So Miranda had arisen after I left her alone, at least long enough to shoot Janet an electronic message…and maybe open the front door to someone?
Likely someone she knew, too.
Geez, Louise, but this was getting crazier by the minute.
“Why would Miranda e-mail you?” I asked. “Was it about her behavior at the Pretty Party? Did she want you to kill the story?”
“No, it wasn’t that at all. In fact, her note didn’t make sense until a few minutes ago,” Janet answered, keeping her voice low. “She said she belonged to a hush-hush club that wasn’t what it seemed on the outside…that she had names and pictures…revealing stuff from secret parties where everyone got drunk and down and dirty. She was willing to hand over the owners on a silver platter, and she promised to forward the special password to get me into the members-only part of the Web site where they post the surprise location of the next gathering a mere hour before it starts. That’s how they keep out the riffraff, you see. She was ready to deal dirt, Andy. If I’d just had the chance to talk to her before—” Janet expelled a slow breath. “If I’d only reached out to her sooner, maybe I…”
“Maybe you what?” She sounded like me after I learned that Miranda had died. I was wracked with guilt, thinking I could’ve done something to change what had happened. “You think she’d still be alive?”
“I don’t know.” Janet tugged on a dangly earring. “But I’m sure now that her tirade at Delaney’s was the beginning of the end for her.” Her eyes flickered. “What if punishing Sonja for her messed-up face was only part of the reason she showed up at the Pretty Party?”
If I go down, I’m taking them with me. Then it’ll be all over, Andy. And I mean, all over. You’ll see.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
Janet looked equally grim. “My thoughts exactly. What if there were Caviar Clubbers there, too, and they felt as much a target as the good dermo?”
Yipes, yipes, yipes.
My arm hairs prickled.
If Janet’s guess was on the money—if there were really high-profile Dallasites merrily swinging at the Caviar Club’s hush-hush orgies—and if Miranda could blow the lid on it all, it screamed MOTIVE like a big, black headline.
It meant Miranda’s death was hardly as clear-cut as the police seemed to think.
I wondered about Miranda’s missing laptop—because it was missing if the cops couldn’t find it—and I imagined the possibility of any of those lurid pictures having been stored in her Dell notebook. The thing was right in plain sight when I’d left her duplex. I’d even glimpsed a photo on her screen saver. Miranda clinging to some dark-haired guy. What if someone had been there after I left, and swiped the thing after making sure Miranda would never rat on anybody?
My throat felt about to close in on me, not liking what that implied.
What if the owners of the Caviar Club knew she was about to blow the whistle?
Like Janet suggested, it might have been someone at the Pretty Party who’d witnessed Miranda going postal…and feared what her fury might further unleash.
So that someone had made sure Miranda wouldn’t talk.
Ever again.
“What if your gut’s on target, the cops are on the wrong path entirely, and she really and truly didn’t commit suicide?” Janet said. “You don’t believe she killed herself, Andy, and now I’m thinking you may very well be right. Someone else could have shot Miranda with her own .22. Someone who wanted to keep her quiet about the Caviar Club, very probably someone she knew.”
I wanted to agree with her.
But my mouth was too dry to respond.
Chapter 12
“We have to tell the police,” I said as soon as I could find the spit to speak, because there didn’t seem any way around it.
Anna Dean already suspected I was keeping things from the authorities, and I hadn’t been…I knew I wasn’t…until this very moment.
But I felt better, somehow, realizing I was no longer the only soul in town who had a reason to suspect there could be foul play involved in Miranda’s death.
Well, except for my mother. Though Cissy tended to see conspiracies everywhere she looked. She thought global warming was an evil plot by the folks at PETA to keep her from wearing mink.
“You have to call the deputy chief and explain about the Caviar Club and Miranda’s e-mail,” I insisted. “That could be important evidence in their investigation. It could change the course of things entirely—”
“Hold your horses, kemosabe.” Janet grabbed my arm and squeezed hard. “No, no, no. We’re not calling Anna Dean. We’re not blabbing about this to anybody, not your mother and not your boyfriend. You hear me? Not before I’ve had a chance to get my story. I’ve spent years penning cutesy prose about debutantes and society matrons and their teas and rodeos for charity, and I’ve finally got my claws into real juicy scoop, the kind that’ll get me on the front page, and I don’t mean the Society pages. Don’t blow it for me, Andy. I won’t let you do it.”
She definitely had her claws into me, and it hurt.
Her magenta fingernails dug into my skin, and I grimaced.
What the devil was up?
I’d never seen Janet go so bananas over a story before. She wrote and edited the Society pages for the Park Cities Press, not the New York Times. But the rag gave her clout in this town, entrée into the lives of the powerful and provocative. It was no secret how much she enjoyed the gig and the social perks it gave her. So the only thing I could imagine that would get her so worked up was if her job was threatened.
Jiminy Cricket.
Could that be it?
“Um, ouch,” I said, and wrested my arm from her grasp. As I rubbed the spot where her pink finger marks lingered, Janet gathered up her pad and pen and shoved them into her purse. “What is going on?” I asked her point-blank. “I’ve never seen you so obsessed over a feature.”
Or over her features, for that matter.
“Don’t ruin this for me, Andy,” she begged, her chin quivering. She had the most pitiful look in her eyes, and I knew then that something more was involved. “This is my shot to prove myself, and I need it.” She wet her lips—no small feat—adding, “Badly.”
“Why?” I said, feeling sure now that something precious hung in the balance. If it wasn’t her life, it had to be her position at the paper. “Is something going on at the PCP?”
Her shoulders stiffened. “Why would you say that? Have you heard anything?”
“No, no, nothing like that.” I nudged her with my knee. “C’mon, you can talk to me.”
She paused a long while, as if unsure how much to spill, then gave in with a sigh. “I’m not supposed to discuss this with anyone, all these SEC rules and what not. But the newspaper’s being bought out by a twenty-five-year-old trust fund baby who’s decided to become a media mogul, and he thinks that anyone over thirty is ancient.” She stopped to gnaw on her upper lip, chewing off most of her magenta lipstick. “He’s threatened to replace me with a younger model if I don’t start writing flashier, bigger pieces and skewing to a broader audience beyond the Slipper Club crowd.”
“A younger model?” I repeated. Janet was only in her early thirties. It wasn’t like she was ancient by any standards, except maybe some twenty-five-year-old guy’s.
“Younger, as in baby.” She snagged a compact from her bag and nervously powdered her nose. “His girlfriend is twenty-one, if she’s a day,” she said so bitterly that I winced. “And, yes, she’s a model, at least for the moment. She walks the runway for Kim Dawson. I’ve seen her. She weighs about eight ounces and wears at least two tons of makeup. I’m surprised her cheekbones don’t collapse under the weight of all the Bobbi Brown blush.”
“Wow, I had no clue all this was going on,” I said, because this was the first I’d heard about it. “I’m so sorry.”
Janet usually kept her work problems to herself, and I hadn’t seen this one coming.
I was so out of the lo
op with the Park Cities scene that I had no earthly idea some junior Mark Cuban was buying out the Press and threatening to ax my friend just because Janet was no anorexic model barely out of her teens.
“That’s why I need your cooperation, Andy. Keep mum about Miranda’s connection to the Caviar Club and the e-mail she sent me, please. Don’t even tell your mother,” she said, imploring. “Give me a couple days, that’s all I ask, then we can go to Anna Dean and tell her everything. But I have to have this story. I need to be the first reporter in town to break it.” She tucked her purse beneath her arm and stood, towering over me in all her magenta glory. “I’ll call you later, and we can talk strategy, okay? Tell your mom thanks for the invite to dinner, but I can’t stay. Too much to do and too little time. Ta-ta for now.”
She swooped down to air-kiss my cheeks before she hurried off, unlocking the door to the den and sweeping out in a rush of deep pink suit and red hair.
I sat a moment, my head still reeling from Janet’s confession, before I got to my feet and walked toward the door like a zombie.
I nearly ran smack into Malone, strolling in from the hallway.
He had a bottle of beer in hand—Moosehead, I knew at first glance, if the green of the glass and big moose mug on the label weren’t enough indication; and that’s what Mother had begun stocking in the fridge for Stephen. I reached for it and took a long hard swig before handing it back a good deal lighter.
But Malone being Malone, he didn’t even flinch. He was good at sharing, much better than I could ever be.
“I saw Janet leave,” he said. “What’s with her lips? Did she super-size ’em at the drive-through? Whew.”
“Don’t ask.” That was the least of my worries.
“You okay?”
I nodded, though I felt a little queasy, probably from trying to so quickly digest everything I’d learned in the past fifteen minutes. “My head is kinda reeling. This has been one long day.”
And it wasn’t over yet.
“Did you square things with Janet?”
“I guess I did.”
If agreeing to keep important information from the police regarding Miranda was squaring things.
I’d come to Mother’s to get myself out of a big mess, and I felt like I’d stepped in even deeper doo-doo in the process.
Poo.
“Well, I’m glad that’s settled, then. You need to relax, babe.” Malone gave me a soft smile.
“I still have to deal with Mummy Dearest,” I reminded him, though I didn’t have the spark to ream her out about her press conference antics, not anymore. Janet’s news had knocked the wind out of me.
Lucky for Mother.
“Cissy’s the one who sent me after you,” Brian said. “She mentioned something about a purse she wants you to see.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Don’t sweat it, sweet cakes. You’ll survive, you always do,” he assured me, catching my fingers up with his free hand and lacing them snugly into his. “Hey, I’ll bet your stomach’s on empty.” He gave a tug. “C’mon to the kitchen. Sandy set out a spread before she disappeared into her quarters.”
He uttered “quarters” with a hammy British accent, clearly mocking the term my mother used for Sandy Beck’s suite at the back of the house.
He thought it sounded proprietary, despite my telling him that’s what the rooms had been labeled when Mother and Daddy bought the house eons ago. I’d seen the copy of the typed-up listing Cissy kept in a carved cigar box in Daddy’s study. Heck, nearly everyone I’d grown up with in the Park Cities had homes with quarters, whether they used them for the live-in staff or turned them into gigantic closets.
“And you’ll get to meet Milton Fletcher,” Brian said, finishing off his beer as we headed toward the kitchen. “He seems like an interesting guy. Did you know he was a Navy SEAL like Stephen?”
“No, I didn’t.”
My mental file on Milton Fletcher was meager, save for the fact he was the private eye Cissy was apparently interviewing for the job of snooping into Miranda DuBois’s life and death. Oh, and that he owned the beat-up Ford parked in Mother’s driveway.
Hearing that he had a connection to Stephen made sense and had me figuring that my mother’s boyfriend was more responsible for his presence than Cissy.
I wondered if the former SEAL was in his late sixties, like Stephen, and if he was losing his hair or wore a toupee, or if he had artificial joints that got him wanded by Security at the airport.
As I had an image in my mind of a gray-haired gent whose knees creaked when he skulked around, searching for clues or stalking cheating spouses, it didn’t register at first that the man sitting at the kitchen table—across an almost empty platter of crustless sandwiches—chatting with Cissy and Stephen was, in fact, Milton Fletcher.
I mean, the dude wasn’t even wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches, for Pete’s sake. He had on a black turtleneck and a distressed leather jacket, and he was thirty-five, if he was a day, with the thickest head of ink-black hair I’d ever seen outside the Tibetan llamas at the petting zoo.
Stephen must’ve caught me standing there, gawking, as he rose from his seat, gestured toward the fellow and said, “Andrea, I’d like you to meet Milton Fletcher, a former naval officer and a superb investigator.”
On cue, the leather-jacketed dude stood and said, “Call me Fletch.”
Like that movie with Chevy Chase?
Well, heck, I guess it was better than calling him “Miltie.”
I’d kind of imagined that “Milton” and all its variations had become extinct, as least when it came to men under age fifty.
Maybe it was a vague beer buzz—hey, when you rarely drink, any alcohol imbibed tends to go to your head—but instead of keeping my Milton jokes to myself, I opened up my big, fat mouth and stuck my foot—nay, both my feet—right between my completely natural, un-super-sized lips.
“So you’re Milton Fletcher, huh? Did your mother have a thing for Murder, She Wrote? Or Milton Berle? You know, that comedian who liked to cross-dress? And what’s with the old Ford? Does the rust make it invisible so people can’t see when you’re tailing them?”
When I finished my sarcastic tirade, I snorted, one of those awkward, totally unfeminine pig-in-the-mud snorts that escaped after I thought I was being particularly funny or clever—often coming off as neither.
Cherchez la pork!
“Andrea!”
Cissy stared at me, horrified, surely assuming that every moment of my Little Miss Manners classes had dropped out of my sievelike brain. Stephen crossed his arms, settling back in his chair, a stifled grin on his face, surely afraid to laugh or risk incurring the wrath of Her Highness.
Thank goodness, Milton Fletcher smiled, too.
I was about to apologize, but I figured Miltie’s reaction was the next best thing to outright approval. Hence, no apology required.
See: Chapter Fifteen, Little Miss Manners Politically Incorrect Edition, Volume 66, “When It’s Okay to be Rude.”
“So you’re Andy, huh?” he asked, eyeballing me, despite the fact that Malone stood at my elbow. “Hmm, you’re not quite what I expected, either. Kind of odd for a chick to have a boy’s name, isn’t it? I’d imagined you as more of a linebacker, but you look all girl to me.”
Even with my two feet in it, my mouth fell wide open.
Malone stiffened, and I prayed he wouldn’t sling the beer bottle at Milton’s head; though he had better manners than I did, so I didn’t figure the smart-ass private eye was in any real danger.
“As for the old car,” good ol’ Miltie went on, as if he hadn’t said enough already, “it beats driving my Porsche Boxer on the job and having to park it in places where I’d be afraid to leave a bike.”
“You own a Porsche Boxer? I’ll bet it’s red, too,” I got out, gums flapping, and—God help mesnorted again just as loudly as before. “Is that symbolic of anything?”
Somehow, that only made Milton Fletcher’s smile
all the more wicked. “I don’t know,” he said. “If you want to play doctor—Dr. Freud, that is—perhaps you can interpret the meaning of my needing to drive an incredibly slick, fast machine.”
I could only stare at him and blink.
“My heavens,” my mother expelled, and Stephen coughed back his laughter.
Malone brushed my arm, and I heard a low growl in the back of his throat. At least, it sounded like a growl.
Fortunately, Milton Fletcher didn’t wait for an encore.
He came out of his seat, patted Stephen on the back and said, “I hate to interview and run, but I have work to do.” He glanced at my mother and tapped his jacket pocket. “Thanks for the retainer, Mrs. Kendricks. I’ll do my best to get to the heart of the matter, I promise, and I’ll keep you posted on anything I learn about Ms. DuBois.”
“Yes, yes, thank you, Mr. Fletcher—uh, Fletch—and I’m so sorry about my daughter,” Cissy apologized, scrambling to escort the P.I. from the room.
But not before he gave me a wink and said, “I’m not sorry about Andy at all. I like fire in a woman. It shows brain activity.”
He nodded at Brian before Mother whisked him off, with Stephen following on their heels.
“Did you get a load of that?” I plopped into a kitchen chair and made a face. “I can’t believe Mother’s hiring Miltie boy to investigate Miranda’s death. He probably spends half the day staring at himself in the mirror. Have you ever met anyone so cocky, right off the bat? ‘Fire in a woman? Brain activity?’ I think he needs someone to write him new lines, geez!”
Brian set his empty bottle on the table with a clank, straddled the chair and sat down, looking sulky. “He was flirting with you, Andy.” He raised his eyes to mine. “And you were flirting right back.”
Excuse me?
“I was flirting with him?” I’m not sure I’d ever sputtered before, but I was sputtering now. “I was doing no such thing.”
“I think you were.”
“Was not.”
“Were, too.”
If he’d stuck out his tongue, I wouldn’t have been surprised. He was acting like a big baby in size thirteen shoes.
Too Pretty to Die Page 14
