Jaine Austen 4 - Shoes to Die For (13 page)

At last, the elevator doors opened, and I got on. I pressed the button for the third floor, and the doors slowly creaked shut. After another eternity, it started moving, squealing and moaning every inch of the way. The elevator had to have been one of Mr. Otis’s first models. I was certain that any second now, the cable would snap.

I cursed myself for eating that Quarter Pounder. Just my luck it would be that final quarter of a pound that broke the cord. I could see the headlines now:
Woman in Elastic-Waist Pants Steps on Elevator, Cable Snaps.
I sighed with relief when the elevator finally opened its doors onto the third floor.

I made my way down the corridor to Maxine’s apartment and rang the bell. I heard footsteps approaching; then a shadow flitted across the peephole.

Maxine opened the door, in a faded terry bathrobe.

“Jaine,” she said, “what are you doing here?”

I couldn’t think of a convincing lie to explain my presence outside her door, so I went with the truth.

“Actually, I’m investigating Frenchie’s murder.”

She blinked, puzzled. “I don’t understand. I thought you were a writer.”

“I am, but I also do a little private investigating on the side. Do you mind if I come in?”

I guess she minded, because she just stood there, blocking my path.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I already told the police everything I know.”

So much for going with the truth.

Just as she was about to shut the door in my face, I felt something furry around my ankles. I looked down and saw an old gray cat. Quickly, I scooped it up in my arms.

“What a darling kitty,” I cooed. I guess the cat must have smelled the Quarter Pounder on my breath, because it started nuzzling my cheek.

“That’s Sparkles,” Maxine said, smiling indulgently at her cat. “She really likes you.”

“The feeling is mutual,” I said, scratching Sparkles behind her ears. “She’s adorable.”

Yes, I was sucking up to Maxine, but I wasn’t lying. I think all cats are adorable. And Sparkles was no exception.

“Would you believe she’s eighteen years old?”

Actually, I did believe it, but I pretended to be surprised.

“No! Really?”

Maxine nodded sadly. “She’s got arthritis now. My vet says there’s nothing we can do.”

“Would you like the name of my vet? She’s terrific.”

“You’ve got a cat, too?”

“Oh, yes. She’s the love of my life.”

By now, all Maxine’s resistance had melted away. I was a fellow cat lover.

“Come on in,” she said. “I was just about to make some tea.”

Still holding Sparkles, I followed Maxine into her apartment and looked around. The place was furnished in brown tweedy furniture, the kind of generic stuff you see at furniture rental places. I found it hard to believe that someone would actually go out and buy furniture this bland. It was like decorating your room with oatmeal.

“Make yourself comfortable,” Maxine said. “I’ll go put on the water for tea.”

She scurried off to her kitchen, and I took a seat on an oatmeal sofa, still cradling Sparkles in my arms. The cat stared up at me worshipfully. Why couldn’t Prozac ever give me some of this worshipful action?

Sparkles and I whiled away the next few minutes in a mutual lovefest until Maxine came back with a plate of Mallomars.

“Want one?” she asked, holding out the plate.

“Thanks,” I said. “Mallomars are my favorite.”

“Mine, too.” She smiled shyly and sat down across from me in a muddy brown La-Z-Boy.

Sparkles wriggled free from my arms and slowly made her way over to Maxine, who picked her up, and settled her in her lap.

“Is my Sparkles comfy?” she cooed, in the same nauseating baby talk favored by cat lovers the world over.

“Such a tragedy about Frenchie,” I said, getting down to the topic du jour.

“Yes,” she echoed woodenly. “A tragedy.”

Call me crazy, but this wasn’t exactly the griefstricken response I’d expected. Maxine had been Frenchie’s only friend at Passions. Possibly her only friend, period. Shouldn’t she be a tad more upset?

“Do you have any idea who might have killed her?”

“Well, you heard what Becky said about wanting to see Frenchie’s corpse on the sales floor.”

“You don’t really think Becky is capable of murder, do you?”

“You’d be surprised at what some people are capable of,” she said, rubbing Sparkles’ belly with slow, even strokes. “I learned that the hard way.”

“What do you mean?”

But she didn’t get a chance to answer, because just then the tea kettle started shrieking.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, putting Sparkles down on the La-Z-Boy and heading for the kitchen.

Alone in the living room, I looked around for signs of a personal life and found nothing. No knickknacks. No vacation souvenirs. No framed photos of loved ones. The room had about as much personality as a Motel 6.

I wandered over to a small oak bookshelf and scanned the books. Not much of interest. Just a few accounting books and some
Reader’s Digest
Condensed Classics. I was about to return to the sofa when I noticed a brown leather volume stuck between two condensed classics. I pulled it out and saw that it was a photo album.

I brought it back to the sofa and started leafing through it. There weren’t many pictures in the album: two formal portraits of a man and a woman, smiling stiffly at the camera, probably Maxine’s parents. The rest were snapshots of Maxine as an awkward child, an awkward teenager, and an even more awkward adult.

Aside from Maxine and her parents, there were no other people in the book. Just a bunch of cats. Poor Maxine. What a lonely life she must have led. I was about to close the book and put it back on the shelf when a photo fluttered to the floor. It was a picture of Maxine at the beach, grinning into the camera. And for once, she wasn’t alone. No, she stood arm in arm with Frenchie. At least I thought it was Frenchie. I recognized the Maltese cross on her chest. But I couldn’t be sure, because her face and neck had been slashed beyond recognition.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

I turned and saw Maxine. Her cheeks were flushed with anger.

“I was just looking at your photo album,” I stammered. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“Well, I do,” she said, snatching the mangled picture from me.

“The person with you in that picture,” I said. “It’s Frenchie, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s Frenchie.” The bitterness in her voice was unmistakable.

“I don’t understand. I thought you liked her.”

“I did,” she said. “Once.”

She crumpled down into the La-Z-Boy. Sparkles meowed at her feet, too old and arthritic to make the leap into her lap.

“Want to tell me about it?” I asked.

She hesitated a beat. I smiled my most sympathetic smile. And I wasn’t acting. At that moment, just thinking about that sad empty photo album, I really did feel sorry for her. I guess she must have decided she could trust me, because the next thing I knew, she was spilling her guts.

“I’ve never had many friends,” she said, lifting Sparkles up into her lap. “So when Frenchie came to work at Passions and started asking me to join her for lunch, I was thrilled. Frenchie was everything I wasn’t. Beautiful and confident and sophisticated. I couldn’t believe she’d chosen me to be her friend. Before long, we weren’t just having lunch together. We’d go out for dinners and movies, and sometimes we even went shopping together. For the first time in my life, I felt special.”

She smiled at the memory.

“Then one night we were having dinner out at the beach, and Frenchie told me about her plan. It would be so easy, she said, to doctor Grace’s account books and make it look like she’d been cheating on her taxes. Then Frenchie could use the doctored books to blackmail Grace into selling her the store. She said that Grace was old-fashioned, that she wasn’t keeping up with the times. That it was only a matter of time before she ran Passions to the ground.

“At first I refused. No way was I going to do that to Grace. But Frenchie convinced me that I’d actually be doing Grace a favor. She told me that Grace had confided in her that she had a heart condition. Frenchie said that the stress of running the store could kill her.

“When I still hesitated, she said that once she took over the store, she’d double my salary. I must’ve been crazy, but I agreed to do it. Frenchie had this way about her; she could get me to do whatever she wanted.”

I thought about Owen, and what he’d said about being under Frenchie’s spell. Clearly he hadn’t been the only one bewitched by her charms.

“I knew it wasn’t right,” Maxine said, “but I did it anyway. I stayed late at night and doctored the books. Grace never suspected anything, because I often work late. And then my part of the deal was done. Frenchie took over. She told Grace that unless she sold her the store for a nominal fee, she’d turn her over to the IRS for tax fraud. Grace was blindsided. She knew Frenchie had her over a barrel. She agreed to sell her the store for five dollars and announced her retirement. You were there that day. You saw how stunned she was.

“Afterward, I went to Frenchie’s office to invite her to lunch. I’d made reservations at the Four Seasons to celebrate.”

Then she winced, pained by what she was about to say.

“Frenchie looked at me like I was a cockroach that had wandered in from the sewer. She told me she wasn’t going to have lunch with me that day. Or any day. She said she’d been bored to tears with me all along, that she couldn’t wait to be rid of me. Not only was she not giving me a raise, she fired me. I couldn’t believe my ears. She said that Grace didn’t have a heart condition, that she was healthy as a horse. And that I was a gullible fool for believing her.

“I told her I’d report her to the police and she just laughed. She reminded me that I was the one who doctored the books, not her. She said that if anything happened to her, she’d make certain I was dragged down with her.

“Oh, Sparkles,” she said, burying her face in the cat’s fur. “How could I have been so foolish?”

Then she started to cry, big choking sobs that racked her thin body.

I hurried to her side and put my arm around her.

“You mustn’t cry,” I said. “Frenchie was a terrible person. You weren’t a fool for believing her. You were just human.”

She looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes.

“You’re right,” she said. “Frenchie
was
a terrible person. And you know something? I’m glad she’s dead. But I didn’t kill her. I swear I didn’t.”

“Just for the record, do you mind my asking where you were the night of the murder?”

“No, I don’t mind. I was home that night. Sparkles and I were watching
The Way We Were
. It’s one of our favorite movies. Right, Sparkles?”

Sparkles yawned. I guess she wasn’t a Robert Redford fan.

“Well, I’d better get going,” I said. “Thank you so much for your time.”

I gave Maxine the name of my vet and she walked me to the door, still holding Sparkles in her arms.

“’Bye, Sparkles,” I said, giving the cat one last scratch behind her ears.

Unwilling to venture onto the elevator from hell, I took the stairs, my footsteps echoing loudly in the empty stairwell. I couldn’t help wondering if I’d just shared Mallomars with a killer.

True, mousy little Maxine didn’t seem capable of murder. I wondered if she even had the strength to ram that shoe in Frenchie’s neck. But it’s amazing what people are capable of in moments of stress. Look at all those stories about ninety-eight-pound women lifting cars to rescue their children. I saw the way she’d mutilated Frenchie in her photo album. How could I be sure she hadn’t unleashed her rage on her in real life, too?

Driving home from Maxine’s, I had a sudden craving for roast chicken.

When I was a kid growing up in Hermosa Beach, Daddy cooked us roast chicken and mashed potatoes every Sunday night. Daddy is the cook in our family. He’s really quite good, although he has a thing about washing vegetables. Which is why it’s not uncommon to find a dollop of Palmolive Liquid in your mashed potatoes. But his chickens are delicious—crispy on the outside, juicy on the inside—and every once in a while I get a craving for one.

So I stopped off at Gelson’s, glitzy supermarket to the stars, where you practically need a cosigner to shop, and picked out a glorious rosemary lemon chicken. Yes, I know that, given the state of my finances, I should’ve been shopping for discount chickens, but I was hungry and I didn’t care.

I got in the car with my precious cargo and headed home. The aroma of roast chicken filled the Corolla. It was all I could do to keep myself from tearing into it at the first stoplight. But I restrained myself. I was determined to eat dinner the civilized way, at the dining room table, with a glass of chardonnay and Tony Bennett on the stereo.

“Look what Mommy brought for dinner, sweetie,” I said to Prozac when I got home. “Yummy roast chicken.”

She sniffed appreciatively and came hurrying to my side. She’s very fond of me when I’ve got a chicken in my arms.

“Don’t worry. I’ll cut you a nice big piece.”

She meowed noisily.
White meat only
, was what I think she was trying to tell me.

I put the chicken on the counter and poured myself a glass of chardonnay. Then I set the table with a placemat and cloth napkin and put Tony on the stereo. I really had to do this civilized stuff more often.

I thought briefly of relaxing with my drink before dinner, like civilized types do, but I simply couldn’t resist the smell of that chicken.

I was just about to tear off the wrapping when the phone rang. I raced to the living room to get it. If it was a telemarketer, I’d scream bloody murder.

A stranger’s voice came on the line.

“Hi, it’s Darrell Simms.”

Damn. It
was
a telemarketer.

“Whatever you’re selling, I don’t want any.”

“I’m not selling anything. We met the other night. At speed dating. Remember? I was the one who liked boating.”

I vaguely remembered some guy blathering on endlessly about his boat.

“How did you get my number?”