Death in a Funhouse Mirror (21 page)

"A door ran into me. Let's get some coffee, go into your office, and I'll tell you all about it. Does your lack of enthusiastic response mean you haven't read the affidavits yet?"

"That's right. I'm so busy I don't know whether I'm coming or going. I haven't even looked in my 'in' basket yet. There's an ominous heap of messages and more than half of the darned things have to do with the wedding. Paul's mother has called me three times, his sister twice, I've even had a call from his ex-wife. Magda's doing her best to protect me, but there are some that she can't handle. Don't ever get married, Thea."

"It's a little late for that, Suzanne."

She hit herself in the forehead with the heel of her hand, mocking herself for being stupid. "What I meant was, don't ever have a wedding. I don't know what possessed me to think I wanted this. All I wanted was Paul."

"The good news is two more days and it'll be over, and you'll be Mrs. Paul Merritt. Are you going to be Suzanne Merritt? Or stay Suzanne Begner?"

Suzanne dipped her little finger into a pot of lip gloss and smoothed it over her lips. "Merritt, I think. I've changed my mind about six times. The only thing I'm sure of is that I don't want a hyphenated name. Merritt-Begner sounds like the name of some obscure congressional bill, you know, the Merritt-Begner Act, requiring underground road crossings for salamanders." She put the gloss back in her purse. I noticed that she'd been losing weight. The skirt of her carefully fitted suit hung on her hips.

"How much have you lost?" I said.

"Six pounds. Any other time I'd be delighted, but if I lose any more, the dress isn't going to fit. Just another ridiculous part of this whole ridiculous business. Let's go get that coffee. Maybe I'll have Magda go out and get us some doughnuts or something."

"Make mine jelly," I said. "I don't like a doughnut without a challenge, and I love the feeling of the jelly oozing up the back of my hand."

"Not me, boy! It's like eating a slug. I'll have Magda call you when the supplies arrive."

Our partners' meeting reconvened in Suzanne's office about twenty minutes later looking vaguely like a scene from "Twin Peaks." On each side of the desk was a napkin, a pristine square of white in the sea of pink messages, and on each napkin sat a small heap of doughnuts. "Looks like about six pounds' worth right here," I said, grabbing the one on the top of my stack and biting into it. A sticky wad of white goo burst out and headed for my lap, but I was too quick for it, catching it in midair, and stuffing it into my mouth.

Suzanne made a face. "That's disgusting."

"Your idea, not mine."

"True." She grinned triumphantly and picked up the affidavits. "This is brilliant, Thea. How did you manage it?"

I threw back my shoulders, stuck out my chest and batted my eyes. "Feminine wiles," I said.

"I could believe that, but I don't. What really happened?"

"I marched in, said 'can you help me?' and asked the guy why Valeria left if she was such a dynamite employee. Guy stared at his wife's picture and said he couldn't remember. So I said 'let me suggest a scenario,' described what Valeria did here, and the guy almost fell off his chair. Started to deny it, backed down, and admitted she'd accused him and then offered him the out of signing the reference letter. He knew her previous employer, so he called the guy, Kramer, and it turned out she did the same thing to him, so we all agreed it was time to put a stop to her little scheme. And without further ado, they offered to write the affidavits, on the spot, and gave them to me."

"What does your father say?"

"I haven't told him yet. Honey, I'm just busy trying to make a living."

Suzanne delicately licked the sugar from her first doughnut off her fingers and picked up a second. "Well, I think we can relax about this one. Moving right along to the next item on our agenda, what happened to your face?" I described my meeting with Cliff and how Ansel had bashed me with the door on my way out and then gotten sidetracked into true confessions. "It's just a little too weird, Thea," she said, "don't you think? Are you sure you want to work with those people?"

"No, I'm not. But Cliff did call today and apologize, and wants me to put together a presentation to his board, and aside from the folks yesterday morning, who need some help with grant proposals and a couple of other little things, we don't have much on the drawing board right now."

She made a face. "We still don't have to take it, Thea. Things will work out fine. They always do."

"I thought you were excited by the possibilities of exploring a new field."

"I was. I am. But maybe this isn't the right entree. Maybe you're too connected to Cliff Paris.
As
I recall, I was the one who suggested you give that whole family a wide berth. And then I go and encourage you to undertake a project with him. I'm not thinking very clearly these days. I regard it as a form of temporary insanity, from which I will have recovered by Monday." She finished another doughnut and licked her lips. "God I love to pig out on doughnuts. I might as well enjoy this. It may be the last time in my life I'll ever eat doughnuts without guilt."

"I hope not. You're just getting married, aren't you? You're not getting a life membership in some weight watching organization. Don't tell me Paul thinks you're too fat?"

There it was again—that idiotic smile at the sound of his name. "No. Paul likes me just the way I am. In fact, he thinks I'm a little too thin."

"The man is a paragon. An angel."

"Oh, come on," she said, "I'm sure Andre thinks you're just right, too."

"Andre who?"

"Ahh," she said, raising her delicately arched brows, "so he didn't come to his senses after all. He's not coming?"

"He called and said he couldn't. Said he'd call me as soon as he was ready to talk about it, and he was going to tell me more, I think, but something came up and he disappeared into a morass of sirens and ringing phones. Hard as we work, his life makes all this seem easy."

"I'm sorry he's not coming," she said. "Man's a fool, what can I say? Are you doing okay?"

"Trying not to think about it. I don't know what to do, how to fix things so we both have what we want. And I don't want to start wondering if I was a fool to let myself get involved again. So I'll just apply the Kozak solution."

"Which is immerse yourself in work, right?"

"Right."

"Excuse me." Magda stuck her head around the door. She looked like something extremely distasteful had just dropped onto her desk.

I looked at Suzanne, who met my gaze and nodded. "It's Valeria," we said together. Magda nodded.

"Give us a minute, and then send her in," Suzanne said.

We gathered the pink slips into a neat pile, threw the napkins away, and brushed the doughnut crumbs off the desk. I found copies of the affidavits and reference letters. We toasted each other with the dregs of our coffee, tossed the cups into the trash, turned on the tape recorder and sat back to wait for Valeria.

She sailed in with the smirk we'd hoped for set firmly on her lipsticked mouth, sat down without being invited, and thrust a wrinkled paper at Suzanne. "I've brought you a copy of the complaint I filed with the Commission Against Discrimination. You might like to read it."

Suzanne picked it up, scanned it briefly and passed it to me without any comment. I read it and set it down on the desk. "What puzzles me, Valeria, is why you put so much effort into dishonest manipulations like these but won't put enough effort into your work to do a decent job."

"My work was fine," she said. "That's not why you fired me."

"That's why we fired you," Suzanne said, "and that's why your last two employers fired you."

"Don't be ridiculous," she sneered, "I left voluntarily. They were very pleased with my work. You know that. You've seen my references."

"Which you wrote yourself and blackmailed them into signing," I said.

"That's complete bullshit. You know it is." But she was beginning to sound uncertain.

"We've talked to your previous employers," Suzanne said. "Both Hillyer and Kramer have confirmed that your work was unsatisfactory and when they tried to fire you, you threatened to accuse them of sexual harassment unless they gave you generous severance pay and signed the reference letters you'd prepared. Why didn't you offer us the same deal?" Suzanne has a talent for sneaking zinger questions in very innocently. And it worked.

"It was too soon," Valeria said without thinking, "I couldn't leave another job so quickly, no one would believe..." She stopped and glared at Suzanne. "Oh no. You're not going to trick me like that. She made advances to me." She pointed at me. "I've never been so shocked in my life. It's all right here in black and white," she said, tapping her complaint.

"And right here in black and white," I said, "we have written statements from Mr. Hillyer and Mr. Kramer describing how you blackmailed them into signing those great reference letters. The three of us conferred this morning and decided we had to cooperate to put an end to your 'bad habit,' before you tried it on any more employers." Valeria snatched the papers from me, scanned them quickly, and dropped them onto the desk like they were too hot to handle.

"It would have been you, of course," she said, her voice trembling with rage. "You just waltzed in there with your gorgeous legs and those great big breasts, and they did exactly what you wanted, didn't they? They probably never even looked at your face." Her reaction was so unexpected neither of us could do anything to stop her. She jumped out of her chair, picked up Suzanne's big wooden "In" box and threw it at Suzanne. Suzanne ducked, and it hit the painting on the wall behind her, smashing the glass and showering the floor with papers and shards of glass. "And that," Valeria raged, "is just the beginning. You conniving bitches haven't seen the last of me. I won't be treated this way." She ran out of the office, shoving Magda, who had rushed in when she heard the crash, roughly aside. The three of us stared at the mess on the floor.

"Incredible," Suzanne said. "She doesn't believe that she's done anything wrong."

Magda tapped her forehead. "I do not think that she is entirely right up here." She reached out and picked a sparkling bit of glass out of Suzanne's hair. "I wish I could think it is over, but I worry about what that girl may do. She won't see that you must defend yourselves, she will only see this as an unfair attack on her." She crouched down, picked up the "In" box, shook out the glass that was in it, and started picking up the papers, shaking each one before she put it back in the box. "I think we still have a vacuum cleaner in one of the closets, Thea. Do you think you could find it?"

I was on the floor beside her, picking up the big pieces of glass and putting them in the wastebasket. The crumbs from our merry feast were being buried under glass, a tangible reminder of how quickly things can change. Suzanne sat watching us, looking confused. I abandoned the glass for a minute, picked up her purse, and handed it to her. "Go to the ladies' room and comb the glass out of your hair."

Her hand went uncertainly to her head. "I have glass in my hair?"

"Of course you do. You practically took a shower in it." I realized that Valeria's sudden attack had had an unsettling effect on Suzanne. Maybe I was less surprised because I'd already seen Valeria explode or maybe I was calmer because the box hadn't been aimed at me, and I hadn't had my possessions smashed and been showered with glass. At her most feisty, Suzanne would have picked up the box and thrown it right back. She had a lot on her mind right now and it made her vulnerable.

"I'll go with her," Magda said, setting the box of papers back on the desk. "You get the vacuum." The look she gave me suggested I was somehow to blame for letting this happen. It didn't bother me. Magda fussed over Suzanne like the daughter she'd never had. Sometimes her protectiveness got annoying, but she was talented and loyal, and as long as she wasn't trying to mother me, I thought it was better to have too much caring rather than too little. I might have felt differently if Sarah had tried to mother me, but that would never happen. I'd had enough of the controlling mother growing up, and Sarah did enough mothering at home to be glad of an adult relationship at work.

I went to get the vacuum. Walking back to Suzanne's office, I found Bobby standing by my desk, looking troubled. He looked at the vacuum. "What happened in there, anyway?"

I realized he hadn't seen the affidavits and didn't know what was going on. "I'll show you." He followed me into Suzanne's office and I handed him the affidavits, which Valeria had neglected to take with her. He read them quickly, a satisfied smile on his face, a malicious smile that seemed totally out of character. I was ashamed that I hadn't recognized sooner how awful working with Valeria must have been. "She didn't like them, so she threw Suzanne's 'In' box and broke the picture."

"I'd like to hope we've seen the last of her," he said, "but I doubt it."

He reached for the vacuum, which I'd set on a chair. "Would you like me to finish cleaning up? I'm pretty good with one of these things."

"I never argue with a man who wants to vacuum."

Sarah stuck her head in the door. "Excuse me," she said, "it's Eve Paris on the phone. You want to take the call?"

"I certainly do." I left Bobby with the vacuum and went to give Eve a piece of my mind.

 

 

 

Chapter 13