“You don’t see me wearin’ any of that shit.”
Stella had to admit that was true—Chrissy, who was endowed with a curvy, generous figure, never wore anything but a bra and a pair of lacy panties—and Stella was pretty sure that occasionally she even went without the latter. “Yeah, but you’re young still.”
“I ain’t never puttin’ those things on. What I got isn’t meant for any kinda flesh prison.”
“Talk to me about that when you’re fifty,” Stella suggested, but she had a suspicion that Chrissy might be telling the truth. What was more, she wondered if the girl had a point. If she could get back all the hours she’d spent fretting over how she looked in a particular garment—if she could get back the few precious moments when she would have been enjoying Goat Jones’s roving hands if her Spanx hadn’t rendered her ass completely numb—then she might be willing to toss the entire collection in the trash and just go back to her naughty-enough Maidenform hipsters.
“Anyway, here’s the interesting thing. This Manetta of yours and that Parch guy, they applied for a patent way back in 2006. Then they reserved themselves a domain name and even put up a little lame-ass content before letting it lapse in oh-nine.”
“Uh … what? In English?”
There was a heavy sigh. “What I’m telling you is that they had a Web site for a while, but it was all ‘coming soon’ this and ‘under construction’ that—it looked to me like they never even went into production with any of it, though there was a picture of a coupla middle-aged guys that I’m pretty sure were Manetta and Parch, with their guts sucked in, wearing visors. I mean Stella, shoot me if I ever date a dude who wears a visor.”
“What’s wrong with a visor?” Stella demanded, thinking of the cute floral-print one Dotty Edwards bought her off QVC a while back, that she sometimes wore jogging if the sun was especially strong.
“Well, I mean, I guess for somebody out there … never mind. Anyway they might have been wearing these ManTees things under their shirts, I couldn’t tell from the picture. So after oh-nine I couldn’t find any evidence of anything much going on, and then bam! Back in January, all of a sudden guess what happens?”
“Uh, what?” Stella wasn’t fond of Chrissy’s guessing games, but she knew better than to rush the gal.
“The sale of the ManTees patent to LockeCorp goes through to the tune of ninety thousand dollars.”
Now that got her attention. “Ninety thousand…? But I thought you said they weren’t actually making the shirts yet.”
“No, but see, they had registered the patent on them. Those two, Parch and Manetta, whatever they were doing over at Courtland Mills, they were working with some sort of team developing high-tech materials, which is I guess how they came across this one fabric they use. This superstretch type stuff you insist on putting on your ass all the time, that sort of thing. I mean there’s a lot of technical language in there, ‘thermoregulating’ this and ‘melt-fusible’ that. There’s drawings and all.”
“Wouldn’t Courtland Mills have something to say about that? I mean, if it was developed on the job?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think these two had much of a social life, Stella. Bet you anything they worked on this on the weekend in one of their garages or something. If they did all the work off-site, they’d own the rights to whatever they invented.”
“Were there photos?”
“No, you don’t need photos to get a patent. They must have hired somebody to make a couple of samples, or talked their sister or mom or whatever into doing it for them, which is I guess what they were wearing on their Web site.”
“So … what exactly did that company buy from them? A coupla homemade shirts and a recipe for making this kind of special fabric? ’Cause seriously, Chrissy, I got a whole basement full of old sewing projects I’d be glad to sell if folks are going to be handing out hundred-thousand-dollar checks, and I know you can buy high-tech fabric up in Kansas City. Probably get it online, too.”
“Yeah, but see Stella, you ain’t looking at it right. What LockeCorp got for their money wasn’t the actual product. It was—well, it was two things, really. First of all they got a kind of promise that Parch and Manetta weren’t gonna march down to the copyright office and start suing them all over the place. And second, they got a guarantee that they weren’t gonna go into competition against ’em.”
“They paid ninety thousand dollars just to not get sued?” Stella clucked. “Okay, I guess I heard crazier things in my day. So then LockeCorp…”
“Parent company of LockeBrands Inc., third-largest maker of men’s undergarments after Hanes and Jockey.”
“So now they get to start selling ManTees?”
“Yup. And depending how fast they get them to market they could beat out the competition, be a real player in the men’s shaper garment space—this could be huge for them.”
“Huh. So, who was that check made out to, anyway?”
“Ha, now you’re thinking. You’ll be interested to know that it was made out exclusively to one Benton Keith Parch. Manetta was named as a partner on the Web site, but not on the patent.”
Stella whistled and noted down the particulars. The rest of the conversation—address and phone details for Manetta and for Alana Javetz-Parch, as well as a confusing stream of patent numbers and citations and examiner names—was merely tedious, now that she had a legitimate suspect to pursue.
Chapter Seventeen
The Impreza was hardly the smooth ride to which she’d become accustomed in the past few days, five feet off the ground in the driver’s seat of BJ’s truck, but it got her where she needed to go—the residence of one Christopher “Topher” Eugene Manetta. His address turned out to be part of a spiffy ring of deluxe condominiums that wound around a pond decorated with little footbridges and statuary, all of which were lit up with fancy landscape lighting. A young couple played tennis, the court as bright as daylight from the spotlights focused on it. Elsewhere people strolled along the walking paths and sat out at café tables on back patios, drinking and talking.
Singles heaven, was what the place appeared to be, with its parking lot full of shiny new cars, its recreational facilities hopping. Stella found Topher’s building and parked in the guest spot, nearly opening her door into a young woman who was jogging by with earbuds in her ears.
According to Chrissy’s research, Topher was forty-eight, which struck her as a little old for all this vigorous singles-set fun, but what did she know? Moments after she knocked on his ground-floor door, it was answered by a medium-tall man with short dark brown hair surrounding a perfectly round bald patch. He wore shiny athletic shorts that he might have been better advised to buy one size larger, and he was drenched in sweat, right down to the pristine white terrycloth sweatbands he wore around his wrists.
The thing that confirmed for Stella that she’d found her man, however, was what he was wearing on top. A sleeveless gray tank top printed with the words MISSOURI DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS was draped over a second tank, which was white, shiny—and very tight.
If Stella had a type, Topher would be far at the other end of the spectrum, but she was still glad she’d taken the time to fine-tune her appearance on the way to the door, tugging down her top, wiggling her jeans a little more snugly up around her ass, and slicking on an emergency coat of lip gloss. “Mr. Manetta?” she asked politely, holding her purse handle primly with both hands and smiling. “Am I interrupting?”
Topher reached for a little white towel draped over the back of a nearby chair and began vigorously mopping at his face, all the while staring and blinking at her. Aware of the way his gaze traveled up and down, Stella put one foot in front of the other, toe pointed slightly away, the way she’d been taught to pose years ago by her mother. The slight thrust of the hip, Pat Collier explained, lined all of a lady’s endowments up as nicely as possible.
Her mother’s wisdom was not lost on Topher, evidently. He gave his right hand a wipe-down with the towel and pulled a tin
y bottle of hand sanitizer from his pocket and squirted a little goo on his hands and rubbed vigorously. Finally, he was ready, and he extended his hand and Stella shook it, trying to ignore the heat and general softness of his flesh.
“Have we had the pleasure, Ms.…”
“Hardesty. Stella Hardesty.”
“Did we meet at the ski club mixer?”
“No, I—”
He held up one finger to shush her. “Darnell Burke’s poker party?”
“No…”
“All right.” Topher bowed at the waist and rolled his hand in an elaborate display of chivalry. “I give up.”
“Well, I’m … here on business relating to Benton Parch, I suppose you might say.”
The change in Topher was immediate and startling. His pleasant smile vanished into a scowl. His eyes, a bland shade of blue and slightly smaller than average, narrowed even more. His posture, which had been breathtakingly erect, shifted slightly, his shoulders slumping and his knees turning in.
“What exactly is this about?”
“Well, really, I just wanted to come and ask you a few questions.” Stella’s plan, which she’d concocted on the way over, anticipated an unpleasant reaction to the mention of Parch, so she swung smoothly into her next step. “I’m from the Wisconsin Department of Intellectual Property. I’ve been trying to reach you by telephone, but I must have the wrong contact information, and I’m in town on another matter so I thought I would try swinging by for a quick visit. I hope that’s all right. What with the budget cuts, our caseload is just through the roof, and I’m working evenings to catch up. We were doing a standard case review of patents filed in the final quarter of last year, and we came across a discrepancy in one on which you were named as a subagent.”
“What … what sort of discrepancy?”
Stella took a sheaf of forms from her purse. If Topher got too close, he would see that they were copies of purchase orders for a variety of industrial cleaning agents that Stella had downloaded from Chip’s university account, so she licked her lips as though she had a little tiny bit of something stuck in the corner and smiled encouragingly to distract him. “Oh, no worries, I think it’s all to the good. We were contacted by an attorney retained by LockeCorp, who discovered this in the course of their postsale legal review. You see, they’re, uh … there are funds involved that they are attempting pay out to the patent holder at the state level. In addition to the principal sale there are state fees and liens, and we have determined an amount is owed to the seller of the patent.”
“You’d have to talk to Benton Parch about that. I’m no longer involved with the company.”
“Well, we’ve been trying, but I was unable to reach Mr. Parch at any of the numbers we have for him.”
Stella watched Manetta carefully but detected no change in his expression, which she would describe as a glum shade of disconcerted. “Yeah, well, we’re not really in personal contact. You could probably reach him through his employer.”
“Is that right?” Here was the hard part, where Stella tried to sneak in a personal question on top of what was already a fairly lightweight ruse. You never knew how things would go at this juncture—sometimes people got carried away with the conversation and didn’t seem to notice you’d gone from chatting to prying and gave up all sorts of stuff; the sharper folks would generally shut down like clams when the pearl diver comes calling, and you’d have to work your way back through earning trust again from the start. “That’s a shame. I know it’s not my place to say anything, but … well, this patent caught my attention. My ex-husband, I was always on him to take care of himself. I don’t know what it is with some guys, they hit forty and just let themselves go, you know? So when I saw LockeCorp plans to manufacture the ManTees … well, I just think if he’d of had a couple of those we might still be married.”
Stella unleashed a giggle, letting her own gaze roam lasciviously all over Manetta’s compressed and stuffed girth. She had to admit that Chrissy had a point; while the flesh in the middle region of Manetta seemed to be quite smooth and uniform under his gym shirt, the bit of ManTee that she could see peeking out the top cut into him cruelly and shone with an eerily smooth patina, the skin underneath it robbed of all of its natural texture and packed in like so many pickled herrings in a tin. Looking at the shirt, Stella did not find her fingertips twitching with an urge to explore further, as she would, say, if Goat Jones showed up in gym shorts or for that matter in a garbage sack with holes cut out for his arms and head.
There wasn’t one damn sexy thing about the thing, and Stella felt sad for all the fellows who, seeing the ManTee models on TV, surrounded by happy hot girl models, would rush out and buy the things hoping to be elevated in the eyes of their ladies. Damn the callous media and its obsession with physical perfection—and damn the human race for its vanity and thirst for self-delusion.
On the other hand, here she was in a Slimplicity Shaping Panty and Bra-llelujah Demi-Lift Bra, which she’d donned especially to have a seductive effect on Manetta. It appeared to be working, too, since he couldn’t take his eyes off her nicely rounded cleavage and smooth, curvy ass. While the parts were all hers, the particular way they were arranged came courtesy of Spanx.
“Wow, I just hate hearing that,” he said, speaking mostly to her breasts. “Men don’t understand, the ladies do so much to put their best self forward, and what do guys think, that they don’t have to make an effort?” Manetta shook his head as though the thought left him dumbfounded beyond belief. “I mean, look at you. You must work out, right?”
“Yes I do,” Stella said, touching her fingers to her hair so that the swoopy part tipped forward over her eye in a sexy fashion. Encouraging man-lust was not the main reason she kept up her running routine and the near-nightly Bowflex sessions and the occasional martial arts bout, but it was certainly a nice by-product.
“And look how nice you’ve fixed your hair, your makeup, your outfit … your whole package, really. Um, I hope I’m not being too forward if I ask if you are over forty…”
“Why, yes I am, in fact,” Stella said, trying to keep her earsplitting grin under control. “A bit over forty, anyway.”
“I know it’s a rude question to ask, and I hope you’ll forgive me,” Manetta said, “but it just goes along with my theory. A lady hits forty and she evaluates herself and makes whatever modifications to her routine are called for. A man who won’t do the same, he just makes the rest of us look bad. Brings down the reputation of the entire gender. I myself am forty-two, and I’m in better shape than I’ve ever been in my life. I think earlier I was tempted to just coast, but now I understand that romance is a two-way street.”
Stella was still feeling swelled up enough with modest pride that she decided to let him slide on the six years he’d shaved off his age. “That it is.”
“I’m still, you know, hoping to find the right lady. I mean, a really special lady,” Manetta said, slipping off his wristbands and dropping them on the hall table. “And when I do, I know we’ll both make an effort for each other. I mean, that’s what ManTees was supposed to be about—respect. Know what I’m saying?”
“Um, I think—”
“Hey, would you like a cup of coffee? A soda? I’d offer you a glass of wine but I know you’re on duty and all.”
Stella wouldn’t have minded a little wine, or—even better—a little shot of Johnnie, which she hadn’t had since leaving Missouri, but it wouldn’t do to lose focus now.
“I’d love a soda, thank you. A diet soda, of course.”
They laughed in unison as Manetta led the way into his condo, which Stella had to admit was tricked out nicely. As he busied himself pouring the soda over ice, she took in the soft green walls, the sofas loaded down with decorative cushions, the candles laid out on little gold plates.
“I like the way you’ve done this room,” she said, though the truth was she preferred what Noelle called “eclectic clutter,” which was just a nice way of saying a li
fetime’s worth of treasures and junk, arranged on whatever surface happened to be handy.
“Thanks. I read in a magazine, women like green. They find it soothing.”
Stella was starting to think Manetta took his woman-prowling a little too far, if he based all of his decisions on the collective tastes of the fairer sex.
He brought her glass and toasted it with his own. Stella thought the cologne smell was stronger now and wondered if he’d spritzed himself on the sly while he was in the kitchen.
“Want to see the rest?” he asked, as she took a sip.
“Um…”
“Of my place.” Before she could respond, he’d motioned for her to follow him down the hall.
“I use the extra bedroom for my gym.”
“Nice,” Stella said, peering in to see a treadmill and a rack of free weights in front of a wall entirely covered with a mirror. Next to them, copies of Men’s Health and GQ were arranged on a little table.
“And this is my bedroom…”
The bedroom was painted a mauve-ish purple, with gold-leafed curtain rods holding bouffant sheer panels twisted and knotted this way and that.
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Those curtains are silk, and that painting has genuine brushwork added to the print. The bedding’s all down, and I have a little fridge in here with water bottles and wine.”
“Huh … so you don’t have to get up and go to the kitchen, is that it?”
“Exactly!” Manetta beamed at her, and for a moment she was afraid he was going to ask her if she wanted to take a romp on the spot, but to her relief he led her back out to the living room, and they sat on the sofa, Stella putting as much distance between herself and Manetta as she could.
Even if he wasn’t a murder suspect, she doubted she would ever find him attractive. He was afflicted with a taint of desperation that was as unmistakable and off-putting as body odor.
“This might surprise you,” he was saying, “but I didn’t always have a lot of success with women. Nowadays, sure, I’m out three, four nights a week. Ski club, spinning class, Latin dance, you name it, I’m into it—and I’m having more fun than ever.” Something about the grim set of Manetta’s jaw made Stella wonder if he was telling the truth. “But there was a time when I couldn’t get a woman to look at me. I mean, I’m a scientist—a geek, you might say. Well, other people said it, anyway.”
A Bad Day for Mercy Page 16