Murder Gets a Makeover

by Laura Levine

  “But then my niece Gloria stopped by for dinner one night and said she had to have it.”

  Obviously a gal of impeccable taste.

  “She wanted to wear it with a tinfoil hat to get out of jury duty.”

  Of all the nerve!

  “I’m certain she’s still got it,” Felipe assured me. “Let me write down her address.”

  As he hurried back into his house, I stepped inside Felipe’s cozy living room, taking deep breaths of whatever was cooking in the kitchen. Minutes later, Felipe returned with his niece’s address.

  “Thanks so much,” I said as he handed it to me.

  Now at that point, any person with an inkling of good manners would have vamoosed.

  But, as you already know, when it comes to chow, I have no shame whatsoever. So I did not vamoose.

  Instead I said, “Gee, it sure smells good in here.”

  “I was just fixing myself dinner. Carne asada, with rice and beans. Albondigas soup to start.”

  “Albondigas soup? It’s my favorite!”

  I did not lie. If you’ve never had some, try it ipso pronto. Miniature meatballs swimming in a rich broth studded with chopped veggies. And don’t even get me started on carne asada with black beans and rice.

  “Come!” he said, as I stood there, my feet practically having grown roots in his carpet. “Join me!”

  “I couldn’t possibly,” I said, hot on his heels as he led the way to his kitchen.

  Minutes later, we were seated at his Formica-topped kitchen table, slurping albondigas soup.

  “Wow, this is fantastic!” I said between slurps.

  “It’s my grandmother’s recipe. I used to make it for my wife all the time before she passed.”

  His face clouded over.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said, wanting to reach out and pat his hand in sympathy.

  But no way was I about to let go of my soup spoon.

  “It’s been ten years,” he sighed, “and I still expect to see her walking through the front door.”

  Unlike Miles, Felipe seemed like a guy who genuinely missed his spouse.

  “I cooked for her all the time,” he said as he brought me a plate heaped with carne asada, beans, and rice.

  “Lucky lady!” I said, digging into the most heavenly carne asada north of Guadalajara.

  “I’m glad you stopped by,” Felipe said, watching me eat. “I like to see a woman with a hearty appetite. Ladies today,” he tsked, “are too skinny.”

  I was growing fonder of this guy by the minute.

  “Like Mrs. Braddock.” He shook his head in disapproval. “Skinny as a rail.”

  “I still can’t believe somebody killed her,” I said.

  “I can. I don’t like to speak ill of the departed, but Mrs. Braddock was not a nice woman. Nobody liked her.”

  Hello. It looked like Felipe was about to dish the dirt.

  “I bet she was tough to work for,” I said, egging him on.

  “The worst. Always expecting me to do extra jobs, never offering to pay for my time. She took advantage of me, just like she took advantage of everyone. The only people she was nice to were her movie-star clients. The rest of us? We were nothing but peasants to her.”

  “That’s awful,” I said, sopping up my black beans with a tortilla.

  “The way she treated her husband was a disgrace. Bossing him around like a servant. And poor Anna, such a sweet lady. Mrs. Braddock was terrible to her. It’s hard to believe she could be so mean to her own sister.”

  Wait, what? Stop the presses.

  “Anna was Bebe’s sister?”

  “Unfortunately for Anna, yes.”

  Holy moly! Felipe had just fed me the juiciest tidbit of all. Suffering abuse is one thing. But from your sister? I could only imagine how Anna must have resented Bebe. Maybe even enough to kill her. Especially if she stood to inherit money in Bebe’s will.

  A gazillion calories later, after thanking Felipe for one of the best meals of my life, I returned to my Corolla, armed with a shiny new motive for Anna to have killed Bebe, and—even more important—a container of Felipe’s amazing albondigas soup tucked in my tote.

  Chapter 14

  Okay, so Anna had plenty of reasons to kill Bebe. But did she actually do it? Or had she let her muscle-bound lover do the job for her? Maybe it was Miles who wrangled the wire around Bebe’s neck, with Anna cheering him on from the sidelines.

  Those of you paying close attention to my little story will no doubt remember Miles telling me he’d been smoking stogies at the El Dorado Cigar Lounge at the time of the murder.

  And so I decided to stop by that establishment on my way home from Felipe’s.

  I found it in the heart of Brentwood, nestled between a Pilates studio and a gluten-free pizza parlor (only in L.A.!).

  Unlike its froufrou neighbors, the lounge was a dim, dark man cave of a joint, furnished with plush leather wing chairs. A glass sales counter on one side of the store faced a massive flat-screen TV mounted on the opposite wall. Several men were scattered about, puffing on cigars and watching a basketball game, when I showed up.

  But what I noticed most when I walked in the door was the ghastly stench of cigars. Frankly, I didn’t blame Bebe for making Miles smoke his stinkbombs outside the house.

  I headed over to the man behind the sales counter, a middle-aged guy in a black silk shirt, his graying hair in a ponytail.

  He looked me up and down, skeptically.

  “Are you sure you’re in the right place?” he asked, his eyes lingering just a beat too long on my hips. “You’re not looking for gluten-free pizza next door?”

  Clearly Mr. El Dorado and I were not destined to be BFFs.

  “No,” I said, forcing myself to smile, “I’m here to buy a cigar. Miles Braddock recommended your lounge very highly.”

  “Miles!” he said, a tad friendlier. “One of my best customers.”

  “A real tragedy about his wife, huh?”

  “I can’t get over it,” he shuddered. “Garroted with a hanger.”

  “Poor Miles. He said if only he’d been home that night and not here at your cigar lounge, he might have been able to stop the killer. He was here that night, right?”

  “Yep, sitting right over there.” Mr. El Dorado pointed to a wing chair near the store’s entrance. “He was there all night watching a Lakers game. Came in at seven, didn’t go home until after ten.”

  There was something about the way he said this, a tad too rehearsed, that made me wonder if Miles had paid him to back up his alibi.

  “So what can I get you?” he asked, gesturing to a display of cigars in the glass counter. All of which looked pretty much the same to me.

  “I’ll smoke what Miles smokes.”

  “Excellent choice! Robust flavor!”

  He took out a burrito-sized cigar from the case.

  “That’ll be fifty dollars.”

  Holy Moses!

  “On second thought, maybe I’ll try something a little less robust.”

  “How much less robust?”

  “Forty bucks less.”

  “Here’s a nice one for only eighteen dollars.”

  Eighteen bucks for a stinky cigar?!

  Reluctantly I handed him my Mastercard.

  “Anything else?” He gestured to a display of cigar accessories.

  “No, I’m set,” I said, refusing to fork over one more dime to this guy.

  He gave me my cigar, wrapped in cellophane, and I made my way to Miles’s chair near the entrance.

  When I plopped my fanny down into the well-worn leather, I was disappointed to see there was nothing blocking the view from the cigar counter. Maybe Mr. El Dorado really did see Miles parked in this chair from seven to ten PM.

  A part of me wanted to throw in the towel and flee from the noxious cigar fumes. But another part of me was telling me to stick around. There was something about Mr. El Dorado that I just didn’t trust.

  I couldn’t ve
ry well sit in a cigar lounge without smoking a cigar, so I decided to go ahead and smoke the darn thing. I mean, how difficult could it be?

  As it turned out, very-to-impossible.

  For starters, how was I going to light it?

  “Excuse me,” I said to a bearded guy bent over a laptop, banging out what was probably a screenplay. “Do you have any matches? I forgot to bring mine.”

  “Sure,” he said, handing me a box.

  “You might want to take off that cellophane wrapper first,” he warned as I started to strike a match.

  Duh. Mistake Number One.

  I removed the wrapper and crumpled it into a nearby ashtray.

  Once again, I was about to strike the match when my bearded buddy asked: “Aren’t you going to cut it first?”

  Cut it?

  “Here. You can use my cutter.”

  He handed me a stainless steel doohickey that looked like a miniature guillotine. I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.

  “Let me,” he said, taking the cutter and expertly snipping off the end of my cigar.

  “Thanks so much,” I said, beaming him a grateful smile.

  “No!” he cried as I put the cigar in my mouth. “Wrong end. The other end goes into your mouth.”

  Mistake Number Two.

  With the right end of the cigar in my mouth, I struck a match and after a strenuous couple of puffs, the cigar finally ignited.

  At last! I was about to smoke my very first cigar.

  But then I made Mistake Number Three. And it was a doozy.

  I inhaled.

  Yikes! That thing burned. My throat felt like scorched sandpaper. How was I supposed to know you’re supposed to puff a cigar, not inhale it?

  After a minor coughing fit, I set the cigar down in the ashtray and began rummaging in my tote for a mint to soothe my aching throat.

  By now my screenwriter friend had abandoned his laptop, watching me, fascinated, no doubt preserving this scene to use somewhere in his movie. I certainly hoped he thanked me when and if he ever won an Oscar.

  I finally found a mint wedged under the container of Felipe’s albondigas soup I’d stowed in my tote.

  I was sitting there, sucking on the mint and listening to the raucous cheers of the men watching the basketball game when suddenly I smelled something burning.

  “I think your ashtray’s on fire,” my bearded buddy was kind enough to point out.

  Oh, hell. I turned and saw flames leaping from my ashtray. Damn it all. The cellophane from my cigar had caught fire!

  How the heck was I going to put it out?

  I looked around frantically. A guy nearby was drinking what looked like scotch, but I didn’t dare throw alcohol on a burning fire.

  You know where this is going, right? As much as I hated to do it, I had to use Felipe’s albondigas soup.

  I yanked it out of my tote bag and pried open the lid of the container, and before you could say “Ay, caramba!” I was dousing the fire with albondigas soup.

  I watched, brokenhearted, as one of Felipe’s yummy meatballs floated in the ashtray.

  All very embarrassing, to be sure.

  But here’s something I think you’ll find interesting. I know I did.

  While I’d been setting my ashtray on fire, somebody on the Lakers had scored a free throw. Cheers erupted from the men. No one aside from the screenwriter had noticed that I’d almost burned down the building.

  Including, and especially, Mr. El Dorado.

  And at that moment, Miles’ alibi went flying out the window.

  He could have come and gone from the cigar lounge on the night of the murder, killing half of L.A., and Mr. El Dorado would have never noticed.

  Chapter 15

  Now that I’d busted Miles’s alibi, it was time to check up on his lover and possible partner in crime, Anna.

  Unfortunately I had no idea how to reach her. In fact, I didn’t even know her last name. When I got up the next morning, I thought about calling Justin and asking him to send me a link to Bebe’s contacts, but I hesitated to make the call.

  I hadn’t heard from him since our last date. Not a word about that violin recital he’d invited me to. According to my calendar, it was supposed to happen that very night. Maybe he found out about my fingerprints on the murder weapon. Some men (say, 99.9 percent) might find that a bit of a turnoff.

  But I really wanted to talk to Anna. So, gathering my courage, I put in a call to Justin, hoping he hadn’t heard about me being at the scene of the crime.

  Alas, I hoped in vain.

  “Jaine!” he cried when he picked up. “What happened? Miles told me the police found you standing over Bebe’s dead body with your fingerprints all over the murder weapon.”

  Thank you, Miles “Blabbermouth” Braddock.

  “It’s all a horrible misunderstanding! I swear, I had nothing to do with Bebe’s murder.”

  “Of course not.”

  Uh-oh. Was that a hint of doubt I heard in his voice?

  “Anyhow, I was hoping you could send me a link to Bebe’s contact list so I can nose around and question a few people.”

  “You mean, like a private investigator?”

  “Kinda sorta.”

  “Writer and private eye, huh? How intriguing.”

  Still, that note of doubt in his voice.

  “By the way,” he said, “about that violin recital I invited you to tonight? There’s been a change of plans.”

  What did I tell you? He was about to bail. I knew he’d be one of the 99.9 percent of guys who steered clear of dating murder suspects.

  “It’s going to start at 7:00 instead of 7:30. So I’ll pick you up around six.”

  “You still want to go out with me?”

  “Of course. You didn’t think I was going to cancel just because of that fingerprints-on-the-murder-weapon thing, did you?”

  “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  “Don’t be nuts. I know you didn’t kill Bebe. You’re much too nice.”

  Did you hear that? In addition to being a cutie pie musical prodigy, Justin was also a discerning judge of character!

  I hung up in a happy glow, eager to see him in action tonight.

  (And to hear him play his violin, too.)

  * * *

  Minutes later, Justin texted me a link to Bebe’s contacts.

  My plan was to hotfoot it to Anna, but then I saw Heidi’s name on the list. I hadn’t forgotten the great haircut she’d picked out for me. If I popped by and visited her today, maybe she could style my hair for my date with Justin.

  My visit to Anna would have to wait.

  I just hoped Heidi hadn’t started that studio job she’d been offered. But she was home when I texted her and said she’d be happy to see me and cut my hair.

  I tootled over to her apartment, the upstairs unit of a charming Spanish duplex in the mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles.

  Heidi greeted me at the door in overalls and a T-shirt, her glossy hair swept back in a bandana headband.

  “Jaine! It’s so good to see you!” she said, ushering me into her apartment, a cozy nest that hadn’t been updated since flappers were doing the Charleston. All the wonderful architectural details were still intact—hardwood floors, arched doorways, and crystal glass doorknobs.

  In her living room, a pink velvet sofa sat center stage, adorned by palm-frond throw pillows and surrounded by vintage rattan furniture. All set off by walls painted a bright lime green.

  If I tried doing that stuff, I’d be arrested by the Decorating Police. But somehow Heidi managed to pull it off.

  “I can’t wait to get my hands on your hair,” she said.

  “Are you sure it’s not a bother?”

  “Not at all. I don’t start my studio job until next week, so I’ve had plenty of time to cut my private clients’ hair.”

  Suddenly I wondered how much she charged those private clients.

  “Do you mind telling me your fee?”

 
; “Usually two hundred dollars.”

  Wowser. I wanted to look good for Justin, but two hundred dollars was way out of my comfort zone.

  “But today’s cut is my treat,” she grinned. “Consider it combat pay for having to put up with Bebe.”

  Was she an angel, or what?

  “C’mon,” she said, leading me past a tiny dining room to a sunlit kitchen gleaming with bright turquoise and yellow backsplash tiles.

  “Welcome to my salon,” she said. “Let’s get your hair washed first.”

  Soon I was leaning over her kitchen sink with a towel draped around my neck as Heidi washed my hair with a heavenly citrus-scented shampoo—followed by an equally heavenly citrus-scented conditioner.

  Then she sat me down at her kitchen table and took a pair of scissors from one of her overall pockets.

  “I know we decided on beachy waves for your makeover,” she said. “Bebe hated curly hair. But I think you’d really look better with your natural curls. Do you mind if I give it a shot?”

  “Shoot away!”

  “So,” she said as she started snipping, “how are you holding up?”

  “Holding up?”

  “I mean, after the police found you with your fingerprints on the murder weapon.”

  “You know about that?”

  “Miles happened to mention it.”

  Boy, Miles sure was tossing around that tidbit of info, wasn’t he?

  “When I discovered Bebe’s body, I wasn’t sure if she was still alive,” I said, “so I tried to loosen the wire hanger from around her neck. That’s why my fingerprints were on the murder weapon.”

  “You actually tried to save her? Talk about no good deed going unpunished.”

  “I don’t suppose you have any idea who might have killed her?”

  “Just about anybody whoever had to deal with her. The possibilities are endless.”

  “Did you know that Miles and Anna were having an affair?” I asked, zeroing in on my two favorite suspects.

  “No!” she said, wide-eyed. “I figured Miles might be cheating on Bebe. After all, she was such a holy terror. But I never dreamed it was with mousy little Anna.”

  “Who just happens to be Bebe’s sister.”

  “I knew about that. And I hated the way Bebe treated her. Well, Anna sure got her revenge sleeping with Miles, didn’t she?”