Baby Brother Blues (Sammy Dick, PI Series: Book 1) Read online

  Baby Brother Blues

  Sammy Dick, PI

  Trudi Baldwin

  Copyright © 2013 All rights reserved.

  Registration number TXu 1-864-245 April 20, 2013

  For Tim, who believed

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47 - Denouement

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  What are those lines from that old song? I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then. Well, I didn’t know. A lame excuse in hindsight, after all that’s happened, but I didn’t know.

  I wish now I’d had some premonition on that late Friday afternoon as his graceful figure slithered past the painted sign on our glass doorway, THE DICK AGENCY: For Your Most Sensitive Business & Personal Investigations.

  My first thought upon seeing him, though, was money. My second thought, sex. Or was it the other way around? Creamy, light-brown skin hugged his high cheekbones. A delicate diamond gleamed in his ear, and his hair ran in tight braided cornrows across his well-shaped skull, down into what appeared to be more diamonds gracing the ends of his braids so that the nape of his neck sparkled. His gray silk shirt and darker gray slacks hung on his V-shape with the ease of the ultra-rich who’ve worn this kind of luxury for so long it’s like a second skin.

  I could hardly wait to hear him speak, but it was not to be. Wordless, he turned his back on me. His eyes rested on the glimmering backs of the Mercedes, BMWs, and Infinities that crowded together daily in the parking lot far below our office like bejeweled lizards.

  I watched the back of his head as his gaze rose higher, out across the custom roofs of the very, very, should I say very one more time? Very wealthy inhabitants of this central location in Phoenix. Then his gaze traveled even higher and eastward to the lofty twin humps of Camelback Mountain, where the even more very, very wealthy class of Phoenix citizenry cling like vultures to the rocks in their huge mausoleums (er, I mean homes) with their city light views and infinity-edged swimming pools jutting out like tongues at the Valley residents below saying, “Nya, nya, nya, nya, nya. We’re rich and you’re not.”

  Do I sound judgmental? Envious? Immature? Probably. I’m older now, but at the time I’d finagled our tiny office location at a decent lease, but with no client base to afford it. I was wallowing, nay drowning, in that ancient Egyptian river, Denial. I was in way over my head and lacking the funds and expertise to swim my way out. In other words, I was easy prey for Mr. Michael Oversong, whose name I would eventually learn from the graceful form standing in front of me.

  The man dragged his eyes down from the twin humps of Camelback, across my unaffordable office, and crawled them up my new bodice, eyelet by eyelet. I rose to the occasion, literally, standing up from my chair to fully display all of my own graceful form, a form certainly equal to his.

  He responded by squinting his eyes a little more and encircling my tiny waist with his gaze. Not to brag, but I laugh when guys go on and on about their six-packs. I have an eight-pack, more like a well stocked wine cellar of rock-hard core muscles, and I’ve earned them. I sweat, lift, run and do crunches until the males I work out with cry auntie and give up.

  Finally, his gaze rested on my gently spiked hair with its dark roots, blonde spikes and reddish tips, designed to attract men who preferred blondes or brunettes or redheads. Take your pick. I could see my hair choice was giving him pause, but he remained silent.

  I needed business, desperately, but now his silence was really irritating me and arousing me and making me nervous. All three at once. My internal alarm went off. I edged closer to the top drawer where I stored my gun and eased it open. He flicked his eyes down once, but didn’t seem to care.

  I leaned across the desk, my hand hidden in the drawer on the handle of my gun. His eyes shone with eerie light: topaz with a life all their own. Cold eyes, yes, but also shimmering with intelligence, and something else. Some other emotion that I couldn’t quite name. Perhaps anger? Violence? Shame? Or maybe the man oozed so much sexuality that the extra gleam was testosterone spilling out into the space between us. At any rate, I was mesmerized, and the arousal I sensed after he slid into my office shot up a few more degrees.

  He moved closer to my desk until his fingers were crawling with the slow purposeful gait of a tarantula toward my business cards, which were sitting in their way too expensive bronze holder on my desk. He extracted one card. Fingered the edges lightly. Ran his index finger with painstaking slowness over the embossed letters of my name. Still not speaking. Maybe he was mute?

  Yo, dude! Is this some kind of weird foreplay or what? If so, it was working. My skin temperature shot up even higher.

  If he fingered the card much longer, I’d break into a sweat, rip the quaint hooks of my peasant blouse apart and say, “Okay, you win. Have at me!”

  But at last he uttered his first words, his voice like the cream within a French éclair, an exquisite, secret find. A slight British accent, modulated and rhythmical. Picture a panther purring right next to your ear, but with a British accent and tinged with French undertones. Irresistible!

  He raised his eyebrows slightly and inquired in his slow, luxurious accent, “Sammantha Dick, P.I.? Is that some sort of pseudonym or is it really your name?” He elongated the word pseudonym, drawing out each syllable like a long train, and now the vision changed, a panther licking ever so slowly up my inner thigh thrust itself unbidden into my mind.

  At this point, he had the upper hand. He knew it and I knew it, so I was compelled, as I always am, to even the balance of power in the room.

  I shut the gun drawer, sat back down in my chair and launched into my stock retort. “Of course it’s my name. My dad’s a detective for the police department and his name is Dick, and his dad was a Dick too, and my mom became a Dick when she married my dad. And my dad’s brother is a Dick and his daughter is a Dick. Her name is Candi. Candi Dick. I really don’t see anything unusual about any of it.”

  He took a slight step back. Shock skittered across his face. Then the blank, steely calm returned.

  She shoots. She scores!

  I smiled smugly. In response, he lapsed into silence again. I’d successfully shut down and lost my one and only potential client. I fully expected him to walk out, but, wonder of wonders, he didn’t leave. I still had a chance. He sucked in an audible breath.

  Aha, the man might be human. I’d caught just a hint of vulnerability in the brief
look of shock, like the sweet aftertaste in a fine wine.

  “May I have a seat?” he asked in a more subdued tone. He’d delivered his first test. Apparently I’d passed.

  “Please, Mister…?” I let the question hang in the air, again, and pointed to one of the two chairs across the desk from me.

  “Oversong,” he responded and took the opposite chair from my point. “Michael Oversong.” Then he lapsed into silence again and looked down at his hands.

  What is your problem? I thought. The silence lengthened. A car honked in the parking lot below. One of the bejeweled lizards getting cranky. “What may I do for you, Mr. Oversong?”

  He examined his hands a bit longer, probably just to piss me off. Then he raised those gleaming eyes to mine and emitted in his British purr, “I want you to keep me from murdering my wife.” He smiled in an odd, somewhat lopsided way as he uttered these startling words. Then he laughed a soft laugh as if he were joking.

  I tried to make sure my butt actually stayed in my chair, so I wouldn’t just sprawl out all over the floor. Now it was my turn to struggle to gain my composure, as I noticed the diamonds on his left hand surrounding his elegant ring finger. The glittering gemstones adorned a platinum band that sparkled with understatement and perfection in a way that whispered, I am very, very, very rich!

  Damn, I was surrounded by rich people and I wanted to be one of them! I needed this client, but what a weird request. One corner of his mouth remained slightly turned up, but his eyes remained cold and hard. Was he dead serious, or was he joking? Or was he just so conflicted he didn’t know what to do with himself?

  “Mr. Oversong, you need to understand that I’m a private investigator who specializes in highly sensitive business investigations. I’m not a bodyguard, nor a psychiatrist whose services you and/or your wife seem to need much more.”

  Oversong shook his head slightly. The diamonds at the ends of his braids clicked and quivered. “You’re wrong there, Ms. Dick; I need a talented investigator to privately discern if I can trust my wife. If I could trust her, then I wouldn’t feel so much like, like, like…”

  His words trailed off and for the second time he lost more than a little composure. On each repetition of the word like, he mindlessly folded my business card over on itself in rigid precision, running his thumb and forefinger along each new crease with such smoldering, restrained violence that I rolled my chair away a few inches. I felt like he might look up and smack me just for witnessing his disarray.

  He finally set the mangled card down on the corner of my desk and reached for a new card. Maybe he was a serial killer, or, at the very least, a serial business card mangler. His eyes met mine again. “You are just what I need, in fact. Your services come highly recommended.”

  This was news to me. I tried to act like getting a good reference was an everyday event in my fledgling business. “Well, thank you. May I ask by whom?”

  “Sylvester Swane.”

  Red light. Red light. Sylvester Swane! One of the premier very, very, verys in this town. A developer and entrepreneur of extraordinary scope who’d partnered in successful business ventures worldwide—not to mention a few highly visible failures that the local newspapers exposed in lurid detail.

  I knew him because my dad grew up right next door to him. But while my dad grew up in something bordering on the all-American family, Sylvester’s dad had slunk off with an exotic crack whore, if there is such an oxymoronic combination, when Sylvester was three. Sylvester and his baby brother, Sonny, were left to be raised by their mother and a series of rotating boyfriends. Out of that glorious past, Sylvester had emerged with a single-minded drive to succeed at all costs. Alpha male extraordinaire, Sylvester Swane regularly lit up the Scottsdale and Phoenix business news, with his gray and white hair swept back from his high cheek bones and deeply lined face.

  “Sylvester and I would like to hire you to go undercover in our firm, Swann Diamonds. Sylvester, my wife Mai, and I are all equal partners in this enterprise.”

  He spoke in that offhand way I’d heard Sylvester speak upon the few occasions I’d met him, as if this were just one of his enterprises.

  “I will hire you as a business performance consultant, ostensibly to discover ways for us to rev up our somewhat declining business. However, Sylvester says that where you are most effective is in evaluating the, ah …” He paused. Eyes darting about the room. Finally alighting on the mangled card sitting on the corner of my desk as it slowly tried to unfold itself. Stared at it with such intensity I feared it might spontaneously combust.

  Then he regained his composure. “Sylvester assures me that you are an intuitive observer of human behavior, and if we follow your instincts, we will be able to dig deeper into our, uh, declining performance and improve it.”

  Whenever males speak of declining performance, the intuition that Sylvester Swane prizes in me kicks in. What kind of declining performance are we talkin’ about here? Personal, sexual, marital, financial? If I were actually able to land this job, I’d have to stay tuned into Michael as well as everybody else at Swann Diamonds to really assess their declining performance. But, hey, at least according to Sylvester, that was my specialty.

  At this juncture, Michael rose from his chair. Quietly stepped back to the window after performing a graceful one-eighty on the back of his heel to stare some more at the bejeweled car lizards below. I marveled at how his clothes fit him. How they might look off of him.

  “This position of, uh…” I noticed him hesitate again with this word performance, but he struggled on, “…performance consultant will enable you to observe firsthand the interactivity and day-to-day operations of our company. You’ll have access to all our records and financials. If, while you are observing my wife’s behavior, you are also able to find ways to improve our overall business performance, Sylvester and I have agreed that a sizeable bonus would be appropriate.”

  I tried not to pant openly. “What kind of bonus are we talking about here?”

  “Sylvester and I discussed a sum of $50,000 to $100,000, depending upon the potential for improved business performance, at the successful conclusion of the investigation. That is in addition to the weekly stipend of $9,000 per week during your investigation. We are hoping you’ll be able to wrap it up in one month or less, maybe two months at the outside.”

  My heart almost leaped out of my throat; this single investigation would rake in more money than Geo, my partner, and I ever dreamed of earning in a year’s time.

  But I forced myself to slow down and discuss some unpleasant facts before we proceeded further. Clients had a tendency to refuse to pay you when you were the bearer of bad news, and I sensed I might have to be just that kind of messenger in this investigation.

  “Please realize that most business investigations uncover truths that the client may not wish to hear, often uncomfortable or very unfortunate revelations. Are you prepared to accept such information, should I reveal it during the course of my investigation?”

  Oversong turned slowly, took a long, audible breath, then locked his topaz eyes onto mine. “I, we, simply must know what is going on.”

  He was temporarily silent, then proceeded. “I trust you to keep this information absolutely confidential, but over the past two years, while our client base has grown, our profits have declined. My wife, who is our Chief Financial Officer, always presents a water-tight explanation, but I have deep suspicions. Further, Mai is so bright and capable there’s no way she can’t know the truth. If someone or some ill-conceived practice is siphoning off our profits, she must know about it.”

  He hissed the word must out between his perfectly straight, bleached teeth as if it were a slithering, blood-sucking leech to be spat out on the carpet. The diamonds at the ends of his braids trembled and shimmered noticeably, catching the late day sun.

  Whoa, don’t get on the wrong side of this man. “Well, Michael,” I brazenly proclaimed, “I’m confident I’ll be able to play the role of a performance
consultant effectively, and you can always fire me if I don’t work out, in either job, as your performance consultant or your private investigator.” I said all this with an innocent smile. This roll over and play ‘at your service’ trick always seemed to seal the deal with most of my potential clients.

  He’d been staring at his hands again and the ‘at your service’ trick only caused him to drag his eyes away from his hands, up through the eyelets of my blouse and finally into my big brown eyes. He uttered with restrained solemnity, “You understand that you cannot fail. The consequences of failure are…” his eyes searched all around the room as if a solution might be scrawled on my lovely dove gray walls. Then he gave up. Returned his eyes to the second mangled business card in his hands, and concluded somewhat lamely, “…inconceivable.”

  I stared at the corn rows on top of his bowed head, thinking this guy vacillates from dead silence, to deadly innuendo, to high drama rather quickly. I wanted to know more about what he meant regarding the inconceivable consequences of failure, but I feared that this would only thrust me deeper into perjury on the witness stand one day.

  So, instead of asking for more details, I figured, what the hell, I need money. This guy has some. Let’s see where this leads. I kept my questions to myself, and we drew closer as I pulled out the preliminary paperwork.

  Chapter 2

  And that’s how I ended up strutting toward the Swann Diamonds corporate headquarters the following Monday morning in a cute little, tight-as-hell blue sheath, topped with a matching short-cropped jacket.

  I’d driven the Mazda3 (for which I was also in debt up to my eyeballs) instead of my Ninja, for my first day at work, wanting to look as legitimate as possible. After going around and around in the parking garage a half block away, I finally found a spot—a small opening on the roof. I slid in the nose of my cute little Mazda, and tucked my parking ticket under the front seat for safekeeping. Then I grabbed my leather briefcase, slung my fake designer handbag over my shoulder, and made my way in my wickedly high heels down the three flights of stairs towards Central One, the ostentatious address of the Swann Diamond Company.