Was that a compliment?
Seriously?
Kelly looked at her solemn partner in barely contained astonishment.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me the first time,” he told her flatly.
“Actually, I did,” Kelly admitted, then smiled broadly at him when his glance toward her turned accusatory. “But it has such a nice ring to it. Humor me and say what you said again.”
Kane blew out a breath as he shook his head. Served him right for going soft for a second. So far, none of what transpired was convincing him that partnering was a good way to go for a man such as him. He returned to his original belief: There was no upside to having a partner. Definitely no upside to having a crazy partner.
“You’re a real pain in the butt, Cavanaugh. You know that?” Kane accused her.
Kelly pretended to seriously mull over his words. “No, I don’t think that’s what you said. It was something about my having done good work.”
Scowling at her, Kane continued to face forward, his eyes on the road. “Keep this up and you’ll negate any good effects you managed to accomplish.”
Kelly merely laughed as she shook her head. “You are a very tough crowd to please, Durant.”
He was beginning to think this woman he’d been stuck with would drive him crazy inside of a week. He didn’t do his best work agitated. One way or another, there would be a breakup in their future—and very soon.
“I don’t know what the hell that means,” he growled. “But I’m not going to ask.”
“It means—”
Still driving, Kane took his right hand off the steering wheel and held it up much the way an old-fashioned traffic cop directing the flow of vehicles would have.
“I said I’m not going to ask. That implies that I don’t want to hear you dissecting your own words. In case you’re unclear on the concept, that means—”
“Okay, moving right along,” she quipped, interrupting his explanation and calling a halt to that line of conversation. With a sigh, Kelly looked out the window at the road before them. For the first time she took note of the route he was taking. It was a different one than they had taken to the high-end residential community. “Are we going directly to the club?”
This time Kane didn’t even bother glancing in her direction. “What does it look like?”
She had a great deal of patience, but it was in finite supply. This man had to be put on some kind of notice, she thought. Otherwise, this testy behavior was liable to continue for days.
“It looks like one of us should seriously think about stopping by the hospital to have a boulder-sized chip removed from their shoulder,” she told him in a sweet, matter-of-fact manner that not even the most critical of people could find fault with.
“Then, once that chip is removed, maybe we’ll have a shot at working together a bit more smoothly.” Or at least she could hope that would be the outcome of the proposed venture, Kelly silently added.
The look he gave her was far from happy or even mildly approving. “This is as smooth as it is going to get.”
“You underestimate yourself,” she told him. Adding, “As well as me.”
He’d tried, he’d really tried, Kane thought. But there was a time when you just had to recognize that the deck was stacked against you. It was time for him to cut his losses and just withdraw.
“I have no estimation where you’re concerned,” he told her in a distant, removed voice. “As for me—no offense—but I just don’t like having a partner.”
“None taken,” she responded cavalierly. “And I kind of picked up on the fact that you are less than thrilled about this arrangement. But you know what, Durant? There’s a reason the department sends their detectives out in pairs, so you might as well get used to it.”
She didn’t think he would come up with an answer so fast, but he did. “It cuts down on the number of cars they have to provide.”
She stared at his profile, rather amazed at the way Kane’s mind worked. “Wow, you really are cynical, aren’t you?”
He continued watching the road as he went. “Never claimed to have a sunny disposition.”
And this woman was nothing if not a Pollyanna, Kane thought. Pollyannas required a happy, hopeful atmosphere around them. That just wasn’t him and it never would be.
“If you want to ask for another partner, I won’t contest it,” he said.
“Contest it?” she echoed. Just how dense did the man think she was? “You’d probably break into a happy dance.” The momentary mental image of the solemn, handsome detective suddenly swaying to some melody only he heard had Kelly grinning. “And that is something that I would actually pay to see,” she admitted. “But not enough to break up this beautiful friendship we’ve got going here between us.”
“What beautiful friendship?” he all but growled.
“The one I’m laying the groundwork for,” she replied cheerfully. “Pay attention, Durant. And FYI, I’m not a quitter. That means that I don’t take off at the first sign of a problem—or the promise of a difficult partner,” she deliberately added. “You’re just going to have to get used to that.
“So, if you were hoping to get rid of me by giving me a sample of your sunny disposition, sorry, it’s not going to happen. By the way, the answer to the question that I asked you earlier about why the department pairs up detectives, it’s so that they can have each other’s backs. I figure you’re too good a cop not to have mine, and I sure as hell am going to have yours,” she told him in no uncertain terms.
“As for the rest of it, you want to sulk and behave like some dark and brooding character out of one of Byron’s poems, go right ahead. Be my guest. But you’ll be missing out on some pretty terrific conversations,” she predicted.
The look he spared her was nothing if not skeptical. “Meaning with you?”
If he was trying to get her to back down or to intimidate her, he was going to have to work at it a lot harder than that, she thought. “I don’t see anyone else in the car. So, yes, meaning me.”
Kane laughed shortly. “Think a lot of yourself, don’t you?”
She raised her chin ever so slightly, which was the only indication that she might have found the question combative.
“What I just said has nothing to do with whether or not I think a lot of myself. I just happen to know my strengths and my limits. That’s all.
“And if you’re wondering,” she continued, “I have inside knowledge—no pun intended—on the way the male mind works. I grew up with four brothers who were anything but docile. They supplied me with my education, and I diligently took notes,” she told him completely straight-faced.
Without her realizing it, they had arrived at Valhalla.
After Kane showed his badge, the man at the club’s entrance reluctantly opened the gates to allow them to drive on to the grounds.
“Let’s see if you can put those so-called notes you took to good use,” Kane challenged her as he headed to the clubhouse.
The route to the impressive structure was marked with a great many expensive, well-cared-for vehicles. The most conservatively priced of the lot turned out to be a silver Mercedes.
“Never understood it,” she murmured, taking in the sea of pricey automobiles. The comment was more to herself than her partner since she just assumed Durant wasn’t paying attention to a word she said, anyway.
Kane surprised her by asking, “Never understood what?”
She managed to recover without missing a beat. “Pouring so much money into something that could so easily be totaled in the blink of an eye. Whether a car’s a Ford or a Ferrari, they’re both just a heartbeat away from becoming a mangled heap.”
Kane shrugged. Expensive cars meant nothing to him. They’d never moved him, not even as a young boy. Life had been far too serious for him to be infatuated with an automobile.
“They’re status symbols, I suppose,” he said.
She took in the groups of golfers on the course just before they reached the clubhouse. “I know that, but this crowd doesn’t strike me as the type to be impressed by someone dropping a quarter of a million on a Lamborghini.”
Thoughts of his father suddenly popped up in his brain. On those rare occasions when his father hadn’t been taking out his frustrations on him or his mother, his father had told him that if he ever won the lottery—the one that he was always faithfully buying tickets for—the first thing he’d intended to do was buy a fancy car. The kind that would make everyone sit up and take notice.
“I’d get my due respect then,” he’d said. “Not like now.”
Usually right after that, the scenario would disintegrate into his father blaming everyone else for his misfortunes. And shortly after that, Kane would be on the receiving end of a particularly vicious beating. That had seemed to be the only way his father could cope with the events in his life, by taking out all his frustration on either his wife or his son. Or both.
Thinking of that now, Kane regarded the pricey vehicles. “You’d be surprised at what does the trick for some people. To some people, it’s all about the kind of vehicle they drive. The flashier, the better.”
Not him, Kelly thought. Durant wasn’t the type to go for flashy status symbols. She would bet on it.
But someone in his life, past or present, had valued flashy status symbols, she decided. She could tell by the way his tone had changed when he’d mentioned it.
Kelly waited half a beat before falling in step directly behind Kane. She meant for him to go first. To her surprise, he deliberately slowed his pace just enough to allow her to catch up.
She was about to thank him, then decided that Kane probably didn’t want her thanks. The less said on the subject, the better was probably the way he liked it. He was going to cause her to reevaluate her whole approach to partnerships, Kelly mused.
“Is there something I can do for you?” a very tanned, very polished looking man in his midforties asked politely as he walked up to them. His clean cut looks and the touch of silver at his temples, in addition to his manner of carrying himself, all pointed to him as being someone in charge.
And he was.
“Detectives Durant and Cavanaugh,” Kane said, taking out his wallet and holding it steady to allow the man to have a closer look at his identification. Kelly did the same. “We were wondering if you could tell us if one of your members—a Randolph Osborn—was friendlier with any one of your members than he might have been with some of the others.”
“Leon Edwards,” the man introduced himself. “I’m the director here.” He got back to the question that had been put to him. “Friendlier?” Edwards questioned, clearly amused. “You are asking me about Randolph Osborn, correct?”
“We are,” Kane confirmed, clearly waiting for a more precise answer.
The director seemed to gauge his words carefully. Memberships and high revenues in the form of donations were at stake here.
“Mr. Osborn, I’m afraid, wasn’t what you would call friendly with any of the members,” Edwards said stiffly. “He did associate with a few of our members, if that’s what you mean.”
Kelly stepped in, knowing her partner would take that as an affront. Kane, she was beginning to see, didn’t exactly have the gift of diplomacy. He favored the direct approach rather than attempting to sugarcoat his words. The man obviously never had subscribed to the old philosophy of catching more flies with honey than with vinegar.
“Could you give us a list of the members’ names?” Kelly requested.
Edwards looked at her and it was obvious to Kelly that he liked what he saw here better than he did when he was interacting with Kane. But there were still rules he obviously was obligated to follow.
Edwards’s gray eyes shifted from one detective to the other. “Just what’s this all about, detectives?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Osborn were the victims of a home invasion last night,” Kane informed the director matter-of-factly.
The man’s eyes widened from their customary slits. Edwards appeared genuinely surprised. “Was anyone hurt?” he asked.
Kelly could tell that her partner was going to give the director a flat “no” in response. It hurt nothing to give Edwards a crumb, feeding his obvious need to get something exclusive on the man, however minute.
“Only Mr. Osborn’s pride,” Kelly confided, lowering her voice as if she was sharing something that deserved to be labeled a secret.
“Well, I can understand that,” the man replied, bobbing his head up and down. And then, as if his brain was on some sort of ten-second delay, he looked up at the two detectives before him, clearly stunned. “And you two think that someone here is responsible for that home invasion?”
That was stating it too blatantly. Kelly decided to reframe her answer so that it sounded more as if they were working with a turn-of-the-last-century mystery. “We think someone here can possibly give us a clue or some sort of a lead as to who might have wanted to do this to the Osborns.”
“You mean break into their house and steal something from them?” Edwards asked. “I assure you that—”
“No, we mean someone who might have wanted to humiliate Mr. Osborn,” Kelly was quick to correct the director’s misimpression.
She glanced at Kane, then made up her mind that allowing Edwards to learn a little bit of the truth would help them close this case sooner rather than later.
“We believe that whoever did it could have easily gotten in and out with the Osborns sleeping right through the entire ordeal, none the wiser,” Kane said. “The objects of the theft were on the first floor and the Osborns’ bedroom is on the second.
“But they were roused, tied up and made to sit through the robbery. The thief obviously wanted to observe their humiliation firsthand. Would you know of anyone here that Mr. Osborn might have had words with? Or maybe there was someone harboring ill will against him for some reason?” Kane supposed.
“Someone?” Edwards echoed with a smirk he didn’t bother hiding. “Would you like those names alphabetically, chronologically or listed by the size of the offense?” the director asked them.
“That many?” Kane marveled. Even he hadn’t expected this to be turned into a crowd scene, which was the way it was clearly heading.
The director looked to either side of him as if to see if there was anyone within earshot.
Apparently satisfied that he wasn’t going to be overheard, Edwards confided to the pair, “You didn’t get this from me, but that man never met an argument he didn’t like. It is getting to the point that the board is seriously considering asking Mr. Osborn to relinquish his membership if he can’t learn how to get along with the other members.
“It would definitely be a shame to revoke their membership since everyone likes his poor, long-suffering wife.” And then Edwards’s face sobered as he focused on the subject. “But Mr. Osborn is making it very difficult for us to turn a blind eye to his irritating manner. We do have to think of the other members...”
Kane glanced at her and Kelly could see by the look in her partner’s eyes that Kane felt the director had given them way more information than they wanted regarding the man in question.
More is better than less, Kelly had decided a long time ago.
“Absolutely,” Kelly heartily agreed. “Mr. Edwards, we don’t want to make your job any more difficult or challenging than it already must be, but we could really use that list of people that Mr. Osborn has had differences with.” When the director continued to look reluctant to comply, Kelly added, “We could get a warrant making you give us that list, but that would call a great deal of unwanted attention to your club. You don’t need that sort of publicity now, do you?”
“No, of course not,” Edwards answered, his tan growing a few shades lighter right before her eyes. “All right. If you have something to write with, I can give you that list right now.”
“You don’t have to check your records or surveillance tapes?” Kane questioned suspiciously.
In response, the director tapped his temple. “All the records are right here, and I can access them whenever I want. That way there’s no fear of someone hacking into our database and making off with some—shall I say?—less than favorable information.”
“Understood,” Kelly said, humoring the man. Then, just for good measure, she added another layer of sweetener. “This club is certainly lucky to have someone like you running the place.”
The director beamed and wrote faster—just as Kelly suspected he would.