I stood in front of the mirror and turned sideways, sucking in my stomach, questioning the black sundress I had chosen that came to just above my knees. Was it too young for a woman of my age? I was 50 plus (okay, really closer to 60 minus), but I thought I still looked good, at least when I wasn’t trying to appear older, and the sundress did a good job of hiding a bit of sag around my middle. I had character lines, well-earned character lines, around my eyes, but I kept my touched-up dark hair in a professional cut that my hairdresser assured me was a fashionable and appropriate hairstyle for women 50 and above: the classic lob with just a bit of bounce and some slight shaping around my face. To be honest, I didn’t care whether or not it was particularly fashionable; I just liked that it flattered my face, and I didn’t have to fuss with it. I frowned at my dress shoes. As I was a bit on the tall side, I tended to have more flats than heels, and I certainly never wore heels when I worked, but tonight felt like a good night for heels. I got on my knees and peered into the depths of my closet, seeking out some shoes I had purchased years ago for Cousin Eddy’s second daughter’s wedding. There they were! I wiped them with my hand towel to take the dust off them and give them a bit of shine and put them on. Perfect!
How long had it been since I’d been on a date? After I split up with Javier, I hadn’t even thought about dating, keeping busy with work and just wanting to go home and relax after a hard day. Dating meant compromises—like actually going out when I said I would go out, or wearing nice clothes when I just wanted pajamas.
I idly wondered if Javi would find out and be jealous. I thought of the younger generation, putting all of their social lives on blast with social media. Normally, I found that behavior to be indiscreet, inappropriate, and self-destructive, but right now I could see the appeal, and I wondered what that said about my feelings for Javi. No need to explore that any more than necessary - I’d just put all of that away for now.
There was one man I went on a date with after Javi, a little over a year ago. We met at a Book Club. Work was busy then, and I had struggled to read the book for that month and ended up just reading the first chapter, the last chapter, and skimmed the middle for a general idea of what the book was about. Steven had recently moved into the city of Palm Hills and was eager to make friends. He was tall, somewhat portly, and he had kind eyes that crinkled when he told a funny story. We bonded over wine and the fact that neither of us had actually read the book.
He picked me up in his truck, an old rust-colored Chevy. No problem for me–I don’t need a guy who drives a fancy sports car. He came inside for just a moment while I grabbed my purse, looked down at Mr. Tuttles, and said, “Weird-looking dog!” Mr. Tuttles threw his nose up in the air and trotted away. That was the point at which, in hindsight, I should have made an excuse to drive separately, but that just seemed wrong, so I told myself we were going to have fun no matter what.
On the way to the restaurant, his cell phone rang. Steve didn’t have bluetooth in the old truck, so he put the phone up next to his ear and talked while he drove, which is highly illegal in California. “My ex,” he mouthed to me.
I only heard his part of the conversation.
“Uh-huh…”
“Well Goddamit, Eva. I can’t do that!
“I don’t care how much you spent on curtains. I own the fucking house! I don’t recall you making any of the mortgage payments!”
“You can tell your affair partner that he’s not seeing a cent out of that house, and neither are you! I don’t care how many times we go back to mediation!”
Steve slammed the phone down on the bench seat, and it bounced back, falling to the floor, sliding underneath the pedals. He burst into tears while I eyed the phone, worried it would get under the brake pedal and prevent us from being able to stop.
The tears turned into sobs as he banged on the steering wheel several times with his palm, apparently taking his frustration out on the truck. Perhaps this was why he didn’t feel a need to buy a mode of transportation that was slightly newer or more expensive.
“I’m so sorry!” he said with big, gulping breaths as tears began to fall from his eyes. I couldn’t think of the last time I remembered a man crying in a social situation. “I just wanted to take you out and show you a good time!”
“It’s okay.” I reached over to pat him on the arm. “I get it. You had a bad breakup.”
“I thought I was over her! But she calls and she pushes and pushes. It’s never enough money. I was an asshole. She deserves more. Do you know what she said to me when she told me she wanted a divorce?” He didn’t pause for me to answer. “You’re a wreck of a man. That’s what she said. A wreck of a man. Who says that?”
Apparently, she did.
“We’re still negotiating the divorce settlement. She’s been dragging it out, trying to get me to give her more money. My therapist says I’m not over her yet, but I swear to you that I am!”
He seemed too upset to notice a white Honda CRX turning in front of us. “Watch out!” I put my hands up to brace for the inevitable crash just as he swerved out of its way without checking to see if there was anybody in the lane next to us. Luckily, there was not.
“She even took our parrot!”
“Parrot?”
“Skippy! Oh, I miss Skippy!”
We pulled up into the restaurant’s parking lot, and I was grateful that the brake pedal still worked even with a cell phone under it. He wouldn’t get out of the truck, though, sitting and blubbering. “He was such a good bird!”
“Steven! Steve look at me!” He brought his eyes up to meet mine. I felt like slapping his face, but I resisted the urge. “You are a fine man. You convinced me to go on a date with you. Now I want you to get yourself together, stop thinking about your ex, and let’s go into that fancy restaurant and have a great time together. We won’t let a recent breakup spoil our good time, now will we?” I used my commanding voice, the one that made investors give me money and hostesses give me the best ttable.
“Five years.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“You said recent. She filed for divorce five years ago.”
“Ah…Oh.”
I suffered through dinner with him while he tried to stop gulping air, but every time he thought of the phone call, new tears would form, and his gasps became louder. People at other tables kept glancing at us, not unkindly, I didn’t think, but inquiringly. I figured they thought I was abusing him in some way. Oh, well, I had given up worrying about what others thought long ago, and I ignored them.
After that, I decided to always drive myself on a first date.
#
The restaurant sat on a hill overlooking the ocean, and when I arrived right on time, the hostess showed me to a table where Peter was already waiting. I like a man who is punctual to the point of being early. He looked amazing in a white dress shirt that complimented his tan and set off his green eyes. Our seats faced an open floor-to-ceiling window with full ocean views - the best seats in the house, as far as I could tell, with the freshness of the air off the ocean swirling with the luxury of the air conditioning inside the building. I thought he must know somebody to get a table this good.
“You look exquisite.” He stood and greeted me as I came in. “I saw that the funeral for your friend was yesterday. I wanted you to know I was thinking of you.”
“Thank you, that’s very kind. You mentioned on the phone that you might have more information?”
“Maybe. But right now, let’s just relax. I have a feeling you could use a break from all that.”
He was right. It had been a tough week, and a little relaxation was exactly what I needed. We both sat back, and I studied him as he ordered a red wine, looking to me for agreement. He had an easygoing manner about him, chatting with the waitress about the specials, and I could feel my shoulders come down as the tension in them eased, surprising myself with how comfortable I felt even though it was a first date. So far, this was going way better than the date with Steven, but that was a very low bar.
“You seem to enjoy your work,” I said once the waitress had gone. “What made you get into Forensic Accounting?”
“I was always good at math, and when I took accounting classes at the University, I was drawn to the forensic classes. Numbers, budgets - they tell a story, don’t you think?”
“I’ve never thought of it like that. I’m not an accountant, I’ve always had people for that, but I guess you’re right. When we bought out Ruff Life Outfitters, their books told a story of massive dysfunction.”
Peter laughed, his eyes sparkling with amusement, and I felt a stirring of something deep down. It was nice to have somebody to laugh with. Maybe I’d been going it alone for too long.
“I’d think forensic accounting would either be fascinating work or super boring, and I’ve been trying all day to figure out which. I was hoping you’d tell me.”
“Believe me, there’s no single word that could make you appear old.”
Was I blushing? My cheeks felt a little hot. I don’t think I’d blushed since eighth grade.
He glanced down at his hand holding the glass of red wine, swirling it absentmindedly.
“I could see where some people would think it’s boring work, but personally, when I look at budgets, accounts, books for a business, I’m looking for fraud, looking for people who are hiding money or trying not to pay their taxes or their wives. The numbers speak to me; they tell a story. Sometimes, they tell a story of deception, and sometimes they tell a sad story of people with too much debt and not enough income. But it’s all in the numbers. They form patterns, merging with each other, floating around in a spreadsheet, giving the same result if you add them up in a row or down a column. That’s how you find a problem, when there’s an aberration in the pattern, a discrepancy, and if I look at the books just right, I can see it.”
“I feel like I’m similar with people. I’ve always been able to tell if somebody was a good fit for the company, what they call a “? Fit” and I was almost never wrong. I’ve always tried to figure how to best use people to their greatest advantage so that we were getting their best work. Some work best on positive reinforcement and encouragement, some want to be left alone and just do the work, some like daily check-ins, some hate it. I’d always found there wasn’t one way to manage everybody.”
Peter nodded. “That explains why you grew the company so well. That, and from what I can tell, your marketing. You had some great marketing campaigns.”
“I’m impressed you’ve remembered them! I had a really talented young man as my Marketing VP with some amazing ideas that I let him run with.”
Peter chuckled, low and genuine. “I’ll admit I didn’t really remember most of them. I did google you, remember.”
“Ha! Of course!”
“So if I wanted to hire somebody, what would be the best advice you could give me?”
“There’s no advice for hiring people, but if you’re ever going to fire somebody, never ask them to come to your own office to tell them.”
“And why would that be?”
“I once fired a very nice woman. She was kind, considerate, everybody’s friend. Unfortunately, she’d been hired for direct sales, and she just couldn’t do the job. It turned out that she was very shy, which wasn’t apparent when I hired her. She couldn’t make cold calls, she couldn’t look a customer in the eye, and she had practically no sales. Honestly, it was a kindness to her to fire her, and I told her I’d work hard to find a much more suitable job for her, but we didn’t have anything else for her at Waggles. She started to cry, and I handed her some tissues, and she sat in the chair and just bawled. I waited a bit, tried to comfort her, and she asked me to leave her, and said she’d be fine. I walked out, asking my Executive Assistant to keep an eye on her. When I returned to my office two hours later, she was still in there crying!”
“Man, that sounds tough. I’m not sure I could fire people.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Honestly, it’s not as hard as it sounds when it’s your company. When you’ve built everything up with your own hands, and you watch one person tearing it down, it’s not hard at all. People like Emily, though, were the toughest. I blamed myself for hiring her. That was supposed to be my superpower, reading people, and I had her all wrong.”
Our dinner came, presented in large white plates with swirls of sauce around the meat. We had both ordered the salmon with risotto and asparagus, and my first taste melted in my mouth.
“You mentioned you had more information for me, but now I’m wondering if that was a ruse to take me out on a date.”
Peter grinned. “You caught me, Detective. Excellent reasoning. I do have one thing I’d like to discuss, though.”
I wanted to ask him to go on, but the risotto was fabulous, and I knew he’d continue without prompting.
“A lot of my work deals with marriages, or, more specifically, divorce. I get asked by one spouse to find out if the other spouse is hiding money. I said I like the way the numbers speak to me, but I probably should be embarrassed to admit that I also enjoy the drama of it. I like guessing ahead of time if there really is more money to be found and then seeing what falls out of my research. And, believe me, if the other person is hiding money, I’ll find it.”
“How often are you right when you guess before the investigation?”
“I’ll give myself a solid fifty percent. I’m good at numbers, but I’m not the best at reading people. Anyway, this man came to me because his wife wanted a divorce. He worked for the post office, delivering mail. He had a middling income, a great retirement plan, and a great health plan. His wife was a businesswoman with no college-level education but a lot of business savvy, and they were living a very comfortable life. She paid for dinners out, fancy trips to the Caribbean, and he had noticed that she was paying for everything in cash. He began to suspect that there was a lot more to her essential oils business than he knew.”
“Essential oils?”
“Yeah, you know, like lavender oil for calming, or tea tree oil for topical infections.”
“I’m familiar. But I didn’t think you could make a lot of money on those, realistically, of course.”
“Of course. It feels like every MLM company sells essential oils, and who knows? Maybe some of them really are oil from an actual plant. The science behind it is questionable, though.
“Anyway, I looked at her books, and there was no way she was selling enough oil to pay for a trip to Maui, much less bi-weekly manis and pedis and monthly massages. Again, all paid for in cash.”
“What did you do?”
“The books were 100% legit, and I even contacted her oil vendor and found nothing there. She wasn’t getting kickbacks; she was selling a reasonable amount of oil for a reasonable ten percent markup; I found nothing to indicate any wrongdoing. But there was no way, between the profit from the oil and his salary, that they could afford all these extras. And she even had no overhead, since she was selling the oils from their house.
“So, I did what any good forensic accountant would do–I staked out her house.”
“You did not!”
“I did, and I’m not even ashamed of it. At first, I didn’t see anything wrong. Various women showed up, stayed a while, and then left with a little bag. I figured she had to be dealing drugs. I mean, there’s really no other explanation, right?”
“That’s where my mind went. But that wasn’t it, was it?”
“Nope. After several days, I followed one of the women to a coffee shop and bumped into her, causing her to drop the paper bag, spilling little vials of oil on the ground. Luckily, the vials of oil were in plastic containers, and I helped her pick them up, apologizing profusely, all the while scanning for anything that looked unusual. We struck up a whole conversation about the healing effects of essential oils, and I asked to smell one. We bonded over scents that help you heal as she let me smell them, regaling me with the benefits of each. There was no doubt about it. All she had in that paper bag was oil.”
I shook my head. “You really are like a detective, aren’t you?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” His grin was infectious, like a little boy’s. “I got my answer, though.”
“And?”
“This very kind woman, while letting me sniff her frankincense, also told me about this amazing psychic she had just seen, who not only spoke to the dead, but also knew exactly which essential oils she had to have.”
“She was running a cash business telling people’s fortunes and selling them essential oils!”
“Exactly! I don’t begrudge her being a psychic. This very nice lady went on and on about how much help her psychic had given her, and how she had been depressed and lonely, but with the advice and the oils, her life had turned around. Who wouldn’t want that? The only thing I was concerned about was that she was making bundles of cash under the table and not paying taxes on it.”
“And hiding it from her husband. What did you do? Did you confront her?”
“I did, but I felt kind of bad about it. Turns out her postman husband was delivering more than just mail, if you get my drift. She thought she was being the hero in the marriage, making extra money that they were both enjoying, until one of his girlfriends texted her. I got the books together, made a very balanced presentation to the judge in the divorce, and made sure she reported her income to the IRS.
“She was very grateful to me for the whole thing, as she had been wanting to come clean. She told me her dead grandmother was nagging her about having an illicit business, and while there’s nothing illegal about being a psychic, she was simply keeping the government’s share.
“It’s funny how people are. When I went into that case, I really thought the husband was a victim of a spouse hiding money. What I found was so much deeper than that, and I ended up liking his wife much more than him, not that that matters in the least to the work I did. It was like finding a gold thread in a random piece of fabric. And when it was all done, the woman read my palm.”
“What did she say?”
He grinned and leaned in, swirling his wine while he gazed at it. “She said I’d meet an intriguing but very difficult person that would change my life forever.”
“That couldn’t be me, then. I’m easy.” The words came out before I could stop them, and while Peter coughed, I wished I could hide under the table. “I mean, I’m not difficult. Oh, God!” I put my hands over my eyes.
The effort of suppressing his cough and trying not to laugh brought tears to Peter’ eyes. I handed him a glass of water as the waitress came over to make sure everything was alright. “It’s fine,” I said in my firm detective’s voice. “I’m simply attempting not to put my foot in my mouth on a first date, and I’m clearly failing.”
He stifled a grin. “I think she’s doing fine,” he said to the waitress. She gave us a confused smile and moved on.
“I do have a question for you, and I hope you don’t find it too intrusive.”
I opened my arms wide. “Feel free. I don’t have any skeletons, at least, none you’d have been able to dig up.” He laughed again, and I liked the way his warm laugh made my insides feel.
“I guess I just assumed there was no Mr. Warner, at least, you’re not wearing a ring. Boyfriends? I did take you out to dinner promising information, but I was hoping it was a date, too.”
I blushed, just a little bit. “No, you’re good. I’ve never married. Maybe a boyfriend or two in my past, but none in my future. I mean, none, yet. I mean…um…I guess I’m just an old maid.”
“Believe me, there’s nothing old about you..”
Now I really was blushing. My cheeks felt a little hot. I don’t think I’d full-on blushed since eighth grade.
Get it together, Kate. You’ve never been this tongue-tied.
“But you told me you might know something relevant to Angie’s murder.”
“That’s right. Yes. Before I sidetracked us, I was saying that while I do specialize in business fraud, most of my work ends up being divorce investigations.”
“I know. Angie gave your number to Cynthia.”
“Cynthia?”
“Yes, Cynthia Barron. The HOA Treasurer. She called you, no?”
“Sorry, I don’t know her.”
Of course. Angie gave Cynthia the number for her forensic accountant the same day she was killed. Cynthia hardly had any time to contact Peter, especially with being worried about being blamed for Angie’s death.
“So, who…?”
“As I was saying, I had a man contact me about possible work for his divorce. He seemed to think his wife was hiding income, but when I told him my rates, he chose not to hire me. I didn’t realize he might have something to do with your inquiries until after our chat at my office, when I was organizing my files. I keep records of people who call me, in case they change their minds, but since he didn’t hire me, I don’t have to worry about confidentiality.”
I wish he’d get on with it. I got it. He’s ethical. I leaned in, literally on the edge of my seat.
“Do you know an Arthur Gransby?”
Beatrice’s husband! I knew it.