Too Pretty to Die (30 page)

“You think I’m taking a giant pen in there with me? Should I clip it to my blouse?” I asked dryly. “Or prop it behind my ear? Maybe Delaney won’t even notice.”

Okay, enough. I caught my fingers in the door handle again, about to pull open the red tin can, when Milton slapped the briefcase closed and returned it behind the seat.

He fumbled with the chunky silver watch on his wrist, ultimately removing it and handing it to me. “It’s got a built-in digital recorder. I’m pressing the Play button now, see? The memory holds nine hours, and you’re already rolling.”

Already rolling
?

Before I could say anything, he grasped my hand and forced the watch onto my wrist, where it dangled rather like a Newfoundland’s collar on a Chihuahua.

“You want me to wear this thing?” I balked.

“No,
Andy
, I want you to use it.” He looked straight at me, as serious as I’d ever seen him. “If you’re intent on confronting Delaney, then you’re not going in there without it. Or else I’m coming in with you. Take your pick.”

What kind of choice was that?

“I won’t be long,” I said, and got out of the car. I didn’t want Inspector Gadget to force any other goodies on me.

My high-heeled boots click-clacked loudly on the cobbled drive, and I was glad I’d kept Milton’s jacket on, as the night was cold. I could see well enough before me, thanks to the glow given off by the gas lamps.

I stepped onto the front stoop and sucked in a deep breath before I pressed a finger against the light of the doorbell, hearing the chimes and hoping Delaney might still be awake. If she was guilty, surely she wouldn’t be sleeping well, right?

A light went on above my head, and the door quickly opened.

An older woman’s turban-wrapped head poked out. “Miss, it’s late,” she said, and I realized it was the Armstrongs’ housekeeper.

“Please, get Delaney,” I told her firmly. “I need to speak with her, and, no, it can’t wait till morning. If you don’t bring her down, I’ll call the police. It’s that important.”

“But, miss—”

“It’s all right, Benita,” I heard Delaney say. “I’ll take care of Ms. Kendricks. I believe I know why she’s here.”

The housekeeper’s head disappeared, and Delaney stood in front of me, holding the door wide open. “Get in here, Andy, before you wake the whole house,” she ordered, glancing past me at the red Porsche in the driveway. I did as commanded, hurrying past her into the foyer. She shut and locked the door. “This way.”

She gestured to her left, taking me into the living room where Miranda had dinged her Picasso. I followed her shadowy figure as far as the archway, waiting as she stooped to switch a table lamp on before I entered. I didn’t want to trip over an ottoman and land on my face. Or worse still, on Milton’s watch.

As she stood, she crossed her arms tightly over her purple silk robe. Her bare face almost startled me. Without her makeup, Delaney had no visible eyelashes, and her eyebrows were too thin to be seen. “Have a seat,” she said, but I shook my head.

“I think I’ll stand. I’ll only be here long enough to get something off my chest.”

“It’s about Miranda, isn’t it?” Her already-too-tight features tightened.

“Yes.” I ignored the hollow pounding in my chest and threw everything I had at her. “The police got the data from Miranda’s cell, and they know your husband was having an affair with her. But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

She glared, saying nothing.

“Which is why you wanted Miranda dead, and, bless her dumb soul, she gave you the perfect chance to do it. You took her gun when she dropped it at the Pretty Party. Only you realized no one saw you do it. So what better way to get rid of her than to use her own keys to get into her duplex when she was alone, sleeping off the booze, and use her own gun to shoot her?” I paused, giving her an incredulous look. “You saw the photo on the laptop, didn’t you? The one of Miranda and Jonathan. So you took the laptop with you. My God, Delaney, how could you kill her? And don’t bother to deny it, not to me. It won’t work. No matter how this ends, I’ll know in my heart it was you.”

“Stop it.” She raised a hand, as if about to deny every word, as I would have expected.

Then she lowered her head, shaking it, and clasped her hands together. She didn’t rant or shout, but answered in a most subdued voice, “I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve done everything in my power to look as young and pretty as I possibly can. Have you ever had a C-section, Andy?”

“No,” I said. She knew I hadn’t.

“Have you ever had folds of your belly hanging down so you need surgery in order to please your husband? Or realized the love of your life looks at every big-breasted woman in the room wherever you go, until you buy yourself a couple DDs of your own?”

“No,” I said again. For Pete’s sake, she could glance at my chest and realize I hadn’t.

“Younger females are so aggressive these days.” She sighed and touched her cheeks. “They don’t have any compunction about sleeping with married men, and it’s way too tempting. They haven’t lived enough yet for the years to show up on their faces, and their mothers apparently never taught them about wearing underpants. They’re all a bunch of sluts, Andy, and that’s what I’ve had to compete with. Don’t you understand?”

I saw her eyes fill with tears, but I wasn’t about to move.

I might’ve felt compassion for her once. I didn’t now.

She was a killer.

“Miranda wasn’t twenty years old, Delaney. She was our age. It wasn’t her fault that Jonathan liked to stray outside your marriage. Though it probably hurt even worse when you learned about her, more than the others, I’d guess. Because she wasn’t twenty-something . . . heck, she wasn’t even perfect, not after what Dr. Sonja did to her. And still, Jonathan wanted to be with her.” That was it, the crux of it all. “Even though she was imperfect, he still loved her, and he was going to leave you. That’s what did it, isn’t it? His text message to her, the one he sent after midnight, after your Pretty Party. You read it somehow. That’s what killed you.”

“No”—Delaney was shaking her head, the tears falling steadily, her voice a mere hiccup—“it’s what killed her, Andy. I tried so hard to be the kind of woman he’d want, but he chose Miranda. Even with the drooling mouth and twitchy eye. He chose her, don’t you see?”

I saw all right.

I saw a woman who’d gone to extreme lengths to keep a man who didn’t want to be kept. Who didn’t love her, and maybe never had.

“But it’s all over now, isn’t it?” Delaney said, wiping her cheeks with the sleeve of her kimono.

“Yeah, Delaney, it’s all over.”

I felt Milton’s watch, dangling from my wrist, and wondered if she realized just how right she was.

I
t had been a week since Miranda DuBois died.

Milton Fletcher had received his final check from my mother for his work on the case. The pathologist Mother had flown in from Los Angeles was given a return ticket and sent home on a departing plane.

Debbie Santos had returned from South America and properly buried her daughter in a lovely private ceremony at Sparkman-Hillcrest Memorial Park, where beauty maven Mary Kay Ash had also been laid to rest. I think Miranda would have appreciated the irony of that.

The Highland Park police had arrested Delaney Armstrong for Miranda’s murder, and someone from ARGH (Abramawitz, Reynolds, Goldberg, and Hunt), my boyfriend’s firm, was representing her. They were offering a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, which I guess fit the case well enough. Trying to stay young and pretty for a lifetime in order to please a man was definitely inspiring of insanity in my mind.

As for Janet Graham, she wrote a smash-bang feature for the
Park Cities Press
, exposing the Caviar Club and its owners, Dr. Sonja Madhavi and her beau Lance Zarimba, noting the pair’s arrest on kidnapping and assault charges and mentioning Dr. Sonja’s alleged intentional disfigurement of Miranda DuBois. She linked it all to Miranda’s murder and the downfall of Delaney Armstrong, a Hockaday graduate, heiress, and soccer mom.

Even the young gun taking over the helm of the newspaper couldn’t convince his board of directors to oust the venerable Society pages editor for his inexperienced chippie girlfriend after that.

So all was well, right?

The bad guys were going to court.

Janet had kept her job (and earned a raise).

Milton Fletcher was out of my hair.

Cissy had turned her focus back to her ladies’ group teas, alumnae luncheons, and charity balls, and ceased meddling in the HPPD’s business.

And Brian Malone had forgiven me for skipping out on him during the Blues-Stars game, which the Blues miraculously won in a shootout; though he threatened to take me to the dentist and have GPS chips soldered to my teeth if I ever did anything like that again.

The best part of it all was his admitting aloud how much he loved me and wanted us to be together, even suggesting he give up his apartment and permanently move in with me.

Weeee.

I promised I would stick by him like glue—at least, on the weekends—and I held true to my word, lolling in bed until noon the next Sunday, while Malone slipped from beneath the covers and offered to fix me breakfast.

“I like my toast brown, but not burned, and no butter, just blueberry spread, and I’ll take orange juice, too,” I told him as he pulled on his sweatpants and hurried from the bedroom, as if in a rush to get the toaster going and the juice pouring.

I closed my eyes and happily rested my head on the pillow for another ten minutes, until I smelled food and opened them again to find Malone entering the room, a tray in hand.

I scooted up against the headboard into a seated position as he plunked the tray over my knees, and it took my eyes a second to realize there was more than just breakfast on my plate.

In the center of two slices of toast sat a robin’s-egg-blue box.

I opened my mouth and mutely gazed at my boyfriend. My heart was going mach five, at least, and I realized instantly what was coming.

He smiled furtively and plunked up the box, got down on bended knee beside the bed and said, “Andy, I—”

Whack!

I heard the bang as the front door of the condo burst open, a voice trilling, “Andrea! Andrea? I saw your car, and Mr. Malone’s, too, so I know you’re here!” Footsteps thudded, bracelets jangled, and the scent of Joy perfume permeated the air. “It’s past noon, and your drapes are still drawn, and the Sunday paper’s still lying on your stoop.”

Oh, God, it was my mother.

Brian stopped mid-sentence and blinked dumbly at me, his train of thought obviously smashed to smithereens.

Dang that Cissy!

Hadn’t she heard of calling first?

She must’ve used her key to the place, one I’d given her “for emergencies only,” which I thought had meant if I were lying dead on the floor, not answering my phone, or if a hurricane blew half of Dallas away—not for interrupting what could possibly be the most important moment of my life.

“Andrea!” She burst into the bedroom, seemingly unmindful of the fact that I was in bed with a breakfast tray on my lap, with my shirtless boyfriend kneeling on the floor with a Tiffany box in his hands, surely about to propose to me.

Like the Attention Diva that she was, she pushed her way in, striding toward the bed in her chinchilla coat and matching hat, thrusting her hand into my face the instant she was close enough to wiggle fingers beneath my nose.

“Guess what?” she asked, though I could’ve seen the sparkle of the huge honking diamond solitaire on her third left finger even if it hadn’t been a mere inch away from my eyeballs. Strange thing was, the ring was new, not the one she’d been wearing since she’d married my father all those years ago. “I’m engaged,” she announced, before I managed to get the word dislodged from my throat. “Stephen proposed at brunch this morning, and I said yes! Can you even believe it?!”

She was beaming, like a schoolgirl showing off her first corsage, and I felt such mixed emotions that I wasn’t sure what to say or do.

Did she
always
have to one-up me?

“Well, aren’t you going to congratulate me?” she said, pouting. Then she looked over at Malone, still on bended knee, and quipped, “Dear boy, did you drop something?”

Yeesh.

High class hijinks and low-down murder.

Praise for the previous

DEBUTANTE DROPOUT MYSTERIES

by
SUSAN McBRIDE

“I’ll read anything by Susan McBride.”

Charlaine Harris

“Delightful . . . chatty, colorful, and trés Texas.”

Publishers Weekly

“Andrea Kendricks is a society sleuth with wit
and verve. One hundred percent fun.”

Mystery Scene Magazine

“Smooth, sassy, silly, slick, and sexy.”

Sauce Magazine

“Susan McBride kept me laughing all the way
through this delicious romp of a mystery.”

Tess Gerritsen

“Susan McBride has an engaging new heroine in
Andrea Kendricks, a young woman whose approach
to crime-solving is asking herself WWND?
(What Would Nancy [Drew] Do?) . . . In a genre
where every character is the consummate pro,
her plucky incompetence is refreshing.”

Thomas Perry

“Ms. McBride knows her territory. She has put
together a funny, eccentric bunch of characters
who bound around town with perfect manicures,
big hair, and lots of social savvy. . . . [A] hilarious
romp.”

Dallas Morning News

“Exciting, sassy, and filled with deliciously wicked
wit, Susan McBride has created a masterpiece of a
mystery that will keep you laughing long after you
close the covers.”

Katie MacAlister

“Susan McBride has a talent for expressing the
intricacies of a relationship, as well as a flair for
dialogue.”

CrimeSpree Magazine

“As alluring as an Escada evening dress and as
tempting as a slice of death-by-chocolate cake.”

Publishers Weekly