Trashy Chic

by Cathy Lubenski

  “Who would you be, that Jessica woman in `Murder She Wrote’ or Jane Marple?” Bertie asked.

  “Couldn’t I be one of Charlie’s Angels?”

  “New angels or old angels?”

  Kate opened her mouth to answer when Bertie let out a screech that almost deafened her. They were stopped at a red light and Bertie was pointing to the car sitting next to them.

  When Kate turned her head to look, Bertie screeched again, “No, no, don’t look, it’s R2 Bellingham.” She dove to the floor.

  Kate jerked her head around, staring straight ahead, her body rigid. After 10 seconds she said, “Why can’t I look? He doesn’t know me, I can look all I want.”

  Kate casually turned her head again and saw a sweating, red-faced side of beef hunched behind the wheel of the big Mercedes.

  R2 never even looked at them.

  “What do we do now? Do we follow him?” Katie asked.

  “We can try, but there’s hardly any traffic. That’s good for keeping him in sight, but it makes it easier for him to see us. On the other hand, he looked distracted. Let’s give a try.”

  Kate followed the black Mercedes at a distance. After a few miles, Bertie realized that unlike in books and TV programs, real people didn’t expect to be followed.

  They were being led across the city to a business park for high-end companies. R2 turned off onto a long driveway that wound behind a multi-storied black building. A boulder engraved with “Bellingham Inc.” anchored the large expanse of green lawn.

  Kate stopped the car at the side of the mostly empty road. The park emptied out on Friday at 5 and didn’t get much traffic again until 9 a.m. Monday.

  “Do I go behind the building? He’s going to see us for sure if I do that,” Kate said. She had one hand on the steering wheel and the other to her face, chewing on her nails.

  “I’m going to get out and see if I can peek around the side of the building without being spotted,” Bertie said.

  “Are you nuts? The man is just going into his business, it’s no big deal.”

  “On Sunday? Why is he here today? I just want to see. Nancy would do it, George. Stay here, I’ll be right back.”

  Bertie strolled casually down the driveway to the back of the building, a lone figure in an empty expanse.

  Kate lost sight of her and was forced to sit there with the car running, biting her nails. She kept checking the rearview mirror, expecting to see a police car with siren whooping, but the park remained empty.

  After about 10 minutes, Bertie appeared, running across the lawn toward the car. Kate reached across the passenger seat and opened the door. Bertie dove headfirst into the car, banging her face hard against the gearshift.

  “Go, go, go he’s coming,” she screamed. Kate stepped on the gas, sending the car tearing up the road with Bertie’s feet still hanging out the open door. Bertie pulled herself upright and sslammed the door shut. She sat there panting, looking anxiously out the back window.

  Kate kept her foot on the gas pedal until Bertie told her she could slow down. Kate pulled on to a side street where the car wasn’t likely to be spotted. “What did he do? Did he see you?” Kate asked. Her voice was shaky and there was a fine sheen of sweat on her forehead.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Bertie said, catching her breath after the sprint across the lawn. “Whew, I’m out of shape. I don’t think I’m cut out to be an investigative reporter. Or Nancy Drew.”

  “Honestly, Bertie, didn’t you learn your lesson Friday night? This is stupidly dangerous. No one wants to be spied on, especially someone with money. Rich people get unbalanced at stuff like that.”

  “Calm down,” Bertie said, panting. “Nothing happened, except that I have to lose about 15 pounds and go to the gym more often.”

  “WHAT. DID. YOU. SEE?”

  “It was totally weird,” Bertie answered. “He pulled up in front of a big double door in the back, and opened it with a remote. Then he opened the trunk of his car and pulled out a couple of garbage bags that he carried them into the building. By himself, there was no one else around.”

  “That’s it? Wow, I’m so glad we followed some rich guy across town so that you could spy on him while he took out his garbage.”“Kate, think about it. Rich guys don’t take out their own garbage, and they don’t take it from their mansion to their business. Why wouldn’t he just dump at home? It doesn’t make any sense. And you didn’t hear the rest of it, so shut up till I finish. He went back for a couple of more bags and dropped one on his way into the building.”

  “And?” Kate asked.

  “And it looked like hair fell out.”

  “Ew, gross!” Kate said. “It couldn’t have been hair, could it?”

  “That’s what it looked like. You’re right, though, it couldn’t have been hair, but I can’t think of anything a multimillionaire could be carrying around in garbage bags on a Sunday afternoon that looks like hair. Rich people are nutty, but I don’t think they’re into scalping … are they?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Back at the kennel, Kate took a good look at Bertie and started laughing.

  “What?” Bertie asked.

  “Look in the mirror.”

  Bertie was almost blinded by the reflection of a great big black shiner that had blossomed after banging her face into the gear shift. A half-hour of teasing was all Bertie could take; she stalked out and went home.

  She checked out the black eye in her bedroom mirror. It certainly was impressive, and it gave her a lopsided rakish look. But she couldn’t tell people the truth about how she got it. Stalking rich people in Bel Air could be hazardous to her career.

  By 11 p.m., Shawn still hadn’t called. Nothing said a lot. Nothing was the same as something in a relationship.

  She woke up late Monday morning, leaving herself just enough time to jump in the shower and wrestle with rush-hour traffic on the freeway. By the time she hit the fourth floor newsroom, she’d already told the lobby receptionist she’d been hit with a football, an accountant on the elevator that a piece of toast has popped out of the toaster and hit her in the eye, and a maintenance man that she’d fallen off a horse.

  Shawn was waiting for her at her desk when she got there. He stared at her black eye.

  “Bertie, what happened?” he said.

  “Oh, this? My bra strap snapped and almost poked my eye out,” she said.

  The confusion on his face was worth the extra two seconds she’d put into making it up.

  “I guess you didn’t get my message, huh?” he asked.

  “Message? I didn’t get any message from you.”

  “I called your apartment about an hour ago and left a message. You must not

  have your cell phone on, I left a message there, too. How are you?” He had the

  grace to look embarrassed.

  “I must’ve been in the shower,” Bertie said, her voice cold. “How am I? Helllloooo??... For all you knew, I could be dead by now or at least blinded by an exploding bra strap.”

  “I had something to do this weekend. I’m sorry, Bertie, honestly. What happened? Please tell me.”

  They’d never talked about a serious relationship, no promises had been made, but it would’ve been nice to count on him. To give herself time to think, she said, “I’ve got a lot of crap to do this morning, I’ll tell you later.”

  She turned to her computer and started to log in. He stood there for a few seconds, then walked away.

  She wasn’t exaggerating about how much she had to do. It was the same story every week. By Friday, her patience for the boring details of her job was exhausted, and she’d leave them for Monday morning. Monday always seemed so far away on Friday. Monday mornings, she was always behind. She pounded the keys and fended off editors looking for stories that were due last week. When she finally looked up and looked around, she realized there was another cubicle empty, the desk cleaned out, the computer shut down. Andy Hoffmeier, a great reporter who’d been nominated for a Pul
itzer, had bolted to the greener pastures of the Washington Post as rumors of layoffs grew.

  Every day more and more people left, some for bigger newspapers where they might have job safety, others fleeing the crumbling world of real journalism for the relative cocoon of the Internet and its headlines-only, short-attention span, no-ethics brand of journalism.

  Bertie’s heart was breaking for the profession she loved. She’d read “All the President’s Men” for a high school book report and was hooked on the idea that journalism was a noble career, a chance to do some good. That was before the bottom line knocked the shit out of it, before bean counters started running newspapers, not newspaper people. Now, it was all about profit. Most people didn’t realize that newspapers still made money, just not enough for greedy owners who thought it was more profitable to run the “product” into the ground to squeeze more and more out of it. Papers shrunk and so did the number of readers.

  It was maddening—didn’t the idiots in charge realize what they were doing? It was a never-ending circle of greed and ruin.

  Bertie had started out writing stories she cared about, but the stupidity of owners who didn’t want their rich friends mentioned in the same story as the word fraud, editors who “edited” out every bit of relevance in a story because they were afraid of offending someone, stories that were shelved so that a company wouldn’t get mad and pull their advertising out of the paper had worn her out.

  She’d drifted into the newspaper’s back eddy—the lifestyle section where she could bide her time till... what? She didn’t know; didn’t have a clue.

  ***

  Two hours later, Bertie felt like the walls were closing in on her. She stared at the claustrophobic space and tried to forget the position she was in: Sitting on the toilet, trapped in a stall in the women’s room.

  She’d memorized the shoes of the women editors she most wanted to avoid so that if she was taking care of business in the bathroom and one came in, a peek beneath the stall door at the footwear and she’d know to stay put. It was a good plan that had saved her several times from small talk with the news trolls.

  Bertie had recognized the strappy sandals of Nan Shepherd, one of the most arrogant and pretentious editors on the fourth floor. She treated her reporters like idiots and then sucked everything that was interesting out of their stories because, by God, this was a serious newspaper.

  Bertie had heard that Nan had once made an award-winning reporter count how many times she’d used “was” in a story and then take out half of them and use something else. Why? Because “was” was boring.

  Nan had been standing in front of the mirror for three or four minutes. Not a long time when you’re busy, but an eternity when you’re sitting on a toilet seat.

  “What the hell is she doing?” Bertie thought. “Knitting herself a man?” To take her mind off her rapidly numbing rear, she thought about the Bellingham murder. She didn’t think Gardener was guilty, but realized she might be thinking with her hormones, not her brain. Anyone charming enough to make money as a man-slut for rich women was definitely charming enough to fool her.

  He would’ve had a better chance of proving his paternity with Bellingham alive, but the old man had easily out-thought the pile of muscles that was Gardener—siccing his son’s wife onto the gardener was Machiavellian.

  Bertie was suspicious of R2, too...er, also. He’d looked so furtive yesterday. That hair … eww—it gave her the creeps just to think about it.

  And what about the Widow Bellingham? Bertie realized she’d never heard the proposition that Gigi had wanted to make. And the daughter?

  Bertie’s head was starting to hurt, as was her doopa. She couldn’t take it anymore … she had to get out of there.

  “Hey, how you?” she asked as she burst out of the stall. Nan was applying another layer of makeup, her face pressed so close to the mirror that she was cross-eyed. “And before you ask, I was enjoying a little S&M over the weekend and a whip cracked me in the eye. Do you think I could get disability?”

  Nan tore her gaze away from the mirror long enough to ask “ask what?” before Bertie was out the door. She was willing to let Nan think she was a disease spreader than risk a real conversation by taking the time to wash her hands.

  She stopped at the first bathroom she came to and did the deed before returning to her desk and starting again on her story about pagan parenting. It was amazing how many pagans were parents in the greater L.A. area.

  Despite all the heavy thinking she’d done in the bathroom, Bertie realized she couldn’t do much about Bellingham with a black eye—it was too memorable, it made things about her, not the people she was talking to, so she hunkered down and got some work done.

  The pagan parents proved to be pussycats, cooperative and really sweet for heathens, but she was still exhausted when she got home that night. She was so happy to see the inside of her little apartment; she just wanted put on sweats and watch bad TV.

  She’d barely closed the door when the doorbell rang. She forgot about the black eye and pressed it against the peephole, letting out a scream of pain. Shawn charged in through the door she hadn’t had time to lock, took a quick look around the living room and then rushed into the kitchen and the bedroom.

  He was the second good-looking man to search her apartment in two days. She was starting to like it.

  “What happened? Are you all right?” he asked, coming back to her.

  “Yes, except you almost gave me another black eye when you banged the door open like that.” She was holding her hand to her face, and he gently pulled it away to look at her eye.

  “It’s all right,” he said, putting his arms around her and tugging her to him. “I’m glad you’re all right now and after whatever happened this weekend. I’m sorry I didn’t call you, Bertie. I wasn’t home all weekend and I had my cell phone turned off. If I’d known you needed help I would’ve been here.”

  She put her head down on his shoulder and they relaxed against each other.

  “Go take a nice hot bath,” he finally said, “and I’ll make us linguini with clam sauce and you can tell me what happened Friday.”

  She wanted to ask him what he’d been doing, but decided to let it drop for now. She could be big about it, especially since he had flowers, too. Bertie soaked until the water started to cool, then put on a silk robe she saved for a special occasion, which she assumed that’s what this was going to be.

  Shawn was a good cook and he brought some excellent wine with him. Candles threw shadows around the little room; it was romantic, something she hadn’t expected.

  They ate and talked and laughed and after her third glass of wine, Bertie blabbed about her Friday night escapade. Shawn was impressed. “That was really ballsy, Bertie,” he said. “And you believed Gardener?”

  “Yeah, I did,” she said. “He seemed really sincere.”

  “Bertie, Ted Bundy was sincere, too, that’s how he convinced all the women he killed into going with him. But I know what you mean. He seems like a nice guy caught up in something bigger than he can handle. And Bellingham was playing him like a 3-year-old with a rubber ball.

  “But Lomax is the one who surprises me. He’s such a little pipsqueak, I’m surprised he’d act like such an ass. I heard some rumors that he was messing around with meth—I guess it might be true. That would account for the temper and the chance he took threatening you.

  “And, speaking of rumors, I heard something interesting over the weekend.”

  From whom, she wanted to ask, but knew he would never betray a source.

  “There was water found on the floor around Bellingham, and in his head wound.”

  “Water? That’s weird.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought. The police are holding it back as a test question in case any of the nutty ‘usual suspects’ confess.”

  “The killer sprinkled water on Bellingham’s head after he murdered him?”

  “I have no idea; there doesn’t seem to be a logi
cal explanation for it. Oh, and get this. They haven’t been able to figure out what he was conked with. None of the conventional blunt objects fit the wound. There weren’t splinters so it can’t be wood, and an aluminum bat wouldn’t create that kind of depression.”

  As casually as possible, Bertie asked, “Did you hear anything about hair at the crime scene?” She hadn’t told Shawn about R2 and the hair and wasn’t going to, but he owed her for not riding to her rescue Friday night.

  “No, nothing about hair, why?”

  Bertie improvised wildly. “You always read about hair being stuck to the murder weapon. I just wondered if they could tell if there was any missing.”

  Good God, talk about lame—and after all that practice today lying about her eye.

  “That doesn’t even make any sense, Bertie. Oh, and that stuff about the water is top secret; I’m holding onto it till I can find some way to use it. You need to promise me you won’t say anything about it.”

  “C’mon Shawn, who would I tell? So, where are you getting all this inside stuff?”

  He stood up and went to her, pulling her up from her chair, and close to him.

  “Hey, let’s don’t talk about Bellingham. Did I tell you that you look really sexy with that black eye?”

  The silk robe slithered to the floor. She wound her fingers through the thick brown hair at the nape of his neck and pulled her face down to hers.

  Shawn Fucks indeed.

  Bertie curled next to Shawn, running her fingers through the two hairs on his chest. She was hot and sweaty after an hour’s romp but feeling vaguely unsatisfied. Shawn, however, looked ready to go again; Bertie just wanted to sleep.

  “So, what’s new? Your life can’t be all Bellingham, all the time,” she asked as a diversion.

  He tensed slightly. “Oh, you know, the trial of the Van Nuys rapist is starting soon and I’ll have to be there at least some of the time.”

  Bertie sat up. “You don’t cover the courthouse. Why do you have to be there?”