“I still got the jeans.” Lorena lifted her hem to expose the frayed and dirty cuffs of her standard Levi’s. “I don’t go no place without two things: my jeans and my Camels.”
Pauline pressed her lips together in disapproval and handed us our numbers. I was 115. Lorena was 116. I told Lorena I didn’t see the point in getting numbers anyway, as I was there to cover the fund-raiser, not to bid on some painting or priceless antique. But Lorena said I should keep it, so I did.
We entered the main hall, where white folding chairs had been arranged in neat rows in front of a stage. A chamber quartet played classical music that was very upscale. Michael Bolton or John Tesh fancy. Waiters passed around champagne and more pink drinks to the clusters of women.
I scanned the crowd, searching for You Know Who.
“Man. This ain’t like any fund-raiser I’ve ever been to.” Lorena pulled out her cigarette and fingered it with longing. “Take a look at that specimen, would ya?”
A tall blond hunk in a tux walked by, a Nordic god with shaggy hair waving as he passed. A bright red #1 was stuck to his back.
“I want to know what conditioner he uses to get hair like that,” I said. “My hair never waves.”
“There’s a lot from that guy I wanna know. The brand of his conditioner’s not one of them.”
And then it hit me. Number one?
“Are they numbering the waiters here?” I asked, as another hunk, a black man with a shaved head, strolled past, a woman on each arm.
Lorena popped the unlit cigarette into her mouth. “This isn’t your usual charity auction, Einstein. They’re not bidding on antiques. They’re bidding on bachelors.”
Synapses fired in my brain, for once leaping the ganglia necessary to induce quick thinking. Men up for bid. Charity. Hunks in tuxes.
Could it be that Stiletto—
my
Stiletto—would be on the auction block so any old woman could buy him?
I coughed, gagging at the very idea.
Lorena smiled. “Ah, yes, and our professor emeritus finally figures it out. The stud muffin you so incomprehensibly rejected is number three. Right over there.”
Lorena pointed to a spot by the stage where the largest group of women huddled. I could barely make out his famous blackish wavy hair. I loved that hair. I’d run my fingers through it many a night as he lay sleeping by my side. It was the same hair that had brushed my cheek and neck in bed.
A pathetic longing swept over me. Okay, he was here. A few feet away. Surrounded by women who wanted him, and now, being a free agent in every sense, he was free to choose any one of them. And they him. For a lifetime of happiness, romance and hot, passionate sex. Oh, to be entwined in Stiletto’s sinewy thighs for just one more night.
I teetered a bit.
“You don’t look too good,” Lorena said. “In fact, pardon my customary bluntness. You look like shit.”
I fanned myself with a program. “Nonsense. I’m fine.”
“Sure you are. You always are top-notch when you’re green.”
A bell rang and Pauline marched up the aisle, clapping her hands and ordering everyone to finish their drinks, perhaps make a trip to the ladies’ and take their seats. Except for the bachelors, who were to join her backstage.
Reluctantly the women broke away, heading in droves for the bathrooms, the men left standing like seashells tossed on shore by a receding tide of estrogen. There was the blond Nordic hunk. An adorable freckled, freakishly tall bachelor whom I’d seen on the sports pages as a local boy made big playing professional basketball. The chiseled African-American man whom I immediately recognized from my experiences in the St. Luke’s emergency center as bone surgeon Dr. Drake, and Stiletto.
He was looking at me. Straight at me. His dark blue eyes teasing and seducing me simultaneously.
With Stiletto, no matter what I was wearing, I always felt naked.
He appraised me from my silver slingbacks on up and returned a verdict of approval. His mouth opened to say something when a lithe woman in a low-cut black dress and incredibly healthy long, thick blond hair suddenly appeared by his side.
She was in her early thirties with an impeccable boob job—not too big, not too perky—and in impressive athletic shape. She slipped one of her toned arms into Stiletto’s and stood on tiptoe to whisper in his ear. Whatever she said, it must have been hilarious because he flashed her his widest, most appreciative grin.
The actress from Allentown. That was his new girlfriend. Sabina whatever. And she was gorgeous!
Stiletto gestured casually in my direction. Sabina nodded eagerly and then the . . . Oh, crap. They were headed straight toward me.
“I don’t know about you, but I gotta piss like a race-horse and that line’s out the door,” Lorena was saying. “There’s a bathroom behind the coat closet upstairs that no one knows about. Follow me.”
“Be right there,” I murmured, unable to move as every muscle in my body had apparently ceased to function.
Lorena left and the next I knew Stiletto was in front of me, so close I could smell his trademark scent of crisp clean cotton and fresh air.
“Hello, Bubbles. Glad you could make it.” He took my hand and in one smooth movement planted a gentlemanly kiss on my cheek. It was very reserved and it occurred to me that this was the kind of greeting Europeans did. Quite a contrast to his fresh pass back in the newsroom.
I, of course, was glamorously tongue-tied. It was all I could do to hold myself back from bringing my fingers to the very spot where his lips had quickly grazed my face.
“This is Sabina.” He touched Sabina’s back in the same way that Notch had touched Alison’s. An encouraging pat. “Sabina, this is Bubbles.”
My God, his eyes were blue. The tux really brought out how blue they were. And had he been working out? He seemed tauter, leaner—though that wasn’t to say he was flabby or anything to begin with. Though, again, maybe it was the tux.
“It is so very, very nice to meet you.”
Someone had taken my other hand. I looked down at the long, slim fingers adorned by a few tasteful rings and realized it was Sabina. She was actually talking to me. Purring, really.
“Steve has told me so much about you. It’s such an honor to meet you, finally. I mean, to be in your presence . . .” She cleared her throat, as if she’d said too much. “Congratulations, by the way.”
I blinked. “Congratulations? For what?” I was thinking that maybe she’d mistakenly assumed I’d taken over Flossie Foreman’s beat as the “Talk of the Town” correspondent.
Stiletto grinned. “For getting married to your dynamic ex-husband, remember? Or has he already slipped your mind? Not that that wouldn’t be perfectly understandable.”
“Oh.” I’d been busted and Stiletto knew it. Already my cheeks were hot. “Right.”
“It’s like a movie, an estranged husband and wife coming together for the sake of their daughter.” Sabina sighed. Her gray eyes sparkled in adoration, as though I was somehow the film star, not her. “I mean, my parents were divorced and a part of me always held on to the hope that they would get married again. In the end, I had to accept they didn’t love each other.”
“There’s a concept,” Stiletto quipped. “Two people not getting married because they’re not in love. What a radical idea.”
I set my jaw. “Some people have been engaged for less.” I was referring to the time Stiletto plunked a rock on my finger, a Harry Winston three carat, as a ruse so he wouldn’t have to go to work in England.
“
Some
people,” he retorted, “get engaged because they fear change and stick with what they know even though they know that what they know is bad for them.”
What?
Sabina pressed her finger to her temple. “I do think I’m getting a slight headache. We better go, Steve. You’re supposed to be backstage with the others.”
“I’ll be right there,” he said. “First, I need to speak to Bubbles alone, if you don’t mind.”
Surprisingly, Sabina agreed to this. She didn’t seem at all bitchy, which was how I would have acted if the guy I was dating suddenly insisted on being alone with a woman he’d recently asked to marry him.
Sabina bowed her head slightly and went off. She
backed
off.
“She is incredibly nice, even if she does come from Allentown,” I said, thinking,
Even if she is dating you and therefore the object of my derision.
“Whatever.” He moved closer, so close I could see the swirls on his pearl-shaped buttons. “Tony tells me a client of Sandy’s died at the House of Beauty right in front of you. Something about an allergy.”
I was touched that Stiletto cared. “Yup. Except it wasn’t an allergy. It was murder.”
The muscle in his jaw flinched. “How do you know?”
I ran through my day, about the tips that had been called into the Lehigh Police Department, about Jeffrey Andre’s silly French threat, and ended with the shot fired at the Christmas tree lot. “Clearly Debbie’s death was more than a simple accident,” I concluded. “And though it sounds whacked, I think someone shot at me to scare me off from asking more questions about her.”
It might have been my imagination, or maybe Stiletto was too cool to let on, but he didn’t seem shocked by any of it. It was as if he knew. As if he’d been brought up to speed.
“The shot was a twenty-two, right?”
I tried to remember if I’d told anyone that. “Supposedly, but . . .”
“That’s their signature. Pretty bush league. Then again, you are dealing with old Soviet reissue and that stuff is all degraded.” Stiletto looked over my shoulder, thinking, not really focusing. “What are you packing these days?”
“Me?” That was a ridiculous question. “The only thing I pack is makeup
.
The only gun I know how to fire is Genevieve’s musket and I don’t know how to fire that too well.”
Stiletto was shaking his head. “Genevieve’s got other weaponry. She needs to get on top of it.”
Wait. This was crazy. “Do you know these people? You said Soviet reissue. Do you know who was shooting at me today?”
“Sure,” he said flatly. “The violent wing of the anti-Christmas lobby.” And at that moment the lights flickered, a warning that the auction was about to begin.
For the record, I was beginning to doubt there even was a violent wing of the anti-Christmas lobby. I was beginning to doubt whether there was any anti-Christmas lobby, much less a violent wing of one.
“I gotta go.” He placed a hand on my shoulder. Gone was all his flirtatiousness. “Take care of yourself, Bubbles. Be careful. Park under streetlights. Don’t hang out in parking lots at night and keep your radar up.”
“Why?” I said as he took off toward the stage. But Stiletto said nothing. He just jogged to the black curtains, not even bothering to kiss me goodbye.
That was the first time I suspected that whatever was going on, it went way beyond a hair-extension allergy down at the little old House of Beauty.
I had the feeling it had to do with me.
Chapter Eleven
I
washed my hands mechanically in the upstairs bathroom while Lorena ranted from her stall, where she was sneaking cigarettes.
In the brief time I’d been there after leaving Stiletto and company downstairs, she had switched from the
News-Times
’s employment policies to a generic tirade about how crappy the newspaper treated all of us when it came to mileage and how come a swanky establishment like the Masonic temple couldn’t afford toilet paper that wasn’t cheapo one-ply.
I agreed about the one-ply. Mostly, though, I thought about Stiletto and how he made me feel like no other man had. Alive. Electric. Sizzling. I was so dizzy from mentally replaying our blow-by-blow exchange and wondering what he had meant by “Soviet reissue” that at first I didn’t notice the two women who joined me at the sinks.
They were women who took care of themselves, from their flawless skin to their genuine French manicures. No acrylic tips for them. Those nails were natural.
I studied the pair in the mirror. If I were more like them, in black Christian Dior instead of a Miss Missy silver lamé halter dress, with expensive foiled hair instead of an overall sunshine blond strip job, would Stiletto not be with Sabina? Would he have decided I was worth fighting Dan for?
Hold on.
Fighting Dan for.
Where had that come from? Is that what I wanted? For Stiletto to fight Dan for me?
“I still can’t believe it,” the woman nearest me, a tall redhead, was saying. “I was in the middle of getting dressed when it came on the news about her dropping dead like that and I was stunned. I had to lie down on my bed and just try to absorb it all.”
Reality poked me in the ribs. They had to be talking about Debbie.
“I can’t get over it, either,” the other one, a short brunette in winter white, added. “It was stunning.”
“Although not entirely unexpected. I mean, I know this sounds horrible to say, but there was a point last year when I could have strangled her with my bare hands, after she set me up on that cruise. What a sham.”
Sham cruise?
I pondered the similarities between the words “sham” and “scam.”
The brunette nodded. “Don’t feel bad, Tess. You’re not the only one who was pissed. The Love Boat, she billed it. Love Boat, my ass. More like the
Lust
Boat.”
“You can say that again. I’m sorry. I know it’s wrong to disrespect the dead but that woman was a con artist.”
“Of the first order.” The brunette twisted a tube of Lancôme’s Perfect Plum and carefully lined her lips.
“Damn straight. There wasn’t one single guy—make that one
legitimate, marriageable
single guy—on board. Just pervs wanting to get into my panties for free and, heck, I can get that anywhere. I didn’t have to pay for the opportunity.”
The brunette smacked her lips. (Don’t ever do that, by the way. It totally ruins the gloss.) “I heard she hired a couple of ex-cons when she ran out of so-called eligible bachelors.”