Too Pretty to Die (21 page)

Man, but he was nosy. Must’ve been all that law school training in badgering the witness.

“Mother had it,” I replied, still not lying.

“Are there more?” He crooked a finger at the screen.

Egads.

I bit my lip and said, “A few.”

“Well, I know Cissy feels responsible for Miranda. Stephen told me she’s going nuts, thinking the police aren’t going to look beyond the suicide angle.” Brian let out a pithy sigh. “She’s really taking this whole thing hard, isn’t she? Almost like it’s her own kid who died.”

“Yeah, just like that,” I agreed, and hoped he didn’t pick up on the resentment in my tone. I didn’t like the sound of it myself.

“So why’d Cissy give you pictures of Miranda? I know you weren’t all that friendly with the woman.” He glanced sideways at me. “Does Her Highness have an ulterior motive?”

“Ulterior motive?” I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “When doesn’t she?”

He snapped his fingers. “Oh, I get it. I know what you’re up to.”

“You do?”

Gulp.

He arose from his crouch so he towered over me. “Yes, I do.” His hands came down on my shoulders, and I tensed, holding my breath until he spoke. “Your mom wants you to put something together, doesn’t she? Like some kind of Web site tribute to Miranda. Is that it?”

Web site tribute?

I nearly crowed with relief.

“Well, I guess you could call it a tribute.” If trying to fulfill Miranda’s vengeful wish of “outing” high profile members of the Caviar Club was paying homage to her. “But it’s not Mother who’s asked me to help with the project. It’s Janet,” I said, not fibbing about that part, anyway.

“Janet Graham?” He looked confused. “What’s she got you doing? Investigating the levels of ozone killed by the gallons of hair spray used on the heads of local evening news anchors?”

I smiled. Nice to have a boyfriend with a sense of humor.

“Now,
that
would be a good story,” I said, wondering the best way to fudge around how I was assisting Janet in her cause, when I wasn’t even completely sure what my job entailed. “Um, well, I don’t even know exactly what’s required of me”—why did I have to be dating a lawyer?—“it’s more like doing her a favor.”

“What kind of favor? Like going with Janet to get a facial this morning?”

“Um, sort of,” I replied evasively.

If I’d said
getting the dirt on who’s attending the Caviar Club orgies
, would that have satisfied him, you think?

The doorbell rang.

For real.

“Pizza’s here!” I cried, and shut off my computer screen, which quickly zapped to black, never so eager to see the Domino’s guy as I was at that moment.

Brian’s hands came off my shoulders, and I followed him into the living room, diverting into the kitchen to get out plates and napkins while he paid off the pizza guy.

We settled in front of the TV, and Brian found a hockey game on: the Dallas Stars vs. his hometown St. Louis Blues.

It was like being saved by the bell twice in one evening.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to peel him away from the boob tube until the game was over. And since he always complained that the Blues were penalty magnets, dragging things out even longer, I guessed I’d have a couple hours of computer time before he even realized I wasn’t sitting right there beside him.

I spirited away my plate heaped with pizza slices and my bottle of Sprite Zero, sneaking out of the room in time to hear Brian swearing at the ref.

“Slashing? Are you effing kidding me? Did you leave your glasses at home, Mr. Magoo? Damn zebras!”

I grinned, the sound of his protests music to my ears.

The world could come to an end; and, as long as there was a hockey game on, Malone would never know it. He would arise from the sofa after the third period was over, find the condo crumbled around him, and go, “My God, what the heck happened?”

I did not begrudge sports for the way they made most men oblivious to everything that went on around them.

It gave us womenfolk time to get our own stuff done.

Though I realized the clock was ticking in more ways than one.

This time, I closed the door to my office before I plunked myself down at my desk.

I turned the monitor back on and resumed the slide show of Miranda’s pictures, chewing on a slice of pizza as I watched each frame click slowly by.

The computer shuffled through a good two dozen photos before I saw one than made me reach greasy fingers for the mouse to stop the visual parade.

I squinted and leaned nearer, hovering over my keyboard so my nose was a mere eight inches from the screen.

It was different from the ones before, darker, kind of hard to make out unless I used the “brighten” feature on my photo software.

I had nothing that assured me these were tableaus from secret Caviar Club gatherings; but I had a knot in my gut as I stared at the monitor, something inside me saying,
This is it.

There was Miranda, in a dress cut so low her boobs half spilled out, her blond hair tousled on her shoulders, seated on a sofa between two men. They had their arms around her, and she had her arms around them. There was a smorgasbord of drinks and ashtrays spread on the low-set table in front of them, but that’s about all I
could
see.

Whoever had used Miranda’s camera to take the shot must’ve had unsteady hands—or else she did the pics with a timer without adjusting the focus—as the quality of the photo was grainy; too blurred for me to make out either man’s features. They could’ve both resembled Mr. Potato Head, for all I knew.

I forwarded to the next photograph, which was darker still, clicking further to the one beyond that and the one after.

At about the fourth such image in the series, I paused. This was fuzzy, too, but I could discern that it was Miranda with those two men on the sofa, only she was locking lips with one, while the other seemed to be kissing her neck. Someone’s hands were on her breasts. I couldn’t exactly make out whose.

Didn’t look like they were naked, not yet anyway, but the nature of the scene implied there was more to come, and I hoped to God whatever Miranda had done beyond what I
could
see wasn’t something she had chronicled on her digital camera by a third party—or was that a fourth party?

I swallowed down my distaste and went ahead several additional pictures, finding another sequence of images that appeared to take place in a hot tub. If Miranda had a bathing suit on, I couldn’t see it. She held a drink above the foamy waters, and two men and another woman crowded around her.

The lighting was no better than before, and I zoomed in on the faces of Miranda’s fellow partiers. They were so crowded together, faces turned toward Miranda, the two dudes on her either side nuzzling her neck, that I wasn’t sure if I would’ve recognized any of the three if they stood in a lineup.

Though there was something about one of the men that jiggled a nerve in me.

He was blond and his shoulders well-muscled, but that’s about all I could discern definitively.

A name hovered at the back of my mind.
Lance Zarimba
.

Could it be? But he was Sonja Madhavi’s boyfriend, right? So why would he be messing with Miranda at a Caviar Club party?

The woman who was not Miranda was leaning in toward the blond man—kissing him on the cheek, from the looks of things—so I couldn’t see much of her beyond a fuzzy ear and throat.

Still, I thought I’d seen enough.

I froze the slide show and slumped back in my chair, not sure I wanted to go through any more of Miranda’s digital film.

Could be these pics had zip to do with the Caviar Club and were just from Miranda’s attempts at looking for Mr. Goodbar, but my gut told me better.

Geez, Miranda, why
?

I couldn’t help asking.

Why couldn’t a beautiful woman with enough class to have been a symphony debutante and enough chutzpah to be named runner-up Miss America find true love without having to get pawed by a pair of sleazy horn dogs in the process?

Call me a prude, but it flipped my stomach to think that Miranda DuBois had been going to these Caviar Club maul-fests, getting drunk and hooking up with guys—two at a time from the looks of things—when she could’ve had anyone.

Or so it had seemed, looking at her life from the outside in.

It was hard to believe that the baton-spinning, pageant-winning girl I’d known most of my life—and who I’d imagined had more self-esteem than anyone on the planet—would have wanted to debase herself by participating in these alleged sex parties.

But apparently she had.

The “you’re dumped” letter from the Caviar Club proved that she’d been involved.

So did the e-mail tip to Janet.

I could hear my inner feminist railing,
But women should be able to enjoy the same kind of uninhibited, uncommitted, meaningless intimacy that men have for centuries.
What’s wrong with being sexually liberated
?
This is a free country, isn’t it
?

Just because some men were dogs didn’t mean women had to lie down with fleas to be their equals.

God help us all if it did.

Weren’t we supposed to be the smarter sex? (Excluding rogue fembots like Jessica Simpson and Paris Hilton, of course.)

My cell phone rang, and I dug it out of my bag before the Def Leppard ring tone had played more than twice. I recognized the number off the bat.

It was Janet.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I think I’ve got it,” she said in a rush. “I’ve figured out a way to get a ringer into the Caviar Club. I’ve been studying the Web site, or at least the part I can get into with the basic password, and it looks like there are two ways for someone to become a member. You know the first.”

“Submitting your picture,” I replied dutifully.

“Well, it seems that there are two layers of Caviar Club membership,” Janet dashed on. “The first level is for newbies, the Sevrugas, who don’t have control over much of anything. But the second tier, the Belugas, they can invite someone to a party without that invitee having to go through the whole photo evaluation process. I think Miranda was a Beluga. She must’ve been, or else she wouldn’t have tempted me with the secondary password. She couldn’t have known it. Only the Belugas can get to the message board with the party information. The Sevrugas have to get it through the grapevine.”

Ding-ding-ding.

A bell went off in my brain, and it wasn’t the Domino’s man at the door.

Janet continued to yap, but I cut her off before the thought slipped away.

“Did you say Sevruga and Beluga?” I asked, and my tone was no-nonsense.

“Yeah, so what?”

I didn’t exactly tell her that Mother had swiped Miranda’s bag out of her Jag before the police got it, but I did mention finding what I’d thought was a partial shopping list of Miranda’s, a torn bit of paper with Sevruga and Beluga written on it, both expensive caviars, though Sevruga was not quite as pricey as Beluga. I noted, too, the other words that appeared beside each: Caspian and Malossol, respectively.

At which point Janet uttered, “No way. Are you sure?”

“Yes.” What, she didn’t believe me all of a sudden? “Sevruga Caspian and Beluga Malossol.”

“Andy,” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper. “The password to the general area of the Caviar Club’s Web site is ‘Caspian.’”

My ears perked up and I pressed the cell closer to my face, as if that would make her voice louder, make everything crystal clear.

“Hold on a sec.”

I heard a
tap-tap-tap
, like she was typing on her keyboard. Then she paused, and all was quiet for a bit until I caught her breathy, “Oh, my God.”

“What?”

“It’s the secondary password, Andy. ‘Malossol.’ It gets you into the next level of the Web site, into the private board where they post where each party will be held a mere hour before it starts.” She sounded out of her mind giddy. “I’m in, don’t you get it? I can find out where to go, get my ringer in, and snag my story. Are you at your computer?”

“Yes.”

“Go to the Caviar Club’s Web site, Andy. You’ve gotta check this out.”

So I did as I was told, prompted by Janet with appropriate passwords all the way, until I could glimpse the mission statement of the C.C., namely that the purpose of the so-called social club was for beautiful people to mix and mingle with other beautiful people, with invitations extended either by certain anointed Belugas or by submission of photographs through the Web site to be evaluated by the Caviar Club’s owners.

It went from bad to worse.

There was a page of professional photographs of a selected cast of members, all of the men in tight T-shirts with puttied hair and all-weather tans, and the women with shirts unbuttoned to the navel, jeans slung as low as they could go, often posed with each other in suggestive situations.

Social club, my aunt Henrietta.

Janet was right. It was all about sex.

Cissy belonged to more social clubs than I could name—garden clubs, bridge clubs, the Junior League, the AAUW—none of which involved being photographed straddling a slicked-up dude licking her throat.

Ugh.

“You recognize any of the faces in those photos?” Janet asked when I made a remark about how sleazy the poses were.

I told her no and was about to segue into Miranda’s camera and what I’d found so far—namely, the photos I felt sure were taken when the Caviar Club parties were really swinging, so to speak—but Janet didn’t let me get another word out.

She nearly pierced my eardrum when she shrieked, “It just went up, oh, God, it went up!”

Here we went again.

It was like talking to my mother, or playing twenty questions.

“What’s up, for Pete’s sake?”

It was as though I’d pricked a balloon and all the air was whooshing out.

“There’s a party tonight in a rented-out club in Deep Ellum, and it starts in an hour. So we’d better get moving, huh, Andy? There’s so much to do and so little time! Can you get over to my place pronto? I’ll call the stylist for the paper and have her bring over all her tools and makeup, plus a few outfits from the latest fashion shoot, since I’ve seen what’s in your closet and it ain’t pretty. We have to get you looking good enough to eat, or no one will believe that a Beluga would’ve tapped you for membership . . .”