Blind Dates Can Be Murder (9 page)

“Well, that answers one question,” he said dryly when she was finished. “How he knew when and where to find you. But it still doesn’t tell us who Frank Malone really was—or why he took your real date’s place.”

Lettie sat in her parked car, looking up at the sign for “Swingers,” Mickey’s strip club. “Where the Elite Meet & Greet” proclaimed the slogan in smaller letters underneath.

Yeah, right
, she thought.
More like, “Where the Scum Go to Slum
.”

Lettie hated the place, hated going in there and meeting with Mickey and passing off the discs. Somehow, on the job, she never felt too bad about stealing people’s data. But once there she was always nearly overwhelmed by her own guilt and shame. The place was so dirty; it made her feel dirty. She couldn’t wait until she didn’t have to do this anymore.

Mickey had told Lettie to show up between 9:00 and 9:30
AM
, so as the minute hand on her watch clicked into place, she slipped the discs in her pocket and climbed from the car. The sooner she went in, the sooner she’d be out of there.

Graffiti was on the door, unintelligible lettering that had been sprayed ages ago in a purple swath across the black paint. Pushing her way past it, she stepped into the dim, smoke-filled back room of the strip club. It felt odd to be there in the morning, without the heavy thump of music in the background—or the steady buzz of voices or the clink of glasses.

Instead, the place was silent. Lettie knew it wasn’t empty, however, because of the smoke. Somewhere, Mickey was there, evidently puffing on a cigar.

“Mickey?” she called, her voice sounding thin and reedy to her own ears. “You here?”

There was no response, so she walked toward the small room he used as an office. She tapped on the half-closed door and pushed it slightly open, to spot him at his desk, talking into the phone. He raised his hand to silence her, and for a moment she was a mere child, the sudden image of her stepfather filling her mind, raising a hand to strike her. The moment passed, however, and she was back in Mickey’s office, waiting as he continued to speak into the receiver.

“Got it. Good. Thanks. I’ll tell her.”

He hung up and tilted back his chair, pulling deeply on the cigar. As he did, Lettie couldn’t help thinking that his pallor was odd. Mickey was half Irish, and he usually had the ruddy complexion and red cheeks of his heritage. Today, however, his skin seemed sickly and almost gray.

“That was an old buddy of mine,” he said, his voice raspy. “Owns a long-term hotel in Mulberry Glen called the Palace. I got you a room there. Check in’s after four.”

“Okay, thanks. You feeling all right, Mickey?”

“Touch of the flu,” he replied, tearing off the slip of paper where he had scribbled the address and handing it to her. “I’ll be fine.”

“If you say so. You’re awful pale, though.”

He cleared his throat, ignoring her comment.

“Listen, I made some discreet inquiries with my wife’s nephew’s brother-in-law, who’s on the police force in Mulberry Glen. Turns out, this girl Jo Tulip was using a dating service called Dates&Mates. They’re the ones who sent her out on that blind date last night.”

“Okay, so get me on with Dates&Mates. I’ll grab her data.”

“Won’t be so easy. I tried the temp agency schtick with them, but it was a no-go, at least not right away. You’re going to have to wing this one on your own.”

Lettie’s eyes widened.

“You want me to apply for a job with them? Even if they ended up hiring me, that could take days—or weeks, even.”

“Maybe not. They’re actively interviewing. In the meantime, you can sign on as a client. I looked the place up online, and I’m thinking you could find a lot of reasons to hang around there, maybe pick up some info. They got classes, computers, all kinds of stuff. If we’re lucky, you’ll be able to get on staff. But if not, just go do your thing and act like a woman looking for a computer date. Hang around. Fade into the woodwork.” He laughed, as if he had made a joke. “Fade into the woodwork,” he repeated. “If ever a gal was born to do that, it’s you, Lettie.”

He slid a packet of cash across the desk, telling her it was for expenses—and that he expected receipts. In return, she reached into her pocket and pulled out the skimmer discs.

“I got these,” she said, changing the subject as she handed them over.

“Oh, good. Let’s load ’em up.”

He took them from her, reached into a bottom drawer, and pulled out the piece of computer hardware that he used to read the discs. She waited, shifting her weight from one foot to the other as he hooked up the disc reader to his computer and started it. As the data transferred over, flashing across the screen, he leaned back in his seat, puffed on his cigar, and told her more about what he was expecting her to accomplish in Mulberry Glen. According to Mickey, Frankie Malone had no family to speak of, his father having died the year before after a long bout with cancer.

“He’s got a cousin who’s gonna help me plan out the funeral,” Mickey said, “but otherwise Frankie was alone in this world.”

“Maybe that’s why he was stalking the girl,” Lettie offered. “Because he was lonely.”

Mickey’s eyes flashed.

“He wasn’t stalking no girl,” he said, punctuating his statement with a shake of his cigar. “He had his pick of girls from my stable here. There was something else going on there. And I want to know what it was.”

Lettie nodded, her heart pounding. She hated it when Mickey got mad.

“I’m still not sure exactly how I can help,” she said softly, avoiding his glare. “It’s not like I’m a private investigator or anything.”

Mickey leaned forward, his words precise.

“No, but you know how to steal data, Lettie. I want data on Jo Tulip. I want to know what Frankie was really doing with her. Something ain’t right here. It just don’t add up.”

Once the chief left, Jo pulled her things out of the backseat of her car and made her way into the building, quickly setting up in the classroom before the students began filing in.

She tried to put everything out of her mind except the task at hand. A Dates&Mates employee brought her a printout of the class roster just before she was set to begin, and Jo glanced over it, mostly to see what the ratio of men to women would be. The class had been promoted to appeal to men—which probably meant that it would be full of women, all there looking for men!

Either way, the course was called “Housekeeping for the Cleaning Impaired,” and Jo had created it specifically to help those who couldn’t seem to help themselves. The perennially messy Danny had been her inspiration—and a big part of helping her with her research.

In fact, Jo and Danny had been working together in their spare time for a while, studying the challenge of how to teach someone who was naturally messy to be neat. Jo had some theories about why folks tended one way or another, and she had been using Danny as her guinea pig to study the question firsthand. He didn’t seem to mind. They had had a lot of fun doing it, and by and large his house did seem neater these days.

Jo’s eventual goal, of course, was to feature her findings on her website—and maybe also in a book. But in the meantime, she was eager to teach her methods to a group at large and see if her theories held true. That’s why she had signed up to teach the class, and why she felt a small surge of excitement as the first few students began to trickle in through the doorway.

As they took their seats and were joined by more, Jo finished organizing her notes at the lectern and her visual aids on the table. Finally, it was time to begin. She walked front and center, smiled at the audience (which really had ended up being mostly men), and introduced herself.

“My name is Jo Tulip,” she said. “Welcome to ‘Housekeeping for the Cleaning Impaired.’”

Danny just missed getting to Jo before her class began. Through the half-open doorway, he could hear her greet the students. Ah well, as frustrating as it was to wait, he wanted the moment to be perfect—not a quick pull-aside in front of thirty people.

He went out to his car and gathered up the photography equipment from his trunk. Dates&Mates was bustling, and as he carried his equipment into the building, he decided that their goal must be to keep a constant flow of singles mingling (and spending money) throughout the place. To that end, they offered classes, an Internet café, a coffee bar, a boutique, dances, parties, game nights, mixers, aerobics classes, and more.

At least the room where Danny took the portraits was quite large and comfortable, with plush furnishings and muted colors and classical music softly piped in through ceiling speakers. The overall aim, he supposed, was to convey a sense of belonging and relaxation for the clients—and whenever he went there he usually found himself relaxing as well.

Today, however, it was a little tough to relax. As he unloaded the camera equipment and set up his tripod, he kept trying to imagine Jo’s reaction when he told her the big news about his photo being in a movie poster. Would she scream? Get tears in her eyes? Tell him she knew he’d had it in him all along? To be honest, telling Jo was going to be as exciting as the moment when he learned about it himself. She’d always been there for him, from the time when he was a kid with his first camera, to college when he spent hours in the lab perfecting his printing techniques, to the years after college when he kept thinking his big break was around the corner. Jo had always encouraged him, and now her optimism had finally paid off.

Finally, he had gotten his big break.

“I need a volunteer,” Jo said, scanning the crowd. A few raised their hands, so she pointed to a large fellow in the second row.