Malicious Mischief

by Marianne Harden

  I am deeply grateful to my agent, Nicole Resciniti, and to Elizabeth Pelletier, my acquiring editor, and to Libby Murphy, my editor, for their unending love for the written word, their belief in this book, and their faith in me, an unproven fledgling. I am also in debt to Shannon Godwin, editorial director, and ultimate “voice of reason.” I want to thank my publicists, Danielle Barclay and Anjana Vasan, who never baulk at my endless questions and work tirelessly behind the scenes.To my gal pals, who I list alphabetically to avoid sibling rivalry: Amanda Carlson, Marisa Cleveland, Jen J. Danna, Amanda Flower, Melissa Landers, Lea Nolan, Cecy Robson, Melody Steiner, Julie Ann Walker. Nothing can change our inception as “Nic’s Chicks,” though males in our mix would have been fun. “Nic’s Chicks & Dicks” is priceless.

  To Dr. Linda Seim for always being there and slogging through first drafts like a trooper.

  To Deborah Drake and Sharon Barber for the friendship and laughs. Long live the Crossroads Hamsters.

  To Gene for being you, your patience and support, and for loving me. To Sierra for listening when I chatter about plots and characters, but also for hearing me as no one else can. To Daniel for never being too big or grown up to hug and kiss your mother. To Blane for always being close when I need you. To Brian for enduring my youthful mothering even though I didn’t know what I was doing. I love you all.

  Get a sneak peek of Delicious Mischief, Book Two in the Rylie Keyes Mystery Series.

  Coming May 2014!

  Mean people suck

  When one hatches a last-minute plan, there are those who are in, those who are out, and those who just happen to be in the car. The septuagenarian riding shotgun seat beside me belonged to the latter bunch. As far as senior Jane Gettelfinger knew, I was hanging a u-ey to snag a Blizzard from the nearby Dairy Queen. However, my real aim was to track down a scumbag for my new boss at Snoop Investigations, a longtime Bellevue, Washington P.I. firm, where I’m a highly underpaid (i.e. diddlysquat) intern.

  My name is Rylie Tabitha Keyes, and I hold down two other jobs in order to keep my ailing grandfather in our ancestral home on Lake Sammamish. So far, I’ve kept at bay the pesky tax assessor, who would love nothing better than to auction off our rundown lakeside cottage for some measly back taxes. Yet, however successful my efforts have been, they’re only a work in progress, as my two paying jobs reward me with barely poverty level compensation. One job, with Baconnaise, because they only give me eight stinking hours a week, and the other, Fountain of Youth Retirement Home (FoY), because it’s cash strapped due to the owner, Leland Rosenberg, losing everything in a Ponzi scheme run by a Rockefeller imposter of the Egyptian persuasion.

  Most wonder how a con artist who was so obviously not a New York blueblood with French Huguenot ancestry could’ve duped our fearless leader at FoY. But not me, I suspected if asked for help, my kindhearted-yet-gullible boss would have led the hungry wolf to a tasty Red Riding Hood. So in order to put Jelly Bellies into our tummies, my grandfather and I have taken in a roommate, my friend Solosolo Namulau’ulu—Solo for short—who also works at FoY. But rather than schlepping seniors to doctor appointments, churches, or Indian bingo as I do each day, Solo helps them stay active with exercises like Wii Fit, salsa dancing, and the occasional home-wide search for the TV remote control. While in his spare time, Solo—in conjunction with his 350 pounds of rawhide Samoan muscle—trains to perform someday on a circus bike for Cirque du Soleil, of which his first audition is in just seven days.

  Truth is, both Solo and I have career goals that fly in the face of our loved one’s expectations, but more on that later. Right now, I needed to figure out how to handle this quick detour from my original destination: senior Jane Gettelfinger’s newly restored, yet so far unoccupied, mansion. Without pissing the old girl off.

  “I’d been meaning to ask,” I said to Jane. “Are you planning to move back to your own home soon?”

  She flashed me an eye, a bit miffed. “Someday.”

  The same answer as always, but I persisted—some might say rather nosily—because I found it bizarre that anyone would live in a modest retirement home when they owned a million-dollar house. “That must have been some remodel job. You’ve been at FoY, what, two years now?”

  “If you say so.” She stared down at the fingernails she’d spent the last five minutes filing with an emery board and shook her head. “I don’t have a memory for things like that.”

  “Now that you mention it, I think it’s been three years.”

  “I didn’t mention it,” she said, a hint of annoyance in her voice. “I could’ve driven myself, you know? I’m not senile.”

  “Of course you aren’t,” I said, glancing sideways at her with admiration. She was really a physically fit senior. “Complications happen sometimes.”

  “Not to me they don’t.” She dropped the nail file into her purse and hauled out her iPhone. “Cataract surgery is supposed to be simple. Clouded eye. Damn nuisance—and don’t tell me setbacks builds character like Elsa did yesterday. Not according to my book. Moral fiber is earned not endured.”

  “Speaking of earning,” I said. “You’ve lots of people helping set up your party tonight, right?”

  “Are you insane?” She huffed and fixed testy eyes on the phone clenched in her bejeweled—as in ice—hands. “Of course, I have help. Peons do everything for me.”

  Smooth. Insult peons while in the company of one. Nevertheless, I persisted to get on her good side. “Remind me how it was you came to be so rich,” I asked, referencing one of her favorite subjects.

  “Seat warmers.” She jabbed a finger at her cell, clearly typing a text, but looking more like an act of murder. “One gave me a yeast infection back in ’66. I took the car company to court and won a boatload. Suckers.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Leland said you sued the pants off them.”

  She barked a shifty laugh. “Fitting, Rylie, very fitting.” Then she sucked in a sharp breath. “What a boring pack of old farts and fuddy-duddies, all of them.”

  Aside from money, Jane mostly talked about men: how to get them in the sack, how to ditch them when they got too clingy, the hit or miss dimensions of their manhood, and her appraisal of their carnal performances. Not a big shocker. Jane is a nymphomaniac, psychologically speaking. Or a sex freak, in slanguage.

  “My God, it’s one thing after another with these idiotic men,” she went on.

  I said nothing, only concentrated on putting my last-minute plan into action by maneuvering down the street alongside the Unemployment Office. Driving slowly, I looked for signs of the after-hours security guard through the large plate-glass windows, but came up empty.

  “Don’t they realize?” Jane’s attention was still on her phone. “That nothing says amour like me under moonlight?”

  “Problem?” I asked finally.

  “Problem is an understatement.” Her voice was as brittle as her bleached blond hair. “Not one male FoY resident is coming to my party tonight.”

  “Not true,” I countered. “Gilad said he would be there.”

  She howled another laugh. “The impotent ones don’t count.”

  I imagined Charles Darwin said that very same thing. Along with “No hard feelings, huh? Welcome to extinction.”

  Cruising on, I finally spied through the plate glass the after-hours guard chomping through what looked like a mega calzone, while Jane only continued to snarl at her phone.

  “How can they not come to my party?” she said. “There will be agony for each and every one of those old pansies, believe you me.”

  Oh, I believed her, all right. Jane scared the bejesus out of me, especially when she jumped all over my ass after my split with Detective Thad Talon. For the most part, it wasn’t much of a break up, because when I demanded (asked, really) Talon to confide in me his real identity, he only smiled and kissed me goodnight. Turns out, that kiss was our last.

  The unemployment office’s back lot was empty when I pulled in and checked my watch. T
wenty past five pm, right on target.

  Blah, bleak, bland Pacific Northwest rain snaked down the windshield, and even with the cloud-shrouded Autumn sunlight fading on the western horizon, I could see nearby trash Dumpsters were crammed with soggy orange and black party favors, a vampire cut-out, and those stretchy spider webs typically strung up for Halloween.

  Jane bounced in her seat, at long last looking up from her cell. “What’s up? Why are we here?”

  I stared at the thin line of her lips. “Is your question one of anger or excitement?”

  “Anger, of course,” she said. “Only men get me excited.”

  I took a deep bolstering breath. “Jane, I’ve got a problem,” I began. “I’m behind the eight-ball on an investigation—”

  “Geez Louise, Rylie, spare me the PI lingo.” Despite two facelifts, she glared at me from under deeply hooded eyes. “Plain English, please.”

  So much for that 99-cent e-book. “Look, if I don’t find this guy.” I took a picture from the center console and handed it over. “I’ll lose my internship.”

  “Bullpucky.” She scanned the photo, then let it drop into the drink cubby. “Never seen him. Wake up, doll face. Come to the real world of favoritism. That PI boss of yours is a friend of your granddad. He won’t can your ass.”

  “But there’s another intern, a son—daughter—of my boss’s cousin.”

  “Which is it, a son, or daughter?”

  I thought a moment. “Well, Sherwin Blank was a guy, but now he’s a she.”

  “Sex change?”

  I nodded.

  “So he’s a he-she.” She eyed me hopefully, expression bright. “Do his man parts still work?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Look, this is serious. My boss has time to train only one intern. Bottom line, whoever finds Andre Rostov first keeps their job.”

  “No sweat. Just ask Talon for help,” she said. “That man could find Elvis.”

  “I can manage on my own,” I said, pouting a little. Talon probably could find Elvis. I, on the other hand, can’t locate my car keys most mornings.

  “Suit yourself.” Jane leaned back, her thinning hair scrunched against the headrest, her light eyes staring off in the distance. “You know, it just might do you good to lose this internship. You’ll have more time to reconsider your break up with Talon.”

  “But—”

  “Oh, I know,” she cut me off with an irritated wave of the hand. “All you’ve ever wanted to be is a PI. But damn, doll face, that man is so, so—”

  Sure, Talon was too babelicious for words, but as I’d feared from the moment we’d met last summer, I needed something more. Something resembling honesty. A moral accessory, Talon possessed in short supply.

  “The key to relationships is openness,” I said.

  “Openness be damned. The key is sex.” She squinted at me. “The sex was good, right?”

  Heavenly. But her next question saved me from answering.

  “What exactly is he not open about?”

  I swallowed hard. I’d stupidly turned our conversation down a waterway I couldn’t navigate without divulging that Talon had a secret identity. “Just stuff,” I said, shrugging.

  “What kind of stuff?”

  I turned my neck to look out the windshield. “His past loves. Things like that,” I lied not swiveling my head.

  “Ha!” she barked. “Is that all? Doll face, you need to grow up. Past loves are nobody’s damn business. Now, what’s this Andre what’s-his-name done? The one in the picture?”

  “Insurance fraud,” I told her, relieved by the change of subject.

  “And he works here?” She looked around again. “Isn’t this the unemployment office?”

  I nodded. “Rostov quit months ago, but the after-hour guard knows him. Though so far, he’s been uncooperative.”

  “And you’ve got a plan to make him talk?”

  Vaguely, but still I answered yes.

  “We will not be late for my Halloween party,” she insisted. “Are we clear on that?”

  “Crystal.”

  Jane and I were both decked out in costumes. Hers: a spot-on depiction of a seventy-five-year-old Lady Zorro. As for my get-up, well, at least for tonight it double dutied as a costume, while four other nights a week, it made do as a uniform for my part-time job with Baconnaise. Swathing me from neck to knees were two rectangles of thick foam fused together at the top and sides, with an opening for my head at the top, while two slits at my shoulders freed up my arms. And gallivanting down the front and back were long, alternating stripes of russet and beige, while stamped across my chest and ass was my employer’s slogan: EVERYTHING SHOULD TASTE LIKE BACON. I’m their Eastside spokesperson. I earn minimum wage eight hours a week as the freckled-faced redhead who waves to Bellevue, Washington rush hour drivers from the corner of 148th NE and NE 24th Street, where I often stand beside a pleasant, but crazed woman who dances while she shouts out rock bottom mattress prices for a nearby store. People frequently toss us money out of pity and at times a delectable like Filet ‘o Fish sails from a car window. I scurry after those puppies, posthaste. Merely to show my appreciation.

  Tonight was Halloween, and as mentioned, Jane was hosting a big bash for who I hoped turned out to be oodles of big tippers. It was a much-needed chance for me to earn extra moolah parking cars, and I needed all the dough I could scare up. I was currently experiencing a more than usual debtage after the ’72 Pinto station wagon I recently bought from a friend and co-worker broke down not once, but twice this week.

  I checked my watch again. Time to rock & roll. As I jockeyed the Pinto in between the back wall and the two columns supporting the overhead carport, the rear door whooshed open hard and whacked the left front fender. It happened just as I’d intended, only the hit was more forceful, surely making a dent in my car. Damn.

  The calzone-eating guard’s flushed face squished out through the thin gap between the door and jamb, his skin stretched bloodless, an unlit cigarette stuck between his lips.

  Awesome. My hasty plan was working. As for knowing the security guard’s routine: eating first, then smoking at 5:30pm. That was easy. Even at the spry age of twenty-four, I was a seasoned user of the unemployment office’s job finding services. And though they know my name by heart, the staff calls me ‘The Career Chameleon.’ Very amusing. However, I’m done with all that flakiness now that my retired police detective grandfather has given his blessing to my private investigator dream, albeit grudgingly. I guess he just figured he had no choice after I solved a murder a few months back.

  Rolling down the Pinto’s window, I caught an earful of the after-hours guard’s warp-speed Italian. Two lone words stood out: mutha fucka. Even garbled by his squished cigarette and thinned lips, some catchphrases were Swarovski clear. This guy was hopping mad.

  He wormed out an arm between the door and frame. Swift hand gestures followed. None of them nice. “I gonna tell you what I tell you before. I no remember so much about Andre Rostov,” he said.

  “I know what you said. Now tell me the truth,” I told him.

  “How come you no read Idiots Guide to People Finding? Blocking me inside here is no way to get what you want. Italian men get ideas when they see a needy woman. There, what did I ‘a tell you? I just got another one. Excusee, if you no mind me asking, what color are your panties?”

  Big sigh. “Wake up,” I said. “I already told you. I’m not sleeping with you for information.”

  “I might,” Jane chimed in with an abnormally jolly hee-haw. “I’ll have you know that back in ’52, I spied for our Green Berets, swapping coitus with North Korean officers for military secrets. Funny how life shows us our strengths. I must have banged a hundred men that year.”

  “I’ve got this handled,” I told Jane, and tried again to explain to the guard. “He used to work here on the weekends.”

  I gave the guard my most excellent dopy-eye look. When his expression lifted from pissed to sympathetic, my heart leapt north to
my tonsils. Was I about to finally solve my first case for Snoop Investigations? Could it be that I was actually going to hold onto my internships?

  “Everybody loves mall Santas,” the guard said. “Not me. I hate the little sonnawabitches.” Then he tried to light his cigarette, but dropped the lighter. Grumbling, he bent to pick it up. Only instead of getting a hand on it, he smacked his head on the doorknob. Loads more kvetching spilled out his mouth.

  “Santa Claus?” I said. “The man is a mall Santa?”

  “And flexible as hell.”

  Jane and I exchanged stumped looks. I asked him what he meant, but my question was drowned out when he whacked the door repeatedly against the Pinto’s front fender.

  “Look, lady, I gonna call the polizia,” he shouted. “Let me out of here.”

  Jane clambered over me and stuck her head out my window. “Not until you spill the beans, buddy-o.”

  “Mind your own damn business, you old bag.” The guard sidled between the door and jamb, trying to squeeze his fleshy body into the narrow opening like Play-Doh through a Fun Factory. Hindered by the doorknob gouging a whopping crater into his big ol’ belly, he spit out a loogie in frustration, missing Jane, but not my much.

  “Hey, you could use some pointers on how to treat a woman,” she yelled, then gasped. “Oh, look at you. Such a naughty boy. Your fly is open, and my-o-my you’re going commando. Well, I’ll be. So it’s true. The bigger the nose, the smaller the penis.”

  “Kiss off,” he told her. “I think maybe you so old you no remember what an eccellente penis looks like. My mistress says I’m a stallion.”

  With her knees digging into the tops of my thighs, Jane climbed out my window even farther and flicked his equestrian do-hickey with a casual finger. “What a big talker. That doodad is nothing more than a Shetland pony.”

  His lips thinned even more. He reached up and seized one of the overhang’s rickety crossbeams affixed above the partially open door, hung from both hands, and squirmed up, trying to squeeze his body outside. Problem was, he managed only to wedge part of his thick trunk into the opening over the doorknob. The man was stuck like Chuck.