Too Pretty to Die (22 page)

Get me looking good enough to eat
?

Hello? Did she just insult my wardrobe?

Tap me for membership
?

Janet expected
me
to be her ringer inside the Caviar Club?

How much crack had she been smoking?

“No way,” I said, but she headed me off like a verbal bumper car.

“See you in ten,” she chirped, quickly adding, “Oh, and leave the boyfriend at home.”

“
Janet
!” I screamed into my cell, but it was too late.

She’d hung up.

I
t wasn’t hard getting out of the condo without raising Malone’s suspicion about what I was up to, since I took off while the hockey game was still late in the second period (with the Blues down 2 to 1).

Ipso facto, he barely took note of the fact that I’d grabbed my sweat jacket and purse before toddling out the door, though I’d done the whole “’Bye, sweetie, have to run to Janet’s for a while, but I’ll be back later. Don’t wait up.”

I had grave doubts he’d even registered where I’d said I was going. If anyone gave him a pop quiz after the Stars had finished pummeling the Blues (which I assumed they would, since Malone constantly complained about the slump his hometown boys were in this season), he’d probably squint up at the ceiling, scratch his chin and murmur, “Hmm, did she go to her mother’s? No? Am I warm?”

That’s why God invented cell phones—so distracted boyfriends watching sports could hunt down missing wives and girlfriends once the final whistle blew. It was then, and only then, that the levels of testosterone came way down, the dudes popped out of their beer-induced comas, looked around, and realized their women had disappeared.

If I were an alien set to conquer Earth, I’d do it during the Super Bowl or the Stanley Cup finals. Less resistance.

I only left the condo under duress, of course, as I would’ve rather stayed at home with Malone and the hockey game, especially after having had such a lousy day.

Reluctantly, I ventured outdoors, dragging my feet as I headed toward my Jeep, and let myself in. I climbed up behind the wheel, slinging my purse to the passenger seat, where it landed with a gentle thud. It didn’t contain much besides my wallet, a tube of lip balm, and my cell phone.

Oh, yeah, and Miranda’s memory card.

I’d already decided to let Janet copy the photos before I turned the tiny disk over to the police in the morning.

Why not
? I’d asked myself.

So long as Ms. Society Snoop promised not to print them in the paper. What else was I going to do with them besides hand them over to Anna Dean, who’d probably discount them anyway, seeing as how the cops were so intent on labeling Miranda’s death a suicide? And I would never show them to my mother, considering how much she wanted to believe the Miranda DuBois she’d watched grow up was practically a saint. I couldn’t imagine Debbie Santos seeing them, either. She’d surely rather remember her daughter in pigtails and pinafores than with two men kissing her in a hot tub.

Though I knew the shots would give Janet goose bumps, as they’d further substantiate her theory that Miranda had sent her that e-mail threatening to bring down the snooty membership of the entire Caviar Club.

I had a pipe dream that maybe such a gift would absolve me of any debts I owed La Graham, so I wouldn’t have to go through with infiltrating the Caviar Club party that started at ten, which might as well have been midnight as far as I was concerned.

Seriously, ten o’clock was my bedtime.

Malone and I could barely keep our eyes open once the evening news came on. It was a struggle for us to stay awake long enough to find out the weather forecast.

Sad but true.

Though if Janet had a mind to make me do this thing for her, I didn’t think pleading an early bird curfew was going to have any effect.

Janet Rutledge Graham had been reared in the Park Cities by a mother as tough as mine, and she wasn’t one to suffer wimps gladly.

So I had no choice but to suck it up and be the kind of friend who’d offer support in her time of need, just as she’d done for me plenty of times.

If I had to endure a glamour puss makeover so I could fake my way through drinks with a bunch of Big D’s sex-starved pretty boys and girls, surely I would survive. I’d had to wear hot pants and stuff my bra to help a prep school chum in trouble, so vamping it up to pump information out of so-called Sevrugas and Belugas at the Caviar Club couldn’t be much worse, could it? Give me an hour and I’d get enough for Janet to write her danged story. Then I’d get the hell out of there, before anyone could say “Louis Vuitton.”

Janet certainly wouldn’t have a problem with that, eh?

Well, I’d find out soon enough, since traffic was light heading south on Central Expressway, and it was just another ten minutes to her place.

Her apartment was well south of my Prestonwood digs. The 1940s-era complex in Knox-Henderson had been renovated and relandscaped, so it was truly sitting pretty. Her hardwood floors and working fireplace were drop-dead cool, though I figured there was just about a two-week window in January when burning wood seemed feasible. The gentrified area where Janet lived bordered my mother’s beloved Highland Park and was a hop, skip, and a jump from Deep Ellum, where there were plenty of clubs and restaurants, one of which was playing host to the Caviar Club’s hush-hush party this evening.

I wondered if Janet lived close enough to walk.

Or, rather,
run
, since that’s likely how fast I’d be moving once I decided to hightail it out of the desperate singles soiree.

The power of positive thinking.

Uh-huh.

I hung onto that tendril of optimism, thin though it was, as I parked the Jeep, locked it tight, and dragged myself toward Janet’s apartment. She flung open the door before I had even reached the Welcome mat, reaching out to yank me inside.

“Where’ve you been? We’ve been waiting on you
forever
,” she said, as if it had taken two days for me to get there and not twenty minutes.

I barely had a chance to dig the Baggie with the memory card from my purse and hand it over to Ms. J, explaining what it was and suggesting she upload the party pics before I gave the minidisk and all its files to Deputy Chief Dean come tomorrow.

“Photos from club bashes? Are you sure?” she’d practically squealed at me, and I admitted that I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but I had a strong feeling.

“Your intuition is working overtime lately, Andy, but then I’m a lot like Oprah. I say we should listen closely to that voice inside us,” she remarked, then reconsidered and added, “only not the one that tells us we’re fat. That one sucks.”

What about the one that told you to get your lips inflated
? I wanted to ask. But I didn’t.

“Can’t wait to take a look at these babies!”

After she’d gleefully snatched the Baggie from my hands—and before she disappeared into her bedroom, where she kept her computer—she quickly introduced me to an ultrathin woman with fluffy blond hair and perfectly outlined eyes and lips named Suzy Bee, the stylist from the
Park Cities Press
, who set me down on a chair in Janet’s living room where track lighting rained down on my un-made-up skin.

“You’re not going to cover up my freckles, are you?” I asked, because I liked my freckles. They’re the only things that kept me from being so ghostly white that I appeared as though I spent my daylight hours in a coffin.

“Just relax,” Suzy told me, while she whipped open a multitiered makeup case and began slapping foundation and powder on my face as I closed my eyes and winced.

I hated makeup with a passion. The most I wore on average days was mascara and lip gloss, never base, which had always felt like a face mask. If I’d aspired to be a clown, I would’ve joined the circus. If Mary Kay Ash were alive, I know she’d put a pox on me for saying so, but I just liked my skin to breathe.

“Sit still, Andrea, and don’t scrunch up your forehead, please,” Suzy commanded, and I tried to relax beneath the bath towel she’d draped around me. Like she was afraid she’d splatter her sparkly pink eye shadow on my sweatshirt and ruin it forever.

Every now and then Suzy would instruct me to open my eyes and look up or look down as she lined my lashes with a pencil, then layered on the mascara. My nose started to itch, but I was afraid to reach up and scratch; so I crinkled it, feeling like Elizabeth Montgomery in
Bewitched
. Only if I’d really been Samantha, I could’ve wrinkled my nose and zapped myself out of that chair and into my living room, next to Malone on the sofa in front of the hockey game.

Man, but witches had it made.

“We’re almost done,” Suzy said after what seemed an eternity, though I kept my eyes open at this point, my attention directed on the door to Janet’s bedroom where she was silently—way too silently—checking out the images from Miranda’s digital camera.

I’d expected to hear a few oohs or aahs, kind of similar to the noises one made when watching Fourth of July fireworks.

Instead,
nada
.

“I did Miranda DuBois’s makeup once,” Suzy Bee remarked out of the blue, and my focus instantly diverted.

“You knew Miranda?” I said, realizing then that she must’ve overheard my conversation with Janet about the photos.

It was hard to be quiet when Ms. Megaphone was anywhere in the vicinity. Janet’s pipes operated at a decibel level more akin to a jet airplane engine, twice that when she was on her cell phone.

Suzy Bee tossed her head, flipping light blond hair from her eyes and screwing her mouth up in concentration as she lined my lips. “It was for a photo shoot,” she said, talking while she worked. “She was having new head shots done by Esther Gorman, you heard of her?”

I nodded, knowing full well that Esther Gorman was one of the hottest photogs in Big D. “She shot my mother for the
PCP
’s ‘Best Dressed’ issue,” I said, adding, “ten years in a row.” Until they’d retired Cissy to their Hall of Fame.

After Suzy Bee advised me not to move my head or risk the outline of my lips stretching up to my nose, she finished what she’d started to say. “Anyway, I did Ms. Dubois’s hair and makeup for her shoot for
D Magazine
, and she was as sweet as pie. Didn’t say a bad word about anyone, except that horn dog Dick Uttley.” Suzy pressed her glossy lips into a sour-looking moue. “That man wears more pancake than anyone I’ve ever worked on, and he still thinks he’s God’s gift to women. He pinched my ass while I was doing his face for a PSA for PBS.”

“Eww,” I said in sympathy.

I pictured the fatherly dude with the wrinkles and shellacked hair who so earnestly delivered the evening news, and I wondered if he’d tried to play footsies with Miranda while they were on-air. Then my crazy brain went beyond that thought to another: Would it have been possible for Dick to buy his way into the Caviar Club to take a nibble? Or did he get enough action on his own, utilizing his anchorman persona to reel in the piranhas? Because I knew there were plenty of piranhas swimming around this city’s fish pond to make for ample male bait.

“Ms. DuBois had such pretty skin,” Suzy went on, though I’d only been half listening. “It was like porcelain, really, not an enlarged pore to be seen. She was worried about her eyelids sagging and her lips being too small. She said she’d gotten some e-mails about how old she looked on high definition, and she was thinking of having some work done. I told her she was nuts. She looked beautiful just the way she was.”

Oh, Miranda had some work done, all right, I mused, thinking Suzy was right. Ms. DuBois should’ve left well enough alone. If she had, she might still be around.

Instead, she’d gone to Dr. Sonja, who’d truly fixed her clock, as my daddy used to say. It wasn’t a good thing.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if Debbie Santos decided to slap a big ol’ lawsuit on the Dermatologist-to-the-Deluded right quick after her plane landed from Brazil, and I wouldn’t blame her a bit.

While she was at it, maybe she’d sue the Caviar Club, too, for rejecting her daughter and pushing Miranda into such a state that she’d put her life at risk by threatening to expose people who had everything to lose if she ratted them out.

At least that was my take on it.

Though I knew the Highland Park P.D. felt differently. About how Miranda’s life had ended, I mean. No one could refute that both Dr. Sonja’s botched injections and the “you’re fired” letter from the Caviar Club had been mitigating factors in Miranda’s death. Where my conclusion differed from Anna Dean and her merry band of Highland Park detectives wasn’t in
how
Miranda had died, but in who’d done it.

“. . . she talked about how attracted she was to some guy she’d met at a party, but she wasn’t sure it would work out because he wasn’t altogether available,” Suzy Bee was saying.

Again I snapped to attention.

“Miranda was seeing an unavailable guy?” I asked, not an easy trick while Suzy applied two thousand layers of lipstick. “As in, he was married?”

“I didn’t pry.” Suzy shrugged her skinny shoulders. “That’s all she said and then she changed the subject real quick.”

Unavailable, huh
?

Like her co-anchor Dick Uttley, I thought, except that didn’t make sense. Suzy had just mentioned Miranda trashing him. Unless Miranda realized she’d slipped when she blabbed about wanting someone she couldn’t have—if that someone was her married co-anchor—and covered up by talking smack about Dick.

I shuddered at the very thought of Miranda shagging Richard Uttley.

Did I say “Eww” already?

Then again, I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to do the horizontal mambo with Larry King, and he’d been married, like, four million times.

“A little flat ironing to smooth out your hair, and we’re done, hon,” Suzy Bee promised, and I breathed a sigh of relief that this torture was nearly over.

How long had I been sitting in that chair
?

Half an hour? Forty-five minutes?

Was the hockey game over yet, and was Malone wondering if I’d run away from home?