Bubbles All The Way

by Sarah Strohmeyer

  “It’s okay, Phil.” I tried to break away, but he clung on. “Really. No problem.”

  He gently brushed back my hair and kissed me softly on the cheek. “I will never forget your kindness.”

  When he bent to kiss me on the lips, I ducked and dashed to the door and ran outside.

  Smack into Chinchilla.

  She was bundled in her coat, side by side with two other women. They did not look like they were from the Welcome Wagon. There wasn’t a casserole or a pan of brownies among them.

  “Funny thing,” Chinchilla said, playing with the heart pendant at her neck. “Once Phil read your note, he was worse than he was with Marguerite. Had to see you right away. Like a teenager in love.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to pass through them to get to my car. “I’m very late.”

  “Not as late as Debbie.” Chinchilla gripped my arm. Before I could wiggle free, I found myself completely encircled by angry housewives in furs, smelling of scalloped potatoes and corned beef hash.

  Chinchilla wouldn’t let me go.

  “Okay, what is it? You want me to get Phil out here?” I asked. “What have I done?”

  “Rumor has it you were the one who was doing Debbie’s hair when she ‘mysteriously’ and ‘suddenly’ collapsed.”

  “So?”

  “So we were talking. You do Debbie’s hair, she dies. You come home and Phil can’t wait to take you in his arms. It’s all coming together. You two are shacking up.”

  This was crazy. “We are not shacking up. He came over to my house to get away from you harpies.”

  A vixen in Chinchilla’s gang let out a hiss.

  “Don’t tell me you two weren’t in a clutch. We saw you two making out. We saw through the windows.”

  Damn. Phil had left the shades parted. That’s always dangerous in this neighborhood. Cable’s too expensive, so most of us have to find other, and cheaper, forms of entertainment. And spying on neighbors across the street doesn’t necessitate a subscription to TV Guide.

  “It was a quick hug! It didn’t mean anything. Look, I’m engaged. I’m getting married Saturday.”

  “Yeah?” Chinchilla grabbed my left hand. “I don’t see a ring.”

  Because I refused to wear it out of protest, though I didn’t see why I should have to tell her that. “Let me go.” I kicked and missed. The women laughed.

  Chinchilla dropped my arm. “Seems to us you had opportunity, means and motive, Bubbles Yablonsky. Looks to us like you might have murdered Debbie so you could get your hands on Phil.”

  Her gang nodded and flexed their fingers, which were covered with gold and silver rings studded with diamonds. The suburbs’ answer to brass knuckles.

  Chinchilla sneered. “Well, it’s not going to work, your plan. I have connections in the police department and I informed my husband about everything I saw tonight. Let me tell you, he was very interested. Very interested. Said it wasn’t the first time you’d had a run-in with the law. He should be paying you a visit real soon.”

  “Your husband?” My stomach was twisting into a painful knot.

  “Detective Burge. Know him?”

  Know him? He was my most ardent enemy, next to Dix Notch. Above all, Detective Burge despised Stiletto. Stiletto went on the lam once when we found a dead body in the park, just to avoid Burge, and since then Burge had never forgiven me.

  In Burge’s mind, it was just a matter of time before he could pin me with something.

  Like Debbie’s murder.

  I couldn’t make sense of my evening with Phil. All the crying and the clutching. I’d been so stupid not to notice the drapes were open so everyone could witness Phil making himself at home in my house.

  Then there’d been the pass he’d made at me. I hadn’t wanted to be kissed or hugged. But Phil had been so “clingy.” It wasn’t easy rejecting a distraught widower. You can’t very well slap him in the face or dump a glass of water over his head, not with his eyes still red from constant crying over his dead wife.

  If only he hadn’t opened those damned drapes.

  I parked in the Masonic temple lot, yanked the key from the ignition, got out and remembered who was there. Stiletto.

  I felt a new anxiety, different from the anxiety of being caught with Phil or being pegged by Burge for murder. It was the kind of quivering I hadn’t felt since my first dance in Northeast Junior High when Randy Mahl, the drop-dead cutie from my eighth-grade typing class, asked me to slow shuffle to “Dust in the Wind.”

  I negotiated the steep steps to the impressive Masonic temple with its grand pillars and felt a surge of excitement. Music spilled out the double front doors along with high-pitched laughter. Stepping into the marble lobby, I was relieved to see I wasn’t the only woman in a sparkly dress. In fact . . .

  Wait a minute—that’s all there were! Women.

  Specifically, women between the ages of twenty and sixty whispering and holding fancy pink drinks in martini glasses. Clearly, they had spared no expense because their makeup jobs were professional and their hair . . . well, let me just say that Debbie wasn’t the only woman in town with a passion for extreme up dos.

  “May I have your name?”

  A matronly woman in a blue gown beamed up at me from a registration table. Her name tag read PAULINE.

  “I need your name,” Pauline said again, “so I can check you off our list and give you a number. For the auction.”

  Oh, right. The auction. “Um, actually I’m a . . .”

  Hold on. I had to be discreet. People were always trying to get their names or their kids’ names into “Talk of the Town,” Flossie once told me. Sometimes she went incognito. If it got out in this crowd that I was temporarily taking over for Flossie, I might be so swamped I’d never have a moment alone with Stiletto.

  “Reporter,” I murmured. “For the News-Times.”

  Pauline checked her list. “I’m sorry. We already have a reporter for the News-Times here.”

  “Really?” Uh-oh. Flossie must have slipped out of her hospital bed. I searched the crowd for a fat woman with a walker and a bum left knee.

  Keeping the same sour puss, Pauline said caustically, “To tell you the truth, we had to turn her away because she didn’t meet the dress code. Oh. Hold on. She’s back.”

  I followed Pauline’s gaze to the door, where a dour figure slouched. She was in the most Gawd-awful teal blue dress that was three sizes too big. However, she was neither fat nor with a walker. She was in a bad mood.

  She was Lorena Ludwig, our personality-challenged pugnacious photographer, and she looked none too pleased.

  “This is all your fault, Yablonsky,” she accused, trudging over in what appeared to be snow boots under the flounces of teal. “I had to go home and dig out my sister’s bridesmaid dress. Look at me. I’m drowning in this thing.”

  Lorena’s brown hair was pulled into a sloppy ponytail, the better to show off the cigarette wedged behind her ear, I supposed.

  “You didn’t have to wear that,” Pauline said. “Any skirt would have been fine. Just not jeans. Especially, those jeans.”

  “I still got the jeans.” Lorena lifted her hem to expose the frayed and dirty cuffs of her standard Levi’s. “I don’t go no place without two things: my jeans and my Camels.”

  Pauline pressed her lips together in disapproval and handed us our numbers. I was 115. Lorena was 116. I told Lorena I didn’t see the point in getting numbers anyway, as I was there to cover the fund-raiser, not to bid on some painting or priceless antique. But Lorena said I should keep it, so I did.

  We entered the main hall, where white folding chairs had been arranged in neat rows in front of a stage. A chamber quartet played classical music that was very upscale. Michael Bolton or John Tesh fancy. Waiters passed around champagne and more pink drinks to the clusters of women.

  I scanned the crowd, searching for You Know Who.

  “Man. This ain’t like any fund-raiser I’ve ever been to.” Lorena pulled ou
t her cigarette and fingered it with longing. “Take a look at that specimen, would ya?”

  A tall blond hunk in a tux walked by, a Nordic god with shaggy hair waving as he passed. A bright red #1 was stuck to his back.

  “I want to know what conditioner he uses to get hair like that,” I said. “My hair never waves.”

  “There’s a lot from that guy I wanna know. The brand of his conditioner’s not one of them.”

  And then it hit me. Number one?

  “Are they numbering the waiters here?” I asked, as another hunk, a black man with a shaved head, strolled past, a woman on each arm.

  Lorena popped the unlit cigarette into her mouth. “This isn’t your usual charity auction, Einstein. They’re not bidding on antiques. They’re bidding on bachelors.”

  Synapses fired in my brain, for once leaping the ganglia necessary to induce quick thinking. Men up for bid. Charity. Hunks in tuxes.

  Could it be that Stiletto—my Stiletto—would be on the auction block so any old woman could buy him?

  I coughed, gagging at the very idea.

  Lorena smiled. “Ah, yes, and our professor emeritus finally figures it out. The stud muffin you so incomprehensibly rejected is number three. Right over there.”

  Lorena pointed to a spot by the stage where the largest group of women huddled. I could barely make out his famous blackish wavy hair. I loved that hair. I’d run my fingers through it many a night as he lay sleeping by my side. It was the same hair that had brushed my cheek and neck in bed.

  A pathetic longing swept over me. Okay, he was here. A few feet away. Surrounded by women who wanted him, and now, being a free agent in every sense, he was free to choose any one of them. And they him. For a lifetime of happiness, romance and hot, passionate sex. Oh, to be entwined in Stiletto’s sinewy thighs for just one more night.

  I teetered a bit.

  “You don’t look too good,” Lorena said. “In fact, pardon my customary bluntness. You look like shit.”

  I fanned myself with a program. “Nonsense. I’m fine.”

  “Sure you are. You always are top-notch when you’re green.”

  A bell rang and Pauline marched up the aisle, clapping her hands and ordering everyone to finish their drinks, perhaps make a trip to the ladies’ and take their seats. Except for the bachelors, who were to join her backstage.

  Reluctantly the women broke away, heading in droves for the bathrooms, the men left standing like seashells tossed on shore by a receding tide of estrogen. There was the blond Nordic hunk. An adorable freckled, freakishly tall bachelor whom I’d seen on the sports pages as a local boy made big playing professional basketball. The chiseled African-American man whom I immediately recognized from my experiences in the St. Luke’s emergency center as bone surgeon Dr. Drake, and Stiletto.

  He was looking at me. Straight at me. His dark blue eyes teasing and seducing me simultaneously.

  With Stiletto, no matter what I was wearing, I always felt naked.

  He appraised me from my silver slingbacks on up and returned a verdict of approval. His mouth opened to say something when a lithe woman in a low-cut black dress and incredibly healthy long, thick blond hair suddenly appeared by his side.

  She was in her early thirties with an impeccable boob job—not too big, not too perky—and in impressive athletic shape. She slipped one of her toned arms into Stiletto’s and stood on tiptoe to whisper in his ear. Whatever she said, it must have been hilarious because he flashed her his widest, most appreciative grin.

  The actress from Allentown. That was his new girlfriend. Sabina whatever. And she was gorgeous!

  Stiletto gestured casually in my direction. Sabina nodded eagerly and then the . . . Oh, crap. They were headed straight toward me.

  “I don’t know about you, but I gotta piss like a race-horse and that line’s out the door,” Lorena was saying. “There’s a bathroom behind the coat closet upstairs that no one knows about. Follow me.”

  “Be right there,” I murmured, unable to move as every muscle in my body had apparently ceased to function.

  Lorena left and the next I knew Stiletto was in front of me, so close I could smell his trademark scent of crisp clean cotton and fresh air.

  “Hello, Bubbles. Glad you could make it.” He took my hand and in one smooth movement planted a gentlemanly kiss on my cheek. It was very reserved and it occurred to me that this was the kind of greeting Europeans did. Quite a contrast to his fresh pass back in the newsroom.

  I, of course, was glamorously tongue-tied. It was all I could do to hold myself back from bringing my fingers to the very spot where his lips had quickly grazed my face.

  “This is Sabina.” He touched Sabina’s back in the same way that Notch had touched Alison’s. An encouraging pat. “Sabina, this is Bubbles.”

  My God, his eyes were blue. The tux really brought out how blue they were. And had he been working out? He seemed tauter, leaner—though that wasn’t to say he was flabby or anything to begin with. Though, again, maybe it was the tux.

  “It is so very, very nice to meet you.”

  Someone had taken my other hand. I looked down at the long, slim fingers adorned by a few tasteful rings and realized it was Sabina. She was actually talking to me. Purring, really.

  “Steve has told me so much about you. It’s such an honor to meet you, finally. I mean, to be in your presence . . .” She cleared her throat, as if she’d said too much. “Congratulations, by the way.”

  I blinked. “Congratulations? For what?” I was thinking that maybe she’d mistakenly assumed I’d taken over Flossie Foreman’s beat as the “Talk of the Town” correspondent.

  Stiletto grinned. “For getting married to your dynamic ex-husband, remember? Or has he already slipped your mind? Not that that wouldn’t be perfectly understandable.”

  “Oh.” I’d been busted and Stiletto knew it. Already my cheeks were hot. “Right.”

  “It’s like a movie, an estranged husband and wife coming together for the sake of their daughter.” Sabina sighed. Her gray eyes sparkled in adoration, as though I was somehow the film star, not her. “I mean, my parents were divorced and a part of me always held on to the hope that they would get married again. In the end, I had to accept they didn’t love each other.”

  “There’s a concept,” Stiletto quipped. “Two people not getting married because they’re not in love. What a radical idea.”

  I set my jaw. “Some people have been engaged for less.” I was referring to the time Stiletto plunked a rock on my finger, a Harry Winston three carat, as a ruse so he wouldn’t have to go to work in England.

  “Some people,” he retorted, “get engaged because they fear change and stick with what they know even though they know that what they know is bad for them.”

  What?

  Sabina pressed her finger to her temple. “I do think I’m getting a slight headache. We better go, Steve. You’re supposed to be backstage with the others.”

  “I’ll be right there,” he said. “First, I need to speak to Bubbles alone, if you don’t mind.”

  Surprisingly, Sabina agreed to this. She didn’t seem at all bitchy, which was how I would have acted if the guy I was dating suddenly insisted on being alone with a woman he’d recently asked to marry him.

  Sabina bowed her head slightly and went off. She backed off.

  “She is incredibly nice, even if she does come from Allentown,” I said, thinking, Even if she is dating you and therefore the object of my derision.

  “Whatever.” He moved closer, so close I could see the swirls on his pearl-shaped buttons. “Tony tells me a client of Sandy’s died at the House of Beauty right in front of you. Something about an allergy.”

  I was touched that Stiletto cared. “Yup. Except it wasn’t an allergy. It was murder.”

  The muscle in his jaw flinched. “How do you know?”

  I ran through my day, about the tips that had been called into the Lehigh Police Department, about Jeffrey Andre’s silly
French threat, and ended with the shot fired at the Christmas tree lot. “Clearly Debbie’s death was more than a simple accident,” I concluded. “And though it sounds whacked, I think someone shot at me to scare me off from asking more questions about her.”

  It might have been my imagination, or maybe Stiletto was too cool to let on, but he didn’t seem shocked by any of it. It was as if he knew. As if he’d been brought up to speed.

  “The shot was a twenty-two, right?”

  I tried to remember if I’d told anyone that. “Supposedly, but . . .”

  “That’s their signature. Pretty bush league. Then again, you are dealing with old Soviet reissue and that stuff is all degraded.” Stiletto looked over my shoulder, thinking, not really focusing. “What are you packing these days?”

  “Me?” That was a ridiculous question. “The only thing I pack is makeup. The only gun I know how to fire is Genevieve’s musket and I don’t know how to fire that too well.”

  Stiletto was shaking his head. “Genevieve’s got other weaponry. She needs to get on top of it.”

  Wait. This was crazy. “Do you know these people? You said Soviet reissue. Do you know who was shooting at me today?”

  “Sure,” he said flatly. “The violent wing of the anti-Christmas lobby.” And at that moment the lights flickered, a warning that the auction was about to begin.

  For the record, I was beginning to doubt there even was a violent wing of the anti-Christmas lobby. I was beginning to doubt whether there was any anti-Christmas lobby, much less a violent wing of one.

  “I gotta go.” He placed a hand on my shoulder. Gone was all his flirtatiousness. “Take care of yourself, Bubbles. Be careful. Park under streetlights. Don’t hang out in parking lots at night and keep your radar up.”

  “Why?” I said as he took off toward the stage. But Stiletto said nothing. He just jogged to the black curtains, not even bothering to kiss me goodbye.

  That was the first time I suspected that whatever was going on, it went way beyond a hair-extension allergy down at the little old House of Beauty.

  I had the feeling it had to do with me.