"
Plenty of people showed up for Dougie's funeral on Tuesday, and not all of them came to mourn. Curt begged off at the last minute because he got tapped to drive to New York City on a delivery, so I sat alone in the back row in my borrowed navy dress, unnoticed by the movers and shakers, watching judges and lawyers and clients and the merely curious file past the deceased. Hilary stood among the explosion of flowers at the head of the casket accepting condolences and looking lethal in black Donna Karan. She eyeballed them all as if she were calculating their net worth. Maybe she was shopping for her next husband. Her twin daughters stood to either side of her like bony bookends, their vulpine faces expressionless. At eighteen, they were already chips off their mother's glacier.
Most of the purported mourners looped right out the door after paying their respects, eager to get back to their unopened mail and unreturned phone calls. A few past and present clients lingered, chatting with Ken and Howard and shaking their heads at the senselessness of premature death. If they only knew. I wondered what it had cost the firm to keep everyone from finding out Dougie had been murdered. I'm sure Janice was aware, but she wasn't talking. To anyone. She was off in a corner playing with her key ring and fidgeting. Donna was invisible, as usual. Wally was circulating, shaking hands and patting shoulders and swapping war stories with trial lawyers, although he was still in basic training while his audience was filled with five-star generals. It was sad and tedious and a little ugly, both there and at the cemetery, and I was relieved when the funeral director announced the luncheon at Darrow's to the leftover stragglers. A fraction of them made the trip, and we remained grouped more or less by socioeconomic status as we were seated, which meant I'd be sharing my chicken picante with the other secretaries. Janice had been cast off with us and didn't look any too pleased about it. Donna hid behind her water glass and speared me with dirty looks. It didn't take long to decide I'd have been better off making a wrong turn on the drive from the cemetery, and that feeling got stronger when Hilary Heath slithered up behind me and laid a bloodless hand on my shoulder. I had to bite my lip to keep from screaming.
"Can I talk to you for a moment?" she hissed in my ear.
Around the table, conversation ceased.
As soon as my chills had passed, I followed her into the ladies' room, which was a little too isolated for my taste, although it was a beauty of a room, with shiny marble and granite, and lots of benches with rose-colored upholstery so you could take a rest from the exhausting task of relieving yourself.
Hilary ignored the benches, and since I made it a practice never to look up to Hilary, I did the same. We stood in front of the sinks, Hilary primping in the mirror and me ignoring my reflection and both of us inching up to something big.
"The reason I wanted to talk to you," she said while she added another layer of paint, "is you're the only one at Parker, Dennis, and Heath I can trust."
"That's not true," I said instantly. "What about Ken?"
Her surgically petite nose wrinkled. "Ken would sleep through his own murder."
Interesting choice of words. "Howard, then."
Her eyebrows met in the middle of her forehead. "Howard can't see past his own ego."
"Wally?" I knew I was reaching, but I didn't want to be Hilary's confidante.
She stopped fussing and fixed my reflection with a glare. "I trust you."
That sounded like a threat. I swallowed hard and kept quiet.
"The police tell me my husband was murdered," she said after a frosty pause. "I want to know who did it. You're going to help me."
Oh, God. I was shaking my head before her mouth had closed. "You should let the police handle it," I said. "They know what they're doing."
"So they say." Hilary put away the makeup and brought out the comb and hairspray. I inched carefully to the right because I despised hair spray, and I wasn't too crazy about Hilary. Another two hundred inches or so, I'd be home free. "You, however, are an insider," she went on. "You see what goes on in that sorry little place day after day."
That sorry little place had bought her a Mercedes, but maybe it wasn't the right time to point that out.
"For the life of me, I don't know how you can work there." She picked and cajoled her hair back into a helmet. "Didn't you go to college?"
"Well," I began. "When I"
She shook her head, picked up the hair spray, and engulfed both of us in a sticky cloud. I closed my mouth before my lungs took on a touchable but firm hold. "I mean, don't you have any marketable skills other than making coffee?"
Gee, she was a master motivator.
Mercifully, the fumigation stopped. Hilary shoved the comb and can back in her purse. When the mist had settled and she was as close to perfection as she could get, she moved in for the kill. "Tell me who you think did it."
"I think you should let the police do that."
It was the safe answer, but Hilary wasn't buying it. "Was it that bitchy Paige girl? Or that weird little quiet one, Darma?"
"Donna," I said.
"Or Melissa." Hilary tapped her front teeth, thinking. "She was his personal secretary, wasn't she?"
"Not really," I said. "We operate as a pool. Whoever's free"
"Don't give me that crap," she snapped. "You think I don't know when it came right down to it, she was his favorite?"
The door opened, and an elderly white-haired woman shuffled past us into a stall while Hilary urged her along with an arctic glare. After an eternity, the lock slid into place, and Hilary turned back to me. "Don't try to deny it, Jamie. For God's sake, he asked me to pick up her Christmas gift last year."
That was a twist, the wife picking out gifts for the girlfriend. If Missy had been Dougie's girlfriend. And I didn't know that for sure, although it felt uncomfortable enough to be true.
"What'd you get her?" I asked, since I couldn't think of anything else to say.
"That," she said, "is not important. I want you to look through her desk, find anything incriminating that you can."
I pushed myself away from the counter in alarm. "I can't do that." Suppose I found something. Suppose Hilary had planted something for me to find. Suppose I got caught and fired or arrested for attempted theft. Visions of orange jumpsuits and cavity searches sprang to mind.
Something else sprang to mind. Hilary was crying, or at least she was trying to. Her eyes were glistening and she managed to squeeze out a single fat tear that sluiced through the layers of foundation and powder and blush on her cheek. Her mouth was twitching with the effort to control herself. Her hands were clenching and unclenching. It was painful to watch, and it hit me hard somewhere in the area of my heart. Here was a woman who had just lost her husband and was trying to struggle along as a newly-minted widow, and she was asking for my help. I supposed I'd done worse things in my life than snoop through someone's private papers. Really, it wasn't asking all that much. Five minutes, just long enough to assure her that Missy wasn't harboring anything incriminating, and I'd have Hilary as a friend for life. For all the good that would do me.
"All right," I said, "I'll do it. How will I contact you?"
The lone tear dropped off Hilary's jaw. Her hands relaxed, and her mouth resumed its normal hard line. Hilary the Bereaved Widow had morphed back into Hilary the Horrible. "I'll contact you," she said. "And you won't regret it," she added, but she was wrong. I regretted it already.
* * *
"Where've you been?" Missy demanded as soon as I got back to the table. "We were about to send out a search team."
"I was in the ladies' room." I slid into my seat.
She nodded. "I know what you mean. This food is terrible."
My lunch had been delivered in my absence, and someone had pilfered the side salad. I glanced around with narrowed eyes, noticing Janice's salad bowl was overflowing with baby carrots. The hell with it, she could have them. I was through wrangling with tough and scary women for the day.
The old woman from the restroom suddenly appeared in my peripheral vision, heading for our table. I'd forgotten all about her. When she got there, she put a gnarled hand on my shoulder and said, "Don't do it, honey. Pride is all we've got."
If pride was all I had, then I truly had nothing. I turned to thank her for the unsolicited advice but she was already on her way back to her own table. I could feel the eyes on me before I turned around. Just great. My first foray into espionage and I already had four witnesses.
"Don't do what?" Missy asked, suspicious now. "What did Hilary want?"
I shrugged and picked up my fork. Very casual. My hand was shaking. "She wanted to talk about Dougie, that's all."
"Uh-huh." I didn't like that look. She was watching me like a dog watches a porterhouse. "And instead of her own kids, she chose you to confide in."
"She claims she trusts me." I nibbled at a piece of chicken and forced myself to swallow. "Give her a break," I added, for effect. "She's a widow."
"She's a piranha," Missy said. "Never forget it. Look at her. The poor widow seems pretty dry-eyed to me."
Give her a second, I wanted to say, but of course I didn't. What I said was, "People express grief in different ways."
I actually felt a wave of heat coming off Missy. "What are you, the U.N.?"
Suddenly I was finding it easier to understand Hilary's request. There was no reason other than a guilty conscience for Missy to dislike her so intensely. Instinct told me she must be hiding something, and I meant to find out what it was.