The Good Girl's Guide to Murder (7 page)

At least I wouldn’t have to repaint my toenails. No one would see the chipped green while I was wearing these babies. I didn’t even want to think of how much they’d cost. Nope, I wasn’t going to dwell on how many bags of Iams I could donate to Operation Kindness with what Mother had spent to dress me up as the proper little heiress, suitable for public consumption.

It would be a completely guilt-free evening.

I’d spent the drive back to my condo convincing myself that, as long as I was going to have to suffer through this damned party, I might as well look good. Or as good as I got without being dragged to the salon with Mother, which was definitely not on my agenda this afternoon or any afternoon in the foreseeable future.

If I needed a trim, I either paid $9.99 at Fantastic Sam’s or got out the kitchen scissors, which might be why my shoulder-length ’do often ended up in a ponytail.

It drove Cissy nuts.

May be part of the reason I did it.

I saw the red light blinking on the Caller ID, indicating voice mail messages, but I wasn’t going to deal with anything more until I’d had a shower. I kicked off my party shoes and peeled my shirt off for starters, dropping my sweaty clothes in a pile on the floor.

The water felt great after the sticky hundred-degree air I’d been swimming through, and I stayed beneath the showerhead until my skin pruned, letting the lukewarm spray of water wash over me. I emptied my mind of all the thoughts that had accumulated along with the grime, and, by the time I stepped onto the bath mat and wrapped myself in a towel, I felt better about myself and the world in general. Enough to smile and hum a favorite Def Leppard tune as I pulled a comb through my hair and wiggled a Q-tip in my ears.

Amazing how something as simple as a shower can make you feel like a new woman, but it had and I did. So much so that I actually started to think that tonight might not be so dreadful, after all.

I dared to check my voice mail while I let my hair air-dry a little, finding a “call me” message from Brian Mal-one followed by four panicked rants from Marilee, wondering when I’d be arriving, asking if I’d remembered to do this, that, or the other. I pressed the “3” key to delete the lot of it, and then I dialed Brian’s number.

“Hey, Kendricks,” he said, picking up on the second ring, knowing it was me thanks to his own Caller ID. Little chance of anonymity in our brave new world, huh? “You still planning on going to that shindig tonight?” he grilled me right off the bat. “Or can we do dinner at Dragonfly and a movie after?”

Shindig?

It sounded like a Midwesterner’s idea of how Texans talked, though Malone
was
a Midwesterner, I reminded myself. He hailed from St. Louis, Missouri, the “Show Me State,” which explained why he always had to see something to believe it. He was a budding defense attorney with the prominent and enormous firm of Abramawitz, Reynolds, Goldberg, and Hunt, better known as ARGH around these parts. They covered the law from all angles: corporate, criminal, wills, and divorce. It was a one-stop shop for well-to-do Texans who found themselves in need of expert counsel.

The brain trust at ARGH had handled the legal work for Daddy’s pharmaceutical company, on whose board Mother remained to this day. J.D. Abramawitz was a close friend of Cissy’s and had arranged for Brian Malone to take on Molly’s case when my friend had been accused of murder. As I’d later found out, Mother had requested Brian handle the matter in order to throw us together, hoping for a love match.

While there were definitely sparks, it wasn’t a fullblown fire. Not the kind that made either of us want to say, “I do.”

Not yet (much to Mother’s chagrin).

We’d both agreed not to rush into anything serious, though we were sure having a good time doing the getting-better-acquainted routine.

It was definitely the most successful of any of Cissy’s crazy matchmaking schemes, the vast majority ranking right up there with Hurricane Andrew in terms of disaster quotient. Like the time she’d set me up with the son of an oil magnate and GWH (Great White Hunter) whose fun idea for a date was to go to the shooting range. While he’d squinted an eye at the man-shaped target and squeezed off quick shots from a 9mm Beretta, he’d hissed through his teeth, “
Take that, Daddy! And that and that and that!
” I’d feigned a trip to the ladies’ room, had made a dash to the parking lot, and burned rubber getting out of there.

Even the bluest of blue bloods could be freaks.

“Andy? You doze off on me?”

“Am I going to the shindig,” I repeated, putting aside thoughts of the blind date from hell and getting back to Brian’s question. I perched on the arm of the sofa, the towel tucked around me, a bare leg dangling. My freshly washed hair drip-dripped on my shoulders. “Unfortunately, it’s not optional.”

“Your mother won’t let you get out of it?”

“Worse.” I sighed. “She bribed me with Escada.”

“The nerve of her.”

“Exactly.”

“I mean, how
dare
she?”

“It’s despicable,” I said, playing along, and he laughed, doubtless thinking, “
Poor little don’t-wanna-be-rich girl
.”

Still, he knew my mother, so he had to feel some pity.

I imagined his boyish, slightly crooked grin, and his unruly brown hair, tousled upon his forehead. It amazed me that I was attracted to someone so centered, so preppy, and so, um, white bread. Well, he
was
Ivy League—a Harvard law grad—so I guess he couldn’t help it. Not a single tattoo or piercing graced his lean body. And, believe me, I’d done a fair amount of investigating in that respect.

Nope, Malone was entirely too presentable for my taste, which leaned toward longhaired poets with sad eyes, brilliant minds, and always-empty wallets. But, in spite of his passion for things buttoned-down, I liked him. A lot. He made me feel warm all over and tingly at the same time. A little like prickly heat.

“So you want me to go with?” he offered. “You know I own a tux, if that’s an issue. It’s Armani.” Quick pause. “All right, it’s a knock-off, but it looks real.”

“It’s not the tux. The issue is Cissy,” I said, feeling horrible when I had to turn him down. “Mother insisted I go solo. She’s hoping I’ll meet an eligible bachelor.”

“What am I? Chopped liver?” He sounded hurt.

“It’s not that exactly. She
does
like you, Malone. It’s just that”—how did I explain Penny George’s spying and that stupid “milk for free” theory without completely humiliating myself and Cissy?

“Just what?”

I tried a different tack. “Think of my mother as the little socialite that could. She won’t let up until I’m the ball on someone’s chain.” Preferably, someone with a pedigree dating back to Plymouth Rock or with at least an oil well—or three—in his pocket.

“She wants us to get married?” Did his voice shake, or had I imagined it? “Is that what you’re saying?”

I nervously played with the cord of my old Princess phone. “Hey, it’s not what Cissy wants, anyway, right? It’s what we want. And I don’t plan to be anyone’s ball and chain”—I assured him, lest he started thinking I was implying anything—“not for a while anyway. I like things as they are.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” I did want a ring on my finger someday. I just didn’t want it to be a rush job, even if that would make my mother happy.

“Well, all right, then.” He grunted. “How ’bout I crash the party . . . put on my penguin suit, and pretend I’m with the wait staff?”

“Cissy would kill you.”

“Probably put a Jimmy Choo up my ass.”

“A Ferragamo, at any rate.”

“So the answer is ‘no’?”

“Yes.”

He sighed.

“Look, I’ll do my best to sneak out early, okay? I’m hoping I won’t have to stay any longer than it takes to get a blister from my new shoes.”

“Cissy got you shoes, too?

“And a matching handbag.”

He whistled. “Whoa, Andy. That’s some bribe. Like a Winona Ryder shoplifting spree without the probation.”

What a lawyerly thing to say. “Don’t make me feel any worse,” I grumbled.

“Give me a call if you make a jailbreak.”

“It’s a deal.”

We said our goodbyes, and I hung up, grinning.

There was definitely something to be said for white bread.

In another twenty minutes, I had the sequined Escada zipped and my toes wedged into the pointy pink sling-backs. My minimalist makeup and hair wouldn’t exactly have gotten me far in a pageant—at least not beyond Miss Congeniality—but it felt like plenty for someone not used to wearing much more than Chapstick. As much as I liked to paint, my preference was to put color on canvas, not skin. I’d seen enough women who looked like clowns to realize that less was often more, unless you had your eye on a gig under the tent at Barnum & Bailey.

Actually, I did know a girl who’d gone to Clown College in Sarasota. Last I’d heard, she was wearing a barrel on the rodeo circuit in Lubbock.

So maybe it did pay to overdo the Mary Kay, if you had that kind of aspiration.

My only goal was to get myself to Addison, do what I had to do—for both Marilee and my mother—and then scram at the earliest opportunity.

I teetered out the door of the condo in my high heels, greeting an elderly neighbor who was walking his dog in the still-smothering heat.

“Hello, Mr. Tompkins.”

The poor man did a double take. “Andy, that you?”

“In the flesh.”

“Flesh is right. Woo-doggy.” He nodded and swiped his brow with a kerchief, though I wasn’t sure if I’d inspired the beads of sweat or if the thermometer was strictly to blame. His pot-bellied beagle seemed more interested in the bushes, sniffing like mad and ignoring me entirely before lifting his leg.

Oh, well. Can’t win ’em all.

“You look real spiffy,” he said in his grizzled twang.

“Thank you, kindly.” I lifted my purse in acknowledgment as I scurried down the sidewalk toward my car. I unlocked the door and jerked it open, metal hinges squealing. I tossed my purse across to the passenger seat and pondered for a moment how I was going to climb in gracefully.

“Woo-doggy.” Charlie howled again more loudly.

I tried not to cringe, glad at least that the rest of my neighbors were tucked inside with their conditioned air. Though I caught a glimpse of Penny George in pink sponge rollers peering between her drapes from an upstairs window, the ratfink.

“You have a good evening, Charlie,” I called out and scrambled into my simmering Jeep, settling myself behind the wheel without ripping a seam or having my dress ride so high that I flashed the old guy. A major feat considering my general lack of coordination, and I felt immensely pleased.

I glanced out the windshield as I started the car and saw the beagle wrapping the leash around Charlie’s ankles. As I pulled out of the lot, I caught him in my rearview, still staring.

All that because I’d put on a skirt and lipstick?

I realized my neighbor was used to seeing me dressed-down, not dolled-up, so I wasn’t surprised that he had trouble believing I was the same person. I liked to tell myself it really didn’t make much difference what I looked like, but maybe I was a fool for assuming other people felt the same.

Beauty didn’t go much beyond skin-deep in the heart of Texas. It was practically a state law that women look good enough to eat. As mouth-watering as chicken-fried steak smothered in cream gravy. Statuesque, big-haired blondes were as much a part of the landscape as longhorns and bluebonnets. Not surprisingly, pageants—and, consequently, plastic surgery—were a huge industry. If Miss Texas didn’t take the Miss USA crown every year, the whole state was affronted. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m fairly certain that butt and boob tape—particularly important in the bathing suit competition—were homegrown inventions.

A fair number of the population—the prettiest of the pretty—were groomed to be beauty queens from infancy. Mothers didn’t sing lullabies to lure these wee girls to sleep, they sang, “There she is, Miss America.”

I remember a classmate by the name of Clancy Lee Carlyle who’d won the title of “Little Miss Lone Star” by the time she was seven. When our second-grade teacher had asked us what we wanted for Christmas, she’d blurted out, “World peace and nuclear disarmament!”

Okay, she’d actually said, “Whirled peas and new-cooler dismemberment.” But Mrs. Overby had explained what she’d meant, making all the rest of us feel like dolts for wanting simple material things.

Silly old me. I’d craved an easel and a new set of finger paints.

Hardly things that would’ve scored points on the pageant circuit.

My daddy, bless his soul, had always tried to convince me that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and I’d wanted to buy the line. Badly. But I knew better because of people like Clancy Lee Carlyle.

And Cissy.

My mother had never met a can of AquaNet she didn’t like.

I sighed and changed lanes, deciding it was the unfortunate but deep-seated wish of every woman to be the cheerleader or homecoming queen, even when well past promage.

Okay,
almost
every woman.

Cissy was the one who’d had those dreams for me. My role, it seemed, was to dash them. Though every time I let her con me into wearing haute couture, like tonight, I gave her hope.

False hope, but hope just the same.

The Jeep’s engine rumbled beneath my pink shoes as I slowed at a stoplight at Preston and Belt Line. The sky was still mostly blue overhead, though I could detect the vague tinge of dusk descending as the sun began its slow slide from twelve o’clock high. The glass of surrounding buildings reflected clouds softening to pink.

Still, it wouldn’t be dark for an hour, at least. The days were definitely getting shorter, but not short enough to suit me. When summer got a hold of Dallas, it didn’t let go easily.

I fiddled with the vents, adjusting the AC to blow on my face. A quick check in the rearview mirror showed the sheen of perspiration on my forehead. My eyeliner already looked smudged. Another reason I didn’t like makeup. Sweat could too quickly turn me into Tammy Faye.

The light turned green, and I surged forward with the rest of the herd of four-wheeled cattle, catching the tail end of rush hour traffic. My gaze skimmed the lanes around me, finding Cadillacs aplenty. A swarm of white Sevilles surrounded me. Sitting high up in my Wrangler, I felt the urge to sing the theme from
Rawhide
.