by Rachel Brady
I wanted to stop and shake her. “You had the same housekeeper?”
At the next cross street, she veered left without warning. I made a late correction and followed.
“No, Monica cleaned the house next to his. But she said the guy was real nice—” She held a hand out, as if to confide something. “—Not like the nut she works for.”
“Everybody has a kooky neighbor,” I said. “Mine swears there’s a ghost in her shower.” That was actually true. Florence, bless her heart, had quirks.
Ninja Runner chuckled and then stopped abruptly. She nodded to a cottage, this one quaint and clean. “This is me.”
I stopped too, already breathing hard. “I like it.”
A lady-bug flag that said “Welcome, friends” waved over her landscaping bed.
“We like it too,” she said. “Now. It was built in thirty-four.”
“Fixer upper?”
The smile she gave me said You have no idea. She raised the latch on her gate. “Have fun with your sister.”
I waved goodbye and went back to the running. As I circled the block and criss-crossed the boulevard, my thoughts drifted to Annette as they so often did. She’d be in a cozy bed somewhere in Wichita right now, dreaming of horseback rides at her faux-grandparents’ hobby farm. I regretted letting her leave for so many days. The Fletchers were an unrelenting imposition on our delicate relationship and, right or wrong, I viewed each day she spent with the people she thought were her parents as a setback to her future with me. But to Annette, I knew I was the imposition—on her life with them.
Frustrated, I ran faster and breathed harder. I imagined I was strong. I’d have to be. The only fair way to mother Annette was to let go when every instinct screamed to hold on tight.
Chapter Thirteen
I showered at Tone Zone and made myself presentable for my very first facial, which, like everything else at the club, sounded inviting but was overpriced. Asked to choose between treatments derived from desert plants, marine elements, or sunflower seeds, I’d reclined for forty-five minutes and had my face washed with a series of cleansers made from “real crushed pearls” and come away with a hundred and twenty dollar invoice that I was fairly certain Richard wasn’t going to reimburse. The crowning jewel was being advised by the esthetician—whose youthful face was frozen in an unnaturally innocuous stare—that Botox would be my best friend in five years.
Happy Birthday.
In the locker room, I gave Richard the run-down on my cell phone while gathering my things. “This entire subculture is nuts. Women here do this all the time. They call it ‘maintenance.’” I was alone; I’d looked under shower curtains and bathroom doors to be sure. “I almost didn’t come this morning, and now I wish I hadn’t. But I do have some good news.”
“At least one of us does.” He sounded far away and his words were discontinuous. I worried that the earlier storm had ruined my phone.
Tone Zone’s locker area offered upholstered love seats and lounge chairs, a step up from the shiny metal benches I used at the Y. I dropped into a Victorian high back and crossed my feet on its lush ottoman. “The Westside Cosmetic Surgery Center had a cancellation,” I said. “I’m seeing Chris King at two.”
“To find out what it’ll take to fix your schnoz?”
“Shut up.”
“Be careful,” Richard said. “If he’s a bad guy, you don’t need to be on his radar.”
“I don’t?”
He ignored the joke. “When will you go back to the Heights?”
“Straight from the appointment. How’s it going with Platt’s family?”
“It’s not.” Even the poor sound quality couldn’t hide that he sounded pissed. I didn’t ask for the story.
“You dig anything up on Kevin Burke?”
“No.”
“Well, what am I paying you for?”
“It’s next on my list,” he said, not amused. “And I’ve been thinking about your Daniel angle. It doesn’t make sense. If he were hiding assets, it’d come out in the divorce. Claire’s attorney would uncover it during the discovery process. A big chunk of change turns up missing, someone’ll ask.”
Beauty treatments were confusing, but I knew even less about divorces. Richard was probably right, but my suspicion lingered. “If he’s responsible for this, surely he’s smart enough to find a way around a paper trail. You’re thinking like Joe Public. Think like a sophisticated criminal. They get away with things we can’t imagine.”
“Daniel had no reason to want Platt dead.”
“Neither did Diana.”
“No reasons that we know about, anyway.”
“True.”
I thought he sighed but it might have been a yawn.
“How about Jeannie?” he asked. “She your partner again today?”
“No. We were supposed to come here together but she threw her back out. For all I know, she’s watching soaps and eating all my ice cream. I’m going home for a sandwich and a nice, long Internet surf before my nose job consultation. I want to learn more about how insurance works between business partners.”
“I’ll check out Burke.”
We said goodbye and I snapped my phone closed and dropped it into my bag, wedged in the chair beside me. When I stood to leave, I wasn’t alone.
Kendra, the one normal person I’d met since working on Claire’s case, stepped out from a partition that divided the changing area from the sinks. The disappointment on her face said I should spare any weak excuses I was considering.
I did a fast mental rewind, trying to gauge how much she might have overheard.
“Janitor’s closet,” she said. “I was re-stocking. What are you really doing here at the club?”
I checked my watch. So much for spending my pre-King hours surfing the Net.
“Come with me.” I flung my gym bag’s strap over my shoulder. “Let’s have lunch.”
***
“You joined the club to spy on Diana.” Kendra’s tone implied she thought I was an idiot. She lifted a bite of salad onto her fork.
“She spends a lot of time here,” I said. “And the note that sent our client to the murder scene was left for her here, in her locker.”
“Do you have the note? I might know the handwriting.”
I shook my head.
“Did you see it?”
“No.”
“So there might not even be a note. Maybe the right person’s already in jail.”
I didn’t tell her I’d once shared similar thoughts.
We picked at our salads. The Bistro, one of two healthful eatery nooks nested inside the club, had been Kendra’s idea. I rolled a cherry tomato to the side of my plate and stabbed a crouton. Kendra took a sip of her bizarre aloe-seaweed drink.
She lowered her voice and leaned in. “Diana would never kill someone. She’s a great lady.”
“She’s weird if you ask me. Why do you like her?”
“She turned my life around.”
I leaned back in my chair, floored. “Don’t tell me she recruited you to some kind of new fangled church or something?”
“She got me this job.”
I relaxed a little. “So you’re loyal, not born-again.”
She smiled, but only a little. It was genuine, though. “Seriously. I couldn’t afford a membership here without my employee discount. And being a member of the club has opened so many doors. I do odd jobs for some of our members, everything from personal errands to babysitting to clerical stuff. Fat checks, easy work.”
“And you ascribe this good fortune to Diana?”
“Who else would hire an inexperienced girl at a fancy place like this?”
“Why’d she take you?”
“I’m friends with her daughter.”
“The waxer.”
She nodded. “You know Megan?”
“We’ve met.”
A tiny Asian waitress, who could have been twelve or thirty for all I could tell, deposited a marinated Portobello mushroom in front
of Kendra and a spinach quesadilla in front of me.
Kendra began slicing her mushroom and I did the same with the quesadilla. Anywhere else, I’d have picked it up and eaten it like a pizza wedge. But we were seated near a ceiling-mounted security camera and I imagined that somewhere in the vast building, in addition to what I was wearing, my table manners were being monitored and discussed.
I pointed toward the camera. “Are those things all over the club?”
She turned to see what I was indicating. “Sure.”
I returned to my entrée, probably pressing my knife a little too hard into the dish.
“Why’d you ask that?” She sipped her seaweed juice and watched me over the rim.
“Where’s the footage archived?”
Kendra squinted at me. For the first time, I noticed expertly blended eye make-up. I felt a little betrayed by that.
Her eyes widened again. “Oh no. You are not.”
“I have to, Kendra. It’s my job to get to the bottom of this.”
“What if you get caught?”
“I won’t. I’ll have inside help.”
“Who?”
“You.”
She set down her utensils and straightened. I’d overstepped.
“I told you how much I need this job,” she said. “I won’t risk it.”
“But you like me.” It was another attempt at levity and, like all others that day, it flopped.
“I like Diana more.”
There we go, I thought. Cover blown.
I tried again. “Instead of looking at it as helping me, maybe you could look at it as helping Diana. If she had nothing to do with Dr. Platt’s death, then whoever really left that note will be somewhere on Thursday’s tapes. Diana will be cleared.”
“She’s already cleared,” Kendra said. “Nobody else thinks she’s done anything wrong. There’s no way she killed Dr. Platt. They were friends. And even if she did—which is ridiculous—why would she pin it on a club member? That’s a stretch.”
“Her husband’s a big time cheater. He slept with the woman arrested for Platt’s murder. They had a long term affair and Diana knew about it.”
Kendra opened her mouth to say something and, presumably thinking better of it, closed it again.
“I don’t know why Diana would kill her friend,” I said, “But if she’s guilty, it’s easy to imagine why she’d hang it on our client. The point is, if there was a note, and if I find out who left it, these questions might disappear.”
Her gaze fell to the tabletop. To my half-eaten salad, actually. “There are no tapes,” she said. “The security recordings are digital. They get saved to a computer.”
“Even better,” I said. “I’ll copy the files. Where’s the machine?”
She looked at me again. “In Diana’s office. She’s the manager.”
We agreed I’d come back later with a thumb drive. Fearing she’d have second thoughts, I steered the conversation toward another topic of great interest to me—her exquisitely strange drink. When the bill came, I picked up the tab. Kendra’s twenty dollar mushroom would be worth every penny if I ended up scoring Thursday’s security footage.
Chapter Fourteen
It was clear what kind of women got Chris King’s attention. Flashbacks of Diana and Claire danced in my mind and I knew my fake nose job consultation would require serious prep work if I was going to make any sort of impression. I skipped up the steps to my apartment, where Jeannie waited with cosmetics and accessories like a zealous stage mom.
“I printed a bunch of stuff.” She pointed to the tiny laundry room off my kitchen, the only place in the apartment where I could spare room for a printer.
I dropped my keys on an end table. “Tell me about it while you work. We don’t have much time.”
She directed me to the kitchenette, where I sat in a chair and waited. She hobbled a few steps behind, her posture stiff.
“It needs to be comprehensive.” I ignored her pain, which I knew was exaggerated. “Face, hair, clothes. You have an hour.”
Jeannie lifted a hot pink sundress, still on its hangar, from the back of the chair across from me. “I’d have rather seen you wear something of Claire’s,” she said, “but this’ll do.”
“Whose is it?”
She held it close, stroked it. “Mine. Armani.”
“Why would you pack that?”
“I bought it yesterday at the Galleria. You should be ashamed of the frumpy shit in your closet.”
I reached for the dress.
She pulled it back. “This won’t come down to how you look, you know. He’ll see right through that.”
Behind her, our breakfast plates were stacked in the dish drainer and the coffee pot had been cleaned. I decided against telling Jeannie that I valued her domestic help more than her advice.
“Go in there with the attitude of the woman you’re pretending to be,” she said. “It’s the whole package.”
I knew she was right. Exfoliated skin and new acrylics could only take a woman so far. “I’ll channel my inner actress.”
“Good girl. Now go wash your face.”
I did what she said and rejoined her at the table, where she laid out an array of high dollar cosmetics, none mine. She removed the top from a bottle of foundation and began blotting it into my face with a sponge. It smelled floral, but went on cold and sticky.
“They did a nice job on your skin,” she said.
I thought of the crushed pearls. “Cost more than a week of groceries.”
She pressed and dabbed and I felt like a kid getting made up for Halloween. “Look up,” she said, and I obeyed. “When you introduce yourself to the doc, be confident. Flirt. Stroke his ego.”
I started to protest, but she admonished me to be still.
“Give him a reason to want to impress you,” she continued. “Trust me. I know his type.” She grinned. “I love his type.”
“You don’t even know him.”
“Educated guess.”
“I wish you could go instead.”
“Me too, sweetie.” She added final touches below my jaw. “But my nose doesn’t need any work.” She clucked her tongue and pulled the sponge away.
I cut my eyes to her but we were so close that it strained me to stare very long.
A thick layer of powder came next. “You’re gonna take this in your bag, Em, and put it on before you get out of the car. No shine on your face, hear me?”
She sounded like me when I talked to Annette. Don’t forget your backpack. Are you sure you brushed your teeth?
Lipliner, eyeliner, brow filler. Eye-shadow. Mascara. Lipstick. Gloss.
She stepped back and evaluated. “Where’s your Chi?”
I looked at her. “My…natural energy of the universe?”
She put a hand on her hip. “Your flat iron.”
Getting only my blank stare in response, she reassessed. “Then an up-do. Got bobby pins?”
On and on it went, Jeannie with her good-smelling hair products and hair twirling and bobby-pinning. Me, immobilized in the chair, fretting over the time.
“Anyway,” she said, working on a new section of my hair, “The articles I printed talk about what happens when a business partner dies.”
I spun to face her. “What does happen?”
She smacked the back of my head. “Hold still.”
“When you go into business with somebody,” she said, “You can sign a buy-sell agreement and get life insurance on your partner. Then if he dies, you can buy out his share using the insurance.”
“What’s the agreement do?”
“It sounds like a prenup for business partners. Something to nail down who can buy an owner’s interest and what price they’ll pay.”
“Are doctors like regular business partners or is a medical practice different?”
She shrugged. “Not sure it matters. Killing a guy to buy up his share of a practice is a stretch. You see that, right?”
I dropped my he
ad into my hands, frustrated. She thumped the base of my skull with a hard flick. “Sit up.”
“Until I figure out who wanted Platt dead,” I said. “Everything’s a stretch.” I tapped a shiny fake nail on my watch face.
Jeannie shellacked my hair with a bottle of Paul Mitchell and told me to put on the dress. I squeezed into it and she pulled the zipper up in back.
“Your legs look awesome,” she said, when I turned around for her inspection. The hem of her dress was alarmingly high on my thighs. “But the neckline sags. We have to push up your boobs.”
I didn’t own bra pads, which Jeannie said was worse than not having a Chi iron. She fashioned a set by cutting and balling up an old pair of my pantyhose and telling me how to stuff it under my breasts inside my bra cups. When I finally got a look at myself in the mirror, I was pleasantly shocked.
Jeannie passed me the thin stack of articles she’d printed and followed me to the door, where her parting action was to spritz me with Giorgio Beverly Hills. I pulled the door shut behind me, feeling as elegant as her perfume, and descended the steps. At the bottom, I emerged from the building’s shadow into the sun and when its warmth washed over me, the transition felt metaphoric.
I did vain, stupid things during my drive to the surgery center. I tilted the rear-view mirror at me so I could admire my sexy lips. Sometimes I glanced at the faint reflection in the driver’s side window for another look at my too-cute hair. Once I lowered the sun visor so I could see the way my fingernails looked as they played over the steering wheel.
I drove a little faster than usual, not because I was late, but because glamour was exciting, even in a Taurus.
When I pulled into the surgery center, I re-applied facial powder as instructed and stepped from the car, approving my reflection in the window one last time before taking long, confident strides toward the building. Jeannie had swept my hair up in a way that looked sharp and classy in the contour of my shadow. I watched my silhouette cross the pavement and marveled at how empowering the new style felt compared to my usual ponytail.
By the time Dr. King met me in an exam room twenty-five minutes later, I was so full of myself I used his first name.
“Good to meet you, Chris.”
He shook my hand with almost no eye contact and reached for my patient folder. After a brief glimpse inside, he said, “Tell me your reasons for considering rhinoplasty.”