Tail Spin
Page 40

No, Savich thought, don’t go there. “I’d like to borrow your cell phone, Angel. I’ll return it. In fact, I’ll pay you a rental fee. What do you say?”
Greed gleamed in those innocent eyes. “How much you willing to pay me? It’s a good phone, lots of fancy things on it. Well, to be honest here, and that hurts real bad, I don’t think it’s got many minutes on it now.”
“However many minutes you’ve got will be perfect,” Savich said.
“You know, a cell phone’s like a guy; if you don’t plug him in every night, charge him good, you got nothing at all.”
Savich slid two bills across the table as Angel dug her cell phone out of her pocket. “I need some lipstick, but they wouldn’t give me my purse. They didn’t take my cell because it’s dead, I guess.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll return it nicely charged.” Savich rose, left the last hundred-dollar bill on the table. “Sherlock, why don’t you give Angel your lipstick. It’s a real pretty shade. See if you can’t make her earn that last hundred.”
He said to Angel, “I’ll see you soon. I think your information was so valuable that I’m going to speak to the people in charge and have all charges dropped.”
She gaped at him.
He held up his hand. “Wait, Angel. I will do this if you swear to me you’ll call this number.” He handed her a card. “This guy helps kids like you. Will you call him?”
He saw the lie in her eyes. “Oh yes, Mr. Special Agent, I’ll call . . . Mr. Hanratty right away.”
He shook her hand and left her and Sherlock to look at the lipstick. He joined the assistant director of the facility, Mrs. Limber, in the hallway. “It’s going very well,” he told her. “Thanks for letting us deal with her alone. I’m going to see if I can’t get her released.”
Mrs. Limber, soft as a pillow and wearing huge glasses, patted his shoulder. “Angel has guts and brains, but she’s got a larcenous soul. Some do, you know.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I know, but—”
“She’s also a freight train—she won’t stop. I see you’ve got Angel’s dead cell phone. Would you like to borrow a charger?”
Inside the small interview room, Sherlock smiled at the lovely shade of dark pink Angel smoothed on her lips. “Very nice. Yep, you keep it, the mirror, too.”
“I want a Big Mac,” Angel said, and tossed her hair.
Sherlock fingered the last hundred. “Why don’t you tell me how you met Roddy.”
When Sherlock found Savich, he was sitting under a tree in front of the detention facility, humming and playing with Angel’s cell.
He looked up. “Did she earn the last hundred?”
“Yep, and now our budding Donald Trump owns my lipstick, mirror, and a comb. Oh yeah, she told me you should keep her cell; with all the cash she got off you, she’s going to buy herself a iPhone. She can’t wait to leave this place in the dust. I don’t know, Dillon, I just don’t know.”
“Sometimes you gotta cut the fish loose. You’re not going to believe what I found on the cell.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Baltimore, Maryland
Wednesday afternoon
This has got to be heaven.”
Rachael stared around the large reception area on the thirtieth floor of the Abbott-Cavendish building on the corner of South Calvert Street. Her breathing quickened. “Oh my, would you look at those beauties. Jimmy told me Laurel is an expert on Chippendale furniture and filled the place with originals, but he never brought me here, said he couldn’t stand the stuff.” She looked around at the mint-condition Chippendale chairs and tables and felt her pulse race. “He was wrong,” she said, lightly running her fingers over a chair back. “How could anyone hate these? They’re exquisite. Just touch the wood, Jack, so smooth and perfect. It’s mahogany from the West Indies. And this chair leg—it’s called the cabriole leg, his signature form.”
Jack looked at the elegantly curved chair leg, at the turned feet, then back at her. He said slowly, “I knew you could come into my house and do this and that and it’d look a lot nicer than it does now, but you also know all about antiques?”
“Particularly Chippendale. Would you look at that lowboy, at the elaborate carving. It screams eighteenth century. Do you know he never used a maker’s mark? To prove authenticity, you need to be able to trace the piece back to the original invoice.”
What was a lowboy? Was she joking? An invoice from the eighteenth century?
Jack said, “No, I didn’t know that.” He listened to her talk about how Americans like Queen Anne splats and kidney-shaped seats, how they prefer cherrywood to mahogany. Those fancy cabriole legs sank at least three inches into the thick, expensive carpeting. You couldn’t pay him to sit in one of those chairs.
“And the three Turners,” Rachael went on. “Jimmy did like those paintings. I remember him telling me about them. They belonged to his mother.” She looked around the reception area, lust in her eyes. “To have a huge budget to decorate a space like this—wouldn’t that be something? I decorated a half-dozen commercial spaces in and around Richmond. I had to work my butt off to be both creative and cheap.”
“Did your clients appreciate what you did?”
“They all did, and that’s nice. Actually, I prefer being in on the design process itself, though, creating a space for a specific look and a specific function. My client list was growing nicely before I went to meet Jimmy.”
They heard a throat clear and looked over at two young women and two young men seated behind a huge swath of highly polished mahogany, each seated at an individual computer station, all nicely dressed, all working industriously on keyboards or speaking in hushed voices on phones. Except for one young woman, who had a raised eyebrow and beautiful fingernails.
Jack smiled at Rachael, nodded toward the young woman. “Let’s go hassle that bright-eyed young lass at reception, see where our prey is.”
The young lass—her tag read Julia—looked suspicious at first, then fell victim to Jack’s smile, a phenomenon Rachael had already observed a couple of times. It seemed Julia couldn’t help herself, she loosened up, smiled back at him. “Good afternoon. How may I help you?”