Wynn’s ears were filled with the noise of crashing waves, as though the ocean had moved seventy miles inland. He watched the lovely aide pass out printed sheets to the gathered press, helpless to halt the tide.
“Second, and I hope you’re listening because this is critical, Hutch has been backing a piece of legislation that’s raised hackles all over the state. Called the Jubilee Amendment. We want you to be our man on the spot and kill this thing stone dead.”
“I can’t do that.” Wynn took small satisfaction in having something to refuse. “A point up front. I’m not your man. I go up, I look everything over for myself, and make up my own mind.”
Grant forced his game-face back into place. “I like you. Always have. You’re too good-looking for a hard-scrabbling boy, but you’ve done well by what you had. So I didn’t have any mind to tell you this, sport. Rumors have started floating around town about some tricky financial dealings. Insider trading, confidential information about the sale of your company, Bermuda banks, the works.”
“Remarkable timing.”
“That’s how things are. It ain’t just rain, it’s a hurricane.” Grant tapped Wynn’s knee. “Here’s how it’s going to play. You’re heading up for eighteen months of the Washington high life. When I launch my Senate run, you’re going to come out for me whole hog. Then you can retire down here to your fancy-pants waterside villa and have folks call you congressman for the rest of your days.” Another tap on his leg. “And in the meantime you’re going to make sure that the Jubilee Amendment is choked to death.”
Wynn had nothing to say, which satisfied Grant immensely. He rose and lifted Wynn with him, motioned to his aide, and smiled as the press surged forward. Wynn flinched but held his ground. He said nothing, just stood and let his brother-in-law proclaim how stunned and honored Wynn was by the nomination. To the accusation of rampant cronyism, Grant countered with Wynn’s success as a businessman and his staunch backing of the party. The questions and the cameras’ square black eyes and the lights all struck at Wynn for maybe ten minutes, maybe five hours. Then he was shaking Grant’s hand and staring the man in the eyes, knowing he was beaten, trapped, and more scared than he had been in years.
Grant clapped him on the shoulder, hugged him close for the cameras, and said, “You start tomorrow.”
1
Monday
J
ACKIE HAVILLAND slipped off the headphones, swiped her hair back into place, and rose in stages. Nine hours in the stenographer’s chair had left her kinked as a puppet with its joints glued together. She was one of nine women working at the long table, split into cramped myths of privacy by waist-high partitions. The woman to her right looked up and said, “Got us a bridal shower today. Can’t get better than the fables of fresh starts, if you’re looking for an excuse to party.”
“Can’t.” Jackie’s brain felt mushed by another day of listening to court-sanctioned surveillance tapes. “Busy.”
“Yeah, right.” Neva had a way of huffing a laugh with every part of her body except her face. “I’ll give you busy. Give you so much busy you won’t know which way is up. Not for days.”
Jackie recognized the tone from Neva’s phone-scolding of her children. There were three under the age of ten. No daddy. The man had been a Triple-A mechanic until the year before last, when he had walked around a broken-down car on I-95 and a rain-blinded trucker had carried him a hundred and twenty feet. One moment a family, the next just another blues riff. Jackie slung her bag and started down the aisle separating their table from the next. “See you tomorrow.”
“Take it from me, girl. You got yourself a bad case of the lonelies. Ain’t but one cure for that, and you won’t find it sitting in front of your TV.” Neva leaned a heavy arm on the partition and pointed at Jackie’s desk. “Look there. Got just the one picture, and the boy’s been gone over a year now.”
“I’m fine.”
Jackie took the stairs to the ground floor, chased by their chatter and all the dirty little secrets she had overheard and transcribed. The agency put on a good front downstairs. The name was etched into a crystal tower splashed by an encircling fountain. Big lobby, lovely receptionist, guards, rotating cameras, oil paintings, and recessed lighting in the chambers used for meeting clients. The company specialized in high-tech surveillance, industrial espionage, deep background checks. There was a world of difference between the downstairs chambers and Jackie’s arena. Even the music was different—classical below, lite rock where fifty hourly workers sat crammed into a windowless cubicle ninety feet to a side. Jackie had taken the job when her brother became ill the last time. Its only asset was flexible hours—so long as she clocked a fifty-hour week, nobody cared when she came or went. Preston had died fourteen months ago this weekend, another victim of living with his afterburners constantly lit. Since then, Jackie had basically been marking time. Holding on to the here and now meant at least pretending to some final tie with the only man she had ever really loved.
The company’s parking lot baked and blistered beneath an April sun. The Orlando afternoon stank of diesel and asphalt and the sullen summer ahead. There was nothing on the horizon that hinted of wind and an excuse to chase the storms Jackie lusted after. She walked to her gas-guzzling Z-28 with its sailboard roof racks and the license plate that read WND-DANCR. A gift from her brother, a relic of the days when money had seemed endless. Back when paying for her graduate school had been a source of pride and joy to them both. Back before Preston had lost it all—job, future, money, health, life.
The car’s interior was an oven set on high roast. Jackie cranked the motor, hit the AC, turned up the radio to blot out the voices in her head. Everyone who worked in the agency’s boiler room listened to Orlando’s time warp to the seventies. Not that looking backward was any brighter than the way ahead. It just held fewer surprises.
An arm in a pinstriped shirt and gold Rolex reached down and tapped on her passenger window. Jackie assumed it was a boss and began forming a generic excuse for whatever she’d done wrong, the man leaned over and showed her shades and a nervous smile. When she opened his door, Jeff slid inside and asked, “Hot enough for you?”
“What are you doing here?”
“More like early August than the week before Easter. Hear it’s hitting a hundred tomorrow.” Jeff wore the narrow, insect-eye shades popular with the high-income tribes. “How’ve you been, Jackie?”
“Okay.” Jeff was an associate with Orlando’s biggest law firm, a dedicated work-hard, play-loose survivor. They had dated occasionally, back in easier times. Before she had hooked up with her ex-fiancé and had her desire for male companionship surgically removed. Jeff’s firm was a big user of her company’s services, and she still saw him now and then, slipping in and out of the downstairs chambers. Reminding her with his little smiles and quick patter of just how far she had fallen. “Do you have a client out here?”
“Sort of. Look, my Beamer’s a lot cooler than this tank. Why don’t we emigrate?”
“I’m fine where I am.”
“Sure. Great.” A flickering glance behind them, then, “Actually, I’m here because a client wants to hire you.”
“Tell him to come in through the agency’s front door.”
“Not the agency. You. And it’s a her.”
“Who?”
“The client. She asked for you specifically.” More than the heat beaded sweat on his forehead and upper lip. “This has to be on the sly. No paper trail, no notifying your bosses.”
“Then it can’t happen. I never sat for my license.” She’d been studying for her private investigator’s licence since Preston’s demise but had never taken the exam, mainly because she had gradually come to accept just how much she loathed the work. Talking about it now only revealed how little progress she’d made on any front.
“It doesn’t matter. My guess is, she already knows.”
“I’m not interested in taking on outside work. Sorry.”
“Just go see her, okay?” He pulled an envelope from his pocket. “A thousand dollars if you’ll drive to Boca Raton and talk with her.”
“Get out of here.”
“Straight up. A thousand bucks. Just drive to the Boca Beach Club and hear what she has to say. Will you do it?”
The money was already spent before she reached for it. Forget the overdue bills. A thousand bucks was a third of the way to a next-generation wave jumper. “So who’s the client?”
“You’ll find out when you get there. Just give your name to the Boca gateman and go inside. She’ll find you.”
Jackie resisted the urge to tear open the envelope. She still had a shred of class left. “This is beyond weird.”
“Tell me.” The rapid swipe of his face almost masked his scouting to either side. “I’m pulled off a major case, given the most bizarre instructions of my life, sent out here to camp at your office and wait. No phone, no paper trail, and don’t be followed.”
“What can you tell me about—”
“Nothing. I don’t know a thing more.” Jeff pushed open his door, scanned for watchers, said, “See you around.”
T
HE BOCA BEACH CLUB was one of those Fantasy Island–type places, something everybody heard of but few ever saw. Certainly nobody in Jackie’s present circle. The club was a beachside palace of sandstone, mock coral, and six-hundred-dollar rooms. The three restaurants were off limits to all but club members and hotel guests. Jackie pulled up to the stone gatehouse and gave her name to the sharp-eyed guard. The inner drive was lined with frangipani and hibiscus. Beyond the emerald lawn, yachts rose higher than the emperor palms. The Z’s powerful rumble sounded blatantly rude as she halted by the colonnaded portico. The valet approached hesitantly, probably wondering why the guard had let a job applicant use the front entrance.
Jackie checked her reflection in the car window. She had stopped by home just long enough to don an outfit from happier times—gray silk slacks, Magli pumps, sleeveless cotton blouse one shade darker than the slacks, black linen jacket with the sleeves hiked to her elbows. Jackie handed the valet her keys and the requisite buck, and headed inside.
“Ms. Havilland?” An older woman in tennis whites and a cashmere cardigan rose from the settee by the entrance. “I’m Esther Hutchings. Thank you so much for coming.”
“You have a persuasive way of asking.”
“I’ve reserved us a table on the veranda.”
Jackie followed her across the reception hall, a vaulted chamber with fifty-foot domed ceilings interspersed by Gothic arches and chandeliers. “Some place.”
“Mizner designed it.” When Jackie did not respond as expected, she added, “He is the architect responsible for the Florida Spanish style. You find a lot of it here in Boca and in the older communities around Miami.”
Pearls. The woman should be wearing pearls, plus one of those frilly outfits made for tea and doilies and servants in dark suits. Esther Hutchings carried herself impossibly erect and spoke as though each vowel were individually polished. “My only regret is that our family didn’t hold on to its old Boca estate. Mizner’s heir designed it. My father sold it to a developer for a perfectly ridiculous sum. To his dying day he claimed he didn’t know the man intended to tear it down and build one of those atrocious beachside hotels.”
Jackie blinked as they entered the rear atrium, both from the sudden light and from the view beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows. The bay sparkled a million-dollar blue, the oleander blossoms offset a manicured lawn, and every moored yacht dwarfed her garage apartment. The veranda was enormous and empty, their table made intimate by mirrored pillars and man-size Oriental vases.
“I’ve ordered us tea, I hope that’s all right.” Esther Hutchings halted by a pair of chairs pointed dockside and a low table buried under linen and silver. “I believe that chair has the nicer view.”
The nearest vase held orchids in purple cascades. Through the royal growth Jackie caught sight of her reflection. Her hair, a rich blond streaked lighter by salt and sun, showed the three months and counting since her last cut. Hastily applied makeup did not mask the burn to her nose and forehead. Her eyes, always her best feature, held wide-open confusion.
“Shall I pour?”
Jackie slipped off her jacket and draped it over the chair back. “It’s your show, Mrs. Hutchings.”
“Yes. Very well. To the business at hand.” Esther Hutchings leaned back in her chair, the tea untouched. “My husband is a United States congressman. Or rather, he was. Recently he suffered a second stroke. A debilitating one. I’ve traveled down for a much needed rest. At least, that’s the reason I’m telling the rest of the world.”
Esther Hutchings paused as another couple entered the atrium. The woman was a pastel silk mirage, the man a product of surgical design. A waiter appeared as if by magic, informed the couple that the entire veranda had been reserved for a private party, then just as silently disappeared.
When they were alone once more, Esther Hutchings continued, “Before his stroke, my husband led a battle to set restraints upon Wall Street and the international banks. Now there is a smear campaign to destroy his name and all he stood for. I want you to track down whoever is behind this.”
“This is a joke, right?”
“Do I appear comical to you, Ms. Havilland? Last week, my husband’s replacement won a special election. Wynn Bryant is his name. A truly despicable man. I wouldn’t be the least surprised if he was behind this smear campaign.”
“Mrs. Hutchings, I’m sorry about your husband.” Jackie chose her words carefully. “But all this belongs to a totally different world from the one where I operate.”
Esther Hutchings revealed an ability to sneer with polite loftiness. “Perhaps there is something about your present employment that you find utterly captivating?”
“At least it’s real.”
“So is this.” Esther Hutchings belonged to a bygone era of grand dames and rigid authority and people who jumped at her behest. Jackie’s disregard for how things should be left her flashing fire. “I insisted on our meeting here because this club is
private.
There are few places where a public person can be both open to visitors and closed to prying eyes. I am being closely watched, Ms. Havilland. My husband’s foes are determined to ensure that every shred of his life’s work be turned to ashes.”
A thousand bucks, Jackie reminded herself. She reached for her cup, took a tepid sip. At least the view was nice.
“I have made very careful inquiries and am convinced you are ideal for this job. At age twenty-seven, when your brother could afford to support you both, you began graduate studies in international finance at the University of Florida. Then your brother, a hedge fund trader and high flier in the currency markets, became seriously ill. You dropped your studies, returned home, and nursed him through a year-long illness that stripped away all your combined savings before finally—”
“That’s enough.” Having this stranger spout her secrets in these absurd surroundings seriously rattled Jackie’s cage. “I’m out of here.”
Esther Hutchings restrained her with one tense hand. “No one would ever suspect us of having any connection. Which is vital if we are to succeed.”
“Let go of my arm.”
“One thing more. My husband was convinced that Pavel Hayek and his group are the driving force behind the opposition to financial reform.”
She froze in midflight. “What?”
Esther Hutchings pulled a manila envelope from her tennis bag. “Just do me the kindness of looking over these documents. I’ve enclosed a contract as well. If you agree to help me, sign one copy and forward it to my lawyers. The first payment will be sent to you immediately.” When Jackie made no move to take the package, Esther slipped it into her hand. “I urge you to view this as a matter of vital importance.”
“This meeting is over.” Jackie left the veranda, crossed the lobby, and reentered the reality of a tropical afternoon.
She handed the claim check to the valet, took a couple of hard breaths, and stared out over the palms at a torrid sky. Unlike this fairy-tale castle with its emerald lawns and mountains of fragrant blossoms, the real world held broken dreams, men who lied, and families that fractured and never healed. What right did Esther Hutchings have to taunt her with such a bruising reminder of everything that was not hers?
Jackie paced to the shaded line where the portico’s shadow was sliced by the sun. Her idle hands opened the packet and pulled out a series of documents fronted by the contract.