The Barefoot Summer Page 3

  “I’ve got a couple more stops to make, so I’d rather be there at nine,” he said.

  “Can’t do it. It’s ten or it’ll have to wait until Tuesday or Wednesday,” she told him. She could rearrange her schedule, but Detective Waylon was not going to call the shots.

  “Then I’ll be there promptly at ten,” he said.

  “You could ask me whatever you want to know right now and save a trip.”

  “I do not do interviews on the phone.” Without a good-bye, have a nice day, or kiss my butt, he was gone.

  She tossed the phone onto the sofa and headed up the stairs to change from her cute little peach suit and high heels into something more comfortable. She had nothing to hide, so the detective could interview her every day for the next year, but by damn, he would do it on her terms. If he thought he could just pop into her business any old time, then he’d better bring a sandwich and a cup of coffee, because he might spend a lot of time in the waiting room.

  With her Sunday outfit hung up and her shoes put back in the right box, she flopped back on her bed and stared at the ceiling. Maybe she wouldn’t sell the cabin. If it didn’t harbor bad memories when she went up there to take care of all the legal matters, she might just keep the thing. It was big enough, with three bedrooms, to use as a weekend company getaway. The lake provided fishing and swimming. She could envision a spreadsheet where employees could write in days for either weeklong or weekend vacation time. That way the place could be a company tax write-off.

  Cold air from the ceiling vent chilled her body, so she swung her legs off the side of the bed and slipped into a pair of pajama pants. Pulling a chambray shirt on over a tank top, she made her way back down the stairs, picked up her phone, and carried it outside to sit beside the pool.

  “I hate you, Conrad Steele.” She threw her hand over her eyes to block the setting sun. “You could have waited another year to get killed. Mother is retiring in December, and I’m up to my eyeballs in work. I don’t have time for this crap right now.”

  Her phone rang, and she was careful to check before she answered this time. If it was the detective again, she planned to let it go to voice mail.

  “Hello, Mother,” she said.

  “I think you should take some time off,” Teresa said. “No one at the firm knows about the situation, but the news will break, and when it does . . .” She let the sentence hang.

  “I’m going to be a big black spot on the company’s immaculate reputation, right?”

  “Something like that.”

  Kate counted to ten. “I’m not running away. That makes me look guilty.”

  “It’s only taking part of the three months’ worth of vacation time you’ve got built up. It’s not running,” Teresa argued.

  If she’d asked for a long weekend a month ago, Teresa would have gone up in flames higher than a Texas wildfire. But now that it was to do with the business, everything had changed quicker than the blink of an eye. Kate wasn’t going anywhere.

  “You are retiring. I’m trying to get things lined up to step into your office. I can’t take time off.”

  “Yes, you can.” When Teresa got an idea, she went at it like a hound dog chasing a coyote. “If we get into a bind, you can work from wherever you are. Go to that cabin and take care of the business involved with that so you’ll be finished with everything outside of the company when I’m gone. You can work from the computer if we have a problem. And if something really serious happens, you can be here in less than three hours.”

  “I told you”—Kate smiled at how slickly those words came from her mouth—“that I’m fine. This whole thing was over years ago.”

  “If you don’t take some time now, you will be too busy after I’m gone to get away. Don’t argue with me. Come into the office tomorrow, spend the week getting things lined up, and then go,” Teresa said.

  “But . . .” At forty-four years old, she didn’t need someone to tell her what to do. But then she was also amazed. Her mother had never suggested that she take even a few days off. Was Teresa Truman, president of the Truman Oil Company, getting soft in her old age?

  No, Teresa would be hardheaded and -hearted until the day that they crossed her arms over her chest in a coffin. This had nothing to do with Kate’s emotional well-being and everything to do with company image.

  “I’ve been running this company since I was thirty years old. The one thing I regret is not taking vacations,” Teresa said. “If it did not involve business, I didn’t see the need for it. Don’t get to be seventy years old with regrets, like I’m doing now.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Kate said.

  Regrets, my naturally born white ass! The only thing that you might feel sorry about is not buying out Texas Red when it was a small company or maybe letting me buy stock in this company through the years. Now I own thirty percent, which is only slightly less than what you own.

  “Good. That’s at least a baby step. See you in the morning. I’m leaving the office now and going home to get a few laps in the pool before dark,” Teresa said.

  “’Bye, Mother,” Kate said and hit the “End” button.

  She visualized her mother’s smile, the one that made her eyes twinkle, the one that she pasted on her face when she won a big deal.

  She eyed her own pool for a minute, then stood up and stripped down to her underwear. The water enveloped her in its coolness when she dived in and started swimming from one end to the other. One hundred laps later, Kate had made up her mind to take a week of her vacation time. Surely it wouldn’t take a day longer than that to get things settled with the cabin.

  A cute little lady in a dark suit made a phone call and gave Waylon a visitor’s tag to clip on to his sports jacket that Monday morning. She pointed toward the elevators and told him to go to third floor. As she said, the waiting room would be to the right and Mrs. Steele would send her assistant for him when she could see him.

  A wall of glass at the end of the waiting area provided a view of downtown Fort Worth. Current magazines occupied orderly rows on the coffee table in front of the sofa where he’d slumped down. He couldn’t get comfortable—the seat was too short for his tall frame, and the back hit him at a place between his shoulder blades that had been sore for weeks. Finally, he left the sofa behind and watched the traffic down on the street from the third-floor glass wall.

  God, he hated the city. Time was when he loved it and everything about the Dallas/Fort Worth area, but lately his heart was back in Mabelle, Texas, on the ranch that his folks had left him. He was tired of chasing the bad guys and doing paperwork. He wanted to sweat in the hay field rather than in a jacket, white shirt, and tie.

  He checked the time on his phone every thirty seconds, and finally, at ten minutes past the hour, someone said his name. He turned around to find a short gray-haired lady with a no-nonsense expression motioning for him.

  She’d made it with five minutes to spare. He did not wait more than fifteen minutes for an appointment—doctor, dentist, or suspect.

  “If you are Detective Waylon Kramer, Mrs. Steele will see you now.”

  He followed her into an outer office, through a set of double doors into a bigger room with the same view out the window on one end. Mrs. Steele was sitting behind her desk and did not get up or extend a hand. He removed his cowboy hat and laid it on the edge of her desk.

  “Please sit,” she said. “Could we get you something to drink? Coffee? Water?”

  “Coffee would be nice. No sugar or cream. Just black,” Waylon said.

  “Millie, make that two coffees and two glasses of water,” she told the gray-haired lady. “Now what can I do for you today, Detective?”

  “You’ve given me a complete rundown of where you were on the day your husband was killed. Could I have something on paper, like your schedule and who you were meeting with on that day? And I’d like access to your financial records,” he said.

  “Okay, I will have Millie run a copy of my schedule that day. I
believe you came to the office at three, so I suppose anything prior to that would be enough? And if you want my phone records or my financials, get a warrant.”

  “I want you to tell me in your own words, but I would like a copy. I can get a warrant if it’s going to be a problem,” Waylon said.

  “You bring the warrant and I’ll grant you access. Am I still a suspect in Conrad’s murder?”

  “We always look at the spouse first, especially when there is an insurance policy involved,” he answered.

  “And is there an insurance policy? I don’t have a copy of one. Maybe one of the other wives bought the thing.”

  “You took it out on him and you pay the premiums,” he countered.

  She inhaled deeply and let it out in a whoosh. “I forgot about that.”

  Waylon bit the inside of his lip to keep from grinning. So he could fluster the ice queen. That made the ten-minute wait worth every second.

  “Which leads me to believe maybe you forgot about something else,” he said.

  “It’s only for twenty-five thousand dollars, for God’s sake, and I had the premium set up for automatic payment. I figured if he died out there on the road it would pay for his funeral expenses. It’s damn sure not enough to kill him over,” she protested.

  Her tone had gone an octave higher, and her body language said she was even more rattled. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Did you find out about those other two women before he died?”

  Millie brought in a tray and set it on the desk. “Anything else?”

  “No, that’s all for now,” Mrs. Kate Steele said.

  Millie shut both doors behind her as she left. Waylon reached for coffee, and Kate picked up a glass of water, downing a third of it before setting it back down—in his books a sign that she was guilty as hell in some way and her mouth was dry from her lies.

  Kate hit a couple of keys on her computer and brought up her calendar. “I told you all this before, but if you want the minute details, here they are. I arrived at work at eight thirty. I came in thirty minutes early to get my files in order for a meeting with the acquisitions department concerning buying out a smaller company. I went from my office to the conference room at nine o’clock. I did not have time in that five-minute ride in the elevator to dash down to the flower shop and kill my husband,” she said. “We were there until noon, hashing out the finer points of a buyout. Millie had lunch delivered, and we took a forty-five-minute break. I didn’t leave except for ten minutes in the ladies’ room, and there were at least two other women in there at the same time I was. We were back at the table at one o’clock and wrapped it all up by two. I went back to my office to make phone calls. I did not kill Conrad or have him assassinated.”

  Waylon took out his notebook and wrote down the timeline as she talked. Most of the time folks got real antsy when he made notes in his book. It didn’t seem to affect Kate Steele as much as he wanted. She sat across the desk from him sipping her ice water as if he were no more than a gnat that she would squash with that glass paperweight any minute. He put his pen and notebook into his pocket and finished off his coffee.

  “You got anything else you want to say this morning?” he asked.

  “Only that if I’d wanted to kill Conrad, I would have done it years ago and I would not have hired someone to do my dirty work,” she said curtly.

  “Don’t leave town. I might have more questions. Thanks for the coffee.” He rose up out of the chair slowly and settled his hat back on his head.

  “I am leaving town next weekend, but I’ll still be in the state,” she said. “You have my cell phone, and before you accuse me of murder again, why don’t you pull your head out of your butt and do some real detective work? Who was he sending flowers to? They damn sure weren’t for me. And if there are three of us, there might be another wife in the wings. Find them and see if that person has a gun to match the bullets that killed dear old Conrad.”

  Waylon nodded. “Good day, Mrs. Steele.”

  “Think about what I said.” She raised her voice slightly as he left.

  “Dammit!” he muttered as he pushed “L” on the elevator.

  She’d brought up two good points that he was already investigating. Was she covering her own tracks by throwing him off course, and why was she taking a vacation right now? Hiding evidence?

  CHAPTER THREE

  On Tuesdays the trash man picked up the garbage, but since that particular day was a holiday, they wouldn’t get it until Wednesday. Still, Jamie was determined to get rid of anything in her house that had belonged to Conrad. She did leave one picture of Gracie with her father in her daughter’s room. Even though Conrad had been a son of a bitch, he was still her father.

  Was it something in the genes? Jamie’s mother hadn’t had a lick of sense with her relationship, and Jamie had been the result. She twisted her black hair up the back of her head and held it with an oversize clamp, dragged two bags out to the curb, and returned for a third big black one that held their actual garbage for the week. It would be ready for the trash man when he came the next day, and it would damn sure be out of her house.

  Her grandmother had suggested giving his things to a charity, but Jamie was a little superstitious. She sure didn’t want another man to put on one of Conrad’s shirts or even his socks and feel the urge to become a con artist. The trash truck rumbled down her street before she even made it back to the porch of the small three-bedroom house that she and Conrad had bought together the week after they’d married. They’d planned on at least two children—a boy and a girl was what Conrad wanted. Moving from a small one-bedroom apartment, she’d felt as if she had bought a mansion when she first moved in. Now it seemed small, because memories lurked in every corner and every damned one of them fueled the red-hot anger inside her.

  She would sell the place and move into an apartment. There was no way she could make the mortgage payment, pay taxes and insurance, and keep up with all her other bills on her teacher’s salary. He might have been a bastard, but he did give her the money for the mortgage every month.

  “Unless I can sell the cabin and put the money on the house.” She sat down on the porch, propped her elbows on her knees, and put her chin in her hands. “That has to be Gracie’s inheritance, since she is his oldest living blood kin. As her guardian, I could sell it and pay off most of this house. I’ll make a will leaving this property to her, which I would have done anyway.”

  “Who are you talkin’ to, Mommy?” Gracie plopped down beside her. She smelled faintly of cinnamon from the french toast they’d had for breakfast, but the rest was sweaty kid that had been playing jump rope in the backyard.

  If anything could ease the feelings inside Jamie that day, it was love for Gracie. She hugged her up next to her side. “I was talking to myself, trying to get things figured out. How would you like to go to the cabin for a few weeks?”

  Gracie jumped up and clapped her hands, her black ponytail flopping up and down in excitement. “Yes, yes, yes! We can swim and go to the snow-cone stand down by the store and will we be there for the festival? And Daddy can share cotton candy . . .” Gracie stopped and tears filled her eyes. “Daddy won’t be there, will he? Do you think he’s in heaven like the preacher said?”

  Jamie pulled her down on her lap and buried her face in Gracie’s hair. “Only God knows that.”

  “Maybe Mama Rita will know. She talks to God.”

  “You’ll have to ask her.” Jamie smiled.

  Gracie wiggled out of her mother’s embrace. “Can we go to the cabin today?”

  “We’ve got some stuff to take care of first, and tonight we have to go see the fireworks display with Mama Rita. How about this weekend? That will give you time to get your toys packed and decide which outfits Barbie will need to take.” Jamie smiled.

  There would be memories at the cabin, but they only spent a week there each summer. It would be a far better place to figure things out than sitting in the house all summer, and besides, Graci
e loved it there.

  “I think I left one of my Barbies there last time we went. I bet she’s lonely.” Gracie sighed. “I will miss Daddy. We never been there without him.”

  “I know, sweetheart, but we’ll have a good time, and maybe you can turn some balloons loose when we leave. They can rise right up in the sky and he might even see them.” Jamie fought the desire to cross her fingers behind her back.

  “Okay,” Gracie said with a serious nod. “Now I’m goin’ to start packin’ my Barbies and their clothes. They’ll need bathing suits and I’ll have to take Snugglies or I won’t be able to sleep.” She disappeared into the house in a blur, leaving the sound of a slamming screen door in her wake.

  An official-looking black vehicle slowed down as it passed her house, then backed up and pulled into her driveway. She shaded her eyes with her hand and hoped to hell it wasn’t more bad news. That detective from the funeral got out, shook the legs of his jeans down over cowboy boots, and tipped his hat toward her. Tall and dark haired, he shot a winning smile her way and swaggered over to lean on a porch post.

  “Mrs. Jamie Steele?”

  “That’s me,” she said.

  “Could I come inside and ask you a few questions?”

  “No, but you can sit on my porch with me and ask anything you want,” she said.

  The hat and clothes might make him look like an innocent cowboy, but she’d been conned by a professional for seven years. Detective Waylon could barely be classified as an amateur in the field, even with his winning smile and those sexy eyes.

  “Hot one, ain’t it?” He sat down on the top step and rested his back against a porch post.

  “I’ve never expected snow in July,” she said. “Let’s cut to the chase. What do you want to know?”

  He pulled out a notebook and a pen. “You are a schoolteacher, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Are you angry right now?”

  “Not that it’s a bit of your business, but hell, yes, I’m mad. I just found out my husband is a polygamist and he’s got at least two other wives. Have you found more?”