Killer Pancake (18 page)

My food was gone. A hundred fifty portions in two morning hours wasn't bad, I figured, and I'd given out over a hundred menus and price lists. The grills and speed cart would be cleaned by the food fair staff and stay locked in place, so I had only one box of supplies to take down to the van. Once the box was stashed, I leaned against the closed van doors. Sudden inactivity made me realize just how hot and exhausted I was. I'd get my check, chat with Dusty, reconnoiter with Julian, visit Marla, then go home and crash. At least that was what I planned as I hauled myself up and walked down toward the entrance to Prince &

Grogan. Before I could get there, however, I stopped and shuddered.

Maybe I have too active an imagination. Maybe I watch too many movie reruns with Arch. But seeing people - or even those boys in the film version of Lord of the Flies - wearing war paint just sends fear ripping through my bloodstream. People can hide their basest selves behind a veneer of fierce black and white stripes. Transformed, they can claim not to be responsible for what they do. I didn't know whether I was willing to be the victim of irresponsible aggression as I now stood facing at least sixty war-painted demonstrators jostling each other and their signs in back of police sawhorses by the Prince & Grogan entrance.

"When you buy, rabbits die!" they shouted at the few customers brave enough to scuttle timidly past the sawhorses and into the store.

Worse, there wasn't a policeman in sight. But then a woman strode confidently to the store entrance. Oh, Lord. The woman entering through the highly polished doors thirty paces in front of me was Frances Markasian.

She had told me on the phone she was coming to see me at the mall food fair. She hadn't shown up. And yet here she was, going into Prince & Grogan.

My check could wait. I swallowed hard and decided to follow Frances. When I came to the sawhorses, the demonstrators surged forward and screeched.

"Are you dying for mascara?"

"Do you care that innocent animals are tortured for your makeup?"

One waved a sign directly in front of my face: DIE FOR BEAUTY! it proclaimed, with a photograph of a pile of dead rabbits. I felt my face turning red, but I concentrated on getting through the doors on the track of the Mountain Journal's premier investigative reporter.

Someone's elbow jostled me and my ears rang from the shouted insults, but moments later, I was safely inside. I scanned the opulent store interior. Frances Markasian had made a detour into accessories and was fingering the various leathers of expensive handbags. Once again she was, as my parents would say, all dolled up. This time she sported a scarlet dress with a flared skirt, scarlet heels, and scarlet scarf twisted in some remarkably woven way through her mass of black hair. I quickly paralleled her step as she minced past a table display of wallets and headed for the far side of the Mignon counter. I slithered into the shoe department that faced that side of the cosmetics counter. Frances had spied on me so many times that I felt no compunction about seeing what she was up to this time. It had even become something of a game between us. Whatever today's game was, the fact that it required two disguises in three days made it extremely interesting.

"I'm here because I need help with my face," I heard Frances inform Harriet Wells. Dusty was waiting on a man I vaguely recognized-the tall blond fellow I'd seen in the shoe department that morning. Maybe he was an undercover cop.

Harriet looked at Frances and frowned. "What would you say is the skin problem you'd like to correct the most?" she asked politely.

Out in the aisle between the cosmetics counter and the shoe department, a five-tiered display of plastic boxes filled with a navy-blue and gold display of Mignon lipsticks, soaps, toners, and creams offered a hiding place. I ducked behind it.

Within moments, Harriet's voice rose slightly. She was trying to sell Frances some concealer, and Frances was making such uncharacteristically enthusiastic responses that I ducked around the plastic box holding the Fudge Mousse lipstick and

Nectarine Desire blush for a better view. From there, I could watch Harriet without her seeing me, since all her attention was focused on Frances, who was whining, "But I just want to look younger." Uh-huh.

"This is Rejuvenation, the newest product to come out of Mignon's European labs." Harriet delicately gripped the pale, ribbed cylindrical bottle. "It has biochromes in it, and just look at what it's done for my skin." She lifted her free palm like a fan toward her superbly painted face. "I'm sixty-two," she declared with a sunny smile. "Rejuvenation will take two decades off your face."

"Sixty-two?" Frances echoed with loud incredulity as she shifted uncomfortably in the red spike heels. "I would have sworn you weren't a day over fifty-five!"

A tiny frown appeared between Harriet's eyebrows, then swiftly disappeared. I myself wouldn't have put Harriet's age over fifty.

"The biochromes penetrate to the deepest layer of the skin. They actually stop the aging process," Harriet announced proudly.

"Is that right? How much for a big bottle of that?" Frances asked brightly.

"Well," mused Harriet, "you need all the preparations to do the complete job. It's like the four basic food groups. First we start with the pre-cleanser...." Here she frowned at Frances and shook her head. "Here, you hold the Rejuvenation while I look for the right cleanser for your skin." She handed the bottle to Frances, who turned it, held it out at arm's length, and grimaced.

Harriet groped beneath the counter. When she reemerged, she gave Frances's face a swift, shrewd assessment. "It really does look as if you have quite a bit of damage to your skin. Did your dermatologist send you?" When Frances shook her head, Harriet asserted, "You could certainly benefit from one of our rejuvenating cleansers..." and then she chided and explained and piled creams and cosmetics on the counter until Frances's tab was, by my reckoning, well over four hundred dollars.

I leaned in closer to Harriet and Frances, but was stunned to be interrupted in my eavesdropping by a stocky fellow who edged in beside me and asked: "What are they saying?" He smiled at me as if this were some kind of joke only the two of us were in on. He had dark brown hair and short, stubby fingers that he drummed on his knees as he crouched next to me.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I replied huffily, and straightened up.

"Is that your boyfriend?" he asked as if he hadn't heard my answer. His accent was flat and midwestern. His arms seemed too short for his body when he gestured knowingly in the direction of the tall blond man with Dusty.

"He is not my boyfriend. Would you please go away?" He opened his eyes wide, as if I'd refused to laugh at his joke. Then he touched the badge on my white jacket. "Are you really a chef? I mean, you're wearing one of those coats. Is your restaurant here in the mall?"

"As a matter of fact, it is. Two of my coworkers are right nearby." Maybe I could frighten this guy away with the threat of numbers.

"Really?" He looked around. "They won't mind if I talk to their boss, will they? How long have you been here?"

"Look, mister, please, please, please go away - "

But the guy raised a thick brown eyebrow and didn't move. Emboldened by my ability to be convincingly dishonest at the hospital, I improvised wildly. "Actually, I work for the department store. You might have read about the accident we had in the mall garage day before yesterday?" He pursed his lips and nodded sympathetically. "That blond fellow over there is an undercover cop who's questioning a suspect, and I'm supposed to pay attention... so can you please leave so I can do my job?"

He ran his hands over one of the plastic boxes stacked in front of us. "This is so much more interesting than shopping for my niece's birthday."

"Are you listening to me? At the moment I'm doing something extremely important and confidential," I said desperately.

When he looked skeptical, I hissed: "Look buster, what I'm trying to tell you is I - work - for - store - security."

"No kidding?"

"No kidding." He took me gently by the arm and said, "We need to have a talk."

"Get your fingers off me," I said fiercely, unwilling to give up my hiding spot without a protest. "Let go, or I will pull so hard that I'll drag you right out of the store with me! And the whole time I'll be yelling so loud, the security SWAT team will come running!"

The guy grinned. His grip on my arm tightened almost imperceptibly. "We need to have a talk real bad."

That did it. "Security!" I shrieked, and began to wriggle. I had a brief glimpse of Frances, Harriet, Dusty, and the blond guy gaping as I twisted and flailed and tried to shake the man's arm off me. In my thrashing, I fell against the piled boxes. The clear containers with all their lipsticks, creams, toners, and soaps tumbled. My tormentor braced his legs and continued to imprison me in a viselike grip.

"Security!" I screamed. I thrashed and felt my hose rip. "Help!" I called again. Why wasn't anyone helping me? "Somebody from security come now!"

The man leaned down. "Lady, I'm here," he said.

9

I've had humiliating escalator rides in my day. The afternoon of a banquet for Brunswick sales reps, I lost control of an oversize box of bowling-ball-size handmade chocolates. I shrieked in futile warning as chocolate globes pelted the escalator steps and ten fur-coated women went sprawling: a strike. Another time, two-year-old Arch threw up all over me and several nearby teenage boys. The boys were extremely unsympathetic. This in spite of the fact that at Arch's age they had probably also overindulged in hot dogs and milk shakes.

Unquestionably, though, this was the most humiliating escalator ride of my life. This stocky, brown-haired guy - this lackey who mumbled that his name was Stan White - was presumably taking me to Nick Gentileschi, head of security at Prince &

Grogan. Once we were on the escalator, Stan released my arm and quickly stepped behind my back. It was obviously a practiced maneuver, the kind a policeman or a security guy makes when he thinks his perp might bolt. I can't say I wasn't considering it.

I tried to ignore all the staring people. They were below us, they were above us, they were pointing from the descending escalator paralleling ours. The usual high, ex- cited hum of shoppers chatting about what they had bought or what they needed to buy ceased as the onlookers swiftly took in our little twosome - the cowering woman in the chef's jacket with a rent-a-cop parked right behind her. It was a particular challenge to ignore a gaping Frances Markasian. You could see the mental wheels whirring to compose a headline: Caught Caterer Cringes! Wife of Homicide Investigator Apprehended after Struggle by Fudge Mousse Lip

Gloss.

"You are making a huge mistake - " I began to say.

Stan White shook his head regretfully. "Lady, if I had a nickel for every time I've heard that line...."

Well, this was just great. The steps moved inexorably upward, past the top of the Mignon counter with its display of shiny white bags stuffed with pink tissue paper, past the elephantine Chinese-style planters sprouting fake palm trees. Just don't let any clients see me, I prayed fervently.

No such luck. A large woman was leaning over the railing next to the escalator at the second floor landing, just above the cosmetics counter. When she straightened up, my heart sank to new depths. The last person I wanted to see at this moment was

Babs Meredith Braithwaite. Even so, I might have avoided her if she hadn't inched over so that the security guy and I collided with her on our rough arrival at the second floor. We stared at each other. Babs's rust-colored suit trimmed with white was somewhat rumpled; her white blouse was hanging out. Her rust skirt slanted crookedly above her brown and white spectator pumps, as if the skirt were unzipped. Nor was her hair as meticulously poufed as it had been two days before. Today it looked like a windblown bird's nest. She was clutching her purse, which was open, as if it had been hastily snatched up. She was panting. She looked as if she had just shoplifted a diamond brooch, when all she'd been doing was spying on the Mignon counter, or so I assumed. The nefarious possibility that I could sic Stan the Security Man on her occurred to me.

"There's somebody back there," Babs whispered in a trembly voice to Stan and me. Her hand rose toward the racks of gaily colored bathing suits. She added urgently, "Please help me." She looked the security guy up and down. "Do you work for the store?"

"Yes," said Stan curtly. "I'm with security."

"There's somebody back there!" Her cheeks were aflame, and it wasn't blush giving the color. I tried to look around Babs's wide body. Somebody back where?

Stan White touched my upper arm gently to guide me away from Babs and oncoming traffic spilling from the escalator.

When I didn't move, he put his hands on his hips and set his mouth in a stem frown.

Babs whimpered, "Aren't you going to help me?" Stan cleared his throat and pointed at me. "Are you with this woman?" he asked Babs. Confused, she shook her head. Stan concluded, firmly, "Then you'll have to find a salesperson. I can't help it if there's nobody back there."

"But," Babs said frantically, grabbing his arm, "there's somebody back there in the dressing room. You've got to come and help me."

Stan White perked up. This interested him. "Is it a man?" he asked. "In the women's dressing room?"

"It's somebody behind the mirror," insisted Babs. "I heard him cough." Reluctantly, she released Stan's arm.

"Lady, please." The security fellow shook his head. "We haven't done that kind of surveillance for years. It's against the law."

Babs clutched her purse. Her vivid cheeks shook with rage. "But, I'm trying to tell you... ! Somebody must have broken in behind the mirrors! Aren't you going to do anything? What kind of security guard are you anyway?"

Stan bristled. "Okay, look. I have to do something else first. Then I'll check the dressing room, all right? Please, we need to go."

"Go where?" she demanded shrilly. "What are you doing with this woman?"