Grusha returned her attention to the bookcase, behaving as if Claudia had not spoken. “Sonya vill put these files in box and you vill take them back to your hotel and analyze handwriting,” she said, engrossing herself in selecting several folders from the shelves. “My driver vill take you. But before you go, ve have wine. Come.”
She dumped the stack of folders on her desk and they went to another corner of the spacious office. A low hexagonal table held a silver tray set with two balloon wineglasses and a decanter with the brilliance of fine cut crystal.
“What an unusual table,” Claudia said, taking a small armchair, thinking that it was a little like sitting in an antique shop.
“Is very, very old design,” Grusha said. She sat on a sofa upholstered in a silky striped material, its mahogany arms fashioned into high curves. “Too bad you cannot see the painted top under the tray. The tsars make these tables a thousand year ago.” She removed the stopper from the decanter with a flourish and began to pour. “You like wine, yes?”
“It’s a little early in the day for me.”
“Come, I insist. You vill enjoy this very nice Cabernet.” Grusha raised her glass in a toast. “To our successful partnership.”
Wine might be de rigueur for a continental afternoon business meeting, but it didn’t feel quite right in Manhattan. Of course, Grusha Olinetsky wasn’t a run-of-the-mill client.
Claudia touched glasses with her hostess and took a sip. What she knew about wines wouldn’t fill a thimble, but something told her that this one was top quality. She thought she could actually detect a delicate berry flavor with a hint of spice. She set the glass back on the tray. “Grusha, about these handwritings you want me to—”
The matchmaker held up a hand like a traffic cop, letting her know that it was still not time to talk business. She leaned down and produced a gold foil-wrapped box from under the cocktail table. As Grusha removed the lid, Claudia noted the Godiva logo embossed on the top. Nestled inside were a dozen or so multicolored chocolates of various shapes and colors.
Grusha slid the box across the table and pointed a French tip at an amber-colored piece. “You must try the Wild Bolivian. Goes very good vit the wine; you vill see.”
Feeling slightly decadent, Claudia took the chocolate she indicated and bit into it. She nearly moaned as rich cocoa flavor melted and slid down her throat like liquid velvet.
Mouthgasm.
She popped the rest of it into her mouth, acutely aware of how easily one could be seduced by these little luxuries; sidetracked with fine wine and fancy chocolate.
She dabbed her lips on a cocktail napkin. “That was amazing. Thank you. Now, I’d really like to hear about your concerns with Andy Nicholson’s work. What kinds of mistakes did he make?”
“You must have another sweet.” Grusha picked up the box of chocolates and offered it to her again, tempting her like the Edenic snake offering forbidden fruit.
Wondering why her client was so reluctant to discuss the business she had brought Claudia here to handle, and at great expense, too, Claudia shook her head. “No, thank you, Grusha, really. I think it’s about time I got a better understanding of what my assignment here really is, don’t you?”
Grusha pushed to her feet, her hands stretched out, her tone almost angry, as if Claudia had breached some social etiquette. “Your assignment is to tell me what you find in the handwriting of these clients I give you. Forget about Nicholson! I know he is your enemy. This is why you agreed to come, yes? I do not care about that. Does not matter what Nicholson think.”
Her vehemence was startling. She had obviously investigated Claudia’s background and learned of her ongoing animus with Nicholson. “Any bad blood between Andy Nicholson and me won’t contaminate the work I do for you, I can assure you,” Claudia said firmly.
“You must make sure it does not. I cannot have you distracted by your hatred for this fool. I am not going to influence you. Just tell me what you find—no report. When you can give me answers?”
What have I gotten myself into now?
“If you just want a few notes about the personalities, tomorrow afternoon,” Claudia said. “I can give you something at least preliminary on these samples by then.”
A bellman brought the heavy box of file folders up to her hotel room on a luggage cart. Claudia tipped him and unloaded them onto the bed. Her meeting with Grusha Olinetsky had left her with more questions than answers. She had felt all along that there was a subtext to the conversation with the matchmaker. Clearly, there was something important that Grusha wasn’t sharing with her. And her instincts told her that whatever the matchmaker wasn’t saying went beyond a simple desire to avoid biasing her opinion.
She thought about Jovanic’s suggestion that something illegal might be going on. Maybe something that had gone off the tracks and now Grusha needed a fixer. Claudia decided that since Grusha had investigated her, she would eat a little crow and ask him to do a background on Elite Introductions and the alleged baroness who ran it
.
As if he had caught her thoughts across the miles, Jovanic called on her cell phone. “How’s it going with the mad Russian?”
Hearing his voice made her long for him. She reminded herself that she needed some distance. “You mean my new best friend? She plied me with Cabernet and Godiva.”
“Is that all it takes to lead you astray? I’ll have a bottle of Cab and a box of chocolates waiting. When are you coming home?”
Claudia laughed. “I only just got here. She’s already introduced me to one of the clients and she’s given me a whole load of samples to analyze.”
“So, why did you have to go to New York?”
“You know, she’s kind of a character. I was wondering whether you could—” She checked the phone display as the call waiting beep sounded in her earpiece. “Hey, Annabelle’s on the other line. Can I call you back in a minute?”
“It’s okay. I gotta go meet Alex. I’ll call you later if I get a chance.”
Alex was Alexandra Vega, his partner. His leggy, blond partner, upon whom Annabelle had offered to spy. Alex, who, in the last couple of weeks, Claudia had begun to suspect wanted to share more with Jovanic than detective work.
“How can you let him
do
that to you?” Annabelle Giordano’s voice held the kind of indignation only a teenager can muster, somehow overlooking the fact that she was the reason Claudia had ended her call with Jovanic. “Alex
is
a babe,” she added sagely.
“Knock it off, Annabelle. I told you, there’s nothing personal between them.”
Annabelle’s snort was worth at least a dozen words. “Well, if it was me, I wouldn’t be so laid-back about it. He’s your dude. Even if he
is
a cop.”
“I’m on the East Coast right now. What would you suggest I do?” She immediately regretted asking the question. Knowing Annabelle, she might suggest phone sex, just to be outrageous. The girl had been through so much in her short life. She’d had far more experience than her fourteen years warranted.
“I could scope out his apartment for you,” Annabelle offered, as if they hadn’t already had that conversation.
“Don’t even
think
about it. You promised you’d stay out of trouble while I was away. Spying on Joel and Alex is not what staying out of trouble means.”
“But he deserves it if he’s being a manwhore.”
Claudia rolled her eyes, even though Annabelle wasn’t there to see the gesture. “
Manwhore?
He is
not
—where’d you get that word? Never mind. I don’t want to know. Tell me how it went at school today.”
She spent the next ten minutes listening to an account of who the biggest badasses were at the school Annabelle was attending with Monica. She understood that the choice of topic was deliberate. Annabelle was letting her know that she wasn’t about to give up her rebellious habits without a fight.
Before they ended the call, she extracted a weak promise from the girl not to get in Jovanic’s face. After a rocky start, he and Annabelle had formed a truce and Claudia couldn’t bear to see it broken. Besides, she really did trust him. Alex she wasn’t so sure of.
Chapter 4
Before settling down to work on the handwriting samples, Claudia called room service and ordered a hideously expensive French dip and fries. She switched on the laptop and waited for it to boot up, beginning to feel the effects of the long day of travel. Apart from the traffic noise from down on the street, the room was too quiet, the stillness making it too easy for her mind to wander into areas where she would rather not go. TV would be too much of a distraction. Deciding on music, she selected an Il Divo playlist on the laptop and sat there, listening to the voices of the four men soar.
In my fantasy I see a just world,
/
Where everyone lives in peace and in honesty
.
Like poking at a sack of snakes, something in the soulful words of “Nella Fantasia” awakened the feelings that Claudia had been struggling so hard to keep buried.
It’s a fantasy all right
, she thought bitterly.
This is a world where good people are kidnapped and murdered. Where’s the justice in that? Someone you care about can be here one moment and gone the next. Some murky evil force in human form can change the direction of your life in a nanosecond.
Nothing. You control nothing . . .
The long-suppressed emotions felt alien, agonizing, like nerves coming to life after being burned. Tears welled up and coursed down her cheeks, splashing onto her knit top and leaving little wet splotches.
Anger was easier to deal with than sadness, but Claudia couldn’t seem to stop weeping. “What the
hell
am I doing?” she muttered at the empty room.
Crying is a useless waste of energy. It won’t bring back the dead.
She stomped into the bathroom, trying to get back to the anger, and snatched a tissue from the holder. She scrubbed it roughly over her face, blew her nose, and was ordering her blotchy image in the mirror to knock it off when room service arrived.
Averting his eyes from her tearstained face, the kid who brought the food set up the meal and departed. It smelled good, and Claudia munched on the sandwich, delaying the time when she would have to open the file folders and begin her analyses.
Deciding that a long, hot shower was what she needed to get back into work mode, she stood under the pulsing massage head until the water worked the kinks out of her neck and shoulders. She dried off quickly with the skimpy hotel towel and threw on a pair of flannel drawstring pants, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and woolly socks, then went back into the bedroom and folded back the bedspread.
She piled the pillows high and settled on the bed. Despite the generally dismal tone of the room, the pillows felt soft and welcoming. At this moment, what Claudia wanted most was to lie back against them and think of nothing at all. Another five minutes and she would be so relaxed that she would fall asleep. But that was not why she had spent the day flying almost three thousand miles, and that was not what Grusha was paying her to do.
She grabbed Shellee Jones’ folder from the top of the stack at the foot of the bed and turned the pages to the handwriting sample. A more detailed inspection affirmed the initial impression that she had formed earlier at Grusha’s office. Shellee’s gregarious personality leapt off the page.
The strong rhythm and showy capital letters reflected a love of life. The inflated loops on her l’s and h’s pointed to a flamboyant but sensitive personality. Her feelings could easily be hurt. The loops on the g’s and y’s were long and wide, symbolic of strong physical drives and a need to be center stage. The handwriting portrayed Shellee as the type of woman who did not simply walk into a room; she danced in
.
Life was a party to be enjoyed and shared with as many friends as she could cram in.
In her handwriting sample, Shellee Jones had written,
I want someone who recognizes all of my wonderful qualities and is supportive of all the creative things I do. This man must see life as a great adventure and he will have to understand that a relationship with me is a blessing that is worth fighting for.
One important piece of data Claudia noted was that the upper loop of the personal pronoun
I
had been formed with a sharp angle. When added to the other characteristics, this feature suggested to her that Shellee carried long-term frustration directed at her mother. That could be translated to anger and expanded to include other women whom she perceived as being in a position of power over her.
Like Grusha?
She flipped the page to Nicholson’s analysis of Shellee’s handwriting. The bulk of his report dealt with her social style and her potent sexual needs, but precious little else. He hadn’t said anything about her potential for conflicts with women in authority, which was an important omission.
Claudia closed the file, concluding that his analysis wasn’t balanced. His comments made Jones sound like an airhead bimbo. He had omitted any reference to her intelligence, which she had in abundance, or her ability to plan ahead, or anything else of much substance.
She was surprised to find that the next folder belonged to Avram Cohen. Why had Grusha requested her to take a sample from this client when she already had his handwriting? Here was the original in the folder, along with Andy Nicholson’s analysis. Was Avram one of the problems she had alluded to?
He was smiling in the picture, but the three-quarter pose he’d adopted gave him a shade of mystery, as if he were saying,
I see you, but I will not allow you to see all of me.
Reaching over to the armchair where she’d left her briefcase, Claudia retrieved the handwriting sample Avram had prepared for her that afternoon. Placing the two specimens side by side to compare them, she observed that the handwriting in both tended to be small and simplified.
A scientific mind
, she thought. The samples were congruent with no major changes between them, so why the need for a second analysis?