I took a tall glass, tore open another Splenda and poured the powder down the middle. Then I stirred in the espresso and added milk, topping off my creation with a couple of ice cubes.
‘Perfect,’ Atherton said, taking out a fiver. ‘And keep the change please.’
Gladly. I felt a chorus of ‘She works hard for the money’ coming on, ala Donna Summer. ‘What can I get you today, MaryAnne?’
MaryAnne approached, studying the menu board as she came. ‘I believe I’d like to try something new and exciting?’ Despite the syrupy Southern accent, MaryAnne still struck me as more down-to-earth than her Barbie friends. ‘Any suggestions Maggy?’
‘Maybe our seasonal specialty drink?’ I said, pointing. ‘Triple Shot, fully-loaded.’
‘Ah, for the days when
I
was fully loaded,’ MaryAnne said ruefully, glancing back at the women she was with. ‘It made so many things – and people – so much more bearable.’
MaryAnne made no secret of the fact that she’d battled drug and alcohol addictions throughout a privileged adolescence in Atlanta where, according to her, neither parent – or anybody else – had ever told her ‘no’.
MaryAnne moved here and eventually cowboyed up to ‘Just say no’ herself, to both drugs and booze. And she’d never forgotten the people who’d helped. The alcohol treatment center on the east side of town bore her name as proudly as did the interior design firm she’d built on the foundation of her recovery.
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to deal, friends-wise,’ I said. ‘The “loaded” part is only sugar. Or I can make it Splenda, if you prefer.’
‘Hell, no,’ she said, Southern belle morphing into Southern broad. ‘And use whole milk . . .’
She paused and we both looked skyward, as if waiting for lightning to strike.
Nothing.
MaryAnne shrugged. ‘Well then, Maggy, let’s really tempt fate and make it cream instead. I have very few vices left and I prefer to make the most of them.’
Like I said, a good shit, our MaryAnne.
‘Where’s Elaine today?’ I asked, more because I was wondering what she’d told the other women than that I really cared. ‘Isn’t she part of your league?’
‘Elaine? I’m afraid she doesn’t play on Thursday, even in the club’s round-robin. Because of Gabriella, you see.’
‘Gabriella?’ The woman in question had gotten a straw from the condiment cart and was settling into a chair across from . . . I’d forgotten her name already. ‘What is your other friend’s name?’
‘The brunette? Why, Jane Smith.’
Yeah, like I’d remember that one. ‘So, Gabriella and Elaine don’t like each other?’
‘It’s more that Gabriella and Elaine’s husband liked each other . . . better.’
I pictured my dentist ex-husband, Ted, with his hygienist. Same old song, in Brookhills, yet someone new was always humming along, thinking they’d composed it.
I snapped back to the moment. ‘Making Elaine the “ex” that Gabriella mentioned?’
‘Yes, poor thing. One morning she forgot her tennis racket and rushed home to get it? Robert and Gabriella were in his and Elaine’s marital bed doing the tangled tango.’
A variation on the ‘horizontal mambo’, no doubt. At least my ex-husband had been considerate enough to do his hygienist off-campus. Though, come to think of it, in the dental chair I’d bought him.
‘Did Elaine suspect?’ I honestly hadn’t. In retrospective, I probably should have, but . . . ‘You know, with Gabriella in the same tennis league and all?’
‘Honey, that was the genius part. The two of them rotated? Elaine was our fourth on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, with Gabriella covering Thursday and Friday.’
‘So when Elaine was playing on Monday . . .’
‘Or Tuesday or Wednesday, Gabriella was playing on Robert. Or vice versa.’ MaryAnne wasn’t even bothering to keep her voice down.
‘That’s awful.’ But, as MaryAnne had characterized the cloak-and-dagger cover story, also brilliant. Except . . . ‘If Gabriella wasn’t married, herself, why didn’t Robert just go to her place?’
‘
She
says it was because people in the lovely, gated community where she lives would talk.’
‘But you don’t believe that?’ Personally, I could see that a gate guard or neighbor might notice the same car, containing the same man, arriving each week.
MaryAnne shrugged. ‘Our Gabriella likes to win. “Doing it” in Elaine’s house, with Elaine’s husband . . .’
‘Proved she had.’
‘As surely as if she were a male dog peeing on another’s territory,’ MaryAnne said.
That explained a lot of things, Frank-wise.
‘And then there’s the rush, of course.’
‘Rush?’ I repeated. ‘As in, haste?’ Given this group and their two-hour tennis matches, followed by leisurely coffee or even lunch, there should have been plenty of time for a ‘quickie’. Or even a longie.
‘No, honey.’ MaryAnne permitted herself a small smile, probably at my naiveté. ‘I’m talking about the adrenaline rush of the “game”. I remember it very well from my days of playing hide-the-bottle.’ Another smile, but this one self-deprecating. ‘Or illegal substance. I swear,’ MaryAnne continued, ‘poor Elaine was an absolute wreck. She lost fifteen pounds and didn’t have them to lose. When it first happened, I insisted she stay with me for a while and, after a week or so, I thought she’d turned the corner. Then she went home and the other Choo dropped.’
As in Jimmy Choo, the shoe designer. All I could do these days was visit the high-end shoes at Saks Fifth Avenue, like I was touring a museum. Once a salesperson even let me touch one. ‘The “other Choo” being?’
‘Elaine got the house and the lion’s share of their investments.’
‘What’s so terrible about that?’ I’d have killed for a deal like that. Not literally, you understand.
‘As it turns out, their house had a hefty mortgage on it to start with, then lost half its value in the housing crash. And the investments? Sunk into a Midwestern, Madoff-like Ponzi scheme.’
‘And here I was feeling bad about not striking a deal like that with my ex. Though there were no investments to be had anyway. Just a used water pic.’
MaryAnne laughed, if a tad grimly. ‘Strange as it sounds, Maggy, I’ve been on both sides of the money equation and I’d choose yours. You were able to keep your friends, but “ladies” like us –’ she quirked one thumb at herself and the other toward the Barbie table – ‘we’d drop you like a hot potato if your money ran out.’
‘Maybe they would,’ I said as I put her latte on the counter, ‘but not you, MaryAnne.’
‘I surely hope not.’ She took the drink. ‘Not to resurrect what can’t be a pleasant topic for you, but I understand the body found under the platform was another real estate agent. One who worked for your partner?’
‘I didn’t know the sheriff had released her identity,’ I said, glancing over at MaryAnne’s table. ‘Do they know?’
‘I’m not sure what Gabriella and Jane might have heard, since we drove separately? I caught it on my car radio though the broadcast just gave the woman’s name, not her affiliation.’
‘Of course, I’d forgotten. You’d have known Brigid from showing your house.’
‘I’d met her, certainly, but I was under the impression Sarah was taking care of everything, including my open house on Friday.’
I’d say that was a pretty safe bet now.
MaryAnne might be down-to-earth, but she still expected the boss to handle her listing personally. And who could blame her, especially when the only other option was an unlicensed apprentice?
‘Well, that’s neither here nor there,’ MaryAnne continued. ‘I did know Brigid, both from Kingston Realty and from Sapphire. I must say, though, that given the hours the girl kept there, I’d have been concerned about her being assigned to my affairs.’
MaryAnne had me nearer the beginning of her reply. ‘You hang out at Sapphire?’
I didn’t mean the question the way it came out, but MaryAnne laughed, not even a ‘tad grimly’ this time.
‘Maggy, my dear. I may be sixty-five but I’m not dead?’
‘You’re sixty-five?’ I gasped. ‘Holy shit. I had you pegged fifteen years younger.’
‘Thank you. It’s the result of eating exactly what I want, exercising moderately and consulting an excellent foreign surgeon quarterly.’
To my eye, nary a tell-tale of lift nor tuck nor plump. ‘As the woman at the next table said in
When Harry Met Sally
, “I’ll have what she’s having”. And I can’t see a trace of work.’
‘That, my dear, is why she’s excellent. I’ll be happy to give you her name when and if you should ever need it. Now, you were saying about Sapphire?’
I held up my hands, palms out. ‘I have no standing because I’ve never been there, yet, ‘but I had the impression it . . .’
‘. . . is a meat market where only Kobe beef need apply? The glitzy ladder of perceived upward mobility? Ultimate mecca of the perennially self-absorbed? Guilty as charged. But, honey, what a moneymaker.’
‘I was going to say “draws a younger crowd”, but . . . wait a second. “Guilty as charged”? MaryAnne, do you
own
Sapphire?’
‘Yes, of course, though with a partner? I was brought in to decorate the place and management couldn’t pay the bill. The rest, as they say . . .’ MaryAnne was staring out a platform-side window. ‘Whatever do you suppose they’re about to do?’
I turned in time to see a tow truck carrying a white Toyota rumble over the railroad tracks. ‘Is that your car?’
‘Of course not. I buy only American. I meant them.’ She pointed.
Two people crossed in front of the far window. One had a pickaxe over his shoulder, the other a shovel. ‘I have no clue.’
Pushing through the swinging service gate and crossing to the platform door, I hoped for some kind of public-works excavation. But, please God, not the exhumation of yet another body from an impromptu grave. What I hadn’t expected was the coffeehouse equivalent of Caddyshack. ‘There’s a prairie-dog colony in our lawn.’
‘Treasure hunters, more likely.’ MaryAnne had followed me.
I stepped out onto the platform where I could see even more holes. Three on the grassy islands of the parking lot, several others yet closer to the building and along the sidewalk running up to the yellow police tape. ‘The news coverage must have mentioned the money that supposedly went missing all those years ago.’
‘And connected it to your hidden room. Did you know it existed?’
‘MaryAnne, until yesterday, I knew nothing about our Mafia, their room or their loot.’ Not to mention Sarah’s problem with her apprentice, nor the fact Brigid Ferndale was dead.
Ignorance, I realized – and not for the first time – truly is bliss.
MaryAnne craned her neck to see around the corner. ‘Interesting psychology, Maggy, don’t you think? The logical place to prospect would be the room where Brigid was found, but the police have that taped off, so people are digging wherever else they can.’
There weren’t enough psychiatrist’s couches in Brookhills to analyze this particular brand of nutsiness. ‘Do you remember exactly what the news reported?’
‘I heard it on WTVR’s FM radio affiliate?’ MaryAnne said. ‘They updated the discovery of the body by identifying the woman as Brigid Ferndale, and then segued into this special they’re doing –
The Mystery of Romano’s Raid
, or some such title.’
WTVR was the local television station where Kate had once worked and aspired to work again. The newspaper editor had probably given them an exclusive.
But . . . ‘Romano’s Raid?’ I repeated. Apparently ‘The Brookhills’ Massacre’ had lost out, less to sensitivity and good taste and more to alliteration and brevity. ‘Sounds like a Burt Lancaster movie.’
MaryAnne laughed, retracing her steps into the depot. ‘Well, I’d best get back to our table. You hang in there, honey.’
‘MaryAnne, wait.’
She turned.
‘I’m planning to visit Sapphire tonight. Any chance you’d like to come with me?’
MaryAnne studied my face. ‘You’re going to Sapphire?’
‘Hey, I’m . . .’ I almost said twenty years younger than you, which – though true, would
not
have been advancing. ‘. . . not dead, either, you know.’
‘You’re a mere youngster, Maggy. But I was wondering, why Sapphire? Everyone who goes there wants something, whether it’s a trophy wife, a rich husband, an investor, a new job or just plain strange.’
‘Strange?’
‘Strange stuff,’ she explained. ‘Though I don’t think that’s your style, especially with that lovely sheriff at your beck and call?’
Strange . . . ohhh,
stuff
. I got it. MaryAnne
did
have a way with words.
The owner of what she herself called a ‘meat market’ raised her eyebrows. ‘So, if you’re not looking to hook-up personally
or
professionally, information must be what you’re after – more specifically, about Brigid. And you, my dear, think I can help?’
‘I’m “guilty as charged”, too,’ I said. ‘But you own the place and –’ I glanced over at her table where the two other women were still talking and beckoned MaryAnne to join them – ‘I understand it may be the last place Brigid Ferndale was seen alive.’
After saying it so bluntly, I feared I’d overplayed my cards. MaryAnne was a business-owner. Given that, was it wise to tell her that a murder victim might have been offed after leaving her establishment?
Apparently so. MaryAnne’s eyes flash-fired with excitement. ‘Really?’
‘Really.’ I canted my head. ‘But I can’t say more now. Are we on?’
‘Wouldn’t miss it for . . . the . . . world! Shall we meet there at, say, eleven thirty?’
‘
Eleven
thirty?’ Bad enough the place didn’t open until ten. Doesn’t anybody else sleep? Or have to get up the next morning?
‘It
is
a tad early?’ she said. ‘But on a Thursday night the crowd will be down, and I have a six a.m. spin class at my spa the next morning.’
I almost asked if she owned the spa, too.
MaryAnne had started for the table again and me, for the service area, when she spoke to my back. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Maggy, but one question?’
‘Sure.’ Turning toward her, I caught the swinging gate so it couldn’t smack me in the butt.
‘You have to know people are talking, right?’ Again, she quirked a thumb toward her tablemates.