“He’s dead.” Angel Buchanan stared at the television mounted above the bar. Her whole body sagged, her high-heeled foot slid off the rung of her tall stool. “He’s dead.”
“Huh?” Angel’s intern-assistant paused in the act of wiggling her own stool closer to the marble-topped cocktail table where the pair were sitting and glanced up. Her gaze followed Angel’s over the heads of Ça Va’s noisy postwork crowd to the news ticker creeping across the TV screen. “Oh. That ‘Artist of the Heart’ guy. So?”
Angel didn’t answer. Instead she gripped the solid table edge to anchor herself as the chatter of the restaurant’s upscale clientele, and even the presence of her curious intern, receded. Her eyes tracked the crawl.
Stephen Whitney, the self-dubbed “Artist of the Heart,” had been hit by a truck while walking in the predawn dark. Though it was clearly an accident, the famous painter was dead all the same. A memorial service was scheduled for the following week in Carmel, California, near the place where the artist had lived for the last twenty years.
“Twenty-three years,” Angel muttered, correcting the newscaster.
Already the holy and the holier-than-thou were weighing in on the loss of one of America’s “great visionaries.” One claimed that not only had Whitney’s paintings celebrated home and family, but so had the way he lived his life. Both the National Choral Ensemble of the Baptist Church and the Harlem Boy’s Choir had promised to sing at the memorial service. A representative from the White House was planning to attend. The public was “stunned” and “saddened.”
Angel didn’t know what to call the ball of emotion suddenly expanding inside of her.
“She’s here,” the intern hissed in her ear. “Miss Marshall’s coming this way.”
Despite the warning, it still took a sharp elbow jab to jolt Angel’s attention back to the present. San Francisco. The popular Ça Va Restaurant. That she was here as a writer for West Coast magazine because her latest story needed Julie Marshall’s reaction to the fact that her boss was a two-faced charlatan who had swindled investors in a classic Ponzi scheme.
The thin, fiftyish Miss Marshall was settling on the barstool across the table. She looked at Angel with anxious eyes. “I know something’s wrong, Ms. Buchanan. Something about Paul. What is it?”
Angel’s gaze flicked back to the TV, that unnameable emotion roiling again in her belly. Something was wrong, all right. The world was getting ready to beatify Stephen Whitney, the man who Angel knew was no saint.
Later, though. She’d have to think about that later.
She forced herself to refocus on Miss Marshall. Though Angel knew from a previous interview that the older woman was head-over-girdle in love with her boss, she wouldn’t let anything as useless as a soft heart soft-pedal the bad news. In her experience, the baldest truth was always healthier than the most handsome lie.
“It is about Mr. Roth,” Angel began, slipping her hand inside her purse to bring out the wad of tissues she’d stuffed there before leaving the office. “You told me last week that you believe he’s innocent and that your house is on the market to pay for his defense. But I found evidence during my investigation…”
“Wh-what are you saying?” The older lady’s voice trembled.
“I followed the paper trail.” Angel placed the tissue wad on the tabletop and pushed it forward. “He bilked all those investors, every one, including your mother’s church circle. Don’t sell your home for him.”
The lady licked her pale lips. “Perhaps…perhaps you’re mistaken?”
God, why did women do something so foolish—dangerous, even—as putting their faith in a man? Shaking her head, Angel gave the tissue wad another nudge across the table. “He isn’t the man you think he is.”
Her hand closing around the tissues, Miss Marshall slowly, ever so slowly, rose to her feet.
Swallowing, Angel stood too. Here it comes, she thought, steeling herself for the sick panic she always felt when a woman cried.
The older lady sucked in a sharp breath. Then her eyes narrowed. “That bastard!” she spit out.
Angel stared.
“That slimy, lying bastard!” Instead of tears, Miss Marshall’s pale eyes were filling with something else, something that looked a lot like that emotion coiling and writhing inside Angel herself.
“Promise me it will all come out in your article,” Miss Marshall demanded. “Promise me that the whole world will know the kind of man Paul Roth is.”
“I always tell the whole story,” Angel assured her.
“Good.” There were spots of color on the woman’s cheeks. “I thought, we all thought, he could do no wrong. The world should know the truth about men like that!”
Before Angel could say any more, a waiter paused at Miss Marshall’s side, the small tray balanced on his palm crowded with martinis and highball glasses. “Ladies, I’ll be with you in just a moment.”
The older woman rounded on him. Angel guessed it happened because the poor guy did bear a slight resemblance to Paul Roth, the “rat-faced, smarmy-smiling, hell-bound seducer of hearts” that had done Miss Marshall wrong. Whatever the reason, following that damning pronouncement, the betrayed woman threw down the tissues and lifted a martini glass off the waiter’s tray to dash the contents into the unsuspecting man’s face.
Then she stormed away.
Not until Angel handed over that wad of tissues and a massive tip to the dripping waiter did she finally put a name to the emotion that had been radiating off the older woman. It was outrage. And Angel recognized it as the same feeling burning inside of her at the idea that Stephen Whitney would be remembered as a noble family man. A hero.
But she didn’t devise a plan of action until later, after she’d returned home to her apartment, her dry cleaning in one hand and a tiny bag of groceries in the other. Outside her door, she dropped them both when her neighbor’s oversized cat, Tom Jones, demanded his customary belly rub.
Of course, the instant another set of footsteps sounded on the stairs, the philanderer abandoned her.
Isn’t that just like a male.
With a sigh, Angel walked into her apartment and immediately crossed to the TV, filling the silence with the voice of the evening anchor on the all-day, all-news channel. Now she learned that even more were mourning the “upstanding” Stephen Whitney, whose paintings “captured so many precious moments of the American family experience.”
The flames of that hot, angry emotion inside Angel leaped higher. They’re wrong, all wrong!
The upstanding Stephen Whitney, who the world thought knew so much about family, was the same man who’d fathered Angel…and then forgotten her. It was then that Miss Marshall’s exhortation blazed in Angel’s mind.
The world should know the truth about men like that.