Lust, Loathing and a Little Lip Gloss Read online

  “That would be good,” Detective Allen said, as he continued to make notes.

  Anatoly dropped his arm and I went to the bookshelf, reached on top of it, feeling around until my fingertips landed on a manila folder. I pulled it down and handed Detective Allen the paperwork. He read it carefully while I went to the next room to pacify my pet with Natura Tasty Herring for Kitties. By the time I came back to the living room the detective was going over the document for a second time in what appeared to be amused disbelief.

  “He really did make it part of the contract,” he said. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

  “I didn’t know anyone would want to do that,” I grumbled.

  “Good point.” Detective Allen put the folder down and made some more notes. “So you had never met Maria Risso before that night, but you invited her because Kane wanted you to?”

  “No, she wasn’t actually on the guest list. She kinda crashed the party.”

  “I see,” the detective said again. “And what was her demeanor?”

  I considered lying for Maria’s sake, but Detective Allen would surely talk to the other people at the dinner party and I couldn’t risk having my account vary radically from everyone else’s. “She was agitated,” I admitted. “But she said she was upset because she hadn’t been invited.”

  “But her husband had been,” Detective Allen prodded.

  “Yes, but like I said before, he never showed up.”

  “And you were talking to him on the phone when he called someone a—” he checked his notes “—a fucking bitch, is that right?”

  “Yep, that’s what he said.”

  “And then a few hours later Maria was at your house, uninvited in place of her soon-to-be ex-husband.”

  It was clear that Detective Allen had already made up his mind as to who the killer was. I glanced over at Anatoly, hoping that he would say something that might take the spotlight off of his client, but he remained silent.

  Detective Allen closed his notebook and offered me a smile. “That’s all the questions I have for you right now. However I would like to have a list of all the people who attended that séance.” He smirked slightly, unable to say the last word of the sentence with a straight face.

  “I’ll make one now,” I offered. “Do you mind if I use your notepad?”

  Detective Allen handed it over and I jotted down all the names of the Specter Society before going to get my cell phone so I could give him the numbers of the members I knew. He perused the list, thanked me for my time and left.

  Anatoly closed the door after him and turned to me. “This is a first. You managed to talk to the police without falsely incriminating yourself.”

  “I know!” I moved over to the couch and plopped myself down. “I don’t even think I’m a suspect. I’m always a suspect!”

  It had started raining again and Anatoly turned to the window and watched as splashes of water made patterns against the glass. “Does this mean you don’t have to worry about Kane not selling to you?”

  “I don’t know. If Kane finds out I’m off the police’s radar then maybe. If it did mean that, would you be happy for me?”

  The only response I got was from the rain, which had increased its tempo. My cell phone blasted out the first few lines of “It’s Raining Men.” “That’s Marcus,” I said quietly before picking up.

  “Honey, I slept in, forgive me?”

  “You never sleep in,” I said suspiciously. “Not when you’re alone.”

  “Yes, well, last night after we parted ways I went to this darling little bar, and at the bar was this darling little man, and—”

  “Say no more. When will you be here?”

  “An hour?”

  “Perfect. I have my own darling little man to deal with at the moment.” Anatoly looked over his shoulder and sent me a lethal glare. “Make that darling big man,” I corrected quickly. “My darling, big, burly man.”

  Marcus laughed and we said our goodbyes before I turned my attention back to Anatoly. I was about to make a joke about Marcus’s promiscuity, but something in the way Anatoly was looking at me made me nervous. He didn’t say anything and I found myself wishing that Marcus wasn’t running late so he could interrupt the moment.

  “You’re upset with me,” I finally said. “Why?”

  “You’re lying to me. I don’t know what you plan to do with Marcus today, but it has nothing to do with eating.”

  “You don’t know I’m lying to you,” I said huffily.

  “You’ve lied to me before. All the time.”

  “And you’ve never lied to me?” I countered. “When we first met, you told me you were a contractor! You, who can’t even build a house made out of Legos!”

  “I thought you were a murderess at the time.”

  “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  “You didn’t think any better of me.”

  “No, but…” I sighed and threw my hands up in the air. “What are we arguing about? All this happened years ago.”

  “Exactly. And I was hoping that by now we would have moved past that kind of thing. But we haven’t, because here you are, lying to me again.”

  I pressed my lips together and considered my options. “You’re right,” I said cautiously. “I’m not going to brunch with Marcus. I’m sorry I lied to you about that.”

  Anatoly nodded. “What are you planning?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “Does it matter?”

  The rain had turned into a storm. Hadn’t there been sun earlier, when Anatoly had climbed into my bed and caressed me with those amazing hands of his? What had happened to the sun?

  “It’s the sin of omission,” he said coldly.

  “It’s not a sin if you tell people you’re omitting something,” I snapped. “Check your Catholic theology.”

  Anatoly wasn’t amused. “Does this have to do with Scott?”

  “What?” I asked, totally taken aback. “What? You think this is about Scott?” And suddenly I was laughing. I laughed so hard and so long that even Mr. Katz felt compelled to leave his food bowl to investigate the commotion.

  “This isn’t funny.”

  “Oh, I beg to differ. I have always been the jealous one in this relationship—and now it’s you! You’re jealous of Scott! Scott the man who I hate more than…well, more than any person who hasn’t yet tried to kill me.”

  “You must have cared about him a lot in order for him to make you that angry,” Anatoly noted. “Now he’s found you a house to buy. A house that you refuse to walk away from.”

  “Have you lost your mind? Scott’s connection to this house is the house’s only drawback! The only thing that man makes me want to do is scream!”

  “I make you scream.”

  “I’m not talking about the kind of screaming that happened this morning in the bedroom.”

  “Neither am I. We have a history of driving each other crazy. I used to think that our frequent arguments would break us up, but now I understand that you are attracted to antagonism. You enjoy fighting. And you seem to enjoy fighting with Scott a lot.”

  “Anatoly, we’ve been over this. I’m not attracted to Scott. I don’t want to fight with him. I want to hurt him, and if I can’t do that then I want to get him out of my life as quickly as possible. And he will be out of my life once escrow closes. I just have to find a way to make that happen.”

  Anatoly took a second to register this. “Is that what you and Marcus are going to be doing today? Finding a way to ensure the closing of escrow?”

  “Anatoly, I told you I’m not going to say anything about what I’m going to be doing with Marcus, but I will tell you that I will not be seeing Scott today or any other day that I don’t absolutely have to. Can you trust me?”

  Anatoly raised an eyebrow. “You’ve never asked that of me before.”

  “That’s because I’m frequently untrustworthy. I know that. But not
when it comes to fidelity.” I stood up and walked over to him. I let my hand slip over his chest. “You make me happy,” I said softly. “You’re it for me.” And all of a sudden I knew. I was totally and absolutely in love with him. But I didn’t say it…I couldn’t say it just yet.

  Anatoly covered my mouth with his. “I trust you,” he said between kisses.

  He stopped and fingered the neckline of my robe before leaning in for one more kiss. Minutes after that he was gone. He didn’t ask me any more questions. He trusted me.

  As I showered, it occurred to me that now that I was no longer a serious suspect it was possible that none of my secret plans were necessary. Maybe Kane would relax and let me stay here without my having to prove anything.

  But I doubted it. Kane was a megafreak, and you couldn’t trust megafreaks to be reasonable.

  Something else was nagging at me, too. I didn’t want Maria to be arrested. I had no idea if Maria had been angry enough to kill Enrico, but I felt fairly sure that she wouldn’t have used a scythe. Maybe a handgun or even a knife, but I just couldn’t visualize her wrapping a curved blade around her ex-husband’s neck. That required a twisted mentality, and Maria, despite her best efforts, was really just a conventional, albeit wealthy, woman with an interest in the whimsical and a chip on her shoulder.

  After cleaning myself up, I managed to gather my mass of hair up behind my head and secured it with a clip. Several wavy locks refused to be confined, but I didn’t argue with them. I liked what I saw in the mirror. It was the reflection of a woman in love.

  Downstairs, in the guest room, which was slowly becoming my office, I found a yellow legal pad in a box labeled “paper-stuff” and brought it, along with a box of granola bars, to the dining-room table. Why I had packed granola bars in a box labeled “paper-stuff” was beyond me, unless of course I was making some kind of subconscious statement about their taste. But I was hungry and this was easy.

  With a sigh I unwrapped my breakfast and wrote the names Kane, Maria, Lorna, Al and Venus all on the top of different pages. Under Kane I wrote the words may have had opportunity to kill Enrico. May being the operative and annoying word since I didn’t really know what Kane had been doing before the séance. There was also the problem of what I was now sure were Enrico’s last words. In jest, Marcus would occasionally call one of his boyfriends a bitch, but I couldn’t imagine someone applying the word to Kane.

  I chewed on my lip for a moment before taking my pen again to Kane’s page. On it I wrote Oscar??? Oscar definitely merited three question marks. Did he factor into this? Officially Oscar had died of natural causes, but there’s a reason why they tell cardiac patients not to ride roller coasters. Had someone tried to bring Oscar’s heart attack on? He was Kane’s father, so surely Kane had access to his house. Kane was probably strong enough to move around the furniture, but would he do that to his own father? The thought made me want to throw up my granola. But I couldn’t rule out the possibility.

  But when it came to Enrico, Venus was an easier fit. I bet people called her a bitch all the time. Hell, it was probably her high school nickname. I’d have to check with Scott to see if she had opportunity. I would ask him on the phone if possible; I didn’t want to do anything to compromise the trust Anatoly had invested in me.

  Still, the problem was that, as far as I knew, the only people who had reason to see Enrico and Oscar dead were Al, Lorna and Zach. That was assuming that Al and Lorna knew the truth about what happened to their daughter. If not, that just left Zach. And if Enrico suspected, as I did, that Zach was gay, he might have thought that calling him a bitch was appropriate. It wasn’t, but one couldn’t expect a child-rapist to be sensitive about such issues.

  I put my pen between my lips and wiggled it around like a cigar. I was getting ahead of myself. Venus and Kane might very well have fabulous motives for killing Enrico. I just had to figure out what they were, which was why Marcus and I were going to play detective at Kane’s today. We would find something; we always did.

  As if on cue, the doorbell rang. I dropped my project and went to greet Marcus at the door. He had on his Armani waterproof leather trench that he had to wear every time it rained in order to justify the price. That, coupled with his perfect self-confident grin, could have qualified him for the cover of GQ.

  He stepped inside and dropped his umbrella in the corner. “Your psychic guru has arrived. As your spiritual leader, I demand that you supply me with a room full of DiCaprio look-alikes. It is God’s will.”

  “Really? Because right now I think God may be telling me to smack you upside the head. He says that’s what you get for attributing your hedonistic little fantasies to His will.”

  Marcus shook his head in mock sympathy. “Honey, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but those voices in your head? They’re not God. Now go get your bag. I didn’t come to chitchat.”

  “My, aren’t we bossy,” I teased as I went to the living room to get my handbag.

  Marcus took a few steps in and nodded his approval. “All right, I get it. This place is worth sitting through a few Ouija-board games.”

  “Are you kidding?” I asked drily. “I’d stab one of Venus’s voodoo dolls of myself and sacrifice a chicken for this place.”

  “Thank you so much for the dark imagery. Now, shall we?” He opened the door and bowed slightly in mock deference. I put on my most regal expression and walked out into the wet cold. We had an adventure to get to.

  15

  They say that those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. But if the person you’re targeting is in the same house, and you have good aim, you might be able to get away with it.

  —The Lighter Side of Death

  “HERE’S OUR STORY,” I SAID AS WE SPED TOWARD KANE’S PACIFIC HEIGHTS home in Marcus’s red Miata. “I’m going to tell him that I’m on the verge of being able to spiritually commune with his parents and that you, being my psychic and all, have advised that I touch something that used to belong to the deceased. You believe that would help me make contact.”

  Marcus looked away from the road long enough to give me a derisive look. “Didn’t your house belong to the deceased?” he asked. “Why can’t you touch that?”

  “I don’t know,” I snapped. “Maybe I have to touch something smaller. Something intimate that they could actually put in their pocket and keep on their person.”

  “There are so many juvenile things I could say to that.”

  “Then it’s a good thing you’re not juvenile.” I lowered the passenger-side window for some air. “I don’t know what Kane will come up with, but whatever it is let’s hope he has to look for it. Then I’ll get to look around while he’s looking around.”

  “And if he happens to know just the thing you need and hands it over in a New York minute?” Marcus asked. “What then?”

  “Then you have to go to the bathroom and while you’re supposed to be in there you’ll really be snooping. Pictures of Kane with his parents would be good. Like, if you can find a picture of Kane with his mom holding a fast-food milkshake in front of a carousel, I can say that his mom contacted me and that she loved taking him to amusement parks, but regrets all the time she fed him trans fat.”

  “Yes, that’s just the kind of message someone comes back from the dead to relay.”

  “I’m pretty sure that people don’t come back from the dead, period. But if I’m going to pretend that they do, then I’ll have them say whatever the hell I want them to say. It’s my story. That’s sort of why I didn’t call ahead. I don’t want him preparing for our visit. The only person who gets to prepare for this is me…I mean us,” I added sheepishly.

  “Fabulous,” Marcus said as we turned onto Kane’s block. “I can tell this visit is going to be a huge success. Better than Cats.”

  I smacked him lightly on the leg. “Oh, shut up and park. This is the address. Be sure that when you’re playing the role of psychic you don’t overdo it. You can be eccentric, but not to
the point of being unbelievable.”

  “And if he’s not home? How long are we going to wait?”

  “Well,” I hedged, “do you remember that time you broke into Anatoly’s place for me? That was kinda fun, wasn’t it?”

  Marcus did a quick double take. “You want to break in,” he said flatly. “To Kane’s Pacific Heights mansion. Because obviously, someone as trusting as Kane would never invest in an alarm system.”

  “I didn’t say we should pick the locks or anything. I just meant that if, I don’t know, a window’s open or—”

  “Right, you don’t want to break in. You just want to climb in an open window when nobody’s looking.”

  “Marcus—”

  “No. No, no, no, no, and…what was it that I was going to say? Oh, yeah, NO! I will be your psychic guru in front of Kane, but we’re not going to be doing anything more stupid than that. My ass is way too cute to be messed with by Bubba the Bi-curious Cellmate.”

  “Fine,” I snapped. “We’ll play it safe.”

  “Thank you.”

  We both got out of the car and, hunching under one umbrella, rushed up the front steps. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that there were trees on either side of Kane’s yard. Not evergreens like those of his neighbors, Kane’s trees were bare with gnarled branches twisted up toward the sky like props from a spooky movie.

  And then there was the double door that served as the main entrance to his home. It was practically a throwback to the time of King Arthur’s court! He even had a coat of arms carved into each side! Marcus toyed with his keys and offered a bemused smile. “And you were worried about me overdoing it.”

  I laughed and smacked him again, this time on the arm. It was a harder smack than I had intended and Marcus dropped his keys. It was just as he was bending down to pick them up that the front door opened. A tall Latino man wearing a grungy T-shirt and dirty jeans looked down at him.

  “I dropped my keys,” Marcus explained, jingling them in front of him as evidence.