By seven o’clock on Sunday night, Clover and I were free women. We shed our orange jumpsuits, donned the black outfits we’d worn the night of the break-in, and bid farewell to everyone.
“My, that certainly was an experience,” said Clover as we rode in a taxi to pick up my car in the parking lot on Roxbury. “An experience I have no interest in repeating.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said, “although I’ll really miss Cherry.”
She laughed. “You can always call her if you get lonesome.” Cherry had made us write down her phone number in case we ever needed her services. Her beeper number too.
After finding my car in one piece, thank God, I drove over to Clover’s, dropped her off, and headed home to Santa Monica. While I was wildly happy to be out of jail, I was dreading my re-entry into civilian life. How would Roger react to my absence over the weekend? How would Preston react to my failure to inspect the property to which he’d assigned me? How would I proceed in my quest for the antidote? Yes, Farkus was a big, fat phony, but whoever and whatever he was, he had whipped up a potion that had turned Roger into the husband from hell, and it was all my fault. I had to undo what I’d done, didn’t I?
“Roger? I’m home,” I said, standing in the kitchen, which, by the way, was spotless and reeked of one of those industrial-strength cleaning liquids, the kind that makes your eyes burn. Obviously, Roger had been a busy boy.
I heard footsteps, then a voice. “Elizabeth?”
“Hi, honey. I’m back from Clover’s,” I called out.
More footsteps. Eventually, Roger materialized in the kitchen—the “new and improved” Roger. Instead of appearing in his old Sunday night uniform, a wrinkled T-shirt, he was wearing an honest-to-goodness smoking jacket, a burgundy velvet number with black satin lapels. He looked handsome but ridiculous. I did not marry George Hamilton, after all.
“Elizabeth.” His jaw dropped when he saw me. Oh, and he pinched his nostrils with his fingers, so he wouldn’t have to smell me. “What on earth have you done to yourself? You look as if you’ve been sleeping on the street.”
“What do you mean?” I said, reminding myself that he wasn’t himself but some distorted version of the man I married.
He took an inventory of me, stepping around me in a wide circle, as if he feared he might catch something. “You’re filthy,” he said finally. “Doesn’t Clover have a shower at that palace of hers?”
“Oh. Right.” I was so focused on Roger’s appearance that I’d forgotten about mine. “We decided to have a no-maintenance weekend. No shampoo. No makeup. Just us girls. It was a lot of fun.”
“Then I guess you and I have an entirely different idea of what constitutes ‘fun,’” he said.
Oh, Roger, I thought with a terrible, heavy sadness. Your idea of fun used to be camping, and one of the things you liked the best about it was roughing it, including not having to shower. Don’t you remember how it was? Don’t you remember how you were?
“What did you do this weekend while I was away?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.
“I wondered where you’d gone, for one thing,” he said.
“But I left you a message on the answering machine,” I said.
“After you’d already made your plans with your friend. Without consulting me, I might add.”
“I’m sorry about that, Roger. Listen, how about if I hop into the shower right now, while you order us a pizza. We could have a nice dinner together, catch up, snuggle in front of the TV.”
“I don’t eat pizza. Too many calories.”
“All right. Then order whatever you like. I’ll be back in a jiffy.”
Encouraged by the fact that he wasn’t rushing out to go dancing with Nikki or some new playmate and that we might actually spend a little quality time together, I hit the shower, washed my hair, let it dry naturally, in the wavy style Roger always preferred, and threw on a beige sweater and matching slacks.
“Hi,” I said upon my return to the kitchen. “This better?” I spun around, so he could get a good look.
“Uh, yeah,” he said sarcastically. “If you were a cocker spaniel.”
“I don’t—”
“The hair, Elizabeth. What’s up with the curls? Is there a dog show in town?”
I felt my face burn with unadulterated rage. Okay, so he was under the influence of the stud stimulant and wasn’t responsible for what he was saying, but I was sick and tired of this Roger, this critical, carping, compulsively neat person who was much more obnoxious in those departments than I could ever be.
“Forget dinner,” I snapped. “I’ll order myself a pizza.”
“Go ahead,” he said. “They’re your thighs.”
“Why you—” Oh, what was the use.
We stayed out of each other’s way that night. I don’t remember ever feeling so lonely. The man I loved was right there in the same house with me, and yet I couldn’t reach him, couldn’t bring him back.
And he wasn’t my only problem. As I was going through Saturday’s mail, I found a letter from Art Yarnell, the general manager of the Phoenician Paradise. I knew he’d been hounding AMLP about me, but I honestly didn’t expect him to write to me directly, at my home address.
As for the letter itself, it was threatening, crazy, over-the-top—yet another rant about how I had singlehandedly damaged his reputation in the hospitality industry and how he was going to make me pay, whatever that meant. Another headache I didn’t need.
Actually, the worst news came the next morning, when I called Preston to tell him that I hadn’t been able to inspect the resort in Santa Barbara over the weekend.
“I had a family crisis,” I said. “I couldn’t leave town.” I decided to omit the part about being locked up in a jail cell.
“You’ve been having a number of family crises lately, haven’t you, Elizabeth,” he said, without a trace of sympathy.
“It’s been a rocky time,” I admitted, “but I can run up to Santa Barbara later this week to do the inspection.”
“I think we’ll let someone else handle it,” he said. “It sounds as if you need a little time to yourself.”
“Let someone else handle—” I was too upset to finish the sentence. I had been the number-one inspector in Preston’s territory. I was the one the company had entrusted with its most important evaluations. I wasn’t about to be shoved aside while some Elizabeth Baskin wanna-be, someone who did not have my discerning eye, someone who didn’t even know how to play Torture the Concierge, stole my assignments.
“You’re due for a break, aren’t you?” said Preston. “Why don’t you take it now.”
“I don’t want a break.” I was not on salary with AMLP. I was paid by the job. No inspections, no income.
“That wasn’t a suggestion,” he said. “It was a directive.”
Obviously, a little begging was in order. “Please, Preston. Give me another chance. I’ll prove to you that I’ve still got it. Send me out and see. You won’t regret it, I swear you won’t.”
“Let’s give it a rest for now, shall we? I’ll contact you when we need you, Elizabeth.”
He hung up. I tried to look on the bright side. No inspections for AMLP meant more time to find Farkus. The question was, How?
It was Brenda who came up with a plan.
“The bottom line is that Farkus has been the herb guru to the stars,” she said over lunch at Ivy at the Shore, the sort of restaurant where ordering off-the-menu is a status symbol. So is asking the waiter where the olive oil was pressed and whether the wheat in the bread is organic and how long it would take to duplicate one of the recipes in The Zone. “They’ve been depending on him for their preparations as much as he’s been depending on them to pay his bills. They’ve been his meal ticket, Elizabeth. Do you actually think he’d leave without telling them where they could reach him? He’s probably making house calls to their estates right this very minute.”
“Not with the police breathing down his neck. On the other hand, I just remembered something. A woman who works in the office next door to Farkus’s made the same point you’re making, that his famous patients were his bread and butter and that he’s probably still in touch with them.”
“Of course he is. The celebrities you saw in his waiting room—Lanie Duquette and Angela Clay and Wendy Winters—have to be just as desperate for their potions as you are for that antidote.”
“So I should call the celebrities and ask them where he is?”
“Elizabeth. You don’t call celebrities. You call their people.”
“Brenda, please. I’ve had a rough weekend. Don’t start talking like a segment on Access Hollywood.”
“I’m serious. At the magazine, we have to go through their P.R. reps. I couldn’t get Lanie Duquette’s phone number for you if I tried.” She smiled. “But I know where she lives. I know where they all live.”
“You do?”
“Yup. So if you and your friend Clover really want to find the elusive herb man, you should consider becoming a stalker.”
I stopped chewing my grilled vegetable salad and gave her a look. “Have you forgotten that I’ve already been arrested once?”
“I’m simply saying you should hang around outside Lanie’s house and Angela’s house and Wendy’s house—nothing creepy. You might get lucky and catch Farkus ministering to his flock.”
“Sounds risky.”
“I repeat: You wouldn’t be stalking them in the usual sense; you’d be staking them out. It’s worth a try, Elizabeth. How cool would it be if you were stationed outside Lanie’s mansion and you saw Farkus drive up, a little black bag in his hand. You could corner the guy and tell him you’ll call the cops unless he gives you the antidote.”
“What if he never shows up at Lanie’s house?”
“What if he does and you miss him?”
“It could be a huge waste of time.”
“What else do you have to do? You said you got fired.”
“I didn’t get fired, Brenda. I’m taking a break, that’s all.”
“So you’re taking a break. Take it on Lanie Duquette’s lawn.”
Well, I didn’t have any other ideas. About an hour after I returned home from lunch, Brenda called with the addresses of Lanie, Angela, and Wendy. “You’re all set,” she said. “Let me know how it works out.”
“I will,” I said, “if I’m not incarcerated somewhere.”
When I told Clover about the idea, she was surprisingly upbeat.
“I thought you’d reject it right off the bat,” I said, “because of the way our last caper turned out.”
“Elizabeth, honey, I’m not in a position to reject any idea that’ll get Bud to act like his old self. Do you know what that rascal did after you dropped me off at the house last night? He left. He hadn’t seen me since Friday and he left—right after telling me I needed a bath, not to mention electrolysis on my upper lip. The man had the mitigated gall to inform me that I had a very faint mustache!”
“Where he’d go after delivering that lovely remark? Ballroom dancing again?”
“Yes. He says that to be the perfect man, he should be perfect at ballroom dancing. And to think that all we wanted our husbands to be was more attentive.”
“And now they’re too attentive, scrutinizing us down to the tiniest hair follicle.”
“Oh, how I wish we’d never messed with them, Elizabeth.”
“Me too, Clover. But we did mess with them, and now we’ve got to clean up the mess.”
“Right. Which celebrity are we staking out first and what time does the staking out take place?”
“Let’s start with Wendy Winters, the NBC News correspondent. She lives around the corner from me. We can stake her out, come here for a quick sandwich, then stake her out again.”
“Count me in.”