panel. Detective.” He turned toward the cop and Poppy automatically turned in her seat to look at de Sanges as well. “Allow me to introduce you to our motley crew.”
He went around the table performing introductions and, when he came to her, said, “This is Poppy Calloway. She’s not actually a merchant, but she’s on so many of our ‘boards’ that we consider her an honorary member of the association.”
It was a standing joke, since she designed the menu and Today’s Specials black or white boards for several of the business owners here today.
De Sanges nodded and looked at her for a suspended instant with those dark, uncompromising eyes. “Ms. Calloway and I have met.”
Everyone present turned to stare at her and she could almost taste the rampant curiosity and speculation. “Don’t look at me as if I were a suspect in one of his cases,” she said dryly. “You all heard about the theft we had at the Wolcott mansion a few months ago. Detective de Sanges came out to take a report when we were dissatisfied with the response we got from the first officer on the scene.”
De Sanges had been dissatisfied as well—that Ava had used one of her many contacts to have him brought in. So he hadn’t been there voluntarily, and he and Poppy had definitely gotten off on the wrong foot when she’d taken exception to what she’d perceived as his lack of concern over a break-in at the mansion that she, Jane and Ava had only recently inherited from Miss Agnes’s estate. Well, could you blame her? He had all but said he’d been yanked off a real job in order to look for their silver spoons.
Which was nothing short of ironic when you considered that only Ava had been born to money. Poppy and Jane came from working-class neighborhoods. They’d all met in the fourth grade at Country Day school—Janie attending on a scholarship and her own tuition paid by Grandma Ingles, who was herself an alumni. Even today—despite inheriting an estate that was short on cash but long on priceless collectibles and valuable real estate—Ava was the only one of them who had any discretionary income. Jane was still inventorying Miss A.’s collections and the mansion was a long way and a small fortune from being saleable, which was their ultimate goal.
Still, in the wake of Jane’s run-in with the thief, they’d learned de Sanges hadn’t just blown them off but had interviewed Jane’s coworkers at the Metropolitan Museum—had in fact spent the most time talking to Gordon Ives. And since Gordon had eventually been arrested for the crime, Poppy thought she could probably cut the detective some slack and agree he had done his job after all.
“I’d like to open the meeting for discussion,” Garret said. “I know everyone here was disturbed about how young our graffiti ‘artists’ were and you no doubt want to thrash out whether or not to press charges against them. Anyone whose business was tagged is, of course, free to do so at any time—this isn’t a case of majority rules. But we’re here to entertain all reasonable suggestions, both pro and con. So let’s get some dialogue going, people.”
No one said anything for a long, silent moment, then Jerry Harvey, whose H & A on the Ave on the corner had taken the biggest brunt of the vandalism, said, “I’d like to know who’s going to clean up the side of my shop.” He’d been the first to spot one of the kids tagging the café across from him when he’d gone to lock the front door of his funky home-decorations and art-framing shop for the night.
A few of the merchants grumbled agreement. The Ace Hardware manager pushed for pressing charges.
Poppy took a breath and quietly released it. “I have a suggestion,” she said. “I know I don’t have the same stake in the outcome of today’s meeting as the rest of you. But I was at the Hardwire when Jerry caught the kids, and frankly I was disturbed by how young they are. The officer who came in response to your call, Jerry, said this is their first brush with the law. Rather than see them thrown into the system I’d like to offer an alternate solution that directly relates to your question.”
All the merchants involved in Friday night’s excitement gave her their undivided attention. De Sanges’s eyes narrowed.
“I think it might benefit all of the businesses to give the kids something to keep them busy,” she said. “To provide them with an artistic outlet that I believe we’d find more palatable than tagging—which I freely admit I don’t get. At the same time we could teach them to take responsibility for their actions.”
“How?” Garret asked.
“First by having them clean up the tagging with a fresh coat of paint that they either have to provide themselves or work off by sweeping or handling other odd jobs for the businesses they defaced.”
“I like that so far,” Penny said thoughtfully. “Except Marlene’s place is brick, so how does that benefit her?”
“There are gels and pastes that dissolve paint from brick, and the same rules would apply—they’d supply whatever’s needed.”
Almost everyone nodded—including Jerry. But he also pinned her with a suspicious look. “So where does the ‘artistic outlet’ part come in?”
Poppy knew this was where things could go south. But it wasn’t for nothing she’d grown up with parents who got involved in causes on a near-daily basis. Not to mention the way her idea tied in to her own personal passion: bringing art to at-risk kids. Drawing a deep breath, she gave Jerry her best trust-me smile, then quietly exhaled. “I propose we keep them off the streets by letting them paint a mural on the south side of your building.”
OH, FOR CRI’SAKE. Jase leaned back in his chair and examined the woman he had privately labeled the Babe. Which, okay, wasn’t exactly a hardship since the whole package—that lithe body, exotic brown eyes and cloud of curly Nordic-pale hair—was very examinable.
He knew from experience, however, that she was a pain in the ass. And didn’t it just figure? She was a damn bleeding-heart liberal to boot.
Earlier, when he’d walked in and seen her chatting up one of the guys in this group of small-business owners, you could have knocked him off his feet with a blade of grass. He hadn’t understood why she was here, since as far as he knew she wasn’t a merchant herself. Hey, as far as he could see, she didn’t do anything useful. Of course, since he had firmly resisted the urge to run a check on her after their previous run-in, he could be wrong about that.
In any case, the president of the Merchants’Association had explained it when he’d said that Calloway was a board member.
Well, of course she was. He should have figured that out for himself after meeting her and her two rich-girl buddies last fall, when they’d used their connections with the mayor to have him yanked off a job where an old lady had been hospitalized by a mugger in order to look for their missing tea towels.
Okay, so it had turned out to be more than that—a lot more. But contrary to the Babe’s accusation that he couldn’t be bothered to do his job, he had been following the exact letter of the law when he’d told her there wasn’t much he could do for them. But he’d nevertheless been digging into Gordon Ives’s background when he got the call that a patrol officer had just arrested the man for another break-in at the Wolcott mansion—this one involving a threat against Jane Kaplinski’s life.
All of which had squat to do with today’s situation. He listened for a moment as Calloway outlined her harebrained scheme. He kept waiting for someone to shoot it down, but when he instead saw several of the merchants nodding their heads, he couldn’t take it any longer. “You’re kidding me, right?”
Slowly, she turned her head to look at him. “Excuse me?”
“I figure this has to be a joke, because you can’t possibly be serious. They broke the law. You want to reward them for that?”
Her eyes flashed fire, giving him an abrupt flash of his own—of déjà vu. Because he was no stranger to that phenomenon—her eyes had done the exact same thing when she’d leaned over him in the chair where he’d sat in the mansion parlor, taking their report last year. Serious chemistry had flared to life