by Rachel Brady
“You look hard core,” said a voice beside me.
Startled, I grabbed the handrail. The display said I’d been running for thirty-six minutes, which was news to me.
“Sorry.” It was a twenty-something brunette. She carried a squirt bottle of disinfectant and a large stack of paper towels like the ones I’d seen in the rack by the weights. “You were away with your thoughts.” She stepped onto the belt of an unoccupied treadmill three machines to my right and sprayed its keypad and handrails.
“I was daydreaming about telling off my boss.”
She laughed, wiped the equipment down. “You’re new. What’s your story?”
I huffed through a few more strides, then dropped my speed to six miles an hour. “You’re normal. What’s yours?”
“I guess that’s a compliment.” She moved one machine closer and repeated the disinfecting routine. “A friend got me this job. I couldn’t afford to come here otherwise.”
“Let me ask you something.” I dropped to five-and-a-half. “Am I the only one here who’s willing to exercise without make-up and cutesy clothes?”
She moved to the machine adjacent to mine and squirted and wiped its panel. “Yes.” When it was clean, she squirted it again, something she hadn’t done previously. “Guess this isn’t your natural habitat. I’m Kendra, by the way.”
She stepped down and circled behind me, resuming her duties on the machine to my left.
I introduced myself. “My natural habitat is a two-bedroom apartment and a thirteen-year-old car, not leather sofas and smoothie bars. This place was my friend’s idea. I’m a guest.”
Kendra didn’t miss my sarcasm. She checked the mirror in front of us to be sure no one was near. “Most of these ladies are nice once you find something in common with them.” She gestured to her own outfit, a sporty turquoise top with matching yoga pants. “I can’t compare plastic surgeons or nanny services with them. Instead I try to look the part.”
I dropped to four miles-per-hour and switched from a jog to a fast walk. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to include you in my rant.”
“No, what I meant was…after I made an effort to fit in, most of them warmed up to me. Try it next time.”
“I hope there’ll be a next time.” I dropped my speed to a slow walk, catching my breath and thinking ahead to the manicures Captain Vanity had arranged. “My friend made salon appointments for us, but I left my house in a snit and forgot my shower bag and clothes. Should I cancel?”
Kendra waved away the question. “Toiletries are provided by the club and I’ll loan you my extra clothes. Follow me.”
I protested, but Kendra insisted. It felt good to have an insider championing for me. She loaned me linen Capris by Liz Claiborne and a paisley, cap-sleeve shirt by Calvin Klein. After changing, I joined Jeannie in the nail salon, where she waited in an overstuffed chair, flipping through the new issue of Elle.
When she spotted me, she cast the magazine to a side table and click-clacked on her too-high Gucci heels to meet me before I entered into the salon.
“That’s an improvement,” she said. “Where’d you get the clothes?”
She was suspiciously giddy and I wondered if she’d been around the acetone fumes too long. “Why are you so chipper?”
“Wendell Platt’s funeral is this afternoon,” she said. “Isn’t that perfect?”
Only Jeannie.
Chapter Four
Maybe it was the tough work-out or all the junk in my mind. It could have been the volatile organics in the salon’s air supply. When I settled into the high-backed leather recliner, my hands propped on individual velvet pillows, I relaxed and drifted off a little, alternately planning outings for Annette and thinking about Vince’s gorgeous smile. At one point Jeannie’s idea to sleuth at Platt’s funeral drifted by, but my manicurist’s warm hands smothered my own with intoxicating peppermint exfoliant and the thought evaporated.
I let myself enter a quasi-dream state, mistakenly convinced I could ward off a full-blown nap. But an indeterminate amount of time later, I woke to find my manicurist applying an acrylic tip to my right ring finger. Two more, and both hands would look femininely fake and elegant, like Jeannie’s.
From the chair beside mine, Jeannie watched me take in the unexpected acrylics. “My treat.”
“Thanks, sort of.” It was a stretch for me to agree to just have them painted. To the manicurist, I added. “No offense, they’re lovely. Just not me.”
She smiled. “First time?”
I hesitated. “Second.”
I told her about the grandmotherly Asian woman who’d painted my nails on my wedding day. She’d sung along to Billy Joel’s My Life, which was playing on the salon’s radio, while working on me. The twist was that she’d used the lyric “my lice” by mistake, a flub that still made me smile whenever I heard that song.
When my hand was finished, Jeannie smiled her approval and paid. We walked to my car.
“Do I have a glow?” she wondered out loud. “I spent twenty minutes in a tanning bed.”
“You always have a glow. It’s annoying.”
“The tanning salon matron—she really was a matron—was a patient of Platt’s. Said the funeral’s at 4:30 at Something Gardens. Serenity Gardens? Eternity Gardens? Whatever. We’ll look it up on-line.”
“It’s a funeral, not a rock concert.”
“Everything’s on-line.”
“How’d you find out she was a patient of Platt’s?”
“Lots of those women were his patients.”
I tried to pick my keys out of my purse but my fingers didn’t feel like my own anymore and the fake nails kept getting in the way. “Lots of them?”
“That’s what the tanning lady says.”
We arrived at my car and went to our respective doors, the afternoon sun beating down on us. I finally retrieved my keys but accidentally dropped them.
“Damn it, Jeannie. I can’t do anything with these nails. Take them off.” I held out my hands, impatient.
“No can do. Get used to those babies.” She walked around to my side of the car and palmed the keys off the gritty concrete in one smooth motion. Her fakes were even longer than mine, but she was well-practiced. “I’ll drive, Whiner.”
We returned to my apartment so I could clean up and get into my own clothes. Jeannie hollered through the bathroom door that Platt’s service would be at Tranquility Gardens and that I should never doubt the power of the Internet.
Annette’s Batgirl towel, still wadded on the rack, stopped me for a moment as her belongings sometimes did. She was away with Nick and Betsy Fletcher this week, spending time with the couple she’d grown up knowing as parents. We’d finally been reunited in March, when the crime ring responsible for her abduction was busted, and after only a few months, my home already felt incomplete without her. A familiar, lonely ache resurfaced.
Missing her, I dried my face with her little towel instead of mine.
***
Floral wreaths were positioned throughout the Remembrance Hall at Tranquility Gardens Funeral Home and Cemetery, but all I could smell was carpet shampoo. Pews, stained glass, and a vaulted ceiling suggested the hall was designed to resemble a chapel, although it was devoid of any religious decorations.
Jeannie and I paused with a small group to reflect on a photo collage featuring Platt throughout his fifty-six years. In the largest image, centered among the others, Platt relaxed on a park bench, one arm casually draped on the back rest. He wore a Hawaiian print shirt and seemed jovial and carefree. His photographer had caught him laughing.
Piano notes floated softly in the still-filling hall and a woman ahead of Jeannie turned and handed her an ornamental pen. The guest book waited ahead on a podium, past the photographs. Before I could stop her, Jeannie stepped up to the book and signed our condolences. I regretted she’d left a record of our attendance but wasn’t about to scratch anything out of a family’s funeral book.
We slid into the
last pew, trying to blend into the background. I studied passing faces, most tired or distracted, and felt guilty for coming to the service of a man I’d never met.
As the room filled, Jeannie and I recognized several people from Claire’s gym. She tapped me on the knee when the tanning matron arrived. I pointed out Kendra, who’d loaned me the clean clothes. Then we huddled together and whispered ferociously when Diana King showed up on the arm of a man we presumed to be her husband. Diana’s ash blond hair was swept into a classy French twist, stabbed through with a rhinestone chopstick. She walked within a yard of me and I caught the scent of her lush perfume.
“Danielle Steele,” Jeannie whispered. “Hundred bucks for a bottle this big.” She indicated something the size of a salad mushroom.
Diana’s companion ushered her into a pew near the front and soon the officiant began.
Turned out, the speaker had never met the late doctor, so any personal accounts I’d hoped to glean were absent from his eulogy. We did learn some generic information, though, like that Platt had survived his wife of twenty-one years and that the couple had never had kids. After her death, he’d become an avid hiker and bird watcher who preferred to pass his spare time in quiet solitude.
Friends and family were invited to the speaker’s podium to share memories, but only two stepped forward—an uncle and a co-worker—with long, awkward pauses preceding each.
“I’ll be pissed if no one gets up to talk about me,” Jeannie whispered.
“You’ll be dead,” I whispered back.
“Especially you,” she said. “You better say something really good.”
When the service ended, our back row seats helped us make a quick exit, and Jeannie headed outside for a cigarette. I stopped at the ladies’ room, where a tall, austere brunette I hadn’t noticed earlier touched up her lipstick at the mirror. It was Smoothie Nag from the club.
Her dark eyes, corners taut as ever, met mine in the mirror and she rubbed her wine-colored lips together. When she glanced down to cap the lipstick, I ducked into a stall and locked the door. She washed her hands, pulled down a paper towel. I heard it crumple and listened for the door, but it never opened.
When I came out of the stall, she was waiting. “You’re the one from this morning. How’d you know Wendell?”
Hiking or bird watching would have been safe answers, but I decided to go with something more likely to resonate.
“I was considering surgery.”
She cocked her head and evaluated me. “Your nose?”
Smoothie Nag, I hate you.
I forced myself to nod. “We’d consulted a few times. I felt comfortable with him.”
She studied me so long my palms moistened.
“Chris is quite good too,” she finally said. “Try him.”
“Chris?”
“Wendell’s partner, Chris King. Remarkable man.” She pulled open the door and passed through it with the same indifference I remembered from the gym.
I was left alone with the faint scent of her expensive perfume and a sinking feeling that the name King was no coincidence.
Chapter Five
After the graveside service, we puttered along the winding cemetery road at five miles per hour, looking for the exit. A familiar car approached, its driver’s side window down.
Jeannie leaned forward. “Is that—”
“Richard.” I rolled down my own window and leaned on the sill. We stopped alongside him.
“Whatcha doin’ here, Big Guy?” Jeannie asked.
Richard leveled a look at me, then pulled his eyes away and answered. “Shadowing Diana.” He paused. “This is how you spend your day off, Emily? At a funeral?”
“Funeral’s nothing,” Jeannie said. “Earlier she went to the jail. Then that fancy gym.” She nudged my shoulder. “Show him your nails.”
I pulled my arm back inside the car. “Diana’s husband and Wendell Platt had a surgery practice together. Did you know that?”
He shook his head.
“What happens to a business when a partner dies?” I asked.
Richard tapped his steering wheel. “I guess Platt’s share goes to his heirs.”
“Ooh!” Jeannie piped up, as if answering a trivia question. “No wife, no kids!”
By way of clarification, I told Richard what we’d learned during the eulogy.
“He must have left his share to somebody,” Richard said. “The question is to who.”
Jeannie pointed at him. “To whom.”
Richard ignored her and squinted at something ahead of him, behind us, in the distance. “She’s leaving.” He took his foot off the brake and idled forward. I watched in my rear view mirror as he slowly caught up to Diana’s departing Mercedes. My cell phone rang.
“I’ve heard of buy-sell life insurance policies,” Richard said. “Something about buying life insurance on your partner.”
“I’ll look into it.”
“Into what?” Jeannie asked.
“Ever heard of a buy-sell life insurance policy?”
She shook her head. “We’ll Google it.”
***
“You won’t believe this,” I said, climbing into the passenger side of Vince’s old pick-up. “She’s gone.”
It was an old-style truck, the kind without an extended cab. Jeannie made Vince drive whenever she could, reminding him each time how much she liked cowboys and their trucks.
I shoved my hip into hers and forced her to scoot over, not wanting to spend another minute outside. The heat was so oppressive my clothes were already sticking to me after the short walk across the lot.
“Gone, like out on bail?” Vince asked, reversing out of our spot. He and Jeannie had agreed to stop at the jail on our way out for Mexican.
“No. Transferred to County.”
Jeannie whistled. “She’s hating life tonight.”
“So am I.” My boss was hiding things. Our client was hiding things. “I asked Claire for a reason Diana would want Platt dead and she didn’t suggest one.”
“You’re assuming Diana’s responsible then?” Vince said.
“I’m not assuming anything.” I leaned forward to look at Vince around Jeannie. “But don’t you agree it’s weird she didn’t tell me Platt was linked to Diana’s husband?”
“She’s a liar,” Jeannie said. “Liars leave stuff out all the time.”
Maybe Jeannie was right. Still, Claire intrigued me and I spent the remainder of our short drive trying to figure out why.
“Is it her money?” Vince asked. “Her looks?”
Certainly, her wealth and beauty fascinated me, but those weren’t the lures that continued to draw me in.
“It’s the type of parent she is, I think. To me, it seems incongruous that a woman who cheats could be a good mother. Yet, somehow I believe she is.”
“A murderer can be a good mother,” Jeannie said. “Take self-defense, for example.”
I didn’t have the energy to point out that murder and self-defense were different things.
Vince flipped his turn signal and pulled into the parking lot of Pepe’s.
“If there are acceptable reasons for murder, you should ask yourself if there are acceptable reasons to cheat.”
“Cheating’s never okay,” I said, a little too quickly.
Vince took a spot near the multi-colored stucco building, stopped the engine, and shrugged. I wondered if the shrug meant he had no opinion or that he thought cheating was allowed in some circumstances.
I didn’t ask.
During the meal, Jeannie sat across from us in a booth and the three of us ate enough fajitas and enchiladas to serve a party of six. In the company of my two most favorite people—well, grown-up people—I tried to relax and enjoy the moment, but couldn’t completely do it. Annette was away. My relationship with Richard was strained again. Vince was wonderful, but he communicated in undertones I couldn’t figure out. And Jeannie had come all the way from Cleveland to celebrate my impending birthday a
nd I thanked her by hauling her around to do job stuff.
“The waitress is too slow,” she said. “I’m going to the bar for another margarita. Want anything?”
Vince’s beer was nearly full and I’d hardly put a dent in my own margarita. I shook my head and she slid from the booth, giving us a too-close view of her cleavage as she stood. Maybe just too close for me.
I drummed my nails on the table, playing with new clicking noises I was never able to make before. Vince took my hand.
“These are new.”
I extended my fingers and evaluated them. “Like wearing a thimble on every one. Dialing’s impossible and buttons are the devil.”
He laughed. “What were you thinking?”
“Me?” I nodded toward the bar. “I fell asleep in the salon’s shiatsu chair and Miss Diva had this done before I woke up.”
He raised my hand to his lips and kissed it, smiling to himself. Then he chuckled.
“What?”
“There’s more coming.”
“More what?”
“Spa treatment…things.”
“No there aren’t.”
“Yes there are. She told me.”
“Told you when?”
“At the jail, when we were waiting for you.”
I drummed the fakes again. They were really good for that.
“I won’t go.”
Vince took a swig of beer. “I’m staying out of it.”
Then he set his glass down and pulled me into the tight space around him that smelled like nautical cologne and sawdust, which I loved. “Got a question for you. How about, before kindergarten starts, we take Annette on a trip? Nothing huge. Maybe the Alamo. Or Sea World.”
I glanced at the bar, wishing I were wired so Jeannie could tell me through an earpiece what to say. But she was talking to a man of her own, too busy flirting to throw me a lifeline.
Connecting with Vince was still hard and I often associated it with the awkwardness of teen dating. Much as I liked him, I couldn’t figure us out. “I…Here’s the thing—”