Marilu spat the word
man
as though it were a cat turd she’d accidentally discovered in her mouth, but Beau didn’t appear to be the least bit offended on behalf of his gender. “I’ll give ’em a show,” he promised.
She disentangled herself gently from Beau’s roving fingers and face, and he held her fingertips in a courtly gesture, as though he were about to take her for a waltz around the dining room. Damn, but the man was smooth. Stella had the unkindly thought that it wasn’t only height holding back the Lardner boys—that kind of suave probably had to get started in the home, when a boy was just a wee thing; once he got to the man stage, it was probably too late.
“I’ll just get my things,” Marilu murmured, crossing the floor on her high-heeled black alligator pumps and fetching a long black wool coat from the closet. Beau rushed to help her into it.
“She sure has got him trained,” Chrissy marveled. “So you want to sneak in there and wait for her to come back?”
Stella considered. Breaking in and waiting was probably the most sensible course of action, especially since the judge was bound to have better snacks than Priss. But Stella didn’t think she could stomach watching Marilu and her rent-boy groping each other in the foyer again. The way they carried on, he was likely to have her dress ripped off before Stella could properly intimidate them. “I think we better follow them and see where they go.”
Inside, Marilu was buttoning her coat while her lover boy fussed with a silk scarf around her shoulders. “Now did you have a chance to go over everything?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am. Cousin Dorcas Severance, fifty-nine. Her husband is Jim Senior, of Belk, Glazkov, and Severance. Two daughters, Minette and Ashleigh. Ashleigh’s the homely one, and the mother of little Tremayne.”
“What a
dreadful
name for a child,” Marilu said, shuddering, as she buttoned her coat.
“It didn’t say if Tremayne was a boy or a girl,” Beau said, slipping his folded cheat sheet into the same pocket that held the check the judge had given him.
“The little bastard
better
be a boy,” Marilu exclaimed. “I got the blue rattle from Tiffany’s.”
Beau chuckled as though she were a great wit. Well, money probably made anyone a little more amusing.
“Let’s go, precious,” Marilu said, picking up a pink calfskin handbag and a little beribboned box. “We can go over the rest of the names on the way. The sooner we get to that brunch, the earlier we can leave.”
“And the sooner we can get back home and get busy,” Beau purred, allowing himself to be led to the door like a prize pony.
Chapter Seventeen
It wasn’t too much of a surprise that Beau drove, though it was Marilu’s big, solid Acura RL they followed through the streets of Kansas City rather than his tidy little compact. Stella figured it wouldn’t do to show up for a fancy party in a car like that.
“Too bad we cain’t hear what-all they’re saying,” Chrissy observed as Stella dodged in and out of traffic, trying to stay with the Acura. She’d suggested she take the wheel, having spent some time a couple of years ago learning a variety of tricks for following folks who you’d just as soon didn’t know you were doing it, but she’d never had a chance to try them out in heavy traffic. Traffic around Prosper generally kept to a leisurely pace.
She was finding that the additional lanes of traffic had advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, all those cars made for excellent cover; her pretty little Jeep Liberty had a dusting of road grime that went back a couple of snowstorms, since Stella hadn’t had time to run it through the car wash all month. On the other hand, her usual driving practices, while not exactly tame, lent themselves to the pedal-to-the-floor-on-a-straightaway-type thrills rather than the dodge-and-feint variety that city folk seemed to favor.
After nearly clipping a slow-moving minivan, and getting stuck in the blind spot of a flatbed truck stacked with crates, Stella almost lost their quarry several times in the fifteen-minute drive into Kansas City’s downtown. It was with great relief that she spotted them in the right-hand lane in front of an imposing old redbrick high-rise hotel. She followed as they rolled into the circular drive and up under the fancy covered valet station, and then braked hard.
“What the hell’re you doing?” Chrissy demanded, jolted forward against her seat belt.
“I don’t want them to see us,” Stella said, glancing in the rearview mirror for traffic as she tried to figure out what to do.
“Well, if you get folks honking behind you, they’re gonna notice for sure,” Chrissy said. “Keep driving. You know where they’re at now.”
Stella eased past, keeping to the outside of the overhang, as a uniformed valet leapt to attention and practically fell over himself helping Marilu out of the car. Thankfully, neither she nor Beau looked their way. Out the other side of the circular drive, she found herself back in traffic. “Now what?”
“Find a spot,” Chrissy said, “and make it quick.”
Dang the insanity of the city pace,
Stella thought as she dodged a pedestrian darting across the street. Up ahead, she noted a spot opening up as an old Cadillac pulled out, and turned on her signal just as a sleek BMW shot past her and nearly caused a head-on collision when it stopped abruptly.
All set to steal her space.
Uh-uh. Not happening.
Stella’s temper, on a hair trigger already due to the stressful traffic, ratcheted up toward the atmosphere. The Cadillac, which they now saw was being piloted by a tiny little man about 150 years old, was moving at a glacial pace, the driver backing up a matter of inches and turning the wheel with a mighty effort before reversing forward a paltry bit and repeating the process.
Stella jammed the Jeep into Park and got out. She stalked the ten feet to the would-be spot-stealer’s driver’s-side door and rapped on the darkened window, which glided soundlessly down. She found herself staring at a florid man in a starched shirt and tie, a little headset corkscrewed into his ear, talking a mile a minute.
“—have her shoot me those financials,” he barked, holding up a finger and glaring at her.
“That’s my spot,” Stella said, raising her voice. “I had the blinkers on.”
He raised one eyebrow, his expression of irritation taking on a quizzical cast.
“You might hear me better like this,” Stella said, reaching out and giving the earpiece a yank. It came out of his ear with a jerk, and she tossed it over to the passenger seat.
“What the hell!” His cheeks flushed an even deeper shade of red.
“What I said was, don’t even think about taking my fucking parking space. I’m not in the mood.” Stella leaned down, forearm resting on his open window, until she was looking the man in the eye, their faces inches apart.
“Yeah? Well, I don’t care what sort of menopausal hissy fit you got going on,” he snapped, and in the fraction of a second when his gaze tracked from her to the space that was finally being vacated by the elderly gent, when his hands shifted on the wheel, when his foot began its journey to the pedal, Stella had a rush of the kind of killer instinct that she’d honed to a razor edge, which had served her well in so many of these good-versus-asshole moments.
She shot out her hand and grabbed a handful of crotch, dug in her fingers with the concentrated force of all her might, just like she’d learned to do during all those months of physical therapy, and gave a ferocious twist.
He screamed. Stella dug in and twisted some more.
“We clear?” she demanded, so close now, she could smell his aftershave, mixed with sweat and fear.
“Yeah-yeah-yeah-please-yeah-please,” he blubbered, scrabbling with his damp and squishy hand, trying to dislodge her iron grip. But he was messing with an angry woman who’d cleared the midcentury mark with attitude to spare, and that put him at a distinct disadvantage.
“Drive forward very slowly,” Stella suggested. “If you go too fast, I’m liable to keep your balls as a souvenir.”
The car began to move, at about the pace an ocean liner would go if it had started at a standstill on calm waters. Stella strolled along until she was satisfied that her new friend had time to process the situation.
“Now, explain to me how you just had a moment of poor judgment, which has thankfully now passed,” she said. “And how you feel about that little incident a few minutes ago.”
“I’m so-so-so-sorry I tried to take your spot,” he stammered. His face was now turning an interesting shade of green.
“And I won’t do it again to some other lady in the future.”
“And I wo-wo-won’t … I won’t…”
Well, that was good enough, she supposed. She released him and gave the windowsill a little pat. “Drive safe now,” she said as she stepped back and the car shot forward.
Back in the Jeep, Chrissy was shaking her head. “You and your violent ways. Got to solve everything with pain, don’t you.”
“Don’t sass me, little girl. I ain’t in the mood.”
She executed a perfect three-point parking job, which surprised even her—there wasn’t much call to put those skills to the test in Prosper—and grabbed her purse and made a hasty exit.
“We cain’t go in there like this,” Chrissy said as Stella fed coins into the meter. “We ain’t dressed for the occasion—we’ll stand out. Come on.” She grabbed Stella’s arm and spun her down the street in the other direction from the hotel.
“Where we going?”
“To fancy up some.” She led the way down the street at a good clip and force-marched Stella into a storefront whose sign had big sparkly red letters spelling
WIG’N’MORE.
In the windows, as the name suggested, a variety of hairdos were displayed on featureless foam heads, decked in piles of glittering costume jewelry, draped with scarves and boas and crystal-studded eyeglasses.
“That isn’t gonna help us,” Stella complained. “Besides, I bet they mark everything up to city prices.”
“We ain’t exactly bustin’ out with options here,” Chrissy insisted. “And we don’t want to miss that party, do we? In case you haven’t noticed, we are in the middle of a city we don’t know nothing about, and far as I can tell, it’s this joint or nothing. Besides, we got that hush money from Jake and Lawrence—it won’t kill us to spend a little. So shut your damn trap and let’s see what they got.”
* * *
Stella’s fears about
blending into the party were set to rest the minute they entered the ballroom marked with a sign reading
SEVERANCE CHRISTENING
. It was jammed with people—easily over a hundred guests milled about, helping themselves from the buffet line, lining up at the open bar, admiring the ice sculpture of a cherub riding a dolphin.
And it wasn’t just the crowd that put her at ease, or the fact that it appeared to be open seating, with the guests milling about on a wave of boozy good cheer despite the fact that the usual cocktail hour was quite a ways off.
No, what really heartened Stella was that the bastard child—baby Tremayne—appeared to have sprung from a blended family. Blended in the sense that half the guests looked like they rode over on the
Mayflower
—the men dressed in navy blazers and striped ties and even the occasional ascot, the women in more conservative versions of the solid-colored suit that the judge wore. But the other half had taken a decidedly more lowbrow interpretation of the dress code. The women wore giant-print dresses and miniskirts and high-heeled sandals and ankle bracelets. The men sported a fair number of slicked-back mullet-esque haircuts, and shiny double-breasted jackets and silk shirts open at the throat, all the better to show off their gentlemen’s jewelry.
“Why, some a these gals make me look downright sophisticated,” Chrissy marveled, echoing Stella’s own unspoken sentiment.
Not that Chrissy looked bad. In fact, she had a certain preening charm that was not lost on any of the men in the vicinity. Wig’n’More had yielded a lace-up bustier top, which, coupled with the black pants Chrissy had been wearing as well as a pair of lime green mules that had been tucked away in the sale shelf at the back of the shop, looked quite fetching. She had accessorized with a pair of dangly green crystal chandelier earrings and a chunky gold bracelet, but the most memorable accessory had to be her own cleavage, which had attained an astonishing new level of magnificence with all the extra support lent by the stiff leatherette material from which the bustier had been crafted.
Stella had to settle for something a bit more sedate. The proprietress of the shop—
CALL ME MYSTI,
her name tag had commanded—gave her only the briefest of once-overs before fetching a number of things from the “hold” rack, claiming that they were so much better with Stella’s fair coloring and lovely eyes that it would be a crime for her to selfishly hold them back for another customer. All of which Stella saw right through, but when she slipped on the silver burn-out velvet jacket over the matching stretch-velvet tank top, and added some fake pearls that would have had to come out of twenty-pound oysters, she had to admit that she looked fine, fine,
fine.
Now, scanning the room, she was aware of the smooth stretchy fabric keeping her midsection nicely restrained, of the jaunty stance forced on her by the new silver-strapped sandals of astonishing height. The shoes might be the death of her, seeing as they were barely walkable, but it would be a pretty death, at least—Stella would go out clutching the sparkly handbag that their new friend Mysti had talked her into.
The clothes were an unexpected expense, it was true, and something Stella hadn’t budgeted for. But they were a
business
expense, and that ought to count for something. Plus, maybe she’d get herself invited somewhere special for dinner and dancing by a certain gentleman friend. The silver ensemble would come in plenty handy then, wouldn’t it?
Stella had a firm rule: She refused to engage in any of the petty competition that seemed to come over so many women when it came to men. Stella rued the millennia it must have taken to lodge in the female mind that they had to brawl for limited resources, except nowadays instead of fighting over a berry bush or roasted brontosaurus leg, women seemed ready to throw down over any kind of man, including the good-for-nothing ones. Why, it was epidemic—as anyone who flipped on the
Maury
show could see.