The PMS Murder (15 page)

First Daddy, now Lance. Men are impossible,
n’est-ce pas?

But I didn’t have time to ponder the nutty nature of the male Homo sapiens, not while there was a killer on the loose.

I put in a call to Doris, but she wasn’t home.

Ashley, however, picked up on the first ring. I explained that I was looking into Marybeth’s death and asked if I could come over to talk to her.

“I was just about to leave for the Brentwood Day Spa,” she said. “Why don’t you meet me there? I’m having a full-body seaweed wrap. You can have one, too.”

“A seaweed wrap?”

“It’s marvelous, darling. Your pores won’t know what hit them.”

Now I was born in Hermosa Beach, so I know all about seaweed. It’s brown stinky stuff. The last thing I wanted to do was wrap my body in it. But I had a murder to solve. And if I had to turn myself into a seaweed sandwich to do it, so be it.

An hour later I was lying naked on a massage table while a nymph named Aloe (I’m not kid-146

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ding; I came
thisclose
to asking if her middle name was Vera) slathered my body with a vile-smelling brown gunk.

“I know it smells awful,” said Ashley, who was being slathered on a table next to me, “but the stuff works miracles.”

“Yes,” Aloe enthused, “kelp is nature’s antioxi-dant. It sucks all the impurities out of your pores, and it breaks down your cellulite, although with all your cellulite, I’m not sure kelp will be strong enough. We may need to use dynamite.” Okay, she didn’t really make that crack about dynamiting my cellulite. But I saw the look in her eyes when she was putting the seaweed on my thighs. She was thinking it.

“Don’t you feel marvelous?” Ashley sighed.

Yeah. Like a crab at high tide.

“Marvelous,” I echoed feebly.

At first I’d felt embarrassed about getting naked in front of Ashley. But I was heartened to see that, out of her designer clothes, Ashley was packing a few extra pounds of her own, in the dreaded hip/thigh area. Nothing like somebody else’s fat to improve your own body image.

Once we were covered head to toe in marine ooze, Aloe and her fellow masseuse left Ashley and me alone in our private massage room.

“We’ll be back in a half-hour,” Aloe chirped, “as soon as you’ve absorbed your kelp.”

“I thought they’d never leave,” Ashley said the minute they were gone. “Now tell me about your investigation. I think it’s wonderful that you’re trying to help Rochelle. And I’m so impressed that you’re a private eye.”

“Just part-time.”

“It sounds so exciting. Except for the footwear.” THE PMS MURDERS

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Her brow furrowed, turning the seaweed on her forehead into tiny rivulets of mud. “I suppose you have to wear sensible shoes on the job?”

“Usually, yes.”

“Too bad. There’s always something, isn’t there?”

I liked Ashley, but I was beginning to think she was just a tad shallow.

“So how can I help you?” she asked. “What did you want to know?”

“For starters, did you see anyone go into the kitchen alone the night of the murder?”

“No.” Her blue eyes gazed out mournfully from behind the gunk on her face. “I’m afraid the only one I saw was Rochelle.”

“What about Colin? He showed up at the house before any of us. Do you think he might have done it?”

She waited a beat before answering.

“I didn’t want to say anything to the police, but to tell you the truth, if I had to guess one of us, I’d pick him. He was furious when he found out Marybeth had passed him over for partner. And he does have a temper. I remember Marybeth telling me that he once got so frustrated over a job they were working on, he punched a hole through the wall with his fist.”

Very interesting, I thought, filing that tidbit away for future reference.

After a half-hour of marinating in seaweed, Ashley and I were hosed down and then polished off with a final coat of body lotion.

“Made from genuine algae,” Aloe informed me, proudly holding out the jar.

Great. I always wanted to smell like the bottom of a fish tank.

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But actually, it didn’t smell too bad. Just a faint musky odor. And I have to confess that when Ashley and I headed off to the locker room to get dressed, I felt marvelous. Relaxed and invigorated at the same time. Maybe there was something to this seaweed therapy after all.

“What I don’t understand,” Ashley said, slipping into a pair of pink velour sweats that cost more than my wedding dress, “is why anyone would want to kill Marybeth. Sure, she got on everyone’s nerves, but underneath it all, she was a wonderful person.”

“Really?”

Somehow I had a hard time believing that.

Ashley smiled wryly.

“Okay, maybe she wasn’t so wonderful. Not at the end. But I remember when I first met her, back in college. She was a lot different then. Very sweet and unaffected. That Little Miss Sunshine act of hers that drove everybody crazy? Back then, it wasn’t an act. She was a genuinely sunny, happy person.” She smiled at the memory.

“As the years went on, she got to be a pain in the ass, but I never stopped loving her.” Quickly, she reached for her imported British hairbrush and started blow-drying her hair. But not before I saw the tears well up in her eyes.

Well, alert the media. Somebody out there actually cared about Marybeth.

Or at least wanted me to think that she did.

Ashley hugged me good-bye in the parking lot of the Brentwood Day Spa, enveloping me in a cloud of massive boobs and designer perfume.

“Good luck, hon,” she said. “I hope you catch Marybeth’s killer. I’m just praying it turns out to THE PMS MURDERS

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be a dreadful accident, that whoever did it thought they were adding lime juice or something. Not very likely, though, is it?”

I shook my head no.

“Pity,” she sighed. Then she got in her Jaguar and sped off, undoubtedly to work on her Black Belt in shopping.

As long as I was in Brentwood, I figured I’d swing by Doris’s place. I’d checked out her address and saw that she lived not far from the spa, off San Vi-cente Boulevard, on Darlington Avenue.

Darlington was a leafy street lined with condos and townhouses. Parking was tight, but I managed to squeeze the Corolla between two SUVs and walked the half-block to Doris’s New Englandy clapboard townhouse. I climbed the steps to her tiny front deck, lined with pots of hot pink impa-tiens, and rang the bell.

She came to the door in jeans and a denim work shirt. Her steel gray hair glinted in the morning sun.

“Jaine!” she said, flustered. “What are you doing here?”

“Actually, I wanted to talk to you about Marybeth’s murder.”

“Oh?” She stood there, making absolutely no move to invite me inside.

“Do you mind if I come in?”

I could practically see the wheels turning in her brain as she tried to think up an excuse to turn me away.

“It won’t take long,” I promised.

Reluctantly, she stepped aside.

“Why don’t we go into the kitchen?” she said, taking me by the elbow and steering me straight toward the back of the townhouse. “I’ll warm up some coffee.”

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Aloe had warned me not to drink coffee or alco-hol for at least 24 hours, while I cleansed my system with herbal tea, preferably made from lemongrass, tree bark, or sassafras root.

Yeah, right. One of my major principles in life is to never drink shrubbery.

“Sure,” I said. “Coffee sounds great.” Doris plunked me down in her tiny white-tile-and-pine kitchen, while she bustled around, fuss-ing with a Mr. Coffee machine.

“Pam told me you were investigating the case,” she said. “But it’s so hard to picture you as a hard-boiled private eye.”

“Everyone says that. I guess I’m more the soft-boiled type.”

She shot me a blank stare. There was absolutely no sign of the hip, wisecracking Doris I’d met at the PMS Club. This woman getting mugs from her cupboard was a Stepford Doris.

“So what did you want to know?” she asked.

“Can you think of anyone other than Rochelle who might have had a motive to kill Marybeth?”

“No, not really. Except maybe Colin. I mean, she did pass him over for that job, didn’t she?” She handed me my coffee and faked a stiff smile.

“Really, Jaine, I already told the police everything I know, which isn’t much.”

“If you don’t mind,” I said, tossing a fake smile right back at her, “I’d really appreciate your going over it with me.”

She sat down opposite me and began stirring her coffee.

“Did you see anyone go into the kitchen alone that night?” I asked. “Anyone who could’ve doctored the guacamole?”

She didn’t answer at first, just kept staring down THE PMS MURDERS

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into her mug and stirring her coffee so hard I thought she’d scrape the enamel off the mug.

Finally, she looked up.

“I didn’t say anything about this to the police, because my memory’s not what it used to be, but at one point while you and Pam and Ashley were upstairs, I left Rochelle and Colin in the kitchen and went to the living room to lay out cocktail napkins.

After a while, I remember Rochelle coming into the living room to spike her margarita at the wet bar.” It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what she was trying to tell me.

“Which means Colin was alone in the kitchen?”

“If I’m remembering correctly. But I’m not really sure. Nowadays, my life is one big senior moment.

That’s why I didn’t say anything to the police. What if I’m wrong?”

It was amazing how different Doris was here in her kitchen. At Rochelle’s, she’d radiated confidence. Here, in the bright morning light, she was a befuddled woman who looked every one of her sixty-odd years.

We sipped our coffees, making idle chat about the murder.

“It’s still so hard to believe that Marybeth is dead,” she said. “All that energy, all that irritating positive thinking. She seemed so . . . indestructible.

“By the way,” she added, “my condolences to you.”

“To me? I hardly knew her.”

“Not about Marybeth. About that picture of you they ran in the paper. You’ll have a hard time living that one down.”

She shot me a smile. So Wisecracking Doris wasn’t dead, after all.

By now we’d finished our coffee, so I thanked her for her time, and she led me back to the front 152

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door. As we passed her living room, I couldn’t resist peeking in. It was strange how she’d whisked me straight to the kitchen when I first showed up.

I wondered if her place was a pigsty. Or maybe she had a stash of porn videos on her coffee table.

But no, it was a tasteful if somewhat bland living room. Standard sofa, armchairs, fireplace. And a grand piano in the corner. But then I saw something that caught my attention. There, over the fireplace, was a portrait—of Doris and a man sitting together holding hands. Clearly they were a couple. A couple in love.

I stopped in my tracks.

“That’s you, isn’t it?” I asked.

She nodded, blushing.

I walked up to the portrait and saw that Doris and her companion were both wearing wedding bands. It had to be her husband. But hadn’t Doris said she’d been through an ugly divorce? Not many divorced women I knew had pictures of their exes displayed over their fireplaces. On dartboards, maybe. But not over fireplaces.

“Is that your husband?”

“Yes,” she sighed. “That’s me and Glen. I was hoping you wouldn’t see it.”

I crossed over to the piano and saw dozens more pictures of Doris and her husband. Wedding photos. Holiday photos. Vacation photos. There was no mistaking the love in their eyes.

I shook my head, puzzled.

“I don’t understand. I thought you hated the guy.”

“I didn’t hate him. On the contrary, I was very much in love with him. He died nearly a year ago.

It’s much too painful to talk about.” Her eyes misted over with tears. “So I lie and tell people I’m divorced. It’s easier that way.” THE PMS MURDERS

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She picked up one of the photos from the piano. It was a small photo, one I hadn’t noticed, and handed it to me. In it, Doris sat by her husband’s side, but now her husband was in a wheelchair, looking pale and gaunt.

“Two years ago, Glen was in a terrible car crash.

It crippled him and caused internal injuries that eventually killed him. It was a slow, lingering death.

I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.” By now the tears were streaming down her cheeks.

“See?” she said, wiping them away with the back of her hand. “Now you know why I can’t talk about it.” So that’s why she’d been acting so strange, why she’d been so flustered to see me. She didn’t want me to discover the truth about her husband.

I felt like such a jerk, making her cry like that.

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I’ll live,” she said, with a wry smile.

We said our good-byes and I headed out to my Corolla.

It’s funny how you never know what’s going on in people’s lives. I’d never have guessed Doris was living with such a painful secret.

In the meanwhile, though, she’d tossed a very important piece of information in my lap—the juicy tidbit about Colin being alone in the kitchen the night of the murder. That, together with the
Cooking with Peanuts
book I’d seen in his apartment, catapulted him to front runner in my Suspects Sweepstakes.

As I headed over to the Earth Café to meet him, I couldn’t help feeling a bit apprehensive.

For all I knew, I had a lunch date with a killer.

Chapter 16

The Earth Café is a reasonably priced health food bistro in Beverly Hills, popular for their low-cal salads and wrap sandwiches. The kind of place skinny people go to load up on bean sprouts.

Huh?
you’re probably saying.
What’s Jaine Austen,
a gal who pops Quarter Pounders like Altoids, doing at a
health food restaurant?

Well, you’ve got a point. Normally health food and I go together like pizza and grits. But I’d decided to follow Prozac’s shining example and watch my calories. If Prozac could summon up enough willpower to stick to her diet, there was no reason why I couldn’t, right? After all, I was at least one hundred points ahead of her on the IQ scale. Well, twenty-five, anyway.