Lipstick and Lies

by Margit Liesche

  “Hi, Dee,” I said.

  Dee whirled around. “Pucci Lewis,” she called loudly. Her satin spike-heels wobbled slightly, carrying her toward me.

  Dee wore a white satin tunic over flowing black trousers, the ensemble a bold change from the conservative silk dress she’d worn when we’d first met at the afternoon tea. The chic outfit, while flattering, was more along the lines of what her sister Kiki might wear. The apparel wasn’t the only copycat item, I noted, as she drew closer. A day earlier, her hair had been pulled back into a tight chignon. Now it was worn loose, in a chin-length bob, and the circle of white at her temple had been banished by a blue-black dye.

  Dee had been looking me over as well. “Why, you look positively beat. Bad day?”

  I smiled. “Not a bad day but a full day, including several interviews and some leg work researching my stories.”

  Unlike her sister’s bob with its fringe of thick bangs, Dee’s new cut was all one length and worn parted on the side. She tucked a section of dark tresses behind her ear, the curve of inky hair a graceful frame for her pearl-studded earlobe. She was eyeing my FBI-issued bag. Made of sturdy black canvas, trimmed with leather, the satchel was surprisingly light considering it contained the tools of trade I would need for the evening’s surreptitious entry.

  “Research material,” I improvised. “I was on my way to the lounge. Join me for a sherry?”

  Did babies cry? She hooked her arm through mine. “Lovely. A nightcap would be just the thing.”

  I knew from the way she leaned on me that Dee had had enough to drink already. But in one of my less noble moments, turning a blind eye to her problem, I ordered a carafe of sherry from a passing member of the staff.

  In the lounge, a vacant pair of club chairs beckoned from near the fireplace. It wasn’t obvious, but the clasp on Dee’s handbag was undone. We took our seats and a piece of paper—actually, an endorsed bank check—sailed out. I caught it before it could touch the floor. The name and address of a law office was printed in the upper corner; the Barclay-Bly sisters were the joint payees on the line at the document’s center.

  I handed over the draft; she hadn’t even realized she’d dropped it. At the same moment, a waitress arrived with a decanter and glasses.

  Sherry was light, my day had been hard. With a delicate clink, Dee and I toasted to good health, good friends, and a quick end to the war. I took a tiny swallow, savoring the mellow hazelnut flavor plus the soft burn of alcohol going down. It was possible the taste was all the more pleasant knowing that when I raised my glass again, I would only pretend to take a sip. A long night lay ahead and my mind needed to be absolutely sharp.

  “So glad I didn’t lose this,” Dee said, returning the check to her handbag, securing the clasp. “Promised Kiki I’d deliver it tomorrow.”

  “I was in the salon earlier. Heard she wasn’t feeling well. Nothing serious, I hope?”

  “Last night, she had a splitting headache. Took a sleeping pill. This morning when I called, the effects hadn’t worn off. She was groggy, still not up to par, that’s all.”

  Her glass chinked softly as she set it on the butler table between us. I poured her a fresh shot. “Kiki agreed to an interview for my piece on the Cosmos Club. When do you think she’ll be back?”

  “V-V’s convinced her to take another day or two off.”

  “With those viperous women conspiring to squelch her election campaign and the Book Faire coming right up? Doesn’t that seem odd?”

  “When V-V sets a course, there’s no use trying to change it.” Dee caught my look. “It’s true. Personally, I think she gives in to his need to run things too readily. This time, though, he’s brewed up something even I can’t resist.” She smiled. “Tomorrow Cook is packing a picnic for us and we’re taking the electric launch out for a cruise down the river. It’s something we used to do monthly when I’d bring her check.” She became animated, describing the boat and the pleasures of meandering along the river, eating and enjoying one another’s company and nature. “Last few times, though, she’s been too busy.”

  “You bring them a monthly check?”

  “Not them. Kiki. It’s her allowance.”

  I must have looked puzzled.

  “In their will,” she explained, “our parents tapped me as their executor.”

  “I see. But Kiki’s older, isn’t she?”

  “Yes. My sister was pretty irresponsible once upon a time, and our parents never got over it.”

  “Your parents put you in a rough spot. But why do you have to deliver it? Why not let your lawyer do it, or just mail her the check?”

  Dee sighed. “The will stipulates I have to do the deed in person.”

  Growing up, I was taught never to discuss money openly. The subject was too personal; it simply was not polite. Yet I could not shake the sense that the senior Barclay-Blys had been concerned about more than youthful missteps in structuring their will. I tiptoed further down the delicate line.

  “But it’s been years since Kiki has done anything wild, right? Did they have reason to think she was up to some new sort of mischief?”

  Dee looked irritated. “I don’t know what my parents were thinking. But it wasn’t that Kiki had somehow regressed. It doesn’t matter anyway. Once I hand the money over, she’s free to do whatever she wants.”

  I pushed on. “Was it V-V? Were they afraid he would take over her funds?”

  “Our parents trusted V-V,” she said a little too quickly. “They gave them the Rouge River property and enough money to build their dream house as a wedding present.”

  “That’s not the same as willing them half of the estate,” I countered.

  She shrugged and looked suddenly morose. “It was their money, their will. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?”

  I wanted to say: No, let’s not. Your parents wanted to control Kiki’s life, even from the grave. They must have had a reason. Tell me about it. But it was her family and I knew to back off. I let her finish her drink in peace.

  Her eyes were teary when she set down her glass.

  “It might help to talk about it,” I said softly.

  “Well, it’s just, well…” She faltered, then her thoughts escaped in a rush. “Sometimes I worry that she loves him too much. A woman should never surrender herself to a man so completely. It can only mean heartache in the end.”

  I restrained a noisy sigh. Instead of a dark family secret, she was alluding to her private experience with the cad who’d left her at the altar.

  “Talk about devotion,” I said in a bright voice, shifting to the other liaison I had in mind. “What do you think of the newspaper accounts describing Nelson Butler’s relationship with the Countess?”

  Seeming stumped by the abrupt transition, Dee knitted her eyebrows into a dark line.

  I continued. “She led a secret life apart from him, first as an enemy agent, then as a counteragent for the FBI. Today she’s in jail, yet Butler swears he still loves her. Now that’s devotion, don’t you agree?”

  She glanced around the room. “I introduced them,” she whispered.

  “What was she like?”

  “She was all right, but now that we know she’s a spy…” She hesitated. “I included her in a small pre-wedding dinner party I was hosting. Everyone liked her back then. She and Nelson had so much in common, I sat them together.”

  I put my glass to my lips, pretending to take a sip while she drained the dregs of hers. “Tell me more about the party. Who else was there? Anyone zany or notorious besides the Countess?” Any additional German secret agents?

  Beneath her thick eyebrows, Dee’s eyes glittered. “You truly are one die-hard reporter, always digging for that scoop, aren’t you?”

  With a shrug, I raised an eyebrow suggesting that, yes, I was.

  She gave a resigned smile. “The party was fourteen months ago. No one of any notoriety attended, nor do I recall anyone doing anything scandalous or saying something newsworthy.”

>   Dee’s ease and confidence in talking about her and Kiki’s relationship with the Countess made me think she was telling the truth. Why then did I still feel uneasy?

  Dee rubbed the vivid blue paint blotch staining her index finger with her thumb, as if trying to erase it.

  “While you were in the salon, getting your makeover, did you happen to notice, has the manicurist returned?”

  The thumb paused. She held her paint-stained hand aloft, fingers splayed, and laughed. “Kiki is the one obsessed with getting manicures.” She knit her eyebrows. “But what do you mean ‘returned’?”

  “Haven’t you heard? Miss Fingers didn’t show up for work this morning. No one’s heard from her. She vanished without a trace sometime in the night.”

  “I hadn’t heard, how awful!”

  I nodded, Dee’s reaction barely registering. Her comment about her sister’s nail-grooming habits had reminded me of the skirmish between Kiki and V-V over Personality Unlimited when I’d first seen them in the library. They had both wanted to deliver it to Glossy, but Kiki eventually won, saying she was going there anyway to schedule a manicure appointment. Manicures were not free and her hands had been perfectly groomed already.

  Adrenaline coursed through me like a drug. I wanted to bop myself on the head. Why hadn’t I pieced it together earlier?

  An urge to get to the Club’s library overwhelmed me. I checked my watch and sprang to my feet. “Sorry, have to go. Expecting an important call. I’m late. Please forgive me.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The library was deserted. At the corner desk where Liberty and I had met the night before, a pair of shaded sconces had been left on, casting the room in dim pockets of shadow and light. The evening before, the lamp on the desk had been turned off and Liberty was reading by pen light. At the time I figured she had just wanted to be discreet.

  The light was a miniature TL-122. I’d seen her slip it into the pocket of her smock. The remarkable part of what I’d observed, then quickly stored away, was that the tiny torch had been throwing off a violet-blue glow. This meant Liberty had used an ultraviolet filter to convert the torch. Made of black glass with both a smooth face and a diffusing one, the filter eliminated most of the visible light in the beam. The remaining rays emitted were ultraviolet. Simply put, last night she had been scanning the text for a secret message. Guarded with each other, she hadn’t explained and I hadn’t asked.

  I pulled the desk lamp’s chain. Soft emerald light washed the shelves. The book’s familiar dark blue spine was where Liberty had left it. I removed the thin volume.

  I sat on the brocade-covered chair occupied by Kiki a day earlier when we’d first met. She had locked the center drawer before we left. In my FBI bag, I assessed the array of tools. This was a simple job. I selected the proper pick from a slotted pocket.

  The drawer pulled open with a rattle. The bottle of nail polish Kiki had considered taking, then left behind, was on its side. In righting the bottle, I checked the contents, noting that the clear polish inside was nearly depleted.

  The bowels of the drawer were dark. I retrieved my miniature flashlight—not a TL-122, but another model suited for the job—and ran the beam over the drawer’s interior, the palm of my hand patting from one item to the next. The finds, such as they were, amounted to papers and receipts relating to the Book Faire. In a final patting sweep, my fingers met the rough cow-grain surface of a letter-sized accordion file lodged in back. I propped the torch on the desk so that the beam shone on the file.

  The first item was a dog-eared, pocket-sized softcover book. I flipped it open. The fine hairs along the back of my neck stood on end. An illustrated explosives manual in German! Questions ping-ponged inside my brain. Who did it belong to? Kiki? It could also be Grace Buchanan-Dineen’s. Kiki had invited her to the Club. Maybe the speaker-spy had asked her hostess to hold onto it for her. I checked the inside cover for an inscription, then thumbed the pages. Whoever it belonged to, it was a strange thing to find locked inside the desk of the Club’s Enrichment Program committee chair. Bewildered and somewhat numb with shock, I set the manual down.

  My next discovery, two cancelled checks signed by Kiki, stapled together and made out to Philip Chambers, Dee’s ex-fiancé, was equally perplexing. Dated a week apart, they had been written a year ago, in July, the month of the couple’s intended wedding ceremony.

  Dipping back into the file, I unearthed a note attached to a faded postcard of the Eiffel tower, announcing Kiki and V-V’s marriage. Addressed to his attorney and signed by the senior Mr. Barclay-Bly, it read, Check him out carefully—Ah. Proof Kiki’s father had been concerned about his son-in-law’s character. And quite possibly the impetus for structuring his estate in a way that would protect his daughter.

  Next was a memo. The gist was that an investigator, hired by Barclay-Bly, had discovered that the Parisian friend who introduced Kiki to her chauffer had lied. V-V was not a descendant of bluebloods like she had claimed. His name had the proper pedigree, that much was true, but he was not a bona fide Vivikovsky family member. A records check in Ukraine that might have uncovered his true roots had proved difficult and, in the end, was abandoned.

  So her father had believed Kiki married a fraud. But was he? Before escaping to Paris, V-V had been a freedom fighter striving to save his country from Stalin. What if in trying to erase his past he was forced to take an assumed name? In wartime, switching one’s identity was commonplace and in many instances the only option for survival. And another thing, Liberty had vouched for V-V…

  Uncertainty gripped my soul. How much weight did Liberty’s word actually carry? It appeared she had not told the truth about Roy or about G-2. Had she also lied about finding nothing of interest in the charm book?

  I shoved the disquieting thoughts aside and returned to the memo.

  Y-Y LV IDOVH

  The letters hand printed in the upper right hand corner in pencil were so faint I hadn’t noticed them earlier. Obviously a coded message. We had studied plenty of sophisticated cipher substitution codes at Spy School, but my immediate instinct was that this was an elementary example, requiring nothing more than Cipher 101 basics. Y-Y unscrambled was surely “V-V,” and applying to the balance of the message the substitution logic of falling back three letters, I came up with V-V IS FALSE. Underscoring the memo’s point.

  The last item in the pouch was a wedding invitation. At least that was what I deduced, examining the heavy ivory-colored envelope. I was wrong. Inside was a thick piece of card stock. On it was a hand-written poem.

  The love of my life came not

  As love unto others is cast,

  For mine was a secret wound—

  But the wound grew a pearl, at last.

  I got to the salutation and my breath caught:

  Kiki, my love—A gift in your favorite palette, pink.

  May they be seeds of pleasure, as you are the love pearl of my heart. Yours with deepest devotion, P

  I blinked a couple of times, trying to decipher the meaning in the message. The sender claimed Kiki’s favorite color was pink and the poem referred to pearls. I stared at the correspondent’s initial, P. So were the rumors true? Had Philip given “Kiki, my love” pink pearls? If so, why was Dee wearing them?

  What had Renner’s secretary, Mrs. K, said? “We do our best to sidestep unpleasantries by keeping busy rather than dwelling on them. Especially in those matters over which we have no control.” Who could understand the powers of love? Or lust? An ember in the fireplace snapped. Hurriedly stowing the items, I relocked the drawer.

  ***

  At the door to my suite, I studied the seam above the handle. In the morning, I’d trapped the doorframe with a strand of hair. The fine strand, hardly long enough, barely dark enough, remained suspended across the crack, lightly glued in place with saliva.

  Secure that no one had invaded my room in my absence, I went in and set the book on the desk. Dropping my bag to the floor, I did a quick but thorough ch
eck of the room and armoire.

  I removed Gran’s derringer from the suitcase, placed it on the desk, keeping the grip within reach and the snub-nose angled toward the door, and picked up the copy of Personality Unlimited. The uniform off-white paper made finding telltale signs of an invisible message all the more difficult, but I scrutinized a large sampling of pages before turning to the table of contents and skimming the headings: Make-up, Dress, Manners, Character Improvement…

  Liberty had said her meeting was at midnight. I randomly flipped to page twelve, part of the Make-up section. The irony was incredible: secret ink was invisible; page twelve described the transformational powers of vanishing cream!

  I drew a shaky breath then scanned for coded transmissions that might be hidden in the typewritten text. Next, I did a word search, hunting for obvious marks or evidence of distorted lettering. Finally, I tried to analyze the subject matter covered on the page, hoping to uncover a coded missive.

  We recommend using a good quality vanishing cream. Less oily than cold cream, it will not merely puff up the skin and smooth out its texture, ridding it of lines, but may also be used as a foundation for face powder. The cream makes the powder cling evenly so you have a smooth finish…

  A few more lines and my eyes began to cross. I fell back in my seat. An instant later, I bolted upright. I moved the book close to the desk lamp. Keeping page twelve separate, I held it up to the light. There! The surface along the paper’s top margin was marred by several colorless scratches.

  I placed the open book on the desk and brushed the marks with my finger. The rough edges of the nearly invisible lines resembled the samples we’d examined in training suggesting someone had used a stainless steel nib of a fountain pen, or another sharp writing implement, to create a message written in phantom ink.

  A colorless fluid, phantom ink was invisible until a black light was shone over it. My hand trembled as I wrenched the portable dark light, requisitioned for the evening’s breakin, from the bag on the floor next to me, and switched it on. A jerky scrawling note appeared. The communiqué, fluoresced now in a brilliant blue, said: BEAUTY SHOP. MIDNIGHT. HELP ME. MUST NOT RETURN TO OKPLATE.