Slow Squeeze (Iris Thorne Mysteries Book 2) Read online

  Barbie looked at her, her eyes tinged with red. “That’s okay, honey. It wasn’t that recent. Just takes me by surprise sometimes. It’s a funny thing. One day, a person’s there and the next they’re gone for good. It takes a long time. I go along and I’m fine, then all of a sudden I think about him and I…” She dabbed at her eye with a linen napkin.

  Iris dabbed at her own eye.

  “Don’t you cry, sugar. It’ll just make me cry more.”

  “I always cry if someone else is crying.”

  “Boy! You and I sure know how to cut straight to the quick, don’t we?” Barbie sniffed and folded her napkin and laughed. “Sitting here cryin’ and carryin’ on and we only just met.”

  Iris laughed too.

  “Iris, you and I have more in common than you think. Bet ya saw me and thought, ‘What in the world have I gotten myself into?’ Didn’t ya, huh?”

  “You do cut a…unique figure.”

  “Darlin’, you reach a point where you learn you just gotta please yourself. People are gonna nip at your heels no matter what.”

  “Isn’t it the truth?”

  Barbie sighed heavily, her chest rising up and down. She draped the napkin across her lap and smoothed it. “Mr. Stringfellow passed on a year ago.”

  “Barbie, I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  “But I want to talk about it. I’ve been kind of lonely since I’ve come west. Got no friends here, no one to talk to. I’m enjoying the company.”

  A waiter brought a basket of hot rolls. Barbie slathered one with butter, took a big bite, and patted her hot pink lips with the napkin, leaving lipstick on the linen.

  “I was thirty years old when I met Hal. He was sixty.”

  Iris raised her eyebrows in polite surprise.

  “I know. But I’d rather be an old man’s lover than a young man’s slave, know what I mean? I was a waitress in his restaurant. Hal’s. Real high-class Atlanta place in this big old plantation house. That was my first legitimate job. I was a stripper before that.” Barbie paused.

  “Supposed to pay well.”

  “It does, darlin’, it does. But you don’t meet the class of people you’d like to build a relationship with. And if someone nice does wander in, who wants to bring a stripper home to Momma? Know what I mean? Hal was divorced. We got married after a coupla years and I helped him run the business. When he started havin’ heart problems, I took over runnin’ the place. Did that for five years. When Hal died, I lost the taste for the whole thing. I sold everything, packed up, and moved out.”

  “Do you have any children?”

  “Nope. You?”

  “No.”

  “Hal had a coupla grown kids. Hated me. So did his ex-wife. Real society type. Tennis lunches and bridge brunches and charity balls and debutante balls and balls balls. She got remarried to some big executive at a soft drink company. Had everything she wanted and still hated me.” Barbie shrugged. “Just no tellin’ about some people.”

  The waiter brought their food. Barbie’s grilled New York strip steak was surrounded by baby summer squash and edible flowers. Iris’s swordfish steak was grilled without butter or oil and circled with flowers and a halo of raspberry sauce.

  Barbie picked up one of the yellow flowers. “What’s this flower doin’ here?”

  “Try it. It tastes spicy.” Iris popped a flower into her mouth.

  Barbie tentatively nibbled on the petals. “Well, I’ll be damned. They wouldn’t have gone for flowers on the food at Hal’s, let me tell you!” She picked up her knife and fork, eyed the steak lasciviously, then dug in. She closed her eyes. “Mmmmm…delicious. How’s your food?”

  “Wonderful,” Iris answered.

  “So, Iris. Say I have a million dollars to invest. What could you do for me?”

  “Do you have a million dollars to invest?”

  “Say I do. What could you do for me?”

  Iris sipped her mineral water. “I don’t know you well enough to say. I need to know your financial goals, your risk aversion. I need to get a feel for who you are.”

  “C’mon, Iris. You have a feel for who I am.”

  “We only just met.”

  “You’re hedgin’. You’ve at least got a first impression.”

  “Well, sure.”

  “Let’s have it.”

  “First impressions aren’t always accurate.”

  “But they’re often dead straight, aren’t they? C’mon. Let’s see how much guts you got.”

  “Okay. I think you’re very warm and personable. You have a great sense of humor. I appreciate what you’ve accomplished in getting from where you were to where you are now.”

  Barbie watched Iris with heavily made-up brown eyes creased with crow’s-feet. She chewed another hunk of steak. “That’s very sweet. Thank you. But you’re holdin’ back the good stuff.”

  “Why do you care what I think of you? You told me earlier you’ve learned to just please yourself.”

  “And I do. But if I’m gonna give you my money, I got a right to see what you’re made of, don’t ya think? Believe me, you’re not gonna tell me anything I don’t already know.”

  “All right. You like showing you have money, but that’s not unusual for someone who’s not used to having it and something that I completely understand. You lack a certain…polish, but it’s part of your charm. Since schooling tends to round off rough edges, I’ll guess you haven’t had much beyond high school, which only shows how far you’ve pulled yourself up. You’re certainly memorable. The flirting and flamboyant clothes contribute to that. People enjoy being with you.”

  “Flirting? Flirting how?”

  Iris paused, struggling for a diplomatic response. “Well, like being touchy-feely. Maybe I misinterpreted your interaction with the bartender. If I did, I apologize.” She took another bite of her cooling food.

  “Being touchy-feely bothers you?”

  Iris shrugged. “Whatever works for you.”

  Barbie reached across the table and put her hand on Iris’s hand. “So if I touch you, you think I’m flirting with you?” She looked into Iris’s eyes.

  Iris returned Barbie’s gaze and didn’t move. “Of course not.”

  “Does it bother you?”

  Iris pulled her hand from Barbie’s and reached for her glass of mineral water. “No. It doesn’t bother me,” she said confidently. “All this provides some interesting possibilities in terms of an investment strategy. My feel is, since you got your money quickly you think it’ll keep coming the same way. I’d like to balance something high-risk, high-return with a few more conservative choices. But I hope I haven’t offended you by some of the things I’ve said. You may want to shop elsewhere, but you won’t find anyone in this town who will do a better job for Barbie Stringfellow.”

  “Waiter? Honey, could I have a cup of coffee please? Iris?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Don’t worry, Iris. You’d have to go a long, long way before you offend me. You’re nice to say I’m not polished. I came from dirt. A little place in Mississippi that you could hardly call a town. Wore clothes the town folks gave me. I’d remake them to fit. High school education? Good Lord, you flatter me. Daddy worked for the railroad. Momma took off when I was twelve, leavin’ me to take care of my three snot-nosed brothers and my father and that shack we called a house. I left home at fifteen. Got a guy I knew to drive me to Atlanta. Ain’t never been back. Got my first job as a stripper, even though I was underage.”

  The busboy brought the coffee.

  Barbie poured in artificial sweetener. Iris drank hers black.

  “Iris, you’re wrong about one thing. My money did not come easy. It may have come all at once when I married Hal, but it did not come easy. I used whatever god-given talents I had to get ahead, to make somethin’ of myself. Just like you. See, you and I aren’t all that different. You just went about it different.”

  Barbie pulled her large handbag onto the table top, plunged her hand insid
e, and dug around. “Hal left me well set. I didn’t even have a bank account before I met him. He taught me to manage money. He taught me that you need to put your money to work for you.”

  She took out a purple wallet, flipped it open, and began writing a check.

  Iris silently watched, remembering that a good salesperson knows when to talk and when to shut up.

  Barbie held the checkbook with the flat of her left hand and tore out the check with her right. She held it between two long nails toward Iris.

  Iris took it. It was made out for fifty thousand dollars.

  “This good enough to get us started, darlin’?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Iris said good-bye to Barbie in the parking lot of Wave and took Pacific Coast Highway south to Topanga Canyon Boulevard. She left the top down on the TR. The night air helped sober her up from the buzz of closing the sale. Her purse sat unzipped on the passenger seat and she caught a glimpse of Barbie’s check. She fingered the paper.

  “Damn, I’m good!” One of the Triumph’s spark plugs misfired as an exclamation point.

  At Topanga Canyon Boulevard, she turned east and headed into the canyon. It was about nine o’clock and there wasn’t much traffic. The air temperature rose as she drove higher and deeper into the hills and farther away from the ocean. Her tires clattered over a wooden bridge that crossed a normally dry, small stream that now ran high due to the recent spate of winter storms. The canyon’s pine trees scented the air. The Pacific faded to the east; the asphalt sprawl of the San Fernando Valley was a threat to the west. The center of the canyon was a world apart.

  She drove past a ramshackle fish restaurant where the shifting earth had tilted the building, slanting the wooden walls like a fun house. Patrons stepped over a large hound that slept across the doorway and were served fresh fish dinners on paper plates. Down the road, in front of a rock and roll emporium, chromed and polished motorcycles stood like dominoes. The bass downbeat of the house band rumbled through the Triumph’s chassis. Bikers were sprawled across redwood picnic tables scattered in front of the place, drinking beer, holding the bottlenecks between their crooked fingers, and carving yet more marks on the table tops with vicious knives. Some bikers looked for real and some looked like white-shirted bean counters by day trying to be born losers by night.

  Iris turned onto Withered Canyon Road, John Somers’s street. There were no street lights, and she navigated the narrow, winding road by memory, by the TR’s bright beams, and by the light of the crescent moon shining blue-white in the smog-free January sky. She passed rustic houses nestled into the hillside or clinging to cliffs on the canyon side. The beat-up broken asphalt gave way to gravel that crunched under the TR’s tires until the gravel gave way to dirt and pine needles marked with tire tracks.

  She parked in the residents’ visitor parking lot overlooking the Santa Monica Mountains, rolling hills black against the night sky. Beyond the mountains was a patch of twinkling lights that marked Pacific Coast Highway. Beyond that was the dense blackness of the Pacific. At night, there was more to feel and hear than there was to see.

  She put the top up on the TR, took out a duffel bag, and locked her briefcase in the trunk. Two brown squirrels ran a few feet away from the car, then turned to watch her, their cheeks unevenly packed full of squirrely treasures.

  She climbed the gravel road that lead to John Somers’s driveway. The gravel was damp, its normally dry, crackling retort muted by recent rains. The house was built in several levels against the side of the hill and could be seen from the top of his steep driveway but not from the road. It was a redwood-paneled rustic affair. John had replaced the shake roof with fire-resistant tile and each summer dutifully cleared the brush from a thirty-foot semicircle around the perimeter of the house to provide some protection against the canyon dwellers’ perennial fear: brush fires.

  Iris walked around to the side of the house and used her key to enter a door that led to the kitchen. The kitchen was brightly lit but empty. When the bull terrier, Buster, didn’t rush in to bark and growl at her, never having warmed to her even after a year, Iris thought that maybe John had gone out and taken the dog with him. There was a pot on the stove and a ladle encrusted with red sauce lying in a spoon rest on the yellow and magenta tiled counter. There were more spoons and dirty white porcelain bowls in the sink. She lifted the pot lid and an aroma of cayenne pepper and onions arose. John had made chili. Iris was still hungry. She’d talked so much during dinner, she’d left most of her meal untouched.

  She sat her bag down on the kitchen’s wood and brick floor and was ladling chili into a bowl when she heard laughter from the living room. She paused, holding the ladle in midair. She separated John’s voice from a second, female voice. It was Penny, John’s ex-wife.

  “Oh, joy,” Iris muttered. She set the bowl on a matching white porcelain plate. Simple and utilitarian. Clean and practical. Like John.

  She walked down the polished hardwood hallway, stepping more firmly than usual so that her footsteps announced her in advance. While she was walking past John’s scrubbed pine table in the dining room, Buster met her, barking all the more ferociously because of the indignity of having been caught off guard. The dog’s short white hair stood up on the back of his thick neck. He sniffed her feet and ankles, peered at her with one blue and one brown eye, then turned his head to give her the blue-eyed stare. His throat rumbled.

  Iris smiled through clenched teeth. “Good dog.”

  He attempted to sniff her crotch. She pushed his big head away and walked into the knotty pine-paneled living room, the dog close on her heels.

  John was already on his feet, walking toward her. His wiry red hair had been carrot-colored in his youth but had mellowed to auburn and was now gray at the temples. His complexion was red-tinged and freckled. He had a long face with a square jaw, narrow green eyes, and a Cupid’s bow mouth. He stood just over six feet tall and was broad-shouldered and long-legged. Physically, he was a mixture of childlike imp and imposing male. Mentally, the same was true. When they dated in college, it had been a combination that Iris found both attractive and exasperating. When circumstances brought them together again fifteen years later, she was chagrined to discover she still felt the same way.

  “You found the chili. Good.”

  Iris puckered her lips. John avoided them and kissed her chastely on the cheek.

  “Hi, Iris,” Penny said cheerfully. She sat on one of the two couches that stood perpendicular to one another. Her shoes were off and her feet tucked underneath her, sitting familiarly on furniture that had once been hers. When she and John split up eight years ago, he had kept the house and the furnishings. At that time, Penny hadn’t wanted him, his lifestyle, or anything that went with it.

  Penny resettled herself on the couch. She held a white porcelain cup and saucer in her hands and was smiling contentedly. Her cheeks were rosy. She had retained a fresh-scrubbed, flower child, chamomile-tea-and-patchouli wholesomeness into her forties. She’d filled out a bit but was still in good shape. She wore well-worn denims and a navy blue turtleneck sweater. Her face was lined beyond her years due to many sunny seasons of outdoor activities. Her thick dark hair, cut sensibly short, was beginning to show gray and, of course, Penny was leaving it alone. She wore no makeup.

  Iris greeted her and then said hello to their daughter, Chloe, who was sitting in an oversized pine rocking chair with one denim-clad leg tossed over the chair arm, the other leg stretched forward on the floor. She pressed the floor with her bare heel to rock the chair. Chloe had inherited John’s height and red hair and coloring but had her mother’s facial features. The years were beginning to smooth Chloe’s gangliness and she was a pretty girl if one looked beyond her adolescent angst. It hurt to greet Iris. It hurt to be nice. Life hurt. She mumbled “Hi” and didn’t look up.

  Iris sat on the couch across from Penny and next to John. Buster continued to sniff her ankles. Iris resisted the urge to jab her pump toe into the soft flesh
beneath his neck. She just smiled and tried to push his big head away with her hand.

  “Buster,” John said. “Leave Iris alone.”

  The dog dutifully retreated and lay near Chloe’s rocking chair. Chloe put her dangling foot on his back and scratched it with her bare toes as she rocked back and forth.

  “Penny,” Iris said. “Long time no see. What have you been up to?” She ate a spoonful of chili, frowning as she chewed.

  “Busy with my classes. Christmas break is over next week. The kids’ll be coming back hyper from all the sugar and excitement.” Penny grimaced in mock dismay.

  Iris grimaced to commiserate. “You have fifth graders this year?”

  “Sixth. It’s different. They’re almost in junior high, so it’s fun for them.” She opened her eyes wide and nodded enthusiastically.

  “I miss teaching sometimes,” Iris said. “The business world has its own challenges and rewards but they’re different. I guess whenever you choose a road in life, you get something, but you leave something behind, too.”

  Penny set the cup and saucer on the coffee table. “Personally, I’ve never wanted to do anything other than teach. To me, molding young minds is the best job a person can have. It’s not only personally rewarding, it’s socially relevant, especially these days. Iris, didn’t you teach hearing-impaired children?”

  “For eight years until I decided to get my MBA.”

  “What made you want to give up teaching to do what you’re doing with—” Penny molded something in the air with her hands, grappling for the right word—“money?”

  Iris gave her a cool look. “I was ready for a new challenge.”

  “Speaking of that,” John interjected, “how did you do on your sales call tonight?”

  “Closed it.” Iris opened her purse, took out Barbie’s check, and tossed it face up on the coffee table. “Nice way to start the week off.”

  Penny glanced at the check from where she was sitting, then leaned closer, the better to count the zeros. “Fifty thousand dollars?”