Killer Move

“Could you do that?” Her gaze came back to the here and now. “I don’t want him to know it’s coming from me. I’m only looking to sell two of the units. The other I’m going to keep until the day I die, and then the kids can fight over it. The Breakers is in my life, and I never want to lose that. I just want to be able to make some changes, you know? I love it that I can still see Phil there. But I think maybe . . . I need to see him just a little less.”

She looked away. “Sometimes when I try to go to sleep at night, it’s like I can feel him standing by the bed, looking down on me. And that’s nice in some ways, but if he can’t climb in and get beside me, then I think maybe I could live without it. Do you understand?”

“Sure,” I said, feeling uncomfortable. I sat back in my chair, bringing my hand away with me.

The waitress returned with my card. She seemed to sense that Hazel was having a moment, and backed away again discreetly and without comment.

“Anything I can do, I’ll do,” I said. “I promise.”

Hazel smiled. “You’re a good guy, Bill,” she said.

By the time I’d parked outside the office I’d shrugged off the encounter. Refreshing dissent among owners at The Breakers remained a sensible tactic. I hadn’t been expecting that Hazel Wilkins’s issue with the decor would be quite so personal, but that was all to the good. Business concerns come and go and ebb and flow. Personal beefs are permanent. If someone who’d known the Thompsons for that long was prepared to start trusting me as go-between, it was going well. I didn’t actually care if she got what she wanted.

Karren’s desk was unattended when I walked in. Janine was in position bending over hers, laminating something. Personally, had I been born and bred a Floridian, I might have made the effort not to be fat when I grew up. In this weather and humidity, it’s simply not the thinking person’s choice. Janine cleaved to some other vision, however, and when stuffed into bright blue stretch pants, her rear end was another thing that Karren and I were at one in finding less than supergreat and perfect.

“Hey,” I said.

Janine let out a squeal and turned around. When she saw it was me, she rolled her eyes and fluttered a pudgy hand over her heart. She did this every single time anything happened that hadn’t been exhaustively trailed via radio, television, and public service announcement. How she’d managed to make it to twenty-six without a heart attack, I had no idea.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

“Live and in color. Who did you think it might be?”

“Well, you just never know.”

“I guess not. How’s . . .” I struggled and failed to come up with the name of her spawn. “Feeling better?”

This was not something I cared about in the least, but that morning a Danish positivity blogger had suggested going out of one’s way to attempt to get inside other people’s lives and minds, however small and unappealing they might appear, as a thought experiment in connection building.

“A little,” she allowed cautiously. A cynical person might have wondered whether the kid, whose name I suddenly remembered—Kyle—was in fact this morning so very healthy that he was being held up by pediatricians as an example to others everywhere, but that his mother was withholding this information in case she needed to come in late another morning that week.

“That’s great. Great.”

She smiled suddenly. “And so how was your dinner?” There was a strange inflection to her question, as if I was being upbraided for being coy.

I frowned at her, confused.

“At Bo’s, silly,” she said. “Was it great? I’ve always wanted to go. But of course it’s way out of our range. It’s on my list. One day.”

“It was fabulous,” I said. “As always. But how did you know I was there?”

Now it was her turn to look baffled. “Well, you asked me to make the reservation,” she said. “You sent me an e-mail, end of last week.”

“Right, right,” I said. That was one minor mystery solved at least. “Of course. Thank you for sorting it out. We had a lovely evening.”

“That’s so cool.”

“Where’s Karren?”

“You know, I don’t actually know. She left about half an hour ago. I did ask her where she was going, just out of interest or in case you needed to know, you know, and she was all, ‘To meet with a client.’ So basically, I think that’s what it is, probably.”

“Okay then,” I said.

I discovered where Karren had gone as soon as I logged on to check my mail. She’d sent me a note explaining that a man called David Warner had called midmorning (while I was sitting listening to Hazel zone out over her dead husband), asking for me and wanting advice on selling his house up the key. He’d wanted to get onto it right away, her e-mail said with judicious reasonableness, and I hadn’t been there, so she was going to take the meeting instead. She hoped that was okay.

“Bitch,” I muttered.