Bending the Rules Page 3

  “That’s excellent news.”

  Ava flashed a smile. “I saw him the other day and he’s got downy fuzz all over his head. If he wasn’t such a big guy, he’d look like a newborn chick.” Then she pushed back from the table. “I’ve gotta use the ladies’.” She leveled a stern look on Poppy. “Don’t you dare spill a single juicy detail until I get back.”

  “There are no juicy details,” she muttered to her friend’s departing back. Her thoughts turned inward to the day’s earlier events, however, and she wasn’t even aware of watching Ava cross the room. Only in the most absentminded way did she track the redhead’s progress by all the male heads that swiveled to watch her go by.

  “I never get tired of seeing that,” Jane said.

  “What?” she asked. Then realizing what she was staring at, she nodded. “Oh. That. Yeah, I know.” They grinned at each other. Because fueled by eat-your-heartout, revenge-inspired determination after being the butt of a humiliating bet when she was eighteen, Ava had changed a lifetime of bad eating habits. She’d refused to call it a diet, though, and she hadn’t made the mistake so many full-figured women did of trying to whittle herself down to a toothpick-thinness unsuited to her bigger-boned frame. She’d stopped actively losing weight once she’d reached a size twelve—or what would be a fourteen, they liked to tease her, if she bought her clothing in the less pricey shops that the rest of them patronized.

  But the actual size wasn’t the point. Ava had curves, she wasn’t afraid to accent them and men all but tripped over their tongues whenever she went by.

  Apparently she didn’t believe in wasting time when there was potential gossip in the offing, either. Back in under five minutes, she demanded even as she took her seat, “So let’s hear it. Who’s the stiff? And what on earth did he do to get you so bent out of shape? This is not like you.”

  “Yes, well, you can thank Jason de Sanges for my mood,” Poppy said through her teeth. “That rat bastard wrecked—”

  “Detective Sheik?” Jane snapped upright. “That’s who’s on your committee?”

  “Oh, no. Not now.” Her eyes slitted. “Thanks to him, the committee is no longer necessary. He torpedoed my wonderful plan.” She explained how he’d slanted the information he’d given the committee to make the three teens sound like hardened criminals.

  The waitress brought their drinks. After several sips of her British ale, Poppy felt the tension that had her neck muscles in knots start to loosen. She could thank Ava and Jane for that, because by allowing her, in the way of true friends, to unload on them they’d helped her shed a large portion of the stress she’d been carrying around. “I suppose I really shouldn’t let it get me so bent out of shape,” she admitted. “It’s not like I’m overwhelmed with free time anyway. Between my work with the kids, and doing the boards and figuring out what the hell I want to do with the rooms the Kavanaghs have finished, I would’ve had to scramble to fit this project in. It’s just…”

  “It was a good plan,” Ava said.

  “Yes! Not perfect, I know, but a lot better than dumping three kids into the system for a first offense. Maybe I could have made a difference in their lives.” She shrugged. “Maybe not. But I sure would have liked the chance to find out. Now I’ll never know.”

  “You still have a crack at them during the cleanup project, though, right?” Jane asked.

  “Yeah, but we all know that’s not going to thrill them. It was the opportunity to paint some honest-to-God community-sanctioned art that might have opened up a chink in their armor.”

  Ava’s auburn brows pleated. “You know what? Detective Sheik may have done a lot more last fall than we first believed—but he’s still a pig.”

  “Yeah,” Jane agreed. “And from now on he’s just plain Detective de Sanges. He doesn’t deserve to be called the Sheik.”

  “No fooling.” Poppy took another sip of her ale, pushed back her pint glass to make room for the steaming basket of fries the waitress set in front of her and sighed as she grabbed one and dragged it through the little dish of aioli. “How can someone who makes me so hot just looking at him have turned out to be such a cold fish?”

  THE SCENT OF deep-fat-fried fish wafted up from the paper-and-twine-wrapped package Jase juggled as he rapped his knuckles against an apartment door one floor down from his own. “Murph! You in there? Hey, I brought dinner. Open up before I drop the damn thing on the carpet.”

  “Hold your water, kid,” a gruff voice said, growing closer as his one-time mentor and long-time friend approached the other side of the door. “I ain’t as young as I useta be, y’ know.”

  “No shit?” he muttered as locks tumbled and the doorknob turned. “Can’t say as I remember you ever being young.”

  “Cute,” Murphy said, opening the door and reaching out to relieve him of the six-pack of St. Pauli Girl he’d tucked under his elbow.

  “Not trying to be cute,” he said honestly. “I don’t remember. I was, what? Fourteen when we met? I thought you were a hundred then.”

  “I was fifty-four!”

  “Which might as well be a hundred when you’re fourteen.”

  Murphy laughed. “I suppose you got a point.” He shot a glance over his shoulder at the blue-and-white paper bundling their dinner as he led the way to the little dining table outside his almost equally small kitchen. “Spud’s fish and chips,” he said as he pulled a couple of longnecks out of the six-pack and set them on the table. “What’s the occasion?”

  “That bogus committee you talked me into joining is no more.” And he refused to feel guilty about the disappointment he’d seen in the Babe’s big brown eyes when the vote hadn’t gone the way she’d hoped. “Figured that calls for a celebration.”

  Murphy slowly straightened from putting the rest of the beer in the refrigerator. Turning his head, he pinned Jase in the crosshairs of his faded but still sharp blue eyes. “I know you weren’t hot to be on this thing in the first place. But how the hell’d you manage that?”

  “By injecting a little reality into a harebrained scheme.” He nodded at the package he’d unwrapped. “I’ll tell you all about it, but right now come sit down. Let’s eat before this gets cold.”

  They each grabbed a wad of napkins and dug into the fish, eating with their fingers. They dipped the battered fish into plastic containers of tartar sauce, scraped thick clam chowder out of tiny cardboard cups with round-bowled plastic spoons and dredged their fries through ketchup, washing it all down with beer.

  Eventually there was nothing left except a couple of grease spots and a splash of garlic-infused vinegar in the bottom of their cardboard dishes. Murphy stacked them, tossed in the empty plastic condiment containers and, wadding up the wrapping paper, added it to the pile. He pushed his chair back from the table, patted his comfortable paunch and met Jase’s gaze. “Good dinner. Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “So tell me about this harebrained scheme.”

  “Do you remember me talking about the Babe?”

  “Sure. Rich girl who got you all hot and bothered a few months back.”

  “She didn’t get me all—” He swallowed the lie. “Okay, maybe she did. But that’s old news.”

  “So what’s the new news?”

  “Turns out she was on the committee, too. And she damn near talked the rest of the people on it into rewarding the kids caught tagging.”

  “How’s that?”

  “She was all for letting them do a mural on the side of one of the businesses.”

  “You’re kidding me. No making them clean up after their vandalism—just giving them something fun to do?”

  “Well, no. She actually did propose making them clean up their mess first with paint they paid for out of their own pockets.”

  Murph nodded. “Okay, good. That’s responsible. But—what?—they’ve been in and out of the system a hundred times already?”

  “Uh, not exactly.” He shifted in his seat. Tipped his bottle up and drained th
e last sip of beer from it. Because he knew this was where self-righteousness got a little shaky. “It was their first run-in with the police.”

  Murphy lowered his own bottle, which he’d been raising to his lips, and sat a little straighter in his seat. “Let me get this straight. The kids have never been in trouble. The Babe was going to have them clean up their mess with paint they’re responsible for purchasing. But she wanted to take it a step further and have them also paint a mural on the side of a building. So…what? She just tossed the idea out there on the table for someone else to implement?”

  Crap. “No, she offered to supervise. She wants to ‘make a difference’ in their lives.”

  The old man snorted. “Right. That’s likely to happen,” he said, deadpan. “Still, if she’s willing to do the work, why would the committee vote against the idea? It’s not like it’d be any skin offa their noses.”

  Crapfuckhell. “I might have gotten a little carried away with my ‘tagging is the first step to crime’ talk. Could have maybe scared them off some.”

  “For God’s sake, boy.” Murphy scratched his thinning iron-gray hair. “Why?”

  Back straightening, he looked Murph in the eye. “You know damn well why. Once you start torquing the rules it’s a slippery slope. One day you’re rewarding kids for trashing people’s hard-earned businesses. Next thing you know you’re giving in to the temptation to just take that old-lady-bashing mugger around the corner and stick your service revolver to his temple to ‘help’ him cough up a confession.”

  There was a moment’s silence in which his words clanged in his head like buckshot fired into a steel chamber—and he wished he could get the past few seconds back so he could cut his tongue out.

  Then Murphy said dryly, “I’m gonna take a wild stab here and speculate we’re not still talking about a bunch of merchants deciding to vote down the Babe’s proposal.”

  Burying his head in his hands, Jase groaned.

  He felt Murph rub rough fingers over his hair.

  “One of these days,” the old man said gruffly, “I’d like to see you give yourself a break and realize you’re not like your dad or grandpa or Joe.”

  “That’s never going to happen…because I am.” Dropping his hands to the tabletop, he raised his head to look at the old man. “I’m a goddamn de Sanges male, which is a lot like being a recovering alcoholic—I’m one act away from being just like the rest of the men in my family.”

  “That’s bullshit, and you oughtta damn well know it by now. But, no—you’re too fucking stubborn to take your head outta your butt. You have never knocked over convenience stores. You have never kited checks or destroyed bars in a drunken brawl. And I’m guessing now is probably not a good time to tell you about this, but I’m going to anyways. I got a call from your brother today, looking for you.”

  Everything inside him stilled. “Joe’s out on parole?”

  “Looks like.”

  “Shit.” Jase laughed without humor. Then, spreading his fingers against the faux wood, he lowered his head again and thunked it once, twice, three times against the tabletop. “I guess I’d better get in touch with him quick then, hadn’t I? Because God knows he won’t be out for long.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Holy shitskis, that “Be Careful What You Wish For” thing is no joke. Just when things were starting to settle down and I was finally getting that man out of my head…this!

  “SHARON, YOU want to come take a look?” Poppy twisted around on her perch near the top of the stepladder to look for the coffee-shop owner.

  The woman popped her head out of the kitchen. Brushing flour from her hands against the white apron tied around her waist, she stepped into the retail area and studied the blackboard, closely inspecting the updated menu Poppy had just completed. Then she smiled. “Lookin’ good.”

  “Excellent.” Poppy packed up her case of colored chalks and climbed down off the ladder. She slid the container into her big tote, which she’d left by the register, then folded in the ladder’s legs and tipped it carefully onto its side in the narrow area behind the glass bakery case until it was parallel to the floor and she could get a grip on it with both hands. Glancing out the door at the pale glow of daybreak beginning to lighten the eastern sky, she said, “I’ll just go put this back in the closet, then clean up and get out of your way.”

  “I took a blueberry coffee cake out of the oven about ten minutes ago,” Sharon said. “You have time for a slice and a cuppa joe? My staff’s going to start trickling in pretty soon and I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for a break.”

  “That would be great.” As if to demonstrate its appreciation, her stomach growled and, patting it, she laughed. “Don’t tell my mother, but I skipped breakfast this morning.”

  She maneuvered the ladder through the kitchen to the big utility closet by the back door, where she stored it away. Then she washed the multicolored layers of chalk from her hands and joined Sharon at a table. They visited over cups of full-bodied coffee and luscious, still-warm cake.

  She didn’t linger long after the snack was consumed, however. She still had three other boards to do this morning at sites scattered from Madison Park to Phinney Ridge to the Ballard neighborhood where she’d grown up, and they needed to be completed before the businesses were open to the public.

  When she finished the last job, a deli just off Market Street, she looked at her watch. She’d planned to drop in on her parents but schools were closed for a teachers’ “professional development” day, she had a date with some kids in the Central District—or the CD, as it was called by native Seattleites—and she had to stop by the mansion first. So with a regretful glance in the general direction of her childhood home, she steered her car toward the Ballard Bridge.

  She lucked into a parking space on the block below the mansion on the steeply pitched western slope of Queen Anne and, getting out of her car, she paused to look up at the house.

  The sunroom that had been scabbed onto the front of the edifice was now whittled down to a size and style in keeping with the rest of the structure and the Kavanaghs had repaired the facade to match the original. Her artist’s soul smiled to see the elegant bones restored to the early-twentieth-century mansion. The sound of hammers, pithy obscenities and male laughter coming from the kitchen as she approached the back door elicited yet another grin.

  She let herself into a room filled with buff guys wielding power tools. Well, okay, only one of the four men in the gutted kitchen was actually operating one. As Devlin Kavanagh’s drill whined into silence and he and his brothers looked over at her, she inhaled a deep breath, then blew it out with theatrical gusto. “I love the smell of testosterone in the morning!”

  Raising his black eyebrows toward his Irish-setter red hair, Dev drawled, “According to Jane, babe, you wouldn’t know what to do with testosterone in the morning.”

  “You are so full of it, Kavanagh. Janie would never rat me out—not even to you. And watching all this tool-belt activity does make my little heart go pitty-pat. It’s. Just. So—” she batted her lashes at Dev and his brothers “—manly.”

  They laughed and went back to work. She headed upstairs.

  Where she found herself wandering the finished rooms, thinking about the videotape Miss Agnes had left for her, Ava and Jane to view at the reading of the will almost exactly a year ago. In it the old woman had said how much the three of them had come to mean to her over the years. And she’d told them in that foghorn voice of hers that she realized they’d have to sell the mansion—but it was her wish that each would carry out one final request from her in getting it ready. Poppy sure wished, not for the first time, that she understood what it was Miss A. had had in mind when she’d requested that Poppy be in charge of the decorating part of the renovation.

  The old woman had been so good to the three of them, amazingly canny when it came to knowing what each one needed, then seeing to it that they got it. For Jane and Ava that had meant a modicum of pare
nting to fill in the gaps left by the always dramatic self-absorption of Janie’s folks and the benign indifference of Ava’s. For her it had meant having her passion for color indulged. Miss A. had done what few other adults would—given a young girl a paintbrush and the paint color of her choice and trusted the kid not to make a huge mess out of her mansion. And in the matter of the dining room, she’d even allowed Poppy to choose window treatments that let in light where before heavy draperies had kept it out. But that was a far cry from decorating the entire place.

  “Omigawd.” She stopped dead in the upstairs hallway. “That’s it.”

  Grabbing her cell phone from her tote, she was punching in an auto-dial number even as she rushed from the mansion. “I finally figured it out!” she crowed to Ava as she strode back to her car. Holding the phone to her ear, she adjusted her slipping tote on her shoulder and almost tripped over a raised slab of sidewalk where an ancient Douglas fir’s root had pushed it up.

  “I was making MissA.’s request way too complicated. I thought she’d completely overestimated my talents and wanted me to act as a big-time interior decorator.”

  “You could do that,” Ava assured her.

  She laughed. “You’re a true and loyal friend and I love you for it. But I design menu boards and the occasional greeting card—”

  “One of which got picked up by Shoebox!”

  Yes, that was a stroke of luck she was still dancing in the streets about—that she no longer had to scramble to come up with the rent check the first of each month. “But, face it, mostly I do catch-as-catch-can low-end commercial stuff for whoever I can convince to hire me and fast-talked my way into a couple of grants to turn on underprivileged kids to art. I’m sure as hell no interior designer.”

  She grinned like a deranged jester. “But that’s what I figured out, that Miss A. didn’t intend me to be. Jane actually tried to tell me this last fall, but my thong was in a twist at the time because I thought she was about to blow the deal I’d made with the Kavanaghs, so it didn’t really register. But I think all Miss Agnes wanted from me was precisely what I was always bugging her to let me do—rip down all those gawd-awful drapes that are blocking out the light, give the rooms a fresh coat of paint and new window treatments and maybe stage it the way Realtors do these days with a few of her nicer pieces of furniture and the odd collectible.”