Obsession, Deceit and Really Dark Chocolate (35 page)

“That’s a stretch, Marcus.” But as I gazed down at my light brown skin I thought about all the people I had met in my life who had never suffered discrimination. A lot of them were under the bizarre impression that they were missing out. It was as if they thought they’d be cooler if they had a glass ceiling hanging over their heads.
Those
were the people who told minorities they barely knew that they understood their so-called struggle. Anne absolutely came across as being one of those people and that didn’t really fit with the furry thing.

“I just call them as I see them,” Marcus said, interrupting my thoughts.

“Did you mention the furry party yet?” I asked, hoping to find
something
to back up my original theory.

“Yes, I had the receptionist bring me the phone fifteen minutes into our appointment. No one was on the other line, of course, but she didn’t know that. I then had a particularly embarrassing one-way conversation about how I wasn’t going to be able to make the furry party at the Chelsea this Saturday. If Anne repeats this information to anyone, my reputation as a
moderate
pervert will be forever tarnished.”

“Did she ask you about the call after you hung up?”

“No, she just looked at me funny and then she started talking a little faster.”

“Aha! So the mention of furries made her nervous!”

“The mention of furries makes everyone nervous, Sophie. Furries are weird.”

“But how would she even know what a furry was unless she—”

“
Vanity Fair, Marie Claire,
MTV and a slew of other media giants have run stories on furries,” Marcus interrupted. “Brooke would know what a furry was because she doesn’t live in a cave.”

“She wouldn’t have to live in a cave not to know what a furry was!” I snapped. “I didn’t know and I’ve never lived in anything more primitive than a studio apartment!”

“Whatever. Anne was uncomfortable with the furry thing. You can interpret that any way you like. Just keep in mind that if your interpretation is different from mine it’s wrong.”

“You’re impossible,” I grumbled.

“Perhaps, but I make impossible cute.”

“True.” I mulled over the little information that Marcus had shared with me. “Do you really think I made a favorable impression on her?”

“That’s what she said, and she seemed to mean it.”

“I’m going to stop by,” I said impulsively. “I’ll pretend I happened to be in the neighborhood and wanted to stop by to say hello to you. Then maybe, just
maybe,
I can talk her into coming out for a drink with me. I might be able to get a little more out of her than you.”

“You doubt my skills as an interrogator?”

“You told me yourself that you’re not comfortable interrogating a client, and that’s bound to affect your performance.”

“Okay, I’ll give you that. I should be done with Anne in about thirty minutes. Stop by then.”

“Beautiful! Marcus, thank you for this.”

“You’re welcome. You can start to pay me back by bringing me a little chocolate to munch on. I’m having a craving, probably because I’m dealing with PMS.”

“You’re dealing with PMS?” I asked incredulously.

“Possible Murderous Senator, darling. Just talking to her gives me cramps.”

I laughed and said a quick goodbye. Anatoly looked up from the silverback mask he had been studying. “Did Marcus get any information out of Anne?” he asked.

“Not much. He doesn’t think she’s a furry, but that’s just his opinion.”

“She’d better be a furry,” Anatoly said. “I don’t want to dress up like a gorilla for nothing.”

“But you
are
going to dress up as a gorilla, right?”

Anatoly sighed and tucked the mask under his arm as if it was his motorcycle helmet, his silent way of saying yes.

I breathed a sigh of relief and told him about my plan to see Anne.

“If you’re going to talk to Anne, I’m going with you,” Anatoly said firmly.

“You can’t, Anatoly. It’s one thing for her to coincidentally run into the reporter from
Tikkun
magazine, but it’s another thing for her to run into both of us. She’ll get suspicious.”

“Sophie, this woman could be a killer, and there’s a chance she already knows that you’re investigating Eugene’s death. You can’t be alone with her.”

“If we’re going to figure this out, we’re
both
going to have to take some risks, and you’re going to have to find a way to deal with that.”

Anatoly grumbled some Russian before relenting. “Fine, I won’t be at your side when you speak to her. But I am going to follow you at a distance. It’s one thing to take risks and it’s another to be needlessly reckless.”

“Fine, follow me. I can live with that.” I reached into the display rack behind me and pulled out what looked like a generic version of Hello Kitty. It had Hello Kitty’s big head and lack of a mouth, but it had longer whiskers, and the bow adorning its ear was purple instead of pink. “This is going to be my costume,” I said definitively.

Anatoly cocked his head to the side. “Why that one?”

“For one thing, it doesn’t have paws, so I’ll be able to use my hands, and second, it doesn’t have a mouth, so no one will be able to kiss me or ask me to, you know, put anything
between
my lips.”

Anatoly’s eyes widened slightly and he looked back down at the large lips of his gorilla mask. “Perhaps I should select a different disguise.”

“No, stick with the silverback. No one is going to mess with an alpha ape.”

23

As awful as this sounds most of us do not want to live among the mentally ill. That’s why we try to keep them all in Washington.

—C’est La Mort

I DITCHED ANATOLY. HE HAD FOLLOWED ME FROM THE MISSION IN HIS
beige, totally nondescript rented sedan. It was the kind of car you could sit in for an hour and still not find anything about it that was interesting enough to remark on. In other words, it was a perfect car to use to tail someone. Unfortunately Ooh La La was on Fillmore, which was not the perfect street if you were hoping to park a medium-size car, nondescript or otherwise. I found a spot several blocks away and Anatoly had signaled to me that I should wait there while he found a spot for himself. I waited for about two minutes before getting antsy. God only knew how long Marcus was going to be able to keep Anne in his chair. Besides, it wasn’t as if Anatoly didn’t know where I was going. He would park and find a place where he could watch Ooh La La from a discreet distance and everything would be fine.

When I arrived at the salon Marcus was at the front desk mixing champagne with crème de cassis in a glass f lute. The contemporary hip-hop and alternative-rock hits that could usually be heard at Ooh La La were conspicuously absent; in their stead was something that sounded suspiciously like Abba.

“You’re the last one here?” I asked in a low voice, craning my neck so I could see the empty room behind him. Marcus’s station wasn’t visible from the entryway.

“Yes, which means that the task of getting Anne her second kir royale is mine.” He held the drink up for my inspection.

“Her second, huh?”

“Yes, and she needs it. Girlfriend is strung as high as a kite.” He looked down pointedly at my empty hands. “No chocolate?”

“Oh, dammit. I totally forgot.”

“But I have—”

“PMS, I know, I know. I promise to buy you a whole box of chocolates tomorrow, okay?”

Marcus released an exaggerated sigh. “Fine, but I must tell you, I’m feeling very unappreciated right now.” With that he turned and led me to his station. “Anne, darling,” he called to the back of the woman who was sitting in his chair. “Look who the cat dragged in.”

The chair swiveled around and I gasped in surprise. Anne looked gorgeous. Her hair, which had been in a French twist last I had seen her, was now cascading around her shoulders, which were exposed by her pale yellow silk camisole. She undoubtedly had come wearing a blazer, but Marcus always insisted that such things be hung up before he started working, and he had clearly been working on her. Her curls were loose and romantic and adorned with delicate golden highlights that made her look at least five years younger than she was. It was hard to envision this woman putting that head inside an animal mask.

“What a wonderful surprise!” Anne said. Her mouth was curved into a smile, but nothing else about her body language indicated happiness. As I stepped closer I could see that, while lovely, she wasn’t quite as put together as she had been during our interview. Her nail polish was chipped, it looked as if she had been biting her cuticles, and her navy skirt needed ironing. She also looked thinner than the last time I had seen her, and she was wiggling her right foot as if she had a nervous twitch.

“Sophie was in the area and noticed the lights were on,” Marcus explained. “She knows this is after hours for Ooh La La, so the little journalist stopped by to investigate.”

“I’m glad you did,” Anne said. “Marcus and I were just talking about you.”

“Oh?” I asked innocently.

“Yes,” Marcus said with a wicked grin. “We were playing the it’s-a-small-world game. Anne found me because her husband is the nutritionist of one of my other clients, and then when we found out that we both knew
you
we realized that we were linked in some wonderful cosmic way.” He held up a lock of her hair. “It’s like that John Cusak movie,
Serendipity,
except instead of finding the love of her life she found the perfect perm.”

“Your hair does look amazing,” I admitted. “I hope you’re going out tonight to show it off.”

“I’m just heading home after this,” Anne said. “But my husband will see how I look and that’s good enough for me. Besides, physical beauty is not what I’m about. It’s what’s inside that matters.”

Right, that’s why you just switched stylists in a pinch and coughed up hundreds of dollars for a perm and color.
“When you look that good you should go out,” I insisted. “There’s lots of cute little bars around here. Why don’t we treat ourselves to a glass of merlot?”

The twitch in Anne’s foot became more pronounced. “I shouldn’t drink any more tonight. This is my second kir royale and I have a long drive home.”

Now, that didn’t sound like the Anne I had read about on the Internet.

“Then why don’t you two go to Bittersweet, the Chocolate Café?” Marcus suggested. “It’s just a few doors down and they serve the most amazing chocolate treats you have ever tasted. You might even want to pick up a box for a friend while you’re there.”

I couldn’t help but smile at Marcus’s lack of subtlety, but Anne just shook her head. “I really shouldn’t…” Just then her cell phone started ringing. Marcus politely retrieved her handbag so she could answer. She took one look at her screen and shoved it back in her purse. “No one I need to talk to right now,” she explained quickly. “You know, on second thought, I’d love a cup of hot chocolate.”

Less than five minutes later we were sitting right by the banister in the loft area of the Chocolate Café. I was sipping the ChocoLatte and Anne had ordered the Bittersweet, which had to be the most spectacular and decadent chocolate drink ever made. But Anne hadn’t touched it, nor had she tasted the dark chocolate macaroons or the dark chocolate truffles that I had purchased. Of course, the small box of truffles was supposed to be for Marcus, but I had already eaten one. I figured I was doing him a favor by consuming at least a few of the excess calories. But Anne didn’t seem interested in chocolate. The only thing she seemed to be interested in was the front door of the café.

“Anne, is everything all right?” I asked. “You seem anxious.”

“Hmm?” She kept her focus on the exit.

“I asked if you were—” This time it was my cell phone that interrupted us. It was, of course, Anatoly. I held up a finger to indicate to Anne that I would only be a minute.

“Hi,” I said after pressing Talk.

“I told you to wait for me.”

I laughed jovially for Anne’s sake. “I know. I was in a bit of a hurry.”

“Here’s how this is going to work,” Anatoly continued, clearly livid. “You are going to tell me where you are right now. Then I am going to get you and we will walk back to the car that
I’m
driving and then
I
am going to drive us home and
you
are going to leave the rest of this investigation to me.”

“Yeah, um…that’s not exactly how it works.” I covered the mouthpiece and whispered to Anne. “My sister asked me to set up her new DVD player, but I didn’t have time. Now I have to walk her through it.”

For the first time since her phone had rung, Anne made eye contact. “You don’t need to leave, do you?” she asked anxiously.

I blinked in surprise. She wanted me here?

“Damn it, Sophie!” Anatoly yelled, and I pressed the phone tightly against my ear so Anne wouldn’t hear his voice. “You don’t know what you’re doing and you can’t follow simple instructions. I’m putting an end to this right now. Where are you?”

“I think you’re a little confused,” I said into the phone while smiling at Anne. “The system you bought can’t be controlled that way.” I smiled at Anne and mouthed
I’m not leaving.

“Sophie, tell me where you are right now,” Anatoly growled.

“Listen,” I said as sweetly as possible, “you’re dealing with a valuable piece of equipment. If you handle it roughly it won’t work, and if you try to force it, you might not be able to insert your disk into it ever again. Make sense?”

“No, Sophie,
you
listen to
me…
”

“Sorry, can’t do it, but I promise to help you out tomorrow. See you then!” I hung up and put the phone in my handbag, ignoring it as it rang again. “Sisters,” I said with an exaggerated eye roll. Anne smiled weakly and toyed with her macaroon. “So what do you think of Marcus?” I asked.

“He’s very talented.” Her hand went up to her hair. “And very intelligent. I wish I had more time to talk with him.”

“About?” I prodded.

“His life. As a gay black man I’m sure he had a lot of hurdles put in his path. My opponent may like to turn a blind eye to the prejudices that are still prevalent in our society, but I see them clearly and I
understand
them. Marcus clearly hasn’t let other people’s prejudices stand in the way of his success. I think he has a lot to teach people.”