The meek shall inherit the earth but not the mineral rights.
— J. Paul Getty
She named the bunny Deuce, and Deuce rode home in the backseat, safely strapped into a shoulder harness while Annie, feeling better than she knew she had reason to be, chattered to Grady about their plans for the rest of the day.
“You’ll want me to divert Dickens while you case his room, right?” she said, then laughed as he looked at her, one expressive brow riding high on his forehead.
“Case his room? Annie, that would mean I’m going to check it out so I can go back later and rob him. I’m going to search his room. Big difference.”
“Probably not in the eyes of the law,” Annie suggested, waggling her own eyebrows back at him. “Six to ten either way, I’ll bet. Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.”
“May I remind you that you’d be charged as an accessory? Or is this your way of wiggling out of helping me? That honesty thing again?”
“Somebody cut up my clothes, Grady. The same somebody killed Bunny One—or would that be Uno? Never mind, it doesn’t matter. I want to find out who was in my room, and then I want to kill him. Do you think I can get away with it?”
“Not if you report the gun on your income tax as a deductible expense,” Grady said as he turned onto the country road leading back to the Peevers Mansion. “Which, knowing you, you’d probably do. List it under work-related supplies, or something equally lame.”
“Ha. Ha. Very unfunny, Sullivan. I’m positive I have at least some larceny in my soul.”
“Don’t we all,” Grady said, shaking his head. “That said, how are you planning to divert Dickens?”
She snuggled more deeply into the soft leather bucket seat. “You’ll see,” she said, wishing she had a plan, wanting him to think she had a plan. Boy, did she wish she had a plan! “Unless you think you have a better idea?” she ventured, trying not to sound too hopeful.
“I think you should ask Archie to have Dickens give you the grand tour of the place. You could tell Archie it would make the little Peeverses nuts to see Dickens showing you around while you greedily take inventory of every room. I have a calculator in my room. You could take that with you, pretend to punch in numbers like you’re doing a running total of Peevers’s assets.”
Annie stuck out her bottom lip, as if his answer had displeased her rather than saved her from admitting she hadn’t the faintest idea about a good diversion. “No fair. You must have been reading my mind. But, since we agree, I’ll run up to see Archie as soon as we get in the house.”
“You do that, Sherlock,” Grady said, as they pulled to a stop outside the front door of the mansion. “But give me about fifteen minutes first, to talk to Daisy if she’s home.”
“Daisy? Why her?”
“I have no idea,” he told her as they gathered bags out of the trunk, Grady carrying most of them because Annie’s arms were full of Deuce. “Maybe I’m attracted to her intellect.”
“Yeah. You and Junior both,” Annie said, opening the door so that Grady could precede her into the house. “The girl’s loaded with intellect.”
“Jealous?” Grady asked as he passed by her.
Annie almost said yes, which would have been ridiculous. Why would she be jealous of Daisy, or any woman Grady might consider attractive? A couple of pretty hot kisses in the moonlight did not give her proprietary rights—not that she wanted them, of course. “Just make sure you’ve had all your shots,” she told him, then ran upstairs to put Deuce away in Maisie’s room, where he’d be safe, leaving Grady to follow after her with all her shopping bags.
* * *
Grady checked his wristwatch, decided he had about ten minutes to interrogate Daisy. He’d probably only need two, but he always liked having a cushion.
He found her in the morning room, playing solitaire on the glass-topped wrought-iron table. She was frowning over the cards as if looking for another move. He’d seen less concentration on the face of a major-league pitcher in the bottom of the ninth, with three on and two out.
“Hello, Ms. Goodenough,” he said, stopping a few feet away from the table. “Would you mind if I joined you for a few moments? Oh, and black seven on the red eight.”
She looked up at him, then down at the cards. “Oh, my goodness, you’re right! Now, why didn’t I see that?” She made the play, then gestured that Grady sit down, join her. “Junie is teaching me cards, you understand, and I’ve been practicing. We’re going to Vegas next month.”
Grady refused to wonder why Junior was teaching her solitaire, as he was pretty sure nobody played solitaire in Vegas. He also refused to consider the idea that starting off with something simpler, like Go Fish, might have been a better choice. “How nice,” he said at last, considering it safest.
“Yeah, isn’t it?” Daisy put her elbows on the table and leaned toward him, speaking very quietly. “Can you keep a secret? I think we’re going to get married in one of the chapels out there.” Then she sat back, frowning. “That’s legal, isn’t it? One of my old boyfriends, Sidney, told me you couldn’t get knocked up if you did it with the woman, you know, on top?” She rolled her heavily made-up eyes. “Good thing I asked my friend Shirl first, let me tell you! So I’d like to be sure. Is a Vegas wedding, you know, legal in Pennsylvania?”
Grady could almost feel sorry for this girl. “Far as I know it is, as long as neither of you is already married. Are you sure Junior’s last divorce is final?”
Daisy’s complexion paled under her makeup. “I don’t know,” she said, then clapped her hands to her cheeks. “What should I do? Shirl can’t help me with that one, can she?”
It was his fault, and he knew it. He knew damn full well Daisy and Junior were nearly too dumb to live, let alone pull off a murder. He should never have bothered to come in here in the first place. So now he was stuck. “I can find out for you,” he offered, trying not to grimace. It wouldn’t be so bad. Maisie could probably find out on line in less than ten minutes.
Daisy reached out with both hands, grabbing Grady’s forearm as she leaned toward him. “You’d do that for me? Oh, aren’t you the sweetest thing! I can’t imagine why Junie says A.W. says you’re a dirty, pond-scum-sucking—” She sat back, smiled at him. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Grady said, standing up and pushing in his chair. “I’ve been called worse. Well, it’s been nice talking to you, Ms. Goodenough. I’ll have that answer for you soon, all right?”
Daisy also stood up, smoothing her lime green knit dress down over her twin monuments to silicone, then over her lush hips. “I just can’t thank you enough, Mr. Sullivan,” she said. Then, before Grady could see it coming, she launched herself against him, wrapped her arms around his neck, and planted a big wet one straight on his mouth.
He barely had time to have it register in his mind that Daisy used mint mouthwash before a hand came down on his shoulder, he was roughly wheeled around, Daisy screamed, and a fist slammed into his jaw.
“Bastard!” Junior gasped out, but he did it from the floor, because Grady had recovered quickly, delivering a karate punch into the man’s soft midsection.
Daisy dropped down beside Junior, asking him if he was all right, telling him she had only been thanking Mr. Sullivan for a favor he’d promised. She was all solicitude... right up until the moment Junior coughed, then heaved his lunch onto the carpet.
“Oh, yuck!” Daisy said, quickly standing up once more. She waved her hands in front of her, as if she could literally push away the sight and sound and even the smell of Junior Peevers at his most unattractive. “I suppose you want me to do something, Junie, baby?” she asked.
“Get... just get the hell out of here! Leave me alone!” Junior told her, clutching his belly, his knees drawn up to his chest. If he started calling out that he wanted his mommy, Grady wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised.
“Ooooh, Junieeee!” Daisy wailed, then ran from the room on her four-inch heels, still waving her hands in front of her.
“You’re an ass, Junie,” Grady said, rubbing his jaw, then moving it back and forth, testing to make sure nothing had been broken. It had to be a lucky punch. A sucker punch. The guy couldn’t be that good with his fists. “Ms. Goodenough was just thanking me for volunteering to find out if your last divorce is final.”
Junior, who had been rocking back and forth, stopped moaning and looked up at Grady, his eyes a near resemblance to the popped-out-on-stalks look of cartoon characters. “She what? She didn’t! You aren’t, are you?”
“Not anymore, because I don’t have to,” Grady said, grinning. “You just gave me the answer. Still married, right? You’re a real prince, Junie, baby. A real prince.”
Junior struggled to his feet, glaring at Grady. “This is none of your business!”
“You’re right, it’s not. But I am curious. Were you going to go through with the marriage in Vegas?”
Junior’s eyelids narrowed, giving him a dyspeptic look that probably was meant to be threatening. “I’ll have you fired. You’ll be out of here on your ear today, Sullivan!”
Grady looked at his watch and frowned. “Gee, I’m scared. And, not that it hasn’t been fun, but I’m late for an appointment.”
Junie was still yelling as Grady walked toward the foyer, stopping when he saw Annie and Dickens standing at the bottom of the steps. She had his calculator in one hand and a mercenary smile on her beautiful face.
“Wasn’t it nice of Archie to suggest we do this, Dickens?” she was saying to the butler. “Can we start in the drawing room? I want to know everything you know about every stick of furniture, every painting on the walls. Antiques are so hot now, aren’t they? I’ll bet there’s a small fortune in that one room. Isn’t it a shame Mitzi declined to join us after we told her what we’re going to do? Does she get many headaches?”
“I have no idea. Can we please just get on with this?” Dickens grumbled, his hands bunching into fists at his sides.
Grady chuckled under his breath, confident that Annie would keep Dickens occupied for either a half hour or until the butler had built up enough steam to blow the top of his head clean off.
Stopping in the empty kitchen to load crushed ice into a small plastic sandwich bag to ease his aching jaw, Grady then slipped into the hallway leading to Dickens’s rooms, already pulling his set of lockpicks from his pocket.
* * *
“And then, when I was twelve, I fell down some stairs and broke one of my top front teeth almost in half. I looked awful. I had to have a cap put on when I was seventeen and had saved up enough money from my after-school job. I got one of those caps with the gold back on it, too. See—” Annie said, stepping closer to Dickens, her mouth open, pointing with one finger to her perfect upper teeth.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Grady motion to her from the doorway of the library, then disappear once more. “Well,” she said, stepping back from the clearly disgusted Dickens, “much as this has been fun, I suppose we’re done now, right? Thanks so much for the tour,” she called over her shoulder, already on her way to meet Grady.
“I thought you’d never get done,” she said, catching up with him at the French doors in the morning room. “Another minute, and I was going to have to show Dickens the tap dance I performed in my first recital.”
“Were you any good?” Grady asked, opening the door and motioning for her to exit ahead of him.
“I didn’t go to dance classes. And I’ve never had a cap on any of my teeth. I was acting, remember. Told you I was good,” Annie said, heading for the steps leading down to the grass from the patio. “But it was getting hairy. An hour, Grady. How could it take you an hour to search one room?”
“Three rooms,” Grady corrected, taking hold of her elbow and almost frog-marching her toward one of the gazebos farther out on the lawn. “Plus bath. Dickens has a whole damn apartment, in which he has jammed enough stuff for a six-room house. Oh, and I spent the first five minutes opening the three locks the man has on his door, five more minutes when I was done, locking them again from the outside. That’s not easy, you know. You can congratulate me at any time.”
“Maybe later.” Annie was biting on her knuckle. She thought she heard something in Grady’s tone, something that made her ask, “Whose stuff?”
“Good question. You’ll get that Junior Detective badge in the mail any day now,” he answered. “Let’s put it this way. There wasn’t a souvenir ashtray from Atlantic City or a set of beat-up TV trays anywhere. It was all quality stuff. I found a neatly typed inventory in his desk— picked that lock, too—listing each piece and its estimated worth.”
“Because...?” Annie asked, sitting down on one of the benches lining the walls of the gazebo.
“Because,” Grady told her, “Dickens has a little business going on, as far as I can tell. He might call those rooms his quarters, or even his apartment, but what he’s really got going there is the home office of his import-export business. Two of his closets were full of nothing but folded-up packing crates. Export the real McCoy, import fakes. I’ve got to hand it to the guy. It’s pretty brilliant. I mean, I doubt the Peeverses are antique experts, and could spot a fake.”
“Wow. And he’s been working here forever,” Annie said, trying to take in all this information, then times it by the number she’d made up in her head. “If he sold off about twenty thousand a year, for about thirty years, that would be—”
“Chicken feed,” Grady told her, pacing back and forth in the middle of the gazebo. “Chump change. A drop in the bucket.” He stopped pacing and turned to look at her. “Oh, and his hobby? His painting? Guess what he paints. Come on, Annie, don’t disappoint me. Guess.”
Annie felt her eyes going wide, pretty sure she’d figured it out. “He doesn’t. Does he?”
“Oh, yes, indeedy he does,” Grady told her, running a hand through his hair. “Right now he’s working on a Reubens, I think. And doing a pretty good job.”
“Ohmigod,” Annie said, getting up to do a little pacing of her own. “Why was I hoping he painted by number? You know, wide-eyed kittens, or maybe big red barns? He’s really forging Archie’s art, and then selling the originals?”
“There were about a dozen canvases rolled up and stuck into tubes under his bed,” Grady told her. “So maybe he isn’t selling off the originals, but just keeping them himself, maybe for a rainy day. We’d have no way of knowing how many of the paintings in Archie’s house are real or fake, not without calling in an expert.”
Annie sat down again, trying to gather her wits. “No wonder he looked so smug when I was admiring that painting on the second-floor landing. It’s probably an original Dickens. Shame on him!”
She wanted to tell Archie. Leave Grady standing there alone and run to tell Archie. He might be a mean old man, but he didn’t deserve to be ripped off by his butler.
“And, besides the paintings, you’re saying he’s stealing other stuff?” she asked, wishing she felt less violated herself. Which was ridiculous. This had nothing to do with her, none of it. That’s not why she was here, to make her own financial killing, the way Dickens had done, was obviously still doing.
“Nothing too big in size,” Grady said. “Figurines, some jade pieces. Jewelry, of course. I think Mitzi would be in for a shock if she ever got her jewels appraised. I found sketches of necklaces, pins. Photographs of different pieces. He must be slowly replacing every piece of jewelry with well-made fakes. You know, I’ve got to hand it to the guy. He’s pretty damn inventive.”
Annie tried to push her mind beyond Dickens’s grand larceny. “This means we can eliminate him as a suspect, doesn’t it? I mean, who knows if A.W. and Mitzi will keep him on when Archie’s gone, right? The best thing that could happen to Dickens is for Archie to live to be one hundred.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Grady told her, sitting down beside her. “But I’m still going to have Maisie check him out, although she’s going to have a hell of a time doing it.”
“Why?”
“Because I found his checkbook and his full name is Charles Dickens, Annie. No middle initial. Do you know how many hits she’s going to get on any Internet search engine, looking up Charles Dickens?”
Annie thought about that for a while, then smiled. “Please let me be there when you tell her,” she said. “I like Maisie, really I do, but if she makes one more crack like ‘what’s that with your eyebrows, honey? Did you do that on purpose?’ Well, you know what I mean,” she ended weakly.
“Maisie’s a one of a kind,” Grady said, taking Annie’s hand and urging her to her feet. “And, speaking of one of a kind, aren’t you going to ask me how my interview went with Daisy Goodenough?”
“All right, how did it go? Good enough?” Annie asked, grinning. “Sorry. Couldn’t resist.”
Grady took hold of her other hand, so that they stood facing each other, their fingers intertwined. “Yeah, good enough, I suppose,” he answered, looking down at her. “We talked, she stuck her tongue down my throat, Junie punched me, and when I nailed him in the gut he barfed all over the rug. Just your usual, everyday, run-of-the-mill interrogation.”
Annie had lost him at the tongue part. “She stuck her what where?”
“She was thanking me for a favor I’d offered to do for her.”
“What did you offer to do for her? Father her children?” Annie snapped, trying to get her hands free, but Grady wasn’t letting go.
“No, she wanted to know if Junior is free to marry her because they’re heading for Vegas next—wait a minute. You’re jealous! I don’t believe this. I said it earlier, but I was only trying to get a rise out of you. But this is real, isn’t it? You’re jealous.”
“Am not.”
“Are too.”
“Am not—oh! Just let me go, all right?”
But he wouldn’t let her go, and she didn’t really want to fight him. After an only halfhearted attempt to break free, she gave up and just stood there, glaring at him. Hoping she was glaring at him, and not just looking up at him like a big, dumb puppy wanting to be petted.
“May I kiss you?” Grady asked.
Annie’s toes curled inside her shoes.
“Huh?” she responded, thinking that was pretty damn articulate, considering she’d just swallowed her tongue. “You’re asking me?”
His smile melted whatever parts of her hadn’t gone to mush when he’d asked her his question. “I’m being polite here, Annie. And that’s hard to do when you’re horny as hell, just in case you ever wondered. Or did you think last night’s kisses were enough? They weren’t for me. Probably that physical attraction thing, right? I thought maybe we should investigate it some more, just to be sure that’s what it is.”
“All hot and bothered, huh? I’m flattered, really. Oh, you poor thing.” He’d finally let go of her hands, so she lifted them both, cupping his cheeks in her palms.
“Ouch!”
Grady jumped back, holding his chin in his hand and rocking his head back and forth. “Damn. Damn, damn, damn.”
“What is it?” Annie asked, concerned because he seemed to be in real pain. “Toothache?”
“Junior-ache,” Grady told her. “I told you. He sucker punched me when he saw Daisy draping herself all over me.”
“Oh, poor baby,” Annie said, then giggled, and pretty much ruined the moment. “Can we try again? I promise to be gentle.”
“Funny,” Grady said, but he took his hand away from his jaw and stepped closer, laid his hands on her shoulders. “But no face touching, okay? Just mouths.”
“Yes, sir,” Annie said, biting her bottom lip. “Are you sure you want to do this?” Dumb question, because if the man thought he was getting out of this gazebo without kissing her, he sure didn’t know her all that well. Yes, she knew herself to be physically attracted to him, and vice versa. But she had also been wondering if that was all that might be between them. If there might be more, so much more. Enough to thrill her and frighten her at the same time.
So the thought of kissing Grady, being held in his arms, made her nervous, and she took refuge in a little silliness. She stood on tiptoe, her hands on his shoulders, lightly puckering up her mouth. “Anytime you’re ready, Rocky.” Unfortunately, with her lips puckered, it came out more as, “Anytime wou’re weady, Wocky.”
That did it. Grady all but swooped down on her, their mouths colliding, their lips parting, his tongue probing her without a bit of hesitation. His hands went to her waist, pulling her against him, tightly against him.
Oh yes. Physical attraction all right. In spades! And yet more, so much more. Did he feel it, too?
She felt an urge to rake her fingernails down his back, then possibly toss him to the floor of the gazebo and have her wicked way with him until he had no choice but to tell her he wanted to spend the rest of his life making love with her.
He kissed her eyes, her nose, the side of her throat.
His warm breath tickled her ear, sent shivers down her spine. This wasn’t just a kiss; this was more than a kiss. Whole worlds more than a kiss. Did he feel it, too? Oh, please. He had to feel it, too.
“This is crazy,” Grady mumbled beside her ear.
Okay, that’s what it was. It was crazy. Mad, and crazy, and confusing, and scary—and wonderful. So she took a chance. “I can live with it if you can,” she said right back at him.
He held her tightly, so that she could feel his chuckle as well as hear it.
“What?” she asked, pushing away from him a little so that she could look up into his face.
“Nothing. I was just thinking. Archie once sent Dickens with a bucket of water to toss over Junior and Daisy when he saw them making love out here.”
Annie looked to her right, up at the second-floor windows, one of which was still covered with a piece of cardboard. “Oh,” she said. “Were we going to make love? Because you didn’t ask me that. You only asked if you could kiss me.”
“One question at a time, Annie,” he said, tipping up her chin with his fingers. “But, now that you mention it, I wouldn’t mind at least discussing—aw, hell!”
Annie nearly jumped out of her skin. “Was that—no, it couldn’t be... but was that a shot?”
Grady didn’t answer. He just grabbed her hand and started running toward the house, stopping only for a moment when she told him she had to take off her heels if she was going to be able to keep up with him. “First the broken window, and now a gunshot. Both times while you were kissing me. Can you believe it?”
“Oh, I believe it,” Grady gritted out, pulling her along with him again. “And I have to tell you something, Annie. This is all getting pretty damn old pretty damn fast!”