Killer Pancake (22 page)

Bathsheba as a chef."

"Don't tell me," I replied evenly. "Bob Woodward as Elizabeth Taylor. In a Marlboro ad. No, wait. Doing the roof scene from Mary Poppins. Except you don't look like Julie Andrews, either."

She blew a smoke ring and gestured for me to have a seat. The two-foot-square platform contained litter that could only be hers: an M&M bag, a Snickers wrapper, an empty can of Jolt cola. Of course, Frances was too much of a skinflint to spring for a ticket to the food fair. Which made her enthusiastic cream/rouge/lipstick/concealer/foundation/mascara shopping spree this morning all the more intriguing. I brushed her wrapper-debris into a small pile on the asphalt roof and sat.

She took another greedy drag on her cigarette, then blew a thin stream of smoke upward. "So where's your escort? He was kind of cute for a rent-a-thug. What'd he catch you doing anyway?"

When I opened my mouth to reply, my stomach howled in protest. I ignored it and said, "Nothing. Security's just suspicious, that's all."

She lifted one eyebrow. "Suspicious of a caterer?"

"Maybe they were suspicious of the wrong person," I countered. "Look, Frances, I've seen your duct-taped sneakers and secondhand clothes. I know you're a tightwad and proud of it. I even heard you wrote an article on what a ripoff all makeup is. For someone with your thrifty bent, you sure bought a lot of cosmetics today." I watched for her reaction, but behind the unaccustomed makeup, she was stone-faced. "Isn't it about time you told me what you're doing with Mignon?" I pressed. I was getting light-headed from hunger, but I was weary of Frances's evasions. "Why the sudden interest in cosmetics at a Denver department store, when your beat is Aspen Meadow, forty miles away?"

She smiled, leaned over, and picked up one of the red shoes to crush out her butt. "You keep asking me that," she said, then smiled slyly.

If I didn't eat soon, I was going to pass out. I tried to think. Frances didn't care about Claire as a person, and she certainly couldn't be convinced to have any sympathy for a grieving Julian. I needed another angle.

"Okay, Frances, here's the deal," I announced grittily. Caterers could be just as tough as small-town reporters. "To you, this whole thing is a story. What kind, I don't know. But my assistant, Julian Teller, wants to know what happened to his girlfriend.

He needs to know what happened to his girlfriend. And I need to know, because Julian Teller is like family, not to mention that he's running my catering business right now. The guy is having a very hard time. He's simply not going to be able to function until we get this cleared up." If then, I added mentally. Over at the food fair, a group of teenagers in T-shirts, ragged shorts, and scruffy high-top shoes shuffled along devouring pizza. ; They stopped by the open tent where the jazz band was finishing up its set. I took a deep breath, which was unwise: The aroma of the pizza sauce, garlic, and melted cheese made me dizzy with hunger. "So. If you don't tell me what you're up to, I'm going to march right into the Prince & Grogan offices and tell them who you are and where you're from. Then, in case there's no action, I'm going to get on the phone with every Mignon executive in Albuquerque - "

"Tell me, Goldy," Frances interrupted blithely, "do you ever listen to jazz?"

"Jazz? Of course I do. So what?"

"Y'ever heard of Ray Charles?"

"Frances, what on earth is the matter with you?"

"Ask a simple question, you get a simple answer." Frances was losing her grip. Perhaps it was the lethal combination of

Marlboros and M&Ms. Then again, maybe she was trying to be clever by pulling her usual routine. She invariably changed the subject to get away from whatever she didn't want to discuss.

"Tell me what you're doing with Mignon," I demanded fiercely.

"Investigative reporting. That's it, I swear."

"I don't think an atheist can swear," I snapped. "It doesn't mean anything." When she chuckled, I insisted, "What kind of investigative reporting?"

She sighed and reached for the Prince & Grogan bags at her feet. "Your husband isn't the only one with medical training. I did a year of med school before turning to journalism - "

"Excuse me, but that's the ex-husband."

"Sorry." Her mournful look was accentuated by the heavy makeup Harriet Wells had applied around her eyes. Here we were, I reflected, two normally unadorned women who'd been outwardly transformed to look like a couple of hookers - and just so we could get information. "By the way, Goldy, I was wondering something." Frances lit another cigarette. "Did you hear that your ex-husband beat up his new girlfriend last night? She called the cops and we picked it up at the Journal, on the police band.

Seems she slid his Jeep into a ditch during the storm, where it stuck in the mud. The doc got really pissed. She's across the street in the hospital with broken ribs and bruised arms."

An image of this poor, pained woman, a new girlfriend I wasn't aware of, floated up in my mind. The Jerk had always been able to find fresh female companionship. When a current girlfriend didn't work out, or ended up in a problematic place like the hospital, he would quickly find a replacement. I thought about Arch. Although he knew why I'd divorced his father, Arch had never witnessed the violence that had destroyed my marriage. If his classmates at Elk Park Prep heard about this incident from a tabloid-type article by Frances in the Mountain Journal, which I wouldn't put past her...

I demanded, "Are you going to run a story about it in the paper?"

Frances took a deep drag. "Nah. The publisher's wife is pregnant and John Richard is her doctor. The wife wants the publisher to hold off on running any story until she delivers."

A headache nagged behind my eyes. "Look, Frances, John Richard's not my problem anymore. What's the deal with the department store? I have to go get something to eat, and then I need to go visit a friend in the hospital."

She pretended to look puzzled. "Not the girlfriend - "

"Frances! What are you up to?"

She set her face in steely anger and tossed her butt in an arc across the roof. "I'm investigating the false claims of Mignon

Cosmetics to make women look younger. Period."

I was incredulous, partly at Frances's own naivet�.

"You're kidding. That's it?" She frowned and nodded. "Was Claire Satterfield helping you?" I asked.

"I didn't even know who Claire Satterfield was before the accident," Frances replied. Her tone indicated that she sure wished she had known Claire. Just think of all the information a Mignon sales associate could have provided....

"But why did you bother to find out she'd had other boyfriends? Why do you think she was deliberately run down?"

"Background, Goldy, background. The claims are what's news."

"But for heaven's sake, those claims are not news. This so-called story has been in books, newspapers, magazines, on radio and television. Haven't you read any Naomi Wolf?

"Get real."

"What are you talking about?" she said bitterly. She blew smoke out her nostrils. "I beg to differ."

"Look, Frances," I said. "In their hearts, women know all this outrageously expensive goop doesn't make them look younger. But the cosmetics people try to guilt-trip every female in the country into feeling they have to do something to take care of themselves. Otherwise, these companies want women to believe, they'll grow old and ugly. They'll never have money, a husband, a white picket fence, a lover, a fur coat, a station wagon, and somebody to drive away with when you get a flat tire.

That's the name of the cosmetics game."

She glared at me and held the cigarette aloft. "Foucault-Reiser is the parent company of Mignon. F-R has been experimenting with cosmetics for thirty years. And experimenting in ways you would not believe," she added darkly.

In my mind's eye, I saw heaps of rabbit carcasses. Hard to take on an empty stomach. "Well, I guess I sort of would - "

Heedless, Frances went on: "Foucault-Reiser launched the hideously expensive Mignon line five years ago, with all kinds of wild claims, fancy packaging, and questionable products. Control the destiny of your face. Like hell. Large pink plastic jars of cream didn't sell, so Mignon switched to dark green glass jars with gold lids, the kinds of containers you imagine once held royal jewels and medieval potions. The message was: This is magic stuff. Sales took off."

I nodded and remembered eons ago, when Arch asked if he could have one of my empty perfume jars for a Dungeons and Dragons prop.

Frances reached into her bag and pulled out a bottle of makeup. "Nobody wants a jar of mud - otherwise known as foundation - with a little white plastic top." She wrenched the shiny cover off the lid, revealing - sure enough - a white plastic top.

"But they put a tall gold top over the white plastic so that consumers will think they're getting something of infinite value. And then there's perfume..."

I groaned, ready to admit she had a story. But she was on a roll.

Frances made a face. " 'I need something really sexy,' I told that woman with the French twist. She sold me Ardor."

Frances brandished a heart-shaped bottle of perfume. "Funny, she sold Ardor to my neighbor for her eighty-year-old mother, whose sexiest social engagement is when her garden club plants bulbs. And the same sales associate, Harriet, told the daughter of the head of the Journal advertising department that Ardor was just the right perfume for a girl to start wearing to school. She's twelve, Goldy. Sales of Ardor, as you might imagine, have taken off. And speaking of sales, if their associates don't keep up their quotas, they're fired. Kaput. So these same sales associates, of which your Claire S. was one, make claims to customers that get more and more bizarre. More and more outlandish. No one has challenged Mignon, and I'm going to be the one who does it."

"Oh yeah? And just how're you going to do that?" She rustled around in one of her bags and held up a small rectangular box. It was covered with navy-blue satiny paper crossed with thin gold and silver stripes. "Mignon Gentle Deep-cleansing Soap with Natural Grains. Twenty bucks. It's soap, period, with about a dime's worth of ingredients, including" - she peered at the label

- "ah-ha, oatmeal! But it'll chap your skin if you use too much of it. Did you hear what that Harriet Wells said to me?" She glared at me indignantly. " 'Cleans deeply but gently into the pores. Restores the original state of your skin!' " Frances grunted. "Crap. Soap robs the skin of lipids. Use it as much as old Harriet says to, and you'll have a nice red face."

"Don't you think people know - ?"

"No, I don't think people know anything, I think people believe what they're told." She reached into the bag again, then held up a tall rectangular box covered with the same elaborate decoration. "Magic Pore-closing Toner? Forty-five bucks? To do what? They swear it tones the pores. As if your skin cells were muscles, ha. You want an astringent, try witch hazel. If you need anything at all. Oh, and did you happen to notice this fall they're going to be adding Mediterranean Sea Kelp to their Magic Pore- closing Toner? Link any cosmetic with something European, and it's a sure sell. And this!" She thrust a squat jar of cream at me.

"Did you hear all the baloney that Harriet-woman was feeding me about how she was sixty-two and this moisturizer stuff stopped her aging process? This junk doesn't even have sunscreen in it! Hate to tell maybe - early-fifties Harriet, but that's the only thing that'll prevent wrinkles, and folks need to start using it when they're young or they're sunk. Biochromes, my ass. What the hell is a biochrome, I ask you?" Her black-striped eyes opened wide. "It was never mentioned in any biology class I ever took. Or in chemistry. Or physiology. Or dermatology, for that matter."

I clapped. "Yeah, yeah. They're going to run all this in the Mountain Journal. And the wife of your publisher is never going to wear makeup again. Is the Journal bankrolling you in this undercover operation?" I gestured to the red shoes, the bags of cosmetics, and her dress.

Before she could answer, however, I got that strange feeling I'd been having the last two days, the kind I used to get when the Jerk was following me in his Jeep after we were separated. I'd been having the feeling a lot lately: on the highway coming to the banquet when I'd veered in front of a pickup, just after the helicopter passed over; during the storm night before last, when I thought I saw the light go on in the pickup at the end of our driveway; even at the Mignon counter this morning. As I sat next to

Frances, the feeling began again as a kind of prickling along the back of my neck. I looked up for the pizza-eating teenagers, but saw only a sudden movement toward one of the tents, the kind of thing you catch out of the corner of your eye.

"What is it?" Frances demanded, her senses ever acute to some emotional change in the person to whom she was talking. "Goldy, what's the matter?"

I looked around and saw absolutely nothing suspicious. This was what happened when you didn't get enough sleep, I told myself. Or enough food. You had hallucinations. A teenager with long, stringy brown hair hopped onto the store roof where we sat and approached us.

He said, "Uh, who's the caterer?" I identified myself and the fellow said, "Somebody said to tell you there's a message for you over at your booth."

"From whom?" I demanded. But he had turned his back. When I called out to him again, he shrugged without turning and loped back off into the food fair crowd.

"I'll go," Frances said firmly as she gathered up her glossily wrapped parcels. "It might be the rent-a-thug. I could vouch that you've been sitting here berating me for the last fifteen minutes. Besides, you need to eat your lunch."

I smiled at Frances's ill-disguised nosiness, at her sudden insincere concern about my need for nourishment. "Nah," I told her lightly, "it's probably the food fair people. Or maybe it's a new client. I'll be right back." But she ignored me.

We walked across the roof and maneuvered back onto the top of the parking garage. I told the money-takers that Frances was helping me, and didn't need a bracelet because she didn't eat normal food. They waved her through. The jazz band had gone on break. Their audience had dispersed and turned their ravenous attention back to the booths.