White Hot

3

Jeremiah arrived at his desk at the Miami Tribune wondering how many women had his picture on their dartboards. He supposed he should have told Mollie the truth about himself ten years ago. But she did seem to enjoy thinking of him as scum.

Which, as far as she was concerned, he was. Twenty was young, but twenty-six wasn’t old, and he’d tried to do the honorable thing, even if it had, in retrospect, been awfully damned dumb. Now he had a blonde-haired publicist up in Palm Beach firing darts between his eyes.

“Son,” his father liked to tell him, “remember that more than anything else, what a woman wants from a man is the truth.”

In his twisted logic, Jeremiah had thought because what he’d told Mollie made him look like a snake, he was off the hook as far as telling the truth. He’d acted honorably, in his estimation, trying to soften the blow of ending their weeklong affair by telling her he’d used her to get his drug-dealing story. The truth was, he’d fallen for her just as hard and fast and incomprehensibly as she had fallen for him. Yet he’d known-and saw it before she did-that they couldn’t last.

So he’d lied to her then, just as he’d lied to her two hours ago. Both lies had been expedient. The first, because he’d thought it would be easier to have her hate him than to try to explain the complexities of why they couldn’t be together. The second, because he’d thought he could get out of there without a dart somewhere on his person if he let her believe simple, human curiosity had driven him to her doorstep rather than a story.

“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.”

“Yep, and it’s the job. Might as well make your peace with it now, save you a lot of heartache in the future. Don’t worry, you won’t end up like me.” She grinned, a hint, indeed, of Loretta Young in the sparkle of her dark eyes. “You don’t smoke.”

Jeremiah reined in any impulse to argue with her. He was not like Helen Samuel. He would never be like Helen Samuel. Thirty years from now, he would not be sitting behind a crummy desk in a crummy office talking Gold Coast gossip with a young investigative reporter. He would be…what? He didn’t know. He didn’t have to know. But damned if he’d be an aging, chain-smoking, cynical gossip columnist with a warped sense of humor.

“If you don’t object,” he said, “I’d like to hear what you know about this jewel thief.”

“Know? I don’t know shit. But I’ve heard a few things.”

She stuck her cigarette in her mouth and fumbled for a lighter as ancient as she was. Jeremiah waited impatiently. When she had the cigarette lit and had taken a deep drag and blown what smoke didn’t get sucked into her lungs into his air space and still didn’t go on, he groaned. “Helen, if you’re going to make me beg for every word…”

“Beg? You, Tabak? Wait, lemme get a photographer in here. We’ll print it on page one.”

He glared at her.

She waved her cigarette at him, ash flicking off onto her blotter. “Oh, you love it. Playing the big, bad reporter. Anybody who hasn’t been around as long as I have is scared shitless of you. Which means everyone else in the goddamned building. Okay, here’s the poop.” She laid her cigarette on her ashtray, getting down to business. “So this little bastard’s hit eight, ten times in the last couple weeks.”

“Seven times in fourteen days, including last night at the Greenaway.”

“Yeah, whatever. Facts are your department.” She grinned, but he didn’t rise to the bait. “Okay. At first, nobody thinks anything. Maybe it’s robbery, or maybe it’s some daffy socialite who forgot to put on her jewels and would rather cry cat burglar than admit it, or maybe it’s an insurance scam. You know, all these baubles are insured. Pretty convenient, if not suspicious, that none of the victims has been hurt or has seen a thing.”

“No witnesses?”

“Nope. None that are talking, anyway. It wasn’t until the fifth or sixth hit that people starting admitting they’ve got a problem on their hands.”

“The police?”

“They’re investigating. The different departments involved are coordinating. I mean, that’s what I hear. I make a practice of not talking to the police if I can help it. But the modus operandi for each hit is the same-the guy strikes at parties, not sneaking into an unoccupied home or hotel room like your typical cat burglar, and takes advantage of the least little mistake. I guess people are regarding him as a cat burglar because he hasn’t been seen-he’s not sticking people up, just slipping into their pockets and handbags unnoticed.”

“Bold,” Jeremiah said.

“And observant as hell.”

“So he must be in a position to watch the crowd without drawing attention.”

“He or she,” Helen amended pointedly.

“You think it’s a woman?”

She shrugged, plucking her cigarette from its position on her ashtray, taking a quick drag, and replacing it again, a half-inch of ash dropping into the mound. “Something about this jewel thief’s different. Maybe it’s gender, I don’t know. You were at the Greenaway last night?”

He nodded.

Helen rocked back in her chair, thinking. Jeremiah could imagine her applying her decades of experience with people, with the Gold Coast, with a world, he thought, with which he was largely unfamiliar. “Okay,” she said. “We’ve got a socialite wearing a diamond-encrusted salamander brooch. She notices the clasp is loose and tucks it into the pocket of her Armani jacket and forgets about it. When it gets a little warm, she takes off the jacket and hangs it on the back of her chair. Later in the evening, she puts the jacket on, remembers the brooch, dips her hand into her pocket, and, lo and behold, it’s gone. She gets security, they search everywhere, but no salamander.”

“That doesn’t mean it was stolen.”

“Two weeks ago, probably no one would have thought a thing of it. Now, it fits the pattern.”

“How much was the brooch worth?”

“Thirty grand. It’s covered by insurance.”

“Has anyone else come forward who lost jewelry before the last two weeks and now thinks it might have been the work of our thief?”

Helen shook her head, iron-gray wisps dripping out of the mass of bobby pins she used to keep her hair up. “Not yet.”

Jeremiah ran the slim set of facts through his mind. “People scared?”

“Not enough to leave their good stuff in the vault.”

“Have the police landed on any common denominators?”

“Not that they’ve shared with me.” Her eyes narrowed suddenly, and she leaned across her cluttered desk. “Why? Have you?”

But Jeremiah was already on his feet. If he mentioned Mollie, Helen Samuel would eat him alive. Then she’d eat Mollie alive. She wasn’t hard news, but she was a hell of a reporter. “Thanks, Helen. I owe you one.”

She snorted. “Yeah, yeah. Put me in your will.”

Now that Jeremiah was real to her and no longer a ghost of her misguided past, Mollie hoped her nightmares would subside. She buried herself in client meetings and on the phone until mid-afternoon, then headed down to Leonardo’s pool for a long break before tackling another couple hours of work after dinner. Tonight she was staying home. No battered brown pickup for her.

Why, she asked herself for the hundredth time, was Tabak interested in her? What story could he possibly be tracking down that might involve her even in the remotest way? She didn’t even know that many people in Palm Beach.

But two she did know called her from the front gate moments after she’d spread her towel on a lounge chair in the shade. She’d brought her portable phone down with her, just in case an important call she wasn’t expecting came through. If serendipity struck, she didn’t want to miss it.

“Are you lollygagging?” Griffen Welles asked, mock-horrified.

Mollie smiled. She’d met Griffen, an upscale caterer, through Leonardo on a long weekend two years ago, her first real friend in Palm Beach. “Shamelessly.”

“There’s hope for you yet. Your Yankee soul isn’t balking at such decadence?”

“Oh, it’s balking. I’m just ignoring it.”

“Well, hit the gate code and let us in.”

That meant Deegan Tiernay was with her. He was eleven years younger than Griffen, a college senior and the son of Michael Tiernay of Tiernay & Jones Communications in Miami. Instead of doing his internship with his father’s prestigious and very large firm, he’d asked Mollie-after meeting her through Griffen-if she’d take him on. She couldn’t have made as much progress as she had without his ten-hour-a-week contribution.

She punched in the gate code and settled back in her lounge chair, welcoming their company even if she wasn’t entirely comfortable with Griffen and Deegan’s relationship. She’d warned herself to remember that Deegan Tiernay at twenty-one was not herself at twenty. And Griffen Welles was no Jeremiah Tabak.

They joined her at the pool, a paradise of sparkling azure water, terra cotta urns of flowers, a curving terrace scattered with enough chairs and small tables for a throng, and adjoining gardens of flowers, decorative palms, citrus trees, and the biggest bird-of-paradise Mollie had ever seen. She could not even imagine taking care of such a yard by herself. That Leonardo’s gardener could do it in twice-weekly visits amazed her; she never failed to compliment him, and often watched him from her deck, imagining herself with a house and a yard of her own someday.

Griffen whistled, grinning. “You’ve got your shoes off and everything. I’m impressed.”

“I’m working tonight,” Mollie said.

“Of course you are, Ms. Workaholic. I know, I know. One year is all you have before you turn into a pumpkin again.”

Mollie laughed, appreciating Griffen’s irreverence. She was thirty-two, tall and lean, her body all angles and taut muscles and long, thin limbs. Her face was more striking than pretty, framed by masses of dark curls. She wore a long sundress in a deep, dark red that added to her exotic good looks. Deegan, in shorts and a polo shirt, looked eleven years younger, but hardly out of his element. He was blonde, athletic, preppy, and soon to come into a sizable trust fund. His maternal grandmother, Diantha Atwood, was a formidable force in Palm Beach society. If she or his parents disapproved of his choice of internship, they were discreet, kind, and supportive on the few occasions Mollie had encountered them. Deegan claimed he’d learn more working with a newbie publicist who had to do everything herself than with his father’s firm, where he wouldn’t get such diversity of experience. Of course, working with Mollie also conveniently established his own independence and no doubt raised a few eyebrows among the authority figures in his life.

“What about you?” she asked Griffen, who’d immediately kicked off her sandals. “Do you have anything on tonight?”

“A small cocktail party in Boca. Everything’s supposed to be low-fat and ultra-fresh.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“I guess it’s a challenge, if I don’t dawdle here too long and have to race around like a maniac. Maybe our cat burglar will make an appearance and liven things up.”

Mollie sat up straight. “Cat burglar? What cat burglar?”

Deegan squatted down beside the pool, scooping up stray impatiens blossoms floating on the water. He cocked a grin at Mollie, his eyes a blue somewhere between that of the sky and the pool. “We’ve got to get you tuned in to Palm Beach gossip. You were at the Greenaway last night. You didn’t know a jewel thief struck?”

She could feel the blood draining from her face and thought, Tabak. “No. I left early.”

“It was in the morning papers,” Griffen said. “It wasn’t a big headline. The papers are still playing this one safe. But local gossip says we’ve got a serious cat burglar on the prowl.”

Deegan got to his feet, flicking the dead, soaked blossoms into the grass. “He swiped a jewel-encrusted salamander out of Marcie Amerson’s Armani jacket pocket last night. Supposedly her insurance company has launched an investigation.”

So that was it, Mollie thought, trying to retain her composure. Jeremiah was on this cat burglar story. That explained why he was at the Greenaway last night. And he had tracked her down this morning for the same reasons he had plopped down next to her towel ten years ago: access, information, a way into a world where he didn’t belong. Then, it was college students. Now, it was Palm Beach society. In both cases, Mollie was an outsider in a unique position. And oblivious.

“Any leads?” she asked.

“Not that anyone’s saying publicly,” Deegan said. The jewel thief, however, didn’t hold his interest. “Mind if I sneak upstairs a minute? I left a few threads dangling. It’ll make work tomorrow easier if I deal with them now. Door’s open?”

Griffen frowned. “I’ve got ten minutes to spare, tops.”

“No problem,” he said, and blew her a kiss. “Mollie?”

“Door’s open,” she said, and he took off at a half-trot, his irrepressible energy making her feel enervated. What was she going to do about Tabak?

Nothing, she told herself. She’d already called his bluff. With any luck, he wouldn’t be back.

“You look preoccupied,” Griffen said. She was at the shallow end of the pool, dipping in her toes. “Perfect. I’m such a baby-I hate cold water. Hey, everything okay?”

“It’s just been one of those days.” Part of her wanted to tell worldly, savvy Griffen everything, but Mollie had become accustomed to keeping her affair with Jeremiah to herself. It wasn’t an easy habit to break. Not even Leonardo, the one person in her life who would understand a mad, doomed affair, knew. Her parents would have understood intellectually, but not in their gut. “Do you really think there’s a jewel thief on the loose?”

She shrugged. “Could be. I’m not worried. I only wear costume jewelry and not much of that. I hate having stuff hanging from my neck and earlobes, especially if it’s heavy. Gets on my nerves.”

“Then our thief’s not likely to make you his next target,” Mollie said, amused.

“Damned straight.”

Griffen had both feet in the water now, standing on the top step with her sundress hiked up to her knees. She was born and raised in south Florida, but not of a wealthy family. Her rise as one of Palm Beach’s top caterers was her own doing. She was hard-working, creative, a natural self-promoter, and fun to be around-and scrupulous about the food she served. Mollie felt they were friends as much because of their differences as in spite of them, but she and Griffen shared an entrepreneurial spirit that allowed both to understand the ups and downs of being self-employed. Griffen had simply been at it longer.

Before she aroused her friend’s suspicions, Mollie changed the subject. Deegan came down, finally, and they were off.

Suddenly itching to be away herself, Mollie dove into the pool, the water the perfect temperature, enveloping her as she tried to ease an unsettling sense of loneliness and fear of the future, the optimism and daredevil energy of her first months in Palm Beach gone. Seeing Jeremiah again, she knew-stirring up the past, the confusions and hopes and terror of being twenty and not quite sure of her path-had undermined her confidence, worked on her nerves. Her affair with him had been a lesson not only in the appeal and the danger of such a man, but in her own vulnerabilities. She’d never thought herself capable of falling in love almost at first sight, of throwing caution and reason to the wind.

But of course it hadn’t been love. It had been infatuation, obsession, hormones, a dip into the kind of life she didn’t live. And chose not to live. She didn’t do torrid affairs. She wasn’t even much of a party girl, not at twenty, not at thirty. She worked hard, but she didn’t play hard. Her appearance at the Greenaway last night had been for the music and her work, her need to establish a presence and a reputation in the area-the fun of it was just a pleasant by-product.

It was Jeremiah’s work, too, that had led him to the Greenaway. He had staked out last night’s party in case the jewel thief showed up. Which he had, the police apparently arriving not long after Mollie had headed home.

She gasped, choking on a mouthful of pool water as she shot to the surface.

Of course.

She leaped out of the pool, wrapped up in her towel, slipped on her flip-flops and stalked upstairs. Before she could think, analyze, or calm down, she’d pulled out the phone book and dialed the Miami Tribune’s number. The switchboard put her through to Jeremiah, and finally he answered. “Tabak.”

“I don’t know anything about your jewel thief,” Mollie said, breathless from her swim, her mad dash upstairs, her indignation. “I didn’t see anything last night, I didn’t do anything last night, and I don’t know one damned thing. I don’t have access to him, I don’t have any information about him, I didn’t even know he was on the loose until twenty minutes ago.”

“You doing anything for dinner?”

“What?”

“I’m in Palm Beach. The call got put through to my truck phone. The miracles of modern technology, eh? I’ll be there in two minutes.”

He hung up.

Mollie stared at her phone. How had that just happened? Given Leonardo’s state-of-the-art security, she didn’t have to let him in. But she didn’t think she could explain two altercations in her driveway with a man in a beat-up brown truck to her neighbors. That left her less than two minutes to get into dry clothes before he arrived on her doorstep.

She raced down the hall, pushing back images of Jeremiah peeling off her wet bathing suit and making love to her at the same time.

“This is not good,” she muttered. “Not good at all.”

But like ten years ago, she couldn’t seem to stop herself.