by Dana Dratch
Dear God, what if Nick had a similar set lurking in his wallet? Who was she really, and what had she gotten him into?
I opened the screen door for Lucy, and she bounced into the kitchen.
“Better?”
“Rowr,” Lucy replied, loping past me and over to her water bowl. She lapped delicately for a minute or so. Then nosed the food bowl, which was empty. She looked up at me, pointedly. Without breaking eye contact, she put an oversized paw in the food dish.
“Nick says you have to wait ’til he gets back.”
She reached down with her nose and pushed the bowl toward me. Then she looked up expectantly.
“An hour, tops.”
She ducked again, this time sliding the bowl right into my feet. Then she sat back on her haunches and stared up at me.
I looked away. Then back. I swear I heard her stomach rumble.
“Oh, all right. But if anyone asks, this was just a snack.”
I opened the fridge. Precious little.
First thing tomorrow, I was taking Nick’s rent money and buying some groceries. But tonight we’d have to get creative.
I found four eggs, a couple of slices of bread, and—hiding way in the back—a half-jar of salsa. I didn’t remember buying the bread, but it was mold-free. Sold!
I pulled half a package of turkey bacon out of the freezer and threw it on the counter with a thunk. Lucy’s ears shot up.
“It’s bacon. You’ll love it.”
While Lucy was a shorthaired dog, she still had her puppy fat and her puppy fuzz, which gave her a fluffy look. And her velvety ears seemed to have come from a much larger dog. On the outside, they were the same reddish-brown as the rest of Lucy. Inside, they matched the creamy color of her belly.
One oversized ear rotated to the side, while the other stood at attention. And she must have believed me, because her eyes never left that bacon.
I threw half the bacon into a pan, glanced at Lucy, and tossed in the rest of it. As it heated up and sizzled, she watched, fascinated.
I dumped two slices of bread into the toaster and cracked the eggs into a second pan. Minutes later, when the toast popped up, Lucy jumped. “Wuff! Rowr!”
“It’s OK. It’s toast. Food. Good stuff.”
She looked dubious. The smell of bacon and eggs had obviously attracted the evil toast-monster, a clear and present danger. And I was clueless.
I turned off the stove, pulled two paper plates from the cupboard, and put exactly half of the eggs on each. I dropped three slices of bacon onto my plate, along with a slice of toast.
I crumbled the remaining three pieces of bacon onto Lucy’s eggs. I put the plate next to her food bowl, and she stepped up immediately. She tasted a little mouthful, and followed it with a bigger mouthful. Pretty soon the plate was empty.
When she came sniffing around the table, I bent down and put half a slice of buttered toast in her mouth. She trotted across the kitchen, dropped it onto her plate, and spent the next few minutes gnawing on it.
As I shoveled in my last bite of eggs, I glanced at the stove clock: 5:25.
Luckily, getting ready for work these days took little to no effort. I pulled on an extra-large pink sweatshirt from the Walmart sale rack, and a ten-dollar pair of mom jeans that gave new meaning to the word “roomy.” Most important, I pulled my reddish blond hair into a tight bun and hid it beneath a giant blue calico scarf. I skipped makeup, put on the glasses, and topped off my ensemble with a big black cardigan.
It was amazing how different I looked with no makeup, no hair care, and an outfit that was god-awful.
Not only didn’t I look like myself, but whoever this person was, she’d been seriously ill for months. My disguise swam on me, which was intentional. What I hadn’t anticipated: long hours, stress, and worry had gifted me with deep, dark circles under my eyes. Another week and they’d be joined by bags big enough to pack all the groceries I couldn’t afford.
My landline rang again. I was tempted to ignore it. Then I remembered Trip’s comment about Billy Bob. Was this the end of the line for me?
I checked caller ID. Annie’s cell.
It wasn’t her fault my life had turned to sand. She’d tried to take me on a sweet European getaway.
“Hey, Annie, I’m on my way out the door. What’s up?”
“Ooh, business or pleasure?”
Thank goodness we weren’t Skyping. If she could have seen the getup I was wearing, I’d have never lived it down.
“Business. Strictly business.”
“Damn, Alex, you really are working too hard. I understand not being able to take a two-week break. But you owe yourself a little fun.”
“Look who I’m talking to. How many days off have you had lately? And don’t tell me traveling with Mom qualifies as a vacation.”
“You got that right. But I always find ways of having fun, too. Like tonight. We’re going to a party at a gallery. One of the guys we’re meeting is the director. Super cute, too. Anyway, he’s giving a small group of us a special tour of a modern art exhibit that won’t open to the public until next week.”
“That sounds great,” I said.
It did. The closest I was going to get to modern art tonight was scrubbing gunk out of a toilet bowl.
“So is Mom naming your artistically inclined children yet?” I asked.
“Chloe and Jean-Louis,” Annie said, deadpan.
“No!”
“Hey, you know Mom. She wants grandkids.”
Peter and Zara would have been her best bet. They’d been married for years. But neither one of them ever mentioned the subject. And for Mom, that was a special kind of slow torture. It was almost enough to make me feel sorry for her.
If I didn’t actually know her.
“You know what she gave me for my last birthday?” Annie said.
“No, what?” I asked.
“Six pastel onesies and a bottle of folic acid,” she replied. “In a pretty pink and blue gift bag.”
“No!”
“Honest!” Annie’s giggle was contagious. She was undoubtedly decked out in a designer outfit curled up on the sofa of a five-star Paris hotel room, getting ready for a party. I was wearing cheap clothes that stank of cleaning chemicals, sitting on the floor of my bungalow (so that I didn’t get that smell on my sofa), gearing up to go clean bathrooms.
And still she made me feel better.
“Thank you,” I said finally, when we both stopped laughing. “You have no idea how badly I needed this.”
“Take it easy, Cissy.”
“Have a good night, Anna Banana.”
I gave Lucy five minutes in the backyard, then carried her to the living room and settled her into her new doggie bed. God bless Gabby for that one. Where it had come from, I didn’t want to know.
I stroked the top of Lucy’s downy head. “Nick’s going to be back inside of an hour. Be a good girl.”
She looked intently into my face and blinked her liquid brown eyes. To say I felt a stab of guilt for leaving such a small, defenseless creature alone would be an understatement. More like a raging, romping case of remorse.
My mother was going to love this dog.
Chapter 18
This is finally it, I thought as we rode up in the service elevator. My last night cleaning!
I’d managed to convince Mr. Gravois that, due to a flare-up of my asthma (nonexistent), I needed to avoid the bathroom disinfectant for twenty-four hours.
When he announced the night’s duties, and passed out the aprons that served as our uniforms, Madame Gravois narrowed her eyes, which darted back and forth from her husband to me.
Oh, please.
Maria and Olga shot me dirty looks and traded stage-whispered insults in Russian.
“Spaciba!” I replied. Thank you!
Both of them looked startled, then twisted their surprised expressions into matching glares.
Didn’t matter. I. Did. Not. Care. After tonight, I was never going to see these peo
ple again.
Unless Madame Gravois popped up in my nightmares.
This evening’s lineup was my favorite double feature: kissing off Coleman & Walters and Gravois & Co. in one fell swoop.
No more mops, pails, or industrial-sized scrub brushes. No more lime-scented bathroom cleaner. And no more elbow-length yellow gloves and stupid, black canvas smock “uniforms” with “Gravois & Company International” stamped across the chest in rubberized, white cursive script. I don’t know if that last touch was Gravois’s idea of advertising, or if he really was afraid one of us might filch one.
Elia looked as placid as always. But when we got off on ten, she gave me a small, encouraging smile.
Everybody at C&W was at Margaret’s, expressing their sympathy. Whether they felt any or not. Since visiting the grieving widow was mandatory, this place would be emptier than a looted tomb. So to speak.
I wasn’t wasting time on the appetizers. I went right for the main course, wheeling my trolley straight to the conference room. The sooner I got my hands on that digital recorder, the better.
But the conference room wasn’t empty.
Huddled on one side of the table, deep in conversation, was Everett Coleman’s right-hand monkey: a short, slick twentysomething who went by the name of “Chaz.”
If Chaz hadn’t gravitated to public relations, he’d have been selling high-end used cars. And you’d have been smart to count your fingers after shaking hands.
Next to Chaz, seemingly captivated by his every word, was Mira Myles.
Mira was bad news. Literally. She wrote a gossipy news (or newsy gossip) column for the Washington Sentinel, my former paper’s competition. Her stories were short on facts, long on innuendo. And a lot of her best “sources” didn’t exist.
OK, that last part was just my opinion. But we’d worked a couple of the same stories, and there was definitely something weird there.
Sporting a brunette Anna Wintour bob-with-bangs, she was the boogeyman a lot of the editors used to scare young and not-so-young reporters. “Mira got an interview with someone who saw the Senator stumbling drunk before the accident. How come it’s not in your story?”
Never mind that Mira’s “witnesses” evaporated like smoke, never to be heard from again. Then it was on to the next story.
So why was Mira here? And why wasn’t Chaz being Chaz and brown-nosing at Margaret’s house?
Neither of them even looked up when I pushed my cleaning cart into the room. That’s when I realized: I wasn’t just part of the furniture, I was invisible. I didn’t rate being noticed at all.
Straining to listen, I grabbed a feather duster, making what I hoped were the appropriate motions. Not that these two would know the difference.
“You realize,” Chaz said, dropping his voice, “that I could be fired for even talking to you. This has to be off the record.”
My bullshit meter was going haywire. Chaz didn’t move his lips without getting Coleman’s permission. So who was pulling his strings now?
“Not ‘off the record,’” Mira corrected. “We’ll say, ‘not for attribution.’ That means I’ll quote you, but I won’t use your name.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never done anything like this before,” Chaz said, with all the sincerity of a hooker on her wedding night.
“You’re doing the right thing,” Mira coaxed. “You want the truth to get out. You don’t want a murderer going free, do you?”
What? If Chaz knew the killer’s identity, Chaz would either be living off his blackmail money in Rio or decorating the inside of a pine box. The only “right thing” Chaz cared about was opposite his left thing.
“This is really difficult,” he said, pausing to gather himself. “I mean, we were really close.”
True. If Chaz could have gotten any closer to Coleman, the killer would have had to drive that letter opener through both of them.
“I understand,” Mira said, tapping her navy frames with her pen. “Just take your time. And for the purposes of identification, we’ll just say you’re ‘a company insider.’”
“Could we say ‘industry insider’ and ‘close friend of the suspect’?”
Huh?
“This is so hard. We dated almost four months. I’m the one who got her the job here in the first place.”
Say what?
Mirrored in the glass I was repeatedly dusting, I saw Mira nod consolingly. “So you probably feel more than a little responsible.”
“She just started acting so weird lately. Distant. I mean, we kept it quiet at work, anyway. No one knew we were dating. But still, something was different. I could tell.”
Mira’s pen flew across the page. “How did you come to suspect she was still working for the paper?”
Oh, hell no.
“Little things. I wanted to meet her friends, but she always made excuses. I never met her family. We’d go to her place or mine. Or some out-of-the-way dive. I thought she was ashamed of me.”
I looked over my shoulder. Mira shook her head sympathetically and placed her hand on his.
“She was using you?”
“Yeah.”
I felt like one of those patients you read about who wakes up during surgery. I was the center of attention, but no one noticed me. And I was frozen to the spot.
“She always had a lot more money than she should have. I mean, the pay here is great, but she was just throwing it around. She always picked up the tab for drinks and dinners. Always paid cash. And she always had plenty of coke, too.”
I hadn’t laid a finger on Coleman. But at that moment, it took every ounce of restraint I had not to grab my carpet rake and beat Chaz like a piñata.
I’d never done drugs. Annie told me so many stories about stoned model has-beens who lost their looks and careers to drugs that I steered clear of the stuff. Never even took the customary toke in college.
Chaz, on the other hand, was rumored to have a big-time love of the white powder.
“Anyway, one of the times she was high, she said something about having a second income,” he said. “I thought she was dealing. I told her, no matter how much money she was making, it wasn’t worth it—that she had to get clean. She just laughed. That’s when she said that, at a time when lots of people were having trouble getting one full-time job, she had two. Along with two supersized salaries.”
I moved to another picture, attacking it vigorously with the duster. In the glass, I could see Mira’s pen poised over her notepad. “Two jobs. Did she say what she meant by that?”
“She said she was still working for the newspaper. She was writing an insider’s account of the P.R. industry. And she was going to keep the gig going for as long as she could. Because the money was—I’m sorry, these are her words—‘un-fucking believable.’”
Yeah, that’s why I‘m broke and taking handouts from my brothers.
“Did you tell your boss?”
This was going to be tricky. If he said, “yes,” and the police found out, the D.A. could haul him in and ask him to repeat that juicy little tidbit under oath. Spreading lies was one thing. Committing perjury was another. And Chaz would not do well in prison.
He shook his head. “I should have. If I had, maybe Everett would still be alive. Maybe I could have prevented all of this.”
“You can’t blame yourself.”
“Everett found out anyway.”
“How?” Mira asked.
Yeah, Chaz, how? I mean, as long as you’re spinning this fairy tale.
“Everett was plugged in. I mean, when it came to networking, there was none better. Word got back to him.”
“Did he ever say how he found out?”
“No,” Chaz said. “Although I think one of his friends at the paper might have tipped him.”
Good answer, Chaz. Scintillating, but vague. Untraceable. And it doesn’t put you in the hot seat. Very smart. Which means that you’re just reading the script. No way you wrote the play.
I glanced over my should
er. Mira had the pen tip to her lips. She was practically salivating.
“Did you know that Everett was going to fire her?”
“He’d all but made up his mind. Friday night capped it. After she made that scene at the restaurant, he had to let her go.”
“Go back to when he discovered she was still working for the paper. What did he say?”
“Everett kept saying, ‘She’s troubled, Chaz. That one is troubled.’ I remember him shaking his head when he said it. He looked sad.”
Oh, come on. The Everett Coleman I knew could mow down a flock of nuns on his way to lunch and still put away a three-course meal, plus cocktails.
“Everett didn’t know you were seeing her?”
“I’d broken it off by that point. When I found out she had two jobs, that she was using me—using the agency—I had to make a clean break of it. When Everett found out, he told me he’d have to let her go. Friday night—her blowup in the restaurant—that was just the last straw. But even after what happened, Everett didn’t want there to be bad blood. He arranged for her to come in on Sunday afternoon, so they could talk. Really talk.”
Chaz paused for dramatic effect and pushed a lock of “sun-streaked” hair from his face.
I could almost see the stage direction in his script: “pause for dramatic effect.” And the Oscar for Best Performance by a Lying Corporate Toady goes to . . .
“Well,” Chaz said, sighing heavily. “You know the rest.”
Son of a bitch. Well, at least this little dramatic recitation explained why he wasn’t paying court at Margaret’s. Someone had given him a hall pass to be here instead. My money’s on Walters. Although I’m guessing the part about the coke was Chaz improvising. No matter how much Walters wanted to blacken my name, he’d have never sanctioned a drug reference in relation to his precious firm. Even so, it had been a bravura performance. I’d give it three-and-a-half stars.
With my back to them, I rolled the cleaning cart out the door and closed it behind me. As I did, Mira said, “Now, tell me what Alex is really like.”
I didn’t know whether to scream or cry.
Chapter 19