already deeply immersed in his undercover persona. Grunting, groaning, and red in the face, he was quite successfully manipulating some sort of contraption with wires, pulleys, and weights.
Not bad for an old fart, Savannah thought as she watched his arm and shoulder muscles bulge with the effort. She had to admit, he still looked pretty darned good in a tank top. She amended the thought to semi-old fart, remembering that, in his mid-forties, he was only a couple of years older than she.
They were really just kids. Okay, kids with twenty-plus years of hardcore life experience. His were cop years. Hers were cop and private investigator years. And, like dog years, those added up fast.
“Yeah,” Tammy said. “We ladies of the Moonlight Magnolia Detective Agency don’t work cheap.”
Savannah didn’t reply. There was no point in stating the obvious—that the members of the Moonlight Magnolia Detective Agency hadn’t been working at all lately.
No clients. No income. Hence the opportunity to do freebies for Dirk.
“Yes,” Tammy said. “After this, old Dirko is going to owe us both a nice dinner at Chez Antoine.” She motioned toward one of the nearest machines. “But even better than that, think how much fun it’ll be if we nail the perv.”
“True. So true.” Smiling a nasty little grin, Savannah chuckled to herself as she perused the possible suspects working the rows of equipment.
If they could nab the guy who was somehow taking candid shots of the gym’s female clients in various stages of nakedness and posting the pictures on the Internet, it would all be worth it. Heck, Dirk wouldn’t even have to buy them dessert at Antoine’s.
Savannah had a mental flash of the French chef’s dessert cart and quickly modified that thought, too. No, whether they caught this guy or not, Dirk was going to pay, and the fee would be expensive, highly saturated fat calories.
Savannah watched as he paused between repetitions and glanced over at the cute, twenty-something, chickie-poo on the machine next to him. He sucked in his belly, flexed his biceps, and gave the young woman what he no doubt thought was a sexy, come-hither grin.
It was all Savannah could do not to stomp across the room, smack him on the head with a barbell, and remind him that he was old enough to be the gal’s father. But she fought down the urge. She was nothing if not the model of self-restraint.
Besides, she had to give him a little credit for the self-confidence—okay, delusions of grandeur—that enabled him to think he had a chance with the girl.
The thought occurred to her: If women could remain as confident in their own beauty as men were in their studliness for so long in life, the world would be a happier place.
“Anybody look suspicious to you?” Tammy asked.
“Not really,” Savannah said as she considered their possible culprits.
Clarissa’s devotees were a wide demographic, judging from the group assembled in the House of Pain and Gain today. On the rowing machine, a seventy-ish lady in a bright purple and red sweat suit worked those handles like a Roman galley slave. She had a fanatical gleam in her eyes as she stroked in time to the pulsing music, punctuated with Clarissa’s admonitions to “Work! Work! Get the rust out of those joints! Get that ugly cellulite off your lazy butt!”
Savannah thought of her own octogenarian grandmother, Granny Reid, and chuckled to think of how the feisty Southern lady would react to Clarissa’s brand of encouragement. If anyone were to suggest to Gran that she was lazy or carried any excess baggage, they might just receive a skillet greased with bacon fat upside the head. And along with the corrective smack, they’d get a lecture about how “sportin’ a few extra pounds to begin with got a lot of good folks through the dark days of the Great Depression.”
Gran was big on stories about the Great Depression, skillet smacking, and the incalculable culinary value of fresh bacon grease.
But Savannah couldn’t stop and think about Gran at the moment for two reasons: One, she would start missing her grandmother and be tempted to hop a plane to Georgia. And two, she had a peeping, picture-taking Tom to catch and a life to live here in sunny Southern California…not to mention a dessert cart full of éclairs and napoleons to eat.
With her priorities firmly in place, she continued to scan the Clarissa Jardin exercise fiends.
The twenty-something hunk hefting barbells near Dirk was a possibility. He was gorgeous, probably of Mediterranean descent, obviously a serious bodybuilder. As he lifted first one weight, then the other, he watched his own reflection in a nearby mirror.
Savannah doubted that he had time or inclination to gawk at anybody’s bod but his own.
Tammy seemed to read her thoughts. She leaned close to Savannah, her mouth close to her ear, and shouted above the booming music. “I don’t think it’s him. He’s just into himself.”
“Yeah, and who can blame him?”
Tammy giggled. “Dirk’s watching you watch him. He’s got his jealous puss on.”
Looking over at Dirk, Savannah saw that he was, indeed, wearing a frown. And it probably was a jealous scowl, though, with Dirk it was hard to tell. Ninety percent of his facial expressions were scowls.
Savannah grinned and winked at him. “It’s okay for him to check out the babes,” she shouted back to Tammy, “but heaven forbid we should peruse the dudes.”
“He wouldn’t care if I were the one looking. He’s only jealous of you.”
“We’re trying to catch a perv here and—”
“Dirk’s got it for you bad.”
“Nobody’s got nothin’ for nobody. End of subject.”
Tammy snickered. “Whatever you say, boss lady.”
“I say…I think we should keep an eye on the creepo with the potbelly in the too-tight shorts over there.” She discreetly nodded toward a middle-aged guy on a stationary bicycle near the window. His electric-blue latex shorts announced to the world that he was neither well-endowed nor circumcised. And both facts were bits of information that Savannah would have gladly lived and died without knowing.
“Dirk should arrest him for wearing those shorts, if nothing else,” Tammy added. “If that isn’t indecent public exposure, I don’t know what is.”
“Yeah, really. With any luck, it’ll be him.”
Savannah continued to hope and work the machines, as she and Tammy moved around the room, trying first one apparatus, then another.
Dirk stuck with his weird pulley contraption, and Savannah was pretty sure he did so to remain close to the bimbo next to him. She made a mental note to mention the fact to him later, to point out what a fool he had made of himself.
Hey, he didn’t have a wife to do it. Somebody had to build the guy’s character.
And all the time, Savannah watched the weirdo in the blue shorts and hoped he would do something suspicious…other than dress grotesquely.
But he didn’t.
She kept constant tabs on him throughout his short and nonexhaustive workout, but he finished, disappeared into the men’s locker room, and left the establishment, wearing skintight jeans and a mesh tank top. And he never passed within ten feet of the women’s locker room entrance.
Meanwhile, Savannah’s muscles were starting to complain. Bitterly. “This bites,” she told Tammy. “Whoever our guy is, he’s not here today. We might as well leave.”
“Yeah, really.” Tammy paused and dabbed a couple of barely there drops of sweat from her brow with a towel. “I need to get out of here and go on my daily run. I want to help Dirk, but this is seriously cutting into my own personal workout time.”
Soaking wet with sweat, hurting in every atom of her body,