“God, what a chickenshit,” he muttered, hitting the space key on his computer, just to interrupt the image of her trim legs and pale, straight hair, her natural, incongruous elegance, apparent even in her sweaty exercise clothes.
He tried to concentrate on the task at hand, namely ferreting out information on Croc’s jewel thief. He was, as his skinny young friend had so accurately pointed out, between stories. In fact, his editor had been urging him to seize the moment and take a vacation, his first in two years. He’d even contemplated where he might go. But it seemed silly to leave south Florida in the dead of winter, and then Croc had approached him with tales of Mollie Lavender as a jewel thief.
Ten years ago, he recalled, trouble had swirled around her, leaving her untouched, like the lone tree standing after a hurricane. Although innocently on spring break and as committed and driven in her life as a musician as he was in his as a journalist, he’d sensed a restlessness of soul and spirit. She was more uncertain and unformed than any twenty-year-old would willingly let anyone know or see, and he’d been drawn to the secret parts of her that she hadn’t yet explored or even admitted existed. Ultimately, he’d let her sort through those complexities herself, without him.
Could she have turned into a jewel thief in the meantime?
Possibly. Why the hell not?
But he could also imagine her right there in the thick of things, oblivious.
Yet the woman he’d seen that morning hadn’t seemed oblivious or airheaded or anything but sharp, professional, and in control.
Except for that picture of him on her dartboard, of course.
Jeremiah grinned, feeling better. How, he wondered, had Croc landed on her as his chief suspect? There had to be more than his common denominator theory. Croc liked being mysterious and in the know. He wouldn’t be above withholding vital information.
Hurling himself to his feet with sudden energy, Jeremiah made his way through the sea of desks and reporters in the big, open Trib newsroom and down the corridor to the separate offices of the arts and entertainment and leisure sections. Helen Samuel had her own office, one, because no one could stand her smoking, and, two, because no one could stand her. Her abrasiveness aside, she was an old-style gossip columnist who prided herself on knowing what was fair game and what wasn’t. A jewel thief on the loose in Palm Beach was right up her alley.
“This is too good, Tabak,” she said when he appeared in her doorway. She stuffed out a cigarette in an already overflowing ashtray. “You sucking up to me for information two days in a row is worth a line in my column, except you’re too goddamned boring. If you kept company with something besides reptiles, I could work with it.” She flashed dark, incisive eyes at him. “You don’t sleep with your lizard, do you?”
“Helen, you make most of my informants seem downright respectable.”
“They’re cockroaches. I’m a professional. Close the door and sit down. I presume you don’t want anyone listening in on our conversation?”
“I’m not hiding my interest—”
“Sure you are.” She waved a tiny, bony hand. She lied about all her personal stats, but she had to be seventy, she couldn’t be over five feet, she weighed at most a hundred pounds, and she prided herself on never having gone “under the knife.” Jeremiah couldn’t imagine what a face-lift could do for her. Rumor had it she’d looked like Loretta Young in her youth. He couldn’t picture it. She pointed at the door. “Shut it. Sit.”
Jeremiah shut the door and sat.
Helen tapped another cigarette out of a sequined case. If lung disease or heart disease did her in, she would only say it saved her from a lonely retirement. She’d been declaring she planned to go out of her office on a gurney long before Jeremiah had arrived at the Trib eighteen years ago as a college student working part-time. Most of her colleagues thought she’d simply ossify first. One of the janitors swore she didn’t go home at night. “She’s really a mummy,” he liked to tell Jeremiah. “You just think she’s alive.”
Jeremiah eased back in the ratty vinyl-covered chair. The tiny office reeked of stale smoke. Helen sat with an unlit cigarette expertly tucked between callused forefinger and middle finger. “So,” she said with a hint of victory in her hoarse voice, “you’re on the cat burglar story.”
He grimaced. “I’m just nosing around. I’m supposed to be on vacation.”
“I haven’t taken a vacation in ten years. Don’t believe in ’em. Of course, I can plant my fanny on a cruise ship and call it work. You and me, Tabak, we’re not so different.” She grinned at his stricken expression. “Ha, scares the shit out of you, doesn’t it? This work’s either in your blood or it isn’t. It’s in yours.”
“I have a life, Helen.”