Hostile Makeover (32 page)

“All Smithsonians? I’ll be damned. Why don’t y’all hang around those musty old museums of yours instead of harassing peaceful citizens?”

“Our museums? Gee, they’re not really ours,” Cherise said, “but we are—”

“And my daughter is not harassing you, but if that is what you want, we would be happy to arrange it,” Rose said in a very matter-of-fact tone. “However, all we ask is that you answer a few civil questions.” She gave him the universally understood “mom look.”

“Very well, ladies, if you must.” He heaved a dramatic sigh. “Y’all may proceed with your interrogation.”

“It won’t take long,” Cherise said. “We have better things to do. We have to see about our museums.”

“By all means, do so then,” he said.

“I’ll do the asking, if you don’t mind, Cherise, Mom,” Lacey said before addressing Tyler. “They’re just visiting. And you could have avoided this whole scene if you had merely e-mailed me back.”

Tyler sat down on the lip of the fountain’s edge and put his hands up in surrender. “Y’all can see I am unarmed, and I am sitting here peacefully for yet another interrogation and disparagement of my good character, even though you are not an officer of the law, but a mere tradesman in the Fourth Estate.”

Lacey was sorry she didn’t have her tape recorder with her. He promised to be a good quote. Instead she pulled out her notebook and tried to keep up with him.

“I merely beg you, Miss Smithsonian, not to stab me, as I believe that is where your particular expertise lies. I assure you, I am not a danger to you.”

“Maybe not, but you are a smarty-pants.”
Smarty-pants? Good God, I’m already talking like my mother.

Tyler put his glasses back on and made a face at her.

“Lacey, you have to be careful about this stabbing habit,” Rose said. “You’ll get a reputation.” Was that a snarky comment? From her mild-mannered mother, the archenemy of snarkiness? Lacey was surprised, if not downright shocked.

“It may be indelicate of me to say so, but she already has a reputation,” John Henry Tyler interjected. “It is not terribly ladylike and might be said to betray a lack of decent upbringing.”

“Young man, you hush up when I am talking.” She looked at her daughter. “Maybe you should switch to baseball bats or something, Lacey honey, instead of knives.” Tyler shuddered visibly.

“If you think Lacey’s dangerous,” Cherise said to Tyler, “you should see what I can do with my feet.” Tyler looked startled, and for Lacey, this was another earthquake. Old Lethal Feet never mentioned that particular episode of her own free will, and certainly not with pride.

“Ladies, please,” Lacey said.

“Yes, please, let us just get on with this,” Tyler pleaded.

“Are you the one who was stalking Amanda Manville? Did you sign those letters ‘Johnny Monroe’?”

“I am hardly a stalker, although I suppose I can understand how that mistake could have been made. I did write a number of letters to Amanda Manville, and I did sign some of those letters by the name Johnny Monroe, which I found easy to remember and conducive to the concealment of my true identity.”

“Why, and what did the letters say?”

“I merely asked in a most civil manner for some moments of her time. I had written her before using my true given name; however, she never gave me the courtesy of an answer. Her publicity people merely sent back a photograph, which I found gratuitous and insulting. She never answered any of my previous letters in which I politely asked what happened to my friend Caleb.”

“Like the open letter to Amanda that you posted on your Web site?”

“Exactly so.”

“And the Johnny Monroe letters?”

“I decided to write her some letters that took a different approach, from a name that held no untoward associations for her. I merely asked for a few moments of her time. Like a lovesick fan. I thought if she simply would talk with me in person, she would soften and give me an explanation. Hah!” Tyler shifted slightly and stretched his back. “Instead she sicced that huge bodyguard on me. As if that was fair. I am a nonviolent and entirely nonthreatening person.”

“He said you were throwing things at her trailer.”

“Was I?”

“I saw you spit at Amanda Manville after she was shot.”

“Yes, I did, and I’m not terribly sorry she is dead.” Rose gasped at the audacity. “You must understand, Miss Smithsonian, I wanted to know what became of the best friend I ever had in this sad world, Caleb Collingwood. And now I’m afraid I will never know, which pains me a great deal.”

“You’re saying he never got in touch with you?”

“He dropped off the planet about three and a half years ago.” Tyler folded his hands together in front of him and put his head down for a moment with his eyes shut. “Y’all write this down now. His last words to me on God’s green earth were, ‘I’m going to see my girl now. I have to talk to Mandy. Take care of yourself, John Henry.’ And then he was gone, never to be seen again.”

“Do you think he could have killed himself? That’s what Amanda said happened.”

The little man started and opened his eyes. “Lord have mercy, no. Caleb was no self-murderer, even though he had no family, just a no-account drunk of an uncle he lived with after his daddy died, and his mother left when he was a boy. Caleb would not kill himself, even though he had lost the love of his life. And as far as I’m concerned the real Mandy Manville died on the operating room table during that plastic surgery, and in her place an alien was being born.”

“But couldn’t something else have happened to him?”

“I blame Amanda Manville, because she took away his manhood in front of everyone’s eyes on national television, and he did not deserve that. Caleb may have been neglected by God in the looks department, but he had as great a heart as anyone who walked this earth, and when he fell in love with plain little old Mandy Manville, that was it. He would be true to her unto death. I believe he is dead. I believe where there is smoke there is fire, where there are rumors there is some truth, and where Miss Amanda Manville Supermodel is concerned, there is no good to be had. Caleb Collingwood is dead, and she murdered his soul, if not his body.”

“And now Amanda is dead. She was murdered—both body and soul—by someone who hated her.”

“Well, don’t y’all look at me. I didn’t do it, and at the time of her demise I was being manhandled by her moose of a bodyguard.”

“Did you divert him on purpose? So the killer would have a clean shot at her?”

Tyler was momentarily speechless, but he recovered. “No, upon my honor. I fear we will never know the truth. We cannot be set free from this mystery.”

“I have to say you show precious little compassion,” Cherise said.

“My compassion is for my lost friend Caleb.”

“Did you know Mandy before she was Amanda?” Lacey asked.

“I had met her several times. I was to be Caleb’s best man. Mandy was a fine lady, not beautiful, but of sweet disposition. I never saw her after that terrible television show.”

“What do you think of Dr. Greg Spaulding?”

“Who?” John Henry Tyler squinched up his face.

“Her plastic surgeon. The one who transformed Amanda Manville.”

“Him? Why, I don’t give two hoots in hell about him. I wouldn’t know him if I ran into him on the street.”

“Somebody tried to kill him the other day. Someone who did run into him on the street. And whoever it was tried to finish the job today in the hospital.” Her mother and sister looked at her in surprise. Lacey’s experience at the hospital that morning had somehow escaped mention over lunch. She knew that John Henry Tyler was too small to have filled the Grim Reaper costume, but perhaps he had friends who were involved.
Perhaps the same friend who gunned down Amanda?

“That so? Well, I cannot say I am surprised.”

“Really? Why?”

“It is a miracle anyone’s walking around alive in this crazy murder capital of yours,” Tyler said. “Drive-by shootings, killings on every corner, and no matter what you might believe, Miss Smithsonian, I did not shoot Amanda Manville, nor did I have anything to do with the attempted murder of her devilish surgeon.” He looked somber. “Is that all?”

“I’ll be writing about this.”

“You feel free,” said John Henry Tyler. “I have nothing to hide. And now if you ladies will excuse me.”

Lacey stepped back. He hopped off the edge of the fountain, collected his dignity, and walked right out of Dupont Circle. Lacey closed her notebook. Rose looked very pleased with herself.

Cherise announced that she wanted to go back to the makeshift memorial to Amanda and read all the signs, because they might contain clues. She and Rose sauntered over to the floral mound. Lacey sat on a bench to jot down notes on her conversation with Tyler.

“Lacey Smithsonian?”

She looked up to see the blonde she’d spotted before at Stylettos. Lacey was right: Montana’s roots were nicely colored, and the blowout looked quite respectable. In fact, she looked far more polished than Lacey remembered ever seeing her. It was clearly a look for the city. However, her T-shirt was as tight as a drum, or rather two drums, and her jeans were even tighter.
Good thing Levi’s are constructed so well,
Lacey thought,
or she would split a seam.

“Montana McCandless Donovan Schmidt, I presume,” Lacey said.

“For the moment. I’m dropping Schmidt. He’s ancient history.”

“So I heard.” The women sized each other up. “And what about current events?”

“He mentions you occasionally. Vic, not Schmidt. I understand you’re friends.” Lacey said nothing. Better to keep Vic’s ex talking. “I think it’s only fair to warn you: I’m back in the picture. In the present.”

“That’s not what he says, but I appreciate your boldness.”

“And you’re moving out of the picture.”

Lacey put her notebook back in her bag and stood up. She came up only to about Montana’s nose, but she looked her right in the eye. “Why don’t we let Vic decide for himself?”

“Oh, we are. I’m just letting you know you should get out of the way before you get hurt.”

A preemptive strike to make me think it’s over when it’s not?
She had to give Montana credit for trying. But she was also getting on Lacey’s nerves.

“Your hair looks great, Montana, thanks to Stella. But you shouldn’t wear your jeans cowgirl-tight in this city, unless you’re planning to rope and hog-tie your man. Or is that the only way you can keep one?”

Montana lifted her chin. “Consider yourself history. Like Schmidt.”

“No, thanks. I consider myself the future.”

Vic’s ex snorted and stomped off. Lacey gathered her wits—and her mother and sister from the Amanda memorial—grateful that she didn’t have to explain Montana or reveal anything else complicated about her relationship with Vic Donovan.
If I still have one.

“Find anything interesting?” Lacey asked.

“Maybe. There are lots of clues here,” Cherise said. “We just don’t know what they are.”

Lacey gazed at the flowers. There were so many, jumbled in a rather disturbing clash of colors, put there by people who had never met Amanda, and yet somehow felt they knew her. They felt as if they had lost a friend. “If you can find a clue in that mess, good luck.”

“What do we do now?” Cherise wanted to know, looking expectantly at Lacey as if she were the cruise director on the S.S.
Smithsonian
. Lacey knew very well what the Smithsonian women wanted to see most of all in Washington, and she was going to give it to them, till their feet were screaming for mercy. After all, even John Henry Tyler had said, “Why don’t y’all hang around those musty old museums of yours?”

“You wouldn’t want to see the museums, would you?”

Chapter 24

They agreed their first target of choice at the Smithsonian Museum of American History would be Lacey’s personal favorite, the First Ladies’ gowns, the ever-popular display on the wives of the Presidents. “And the shops, don’t forget the shops,” Cherise said. “I need something that says Smithsonian all over it.”

“Okay. I need to stop by the office for about half an hour, but I can drop you at the museum and then meet you later.”

“No, Lacey,” her mother corrected. “We have half an hour to spare. We’d love to see your office.”

“But I have to write a story and check my messages. You’ll be bored. Really bored.”

“We will be fine. You can do your work, and we won’t make a peep.”

“I can’t work with you there peering over my shoulder.”

“You used to do your homework with me peering over your shoulder. And you always got excellent grades, except, of course, in math.” Rose was firm on the subject, presumably suspicious that Lacey would be off investigating without her freshly made-over backup team.

“You won’t like it, and it’s a perfect waste of your new clothes.” Lacey said, giving in.
Tuesday, I just have to make it till Tuesday.

 

The Eye Street Observer
’s newsroom was quieter than it was during the workweek, but there was a low-key hum of activity when Lacey arrived with her family. She passed by Mac’s office. His lights were on and he was in, no doubt working on a heart attack.

As a general rule, Lacey tried to keep her weekends free of the office. But the second attempt on Spaulding’s life was worth a story. In fact, she was sure Mac would send the Grim Reaper after her if she failed to turn in this story. She could write a few paragraphs and hand it off to the weekend city editor, or Tony Trujillo, the cops reporter, if he was around. She was trying to compose the story lead in her head.

“Smithsonian!” Lacey turned to see Mac at his door glaring at her.

“Hi, Mac.”
Don’t start.

“Did you not promise me you would stay away from here and do family things this weekend?”

“I am.” She indicated her two companions. “This is my mother, Rose Smithsonian, and my sister, Cherise Smithsonian.” They waved and smiled. Lacey just hoped they wouldn’t say anything incriminating about her.