CAPTURING CLEO Read online

  The redhead flashed him a small smile and slipped inside. A moment later she was back, holding the door open wide and inviting him in.

  “Cleo’s in the shower,” she said, leading him into the living room. “You’re early.”

  “Actually, I was two minutes late,” Luther said, glancing around. The place was as neat and plain on the inside as it was on the outside. Very homey, very feminine. The furniture was mismatched and looked comfortable, and a few odds and ends added color. There was even a vase of red roses on an end table. Something from the boyfriend, he imagined with a frown. Whoever that might be.

  While he was contemplating possible suspects for the role of Cleo Tanner’s love interest, a big dog padded up to him and sniffed uncertainly.

  “Be nice, Rambo,” the redhead said, then she fixed a calculating smile on Luther. “I’m Syd Wade,” she said. “I live next door.”

  “Luther Malone,” he said, offering his hand. She took it and shook, very briefly.

  “I have a picture-frame shop in town. I’ve Been Framed.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve Been Framed. That’s the name of my shop.”

  Luther nodded, figuring it would not be nice to tell her he’d never heard of the place.

  “I’d love to stay until Cleo gets out of the shower, but I have an order to put together before I open at ten. Since you’re a cop, I guess it’s okay to leave you here unsupervised.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “For your information, there’s no way Cleo killed that moron she used to be married to,” she said defensively.

  He agreed with her but wasn’t ready to say so aloud, so he just nodded an acknowledgment.

  “Behave yourself while you’re waiting,” she said with a smile. “Or Rambo will get you. She’s a real tiger under all that hair and those big brown eyes.”

  Luther looked down at the dog, whose big, friendly eyes and wagging tail did not jibe with the name Rambo.

  Syd left, and Luther sat down on Cleo’s couch. Rambo joined him, placing her chin on his knee and looking up with eyes that begged shamelessly for love and attention.

  “Okay,” he said, scratching behind the dog’s ears. He was almost certain Rambo sighed in delight.

  No, he didn’t think Cleo killed Jack Tempest, but she was definitely involved. The grapefruit was no accident. In fact, it was downright creepy. If he’d thought Tempest had any reason to kill himself, he’d think the man had jumped with the grapefruit in his hand, just to point the finger at Cleo. From what little he’d learned, Tempest had done his very best to make Cleo’s life difficult since the divorce.

  Stealing the publishing rights to the song she’d written and recorded years ago had only been the beginning. He hadn’t exactly let her go after the divorce. He kept turning up, like the proverbial bad penny, wherever she went. She moved, and a few months later he was right behind her. He managed a few unsuccessful musical acts, and a couple that had done fairly well. Surely his business had suffered when he’d given harassing Cleo so much time and attention, but he’d managed to do okay.

  He’d tried to ruin her credit by listing her name on his old unpaid debts, causing her all kinds of grief. Whenever she seemed to be doing well, Tempest turned up to throw in a monkey wrench, somehow. He’d gotten her fired from countless singing jobs. He’d harassed her for years, while being very careful not to cross any legal line.

  The latest bit was, Tempest was behind a petition to get Cleo’s liquor license revoked. Something about being too close to a church, even though the church in question was three blocks away and she’d been in operation there for over two years without a single problem.

  Jack Tempest had either loved his ex-wife very much, or hated her beyond all reason. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” she asked, coming into the room and catching him daydreaming with his fingers enmeshed behind Rambo’s ears.

  Cleo looked too damn good. Hair damp and curly, blue slacks and matching blouse snug, heels high—if not as audaciously high as last night—she was soft, nicely curved and feminine.

  “I thought cops were like vampires and had to be invited in,” she said in a voice that was definitely not soft.

  “Your neighbor, Syd, let me in.”

  Cleo rolled her eyes and mumbled something obscene.

  Luther forced back a smile. “I don’t suppose you have any coffee?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t drink coffee.”

  “No wonder you’re not a morning person,” he said, rising slowly and pushing back the urge to find out if Cleo would growl and sigh if he rubbed behind her ears. She’d probably bite his hand off. Changing the subject seemed like a good idea.

  “Why didn’t you ask who was at the door before you opened it?”

  Cleo stared at him, wide-eyed and disbelieving. “I thought you were my neighbor. She often drops by in the morning before she goes to work.”

  “And why in hell do you keep a key under your mailbox?”

  She shook her head. “Sometimes Syd lets Rambo out when I work late, and sometimes I forget my key, and… it’s really none of your business where I keep my spare key.”

  “It’s not safe,” he argued.

  “Who are you, keeper of the city? Defender of the weak?”

  “Watchdog over the stupid,” he added.

  Her amber eyes narrowed. “So now I’m stupid.”

  “No, but keeping your key—”

  “I pushed my ex off a tall building and I’m stupid.” As she had last night, she offered her hands to him, palms up, wrists together.

  His eyes fell to the delicate veins there, to the curve of her wrists and the pale softness of her fingers.

  “So cuff me, Malone. Take me in. Arrest me and get this over with.”

  He leaned in, ever so slightly. Just enough to make Cleo lean back. “Don’t tempt me.”

  Chapter Three

  “This is not the police station,” Cleo muttered, as Malone pulled his gray sedan to the curb. “As a matter of fact, we’re not even close to the police station.”

  Malone threw open his door and unfolded his long body from the driver’s seat, ignoring her statement. He rounded the car and opened her door for her, leaning slightly in. Like it or not, he took her breath away when he moved in close like this.

  “The Rocket City Cafe has better coffee,” he said as he offered his hand to assist her from the car. She grudgingly placed her hand in his and stood. “Besides,” he added as he released her hand and closed the car door, “you’re nervous. The station would just make matters worse.”

  “I am not nervous,” she retorted.

  The annoying Detective Malone responded with a brief smile.

  The Rocket City Cafe was a small restaurant with plastic red-and-white checkered tablecloths and a strange collection of patrons. Two old men sat in a corner booth and argued about local politics. A group of elderly women crowded around a table in the center of the room, and from the excited utterances about brownies and bundt cakes, it seemed they were planning a bake sale. A middle-aged waitress in a pink uniform and a white apron leaned against the counter where a No Smoking sign was prominent, and smoked as if she really enjoyed every puff. A very young short-order cook, with his long hair in a hair net, scrubbed the grill behind the counter. He was singing, and not very well.

  When the waitress saw Malone she smiled and put her cigarette out in a nearby coffee cup. “Hey, Sugar,” she said, with a grin that transformed her face into a mass of wrinkles. “The usual?”

  “Yeah, and...” He glanced down at Cleo. “What do you want?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t make me eat breakfast in front of you while you sit there and glare at me. Get something to eat. They have really great doughnuts here, and if that doesn’t grab you, they have pancakes. Eggs. Cinnamon buns.”

  She stared at him silently.

  He lifted finely shape
d eyebrows and pinned those dark eyes on her. “At least get something to drink.”

  The waitress was waiting. Malone was waiting. And Cleo just wanted to get this over with. “Orange juice,” she said, giving in too easily. “And toast.”

  Malone led her to a booth against the window, where they could watch the people passing on the sidewalk. This position also placed them as far away as possible from the other customers, no doubt so he could interrogate her without having to lower his voice.

  Cleo sat, and the old cushion sank.

  “So,” Malone said, taking his own seat, which didn’t seem to sink quite so low. “Tell me about Tempest.”

  Cleo fixed her eyes to Malone’s. He thought she was nervous? She’d show him. She could be fearless when she had to be, and she was not afraid of this cop or anyone else. “Jack was a mean-spirited, unfaithful, unscrupulous snake. Marrying him was the worst mistake of my life, and I’m not sorry to know that I won’t ever have to see his face again.”

  The waitress popped into the picture to place a huge mug of coffee before Malone and a tall glass of cold juice before Cleo. Their conversation ceased until she moved away.

  “Do you know who killed him?” Malone asked calmly.

  “No.”

  “Would you tell me if you did?”

  “Probably not.”

  Malone took a long swig of coffee. “Fair enough,” he said as he set the mug on the table. “I’ll need a list of everyone who was in the club last week when you told your little grapefruit joke.”

  “If I can remember.”

  “Do you have a gentleman friend, Ms. Tanner?” He didn’t look at her as he asked this question, but stared into his cup of coffee. “Someone who might have felt compelled to defend your honor and then leave a grapefruit behind so you’d be sure to know this murder was a gift?”

  “No gentleman friend,” she said precisely, her heart clenching at the idea that someone might have thought she’d consider Jack’s murder a gift.

  “Oh,” he said. “Then, who sent the roses?”

  The temperature of her blood rose a notch. She was not going to tell Malone about her secret admirer. He’d probably find it all very amusing. Besides, secret admirers were harmless. She’d had more than her share. They all turned out to be shy, sweet men suffering from something that was no more intense than a crush, ordinary men too timid to approach her even to say hello.

  “None of your business.”

  “You are going to cooperate, aren’t you, Ms. Tanner?”

  She didn’t like the way he said that, or the way he lifted his eyebrows and planted his eyes on her and asked the question as if it wasn’t a question at all, but a demand. No one pushed her around anymore, no one told her what to do. Not even Luther Malone.

  Cleo was saved from answering when the waitress appeared again, bearing a tray laden with food. She placed a heavy white plate with four pieces of toast—three more than Cleo would eat—on the table, along with a bowl filled with small containers of butter and strawberry jam.

  Malone’s plate was huge: scrambled eggs, a mound of bacon, a bowl of grits, and one of those doughnuts he’d tried to entice her with. Glazed.

  She shook her head and smiled as she reached for the preserves, letting loose a very small laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” Malone asked defensively.

  “Nothing. Just wondering if I’ll be a suspect when you keel over with hardened arteries.” She glanced at the plate. “Something which is certain to happen any day now, if that is your ‘usual.’”

  “Oh,” he said, reaching for the pepper. “I thought you were laughing at the doughnut.”

  “That’s just icing on the...”

  “...doughnut?” he finished.

  She liked the fact that he ate such a huge and fat-laden breakfast and then finished it off with the cliche of a cop’s doughnut. It made him more human, somehow. Her smile faded. It was bad enough that she’d placed him so high on the Barney-Bruce scale and thought he was inappropriately good-looking; now she actually had to like something about him? Bad news. Very bad news.

  “And to answer your question,” she said, putting on her most severe face, “no, I don’t see any reason why I should cooperate with you.”

  He nodded his head as if he’d already figured that out. Cleo took a bite of her toast, glad that Malone was giving at least some of his attention to his breakfast. He did keep looking at her, though, lifting his head and staring at her hard, as if he might see something different this time.

  He lifted his head, stared at her face and pointed. “You have...” He wiggled that long finger in her direction.

  “I have what?” she snapped. “Guilt written all over my face? A suspicious glint in my eye?”

  He reached across the table and touched her face, there near her mouth, dragging the tip of his finger slowly and gently down. It was a shock when he touched her, a literal, heart-jolting shock. His warm finger briefly brushed her lower lip, sending a riot of sensations she did not want or need through her body. Her heart beat too fast, her temperature rose, and she was quite sure he’d be able to see the heat she felt in her cheeks.

  Malone showed her his finger as it withdrew. “Strawberry jam on your face.”

  When he licked the jam off his finger, she thought she would swoon.

  Cleo Tanner did not swoon! She took a napkin and rubbed it vigorously against the corner of her mouth, there where he’d touched her, doing her best to wipe away any remaining jam as well as the lingering effect of that warm finger on her face and her lip.

  Malone seemed unaffected, by the contact and by her reaction to it. “Do you think Tempest would commit suicide?”

  “No,” she said, while he dug into his breakfast. “I already told you that.”

  “It’s the grapefruit that mucks everything up. Would he jump with a grapefruit just to screw up your life again?”

  Again, like Malone knew everything about her and Jack. “Maybe,” she admitted. “If Jack was going to kill himself, he’d definitely go out of his way to pin it on me.”

  Malone wagged an egg-laden fork in her direction. “That’s what I figured, but still, I don’t see suicide.” He sounded almost disappointed.

  “Then, why the hell did you ask?”

  “Gotta cover everything.”

  “Then, don’t forget about Randi with an i,” Cleo said. “She’d been with Jack long enough to know what he was like, and she didn’t like me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Jack wouldn’t leave me alone, that’s why.”

  He nodded again, as if he understood.

  “Now will you hurry up and eat that monster breakfast so you can get me back to my car and I can go home? I’ve had about all the cooperation I can take.”

  Luther didn’t hurry, but he did quit questioning Cleo and gave his breakfast the attention it deserved, while she played with a piece of toast and sipped at her juice. Cleo Tanner hadn’t tossed her ex-husband off the First Heritage Bank building, of that he was ninety-percent sure. But she was at the middle of it, somehow.

  He wished she’d eat a little more, maybe get more jam on the corner of her mouth so he could remove it for her. Wiping it off had been bad enough. What he’d really wanted to do, what he still wanted to do, was lick it off. Stupid idea. Cleo was gorgeous, in an exotic, all-woman kind of way, but she was too stubborn for his taste. She liked to argue, to butt heads. And what a mouth! He liked his women soft and sweet and compliant.

  Well, soft, sweet, and compliant was great for an hour or two, he admitted grudgingly. After that, most women lost their luster. They wanted too much, they needed too much. Cleo Tanner was anything but compliant. She was also anything but sweet. As for soft...

  He almost groaned aloud when Russell walked into the diner, smile on his face, not a single golden hair out of place. The kid didn’t even dress like a homicide detective. Tan pants, blue shirt, brown jacket, burgundy tie and those damn loafers. The kid looked
like he’d just stepped out of GQ, right down to the brilliant grin he turned on them.

  “I figured I’d find you here,” the kid said, and then he laid eyes on Cleo.

  The kid was transparent, and he’d just fallen instantly, deeply and annoyingly in love. Well, in lust, anyway. Luther had a feeling that happened a lot to Cleo. She sucked unsuspecting men in like a swirling, dangerous, inescapable black hole. If he wasn’t careful, he could be next.

  “What do you want?” Luther asked.

  “We’re supposed to be partners, remember?”

  “That doesn’t mean we’re joined at the hip,” Luther grumbled. God, the kid was so damn… enthusiastic.

  “My mistake. I thought we were working on the Tempest case today. I didn’t know you had a...” He laid adoring eyes on Cleo again. “A breakfast date.” Russell actually blushed.

  “Michael Russell, this is Cleo Tanner.”

  The kid’s smile faded quickly. He knew the name well. “Oh.” Still, he offered his hand, and Cleo took it. “A pleasure, ma’am.”

  “I wish I could say the same,” she said, with a frosty smile that Russell apparently found endearing. He sat beside her, and she scooted toward the window to give him room.

  “Cleo Tanner,” Russell said, nodding his head knowingly.

  Cleo sighed. “Yes, Jack Tempest was my ex-husband,” she said in a no-nonsense voice. “Yes, I hated his guts. No, I didn’t kill him. You’re up to speed, now.”

  Russell smiled at her, that sweet smile that probably had women falling at his feet. Luther was glad to see that Cleo didn’t immediately fall. She looked as wary as ever.

  “Glad to hear it,” the kid said.

  “Robin,” Luther said, signaling to the waitress as he took out his wallet and threw a few bills on the table. “Get Mikey here a good breakfast.”

  Russell bristled at being called Mikey, as he always did, and Robin waited for his order. The kid debated for a minute, until Luther rose to his feet and signaled for the kid to let Cleo out. Russell came quickly to his feet and offered Cleo an assisting hand that she blatantly refused. Good for her.