Chapter 23
“I swear I wasn’t trying to steal the espadrilles!”
I was sitting in a windowless cubbyhole in the bowels of the mall, across from my arresting officer—a stocky mall cop, with sweat stains the size of Staten Island under his arms.
“I was just trying to catch the killer,” I continued, pleading my case.
“What killer?”
“The person who poisoned the Skinny Kitty.”
He shook his head, confused.
“You’re looking for someone who killed a skinny cat?”
“No, no. Skinny Kitty is a cat food, and the guy who invented it got murdered. And now I’m trying to track down his killer.”
“You some sort of detective?” the mall cop asked, giving his armpits an energetic scratch.
“Part-time semiprofessional,” I nodded.
“Semiprofessional?” He shot me a skeptical look. “From what I’ve seen, I’d say barely professional.”
Ouch. That hurt.
At which point there was a timid knock on the door, and the shoe salesman I’d flagged down at Nordstrom poked his head in.
“You wanted to see me?” he asked the cop, whose name, according the tag on his shirt, was J. Schulte.
“You recognize this woman?” asked J. Schulte (or, as I liked to think of him, The Sweater).
“Yes, she was trying to find a pair of seven-and-a-half Nikes with a ketchup stain on the toe.”
The Sweater blinked, puzzled.
“Nordstrom sells stained shoes?”
“No,” I piped up. “They were my shoes. I took them off to try on the espadrilles, and then I couldn’t find them and when I finally did this lady who looked like Ernest Borgnine was trying them on, and I had to pretend I had toe fungus so she’d give them back to me, and then I saw Deedee, at least I thought it was Deedee, and I’m pretty certain she’s the killer since her husband didn’t die of a heart attack like she said, but food poisoning just like Dean, so naturally I ran after her, only it turned out not to be Deedee after all and I didn’t realize I still had the espadrilles until you showed up and arrested me.”
I tend to babble when I’m nervous.
But fortunately, my stream of chatter was cut off by the phone ringing.
The Sweater answered it and motioned me out of the room.
I spent the next few minutes sitting in a tiny waiting area, under the watchful eye of a female security officer who in a former life had no doubt been an NFL quarterback.
After what seemed like a small eternity, I was summoned back to the august presence of The Sweater.
“I tried to pass on your story as best I could to the security executive at Nordstrom,” he said. “You’ll be happy to know they’re not pressing charges.”
Thank heavens for those wonderful people at that fabulous store!
“In fact,” he said, “they feel so bad that you’ve had such a stressful experience, they want you to have this.”
With that, he handed me a business card.
How nice. Feeling guilty for having me falsely arrested, I bet they were offering me the services of a personal shopper!
But then I looked down at the card, which read:
DR. ALICE RUDNICK
PSYCHIATRIST
“They suggest you seek counseling ASAP,” The Sweater said. “Preferably with meds. I personally would recommend heavy doses.”
Well! Of all the nerve! Implying that I was a raving loony.
I was so angry, I stomped right out of the security offices straight to my Corolla, fuming all the way.
Okay, so I stopped off for a Mrs. Fields cookie.
And the espadrilles.
And a flirty sundress.
Oh, hell. I was as bad as Kandi.
* * *
I don’t know what possessed me to go on that crazy shopping spree.
I guess Dr. Alice Rudnick would say it was some sort of escape mechanism, that I shopped to forget the death threat I’d just received and the snake pit of danger my life had become.
But as I hauled my goodies back to my Corolla, whatever temporary respite I’d gotten from my shopping spree vanished, and a fresh wave of fear flooded over me.
I remembered all too well my Raid death threat, which lay like a burning ember in my pants pocket, and made a mental note to bring it to the cops the first thing in the morning.
Right then, though, all I wanted was to go home and soak in a nice relaxing tub, preferably with a glass of chardonnay at my side.
Back at my apartment, I found Prozac draped across my armchair.
“Oh, Pro!” I wailed, kicking off my Nikes. “I’ve had the most ghastly afternoon. I got a death threat from the killer, and I almost got arrested for shoplifting.”
Through slitted eyes, she lobbed me a world-weary look.
Yeah, right. Whatever. At least one of us can get arrested in this town.
I headed to the kitchen for a rendezvous with my good buddy Mr. Chardonnay and had just pulled the bottle from the fridge when I heard the unmistakable sound of Lance banging at my door.
“Jaine, it’s me. Open up!”
Clutching my bottle of chardonnay, I hurried to the door and opened it to find Lance looking utterly dejected, Mamie at his side.
He staggered in, still in the same outfit he’d worn that morning, his blond curls limp, his polka dot tie askew.
Mamie, trotting in behind him, made a beeline for Prozac’s tush, which she began sniffing amiably.
“Horrible news,” Lance groaned. “Mamie didn’t get the part.”
“Oh, no!” I tsked in sympathy. “Want some chardonnay to ease the pain?”
“Thanks,” he said, grabbing the wine and glugging it straight from the bottle.
So much for my rendezvous with Mr. C. Why the heck hadn’t I poured myself a glass before I answered the door?
“What a nightmare!” Lance said, plopping down on the sofa, cradling the wine in his lap.
“Mamie didn’t fetch her newspaper on cue?”
“We didn’t even get that far. Remember the trick I taught her to impress everybody? Picking up her toy Hermès bag and trotting around with it?”
“Vividly,” I nodded.
“Well, it turns out the ad agency producer is a dedicated fashionista. She had a bag just like Mamie’s. Only hers was the twelve-thousand-dollar original. When I told Mamie to go get the Hermès purse, instead of picking up her prop bag like we’d rehearsed, she went straight for the producer’s twelve-thousand-dollar jobbie, snatched it up in her jaws, and got dog spit all over it.”
“Oh, gaak, no!”
“The producer went ballistic, and Mamie got so discombobulated, she wound up taking a tinkle on the director’s leg.” He paused to take another slug from my wine bottle. “Needless to say, she didn’t get the gig.”
“I’m so sorry, Lance.”
“Not only that, Deedee dropped her as a client. Poor Mamie,” Lance said, shaking his head. “She’s positively brokenhearted.”
I looked over at Mamie, still sniffing Prozac’s rear.
Trust me, the only brokenhearted one in that duo was Lance.
“I suppose I’ve only got myself to blame. I’ve taught Mamie to be so discerning, it’s no wonder she went for the real bag.”
At that moment, the discerning dog in question had abandoned Prozac’s tush and was now industriously licking my big toe.
Prozac gazed down at her with pitying eyes.
Welcome to my world, fluffball.
“What a day from hell,” Lance moaned. “I can’t possibly think of a more horrible afternoon.”
“I can. You could have gotten a death threat from a killer and almost been arrested for shoplifting.”
“You poor thing,” he said, swimming up from the depths of his own misery to wallow in mine. “Tell Uncle Lance all about it.”
And I did. I told him about losing my shoes and finding the death threat in my Nike and running after the ersatz killer with a pair of Nordstrom espadrilles and winding up in mall jail.
When I was through he shook his head, tsking.
“Espadrilles? Really? Jaine, honey. They’re so last year.”
“Lance, will you please focus? I just got a death threat from a killer.”
“You know what you need, hon?” he said.
“A bottle of chardonnay without your drool all over it?”
“A fun night out. We both need one.”
Which is why an hour later we were sitting on the patio of the swellegant Coast Café on the beach in Santa Monica, sipping martinis and looking out over the glorious Pacific Ocean.
How wonderful it was to loll among the rich and pampered, watching the sun go down and sucking the pimentos out of our olives.
Soon our martinis were doing their job, and our cares of the day were fading away.
“I suppose it’s all for the best,” Lance said, waxing philosophical. “I’m not sure Mamie and I are cut out to be stars, anyway. You know, life in a fishbowl, constantly fighting off the paparazzi. I’m definitely the kind of guy who needs his privacy—Oops. Hold on a sec while I take a selfie of me and my martini to post on Instagram.”
We ordered the cheapest thing on the menu for dinner—hot dogs with fries.
I proceeded to swan dive into mine with gusto, while Lance flirted shamelessly with our gorgeous young waiter.
Lance was right. It was good to get out, especially on such a lovely night at the beach, the sun setting in a glorious ball of orange, the ocean breezes soft as velvet against my cheek. So what if my hair was now the consistency of a Brillo pad, and the carbs from my fries were frolicking gaily on my hips?
That ghastly death threat seemed like a distant memory—Dean’s murder a million miles away.
I was sitting there, nestled in my bubble of contentment, when I saw a couple being seated at a secluded table in a corner next to a potted palm. Something about the woman’s cap of shiny blond hair looked familiar. And then I realized it was Nikki, the food stylist. She reached across the table to hold hands with her date. This must be the boyfriend she mentioned, the guy she hooked up with after Dean dumped her, the one she was so in love with.
I glanced over to check him out and almost choked on a fry to see that it was Artie Lembeck, Dean’s former business partner—the redhead in the baseball cap who’d brought champagne and cheese puffs to the funeral to celebrate Dean’s passing. The guy who claimed Dean had cheated him out of his rightful fortune.
So Nikki was dating Dean’s arch-rival.
I’d sort of written her off as a suspect, but now I wondered if Nikki was the killer, after all.
Had she blasted Dean’s Skinny Kitty with Raid as payback for swindling her beloved?
Or had she merely phoned Artie and had him come over to do the job himself?
Suddenly I felt chilled.
And it wasn’t from the cool ocean breezes—but from the realization that I’d not escaped the murder. Not one bit. I was still very much in the thick of it.
For all I knew, at that very moment I was sitting just a potted palm away from the killer.