There was a long moment of silence, during which Claire’s brow furrowed. Her eyes defocussed, leading me to wonder if she might be thinking about Steward.
“I didn’t know her well enough to say. You should ask Bootsy. She’s a server at Club Mystique, and I think she should be home now.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “She works at Club Mystique? So she knew Stephen, too?”
Claire scrunched up her thin eyebrows and peered at me. “Of course. She’s the one who introduced them.”
“Stephen told us he met Angela when he went into Island Passion looking for a job,” I said.
“Really? That’s not what Angela told me.”
I looked over at Chance and he nodded. At least we both knew where we were headed next.
CHAPTER 21
Bootsy Flanigan was Claire Wood’s opposite in many ways. Where Claire was plain, Bootsy was flashy. Instead of reserved and professional, the lovely Ms. Flanigan was flirty and flip. We’d caught her in the middle of doing laundry, but even at that, it was obvious we were dealing with a girl who liked the latest fashion.
She wore a black T-shirt that hung off one shoulder and shorts that were, well, short. Even her platform slippahs, those shoes the rest of the world calls flip-flops, had heels and bling.
If there was one thing Bootsy appeared to not be, it was trusting. Right now, she had her arms folded in front of her and she stood with one leg straight and the other cocked at an angle while she leaned against the washing machine in the first-floor laundry room.
“Who did you say you were again?” Her brown eyes flashed with suspicion as she stared first at me, then Chance.
Oddly enough, it was one of the few times I hadn’t seen a woman swoon at Chance’s blue eyes and Hollywood smile. Obviously, she wasn’t going to be swayed by some BS or Chance’s Phillip Marlowe Online Detective Agency ID.
“Look, Ms. Flanigan, I’m a landlord who has a tenant that needs help. We’re trying to get to the bottom of a scam in which she lost her rent money.”
“And why did Claire send you down here?”
I repeated that explanation, too. This was getting to be more than tedious; it was downright annoying.
“We believe Angela was somehow caught up in a scam her boyfriend instigated.” I deliberately kept my response vague. Chance and I had agreed on the way down that we should not be giving information, but trying to dig out new facts.
Bootsy heaved a long sigh, looked over her shoulder at the chugging washer, and finally gave us our first straight answer. “She’d been pretty upset lately.”
“Do you think it was because of her boyfriend?”
“Joseph? He’s such a slime. I wouldn’t put anything past him.”
Behind Bootsy, the washer stopped chugging and the momentary silence quickly gave way to the sound of water gurgling down a drain. This wasn’t a bad little laundry room. It had room for two washers and two dryers; the door opened to a small hallway; and there was a window at the back, which Bootsy had opened for ventilation. It was, however, a bit confining and I wondered if that might be contributing to her suspicious nature.
“If we’ve caught you at a bad time…” I let the words trail off.
She shook her head and shrugged, then pulled loose the black scrunchy securing her ponytail. Leaning her head back, she gathered her hair and repositioned the scrunchy, this time into a looser version of the same ponytail. “No, it’s okay. This is just kind of weird. Talking about Ang like this. She was telling me just last week how she needed to get away from Joseph.”
“What day was that?” Chance asked.
Little frown lines formed on Bootsy’s brow as she seemed to think. “Friday morning.”
Chance and I exchanged a glance. The day after Stephen’s visit. I said, “Claire told us she overheard a very heated argument between the two of them.”
“He’s a mean guy. I told her not to date a guy like him, but she had a serious case of bad-boy attraction syndrome.” She shook her head and her voice took on a hard edge. “She never would admit it, but I’m pretty sure he was hitting her, because she had this bruise.” She rubbed her left cheekbone and shivered. “Ang told me she walked into a door in the middle of the night. Isn’t that what they all say? They make excuses for the guy. It was classic.”
“But she never told you he hit her?” I asked.
“No. Girls like us don’t admit that sort of thing—even to ourselves.”
Chance frowned as he glanced at me. “Are you in that sort of relationship now? Is someone beating you?”
“I told you. We don’t talk about it. But for your information, no.”
I looked at Chance. He still had a frown on his face. “What are you thinking?”
He shook his head and donned his Hollywood smile. “Nothing,” he said as he turned to Bootsy. “You said Angela told you she wanted to get away from Joseph. Do you think she’d admitted to herself she was in a bad relationship?”
“It’s hard to say. All I know is she was totally distraught.”
“Was she being treated for depression?” Chance asked.
“I don’t know. One of the cops who was here was asking about the same thing.”
Bootsy clutched her arms tighter and seemed to withdraw into herself. It seemed an odd reaction, as though she were deliberately avoiding answering. It could be she didn’t want to betray her friend—or for a different reason altogether.
When she spoke, her voice was soft as a whisper and the fashionista looked like a lonely child who had lost her favorite dolly. “I hope it’s not true.”
It looked like Chance was going to ask another question, but I stopped him with a raised finger. “Bootsy, what do you mean? You hope what’s not true?”
“I heard one of the cops talking. He said they’d found a note.” She stopped and brushed a tear from her cheek with her fingers and forced a weak smile. “I’m going to miss her, you know? Why would she do that? Kill herself?”
She pulled a tissue from the top of the washer. I hadn’t even noticed the box before, but it made me realize she must have been crying over her friend’s death when we’d walked in. I glanced around the room. It was a typical laundry room with white walls, a safety notice, and instructions for the equipment. But there was no chair or even any room for one.
“Do you usually hang out here while you’re waiting for your laundry?”
She snickered. “No. Why?”
“When we walked in, it appeared as though you were lost in your thoughts. Were you thinking about Angela?”
“We met right here in this room.” She grabbed the end of her ponytail and stroked the hair absently. “She was telling me how everything on the second and third floors was tied up. One of the tenants had their family in from Minnesota for a wedding. They had eight people crammed into their unit. Can you believe it? I’d rather live on the street.”
“That’s pretty crowded.” I said. “So you two got to talking?”
Her smile returned, but she let her gaze rest on the floor. “I told her she was wearing a cute top. She said she liked my flip-flops. That was when we realized how much alike we were.”
“Were you both from off-island?”
“You can tell, huh?”
“You don’t have the island accent. And you said flip-flops instead of slippahs. Yeah, I can tell.” I tilted my head toward Chance. “This guy’s the same way. He’s from LA. Me, too, originally.”
“Huntington Beach.” She looked at me and snickered. “I thought the traffic there was bad.”
“Just avoid the H-1 at rush hour.” I winked at her.
“This said by a man who doesn’t drive.” Chance rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Bootsy, it could be very helpful for us to take a look around Angela’s apartment. Do you have a key?”
Her friendly facade dropped away, and her eyes narrowed. “Why would you need to get in her apartment?”
“There might be clues as to what happened to her,” Chance sai
d.
“But the cops are investigating.”
Maybe Angela’s death, I thought, but not Grace’s scam. Not Island Passion.
“They may not be doing much,” Chance persisted. “If you don’t want to let us in, I understand.”
“The cops only have so much manpower, Bootsy. Don’t you want to know what happened to Angela?”
She glared at us with fire in her eyes. Scratch the easy access; it was not going to happen. But the biggest fallacy in the whole “Angela jumped” argument was where she lived—the second floor. I doubted if anyone thought they could do anything more than break a bone with a fall that short.
“Bootsy, do you know who was with Angela Tuesday night?”
“I didn’t see her that night,” she snapped.
Rats. We were being shut out. She was fine talking about Angela, just not her death. And she definitely wasn’t giving us access to the apartment. I desperately wanted to ask her about Stephen Brantley. It seemed like the next logical subject—she worked with the guy, had supposedly introduced him to Angela, and he’d lied about that simple detail.
“Did you see anyone coming or going that night?” Chance asked.
“I think it’s time you left. I’ve answered your questions, now you have to respect my privacy. I want you to leave.”
I sighed and nodded. “I’m sorry if we’ve upset you.”
“I’m not upset. I have things to do.” She crossed her arms over her chest and glared back at me.
Right. Got it. We’d said something that had touched a hot button. Something was causing her tremendous pain—or fear. I wished I knew which it was. What I did know was that the next place for us to look for clues about what made Angela tick was back on the second floor. We had to get into her apartment.
CHAPTER 22
Chance and I talked about the question of how Stephen and Angela had really met while we waited for Bootsy to exit the laundry room. After fifteen minutes, she came out and returned to her apartment. A minute later, she came back out and went to the mailboxes. Oddly enough, after she checked her box, she went to a second one and opened it with a key from a different ring.
I glanced at Chance, who sat across from me in the plush driver’s seat of the Ferrari. We were parked on the opposite side of the street in a loading zone. Thankfully, nobody had yet needed our spot.
“Who’s mail do you suppose she just checked?” I asked.
Chance licked his lips, then quickly waggled his eyebrows a couple of times. “Why don’t we find out?”
Without further ado, Chance moved the car to a less illegal parking spot closer to the Honolulu Sands. We went to the mailboxes. There were no names, but they were numbered. The box Bootsy had checked was for Angela’s condo.
I looked at Chance and smiled. “So she does have a key.”
“We know she has one for the mailbox.”
“Look, Chance, I’m a landlord. Trust me. If she and Angela had keys to each other’s mailboxes, they had door keys. No question.”
“So she doesn’t want us to go inside. You think she doesn’t trust us?”
“Could be. Or it could be she’s hiding something. Do you have your lock picks?”
Chance’s face lit up like a little boy’s who’d just gotten the coolest toy ever made. “Of course.” He reached for his back pocket and pulled out a small leather case.
“Good, you came prepared. Let’s take the stairs. We don’t need her to catch us waiting for the elevator.”
It took us no time at all to go up one floor, get to Angela’s apartment, and for me to take up the lookout position while Chance worked the lock. After a full minute, I glared at him as he knelt there still struggling to get the technique right. “Could you hurry it up, please?”
“This is tricky business, McKenna.” He winced, tried turning the lock, but it didn’t budge.
“We got caught the last time we did this,” I hissed. “That old Chinese woman and her husband. Do you remember them?”
“I remember the big guy with the meat cleaver. He looked like he would have been happy to use it.”
“At least Bootsy won’t have a big bodyguard around.”
“He was a cook, McKenna.”
“Whatever. You need to practice more.”
Just then, the tool twisted in his hands and the door slid open. “You were saying?”
I bowed and extended my hands and arms, then raised and lowered them a couple of times. “Greatest lock picker ever.”
Chance pocketed his tools and slipped inside. “I’ll work on my technique.”
“Good idea,” I said as I followed him. But the moment Angela’s front door closed, the realization that we were again breaking the law settled in. “Man, I hate doing this.”
“I know, but it is a rush. And it might be the only way we figure out how to connect the dots between Angela and Grace’s scam.”
“You think they’re related?” I asked.
“You don’t?”
“Actually, I do. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he muttered as he looked around. “That’s why we’re here.”
The layout was a mirror image of Claire’s unit. Living room directly ahead, kitchen on the left, bedroom off to the right. It was the same galley kitchen with virtually identical appliances. The main difference was in the decoration. Where Claire had painted her unit in a pale gray with white trim, Angela’s walls were standard, stark, apartment white.
Chance and I both went to the middle of the living room and studied our surroundings. “Where do you want to begin?” I asked.
“How about I look around out here? You take the bedroom and bath.”
“Sounds good.” I turned and entered Angela’s bedroom.
If I hadn’t known Angela to be fashion conscious before, I would have clearly gotten the picture now. One wall was lined with open armoires filled with assorted clothing. Everything appeared to be organized first by type—blouses, pants, long dresses, skirts—then by color.
I sighed as I realized there were color coordinated storage boxes on top of the armoire. This could take forever. But, I had to admit, it was one of the most magnificent pieces of closet organization I’d seen in years.
Looking around the room felt very much like standing in the women’s floor of a department store. From narrow brim to wide, hats hung on hooks along a wall with a full-length mirror. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen so many hat types and colors. There were burgundy, green, gray, and black in a variety of textures from straw to felt.
I called out to Chance in the living room. “This girl spent serious money on clothing.”
He poked his head inside, gazed around, and whistled long and low. “Wow.” He added, “Lexie’s younger sister has a room that looks a lot like this. She’s got a makeup stand just like that one and just as many clothes. A lot of them she’s borrowed from her sisters.” He shrugged and returned to his search.
I hadn’t thought about going through the clothing, but there was one tiny section on the far right that caught my eye. It was actually the color, drab as could be, that seemed out of place. I went to the shirt and pulled it out.
“Well, I’ll be,” I muttered. It was an All Day Delivery shirt. There was no name stenciled on it, but it looked to be about Joseph’s size, a men’s large. There was also a pair of khaki work pants like the ones the drivers at All Day Delivery wore.
After replacing Joseph’s clothing, I took a precaution against the evidence disappearing and photographed everything in its place next to the other clothes.
I ran my fingers along the entire line of Angela’s clothing. Nothing appeared out of place, so I moved on to the makeup stand. It was a delicate, white table with curved legs and a round, lighted mirror in the center. The set also included a matching white chair.
I knelt in front of the stand, inspecting it for drawers or—what, a secret compartment? There was no drawer, no compartment. At least nothing I found. When I
stood and gazed down at the layout, I tried to picture Angela sitting here, preparing for her day. What was her ritual? Did she comb out her long, brown hair as she sat here? Admire her dark eyeliner? Decide she needed more of that red lipstick she wore?
The picture wasn’t coming together. We’d met her only the one time. She’d been alternately cold and vulnerable. Why? Getting into the heads of the people I chased had been what helped me to be a good skip tracer. So who was the real Angela Keating? The cold fashionista who’d greeted us at Island Passion? Or the sweet girl Joseph had loved. I sat down on her little stool to find out.
Laid out before me was an array of bottles, tubes, and other containers. Lipstick, blusher, eyeliner. She had three different perfumes. None was a bottle of Primal. In fact, only one had a label. The other two were in bottles that looked like they’d come from an apothecary.
This was just scratching the surface and only served to make me more curious. Why did she have two unlabeled bottles of perfume? Was she sharing with a friend? What if they were custom? My curiosity level was now running somewhere up in the stratosphere. As Lexie said, inquiring minds, and all that stuff. I had to know.
I pulled the first unmarked bottle and removed the spray top. Distinctly sweet. I sniffed again—was that coffee I smelled? I had trouble getting the cap back on the bottle, but it finally snapped into place. The second was more mysterious because I couldn’t detect a scent. What the heck. I pressed the spritzer top thing ever so slightly.
A fine mist exploded in my face. It was like someone had shoved a bouquet of flowers up my nose. Jasmine predominated, but the scent overpowered me. I sneezed. Then again. Crap, now I smelled like I’d been sampling women’s perfume or had visited a French brothel.
Enough with that stuff. Maybe I’d have better luck in her jewelry box. It was white, about three inches tall, and eight inches wide. Reaching out, I pulled the box toward me. A business card that had been hidden behind it fell over.
There was nothing unusual in the jewelry box. With the exception of a couple of articles of men’s clothing, this was turning into a big, fat nothing. I took a photo of the open box and closed the lid, then picked up the business card that had fallen over. It was from Club Mystique. On the back, written in a flowing cursive script, was a phone number. I took photos of the card, front and back, then replaced it and went to the bathroom.
The Scent of Waikiki Page 12
