by Laura Levine
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t be lying for Tyler any more.”
She stubbed out her cigarette with a vengeance, her eyes cold as ice. Bye-bye, Aunt Bea. Hello, Lady MacBeth.
Back home, I found a message from Becky on my machine. It was her day off, and she wanted me to stop by her apartment and give her a progress report.
I’m dying to know what happened when you talked to Maxine, her voice chirped from the machine. For the first time, I’m beginning to feel like there’s a ray of hope at the end of the tunnel.
Oh, great. Just when she was hopeful, I was about to come along and stomp on her ray. What was I going to say to her? Guess what, Becky? Your boyfriend doesn’t have an alibi. And not only that, he’s cheating on you.
Reluctantly, I got in the Corolla and drove to Becky’s place. She answered the door in hot pink tights and a lime green sweatshirt. With her Day-Glo orange hair, she looked like a technicolor test pattern.
Nina was lounging on the sofa in pajamas, reading the National Enquirer.
“Listen to this,” she said, reading a headline. “I Was the Love Child of Madonna and Tony Blair.”
“Who’s Tony Blair?” Becky asked.
Nina shot her a reproving look. “Don’t you know anything? He’s the president of Canada.”
I made a mental note to myself to never, under any circumstances, wind up in a hospital with Nina as my nurse.
“I just made soy-carob-walnut brownies,” Becky said. “You’ve got to try one.”
She held out a plate of brownies. I say brownies advisedly. They looked more like bite-sized pieces of roofing tar. I smiled weakly and took one.
“Watch out for the walnuts,” Nina said. “They can get caught in your esophagus and you can choke to death.”
Becky bit into her brownie, ignoring the esophagus warning.
“So tell me about your visit with Maxine,” she said, chewing happily.
I told her how Maxine had cheated and lied for Frenchie, only to have Frenchie dump her in the end, and how she’d driven to Passions the night of the murder.
“So she had motive and opportunity,” Nina said, abandoning the bedroom antics of Madonna and Tony Blair.
“Yes, but she swears Frenchie was already dead when she got there.”
“Big deal,” Nina said. “She could be lying.”
“Actually, Maxine wasn’t the only one at the store that night. Grace and Amanda Tucker were there, too.”
I told them what I’d overheard outside Amanda’s living room window.
“Gosh, Jaine,” Becky said. “You’ve done such a good job! You’re just as good as any real detective.”
I smiled stiffly, wondering if she was ever going to promote me to “real” detective status.
“I’ve got to pay you for all your time,” she said, jumping up. “I’ll go get my checkbook.”
“Wait. There’s something else you should know.”
“What?” she asked, her blue eyes round and trusting, no idea of the ax that was about to fall.
“It’s about Tyler.”
“What about him?”
“For starters,” I said, “he doesn’t have an alibi.”
“Of course he does. He was with his writing instructor when Frenchie was killed.”
“I’m afraid not. I spoke with Tyler’s instructor today. She told me she lied to cover for him. She said he left class that night with plenty of time to drive over to Passions and kill Frenchie.”
“I don’t understand,” Becky said, scratching her orange spikes. “Why would she lie for him?”
Okay, here was the tough part. I took a deep breath.
“She was having an affair with him.”
Nina gasped.
“That’s not true,” Becky said, shaking her head so hard I was afraid she’d sprain her neck. “She’s making it up. Tyler told me she had a crush on him, that she kept coming on to him. But Tyler wasn’t interested in her. She was way too old for him. He couldn’t have liked her.”
“I saw him kissing her, Becky.”
She shook her head again, as if shaking it could somehow make me and my bad news disappear.
“I don’t know where he told you he was last night,” I said, “but he was on a dinner cruise in the marina. I saw him.”
“No,” Becky said, “that’s impossible. It was somebody else you saw. Tyler would never cheat on me.”
She raised her chin defiantly.
“I think you’d better go now. I don’t want you working on the case any more. I’ll send you a check in the morning.”
Then, bursting into tears, she ran down the hallway to her bedroom.
“Damn,” Nina said, shaking her head in dismay. “And I thought Tyler was such a nice guy. Men. What shitheels, huh?”
Then she tossed aside her Enquirer and hurried off to comfort Becky, whose sobs I could hear all the way from the bedroom.
Chapter 21
“So tell me all about your date. I want to hear every detail.”
Kandi and I were having an early dinner at the Hamburger Hamlet, an upscale burger joint in Brentwood. We’d ordered bathtub-sized margaritas and were waiting for our bacon cheeseburgers.
“No,” I said. “You don’t want to hear every detail. Not without a barf bag.”
I took a healthy slug of my margarita, licking the salt from the rim of the glass.
“Oh?” Kandi said. “It wasn’t good?”
“Are you kidding? Try Utter Fiasco, Nautical Nightmare, Speed Date from Hell.”
I gave her the highlights (or, more accurately, the lowlights) of my maritime adventure.
Kandi blinked in amazement. “He took you out on a garbage boat? Fed you Orange Crush and peanut butter crackers? Gave you a dead starfish? And put you on a dating wait list?”
“Yes to all of the above.”
She just sat there, shaking her head. Then finally she regained her powers of speech.
“So? Do you think he’ll call?”
“Kandi!”
“Okay, okay. I just thought maybe you might want to give him another chance.”
“Are you crazy? I wouldn’t go out with him again if he were the last garbageman on earth.”
She shot me an apologetic look. “I’m sorry, hon. If I hadn’t changed your speed-dating questionnaire, this never would have happened. I feel totally responsible.”
“You are totally responsible. I would be strangling you at this very second if I could reach across the table without spilling my margarita.”
“So,” she said, ending what had to be the shortest guilt trip in the history of man, “do you want to hear about my date with Anton, the performance artist?”
“Sure,” I sighed, resigned to the inevitable. “Tell all.”
“You’re not going to believe this. You want to know what his act was? He sat on stage naked in a bathtub filled with hot fudge! While he sat there, he recited all thirty-one Baskin Robbins ice cream flavors. Then, for the finale, he sprayed himself with Reddi-Whip. He called it Sundae in L.A.”
Wow. And I thought my date was a disaster. I was just about to offer Kandi my condolences when she said, “Isn’t that just so incredibly creative?”
Oh, God. She actually liked it. The little idiot had fallen in love again. I could see it in her eyes. She was already plotting out her future with Anton, mentally moving in with him and buying black satin sheets for their hip downtown loft.
If you ask me, some people shouldn’t be allowed into the dating pool without a lifeguard.
Our bacon cheeseburgers came, and strangely enough, I wasn’t very hungry. Becky’s brownie was sitting in my stomach like a lead balloon, defying the laws of digestion. I was so stuffed, in fact, I could barely finish Kandi’s onion rings.
I listened to Kandi blather on about Anton’s artistic vision until we finally paid the check and headed out to the parking lot.
“Don’t worry, hon,” Kandi said when we got to our cars. “One of these days you�
��re going to wind up with a special someone to share your life and your bed.”
“I’ve already got a special someone to share my life and bed.”
“Cats don’t count.”
She hugged me good-bye and drove off in her Miata, visions of hot-fudge sex dancing in her head.
I drove home, wondering how long it would take for Kandi’s affair with the Hot Fudge King to self-destruct. I gave it two months, tops.
After parking the Corolla, carefully checking to make sure I wasn’t in front of a driveway, I headed up the path to my apartment. By now that damn soy-carob-walnut brownie was permanently wedged somewhere in my intestines. But I didn’t have time to contemplate my gastrointestinal woes, because just then, scaring the living daylights out of me, I heard someone shout:
“You interfering bitch!”
My heart raced as Tyler stepped out from the shadows. No longer boyish and charming, but seething with rage. The same rage I’d seen the day he’d attacked Frenchie.
“You’ve ruined everything,” he said, the veins in his temples throbbing.
“That’s not true,” I said, pasting a sickly smile on my face. “I didn’t ruin anything. Becky still loves you.”
“I’m not talking about Becky. I’m talking about that cow Kate Garrett. She knows an important editor at Random House. She was going to get him to read my manuscript. And now she won’t give me the time of day.”
He stepped closer.
“Do you realize what I went through to make that connection? I practically threw up every time I had to kiss her. And it was all for nothing, because of you.”
I looked down and saw him clenching and unclenching his fists.
Oh, God. What if he tried to strangle me like he’d tried to strangle Frenchie? But he never actually hurt Frenchie that day, I reminded myself. He’d just threatened to. But maybe the only reason he didn’t go through with it was because he knew there were a bunch of witnesses around. There were no witnesses now, though. Nothing to stop him from putting his hands around my neck and—
“Jaine? Are you okay?”
I turned and saw Lance standing in his doorway. Dear, sweet, nosy Lance!
“No, Lance. I’m not okay. Call 911.”
Tyler blinked in the light from Lance’s open door.
“Is that Tyler?” Lance asked. “The guy from Passions?”
“Yes, it’s Tyler. Now call the cops.”
“Oh, hi, Tyler,” Lance said, with a friendly, flirty smile.
“For crying out loud, Lance. He’s about to attack me. Will you please stop flirting and call the cops?”
Maybe Lance saw Tyler’s veins throbbing like congas, or maybe he was cowed by the anger in my voice. Whatever the reason, he decided to take me seriously.
“Right, Jaine,” he said, and disappeared back into his apartment.
But the threat of the cops showing up didn’t seem to faze Tyler. He kept walking toward me, until he was so close I could practically scrape the tartar off his teeth.
“Don’t come any closer,” I said. “Or—”
“Or what?” he said, tauntingly. “What will you do?”
Frantically I searched my purse for something to hit him with. But as luck would have it, I was fresh out of blunt instruments. And then I came across the can of hair spray I’d tossed in my purse yesterday on my way to the marina.
I whipped it out with a flourish.
“I’ve got mace,” I said, trying to hold the can so the label didn’t show.
“It’s not mace,” Tyler sneered. “It’s Extra Hold Spray Net.”
I spritzed it anyway.
And guess what? It worked. As you probably know if you’ve ever had poor aim in a grooming session, the stuff stings like the dickens.
While Tyler covered his eyes and let out a string of curses, I took advantage of the moment and bolted into my apartment. Then, peeking out the living room window, I watched as Tyler staggered down the pathway out to the street.
By the time the cops came five minutes later, Tyler was long gone. This was the second time in two days the police had shown up on my doorstep. If I kept this up, they’d soon be naming a precinct after me.
I told the cops what happened, how Tyler had ambushed me and was going to attack me.
“I’ve got a witness. My neighbor saw everything.”
I pointed to Lance, who’d hurried over to my apartment the minute Tyler had left.
The cops turned to Lance.
“You see him make any threatening moves?” one of them asked.
“Well…no.”
“Did you hear him say anything threatening?”
“Not really. But he did look pretty angry.”
“Last I heard,” the cop said, “looking pretty angry isn’t exactly a crime.”
“I’m telling you,” I said, my voice a hysterical shriek, “the man was going to attack me.”
“Do you know where your alleged assailant lives?”
I didn’t like his use of the word “alleged.” Not one bit.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do.” I dashed to my desk and rummaged through the drawer where I’d put the staff address list Becky had given me.
“Here it is,” I said, handing it to the cops. “Tyler Benjamin. Third one down.”
The cops wrote down his address, promising they’d question him and get back to me.
“You shouldn’t be alone tonight,” Lance said when they’d gone. “Why don’t you stay at my place?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Really. I’m fine.”
But I didn’t feel fine. Not even remotely. Which is why, the minute Lance trotted off to his apartment, I trotted off to my refrigerator for a snootful of chardonnay. My hands trembled as I poured some into a jelly glass.
Prozac, always acutely sensitive to my moments of stress, started yowling for a snack. I tossed her some Kitty Liver Treats and headed for the living room, where I sunk down into the sofa.
After sipping (okay, gulping) my glass of chardonnay, I managed to relax a bit. My nerve endings had stopped doing their rendition of “Dueling Banjos,” but I was still a far cry from calm. I kept seeing Tyler’s hands clenching and unclenching, warming up for a strangling session. He was one seriously angry guy.
Angry enough, I felt certain, to have killed Frenchie Ambrose.
I made sure all my windows were locked, then got undressed and climbed into bed, clutching Prozac in one arm and the TV remote in the other. I was far too wired to sleep.
I was zapping around aimlessly, unable to focus on the screen, when I thought I heard a noise in the hallway. I bolted up in bed. Yes, I definitely heard something. It was the sound of breathing—loud, gasping breaths.
It had to be Tyler. But how had he managed to break in? I’d locked all the windows, hadn’t I? Oh, God. Maybe he had some kind of special burglary tool that broke window locks with a flick of the wrist. He’d probably been hiding in the bushes all along, just waiting for the right moment to break into my apartment and strangle me.
My heart in my stomach, I was just reaching for the phone to call 911 when I looked over and saw that the heavy breathing was coming from the TV. I’d apparently zapped onto the Whoopsie Doodle Channel, where a couple of bad actors were writhing around on a waterbed.
I sank back down in bed, limp with relief. Really, if I ever wanted to be a success at this detective stuff, I had to stop being such a wimp.
I zapped away the sweaty lovers in favor of a nice snooze-inducing infomercial on the benefits of coral calcium. Then, just when I finally managed to drift off to sleep, I was jolted awake by the sound of someone banging at my front door.
Oh, God. This time it really was Tyler.
I raced to the kitchen and grabbed the heaviest pan I could find so I could bop him over the head in case he forced his way in.
“Who is it?” I called out, in a trembling voice.
“Police.”
I pe
eked out the living room window and saw the same two cops who’d come to the house earlier. I put down my frying pan and opened the door.
“Thank heavens it’s you,” I said.
“Hope we didn’t wake you.”
Heck, no. I always wander around my apartment at 2 A.M. clutching a frying pan.
“We spoke with Mr. Benjamin.”
“Did you arrest him?”
“No, ma’am. We didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“He claims you invited him to your apartment.”
“I did not!”
“He says you gave him your business card and told him he could contact you any time day or night.”
Oh, damn. I had given him my card. That day we had lunch together at Pink’s.
“Did you give him the card?”
“Yes, but—”
“Did you tell him he could contact you any time day or night?”
“Yes, but—”
“Mr. Benjamin claims you have a crush on him. And that when he wouldn’t return your advances, you sprayed him in the eyes with Extra Hold Spray Net.”
“That’s a lie!”
“You didn’t spray him in the eyes?”
“Yes, but—”
“With Extra Hold Spray Net?”
“Yes, but—”
Frankly, I was getting a little tired of my dialogue in this scene.
The cops exchanged glances. They clearly had me pegged as a hairspray-wielding spurned lover.
“You know, ma’am, you’re lucky he didn’t press charges.”
Then they wished me a good evening and walked off into the night.
I trudged back to bed, where I found Prozac sprawled out on my pillow.
“That went well,” I said, flopping into bed.
She looked up and meowed. Which was her way of saying, As long as you’re up, how about a snack?
“Forget it, Pro,” I said. I was in no mood to fix her a snack.
Which is why I spent the rest of the night sleeping without a pillow.
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