said.
Later, Keisha answered the phone with “O’Connell and Spencer Real Estate,” then said, “Yes, she’s right here. Just a minute.” Then in proper professional tones but with a grin on her face, she said, “Mr. Lattimore is on line one for you.”
I’d deliberately put Tom Lattimore to the back of my mind, though every once in a while he nudged to the front and I knew I should call him. Now, I answered the phone with, “Hi, Tom,” and he replied too quickly, “Kelly, how are you? And that husband of yours? Sorry to hear about his accident. Those cop chases”—I could almost hear him going tsk, tsk—“always so dangerous.”
“It wasn’t Mike’s fault. The other car ran a stop sign.”
“Of course, of course. Young girl was killed wasn’t she?” He wasn’t getting this conversation off to a good start. “But that’s not why I called. I have a big deal in the works, and I want to talk to you about it. You may want to be part of it.”
In other words, he needed me to do something. “I heard about it, Tom, and I’d like to talk with you.”
“Good, good. Too late to ask you to lunch today?”
“I have to take Mike to therapy at ten and then get him home and feed him, but I could meet you by 12:30.”
“How about Lili’s at 12:30?”
I hesitated. Mike and I considered Lili’s our special place. When we were dating, a lot of our evenings started off there and ended in Mike’s bed. I hated to sully the memory.
“How about the Grill?”
“No privacy. What I want to talk about is still pretty confidential.”
Not as confidential as you’d like to think. And Lili’s isn’t all that private.
We finally decided on Chadra again—that’s where we’d met when he’d tried to come on to me. Curiosity about who Tom might be seeing now flitted through my mind, but I really didn’t care. I bet he left some angry husbands in his wake—and probably their wives when he moved on.
“See you there at 12:30,” I said.
I hadn’t told Mike about Christian’s phone call of warning, the big-box development or any of it, so I explained it on the way home from his physical therapy, ending with my lunch with Tom Lattimore . His predictable response was a muttered, “I don’t like that guy.”
“I don’t much like him either, but this is business, not an assignation,” I said.
“It better not be.”
Chapter Six
After getting Mike settled and fixing him a sandwich and a beer, I was unintentionally ten minutes late getting to Chadra . For once, I didn’t have to sit alone at a table waiting, looking like I’d been stood up. Tom was there.
He greeted me with a peck on the cheek and “It’s been way too long, Kelly. You’re looking great. Marriage must agree with you.”
We sat, I ordered ice tea, declined the buffet on the grounds I ate too much last time, and ended up with a delicious bowl of tomato-basil soup and a small house salad. Tom excused himself to go to the buffet and came back with his plate loaded. I was glad I had resisted.
Tom had requested a corner table, well away from other diners. Even so, he leaned in confidentially as he spoke. “Kelly, I’ve got a big deal going, a shopping center on Magnolia.”
“I heard, Tom. Where on Magnolia?”
“Just west of Hemphill, south side of the street. Across the street from the Paris Coffee Shop and those offices. I think we can do it with two square blocks.”
“Those buildings have a historic designation. You can’t touch them,” I said.
“Just some junk things. There’s a new sushi restaurant—I hear it’s good by the way, but if so, they can relocate. Let’s see, one of those yoga places, a taco place, that small independent bank that will probably get picked up soon by one of the big banks anyway. Stuff like that. I guess there’s an antique or junk store. Oh, and an old guy who repairs old clocks, has a ton of them in a jumble in his shop.”
Those weren’t junk businesses to me. I banked at that
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