Killing Cupid (A Jaine Austen Mystery)

Books by Laura Levine

 

THIS PEN FOR HIRE

 

LAST WRITES

 

KILLER BLONDE

 

SHOES TO DIE FOR

 

THE PMS MURDER

 

DEATH BY PANTYHOSE

 

CANDY CANE MURDER

 

KILLING BRIDEZILLA

 

KILLER CRUISE

 

DEATH OF A TROPHY WIFE

 

GINGERBREAD COOKIE MURDER

 

PAMPERED TO DEATH

 

DEATH OF A NEIGHBORHOOD WITCH

 

KILLING CUPID

 

 

Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

A Jaine Austen Mystery

KENSINGTON BOOKS
www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

As always, I am enormously grateful to my editor John Scognamiglio for his unwavering faith in Jaine, and to my agent, Evan Marshall, for his ongoing guidance and support.

Thanks to Hiro Kimura, who so brilliantly brings Prozac to life on my book covers. To Lou Malcangi for another eye-catching dust jacket design. And to the rest of the gang at Kensington who keep Jaine and Prozac coming back for murder and minced mackerel guts each year.

Special thanks to Frank Mula, man of a thousand jokes. And to Joanne Fluke, who takes time out from writing her own bestselling Hannah Swensen mysteries to grace me with her insights and friendship—not to mention a cover blurb to die for.

Thanks to Dr. Madelyn Graham, veterinarian extraordinaire. And to Mike O’Toole, whose Gondola Getaway is one of the most fun things you can do in Southern California.

Thanks to John Fluke, product placement guru and all-around great guy. To Mark Baker, who was there from the beginning. And to Jamie Wallace (aka Sidney’s mom), the genial webmeister at LauraLevineMysteries.com.

A loving thanks to my friends and family for hanging in with me all these years. And a special shout out to all the readers who’ve taken the time to write me and/or show up at my book signings. You guys are the best!

And finally, to my most loyal fan and sounding board, my husband Mark. I couldn’t do it without you.

Chapter 1

T
here it was, waiting for me on my bedspread. An early Valentine’s gift from my Significant Other.

Gingerly I picked it up.

“A hairball. How very thoughtful.”

My cat, Prozac, looked up from where she was lolling on my pillow, beaming with pride.

At this stage of my life, I was used to crappy Valentine’s gifts. Mainly from my ex-husband, The Blob. I remember the Valentine’s Day he came sauntering through the door with a slightly wilted bouquet of roses.

“For you, pickleface,” he said.

He liked to call me pickleface. One of the many reasons we are no longer married.

The Blob never brought me gifts, not unless you consider a complimentary toothpick from Hop Li’s Chinese Restaurant a gift. So my heart actually started to melt just a tad. Seeing a small envelope sticking out from the bouquet, I opened it eagerly, only to read the words:

Nothing says Happy Valentine’s Day like used funeral flowers.

So like I say, I was used to dreadful Valentine’s gifts. But none as dreadful as the one I was about to get that day when Joy Amoroso called.

 

I was stretched out on my sofa, scraping Prozac’s hairball out from my slipper, when the phone rang.

“Jane Eyre?” asked a woman with a decidedly phony British accent.

“Austen,” I corrected her. “Jaine Austen.”

“Yes, right. Whatever. This is Joy Amoroso calling. You’ve heard of me, of course.”

Something in her tone of voice told me to answer in the affirmative.

“Um, sure,” I lied.

“I need someone to write advertising copy, and Marvin Cooper gave me your name.”

Marvin Cooper, aka
Marvelous Marv, The Mattress King
, was one of my biggest clients. What a sweetie, I thought, to have recommended me for a job. If I’d only known what hell was in store for me, I would have smothered him with one of his Comfort Cloud pillows. But at that moment, I was thrilled at the prospect of a paycheck winging its way toward my anemic checking account.

“I assume you know all about my business,” the phony Brit was saying.

“Of course,” I lied again.

“Come to my offices tomorrow at ten a.m., and I’ll decide if you’re good enough to work for me.”

What nerve! I felt like telling her to take her silly job and shove it. She may not have realized it, but she happened to be talking to the woman who won the Golden Plunger Award from the Los Angeles Plumbers Association for the immortal slogan
In a Rush to Flush? Call Toiletmasters!

Yes, I would have dearly liked to flip her a verbal finger, but “Okay, sure,” were the lily-livered words I actually uttered.

“Good. See you tomorrow. Ten a.m. sharp.”

And before even giving me her address, she’d hung up.

Who on earth was this presumptuous woman?

I was just about to head over to my computer to check her out online when there was a knock on my door.

I opened it to find my neighbor, Lance Venable.

A normally bubbly fellow with bright blue eyes and a headful of tight blond curls, Lance looked distinctly bubble-free as he trudged into my apartment.

“Oh, Jaine!” he sighed, summoning his inner Sarah Bernhardt, “I don’t think I can face another Valentine’s Day without a date.” With that, he plopped down on my sofa, his arm slung dramatically across his forehead, very Marcel Proust Yearning for a Madeleine.

“Cheer up, Lance. We’ll stay home, order a pizza, and watch
Fatal Attraction
like we always do.”

“No, I’m afraid not even the thought of Glenn Close with a butcher knife is going to cheer me up this year. In fact, I was thinking of going to a weekend retreat at a monastery.”

“A monastery? But you’re not even Catholic.”

“That’s not the point. I need to meditate, to contemplate, to see how I look in one of those cowl neck robes. And besides, who knows? I just might meet somebody.”

“Lance, you can’t go to a monastery to pick up guys! They’re celibate.”

“So? I like a challenge.”

The scary thing is, he wasn’t kidding.

“But enough about my pathetic life. What’s going on in your pathetic life?”

“For your information,” I said, scraping the last of Prozac’s hairball from my slipper, “my life does not happen to be the least bit pathetic. “But now that you asked, the most maddening thing just happened. I got a phone call from a mystery woman named Joy Amoroso, telling me to come in for a job interview without even giving me her address or the name of her company.”

“Joy Amoroso!” Lance’s eyes lit up. “I know all about her. She owns Dates of Joy, Beverly Hills’s premier matchmaking service!”

He sprang up from the sofa, his lethargy a thing of the past.

“Be right back!” he cried, dashing out the door. Seconds later he was back, as promised, waving a glossy news sheet.

“The Beverly Hills Social Pictorial,
” he said, leafing through it. “I subscribe to keep track of my customers.”

The customers to whom Lance referred were the wealthy dames who shopped at Neiman Marcus’s shoe department, where Lance toils as a salesman, fondling billion-dollar bunions for a living.

“Aha!” he cried, finding the page he’d been searching for. “Here she is.”

He handed me the magazine, pointing to an ad for the Dates of Joy matchmaking service.

There in the middle of the ad was Joy Amoroso, an attractive blonde sitting behind a desk, a statue of Cupid slinging his arrow in the background. At least, I assumed Joy was attractive. The picture itself was extremely hazy, as if it had been shot through a lens liberally lathered with Vaseline.

“When you get the job,” Lance was saying, “you’ve got to promise you’ll get me a date.”

“I thought you were going to a monastery.”

“A monastery? Why on earth would I go to a monastery when I could be going on a Date of Joy? I hear she’s got a client list filled with gazillionaires.”

“Don’t get your hopes up. I haven’t got the job yet.”

“Oh, but you will.”

And as very bad luck would have it, he was right.

Little did I know it then, but my Valentine’s Day was about to go from
Fatal Attraction
to just plain fatal.

Chapter 2

I
found Beverly Hills’s premier matchmaker several miles outside Beverly Hills, in the perfectly pleasant but distinctly less prestigious town of Mar Vista.

Housed in a three-story stucco office building between Ellman’s Upholsterers and Jerry’s Discount Flowers, Dates of Joy was a far cry from the swellegant mecca of matchmaking I’d imagined.

Nabbing a spot in front of Jerry’s Discount Flowers, I made my way past buckets of drooping carnations into Joy’s office building. There I stepped onto a musty elevator, where some industrious hoodlums had etched the walls with an impressive display of male genitalia.

I got off at the second floor and found Joy’s office at the end of a dank hallway. In contrast to the oatmeal walls surrounding it, Joy’s door was painted a bilious Pepto-Bismol pink, the words
DATES OF JOY
etched in flowery calligraphy.

I headed inside to find the walls painted the same Pepto-Bismol pink and lined with large framed blowups of happy couples gazing at each other, gooey-eyed with love.

At the time, I assumed that they were all Joy’s satisfied customers.

Seated at a receptionist’s desk was a goth pixie clad in black leather and a tasteful assortment of body piercings, her spiky hair a blazing shade of purple. And hunched over a computer behind her was a skinny guy in black horn-rimmed glasses held together at the hinges with duct tape. In his white short-sleeved shirt and yellow bow tie, cowlicks running riot in his hair, the guy had Computer Nerd written all over him.

“May I help you?” the goth pixie asked, looking up from her computer, a steel stud glinting merrily in her nose.

“I’m Jaine Austen. I’m here to see Joy Amoroso.”

“Oh, right.”

Was it my imagination, or was that a look of pity I’d just seen flit across her face?

“Joy will be right with you,” she said. “Won’t you have a seat?”

She gestured to a row of plastic chairs lined up against the wall. I plopped down into one and checked out the reading matter on a tiny coffee table in front of me. Along with the usual dog-eared issues of
People
was a thick loose-leaf binder.

“That’s our Date Book, with pictures of our clients,” said the pixie, whose name, according to the ID bracelet tattooed on her wrist, was Cassie.

I opened the book, expecting to find a bunch of bald heads and stomach paunches, but the book was stuffed with stunners. One good looking prospect after the next. Joy certainly had a lot of hotties on tap.

Just as I was ogling a particularly adorable tousle-haired studmuffin, the door to Joy’s office opened and out walked the date-meister herself.

The woman in front of me bore little resemblance to the photo in her ad. That picture had been taken at least ten years and fifty pounds ago. Joy Amoroso was still an attractive woman with deceptively angelic features. Button nose, big blue eyes, and a fabulous head of streaked blond hair. But that pretty face of hers came with an impressive set of chins, and she was clearly packing quite a few pounds under her flowy A-line dress. Only her feet were tiny—slender little things encased in what looked like nosebleed expensive designer shoes.

“Jaine!” she cried with the same phony British accent she’d used on the phone. “So teddibly sorry to keep you waiting.”

She looked me up and down with all the subtlety of a New York City construction worker. I guess I must have passed muster, because she then asked: “Won’t you step into my office, hon?”

Tearing myself away from my tousle-haired dreamboat, I grabbed my book of writing samples and followed her into her inner sanctum.

Like the reception area, Joy’s office was filled with framed photos of happy couples. But unlike the no-frills furniture in the reception area, Joy’s decor ran to the antique and ornate. A Marie Antoinette-ish desk and chair dominated the room, along with an étagère crammed with fussy knickknacks. Over in a corner lurked the same statue of Cupid I’d seen in Joy’s ad, now shooting his arrow up at what looked like a water stain on the ceiling.

But what caught my eye most of all was an open box of Godiva chocolates on Joy’s desk, chock full of creamy dark chocolate truffles.

My taste buds, napping after the cinnamon raisin bagel I’d had for breakfast, suddenly jolted awake. A truffle sure would’ve hit the spot right about then. Of course, a truffle would hit the spot with me just about any time. But those velvety Godivas looked particularly mouthwatering.

Taking a seat behind her desk, Joy popped one in her mouth. My taste buds and I waited for her to offer me one, but alas, we waited in vain.

Obviously Joy was not a sharer.

She gestured for me to sit in one of the froufrou chairs facing her desk, and as I did, I felt a broken spring poke me in the fanny.

“Comfy?” she asked.

“Very,” I lied, still hoping for one of those Godivas.

“So,” she said, sucking chocolate from her fingertips, “Marvin Cooper tells me you’re a wonderful writer.”

I blushed modestly.

“But I’ll be the judge of that,” she added with a grim smile.

She held out her hand for my sample book. I only hoped she didn’t smear chocolate all over my Toiletmasters campaign.

As she leafed through my ads, I whiled away the minutes looking at pictures of the happy couples on the wall and trying to ignore the spring poking me in my fanny.

“Not bad,” she said when she was finally through.

Then she got up and began pacing the room in her teeny designer-clad tootsies, launching into what had all the earmarks of a well-rehearsed campaign speech.

“As you well know,” she began, “Dates of Joy is the preeminent dating service in Beverly Hills.”

I wisely refrained from pointing out that we were a good three and a half miles from Beverly Hills.

“I handle only the crème de la crème of the L.A. dating scene. Movers and shakers. And all sorts of celebrities. My fees start at ten thousand dollars a year. And go up. Way up.”

Wow. And I thought my Fudge of the Month Club was expensive.

“And I’m worth it,” she said, her chins quivering with pride. “I’m the best there is. That’s because I’ve got matchmaking in my blood. My mother was a matchmaker, and her mother before her.”

Not only that, according to Joy, one of her royal ancestors back in jolly old England was the one who fixed up Anne Boleyn with Henry VIII.

I nodded as if I actually believed her.

If this woman was English royalty, I was a Tibetan monk.

“Although I abhor the idea of self promotion,” she was saying, “I have to keep up with the times. So I’m looking for someone to write copy for a sales brochure. “So whaddaya think?” she asked, dumping her royal accent. “You interested?”

“Sounds very intriguing.”

Time to see how much gold was at the end of this particular rainbow.

“And the pay?” I asked.

“I was thinking somewhere in the neighborhood of three grand.”

Someone call the movers! That’s my kind of neighborhood.

And yet, a little voice inside me was telling me to run for the hills. I knew trouble when I saw it coming down the pike, and I could tell Joy Amoroso was trouble with a capital OMG! That bossy manner, that insane Queen Mum accent that seemed to come and go like an overbooked call girl on New Year’s Eve. The woman would drive me up a wall in no time.

Why not save myself the aggravation and just say no?

So what if I owed a few bucks to MasterCard? And Macy’s? And the Fudge of the Month Club? So what if the Fudge of the Month Club cut off my membership and I never got another box of fudge ever again—not even the white chocolate macadamia nut fudge I’m particularly fond of?

Surely I could live without white chocolate macadamia nut fudge.

Couldn’t I?

Oh, please. We all know the answer to that one.

“So,” Joy asked, popping another chocolate in her mouth. “Is it a deal?”

“It’s a deal.”

And that, in a macadamia nutshell, was how I came to sell my soul to the Matchmaker from Hell.

 

“You’ll start tomorrow at nine,” Joy commanded. “I want you to hang out at the office for a few days to get the picture of how I work.”

I’d get the picture, all right.

And trust me, it was not a pretty one.

Riding up the elevator in Joy’s office building the next morning, I found myself elbow to elbow with a gal who looked like she just stepped out of a Victoria’s Secret catalog. Pouty lips. Eensy waist. And boobs that made it onto the elevator a good thirty seconds before she did. Surely she wasn’t going to see Joy. A woman like that needed help finding a date like I needed help finding the cookie aisle in the supermarket.

But much to my surprise, when she got out of the elevator, she trotted straight to Joy’s Pepto-Bismol door.

I followed her inside and blinked in surprise to see the reception area was crammed with stunning guys and gals.

“I’m here for the casting session,” Ms. Secret told Cassie, who was seated at her desk, a skull and crossbones barrette adorning her bright purple hair.

A casting session, huh? I figured Joy was looking for models to use in her new brochure.

“Take a seat in the photo studio,” Cassie told Ms. Secret, pointing to a large room adjacent to the reception area. I peeked inside and saw about a dozen other Beautiful People sitting around, chatting among themselves and gazing at their own head shots with unabashed admiration.

“Hi, Jaine,” Cassie said, catching sight of me. “Joy will be tied up for a while. Until she’s free, she wants you to work with Travis.”

She pointed to the bow-tied geek I’d noticed yesterday.

“I’m supposed to show you our Web site,” he said, pulling up a chair for me next to his computer.

“So what’s going on?” I asked with a nod to the beautiful people. “Is Joy casting models for the brochure?”

“Not exactly.”

He glanced at Joy’s door, as if to make sure she wasn’t listening.

“Remember the date book you saw yesterday? With pictures of Joy’s clients? Well, hardly any of the people in that book are actual clients. Most of them are models or actors. Every once in a while Joy holds a phony casting session, pretending she’s going to shoot a TV commercial. All the models and actors leave their headshots, and then Joy puts them into her date book.”

“No way!”

“That’s how she reels in the new clients,” he nodded.

“What about all her movers and shakers? And her celebrity clients?”

Cassie, who had been listening in, now turned around, guffawing. “Are you kidding? The closest we ever got to a celebrity was when Reese Witherspoon’s maid came looking for Ellman’s Upholsterers next door.”

“My job is to scan the headshots and put them on the Web site,” Travis explained. “And Joy wants you to write phony bios to go along with the pictures.”

“Phony bios? She never told me about that yesterday.”

“There’s lots of things Joy never tells you,” Travis said with a bitter laugh. “Like how she expects you to pick up her dry cleaning on weekends.”

“Or get her Thai food at one in the morning,” Cassie chimed in.

I bristled in annoyance.

If Joy thought I was going to compromise my integrity by writing phony bios to lure in unsuspecting clients, she had another think coming. We Austens have our principles. I’d simply tell her it was no dice.

But then I remembered the stack of unpaid bills multiplying like rabbits on my dining room table.

Oh, well. What harm could it do to write a few teensy bios? After all, surely Joy had some legitimate clients, people whose lives she actually improved.

“So where are Joy’s actual clients?” I asked.

“Here they are,” Travis said, clicking open another file.

Suddenly his computer screen was filled with real human beings, people with thinning hair and thick waists, with noses and breasts that had never seen a surgeon’s knife. All of them smiling into the camera with a look of hopeful desperation in their eyes.

Travis was scrolling from one photo to the next when he stopped at a photo of a truly lovely woman. A fragile wisp of a thing with startling blue eyes and a nimbus of silken blond hair framing a perfectly chiseled Grace Kelly face.

“Who’s she?” I asked, assuming she was a model mistakenly stuck in the Real People file.

“She used to be a client,” Travis said.

“What a beauty.”

“She sure was,” Cassie echoed, swiveling around in her chair and staring down at Travis’s computer screen.

“She dropped out of the club years ago,” Travis said. “But Joy keeps her photo on the site to lure in the new clients.”

We continued scrolling through real clients, uncovering some genuinely attractive daters here and there, but they were few and far between.

Meanwhile, the model/actors continued to stream in and out of Joy’s office, leaving their head shots with Cassie.

“Ta ta!” Joy would trill in her phony British accent as each hopeful left. “I’ll let your agent know as soon as I make up my mind.”

“As if that’s ever going to happen,” Travis muttered.

“I don’t suppose Joy’s really British?” I asked after one particularly hammy “Ta ta!”

Travis and Cassie had a hearty chuckle over that one.

“Are you kidding?” Cassie smirked. “Her real name is Joy Woznowski. And she was born in the Bronx. Which I know for a fact because I’ve snooped at her passport.”

Having exposed Joy for the utter phony she was, Cassie swiveled back to her desk, while Travis and I returned to the Web site. Travis was pointing out which bios Joy wanted me to write when suddenly what seemed like a minor hurricane erupted from Joy’s office.

Joy came storming out into the middle of the reception area, tottering on her tiny heels, her face purple with rage.