Too Pretty to Die (12 page)

“You’re one of those earthy women who use lip balm more often than lipstick, am I right?” he went on. “I’ll bet you take five minutes to brush your teeth in the morning and don’t put on makeup unless you’re going to a funeral, huh?” He chuckled in that oh-so-cool and throaty voice. “But you have one of those faces that could be really beautiful if you just put a little effort into it. We get so many clients who tend to overdo. It’s rare to see someone who’s actually underdoing.”

There he went again: complimenting me with put-downs.

Was there something in the water?

Rather than feeling bolstered by his backward praise, I felt a gush of resentment. Could be a build-up of all those years my mother said practically the same things, which only made me want to “underdo” all the more.

I didn’t know if I was supposed to talk or not, but I couldn’t help myself. Words flew out unchecked.

“Would you say that someone like, oh, I don’t know, Miranda DuBois overdid it?” I asked.

I felt his fingers stiffen, releasing their hold on mine, and he quickly shoved my hand back inside the blanket.

“Miranda DuBois? Why would you even . . . ?” He paused, but I’d caught the tremor in his tone. “Ah, I get it. The Pretty Party. I heard Sonja mention something about you and your friend being there last night.”

He obviously didn’t recall seeing me there. Probably a result of my underdoing it. The prissy girls got all the attention.

“So you witnessed the big bang, did you?”

“Yes,” I said, and wished I could open my eyes to look squarely at him. Only the cucumbers made that impossible. “I was the one who took Miranda home after the”—
how did one put it delicately
?—“incident with the Picasso.”

“She was pretty worked up, wasn’t she? It’s too bad she couldn’t have done things more quietly. It would’ve been better for . . . everyone.”

His voice sounded tight, even bitter.

I heard him get off the stool and move around the recliner. Then he picked up my left hand and began kneading it, far less gently than he had the other side.

“Didn’t she have a right to be mad?” I dared to inquire, perhaps stupidly, since I was wrapped in a cashmere throw, flat on my back, with goop on my face and cucumber slices holding my eyes closed. “I mean, shouldn’t Dr. Madhavi have done something to fix whatever went wrong? Miranda certainly blamed her.”

“Miranda brought it on herself,” he said, way too quickly.

He unceremoniously dumped my hand against my thigh. He must’ve pushed his stool away, as I heard it slap against the cabinets.

“Hey,” I said in my most soothing voice, not wanting him to desert me while I was still encumbered by cucumbers. “I was just curious. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

I was beginning to think that mentioning Miranda wasn’t such a hot idea.

“Look,” he said, after a pause that seemed forever, “I don’t know if the girl was your friend or not—”

“She wasn’t,” I told him—well, told the air, because I wasn’t sure where he was standing exactly. “Not really.”

“You have to understand something. Miranda was a problem for Sonja. She was desperate for something to make her more perfect. She was just like every other beautiful woman, afraid of getting older. She should have left well enough alone.” His sneakers squeaked on the tiled floor, pacing around me. “Sonja did what she had to do.”

“So you were there when she injected Miranda?”

“Is that what she told you?” His voice went up a notch. “Did she say something about me?”

About him
?

“No, she didn’t mention you.”

“Oh.”

I couldn’t tell if he was relieved or crestfallen. He got so quiet that I felt the need to speak.

“Listen, you don’t have to explain Miranda DuBois to me. I grew up with her,” I told him. “She was always a perfectionist. It must’ve been hard meeting such high expectations.”

“She was so beautiful already,” he said. “She shouldn’t have gone to Sonja in the first place. She should’ve just stayed away.”

He kept saying
was
, which began to bother me.

Did he know Miranda was dead?

Or had he used the past tense because Miranda had stopped being Dr. Sonja’s patient weeks ago, after the blow-up over the botched injections?

Whatever the reason, I felt suddenly uncomfortable discussing a dead woman. Even if I was the only one in the conversation who knew she was dead.

“Let’s not talk about Miranda. How about we don’t talk about anything, okay?” I pleaded. “I think this mask is starting to harden.”

It was like having plaster of paris on my face, making it more difficult to move my lips. Plus, I had the odd sensation of cucumber juice leaking through my eyelids.

I was about to reach up and take off the danged vegetable slices when Lance’s fingertips brushed my skin as he removed them for me.

The stool creaked as he settled back onto it, and I felt a warm cloth being rubbed gently across my face, wiping off the tangerine goo.

Thankfully, Lance Zarimba performed the rest of my facial in relative silence, only piping up when he wanted to explain what he was doing; as in, explaining what kind of crud he was smearing on my face.

When my fifteen minutes were up and he was finished, he took the cashmere blanket away and raised the head of my chair so I could look into the hand-held mirror he proffered. My skin looked surprisingly pink and shiny. Not a blotch in sight.

Could be there was something to this rosemary-tangerine pore-tightening botanical facial after all.

I got up from the chair and turned to thank him, but Lance was already halfway out the door, mumbling something about having to prepare a room for his next appointment.

So I found my own way back to the reception desk and hung around for a minute, glancing at the products for sale until Janet appeared a few minutes later.

She looked flushed, her frizzy curls even more frazzled, if that were possible. And she cupped her hand over her mouth as she approached and said, “C’mon, Andy, let’s go,” which emerged kind of muffled ’cuz she was speaking through her fingers.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked as we passed through the glass doors of The Pretty Place and then crossed to the mall exit, before heading out to the parking lot.

She didn’t pause to explain until we’d reached her Jetta, at which point she dropped her hand and looked me right in the face.

I blinked a few times, before I went ahead and stared outright.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Say something.”

“What did you do?” I asked, still trying to reconcile the “before” Janet with the “after” Janet standing before me.

“It’s just a little bee-pollen plumper with a shot of Restylane. It’ll go away after three, four months.”

Good God, I sure hoped so.

I kept thinking of the Grinch and how his heart was two sizes too small. It was sort of the same with Janet’s lips. Only suddenly they were two sizes too big.

“So did you get what you wanted from Dr. Sonja?” I asked, meaning the interview, or possibly the giant fish mouth. I squinted at her, thinking,
Wow
.

“She acted surprised when I told her Miranda was dead, but she didn’t exactly seem crushed.” Janet paused, glaring at me. “Why are you staring, Andy?”

Like she had to ask.

“Wow,” I said aloud this time, because the word was stuck in my head; and because I couldn’t believe she’d gone and done something like this. “Are you sure you can fit those suckers in the car with us?” I teased.

“For Pete’s sake,” Janet snapped. “Just shut up and get in.”

I
had rarely been so glad to get home in all my life.

When I crawled out of bed at seven-thirty and dragged myself to Miranda’s, I’d only envisioned being gone forty-five minutes at most.

By the time I got back to the condo it was after ten o’clock.

I dropped my keys on the kitchen counter as I passed through my tiny digs, half expecting to find Malone at the breakfast table, munching on cereal and toast. Only I was pleasantly surprised to find him still asleep.

After I stripped off my sweats, I slid back between the sheets. He grunted and his arm snaked around my belly, murmuring in a husky voice, “You smell like salad dressing.”

That was probably the nicest thing anyone had said to me all day.

Despite the craziness on my mind, I curled up with him and slept for another two hours. When we finally got up for real around noon, I briefly filled Malone in, and he suggested something to take my mind off things: an afternoon movie.

I hadn’t been to the picture show in a long while, so I happily agreed.

I even turned off my cell the whole time we were in the theater. I didn’t want anything to intrude on my time with Malone. We didn’t get much “us only” moments these days, what with the hours he worked at the firm. So I’d take what I could get, even on a day like this. No, especially on a day like this.

I didn’t switch my cell back on until Brian and I were walking out of Valley View Mall after having lunch and seeing the latest Harry Potter flick.

Malone was right about it taking my mind off more serious matters. It had certainly done the trick. It didn’t hurt that the theater audience was sparse and we’d pulled our usual “sit in the back row” maneuver so he could put his arm around me and I could sling my legs across his thighs and nestle against his neck.

Between snuggling, we’d watched the big screen, whispering to each other throughout about how the next installment of Harry Potter would have to explain why Harry looked middle-aged if they didn’t recruit younger actors for future pics.

Brian had suggested seeing another show and totally blowing our entire day at the theater. Much as I enjoyed holding hands with him in the dark and breathing in the scent of stale popcorn, I realized I couldn’t hide from real life forever.

I just hadn’t figured reality would intrude so quickly upon stepping from the shadows of the mall into the afternoon sun.

My cell had barely been on for thirty seconds before I heard aborted bursts of Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me.”

I squinted at the number of messages on my voice mail—twenty-one in a two hour span. Wow, a record for me.

What the heck had been going on while I was in the mall?

I cut off Joe Elliott mid-“Sugar” and flipped it open.

“Yo, Hot Lips, what’s up?” I said, knowing who was on the other end, thanks to good old caller ID.

Your mother
? Brian mouthed, and I laughed. Like I’d greet Cissy with a “Yo,” much less call her “Hot Lips.”

I shook my head and mouthed back,
Janet Graham
, just as Janet started tearing into me.

“Good God, Andy, where’ve you been? I’ve been ringing your cell for, like,
ever
, and I’ve left a million messages!”

A million wasn’t far off, though it was more like a dozen.

“Sorry,” I told her, “but I was at the movies with Brian—”

“You were at the
movies
?” she screeched, her tone suggesting I’d committed a mortal sin. “What’s wrong with you? I can’t believe you were out of touch when so much has been going on. Surely, you’ve heard all the dirt by now, yes?”

What dirt? I wondered, until my brain kicked in and I realized whatever it was must have to do with Miranda DuBois.

Terrific.

“First off, why didn’t you tell me you were the last one to have seen the late great Second Runner-Up Miss USA alive before she purportedly killed herself?” I listened to her rant as I followed Brian through the parking lot toward his red Acura. “I was with you for, like, an hour this morning. How could you not share that kind of buzz
immediately
? And you call yourself a friend.”

The last one to have seen Miranda alive.

Just hearing that phrase made me flinch.

And how had she found out, by the way?

I knew I hadn’t told her.

Oh, oh, no, please, it couldn’t be.

A wave of panic hit me, and I stopped where I was, smack in the middle of a lane of traffic. A horn honked, and I regained my senses fast enough to move aside as an impatient XTerra rolled past.

I was certain Anna Dean hadn’t informed the media about my presence during Miranda’s final hours.

I wasn’t so sure that my mother hadn’t let it slip. And Highland Park was like a small town in so many ways. All Cissy had to do was tell a few of her friends . . . who told a few of their friends . . . and then someone was whispering it in the ear of the society pages editor of the
Park Cities Press
.

Namely, Ms. “I Stick My Nose in Other People’s Business for a Living” Janet Graham.

“Are you there, Andy? Hello? Do we have a bad connection?”

Unfortunately, no, we didn’t. I’d heard every stinking word.

“Who told you I saw Miranda last?” I asked, my voice rising as Brian turned around to look at me, his car keys dangling from his fingers. He stood near the trunk of his Acura, while I was still five yards back. It would take me two days to reach it at this rate. “Have you been talking to Cissy?”

“Well, um, not directly,” came her ambiguous reply.

I scowled into the cell. “What does that mean?”

“Geez, girl, don’t bite my head off. I got the dirt through the most public of channels, and you would’ve already heard about it had you not been hiding in the cinema with your boyfriend for half the damned day.”

“Go on,” I said through gritted teeth.

“The Highland Park police called a press conference because of pressure from the media,” Janet said, talking so fast I could barely keep up with her. “A reporter from Miranda’s own station heard the chatter on the police scanner, and they got a camera crew over to the duplex just as the M.E. was wheeling her out the front door.”

This all couldn’t have happened much after I’d left Cissy’s house and gone to The Pretty Place at North Park Center with Janet, not long after my conversation with Deputy Dean about the final night of Miranda’s too-short life.

“The HPPD spokeswoman didn’t give details, just kept it simple, saying that a local woman was dead, pending notification of next of kin. It’s not like they were gonna be able to keep something like this a secret, since Miranda DuBois was a celebrity,” Janet went on, acting more like the
PCP
’s ace crime reporter (which they didn’t even have) as opposed to their one and only society scribe. “Every major media outlet had a microphone there, and the natives got pretty restless when their questions about the cause of death and whether the police were looking for suspects went unanswered.”