Malice Masterpieces

by K'Anne Meinel

  There was a lot worse she could have done to Bev, sliced her throat, tortured her worse than she had…she thought the message she had left with the woman was enough to frighten her into silence, perhaps forever. Some women react differently than others. She personally would want revenge. She didn’t think that the Bev’s of this world though would. She wouldn’t take a chance though; she would investigate the woman thoroughly when she got home.

  “Flight one twenty three to Los Angeles is now boarding at gate twelve” she heard over the loudspeaker and headed for the gate. As she approached it she stopped herself. What was she thinking? This guy knew enough about her that he could track her movements the past week, who knew how much more he knew about her? As she approached the gate she veered to the desk. “May I help you ma’am?” the woman behind the desk asked.

  She smiled. “I’m sorry, I have a ticket to head to L.A.”

  The woman interrupted, “Yes, if you just get in the line here.”

  ‘As if I didn’t know’ Alice thought sarcastically. She smiled again. “I know, but I just got a call from work, I need to change it to Miami. Could we do that?”

  The woman blinked at her and then looked a little suspiciously at her. “Just a moment, I’ll check.” She walked away from the counter to make a call on the phone behind her.

  Alice stood there trying not to look suspicious. She knew her name was good, she was a frequent flyer mile holder, and she looked innocent. She just hoped they thought she was innocent, that there were no red flags going up. A last minute change like this always alarmed airport personnel, she understood that with heightened security these days but it didn’t help her situation. She waited, holding her first class ticket to L.A. tapping the counter slightly with it.

  “Ma’am?” she saw that another man had joined the woman she had been speaking with. Alice looked up innocently, she hated being called ma’am but it didn’t show on her face. “I understand you wish to cancel this ticket and exchange it for one going to Miami?”

  “Yes, I just got a call from my office and I need to go to Miami to see a client instead of heading back home to L.A.” she explained, she hoped convincingly.

  “May I see some identification,” he asked officiously.

  She knew he was doing it for forms sake, they would run her name to see if she came up on some registry. She was back to using her real name so that shouldn’t be a problem. Even if she had been using one of her false one, those too were clear. Her fake passport was well hidden if they searched her and she wasn’t worried about that. “Certainly,” she answered as she pulled out her driver’s license and he took it to scrutinize it closely, he took her first class ticket too, to compare names and other data. She waited as she watched others get on the plane; occasionally someone looked at her curiously, wondering what she was doing at the counter. He made a phone call at the back phone. After watching her for a while he nodded. Alice used her peripheral vision to look for a hidden camera or two, certain her picture was being taken or she was being compared to some database. The planes passengers were nearly all on before they came back to her.

  “Okay Ms. Weaver, sorry for the delay, I’m sure you understand that we have to check things out these days. We’ve made the change, I’m sure you understand there will be a charge for it.”

  “What about the refund for my ticket to L.A?” she asked as any passenger paying full fare would.

  He nodded as though expecting the question, “The difference is four hundred dollars and we had to charge you ten percent for the change.”

  ‘Wow, how ‘big’ of them’ she thought sarcastically but smiled and nodded as though it was acceptable.

  He printed out a ticket for her there at the counter, “We have someone pulling your bag off this flight now and putting it on the flight to Miami.”

  “Oh, thank you,” she said heartfeltedly as any passenger would. They better damn well NOT lose her luggage.

  He directed where to go in the terminal, said there was a forty-five minute wait until her flight for Miami took off and she was on her way. She knew she was being watched, and probably in person as well as on camera’s. She stopped in a bar and ordered a Shirley Temple to pass the time as she people watched. She kept her eyes peeled for the guy named ‘Richard’ but didn’t see him. She hated not knowing where he was and why he was watching for her. She thought about the film she had in her briefcase and wondered what it contained and who she knew who could develop it discretely in Miami. It might just be photos of her around the Cayman Islands; it might be a lot more incriminating than that although she hadn’t done anything recently, but he had known about something of value in her briefcase. She pulled out her cell phone and looked up a number.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, it’s Alice,” she knew her caller identification would not come up; her phone was designed to call everyone with the number hidden. “I have a possible job for you.”

  “So soon?” he asked surprised.

  “Are you complaining?” she returned with a grin.

  “No, no, not at all, whatcha got?” he asked.

  “I have some film I need processed. Do you know anyone in Florida that has a lab?” she asked first.

  “Where exactly in Florida?”

  “You tell me, I’ll travel to them if I need to,” she countered, she didn’t want him to know where she really was.

  “Hmmm, I know a guy by reputation in the Miami-Dade area; he might be willing to work with you for a fee. Will I get a finder’s fee?” he asked greedily.

  “Of course,” she said annoyed.

  “Okay, I’ll give him a call, see if he is willing, and give you a call back.”

  “That sounds good, thanks.”

  “So what work do you have for me?” he asked curious.

  “Maybe some fingerprints, I’ll let you know okay?” she hedged; she had the information she had really called him for. She might throw him some more work, she might not. She knew he thought she did security work occasionally for some firms and that was the ‘secret’ payments he had been getting from her and others. She didn’t have a lab of her own, didn’t want one, but she knew his occasional help was invaluable.

  “That sounds good; I’ll call him right now and get back to you.”

  “Great, just leave me a message if I’m in a meeting.” No point in telling him she might be on a plane. Too much information would only get him killed, literally.

  “Sounds good, talk to you later,” he rang off.

  She turned off the call without saying ‘goodbye’ figuring what was the point. She quickly erased the call history. Checking her email on her smart phone as she sipped her Shirley Temple she saw nothing of importance that required her immediate attention. She finished up the drink and went to wait by the gate for her flight.

  Florida was hot and sultry, waiting on the next cloud of rain to come through. She thought she would die of the heat as she headed out for a taxi. They had lost her bag of course she thought ironically and they’d promised to call her when it was found. Guess it was too much to hope that they could transfer one bag from one plane to the other without losing it. It was probably on its way to L.A. if anyone had even bothered to look for it in the first place. Meanwhile she had the clothes on her back as she got into the taxi. Heading for a nice hotel she checked in and checked out her room. A blinking message on her cell phone indicated that her guy in L.A. had called and she checked the message, hastily writing down the phone number and address of the man in Miami she could use.

  “Hello, my name is Alice and I’m looking to speak to…”

  “Oh yesss, Aliciaaaa,” a smooth talking Latin voice came over the line. “I’ve been expecting your call,” he oozed.

  Mentally Alice rolled her eyes. She knew though that her guy in L.A. wouldn’t have recommended him if he wasn’t any good, he wouldn’t dare. She made arrangements to meet him in half an hour at one of the county offices of Miami-Dade. A taxi dropped her off out front.


  “Hello, I’m here to see…” she began but was interrupted by a skinny Cuban man who asked, “Alicia?” in a delighted voice.

  She looked at him in apparent delight, “Hello, I’m glad we could get together.” He grabbed her hand to capture it in his own.

  “I’ve been so looking forward to meeting you since our mutual friend told me of you,” he replied.

  She wanted to shudder at how smarmy he was. How he could work for the county was beyond her but she kept her smile and asked, “Shall we go to your office?”

  She was handed a visitors badge and he led her past many offices to an elevator and down they went to the dungeons or lab where he worked. She looked around curiously as they walked along. “Here we are,” he said thrilled to have her to himself in his lab. “What do you have for me today?”

  She looked at him wondering if his smooth Latin charm worked on the ladies, she knew she was immune. “I have a couple of rolls of film I need to develop, do you have an automatic developer or may I do it myself?”

  “Oh hooo,” he said delighted. “Something between you and a lover perhaps eh?”

  She laughed as she shook her head. “No a client, I need absolute discretion on this, it’s why you will be paid for that ‘discretion,’” she stressed.

  “And what will I be doing while you develop this film eh?” he said suggestively.

  She reached in her briefcase for the fingerprints she had taken in the hotel room. “You will be running these, see who they belong to and what information you can find out for me.”

  He looked surprised. He saw that she had actual fingerprint film that had lifted the prints from wherever they had been. He reached for the packet to look at them closely. He nodded, they were good prints, and he could run these through the database. “Let’s get you set up at the developer, if anyone asks, you are working with the force to help us solve a crime,” he said lamely.

  She could have thought up a better excuse if she wanted but let his go as he showed her to a large machine that was behind a darkened curtain. He began to show her how to feed the thirty five millimeter film into it but she brushed him away, expertly handling the controls herself. He looked surprised and then shrugged as he went to look up the fingerprints. Alice loved the machine, ones like this made life so much easier than in years past where you had to wait for days to get film on to negatives. These machines unrolled the film and your negatives were available in a short amount of time instead of days. As it spit out the first roll she fed the machine the second roll and hooked the end of the film into the feeder. It was soon rolling into the machine. She hung the first roll up and began to look through it with orange light as the machine processed the second roll. She couldn’t see much but then the orange light wasn’t great. She waited until the second roll was developed to feed the first one into another machine in this small room. Pressing a few buttons she soon had small pictures of what was on the film spitting out. By the time the entire first roll was printed she fed it the second roll. None of the pictures were anything she had to worry about and she was relieved. This idiot Bev and her partner Richard had been taking pictures of her in L.A. and in the Cayman’s. There was even one of her in the South Carolina airport.

  It was then that she wondered if there had been more film. It was like these two had taken pictures repeatedly in case they missed the first. Many of the pictures were almost time lapse photography and worthless. Then she had another thought, had someone hired Richard who hired the incompetent Bev to follow her? To find out information about her? She packed the printed pictures into her briefcase to look at later in better light. She destroyed the negatives using a chemical she found in the darkroom and washing it in the sink, rendering the negatives absolutely useless before cutting them up with a scissors and throwing them in a trash. The chemical had burned away the images; the scissors made her feel like she had accomplished something.

  It was none too soon though as her Latin benefactor stepped into the room, “How goes it?” he asked with a smile.

  “Oh, I’m done, it was nothing after all,” she indicated the destroyed negatives as she went to slip by him into the lighted room.

  “All that for nothing?” he asked incredulous but looked around the darkroom suspiciously. She had turned off the machines she had used and cleaned up after herself, he couldn’t tell what she had printed and unless he checked stock he couldn’t tell she had printed anything.

  “Ah well, that happens,” she dismissed it. “What did you find on the fingerprint?”

  “It’s still looking, it may take days at this rate, I don’t know why,” he shrugged dramatically. “How about you and I go to dinner as it sorts those prints for us?”

  “I thank you for the offer but I need that information as soon as it comes in. You will be paid for the camera work I just did but not for the prints until you have some information for me. Please call our mutual friend when you have the results okay?”

  “So, no dinner eh?” he asked disappointed that his charm hadn’t worked.

  She laughed endearingly. “Thank you, no, I’m working…”

  He sighed dramatically. “Ah, perhaps another time eh?”

  “Perhaps,” she said with another smile and patted his cheek. He looked delighted.

  “I will escort you out and I will call our friend when the results come in, I hope this is the start of a beautiful,” he stretched out the word beautiful making it sound disgusting. “Relationship.”

  Alice smiled in agreement and then allowed him to escort her to the elevator. When he made to get into it with her she said, “Just one floor up right?”

  He nodded.

  “I think I can manage, get those results for me okay?”

  He looked disappointed but was charmed by the smile she threw him as though he had done something for her.

  Alice made her way out with no problem, handing off her visitor’s card.

  Back in the hotel room nothing about the pictures suggested that she had anything to worry about. Her active imagination though told her that there must be more to it than this, that there were probably more pictures. She called down to the desk, “Do you have a shredder I may use for some business documents?”

  She spent an hour shredding pictures, she hesitated at the ones of her and Sonja, a couple were actually good and made her smile in remembrance of her time with Sonja, but in the end decided it was best to shred them all. Taking the confetti she fed it through a second time until all that was left was a pile of small squares of pictures. She mixed it thoroughly and then began to feed it down the toilet, flushing repeatedly until the entire pile was gone.

  Her cell phone rang. “Hello?” she answered.

  “Ms. Weaver, hello, we have found your luggage, where would you like us to deliver it?” a pleasant voice informed her.

  She was relieved. She wanted a change of clothes desperately at this point, it had been a long day and she was tired. She gave them the address of her hotel, reading it off the letterhead on the desk. Sitting on the bed she flipped mindlessly through the cable channels offered by the hotel, the movies sounded intriguing but she simply wasn’t in the mood to sit and watch one, she was too restless. When her luggage arrived a few hours later she decided that doing laps in the pool was in order and changed into a swimsuit, shorts, and sandals. She spent a pleasant hour in the pool, ordered room service, ate a late dinner and then watched cable until she felt sleepy enough to go to bed.

  Hoping to get the results from the guy in Miami-Dade she spent a couple of days in Miami, waiting, sunning herself, getting a much needed tan. She was restless though, what was taking so long? She had taught herself patience though long ago, a necessary skill. Her evenings she went to good restaurants and a club or two. The scene wasn’t that much different from L.A. She enjoyed herself, flirting, chatting, getting to know some people but nothing too involved, too intimate, or anything she would allow herself despite several offers. After a few days though she figured the guy was either
incompetent or something had happened and making a call to her contact in L.A. left him a message to that extent. She made a second call to the airline and arranged for a flight back home, she was done hiding out, she had nothing to hide from, and she had done nothing wrong other than to humiliate that incompetent Private Investigator wannabe, Bev.

  The flight back was like a million other miles she had traveled. First class of course, she allowed herself a small glass of wine to relax but only once she had an excellent meal to accompany it. She did indeed feel better. Good food, good wine, and no company as the seat next to hers was empty, just the way she liked it when she was in this kind of mood. She thought over the past week of her life and wondered why she hadn’t killed the likes of Bev. Perhaps there was no challenge in it. The woman had merely irritated her in her incompetence. She hadn’t been worth the kill. Her humiliation might burn for the rest of her useless life but then she shouldn’t have been playing with the big kids. Alice played to keep, but she had played with her prey this time and the humiliation had been satisfying. The woman’s death would have given her no satisfaction. Some people are born to die. They were born evil. This woman had been born pathetic but then that was just Alice’s opinion. The little she had investigated into her did not change her opinion. She had told the truth that she was studying to become a private investigator, it took more than study though, it took a certain something that Alice was certain Bev lacked. She didn’t have the gumption. She should have at least attempted to fight back when Alice confronted her, but then to give her credit, Alice had been pretty convincing with her supposed gun. Alice hadn’t had anything bigger than a makeup stick in the little purse and had used its hard end to get the woman to comply with her demands. She was pleased in a way that this had worked but wondered if this loose end would come back to annoy her someday.