This was Highland Park.
No one woke to noises and assumed something nefarious was going on next door. Any thumps in the night were likely caused by the hired help sneaking leftover tiramisu from the fridge, spoiled teens without curfews slipping in the back door, or a restless ghost.
“Around 6:00 a.m., Mrs. Cameron went outside to retrieve her newspaper,” Anna Dean went on, “and she noticed the front door to Ms. DuBois’s duplex was ajar…”
Ajar?
“But…” I’d shut and locked it when I’d taken off. I’d double-checked to make sure, even though I hadn’t closed the dead bolt because I didn’t have the key. Had Miranda gotten up sometime during the night and wandered out? Or, perhaps, let someone in? She’d been so zonked out when I’d departed that either seemed unlikely.
“…Mrs. Cameron knocked at first then let herself in, sensing something was wrong. She discovered Ms. DuBois on the living room sofa.”
Right where I’d left her.
So, a nearly comatose Miranda had awakened from a drunken stupor, unlocked and opened the front door, before lying back down on the sofa to kill herself?
“That can’t be right—” I started to protest, but Anna Dean didn’t seem inclined to listen to my protests.
Maybe she was used to those around the victim saying, No, that couldn’t have happened. She wouldn’t have gone there, done that.
I wet my lips, moving in a different direction, figuring there was surely one thing that would prove one of us right and the other wrong. “Did she leave a note?”
“We haven’t found one, no. But we did find this.” Deputy Dean produced another plastic bag, sliding it across the counter.
The paper within the bag was crumpled, but not so I couldn’t read it.
Due to your current unfortunate circumstances, your membership in the Caviar Club has been revoked. We wish you luck in your recuperation. Should your situation improve, please reapply, and we will give your application our prompt attention.
“Do you know what the Caviar Club is?” she asked, and I shook my head.
“No.” I’d never heard of it, though it sounded like any one of innumerable private cliques around the city, part of why I liked staying out of the world of the Dallas glitterati. The games they played made my head hurt. And this one apparently didn’t want a member who had an eye tic or a droopy mouth.
“Could be a wine- or food-tasting club,” I said, the best guess I could offer. “Those are popular. But why would they kick her out just because she had an eye twitch and a sneer?”
“Whatever it is, rejection can be killer,” Anna Dean said soberly, and I silently concurred.
Too many women these days sought acceptance in places they shouldn’t; and, when they didn’t get it, life seemed hopeless.
Had Miranda’s botched injections made her feel like her life was over? Had she made a middle-of-the-night snap decision to forego retaliation and book a stay six feet under?
You could be too rich or too thin, I thought. Or too pretty.
I sighed, passing the plastic-encased note back to the deputy chief. I mumbled an apology, wishing I knew more, wanting so much to shed light on what had happened; but I was just as confused as she was about Miranda DuBois’s final moments.
“Did you check her computer?” I asked, as it had been sitting right there on the coffee table near the sofa. “Maybe Miranda left some kind of message on it.”
Deputy Dean squished up her forehead. “What computer, Andy?”
“Her laptop,” I said. “It was in the living room. I turned it to sleep mode before I left because the screen was so bright.”
The deputy chief fairly squinted at me. “There was no laptop in there, Andy. Perhaps she put it away after you left. We’ll look around.”
I suddenly thought of something else. “Did you check her phone for the last number dialed?” I asked. I just couldn’t fathom Miranda pulling her own plug without reaching out to someone. Like her mother. They’d always been so tight. “Maybe she tried to call someone.”
“We’re still looking for her cell phone.”
No laptop or cell?
“That’s odd,” I said, because it was. “And you don’t think she was burgled?”
Deputy Dean looked affronted. “The house appears neat and intact, but we’re being very thorough, rest assured of that. And if you don’t mind”—her voice turned impatient—“how about you leave the questions to me?”
I shut up, my cheeks no doubt a warm shade of pink.
“All right, then”—her calm restored, she continued the grilling—“what time did you leave?”
I squeezed my eyes shut, warding off a vaguely woozy sensation, then forced myself to look directly at the policewoman, wanting desperately to emulate her cool exterior and feeling anything but. In fact, I was feeling downright nauseous.
“It was around nine-thirty.” My mouth tasted funny, as if I’d swallowed old mothballs. “I spoke to Mother on my cell first. Cissy Kendricks of Beverly Drive,” I clarified. “I can give you her number if you want to double-check with her. I’m sure she knows exactly how long we talked. She was, um, in the middle of something, and I interrupted her.”
“Oh, I’ve got Cissy’s number,” she said.
I would’ve laughed under any other circumstance. Instead, I laced my fingers together to steady them and nodded. “Of course you do.” I remembered then that my mother and Anna Dean had cause to connect, beyond the dead body in the living room. Cissy had joined the deputy chief in chairing the most recent Widows and Orphans fund-raiser.
“Go on, Andy,” Deputy Dean’s firm voice nudged. “What happened after you hung up with your mother?”
“Yeah, after.” I cleared my throat. “I took off for home about five minutes later, once I was sure Miranda was fast asleep and locked in.” I turned my hands palms up on the granite island. “That was it, really. I didn’t hear from Miranda, so I figured she’d slept through the night. I came back this morning to see if she was okay.” Despite myself, tears welled, and I sniffled. “I should never have left her alone, should I?”
But Anna Dean obviously didn’t have any comforting words to offer. I doubted anyone could say anything that would make me feel better about this.
“When you talked to your mother, did you mention to her where you were? Who you were with?” she quizzed.
“Yes.” My head bobbed. “I’d called to ask for help. Cissy’s lifelong friends with Miranda’s mother, Debbie Santos, and I thought Cissy might phone Mrs. Santos and let her know how upset Miranda was. I thought she might need someone with her to support her, someone close.”
Much closer to her than I ever was.
“Mother suggested I bring Miranda to Beverly Drive, so she and Sandy could keep an eye on her. But Miranda was sound asleep. I hadn’t wanted to wake her.” My voice cracked as I said it, wishing in hindsight I’d done things differently.
“Did you say Miranda’s mom’s name is Santos?” Anna Dean’s pen stopped moving. “It isn’t DuBois?”
“Not anymore. She’s been married more times than Elizabeth Taylor,” I explained, “and her latest husband was Ernesto Santos, a diamond importer from South America. They’re divorced.”
“Ah,” said the deputy chief, stopping pen again to ask me, “Do you have a number where Mrs. Santos can be reached? That would save us some time digging up the information ourselves.”
Speaking of South America.
“She’s in Brazil, on a two month vacation,” I said, repeating the line provided by my mother. “The, um, spa where she’s staying doesn’t allow cell phones, and they have no television, radio, Internet, or landlines.”
I didn’t add that the plastic surgeons who’d be overseeing Mrs. Santos’s “vacation” didn’t allow distractions to healing…well, besides the cabana boys in Speedos, or so I’d heard. “Cissy might know some way to reach her,” I offered.
Mother had connections everywhere. She could pull strings like nobody’s busines
s, which sometimes came in mighty handy.
“Are there any siblings?”
“No.” That was one thing Miranda and I had found in common. We were both only children.
“Where’s her father?”
“Dead,” I said, and proceeded to recount what I knew about Jack Reynolds DuBois having been killed in a yachting accident; around two years after my father had his fatal heart attack. Miranda had been in college.
Make that two things Miranda and I had shared: losing our daddies.
The deputy chief sighed, and none too happily. “That’ll make it hard to contact her next of kin.”
“I guess it will.”
The knot of responsibility in my belly had turned into an ache, and I tried not to dwell on the fact that Miranda had been alone in the end. She had one of the most famous faces (and cleavage) in all of Dallas, and yet she’d had no hand to hold when she needed it most.
It didn’t matter that I hadn’t been her bosom buddy.
That I’d barely seen her since prep school graduation had no bearing.
A girl I’d known had died.
And I’d likely been the last person who saw her alive.
The last one who could’ve helped, who might have made her change her mind…
Aw, crap.
That did it, plain and simple, and all my emotions flooded up to the surface.
Sobs rose in my throat, and I put my hands to my face.
Like a blubbering baby, I cried.
I hated the very sound of it, the way my shoulders shook, the helplessness I felt, and still I couldn’t stop until I let it all out.
“Here.”
At the gentle tap on my arm, I pried my damp palms from my cheeks and looked up as I sniffled.
Anna Dean pressed a paper towel into my hand.
“I couldn’t find a tissue,” she said. “This was the best I could do.”
“Thank you,” I murmured through snot and tears, grateful for her small act of kindness.
I blotted eyes and skin then blew my nose. When I was done, I balled the paper towel in my hand, not sure what to do with it. I felt blotchy and awkward, and wished ever so briefly that I was more like my mother, who always seemed so in control of every situation.
I finally stuffed the wadded towel in the pocket of my hoodie, and made a disgusted noise before I blathered on: “If I were Cissy, I’d have a proper hankie, folded and pressed, ready to go. But I can never seem to find a Kleenex when I need one. Sometimes I wonder if I wasn’t adopted after being left in a milk crate on the doorstep.”
The deputy chief momentarily shed her stoicism to offer a look of sympathy. “I’m sure even your mother gets rattled, Andrea. Everyone does, though some are better at hiding it than others.”
“It’s not even like Miranda and I were close, but I feel like I’ve been hit by a Mack truck,” I said wearily, and glanced back at the doorway, hearing voices and movement beyond the kitchen.
“You’ve gotten a shock, and it’ll take some time to sink in. I’ll call you again if I have any more questions.”
I turned to her, wiping my nose on my sleeve. “You want me to leave?”
If I’d been a normal person, I would’ve welcomed the chance to escape, to get out of a place so recently visited by the Grim Reaper. But I wasn’t done yet. I still had so many questions.
“If you wouldn’t mind, Andrea, I do have work to do.” The deputy chief crossed her arms over her chest, and her shiny badge winked beneath the kitchen lights, as if I needed a reminder of who she was and why she was there.
Instead of taking the hint and vamoosing, I flung an ultimatum at her: “Promise me you’ll investigate this further. Maybe things aren’t as clear cut as they seem on the surface. Miranda just wasn’t the kind of girl to give up so easily.”
“You said you weren’t very close to her, so maybe you didn’t know her as well as you think,” Deputy Dean said in such a logical way that I felt like nodding.
Only I didn’t agree. Or perhaps I didn’t want to.
I couldn’t believe that Miranda DuBois had woken up after I’d taken off last night and decided to off herself, just like that.
It wasn’t possible, was it?
Though what did I know about suicide? I’d never tried it, never even considered it, even when I’d felt the most alone.
Maybe Miranda had felt too damaged—too humiliated—to greet another day. Maybe it hadn’t taken much thought at all.
The stoic mask returned to Anna Dean’s face, and I wasn’t surprised when she said, “We’ll see what the medical examiner has to say, but the evidence is looking pretty strong from where I stand. I’m not one to rush to judgment, though, Andrea, and I won’t do it here. When the M.E. tells me the cause of death, that’s when I’m sure and not a moment before then.”
“Thank you.” At least she hadn’t dismissed my concerns. That had to count for something.
The deputy chief rounded the granite island. “Why don’t you stop by your mother’s before you go home? It might do you good to have someone to talk to about this.”
Oddly enough, the idea of seeing Cissy and telling her about Miranda didn’t sound all that atrocious. My mother could be hard on me sometimes, a tad overbearing and overprotective; but beneath the Chanel and pearls beat a truly caring heart. Even if she didn’t like to show it, Cissy felt things very deeply. I’d grown up thinking my mother was indomitable, sort of a modern day Joan of Arc who could stand in the fire and not flinch. I’d only begun to see how wrong I was over the past year.
Despite the fact that one would rarely ever glimpse Cissy Blevins Kendricks with a hair out of place, she bled red like everyone else. (Okay, so it was Coco Red by Chanel, but still.)
I slid off the stool, rubbing damp palms on my thighs. “You’re right,” I told Anna Dean. “I should go.”
There was nothing else I could do for Miranda besides.
It was too late for that.
Chapter 5
I shuffled out of Miranda’s duplex just as the medical examiner’s van pulled up, and I can’t say I was unhappy to miss what came after. I didn’t want to view Miranda’s lifeless corpse encased in a body bag as it was wheeled outside on a stretcher.
Long ago I’d decided it was far, far better to remember people as they were (i.e., alive and breathing). If you got a glimpse of them in death, you could never shake it from your mind.
Trust me on that.
And call me insensitive, but it felt even worse when the deceased was someone young with an interrupted life. It always left you to wonder what they could have become had they stuck around.
Though, most often, dying wasn’t a matter of choice.
Sometimes life derailed like a bad day at Amtrak, and there wasn’t much you could do except hang onto the handrails, grit your teeth, and ride it out.
I knew Miranda DuBois and I had never been tight, and maybe it shouldn’t have been so difficult for me to accept that she had chosen to check out of the Heartbeat Hotel way earlier than scheduled.
But it was.
I just couldn’t reconcile that a woman who’d braved her way through beauty pageants, debutante balls, sorority rush, and television news would end it all because she was no longer the prettiest girl in the room.
Sure, Miranda had been superficial and vain, but she could conjure up tough when tough meant winning instead of losing. Pageant queens were no pansies, despite how they fluttered around in glittery ball gowns and rhinestone tiaras. Miranda might’ve oozed charm on the surface, but she had the cunning of Donald Trump. She’d used what she had to get where she wanted to be. Was that such a bad thing?
She’d carved herself a place as a bona fide Dallas celebrity with a sandwich named after her at Who’s Who Burgers in Highland Park Village, and a cartoon rendering of her bodacious blond self hung on the walls of The Palm on Ross Avenue in the West End.
In the yearbook, Miranda had written her ambition as “To be famous,” and she’d achieved
that, for sure. Were a droopy lip and an eye tic worth giving up all that?
My answer would have to be, “No.”
Was I in denial?
Maybe that was it.
I was suffering from a severe case of guilt.
Most assuredly, I wasn’t taking Miranda’s alleged suicide well. My insides felt like ill-prepared oatmeal: mushy and full of lumps.
Daddy had always advised that I listen to my gut, and my gut was telling me there was more to what had happened to Miranda than anyone realized.
Until I better understood, I couldn’t get her out of my mind.
I nearly called Brian.
For my own peace of mind, I needed someone to hear me out and explain away my doubts, and Brian was one of the best listeners I knew.
But I didn’t do it.
I hated the thought of waking him up. He’d been through a lot lately, with his heavy workload at ARGH (aka Abramawitz, Reynolds, Goldberg, and Hunt, the primo defense firm in the city), not to mention a money-laundering case that had nearly done him in. Then his parents had popped into town, and we ended up taking them along to the Birthday Party from Hell at my mother’s.
Talk about trying times.
If Brian wasn’t such a Steady Eddie and natural-born Eagle Scout (much like my daddy had been), he would’ve needed to book a room at the funny farm.
Besides, what good would it do to jolt him out of a sound sleep to grouse about Miranda’s death?
He hadn’t even known her beyond watching her on the news on occasion. I’m sure he’d sympathize, but it wouldn’t mean anything to him, not the way it should.
Instead, I followed Anna Dean’s suggestion and headed over to Mother’s.
My mother had known Miranda. Even better, she knew me. I never thought I’d say this, but if anyone understood how I was feeling at the moment, it would be her.
As I left Miranda’s street, I passed a silver VW sedan whose redheaded driver bore a striking resemblance to Janet Graham; but I didn’t ease my foot from the gas pedal, not even a little. I wanted out of there. Getting as much distance between myself and Miranda’s place was foremost on my mind.
Too Pretty to Die Page 6
