Killer Move - Michael Marshall [38]
But why the hell would Warner do this?
I didn’t even know the guy. I’d met him just once, that chance encounter in Krank’s—and it wasn’t like I’d latched on to him and got feral Realtor upside his face, hustling him to the point where I deserved some kind of comeuppance. I was in the bar with Steph and a couple of her colleagues from the magazine. They were all over some minor work crisis, and so I’d wound up chatting with a stranger about the Reds’ chances in the state league, as two men leaning on the same bar will sometimes do. It was Warner who’d brought up his house, not me. So why on earth would he meet Karren on Tuesday, think, “Hey, here’s a pretty girl, here’s some leverage, let’s stir things up for the asshole Realtor . . .”
Why?
I heard footsteps approaching the office, and froze. The door opened and Karren walked in. There was nothing different about her, but she looked different.
“Hell happened to you?” she asked, as she dumped her purse on her desk.
“What do you mean?”
“You look like a bad passport photo. Late night?”
“Couldn’t sleep,” I said.
She winked. “Doesn’t surprise me.”
“What do you mean?” My tone was a lot sharper than I’d intended.
“Whoa,” she said. “Just a pro forma dig, okay? The ‘How do you sleep at night, dude?’ routine. Not that I’m implying you have anything to . . . Look, whatever, you know? Call off the dogs. Relax.”
“Sure,” I said, forcing a smile. “Sorry.”
I was finding it hard to look away from her. Once you’ve seen a picture, you can’t forget it, and I had seen pictures I should not have seen. Being in her presence wasn’t turning me on, however. I felt . . . protective, perhaps, which was not something I’d ever have expected to feel about Karren White, a woman I believed had chosen to spell her Christian name in a nonstandard fashion purely to give her an excuse to spell it out to clients, the better to lodge it in their minds.
I felt that I should warn her about the photographs. But you can’t just pipe up with “Hey! I’ve got a dozen seminude pictures of you on a USB drive in my pocket . . .” unless you have a very innocent and convincing second half to the sentence, ready and waiting. I did not. Maybe I could do it when I had an explanation for how the pictures had ended up on my machine, but not yet.
“When you met with this David Warner guy on Tuesday,” I said instead, making it sound casual. “Anything strike you?”
“Apart from him being a sexist asshole? Not really. Why?”
“I didn’t tell you. He arranged to meet me that evening, to see the house.”
“Good for you.”
“Uh, not so much. He blew me off. Twice.”
“Huh,” she said, a little less tart. “Seems like he’s prepared to piss off Realtors regardless of their race, creed, or gender.”
“An equal opportunity asshole, for sure. You get a number for him?”
“No,” she said, looking sheepish. It was appealing because of its rarity value. Karren did not make unforced errors. “Forgot to take a note of it off the log. Duh.”
Indeed. One of the first rules of the job is to get a potential client’s phone number. I smiled and said something about it being no great loss.
As she settled down to bash out e-mails, I picked up one of the office handsets and scrolled laboriously back through the log of incoming calls. I went more slowly once I got back to Tuesday morning, knowing that what I was attempting would likely be hard—as we get a lot of calls, almost all with local codes.
I was about to give up when I saw a number I thought I recognized, however. I cross-checked with my phone and confirmed it. When I’d been sitting with Hazel outside Jonny Bo’s, a call had come into the office from the number I had stored for Melania’s cell phone.
“Karren—he called the office himself, right? Warner? Not his assistant.”
“It was him.”
“And not a pass-through? A ‘Got my asshole boss on the line, will you take a call from Planet 1970s