Too Pretty to Die (18 page)

“That’s why I need your cooperation, Andy. Keep mum about Miranda’s connection to the Caviar Club and the e-mail she sent me, please. Don’t even tell your mother,” she said, imploring. “Give me a couple days, that’s all I ask, then we can go to Anna Dean and tell her everything. But I
have
to have this story. I need to be the first reporter in town to break it.” She tucked her purse beneath her arm and stood, towering over me in all her magenta glory. “I’ll call you later, and we can talk strategy, okay? Tell your mom thanks for the invite to dinner, but I can’t stay. Too much to do and too little time. Ta-ta for now.”

She swooped down to air-kiss my cheeks before she hurried off, unlocking the door to the den and sweeping out in a rush of deep pink suit and red hair.

I sat a moment, my head still reeling from Janet’s confession, before I got to my feet and walked toward the door like a zombie.

I nearly ran smack into Malone, strolling in from the hallway.

He had a bottle of beer in hand—Moosehead, I knew at first glance, if the green of the glass and big moose mug on the label weren’t enough indication; and that’s what Mother had begun stocking in the fridge for Stephen. I reached for it and took a long hard swig before handing it back a good deal lighter.

But Malone being Malone, he didn’t even flinch. He was good at sharing, much better than I could ever be.

“I saw Janet leave,” he said. “What’s with her lips? Did she super-size ’em at the drive-through? Whew.”

“Don’t ask.” That was the least of my worries.

“You okay?”

I nodded, though I felt a little queasy, probably from trying to so quickly digest everything I’d learned in the past fifteen minutes. “My head is kinda reeling. This has been one long day.”

And it wasn’t over yet.

“Did you square things with Janet?”

“I guess I did.”

If agreeing to keep important information from the police regarding Miranda was squaring things.

I’d come to Mother’s to get myself
out
of a big mess, and I felt like I’d stepped in even deeper doo-doo in the process.

Poo.

“Well, I’m glad that’s settled, then. You need to relax, babe.” Malone gave me a soft smile.

“I still have to deal with Mummy Dearest,” I reminded him, though I didn’t have the spark to ream her out about her press conference antics, not anymore. Janet’s news had knocked the wind out of me.

Lucky for Mother.

“Cissy’s the one who sent me after you,” Brian said. “She mentioned something about a purse she wants you to see.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Don’t sweat it, sweet cakes. You’ll survive, you always do,” he assured me, catching my fingers up with his free hand and lacing them snugly into his. “Hey, I’ll bet your stomach’s on empty.” He gave a tug. “C’mon to the kitchen. Sandy set out a spread before she disappeared into her quarters.”

He uttered “quarters” with a hammy British accent, clearly mocking the term my mother used for Sandy Beck’s suite at the back of the house.

He thought it sounded proprietary, despite my telling him that’s what the rooms had been labeled when Mother and Daddy bought the house eons ago. I’d seen the copy of the typed-up listing Cissy kept in a carved cigar box in Daddy’s study. Heck, nearly everyone I’d grown up with in the Park Cities had homes with quarters, whether they used them for the live-in staff or turned them into gigantic closets.

“And you’ll get to meet Milton Fletcher,” Brian said, finishing off his beer as we headed toward the kitchen. “He seems like an interesting guy. Did you know he was a Navy SEAL like Stephen?”

“No, I didn’t.”

My mental file on Milton Fletcher was meager, save for the fact he was the private eye Cissy was apparently interviewing for the job of snooping into Miranda DuBois’s life and death. Oh, and that he owned the beat-up Ford parked in Mother’s driveway.

Hearing that he had a connection to Stephen made sense and had me figuring that my mother’s boyfriend was more responsible for his presence than Cissy.

I wondered if the former SEAL was in his late sixties, like Stephen, and if he was losing his hair or wore a toupee, or if he had artificial joints that got him wanded by Security at the airport.

As I had an image in my mind of a gray-haired gent whose knees creaked when he skulked around, searching for clues or stalking cheating spouses, it didn’t register at first that the man sitting at the kitchen table—across an almost empty platter of crustless sandwiches—chatting with Cissy and Stephen was, in fact, Milton Fletcher.

I mean, the dude wasn’t even wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches, for Pete’s sake. He had on a black turtleneck and a distressed leather jacket, and he was thirty-five, if he was a day, with the thickest head of ink-black hair I’d ever seen outside the Tibetan llamas at the petting zoo.

Stephen must’ve caught me standing there, gawking, as he rose from his seat, gestured toward the fellow and said, “Andrea, I’d like you to meet Milton Fletcher, a former naval officer and a superb investigator.”

On cue, the leather-jacketed dude stood and said, “Call me Fletch.”

Like that movie with Chevy Chase
?

Well, heck, I guess it was better than calling him “Miltie.”

I’d kind of imagined that “Milton” and all its variations had become extinct, as least when it came to men under age fifty.

Maybe it was a vague beer buzz—hey, when you rarely drink, any alcohol imbibed tends to go to your head—but instead of keeping my Milton jokes to myself, I opened up my big, fat mouth and stuck my foot—nay, both my feet—right between my completely natural, un-super-sized lips.

“So you’re Milton Fletcher, huh? Did your mother have a thing for
Murder, She Wrote
? Or Milton Berle? You know, that comedian who liked to cross-dress? And what’s with the old Ford? Does the rust make it invisible so people can’t see when you’re tailing them?”

When I finished my sarcastic tirade, I snorted, one of those awkward, totally unfeminine pig-in-the-mud snorts that escaped after I thought I was being particularly funny or clever—often coming off as neither.

Cherchez la pork!

“Andrea!”

Cissy stared at me, horrified, surely assuming that every moment of my Little Miss Manners classes had dropped out of my sievelike brain. Stephen crossed his arms, settling back in his chair, a stifled grin on his face, surely afraid to laugh or risk incurring the wrath of Her Highness.

Thank goodness, Milton Fletcher smiled, too.

I was about to apologize, but I figured Miltie’s reaction was the next best thing to outright approval. Hence, no apology required.

See: Chapter Fifteen,
Little Miss Manners Politically Incorrect Edition
, Volume 66, “When It’s Okay to be Rude.”

“So you’re Andy, huh?” he asked, eyeballing me, despite the fact that Malone stood at my elbow. “Hmm, you’re not quite what I expected, either. Kind of odd for a chick to have a boy’s name, isn’t it? I’d imagined you as more of a linebacker, but you look all girl to me.”

Even with my two feet in it, my mouth fell wide open.

Malone stiffened, and I prayed he wouldn’t sling the beer bottle at Milton’s head; though he had better manners than I did, so I didn’t figure the smart-ass private eye was in any real danger.

“As for the old car,” good ol’ Miltie went on, as if he hadn’t said enough already, “it beats driving my Porsche Boxer on the job and having to park it in places where I’d be afraid to leave a bike.”

“You own a Porsche Boxer? I’ll bet it’s red, too,” I got out, gums flapping, and—God help me—snorted again just as loudly as before. “Is that symbolic of anything?”

Somehow, that only made Milton Fletcher’s smile all the more wicked. “I don’t know,” he said. “If you want to play doctor—Dr. Freud, that is—perhaps you can interpret the meaning of my needing to drive an incredibly slick, fast machine.”

I could only stare at him and blink.

“My heavens,” my mother expelled, and Stephen coughed back his laughter.

Malone brushed my arm, and I heard a low growl in the back of his throat. At least, it sounded like a growl.

Fortunately, Milton Fletcher didn’t wait for an encore.

He came out of his seat, patted Stephen on the back and said, “I hate to interview and run, but I have work to do.” He glanced at my mother and tapped his jacket pocket. “Thanks for the retainer, Mrs. Kendricks. I’ll do my best to get to the heart of the matter, I promise, and I’ll keep you posted on anything I learn about Ms. DuBois.”

“Yes, yes, thank you, Mr. Fletcher—uh, Fletch—and I’m so sorry about my daughter,” Cissy apologized, scrambling to escort the P.I. from the room.

But not before he gave me a wink and said, “I’m not sorry about Andy at all. I like fire in a woman. It shows brain activity.”

He nodded at Brian before Mother whisked him off, with Stephen following on their heels.

“Did you get a load of that?” I plopped into a kitchen chair and made a face. “I can’t believe Mother’s hiring Miltie boy to investigate Miranda’s death. He probably spends half the day staring at himself in the mirror. Have you ever met anyone so cocky, right off the bat? ‘Fire in a woman? Brain activity?’ I think he needs someone to write him new lines, geez!”

Brian set his empty bottle on the table with a clank, straddled the chair and sat down, looking sulky. “He was flirting with you, Andy.” He raised his eyes to mine. “And you were flirting right back.”

Excuse me
?

“I was flirting with
him
?” I’m not sure I’d ever sputtered before, but I was sputtering now. “I was doing no such thing.”

“I think you were.”

“Was not.”

“Were, too.”

If he’d stuck out his tongue, I wouldn’t have been surprised. He was acting like a big baby in size thirteen shoes.

Anyone who thought that people ever grew up were nuts. The only thing that separated the so-called real world from high school was a locker combination.

I started to reply with something equally juvenile, in the vein of “stop being such a big poo,” when it dawned on me that Brian was jealous with a capital J, the way I’d been jealous of his relationship with Allie Price, his ex-chick and colleague at the firm (though I wasn’t anymore, not after spending some time with her and understanding that she was no threat to me).

An attractive guy had just paid way too much attention to me in the span of a few minutes—in front of my mom, my dude, God and Stephen—and Malone didn’t like it the least little bit.

“Awww,” I said, feeling all warm and mushy. I got up from my chair and rounded the table, arranging myself in his lap, catching my arms around his neck. “You’re so sweet to get all worked up over nothing.”

“Huh?” He blinked, dumbfounded, and I gave him a decidedly appreciative kiss, the kind the French copyrighted (and for good reason).

My mother took that moment to reappear, standing at the mouth of the kitchen, hands on her hips. “Andrea, darlin’, would you please get off your boyfriend and come take a look at this bag I’ve, ah, acquired. It’s important, truly. You can make out with Mr. Malone later, somewhere other than my kitchen.”

Malone pushed his face into my shoulder, and I felt him shaking with laughter (though he smothered it beautifully).

“Well, Mother,” I said, “if you put it that way.”

I peeled myself from my boyfriend’s lap under my mother’s disapproving eye.

Malone’s cheeks were pink, like a naughty child, and I was tempted to kiss him again, despite having a chaperone.

Instead, I gave his arm a pat and told him not to wander, as I wouldn’t be long. I planned on us leaving just as soon as I finished playing fashion consultant to Mother, which was a laugh riot when you thought about it. Unlike Cissy, I was hardly into couture, considering my favorite shopping digs were low-rent vintage stores and Goodwill for broken-in jeans. My mother would prefer bathing in boiling oil to going Goodwill hunting.

Whatever the mystery behind the bag she’d mentioned, I figured it would only take a few minutes to ooh and aah over it before I could bail.

Cissy led me up the stairs to her bedroom, where the afternoon light filtered in through silky sheers, between creamy drapes pulled to the sides and anchored around upholstered buttons.

I spotted a small black leather handbag sitting in the middle of her bed, atop the soft pink duvet.

I waited until my mother had seated herself on one side of the bed, and then I settled across from her, the purse in between us. An invisible cloud of her Joy perfume filled the space around me, and I knew that if I closed my eyes, I could always, always find Cissy by following her scent.

“Well, there it is,” she said, doing a Vanna White and gesturing toward the slim black leather bag, which had a tiny Coach tag dangling from the zipper and looked vaguely beat-up with a generous assortment of stains and scratches across the side.

“Um, this is it?” I asked, not sure what she wanted from me. “This is the bag you wanted my opinion on?” Egads. It was
so
not her style. How to be diplomatic? “Er, well, Mother, to be honest, it’s not something I would’ve imagined you’d carry. It doesn’t even look new.”

And, if I knew anything about Cissy, it was that she liked things shiny and polished, never borrowed, never broken-in.

“Oh, did I say this was
my
purse, Andrea? No, no, I don’t believe I did.” She cocked her head, and her blond chin-length bob caught the light from the ceiling chandelier, giving her a temporary halo. Though when I blinked, it went away.

“Then whose is it?” I asked, and poked the bag in question. “Is it Sandy’s?”

“No, it’s not Sandy’s.” Mother reached across the duvet and nudged the bag toward me. “As a matter of fact, it belonged to Miranda DuBois. I removed it from her car before Anna Dean showed up to have it towed. It was in the glove compartment. I’d hoped to find the missing laptop you mentioned, but it wasn’t anywhere.

Um, excuse me
?

“And you were snooping in Miranda’s Jag because . . . ?” I hardly knew what to say, and I certainly didn’t want to
touch
the thing. “How could you—” I stopped myself, realizing that an accusatory tone would get me nowhere. So I tried again. “Why didn’t you leave it for Anna Dean to find?”