If Looks Could Kill (19 page)

"Then again," Chris added, just as deliberately, "that could have been the weekend I was entertaining the St. Louis Cardinals. One at a time." She paused, her voice chilling. "Except the batboy, of course. He had school the next day."

"So," Mac offered quietly behind her in his best defusing tone of voice, "we're looking for someone who knows both of Chris's pseudonyms... you don't have any others you'd like to get off your chest, do you?"

Chris retreated with a wry smile. "Do you count the alias I use for the phone sex line I run?"

Chris could almost see the minimal betrayal of amusement he'd allow. He'd evidently finally found his cigarettes, too. Either that or he was just playing with matches. Chris heard a rasping, and then caught the sharp whiff of sulfur. Either way, it smelled better than the pine cleaner scent on the detective.

"Then we're looking for someone who knows Chris's two pseudonyms. Someone intelligent enough to have gotten away with this three times without being caught."

"Or," Lawson countered, "someone who's pretty angry that they haven't been noticed yet."

Chris felt that one right in her chest. She turned away from her window to see that Mac took the news with a raised eyebrow and a considering look her way.

"Good point," he admitted. "He's sending letters. That means he either really hates her, or really loves her, and wants her to get the message."

It was getting hard to breathe again. "I'll send a letter right away."

It seemed, though, that she'd been left behind.

"Someone with access to St. Louis," Mac was saying. "Brentwood in particular."

Lawson gave Chris another of those pointed looks. "With St. Louis being TWA's hub, no real trick there."

"It's not Dinah," Chris insisted.

"Is it you?" Lawson countered.

Chris turned from the window then and challenged her face-to-face. "No."

She wondered if she sounded certain enough. She couldn't tell by the expression on Lawson's face. The only two expressions the woman wore well seemed to be disbelief and ravenous curiosity. She was trying on the former now, and it pissed Chris off.

It would have pissed her off a whole lot more if she were certain about anything in this situation.

"So," she said, "you're telling me we're looking for someone who lives anywhere in the country, who figured out who I am, might be a woman, is somehow fixated enough on the Livvy Beckworth books that she—or he—wants to make them into participational art, and is probably figuring out how to get hold of an oleander bush in St. Louis."

"You want to give me one good reason why you keep qualifying this perp as a possible man?" Lawson demanded. "Even with a woman's name on that box?"

"That name doesn't mean anything," Chris insisted. "It doesn't take all that much to dress up, or even have somebody else go in and get your mail from a post office box for you. Heck, I've wandered around here in disguise and nobody's caught me. Why should it be so hard to get away with it in a metropolitan area of two million?"

"Here?" Mac demanded. "When? Not when I was here."

Chris gave him another grin. "You helped me across the street the other day. Seems to me, I remember planting a big kiss on your cheek."

That very cheek turned a commensurate shade of pink. His eyes grew in confounded silence.

"You see what you expect to see," she told him. "Even cops. It's an amazingly easy process, once you know the tricks."

"And you know the tricks."

"That Scottish Play."

"So we really haven't gotten anywhere." He paused to take a long pull from a slightly crumpled-looking cigarette. "Except that the perp knows your secrets."

"Not all of them," Chris countered.

"Like you said," Lawson challenged. "Don't assume anything."

Chris knew exactly how that should make her feel. It made her feel like crawling under the table and hiding.

* * *

The sunset that evening was breathtaking, the kind that only happens on the edge of spring. Clear, crisp, the breeze faint and the sky brilliant in jewel tones of peacock and crimson. It conjured up images of magic and power. Pyrrhic death, rebirth. Chris had her head buried in her hands and missed the whole thing.

"Well, you knew it was bound to come out sooner or later."

Chris rubbed at her eyes with the heel of her hands and sighed, the phone receiver making her ear go numb. "I know," she conceded. "I was just hoping for later."

"Oh, for heaven's sakes," Dinah said. "It's not like the FBI just discovered you hiding the Lindbergh baby under your bed. Live with it, girl. You're famous."

"No," Chris countered carefully, too tired and fought over to be polite. "Jacqueline is famous. I'm just a normal person."

She got another telling snort for that one. "Sweetheart, you haven't been normal a day in your life."

Chris closed her eyes and pictured Dinah at her desk in New York, a black lacquered affair done in what Chris called the surgical precision school of decorating. One pencil sketch, black and white, on a white wall, one huge urn with a few six-foot feathers in it, one black leather chair. It was Dinah's firm belief that the only one who should feel comfortable in her office was she herself. That in contrast to Chris's garage-sale school of decoration, stuffed animals and flea market castoffs, clothes the color of stained glass, and books that went from slapstick to horror. A good balance, if ever there was one.

"Well," Chris said dryly, "if you'd like to put your money in the pool for who the crazy is, the betting is still wide open. You and I are even in the running."

Chris could imagine her agent shaking that dark head of hers. On the phone Dinah sounded about six feet tall with lacquered blonde hair, red nails and the posture of an S.S. officer. In person, she was chubby and brunette. Which was why she considered her phone demeanor and office furniture so important.

"It amuses me to wonder what that poor hick cop is thinking right this minute," Dinah said. "After all, I can hardly keep up with you. I can't possibly imagine he is."

"He's not a hick. He's not even a he. And you don't need to make it sound like I'm Walter Mitty. I'm just a poor working girl trying to make a living."

"Don't be absurd. You're a workaholic trying to drop me into an early grave, with at least three separate identities to uphold. There are days I swear you're probably screwing the President on the weekends just to get variety."

Chris managed a laugh. "I couldn't think of it. Weekends are our busiest times at the How Do."

That got her a heartfelt groan. "Please. My quaint quotient is quite high enough. Just promise me you won't spring any new surprises without telling me first... you know, Broadway plays, astronaut training, clown school."

"I promise. And try not to be disappointed, but you already know all there is to know."

"That's good, dear. It should be that way. After all, it's an agent's God-given duty to have enough on her clients to hold over them in times of negotiation."

"Then be glad and rejoice, Dinah. You know more about me than any living soul on earth."

The truth, she thought not for the first time. Certainly something that the powerful, often ruthless agent could easily hurt her with if she didn't have such a strict code of ethics. If she didn't have a notorious weak spot for her first client.

It was, after all, Dinah who held the strings to each of Chris's different lives, who could most easily expose her. Dinah who understood in her own way just what Chris's privacy meant to her.

Dinah had been there at the beginning, when Chris had dipped that first toe into the world of publishing. Still caught in the morass of the St. Louis social service system, still finishing her third degree at night, still running.

Who was she kidding? She was
still
running. She was just able to do it with more comfort. On her own terms. As long as Dinah kept her confidence and Sergeant Lawson kept her distance.

As long as whatever was going on stopped short of her real secrets.

* * *

Chris didn't get any work done that night. She didn't even manage to stay in the house, pulled outside by the fresh throb of insects, by the fading fingers of sunset and the promise of space.

It was a weeknight, so the town was quiet. A few cars crawled along the streets, fewer pedestrians strolled the sidewalks. Only about half the streetlights were working, checkerboarding the streets in light and humming faintly as Chris passed.

Quiet. Pyrite was so quiet on nights like this, even when the kids cruised in their rebuilt cars or the Tip A Few exploded into broken glass and curses. Chris had spent too many years in places where the lights had been harsh and the noise reverberated off walls like a physical blow. She'd worked in bars where the music had battered her, where the clientele had reached out with fat, sweaty hands and pushed her back into the darkness. She'd lived in places where the cacophony of the streets had beaten her down like a hundred fists, folding her in, pummeling at her, squeezing her dry until she grew smaller and smaller inside, afraid one day she'd disappear altogether.

Yeah, she thought. She'd lived in L. A. She'd survived it, and then St. Louis, by keeping her eyes focused on the future and dreaming of places like Pyrite.

"What are you doing out this time of night?" Sue asked when she answered her door.

Sue and Tom lived in a cute blue-and-white frame Victorian house three blocks over. Their yard was overrun with toys, their floors littered with schoolwork, and their lives disarrayed with children. It was the only place Chris could think of where she enjoyed the noise so much.

Still dressed for city hall in her denim skirt and Oxford shirt, Sue pushed the screen door open and invited Chris inside.

"I didn't get to talk to you before," Chris demurred, glad as ever to leave the dark behind.

Picking up a pot of dying philodendron on the way by, Sue led Chris into the kitchen. "I was wondering when we'd get around to this."

Terry, her oldest, was in the huge gingham and pine kitchen doing dishes. Bobby, the second, was tormenting Ellen, Chris's godchild, with a whiffle ball bat in the living room. Chris almost closed her eyes to just soak in the tide of normality in this house.

"Aunt Ch-is!" Ellen squealed, hurtling at her like a linesman.

Chris swept the little girl up into her arms and buried her face in the cloud of silky blonde hair. She sated herself on the smell of baby shampoo and crayons, the cascade of delighted giggles, the warm softness of a wriggling body. She fought the old familiar ache and squeezed the little girl until both of them were giggling.

"Found it!" Ellen crowed, dipping into Chris's shirt pocket and coming away with treasure. Tootsie Rolls, Chris's traditional offering, always two or three tucked away somewhere for the finding. In insecure moments, she wondered if she were rigging her hugs. Bribing her affections. It didn't matter. She needed those headlong embraces.

Prize won, Ellen headed back into the fray with her brother, who got his own piece of candy, and the two women got down to business.

"Where's Tom?"

"Billy Detwieler's appendix. What's up?"

Chris accepted her twelfth cup of coffee that day and pulled up a chair at the battered picnic table the Clarksons used for dinner and homework.

"Two things. Did you get to talk to Shelly?"

Sue's pragmatic features folded a little. "She's a tough kid, isn't she?"

Chris sipped at her coffee and lifted a wary glance toward Terry.

Sue never bothered reacting. "Terry, I'll finish. Get your homework."

There was the requisite protest, but Terry, a carbon copy of her mom, headed on upstairs and left the two women alone.

"I wanted to be able to take her, Sue," Chris protested.

Sue picked a beer out of the fridge and settled herself down across the table with a knowing shake of her head. "You took that girl in full time, the judge would have you up on charges of kidnapping in a New York minute. Don't worry about it."

"I just didn't know what else to do," Chris insisted. "You know what would happen to her if she really did take out of here."

Sue didn't, of course. Not really. But Sue had all the best instincts of a good mother. "I thought it might be nice for Harmonia Mae to have someone help her out in that big B-and-B of hers. She's getting too old to keep up, and Mr. Lincoln needs somebody to play with."

Harmonia Mae. Why hadn't Chris thought of that? The very image of Victorian propriety, the town's grande dame would not only give Shelly the stability she needed, but would never in her life think of expressing the more sloppy affections that would send Shelly running in the opposite direction. And Bobby Lee would have less luck on her doorstep than the judge's. The perfect solution, if they could get Shelly to see sense.

Sue answered the question even before it was asked, wrapping a grin around the mouth of her beer bottle. "Shelly whined and bitched like a three year old," she admitted, "but she seems to get a kick out of sharing quarters with the monkey." Another sip. "I think she doesn't really mind the idea that she's at information central with all the murder stuff going on, either, with Sergeant Lawson staying there."