Too Pretty to Die (25 page)

“Ah, sorry, one more thing, Ms. Kendricks . . .”

I felt pinned into place again by the Clipboard Queen, just when I assumed I’d gotten clearance to take off. I feared for a moment she’d seen through my faux Cissy attitude and meant to toss me out on my keister.

“I’m afraid that Ms. Mitchell won’t be attending tonight. She phoned a little bit ago and said to tell you she’s sorry to have missed your debut at the club, but she’s decided to spend some quality time with her husband.”

Now
that
was a laugh riot.

“Thanks for the skinny,” I said and turned away, smiling for real as I carefully tottered toward the silk-draped doorway.

Ah, so it was true. Cinda Lou had opted out of partying to cuddle up with her decades older and oodles richer husband.

How very wifely—and wise—of her.

The girl must’ve decided to reform
tout suite
, which meant she’d be out of my hair this evening.

Phew and double phew.

Lucky Break Number Two, I mused, and wondered how long my luck would last as I pushed back the silk panel and crossed through the threshold into the party zone.

I gave my eyes a minute to adjust as I dropped the drape behind me. The club was lit only by a few dimmed spots and loads of candles, arranged in elaborate standing candelabras of wrought iron and illuminating the faces of the thirty-odd people in the room in a muted glow.

Well, everyone looked better in candlelight, didn’t they?

Although if the Caviar Club was limited only to the prettiest of the pretty, I wouldn’t imagine any lighting tricks would be necessary.

A waiter all in black emerged at my elbow and offered me a glass of champagne, which I took instinctively. I didn’t intend to drink it—or much of it—but I couldn’t afford to look out of place, and everyone else in the room had glasses in hand.

As I took delicate sips of the bubbly, I peered over the rim of my glass at the smiling faces, listening to the eruption of laughter right and left, and I wondered if anyone was mourning Miranda. Did they even realize she was dead? Did they care?

Even worse, I imagined that whoever had pushed Miranda into the Great Beyond could be in this very room, drinking Moët Chandon and living it up.

The thought made me sick to my stomach.

“Ooh, aren’t you a tasty little thing. I could just eat you up,” a voice cooed in my ear, and I jerked around to face the source of the lecherous remark.

I met the fellow eye-to-eye, or rather, eyes to beady eyes.

He was no taller than I was in my sky-high boots, with a thick head of hair so overstyled that I figured he’d used at least a whole jar of gel, if not two. His two-day stubble merely made him seem dirty, not sexy. Ditto the red silk shirt opened wide enough for me to get a load of his chest hair. I had a good sense this dude had the DVD set of
Miami Vice
and every other show Don Johnson had ever been in.

“You must be new here, huh? ’Cuz I would’ve remembered if I’d seen you before,” he said, his gaze roaming over every curve revealed by my knit dress. “I like my chicks natural, not buffed up or blown up, if you dig what I’m saying,” he added, as if I’d take any of that as a compliment. “Natural is
hot
.”

Considering that it had just taken an hour for Janet’s stylist pal to doll me up, I hardly considered my appearance “natural.”

But I calmly held my champagne flute and kept my trap shut.

When still I’d said nothing, he piped up: “Ah, so you’re shy, eh? That’s okay. I don’t like women who talk too much, and so many of them do.”

“What about men who talk too much?” I said. I couldn’t help myself.

“So you’re a funny girl, eh?” He rubbed the stubble on his chin. “A sense of humor is the true sign of beauty so far as I’m concerned.”

My God, where did this guy get his lines?

“By the way, I’m Daniel Kingsolver. I’ve got my own online cigar store. I call it ‘Not Just a Cigar.’ You know, from that thing Freud said. Get it?”

“Oh, yeah, I get it.” And I wanted to get rid of it as fast as possible.

He grinned, stunning me with his porcelain veneers, which had me suddenly craving Chiclets.

You are an ass
, I wanted to tell him, and reminded myself why I was there in order to refrain from tossing my champagne.

“So, Danny, are there lots of local celebs in the club?” I took a gander and asked him.

His smile faltered. He shifted on his feet and tugged at the gold hoop in his right earlobe. “Yeah, there are some big shots, but they hang out in the back room. They don’t like to mix with the Sevrugas, unless there’s a particularly delectable babe they don’t mind smuggling in. Now me, I like hanging out with the real people, not the pretenders, if you know what I mean.”

He actually winked at me.

I stood there for a long moment as I contemplated whether Daniel Kingsolver truly considered himself “real” vs. a “pretender.” I found myself wondering, too, if his lame come-ons really worked on anybody.

I would have wagered that the dude went home alone this night . . . heck, every night.

“Are you allowed behind the red curtain, Danny?” I asked, because I didn’t want to waste another minute on this tragic reincarnation of Don Johnson if he didn’t have access to the back room at club gatherings. Because I was sure enough that’s where Miranda had hung out.

The light left his eyes, and he shuffled on his feet.

“Um, not exactly, but I don’t need to get back there to find a girl to get nasty with me, if ya know what I’m saying.”

I cringed.

“Besides, I’m up for Beluga on my next evaluation, and they say third time’s the charm, right?”

Who’d let this dog in?

Someone with a Don Johnson hangover from the 1980s?

Yeesh.

“Ah, excuse me, Danny, but I think I see a friend,” I said, pretending to nod at someone across the room and quickly extricating myself from the presence of Dr. Fraud, the online cigar salesman.

I wedged my way between pairs and trios of Caviar Clubbers who were dancing—or, rather, grinding, which looked a lot like having sex without removing clothes—and others with heads together, confabbing, while the waiters wove around the room, dispensing champagne and retrieving empty glasses.

Despite only flickering candlelight and plenty of shadows, I did my best to take in all the faces, searching for anyone familiar, either famous or infamous, but only spotting a few women I was sure I’d seen modeling furs in last Sunday’s full-page ad for Neiman-Marcus in the
Dallas Morning News
.

Big whoop.

I really wanted to do something good for Janet, not to mention poor Miranda, but I was beginning to have my doubts that I’d uncover anything earth-shattering for Jan to write about in her career-saving feature. Without getting past the red velvet curtain, the best story I could come up with would be about a girl geek turned beauty for a night getting hit on by a very cheesy Mr. Wrong.

I glanced back toward the
Miami Vice
devotee and felt relieved to see him hitting on someone else already. I took several baby sips of the sweet champagne, my toe tapping to the beat of the music and my gaze wandering over so many faces wearing that look of wanting, of desperation, I’d seen a thousand times. Heck, I’m sure I’d worn it myself once or twice. It didn’t matter how it was packaged, whether it was online dating, the classifieds, or the Caviar Club. It was all about the same thing: pairing off.

Companionship, love, sex.

Take your pick.

I had never been as happy to be off the market as I was at that moment.

Sighing, I looked over my right shoulder, and my gaze stopped short.

A lanky dude with pierced ears and wavy brown hair to his shoulders approached, smiling shyly in classic Keith Urban fashion, and my cheeks heated up.

Hubba hubba
, my hormones cried instinctively.

He was beautiful, indeed, and would’ve been high on my personal “yum” list B.M. (Before Malone). Only my life had changed since I’d met Brian, and so had my tastes. I had a button-down, hockey-loving, “I would never pierce my ears unless I were a pirate,” briefcase-carrying boyfriend, whom I adored. I would rather walk naked down Central Expressway in rush hour traffic than cheat on him.

Though it couldn’t hurt to flirt a little with this guy—heck, I’m sure Mata Hari had flirted plenty—and chat him up. I’d wager he was allowed past the velvet curtain. He might have even known Miranda and who she’d hooked up with at past parties. So talking to him would be a magnanimous thing, not selfish at all, right?

Gorgeous Dude had barely opened his mouth to say, “Hey,” when a hand grabbed my arm and jerked me around, and I found myself standing nose-to-jaw with a man I’d hoped never to lay eyes on again.

“Surprised to see me?” Milton Fletcher said dryly.

“Ack,” I said, spilling my champagne on his leather shoes.

And it wasn’t even on purpose.

“
Y
ou!”
I hissed at him, while droplets of pale gold from my champagne flute continued to plop onto his loafers.

They looked expensive, too, like Gucci or Bruno Magli. Heck, everything he wore appeared pricey, from his midnight blue velvet blazer over a tailored shirt with French cuffs (and cuff links!) to his artfully distressed jeans. I’ll bet he’d even driven his Porsche tonight to enhance his uptown image. No beat-up Ford Taurus tonight, no siree.

“What in God’s name are you doing here?” I ground out, not sounding the least bit glad to see him. Because, well, I wasn’t.

“Um, hello to you, too, and thanks for the bubbly, but I normally like to drink it, not wear it.” He reached for my hand and pried the glass from my fingers, though it was completely drained by then.

Darn it.

I wish I’d had at least a magnum more to spill. I wouldn’t have minded sloshing my drink all over the front of his chichi jeans, too.

“Don’t tell me you’re a member of The C.C.,” I said, and leaned in far more closely to him than I wanted to. The clean soapy scent of him filled my nose, and I found myself wishing he smelled repulsive, like patchouli cologne or baby spit.

He set my empty champagne flute on the tray of a passing waiter, freeing his hands to place them both on my hips, tugging me close as he whispered back, “I’m a lowly Sevruga tonight, darlin’, as I suspect are you, because I can’t imagine that you’d belong to this group of looks-obsessed partiers for real. Unless this whole debutante dropout, antisocial card you play is just to piss off your mother, and you’re really as artificial as a Martha Stewart retractable Christmas tree from Kmart.”

Whoa there, pardner.

Exactly who did he think he was
?

Other than a former Navy SEAL who made a buck trailing cheating spouses to low-rent motels and taking pictures through the curtains.

“Excuse me?” I squawked.

“Oh, you heard me, all right,” he said, his breath brushing my cheek. “You’re not always who you appear to be, are you, Andy Kendricks? Cissy sees you as something of a good girl who detoured off the beaten path, but I’m not sure what to think. This afternoon, you were dressed in sneaks and ponytail, and now you’re almost unrecognizable. Though I’m not complaining. You look damned good when you apply the war paint.”

If that was supposed to be a compliment, it sure didn’t sound like one.

I refrained from biting his head off, instead blurting out, “You’re a sexist pig, and you’ve got a stupid name to boot! So take a hike, Bubba Gump, and let me go!”

My voice seemed to rise above the Latin music, and a few of the clubbers schmoozing around us turned to glance.

“Everything okay?” a spiky-haired guy in a muscle shirt stepped forward to ask, and Milton laughed, shooting the dude an embarrassed smile.

“Everything’s fine.” He waved the fellow off. “Just having a little argument over how the Cowboys are playing this year. I say they’re catching fire, and this cutie-pie here thinks they’re going nowhere but the toilet.”

Muscle Shirt nodded in that simpatico way that men did. “You’ve got my sympathies, buddy, ’cuz I’m with the chick. The ’Boys suck.”

Then he left us alone to resume canoodling with two very blond women.

I glared at Milton. “Does Cissy know you’re such a cad?”

“She’s not paying me to be gallant,” he shot back. “She’s paying me to find out who shoved her friend’s daughter past the Pearly Gates.”

“That almost sounds believable,” I said. “Coming from such a smooth liar. How’d you get into the party, huh?” I asked, this time lowering my voice. “Did you tell a bunch of fibs, like that you’re Roger Staubach’s long-lost son?”

“Shhh.” He actually put a finger over my lips. “I’m actually going by Fletch Staubach, so if you could play along . . .”

The way he was grinning, I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.

I was leaning toward not.

“You can call yourself Doogie Howser and pretend you’re a doctor tonight for all I care. Just act like you don’t know me and leave me alone,” I said, and tried to draw away from him.

But he held on.

If I could’ve conjured up a waiter at that moment, I would’ve grabbed another flute of champagne and tossed it on his head.

The harder I tried to get away, the tighter he held my hands in his and the closer he bound me to him, doing his best imitation of tasting my earlobe as he replied in a low voice, “I have a keen sense you’re here for the same reason I am. Miranda DuBois, right?” he answered before I could deny it. “You’re nosier than a hound dog and about as itchy. You can’t leave this case to the police any more than your mother can. Am I on the money or what?”

Okay, so maybe he was partially right.

But my mother didn’t know about Miranda’s connection to the Caviar Club . . . or did she? Had she overheard that bit of my conversation with Janet in the den?

“Did Cissy tell you that Miranda was a Beluga until they kicked her out after her botched wrinkle treatment?” I asked.

“She wasn’t sure about the connection, though she may have pointed me in this direction, yeah. Then I did a little sniffing around myself. I have a friend who’s a producer over at Channel 5, and she let me have a few minutes at Miranda’s computer before the cops showed up to haul away the hard drive. Miranda had downloaded her invitation letter, and I retrieved a few deleted instant messages from some married guy who called himself ‘Big Dog.’” He raised his dark eyebrows. “They talked about meeting at one of the C.C. parties, so I put one and one together and came up with two. As in a pair of fish eggs who were hot for each other. I just need to find out who the guy is and if he’s here tonight.”