Blood Will Tell (14 page)

"Well?"

"I guess not."

"All right then. Let's go."

"Where?" "The only place in town," he said. The red hand changed to a walking man and he started across Fourth with her in tow. "Nordstrom's."

"Nordstrom's!" Kate flashed back on Jane's closet, at the line of immaculate wool suits and pristine silk shirts hanging there with almost military precision. "Jack! I can't go to Nordstrom's! I've never been inside Nordstrom's, not once, not ever! Besides, I can't afford to spend money like that on clothes I'll only wear one time in my life!"

"It's work," he repeated sternly, "and don't whine about money, you've got plenty left from that job on the Slope last spring." She had more than he knew, she thought, remembering Jane's cash card in her pocket.

All too soon, Nordstrom's loomed up, brownstone-faced and imposing, on the corner of Sixth and D. To Kate, Sixth Avenue looked like the River Styx, and the glass doors of the store like Charon's boat. "Sit," Jack told Mutt, and Mutt, with an expression of saintly resignation, sat down to wait next to the doors.

Nettled at this usurpation of authority over what was her dog, after all, Kate snapped, "She can come in with us." "No," Jack said, holding one of the doors open. "She can't." "Don't you want to come in?" Kate asked Mutt. "You can if you want."

Mutt lifted her muzzle in the direction of the open door; sniffed once and erupted in an enormous sneeze. Eyes wide, she looked from the building to Kate and back again. She shook herself once, all over, and sat down as far from the entrance as she could get without actually being in the street.

A woman in a fur-lined coat that swept behind her like a royal train sailed out of the store, bestowing a gracious smile upon Jack. She saw Mutt at the same time the light at the corner turned green, and crossed the street to avoid walking past her. Jack, still holding the door open, raised one eyebrow. Kate, abandoning all hope, entered therein.

On the other side of the doors it was even worse than she had imagined, a sea of gold-topped glass bottles and glittering rhinestones and patterned silk scarves and patent leather shoes, presided over by a herd of yuppies with perfectly white, perfectly straight teeth, all dressed to those teeth in glittering rhinestones and patterned silk and patent leather and scented with a cacophony of various odors from the gold-topped glass bottles.

No wonder Mutt had sneezed. Jack, with a numb, dumbstruck Kate firmly in tow, headed for the escalator.

Upstairs was worse. Upstairs there was nothing but clothes. Women's clothes, and not a decent pair of work jeans among them. Kate spied a cafe in the back. "Great! Let's get something to eat!"

Jack caught her, literally by her collar, and hauled her back. "We just ate," he said. He was grinning. It was a big grin, a wide grin, oh my yes, the man was certainly enjoying himself, probably hadn't enjoyed himself this much since he'd caught the now ex-FBI agent-in-charge drunk on Fourth Avenue behind the wheel of his own car, unable to explain the presence of the professional woman doing pushups in his lap. Kate definitely bristled, and Jack was delivered from instant and total annihilation only by the approach of a sales clerk, female, lots of teeth, all on display, lots of blonde hair, ditto, lots of height, wearing a pin-striped suit over a cream silk shirt with a gold bar pin at the collar and discreet gold studs in her earlobes. "Are we finding everything all right?" She smiled kindly upon Kate.

It wasn't the "we," it wasn't even the kindly smile. Kate disliked being towered over by anyone, and in that moment she discovered that she especially disliked being towered over by blondes who looked like they would fit nicely into anything tailor made for Marilyn Monroe.

Unaccountably, Jack did not appear to share in this dislike, and greeted the salesclerk with an expression that was half a drool away from outright salivation. "We were looking for some clothes for the lady," he said.

The sales clerk glanced at Kate for a nanosecond before zeroing back in on Jack. "What kind of clothes?" He told her, in detail and at length, gazing with adoration into the big, blue eyes and hanging on every word spoken in the soft, breathy voice. With a disbelief rapidly succeeded by increasing disgust, Kate decided that if Jack had had a tail, it would have been wagging hard enough to power an electric generator. What was it with men and Marilyn Monroe? Even in retreat from the world on her homestead, just from the magazines she subscribed to Kate couldn't help being aware of the cult surrounding a woman who had, let's face it, screwed everything in pants on both sides of both oceans, only to kill herself at the age of thirty-two because, everyone seemed to agree post-mortemly, she felt used and lacked self-esteem. It was Kate's opinion that if she'd kept her fly zipped Monroe would have lived to be ninety, although it was her further opinion that Monroe would rather have been a dead legend than a live, faded ex-beauty queen any day. The only thing tragic men saw in Marilyn Monroe's untimely demise was the chance they'd missed to lay her.

By which it may be seen that Kate Shugak had no patience with the self-destructive. Neither did she have any patience with those who idolized the self-destructive, down to the beauty mark on their upper lips. Her chin, firm to begin with, became more in evidence. Jack, who hadn't survived a nine-year, on-again, off-again relationship with Kate Shugak without learning a few things, noticed the chin immediately. He broke off his conversation with his new best friend to say smoothly,

"Alana, may I introduce Kate Shugak."

In lieu of Mutt, Kate bared her teeth. "Alana." Alana smiled in a way that lifted the beauty mark on her upper lip several millimeters and Jack's temperature several more degrees, and said, just as smoothly, as if she and Jack had been rehearsing the first entrance of Ekaterina Ivana Shugak into the hallowed halls of this northern shopping Mecca for the past year, "Jack--" So it was Jack already, was it? "--Jack tells me you're looking for some evening clothes." Her eyes ran down Kate's body, and with what must have been either monumental natural restraint or excellent and intensive training did not faint at the sight of well-worn blue jeans and white T-shirt, accessorized by a Nike windbreaker and matching Nike sneakers. The scar on Kate's throat was observed, considered for a moment in context with available collar styles, and dismissed. "How tall are you, Kate?"

"Five feet one," Kate lied.

"Including the Nikes," Jack said, and she damned him with a glare.

"And what is your favorite color?" The question was accompanied by a smile of what appeared to be genuine interest.

Kate looked Alana--what kind of a name was that for a grown woman, anyway?--Kate looked Alana straight in the eye and said firmly, "Khaki."

Nordstrom's didn't hire its employees off the back of a turnip truck.

The smile didn't waver. The immaculately coiffed head even gave an approving nod. "A good, solid neutral that goes with everything." The breathy but perfectly modulated voice dropped to a confidential murmur.

Jack sighed a dizzy appreciation of the artistry involved, careful it wasn't loud enough for Kate to hear. "May I ask, have you had your palette done?" Whereupon Jack Morgan had the rare and glorious experience of seeing Kate Shugak totally at sea. "My what?"

Jack bit his lip and stared hard at the opposite wall.

"Your palette," Alana said, irritatingly patient. "Your colors. Are you winter, summer, spring or fall? Khaki is a good color for you, yes, I can see it setting off your skin and hair, but I think a warm peach, or even a red, yes, a red might just bring out even more highlights. In fact, there's a little dress on this rack--"

"I don't wear dresses," Kate stated.

One impeccably penciled eyebrow raised ever so slightly. "Tuxedo pants it is then," Alana said without missing a beat. "This way." She wove her way through the racks and around a shopper scrutinizing the inside seam of something covered in gold sequins that Kate tried not to look at too closely.

"Here we are." Alana held the pants up for inspection. They were made of a heavy, dull black silk, with a thin strip of a lighter weight, shinier silk running down the outside seams. Kate took the hanger. The best that could be said was that they had pockets and a front fly. She held them up to her waist, and didn't even try to keep the triumph out of her voice when she observed, "I'm terribly sorry, but these seem to be about six inches too long." "We can hem them for you," Alana said.

This time the triumph reached Kate's eyes. "I need them by seven o'clock tonight," she said gently.

Alana took the hanger from her and replied, even more gently, "We'll have them ready by five."

Jack started to laugh, caught Kate's eye and turned the laugh into a cough.

It went like that for the next hour, the longest hour of Kate's life.

Alana was pleasant, knowledgeable and terrifyingly efficient. Kate loathed her. She loathed the first three tops Alana presented for her inspection, too. The first was covered with gold and black sequins. "I don't do sequins," Kate said. The second was peach and had ruffles.

"Ruffles," Kate said, aghast. "Rufflesi Who do I look like, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm?" "You can see through it!" she said of the third top, and of the fourth she said, a little desperately, that the neckline of the beaded red jacket was too low, her bra would show. Whereupon Alana whisked them off to the lingerie department and produced a variety of skimpy brassieres that didn't look as if they would hold up a sneeze, let alone Kate's breasts. Jack, under the influence of the sight of so much silk and lace, lost his head and suggested underwear to match, since Kate's sensible, comfortable white briefs might produce a line beneath the silk of the tuxedo pants. It was immediately evident by the quickly suppressed horror in Alana's eyes that underwear lines beneath tuxedo pants were unthinkable, and a lacy pile of nylon bikini briefs appeared next to the skimpy brassieres.

Kate hated nylon briefs. The nylon felt clammy when you first put it on and then after it warmed up it felt as if there was nothing there. She hated bikini briefs, too, which had an inconvenient tendency to ride up into your crotch every time you bent over to pick reds out of a net. She did her best to explain this to both Jack and Alana, who selected bra and briefs and added them to the pile, unheeding. Kate caught Jack looking at a rack of those bra-panty combination things she'd found behind Enakenty's bedroom door and in Jane's lingerie drawer, and snarled, "Don't even think about it." Jack tested the level of resistance in her expression and wisely moved on.

Shoes were next, and after five minutes Kate decided hell was a foot, and the devil a shoe salesman. The devil in this case took the form of a young man named Garth with a lot of stiff brown hair, more teeth than John Kennedy, Jr." and a double-breasted, pin-striped suit so sharp you could cut yourself on it. Garth went into raptures over Kate's tiny feet and produced a pair of black spike heels carved from the carcass of some unidentified reptile, with toes that might have had enough room for the point of a pencil and an instep designed by the Marquis de Sade. "A pair of our finest heels," said Garth, beaming.

"To give you that little extra advantage in height," Alana said. She'd become remarkably adept at reading Kate's expression by that time and added, "But then, perhaps some of us are happy with our height the way it is." "I don't know about us," Kate said through her teeth, "but I certainly am."

Not one to give up without a fight, Alana said to Jack in the tone one used to confer with equals, "You know, this pair would make the line of the pants."

"The line of the pants will have to make it on its own," Kate said, still through her teeth. "I have never worn high heels in my life, and I am not about to learn how tonight."

Jack and his new best friend gave her a long, thoughtful look, exchanged a commiserative glance and compromised on a pair of black leather flats with a heel no higher than the soles of Kate's Nikes. "The soles are too slick," Kate said, by then without much hope. Garth produced rubber heel and toe protectors and had them on the shoes before they went into the box.

Kate fought her way out of Nordstrom's finally and Mutt bounced to her feet with a joyous bark. Kate glared at her. "Where the hell were you when I needed you?" "Now the hair," Jack said, bags hanging from both hands, "Alana gave me the address of her stylist."

"What's wrong with my hair?" Kate said, voice rising as they stepped into the street.

"Just a light trim," Jack said reassuringly, "nothing major. Alana says your hairstyle is perfect for you."

Kate stopped in the middle of Sixth Avenue. "Jack." He stopped, too, eyebrows up in a mildly inquiring expression, thoughts focused on a vision of Kate future. "Jack," she said, this time with more force.

He blinked at her. "What, Kate?"

She spaced out her words, enunciating each syllable with great care. "I

Cut My Own Hair. I Just Did, Two Weeks Ago. It Doesn't Need Cutting Again This Soon."

His brow cleared. "Oh, we're just talking about a trim, Kate," he said reassuringly, "even it up a little, maybe some conditioning, you know, to make it shinier, softer, more manageable."

"Dammit, Jack!"

At that moment the light changed and three horns went off, one for each lane of traffic. Jack, surprised, looked around. "For heaven's sake, Kate, what are we doing out here in the middle of the street? Come on, anybody'd think you were fresh out of the bush."

And the son-of-a-bitch had the gall to grin at her.

Twenty minutes later Kate found herself ensconced in a high chair at Winterbrooke Hair, immobilized in a plastic cape while Jack conferred with his second new best friend of the day, a trim woman with an artfully tousled mop of auburn hair and an assessing eye. They inspected Kate with the air of a pair of genetic scientists altering the latest in designer genes. Some mention was made of bangs. Kate caught Jack's eye with a glance that vowed castration. "Maybe not bangs," he said.

"An off-center part, perhaps," Jeri suggested, "to soften the effect?"