Too Pretty to Die (19 page)

Cissy looked at me like I’d asked the dumbest question on the planet. “I thought there might be something there that would shed some light on what happened. After all, the police don’t seem to be listening to
you
, do they, Andrea? And you were with Miranda last night before she passed away, so I figured that it was my duty to do everything I could to assist Debbie Santos in learning the truth about her daughter’s death . . .”

She kept talking, but I hardly heard what she said, as her voice faded to fuzzy somewhere after she’d uttered the words,
It belonged to Miranda DuBois.
I removed it from her car.

I had a sudden urge to pick up the purse, sling it against the wall and scream at the top of my lungs.

But I didn’t.

Instead, I looked at my calm and collected mother and whispered, “Please, please, please, tell me you didn’t really take this from Miranda’s Jag without saying anything to Deputy Dean.”

“Okay, I won’t tell you that,” she replied, cool as the proverbial cucumber. “But I did, and I’m not sorry.”

Was this another one of her “do as I say, not as I do” examples? It’s a good thing I was all grown up (relatively speaking), or I’d figure there was open season on the cookie jar, despite the “no cookies before mealtime” rule she’d instigated.

“Have you unzipped it yet?” I asked tentatively. “Did you see what was inside?”

I winced, awaiting her response.

“Of course I didn’t pry inside,” she snipped, affronted. “What kind of person do you think I am?”

Did she really want my honest opinion on that?

Oh, boy.

I sighed, thinking,
Mother, Mother, Mother, what have you done this time
? She’d set plenty of precedence for doing the outrageous, if not the unlawful. Like when she’d stolen the mail from the box of a murdered woman who’d once been her friend and bridge partner.

Cissy’s blue eyes gazed back at me so innocently. As if poaching a purse from the car of a dead woman—and one whose death had become increasingly suspicious—was de rigueur, humdrum, everyday, no big deal.

And she’d told Anna Dean that
I’d
been the one withholding evidence?

If this wasn’t such a serious situation, I would’ve laughed in her perfectly powdered face. But instead I picked up the purse and unzipped it.

I mean, as long as Mother had done the deed and pilfered the bag from the Jag, I might as well see what was inside it, right?

So I gently spilled the contents atop the duvet cover, and Mother and I bent our heads over the smattering of items, taking everything in and saying nothing.

If there was a clue amidst Miranda’s belongings as to what actually transpired before she died, I knew Cissy was as anxious as I was to find it.

N
eedless to say, it felt a bit creepy, touching things that had belonged to Miranda, considering she would never handle any of them again.

What would my mother do with the purse and its contents when we were done with them? Give everything to Debbie Santos when she got back in town? And Mrs. Santos would then, what, keep the cosmetics and credit cards as mementoes? Toss them into the garbage?

Sometimes when I dwelled on the morbid, I mulled over the things I’d accumulated through the years—the odds and ends from flea markets, the art work I’d painted or had picked up at consignment shops just because I was drawn to it, and the hand-me-down furniture and gifts from people I loved—and I wondered what would happen to all of it when I was gone. Would anyone want it? Would those who survived me divvy up my stuff? Or would they call for the Goodwill truck and wash their hands of it, without feeling an iota of regret.

I contemplated what I had right now in my purse: my wallet with a few credit cards, checkbook (yes, I was still a paper-writing dinosaur), and a photo of Brian and me, a notepad, a pack of gum, a tiny bottle of contact lens solution, a tape measure, business cards, a couple of Band-Aids for emergencies, pens, and assorted paper clips and rubber bands.

What did that say about me?

Except that I was a fairly boring individual.

If I were gone tomorrow, would someone pitch everything? Toss it all out like used litter from a cat box?

What I found most precious, someone else might deem junk.

It was one of those jokes the universe played on us (one of way too many, so far as I was concerned).

I palmed the green Clinique compact and tube of lipstick, imagining a less than sober Miranda powdering her nose and swiping color on her lips before heading to the Pretty Party last night to scare the
cojones
out of Dr. Sonja (and everyone else, for that matter).

There was a small tube of Retinol, which I thought was used on acne, but Cissy informed me was a prescription wrinkle treatment.

“It peels the layers right off, after it turns your skin a bright red, almost like a bad sunburn,” she explained, and I stuck out my tongue and went, “Ewww.”

These days, it seemed like “no pain, no gain” applied to beauty instead of muscles.

Blech.

It boggled my brain to consider that an attractive woman like Miranda, barely past thirty, would be so consumed with having a crease here or there.

There was so much else to worry about, considering the state of the world, that being preoccupied with appearance seemed very silly.

Still, Miranda’s vanity aside, I didn’t imagine her Retinol harbored any dark secrets. Her wallet didn’t exactly scream BIG CLUE HERE! either. So far as I could tell, it held little more than twenty bucks cash, a driver’s license, and a Gold Visa card.

Oh, wait. I take that back. There was a torn piece of paper stuffed behind the bills, on which she’d written:

Fish eggs. Yuck.

I glanced at my mother and held out the note. “Does this mean anything to you?” I asked her.

She squinted at the words for a moment. “Looks like part of a shopping list. Caspian Sevruga and Malossol Beluga caviar. Wonderful stuff. Miranda had expensive taste.” Fleetingly, she smiled. “Just like her mama.”

I was sure Debbie Santos would be proud, but I doubted Miranda’s choice of gourmet caviars had much of an impact on her cause of death. So I stuck the list back in the zipper clutch.

I figured Miranda had to have a bigger everyday purse back at the duplex, the one that held oodles of girl stuff and a billfold filled with plastic; something substantial enough so the police would never realize this little purse was missing.

Besides, it’s not like our scavenging had yielded anything worth passing on to the Highland Park P.D.

Nothing from the handbag told us any more than we already knew, and I’d nearly given up entirely when I tried the tiny zipped pocket inside the fabric lining, only to find it stuck. Well, that big ol’ zipper end was gone, so there wasn’t much left to grab onto.

I left Mother upstairs in her room and headed down to the kitchen to find a pair of pinchers, the kind that Sandy Beck kept in the utility drawer.

Malone and Stephen were finishing up the last of the crustless sandwiches and swapping golf tales when I entered the room.

“Is everything all right?” Malone asked, for probably the tenth time that day.

Really, did I need that much checking up on?

“Sure, sure, fine,” I replied as I scrounged in the drawer for the pinchers.

Yep, yep, everything was fine and dandy.

“Did you see the bag?” my boyfriend tried next, and I assured him that I had.

I made no mention of Mother’s sticky fingers and my concern that, should Anna Dean learn what she’d done, Cissy would be locked up for interfering in a police investigation. Then Mother would have to make an urgent call to Vera Wang to have swanky jail togs designed so she wasn’t wearing the same ugly orange jumpsuit as everyone else in the Dallas County pen.

I nearly hollered, “Eureka!” when I located the pinchers, then I hightailed it out of the kitchen, racing up the Oriental runner over creaky stairs, back to Mother’s room.

Cissy had plumped silk shammed pillows behind her back and removed her shoes. She had arms slung over bent knees, her stocking feet pale as pearls against the pink of the duvet.

“I hope Mr. Fletcher has more luck finding out about Miranda’s final hours than we’re having,” she commented, and I bit the inside of my cheek to stay quiet. “I just feel terrible for Debbie, being out of the country when all of this happened. It’s a good thing her Brazilian surgeon has her on tranquilizers. I know I’d be a basket case if I were in her position. The poor dear is wrapped up like a mummy after all the, ah, adjustments, and she can’t even get on a plane to come home and bury her daughter. Not for at least a week. Her doctor won’t let her fly until she’s less swollen.”

While my mother continued her gloomy monologue, I delicately worked on pulling the broken zipper with the tiny pliers, so I could see what was in the pocket.

When I finally yanked it open, I gave a little yelp, setting down the pinchers to shove my fingers into the gap and encountering something solid and compact.

“What is it?” my mother asked, unfurling arms from her knees and scooting forward to get a better view as I withdrew the object in question.

It was a slender digital camera.

The model was Pentax, and it wasn’t much bigger than a credit card; smaller even than a box of Sucrets.

Janet’s description of the “anonymous” e-mail from Miranda ran through my brain again, and I felt a tickle at the back of my throat, which I knew had nothing to do with allergies.

She said she belonged to a private club that wasn’t what it seemed on the outside . . . that she had names and pictures . . . revealing stuff from secret parties where everyone got drunk and down and dirty with everyone else.
She knew who the owners of the club were, too, and she knew all the dish about their member selection process.
And
she was ready to spill the beans about everything
.

My mother’s drawl cut through my mental digression.

“A camera? Well, phooey.” She looked terribly disappointed. “Is there anything interesting on it?”

Funny, but I was wondering the very same thing.

“Let’s see.” I touched the button on top, and the Pentax made a little noise.

The screen on the back turned bright blue and then shifted to a live shot, so I could see my mother through the lens, watching me with her head tipped. I didn’t want to play with the thing there in Cissy’s bedroom. I wanted to take the camera home, hook it up to my computer and sift through any photographs that might be saved on the memory disk.

So I shut it off.

“I don’t want to mess with this here, maybe press the wrong button and delete something I shouldn’t,” I told her. “I want to be careful, just in case.”

“Just in case what?” she asked.

In case there are photographs on the Pentax detailing some of the Caviar Club’s private orgies
I wanted to blurt out, but didn’t.

If the pictures Miranda had mentioned in the e-mail to Janet were contained on the Pentax, I wasn’t about to risk screwing them up by playing around with the buttons on a camera I’d never used before.

“I’d hate to destroy evidence,” I replied ultimately, the safest explanation, and not untrue besides.

The last thing I wanted was for Cissy to get wind of Miranda’s ties to the Caviar Club and start kicking up dust in that direction. Janet would skin me alive, and I was rather quite fond of my epidermis, despite the freckles and occasional zits.

Which is all to say, I kept mum on the subject.

“So that’s all we’ve got?” My mother frowned. “I figured there’d be something, I don’t know, more helpful.”

“Like a note detailing what happened to Miranda after I left her at the duplex snoring soundly on the sofa and before six o’clock this morning when her neighbor walked through her open door and found her dead?” I offered, because it was the most absurd thing I could come up with, and it avoided answering her question altogether. I’d always been good at deflection.

“Yes, just like that,” Cissy said in all seriousness. “Things always turn out so neatly on
CSI
. It’s a shame real life is so much—”

“Messier?” I finished for her. “Less cut and dry?”

“Exactly.” She sighed and swung her legs gracefully over the side of the bed, slipping her shoes back on. “I have to check with Sandy about when the forensic pathologist is flying in from L.A., and I need to call Sparkman-Hillcrest about Miranda’s burial. Oh, sweet pea, I still can’t believe this isn’t a bad dream,” she said, and paused to stare at the pile of Miranda’s things scattered across her bed. “But I can’t dwell on that, can I? There’s so much work to do and so little time.”

“Mother, why?” I called out to her as she began to exit toward her sitting room. “Why are you doing this?”

She stopped and ever so slowly turned around. “Why?” she repeated, as if she hadn’t heard me right.

I scooted toward the end of the bed, slinging my legs over the footboard and dangling them, like I did when I was a kid and my feet didn’t touch the floor.

I rubbed my palms over my knees and said, “You’re near-obsessed with proving Miranda didn’t kill herself. I know you’ve been friends with Mrs. Santos a long time, but I don’t understand exactly why this seems so all-fire urgent. Can’t you let the police do their job and see what they’ll turn up? I’m sure they’ll be finished with their investigation by the time Mrs. Santos gets home. Then she can deal with them, not you.”

Her eyebrows went up and she crossed her arms, one hand reaching up to fiddle with her necklace, an Edwardian locket my father had given to her not long before he died. “I can’t even believe you’re second-guessing me, Andrea.”

She couldn’t? Since when?

Though the tone of her voice made me feel awful, and I lowered my eyes, cheeks warming, hating when she looked at me like that, as if I didn’t trust her (which I did, for the most part, a good deal of the time anyway).

“Never mind,” I said quietly.

She took another few steps toward me. “But I do mind,” she insisted. “Because I would hope my own daughter would see why I can’t simply stay out of this, have the police rubber-stamp Miranda’s passing as suicide, and let Debbie clean up the mess when she gets home from Brazil, full of bruises and stitches.”