Too Pretty to Die

by Susan McBride

  I knew I wouldn’t be able to peel him away from the boob tube until the game was over. And since he always complained that the Blues were penalty magnets, dragging things out even longer, I guessed I’d have a couple hours of computer time before he even realized I wasn’t sitting right there beside him.

  I spirited away my plate heaped with pizza slices and my bottle of Sprite Zero, sneaking out of the room in time to hear Brian swearing at the ref.

  “Slashing? Are you effing kidding me? Did you leave your glasses at home, Mr. Magoo? Damn zebras!”

  I grinned, the sound of his protests music to my ears.

  The world could come to an end; and, as long as there was a hockey game on, Malone would never know it. He would arise from the sofa after the third period was over, find the condo crumbled around him, and go, “My God, what the heck happened?”

  I did not begrudge sports for the way they made most men oblivious to everything that went on around them.

  It gave us womenfolk time to get our own stuff done.

  Though I realized the clock was ticking in more ways than one.

  This time, I closed the door to my office before I plunked myself down at my desk.

  I turned the monitor back on and resumed the slide show of Miranda’s pictures, chewing on a slice of pizza as I watched each frame click slowly by.

  The computer shuffled through a good two dozen photos before I saw one than made me reach greasy fingers for the mouse to stop the visual parade.

  I squinted and leaned nearer, hovering over my keyboard so my nose was a mere eight inches from the screen.

  It was different from the ones before, darker, kind of hard to make out unless I used the “brighten” feature on my photo software.

  I had nothing that assured me these were tableaus from secret Caviar Club gatherings; but I had a knot in my gut as I stared at the monitor, something inside me saying, This is it.

  There was Miranda, in a dress cut so low her boobs half spilled out, her blond hair tousled on her shoulders, seated on a sofa between two men. They had their arms around her, and she had her arms around them. There was a smorgasbord of drinks and ashtrays spread on the low-set table in front of them, but that’s about all I could see.

  Whoever had used Miranda’s camera to take the shot must’ve had unsteady hands—or else she did the pics with a timer without adjusting the focus—as the quality of the photo was grainy; too blurred for me to make out either man’s features. They could’ve both resembled Mr. Potato Head, for all I knew.

  I forwarded to the next photograph, which was darker still, clicking further to the one beyond that and the one after.

  At about the fourth such image in the series, I paused. This was fuzzy, too, but I could discern that it was Miranda with those two men on the sofa, only she was locking lips with one, while the other seemed to be kissing her neck. Someone’s hands were on her breasts. I couldn’t exactly make out whose.

  Didn’t look like they were naked, not yet anyway, but the nature of the scene implied there was more to come, and I hoped to God whatever Miranda had done beyond what I could see wasn’t something she had chronicled on her digital camera by a third party—or was that a fourth party?

  I swallowed down my distaste and went ahead several additional pictures, finding another sequence of images that appeared to take place in a hot tub. If Miranda had a bathing suit on, I couldn’t see it. She held a drink above the foamy waters, and two men and another woman crowded around her.

  The lighting was no better than before, and I zoomed in on the faces of Miranda’s fellow partiers. They were so crowded together, faces turned toward Miranda, the two dudes on her either side nuzzling her neck, that I wasn’t sure if I would’ve recognized any of the three if they stood in a lineup.

  Though there was something about one of the men that jiggled a nerve in me.

  He was blond and his shoulders well-muscled, but that’s about all I could discern definitively.

  A name hovered at the back of my mind. Lance Zarimba.

  Could it be? But he was Sonja Madhavi’s boyfriend, right? So why would he be messing with Miranda at a Caviar Club party?

  The woman who was not Miranda was leaning in toward the blond man—kissing him on the cheek, from the looks of things—so I couldn’t see much of her beyond a fuzzy ear and throat.

  Still, I thought I’d seen enough.

  I froze the slide show and slumped back in my chair, not sure I wanted to go through any more of Miranda’s digital film.

  Could be these pics had zip to do with the Caviar Club and were just from Miranda’s attempts at looking for Mr. Goodbar, but my gut told me better.

  Geez, Miranda, why?

  I couldn’t help asking.

  Why couldn’t a beautiful woman with enough class to have been a symphony debutante and enough chutzpah to be named runner-up Miss America find true love without having to get pawed by a pair of sleazy horn dogs in the process?

  Call me a prude, but it flipped my stomach to think that Miranda DuBois had been going to these Caviar Club maul-fests, getting drunk and hooking up with guys—two at a time from the looks of things—when she could’ve had anyone.

  Or so it had seemed, looking at her life from the outside in.

  It was hard to believe that the baton-spinning, pageant-winning girl I’d known most of my life—and who I’d imagined had more self-esteem than anyone on the planet—would have wanted to debase herself by participating in these alleged sex parties.

  But apparently she had.

  The “you’re dumped” letter from the Caviar Club proved that she’d been involved.

  So did the e-mail tip to Janet.

  I could hear my inner feminist railing, But women should be able to enjoy the same kind of uninhibited, uncommitted, meaningless intimacy that men have for centuries. What’s wrong with being sexually liberated? This is a free country, isn’t it?

  Just because some men were dogs didn’t mean women had to lie down with fleas to be their equals.

  God help us all if it did.

  Weren’t we supposed to be the smarter sex? (Excluding rogue fembots like Jessica Simpson and Paris Hilton, of course.)

  My cell phone rang, and I dug it out of my bag before the Def Leppard ring tone had played more than twice. I recognized the number off the bat.

  It was Janet.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I think I’ve got it,” she said in a rush. “I’ve figured out a way to get a ringer into the Caviar Club. I’ve been studying the Web site, or at least the part I can get into with the basic password, and it looks like there are two ways for someone to become a member. You know the first.”

  “Submitting your picture,” I replied dutifully.

  “Well, it seems that there are two layers of Caviar Club membership,” Janet dashed on. “The first level is for newbies, the Sevrugas, who don’t have control over much of anything. But the second tier, the Belugas, they can invite someone to a party without that invitee having to go through the whole photo evaluation process. I think Miranda was a Beluga. She must’ve been, or else she wouldn’t have tempted me with the secondary password. She couldn’t have known it. Only the Belugas can get to the message board with the party information. The Sevrugas have to get it through the grapevine.”

  Ding-ding-ding.

  A bell went off in my brain, and it wasn’t the Domino’s man at the door.

  Janet continued to yap, but I cut her off before the thought slipped away.

  “Did you say Sevruga and Beluga?” I asked, and my tone was no-nonsense.

  “Yeah, so what?”

  I didn’t exactly tell her that Mother had swiped Miranda’s bag out of her Jag before the police got it, but I did mention finding what I’d thought was a partial shopping list of Miranda’s, a torn bit of paper with Sevruga and Beluga written on it, both expensive caviars, though Sevruga was not quite as pricey as Beluga. I noted, too, the other words that appeared beside each:
Caspian and Malossol, respectively.

  At which point Janet uttered, “No way. Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” What, she didn’t believe me all of a sudden? “Sevruga Caspian and Beluga Malossol.”

  “Andy,” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper. “The password to the general area of the Caviar Club’s Web site is ‘Caspian.’”

  My ears perked up and I pressed the cell closer to my face, as if that would make her voice louder, make everything crystal clear.

  “Hold on a sec.”

  I heard a tap-tap-tap, like she was typing on her keyboard. Then she paused, and all was quiet for a bit until I caught her breathy, “Oh, my God.”

  “What?”

  “It’s the secondary password, Andy. ‘Malossol.’ It gets you into the next level of the Web site, into the private board where they post where each party will be held a mere hour before it starts.” She sounded out of her mind giddy. “I’m in, don’t you get it? I can find out where to go, get my ringer in, and snag my story. Are you at your computer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go to the Caviar Club’s Web site, Andy. You’ve gotta check this out.”

  So I did as I was told, prompted by Janet with appropriate passwords all the way, until I could glimpse the mission statement of the C.C., namely that the purpose of the so-called social club was for beautiful people to mix and mingle with other beautiful people, with invitations extended either by certain anointed Belugas or by submission of photographs through the Web site to be evaluated by the Caviar Club’s owners.

  It went from bad to worse.

  There was a page of professional photographs of a selected cast of members, all of the men in tight T-shirts with puttied hair and all-weather tans, and the women with shirts unbuttoned to the navel, jeans slung as low as they could go, often posed with each other in suggestive situations.

  Social club, my aunt Henrietta.

  Janet was right. It was all about sex.

  Cissy belonged to more social clubs than I could name—garden clubs, bridge clubs, the Junior League, the AAUW—none of which involved being photographed straddling a slicked-up dude licking her throat.

  Ugh.

  “You recognize any of the faces in those photos?” Janet asked when I made a remark about how sleazy the poses were.

  I told her no and was about to segue into Miranda’s camera and what I’d found so far—namely, the photos I felt sure were taken when the Caviar Club parties were really swinging, so to speak—but Janet didn’t let me get another word out.

  She nearly pierced my eardrum when she shrieked, “It just went up, oh, God, it went up!”

  Here we went again.

  It was like talking to my mother, or playing twenty questions.

  “What’s up, for Pete’s sake?”

  It was as though I’d pricked a balloon and all the air was whooshing out.

  “There’s a party tonight in a rented-out club in Deep Ellum, and it starts in an hour. So we’d better get moving, huh, Andy? There’s so much to do and so little time! Can you get over to my place pronto? I’ll call the stylist for the paper and have her bring over all her tools and makeup, plus a few outfits from the latest fashion shoot, since I’ve seen what’s in your closet and it ain’t pretty. We have to get you looking good enough to eat, or no one will believe that a Beluga would’ve tapped you for membership…”

  Get me looking good enough to eat?

  Hello? Did she just insult my wardrobe?

  Tap me for membership?

  Janet expected me to be her ringer inside the Caviar Club?

  How much crack had she been smoking?

  “No way,” I said, but she headed me off like a verbal bumper car.

  “See you in ten,” she chirped, quickly adding, “Oh, and leave the boyfriend at home.”

  “Janet!” I screamed into my cell, but it was too late.

  She’d hung up.

  Chapter 15

  It wasn’t hard getting out of the condo without raising Malone’s suspicion about what I was up to, since I took off while the hockey game was still late in the second period (with the Blues down 2 to 1).

  Ipso facto, he barely took note of the fact that I’d grabbed my sweat jacket and purse before toddling out the door, though I’d done the whole “’Bye, sweetie, have to run to Janet’s for a while, but I’ll be back later. Don’t wait up.”

  I had grave doubts he’d even registered where I’d said I was going. If anyone gave him a pop quiz after the Stars had finished pummeling the Blues (which I assumed they would, since Malone constantly complained about the slump his hometown boys were in this season), he’d probably squint up at the ceiling, scratch his chin and murmur, “Hmm, did she go to her mother’s? No? Am I warm?”

  That’s why God invented cell phones—so distracted boyfriends watching sports could hunt down missing wives and girlfriends once the final whistle blew. It was then, and only then, that the levels of testosterone came way down, the dudes popped out of their beer-induced comas, looked around, and realized their women had disappeared.

  If I were an alien set to conquer Earth, I’d do it during the Super Bowl or the Stanley Cup finals. Less resistance.

  I only left the condo under duress, of course, as I would’ve rather stayed at home with Malone and the hockey game, especially after having had such a lousy day.

  Reluctantly, I ventured outdoors, dragging my feet as I headed toward my Jeep, and let myself in. I climbed up behind the wheel, slinging my purse to the passenger seat, where it landed with a gentle thud. It didn’t contain much besides my wallet, a tube of lip balm, and my cell phone.

  Oh, yeah, and Miranda’s memory card.

  I’d already decided to let Janet copy the photos before I turned the tiny disk over to the police in the morning.

  Why not? I’d asked myself.

  So long as Ms. Society Snoop promised not to print them in the paper. What else was I going to do with them besides hand them over to Anna Dean, who’d probably discount them anyway, seeing as how the cops were so intent on labeling Miranda’s death a suicide? And I would never show them to my mother, considering how much she wanted to believe the Miranda DuBois she’d watched grow up was practically a saint. I couldn’t imagine Debbie Santos seeing them, either. She’d surely rather remember her daughter in pigtails and pinafores than with two men kissing her in a hot tub.

  Though I knew the shots would give Janet goose bumps, as they’d further substantiate her theory that Miranda had sent her that e-mail threatening to bring down the snooty membership of the entire Caviar Club.

  I had a pipe dream that maybe such a gift would absolve me of any debts I owed La Graham, so I wouldn’t have to go through with infiltrating the Caviar Club party that started at ten, which might as well have been midnight as far as I was concerned.

  Seriously, ten o’clock was my bedtime.

  Malone and I could barely keep our eyes open once the evening news came on. It was a struggle for us to stay awake long enough to find out the weather forecast.

  Sad but true.

  Though if Janet had a mind to make me do this thing for her, I didn’t think pleading an early bird curfew was going to have any effect.

  Janet Rutledge Graham had been reared in the Park Cities by a mother as tough as mine, and she wasn’t one to suffer wimps gladly.

  So I had no choice but to suck it up and be the kind of friend who’d offer support in her time of need, just as she’d done for me plenty of times.

  If I had to endure a glamour puss makeover so I could fake my way through drinks with a bunch of Big D’s sex-starved pretty boys and girls, surely I would survive. I’d had to wear hot pants and stuff my bra to help a prep school chum in trouble, so vamping it up to pump information out of so-called Sevrugas and Belugas at the Caviar Club couldn’t be much worse, could it? Give me an hour and I’d get enough for Janet to write her danged story. Then I’d get the hell out of there, before anyone could say “Louis Vuitton.”r />
  Janet certainly wouldn’t have a problem with that, eh?

  Well, I’d find out soon enough, since traffic was light heading south on Central Expressway, and it was just another ten minutes to her place.

  Her apartment was well south of my Prestonwood digs. The 1940s-era complex in Knox-Henderson had been renovated and relandscaped, so it was truly sitting pretty. Her hardwood floors and working fireplace were drop-dead cool, though I figured there was just about a two-week window in January when burning wood seemed feasible. The gentrified area where Janet lived bordered my mother’s beloved Highland Park and was a hop, skip, and a jump from Deep Ellum, where there were plenty of clubs and restaurants, one of which was playing host to the Caviar Club’s hush-hush party this evening.

  I wondered if Janet lived close enough to walk.

  Or, rather, run, since that’s likely how fast I’d be moving once I decided to hightail it out of the desperate singles soiree.

  The power of positive thinking.

  Uh-huh.

  I hung onto that tendril of optimism, thin though it was, as I parked the Jeep, locked it tight, and dragged myself toward Janet’s apartment. She flung open the door before I had even reached the Welcome mat, reaching out to yank me inside.

  “Where’ve you been? We’ve been waiting on you forever,” she said, as if it had taken two days for me to get there and not twenty minutes.

  I barely had a chance to dig the Baggie with the memory card from my purse and hand it over to Ms. J, explaining what it was and suggesting she upload the party pics before I gave the minidisk and all its files to Deputy Chief Dean come tomorrow.

  “Photos from club bashes? Are you sure?” she’d practically squealed at me, and I admitted that I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but I had a strong feeling.

  “Your intuition is working overtime lately, Andy, but then I’m a lot like Oprah. I say we should listen closely to that voice inside us,” she remarked, then reconsidered and added, “only not the one that tells us we’re fat. That one sucks.”

  What about the one that told you to get your lips inflated? I wanted to ask. But I didn’t.