Blue Blood: A Debutante Dropout Mystery (2 page)

“Trey, darling,” Mother purred, “why don’t you tell Andrea about the time you played the pipe organ for the pope?”

I wasn’t fast enough to escape to the ladies’ room.

“All right.” He cleared his throat and opened his mouth so I could see the hunk of chive stuck between his front teeth. “It was four years ago, no, five, excuse me, when I made a pilgrimage to Turkey to find the answer to my quest for the meaning of life,” Mr. Maxwell Number Three started up, Mother egging him on with gentle coos and keeping me in line with nudges under the table until I was sure my shin was black and blue.

“. . . it was in Istanbul when I ran into a priest with one leg who’d lost his church organist to a tragic rug-weaving accident . . .”

I didn’t even pretend to listen. Instead, I scoured the Palm’s extensive wine list, wishing I’d ordered something stronger than Perrier with lemon.

Wondering how I’d ever fallen for another of Mother’s schemes.

Thinking that, if they didn’t bring me a plain old hamburger as I’d requested instead of the filet mignon my mother had indicated to the waiter behind her hand, I’d order every damned dessert on the menu and rot out the teeth she’d spent so much money to straighten and whiten when I was growing up.

Though Mother owed me a lot more than chocolate mousse.

And she would pay for it.

Dearly.

T
he phone rang, shattering my dreams, which had something to do with a purple-haired woman and a handsome televangelist saying, “Praise the Lord” a lot and trying to pry money from my hands in order to save starving children in Nepal.

It rang again, and I peeled open an eye just wide enough to read the glowing arms of my alarm clock.

Five-thirty.

I groaned and rolled over, thinking this was just part of the nightmare that had started with the set-up at the Palm and had ended with a headache requiring Excedrin P.M. and watching late, late night TV until I’d fallen asleep. Which accounted for the dream about the televangelist and his wigged sidekick.

Maybe it was Cissy, calling to spoil the start of the day since she’d managed to do such a bang-up job ruining the previous evening by forcing me to endure the company of a philosophical Mensa pipe organist during one of the longest dinners of my life. Besides, she was the only one I knew who’d dial me up before the sun had risen. Tormenting her only child was more fundamental to her than sleep.

When the phone rang twice more, I fumbled for the receiver before my voice mail could pick up. “Okay, okay, I’m up already,” I groaned.

“Andrea?”

The voice that said my name wasn’t my mother’s smooth drawl. It seemed familiar somehow, though I couldn’t quite place it, not at the crack of dawn when my normally sharp senses were still snoozing.

“Andrea Kendricks?”

“Yes?”

“Oh, God, it’s me, Molly O’Brien.”

“Molly?”

“You’ve got to help me, Andy, please.”

Fear shook her every word, and I was suddenly wide-awake. Last time I’d seen Molly, we’d shared a place at Columbia College in Chicago, before she’d dropped out and run off to Paris with a Hemingway wannabe sporting a long black ponytail and a nose ring.

“I’m in trouble, real trouble. They came to my apartment this morning and got me out of bed and I had to leave David with my landlady . . .”

“Hey, slow down.” She was talking so fast I could hardly understand what she was saying. I sat up, reached for the lamp, and switched it on. Blinking at the flood of brightness, I felt around for my glasses and knocked a paperback off the night table.

“Take a deep breath and start over,” I told her.

“I’m at the police station,” she blurted out.

At that point, I was the one who needed to take a deep breath. “Which one?”

“Far North Dallas,” she cried like someone whose house was on fire. “They said Bud’s dead and that I killed him.”

The terror in her voice shot through me faster than a cup of caffeine.

I didn’t stop to ask who Bud was. I kicked off the covers and swung my legs over the side of the bed, telling her as confidently as I could, “Just hold on. I’ll be right there.”

Then I hung up and called Mother.

I
had met Molly as a freshman in high school.

She had been on scholarship at Hockaday, and I was there because my mother had been a Hockaday girl and couldn’t imagine I’d go anywhere else, least of all—God forbid—to public school. Molly had been quiet, pretty with her dark hair, fair skin, and more shape than any teenager deserved, but a loner because of her lack of social standing. I, on the other hand, had enough good background to go around, what with being half Blevins and half Kendricks, two of Dallas’s oldest families, if anything about Dallas can truly be called “old.” But I was no more popular than she.

Gawky and flat where others were graceful and curved, I made up for my lack of poise and T&A with an overflow of creativity. To my mother’s chagrin, I didn’t try out for field hockey, golf, or tennis. Instead, I experimented with brushstrokes and ink strokes, like a modern-day Mary Cassatt. I volunteered to paint murals over graffiti-covered walls in the city, and gleefully slaved over graphics and layout for the yearbook and school paper. While I was so-so with watercolors and oils, I was daVinci with freehand drawings. I once overheard a teacher tell another that I was “a patchwork purse in a sea of Guccis,” which may have been devastating to my self-esteem had I not taken it as a compliment.

Molly and I sat next to each other in art class, which bonded us more permanently than Elmer’s craft glue. She wanted to be a fashion designer and whipped up the wildest pint-sized outfits that she’d display on Barbie dolls, hoping to work her way up to real people. Before she’d entered Hockaday, she’d lived with a foster family on the outskirts of the Park Cities. I was the only child of Cissy and Stanley Kendricks of Beverly Drive in Highland Park. She taught me what it was like to grow up with nothing, and I showed her what it meant to be raised from the pages of the Neiman Marcus catalog. We both envied the other somehow, which sealed our friendship tighter than spit or blood.

Long before graduation, we’d made a pact to attend Columbia College, a small art school in downtown Chicago. Despite Cissy’s threats to disown me if I didn’t attend a Texas university and rush her beloved Pi Phi, I followed my heart and moved to the shores of Lake Michigan. I settled in quickly, despite the weather and the tiny off-campus apartment Molly and I rented. My course load was heavy on graphic arts and basic computer, while Molly studied fashion. Somewhere along the way, she met Sebastian, with his nose ring and ponytail. He’d filled her head with talk of Hemingway’s Paris and reminded her that the greatest couturiers hailed from the land of Gitanes and Gauloises (aka, the brands of stinky cigs he’d pretentiously smoked). Little more than halfway through our studies, she packed up, bid me “adieu,” and flew the coop.

Though I got a few postcards from her initially, after six months, I didn’t hear a peep. She never returned to Chicago, and I concentrated on my own life, without her in it. A handful of years later, after guilt and homesickness drove me home, I heard from the friend of a friend that Molly had resurfaced in Big D, alone and with a child in tow. Word had it she was serving cocktails in order to support them both. I’d thought of looking her up, but was so busy starting my web design business—and enduring Mother’s schemes to marry me off—that I never even cracked the Yellow Pages to track her down. We hadn’t spoken in almost a decade.

Until this.

I phoned the private line—the “pink phone,” as I’d always called it—and woke my mother in two rings.

She lived there alone with a handful of staff. Sixteen rooms and guest quarters, but she couldn’t bear to sell the place. I’d been raised in that house. Daddy had died there. And Mother said it was too full of memories to let go.

I could hear the rustle of sheets as she breathed a soft, “Hello?”

“It’s me,” I said.

“Andrea, for heaven’s sake.” I could picture her pushing the pink silk shade off her eyes and into the blond puff of hair. “My first good night’s sleep in . . . God, I don’t know how long . . . and you’ve just ruined it.”

“Good morning, Mother.” I was pulling on my jeans as I spoke, the receiver caught between my jaw and shoulder. “I need your help,” I told her, echoing Molly’s own words.

“At this hour? Whatever for?”

“A friend’s been accused of murder.”

“Stop teasing, Andrea.”

“It’s Molly O’Brien.”

I heard her sharp intake of breath. “The Hockaday scholarship girl? The one who had a child out of wedlock?”

My mother was nothing if not quick. “She needs a lawyer, a criminal lawyer, so could you call the firm and see if they can send someone over to the Far North Dallas substation to get her out?”

“Why couldn’t you have listened to me, darling? Have you ever heard of a Pi Phi getting arrested?”

“Oh, please, not again.” It was like a broken record. “It’s too early for a lecture.”

She sighed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you,” I said to show her that the Little Miss Manners classes she’d enrolled me in when I was five had not been for naught.

I got off the phone and finished zipping my jeans. I drew my nightshirt over my head, knocking my glasses askew in the process. Found a bra in my top dresser drawer and unearthed a paint-flecked sweatshirt from the closet.

After slipping my feet into a pair of driving moccasins, I headed for the bathroom, lingering just long enough to squint at my predawn self in the mirror. At least my skin hadn’t broken out overnight, though my shoulder-length hair was seriously flattened on one side. Since no amount of brushing could fluff it up, I settled for a ponytail. I pushed my glasses onto my crown and splashed cold water on my face, drying off with a thick terry towel.

A fast gargle with Listerine, then I went in search of my purse, which had a way of getting lost despite the fact that there were few places for it to hide in my nine-hundred-square-foot condominium. It was a far cry from Mother’s house on Beverly Drive, but I felt comfortable here. I was only five feet five and a hundred twenty pounds. I didn’t need a lot of room. Besides, I’d been waited on hand and foot since I was born, and I rather liked taking care of myself, even if it meant my spoons were stainless steel instead of silver.

Outside, the stars still clung to the sky like thumbtacks, the moon close to full. It was colder than I’d anticipated, and I nearly went back for a coat.

A cat darted out from beneath a nearby car as I approached my Jeep Wrangler, but otherwise all was still.

The two-storied townhouses and condos that surrounded mine crouched in staggered shadows against the navy backdrop. Most of the windows were dark. Yellow bug lights gleamed on every porch.

I drove off in a sputter of engine, making it to the Far North Dallas substation in a record seven minutes.

My cell phone rang as I pulled into the parking lot, thick with blue and white Ford Tauruses and Crown Victorias. I angled the Jeep into a space, cut the motor, and picked up.

“Andrea?”

“Mother,” I sighed, unable to keep the relief from my voice. “You did get a hold of someone at the firm?” The woman could throw a catered affair for five hundred in the blink of an eye. I had to believe she could summon a lawyer on short notice.

“I called J.D. directly,” she informed me, sounding pleased with herself despite the circumstances. J.D. was J.D. Abramawitz of Abramawitz, Reynolds, Goldberg, and Hunt—aka, ARGH—one of the top law firms in Texas. “He said he’d send a man to the police station to meet you. Though, God knows, I don’t understand why you feel the need to bail out that scholarship girl.”

“She used to be my best friend.”

“If only you’d spend time at the Junior League . . .”

“I’ve got to go.”

I put away the phone and locked the Jeep even though it was parked in a lot full of cop cars. These days, nothing was guaranteed.

I had only been to the police station once before when I’d had my car broken into and my stereo ripped off. It wasn’t anything like what you saw on television. Not the Far North Dallas substation, anyhow. The area was relatively crime-free, or at least as close as you could get these days, and seemingly worlds apart from neighborhoods to the south, east, and west, where daily drug busts and homicides made the nightly news with frightening regularity.

Chairs lined one wall, but all were empty. Above them hung posters with safety tips.
UNLOAD YOUR FIREARM BEFORE CLEANING
, one warned, and another,
DON
’
T SHARE NEEDLES
. Whatever happened to the good old days of
LOOK BOTH WAYS BEFORE YOU CROSS THE STREET
?

My mocs made noisy slaps on the linoleum as I approached the crop-haired desk clerk, interrupting her perusal of
People
magazine.

I could see movement through the glass doors to my right, the back of a woman’s dark head, and I wondered if that was Molly. There didn’t seem to be much else going on this early in the morning.

“Can I help you?”

I tried to look poised and in control, not like a thirty-year-old web designer whose clients were mostly penniless nonprofits. “I’m here to see Molly O’Brien,” I said, hoping I sounded authoritative. “She was brought in about an hour ago.”

“Ah, the waitress who offed her boss,” she said, perking up.

“
Allegedly
offed her boss,” I quickly corrected, realizing now who Bud was. But that was about all I knew.

“You her lawyer?” she asked and gave me the once-over, wrinkling her nose so that I was tempted to give the sleeve of my sweatshirt a sniff. It had a nice smudge of cobalt blue on the front from some recent work in oils, but was otherwise clean.

“I’m a relative,” I told her. “Has she been formally charged?”

“She’s still being questioned.”

“Can I see her?”

She hesitated, squinting at me before giving a nod, apparently deciding I was harmless enough. Then she pushed a clipboard at me. “Sign in.”