Green Hoodie was frantically yanking out cords and cables from the hard drive of Rhonda’s computer. Wearing rubber gloves, he worked quickly, obviously anxious to get the job done. Why a hard drive; why not cash or jewelry? As he wrestled the hard drive free from the niche beneath the computer table, his hood slipped back, revealing his face. I was certain I’d never seen him before.
The guy was a thief. My first thought was to phone the police. I snatched my new phone out of my coat pocket and turned it on, then hesitated. Phone the police and I’d be in trouble for illegally crossing a police line. Trumbull was sure to bust me for that.
Then I remembered the phone’s photo option. Crouching beneath the window, I raised the camera and pointed the lens at where I thought the guy’s head would be. The instant I snapped the picture I jerked my arm down. Had the guy noticed the flash? I tensed myself to run, but nothing happened. Maybe there’d been too much sunlight out here for him to have caught the flash.
When I dared risk another peek into the room, it was empty. A second later I heard the back door slam. I froze. Before I could decide what to do, Green Hoodie strode around the side of the house, his backpack sagging with the weight of the hard drive. He didn’t spot me crouching behind a porch pillar.
I felt a sudden, wild impulse to jump out and confront him. He might be swiping crucial evidence that would prove Labeck’s innocence. Fortunately, the craven coward in me creamed the Goody Two-shoes. I watched as the man hurried down Rhonda’s driveway, then jumped on a motor scooter parked at the curb. He tossed the ad papers into the street, started the scooter, and sped away. The scooter’s engine made no more noise than an electric shaver and barely left a trail of exhaust on the quiet street.
By the time I got in my car, coaxed it to start, and started driving up and down the nearby streets hunting for him, Green Hoodie was long gone. My first big clue—and I’d muffed it.
What about the photo, though? I brought it up while I waited at a traffic light.
I had him! It was a badly lit photo, shot at a sinking-ship angle, but I’d snapped the guy’s face in three-quarters profile. Short, sandy hair, pale, slanted eyes, thin mouth, goatee, a face that was all hard planes and angles. Was this the face of Rhonda’s murderer?
Obviously, he knew his way around Rhonda’s house. He could have let himself into her house on Saturday night and strangled her.
I couldn’t just sit on this. It was important, I was certain of it. The light turned green and I stepped on the gas, unsure where to go. The right thing to do was to find Vince Trumbull, show him the photo, explain how I’d gotten it, and demand that he track down the guy.
Great idea, Maguire. Trumbull would blow off the photo, claiming I’d faked it. Then he’d have me strip-searched and thrown into a cell.
So not the police. Then who?
Bonaparte Labeck.
Despite the fact that he was overbearing, arrogant, and sexist, Labeck had a first-rate mind. He knew weird but useful things, like what a wind vector was, or why the exact dimensions of pi stretched on to infinity, or how all the parts of a car engine worked. With Labeck’s technical expertise and my intuitive brilliance, we could bust this thing wide open.
But how could I find him?
Even if I knew I wouldn’t tell you. That’s what the big snot had said.
Fine. Who needed him? I was going to track down Hard-Drive Hoodie myself. I studied the photo again. Something unpleasant about the face, a sort of built-in sneer. He looked like the kind of guy whose middle-school science project was studying the effects of burning up ants with a variety of magnifying glasses of different strengths.
He was not the kind of guy I cared to meet in a dark alleyway. He didn’t look like a man who would fall for my usual weapons: batted eyelashes and bullshit.
For this guy I would want knockout gas, heavy-duty handcuffs, and a bulletproof vest. Maybe a Taser.
Chapter Twenty-two
If you’re Mentos and he’s Diet Coke and the two of you don’t erupt, your sexual chemistry is not working.
—Maguire’s Maxims
“No offense, doll, but you look like hell,” Magenta said.
“Thanks a lot.”
“When was the last time you slept?”
Just thinking about sleep brought on a huge, jaw-crunching yawn. “I was up until four this morning.”
Magenta shook his head. “Wild-goose chase, baby.”
“I’m not quitting,” I said stubbornly.
I was lying—I was thinking very seriously about quitting.
I’d spent every spare second trying to ferret out Green Hoodie’s identity. I’d gone to the Weekly Advertiser office and shown his photo to all the employees, but no one had recognized him.
I’d tapped in to the criminal network I’d hooked up with in prison, using up my miserly hoard of GoMo minutes phoning shady acquaintances who dwelled in the world of housebreakers and second-story men. No luck.
I’d gone back and talked to Fran Schnabble, who claimed not to recognize the guy in the photo.
I’d spent so much time on my laptop I’d dozed off and had a nightmare that my eyeballs had turned into the two O’s in the Google logo.
Maybe if I could have devoted all my time to the hunt, I might have come up with a lead, but I had to squeeze my sleuthing into the hours when I wasn’t working, and yesterday, with Samantha out sick, I’d had to pull a double shift. By the time the café had closed tonight, I was exhausted and discouraged. I walked the few blocks to the downtown entertainment district and let myself in through the back doors of The Bling-Bling Club, where Magenta was performing.
Magenta and I have an arrangement. I help him prep for his show and he gets me free admission to the Bling. His dressing room is beneath the stage, a windowless brick bunker glammed up with harlequin masks, swags of fabric, theater posters, and colorful rugs. I’d watched Magenta prepare dozens of times, but I never got tired of seeing him work his voodoo.
Transforming a middle-aged male into a sex goddess is a process akin to turning beeswax into mascara. Magenta started by shaving every inch of his face until his skin was as follicle-free as a baby’s. I did his hair, spritzing it with a special gel, and stretching a tight net over it. Next he sponged on heavy-duty foundation—tonight a creamy dark beige—from neck to hairline, until his face was a canvas primed for painting. His natural eyebrows disappeared beneath pasty white concealer, replaced by an arching black line an inch above his actual brow line. With quick, artistic strokes, he outlined his eye sockets in black liner.
“Have you heard from Labeck?” asked Magenta, dabbing dots of white foundation in the corners of his eyes.
“Not a word.” I was worried. Two days had passed since we’d parted at the ice arena.
“What’s going on with you two?” Magenta asked.
He lowered his lids and I carefully applied his false eyelashes, black nylon two inches long, designed to make his eyes pop even from the back row of a theater.
“He went all Neanderthal when he found out I was working at Hottie Latte. I called him a control freak and he called me a train wreck.”
“God, the two of you, you just make me want to slap you silly. You know what your fights are about, don’t you?”
“I’m right and he’s wrong?”
“No.” Magenta stroked on more eyeliner, then contoured his mouth with a plum pencil, drawing it a half inch beyond his own lip lines until he’d achieved a voluptuous pout. He regarded himself in the age-spotted mirror of his dressing room, then filled in the outline with lipstick. “Squabbling is your pathetic version of foreplay. You two bicker when you should be boffing. Now bring me my speed bumps, will you?”
I took Magenta’s fake boobs out of the wardrobe, part of a complete neck-to-waist torso, beige nylon with D cups made out of silicone foam, including nipples the size of gumdrops. They slid on over the shoulders and fastened at the back like a brassiere, way too Silence of the Lambs for my taste. Magenta already h
ad on his body stocking, which had a built-in girdle that smoothed out his male parts.
I removed Magenta’s gown from its hanger and held it while he stepped into it, careful not to snag it with his satin pumps. The gown was beaded red-orange silk and must have weighed forty pounds. I had to climb on a chair to zip up the dress. Magenta is five eleven barefoot; in heels he’s a giraffe.
“Wig, dahlink,” he said.
Still standing on the chair, I set the wig on his head. He wrestled it down over his ears, adjusted the front, tossed his head. Sandy-honey locks tumbled everywhere.
“Well?” he asked, slowly revolving.
I wolf-whistled. Magenta flashed a smile, pleased.
“Earrings!” I exclaimed, handing him rhinestone hoops the size of saucers.
While he gargled with the special honey, green tea, and lemon concoction he uses to loosen up his vocal cords before a performance, I borrowed his makeup, wanding on a blink of mascara and blushing my cheeks so I wouldn’t look like the walking dead.
Then, careful not to smear his makeup, I kissed Magenta, swatted him on the rear for luck, and left. He liked to be alone the last few minutes to psych himself up for his performance. Through some mysterious process, he feels his way into the personality; becomes the singer he’s impersonating.
I squeezed into the standing-room-only crowd in front of the stage just as the room darkened. Spotlights skipped over the stage, the sound track blasted, and Magenta boogied out. Except it wasn’t Magenta. It was—as a reviewer had once described Beyoncé—“a storm system disguised as a singer.” The crowd screamed as Beyoncé warbled the opening notes of “Naughty Girl,” voice rippling over the beat, rasping, fluting, teasing, daring you not to love her. Magenta doesn’t lip-synch; he does the actual singing. His vocal range encompasses three octaves; he can go from Louis Armstrong growl to Frankie Valli falsetto all in the same phrase. And he can dance. Backward, in four-inch heels, pelvis pumping like Tina Turner.
He did “Single Ladies” and “Crazy in Love,” then a wink-wink version of “If I Were a Boy” before finally prancing off, blowing kisses, bathed in applause, and clutching a pair of Fruit of the Loom briefs someone had tossed onstage.
“Buy you a drink?”
The deep voice made my heart flutter. I turned with a smile, expecting to see Labeck. But it was Jared Kennison, Dr. Dreamboat.
He responded with a smile of his own that nearly melted me into a puddle of hormones.
I flashed forward one year, to when I would be holding a three-month-old, baby-sized replica of this gorgeous set of genes. I can’t help it. I’m a woman, and women do this. Introduce us to a single man and we size up his husband potential, marry him in an extravagant wedding, and produce our first child, all in the tick between “Buy you a drink?” and “Yes.” It’s not our fault. We’re genetically programmed to do this, nature’s way of propagating the species.
“Mom,” I’d say on the phone. “I’ve met Mr. Right. He’s a doctor.”
Aside from “I’ve paid off all my students loans,” those are the seven words every parent most longs to hear.
I absolutely hated that I hadn’t been able to eradicate that component of my personality. I was a resourceful, independent woman. I didn’t need a man to complete my life. Women like Rhonda ought to be our heroines. They see a man they like, they go after him, they have their way with him. Smack, whack, thank you Jack. No messy entanglements, hurt feelings, or complications.
But I was fighting fourteen generations of Italian mothers here, so when Dr. Dreamboat asked if he could buy me a drink, I stood up straighter, thrust out my chest, smiled flirtatiously, and said “Yes, surprise me.” While he was gone I tugged my tee shirt a little lower on my boobs and raked my hair back, hoping it didn’t smell like French roast.
The line at the bar was three deep, but the bartenders were all females and Dr. Dreamboat immediately moved to the front of the line. He was back in two minutes. It was like having James Bond hand you your drink—although my drink turned out to be a cranberry vodka, not a vodka martini.
“Sissy drink, I know,” he said, smiling, displaying sun rays around his eyes so wondrously sexy that his male patients must order look-alikes by the score. “It’s the health nut in me. If you have to drink, at least drown the alcohol in something healthy. Cranberry juice cleans out your kidneys.”
“You’re a health nut?”
“I run four miles every morning. I lift, work the machines, watch what I eat.”
“I walk four blocks to my car every morning.”
“It obviously works for you.” The way his eyes speed-read my body—not overtly sexual, but he was letting me know he was doing it—made my knees go a little weak.
“I meant to call you,” he said.
“That’s okay. Guys say they’ll call, but they don’t. It’s built into their genetic code.”
“On behalf of my gender, I apologize.” That smile. Creases in his cheeks that formed parentheses around his mouth.
I glanced around. “You’re not here with a date?”
“I was. She didn’t feel well and went home.”
“Oh.” I’d pulled that one, too, when a date was going south. Once when I was out with a guy whose idea of conversation was making armpit noises, I’d sneaked out through a bathroom window. Not that any woman would ditch a date with Jared Kennison. If she was walking down the street with him and a safe fell out of a window and crushed her, the woman would pull her shattered bones together, yell “I’m fine,” and insist on continuing with the date.
Kennison swirled his drink around. “I was sorry to hear about Rhonda’s death. You worked for her, right? Were you close?”
“Not exactly. She fired me.”
“Ouch.”
“How about you and Rhonda? Was she one of your patients?”
He shot me a cool look. “No.”
Oops. Social gaffe. You didn’t just come out and ask a plastic surgeon if he’d vacuumed the cellulite out of someone’s thighs.
“Rhonda and I moved in the same social circles, ran into each other at parties, golf tournaments, that kind of thing,” he said, smiling to show he’d forgiven me.
There was an awkward gap in the conversation as we each struggled for something to say. Conversation was never an issue with Labeck because we always had something to argue about. The pianist started playing “Don’t Ask Me Why.”
Maybe it was the vodka, because I was abruptly back at Rhonda’s party with the drunk guy playing the Billy Joel medley. And in that memory there was … something elusive, glimpsed from the corner of your eye but gone when you turned to look. Something about the way Rhonda and Kennison had looked at each other…
“Dance?” Jared asked, breaking my chain of thought.
I hesitated. Two nights ago, I’d been with a man who’d massaged my back with such tenderness that I could still feel the warm imprints of his hands on my skin.
A man who hadn’t bothered to contact me since then, leaving me to discover whether he was alive or dead by reading about it in the newspaper. Probably Aspen Lindgren was hiding him in her bedroom.
“I’d love to dance,” I told Jared Kennison. Take that, Bonaparte Labeck! I surrendered myself to the delicious sensation of being in the arms of a man who was such a good dancer he actually made me look good.
“You’re really cute, Mazie,” he said, and my heart skipped a beat because he was gazing at my lips. “You ought to be a model.”
Not a very original line. Still, I enjoyed hearing it. “I’m too short. What would I model—Smurf wear?”
“Seriously, you ought to have some shots taken and send them to a modeling agency.”
I was too embarrassed to admit it, but I’d actually looked into the possibility of modeling. Unfortunately, the only agency that had expressed an interest in hiring me had asked if I was willing to pose nude, and whether I was allergic to dogs. The reputable agencies preferred models just out of puberty. If you were old enoug
h to legally drink, you were too old.
Kennison smoothed my hair back from my face. Usually this is a signal that a kiss is in the cards, but along the way, he hit a snag.
“What’s this?” He touched my left cheekbone. “Not a birthmark?”
“That?” My hand went up to the puckered skin. “Nothing. Just where someone tried to fricassee me with a cigarette lighter.”
“A burn. I figured. You should have it taken care of.”
I shrugged. “I just cover it up with hair.”
“Mazie, a couple of simple treatments would get rid of the scar. Tell you what, come to my office Monday. I’ll do an exam and we’ll schedule some treatments.”
I hesitated. It would be just too weird, seeing somebody in a doctor’s office after close-dancing with him. I preferred my doctors ancient and nearly blind.
“If it’s a question of the expense,” he said, “I’d do it pro bono.”
I started to shake my head, but that’s when he tilted my face upward and kissed me. It was a nice kiss. Our lips fit, we didn’t bonk noses, and he didn’t try to thrust his tongue down my throat. But it was not a trip to the moon on gossamer wings. His jaw was scratchy and his breath smelled like vodka. If we were a science-fair project, and he was vinegar and I was baking soda at the bottom of a papier-mâché volcano, we wouldn’t have erupted.
But when we broke apart, we both smiled to indicate we’d enjoyed it. He bought us more drinks. We danced some more. I sang along with the music, realizing that I was a little loopy and enjoying the sensation.
“May I cut in?” asked Magenta, who’d scrubbed off his makeup and changed back into gender-appropriate clothes. Without waiting for an okay, he pried me out of Dreamboat’s arms and into his. “I don’t trust that guy,” he said, using his everyday voice, a growl that lurks in the subbasement of baritone.
Crazy for You: Life and Love on the Lam (A Loveswept Contemporary Romance) Page 15
