Too Pretty to Die

by Susan McBride

  “Can’t wait to take a look at these babies!”

  After she’d gleefully snatched the Baggie from my hands—and before she disappeared into her bedroom, where she kept her computer—she quickly introduced me to an ultrathin woman with fluffy blond hair and perfectly outlined eyes and lips named Suzy Bee, the stylist from the Park Cities Press, who set me down on a chair in Janet’s living room where track lighting rained down on my un-made-up skin.

  “You’re not going to cover up my freckles, are you?” I asked, because I liked my freckles. They’re the only things that kept me from being so ghostly white that I appeared as though I spent my daylight hours in a coffin.

  “Just relax,” Suzy told me, while she whipped open a multitiered makeup case and began slapping foundation and powder on my face as I closed my eyes and winced.

  I hated makeup with a passion. The most I wore on average days was mascara and lip gloss, never base, which had always felt like a face mask. If I’d aspired to be a clown, I would’ve joined the circus. If Mary Kay Ash were alive, I know she’d put a pox on me for saying so, but I just liked my skin to breathe.

  “Sit still, Andrea, and don’t scrunch up your forehead, please,” Suzy commanded, and I tried to relax beneath the bath towel she’d draped around me. Like she was afraid she’d splatter her sparkly pink eye shadow on my sweatshirt and ruin it forever.

  Every now and then Suzy would instruct me to open my eyes and look up or look down as she lined my lashes with a pencil, then layered on the mascara. My nose started to itch, but I was afraid to reach up and scratch; so I crinkled it, feeling like Elizabeth Montgomery in Bewitched. Only if I’d really been Samantha, I could’ve wrinkled my nose and zapped myself out of that chair and into my living room, next to Malone on the sofa in front of the hockey game.

  Man, but witches had it made.

  “We’re almost done,” Suzy said after what seemed an eternity, though I kept my eyes open at this point, my attention directed on the door to Janet’s bedroom where she was silently—way too silently—checking out the images from Miranda’s digital camera.

  I’d expected to hear a few oohs or aahs, kind of similar to the noises one made when watching Fourth of July fireworks.

  Instead, nada.

  “I did Miranda DuBois’s makeup once,” Suzy Bee remarked out of the blue, and my focus instantly diverted.

  “You knew Miranda?” I said, realizing then that she must’ve overheard my conversation with Janet about the photos.

  It was hard to be quiet when Ms. Megaphone was anywhere in the vicinity. Janet’s pipes operated at a decibel level more akin to a jet airplane engine, twice that when she was on her cell phone.

  Suzy Bee tossed her head, flipping light blond hair from her eyes and screwing her mouth up in concentration as she lined my lips. “It was for a photo shoot,” she said, talking while she worked. “She was having new head shots done by Esther Gorman, you heard of her?”

  I nodded, knowing full well that Esther Gorman was one of the hottest photogs in Big D. “She shot my mother for the PCP’s ‘Best Dressed’ issue,” I said, adding, “ten years in a row.” Until they’d retired Cissy to their Hall of Fame.

  After Suzy Bee advised me not to move my head or risk the outline of my lips stretching up to my nose, she finished what she’d started to say. “Anyway, I did Ms. Dubois’s hair and makeup for her shoot for D Magazine, and she was as sweet as pie. Didn’t say a bad word about anyone, except that horn dog Dick Uttley.” Suzy pressed her glossy lips into a sour-looking moue. “That man wears more pancake than anyone I’ve ever worked on, and he still thinks he’s God’s gift to women. He pinched my ass while I was doing his face for a PSA for PBS.”

  “Eww,” I said in sympathy.

  I pictured the fatherly dude with the wrinkles and shellacked hair who so earnestly delivered the evening news, and I wondered if he’d tried to play footsies with Miranda while they were on-air. Then my crazy brain went beyond that thought to another: Would it have been possible for Dick to buy his way into the Caviar Club to take a nibble? Or did he get enough action on his own, utilizing his anchorman persona to reel in the piranhas? Because I knew there were plenty of piranhas swimming around this city’s fish pond to make for ample male bait.

  “Ms. DuBois had such pretty skin,” Suzy went on, though I’d only been half listening. “It was like porcelain, really, not an enlarged pore to be seen. She was worried about her eyelids sagging and her lips being too small. She said she’d gotten some e-mails about how old she looked on high definition, and she was thinking of having some work done. I told her she was nuts. She looked beautiful just the way she was.”

  Oh, Miranda had some work done, all right, I mused, thinking Suzy was right. Ms. DuBois should’ve left well enough alone. If she had, she might still be around.

  Instead, she’d gone to Dr. Sonja, who’d truly fixed her clock, as my daddy used to say. It wasn’t a good thing.

  I wouldn’t have been surprised if Debbie Santos decided to slap a big ol’ lawsuit on the Dermatologist-to-the-Deluded right quick after her plane landed from Brazil, and I wouldn’t blame her a bit.

  While she was at it, maybe she’d sue the Caviar Club, too, for rejecting her daughter and pushing Miranda into such a state that she’d put her life at risk by threatening to expose people who had everything to lose if she ratted them out.

  At least that was my take on it.

  Though I knew the Highland Park P.D. felt differently. About how Miranda’s life had ended, I mean. No one could refute that both Dr. Sonja’s botched injections and the “you’re fired” letter from the Caviar Club had been mitigating factors in Miranda’s death. Where my conclusion differed from Anna Dean and her merry band of Highland Park detectives wasn’t in how Miranda had died, but in who’d done it.

  “…she talked about how attracted she was to some guy she’d met at a party, but she wasn’t sure it would work out because he wasn’t altogether available,” Suzy Bee was saying.

  Again I snapped to attention.

  “Miranda was seeing an unavailable guy?” I asked, not an easy trick while Suzy applied two thousand layers of lipstick. “As in, he was married?”

  “I didn’t pry.” Suzy shrugged her skinny shoulders. “That’s all she said and then she changed the subject real quick.”

  Unavailable, huh?

  Like her co-anchor Dick Uttley, I thought, except that didn’t make sense. Suzy had just mentioned Miranda trashing him. Unless Miranda realized she’d slipped when she blabbed about wanting someone she couldn’t have—if that someone was her married co-anchor—and covered up by talking smack about Dick.

  I shuddered at the very thought of Miranda shagging Richard Uttley.

  Did I say “Eww” already?

  Then again, I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to do the horizontal mambo with Larry King, and he’d been married, like, four million times.

  “A little flat ironing to smooth out your hair, and we’re done, hon,” Suzy Bee promised, and I breathed a sigh of relief that this torture was nearly over.

  How long had I been sitting in that chair?

  Half an hour? Forty-five minutes?

  Was the hockey game over yet, and was Malone wondering if I’d run away from home?

  And where the heck was Janet?

  I still hadn’t heard a peep from the bedroom. She must’ve been going through every one of Miranda’s photographs with a fine-tooth comb, or at least with the zoom feature.

  “Jan?” I called out as Suzy tugged on my hair with a flat iron and I felt the heat against my neck. “Are you alive in there?”

  “Give me five,” my long lost friend hollered back while Suzy mussed my hair with her fingers.

  I glanced at my purse, planted on Janet’s dining room table, not quite within an arm’s length, and I willed my cell to ring, figuring it was about time Malone surfaced from the Stars-Blues game and started looking for me. Unless the Blues had caught up and they were headed for ove
rtime, even a shootout. Tack the postgame onto things and it could be close to midnight before Brian realized I wasn’t sitting at my computer and started looking for me.

  Nice to know I was so sorely missed.

  “Your face is done,” Suzy said, whipping the towel from around my neck and tugging me out of the chair. “Now it’s time to dress you properly.”

  Since when were jeans and a sweatshirt not proper?

  “We’ll have you looking chic in two minutes flat!” Suzy promised, dragging me over to where she had clothing on hangers neatly laid over the back of Janet’s sofa. She picked up a bright red jersey dress, shook her head and muttered, “Too flashy.” Then she held up a pearl gray jewel-necked sweater and tweedy A-line skirt, squinted at me, and declared, “Too prim and proper. Janet said you need to look bedable.”

  Bedable?

  Seriously, was that a word?

  Without further ado, she grabbed up a creamy cable knit dress with pearl buttons up the back and a Peter Pan collar that had a Ralph Lauren label.

  “You wear size seven shoes, right? That’s what Janet told me.” She pushed a pair of black spiky-heeled leather boots at me as I stood there, gawking. “It’s the naughty prep school girl look,” she explained. “Men love it.”

  I suddenly felt the urge to sing Britney Spears’s “Oops!…I Did It Again,” which surely should be punishable by an afternoon in detention, bare minimum.

  Oy vey.

  Despite my better judgment, I took the clothes in my arms and started to head toward the bathroom.

  But Suzy zipped around in front of me and cut me off.

  “You can change right here,” she said. “I don’t want you catching sight of yourself in the mirror, not just yet, and you might mess up your hair besides. You’ll need me for the back buttons, too.”

  I’d been dressing myself since I was five, but I guess that didn’t matter much. The skeptical side of my brain imagined this as part of Janet’s evil plan to ensure I didn’t run screaming out the door.

  “Fine,” I said.

  But I did turn around modestly while I changed in the middle of Janet’s living room. Suzy Bee fussed and fluttered every step of the way until I was done, the pointy-toed boots pinching my feet and the Peter Pan collar fairly strangling me.

  “Violà!” Suzy the Stylist cried, and stepped back to admire her handiwork. Then she shuffled me around Janet’s furniture until I came face-to-face with a full-length mirror. “So?” she asked, peering at me over the top of my right shoulder. “What do you think?”

  I stared at the girl in the mirror, feeling like I should introduce myself, because she wasn’t someone I knew.

  Certainly, she wasn’t me.

  Chapter 16

  The woman gazing back at me from the silvered glass had eyes that were almond-shaped and smoky, twice as big as they ordinarily were; her cheeks looked smoothed and defined by a subtle blush of bronzy pink. Her mouth was luscious as dewy strawberries, parted lips an earthy pink against white teeth. And her hair…good God, where had the unruly mess of wavy brown gone? And it wasn’t bundled in a hasty ponytail, no siree, Bob. Against all odds, it actually appeared chic, smooth yet messy, sexy and tousled and framing a heart-shaped face in a way I’d only seen on airbrushed women pouting from the covers of fashion magazines.

  As for the Girl in the Mirror’s attire, it was as far removed from sweatshirts and jeans as one could get. The clingy knit dress actually showed off curves instead of hiding them, and the four-inch spike heels on the boots suggested tall and slinky rather than petite.

  “What have you done to me?” I wailed, and Suzy blinked, obviously taken aback. “I look freaking gorgeous!”

  I was groaning instead of raving, but it wasn’t out of disrespect for Suzy’s handiwork. It was because the woman in the mirror wasn’t Andrea Blevins Kendricks. Not the one I recognized, and I should know best.

  It was the chichi countenance of someone else entirely. Someone who’d obliterated every tiny brown freckle with makeup and had fussed with her hair until each strand did as it was told; someone who’d spent forty-five minutes getting groomed to death by a stylist from the Fashion section of the newspaper and had turned into a complete and total stranger in the process (at least on the surface).

  God help me if my mother ever caught me looking like this.

  She’d start expecting way too much from me, and I wasn’t about to waste half my life prettying myself up just to go grocery shopping, as was the Dallas way (unless one had servants to hit the Tom Thumb for them, which was most definitely the Beverly Drive society matron’s way).

  “So do you like it? Or don’t you?” Suzy was asking, though any attempt at a response on my part was interrupted by a very loud wolf whistle.

  Odd, since there was no construction site in Janet’s apartment that I was aware of.

  I turned my head with its carefully tousled ’do to see that Janet had emerged from her bedroom, big mouth agog.

  “Well, butter my biscuit!” she said, apparently as shocked as I was by the transformation. “I can’t even believe it’s you, Kendricks. You look like a…”

  “Fraud,” I finished for her, because it was the truth.

  “Not what I was about to say at all”—she wagged a finger at me—“no, no, you look like a high-class babe that the Caviar Club would be itching to add to its roster.” She gave Suzy a thumbs-up. “You done good, Ms. Bee. I wasn’t sure the transformation could be accomplished, but I knew if anyone could turn the Goodwill Girl into Beluga Barbie, it was you.”

  Goodwill Girl? Beluga Barbie?

  Geez.

  “You promised a private meeting with Manolo when he’s in town, don’t forget,” Suzy chattered as Janet urged the reed-thin blond and her bait box full of makeup toward the door. “And backstage passes at the Tom Ford show—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m good for it, Ms. Bee, no worries,” Janet said as she hustled the stylist out of the apartment and shut the door. Dramatically, she leaned against it, letting out a big sigh. “I thought she’d never leave.” She took a few giant steps in my direction then stood before me, wringing her hands. “Oh, God, Andy, this whole thing’s getting crazier than I imagined. Did you look at all the pictures on Miranda’s camera from the parties?”

  I thought I’d already told her that I hadn’t, but I shook my head anyway.

  She exhaled slowly then said, “Girl, we need to talk before I send you out to the barracudas.”

  “Don’t you mean the Belugas?” I tried to joke, but she obviously wasn’t in a joking mood.

  “Sure, that’s what I meant,” she replied, and reached for my arm. “C’mere and chat a sec before you go.” She tugged me toward the sofa but changed her mind and waved me up again. “Wait, you’ll wrinkle, and we can’t have that. Can you just lean against the wall or something? I’ll be quick.”

  “I’ll stand,” I said, not inclined toward wall-leaning. “Well, go on.”

  I was ready to get my Mata Hari act over with, though I had nothing against a good briefing before I infiltrated enemy turf.

  Janet didn’t sit for long, either. She bounced off the couch, doing a bit of pacing as she talked about the photographs on Miranda’s memory card, starting off with the fact that she was as sure as I was that the pictures were taken at Caviar Club parties. But Janet had some evidence to back up her instincts.

  “I zoomed in on half a dozen shots, and the Caviar Club’s watchdog, Theresa Hurley, was in the background of several of them. She’s holding a clipboard in one,” Janet told me. “Like she was doing her bulldog routine, checking off names from a list.”

  Speaking of clipboards, how could I ever slip in without the Bulldog knowing right off the bat that I didn’t belong?

  I posed the question to Janet, but she waved it off like it wasn’t important.

  “Unfortunately, I really didn’t see anything much more than vaguely blackmailworthy. It takes an awful lot to shock these days,” she said, and sniffed. �
��Let’s see, we’ve got a couple of city councilmen in semicompromising positions, and several party girl heiresses going at it with each other.” She shrugged. “Nothing for anyone to get whipped into a frenzy about, much less drive them to commit a murder.”

  I had a feeling I knew why the big bombshells were missing.

  “The really incriminating stuff must be on Miranda’s laptop,” I said, voicing my thoughts aloud. “And whoever went over to her house last night and shot her realized that. They could have even glimpsed something on the screen”—as I had—“while the laptop was out on the coffee table.”

  “Well, that we’ll never be able to prove, any more than we can prove Miranda didn’t shoot herself,” Janet said, and I glumly agreed. “Still, we’ve got something, Andy.” She sat up straighter. “Did you recognize anyone when you took a gander at the jpegs?” she asked, and there was a gleam in her eye that told me she had.

  “I thought the blond guy in the hot tub with Miranda looked a little familiar,” I said. “It was hard to tell, but he reminded me of Dr. Sonja’s beau. I’m not sure about anyone else. It was kinda hard to see.”

  “The blond dude with his tongue in her ear looked familiar? I’ll bet he did.” Janet laughed. “Yeah, my eagle eyes spotted Lance Zarimba, too. I wonder how Dr. Botox feels about her dude messing around with other women. Miranda DuBois in particular, considering she and Dr. Sonja were hardly pals.”

  “Oh, Lordy,” I breathed, considering all the implications.

  Could Lance have been the “unavailable” man that Miranda had babbled about while Suzy Bee did her make up for D Magazine?

  “There’s definitely a story there,” Janet remarked, and, boy, did she look pleased with herself. Her overinflated lips had curled up into a Cheshire cat grin. “It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? I mean, if Dr. Madhavi’s boyfriend belonged to the Caviar Club, did she know about it? Or is she a part of things, too?”

  “Whoa.”

  “Whoa, indeed.”

  Take about a tangled web. I don’t think they get any more complicated than a love triangle, particularly when one of those involved has a medical degree.