The Good Girl's Guide to Murder: A Debutante Dropout Mystery

by McBride, Susan

  The tag pinned to her ample breast read, NATTIE BUMPUS. I followed on her heels and waited while she glanced through paperwork on a clipboard and then pulled a manila folder from the stack.

  “Kendall Mabry, you said?”

  “Yes.”

  “Looks like you just missed her. Seems she was discharged against medical advice at ten-thirty this morning.”

  “Do you know if anyone was with her?”

  Nurse Nattie flipped through more pages. “Dr. Feinstein was on call when she left, because Dr. Taylor’s off today, and he noted Ms. Mabry was accompanied by her uncle.”

  “Her uncle?”

  “A fellow named Gable.”

  Unfortunately, I knew it wasn’t Clark.

  “Are you sure?”

  Nurse Nattie tapped the papers. “Everything was done by the book. We couldn’t keep her against her will, even though Dr. Feinstein tried to discourage her from leaving. She’s eighteen, so she doesn’t require a parent’s permission. He did emphasize the importance of taking the Inderal for her heart condition and following up with the cardiologist recommended by Dr. Taylor. Hope she follows through.”

  Kendall left with Justin.

  I leaned my palms against the counter feeling weak in the knees.

  Did the girl know what she was doing? Or had she been coerced?

  Good God, Kendricks, I told myself. Get a grip. It’s not any of your business. You don’t even really like Kendall, do you?

  Maybe I didn’t. But I felt a strange sense of responsibility for her.

  Sort of like that old proverb, that if you save someone’s life, they become a part of you.

  I got in the Jeep and headed out of the Medical City parking lot, pulling over to the shoulder before I exited the grounds altogether. I opened the pink Escada bag and retrieved my cell phone, dialing up Marilee’s office extension. When she answered, I raced to get out the words, “Kendall’s not at the hospital . . . she checked out against medical advice. They say that Justin was with her.”

  “Andy, it’s okay,” she assured me. “They’re both here, at the studio. Kendall’s a little shaky, but she’s fine. She and Justin insisted on helping, so I sent them to the kitchen to assist Carson with the desserts for the Diet Club.”

  “Kendall’s there?”

  “Yes.”

  My shoulders sank with relief. “And she’s okay? Should she be out of bed?”

  “Like I said, she’s shaky. But she promised to go home and rest after she’s done in the kitchen. Justin’s promised to stay with her. She’ll be okay so long as she takes her medication. You’re sweet to worry. I’ll tell her you called.”

  She hung up, and I sat behind the wheel for a moment, just staring at the cell phone in my hand. I tried to convince myself to shake it off, to let Kendall be. As Marilee said, she was fine.

  Before I put my phone away in my shoulder bag, eschewing the Escada, which I tossed behind the seats, I dialed Janet Graham’s cell. I wanted to see if she’d be dropping by Cissy’s for the taping. I found her at her office, finishing up the piece about Marilee’s party.

  “Come by, Andy, would you? I could use a ride to your mama’s place,” she said, and I told her I was on my way.

  Put Kendall out of your mind, I instructed, as I drove away from Medical City toward Greenville Avenue.

  The newspaper office was Janet’s home away from home. I knew she often went in on Saturday mornings. Said she got more done when the place was quiet. That’s when she filed her column and picked out photos for the Tuesday edition. Though she had the option of sending in her pieces by modem, she’d confessed she liked the kick of being part of a real-live newsroom.

  The PCP came out on Tuesdays and Fridays, unlike the Dallas Morning News, which was a daily. The suburban rag was widely read in the Park Cities, with nearly 70,000 subscribers. Hardly chickenfeed. And Janet was a big reason for their ever-growing readership. Highland Park socialites knew they’d made it when their names were mentioned in Janet’s pieces on the society pages, to which a whole section of the paper was devoted.

  I figured maybe we could do lunch from the vending machine before we hit Mother’s house. I could use a little fortification—even plastic-wrapped chicken salad—if I was going to have to face Cissy and her cronies.

  The lot at the stucco-walled building was nearly empty, so I had my pick of spots. I pulled the Jeep right up to the concrete base around the only tree left alive near the pavement. Despite the bad angle, I managed to cover at least the trunk and the windshield in the shade. By Dallas standards, that was a primo parking space.

  I rolled my window down a crack and locked up, just in case someone thought the pink Escada evening bag on the back seat was worth stealing.

  The Park Cities Press kept a large suite on the second floor, across the hall from an orthodontist’s office. The door was clearly marked and unlocked, and I entered to find an empty receptionist’s desk. But lights were on, and, though I’d hardly label it a beehive of activity, a few warm bodies were in evidence, tapping away on keyboards or huddled over copies of the paper. Where bodies weren’t, computer monitors displayed bouncing balls and shooting stars on the screen savers.

  Janet’s cubicle had a window view, which made her almost as important as the editors who had actual offices with doors and walls.

  She peeked around the corner as I strolled the aisle in her direction. Did I mention that her cherished window has a view of the parking lot?

  “Hey, girl, I’ve been watching for you,” she said and grinned. Her bright red hair was piled on top of her head with a smattering of sparkly butterfly clips. “Hang on for about twenty minutes, and I should be ready to head over to Beverly.”

  “I thought we might get a bite first. You hungry?”

  “I’ve already got a head start on you, honey,” she said and pointed to the sandwich wrapper and half-eaten Milky Way on her desktop—if there really was a desktop beneath all the papers. Countless invitations and photographs from parties she’d attended were pinned to a stretch of cork-board. An ivy plant with brown leaves sat on the top shelf that ringed her gray cage. A handful of gold Godiva and silver Ethel M boxes attested to her popularity with the people she wrote about. They adored her because she never said anything negative. Not to their faces and not in her column, anyway.

  I noticed, too, plenty of photographs of Marilee, as well as a rather plump folder marked MABRY. The notes for her tell-all book, I surmised, wishing I could take a peek.

  Janet must’ve sensed where my eyes had gone as she picked up the file and shoved it inside her right-hand drawer.

  “Go on and get yourself something while I finish up, okay?” she said, and I nodded, as she sat back down in front of her computer and started tapping away.

  I tried to read over her shoulder. “So you’re writing about Marilee’s party?”

  “Yep.”

  “Are you mentioning her fight with Amber Lynn?”

  “I’m calling it a ‘colorful reunion of the two Mrs. Mabrys.’ It sounds much more civilized.”

  “So what are you calling the fire?”

  She paused. “Um, just a fire, Andrea. Or I could use ‘conflagration’ if it’d make you happy.”

  “No, fire’s good.”

  I left her alone and wandered off in pursuit of a sandwich. I tried to remember where the vending machine was the last time I’d met Janet here to take her to lunch, only to be told she couldn’t go out, that she was waiting on this fax or that phone call. So we’d ended up dining on pimento cheese on white bread wrapped in a triangle of plastic.

  Yum.

  I took a right when I should’ve taken a left, and I ended up in a room with a mock-up of the paper displayed on the walls. Had to be the upcoming issue, I decided, because there were still some blank spots on the computerized printouts.

  Out of curiosity, I stepped closer, until I could read the front-page headlines.

  My heart ground to a halt when I saw the words p
rinted below the bottom fold:

  GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER . . . AND STAYING?

  Whoa, Nelly.

  As if that wasn’t bad enough, below the screaming black letters was a photograph of a dark-skinned woman with a red kerchief wrapped around her head, standing in a massive front doorway.

  It was Dr. Taylor, pretty much as I’d glimpsed her when I’d been driving to Mother’s house yesterday morning.

  Un-frigging-believable.

  I hunched over, squinting at the copy, noting Kevin Snodgrass’s name on the byline. The story played heavily on what Sandy had told me about Highland Park being legally segregated until the 1920s, then went on to say that no non-Caucasian had owned a home in the area until Dr. Beth Taylor and husband Richard had purchased the Etherington home on Beverly Drive.

  I read on.

  Apparently, Dr. Taylor and her husband moved from Tyler, where she ran a medical clinic and he worked as an investment banker at Republic Bank. It alluded to Beth growing up in a small town near Longview and having had an older brother, Ronald Hull, who—according to public records—had been honorably discharged from the Army and had died in a traffic accident some twenty-odd years ago. Ron had been the single parent of a little girl, whom the Taylors had adopted and raised as their own.

  Renata, I realized, though Snodgrass didn’t print her name.

  The things you learn, huh?

  I wondered what that must feel like, to lose your daddy so young and end up with your aunt and uncle as parents? I guess it wasn’t something you blurted out to strangers upon first meeting, was it?

  Snodgrass went on to note that the Taylors confessed to having always loved Dallas and even talked about moving to the city many times before they actually did it. As fortune would have it, Beth was offered a position on the staff at Medical City several months ago, and they decided to go for it. She sold her share of the clinic to her partner in the practice, and Richard easily found a job with Bank of America in Big D.

  “We visited lots of neighborhoods, but picked Highland Park because it was the most beautiful area we’d ever seen, so many gorgeous old houses and big trees,” Dr. Taylor had remarked. “We’re sure we’ll love it here. So many other professional people are our neighbors, and those I’ve met already seem so friendly.”

  Snodgrass surmised that it must be difficult being the first blacks to reside in HP, though Beth had responded—crisply, I’d imagine after meeting her—“It’s overdue, don’t you think?”

  There were also quotes from some of the neighbors, most notably one “Cissy Blevins Kendricks, Big Steer Ball Co-chair and Society Hall of Fame Best Dressed.”

  “It’s about time we had some fresh blood on Beverly,” Mrs. Kendricks insisted, adding, “New neighbors are welcome on my street so long as they pay their taxes, keep up their lawn, and don’t kill anyone.”

  I smiled.

  Mother was nothing if not quotable.

  Stepping back from the paste-up of the front page, I shook my head, finding it hard to believe that the paper was doing a story on a black family moving into Highland Park in the twenty-first century. What was wrong with this picture? And I don’t just mean the shot of Beth in her red kerchief. That hokey headline stolen from the old Sidney Poitier film was laughable.

  God help us all.

  “Um, excuse me, but I don’t think you’re supposed to be in here.”

  Slowly, I turned around to find a tall man filling the doorway. He had on jeans and a Polo shirt, untucked. Coffee let off steam from the Styrofoam cup in his hand.

  “Sorry,” I said, “but I guess I got lost. I was looking for the vending machines.”

  “Out the door and take a left.”

  “Thanks.”

  He turned sideways to let me pass, and I felt his eyes on me as I veered off in the opposite direction, nearly running straight into a room with three vending machines, one for sodas and two for everything else. I rounded a small veneer-topped table and plastic chairs, smelling the stale odor of cigarettes and spotting a dirty ashtray despite the sign on the wall that ordered NO SMOKING.

  I pulled a few bucks from my purse and fed the machine, settling on a tuna sandwich. Then I got myself a can of Diet Pepsi and headed back to Janet’s cubicle.

  She was fiddling with the text on her screen, deleting a sentence here or there, fine-tuning things.

  Grabbing hold of a loose chair, I pulled it up to her desk, unsure of how to clear any space to set my food and drink without using papers and photos as coasters.

  But she waved a hand, wriggling fingernails painted a deep pink to match her dress. “Make yourself comfortable, sugar,” she drawled. “I’ll just be another few minutes, really. I’ll be meeting my photographer there and he can bring me back when we’re done. We’ll have to go over his shots anyway and get them page ready.”

  “So fast?” I said as I freed the tuna from the plastic wrap and popped my soda.

  “Honey, everything these days is digital.”

  “I saw the front-page layout for Tuesday’s edition,” I confessed to her, explaining that I’d wandered into the wrong office en route to the vending machines.

  “So you caught the piece on your mama’s new neighbors, huh?” She stopped messing with her keyboard and swiveled around. “What’d you think about that?”

  From the way she looked at me, I could tell she didn’t think any more of it than I did.

  I chewed thoughtfully on a bite of sandwich that tasted a lot like Play-Doh. Not that I’d eaten Play-Doh recently, but one never forgets. As I swallowed, I shook my head in disbelief, just as I’d done when I’d seen the mock-up. “Guess who’s coming to dinner and staying?” I nearly choked just repeating the words in the headline. “What lame brain came up with that?”

  “Ace reporter Kevin Snot-Ass himself.” She blew out a breath, setting her red bangs to fluttering. “What a genius, huh?”

  “A regular Einstein.”

  “Yeah. I’d rate this one right up there with his story about the SMU coeds who stripped at night to earn money for tuition. What was that headline? Oh, yeah”—she made a grandiose gesture with her hands, and I could envision the letters in bold as she spelled out the banner—“LAP DANCING THEIR WAY TO AN MBA.”

  “No.”

  “Yes, it’s true.” Janet laughed, a sound amazingly like a snorting pig.

  Which got me to giggling, too.

  I mean, really.

  What else could we do?

  Chapter 20

  Five minutes later, I’d finished half the tuna sandwich and Janet had wrapped up her coverage of Marilee’s party, so we headed out to the parking lot and climbed into my oven-like Jeep (so much for finding the sole shady spot).

  Destination: Cissy’s.

  As I slipped on my Ray-Bans, Janet set a plump Louis Vuitton bag in her lap, one with the LV monogram in all sorts of Day-Glo colors (ugly as hell, I thought). But it matched her deep pink sleeveless shift. A Ralph Lauren, I knew, because the tag was sticking up.

  Out of habit, I reached over and flipped it under for her.

  She didn’t even flinch.

  It was just one of those things that friends do for each other without even thinking, like spotting chives between front teeth, pantyhose tucked into underwear, or toilet paper stuck to a shoe.

  On the way over to Mother’s, I told Janet what had happened to Kendall after the party came to a fiery end, including the girl’s previously undiagnosed heart condition and the fact that she’d truly come thisclose to dying. I also filled Janet in on how Justin Gable factored into the whole mess; his turning into Kendall’s health guru and feeding her herbs like kava kava and ma huang, which the doctor had suggested could’ve triggered the nearly fatal attack of long QT syndrome. And I told her that the physician who’d made the call on Kendall’s condition was none other than Dr. Beth Taylor, the new neighbor of Mother’s featured in Kevin Snot-Ass’s front-page feature in the Park Cities paper.

  “Small world,�
� she said, just what I’d thought when I’d found out myself. “Sometimes I think living in Dallas is incestuous. Everyone’s related to someone else, or they’re friends of friends. Like six degrees of separation.”

  In my case, it was six degrees of Cissy Blevins.

  Speaking of, I mentioned to Janet, “Dr. Taylor will be at the Dallas Diet Club meeting today, and maybe it’s a good thing since people around Marilee seem to keep getting hurt.”

  “Like the wardrobe lady bitten by the spider”—Janet was nodding—“and the director whose shoulder was nearly knocked out of its socket by a boom mike. Now this thing with Kendall. Don’t bad things come in threes?”

  “Let’s hope that’s the end of it.”

  “So Justin was giving Kendall harmful herbs?”

  “Maybe not harmful to healthy people,” I said, “but dangerous for someone with Kendall’s arrhythmia.”

  “You think he knew?”

  “I don’t see how. Especially if Kendall had never undergone an ECG, which Marilee insisted was the case.”

  “So her collapse was accidental?”

  “No one’s quite sure how such a big dose of ephedra got in her bloodstream. Mother thinks Justin is responsible for attempted murder,” I admitted and found myself gripping the steering wheel harder. “I thought she was full of hot air at first, but I’m not so sure anymore. He’s behaving pretty oddly and he seemed awfully reluctant to tell Dr. Taylor what supplements he was giving Kendall. Marilee let the cat out of the bag, though, so he couldn’t avoid the truth when Dr. Taylor cornered him. Then I found out he helped Kendall leave the hospital this morning against medical advice. I’m worried for her, Janet. I can’t help it. She’s such a confused kid.”

  “Justin signed her out?”

  “He claimed to be her uncle.”

  “No?”

  “Yes.”

  “He is a piece of work, isn’t he?” I glanced away from the road to see Janet tapping her chin with her forefinger. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? When did all the bad stuff start happening with Marilee’s crew? After she met Justin, or before?”