Night of the Living Deb

by Susan McBride

  “Maybe not someone on the list, Kendricks.”

  Something clicked inside my brain.

  A remark one of the cops had made this morning.

  “The Oleksiy case involves money laundering, doesn’t it, Allie?” I asked her, thinking of Starsky’s comment that Brian might have taken something that wasn’t his and gotten in over his head.

  “It does, yeah.” She added in a whisper, as if afraid someone would overhear, “Let’s just say that it’s a whole different ballgame in this brave new world. With the Patriot Act clamping down on banks, things like gift cards and stolen art are becoming the currency of choice.”

  I’m not sure what any of that had to do with Brian, but I had a strong sense he’d gotten himself mixed up in something dangerous.

  “What if you’re right about a connection?” I caught my mother’s eye, and she narrowed her brows, listening. “What if Brian starting digging into one of these witnesses’ backgrounds and unearthed some nasty worms?”

  “I’m already nosing around in that wormhole, Kendricks.

  When things cool down, I’m gonna have a chat with Malone’s secretary.”

  “Though it doesn’t make sense, does it?” I ruminated aloud. “I mean, if he uncovered dirt on a witness testifying against Oleksiy, that’d be good for your side, right? So who’d want to kidnap him? The district attorney?” Even I figured that was unlikely.

  “Did you say kidnap?”

  Had I?

  Oh, boy.

  “Geez, Allie, I’m not sure what you mean.” Did I want to drag her into this? Was I taking a risk, spilling to Allie?

  Though she wasn’t a cop. She was Brian’s colleague, his friend. “Um”—crap, I felt obligated to come clean—“okay,

  yes, I said kidnap.”

  “Wait a minute, drama queen. Are you telling me someone’s holding Brian hostage?” she jumped on me. “What’s going on? I thought we were in this together. Don’t hold out on me.”

  In it together.

  How weird did that sound?

  Then again, she was already part of this whole sordid mess, and she was the one with the firsthand knowledge about Brian’s work, about this Oleksiy case; she was the one who had a contact at the Dallas P.D. It might not be in Brian’s best interest to shut her out.

  So I blabbed.

  “I got a ransom demand,” I admitted, “right after Mother and I left the Addison police station.”

  “Wait a minute, Annie Oakley. You and Mama Kendricks had a run-in with the Addison P.D.?”

  Oops. I hadn’t exactly filled her in on that either, had I?

  “It was a big misunderstanding. We’d gone over to Brian’s apartment, after some reporters had been poking around, apparently, so a neighbor phoned the cops—”

  “Why were you at Brian’s?”

  “Looking for clues.” And finding none, except the birthday card, which was message enough for me. “The police thought I knew where he was.”

  “But you don’t, do you?”

  For God’s sake.

  Et tu, Brutus the Blonde?

  “If I knew where he was, do you think I’d be waiting around for his kidnappers to call? You figure I made this whole thing up just for kicks?”

  “Hey, tone it down, Kendricks. You don’t have to yell at me.”

  I sucked in a breath, tried to keep my cool. Mother traded chairs for one beside me and put her hand on my shoulder, giving a squeeze.

  “You don’t think someone’s playing you?” she asked.

  “You really believe that Brian’s been kidnapped?”

  Tears pricked at the back of my eyelids again, and I fought them hard. I would not crack. There was too much still to do. “I have to believe it, Allie. I have no choice.

  They said they’d kill him if I didn’t pay up.”

  “How much do they want?”

  “Two hundred twelve thousand.”

  “What? That makes about as much sense as Kinky Friedman in the governor’s mansion.”

  Which is exactly what I’d thought, but I figured kidnappers had their quirks, too.

  “Why not a million?” she asked. “Or ten mil, while they’re at it?”

  “I don’t know, Allie.” Gee, what was I? The ransom psychic?

  “When do they want it?”

  “Delivered by midnight tonight,” I informed her, my voice a disturbing croak. “They’re supposed to call again with instructions, so I’m practically sitting on my cell phone.”

  “Did you contact the cops?”

  “No!” I panicked at the thought. “They said no police or media, or I’ll find pieces of my boyfriend all over Dallas.”

  Well, actually, the voice had said “New Dallas,” which was odd, wasn’t it? “Then they told me they won’t waste a bullet. They’ll just sharpen their knife.”

  “You’re joking?”

  What did she want? The ransom note recorded on CD for her listening pleasure?

  “No, I’m not joking, and yes, that’s what they said, and no, I don’t know if it was a man or woman, which is why I’m using the plural, in case you’re planning to sic the grammar police on me.”

  “Excuse me for saying so, Kendricks, but those are some crazy-ass kidnappers. Sharpening a knife, saving a bullet, demanding 212,000 bucks from a Highland Park deb who could easily fork over ten times that.”

  “Debutante dropout,” I reminded her, feeling irked that she, a lawyer, didn’t have all the facts. “I didn’t go through with it.”

  “But you didn’t give up your inheritance, did you?”

  I bristled, reminding her, “This isn’t about me, Allie.”

  “Isn’t it? You think anyone would’ve wanted to hold Brian for ransom if you weren’t his paramour?”

  His paramour?

  That was so 1930s. Sounded like a word my mother would use.

  I figured I’d had my quota of Blondie for the day. “If you want to help Brian, then fine, but I don’t need you to make me feel worse,” I snapped, earning a curious look from my mother. “Ringing up Malone’s parents in Missouri was awful enough,” I grumbled. “I’m almost relieved they weren’t home, something about petting and woofing—”

  “Their animal-psych retreat,” Allie interrupted, like a chronic Ms. Know It All. “They do it every fall like clockwork.”

  “Animal retreat?” Honestly, was it wrong to assume everyone else had gone mad, and I was the last semi-sane person on the planet?

  “Malone’s mom and dad are pet psychs.”

  “Pet psychics?”

  “Psychologists,” she corrected, and there was no kidding in her tone. “They analyze critters, trying to figure out why Fido’s chewing up the husband’s shoes or why Fluffy’s peeing on the Persian rug. Their motto is something like, ‘We’ll show your pets how to heal.’ If they’re off to the boonies for human-canine bonding, they’ll be incommunicado for a while. Probably all for the better,”

  she reasoned.

  Another bit of Malone’s life I’d been left out of, though Allie seemed as well-versed on the subject of his parents as she was on where he hid his extra house key. Damn her skinny self.

  Why hadn’t Brian mentioned his folks were pet psychologists?

  Was he too embarrassed to tell me? Or was it just one more thing in his life he’d kept private, like that

  journal filled with bad poetry and his affinity for The Joy of Cooking?

  Man, but it was hard to fathom how such a straitlaced lawyer could have been raised by a pair of dog shrinks.

  Though one could say the same about me and Cissy, couldn’t they? As in, how could such a prissy and proper socialite have reared such an etiquette-impaired society refugee?

  “Kendricks?” Allie’s voice again derailed my thoughts.

  “You might want to use your computer savvy and look into this ransom thing. It sounds too hinky to be real.”

  What did she mean “
look into this ransom thing”?

  “I don’t know what you think I’ll find online,” I told her.

  “It’s not like lots of kidnappers are doing blogs, and I don’t know of any Web sites offering advice for dealing with boyfriend snatchers, like what to say when you make the first contact or what kind of tote to stick the cash in.”

  “Any reason you’re afraid to do some snooping?” Allie challenged. “You don’t even need to leave the safety of Mama Bird’s nest for that. But handling the kidnappers’ demands . . . girl, that’s not your bag. On the other hand, I’m used to dealing with dirt-bags face-to-face. They’re usually clients,” she said and made it sound like a good thing. “Maybe I should go with you on the drop. I’m cool under pressure.”

  “Thanks for the offer”—surprising as it was—“but you can’t, Allie. They want me solo.”

  “I could hide in the backseat.”

  I glanced at the clock. I’d already been on the phone with her for too long, and I didn’t want to tie up the line, call waiting or not.

  “Why don’t you leave the ransom to me, all right? You worry about getting into Brian’s office. Find a copy of that list. See what you can turn up. Maybe you’ll figure out who’s got him, and we can nip this whole thing in the bud.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “I’m on it.”

  “Great.”

  I hung up and set the phone down on the table. My hand was trembling.

  “Sweetie? Are you okay?” my mother asked.

  “I’m fine.” I made a valiant effort to shoot her a convincing smile; but it was a feeble attempt, and I’m not sure she bought it.

  What I wanted to do was lay down my head and cry.

  Or throw up.

  How was I supposed to feel? To react?

  My life had come to resemble the plot of a bad crime novel when you strung all the parts together.

  Malone was missing, and the cops believed he was involved in the murder of a stripper found wrapped in plastic in the trunk of his illegally parked car. Like that wasn’t god-awful enough, there was the phone call claiming Brian was being held for ransom, and now I had to worry about delivering the moola by midnight tonight or risk a bloodletting.

  To top it off, Malone was under fire at his office for skipping out with documents from an upcoming trial, and the Big Cheese at his firm was holding meetings threatening to oust him if he didn’t show up with said docs pronto.

  And I couldn’t call the police, because the detectives assigned to Trayla Trash’s homicide thought I was a liar—or at least a withholder of crucial scoop—plus, the Bad Guys had warned against involving the P.D., so I had to put my faith in my mother’s boyfriend, the Navy veteran and ex-IRS agent, the fellow I’d been resenting this past month for trying to take my father’s place in Cissy’s life,

  when just the day before I’d all but vetoed the idea of Stephen taking Mother to Vegas.

  Talk about irony.

  Funny how plans to rescue a kidnapped boyfriend had changed everything.

  Chapter 16

  It seemed forever since Stephen had left Mother’s house, and my cell hadn’t rung once since Allie interrupted my lunch date with a cold tuna fish sandwich.

  I spent a good hour curled up on the window seat of Mother’s sitting room, staring out the window and doing my best “pathetic girl” routine, my cell in my hip pocket and the birthday card I’d found at Brian’s apartment clutched in my hands.

  When Cissy had come looking for me and found me gazing teary-eyed at Malone’s scribbled words, she’d put her hands on her hips and expelled a most disappointed sigh, then insisted I get up off my booty and do something useful.

  “You could always help Sandy fold laundry,” she suggested, “because crying isn’t going to solve anything, you realize.”

  Of course, she was right.

  Acting like a soggy dishrag wouldn’t bring Brian home, no matter how good it felt to mope for a spell.

  So I took her advice, vacating the window seat to attempt something constructive.

  Instead of laundry, however, I went to my old room and plunked down in front of the ancient Dell that whirred way too noisily when I turned it on.

  I clicked on the ISP icon and hooked up to the Net on a dial-up modem that reminded me why God had created DSL, and I waited for the connection, tapping a foot and glancing around me, at my canopied bed, the Madame Alexander dolls seated in rows on the shelves of my bureau, and the neat line of my yellow-spined Nancy Drew books.

  Mother had preserved my girlhood digs with museumlike care, keeping things precisely as I’d left them. I’m not sure if it was an indication that, somewhere in her heart, she wished she could keep me a child forever, or if there were just too many rooms in the mansion to worry about converting mine into something else. Like she needed another guest room or den?

  It was somehow comforting to return to the house where I’d lived for eighteen years with my parents, until Daddy passed away and I’d gone off to art school, and realize a tiny piece of myself was still here.

  Like this ancient computer, which kept giving me the hourglass—the international symbol of hurry up and wait—when I itched to play amateur detective and check out the phrases from the ransom demand, as Allie had prodded. I wasn’t sure if I’d find anything of interest, but everything was worth a shot at this point.

  Another few minutes and I was finally online.

  I gave my knuckles a crack, pulled up Google and, for kicks, entered the dollar amount of the ransom, because $212,000 sounded odd even to my decidedly odd ears.

  First, I spelled the words out, tapped my foot impatiently until relevant pages appeared, though as I scanned them, I realized they weren’t really so relevant. Basically, I hit a dead end.

  So I typed in the numbers—$212,000—which, after the Dell sputtered and whirred for a bit, pulled up more than 139,000 matches.

  Yowza.

  Who’d of thunk it?

  I did an Evelyn Woods speed-read of the dozen entries that came up first and saw one common denominator, and a bizarre one to boot. All had to do with the dognapping of Paris Hilton’s pooch. Apparently, the amount was precisely what the poor, jittery Chihuahua was ransomed for, before all the publicity scared the would-be bad guys and the critter was returned, unharmed.

  Coincidence?

  It was possible, I guessed.

  Or were my boyfriend-nappers Paris Hilton fans?

  Heavens to Britney! How frightening was that?

  Because being enamored of the world’s most infamous dilettante clearly implied a lack of common sense and a huge dose of irrationality, not to mention a high degree of celebrity worship that hinted at a lifelong subscription to the National Enquirer.

  It could also mean whoever was involved kept up on the local dish and the doings of Dallas society, which might be how they’d known about my status as a daughter of fortune.

  Hmmm, interesting supposition, and maybe less off-the-wall than it had sounded initially.

  So the $212,000 might not have been as random as it seemed. Less a figure pulled out of thin air than a need to be a copycat. Or else they figured Brian was my pet, like Paris Hilton’s Chihuahua?

  Could it mean the kidnappers had a sense of humor? Or were they merely money-grubbing idiots?

  Not wanting to get sidetracked by that clearly unsolvable riddle, I went ahead and dissected the phrasing the bad guy had used on the phone, searching for those parts I recalled verbatim.

  “I won’t waste a bullet” and “sharpen my knife” came to mind, though the search for those terms merely brought up link after link with gun- and knife-related pages, some that looked like online diaries that detailed violent fantasies or lyrics to songs, even a few dealing with hunting.

  I tried a few variations, but still came up empty.

  I didn’t see anything that triggered an “ah-ha” kind of response, the way the $212,000 had.

&nbs
p; So I went ahead and searched for “Trayla Trash,” because I was curious about the woman who’d caught Malone’s eye at the strip club—for whatever reason, and I was thinking of the obvious because, well, he was a heterosexual man and he wasn’t blind.

  I turned up half a dozen pages related to exotic dancers at strip clubs across the country, even the cast of a porn flick called Hillbilly Ho. As much as I itched to find out more about Ms. Trayla’s career, I was nervous about clicking onto any of the links. I didn’t want to get trapped into triple X-rated pages that wouldn’t let me out.

  Just for variation, I tried “Traylor Trash,” but most of those listings had to do with an Ohio garage band.

  Who was Trayla Trash really? I wondered, recalling that Lu had called her “Betsy,” but said she didn’t know much more than that about her private life.

  Maybe strippers didn’t befriend barmaids. I wasn’t up on the chick-bonding protocol at gentlemen’s clubs.

  Out of curiosity, I plugged in the name of the case Malone and Allie were working on as part of the defense team, taking several stabs at the spelling of “Oleksiy” before I found the one that triggered a handful of links.

  I hadn’t asked Allie about it in detail, so I didn’t realize that Oleksiy was the dude’s first name. His surname was Petrenko, and he was a Ukrainian immigrant, a regular Horatio Alger who’d risen from poverty to minimogul, owning a string of dry cleaners and quietly investing in assorted other local businesses. Somewhere along the line his partner—his brother, as it were, who’d been sleeping

  with Oleksiy’s wife, according to the pretrial articles—had turned on him, ratting him out to the feds for things like embezzlement and money laundering.

  A money launderer who owned dry cleaning franchises?

  That was classic.

  As was the brother sleeping with the wife and then turning on his sib.

  How very Cain and Abel.

  There was only the grainiest photo of Petrenko, and all I could discern was that he looked rather ordinary. Not tall, not short. Neither bald nor thick-haired. A middleaged man who wouldn’t draw second glances. The online pieces didn’t share much personal info or name any of the witnesses who’d be testifying in court, besides the turncoat brother; though I figured Allie had more of that scoop at her fingertips.