WOMAN DIES IN PLUNGE OFF ST. FRANCIS HOTEL HEIR TO FORTUNE SAYS, “THE BITCH DESERVED IT!”
And I'd often accused Rae, an aspiring writer, of having a lurid imagination!
The intercom buzzed as I sat down at my desk. “Yes, Ted.”
“Jeff Riley, from Oakland Airport, on line two.”
“Thanks.” I punched the button. “Jeff, thanks for returning my call. I wanted to ask you about the woman you came across in the tie-downs. Can you tell me anything more about what she looked like?”
“Well, like you.”
“Native American features, too?”
“… Uh, no.”
“What kind, then?”
“Uh, I don't know. Normal? Pretty? Yeah, I guess she was pretty.”
I was asking the wrong person for details. Jeff was a good lineman and a good pilot as well, but his powers of observation seemed mainly limited to aircraft. Too bad the woman hadn't had an identification number tattooed across her forehead.
“What was she wearing?”
“Jeans? A sweater? Probably.”
“And she said she was a reporter from which publication?”
“She didn't say, and I didn't think to ask. But she was pushy like reporters are.”
Big help. It seemed that every other person I met these days was pushy.
“Thanks, Jeff. Has Ripinsky landed yet?”
“Nope. You expecting him?”
“Of course—Valentine's Day.”
“Jesus Christ, I forgot! You've saved my ass! I owe you big-time.”
O
utside the windows of Palomino restaurant in Hills Plaza the loops of lights on the Bay Bridge shone cold and hard-edged against the black sky. Inside the bar, all was mellow wood and brass, soft illumination and warmth. Waiters moved around the long table that had been assembled for our party, taking drink orders. Other patrons cast surreptitious glances at us or frankly stared; Ricky Savage was a celebrity, and the rest of us seemed to interest them almost as much.
I leaned against Hy's arm where it rested on the back of my chair, tipped my head to look up at him. It continually amazed me that my lanky, hawk-nosed, mustached lover was as much at home in a handsome dark suit and tie as in the jeans and tees he wore while tinkering with aircraft or riding fence on his ranch. He returned my look, his gaze sliding from my face to the low V of the clingy red dress I'd pulled from my closet and dusted off for the occasion. When his lips curved in a slow smile, I knew I'd made the right choice.
A waiter leaned over my shoulder and I gave him my drink order, then directed my gaze to the end of the table where Ted and Neal sat. Ted was elegant in one of his brocaded frock coats, but he fingered his goatee nervously and his dark eyes darted around the room; Neal, less rumpled and more tweedy than usual, looked at me and shook his head slightly.
“What's that about?” Hy asked, his lips close to my ear.
“I'll tell you later. Actually there're quite a few things I need to discuss with you.” He'd arrived at my house with only minutes to spare to change before the limo Ricky had hired was to pick us up; there hadn't been time to talk at any length.
“Oh?”
“Later.”
He squeezed my shoulder.
Charlotte and Mick were seated between Neal and Rae. Mick was telling a joke—long and involved, and he'd forget the punch line, but that didn't matter because Keim would supply it. He wouldn't care that she upstaged him, because he was besotted with this older woman who shared his fascination with cyberspace.
Keim completed the joke, burst into bawdy laughter, then waved toward the entrance. I looked that way, saw that Anne-Marie Altman and Hank Zahn had just arrived to complete our party. She'd had an afternoon court appearance in L.A. and then fallen victim to overbooking on the shuttle; he'd had to deliver their foster daughter, Habiba Hamid, to a slumber party. In spite of the relative lightness of his duties, Hank looked harried, his tie askew, his trench coat collar turned up on one side. Anne-Marie, airline delays notwithstanding, was cool and collected in gray-blue silk that brought out the sheen of her ash-blond hair. As they came over to the table, Ricky flashed Hank a sympathetic look and signaled for a waiter.
Of all of us, though, it was Ricky and Rae who stood out. He'd always had star quality, but now it had matured into something more than good looks and presence; lines that reflected the pain and unhappiness he'd recently suffered gave his face more character, and there was a new self-awareness in the way he spoke and moved. New gentleness and contentment in his crooked smile, too; Rae was good for him.
And he was good for her. The striking woman in emerald green whose reddish gold curls fell to her shoulders scarcely resembled in appearance or manner the insecure, often depressed, always needy little person whom I'd hired as my assistant at All Souls Legal Cooperative years before.
Tonight they both seemed unusually excited. They held hands under the table, exchanged occasional whispers. She smoothed back a lock of his thick chestnut hair; he said something into her ear that made her blush and then laugh. I glanced at Mick. He shrugged and grinned, but I sensed he knew something the rest of us did not.
After a while Ricky raised a questioning eyebrow at Rae, and she nodded. He tapped on his glass, and we all grew silent.
“Red and I asked you all here tonight,” he said, “because you're very special to us and we wanted to share our first Valentine's Day with you. You accepted our being together when an awful lot of people didn't, and you accepted me for who I am rather than as the guy you'd read about in the tabloids. We both thank you.” The man who regularly performed for crowds of many thousands paused, at a loss for words. “Red, how do I do the rest of this?”
“Just wing it, darlin’.”
“Okay.” He took a deep breath. “There's another reason we asked you here: to invite you to our wedding—date and details to come.” He raised the hands they'd had linked under the table and displayed the emerald-cut diamond on Rae's finger.
Rae had her eyes fixed on me—not anxious exactly, but looking for approval from the friend who had once been the harshest critic of their romance. I put any lingering misgivings aside for the moment and raised my glass to them. She and Ricky smiled and toasted back. When I looked at Mick— who only six months ago had raged at Rae and said he would never forgive her for her affair with his father—he gestured in a manner that said if they were happy, so was he. And Hy whispered into my ear, “I told—”
“—you so. Yes, I know.”
The waiters brought out champagne in ice buckets, and the celebration really got under way.
An hour later I was on my way back from the rest room when I ran into Tony Nakayama, one of the architects who occupied the suite of offices directly across the pier from ours.
“Hey, Sharon,” he said. “Big doings?”
“Valentine's Day. And Rae's engaged.”
“Good for her! Say, did you happen to notice that woman who was watching you guys earlier?”
“A lot of people've been watching us. The man Rae's marrying is Ricky Savage—”
“I know. But this is different. The woman came in maybe five minutes after you did. Sat alone at one of the little tables.” He motioned toward the center of the room. “She was wearing a sweater with a hood, and she kept tugging the hood forward and down like she didn't want anybody to recognize her. Then she'd twist around and stare at your table. What struck me each time she turned away was how angry she was.”
“Angry.”
“Yeah. Real rage around the mouth and in her eyes. Bad body language, too. She had a couple of glasses of wine before she tossed some bills on the table and stalked out.”
“What did she look like?”
“Very attractive. Honey-blond hair. I couldn't tell its style or length because of the hood.”
“Height and weight?”
“Medium height. The sweater was one of those long ones, and she wore it over a loose skirt. Can't really say how much she weighed.”
It didn't sound like the woman who'd impersonated me. “Who was her server, did you see?”
“I didn't notice. Sorry.”
“Well, thanks for telling me about her.”
“You're welcome. And give Rae my congratulations.”
Tony went on toward the rest rooms, and I looked across the bar at our table, focusing on Ricky. Now he was telling a joke, but unlike his son, he wouldn't have to rely on anyone else for the punch line. All his life he'd had a way with words, with music, with women. He'd broken many a heart, my own sister's included …
He seemed to feel my gaze on him, because he looked my way; I motioned for him to join me. He excused himself, kissing Rae's hair as he passed behind her, and came to meet me. “Something wrong, Shar?”
“I need to talk privately with you.”
“Sure.”
“No, outside.”
We went past the hostess's station and stepped through the doors into the plaza's courtyard. The night was rapidly turning frigid, and the few people who hurried past were bent on their destinations. Ricky saw me shiver, took off his suit coat, and wrapped it around my shoulders.
“What,” he said, “you dragged me out here to ask me if I'll be a good husband to Red?”
“Sort of.”
“The answer is yes, and you know it.”
“Do I?” Quickly I described what Tony had told me of the strange woman's behavior.
Ricky got my drift before I finished; his dark eyebrows pulled together in a frown, and a corner of his mouth twitched in annoyance. When I stopped talking, he put his hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes for a moment before he said, “I'll tell you this one time, Shar, and that will be the end of this particular type of discussion forever. Your sister and I married very young and made a lot of mistakes; most of them were mine, and I'm not going to repeat them. I promised Red early on that I'd never deliberately do anything to hurt her. I've kept that promise, and I intend to go on keeping it.”
His gaze didn't waver; his voice was low and level. Nothing more to hide, no more lies, no more infidelities.
“I'm sorry,” I said. “Given the past, I had to ask. End of subject—forever.”
“Good.” He relaxed his hold on my shoulders and hugged me. “This woman really seemed angry, huh?”
“That's how Tony described her.” But I didn't want to dwell on the incident on such a festive occasion, so I added, “I wouldn't give it another thought. He's prone to exaggeration.”
“Could be she was interested in somebody besides me. Or was jealous because we're having such a good time.”
“That's more likely. Mick seems genuinely pleased with your news. Chris, too?” Chris was his eldest daughter, a freshman at U.C. Berkeley.
Ricky leaned against the brick wall of the building, one arm around my shoulders. “Yeah, she's pleased. You know, the two of them have done a lot of growing up in the past six months. In fact, Chris would've been here tonight, except for a busted romance. Didn't want to be an eleventh wheel on Valentine's Day was how she put it.”
“Have you told the other kids?”
“Of course. I flew down to L.A. on Monday. Lisa and Molly are thrilled; Red's completely won them over. Brian chose to pretend I wasn't there. Frankly, I'm worried about him, and so're your sister and her husband. None of us knows what to do.”
“Is therapy an option?”
“Charly's looking into it.”
“What about Jamie?”
The way Ricky grinned confirmed my suspicion that fifteen-year-old Jamie was his favorite daughter. “Oh, she growled and scowled and gave a snarl or two for form's sake. And then she said her mom was so happy with Vic that she'd already forgotten she was ever married to me.”
“Ouch.”
“A mild shot is all. In the end she told me that since her mom was happy, she guessed I might as well be happy too. And finally she gave me her permission to go ahead with the nuptials.”
I laughed. “She's something else.”
“What d'you bet that within a year Red'll have won her over, too?”
“I'd have to agree with you.” I hesitated, then asked, “What about Charlene? How is she with this?”
“You know, for all of her lack of subtlety, Jamie may have a point. When I told Charly, she said, “That's nice, dear,’ and kissed me on the cheek like she would one of the kids who'd scored some minor triumph. Then she asked Vic to make us drinks so they could toast my happiness, and she went to check on a fax that was coming in. She's all caught up in getting her M.B.A. and jetting around to these internàtional financial conferences with Vic, and … Well, it's strange. I never thought I'd see the day when Charly and I could feel indifferent to each other, but that's what it boils down to.”
More likely, checking on the fax had been Charlene's way of hiding her perfectly natural feelings of regret and loss— just as Ricky's talk of indifference was his. “Things change, Brother Ricky.”
“Yeah, they do, Sister Sharon.”
Our eyes met, and we laughed. “Well, some things do,” I said. “But you and I—we're still family.”
That night as I lay beside Hy, I felt colder than the temperature warranted. Pulling the comforter closer, I pressed my back against his and burrowed deep. Sleep was an impossibility; my mind kept skipping from pleasant thoughts of the evening to the angry woman in the bar at Palomino. Contrary to what I'd told Ricky, Tony Nakayama was not prone to exaggeration. If he'd felt compelled to tell me about her, she must have been very angry indeed.
There was always the possibility that she was an obsessed fan of Ricky's, her rage directed at Rae—and that was cause for considerable concern. Or she could have been someone Anne-Marie or Hank had won a civil suit against—also worrisome. Or a dissatisfied client of my agency. Or … well, the possibilities were numerous.
Perhaps Hy … ?
No, he was the one person I could rule out. When I told him about the woman, over a nightcap once we got home, he was as concerned as I. If he had any reason to think he was the object of her angry glances, he'd have told me. Hy and I didn't lie to each other; half-truths and silences were more our style—and we seldom indulged in either anymore.
And now I was down to the one potential object of the woman's rage that I didn't want to speculate on—not in these dark, quiet hours, even with Hy sleeping beside me.