Too Pretty to Die (24 page)

“Nothing else will work as well in this situation,” Janet insisted. “And it’s just pretend. Try to cozy up to Dr. Sonja’s he-man, too, and see if he talks at all about Miranda. If we can tie them together, wouldn’t that be juicy?”

She was practically rubbing her hands together and salivating.

My reaction was far less enthusiastic.

“Oh, God.” I groaned. “I don’t want people to believe I’m cheating on Malone. What if something gets back to him?”

“Please, Andy, it’s just for tonight, and it’s only pretend. Brian won’t ever find out, if you don’t tell him. And even if Cinda Lou flaps her trap, it’ll only make you seem more interesting and less like the geek you are.”

“Gee, thanks.”

Why was I starting to feel like it was Kick Andy in the Teeth Weekend?

“I’ll keep going at the pics on my PhotoShop while you’re gone,” Janet said, gradually shooshing me toward the door. “If I see anything else interesting, I’ll let you know.”

Terrific.

“Oh, oh, the clock is ticking. Let’s get a move on.” She checked her wristwatch. “You’re only twenty minutes late for the party, which isn’t a bad thing. Gives everyone else a chance to have arrived already.”

Whoopee to that.

I couldn’t wait to see which local heathens showed up.

I tried not to dwell on the fact that one of them could very well be a killer.

If I had a choice between spying for Janet at the Caviar Club to-do or having to get a set of rabies shots, I think I would’ve picked the latter.

“Don’t take notes or anything,” Janet was saying. “Just remember names and what they’re doing. Here, take my cell”—she shoved her fancy phone into my sweaty palm—“it has a camera built in. Snap away if you can do it without rousing suspicion. I’ll keep your phone here,” she went on, “in case Malone calls. I can tell him you’re picking up takeout or something, and I’ll have you call him later.”

“Ten-four,” I shot back.

I felt like Maxwell Smart-ass.

No sense asking how I’d gotten myself into this. Every time I found myself doing something idiotic or inane, I could trace it back to the sucker aspect of my personality. I would call it a defect, except for those times when I was bamboozled into doing something for a truly good cause. Such as when I manned a booth at the Nitty-Gritty Girls Club’s bazaar selling pink and blue bracelets to raise money for the neonatal unit at Medical City.

Though I couldn’t exactly put tonight’s escapade in the same category as volunteering for the sake of saving premature babies.

Helping Janet hang onto her job by getting dirt on the Caviar Club and on Miranda DuBois’s connection to it wasn’t a charitable act that I could write off on my income tax.

But I owed her one more, and I aimed to pay off all my debts, even if it meant dressing up like Bimbo Barbie. Never let it be said that Andrea Kendricks didn’t keep her promises, no matter how shameful or humiliating.

Honk!
Honk!

Somebody blasted a car horn just outside, and I saw Janet’s neck crane toward the front windows. “That’s your ride,” she said, “because you certainly cannot arrive at the club in your Jeep.”

Oh, right, heaven forbid.

“I could walk,” I said.

“In those boots?” Janet sniffed, glancing down at the shiny leather with the four-inch heels. “Puh-leeze.”

She had me there.

Yeesh.

Janet wouldn’t let me leave with my beat-up shoulder bag, either. She foisted a sparkly Judith Leiber bag into my hands. It was the size of a glove box and smothered in crystals. If I had to guess, I’d say it was worth a couple thousand dollars.

Scared me to think of carrying it around Deep Ellum.

Besides, I could only fit my ChapStick, my borrowed cell, and some cash inside the tiny purse, but Janet assured me that would do.

“Have the Town Car pick you up in an hour and bring you back here for a debriefing. And, puh-leeze, call me on the cell if you need bailing out. Godspeed and good luck,” she said as she shooed me out the front door.

I half expected her to salute.

“Oh, and be careful. Keep your head down, whatever that means.”

Lord, but it sounded like she was sending me off to battle.

And maybe she was, in a way, which didn’t make me feel any more at ease about my mission.

“I’ll see you soon,” I said, as much a promise as a farewell, and I headed toward the waiting Lincoln, staring down at my feet to avoid cracks in the sidewalk.

I narrowly escaped a tumble off my stiletto boots when my right heel caught itself in the bordering grass; though at least I hadn’t stepped on a crack. Didn’t want to break my mother’s back, or mine, either.

Graceful, I wasn’t.

As I tottered toward the black sedan, I ignored all the warning bells that were going off inside my head, reminding myself I was doing this for Janet and maybe even for Miranda; and I wondered, at the same time, if I’d completely lost my mind, and pegged the answer as a firm, “Hell, yes.”

Perhaps I was my mother’s daughter after all.

Insanity obviously ran in the family.

T
he club’s French name, Bébé Gâté, flashed across the second-story windows of the façade in bright pink neon.

How appropriate, I mused, considering the English translation was something like “spoiled brat.” Seemed to me that it pretty well summed up the crowd I’d be playing poseur amidst this evening.

It was a beautiful old brick building, obviously rehabbed, smack on Elm Street (from which the “Ellum” in Deep Ellum had been corrupted through the years). The club was situated above a sushi restaurant. I didn’t see an entrance in the front, which might’ve been why my driver headed around back.

There, a white awning covered a doorway fiercely guarded by a bouncer who looked like a real-life Buddha, only wearing slouch jeans and a black T-shirt overlaid by enough gold chains and winking bling to make Mr. T proud. At that precise moment, he was opening the brass-handled door to a woman deposited smack in front by a shiny black Mercedes. Apropos for November (
not
), she wore a miniskirt and fur boa.

I stared, and not exactly in awe.

“You said you need me to pick you up?” my driver—whose name was Siddarth—asked, as I sat in the backseat, my breath condensing on the window, making no move to get out.

“Yes, please, in an hour,” I told him, and we synchronized our watches. It was nearly ten-thirty, so that would make pickup time eleven-thirty. Way past my bedtime. I hoped I could stay alert enough to keep track of everyone and relay any scoop in a coherent fashion to Ms. Janet later.

The dude waved me off when I tried to pay him from the cash in my borrowed purse, as he let me know “Miss Graham has taken care of things.”

Oh, she’d taken care of things, all right
, I mused, wishing Janet was in my loaner pinch-toed boots right then instead of me.

I gathered my wits and my courage, and I pushed my way out the door. The bouncer eyed me suspiciously, and I wondered if it was abnormal for Sevrugas or Belugas to arrive at Caviar Club parties in a Lincoln Town Car. Would an Escalade have been more proper? Knowing Janet, she’d bill the fare to the newspaper, and they’d probably gawk at a receipt for, oh, say, a stretch limo Hummer.

Whatever.

It was time to get motivated. I had a role to play.

So I raised my chin to haughty heights as I carefully picked my way toward the club entrance. My goal was to channel Cissy Blevins Kendricks so long as I was acting like a Beluga ingénue, as no one dared question a Highland Park heiress who behaved like, well, a Highland Park heiress. It was all about the attitude.

Okay, that and the Manolo Blahnik boots and Judith Leiber bag. The hair and makeup didn’t hurt, either.

“You new here, babe?” the dude with the muscles and the bling asked, checking me out from head to toe as I approached. Guess his suspicion had faded in favor of ogling.

“I’d of remembered if I’d seen you before, fine-looking thing that you are.”

“Is that so?”

“Oh, yeah, baby, it’s so.”

As he leered, I took a personal moment of silence, realizing this guy wouldn’t have given me a second glance had I been dressed in my usual attire of jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers, sans makeup, with my hair pulled back in a scrunchie. And if I’d been too lazy to put in my contacts and worn my glasses, I doubtless wouldn’t have even garnered a first glance.

I had to remind myself that I wasn’t there to judge the superficial, merely to spy on them. I was incognito, playing the role of Andrea Blevins Kendricks, blue-blooded trust fund baby on the prowl for a boy-toy.

Which meant I could hardly lecture each shallow soul I came up against on the virtue of loving what was on the inside of a person, as it would surely blow my cover . . . and I’d be here all night lecturing besides.

So I just smiled at the Buddha-man who’d pulled wide the door for me, and I said in an exaggerated drawl, “Why, thank you, darlin’.”

If he’d made any attempt to pinch me as I’d passed, I would’ve reverted to my normal self and kicked him in the groin with my lethal boots.

But he didn’t.

So I grabbed the railing and hauled myself up the steps to the second floor, hearing music blaring—it sounded like Shakira—the closer I got to the top.

Before taking the last few steps, I stopped, steadied myself, and quieted my nervous jitters. I’d never been much of an actress, having avoided following in my dramatic mother’s footsteps. She’d done a little theater while a student at SMU, and she thrived on being in the spotlight, even if that spotlight came from the glow of a ballroom chandelier at a charity event.

You can do this, Andy
, I told myself, thinking I never gave myself enough credit for my own accomplishments, as off the wall as they may have been.

There was another thing I knew for sure: I had never let a friend down, and I wasn’t about to start now.

I carried my head high, summoned up all the inner diva I could muster, and completed my climb up the stairwell, to where a set of French doors awaited. I let myself through those, entering a dimly lit foyer with sheet metal flooring and wall niches filled with bronze nudes.

Music pounded from an adjacent room, the archway between draped in silk. I detected shadows and movement beyond the flimsy fabric, the cacophony of laughter and raised voices competing with the Latin beat throbbing through the air.

I didn’t even see the woman standing to my left until she startled me by asking, “Name, please?”

My head swiveled in her direction, and I realized the petite brunette with the clipboard had to be the one Janet had labeled the “skinny bulldog” aka the Caviar Club’s mouthpiece.

Theresa Hurley.

Though she looked anything but ferocious. She was positively tiny.

I doubt she stood more than five feet tall in her stocking feet, hardly threatening by any standards. Indeed, I felt Amazonian as I approached her and towered above, teetering on heels that elevated me to a skyscraping five-nine.

“Your name?” she said again, as if I hadn’t heard her the first time.

“Andrea Kendricks,” I told her, doing my best to look bored in the way that most socialites did, as in,
Ho-hum, one pompous and exclusive party simply blurred into the next
. “Cinda Lou Mitchell tagged me,” I said in a blasé tone, recalling the term Janet had used. I added for effect, “She and I go way back to Hockaday. Oh, the times we had.” I let out a nervous laugh that surely gave me away.

The efficacious Ms. Hurley strained over that clipboard, scrolling a pen down the list of names, making me nervous the nearer she got to the bottom without apparently finding mine listed.

I held my breath until she flipped the page and tapped the paper with her pen. “Here you are, Ms. Kendricks.” She smiled, looking eons friendlier as she said, “You’re one of two new Sevrugas here tonight. Please, go on in and enjoy yourself. There’s plenty of champagne and, of course, caviar.”

“Of course,” I murmured, nonplussed.

But inside I was thinking,
Whew.

I smiled back, hoping mine appeared appropriately haughty; while beneath the tiny pearl buttons on my Ralph Lauren jersey dress, sweat trickled down my spine.

Lucky Break Number One, I decided.

“Oh, and Ms. Kendricks,” the Keeper of the Names piped up before I’d taken a single step toward the silk sheer that separated me from the party, “if you’d just sign this confidentiality form, you can go on in and enjoy yourself.”

Confidentiality form?

“What’s that?” The words popped out before I could stop them.

“I’m surprised Ms. Mitchell didn’t tell you.” The legal-minded Ms. Hurley shoved her clipboard and a pen in my direction. “It’s nothing, really. It merely states that what happens at the club stays at the club, so no one has to worry about censoring themselves.” A tiny smile lit her face. “It’s to protect all our members, whatever their names. Because no one likes a blabbermouth, do they, Ms. Kendricks?”

Was that supposed to be a threat? Because it sounded like a threat to me.

I took the pen from her hand and glanced at the form, which was brief and basically stated the “what happens here, stays here” policy with “dire consequences” resulting from exploiting the privacy of the Caviar Club gatherings or its membership without approval from the ownership, though it didn’t say who the “ownership” was.

I signed the danged thing, scribbling illegibly, because I saw no way out. Besides, I wasn’t exactly doing this on the up and up anyway, so if they wanted to sue me for telling Janet what I saw tonight, they could have at it.

When I handed the clipboard back to Hurley the Hun, she gave me a quick rundown of the rules, like never revealing to nonmembers the location of the parties, never inviting nonmembers to gatherings because only Belugas who’ve reached “tagger” level can do that.

And, “most importantly,” she said, and poked her pen in the air for emphasis, “never, never enter the private room beyond the red velvet drapes. It’s for top tier Belugas only. You can be terminated for such an offense.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” I lied, wondering what was behind said velvet curtain, even before I’d seen it. Was that where the real action was? The kind of stuff worthy of blackmail photos, perchance?