No Way To Kill A Lady

by Nancy Martin

  “Did you? Leave perfume in his car?”

  “Well, not on purpose.” She turned pink. “He might drop by this afternoon. Do you like my hair?”

  “It’s lovely.”

  Libby helped herself to a second muffin. “So tell me everything about last night when you broke the law.”

  “No laws were broken.”

  “I mean about breaking into Quintain! Do you have sex on your mind all the time? What happened? And where’s Emma?”

  Reluctantly, I told Libby about my escapade at Quintain, Emma’s arrest and my discovery of another dead person. But Emma’s departure with Hart Jones elicited a cry of delight from Libby.

  “Hart’s back in the picture?” she exclaimed when I had related the whole tale. “Oh, Nora, do you think he might sweep her off her feet this time? Where do you think they went together?”

  “Probably not home to meet his mother.”

  “Do you think they’ve run off for some kind of romantic tryst? Only Emma could seduce a man when she’s seven months pregnant!”

  “Eight,” I said. “And let’s remember he’s engaged to be married.”

  “Into the Haffenpepper family,” Libby replied. “And they hang on to their in-laws with talons. Once he’s married, he might as well be cemented to Penny. They’ll never divorce. Family values—that phrase might have originated with the Haffenpeppers.”

  I had been thinking about Emma’s choices lately. I said, “Hart’s a good man, Lib. If we could choose someone for Emma to be with, it would be him, wouldn’t it? Somebody stable, but fun. Employed, but not wedded to his career. He’d be a wonderful father, too.”

  Libby nodded. “He coaches a baseball team, doesn’t he? Of handicapped kids? Just the kind of selfless work the Haffenpeppers love.”

  “Last night, Emma whistled, though, and Hart came running.”

  Libby sighed. “Why can’t I engender that kind of passion in a man?”

  “You do.” I pointed at her phone. “On an hourly basis. How many PitterPat followers do you have at the moment?”

  “Eighteen thousand.”

  “Eighteen—!” I was astounded. “Libby, I had no idea! Surely one of them wants to meet you in the flesh?”

  “I’m not so sure,” she said, suddenly uncertain.

  “Well, you should ask them. Invite one of them to meet you for a drink somewhere.”

  “What if they all turn out to be . . .”

  “Nerds?” I asked.

  “Perverts,” she said, her eyes shifting sideways.

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “Maybe not.” She smiled warmly again and broke off a bit of muffin. “I’m glad we can have these sisterly chats now and then, Nora. What’s that you’re reading?”

  “Aunt Madeleine’s ledger. It’s a record book of some kind.”

  Munching on her muffin, Libby pulled the ledger across the table and flipped through the pages. “This made no sense to me back when I was a child, and it still doesn’t. What was she keeping a record of?”

  I took a deep breath for courage. “Actually, I’m starting to worry about that.”

  Libby put down the book and gave me a solemn stare. “Does this have something to do with the sex trafficking?”

  “I never believed that story,” I said. “Even the morning news says there was only one woman who turned to prostitution, so we can hardly conclude that’s what Madeleine was up to. But it certainly looks as if she was accepting money from men for something.”

  “What are you—? Wait a minute! You mean she was—? Money for sex? Nora, that’s a perfectly preposterous conclusion.”

  I told Libby first about my long-ago encounter with Aunt Madeleine and her request that I destroy her book in the event of her death. Then about the slap I’d been given when I mentioned Aunt Madeline’s name to Mr. and Mrs. Banks. At last I flipped through the ledger book and found a name on one of the pages. I pointed it out to Libby.

  “See? Mr. Banks. Listed three times. Each time with a sum of money in the opposite column. Clearly, he paid her. His wife must have assumed he paid Madeleine for . . . some other reason.”

  “Maybe he was buying something. A painting. Or—or a statue. Or—some service.”

  “I’m trying to guess what kind of service Aunt Madeleine performed.”

  “Nora! She wasn’t prostituting herself!”

  Michael arrived in time to hear that declaration. “Prostitution? At breakfast? Hey, it’s Max! Hiya, little buddy!”

  Maximus splurted his muffin out of his mouth and reached his arms to Michael. “Da!”

  “Hello, Libby.”

  “Good morning,” she said coolly, as Michael leaned down and kissed me.

  Then he snatched Max from my possession and swung him high. The baby gurgled with delight. His favorite playmate was back.

  Libby said, “It’s good to see you out of jail.”

  “Yeah, thanks. It feels good to me, too. Max, I missed your birthday! Look how big you are! How much do you weigh now?”

  “He’s twenty-three pounds,” Libby supplied.

  “A linebacker,” Michael said, carrying the baby to the kitchen counter. “Let’s see what we’ve got here. Muffins? What kind of breakfast is that for guys like us? Personally, I don’t want to look at scrambled eggs ever again, so let’s see what kind of leftovers we have to work with.”

  Max was happy to find himself snugly tucked into the crook of Michael’s arm. He sucked on his thumb, gaze full of anticipation while Michael checked the fridge and gathered up the fixings for a substantial hash.

  Watching, Libby said to me, “It’s good for Max to have a man in his life. Even if it’s—”

  “Max always has Rawlins,” I interrupted before Libby could put her foot in her mouth. “He’s practically a man these days.”

  “Yes, I know. But he’ll soon go off to college. Me with a child in college! I haven’t broken the news to my followers yet.”

  “Most of ’em already know,” Michael said from the stove.

  Libby sat up, prettily alert. “How would you know anything about my followers?”

  “On that whatchamacallit, PitterPat thing, right? Half the guys in the joint are following you.”

  Libby’s mouth opened in a thunderstruck O before she began to sputter. “What? Are you—are you saying my followers are—are prisoners ?”

  “Sure,” Michael said over his shoulder. “Who else has all the time in the world to spend on the Internet?”

  “But—but—”

  “In minimum security, everybody gets an hour a day in the computer lab. They take turns reporting on you. Sometimes they print out your pictures. The really—uh, you know—attractive pictures. You’re the pinup girl of cell block A.”

  “Oh, my God!” Libby buried her face in her hands.

  “Michael,” I said gently, “why don’t you take Max outside? I’ll make your breakfast.”

  “No, no,” Libby said from behind her hands. “Don’t try to shield me, Nora. I need to know the ugly truth.”

  I patted her arm. “Don’t be upset, Lib.”

  “I’m not. I’m really not.” She lifted her trembling chin. “I should have known, I suppose. Who else would say such nice things to me? Be so encouraging of my creative spirit? So appreciative of the passion and joie de vivre I pour into my PitterPat profile? Only men behind bars!” She burst into sobs.

  “I’m so sorry, Lib.”

  “Hey,” Michael said, “you’re doing a public service. Instead of researching how to make bombs out of fertilizer or new ways to commit credit card fraud, they’re surfing the Web for more pictures of your feet.”

  “Michael,” I said.

  “What? It’s the truth.”

  Libby snuffled. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I’ve been seduced by the belief that everyone can be a celebrity now. All it takes is deciding to make yourself into somebody. Somebody big and exciting and worthy of attention. It really doesn’t matter if undern
eath it all you’re just a nobody. It’s seductive—having people watch you and listen to what you say and do. Very seductive. It makes me think I’m better than average. It’s not exciting, being average.”

  “You’re never average, Libby. And clearly, your followers enjoy you.”

  Libby gathered her composure. “I suppose if—if imprisoned followers are involved, I could look at my efforts in the context of public service. Distracting them from detrimental influences. That—that’s a noble cause, right?”

  “Damn straight,” Michael said.

  Hopefully, she asked, “So there’s no need for me to . . . stop?”

  “If you did, you might trigger another Attica prison riot.”

  She dried her eyes on my napkin. “Well, I certainly wouldn’t want that on my conscience.”

  Michael brought Max back to me to hold while he cooked. First butter went into the cast-iron skillet, then some diced onion. While the fragrance wafted up from the stove, he said, “Now, what did I hear about prostitution?”

  I sighed. “It’s Aunt Madeleine. I finally got a chance to read a few pages of her black book.”

  “And?”

  “I think she was accepting large sums of money from her friends.”

  Libby said, “We’re afraid Madeleine took money in exchange for . . . Oh, dear. For sex.”

  Michael looked at me. “What makes you think that?”

  “I don’t think that. But she annotated all her deposits with a man’s name. And usually the names of hotels. See?” I held up the book.

  I had looked through all of the names. All of them important men like Mr. Banks. Many of them were dead now, contemporaries of Madeleine. A few names I didn’t recognize, but the ones I did know were all men of property—men who could have handed over large sums of money without feeling the sting.

  Michael was busy adding some chunks of red pepper to the skillet and didn’t bother to look. “Yeah, I noticed that last night when I skimmed a few pages. I didn’t think of sex right off. I guess she could have been pretty great in the sack.”

  “And why not?” Libby got ruffled. “She was a beautiful woman.”

  “Yeah, but ten thousand bucks?” Michael flipped the contents of the skillet before strolling back to the table and pointing to one of the notations in the ledger with his favorite kitchen knife. “And some guys didn’t just pay her once or twice, but several times. That’s a lot of money for a roll in the hay. Not that I have any firsthand experience paying for sex, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “And, anyway, my family never got into the sex trade, but we all know the first rule of doing any kind of crooked business is not to put anything on paper. She was smart, right? Too smart to create evidence that could be used against her.”

  “Maybe she didn’t know that rule,” I said.

  Libby asked, “What else do you think she could have been paid for, if not sex?”

  Michael had a good mind for crime, it could not be denied. And the same way Libby threw herself into the practice of erotic yoga, he enjoyed exercising his criminal creativity. He said, “It doesn’t look like gambling to me. Could be blackmail, though. Extortion. Or bribery, maybe. Insider trading, or some kind of real estate scam, or maybe illegal campaign donations—”

  “Wait, wait.” Already I reeled with the possibilities.

  “Receiving stolen property,” he continued. “Or drugs—”

  “Drugs!”

  Libby snapped her fingers. “What about the Mayflower Madam? Maybe Madeleine wasn’t accepting money for sex, but arranging assignations between men of her social circle and high-class call girls.”

  “Yeah,” Michael agreed. “Maybe that. But it doesn’t feel right to me.”

  I put my forehead down on the kitchen table. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

  Libby said, “It might explain all the special guests she had upstairs at Quintain.”

  “Special guests, huh?” Michael sounded amused.

  “Stop.” I sat up. “When I spoke with the secretary of state, she said something very sweet about Madeleine. That she was a great patriot. And she wanted to know if one of us might write a book about her. Surely, a respected international diplomat wouldn’t encourage us to write about a Mayflower Madam. It really bothers me that Madeleine is being seen in such an ugly light. I want to protect her.”

  “I know one way to find out what she was doing,” Michael said over his shoulder. “You could go see a lady I know.”

  Libby practically leaped from her chair. “A madam?”

  “Retired,” Michael said. “A friend of an uncle of mine knew the whole prostitution scene from top to—uh—bottom. I bet she’d remember if your aunt was mixed up in call girls.”

  Which was how I found myself speeding down the highway in the passenger seat of Libby’s minivan while little Max spent the rest of the morning in Michael’s care. I wanted to clear Madeleine’s name, and at the moment our errand felt like a crazy way to accomplish that.

  “I can’t wait!” Libby cried. “We’re going to meet a real madam! Do you think I should go home and change? I want to look my very best!”

  “Libby—”

  “You never know what kind of tips we might pick up from a professional.”

  “I can’t believe you’re behaving as though this person is some kind of role model.”

  “Just wait,” Libby predicted. “You’re going to like her. I’m sure of it! You need extensive social skills to be a success in her business.”

  We arrived at the address Michael had provided and found ourselves staring at the sign on the front of the large white building that had been constructed to look like a grand Victorian-style hotel. White rocking chairs lined the porches, and someone had lavishly decorated for the season with hay bales and pumpkins.

  “Shady Rest Home?” Libby’s excitement deflated like a balloon popped at the end of a party. “How old is this madam, anyway?”

  “Michael did say she was retired.”

  Libby parked in the visitors’ lot. We trooped through the front door of the Shady Rest Home personal care facility and into a pleasant lobby with a front desk surrounded by elderly men and women in wheelchairs.

  “Can I help you, girls?” piped a voice from the middle of the pack.

  Libby and I waded through the sea of perky faces to the front desk, which was occupied by a stout middle-aged woman with a wide smile. She wore a smock covered with little animals kicking soccer balls. On the desk in front of her lay several bingo cards and a basket full of letters and numbers. The name tag on a lanyard around her neck read: SHARYN, SOCIAL DIRECTOR.

  “Hi,” I said. “We’re here to visit one of your residents, please.”

  “We love visitors! First-timers? I can tell just by looking. I’ve been here twelve years, so I know everybody’s relatives.” She pulled a clipboard off a hook and handed it to me. “Sign your name, sweetie, and leave your driver’s license with me.”

  “Actually, I don’t have a driver’s license.”

  “Me neither!” A cranky voice spoke up at my elbow.

  As Libby dove into her handbag in search of her driver’s license, I turned to an elderly gentleman who looked like either he had shrunk considerably since his shirt was purchased or somebody had made a very big Christmas blunder. He wore it buttoned up tight around his scrawny neck. In his lap, he held a bingo card and a large orange marker. From the look of things, he was close to shouting, “Bingo!”

  He peered up at me accusingly. “My son took away my driver’s license two years ago. Do you think that’s fair?”

  “Now, now, Mr. Jackson, don’t go taking out your frustrations on our guests. Your son was only thinking of your own safety.”

  “Safety? The only thing that wasn’t safe was my own garage door! I kept bumping into it, but I never hit anything else, did I?”

  “A few dozen mailboxes and one skunk,” Sharyn said. “But who’s counting? Don’t mind him, sweetie.
Who are you here to see?”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your game. Um, actually, we’re here to see”—I lowered my voice and leaned closer to Sharyn—“Miss Foxy Galore.”

  “Foxy Galore!” boomed Sharyn. “Miss Foxy, where are you?”

  Everyone in the wheelchairs craned around to look for their missing comrade until one wavery voice finally said, “She sneaked off to the bathroom again.”

  “Tch, tch.” Sharyn shook her head. “That lady just can’t give up the smokes. You want to try talking some sense into her?”

  “Well, this is more of a social call.”

  Mr. Jackson burst into guffaws. “You’re not the kind who usually pays social calls on Foxy!”

  “Please, Mr. Jackson.” Sharyn gave him a disapproving frown. “Let’s be sensitive to our fellow residents, shall we? Here, girls, pin these passes to your coats. We don’t allow anyone to just stroll in here anytime they want, so you might get stopped by security. If you want to find Miss Galore, go through those doors and turn right at the beauty parlor. Then turn left at the dining room and right again when you see the swimming pool and one more left at the fish tank. Got that?”

  “Beauty parlor, dining room, swimming pool, fish tank. Got it.”

  Glumly, Mr. Jackson said, “They’re always making us do those brain puzzles. Remember this, remember that. Just sometimes, I’d like to forget a few things. The only thing worse is that danged exercise class.”

  Libby said, “You should start doing yoga.”

  He transferred his glare to her. “Yoga! That’s ridiculous!”

  “On the contrary, it will keep you young and supple. It’s great for the endorphins, too.”

  He gave Libby an up-and-down perusal and perked up. “You look pretty supple yourself, young lady. Where can I get some of those dolphin things?”

  “Why don’t I bring my mat some afternoon, and we could all try a few poses? There’s nothing I like more than sharing my spiritual quest with the unenlightened.”

  “Who you calling unlighted?”

  I grabbed my sister’s arm. “C’mon, Libby. Let’s go see Miss Galore.”

  Mr. Jackson shouted after us, “Beauty parlor, dining room, swimming pool and fish tank! See? I’m as lighted as the next guy.”