Night of the Living Deb

by Susan McBride

I quickly made a mental list that began with calling Matty to see if he’d heard from Malone since last night.

  “What’s Matty and Eleanor’s number?” I asked the incredibly still-silent Allie as I stretched the phone cord as far as it would go; luckily, far enough to reach my cell and detach it from where I’d plugged it in to recharge.

  I could imagine Allie rolling her eyes as she recited the digits, which I dialed with my thumb, telling her to hang on as I listened to it ring.

  One ringie-dingie . . . two . . . then success.

  A high-pitched voice uttered, “Hello?”

  “Eleanor? It’s Andy Kendricks, from last night,” I reminded her, in case she’d forgotten after one too many vodkatinis.

  “Oh, yeah, hi, Andy, wasn’t that the most fun you’ve ever had with your clothes on? My God, when that dancer came over and—”

  “Would you put Matty on?” I had no patience for smalltalk.

  I still had Allie on the other phone, so I was doing this two-fisted. “It’s important.”

  “We’re just about to sit down to eat—”

  “It’s about Brian. I can’t seem to find him, and I thought if I talked to Matty, we could figure out where he is.” My own voice sounded odd to my ears, anxious, bordering on tearful.

  My worry must’ve come through loud and clear to Eleanor, because she murmured, “Just a minute,” and I heard mumbled voices before a man said, “Um, Andy, you do know Brian ditched me at The Men’s Club last night, so I’m not exactly high on him right now?”

  “Yes, I know. Allie told me.” I took a deep breath. “But he hasn’t been to his apartment or the office, and I’ve left him tons of messages on his cell and his landline, and Allie’s even paged him, but he doesn’t answer, and I’m getting scared,” I yammered without so much as a pause.

  “Please, tell me you’ve heard from him?” It was impossible to cross my fingers with a phone in both hands, so I did it mentally.

  “No, I haven’t.”

  Well, crud.

  “I’m not surprised he’s somewhere, hiding with his tail between his legs, since he took off after that woman last night and ditched me completely. I had to bribe a waitress to go backstage and look for him, which is when I heard he’d left with the chick through a back door.”

  “Left with a chick?” I echoed, thinking I’d heard wrong,

  what with my pulse pounding so loudly in my ears. “You saw him go backstage with a woman? And he took off with her?”

  “Oh, hell, Andy, I don’t think I should be telling you this.”

  I doubt I’d ever shaken with disappointment before, not so my teeth chattered, but I was doing it now. My whole body quivered, my knees fairly knocking, “For God’s sake, Matty, spill, or I’ll come over there right now and drag it out of you.”

  “All right, all right.” He sighed. “But I shouldn’t be the one to do this. If Brian’s got something going on, he should tell you himself.”

  I didn’t move. Didn’t say a word. Just stood there, holding the phones to my ears with trembling hands, and waited.

  “He was supposed to go arrange for me to have an, um, lap dance.” He whispered the two words as if not wanting his fiancée to hear. “I thought that’s what he was doing when he zeroed in on the blonde and took off after her like a rocket.”

  “Okay, what blonde?” I found the voice to ask. “Who was she, Matty? Did you recognize her?”

  “Are you sure you want to hear—”

  “What blonde, for God’s sake!” I cut him off, screeching, feeling the heat in my face, not understanding any of this. Wanting just to stop everything and start the day over

  again. It couldn’t get any worse.

  Matty’s voice was a sad monotone as he reeled off, “She was obviously a stripper. All she had on was a thong.

  She had lots of hair, kinda Farrah Fawcett retro, if you know what I mean. I didn’t really see her face.”

  Of course, you didn’t, I wanted to scream. You were too busy eyeing her bare-naked bazoombas!

  “This may sound stupid, but they sort of stared at each other from across the room for a minute before she took off. He followed her backstage. I was pretty blitzed, but I do remember thinking he’d picked her out for me and was setting up my, er, private party.” Again, he finished the sentence with a whisper. “But he never came back. I tried to go after him, but a goon from the club stopped me. So I

  gave the barmaid a twenty to look for him. She was back in about ten minutes. Said she saw him vamoose with the blonde through a back door. Barmaid’s name was Lu, I think, but I don’t know anything else except that Malone had better turn up soon ’cuz he’s holding onto some important

  hardware for me while Eleanor and I get settled into the new place, though it’s not like I trust him much at the moment. Wish I knew more, but I don’t.”

  More?

  Like what he’d said wasn’t plenty.

  “Do you know if he took his car?” I asked, not ready to give up.

  “His car?”

  “Was it left in the parking lot, by any chance?” I asked, because that in itself would be highly suspicious. Malone loved his Acura coupe, maybe more than some people.

  He’d never have gone anywhere without it.

  “Sorry, yeah, I checked with the valet before I called a cab, figuring I could drive Brian’s ride home, since his vanishing act had totally sobered me up. But the dude said a guy had picked it up and taken off.”

  “Maybe that guy wasn’t Brian,” I surmised aloud, because I had so little to cling to, what with all of Matty’s devastating statements. I’d rather buy the idea that someone had carjacked Malone’s coupe than imagine he’d sailed off with a stripper to her sleazy apartment.

  “Sure, Andy, maybe it wasn’t Brian,” Matty said, so obviously wanting to appease me that I didn’t believe he meant it.

  For whatever reason—however it had happened—Brian had taken off, hadn’t told anyone where he was.

  I felt totally abandoned, and it shook me to the core. I could hardly stay upright, my legs wobbling, but I was no weeble. So there was no guarantee that I wouldn’t fall down.

  “I’m sorry, Andy,” Matty muttered. “I’m really sorry. I don’t know what the hell he was thinking . . . or not thinking.

  It’s just not like him. And I thought he . . . that you two . . . man, I’m as confused as you are.”

  My head was spinning. My stomach lurched.

  Brian had left The Men’s Club with a stripper? And nobody knew where he was, except maybe said stripper?

  Good God.

  That was my worst worst-case scenario, and this time it was no joke.

  It was all I could do to keep my pancakes down.

  Chapter 6

  I had the sense to ask Matty to give me a call if he heard from Brian, and he assured me

  he would. I believed him, too. He sounded so guilty about what had happened, kept apologizing to me.

  Like whatever Malone had done was his fault.

  Then I flipped the cell closed and set it near my purse.

  “You still there?” I said into the receiver of my Princess phone as I followed its hyperextended cord back to the sofa table.

  “I’m here,” came Allie’s voice.

  So unnaturally subdued.

  I realized she’d heard my end of the conversation with Matty and understood the gist of it, or at least my rattled responses. Still, glutton for punishment that I was, I repeated nearly verbatim what Malone’s friend had told me—as Matty’s words had been burned in my brain—all

  the while fighting the tremor in my voice, because I would not crack. I would not disintegrate into self-pity and tears.

  It was not the Kendricks way.

  If there was anything I’d inherited from Cissy, it was a spine made of rebar. My mother had strength to spare, and some of it had trickled down to me. Ironically, I wouldn’t have survived dropping out
of my deb ball without it.

  Though Mother would deny it, she’d also passed on her chutzpah, and I had enough stored up to get through any horse manure life threw my way.

  Including this.

  Oh, yeah, and I would get through it, no matter what, though the dreamer in me still hoped for a happy ending.

  Andrea meant “courage” in Greek. My father had told me it’s why he’d picked out the name for his baby girl. For eighteen years, Daddy had impressed upon me not to jump to conclusions (as Cissy was so fond of doing). “You must have the patience to wait for the truth, pumpkin. Not

  everything’s real, just because it’s right in front of you.”

  Sort of like the warning on side mirrors: objects may be closer than they appear. Sometimes objects weren’t what they seemed at all, except in our imaginations. A blur in the flash of headlights. A dark shadow that didn’t exist.

  Daddy would’ve wanted me to give Malone the benefit of the doubt, at least until Brian could speak for himself.

  I would allow him that much.

  Allie seemed less willing to forgive.

  “The bastard,” she kept muttering. “I can’t believe he’d turn into such an ass overnight. It’s so out of character.”

  “Exactly,” I agreed, because it was true. It wasn’t like Brian to do any of the things he’d been accused of doing, and I was having a heck of a time believing any of it.

  Something in my gut was doing the arm-flailing, robotic, “Danger, Will Robinson!” warning dance.

  Every loyal ounce of me would rather believe that Malone had gotten himself into a sticky situation he couldn’t get out of instead of buying that he would rather have let Matty down or betrayed me with a stripper from The Men’s Club.

  That whole scenario bothered me immensely. Bugged me in a way it probably shouldn’t. If I were an average, everyday scorned woman, I wouldn’t need any further confirmation. I’d be ready to rip Malone’s head off, pluck his heart from his chest with my fingernails, and throw what remained to the sharks.

  But I wasn’t a normal, everyday anything.

  I was me.

  And I just wanted to understand this whole sordid mess, because something felt very off-kilter, and that made me afraid for him.

  “You’d better believe I’m gonna give him a piece of my mind when I see him at the office tomorrow. Men!” Allie snorted, and yet I was hardly aware she was actually offering sympathy.

  I was still trying to figure out how to proceed.

  Trying to decide whether to crawl into bed and not emerge for a week. Run to my mother’s house, go through all her Kleenex, and wallow in sappy movies on the Hallmark Channel. Head to Malone’s apartment, find that key above his threshold, and tear the place apart, looking for answers (which didn’t sound like such a bad idea, really).

  But I was leaning toward something less destructive, and more productive.

  Something that would tell me one way or another if Malone had really ditched me for a girl whose idea of formal dress was to wear high heels with her thong.

  “Is there anything I can do for you? You want to have a drink?” Allie was rambling on. “Hell, lots of drinks. I’ll pay, and I’ll drive so you can get bombed out of your gourd. The son of a—”

  “Allie, take me down there,” I cut her off, knowing exactly where I had to go and what I had to do.

  “Take you down where?”

  “The Men’s Club,” I told her. “I want to talk to someone who might’ve seen him, try to find this barmaid named Lu and get her to cough up where her stripper pal might’ve gone with Brian. I have to track him down, wherever he is.

  I need to talk to him.”

  He had a lot of explaining to do.

  “Talk to Malone? Are you out of your fricking mind?”

  she sputtered. “After he dumped you for a hootchie mama without even having the balls to explain it to you face-toface?

  You should run over him in your Hummer then back up and do it again.”

  “I don’t have a Hummer.”

  “Then buy one, for God’s sake! It’d be worth it to smoosh him beneath those giant wheels.”

  Allie was obviously a woman of action. Unfortunately, she wasn’t a very good listener.

  I tried again. “Will you or won’t you?”

  “You really want to do this, Kendricks?”

  “Yes.” And I needed her to go with me.

  It was dark outside already, and I didn’t want to venture into that neck of the woods by myself. But I would, if I had to.

  I heard her sigh and knew she’d caved. “Okay, okay. I’ll go. But if I see Malone, I might have to bitch slap him for doing what he did.”

  “We don’t know that he’s done anything, Allie. Not for sure.”

  Call me Tammy, but I planned to stand by my man until I had all the facts. So far, everything was secondhand, and that wasn’t good enough, not when my heart was in the balance.

  “Hello, Kendricks? Aren’t you paying attention? Even if Malone can prove he was possessed in the past twenty four hours, he snuck out of the strip joint with a tramp, bailed on Matty, neglected to buzz you and clue you in, and he left me hanging when he was supposed to confab with me over a case.”

  “Thanks for the Cliff ’s Notes version, but I’ve read the book.”

  Part of me almost wanted to hang up on Allie and do this on my own. But I believed in the buddy system, particularly when traipsing down to a strip joint in a not-solovely area of town was involved.

  “Allie? Yes, or no?” I prodded.

  After a rather lengthy and, I’m sure, purposeful pause, she gave in. “Why don’t you meet me down here, in the West Village? We can have margaritas first at Taco Diner.”

  Um, did she think this was a party? “Not a good idea,” I said, not being a fan of drinking

  and driving.

  “Okay, you can hold the margarita until after we hit the club and play Matlock, but I’m having one first. I’ll get it in a plastic cup and wait outside, so you don’t have to park or come up to my condo.”

  Which meant I’d play taxi driver on this trip.

  “Taco Diner, right,” I said then, “Oh, wait, um, Allie?”

  “Yeah?”

  I wasn’t even sure The Men’s Club was open on Sunday night, and I mentioned that to her, which nearly cost me the hearing in my right ear, since Allie’s response was to laugh like a maniacal hyena.

  “Are you kidding?” She chortled, snorted, then chortled again. “You’re hilarious, Kendricks. You really are. Who d’you think runs the place? The Catholic Church? ’Cause there aren’t a whole lot of nuns with a pole dancing habit.

  Get it? Nuns with a habit?”

  Someone needed to tell the woman to curb her enthusiasm.

  Was she this obnoxious in the courtroom?

  Yeesh.

  I’d convict a client of hers just because she was annoying.

  “I’ll be there in twenty, Allie,” I said, as politely as I could.

  I hung up before she could offer another nun pun.

  Somehow, I just wasn’t in the mood.

  Chapter 7

  It was not much past eight o’clock, but it was fall, which meant dark.

  Not that I minded driving at night, except I had astigmatism that my contacts didn’t correct (the right kind of lenses made me dizzy). So the streetlights and headlamps had extra yellow rings around them. Kind of distracting when a person needed to pay attention to the road and not to glowing aureoles floating at them from the opposite lanes.

  I did love how Dallas looked after sunset, particularly as I drove south, toward Lemmon and McKinney where Allie lived. Not that I didn’t like my own turf of North Dallas, in the quiet of the ’burbs, apart from trendy spots and a safe distance from my mother. But places like Turtle Creek and the Park Cities, and even downtown, were an eyeful to see, both in daylight and when dusk descended.

  Malon
e and I had driven around Mother’s neighbourhood after we’d been summoned for dinner there several weeks back. We wound along Lakeside so we could glimpse the mansion I’d always thought looked like the White House reflected in Exall Lake. A coyote had shot across the road ahead of us. Yellow-brown fur with the stub of a tail, so scrawny it looked like a stray dog in need of an Alpo fix.

  Who’d have figured there was wildlife living amongst the richest of Big D’s rich? The kind that nature made; not the playboys and party girls, just in case there’s any confusion about what I meant.

  I loved viewing the silhouette of downtown, glittery windows lit up like Christmas, the green argon lights that framed the NationsBank building and Reunion Tower with its rotating globe.

  There were things I had not missed about my hometown while I’d been away in Chicago at art school—like, the insecurity of not having big enough hair, boobs, and jewels—but there was more still that I’d pined for.

  My roots were solidly entrenched in the sandy dirt, buried beneath the soil several generations deep. Occasionally, I considered living elsewhere, the Pacific Northwest, maybe. Or I imagined what it might be like to shuck the real world for a while and move to Paris, go Bohemian, immerse myself in the history of the place, and paint like Van Gogh during one of his happy periods (because I’m sure he had happy periods before the whole cutting-off-his-ear thing).

  But I couldn’t do it.

  I carried Dallas in my DNA, felt its brand on my skin as surely as if someone had taken a cattle prod with a big D to my butt. I was bound by kin to stay near enough to Cissy so I would be close if she needed me. Try as I might to fight the bond between us—both the city and my mother—there

  it was. And it was steel.

  Malone occasionally talked about going back to St. Louis, and I hoped he wouldn’t. Because I’m not sure I could leave my home again, not even for love.

  Or in spite of it.

  As I approached the West Village, I spotted the Magnolia Theatre’s red and blue neon lights, and I suddenly found myself wishing I were heading there with Brian, to sit in the back row of a cool art film, his arm around me, my head on his shoulder.

  Instead, I aimed to pick up his ex-girlfriend, who’d promised to drive to a strip club with me so I could grill a barmaid named Lu about whether or not my missing beau had slipped out the back of the joint with a girl in a G-string.