White Hot Page 6

  “What kind of stirrings?”

  “Just talk. I think this thing could get dangerous.”

  “Croc, goddamnit-”

  “I don’t have shit, Tabak. Just feelings. One thing I know for sure is, none of the hot ice has been fenced locally. Not one rock. So our thief’s either sending it out or holding on to it.” He paused, and Jeremiah pictured him at some rat-hole pay phone, resisted a surge of sympathy for a wasted life. “Any chance you can search Pascarelli’s place?”

  “Jesus Christ, Croc. No, I can’t search Pascarelli’s place. I’m a reporter, not a goddamned burglar. And I’m not a lunatic.” Jeremiah went still, eyeing his turtle, thinking. “Croc…don’t you go trying to search Pascarelli’s place yourself. I don’t need a loose cannon on my hands.”

  “Hey, I was just kidding. I know you play by the rules.”

  “You’d best play by those same rules. You break the law, don’t expect me to be landing at your jail cell with bail money.”

  “A cheap bastard like you? Nah. I wouldn’t expect that. Whoops, I’m running out of time. Hate to spend another quarter listening to you spout off. Keep digging, okay?”

  “How can I reach you?”

  But Croc had hung up, and Jeremiah growled at the phone and hurled it into the kitchen. He went through a lot of phones that way. His lizard stared at him, motionless. His snake slept. His turtle continued to eat his spinach. Jeremiah swore viciously. His gut burned. His head pounded. Whatever calm he’d managed to find en route south had deserted him. Things didn’t feel right. He couldn’t pinpoint what, or why it was getting to him. Rich people were losing a few baubles to a clever, nonviolent thief. It wasn’t dangerous, it wasn’t sick, it wasn’t controversial or depressing, and he probably shouldn’t trust his instincts to work right up in Palm Beach.

  He should find a real story or go fishing with his father for a week. He had no business chasing down a jewel thief, especially not on behalf of a street creep who wasn’t being straight with him.

  But Croc wasn’t the problem. Mollie, Jeremiah knew, was the problem. He’d picked her off a beach filled with college students ten years ago because something about her had grabbed at his soul.

  He groaned at his own romantic idiocy. A decade hadn’t made him any smarter about her. He grabbed his own whittling knife and went down to join the boys on the porch. Four eighty-plus-year-olds and him. They passed him a cigar and a hunk of wood, and Jeremiah figured it beat driving back up to Palm Beach and sneaking around Leonardo Pascarelli’s house just in case his big-eyed ex-flute player ventured out tonight. He could follow her, search her house, or just sit out on the street talking to himself like a damned fool. Best he just sit out with the guys instead and let the night sort itself out.

  It wasn’t until after eleven that Mollie got the brush of Jeremiah’s lips off her mind. She couldn’t even characterize it as a real kiss, and yet she’d obsessed on it for hours. Work had not served as a distraction. She made her West Coast calls, brainstormed with pad and pen, and spent thirty minutes updating her contacts database. Then she threw darts and, finally, sank into a hot, scented bath. As a means of restoring her universe to some semblance of order, she projected herself five years into the future. She’d have a cute little house, an office, a small staff, talented clients, and a fun man in her life. It wouldn’t be Jeremiah. It couldn’t be Jeremiah, no matter how dark and sexy she still found him.

  Jeremiah, she reminded herself, wasn’t fun.

  When she bundled up in her bathrobe and slid into bed to watch a late-night rerun of I Love Lucy, she found herself almost wishing for a Boston winter. Winds howling. Radiators hissing and knocking. Thermometer plummeting. Instead a cool breeze filled the room with the scents of the tropical night and the sounds of the ocean not far off, and crickets chirping madly, dozens of them, as if to remind her she was up above Leonardo’s garage, all alone.

  The telephone rang, jolting her upright, sending the remote flying out of her hand. She picked up, heart racing wildly.

  “Mollie, sweet Mollie,” Leonardo Pascarelli crooned.

  “Leonardo! Good heavens, you almost gave me a heart attack! Isn’t it the crack of dawn or something in Italy?”

  “Or something. I’ve been wandering and pacing in my suite for hours. I sang La Bohème tonight.” He hummed a few bars of the overture. “Now I’m having a drink on my balcony and unwinding. Did I wake you?”

  “No, I’m in my room watching I Love Lucy. It’s the episode with Lucy and Desi in London and she wants to meet the queen.”

  “Yes! I remember! And she makes Desi let her perform with him. Ah, those were the days of the great shows. Sometimes,” he went on in his wonderful voice that even when not performing resonated in the listener’s soul, “I wish I’d stuck to singing in the shower and worked in my father’s butcher shop.”

  “Your father’s butcher shop went out of business twenty years ago.”

  “I could have sold lamb chops in Haymarket Square and sung Desi Arnaz songs to snotty young conservatory students.” Mollie could hear him gulping his drink, his melancholy palpable. He had always wanted more-more love, more romance, more acclaim, more everything-and yet wished he didn’t, wished the abyss inside him, that he could neither define nor ever fill, would just vanish, even if it took his drive and ambition with it. He sighed heavily. “If Papa could see me now…”

  “He’d be proud of you, Leonardo.”

  “I don’t know. No wife, no children. I forget even where I am. Florence, Venice?”

  “Leonardo, this isn’t your first drink, is it?”

  “It is. I’m just being mournful because I haven’t been to bed yet and I’m alone in the country of my ancestors, and I’ve just sung Puccini.” He cleared his throat, pushing through his dark mood. “But never mind me. Tell me about you, sweet Mollie. How are you? How’s your business? How’s your life?”

  She sank back against the pillows, the room suddenly feeling strange with its warm colors and sprawling bed, its tasteful paintings of flowers and its beautiful blown-glass lamps. Everything in the guest quarters was chosen by an interior decorator because Leonardo had used up his limited patience for decorating in the main house. He didn’t care, didn’t have time. His world-his abyss-lay inside him, not outside, as much as he tried to find it there. He enjoyed the material success his talent brought him, but ultimately it didn’t matter, couldn’t help quiet his demons. Mollie smiled, remembering Leonardo and her parents engaging in a loud discussion of a new conductor’s interpretation of Mozart as they drank tea from a chipped teapot. It could have been Austrian china or a Kmart special, and none of them would even have noticed.

  Mollie knew she could tell Leonardo about Jeremiah and his jewel thief. Her godfather didn’t know about her affair and its role in her decision to drop out of the conservatory, but he was no stranger himself to the dark places of the soul found after succumbing to the whims of passion. He sang opera, after all. And he could draw upon personal experience, decades of his own love affairs gone wrong.

  But to say out loud to anyone, even this godfather she adored, what had happened between Jeremiah and her ten years ago-what had happened today-was just too risky, too daunting. Once she started, where would she stop? Where would the words take her? She’d practiced self-containment for so long. It was like coming upon long-buried nuclear waste, wondering if it had been down there for enough half-lives to be safe.

  So she told Leonardo about business and how Deegan Tiernay was working out, and that she and Griffen were becoming even better friends, and just kept Jeremiah and his jewel thief to herself.

  “Oh,” she added, “I almost forgot. I’m going to the children’s hospital charity ball tomorrow night. Don’t you have an ex-girlfriend or someone who left a nice dress in a closet?”

  He paused, obviously taking her question seriously. “Upstairs. The pink bedroom. There should be several dresses in your size or close to it. Pick any you want.”

  “Leo
nardo, I was just kidding.”

  “Well, I’m not. What do I need with dresses? There’s jewelry, too. A lovely diamond-and-ruby necklace. Come, Mollie, I can’t believe you haven’t snooped.”

  “I’d never search your closets!”

  He laughed, his melancholy dissipating. “You’re your parents’ daughter after all. No curiosity.”

  “I’m as curious as the next person, just not about what’s in your closets. Your mind, yes. Your closets, no.”

  “I rest my case,” he said, and added dryly, “But I’d rather you invaded my closets than my mind.”

  “I’m not planning to invade either one. Thanks, Leonardo. I don’t know, living at your house-” She grinned, feeling better. “I can see myself in diamonds and rubies.”

  “Then wear them. And enjoy your ball, Cinderella.”

  5

  Jeremiah dug through the rubble on his desk for an invitation to a private party before the children’s hospital charity ball that evening. He knew he’d received one. He wasn’t organized, but he had a good memory. He picked through scraps of paper, steno pads started and abandoned, computer diskettes, articles ripped from newspapers and magazines, printouts off the Internet, unread memos from the Trib brass. He had a tendency to let things that didn’t interest him pile up. Periodically he’d decide everything was out of date and sweep it all into his trash can.

  Croc’s jewel thief just might consider a private party and one of the big charity balls of the season prime targets. Then again, he hadn’t hit anything that high-profile. Even if the thief didn’t show, Jeremiah figured he could get a sense of how a jewel thief was being received among his potential victims. The papers and police might not be calling the string of stolen and possibly misplaced jewels the work of one thief, but he’d be willing to bet that speculation and rumors were running rampant sixty-five miles to the north.

  He wasn’t ready to back out totally and abandon Mollie to Croc’s devices. He wouldn’t write the story, but he damned well wasn’t going to leave it to Croc, aka Blake Wilder, aka an elusive pain.

  Since he was already invited, he could show up in Palm Beach, in his own truck, without calling attention to himself.

  If he could find the goddamned invitation.

  Helen Samuel edged up to his desk. He could see the shocked look on the faces of his fellow reporters. Helen made a practice of avoiding the newsroom and disdained the idea of “investigative” reporters. To her, news was news, and a reporter reported it. She was sipping a watermelon-colored health drink with green flecks, the smell of rancid smoke emanating from her bright orange knit suit. Without so much as a good morning, she said, “My spies tell me you’re on this jewel thief story for personal reasons.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as a pretty young publicist from Boston.”

  Jeremiah tilted back in his chair and regarded her with an equanimity he didn’t feel. “You mean Mollie Lavender.”

  Helen sipped her drink. “I like it when people don’t try to bullshit me. You’re not going to ask how I got her name?”

  “Helen, you own every fly from Cocoa Beach to Key West. I’m surprised I had twenty-four hours before you found out.” He paused, considering his options. “Off the record?”

  “Sure. What the hell.”

  Jeremiah debated how much to tell her; there were a lot of things he’d rather have buzzing around him besides Helen Samuel. If he told too much, she’d buzz. If he told too little, she’d really buzz. “I knew Mollie briefly about ten years ago. A source said she’s one of the common denominators in this jewel thief story.”

  “Meaning she was at every party hit,” Helen said, staying with him.

  “Right. I checked her out, just in case she’d stumbled into something. She’s only been in town a few months.”

  “Five. She set up shop in Leonardo Pascarelli’s guest quarters. He dotes on her.”

  Jeremiah had to allow that Helen Samuel was a formidable force in south Florida. She knew everything about everybody and made up none of it. She just didn’t keep much of it secret, either. “I don’t think she knows anything about our jewel thief.”

  “You haven’t kept up with her in the past ten years, I take it?”

  He didn’t avert his gaze. “No.”

  “Part on good terms?”

  “No.”

  She grinned, leaning toward him. “One day, Tabak, you’re going to bump up against a woman who’ll like nothing better than to hand you your balls on tongs, and you’re going to want her so bad-” She laughed hoarsely. “And when she won’t have you, you’ll hear half the women in Miami let out a cheer at you finally meeting your match.”

  “You’re assuming I’m the one who did Mollie wrong. Maybe it was the other way around.”

  She shook her head, confident. “It wasn’t.”

  Jeremiah decided a change of subject was in order. “Well, that’s all I’ve got. You going to this children’s hospital ball tonight?”

  “I’ll pop in. Why? You want to sit at the table with the bigwigs from the paper?”

  “I was invited,” he said.

  She snorted. “Star reporters. Christ, what a business. In the old days-”

  He couldn’t let her get started on the old days. “I’m more interested in the pre-ball private cocktail party. Our thief hasn’t hit any of the big galas. I’m not expecting anything, I’d just like to see what’s what at this kind of event.”

  “A party’s a party. You’re just angling to see this Mollie Lavender.”

  “Helen-”

  She waved a hand. “Forget it, I’m just jerking your chain. If you can’t find your invitation, I wouldn’t worry. I expect our illustrious publisher will pull up an extra chair for his star reporter if you show up.”

  Under ordinary circumstances, it would have to be a command performance before he’d sit at a Miami Tribune table at a Palm Beach charity ball, even one benefiting a children’s hospital. Even then, he’d shoot himself in the foot first.

  “Be tacky to show up at the pre-ball private party and skip the main event,” Helen said.

  He gave her a deadpan look. “I wouldn’t want to do anything tacky.”

  “You’re so full of shit, Tabak. Keep me posted on Mollie Lavender.”

  She withdrew with her green-flecked pink drink.

  Jeremiah debated calling to see about putting a billboard up on 95 saying he’d slept with Mollie, just to get it over with. Or sending an e-mail around the Trib staff. Yes, it’s true. I slept with Leonardo Pascarelli’s flute-playing goddaughter ten years ago.

  But, in a strange way, he trusted Helen to keep her mouth shut, at least for now.

  So he focused on the task at hand, which was finding the damned invitation. He dragged his wastebasket over and dug in with both hands. Because he tended to throw things away prematurely, he didn’t deposit organic matter, or allow anyone else to deposit organic matter, in his wastebasket.

  Gold lettering? Cream-colored paper?

  This story was getting complicated, not from a professional standpoint-he wasn’t writing it-but from a social one. One way or the other, by the time his little jewel thief mystery was solved or he gave it up, he figured he was going to end up having to buy a suit.

  He spotted the invitation six inches from the bottom. Holding back the rest of the trash with one arm, he fished it out and dropped it onto his desk. Yes, he had one hell of a memory. Cocktails at six in the Starlight Room of the Palm Beach Sands Hotel, then on to the ball.

  He sat back, pleased with himself. Then he noticed the fine print.

  The gig was black-tie.

  There was no way out of it. He was going to have to buy that damned suit. It was two o’clock. That gave him two hours, no more, before he had to hit the interstate north.

  “Hell,” he said through clenched teeth, and lurched to his feet. He rushed out in such a way that eyes widened, and he knew his compatriots at the Trib thought that Jeremiah Tabak, star investigativ
e reporter, was following up a hot lead, not heading out in search of a suit.

  The pink bedroom was where Mollie always stayed when she visited Leonardo, and she knew exactly which dress she wanted to wear. The champagne silk. She’d tried it on two years ago on a visit and already knew it fit. She brought over shoes, stockings, makeup, hairpins, and three possible pairs of earrings and necklaces and spread them out on the big, canopied bed. Dressing in Leonardo’s house was almost as good as having him with her. His gaudy, eclectic taste permeated every room, making his presence almost palpable. She knew he would try to get her to wear the fiery red dress. She’d feel like a hooker, or a doomed heroine from one of his favorite operas.

  The champagne dress was perfect. Simple lines, a not-too-low neck. And she had shoes to go with it.

  She admired herself in a gilt-edged three-way mirror in the huge, spotless pink bathroom. Yep. Perfect. A pity she had to do her own makeup and hair.

  It took three tries with her hair, but finally she had it up and staying put. The makeup was easier. With such a pale dress, a soft touch worked fine.

  But none of her earrings and necklaces worked at all.

  She frowned, already knowing she was tempted. She’d been tempted the second Leonardo had made his offer.

  She didn’t quite remember the story of the diamond-and-ruby necklace. It was dramatic, wrenching, and involved at least two women, both of whom still claimed to love and adore Leonardo. He had two locked, alarm-equipped closets for his valuables, but he left the necklace in a velvet box in the top drawer of the tall dresser in the pink bedroom, exactly where a cat burglar would look, as if he were setting up the fitting end to its story of woe.

  “Only you, Leonardo,” Mollie muttered, and dug out the velvet box.

  The necklace was even prettier than she remembered. A cluster of diamonds and rubies on a mid-length, thin gold chain. Not as ostentatious as it could have been, true, but nothing she’d ever buy for herself. She tried it on. The pendant licked the top edge of her bodice. It was irresistible.