“I still think there could be an ex-lover involved,” Nina said.
“Erin said she didn’t have time for a boyfriend,” I said.
“Which might be the motive, the reason the person or persons unknown are doing this to her.”
“Motive? Person or persons unknown?”
“I’m starting to sound like you, I know.”
By then we were inside the Midtown Antique Mall in downtown Stillwater with its sixty-five dealers, three floors, and enough nooks and crannies to keep even the most ardent treasure hunter content. We explored them all. Or rather I should say Nina explored them all while I followed along and worked my smartphone. These days if you want to learn about someone, you start with the internet, because that’s where most people store their lives when they aren’t using them.
As it turned out, Erin Peterson’s success story wasn’t all that unique. It was one she shared with luminaries like Debbi Fields, Marie Callender, and Chef Ettore Boiardi: She made something so good that friends told her, “You should sell this.” Instead of cookies, pies, and spaghetti sauce, though, in her case it was salsa.
According to the origin story on her website, Erin’s journey began with “Potluck Fridays” at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where she majored in business. Apparently her friends had decided it was a good idea to eat heartily before beginning a weekend of heavy drinking at what many people consider to be one of the most infamous party schools in America. Her most frequent contribution to the meal was salsa that she made from her mother’s recipe. Her classmates loved it and began referring to her as “the salsa girl.”
Erin discovered it wasn’t all that much harder to make a lot of salsa than a little. At the urging of her classmates, she began producing large batches that she sold in jars out of the apartment she shared with two roommates and at Memorial Union and other spots around campus. On a whim, she brought her salsa to the Dane County Farmers Market in the square surrounding the Wisconsin State Capitol.
I mentioned it to Nina, who was examining a hand-carved cribbage board made to resemble a battleship, complete with gun turrets and conning tower.
“Remember that huge farmers market that we went to in Madison a few years ago?” I asked. “About two hundred vendors? That’s where Salsa Girl started her business.”
“That’s nice,” Nina said.
What happened, Erin showed up with about a hundred jars of her salsa and a card table. She didn’t know the rules, the biggest of which was that you had to be a member to sell your wares at the market and that there was a five-year waiting list. By the time she was discovered and ejected forcibly from the premises, however, she had nearly sold out. What encouraged her most, though, was that she heard that some of her customers had returned to the market the following week hoping to buy another jar from the salsa girl.
Fortunately, there were other markets where Erin could sell her salsa, and she began doing so, to the detriment of her studies. One day she was taking a quiz dealing with business statistics when she asked herself “What am I doing here? If I want to learn how to run a business, why not start with this business?”
She finished the quiz and handed in her paper, but never returned to class to learn how well she had done. Instead, she left school and went back to her home in Minnesota. She told her mother her plans. “She was furious,” Erin said both on her website and in an article published in the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal. “That changed, though, when I hired her because I was unable to keep up with the demand by myself.”
It was at the farmers market on the Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis that Erin met Randy Bignell-Sax. Randy was a member of the Bignell family, who owned and operated both Bignell Bakeries and Minnesota Foods. He was so impressed by the quality of Erin’s hand-crafted product, which was now being sold in two flavors under the label Salsa Girl Salsa, that he invested enough working capital for Erin to be able to move to her first manufacturing plant—well, second if you counted her mother’s kitchen. From there Salsa Girl expanded to a third location, and finally the one where I found her that morning. She expanded to six flavors and quickly paid off her business loan from Randy, although he retained a 10 percent stake in the company.
“That must be where Peterson/Sax Enterprises came from,” I said.
Nina was inspecting a stereoview photograph through a stereoscopic card viewer. It allowed her to observe the two side-by-side photographs on the card as a single 3D image.
“Wow,” she said. “You need to see this.”
“What is it?”
“The ice palace from the 1887 St. Paul Winter Carnival.”
I took a look. The palace was actually a castle made entirely of thirty-five thousand blocks of ice taken from the Mississippi River. At 217 feet long, 194 feet wide, and 140 feet high, it was, in a word, breathtaking.
“They built this by hand, can you believe it?” Nina said. “Why can’t we build something like this? The ice palace they built for the Super Bowl was a tar paper shack compared to this. I’m going to buy these.”
Nina took a box full of stereoview photograph cards to the register in the front of the store. In the meantime, I continued my internet search. There was little left to learn. I discovered a few more articles that appeared in local media outlets like City Pages and CBS Minnesota, yet they all told nearly an identical story. There was no mention of Erin’s mother’s name or where they lived in Minnesota, and no photographs of either her or Erin except for a shot of Erin and her production manager dressed in white lab coats and hairnets and standing in front of a mixing tank. Erin was barely recognizable.
She didn’t have a LinkedIn page, and her Facebook page, listed under the name Salsa Girl, was used strictly to promote her business. Instead of a pic of her, it displayed the same likeness of Salsa Girl that appeared on the product labels and other company literature.
“That surprises me,” I said.
“What surprises you?” Nina asked.
We were on the sidewalk and headed north. I told her about my findings.
“Why would she post her photograph?” Nina asked. “Or her mom’s?”
“Why wouldn’t she?”
“I have a website. I have a Facebook page. Weekly email marketing, too. Have you ever seen my photograph? Or Erica’s? Have you read any personal information?”
I hadn’t, except under the ABOUT US tab on her website where Nina mentioned that Rickie’s had been named after her daughter.
“What we look like and where we’re from has nothing to do with what we’re selling,” Nina said.
Still, it occurred to me that I knew nothing about Salsa Girl except for what I could find on her website. It made me wonder about my relationship with other friends as well, guys I’ve played hockey with for years. I was thinking to myself but spoke out loud: “What’s Andy Adams’s wife’s name? Does he have kids? Where does he work again?”
“Who’s Andy Adams?” Nina asked.
“Guy I play hockey with, always wears an old Minnesota Fighting Saints sweater.”
“I don’t remember him.”
“I barely remember him myself, and we had beers after we played the last game of the season just two weeks ago.”
“You’re not having an existential crisis, are you, McKenzie?”
“I might be working myself up to one.”
“Wait until we get down the street first.”
“Why? Where are we going?”
“Isaac Staples Sawmill. Can you think of a better place to question if your life has any meaning or purpose than in an antiques store located in a hundred-and-seventy-year-old building?”
* * *
A few hours later, I was sitting on a sofa in Bobby Dunston’s man cave that I had helped him build in the basement of his house and drinking a Leinenkugel. Bobby had major league baseball on his HDTV. At least Kansas City was playing major league baseball; I had no idea what the hell the Twins were doing.
Bobby and I had known each other since before kindergarten, and it was easy for us to sit together for long stretches without speaking. But as I watched the Royals hit a lazy pop fly to yet another one of Minnesota’s ever-expanding cadre of inadequate shortstops I had to say, “Do we really know anybody? I mean, do we even know who our friends are?”
“What are you talking about?” he said.
“Take Andy Adams, for example.”
“What about him?”
“What do we know about him? Really know?”
“You mean besides the fact that he never passes the damn puck?”
“I’ve been contemplating the nature of friendship.”
Bobby stared at me for a long count, an expression of alarm on his face. Finally he stood and walked to the bottom of the staircase leading to his kitchen.
“Nina,” he shouted. “Nina Truhler.”
Nina appeared at the top of the stairs; Shelby Dunston was standing behind her.
“What is it?” she asked.
“What did you do to McKenzie? The last time I saw him he was perfectly fine; now he’s talking gibberish.”
“He’s having a moment of personal reflection and self-doubt.”
“That’s what I mean. I’ve known him for over forty years and he’s never had a moment of personal reflection and self-doubt. You broke him.”
“It wasn’t me. It was Salsa Girl.”
“Salsa Girl?” Shelby said. “I want to hear this.”
Shelby hustled down the stairs, crossed the room, and sat next to me, her long legs tucked beneath her. She rested an elbow on the back of the sofa and rested her chin in her hand. Her wheat-colored hair fell across one eye, and for a moment she reminded me of Veronica Lake in all those 1940s gangster movies.
“Well?” she said.
“Well what?”
“Salsa Girl.”
“Oh, for—she asked me to do a favor.”
“And?”
“And I said yes.”
“And?”
“What do you mean ‘And’?”
“You do favors for friends all the time. What’s the problem?”
Nina answered for me. “The problem is, before she asked for the favor, Erin asked McKenzie if they were friends and he said yes.”
“And?” Shelby said.
“I’ve known her for about seven years,” I said. “We all have, but only because of Ian. Now that I’ve had time to think about it, I realize that I know nothing more about her than what’s on her website. I’m wondering if it’s true. If we are friends. Not only her, but it’s occurred to me that half the people I know, the guys I play hockey with, the cops I worked with, the people I’ve done favors for—they’re strangers to me.”
“That’s true of everybody,” Shelby said. “I have one hundred and seventy-seven friends on Facebook, and I think I’ve actually met about thirty of them in person.”
“I have regular customers,” Nina said. “One of them put me down as a reference on her résumé. Some of the others, they behave as if we’re cousins or something. I don’t even know their names.”
“That’s the point,” I said. “I have friends”—I quoted the air with both hands—“with whom I’ve never had a meaningful relationship.”
“Like who?” Shelby asked.
“Erin Peterson.”
“I’ve never been able to warm up to her,” Nina said. “She’s always friendly enough, yet at the same time—I don’t know. She doesn’t seem to care about anything except her business.”
“I wouldn’t say that. She gives a lot of money to charity, mostly women’s groups—Women’s Foundation of Minnesota, Tubman, the Sojourner Project.”
“How do you know?”
“She told me. McKenzie,” Shelby said, “if you want to know something about the woman, why don’t you just ask her?”
“Hey?” Bobby’s voice changed. If you didn’t know him you might not have heard it; the calm authority. “Exactly what does she want you to do?”
I answered his question. He asked several more. Bobby was the best cop I knew, even better than I was. We started together at the St. Paul Police Department twenty years ago. I retired to accept a reward on a rather ambitious embezzler—$3,128,584.50 before taxes—that a financial wizard named H. B. Sutton had nearly doubled for me. The plan was to give my father, who raised me alone after my mother died, a comfy retirement. Unfortunately, he died six months later, leaving me both rich and bored. Meanwhile, Bobby stayed with the SPPD, eventually moving up to commander in the Major Crimes Division.
“Who are you going to get to supply the surveillance equipment?” he asked.
“I was thinking Marshall Lantry.”
“Isn’t he a criminal himself?” Shelby asked.
“He’s never been convicted,” I said.
“Half the people McKenzie knows are criminals,” Nina said.
“Yes, but are they his friends?”
“In the meantime,” I said.
Bobby knew what I was asking. “I don’t do favors for friends,” he said. “Not even for you. Especially not for you.”
“Police officers are regularly assigned to patrol those areas where criminal activities are known to occur, and if the patrol commander of the Western District was made aware that—”
“How would she be made aware of crimes that the victim has refused to report?”
“Someone would need to reach out to her.”
“Uh-huh. That’s what I thought. McKenzie, in case you haven’t been paying attention, there’s a heroin epidemic sweeping the Twin Cities. I don’t have the time or the resources to waste safeguarding another one of your girlfriends. Explain it to him, Shel.”
“Honey,” Shelby said, “what Bobby’s trying to say is that there’s a heroin epidemic sweeping the Twin Cities and he doesn’t have the time or the resources to waste safeguarding another one of your girlfriends.”
“Exactly how many girlfriends does he have, anyway?” Nina asked.
“There’s you, me, Heavenly Petryk…”
“C’mon,” I said.
“McKenzie,” Bobby said. “You know that Salsa Girl is lying about all of this, don’t you?”
Both Nina and Shelby seemed outraged by the suggestion.
“How can you say that?” Shelby wanted to know.
“The sabotage of her building and trucks is obviously acts of retribution; it’s payback,” Bobby said. “It’s highly unlikely that she doesn’t know who’s behind it.”
“Yet entirely possible,” I said.
Bobby spread his hands wide and shook his head. He looked exactly like he did the other night when I bet my ace against his full house.
* * *
Nina seemed distracted after we left Bobby and Shelby’s house in the Merriam Park neighborhood of St. Paul and drove to the condominium we shared in Minneapolis. I knew why, too. The woman was suffering withdrawal symptoms. She had not set foot in her club since Saturday night, hadn’t even made a phone call to check up, and now she was wondering if the place might’ve been burned to the ground and her employees were too frightened to tell her.
“When we get home, instead of going up, maybe I’ll drive over to Rickie’s just to make sure everything’s all right,” Nina said.
“Everything is fine and you know it.”
“Jennifer Grimm is singing in the big room tonight. It’s the first time we’ve had her. I’d like to make her feel welcomed.”
I glanced at the illuminated digital clock on the dashboard of my Mustang.
“The woman must be in the middle of her second set by now,” I said.
“It wouldn’t hurt to drop in for a minute to say hello.”
I would have argued with her, except Nina running off to the club left me free to wander over to the industrial park that housed Salsa Girl Salsa—just to make sure everything was all right.
* * *
I parked my Mustang in the far corner of the back parking lot. At my rear was a cyclone fence that separated Salsa Girl from a yard filled with dozens of semitrailers. On my left was a nearly identical fence that kept pedestrians from climbing down into the valley that was Interstate 94. There were trees along the fence and no lights. I picked the spot because it rendered my car virtually invisible to anyone who wasn’t looking for it; there were a few lights mounted on poles near the building and Pelham Boulevard, but they didn’t reach where I sat. It also gave me an unobstructed view of the Salsa Girl loading dock. True, I couldn’t see the front of the building, yet I could see the driveway that led to it. If anyone pulled in, I’d know it.
Even though it was cold, I rolled down the Mustang’s windows so the glass wouldn’t cloud over. You’d think forty-five degrees would seem warm after a long winter, but it didn’t. I sat behind the steering wheel in my brown leather jacket, gloves, and stocking hat with the logo for the University of Minnesota, my alma mater thank you very much, and stared at the back of the building with a pair of binoculars that I kept in the glove compartment for just such occasions. The binoculars trembled in my hand because of the cold. I thought briefly of starting the car and turning the heater to high but ignored the suggestion. I was supposed to be hiding, remember?
The thing about conducting fixed surveillance, it’s stressful. There’s the physical stress—shivering behind a steering wheel is not fun. Worse is the mental stress. You can’t listen to the radio or iPod, read articles or watch videos on your phone, or text your friends. Nor can you risk nodding off. If you did, you could very well miss the one thing you were there to see.
To remain vigilant you play mind games—if this happens you do that, if that happens you do this. You study the environment, alert to those areas where a target might slip past unseen. You watch birds and squirrels, hoping the birds will fly and the squirrels will run because that means something is moving.
The way I looked at it, surveillance was the same as hunting from a duck blind or a deer stand. You remained still, you watched, you waited. The problem was I had no idea what I was watching and waiting for. It was unlikely that a group of protestors carrying signs demanding the ethical treatment of tomatoes and jalapeños was going to convene in the parking lot. Nor did I have any reason to suspect that Erin’s vandals would return to the scene of the crime. I was there only because of the possibility that something might happen.
And then it did.
A black and shiny car drove up the driveway. I recognized the make and model even in the low light because I used to own one just like it: an Audi S5 that retailed for about sixty-five grand. The value of the car made me ask myself, What does Salsa Girl drive?
Instead of heading for the front of the building, it pulled around back, moved to the loading dock, and stopped. The flicker of rear lights told me that the driver had put the vehicle in park. I stared at it through the binoculars. The headlights were extinguished; personal experience told me that the driver must have turned off the engine. The dome light flashed on as the driver’s side door was opened. For a moment I could see the driver’s face. Not Erin but a man I didn’t recognize, young, white. He slid out from behind the steering wheel and stood next to the car. He was wearing a long charcoal wool coat with the buttons undone and black gloves. That’s all I could see before he turned his back to me, shut the door, circled the Audi, and headed toward the loading dock.
He climbed the staircase that led from the asphalt parking lot to the elevated dock and the door next to it. He unlocked the door. I couldn’t tell if he was using a key or picks. I guessed a key because his body language didn’t reveal a change in his demeanor from normal to nervous. Nor did he look around cautiously the way a thief might.
He entered the building, closing the door behind him.
Now what? my inner voice asked.
I figured I had two options.
One—move up on the scene and confront the driver when he left the building. I would have liked that idea better if I had thought to bring a gun.
Two—wait until the driver left the parking lot and follow him; try to get a good look at his license plate and take it from there.
I was debating the pros and cons when a third option presented itself: a black-and-white Ford Crown Victoria complete with light bar, push bumper, and the words POLICE CITY OF SAINT PAUL painted on the doors. It pulled in to the lot and approached the Audi, stopping only a few feet behind its rear bumper. An officer emerged from the patrol car. He did not turn off his engine. He did not extinguish his lights. Instead, he moved cautiously to the driver’s side door of the Audi and shined a flashlight through the windows. He must not have seen anything that interested him, because he moved the light along the base of the building and along the loading dock.
Bobby, my inner voice said. You would never reach out to the Western District patrol commander just to accommodate a friend. Of course not.
The officer returned to his cruiser. Through the binoculars, I saw him speaking on his radio; I could almost hear his voice asking for a 10-24 on the Audi.
That’s when the driver chose to leave the building. He backed his way out of the door, closed it tight, and turned. He was carrying a large box with both hands that he nearly dropped when he saw the police car. As it was, he paused for a long time as he stared at it.
The police officer slipped out of the car and spoke to the driver across the roof. Words were exchanged, yet the driver didn’t budge. The officer gestured. The driver moved to the stairs and descended slowly. The box looked as if it suddenly weighed ten thousand pounds.
The officer didn’t approach the driver; instead he remained behind the patrol car. He gestured for the driver to stop, and they began a conversation.
I left the Mustang and moved across the parking lot toward them. The driver’s head came up when I crossed into the circle of light near the building. The officer caught the look in his eye and pivoted so he could watch me and the driver at the same time. He brought his hand to the butt of his Glock. He made sure I saw him do it.
I moved both of my hands away from my body so he could see that they were empty and continued approaching.
“Stop,” the officer said.
I stopped.
“Who are you?”
“My name’s McKenzie. I was asked by the owner to keep an eye on the place.”
The officer gestured at the building. “This place?” he asked.
“Salsa Girl Salsa.” I threw a thumb over my shoulder. “I was watching from over there.”
“Licensed?”
“No. Just a concerned citizen.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why were you watching?” the Audi driver asked.
“Because someone has been vandalizing the property.”
“Salsa Girl never mentioned it to me.”
“Why would she?”
“I’m her partner. No, really. Randy Sax. You can check.”
I was close enough now to get a good look at his face. It was older than I thought when I saw it at a distance; the half moons under his eyes suggested that he didn’t get much comfort from sleep. Yet he had a high, whiny voice that made him sound like a teenager questioning why everyone was picking on him.
“Okay,” I said.
“What’s your name again?” the officer asked.
“McKenzie. Call Erin Peterson. She’s the owner. She’ll vouch for me.”
“Rushmore McKenzie?”
“Yeah.”
“I remember you. You’re the one who quit the department to collect the price on some embezzler a few years back. The insurance company paid you fifty cents on every dollar of the stolen money that you recovered.”
“That’s right.”
“Damn.”
From the way he cursed, I didn’t know if he was envious or disgusted by what I had done. Believe me, I got both reactions from the cops in the Twin Cities.
“Let me see some ID.” The officer made a gimme gesture with his free hand; the other remained on the butt of his handgun. “Both of you.”
While I reached for my wallet, Randy Sax set the box he was carrying on the trunk of the Audi. He dug into his pocket for his wallet, too. We both handed our driver’s licenses to the officer. He returned to his vehicle and called in a 10-27, a driver’s license check. Randy and I stood between the police car and the Audi where the officer could see us.
“You’re a cop?” Randy said.
“I used to be a cop. Back when I was young and impressionable.”
“I’d love to be a cop. Why’d you quit?”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time. Tell me something, Randy.” I couldn’t bring myself to call him Mr. Sax. “What’s in the box?”
“Tomatoes.”
Randy opened the box just wide enough to reach in and pull out a lush red tomato, then quickly closed it again. He held the tomato for me to see.
“I’m making a huge batch of my world-famous spaghetti sauce for my family Tuesday. It’s my niece’s birthday.”
“Does Erin know that you’re stealing her tomatoes in the dead of night?”
“Technically, ten percent of them are mine. I was on my way home from a party and decided—what’s this about vandalism?”
“Technically, I’m not at liberty to say.”
“If you’re working for Erin, then you’re working for me, too.”
I held out my hand and gave it a little wag.
“You’re making a mistake if you think you can treat me like some dumb kid,” he said. “I not only own ten percent of the company, my family owns Minnesota Foods. We distribute Erin’s salsa. What do you think of that?”
“I’m sure it’s a profitable relationship for everyone involved.”
Randy’s expression became that of a middle schooler who was being sent to his room for reasons that seemed unjust to him. I expected him to go off. Instead, he said, “No one tells me anything,” and studied his tomato. Once again, I wondered about his age. According to the Salsa Girl origin story, he had invested in Erin’s company about ten years ago. Assuming he was the age of consent at the time, he’d have to be at least thirty now, and I would say he looked a few years older. Yet Bobby Dunston’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Victoria, seemed more mature.
By then the officer had decided that we were who we claimed we were and returned our driver’s licenses.
“Thank you, gentlemen,” he said. “Have a pleasant evening.”
“We’re good?” Randy asked.
“Yes, sir. Sorry to have troubled you.”
“Not at all, not at all. Doing your job. That’s great. Here. Have a tomato.”
The officer took the tomato and gave Randy a casual salute with it. Randy opened the trunk of the Audi and put the box inside while we watched.
“McKenzie,” he said, “you gotta come to the party, see what I do with all these tomatoes. Erin is always invited to family gatherings, only she never comes. Tell her to take you.”
“We’ll see,” I said.
“Night-night.” Randy climbed into his Audi and drove off. The officer and I watched him go.
“Where are you?” he asked.
I gestured at the corner of the parking lot where the Mustang was parked.
“Nice car,” he said. “You buy it with the reward money?”
“Actually, my girlfriend gave it to me.”
“Must be some girlfriend.”
“I’ve always thought so.”
The officer tossed the tomato into the air and caught it.
“It’s not three million bucks,” he said. “As long as we come out ahead, though, that’s the main thing.”
The officer climbed into his car and drove off. I returned to my Mustang, started it, rolled up the windows, and put the heater on high.
My inner voice asked, Do you really believe that Randy stopped on his way home to steal a box filled with tomatoes?
“I should have looked inside the box just to make sure,” I said aloud.
* * *
I had left the parking lot and was heading west toward the entrance of a freeway that would take me home when my cell rang. Normally I would have ignored it; I don’t like using my phone when I’m driving. Yet given the time of night, I thought it was probably Nina. I felt a tingle of concern as I pulled over and took the phone from my pocket. Only it wasn’t Nina. It was Erin Peterson. I swiped right.
“This is McKenzie,” I said.
“McKenzie, I just got a call from Randy Sax.”
“He’s kind of a dip, isn’t he?”
“He’s also irate.”
“He didn’t seem that way when he left.”
“McKenzie, he told me that the police stopped him in the parking lot and all but arrested him, and then you showed up and started interrogating him, too.”
“That’s not quite how it happened.”
“What did happen?”
I explained.
“You’re right, Randy is a dip. McKenzie, what were you doing at Salsa Girl?”
“Keeping an eye on your building.”
“You’re taking this way too seriously.”
“Or not seriously enough. Did Randy tell you that he stole a box filled with tomatoes?”
“Only after I insisted he tell me why he was there at this time of night. McKenzie, can you meet me?”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
I glanced at my digital clock again. Knowing her habits, I figured that Nina was still at Rickie’s.
“Tell me where,” I said.
* * *
Like most women who take good care of themselves, Erin made it hard to guess her age. Thirty? Forty? Somewhere in there. I wasn’t normally obsessed with age, but seeing her sitting at the bar in a joint not far from the Minneapolis campus of the University of Minnesota made me wonder. She seemed to blend in so nicely with the students. One of them was standing next to her chair and speaking earnestly. I didn’t know what he was saying, although I could guess. Probably it was the same thing that I would have been saying to an attractive woman in a bar if I were his age. In any case, Erin kept smiling and shaking her head.
Finally Erin slipped off her chair and rested her hands on his shoulders. She leaned in and pecked his lips. Clearly he wanted a longer, more passionate kiss. It was just as clear that he wasn’t going to get it. After some hemming and hawing, the kid left. Erin returned to her chair. She said something to the woman sitting next to her, and the woman laughed.
The woman raised her empty glass as I approached from behind. The bartender reached her in a hurry and refilled it. Afterward, he pointed at Erin’s drink. She shook her head.
“Fancy seeing you here,” I said.
“McKenzie.” Erin’s voice was high—at least higher than usual—and her eyes were inordinately bright and shiny. Saying no to another drink was probably wise, my inner voice said. She rested her hand on my arm. “Thanks for coming.”
“My, my,” said the woman next to her. She spoke with a Hispanic accent that sounded second generation. “Aren’t you a hunka hunka burnin’ love?”
“Really?” I said.
“Down, girl,” Erin said. “McKenzie is spoken for.”
“Loudly?” asked the woman.
“I don’t know. How loudly does Nina speak for you?”
“Pretty loud.”
“See? She’s so gorgeous, too, that you just want to run her over with your car. Her eyes are silver. I mean, they’re blue, but they’re so pale that they look silver. Silver.”
“I take it you’ve been here for a while,” I said.
“We started at—oh, McKenzie, this is Maria. Maria is my production manager. She’s been with me eight years as of today. Maria, say hello to McKenzie.”
“Hello to McKenzie,” Maria said.
Both women giggled.
Oh my God.
“We decided to have dinner to celebrate after we closed up shop,” Erin said. “Just the girls. Alice and the others have already gone home.”
“Lightweights,” Maria said.
“Is that why you called, because you need a ride home?” I said. “It’s not a bad idea.”
Erin lightly slapped my chest three times.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I have that covered. I might be ever so slightly intoxicated, but I’m not … I’m trying to think of a word.”
“Out of control,” Maria said. “That’s three words, but if you say ’em really fast…”
“No, that’s not it. Injudicious. I’m not injudicious. A professor at DePaul University always used that word when he was scolding students for not paying attention to his lectures. It’s my favorite word.”
“DePaul, where’s that?” Marie asked.
“Chicago.”
“McKenzie, do you have a favorite word?”
“Yes, but I stole it from the Reverend Jesse Jackson. He once said, ‘I not only deny the allegation, I deny the alligator.’”
“That’s great. But which word? Allegation or alligator?”
“You need to use them both together.”
“It’s a favorite joke, then, not a word.”
“I don’t know what you want to talk about, but I suspect we’ll be better off talking about it tomorrow.”
“I wanted to tell you something important. Something that couldn’t wait. What was it? Something about—oh yes, about the Bignell family. Randy Bignell-Sax is a member of the Bignell family, and we do not want to antagonize the Bignell family until I’m ready.”
Until you’re ready? my inner voice asked.
“Does that include Randy?” I asked aloud.
“Randy is—what’s the word? Capricious.”
“Ohhh,” Maria said. “I like that one, too.”
“I can control Randy. He’s harmless. The rest of the Bignells, though, they are ruthless people, and I want to stay out of their line of sight.”
“Randy invited me to a party for his niece tomorrow night,” I said. “He said you should take me.”
Erin thought that was funny.
“Absolutely not,” she said. “That would be … injudicious.”
“Again, how about we talk tomorrow morning?”
“I’ll be in the office at six thirty.”
Looking into her shiny blue eyes, I didn’t believe her.