VC01 - Privileged Lives (74 page)
A woman had come in after him—a young black woman in a pale coffee-colored clinging lace dress. She had a strikingly aquiline profile and dark, wavy hair and she looked like a fashion model.
“Someone had better tell him to turn that racket off,” Oona said.
Xenia Delancey approached the black woman. They walked over to a display rack. Xenia Delancey suggested a cream-colored blouse. The black woman held it up to her bosom. She studied her reflection in the mirror. After a moment she shook her head and handed the blouse back. Xenia Delancey began looking for another.
On the other side of the boutique, the Hispanic sauntered over to a costume-jewelry display. He set the boom box down on the counter and boosted the volume. The glass display case added a rattling vibration of its own.
Spilled a pint of plasma and you still don’t hurt—
Oona’s eyes had become burning slits. “This is beyond belief. Things are falling apart in this lousy city. Isn’t anyone going to take a stand against that racket?”
“Oona, sweetie,” Leigh said, “please don’t get excited.”
Oona drew in a breath, and then she was in motion. She crossed directly to the Hispanic.
“Will you kindly turn that racket off?” she said.
He turned. Sweat gleamed on the steep ridges of his cheekbones. His dark eyes returned her gaze unflinchingly. “What?”
“I said,” Oona shouted, “turn that garbage off!”
“What?”
It occurred to Leigh that the Hispanic needed a translation.
Oona walked to the boom box, snapped it open, and yanked out one of the batteries.
The music stopped.
Oona turned and picked up her dress and took the battery with her into the changing room.
The black woman burst out laughing.
“Verdict, please.” Tori was holding up a green beaded bolero.
“Twenty-four hundred.”
“You mean for the whole dress,” Leigh said.
“There isn’t a whole dress. This is it.”
“It seems a little expensive,” Leigh said.
“I suppose.” As Tori crossed back to the display rack the black woman intercepted her.
“I love that jacket on you.”
“Do you really?” Tori said.
The woman nodded. “It picks up the green of your eyes. But you know, the violet might look even better.” She walked to the rack and pulled out a violet bolero. “
Voilà.
Let’s see it on you in the daylight.” She carried the violet bolero over to the door, and Tori followed.
An alarm went off.
“Excuse me,” Ms. Hansen called, raising her voice above the jangling bell. “That merchandise is tagged. It can’t leave the boutique till we deactivate it.”
“I’m sorry.” The black woman was giggling in embarrassment.
“Will you kill that alarm!” Ms. Hansen called to Xenia Delancey.
It was a moment before silence was restored.
Leigh glanced toward the changing rooms. The curtain in the little doorway was swaying. “Did someone just come out of the changing rooms?”
“I didn’t see anyone,” Tori said.
OONA ALDRICH FELT TOO WOOZY
to take the overhead route getting out of the one skirt and into the other. So she undid her own skirt and let it puddle around her feet. She lifted one bare foot out and with the other flipped it toward the bench. And missed.
Now she opened Ms. Ingrid Hansen’s prissy little silk skirt. She held it in a hoop with both hands, lifted one leg, and tried to step into it.
Right away she saw there was going to be a balance problem. Holding the skirt open required two hands, but keeping herself upright on one foot required at least one wall and one more hand.
Oona looked around the changing room.
There’s the wall, but has anyone seen a third hand
?
She put her engineering smarts to work.
What about sitting down on the bench
…?
She sat down on the bench. Well, she’d intended to sit. It was more of a fall but no bones were broken.
And pulling the skirt up my legs
…?
She pulled the skirt up her legs. She stood, adjusted the hang of the pleats, fastened the belt. She looked at herself in the mirror, fore and aft.
Not bad.
She slid the jacket off the hanger and slipped her right arm into the sleeve.
Something rapped on the door.
“Just a minute!” Her left hand, halfway into the jacket, snagged the lining. She reached with her right hand and slid the door bolt back.
“How do I look?” She faced the mirror, tried to untangle her left arm, heard cloth rip. “Shit. Now I’ll have to buy the damned thing. Well—what do you think?”
Funny—she liked the skirt, but the jacket struck her as sort of pukey. Well, no wonder. She was wearing it halfway on and halfway off.
“Give me a hand with this jacket, will you?”
There was a movement in the mirror behind her. For half an instant her brain recorded the image of a man standing there, two eyes staring with lids pulled back like snarling lips. At the same moment she registered two words, only one of them English.
“
Saludos
, bitch.”
Before she could turn, something tugged at her hair and a sudden pressure twisted her head back. The air sparkled and silver whipped past her eyes. A hot piano-wire of pain gripped her neck and fire flicked across her throat.
She struggled to break free. The jacket held her hand like a tourniquet.
He bent her back and, with a cracking sound, she felt her spine surrender. She was on the floor, pushing up with one arm, trying to reach the bench, when a blade danced down in front of her eyes, winking right, left, up, and down.
She screamed and it was like a cartoon because she didn’t hear the scream, she saw it—a red scream, liquid and hot and flying in twenty directions at once. The bubbling scream flowed back into her throat, choking off her air.
And the blade’s bloody kiss went on. And on.
“
THIS IS INSANE
,” Leigh said. “It can’t take her twenty minutes to change into a simple dress.”
“Take it easy,” Tori said. “Oona’s insecure, she’s a perfectionist.”
“Not on my time she isn’t.”
Leigh crossed the boutique to the little doorway that led to the changing rooms. She stepped past the curtain, and her glance took in a corridor with an emergency exit at the end and three doors on each side. On the right two stood half ajar.
She moved past them and stopped at the third door.
“Oona? Are you in there?” She rapped on the door. No answer. She leaned her ear against it and felt a sort of coiled stillness radiating through the wood panel.
Oh my God,
she thought,
if Oona has passed out in the dressing room
…
Leigh tried the doorknob. It turned. She gave a push inward. The room was empty.
She went to the door directly opposite. She knocked. “Oona?”
No answer. She tried the handle. The door swung inward. The room was empty.
She went to the next door and rapped sharply. “Oona—are you in there?”
She felt the first stirrings of concern. The doorknob turned and she pushed the door open. A flash of green whooshed up in front of her face.
She recoiled.
A dress left hanging on a hook was trembling in the air current from the open door. She saw it was green linen—not the dress Oona had been trying on.
A green linen belt had been thrown across the seat of a chair, and a woman was leaning toward it.
“Excuse me,” Leigh said, and when the woman refused to acknowledge her, she realized she had apologized to her own reflection.
She went to the last door.
The sounds of voices and bells floated in from the main floor—luxuriously muted as if they’d had to pass through layers of lamb’s wool and silk.
“Oona!” With one rap she gripped the handle and pushed.
She stood staring at a trash basket with a botany print wrapped around it, filled with sheets of pink tissue paper. Resting in a nested indentation on the tissue were three pins with fat heads.
Damn Oona
, she thought.
This can’t be
—
there’s no way out of here except the fire exit or through the boutique
—
She stepped back into the corridor. Her eye went again to the first changing room with its half-open door. She realized now that she hadn’t actually looked in that room or in the one next to it—she had assumed that with their doors ajar they had to be empty.
She went to the nearest half-open door. “Oona?”
“
GET AN AMBULANCE
.”
Ms. Hansen’s eyes swung up and around as though she’d been slapped. “I beg your pardon?”
Leigh seized the telephone from the counter and thrust the receiver at Ms. Hansen. She felt her voice grow teeth. “Get an ambulance this minute, or I will sue the ass off this store.”
About the Author
Edward Stewart (1938–1996) grew up in New York City and Cuba. He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and at Harvard, where he edited the famed
Lampoon
humor magazine. He studied music in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, and worked as a composer and arranger before launching his career as a writer. His first novel,
Orpheus on Top
, was published in 1966. He wrote thirteen more novels, including the bestselling Vince Cardozo thrillers
Privileged Lives
,
Jury Double
,
Mortal Grace
, and
Deadly Rich
.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1988 by Edward Stewart
Cover design by Kathleen Lynch
978-1-4804-7073-6
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
THE VINCE CARDOZO MYSTERIES
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
