It was clear what kind of women got Chris King’s attention. Flashbacks of Diana and Claire danced in my mind and I knew my fake nose job consultation would require serious prep work if I was going to make any sort of impression. I skipped up the steps to my apartment, where Jeannie waited with cosmetics and accessories like a zealous stage mom.
“I printed a bunch of stuff.” She pointed to the tiny laundry room off my kitchen, the only place in the apartment where I could spare room for a printer.
I dropped my keys on an end table. “Tell me about it while you work. We don’t have much time.”
She directed me to the kitchenette, where I sat in a chair and waited. She hobbled a few steps behind, her posture stiff.
“It needs to be comprehensive.” I ignored her pain, which I knew was exaggerated. “Face, hair, clothes. You have an hour.”
Jeannie lifted a hot pink sundress, still on its hangar, from the back of the chair across from me. “I’d have rather seen you wear something of Claire’s,” she said, “but this’ll do.”
“Whose is it?”
She held it close, stroked it. “Mine.
Armani
.”
“Why would you pack that?”
“I bought it yesterday at the Galleria. You should be ashamed of the frumpy shit in your closet.”
I reached for the dress.
She pulled it back. “This won’t come down to how you look, you know. He’ll see right through that.”
Behind her, our breakfast plates were stacked in the dish drainer and the coffee pot had been cleaned. I decided against telling Jeannie that I valued her domestic help more than her advice.
“Go in there with the attitude of the woman you’re pretending to be,” she said. “It’s the whole package.”
I knew she was right. Exfoliated skin and new acrylics could only take a woman so far. “I’ll channel my inner actress.”
“Good girl. Now go wash your face.”
I did what she said and rejoined her at the table, where she laid out an array of high dollar cosmetics, none mine. She removed the top from a bottle of foundation and began blotting it into my face with a sponge. It smelled floral, but went on cold and sticky.
“They did a nice job on your skin,” she said.
I thought of the crushed pearls. “Cost more than a week of groceries.”
She pressed and dabbed and I felt like a kid getting made up for Halloween. “Look up,” she said, and I obeyed. “When you introduce yourself to the doc, be confident. Flirt. Stroke his ego.”
I started to protest, but she admonished me to be still.
“Give him a reason to want to impress you,” she continued. “Trust me. I know his type.” She grinned. “I love his type.”
“You don’t even know him.”
“Educated guess.”
“I wish you could go instead.”
“Me too, sweetie.” She added final touches below my jaw. “But
my
nose doesn’t need any work.” She clucked her tongue and pulled the sponge away.
I cut my eyes to her but we were so close that it strained me to stare very long.
A thick layer of powder came next. “You’re gonna take this in your bag, Em, and put it on before you get out of the car. No shine on your face, hear me?”
She sounded like me when I talked to Annette.
Don’t forget your backpack. Are you sure you brushed your teeth
?
Lipliner, eyeliner, brow filler. Eye-shadow. Mascara. Lipstick. Gloss.
She stepped back and evaluated. “Where’s your Chi?”
I looked at her. “My…natural energy of the universe?”
She put a hand on her hip. “Your flat iron.”
Getting only my blank stare in response, she reassessed. “Then an up-do. Got bobby pins?”
On and on it went, Jeannie with her good-smelling hair products and hair twirling and bobby-pinning. Me, immobilized in the chair, fretting over the time.
“Anyway,” she said, working on a new section of my hair, “The articles I printed talk about what happens when a business partner dies.”
I spun to face her. “What does happen?”
She smacked the back of my head. “Hold still.”
“When you go into business with somebody,” she said, “You can sign a buy-sell agreement and get life insurance on your partner. Then if he dies, you can buy out his share using the insurance.”
“What’s the agreement do?”
“It sounds like a prenup for business partners. Something to nail down who can buy an owner’s interest and what price they’ll pay.”
“Are doctors like regular business partners or is a medical practice different?”
She shrugged. “Not sure it matters. Killing a guy to buy up his share of a practice is a stretch. You see that, right?”
I dropped my head into my hands, frustrated. She thumped the base of my skull with a hard flick. “Sit up.”
“Until I figure out who wanted Platt dead,” I said. “Everything’s a stretch.” I tapped a shiny fake nail on my watch face.
Jeannie shellacked my hair with a bottle of Paul Mitchell and told me to put on the dress. I squeezed into it and she pulled the zipper up in back.
“Your legs look
awesome
,” she said, when I turned around for her inspection. The hem of her dress was alarmingly high on my thighs. “But the neckline sags. We have to push up your boobs.”
I didn’t own bra pads, which Jeannie said was worse than not having a Chi iron. She fashioned a set by cutting and balling up an old pair of my pantyhose and telling me how to stuff it under my breasts inside my bra cups. When I finally got a look at myself in the mirror, I was pleasantly shocked.
Jeannie passed me the thin stack of articles she’d printed and followed me to the door, where her parting action was to spritz me with Giorgio Beverly Hills. I pulled the door shut behind me, feeling as elegant as her perfume, and descended the steps. At the bottom, I emerged from the building’s shadow into the sun and when its warmth washed over me, the transition felt metaphoric.
I did vain, stupid things during my drive to the surgery center. I tilted the rear-view mirror at me so I could admire my sexy lips. Sometimes I glanced at the faint reflection in the driver’s side window for another look at my too-cute hair. Once I lowered the sun visor so I could see the way my fingernails looked as they played over the steering wheel.
I drove a little faster than usual, not because I was late, but because glamour was exciting, even in a Taurus.
When I pulled into the surgery center, I re-applied facial powder as instructed and stepped from the car, approving my reflection in the window one last time before taking long, confident strides toward the building. Jeannie had swept my hair up in a way that looked sharp and classy in the contour of my shadow. I watched my silhouette cross the pavement and marveled at how empowering the new style felt compared to my usual ponytail.
By the time Dr. King met me in an exam room twenty-five minutes later, I was so full of myself I used his first name.
“Good to meet you, Chris.”
He shook my hand with almost no eye contact and reached for my patient folder. After a brief glimpse inside, he said, “Tell me your reasons for considering rhinoplasty.”
Then he reached behind him for a wheeled-stool and pulled it forward without ever looking at it. He rolled forward, studying my face without really seeing me, and as he drew nearer, my Giorgio Beverly Hills mixed with something equally divine on his end.
“I’d like to smooth the bridge.” I ran a finger lightly over my nose. “And maybe bring the tip down a little bit.”
He propped my chin on his hand and turned my head, considering it from the front, then sides. “Your overall facial structure is proportional,” he said. “Pretty chin, nice cheekbones.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Dr. Platt thought so too.” I turned my eyes away and gave what I hoped was a convincing sad smile.
King flipped backward in my chart. “You saw Dr. Platt?” he asked. “It’s not in your folder.”
I waved off the question. “Informally. We were to meet here for our first visit, but then…you know.”
“Mm,” he said, more to himself than me. “We certainly miss him.” He scribbled something in my chart, then looked up abruptly. “The concerns you express can be addressed with minor reshaping. It would be a closed procedure.” He lifted a plastic model from the countertop. “We’d make incisions within the nose and separate the skin from the bone and cartilage here. Once that’s done, tissue can be removed or reshaped as required. We can correct the asymmetry too.”
“Asymmetry?”
“The way your columnella—” more pointing to the model “—is offset to the left there.”
I tried not to take offense.
“The procedure will take about an hour or two,” he continued. “Will this be your first surgery?” He flipped around in my chart some more and paused on my medical history form.
“Yes.”
I watched him study my file and wondered how to bring things around to his business arrangement.
“What happens now?” I tried. “Do you have twice as many patients? Will you get another partner?”
King clicked his pen and dropped it into his pocket. “It’ll be an adjustment. But things always work out somehow, don’t they?”
He’d answered my question with a question. I recognized this as one of Richard’s tricks.
“Let’s do your photos,” King said. “Our computer imaging package will approximate your new look. You’ll have an opportunity to review various possible outcomes and let me know which most closely captures what you’d like to achieve. I can’t guarantee the final result will look like the picture, but we get very close.”
He stood and opened the door. I remembered Jeannie:
Give him a reason to impress you
.
“I know how computer imaging works.” I passed him in the doorway. “You’re my third consult.”
He escorted me down the hall.
“I want the right surgeon,” I said. “Someone to make me feel as comfortable as Dr. Platt did. Diana insisted I meet you.”
“Ah.” A new bright tone came to his voice. “My wife is match-making.”
“She recruited me at Tone Zone.”
“She lives for that place,” he said. “Hell, she lives
at
that place.”
“Girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.” I smoothed the twist Jeannie had pinned in my hair. “We’re not twenty anymore.”
“You’re lovely, both of you,” he said. “And I know you work very hard at it.”
Unsure whether that last bit was a compliment, I didn’t answer.
He peeled to the right and we passed Platt’s office, identified by a chiseled name plate mounted on the door. Open cardboard boxes waited on his desk and I wondered who among Platt’s circle would come to claim his things today. Dr. King gestured to a crowded little room with a backdrop and diminutive flash umbrella against the far wall. He flipped on the lights and I went inside and sat in the empty chair where I would pose for my Before shots.
He deposited my folder on the counter. “Lucy will take care of you.”
I crossed my legs as suggestively as I could. “The other doctors took my pictures personally.”
“I’m a better surgeon than photographer. We’ll talk again when she’s finished.”
He left the room, evidently less impressed with me than I was. And when Lucy finally came, she was no help either. I asked what would happen to the practice now that Dr. Platt had passed. She said, “They-never-tell-us-anything-look-to-your-right-please” and raised the camera. She snapped pictures of my asymmetrical nose and left me alone in the room. I viewed her abandonment as an opportunity.
Two doors down, I slipped into Platt’s office and closed the door to barely a crack. I peered into the half-packed boxes on his desk and found books and picture frames, two coffee mugs and a sweater. He used one of those desktop calendars that cover the full writing surface of a desk. I moved the boxes aside and ripped off the top page, July, without reading it. I folded the giant sheet over and over until it was small enough to shove in my bag. Then I replaced the boxes and tried his desk drawers, all locked.
A quick look around the room suggested nothing else of interest, only wall-mounted diplomas and overflowing stacks of medical journals. When I returned to the photography room, Dr. King was waiting, reading a message on his iPhone.
“Ladies room,” I apologized, and dropped back into the chair. “Are my images uploaded?”
Kendra found me loitering in the lounge, flipping through a celebrity gossip rag.
“You snoop in style.” Her eyes took in Jeannie’s dress, which I was growing to like.
“I feel radioactive.” It was the first time in my life I’d worn hot pink. “I made a salon appointment for later, in case anyone wonders why I’m here twice in the same day.”
She nodded. “How will this work?”
“I need time in Diana’s office.” A pair of women in tennis skirts passed, smoothies in hand. “How much time depends on the file sizes.”
“The best chance is during her staff tag-up,” Kendra said. “It lasts fifteen, twenty minutes.”
“When’s the meeting?”
“Whenever Diana says.”
I checked my watch, not that it mattered. “Put my number in your phone, okay? Call me when it starts.”
“I’ll text you. It’s quieter.”
“Fine.”
She pulled out her phone and stopped. “Give me a few seconds, then follow me. Don’t make it obvious.”
Before I could ask, she turned and walked away. I gave her a nice head start before following her through the twisty-turny hallways to a strangely shaped nook between a ladies room and a storage closet. Kendra was waiting beside some drinking fountains, leaning against a fire alarm box.
“No security cameras here,” she said. “Tell me your number now.”
I thought her precautions were a bit extreme for sharing a phone number, but I gave it to her without commentary and she punched it into her cell.
“All of us can’t be at the meeting, obviously. People still have to man the floor. So if you get caught—”
I rested a hand on her shoulder. “I won’t throw you under the bus.”
She forced a smile, lips tight. “You’ll need this.” She pressed a key into my hand.
“Thanks.”
I turned to leave but she touched my wrist. When I looked back, her bold, brown eyes were intense. “Diana didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Maybe not.” I turned the key over in my hand. “But somebody here did.”
***
Situated on the building’s second floor, Diana’s office opened off of an elevated, rubberized running track that encircled a colony of Pilates machines. A poster on her door advertised the July special: two free chemical peels with the purchase of permanent make-up.
Unwilling to draw attention to myself by circling the track in a tight dress and strappy heels, I found a nearby bench and pretended to read the latest issue of
Houston Woman
while waiting for Kendra’s all-clear text message.
I checked my phone compulsively. During one idle pass through its menus, I saw I’d missed several calls. They’d been logged throughout the afternoon, but the callers weren’t listed. Immediately, I thought of Annette. Then before I could investigate further, a message from Kendra arrived: “Go.”
At least I was still receiving texts.
Her key, warm from its time in my hand, felt like a secret weapon. I carried it purposefully toward Diana’s office, unlocked the door as if I had every right to, and closed myself inside. Like everything else at the club, the office was plush to the point of being overdone. I stepped across thick, well-cushioned carpet to a chair behind her desk, dropped into it, and wiggled her mouse to wake up the dark computer monitor.
Diana kept a spiral notebook and a file caddy on the corner of her desk, right next to a glorious amethyst geode the size of a basketball. I wanted a look at her papers but forced myself to stay focused. I had no idea where I’d find the camera files on her hard drive or how long they’d take to copy and I wouldn’t leave without at least having those. Her screen came to life.
I scanned the Programs folder for software applications that sounded remotely relevant. After a few duds, I found the right package and figured out how to get to last week’s files. I decided to copy both Wednesday’s and Thursday’s footage, just in case. When I clicked on the first one, the screen divided into quadrants with views from various cameras around the club playing in each corner. Tabs at the bottom of the screen let me switch to even more camera views and I was instantly drawn into the activity playing out before me.
Copy now, watch later, Emily. Don’t be stupid
.
I plugged my thumb drive into Diana’s computer, which she kept under her desk. While the files copied, I pilfered through the papers on her desk. Diana’s appointment calendar was as empty as mine and I thought she might be the sort who remembered all her engagements without writing them down. Or maybe she tracked them digitally with one of those fancy phones that does every damn thing. I bristled, annoyed because my own impaired phone had probably been permanently damaged in the morning’s downpour.
Diana’s desk drawers didn’t give up anything juicy until I came to the last one. There I discovered a blue folder with a collection of neatly arranged newspaper clippings inside. Filed in reverse chronological order, the most recent article, a week old, was on top:
Houston’s Tone Zone to Open Second Facility
.
Last month, it had been:
Local Health Club Donates $5,000 to United Way
I flipped through the stack.
April:
Tone Zone Fundraiser Offers 5K/10K Challenge to Area Runners
March:
Fitness Club Donates Rodeo Scholarship Funds
January:
Women’s Health Club to Open Doors This Month
August:
Investors Announce Plans for Ladies Gym
With a steady hand, Diana had meticulously highlighted specific quotations and as I studied them, the complexity of Claire’s case skyrocketed. Five investors shared ownership in the club, but neon yellow said Diana only cared what one of them had to say. The quotes she’d highlighted were all ascribed to Wendell Platt, MD.
I chewed on a fake thumb nail and stared at his name.
Plenty of folks had multiple business interests, especially rich people. But, at the surgery center Platt worked with Chris King and at Tone Zone, he worked with King’s wife. The arrangement had Triangle written all over it.
I slipped the newspaper articles back into their folder and returned them to the drawer. The files finished copying and I was about to eject the thumb drive when Diana’s doorknob twisted.
Almost reflexively, I grabbed the telephone handset and raised it to my ear. Natalie burst inside and, upon seeing me, stopped. I held up an apologetic finger and continued talking to nobody about a car that wasn’t broken.
“But yesterday you said I’d have it today,” I said. “Am I at least getting a loaner?”
I shook my head at Natalie. She gave nothing back.
After a suitable pause, I muttered insincere thanks and hung up with a huff I hoped wasn’t too much.
“Cell’s on the fritz,” I said. It wasn’t a total lie.
“How’d you get in here?”
I shrugged. “Door was open. Seemed as good a place as any to get the bad news.”
She regarded me for a moment. “You’re not dressed to work-out.”
I leaned down, as if to scratch my ankle, and pulled my thumb drive from the computer’s USB port. Since I’d taken the drive without the usual “safely remove device” ritual, a familiar error message appeared on the screen and I made a conscious effort not to look at it.
“Hair appointment.” Foresight was working for me now. “Thought I’d try a new look.”
Natalie couldn’t see the screen, but Diana would wonder about the message when she returned. There was no way to close the error box without being seen so I left it there and stood.
Natalie swiped a spiral notebook from the file caddy on Diana’s desk, returned to the door, and twisted the little lock in the knob. “After you.”
She stepped aside so I could leave first.
Outside on the rubberized track, she closed the door behind us and push-pulled it twice to check that it was locked. She left me behind as she headed downstairs, apparently scurrying back to Diana’s meeting. I watched her calf muscles flex as she descended the first few steps. My phone chimed.
It was another text message from Kendra: GET OUT NOW.
I flipped the phone shut, pissed.