Crazy for You (21 page)

“Cancer?” My hand flew to my face.

“Possibly. Best take care of this thing now while you’re young.” He glanced at the information form I’d filled out earlier. “I see you’re not quite thirty yet, is that correct?”

I nodded, wondering how old he was. Had a few procedures contributed to that gorgeous facade? A jaw lift maybe? A bump of Botox? And were those creases bracketing his mouth created by the magic of collagen? He’d let his hair go silver at the temples, age signs that only added to the overall dazzling effect.

“Mazie?” He cocked his head and smiled.

My face prickled with heat. He’d caught me staring at him. It must happen to him all the time. Probably he had to keep a cattle prod handy to jolt his female patients back
to their senses.

“How much would this all cost?”

Kennison handed me an informational pamphlet on rehabilitative surgery. “Since this would be reconstructive, rather than cosmetic surgery, your insurance should cover it.”

“I don’t have insurance.”

“No insurance?” He looked startled, as though I’d announced that global warming was caused by an increase in the electric eel population. He steepled his hands, prayer style, rested his chin on them and stared at me. Two impulses seemed to be warring here: his need to impress me versus his physician’s reluctance to give away his services. Where was the man whose hands had been all over me at the Bling-Bling Club? Replaced by a detached professional whose hands were staying scrupulously on their own side of the desk.

“Tell you what, Mazie. Let’s have you talk to our financial director. We’ll see if we can’t develop some kind of payment plan.”

Saturday night he’d said he’d do the work pro bono. Now he was fobbing me off as though I were a poor relation. He walked me out of his consulting room and down the hall to an office where a woman with short gray hair and glasses sat at a desk growling under her breath at a computer.

“Carol,” Jared said. “This is Mazie Maguire. She’d like to talk to you about payment options for reconstructive surgery.”

Carol’s eyes flicked over me, taking in the frayed jeans, the Target turtleneck, the unmanicured nails, and the fake silver jewelry in one swift glance, shrewdly assessing that I was poverty-stricken but possibly of romantic interest to her boss. “Have a seat,” she said briskly, her tones clearly indicating she resented having her work interrupted by a person inconsiderate enough not to have chosen wealthy parents.

“I’ve got to go.” Jared squeezed my hand. “I’ll give you a call, okay?”

He winked at me as he left. I guess the wink was supposed to make me feel less like a door-to-door evangelist who’d just been shoved off a porch.

Carol went into a canned spiel, but getting her to commit to the actual cost of the procedure was like trying to get a straight price quote out of a car salesman. She hemmed
and hawed and circled around the cost, but eventually she got to the bottom line. Yes, I could afford to get rid of the squid.

But only if I sold my liver, spleen, and kidneys on the black market.

“I’ll think about it,” I said politely, getting up and making for the door, suddenly feeling an overwhelming urge to get out of the place. I should have known better than to come here. I didn’t belong in this oasis of seaweed wraps and diamond-dust dermabrasion and Evian water colonics. I didn’t fit in with the toned, tanned suburban women whose hair was fifty shades of ash blond and who spent more on their dogs’ manicures than I made in a year. I could barely afford a box of Band-Aids, let alone a patch of my own thigh grafted to my cheek.

Even the clinic’s parking lot gave me a case of the insecures. There was my sweet little Pig parked amid a sea of hogs, the enormous SUVs suburban families now required to get their two point five kids to cello lessons—although I did spot a few lowly Toyotas and Chevies scattered about, and there was a gas-sipping little motor scooter snugged in the staff parking area.

Scooters in November? Scooters had lousy traction on ice and snow and turned their riders into popsicles. I paused with my car keys in hand. Green Hoodie had been driving a scooter. I hadn’t gotten a close look at it, but had noticed it was a dark color. The one parked in the lot here was a black Honda with silver trim.

A coincidence. Motor scooters were rare, but you did see them around, even in winter. Probably its owner lived two blocks away and rode the scooter to work to help save the planet. I got into Pig and started the engine. Then I sat there as my good and bad angels went at it hammer and tongs.

Good: Waste of time, Mazie. The odds against this being the scooter driven by Green Hoodie are a million to one. You’re already late for work. You need to be prompt and reliable. You owe it to your employer to put in a full, honest day’s work.

Bad: Ah, go build an orphanage, ya little brown nose. I say it’s time for the Mazie Maguire Hogwash and Hooey Show!

As usual, Bad kicked Good’s ass. A minute later, I was back in the clinic, trotting up to the reception desk. “Excuse me,” I said breathlessly to the young woman, who’d apparently been chosen as the public face of the Kennison Clinic because of her
resemblance to a currently hot movie star, “but I just saw two kids hanging around the staff parking lot. I think they might be trying to steal a motorbike parked there.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh, jeez! I better call security.”

Dammit!
I’d wanted her to notify the scooter’s owner, who would then rush out to see that it was all right.

She pressed a button and spoke to someone in a low, urgent voice, then hung up and smiled at me. “All taken care of,” she chirped. “Thank you for reporting it. Lots of people wouldn’t have bothered.”

“That’s what’s wrong with people nowadays,” I said sanctimoniously. “Nobody wants to get involved.”

Back outside, I stood by Pig, pretending to unlock it, but watching as a woman in a security uniform burst out of the clinic’s back door. She scanned the staff parking lot, then strode over to the black scooter, inspected it, and spoke into a walkie-talkie.

The back door opened again and a man emerged.

My heart stutter-stepped. It was Green Hoodie! I’d spent so much time staring at his photo over the past two days I could have sketched his face by heart. Short sandy hair, sharp cheekbones, goatee. He’d rushed out in his doctor’s smock. Hurrying over to the scooter, he opened the saddle pouch, then conferred with the security guard. The guard set off around the building, presumably in search of the phantom punks, while the man examined the scooter, probably checking for evidence of vandalization.

I knew I should leave. But the need to find out more about the guy was too overwhelming to resist. Pasting a Good Samaritan look on my face, I approached him.

He turned toward me, his eyes cool and guarded. “Are you the one who reported the kids?” Kids came out “kidtz.” He had a slight accent, German or Slavic. He was medium height and wiry, maybe in his late thirties, with skin that was a tanning-booth caramel all wrong for his pale eyes and light hair. He hadn’t bothered to put on a jacket; he wore a white lab coat over his shirt and pants. A whiff of something antiseptic-smelling drifted off his clothes. The name tag on his lanyard read
Alex Petrov, MD, Anesthesiology
.

He was Green Hoodie. No doubt in my mind.

He frowned at me and I realized that he was waiting for my answer.

“Yes, I saw them,” I said. “Two boys.”

“And what was it they were doing?” There it was again, the perfect English underlaid with a sibilant hiss, the
wh
in “what” sounding a bit like
fw
. Polish or Russian, I thought.

“I think they were trying to steal your scooter.”

“Well, what did they look like?” His voice took on a badgering edge. His mouth was small, his lips paper thin. You’d think that with all that collagen lying around in a plastic surgery clinic someone could have injected him a fuller pair of lips.

The trick to lying, I’d discovered, was to keep it vague. Details make people suspicious. “Sorry—I wasn’t really paying attention.”

We looked at each other and a chill skittered down my spine. My gut was ordering me to leave, right
now
!

“I am grateful to you for coming forward.” He didn’t sound the least bit grateful. “May I inquire your name?”

“My name?” Buying time by acting stupid usually worked.

His mouth tightened to a slash. His ears were turning red from cold. “Yes.”

“Oh. Vanessa Vonnerjohn.”

“And you are a client here, that is correct?”

He was like a cobra, his pale eyes with their tiny pupils hypnotic, and his ranking on the scare-o-meter was ratcheting up by the second. Was this the man who had strangled Rhonda Cromwell?

“Look, I’d love to stay and chat, but I gotta go.” Somehow I managed to wrench my eyeballs away from his. “Stuff to do, skin to exfoliate, you know how it is.”

My heart was pounding as I beat a hasty retreat to Pig. I started the car and drove quickly out of the lot. Alex Petrov stood by his motor scooter, watching me. And—oh, good thinking Maguire; as usual you didn’t plan ahead—he was checking out my license plate.

He was still watching as I drove out of the lot and into the street. Using my ex-mother-in-law’s name was the flimsiest of tricks. All he had to do was track down the form I’d filled out in Kennison’s office to discover my real name, my address—even my blood type.

He didn’t know I’d seen him break in to Rhonda’s house; he had no reason to want to harm me, I reasoned. But I’d had the chilling feeling that Petrov had somehow been sucking all the secrets out of my mind. I’d attracted the attention of a guy who looked like he kept a collection of pickled human ears in his secret laboratory.

But if he found out my name, I reassured myself, I also knew
his
name, and Mazie Maguire, barista slash private investigator, was going to Google the hell out of Alex Petrov.

Chapter Twenty-five

God couldn’t be everywhere at once, so She invented girlfriends.

—Maguire’s Maxims

“Sorry I’m late,” I said, hurrying into Hottie Latte.

“Just get your clothes off,” Juju snapped. “We’re swamped.” She held out a hot pink bustier with matching hipster briefs and strappy high-heeled sandals. “Wear this. How come you’re late?”

“I was at the Kennison Clinic—”

Juju’s eyes widened. “You getting boobs?”

“No.” I dashed into the employee restroom and started stripping, talking to Juju through the door. “You remember I told you about Green Hoodie?”

Even through three inches of door I could sense Juju rolling her eyes. “Green Hoodie, Green Hoodie, let me think. Wait—would that by any chance be all you talked about the last three days?”

“I found him, Juju. He’s a doctor!”

“Shut up!” I could hear multisclamations—dozens of exclamation points at the end of that sentence.

“I went to the clinic because Jared Kennison—”

“Dr. Delicious?”

“Umm, yeah.” I pulled on the bikini briefs. Briefs, ha! These things were so brief they should be called nanoseconds. “Anyway, he offered to do some work on my scar.”

“What scar?”

“The one on my face, Mister Magoo.”

“You got a scar on your face?”

“How could you not see it? I’m talking about the thing that ate Milwaukee.” I wrestled on the bustier, whose lacey appearance was deceptive; it possessed the ribcrushing
power of a boa constrictor. As I fastened up its millions of tiny snaps, I could feel my kidneys squashing in next to my lungs, while my bumpers popped up in 3-D Sensurround. “Jared wanted to take a look at the scar.”

“Don’t say anything for a second, okay? I want to get a clear picture of this in my mind first. Did he make you get naked? Were you forced to lie down on one of those little exam tables? Did he palpitate your—”

“Stop it! I kept my clothes on the whole time.”

“Damn, girl, that’s no fun.”

“He said my scar might turn cancerous some day and eat my brains.”

“So he’s going to fix it?”

I leaned one hand against the top of the toilet so I could pull on my heels. “No, I can kiss my brain goodbye. Can’t afford the surgery.”

“We could do a fund-raiser for you! Put jars with coin slots near the cash register—”

“Forget it.” If someone was going to donate a couple thousand dollars toward excising parts of my body, they could start with my belly flab. I studied my reflection in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door. Some of my goose bumps were bigger than my bazooms.

I told Juju about Alex Petrov in between clearing tables, waiting on customers, and brewing drinks. I flubbed orders, bumped into tables, and added salt to a peppermint mocha. My body was on automatic pilot while my brain was in hamster wheel mode, spinning theories like mad.

“You all set for tonight, Mazie?” Samantha asked, passing me with a tray of dirty dishes.

“Set for what?” I asked distractedly.

“Hunk-a-rama.”

“Oh, right.” I vaguely remembered Juju mentioning that she’d bought tickets for all of us to some male strip show. “I’m not going.”

Samantha reacted as though I’d just said I liked to twist the heads off live chickens. “Of course you’re going. You can’t miss Hunk-a-rama.”

Watch me, I thought grimly.

When it was time for my break, I choked down a cinnamon roll, washed it down with a milk, wiped the sticky goo off my fingers, and slid into the chair in front of Juju’s computer. The computer was strictly reserved for company business, but Juju, recognizing that this was an emergency, told me to help myself.

Alex Petrov
, I typed, and thousands of entries came up, lots of them with Cyrillic characters. Must be a common Slavic name.

Alex Petrov, MD
, I tried. Still dozens of entrants. I scowled at the screen, dreading the prospect of checking every entry.

“Let me.” Juju spoke around the bagel clamped in her teeth. She reached over and typed in
Alex Petrov, Kennison Clinic
.