Private Lies (Jane Avery Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  Here, Sam tore the top page off his legal pad and shot it into the trash. “Please strike that from the notes, Jane.”

  From me: “Sure thing.”

  From Phillip Billinghurst (apple cheeked, sweaty necked), Valentine’s personal chef: “Well, of course he joked about poisoning his wife’s soufflé, but who hasn’t?”

  Things started looking up around the time Mrs. Lickleider, Valentine’s gray-haired, bespectacled eighth-grade teacher, primly perched in the hot seat.

  “Little Archie was the best student I ever had. He’d stay after school every day to bang out the erasers.” Here, Sam had sat forward in his seat, looking hopeful, only to have his face avalanche seconds later when she added, “And then he’d bang me in the coat closet.”

  As soon as the door was closed behind her, Sam dropped his pen on his yellow legal pad and commenced rhythmically thumping his forehead on the table.

  Like, for real.

  “Hey,” I said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Ease up there, fella. You’re going to give yourself a concussion.”

  A round pink spot bloomed above his eyebrows when he turned his face to me. I did my best to squelch the errant smile threatening to hijack my face.

  “We are screwed!” Sam’s accent became thicker when he was angry, the diction of his country of origin more pronounced in the w turned v of we.

  “Come on.” I patted the flat of his back between his shoulder blades, trying not to notice the roller coaster of lean muscle my palm was currently riding. “It’s not that bad. At least they all had something nice to say about him.”

  “Not that bad?” he repeated. “Not that bad? This is easily the least beneficial list of individuals that ever I have deposed. And these are the people who like him!”

  “How about some tea?” I offered. “I think that’s just the thing we need here.” I had just begun to push my chair back from the desk when there was a knock on the conference room door.

  “Come in,” Sam said, the invitation mostly muffled by the table his face was pressed against.

  The door opened to reveal a tall, slender woman in a sleek pinstriped skirt and blazer, her chestnut hair neatly tucked into a doughnut bun at the crown of her head.

  “Sam Shook?” she asked through velvet-red lips. “The receptionist said I could find you back here.”

  Apparently I wasn’t the only one for whom the infamous Judy harbored a grudge. Anyone else and she would have dialed into the intercom to ask if we were available for a visitor and perhaps even to give the visitor’s name.

  “Yes,” Sam confirmed. His unfailingly polite, “How may I help you?” was a stark contrast to the What do you want? I would have given in his position. Noticing this contrast made me feel shabby somehow. Petty and ill-bred.

  Would it kill me to be more pleasant? I asked myself.

  Probably, I answered promptly.

  “My name is Carla Malfi. I’m . . . well, I heard you might be in need of character witnesses for Archard Everett Valentine?”

  Sam perked up, nimble fingers searching out his discarded pen. “Yes, in fact I am. Please have a seat, Miss Malfi.”

  “Call me Carla.” She crossed the room with the grace of a panther, seating herself next to me and opposite Sam. When she crossed one shapely leg over the other and I felt a sudden surge of dislike, I knew.

  Valentine had banged her too.

  “I am Sam Shook, and this is my colleague, Jane Avery.”

  A shadow passed over Carla’s face.

  “You say Valentine sent you?” Sam asked, turning over a new page on his legal pad.

  “No.” She looked down at her hands. The cuticles had been bitten down to the quick. “Alex Avery did.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Jane? Jane?”

  Sam’s infinitely calm voice hailed me from some upper stratosphere.

  I didn’t know how long I had been fugued out or what I might have said or done aside from lasering a hole through the table with my unblinking gaze.

  “Jane, are you all right?” He gave my shoulder a reassuring squeeze.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m okay. I just got a little dizzy there for a moment.” I turned my gaze to Carla Malfi, who was doing her best to gnaw her fingernails down to nubs. “Did you say that Alex Avery sent you?”

  She nodded. “That’s correct. Any relation?”

  This question relieved me as much as it terrified me. Relief: Carla had obviously never met my mother face-to-face, because if she had, she would have known I was her daughter. Not just from the near-identical dark-haired, light-eyed coloring, but from the bones she had grown in my face. Terror: I’d have to perpetuate a major whopper to Sam Shook, who would promptly boot me from the interview, if not from the law office, if he knew.

  “Nope. No relation.” Lie.

  Sam and I exchanged a glance, wherein permission for me to proceed was asked and granted. When he indicated my laptop in silent question, offering to take over the notes, I shook my head no. Not because I had some burning need to control what was written, but because in addition to getting down key facts about the witnesses, I had amused myself by trying to decide what I would name an eye shadow color based on Sam’s entrancing eyes.

  Lusty Mink was the top contender.

  “Maybe you could begin by telling us exactly what your relationship is to Archard Everett Valentine,” I suggested.

  “I’m Valentine’s therapist.” The overhead lights rimmed her filling eyes with fluorescent crescents. “And his mistress.”

  Oh, snap.

  Kristin Flickner, and now Carla Malfi. Valentine had something of a “professional women of Denver” collection going on.

  “Okay. We’ll come back to that,” I said, employing my least judgmental tone of voice. “But first, I’d just like to clarify. When you say that Alex Avery sent you, you’re referring to Alex Avery the private investigator, correct?”

  Surprise lifted Carla’s and Sam’s eyebrows in concert, both sets of which, I had to note, were uncommonly well groomed above eyes both pretty and deeply tired.

  “How did you know she’s a private investigator?” Carla asked.

  “Her name pops up whenever I google myself.” Not a lie. My mom figured out the whole Google-ad words thing when the fusty, hard-boiled good ol’ boys common to her profession were still paying for space in the Yellow Pages and engineering terrible cable TV commercials. “When did you speak to Alex Avery?”

  “A couple of days ago.”

  Logically I had known she wasn’t going to say something like, Why only five minutes ago! In fact, she’s just in the waiting room if you’d like to go say hello. But still, my silly heart ached all the same.

  “And how do you know her?”

  “I don’t. Not really.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” I said.

  One tear escaped the well of her lower lid and slipped down her cheek. Sam nudged the box of tissues from the center of the conference table over to her.

  Carla snagged one and dabbed her eyes.

  “Would you care for anything?” Compassion softened Sam’s gaze to melted chocolate. And we were talking the quality 86-percent-cacao shit. “Water? Tea?”

  “Tea would be nice.”

  Sam pressed the button on the intercom. Judy’s postmenopausal-excess-of-testosterone-deep voice came over the line.

  “What is it?”

  “Yes, good afternoon, Judy. Could you bring a cup of tea into conference room B, please?” Sam asked, polite as fuck.

  “Can’t,” she snapped. “Too busy.” The line went dead.

  “It’s okay, really,” Carla said, embarrassment for us both plain on her face.

  “I’ll get it,” I offered.

  “Nonsense,” Sam insisted. “You continue. I’ll get the tea. Cream or sugar?” he asked Carla.

  “No, thank you,” she said.

  “Okay.” He beamed a reassuring smile at her. Lord, but that man was good with the smiles.
“I’ll be right back.”

  I watched in wonder as Sam slipped out of the room. A full-on partner getting someone tea so I could continue an interview?

  “Right,” I said, glancing at my notes. “You were telling me how you came into contact with Alex Avery.”

  Carla tucked the wadded tissue into the pocket of her blazer. “Two days ago, she called my office and introduced herself, then proceeded to make it clear that if I didn’t come forward about my relationship with Valentine, she’d expose us both. I could lose my license.”

  “I see.”

  That Valentine had been plowing every available field didn’t surprise me. But that my mother had felt it necessary to bully Carla Malfi into telling Valentine’s divorce lawyer about it? There was no scenario in which this made sense to me. She’d always been a “bang and let bang” sort of woman, often insisting that what people wanted to do behind bedroom/closet/car doors was entirely their business.

  “Tell me, Carla, when did you begin seeing Mr. Valentine?”

  “Seeing?” she asked, pausing to daintily honk her nose into a new tissue. “Or seeing?”

  “Either,” I said. “Or both.”

  “He was assigned to me two years ago. He was my client for six months before . . . before the relationship turned intimate.”

  My brain fastened to one word in particular.

  Assigned.

  Assigned meant ordered by a judge. Ordered by a judge meant court records. Court records that I would have access to as an associate at good old Dawes, Shook, and Flickner, thankyouverymuch.

  “And for what reason was he assigned to you?” I asked.

  “Anger management.”

  Yes, I thought. That sounded about right. I’d seen flashes of it in the back of his limo. Across the table in the restaurant. That ever-present, hot-blue flame dancing just below the carefully contrived mask of control. Eyes behind which loose wires whipped and sparked like electric snakes.

  “But it soon became my professional opinion that Valentine did not have an anger management problem.”

  “What brought you to this conclusion?”

  “Shortly after Valentine began seeing me professionally, his wife, Miranda, insisted on coming to see me too. Of course, I had my reservations, but I thought perhaps if I worked with them separately, they might be able to transition to couples therapy at some point.” She sniffled and dabbed her nose. “But after several sessions with Miranda, I came to the conclusion that she was a serial manipulator the likes of which I’d never seen in my fifteen years as a therapist.”

  I glanced up from my keyboard to examine Carla’s heart-shaped face more closely. Partially because I wanted to decide if she was lovelorn enough to be delusional regarding the quality of Valentine’s character, and partially because she didn’t seem old enough to have been practicing that long. In either case, I never would have credited Valentine of dallying with anyone remotely close to his own age, which I put somewhere between thirty-five and “will never not be hot.”

  I knew firsthand how charismatic Valentine could be. Women lied for men with far less to offer.

  “So you think Miranda lied about the abuse?”

  “I do,” she said.

  “What reason would she have to do that?”

  “Money. Power. Attention. Take your pick. I’m sure you’ve seen how she’s trying to smear him in the press.”

  “I have.” I had just assumed the allegations were true.

  The door squeaked open, and Sam deposited two steaming cups on the table. One before Carla, and one before me.

  “I thought you might like some as well.”

  “That was very thoughtful of you.” I picked up the cup and blew on the tendrils of swirling, bergamot-scented Earl Grey steam. “Thank you.”

  Polite as fuck and thoughtful. Damned if I didn’t look like a goddamn slouch by comparison.

  “So you came to believe that Miranda was lying about the allegations against her husband.” The prompt was designed not only to get Carla talking but also to bring Sam up to speed.

  “Yes,” she said. “The more I learned about Valentine, the more I grew to admire him. Eventually, that admiration grew beyond the bounds of a simple therapist/client relationship and into something more.”

  More like banging on the leather couch in her office.

  “Was it you or Valentine who initiated contact?”

  “Me,” she admitted. “He was never anything but respectful.” Her eyes went all sly, her lashes lowering over her caramel irises. “Well, except for the time when he asked for my panties.”

  “You too?”

  Carla and Sam both swiveled to look at me.

  I took the longest sip of tea in the history of the universe while my brain scrambled for recovery.

  “What I meant was, did you two begin your relationship on the occasion that he asked for your panties? Or was it a different time?”

  “A different time. I did try to maintain some semblance of propriety in the beginning.”

  “Did you give them to him?”

  Carla blinked, clearly piqued by my priorities. “Pardon me?”

  “Your panties. Did you give them to Valentine?”

  By this point, Sam was also looking at me like I was out of my mind.

  And maybe I was.

  Otherwise, why the hell would it smart so much that this panty thing was a serial habit with Valentine? Had I honestly believed there was something special about me in particular that would make a man like Archard Everett Valentine covet my underthings?

  “Not on that occasion, no.”

  “But on a different occasion?” I pressed.

  “Yes,” she admitted. “It was during a particularly difficult phase of his marriage, and I wanted to establish trust—”

  “Did Valentine ever tell you why he’d asked for your panties—ouch!”

  I leaned down to rub at the spot on my shin Sam had not-so-gently nudged with the hard square toe of his dress shoe. Apparently he didn’t approve of this line of questioning.

  “No, but I assumed—”

  “Thank you for sharing with us so candidly, Carla,” Sam interrupted. “I think that is all the information we need for now. May we reach out to you if we have any additional questions?”

  “Of course.” She rose and shook his hand, then mine. As soon as the conference room door closed, Sam turned to me.

  “Would you like to tell me what that was about?”

  Uh-oh. The v-w had returned.

  “Not especially,” I said.

  “I don’t mean to tell you what to do, but in my experience, you must be very careful when interviewing potential character witnesses, especially when you rival them in terms of position and power. If you want to get them to open up, you must prevent the conversation from becoming adversarial.”

  Adversarial.

  The lightning bolt of an idea flashed through my head. “Sorry,” I said, jumping up from my chair. “I’ll be right back.”

  I caught up to Carla in the hallway just down from Judy’s desk. It was risky, what I was about to do, but all I could think about was the answer on the other side.

  “Hey, can I ask you something? Strictly off the record.”

  She shifted on her heels, folding her arms across her chest. “What is it?”

  “Are you doing okay? I mean, it must have been difficult for you, when Valentine moved on to a new mistress.”

  A fine furrow appeared between Carla’s brows. “A new mistress?”

  “I’m so sorry.” I let my face fall dramatically. “I assumed you knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “About Valentine and”—I dropped my voice to a whisper as I leaned in closer—“Kristin Flickner.”

  I had prepared for a look of heartbreak. Had shored myself up against the guilt I would feel at having willfully inflicted distress on another human being just to suit my own ends.

  Hilarity, on the other hand, I was completely ill-equipped to h
andle.

  To say that Carla Malfi laughed in my face would be no exaggeration at all. She busted up royal, going so far as to press a hand to her midsection as if glee was going to pop out of her stomach like an alien.

  “Thank you,” she said, wiping a tear of mirth from the corner of her eye. “I needed that.”

  Sadly I found myself unable to join in on the abundance of jollity in the wake of my plan’s epic failure. “I’m afraid I don’t understand what’s so amusing.”

  The levity on Carla’s face was replaced by something like pity as she realized I obviously had no idea what the hell I was talking about. “I know for a fact that there’s no way Kristin Flickner and Valentine are having an affair.”

  “How?” Now it was my turn to cross my arms over my chest. A gesture of irritation I was unable to avoid.

  “Because she’s his half sister.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  A pain hammered behind my left eye socket as Sam’s excellent coffee crawled up my throat, dragging a wash of stomach acid with it.

  Kristin Flickner. Valentine’s half sister.

  What the fuckety fuck?

  I was beginning to suspect that the whole goddamn crowd of Valentine’s friends and relations was one big inbred family, and my mother had been doing some rogue genealogical mapping.

  Why the hell had I just assumed that Shepard knew what he was talking about when he’d said they were boning?

  I was making up my mind to give him the rough side of my tongue—and not in the good way—when the soldier in question came barreling through the same door Carla had just exited.

  In his arms, a giant beribboned bouquet of Stargazer lilies—my least favorite flowers.

  I stalked down the hall and straight up to Judy’s desk, where Shepard was presumably inquiring as to my whereabouts.

  “Shepard,” I said tightly. “What are you doing here?”

  “There’s my girl now!” he said, pressing the malodorous blooms into my arms. “These are for you.”

  “Well, isn’t that thoughtful.” I stood on tiptoe to press a mock kiss to his cheek while hissing a hasty, “What the fuck are you doing here?” in his ear.

  “I just wanted to congratulate my smoochypoo on her first day,” he said, loud enough for Judy to hear.