Eternally 21: A Mrs. Frugalicious Shopping Mystery

by Linda Joffe Hull

  I’d watched one too many detective shows to leave a mall so abuzz over Laila’s murder that cosmetics counter girls were talking suspects over hand soap. More important, one of my main suspects was so nonchalant as to be taking bets on the identity of the killer. With Griff otherwise occupied, the job of finding out why temporarily fell on me.

  “Isn’t that kind of disrespectful?”

  “The winner of this pool isn’t just whoever picked correctly,” he said, opening the cardboard flaps.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” I said.

  “As far as I’m concerned, this is a case of justifiable homicide. Most of the pot is going to help defray the legal bills of whoever had the guts to do what everyone else wanted to.”

  I couldn’t help but think the pool might just be earmarked for the innocent-looking but certainly not innocent-acting bookie before me. “I see.”

  “Do you want in?” he asked. “It’s only ten bucks.”

  “I can’t imagine who I’d pick,” I said, wondering if he’d be more appreciative or offended by hearing his own name.

  “It’s probably a bit too early to start handicapping, considering we just found out less than an hour ago anyway.” Andy pulled a package from inside the shipping box he’d just sliced open. “Sick!”

  Did I even have a proper category on my spreadsheet to adequately describe how sick taking wagers on a murder seemed?

  “How cool is this?” he asked pulling what looked like an iPod clone from the shrink-wrap.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He turned it on, handed me the ear buds, and pointed the base out toward the mall at an elderly couple seated together on a bench at the opposite side of the courtyard. “Listen.”

  “I hate mall-walking,” the man said.

  “Hate shmate,” the woman said, “we still have three laps to go.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “It’s the newest version of the Eavesdropper,” Andy said. “Allows you to listen in on conversations up to twenty-five feet away.”

  “But my feet hurt,” the man continued.

  “There’s a warm bubble bath in it for you when we get home,” his wife said. “For us.”

  Despite the geriatric TMI, there was no telling how much more intelligence I could pick up with the help of a clever little device like the Eavesdropper. “How much does one of these things run?”

  “MSRP is $99.99,” Andy said.

  Which was a solid $79.99 over my budget. “It’s really, really cool but … ”

  “I can make you a deal on last season’s floor model.”

  With the word deal, Mrs. Frugalicious perked up her ears. “By deal, what do you mean?”

  He motioned me to follow him toward the register area, reached below the register, pulled out a boxier, slightly scratched version, and handed it to me.

  “Hmm,” I said, not allowing myself to look behind me for a peek at just how much more sleek and streamlined the newer version really was. “What’s the difference between this model and the new one?”

  “The new one has a few extra bells and whistles, but the sound mechanism and background noise reduction are the same.”

  “What’s the price difference?”12

  “I can sell it for sixty percent off.”

  “So, like $39.99?”

  “This one retailed for $89.99, so I can sell it for $24.99 final sale.”

  There was no way I should have even considered spending twenty-five dollars on an impulse item, but then again, I shouldn’t have been accused of shoplifting, witnessed Laila’s death, nor found myself in the position of needing to help investigate her murder either. “I’ll take it.”

  “Great.” He smiled. “You planning to hang around the mall for a while?”

  “I still have a bit of shopping to do,” I said, managing not to substitute the word sleuthing.

  “If you hear anything that’ll help me handicap the board, be sure to fill me in.”

  I wasn’t sure whether Andy had shot to the top of my suspect list for his whodunit pool or if I should cross off his name for cutting me a deal on a listening device and setting me loose in the mall. But one thing was certain: Laila had definitely misjudged the kid. Maybe he wasn’t on management track at Gadgeteria, but Andy was no slouch in the brains department.

  He’d capitalized on my fortuitous appearance without missing a beat by enlisting me to do the reconnaissance he’d be doing were he not stuck in his store. Little did he know I was already on the job, but I now planned to head directly to Eternally 21 to ask a few questions myself.

  Still, I might have felt like an accessory to illegal gambling—and possibly murder—were I really reporting everything I saw and heard as I made my way across the mall to Andy instead of Griff and the police.

  “I’ve got ten on the night custodian at Eternally 21,” someone said from the doorway of the stationery store.

  Needless to say, I was hearing a lot.

  “And not those animal rights people?”

  “From what I hear, Laila always left such a mess of wrappers and food scraps, it was bound to make anyone snap.”

  “I’m sure it was that one girl who works at Frozen Fruitastic,” the salesgirl at Sunglass Hut said, as she spritzed Windex on a display case in the corner of her store.

  “That one with the purple hair?”

  “Laila reported her for giving her friends free smoothie leftovers on Wednesday. By Thursday, Laila was gone.”

  “You know what they say.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Hell hath no fury like a Goth scorned.”

  I headed down a nearby escalator, veered around the play area, located an open table just outside of Whimsies and pretended to adjust my faux-Pod.

  Shoshanna, dressed head to toe in black ruffles, emitted a wail high-pitched enough to make me wish I really was listening to music. “I might as well just turn myself in!”

  My heart began to pound as I scanned the sides of the Eavesdropper for anything resembling a Record button.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said a salesgirl I couldn’t see, but who I pictured looking like the murderous accomplice edition of Barbie’s BFF, Skipper.

  “The Bible says thou shalt not hate,” Shoshanna sputtered. “Or something like that.”

  “Laila wasn’t around in biblical times or there would have been an exception, I’m sure.”

  “I hated her nonetheless. Do you know she once told me I should stop stuffing myself into a size four when I’m barely an eight?”

  “Girl,” her co-worker said, “I’d have killed over a lot less.”

  I pulled the instruction manual from my purse and scanned the index for what turned out to be a non-existent listing for recording audio.

  “She was just so mean sometimes.”

  “Most of the time.”

  “Oh, Good Lord, I’m going to rot in—”

  “He wouldn’t send you where He’s already sent Laila.”

  I pressed button after button. How Gadgeteria could sell a listening device that couldn’t tape one lousy, wildly incriminating conversation was anyone’s guess. Was that one of the improvements on this year’s model? Why hadn’t I thought to buy it at full price? I could have solved the case and returned the darn thing the same day.

  “We need to pray,” Shoshanna said.

  I pulled my price bible from my purse. Maybe if I jotted down everything while it was still horrifyingly fresh in my mind …

  “Dear Lord.” Shoshanna’s voice was tear-choked and shaky. “Please forgive me for my sinful thoughts and actions … ”

  Like poisoning her frenemy?

  The only thing stopping me from rushing in to make a citizen’s arrest was some concern that audio-enhanced overhearing might well be the pedestrian equivalent of an illegal wiretap.

  “I know your love for us is so great, you grant our prayers whenever you possibly can.” She stopped, blew her nose, and seemed to be trying to collect herself
. “And I thank you for that.” Her already shaky voice resumed in a barely audible squeal. “But I would never have prayed for Laila to disappear if I’d known it would be because someone murdered her.”

  As in, all she’d done was simply pray for Laila to go away?

  “Amen,” she managed and began to sob in what was either an award-winning bait-and-switch performance or the guilty anguish of a truly religious young woman with an incongruous weakness for tight, short clothing.

  “Shoshanna,” her co-worker sighed. “You are taking this way too hard. I mean, if the Lord did dispatch someone to kill her off, it wasn’t just because of you alone.”

  “But I wanted her gone so badly.”

  “What about Eternally 21’s newest manager and assistant manager?”

  “What about them?”

  “You don’t think Tara prayed for her to drop dead once or twice a day?” the co-worker asked. “And that sweet Hailey?”

  “I suppose Laila did treat them like slaves.”

  “That was when she wasn’t referring to them as Tara Ho and Whorely.”

  Tara Ho?

  Whorely?

  A customer walked into Whimsies, abruptly ending the discussion I was busily overhearing, but if Laila DeSimone said or did half the things I’d already heard about her, I had to agree with Andy—her death might well turn out to be a case of justifiable homicide. The information I was collecting could be key not only to law enforcement, but to the defense of whoever finally put an end to Laila’s bad behavior.

  Judging by the conversation going on inside Eternally 21 between Tara, Hailey, and a certain familiar man in his early forties with salt-and-pepper hair, I was about to collect a good deal more.

  “I can’t believe someone could have”—Hailey’s voice was filled with tears I doubt I could have cried over someone who’d called me such names—“poisoned her.”

  “Awful,” Richard said.

  “We’ve been trying to carry on the way Laila would have had it been one of us instead of her,” Hailey said. “But—”

  “You’re doing a nice job,” Richard said.

  “Thanks,” Tara said. “I moved things around to cover up the spot where she … ”

  “I changed the mannequins into outfits she loved,” Hailey added.

  “I see that,” he said, scanning the flashy ensembles of the various faceless, hairless, chrome female forms. His gaze stopped on a lone mannequin placed beside the register area.

  I peered around a brass mountain range installation and spotted said mannequin at the back of the store. She—it?—was clad in the very same ruched, plum-hued, off-the-shoulder jersey knit dress, metallic platform pumps, and multilayered beaded necklace Laila had worn on the day of her demise.

  Her motionless hand seemed poised to grab an apple from the sympathy fruit basket propped beside her.

  “Putting her by the food is a very realistic touch,” Richard said, sounding more choked up than I might have expected from a possible murderer.

  “Kind of a maudlin one, if you ask me,” Tara said. “But Hailey insisted.”

  “It’s a tribute to her,” Hailey said. “She was my role model.”

  Even if she weren’t on my suspect list, I’d have wondered if I’d really heard what I thought I’d heard over the jangle of Hailey’s bangle bracelets had Tara and Richard not asked in unison, “Your role model?”

  Hailey sniffled. “She had such style and vision.”

  “She was good at predicting trends,” Tara said. “And if I were going to kill her, it certainly wouldn’t have been before inventory. She had a real knack for maintaining optimal stock levels.”

  “Because no one understood fashion and merchandising like her,” Richard added.

  After the earful at Whimsies, I expected the three of them to be belting out “Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead!” down the mall corridor. Instead, Hailey was singing the praises of her mean-spirited, man-stealing, bulimic former boss, and Tara and Richard just seemed shell-shocked.

  “You know,” Tara said. “As soon as the police finish up at the pet store, they’re headed here.”

  “That’s why I came by,” Richard said. “To provide extra support for you two.”

  “Why?” Tara asked.

  “Just in case you—”

  “I’ve got nothing to hide,” Hailey said.

  “Me either,” Tara said.

  Both of them turned and looked pointedly at Richard.

  “I also came by to tell the police about my friendship with Laila,” he said.

  “What about your wife?”

  “My wife?”

  In the silence that followed, Tara walked to the back of the store and grabbed a piece of fruit. “Please thank her for sending this basket, by the way.”

  “Claudia doesn’t need to know,” Richard finally said. “We were separated when I was seeing Laila.”

  Tara took a bite of what appeared to be a pear. “You didn’t look separated at the memorial service.”

  “We decided to try and patch things up,” Richard said. “Which is why I was trying to break things off when—”

  “Laila conveniently disappeared from the picture?” Tara asked.

  Richard’s face looked blotchy and red even from my vantage point behind the mountains. “I’ll admit I may have thought about promoting her to an out-of-town position,” he said. “But kill her?”

  But kill her? I wrote beside Richard’s name in a new suspect list column I’d given the heading: Denials.

  Richard’s wife, Claudia, earned herself a checkmark in my other new column Innocent? by virtue of his admission that she didn’t know about Laila. After all, if he was separated when he was seeing Laila and his wife didn’t know about their relationship, why would she have any reason to want to kill her?

  Assuming what he’d said was true.

  Which led to yet another new column: Lies.

  Which led back to Richard’s line, where I added, plans to tell the police about relationship and wouldn’t get rid of her before inventory time. Under Lies, I wrote TBD.

  I took a sip of the diet soda13 I’d picked up at the Greek place— the one spot where Laila didn’t seem to have eaten that fateful day—and looked toward the entrance to the food court. Griff had to be wrapping things up at Pet Pals any minute. He’d be looking for me and my soon-to-be-updated spreadsheet as soon as he got back to his office.

  Despite how farfetched it sounded, I also added Animal Rights Activists and Cleaning Crew to my suspects. I took another sip of soda and was about to add the details of what I’d heard in the last hour, starting at entry number one (Tara Hu) when I spotted something purple out of the corner of my eye.

  More specifically, the purple hair of a certain young woman in a Fresh Fruitastic uniform who I hadn’t quite gotten around to adding to my list.

  Not yet, anyway.

  She sat half a dozen tables away amid a group of food court employees. I dropped the phone back into my purse, grabbing the Eavesdropper that had been on a lunch break of its own instead. I placed the ear buds into position, pressed the background noise reduction button, and pointed the contraption at a table that should have been well out of hearing distance.

  “Apparently some lady picked up a missing corn snake thinking it was a bracelet,” one of them said.

  “Seriously?”

  “She fainted in the middle of Banana Republic.”

  “I’m sure I’d have fainted too.”

  “You think that’s bad? We found a dead rat in a bag of potatoes yesterday.”

  “That’s disgusting!”

  I’d heard enough to not only keep me from considering a future mall-eating binge but to reconsider another sip of my soda.

  “I’ll tell you what else is disgusting … ”

  A mom pushed a double stroller with two screaming toddlers down the aisle between me and the table, drowning out what I was certain would be another revolting health infraction.

  Except for his
last three words.

  “ … were doing it.”

  I turned up the volume.

  “Seriously?”

  “I thought he was doing … ?”

  “He totally is.”

  I totally wanted to know who he was, but their voices dropped enough to necessitate yet another tap on the Up button.

  “ … said she saw them making out on the loading dock between Eternally 21 and Restoration Hardware.”

  “No way!”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “And you believed her? Everyone knows she hates Laila’s guts.”

  As I suspected, she number one was Laila, being gossiped about.

  “Don’t you mean hated Laila’s guts?”

  “Touché.”

  “Does she know?”

  Question was, who was she number two, the gossiper?

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “It does to me. I’m headed over to Gadgeteria to bet as soon as I’m done eating.”

  “You better not put any money down on me, or I’ll kill you.”

  I looked around the recycling bins and spotted the purple-haired girl shaking her head.

  “Hmmm … ” whoever she’d threatened said. “I wasn’t going to, but it seems to me you certainly hated her enough.”

  “How cool would it have been to offer her a special smoothie after she reported me for giving away freebies?” the purple-haired girl said. “Too bad she hated fruit too much to have ever touched it.”

  Their laughter rang in my ears as I added Smoothie Girl to the spreadsheet.

  “I’m sure someone on the cleaning crew offed her,” someone else said. “Eternally 21 definitely has to have rodents from all the wrappers she leaves around.”

  “Sick,” someone said.

  “Not nearly as sick as Laila doing—”

  “Hey look!” A young woman in a Dairy Queen uniform pointed to one of the three giant televisions outside the sporting goods store.

  Instead of the constant stream of soccer, football, tennis, or whatever sporting event was currently being broadcast, I spotted Anastasia’s helmet of hair before the soft-serve girl could utter three simple, but terror-inducing words.

  “We’re on TV!”

  12. New, improved versions are often more visually pleasing but always more costly. As long as the technology hasn’t changed substantially, last year’s model can be this year’s deal.