Danger in High Heels (15 page)

"So Irina and her sister were arguing about money," Dana mused, looking down at the readout.

I nodded. "And depending on how much 'zing-ya' they were talking about, it might make for reasonable motive for murder."

"We need to find that sister," Dana said.

We both looked down the hallway toward Irina's dressing room.

While yellow crime scene tape still sealed Ricky's door shut, Irina's was free of barricades. I looked over both shoulders. A couple of wardrobe people were hanging out in a doorway three down, and a PA was running through the hall with a clipboard in hand. None paid any attention to us. I slowly made my way down the hall to Irina's door, trying to look like I had every right to be there. I grabbed the door handle and gingerly turned. It twisted in my han,d and the door easily popped open.

If that wasn't an invitation to snoop, I didn't know what was.

With one more quick over-the-shoulder, I pushed forward, and Dana and I slipped into the room, Gargantu-stroller and all.

I jiggled Max up and down, praying he stayed silent in my arms as I quickly surveyed the room. A vanity sat on one side, flanked by lights. On the other was a wardrobe rack, filled with a dozen glittery dresses and a couple pairs of street clothes. Empty coffee cups sat on a table near the wall, along with make-up, hair pins, and various other personal items. It looked like no one had cleaned out the room since Irina had been here.

Lucky for us.

"What are we looking for?" Dana whispered, as I started opening drawers in the vanity.

I shrugged. "I don't know. Anything that could lead us to the sister."

Dana nodded, opening a closet and finding more costumes and several pairs of shoes.

I scooped up the contents of Irina's wastebasket, coming up with receipts for lunch, a couple of cocktail napkins, and several used tissues full of stage make-up. I looked through the cosmetics in a bag on the vanity, finding nothing more incriminating than the fact that Irina bought supermarket brand eyeliner. I moved to the wardrobe rack, finding custom garments that had me drooling and dying to try them on. But nothing that screamed sister or secret killer.

"Man, she had a lot of dancing shoes," Dana said, gesturing to the line of footwear in the closet.

I paused, checking them out. She was right. Several ballroom dancing shoes in colors ranging from hot pink to nude to jet black lined the closet floor. Most of them were soft, supple, and made for movement. The heels were three inches or lower, flat across the back.

Most of them.

One pair of leopard print platforms near the back of the closet was decidedly not dancing shoes.

I kneeled down and picked them up.

Dana raised an eyebrow. "Leopard? Seriously? God, what a slut." She paused. "Is it wrong to call the dead a slut?"

I shook my head. "Not if she was sleeping with your boyfriend."

"Thanks." She paused. "I think."

"But these aren't Irina's shoes," I pointed out.

Dana cocked her head at me. "Okay, I give. How do you know that?"

"Look at the other ones."

Dana did. Then she looked back at the ones in my hands. Then back to the row in the closet. Finally I saw the light bulb go off behind her eyes. "They're the wrong size!"

I nodded. "They're close, but these are eights, and I'd bet those are nines."

Dana picked up a pair of nude dancing shoes and checked the inside tag. She nodded. "You're right. Nine, wide." She paused. "Is it wrong of me to be glad she had fat feet?"

I shook my head. "There's no way a nine wide would fit in this eight."

Dana took the other leopard shoe in her hand. "So, you think these belong to her sister?" she asked.

I shrugged. "Well, they're not Irina's, and it didn't sound like she was close enough with anyone on set that she'd be sharing closet space."

"So the sister is the slut," Dana said, scrunching her nose up at the platform. "I guess it runs in the family."

I turned the shoe over. On the bottom of the shoe, someone had written in black sharpie. "Property of Glitter Kat." I raised an eyebrow showing the bottom to Dana.

"Glitter Kat," she read. "You think that's Katrina?"

"It has to be." I paused, remembering what I'd seen on one of the cocktail napkins in the wastebasket. "And I think I know where to find her."

I ran to the trash and dug around, coming out with the napkin that had caught my eye. I smoothed it on the table. The logo on the corner read, "Glitter Galaxy" with an address in Industry. Right next to a silhouette of a naked woman hanging off a pole.

Dana gasped over my shoulder. "Oh. Em. Gee. It's a strip club!"

I nodded. "It looks like dancing ran in the Sokolov family."

Chapter Twelve

The City of Industry is one giant block of warehouses after another, housing the inventory for most of Los Angeles's import and export businesses. At least half of which are legal. A warehouse full of toys from China might be right next to a warehouse full of overpriced Scandinavian furniture, next to a warehouse full of Coach knock-offs. Between the warehouses are nestled trucking companies, cheap Chinese buffets, and gentlemen's clubs where no actual gentlemen would step foot.

The Glitter Galaxy was a one-story, square building sitting between a John Deere wholesaler and a warehouse with the name "China-Co" printed on the side. The parking lot was surprisingly full for a Tuesday afternoon, sprinkled with a mix of pick-up trucks, sedans, and big rigs. We were the only minivan.

I parked in a slot off to the side and stepped out into the glare of the Galaxy's neon signage. Clinging to their roof was a nude woman with huge neon yellow nipples. I looked down at Livvie and Max in their car seats.

"You know, I'm not having a real 'good mom' moment right now," I told Dana.

She paused, looked down at the babies, up at the neon lady. "Well... let's look at it this way: You did breastfeed them, right?"

I nodded.

"Then it's not like they'll see anything in there that they haven't seen before."

"That almost made me feel better."

"Don't worry. I'm pretty sure they're too young to be scarred for life. I think you have to be at least six months old for that."

I hoped she was right as I grabbed two kangaroo pouch carriers, popped a baby in each one, then handed a carrier to Dana.

"Oh, actually..." Dana said, holding Max by the armpits as the pouch dangled around him. "Do you mind if I wear Livvie?"

I shrugged. "Sure. I didn't realize you had a preference."

"Oh, no, not a baby preference," she clarified, swapping tots with me and strapping Livvie onto her chest. "It's just that Livvie's carrier is powder pink, and it matches better with the canary yellow in my sweats, don't you think?"

I was about to roll my eyes at her, but as I looked over, I had to admit, she was right. Hey, if you gotta wear a baby, you might as well accessorize them well. Plus, I was glad she was taking more interest in her looks. Even if it was just accessorizing her sweats.

I strapped Max to my own chest, his baby blue carrier actually going very well with the red top and white, denim pants I'd selected that morning. Then I beeped the car locked and pushed through the doors to the Glitter Galaxy.

The interior was dark, windowless, and smelled like stale cigarettes despite the statewide ban. A long, cat-walk style stage took up most of the floor space, jutting into the center of the room. It was painted green and doused with a healthy sprinkling of glitter, like a child's art project gone awry. Groupings of tables and chairs sat near it, half of them full of droopy-eyed guys with their hands under the tables as they watched the action on the stage. Around the perimeter of the room were plastic booths, painted white with red trim to look like space ships.

A sign above the stage proclaimed in neon that we had entered the "Glitter Galaxy", and an advertisement in hand written paper next to that said that drinks were half priced to all earthlings from 3-6pm on Thursdays.

On the stage was a woman in a space helmet, wearing tall platform heels and nothing else, wiggled her naked butt to Elton John's "Rocket Man" being pumped through the speakers.

Instinctively I covered Max's eyes.

A woman with long dark hair and almond eyes approached us. She stood at least a head shorter than I was and wore a lime green bikini with little aliens painted on it. She looked down at the babies strapped to our chests. "Eighteen and over only here," she said in a thick, Asian accent.

"I promise they won't watch," I said, still covering Max's eyes.

She raised an eyebrow at me. "Hey, we're pretty open here, but we got to draw the line somewhere."

"Look, we're not here to…" I trailed off, thinking of those hands under the tables. "We're here to see Katrina," I settled on. "Glitter Kat."

The woman paused. "You know Kat?"

"We know her sister. Or, knew," I corrected myself.

She stuck a hand out my way. "Ling."

"Maddie." I shook, trying to block out where that hand might have been. "Is Kat here?"

Ling shook her head, a frown settling between her delicate brows. "She hasn't been in all week. I was actually starting to worry about her. It wasn't like her not to show for Thursday."

"Why do you say that?" I asked.

"It's our big money night," she said, pointing to the half-priced drinks sign. "Not that I'm complaining. I took her slot. Made three large. Nice night."

"Three hundred?" I asked, impressed.

"Thousand."

I blinked at her. "You're kidding."

"No way, José," she said, her thick accent stumbling over the Americanism. "I don't kid about green."

I did a little mental math, trying to calculate how many pairs of new boots that was.

"When was the last time you saw Kat?" Dana asked.

Ling scrunched up her face, her eyes searching the ceiling for answers. "Monday night."

The day before Irina was killed. An interesting coincidence.

"Did you ever meet Kat's sister?" I asked.

Ling shook her head. "No. But this isn't really the kind of place you invite your family, you know what I mean?" She paused, looking down at the baby I was wearing. "Well,
most
people don't."

"Did she ever talk about her sister?" I asked, ignoring the jab at my parenting. Hey, I still had Max's eyes covered. "Her name was Irina."

Ling narrowed her eyes at me. "
Was
? Something happen to her?"

"She's dead," Dana said.

Ling clucked her tongue. "Oh, that sucks."

"Katrina never mentioned her?" I asked.

She shook her head again. "Sorry. I never heard her talk about a sister. But Kat wasn't really that easy to get close to."

"How so?"

Ling scrunched her nose up again. "She had a terrible temper. Always yelling. She even yelled at her uncle when he was here."

I perked up. "Uncle?"

"Yeah. This Russian guy. He comes in last week and says he's looking for Kat. That he's her uncle."

"And Kat yelled at him?"

She nodded. "She got all upset when she saw him, then they went outside, and I heard them arguing in the parking lot."

"What did they say?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. It was all in Russian."

"Can you describe this uncle?" Dana asked.

"Tall, dark hair, pale skin. Kinda good looking in a Euro-trash way. Mindy was even gonna ask him out," she said, gesturing to the space girl on the stage. "But I told her not to bother."

"Why is that?" I asked.

"He was wearing an earring. It was a big, diamond stud. In his right ear. You know what that means." She winked at me. "Fruity."

"Wait - I thought left ear meant gay," Dana put in.

"That's what Mindy, thought, too. We argued about it all afternoon after he left."

"Anything else you can tell us about him?" I asked.

She shrugged her slim shoulders. "Sorry. I didn't pay much attention. He argued with Kat, then he left, and Kat did her set. I figured it was no biggie, right?"

"Ling!" a guy shouted from the last booth.

"What?" she yelled back over the music.

"You're up!"

"Sorry. Gotta go shake my money maker," she told us, heading off toward a silver, beaded curtain to the right of the stage.

I watched her, digesting what she'd told us. "So our mystery guy visited both Irina and Katrina," I mused out loud.

Dana nodded. "And he argued with both."

"And then Katrina argues with Irina about money, and Irina ends up dead."

"And Katrina takes off," Dana added. "Totally suspicious."

"Totally," I agreed. "What do you want to bet the Russian guy wasn't really Kat's uncle?"

"About as much as I'd want to bet that Kat had something to do with her sister's death." She paused. "Maybe Irina wanted money from her to buy votes?" Her eyes lit up. "Maybe she hired the Russian guy to shake her sister down for cash."