Page 1 of Kiss Me Now
Chapter One
Ian
Islipped on my sunglassesand tugged my baseball cap lower as I watched the wife of the third most powerful man in American politics slip out of the cheap apartment she’d rented for trysts with her pool boy. I didn’t bother sliding lower in the driver’s seat. It would only draw her attention. That was the last thing I wanted.
Washington DC and the people who ran it never failed to be a cliché. I snapped a few pictures with a telephoto lens. She walked down the street to the Mercedes she always parked two blocks away. As if she were fooling anyone.
Well, she was fooling her husband. He had no idea. It was mid-afternoon. My subject had to spend her evenings on her husband’s arm at his various soirees and receptions, so Pool Boy got the daylight hours. I wondered what she told her husband she did with her days. The spa? Charity luncheons?
I settled in to wait for her boyfriend. An hour had passed with no action when my dash display lit up with an incoming call from my favorite person on earth. For the first time all day, I smiled and answered.
“Hey, Gran.”
“Hi, honey. I’m not disrupting your work, am I?”
“No, it’s fine. What’s up?”
“Ian Greene, you better not work too late.” Gran’s voice held her usual note of concern.
“Gran, you know most people work until dinner time, right? It’s the middle of the afternoon. I’m not in danger of overworking myself.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. I might work long hours most days, but today I could tell her with a clear conscience that as of the time of this phone call, I had not yet overworked.
“I know you work way past suppertime most days, Ian. You need to take better care of yourself.”
The apartment door opened as she spoke, and I scooped up my camera and trained it on the young guy emerging.
“I’m fine, Gran. I promise.”Click, click. “Now tell me about you. How’s life on the mean streets of Creekville?” I made sure I had the apartment number in the shot.Click.
Gran laughed. “Well, Gertie Meyer got her hair colored a red that doesn’t naturally grow on any human head, and then she got her eyebrows tattooed on, and Lois told her at canasta the other morning that she ought to sign up to appear as a clown at the church fair, and now they aren’t speaking.”
I smiled, amused at the scandals that rocked Gran’s town. It was refreshing after the truly heinous ones I regularly uncovered in DC. I snapped a couple more pictures, making sure to capture Pool Boy’s fit physique. That was really going to bug the husband. “I can’t believe Lois said that to her. That sounds downright mean, even for her.”
“I’d agree except that when Gertie swanned in with her ridiculous new hair color, she told Lois that her sweater made her look like she was smuggling two different sized melons in her bra, so Gertie had it coming.”
I laughed. “Good for Lois, then. I’d love to have seen that argument.” Pool Boy rounded the corner, and I set the camera on the passenger seat. Once again, all the players involved had behaved in predictably corrupt ways, and I had the evidence we needed for our client. It was unfortunate that I could reliably expect the nation’s elite to be on their worst possible behavior, but hey, it paid the bills. Handsomely.
“You can see Gertie and Lois spar anytime you want to, you know,” Gran said. “I keep telling you to come and see me. I worry about you, breathing in all that dirty air.”
“You usually accuse the capital of hot air.”
“Only the politicians are full of hot air. And not all of them. Lots of truly good-hearted people do their best there. You just happen to spend all your time working with the bad ones.”
“Notwiththem. More like workingonthem, taking them down.”
“It’s jaded you. You forget they’re the tiny fraction. But in this case, I meant the actual pollution, anyway. Particulate matter. The stuff the EPA doesn’t even bother to check out here because the air is so pure. You should come and breathe it.”
I wished it was that simple, but she was two hours away in the heart of Virginia, and it wasn’t easy to get away to spend a weekend. “I’ll get out there eventually,” I promised, but I felt a pang somewhere in my shriveled heart at the wordeventually. Gran was eighty, and spry as she’d been twenty years ago, but she wasn’t going to be around forever. “I mean soon,” I said. “I’ll get out there soon. I worry about you alone in that big old house.”
Gran gave a light laugh. “Don’t worry about it, hon. My neighbor Brooke has been an absolute delight, keeping me so busy I don’t have time to sit around feeling sorry for myself. She’s why I called, actually.”
I stifled a sigh as I started the car and pulled into traffic. There wasn’t a thing that I didn’t love about Gran, but if there was one thing I liked a tiny bit less than all her other stellar qualities, it was her relentless matchmaking. She didnotlet up, nor would she, she had informed me, until she saw her oldest unmarried grandchild happily settled. I braced myself for the sales pitch on this new neighbor. Gran had mentioned her before, trying to casually drop in that the young woman had moved in next door in the spring, and oh, by the way, had she mentioned how pretty she was?
But Gran surprised me with a totally different question. “How do I find a good lawyer for wills and things? Walter Sellers does them for everyone around here, but his wife Diane is always running her mouth about the details, and I don’t need her airing mine for everyone.”
I blinked, trying to follow the thread of the conversation. “Sorry, what does an estate lawyer have to do with your new neighbor?”
“Well, we’ve gotten to know each other so well that I’ve really come to love her like another grandchild. And you all are so busy with your lives, and I don’t want this place to become a burden to you when I pass, nor do I want anyone to fight about it. So I’m thinking I may leave it to her. There’s plenty of stocks and other things in the trust for the rest of you, but this will at least get the house out of everyone’s hair.”
My spidey senses tingled. Why was Gran suddenly wanting to leave her property to a woman who had only been her neighbor for a few months? I was one of the best investigators in Washington DC for a reason: I had excellent instincts and every one of them was screaming.
