She was in an extreme state of distress when Wiedemeyer sidled over to her desk, the remains of a Krispy Kreme doughnut scattered down his tie. No doubt it had been a busy day for him on the death-and-dismemberment beat, reading such stimulating publications as CDC’s “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.” For Wiedemeyer this always required lots of sugar. And, of course, he had to report to Lacey on the distressing workplace death of the day. With hand gestures.
“Another poor bastard dead on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge Project,” Wiedemeyer announced proudly. “Right next to your place, right, Lacey? A construction worker. No hard hat. Of course, a hard hat wouldn’t have helped him when the crane knocked him in the
cabeza
. It somehow hooked onto his tool belt, swooped him over the fence, and dropped him onto the Beltway. No hard hat. No fall protection. Smack. But he might have made it, except just then a Virginia Department of Transportation truck ran right over him. The vicious slime bastards.” He took a deep gulp of air, like a fish out of water. “Poor little bastard never knew what hit him.”
“Which ones are the bastards, Harlan?”
“Everyone’s a bastard, Lacey. Everyone.”
“Yeah. The crane. The Beltway. The truck. The bastards. We got it, Wiedemeyer.” Tony distilled the report to its essence. “Now if you can stop listening to yourself talk for a few minutes, we got a situation here.”
But nothing daunted Harlan Wiedemeyer for long. He was all chummy sympathy after hearing about her missing car.
“Jeez, I know how you feel, Lacey. First my car is totaled, and now yours is gone. I wonder how many poor bastards have to go through this every day.”
“I don’t care how many poor bastards lose their cars every day, excuse me very much, Wiedemeyer,” she snapped. “At the moment, if you don’t mind, I only care that mine is gone! My car. My beautiful 280ZX.”
“I’d like to get my hands on that bastard! Who stole it?” Harlan was shaking with righteous fervor.
Lacey just looked at him. Wiedemeyer could barely wrestle down a doughnut, let alone a car thief.
“Hey, I know. I’ll drive you home, Lacey. I’ve got a rental car,” he offered. “We can stop for doughnuts.” She had to stop herself from smacking him, because the words just didn’t come. Trujillo stepped in.
“She’s had enough of your help for a while,
mal de ojo.
Thanks all the same.”
The little man retreated, but as he backed away from her desk, Wiedemeyer said, “I didn’t have anything to do with this, Lacey. I wouldn’t dream of it; you know that.” He walked a few steps, then turned around again and glared at Trujillo. “And I am not an evil eye, a harbinger of bad luck. It’s a crazy rumor. I have no idea how it got started.” He continued muttering back down the hallway. The few remaining reporters in the newsroom steered clear of him. Tony jingled the keys to his Mustang.
At home, Lacey dropped her bag on the floor and felt a scream of frustration coming on when the phone rang. She didn’t want to answer, but she picked it up anyway, cursed by her insatiable curiosity.
“Lacey Blaine Smithsonian, you haven’t called home in three weeks. I just wanted to know if my eldest and most forgetful daughter was still alive or if I should come to the funeral.”
Oh, no,
Lacey thought.
Please, no. Not now.
Rose Smithsonian had a mother’s instinct for calling at all the wrong times. Lacey never quite knew what to say to her, because she didn’t quite feel related to Rose. She wasn’t sure she ever had. When she thought of her mother, she saw a relentless bulldozer of a woman, albeit a small bulldozer, with an unbridled enthusiasm for
projects
, the most important of which were her daughters. But Cherise, Lacey’s younger sister, was the blue-ribbon prizewinner of Rose’s projects, like a perfect soufflé: happy, fluffy, perky, and just so darn sweet. Lacey was more of a fallen angel-food cake, which could never rise to her mother’s expectations and so had never really been properly frosted and decorated, in Rose’s estimation. She would never bring home a ribbon. But to Lacey’s chagrin, her mother would not give up on her, as other mothers with better sense would have.
When she wasn’t working on crafting the perfect daughters, Rose devoted her life to decorating her house, in wild frenzies of enthusiasm that would leave the whole family camped in the hallways like refugees for weeks at a time while every room was stripped, scrubbed, painted, and wallpapered beyond all recognition. Lacey didn’t know how she had ever lived through her mother’s Neon-Orange-and-Lime-Green Phase, which was followed by the Eye-Popping Primary-Color Assault, and capped by the Dismal-Eggplant-and-Ochre Period. Lacey was convinced she had nothing in common with Rose except the name Smithsonian.
Lacey long ago concluded she had been exchanged for the real baby Smithsonian at birth, probably by wayward Gypsies. Even as a small child, she had treated her family as a group of strangers who had politely taken her in without understanding what exotic manner of creature she really was. The only one she had resembled at all, in looks or spirit, was her Great-aunt Mimi, her favorite relative, who was now dead. She missed Mimi more than she could say, but she was grateful she had a few things to remember her by. Her mother, however, was still under the impression that Lacey was her responsibility and somehow related to her, despite the utter lack of a family resemblance.
“Hi, Mom, I’m still alive. How is every—”
“Lacey, honey, what’s wrong? You sound funny.”
“I’m fine. Really. Not funny at all.” She tried to lighten up her voice, but the misery of having her car stolen weighed heavily on her.
“Lacey, something is wrong. A mother knows these things. Did you lose your job?”
“No, I didn’t lose my job! But if you must know, my car was stolen today,” she snarled, without meaning to.
Happy now?
“Stolen?” Her mother’s voice registered alarm and excitement. “Goodness gracious, haven’t I always told you that Washington, D.C., is a terrible place? My poor baby. Stolen? By car thieves?”
Lacey, what have you done? You don’t share personal information with Rose.
“It’s no big deal,” Lacey said, trying not to sniffle.
“No big deal? I should say it is a big deal, young lady. I knew something like this would happen.” She heard her mother call to someone else and relate the news. No doubt she had just made her mother’s day. Now there’d be something shocking to tell the neighbors.
“Who’s there?”
“Your sister and your father. We’re just finishing dinner. I made my special meat loaf.” Lacey’s stomach turned over at the very thought of her mother’s meat loaf. “They are shocked about this crime, let me tell you. Shocked.”
“Mom, things happen. I’ll be okay. I have insurance.”
“And no car! I just don’t feel right with you trapped all alone in that terrible place.”
Lacey sank down in one of her striped satin wing chairs, unbuttoned her jacket, and slipped off her shoes. She hated being grilled by family members, even on the phone, where if necessary she could simply hang up. “Cars get stolen in Denver too,” she protested.
“Not ratty old cars like yours. I mean, if they go about stealing a car as old as yours, what kind of danger would you be in if it were a good car?”
“It
is
a good car,” Lacey protested. “I love that car. It’s a classic—”
“Did you call the police?”
No. I’m brainless.
“Of course I called the police, and the insurance agent. Everything is going to be fine.”
Yeah, right.
She heard her mother groan in utter disbelief. “Stop worrying. How’s Cherise, Mom?” Switching the subject to her sister, Cherise, was usually a surefire way to put her mother off track. It seemed to work: Lacey was informed that Cherise, the perfect one, was now dating a very nice young man who was an accountant or something. He seemed very “suitable.” Her mother filled Lacey in on all the family news she would have heard in her obligatory twice-monthly phone call, which had apparently slipped to three weeks. But Rose wasn’t ready to let go of Lacey’s stolen car just yet. She urged Lacey to call if she needed anything.
“And I can fly out there tomorrow on Frontier. Your father wouldn’t mind.”
“No! Mom, I’m fine. I’m sure you’ve got other things to do. Like your big Halloween thing, right?” Rose agreed that her traditional Halloween open house was a top priority, but she still sounded dubious about Lacey’s safety alone. Finally they exchanged good-byes. Lacey was thankful she had survived the Smithsonian Inquisition for another week—or three. She changed her clothes, ate some popcorn, and was about to call it an early night when her cell phone rang, startling her. Mac had forced it on her after Felicity’s minivan explosion the previous month, but she rarely used it, and when she tried she often found the battery had been dead for days. “Hello?”
“Hello, Lacey? Turtledove here. I’m downstairs. You said you wanted to talk. May I come up?”
Wow, a gentleman,
she thought.
Everyone else just troops in through the broken security door.
She made sure he remembered the apartment number and let him in when he knocked.
“Thanks for calling back, Forrest. But I didn’t expect you to show up on my doorstep.”
“It was on my way. Thought I’d swing by. It’s been a long day with the—Well, it’s been a long day.”
“Do you prefer Forrest or Turtledove?”
“Only my friends call me Turtledove.” His voice was deep and rich, and his brown eyes were amused. “So you can choose.”
“I prefer Turtledove, if you don’t mind. Thanks for helping me out last month, when you guys hid Mimi’s trunk for me.” She had been afraid the vintage patterns in her trunk would be an irresistible target for the fashion designer Hugh Bentley and his henchmen. Damon Newhouse and his conspiracy Web site crew, Turtledove among them, had helped her stage a diversion and moved the trunk to safety. Now he went over to the big old leather-covered and brass-buckled trunk and smiled slowly.
“I see you got it back. Looks nice there.”
“I need it for the decor. And . . . well, I need it.” Lacey glanced fondly at Mimi’s trunk, now safely back in her living room in its usual place as her coffee table.
“Any more secrets in it?”
“Who knows? I hope so,” Lacey smiled and offered him a beer and the last of the popcorn, but he just had a glass of cranberry juice instead. Lacey sat on the sofa and he took a chair. “This conversation is just between us, okay?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Of course.”
“The reason I called is that I want to know if you think Amanda Manville is really in trouble.”
“She thinks she is.” He swallowed half the drink in one gulp. “My associates and I proposed doing the job right, at least while she’s here in the District. State-of-the-art security for a high-threat, high-profile celebrity. Secure perimeters, around-the-clock controlled access, locked-down safe areas, multiple identity and credential checks, the works. But she didn’t want that. She just gave us one photograph—Dr. Greg Spaulding—and orders to keep him away from her, and not to let the lovesick stalker near her, if he should show up. I think mostly she just wanted bodyguards for show, a big, flashy celebrity entourage. Maybe just to scare off Spaulding, or the stalker. Or maybe it’s just a big old ego trip.”
“She wants to get me involved,” Lacey said. “With her idea that someone’s going to kill her. She thinks I can solve it, or do something to stop it. Shows what she knows.”
“Ms. Amanda’s got everyone around her half-crazy with it. And pissed off. For all sorts of reasons.”
“Yvette Powers?”
“Check.”
“Brad Powers?”
“She’s got a way with him,” Turtledove said. “And he’s not smart about women.”
“Unlike you?”
His smile was back. “Any man can be a fool, but that woman is dangerous. She wants to show she’s the alpha bitch, no matter what it takes. With women, she likes to scream.”
“With men?”
“She uses sex. Or she tries.”
“And with you?”
“Ms. Supermodel made me an offer. She said she’d do
anything
if I could just keep her safe.” He leaned back in the chair. Lacey nodded. She could see the attraction.
“And?”
He laughed. “Reporters are as bad as detectives. But I’ll tell you one thing, Lacey: It’s my responsibility to keep her safe, or as safe as she’ll let me, but ‘love slave’ is not in my job description. Believe it or not, getting personal can be an occupational hazard when you’re in my line of work.” Lacey could believe it. He smirked. “Besides, she’s got way too much baggage.”
“Do you think she killed her old boyfriend?”
“That’s the rep. And I think she’s capable, but . . .”
“But what?”
“If she actually killed the first guy and got away with it, why not take out the doctor?”
“Maybe because she’s under a cloud of suspicion.”
“Good point. But she could hire it done by a pro. She’s got the money. And she’s crazy enough.”
“But who’d really want to kill her?”
“After today, I’d say just about anyone who’s met her. If she dropped off the planet the staff at Snazzy Jane’s would throw a big old party.”
“What about the reported stalker?”
Turtledove shrugged. “She gave us a name, but no one’s really sure what the letter writer looks like. Or if the stalker even is the letter writer. You saw me dump that scruffy little guy in the street today? We think he’s the letter guy. Or one of them. He was nervous, sweaty, stuttering and stammering after I escorted him out.”
“I hate to break it to you, big guy, but I think you’d get that reaction from any number of law-abiding citizens,” Lacey said. Turtledove gave a little nod, taking the comment modestly. “Did you catch a name?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. And there were reporters everywhere all day, so I couldn’t very well shake him down in the street. Bad publicity.”