couple. His face was mottled from years of drinking too much cheap red wine from the bottles he refilled at the cave down the street. She was still pretty and took pains every month to dye the gray from her black hair that she wore in a twist pinned to the back of her head. They had a grown son who worked in a nearby bank and a daughter who lived in the south.

  Iris tapped the snapshot against her forehead, trying to remember their name. It came to her. Monsieur and Madame Mouche. Mr. and Mrs. Fly.

  She sorted through another handful of photos and was surprised to find nude shots of her. She’d forgotten all about them, but seeing them brought the day back to her. It hadn’t been forgotten after all, but just stored away, like a flower pressed between the pages of a book she’d long ago finished reading and returned to the shelf.

  Todd had taken the shots using only the sunlight that streamed through the tall windows of his apartment. She had just risen from bed and was angry with him. They had argued the previous evening. He’d left the apartment and hadn’t returned until the next morning when he’d found her wrapped in a sheet, sitting by the window, looking at the city.

  His apartment was spectacular and the photographs captured it well. On the top floor of an eighteenth-century building, it had fifteen-foot-high ceilings, ornate crown and base moldings, marble floors, polished antique brass fixtures, a modern kitchen, and a view of the Seine with the Eiffel Tower in the background.

  The first time he’d brought her there, she commented that his business must be going well.

  Todd had looked at his surroundings and smiled. “I’ve finally figured it out.”

  One day, she’d come back from shopping to find Todd sulking and drinking.

  “The Paris Match job,” he told her when she’d asked what was wrong. “I didn’t get it.”

  “I’m sorry, Todd. Something else will come along,” she said to be encouraging. “It always does. You’re doing well.”

  He gave her a dark look that stunned her with its ferocity. “I’m a fucking failure,” he snarled. “My life’s a complete waste.”

  She was taken aback by his comment. “This is just a small setback.”

  He looked at her incredulously. “You have no idea, do you?”

  “About what?”

  “About me. About what it
means to be me.”

  Trying to be helpful, she sat near him and quietly asked, “What’s going on, Todd?”

  “Like you would have a clue.”

  Iris was stunned by this caustic side of Todd; she’d never seen it before. She was unprepared to go where the conversation was heading. She walked into the kitchen and began putting away the groceries she’d bought. While she was doing that, she heard the front door slam.

  She’d paced the floors most of the night, worried sick about him. He’d returned the next morning carrying croissants and chocolatines from her favorite patisserie. She was madder than hell and he irritated her by thinking it was cute, so cute that he wanted to take pictures of her just as she was, sitting in the natural light, draped in a sheet.

  Iris flipped through the photographs. She thought her face looked ragged but her body looked good. Todd knew how to pose her to capture her best angles. She remembered that as he was taking shots and adjusting the sheet over her nakedness, she had found herself becoming aroused. Her expression in the photographs changed as her anger gave way to desire. They had made love on the floor in the sunbeam of a Paris morning. Afterward, she hadn’t completely forgiven him, but she wasn’t done with him either. The questions were still all there, but she didn’t care. His was an intoxicating life, unlike anything that she had ever known, and she hadn’t had her fill.

  The toilet flushed. Garland was up.

  She quickly put away Todd’s photos except for the nudes of her, which she slipped into a kitchen drawer. Her cheeks were hot. The recollection of that time with Todd had made her blush as if she had been caught betraying Garland.

  He padded toward her in bare feet, his hair rumpled, wearing the cotton bathrobe he kept at her house. He kissed her and his mouth tasted like peppermint from having just brushed his teeth.

  “I didn’t hear you get up,” he said as he poured himself coffee and then held the pot over her empty mug. She nodded and he filled it. “I was out like a light.”

  “You must have needed the rest.” Her face felt cool again. Thankfully, the flush had left.

  He hugged her from behind. “You’re the one who needs the rest, sweet pea. What time did you get up?”

  She shrugged. “Early.”

  “Maybe you should try to take a nap later today.”

  She put her hands on top of his which were holding her waist. This was what love really was.

  He kissed her on the back of the neck and let her go. “Any idea what you want for breakfast?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have a thing in the house. I haven’t had time to go to the store since I’ve been back.”

  “I don’t feel like eating out. Let’s cook something here. I’ll run down to the store. How about pancakes and country sausage?”

  “Sounds good. Oh, and some fruit.”

  He started walking to the bedroom. “Go ahead and take a shower, and I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  She was still standing in the kitchen, looking through the newspaper which she’d opened on the breakfast bar, when he walked back through the house, now wearing jeans and a sweatshirt printed with a logo from his alma mater.

  After she heard his car go down the hill, she pulled the photographs from the kitchen drawer and took them into the smaller bedroom that she used as an office. She fed them through the paper shredder, the images still visible yet shattered on the even slivers of paper that fell into the wastebasket.

  Of course Todd must have been dealing drugs. How else could he have afforded that luxury Paris apartment? He had a few photography jobs during the time she’d stayed with him, but that paltry amount of work couldn’t have earned enough to support his lifestyle.

  She ran her hand around the wastebasket, mixing the fragments of photographs.

  Then there were all the people Todd knew and the comings and goings at Le Café des Quatre Vents. She had taken it at face value. She was having a wild and nutty fling. That’s all she’d thought it was until Todd had told her he felt differently. Then she realized that she was in love with him. She now knew that she’d been in love with the Todd that he’d allowed her to see. She could have attempted to peel back the layers but didn’t care to. He’d painted a pretty picture and she’d decided she liked the picture just fine.

  But after Todd had stayed out all night, things changed. The dream began to unravel for her while he started to cling to her in a way he hadn’t done previously. There was an edge of desperation to it. She saw a fragility that he hadn’t revealed before. He kept asking her if she was still returning to Los Angeles at the end of September to start her new job. Early on, she’d had a wild notion of tossing caution to the wind and sharing his Bohemian lifestyle, but she’d settled down over the course of the three months she’d spent in Paris. She was beginning to feel homesick. And the intensity of his emotions was starting to scare her. It was as if he wanted to absorb her, like a balm; as if he thought she could save him, as if she was his last hope. She cared for him deeply, but it was beyond her to save him.

  One night, a few weeks before she was to leave, he proposed marriage to her on bent knee. She said yes, touched by the earnestness in his face, swept away by the vision of their life together, rendered in brilliant colors. He didn’t have a ring for her, but would get her one.

  She said, “Here, I’ll give you a ring instead.”

  He squeezed her class ring onto his pinky finger. “I’ll never take it off.”

  “And you never did,” she said aloud, still trailing her hand through the shredded photographs. She sighed.

  Todd had made plans for a small wedding shortly before she was due to go home. Now she was the one who became duplicitous. She had to get away, to run. She became obsessed with the idea that he was a wounded man, although she couldn’t pinpoint why she felt that way. She’d convinced herself that the glint in his eye was madness.

  It seemed so dramatic and overblown now, sitting here years later in her quiet house with her steady, sure man. In a sweeping gesture, an exploit worthy of Todd, she’d picked up and fled with no forwarding address. She despised herself for it. It was rather like stomping on a puppy.

  Todd wasn’t a bad man at heart. Garland would disagree, but she refused to believe that about Todd. In the years that had passed since she’d left Paris, many of them spent without love, she’d thought about the life with Todd that she had thrown away. She’d fantasized that with some stability in his life, they might have turned out fine together. But something had made her run. There was no getting around that. For years she’d thought that it had been a flaw in her.

  She had gone to Moscow to say she was sorry and to touch those months in Paris one last time.

  She picked up the wastebasket, carried it through the house and out the kitchen door, depositing the contents in the Dumpster at the side of the house. The fog was starting to burn off sooner than she’d anticipated. She went around the house into her backyard and stood looking at the ocean, which was a deep sapphire blue today.

  “Hi ho, neighbor.”

  Iris squinted through the tall hedge that separated her yard from the one next door and saw her neighbor Marge wearing gardening gloves and carrying a pair of shears and a basket full of cut flowers.

  “Come over and I’ll give you some flowers for your table. Everything is blooming so beautifully this year,” she enthused. “I just can’t believe how lucky we are!”

  Iris slipped between the hedge and the white picket fence at the end of Marge’s yard where it met the cliff. As she skirted through, she faced the house and did not look down to Pacific Coast Highway several hundred feet below.

  Even though it was still early, Marge was dressed in a knit suit and heels, not a hair out of place. Her eyes were bright in a sprightly face that did not disguise her age, but that seemed eternally youthful. It said more about spirit than wrinkles.

  “Here, take all you want, Iris.” She started picking the prettiest blooms from the basket.

  “Marge,
you keep those for yourself.”

  “Oh non-sense. I want you to have them. I saw that your Garland is here. These will make a nice bouquet for your breakfast table.”

  “Thanks, Marge. Well, I’d better get dressed. Garland will be back from the store soon.”

  “And I’m off to church. You did promise to come with me one day.”

  Iris nodded.

  “Is something wrong, Iris? You seem blue.”

  “I was thinking about absent friends. About a guy I knew. He’s dead now. I thought I was in love with him, but I was never certain whether it was real.”

  Marge waved dismissively with a gloved hand. “If you felt it, it was real. Love’s a little bit stupid that way.”

  Iris felt her chest tighten as the tears welled. She took a deep breath.

  “Cheer up, honey. Don’t dwell on the past. We all do the best we can.” She cocked her head in the direction of the street. “That sounds like Mr. Garland Hughes, and if I know him, he’s returned with a big bag of groceries to make you breakfast.”

  “Thanks, Marge. Have a nice day.”

  Marge called out to Iris when she was halfway back in her yard. “Miss Iris, do me a favor. Do not waste one moment of this gorgeous day thinking about things you can’t change.”

  Iris waved at her and returned to the house. She smelled the aroma of cooking sausage before she opened the door.

  The phone rang just as she stepped inside. It was Roger Weems. The buy was set up for 8:00 the next night, Monday, at a restaurant named Greentree in Pasadena, a city just east of Los Angeles.

  Iris hung up and told Garland the plans. They didn’t talk about it again the rest of the day. It was indirectly addressed when Garland changed his airline reservation to depart Tuesday morning instead of that afternoon. Otherwise, Iris took Marge’s advice and focused on the present.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Monday morning, Iris looked forward to taking refuge in her work. She had occasionally thought of making a job change and now one was before her. Jim Hailey needed a response from her about the regional manager’s position by the end of the week. Lately, she’d considered hanging out a shingle and starting her own investment management firm, luring her top clients and employees to follow her, being her own boss. Today, she relished going to a job that she could do in her sleep. She wanted to see the same old faces and do the same old thing. They were sojourners on the same journey. She hadn’t quite seen it that way before, but she now felt a bittersweet affection about the Los Angeles branch office and those who worked there.