Blue Blood: A Debutante Dropout Mystery (14 page)

“Your turn,” David prodded, and I fixed my attention on the cards in my hand, seeing his small face light up as we played. Seeing Molly in his smile.

An hour later, I called it quits. I could only lose to a six-year-old so many times before my ego suffered.

“I surrender!” I announced and threw down my cards. “Guess I’ll have to turn over my title as champion to you now.”

“I’m the champion?” David’s cheeks warmed to pink.

“You bet.”

“I think it’s time for the newly crowned champ to hit the sack,” Sandy said, looking tired herself.

I told David “goodnight” and Sandy followed him upstairs to make sure he brushed his teeth. Afterward, she’d tuck him in bed and tell him a story. She had an endless cache of them, each of which I’d probably heard a dozen times.

I wondered if David would cry himself to sleep, but hoped he wouldn’t. He seemed to have settled in remarkably well. Sandy had obviously taken him under her wing. And Mother wasn’t doing so bad with him, either.

He’ll be fine,
I told myself. And it was just temporary, right? Until Molly could get out of jail and go home.

Quiet filled the kitchen without Sandy’s voice and David’s giggles. I pushed away from the table and headed for the downstairs den. With a grateful sigh, I sank into the rose-patterned chintz cushions on the overstuffed sofa and propped my feet atop the coffee table, something I couldn’t do if Mother was around.

I flipped on the TV perched in the cherry armoire and caught the nine o’clock news starting on Channel 11. They led off with a piece about fighting in the Middle East, then segued to a press conference with the mayor. Just when my eyes began to glaze over, they switched to a shot of a reporter standing in front of Jugs. She proceeded to give an update on the murder of Bud Hartman.

I sat up straighter and leaned my elbows on my knees as a familiar face appeared on the screen.

Peggy Martin. The mother of Mothers Against Pornography. The not-so-wicked witch who’d approached me in the parking lot as I was leaving.

Turning up the sound, I listened as she remarked with dismay about restaurants like Jugs infiltrating the suburbs, reinforcing the stereotype of women as sexual objects, and bringing crime along with it.

“Look what happened to Mr. Hartman,” she said, and the camera zoomed in to catch the despair drawn on her wrinkled face. “He treated women like toys and paid the ultimate price for his bad behavior.”

The reporter tied things up with a pithy remark about that being a sad epitaph on Hartman’s tombstone.

Only, he wouldn’t have a tombstone, I mused. He was being cremated.

I pushed the buttons on the changer and moved through the stations to find Channel 3 on Mother’s cable.

Ah-ha.

A handsome man in crewneck sweater and tan slacks sat on a gilt-framed sofa beside a Technicolor woman with bright makeup and a lavender wig built like a beehive. Stained glass windows lit up the background and blood-red carpeting smothered the floor underfoot.

“We do so much to help the poor in Third World countries,” the man said, and the woman nodded her head and replied, “Amen, Reverend Jim Bob. Amen.”

“Those kids in Guatemala that we took the toys to last Christmas . . . Lord, I’ve never seen such gratitude in anyone’s eyes. It was as if they were touching heaven, and it was just a box of GI Joes.”

“Praise God,” his purple-wigged cohort cried again and raised her hands. “Hallelujah and Amen.”

Aphone number and message ran continually across the bottom of the screen. Reminding me of a tornado warning, it begged me to
PLEASE GIVE TO THOSE LESS FORTUNATE
. . .
THE CHURCH OF PERPETUAL HOPE BLESSES YOU
. . .
COME PRAY WITH US AT THE CORNER OF PRESTON AND PARKER ROADS IN PLANO
.

So that was where Bud Hartman’s memorial service would be held. At least now I had the address.

I found it hard to believe Bud had been a churchgoing man, and I wondered what his connection was to Perpetual Hope. Or had the choice of location been Julie Costello’s and had nothing to do with Bud’s religious preference? I had no problem imagining her falling under Reverend Jim Bob’s spell. He was a good-looking fellow with rugged features and thick salt-and-pepper hair.

Reverend Jim Bob and Beehive continued to babble about all the missions they’d undertaken to touch the lives of toyless children, and I yawned loudly, feeling fatigue run through my blood like Novocain.

I shut off the tube and dragged myself from the overstuffed couch. Weariness slowed my movements, and I shuffled through the house, my flip-flops slapping on the tiles.

The towering grandfather clock in the foyer chimed half past nine as I took the stairs up to the second floor and padded down the hallway toward my old room.

I opened the door and switched on the ceiling light, illuminating the tableau of my youth, a reflection of my own tastes superimposed on my mother’s. The frilly canopy bed dripped with scarves in wild prints. The white French-style desk and ornate chest of drawers had flowering vines crawling up the sides, and the entire wall behind them had been painted to mimic Monet’s garden in Giverny, down to the water lilies. Mother had shown great restraint in letting me augment the perfect girlie room her interior designer had supplied. It had not been done without a great deal of sighing on her part—with reassurance from my father that walls could always be repainted and furniture replaced—and had taken me an entire summer to finish.

As I stood there, looking in, the sight tweaked a happy chord inside me, knowing that Cissy hadn’t hired someone to obliterate my creations with a bucket of Benjamin Moore.

Above the escritoire on which my old computer sat, the shelves overflowed with books, including a perfectly preserved set of Nancy Drews with yellow spines. Mother hadn’t touched those either.

It was déjà vu all over again.

Nothing had changed since I’d headed to college.

As if I could come back anytime and pick up where I’d left off.

I went over to the bureau, catching my reflection in the mirror, half-expecting to see a skinny kid with braces and pigtails.

My fingertips drifted across the sterling set of combs and brushes with my monogram etched into the polished backs. A collection of perfume bottles with glass stoppers crowded atop an art nouveau tray. Mother had encouraged me to collect them. But she’d been the only one of us who’d taken an interest in that.

Daddy had done better with his idea of the perfect collection, giving me leatherbound copies of classics, like
Black Beauty, Heidi, Rebecca, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice
, and
Wuthering Heights
, which I’d read at night before falling asleep, sometimes beneath the covers with a flashlight for fear Cissy would notice a glow slipping out from under my bedroom door past ten.

It pleased me immeasurably that Mother had never given away any of my books to charity or the church rummage sale. I still had hopes that someday I’d have a daughter of my own to pass them on to. Although, with my luck, she’d get Cissy’s designer genes and be more interested in perusing the latest issues of
Vogue
or
Town & Country.

The cadre of Madame Alexander dolls I’d received for Christmases and birthdays in my girlhood still occupied the shelves of the large armoire, though their original clothing was packed in a drawer. Instead, each of them, from Heidi and Red Riding Hood to the Little Women, wore creations whipped up by Molly O’Brien. Little miniskirts and halter tops cut from Cissy’s outrageous pink and green Lilly Pulitzer castoffs made them resemble a line of spaced-out go-go dancers with their round blue eyes and mouths in a perpetual moue.

My own castoffs filled the walk-in closets. There were enough shoes alone to make Imelda Marcos pea green with envy. There were little- or never-worn taffeta party dresses for dances at the country club or one of Mother’s benefit galas, and there was, of course, the specially made white Vera Wang gown I was supposed to have worn for my debut.

I wondered if Mother kept it on hand as a reminder of the disappointment I’d caused her. Though I’d told myself many times since that, where I was concerned, she should have been used to not always getting her way well before then.

Seeing the gown caused a little lump of regret in my throat, but only because it made me think about what life would have been like if Daddy were still around.

If wishes were horses.

It did no good at all to dwell on “what ifs.”

I crossed the room and sat down on the bed, picking up the nearest silver-framed photograph from the nightstand.

My father and me. His near-bald head pressed to mine. His eyes mere slits, his smile so wide. My mouth was open in a fit of giggles.

My throat tightened, and I set the photograph aside.

There was another of me with Cissy, both of us wearing pained expressions, as if our shoes pinched our feet.

It was taken during my thirteenth-birthday luncheon at the Junior League. She’d made me wear a hat. I looked like a Jackie Kennedy wannabe. Mother had drawn up the invitation list and had conveniently left off Molly’s name, though I’d told my friend to come just the same. She had, which was probably the reason Mother’s otherwise perfect face showed strain. The frown on my lips had more to do with the location. I wanted to have my party at the skating rink, but that hadn’t been an option.

I shook my head and set down the picture, then fingered one of Molly and me. I couldn’t even remember when it had been taken. We must have been about fourteen with long straight hair and chubby cheeks.

We’d taken it ourselves, holding the camera an arm’s length away. We looked clownish, our faces tinted too brightly with pink blush and pearl-blue shadow swiped from Mother’s vanity. We were pretending to be society ladies, though it impressed me now that we looked more like call girls in training.

Who would have ever thought back then that one of us would end up in a cell at Lew Sterrett, accused of murder?

I toed off my flip-flops and sagged into thick layers of lacy pillows. Shutting my eyes, I tried hard to make sense of what had happened and how to fix it. The hazy pieces of the puzzle didn’t fit together yet, but they would soon, I was sure.

I recalled how easy it had been to slip through the unlocked rear door of Jugs that morning and how I’d wandered through the restaurant undetected until Julie Costello had bumped into me.

Wouldn’t it have been as simple for Bud’s murderer to linger behind in the restaurant after the late shift when the alarm was still shut off? As I’d seen for myself, there were numerous places to hide. It would have been a piece of cake for the killer to stay out of sight and wait until Bud was alone. Then he could’ve picked up the knife from the floor where Molly had dropped it and finished Bud off with a stab in the back.

The knife.

I’d told Malone the killer could have worn gloves, which would explain why Molly’s prints were the only ones found on the handle. When I’d been in the kitchen at Jugs, I’d noticed the food handlers had worn plastic gloves from boxes kept by the gross in the storeroom.

How hard would it have been for someone to yank out a pair and pull them on before picking up the knife?

Anyone could have done it. Any one of the waitresses whom Bud had manhandled, any one of their angry boyfriends or husbands.

Or Julie Costello.

Or Bud’s mysterious partner whose name Molly didn’t know.

If the strip mall security guard, Fred Hicks, had been occupied with a couple of drunken college boys at the Zuma Beach Club—as he’d professed in his statement to the police—he could have missed the real killer’s exit entirely.

And there was still the matter of the disappearing bank bag. Who had taken it? Couldn’t the cops track down that sort of thing by getting warrants to check bank records?

That alone could lead them to the killer.

My mind raced.

There were so many “maybes” to follow up. Too many to make me feel anything but unsettled.

If only Brian Malone would help me out.

I frowned.

Malone thought I was little more than a screwball artist vainly trying to save an old friend who looked guilty as sin.

I rolled onto my side and curled into a fetal position, wishing I had something more than theories and gut feelings.

The whir of the air conditioner kicked on, and the noise of it lulled me, until my brain felt too groggy to think.

In my dreams, I saw children holding hands in a circle, playing “Ring Around the Rosie.” Then they turned into shouting women bearing protest signs who flew away on broomsticks.

At one point in the night, I awakened to feel a soft touch on my forehead, and I peered into the dark to smell my mother’s perfume.

“Go back to sleep, baby,” she whispered, and I closed my eyes and drifted off again.

S
unlight streamed through the windows, spilling onto the silk rug that covered the floor, nearly touching the ruffle of the bed skirt.

I blinked against the brightness, disoriented, trying to remember where I was and how I’d gotten there. Slowly, it came back to me. Dropping in to see David at Mother’s house, reminiscing in my old room, and curling up on the bed to rest. The scent of Cissy’s perfume tickling my nose as I’d slept.

My contacts stuck to my corneas, and I squished my eyes open and shut until I felt them loosen up. Then I glanced at the clock.

Nine-fifteen.

Oh, crap.

I threw aside the blanket that Mother must have draped over me during the night when she’d come in to check on me, and I hopped off the bed, my pulse jumping, wondering how I was going to get dressed for Bud’s memorial service and make it out to the Church of Perpetual Hope in only forty-five minutes.

Shedding my rumpled clothes into a pile on the bathroom floor, I turned the shower on as hot as I could stand it and scrubbed the smell of Jugs from my hair and skin with a scented bar of Crabtree & Evelyn soap.

Ever the perfect hostess, Mother always kept fresh towels on the racks, and I rubbed myself dry, then wrapped the soft Egyptian cotton around my damp head as I rummaged through the depleted medicine cabinet to scrounge up a spare toothbrush and tightly rolled tube of Crest. I located a sample-sized mascara with a crust of black around its rim and dabbed at my lashes, pinching away any clumps. A dried-up stick of deodorant nearly crumbled to pieces in my armpits.