MISTLETOE OVER MANHATTAN

by Barbara Daly

  Damn! It really mattered to him. That was the problem. The time wasn't right for their relationship to turn physical, but there she sat, so beautiful, so desirable with her marshmallow-cream breasts peeping out at him, her pale hair swinging and her eyes the color of a freezer pack looking so wide and innocent. He could have slept with this woman five years ago if he'd turned on his charm when he'd had a chance, and the fact that he hadn't grabbed at that chance was killing him.

  He had to get her off his mind—although it wasn't his mind that was giving him a problem—until he'd successfully settled this case and she was swooning with admiration. So he'd take Brie out tomorrow night and somebody else Friday night and then figure out how to get through the weekend.

  She was arguing with him even now, and he couldn't blame her, because he'd been daydreaming and had said something stupid. No more stupidity. His life depended on it.

  It was the following morning that Mallory felt the full impact of her recent veering—veering? careening!—from the beaten path to order and serenity.

  By the time Carter came out of his room looking ready for breakfast—and a lot more coffee, judging from those bags under his eyes—she was dressed in her new tight pants, blue-green jacket, outrageous sheer tank top Maybelle had thrust into her bag at the last minute and high-heeled Pradas and was methodically dumping the entire contents of her handbag on the desk.

  "What are you doing?"

  "I can't find my credit card."

  "Call and ask them to FedEx you another one."

  She gave him a look that would have made her mother proud—until her mother saw her wearing aqua to the office.

  "Okay," he muttered. "When did you use it last?"

  She tried to focus on the lost card instead of on Carter's mouth. "Bloomingdale's, I think, when we went up to buy socks. You volunteered to handle our meals together and file for the reimbursement, so I think, yes, it must have been Bloomingdale's."

  "You probably stuck it in some weird place."

  "I never, as you put it, stick my credit card in some weird place. It has its place and that's where I put it."

  "I might have known." She heard the sarcasm in his tone. "But this time—" he pointed a triumphant finger at her "—you didn't."

  Her mouth tightened. "I hardly need you, who packed no socks, to point that out to me."

  "No, I guess you don't. You never forget anything, right?" He moved closer to the desk, his gaze scanning the objects scattered over it. "Let's see what we've got here." His smile was not what you'd call friendly.

  "Stay out of my handbag," she ordered him.

  "I'm just looking for your credit card, not touching anything," he said. "A baggie full of first aid stuff isn't all that private, is it? Oh, my. Look what we've got here. A tiny tool kit. A tube of superglue. Do you have a foldaway crane in here somewhere? And where's the duct tape?"

  Her face flamed with heat. She did, in fact, have small rolls of scotch tape and electrician's tape with her at all times, as well as a pair of scissors, two needles, one threaded with black and one with white, two small brass safety pins, self-sticking Velcro discs…

  "It's good to be prepared in an emergency."

  "How often do you have an emergency?" he asked, zeroing in on her sewing kit.

  "I pull out a hem from time to time."

  He raised his face to the ceiling. "Oh … my … God, it's a crisis. Throw that woman out of this meeting. Her hem's hanging."

  "If you look your best, you work your best," Mallory said, but it sounded pretty lame even to her.

  "Not necessarily," he said, suddenly shifting gears and becoming just Carter again, Carter without the attitude. "For example, I look great." He began helping her take things out of the handbag. When he ran onto the box that that held exactly twelve aspirin tablets, he opened it, shook four out into his hand and swallowed them dry. "And now I'm going to work better. Hey! Here's your credit card." He pulled it out of an inner pocket of the handbag and held it up triumphantly.

  "Thank you," she said, feeling wilted. "I would never have looked for it there. That's my PalmPilot pocket, not my credit card pocket. No wonder I couldn't find it."

  "I think it works out better never to know where anything is," he said as she repacked her handbag. "That way, when you lose it, you know you'll have to look everywhere for it."

  "I see a flaw in your reasoning," she muttered.

  "We can talk about it at breakfast," he said. "Ready to go? I'm going to have pancakes this morning. All those eggs are giving me too much energy."

  I know a really great way you could use it up.

  "Go on into the conference room," she said when they'd breakfasted and arrived at Angell and Angell. "I'm going to talk to Phoebe about speeding up the photographic evidence."

  "Good luck," he muttered.

  She left her briefcase in the hall outside the conference room door and stepped down to Phoebe's office, where she heard voices through the not-quite-closed door. Just one voice, actually, Phoebe's.

  "I'm doing my best, Father," she was saying. "I don't like it, though. It's not ethical, and I—"

  Mallory could just barely see Phoebe as she paced her office, a phone to her ear and her hand clasped to her forehead.

  "I know," Phoebe said after a long listen. She sounded beaten.

  "Yes, Father, I know. Tough and practical," she said a moment later. "I'll keep trying, of course."

  Mallory slipped away. Alphonse Angell was controlling Phoebe's decisions from Minneapolis. She just wondered what he wanted his daughter to do that she considered unethical.

  "Did she agree?" Carter asked when she returned to the conference room.

  "I'll talk to her later," Mallory said. "She was busy."

  "You chickened out." His eyes glittered devilishly.

  "Did not!"

  "Bet you did."

  "If I did, may my teeth turn green," Mallory said, "and hush. Here's our witness."

  "What I don't unnerstand," Maybelle said, "is why that woman don't just have her teeth whitened."

  "What I don't understand," said the makeup artist, "is why she opened her mouth to the max and flung her head back in the middle of dyeing her hair."

  Mallory stifled an impatient breath. She stifled it to keep from blowing the makeup artist in the eye. Maybelle had decreed they would meet at Bergdorf's at seven, and Mallory had arrived nearly in tears, wanting to tell Maybelle that in spite of the red jacket, pants she could hardly sit down in and flirty snow boots, nothing whatever had happened last night. In fact, the first thing Carter had done when they'd gotten home was call Brie and remake their date for tonight.

  She had actually wept a little as she took the tags off her new clothes and hung them up, had wept for Carter and had wept at the money she'd spent. Or not spent, since she hadn't actually paid for them yet. And then, to top everything off, Carter had taken Phoebe Angell out to lunch.

  Here she was in her darkest hour and all Maybelle could do was obsess on the woman with green teeth, that is, after telling Mallory her next step was to jazz up her makeup a little. So while Maybelle extolled the wonders of whitening, Mallory sat on a high stool at the Trish McEvoy counter in Bergdorf's Level of Beauty—a fancy name for a fancy basement—getting stuff brushed on her eyelids, her cheeks, her nose, along with a steady stream of instructions from a woman so elegant, so perfectly groomed that Mallory wondered how she ever got anything else done. Later, she'd get to spend a few hundred dollars more on makeup. Tonight, Maybelle had assured her, she wouldn't have to spend a dime, just had to sit still, be quiet and she'd have a whole new image in no time flat.

  "I mean, those whitnin' jobs are incredible," Maybelle was saying now. "I talked the president into one."

  The makeup artist came to a halt with the lip pencil. "The president?"

  "Not ours," Mallory said, proud to be able to add something to this conversation. "The president of an emerging nation who needs to change his image to get reelected."
>
  "Yay-yuh," Maybelle drawled. "And there was somethin' a little threatnin' about these here teeth." She parted her lips to grasp tiny white incisors. "We had 'em filed down some. I told him if he looked less vicious he might act less vicious." And then she was right back to her obsession. "Course, I realize this woman you're talkin' about would be waitin' 'til after the trial—"

  "There's not going to be a trial," Mallory cut in.

  "Hold still," said the makeup artist.

  "Course there's not gonna be a trial, but jes' supposin' there was a trial, she'd want to wait 'til after, but Kevin's tellin' me she says it's permanent."

  "She has caps," Mallory said through closed lips. "That's the problem."

  "But why'd she open her mouth and throw back her head?" the makeup artist persisted.

  "Because," Mallory whistled through her teeth, "she was dyeing her hair red—"

  "You can open your mouth now."

  "—dyeing her hair red for the part of Annie Ado in a community theater production of Oklahoma, and she took a sudden notion to rehearse 'I Can't Say No.'"

  "Thanks. I feel better knowing."

  "What about the caps?" Maybelle was sticking to the topic.

  "You can whiten teeth but you can't whiten porcelain caps," Mallory said.

  "Way-ell, I'll be danged," Maybelle said. "Sure am glad the president has all his own teeth."

  "There," said the makeup artist, "look at yourself."

  Mallory had to admit the colors were subtle. The Be Prepared Pink kit had instantly struck a chord with her. The only thing she minded was that a lot of the kit had been transferred to her face, layered on top of moisturizer, concealer and brush-on foundation. She felt filled and frosted like a cake.

  Buying them—she would hate that, too, when the time came to reimburse Maybelle. But her eyelashes were the worst blow. "People will think they're fake," she hissed to Maybelle, not wanting to hurt the makeup artist's feelings.

  Maybelle sighed. "Oh, hon, you are nearly hopeless. You really are. But if you think I'm giving up on you, forget it. We're going to hit on something that makes you feel sexy, and that's all there is to it."

  Mallory turned slowly to face her instead of the mirror. "What did you say?"

  "Why, that's all this is about. You're as cute and feminine as you can be. I'm just lookin' for something that will make y'all feel that way."

  "But I—"

  "How'd y'all get to be like this anyhow?" Maybelle went from exasperated fellow-woman to counselor in a split second. "I don't usually get into the Freudian stuff, but I'm thinkin' in your case it might be intrestin' to know how you got your idea of what a woman was s'posed to be."

  It stunned Mallory. Slowly she reached deep into her voluminous handbag, the handbag of an efficient woman who believes in Being Prepared. Carter had found her credit card before he'd gotten down to the bottom, where for some reason she'd been carrying her mother's latest book. In case she needed it, she supposed, and she needed it now. She pulled it out and thrust it at Maybelle.

  "Read this," she said. "It will save us a world of time."

  "Goody, bedtime readin'. Who wrote it?" Maybelle said, holding the book away from her, apparently to see it better.

  "My mother."

  "That should be intrestin'. Thanks, hon, I'll read it for sure. Here's your makeup." Although Mallory hadn't seen money or plastic change hands, the salesperson had produced a bag filled with makeup, which Maybelle handed to Mallory. "Go home and hit this guy with your new face. See what happens. Let's meet here again tomorrow night. We seem to be doin' better here than we do at the office." She frowned. "It maybe them horns. The president looked a little scared when he saw 'em, too. Maybe I need me a less fancy desk."

  And she was gone. She hadn't worn the llama coat tonight. The coat that was slowly receding up the escalator looked more like panda bears sewn together. Mallory watched until the last sliver of pansy-tooled boot vanished, then turned back to the makeup artist. "Don't I need to pay you for these?"

  "Oh, no. It's taken care of."

  "I can't let her go on buying things I'll have to pay for later," Mallory said, losing her natural need for discretion in the panic that set in. "I don't know the price of anything I've bought in the last two days. I could be bankrupt and not even realize it."

  "Oh," the girl said, dismissing this idea with a wave of a perfect frosted-copper-tipped hand, "don't worry about it. Let Maybelle have her fun."

  "I can't help liking her," Mallory said even more desperately, "but there's a limit to how much fun I can afford to let her have."

  Now the girl actually laughed. "You may end up not paying for anything," she said.

  "What?"

  "You don't know about Maybelle, do you?"

  "She has many, many diplomas," Mallory said grimly.

  "She has many, many sections of Texas land, too," the girl said. "She inherited them when her husband died."

  "How big's a section?"

  "How would I know?" the girl said. "But it's a lot of acres, and some of them are right outside of town. In fact, they kind of sneak into the town. Pretty far into the town." Her grin was widening, and now she was just a cute, nice girl who was really, really good with makeup.

  "Which town?"

  "Dallas."

  "Ah-h-h."

  "Yeah, and the ones out in West Texas where Maybelle actually lived were so full of oil they weren't good for much else." She giggled.

  "Oil," Mallory breathed out another "ah-h-h."

  "I'm talking a lot of oil. Maybelle said it got 'right depressin' livin' with the smell.'" The girl laughed outright. "I told her that was the kind of depression I didn't need Wellbutrin for."

  "So … I guess she has a charge account here, and she just…"

  "The salespeople get a little orientation session on Maybelle when they start working at Bergdorf's," the girl said. "Maybelle takes, we add it up and send it up to bookkeeping, bookkeeping talks to her accountant and her accountant sends money. Everybody's happy."

  Mallory was reduced to muttering inanities like, "I see. Uh-huh. Umm." She thanked the girl for the information and was pulling herself together to drift away when the girl said, "I put some instructions in the bag. I'm not sure you were paying attention while I was doing your face."

  "Thank you," Mallory said. "I wasn't."

  "Well, don't worry. Any problems, come back to me. I can fix the little stuff, Maybelle can fix the big stuff."

  "You really think so?"

  A mysterious expression settled over the girl's face. "I'll bet you a Pink Pearl lip gloss when that president she's counseling gets reelected."

  * * *

  8

  « ^ »

  Feel sexy. Mallory was still obsessing on the idea as she took the escalator up from the cosmetics level to the first floor. There she paused, thinking, making a plan. Until that magical moment she began to feel sexy inside, how was she going to make any headway with Carter? Maybe she needed a prop, just the way Carter needed that pen to worry between his fingers as if it were a cigarette. She walked slowly toward the front doors on Fifth Avenue

  , thinking what that prop might be, and remembered the mistletoe she'd admired on the Christmas floor at Bloomingdale's. Bergdorf's would surely have mistletoe, too.

  Mallory found the elevators and went to the eighth floor, stepping out into another fantasy world of heavily decorated trees on which everything was for sale, trees and all. And there, hanging in a doorway, was a ball of mistletoe that was, if anything, bigger, greener—and more expensive—than the mistletoe at Bloomingdale's.

  A few minutes later, she owned a ball of mistletoe. Seen from a different perspective, she owned something from Bergdorf's she'd actually paid for.

  As soon as she stepped through the door of the suite, she discovered that she and Carter also owned a Christmas tree. It was a tiny, live tree in a beribboned terra-cotta pot, and someone had placed it on the small round table they could use for dining if
they ever dined in. She assumed it was a special holiday courtesy of the St. Regis until she noticed the gift card.

  "From a friend," it said. "May your Christmas wishes come true."

  Probably one of Carter's women, she thought despondently. It smelled nice, though. Her mother's trees didn't smell at all. Nothing in her mother's house smelled of anything but bleach, ammonia or baking soda, the thrifty housewife's cleaning supplies. The Christmas tree, dutifully put up one week before Christmas and taken down on January 1, was, of course, fake.

  She wondered what Maybelle would make of her mother's book. She'd know soon, because anything Maybelle thought was bound to come out of her mouth, and sooner rather than later.

  With a sigh for what might have been, she lined up her new makeup on the marble counter in her bathroom and opened the mistletoe box. The ball of greenery came with its own little hanger, so she dragged a chair over to reach the archway that led to her bedroom door.

  Then she hesitated, thought a minute, playing out the scene in her head. It would look too obvious if she backed him up toward her own bedroom door, so instead, she dragged the chair over to the arch that led to his bedroom door.

  Who said she didn't need to travel with a tool kit? Newly grateful for her mother's wisdom, she went to work. It wasn't easy to install the hanger in the woodwork, and it was entirely possible the hotel would charge her for damages, but she reminded herself again that for the moment, money was no object.

  It looked beautiful up there, and with the tree, the suite had taken on a wonderfully Christmassy air.

  Now she could focus on the case until Carter came home. Assuming she could see through her eyelashes.

  "Interest rates are falling, the after-tax spread between munis, corporates and treasuries is narrowing dramatically and I personally feel this trend is going to continue."