“Listen up,” Marla said as she clapped her phone shut. “I found out some good stuff from Frances and her sidekick. They wanted a ‘Do you confirm or deny’ statement. I promised that if she left, I’d call her back, which I just did. I traded a couple of tidbits about the Jerk’s girlfriends for facts we couldn’t have weaseled out of the cops.” Marla paused for effect. “The reporters have already canvassed the neighbors. They didn’t hear anything. No yelling or fighting, no shots. But someone saw a woman, or someone who looked like a woman, wearing heels, a black raincoat, and a black scarf. The neighbor noticed the rain gear because it was dusty and windy, which he thought was weird. Anyway, the Jerk roared up the driveway in the Audi, and then this woman raced up after him.”
“ ‘This woman’? What woman?”
“Good question. Apparently, after the lunch, Sandee arrived with him at his house. She stayed in his car for a while—I think we can guess doing what—then got out and drove off in her VW. Not two minutes later, this other person ran across the cul-de-sac and up the driveway. The neighbor figured it was somebody who knew him, because she was carrying a shopping bag. As if she was going to give him a present or something.”
“Yeah, slugs in the chest. But the neighbor didn’t hear anything?”
“Nada. Someone shooting inside a garage, with a wind howling outside? Gunshots could easily get muffled.”
I bit the inside of my lip. “So are all the reporters gone?”
“Nope. Three of ’em from the Furman County Monthly haven’t had this hot a news item since they caught eight real estate agents having a sex orgy in an empty house.”
I smiled. “I need to change into something respectable. Those nut cookies I made last night are in a tin on the counter.”
Marla didn’t need a second invitation.
Upstairs, I rummaged through my closet, crammed myself into a black skirt and top, and put in a call to Holly Kerr.
“I’m just on my way to water aerobics,” she said, with what sounded like forced brightness. “Everyone tells me that…after the death of a loved one, it’s important to keep the routine going.”
I thought of Arch and Tom out on the golf course. “This will just take a moment,” I promised. Marla called up that she’d eaten the cookies and I needed to haul out to her Mercedes with her! I closed my eyes. “Holly, I was wondering if you had a list of the people who were invited to the lunch yesterday.”
“There wasn’t a list. That’s what I told the police.” I stifled a gurgle of dismay. “Apparently there was some trouble afterward, they wouldn’t tell me what. I told them that you don’t invite guests to a funeral. You call people up, tell them about it, and guess how many will be there. Remember, I told you to make food for sixty? We had fewer than sixty, I think. I have the guest book here somewhere. A friend brought it over. I don’t know if everyone signed it. As soon as I find it, I’m supposed to call the police so they can come get it.”
“Besides the guest book, did the police ask you to make a list of the other people you remembered who were there?”
“Yes, but why are you asking me this? Do they want you to make a list, too?”
“Holly, John Richard was killed after the lunch.”
She gasped.
“I’m the one they suspect—”
“You? But Goldy, why?”
“I don’t know. I did not do it. So I’m begging you, please, give me a copy of the list of guests before you give one to the cops. I need it more than they do, trust me. Could you?”
She groaned. “Oh, of course. Lord! And he looked so happy with that girl! She was awfully young for him. Do you think it could have been a jealous husband?”
I swallowed and remembered the hot breath in my ear at the Grizzly Bear Saloon. Sandee Blue is my girlfriend. “I don’t think so.” How would Sandee’s other boyfriend look in a black scarf, heels, and black raincoat?
“My dear, the aerobics class is going to start without me. The police are coming back this afternoon at four.”
“I’ll be there in the early afternoon,” I promised, and signed off. I grabbed a pad of Arch’s school paper and a pen, and headed down the stairs. On the way out, I pushed past three reporters, one of whom identified himself as being from the Furman County Monthly.
“Mrs. Schulz—
“We’ve heard—”
“Do you have any—”
“Hurry up!” Marla cried, beeping her Mercedes horn. At least she didn’t scream, We don’t want to be late for the strip show! I trotted to the Benz and tucked myself inside. We peeled away from the curb with a squeal of tires and another long beep, for good measure.
Overhead, a thick cloud cover made the morning sky smooth and bright, as if someone had pulled luminous gauze across the heavens. A wire strung across the lake’s waterfall provided a flock of newly arrived cormorants with a place to preen, flutter, and stretch their wide wings. Not a hundred yards from the lake house, a heron lifted himself up and up, while a crowd of birders pointed and focused their binoculars. Ahead of us, a small herd of elk seemed to be waiting to cross the street. Beside them, a boy who looked just like Arch was looking both ways, as if he intended to hold up traffic to allow the elk to pass.
“Hey!” I cried involuntarily. I pointed. “Arch told me he was going to play golf with Tom!” The elk chose that moment to make a mad dash across the street. The boy scampered across beside them.
“Where’s Arch?” Marla cried as she hit the brakes. The Mercedes skidded sideways, into the oncoming lane. Two elk bolted across; three more balked and cantered back to where they’d come from. “Damn elk!” Marla shouted. She hit the gas a bit too hard, which made the Mercedes roar forward. The trio of elk that had made it back to their starting point gazed in surprise. Marla honked, buzzed down her window, and shouted at the elk, “Where are the hunters when you need them?” The elk lumbered back toward the water, while Marla, still furious, overcorrected her steering and sent the Mercedes careening toward the ditch on the right side of the road.
“Goldy, would you quit distracting me while I’m trying to drive?” Marla reprimanded me, once we were back in our lane. “I didn’t see Arch.”
“Okay,” I said with as much calm as I could muster. “Where were we?”
“Looking at something that wasn’t there. Before that, the Jerk’s exploits. Don’t worry, I already e-mailed Brewster my old catalog.” She tilted her head and gunned the engine again. “What I still can’t figure out is why someone would sabotage your food, whack you out of the way, and then steal your kitchen shears. Was our killer going to hack the Jerk to death after shooting him?”
“Who knows? And anyway, who could hate both John Richard and me?”
“I’m going to have to ask around about that one,” Marla mused. “I don’t suppose you have any theories.”
“Holly Kerr wondered if Sandee might have a jealous significant other hanging around,” I told Marla about the hostile fellow whispering in my ear while I was stumbling around the Grizzly. “Maybe he thought the Jerk and I were colluding to keep Sandee away from her boyfriend.”
“Hmm. Need to check in with the gossip network on that one. Can you hand my cell over, please?”
I did so. Marla glanced at her phone, punched in some numbers, and nearly sideswiped a garbage truck—all in the space of fifteen seconds.
By the time we reached the Rainbow Men’s Club in Denver, Marla had learned that Sandee had dumped her boyfriend, Bobby Calhoun—aka lead singer of Nashville Bobby and the Boys—in favor of the Jerk. Marla’s sources asserted that Bobby’s black pompadour was a wig. But the muscular body that he rubbed with Vaseline before unbuttoning his satin shirt at performance time was real. Reportedly, Bobby Calhoun loved three things: singing, firefighting, and Sandee. When he’d saved up enough money, he was going to pack up his sequined suit, steal Sandee away from the Rainbow, and head back to Tennessee.
“And where did John Richard figure in this little scenario?” I asked. “
Or me?”
“Apparently, neither of you did. None of my people seems to have heard Bobby complain about the Jerk or you.”
“But I’ll bet anything he was the guy at the Grizzly who warned me away from Sandee.”
Marla raised her eyebrows.
“Since John Richard was killed, our little Sandee has moved back into Bobby’s condo, outside Aspen Meadow.”
Marla stopped talking as she peered through the windshield at the club door. “Doesn’t the Rainbow have valet?” When it was apparent that they didn’t, Marla started backing the Benz into a metered parking space. She cursed as she hit the bumper of the pickup behind us, jumped her car forward into the rear lights of a Subaru wagon, and came to a halt a foot from the curb. “Think I should leave a twenty under the wiper, in case a cop comes?” she asked.
“It’ll get stolen.”
With immense relief, I got out of the car and glanced up and down the street. The previous night’s hail had cut shallow gullies into the curb’s detritus. Remnants of torn paper cups, newspapers, and pizza boxes lay in the mud. We were less than two miles from the glass atria, sidewalk cafés, and bustle of suits that characterized downtown Denver. But here, everything looked scruffy, from the black fronts of bars to the shifty-looking men and women prowling the sidewalks.
Marla had finished clinking coins into the meter and was already bustling through the Rainbow door. I followed as quickly as my still-sore legs and neck would allow, and tried not to think about what we were doing, where we were going, and what we hoped to accomplish.
The Rainbow entryway was darker than a cave, and I had the sudden paralyzing thought that my only experience with an abundance of naked women had been in gym locker rooms. For crying out loud, I was a Sunday-school teacher. What if Father Pete saw me? What if I saw Father Pete?
As Marla leaned over a dark glass counter, I blinked at the large display of signs telling what you could and could not do inside the Rainbow. One sign screamed that “Public Fighting Is Illegal in Denver.” Thank God for that!
I gaped at the older woman who was manning the cash register. She was the same heavily made-up, raven-haired lady from the funeral lunch, the one who’d asked me if I’d played a trick with a glass, when I almost dropped one. And she still looked vaguely familiar, but I was trying to focus on her question and couldn’t place her. She said, “You know this is a men’s club, ladies?”
Marla retorted, “We’re coming in anyway, because we both belong to ACLU, thank you very much. My pal here even caters for them sometimes. So! We’ll take two all-you-can-eat buffet tickets, and before you say it, I can read that there’s a two-drink minimum. Not to worry, we’re going to need all the booze we can get. And before you ask, no, neither of us has video-recording equipment stuffed in our purses.” Before I could say anything, Marla asked, “We want to see Sandee with two e s. Where would she be?”
“The table closest to the buffet,” the woman replied, smiling. She stashed a huge wad of cash in the register, looked up at us, and hesitated. “Don’t either one of you remember me?”
“I do,” I said suddenly as a memory flashed. The Jerk had treated her. “Sorry. Lana Della Robbia, right? You were one of John Richard’s patients.”
She nodded. “And Dr. Kerr’s. Dr. Kerr delivered my babies. Fifteen years later, Dr. Korman removed a cancerous growth from my female plumbing. I owe him my life.” She smiled. “I was at the service for Dr. Kerr yesterday,” she went on, “and at the lunch you did.”
At the Roundhouse, she’d been wearing a black designer suit; her hair had been swept up in a tight chignon. She’d been seated at the table with the jokesters who’d brought their own booze. Next to Lana had been that wide-shouldered, tan guy with the bodybuilder physique, the one who’d offered to juggle glasses. What had she called him? Dannyboy. I also remembered Dannyboy’s long, brown-blond hair that fanned out around his unattractively ruddy face and gave him the look of a hungry lion. Lana, Dannyboy, and the liquor drinkers had been only a few tables away from John Richard and Sandee.
“It was a nice event,” Lana said, but her voice was hesitant.
“But?” I prompted. Behind me, a gaggle of guys was protesting and telling me to hurry it up.
Lana glanced at the rowdy fellows and lowered her voice. “I guess I was surprised to hear Ted Vikarios give a speech, since he and Albert Kerr had that big falling-out all those years ago.”
“ ‘That big falling-out’?” I repeated, before the crowd jostled one of the guys into my side.
“Come visit us at our table!” Marla offered, tugging me into the club’s interior.
“Why did you do that?” I shouted to Marla over the pulse of rock music. “I was just about to find out something!”
“You were just about to get trampled!” Marla replied as she pulled me down a dark hallway past a cloakroom.
I said, “Lana must have thought highly of the Jerk if she referred to him as Dr. Korman! Maybe she fixed him up with Sandee.”
Marla raised an eyebrow at me. “More likely our ex came here. Water seeking its own level, that kind of thing. Let’s sit down at one of these little tables.”
The club’s spacious interior encompassed six black-mirrored, raised hexagonal platforms. On top of each mirrored surface, a naked-except-for-a-thong young woman danced. Well, you couldn’t really call it dancing. It was more like stepping-in-place-while-wiggling-hips-and-boobs.
And what boobs they were. I wondered how they’d phrased their requests to their surgeons. Maybe using fruit analogies? I’ve got tangerines now, but could you give me oranges? Grapefruit? And melons! The dancers were shaking everything from cantaloupes to pumpkins. I would have sworn a red-haired woman in front of us had asked for honeydews. I didn’t know if docs would ever be able to bestow watermelons, but science was always advancing.
Around each of the black-mirrored mini-stages, men sat watching the naked lady in front of them. Electrified chandeliers flashed red, blue, green, and yellow along with the beat of the music. There was a bar on the far side of the space, plus a sprinkling of small tables ringing the place. We sat at one of these. After watching the goings-on for a bit, I noticed that the men seated around the large mirrored tables were expected, at regular intervals, to put a greenback into each dancer’s proffered thong. Then the dancer dropped the greenback into a small hole in the center of the black table.
“There was a young woman who graduated from Elk Park Prep a few years back,” Marla leaned over to tell me. “Her parents were strict—fundamentalists, I think. The girl turned eighteen two days after graduation. She announced, ‘Forget it, I’m not going to college, I’m gonna be a dancer.’ She works here.”
“These girls are all so young!” I exclaimed.
“What did you expect?” Marla asked. “Forty-year-olds?”
“I don’t know what I expected,” I said, suddenly dizzy.
I had not expected to see a group of young women—only a couple of whom looked a day over twenty-five—parading in front of men who appeared to be between forty-five and sixty, with the preponderance of them in their fifties. Uh-oh, now they were doing something new. When they weren’t doing the half wiggle, the dancers leaned their ponderous breasts over first one, then another of the faces of the men sitting around the tables. The men were expected to come up with more bucks for the boobs-in-the-face routine. But how they could breathe in that narrow space, much less rummage for their wallets? It would be like trying to do a nighttime sail through the Strait of Magellan.
We looked for Sandee but couldn’t spot her. At the nearest table, the red-haired woman-with-the-honeydews was dancing in a more animated way than the other strippers, who looked as if they might be on drugs. A ruby-red light focused on the redhead, revealing that she was a bit older than her compatriots. The light made her hair glow almost purple, and also highlighted what I thought was a desperate look in her eyes. Each bill she received made her gyrate even faster. When her shift was over, she stepped
down and approached us.
“Uh, what’s happening?” I asked Marla as Big Red made a beeline for our table.
“I don’t know,” Marla replied, “but I hope she puts on a bra before she gets here. This table won’t support both of those.”
Thankfully, the red-haired lady did put something on, a black wrap shift that she fluffed out and tied before arriving beside us.
“Ladies?” she said. “May I sit? I’m Ruby Drake. I think we have something in common.” As I opened my mouth in protest, she said, “I knew your ex-husband, John Richard Korman.”
“Ruby Drake,” Marla repeated. She frowned, as if trying to remember something. “You were his fifty-second girlfriend.”
“I was never Korman’s girlfriend,” Ruby Drake replied, her tone icy. “Far from it. In fact—”
Before Ruby could finish, Lana sashayed over to our table and interrupted her. “Ruby, you’ve got some men asking for you on the far side of the room.” Lana pointed a lacquered nail at one of the Rainbow’s dark corners, and Ruby slunk away.
“Dammit to hell,” I said under my breath. “We try to find stuff out here, and all we get is interrupted. Don’t folks come here to relax?”
“I don’t know,” Marla replied as she waggled her fingers at one of the platforms. “But check it out. There’s Sandee.”
Sandee Blue was wriggling seductively at one of the far mirrored tables. Through the cloud of cigarette smoke, I could make out a substantial crowd of men gawking at her. And what was she covered with, shortening? Her skin had a bright sheen, and I wondered if she’d learned that trick from her Elvis-impersonating boyfriend. A neat trick, if it was true.
“Why would John Richard,” I asked Marla, “who could have any wealthy tennis-playing socialite he wanted, go for a young stripper who has no money, no brains, and a pair of breasts that could be mistaken for Crenshaw melons?”
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