Chapter 2
To say I did the happy dance when Jennifer Weatherby left my office would be the understatement of the year. I did the cookie-dough-right-out-of-the-package two step, the I-got-the-pool-to-myself cha cha cha.
Ten thousand dollars in cold, hard cash for a single week’s work! And five of it already warming my pocket.
This would be my biggest payday ever. And all I had to do was follow one of Marport City’s most successful citizens around for a week. From what I knew of Ned Weatherby, I really didn’t think I’d be digging up all that much dirt, but what the heck? Despite his reputation for being a bastard in business, he didn’t have one for being a bastard with the ladies. But it was Jennifer’s money. And for ten large, I’d give the lady what she wanted. Lots and lots of pictures. Documentation. Proof was in the pudding, as they say. I just wasn’t so very sure the pudding was going to be licked off any interesting body parts.
According to the itinerary she’d left me, Jennifer Weatherby wanted me to start checking out her husband that very night. That gave me just hours to get my digital camera ready, the voice recorder charged. We only had two other cases on the go, and I left them in Dylan’s capable hands. I even managed to sneak in a few hours sleep before I started what I assumed would be a long, boring case. A long, boring week.
For the most part, it was just that. When Ned was home with Jennifer, I dozed in vehicles (the various cars and vans I borrowed from those who owed me favors, or those to whom I was now indebted), always parking nearby so that when Mr. Weatherby left, Dix Dodd was on his tail. I lived on greasy fast food and coffee so mean it spit back.
Thanks to a listening device Mrs. Weatherby volunteered to plant on the phone in her husband’s den (the legality of which was questionable, strictly speaking), I recorded conversations between Ned Weatherby and his mother (loved the flowers dear but you really shouldn’t have), Ned and his old army buddies (did men never outgrow toilet humor?), his lawyer Jeremy Poole, whom I’d heard of, his accountant Tucker Flaherty, whom I’d never heard of, and three conversations with an unfortunate caterer—a Mr. Kenny Kent— who just couldn’t seem to get it right. And I recorded endless conversations between Ned and his secretary Luanne Laney.
On hands and knees, I snuck through the bushes on the golf course as I followed Ned Weatherby around. I trailed my mark into his church when he went for choir practice, slinging on a gown and auditioning myself when the pastor—a serious young fellow by the name of Pastor Fitz Ravenspire—found me lurking in the pews. (I must say, for a man of the cloth, he sure didn’t mince words when it came to my singing talents.) I waited outside the men’s room at so many ball games, the beer-and-nuts guy thought I was trying to pick him up. Boring few days. Yep, exactly what I expected. And when Ned Weatherby’s lights went out at night, I lay down exhausted in the car seat and drifted off with the smell of vinyl and ass drifting up my nostrils. Drifted into complacency. Boring. Boring. BORING!
So anyway, did I mention I’m an idiot?
Because boring lasted all of five days, then went out with a bang.