Laura Caldwell - Red Hot Lies

Tom LaHaye had been happy to give me her contact information when he got back to the hotel and I told him on the phone I’d decided to look for a second home in Panama. “You’re going to love her,” he said. “You’re going to love this place! It’s the best.”

I talked to Mayburn before I called Beatriz, and he thought my plan to pose as a wealthy American looking for vacation property was a good one, since it would get me in the ballpark of the properties owned by Forester, and we figured that if Sam was meeting with real-estate agents, it must have been about the properties owned by Forester through his bearer shares.

“I’ve been looking more into those types of shares,” Mayburn told me. “Forester’s estate could put liens on the shares if they’d been stolen. But since Sam had authority to possess them, at least while they were at the office, it’s probably not entirely clear if the law would view them as stolen, and it would take a bit of time to work it out. In the meantime, Sam probably knows this and he’s more than likely trying to liquidate the properties.”

“And just take the money?” I’d asked.

“I guess.”

I couldn’t fathom it-not the money or the thought of Sam stealing it, but I was taking it one step at a time, I decided. First, meet with the agents and see if I could find him.

Meanwhile, Mayburn had worked the phones and the Web, and found five other real-estate agents who fit the vague profile Mateo had given me of the woman he’d seen with Sam. I’d meet with them, we decided, look at properties, and I’d try to figure out if any of them was the mystery woman.

Mayburn cautioned me not to bring up Sam right away when I was with the agents. “If they’re involved in something shady with him,” he said, “they’re going to drop you off at a street corner-or worse-and disappear.”

Beatriz pulled up wearing an orange suit this time. I’d worn my best heiress outfit-a white skirt, blue blouse, high black sandals and huge sunglasses.

Beatriz hustled me into her car, an SUV, and talked fast as we pulled away. “Okay, so you want a condo, you said on the phone. And you would like to spend one to two million. Is that right?”

“Yes.” I knew from Sam’s boss that the properties owned by Forester’s Panamanian corporation were in that range and higher.

“Okay. I have showings at eleven o’clock, but I will take you to many places and if you don’t like, I pick you up tomorrow, okay?”

“Perfect.” Especially since I had three more agents booked that day.

She gave me a genuine smile through the orange lipstick that matched her suit, and I felt guilty for making her work when I had no intention of buying a thing.

“Don’t worry about that,” Mayburn had said when I mentioned the guilt last night. “All real-estate agents do is drive people around hoping that maybe, somewhere, someday one of them will buy property, and who knows? Maybe you will someday. Maybe you’ll love it.”

The truth was, I did find myself falling a bit for Panama City. The first place I saw was a development at Costa del Este, just outside the city. Driving up to the area, I marveled at the streets lined thick with palm trees and beachfront condominiums glittering white against the foamy light blue surf. The place Beatriz showed me boasted internal winding stucco staircases and huge curved balconies.

After touring the development, we got back in the car, and I finally mentioned my fiancé and pulled out his photo.

“He is handsome,” she said vaguely, glancing back to the road. “Now, let’s see. Where do I take you next?” She made a few turns. “Do you know that Panama has almost no hurricanes?”

“Really?”

“Yes. Is one of best things about our country. It is because where we are situated in the Caribbean.”

We pulled up to another development, and once again I mentioned Sam’s name, then Forester’s. I got no reaction. I asked her if she’d met Alec Thornton, the name of Alyssa’s brother. Not a flicker. I was pretty sure Beatriz wasn’t my girl.

I repeated the process with two more agents that day-one named Gabriela, the other Pilar.

Gabriela suggested that if I wasn’t going to spend a lot of time in Panama over the next few years, and if I would consider a more long-term investment, maybe I should think of a property in Casco Viejo.

“It is one of the oldest cities in the Americas,” Gabriela explained when we got there.

She was a gorgeous woman-nearly six feet tall and exquisitely dressed in crisp linen pants and heels.

I followed her through the bricked streets of Casco Viejo, each of which seemed to lead to the Pacific. From many places, I saw boats entering the Panama Canal in the distance. I tried not to imagine Gabriela with Sam as we walked; I tried not to interrupt her history lesson or blurt out one of the many questions that batted about in my brain, like, Are you sleeping with my fiancé?

But my task soon became easier, because the charm of Casco Viejo was hard to avoid. Strolling through it was like walking back in time. Bougainvillea twisted itself around rusted wrought-iron fences and balconies. Old churches with flaking, carved red-tiled roofs sat in the center of the plazas. Bright paint crumbled from the side-by-side stone houses, some of which were empty hulls.

“The pirates,” Gabriela said, gesturing at one house. “They stripped this city hundreds of years ago. And we have had many fires. We are just now building it up.”

She pointed out a jazz bar and then a palace-imposing and scrubbed a gleaming white-which was now a museum. “You see, this is good area for investment,” she said, stopping under a white square arch of another vacated building. “It is changing fast.”

I pulled out a photo of Sam. “Do you think my fiancé would like it here?”

“Yes, of course. You need to build to specification-we have very strict rules about renovating in Casco Viejo-but you will enjoy it.”

I held the photo a little closer to her. “But do you think he will enjoy it? His name is Sam Hollings.”

No reaction, except another “Yes, of course.”

“Have you ever met him?”

She looked at me quizzically. “I do not think so.”

“Have you ever met Forester Pickett? Alec Thornton?”

Her expression morphed into full bewilderment that appeared genuine. “I am sorry. I do not believe so.” She paused, her beautiful, nearly black eyes looked puzzled. “Maybe I take you to nicer place? A lovely condo?”

A few hours later, I was ambling through a host of other lovely condos in Punta Pacifica with Pilar, and I got no further with her. She had no response to Sam’s, Alec’s or Forester’s names or Sam’s picture.

At the end of the day, my white heiress skirt was smudged with soot from Casco Viejo, my skin coated with construction dust from the new developments. Exhausted and defeated, I thanked Pilar, went to my room and crawled into bed. I had another appointment the next day with an agent named Adelina, but what was the point? There were possibly hundreds of black-haired Realtors in their thirties in the city.

I stared at the white hotel ceiling. I picked up my cell phone and dialed Grady’s number. Flashes of him had been popping in my mind all day-images of him kissing me, the sensation of him licking the side of my neck. I’d never thought of Grady in a sexual way before. Now I was having a hard time stopping such thoughts, probably because it took me away from the utter helplessness I was feeling.

Grady didn’t answer, and suddenly I felt silly trying to come up with something to say. Be flirty or resort to our usual banter? And if you wanted to date a guy, which I wasn’t even sure I did, weren’t you supposed to wait for him to call you? I could barely remember all the rules, and the thought of dating again made me woozy. I hung up without leaving a message.