“Mollie, m’girl, I knew you’d be there.”
It was Leonardo, boisterous and exhausted. She felt the tears forming, spilling into her eyes. “Leonardo, it’s what, three or four o’clock in the morning in Austria?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I had to know. Tell me, m’darling, how was your party?”
17
The Palm Beach cat burglar was front-page material on virtually every newspaper in the country, including the Miami Tribune.
Helen Samuel wrote the story.
It was her first front-page story in her fifty-year career. She arrived on Jeremiah’s doorstep to show him. He told her she got the front page because it was a slow news day. “Otherwise, it’d be buried inside.”
“Ha! You’re just jealous.” She was out front with the boys, passing out cigarettes and copies of the Trib with her byline above the fold, as delighted with herself as Jeremiah had been at twenty-six. “We’ve got not one but two rich boys, we’ve got a doting rich grandma with a gun, we’ve got a hired thug, and we’ve got you, Tabak.” That last she clearly loved. “A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter tackling a two-hundred-twenty-pound security expert in Leonardo Pascarelli’s media room. Damned good thing you were heroic or your reputation would be shit right now. You watch, it’ll be a TV movie.”
“Don’t forget the publicist,” he said.
“I’m not. She’s the innocent, the ordinary person caught up in extraordinary circumstances with her unique set of clients. A jazz-playing Apollo astronaut. A mutt. Then there’s the caterer.”
“Griffen Welles.”
She’d entered the kitchen to finish cleaning up and had found her boyfriend shot and bleeding, a battered Croc holding him, a white-faced best friend, and Jeremiah holding a gun on a near-catatonic elderly socialite and a well-known security expert. The police and ambulance were en route. And so were the Tiernays. Unwilling to leave his brother’s side, Croc had asked for a portable phone and called them himself.
“It’s a great story,” Helen said with a satisfied sigh. Forty-eight hours after it was over, and she still hadn’t let it go. “Of course, I knew it would be. That’s why I kept giving you the dish and letting you do the running around. I’m too old for that shit.”
Sal, Bennie, and Al passed around a book of matches and watched her, transfixed. Sal looked particularly smitten. Jeremiah just shook his head.
Helen grinned at him. “God, this feels good. The kids’re going to be all right, you know. Deegan and Kermit. Their folks got with the program in the end. Momma was a little late on the upswing, but she’s at the hospital round the clock, had Kermit moved into the main house. They’re making the younger boy take responsibility for what he did, but they’re right there with him.”
“He got their attention,” Jeremiah said.
“That he did. Atwood’s only talking to her lawyers, but the way I see it, she was raised by disengaged parents, then raised her own daughter that way. The generational cascade at work. The triumph of form over substance.” She flicked her half-smoked cigarette onto the porch and ground it out with her foot; the guys, Jeremiah knew, would do likewise. “You figure out what to do about your blonde?”
He rolled up on his feet. He’d spent last night at his apartment; he’d needed the space, Mollie had needed the space, and his reptiles needed to know he was still alive. Plus, Bennie, Al, and Sal had wanted details. They’d left a message on his voice mail—it was Sal who figured out how to use it—saying they were renting a car and driving up to Palm Beach if he didn’t get down there. Over bagels and coffee and a little whittling on the porch that morning, Jeremiah gave them details, and they gave him advice. Unsolicited advice. It had to do with marriage, commitment, kids, and having a life. And a dog. Bennie thought he should get rid of the reptiles and get a dog. A beagle would be good.
Then Helen had arrived.
He regarded her with an affection that even a month ago he would have thought impossible. “Yes,” he told her, “I most certainly know what to do about my blonde.”
Mollie didn’t know how they did it. Busy musicians all, her parents, her sister, and Leonardo all managed to arrive at the West Palm Beach Airport within an hour of each other. They brought their instruments, and tons of unnecessary clothes because they hadn’t taken the time to think about what they really needed, and they wanted to hear everything, the whole story, all over again, from start to finish. It was a transparent show of support that Mollie appreciated.
They were out back, now, with Griffen Welles and Chet and a few other of her clients, all making sure she was okay, that she didn’t feel alone and isolated in her new home. She’d wandered out front to get her bearings.