Jaine Austen 4 - Shoes to Die For (12 page)

Chapter 13

T
he sun shone brightly on the day of Frenchie’s memorial service. Birds were chirping, flowers were blooming, and fluffy white clouds scudded across a deep blue sky. Clearly Mother Nature didn’t give a flying fig that Frenchie’s corpse was cooling in the L.A. County Morgue.

I got in my Corolla and headed for St. Joan of Arc church, pondering the latest bombshell from my parents.

So Mom had landed the female lead in
Lord Worthington’s Ascot.
Somehow I had trouble picturing her as a British aristocrat. I mean, this is a woman whose idea of a formal event is the opening of a new Safeway.

I wondered if Daddy was right. Could the director possibly have a crush on her? After all, Mom was a very attractive woman. But then, Daddy was a confirmed paranoid. So it was hard to tell. One thing I knew for sure. Daddy would be hell to live with now that he’d been passed over for the male lead. I was just glad I was three thousand miles out of their orbit.

The first thing I saw when I drove up to the church was a marble statue of Joan of Arc glittering in the noonday sun. I looked at the noble young girl and couldn’t help comparing her to Frenchie, who had about as much nobility as a swamp rat.

I parked my car in the parking lot and hurried inside. Only a handful of people were scattered in the large sanctuary.

I slid into a pew and scanned the mourners. I spotted Grace and Maxine, sitting on opposite ends of a pew. Maxine kept looking over at Grace, as if to catch her attention, but Grace sat ramrod stiff, staring straight ahead. A few of Frenchie’s fashionista friends sat together whispering in another pew. The only man at the service was a paunchy middle-aged guy in the front row, sobbing into a Kleenex.

The priest, a stocky man who looked like he could have been a football quarterback, was giving a eulogy for Frenchie. I could tell he didn’t know her very well because he was talking about what a swell person she was.

“Although Giselle has left us, she will always be with us in spirit.”

Not exactly a comforting thought. Did we really need Frenchie’s spirit hovering over the planet? Couldn’t she just go and aggravate people in the afterlife?

“And now,” the priest said, “Giselle’s husband, Owen, would like to say a few words. Mr. Ambrose?”

The paunchy guy in the front row got up and headed for the microphone. I blinked in amazement. This was Frenchie’s
husband
? I’d just assumed he was her father. He had the dissipated look of a man who’d spent far too much time alone at the end of a bar nursing a bottle of Jack Daniels. Tall and barrel-chested, his thick black hair was riddled with gray. Maybe at one time he’d been a studly guy, but now he looked like an aging Fred Flintstone.

He hadn’t gotten more than three sentences into his eulogy when he started sobbing. He tried to calm himself, but he couldn’t talk without breaking down. Finally, the priest had to lead him back down to his seat.

“Who else would like to say a few words about the dearly departed?” the priest asked.

No one wanted to say a few words, so the service broke up. From start to finish, it took all of about six minutes.

The priest handed out directions to Frenchie’s apartment, where her husband was hosting a “memorial buffet,” and the mourners got up to go. As we headed up the aisle, I heard snippets of conversation from Frenchie’s fashionista buddies.

“I hear they’re shipping the body back to her parents in New Jersey. After the autopsy, of course.”

“Want to go to the memorial buffet?”

“Nah, let’s have lunch at the beach.”

“Oh, yes. That sounds so much nicer.”

I hoped Frenchie’s spirit wasn’t hanging around to hear how breathtakingly fast her friends had gotten over her death.

And then I heard a snippet of conversation that caught my attention.

“Grace, can you ever forgive me?”

It was Maxine. She and Grace were standing on the steps of the church. I stopped and pretended to be reading the directions to Frenchie’s apartment while I listened in on their conversation.

“I can’t believe I behaved so horribly,” Maxine said. Her frizzy brown hair was wilder than ever, and her tiny face was pinched with unhappiness.

What horrible thing, I wondered, had Maxine done?

“I don’t suppose you want me working at the store any more,” she said, staring down at her support pumps.

“I don’t know, Maxine. I’ll have to think about it,” Grace said.

Unlike Maxine, Grace looked amazingly chipper in a black Prada suit. I knew it was Prada because I’d seen it at Barneys. With her perfectly coiffed white hair and wraparound sunglasses, she looked good enough to hit the runway in Milan.

“I’ve got to go now,” Grace said, checking her watch. “I’ve got a shipment coming in from New York.”

With Frenchie gone, it looked like Grace was back in the saddle at Passions. Then she turned on her heel and walked to her car, a silver Jaguar sedan.

“I’m really sorry,” Maxine called after her, in a soft, sad voice.

But I wasn’t paying attention to Maxine any more. Or Grace, either.

No, my eyes were riveted on the roof of Grace’s Jaguar. Which I now saw was plastered with jacaranda blossoms. I remembered the jacaranda tree in Passions’ parking lot, and how the blossoms were sticking to Frenchie’s car in the rain. And here they were, stuck to Grace’s car. It hadn’t rained at all since the night of Frenchie’s murder. If these were fresh blossoms, they would’ve blown away in the wind. But they were stuck on, plastered there by the rain.

And then I wondered: Was it possible that Grace had driven to Passions the night of the murder? Was she the one who stabbed Frenchie with a fake Jimmy Choo and sent her to that Great Boutique in the Sky? Had Grace been prepared to try anything—including murder—to get her store back?

Frenchie’s apartment building was a nondescript concrete box called Malibu Villas. Its name was clearly a figment of the owner’s imagination, since it was nowhere near Malibu, and nothing remotely like a villa.

I rode up in a creaky elevator with a pair of twentysomething bimbettes in T-shirts so tight they were practically tourniquets. The place was undoubtedly populated by transient young singles. Frenchie’s middle-aged husband must have stood out like a sore thumb.

Owen Ambrose answered the door to his apartment, holding a beer stein filled with what looked like scotch. His florid face was glistening with sweat.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I murmured.

“Who’re you?” he muttered, gazing at me with glassy eyes.

“I’m Jaine Austen. A business associate of Frenchie’s.”

“Come on in,” he said, almost blowing me away with the booze on his breath.

I stepped inside and was surprised to see that the living room was filled to capacity with pricey oversized furniture, the kind of stuff you see in sprawling estates, not a crackerjack apartment with an unobstructed view of the Golden Arches.

“Help yourself to the buffet,” Owen said, pointing to a card table draped with a black crepe paper tablecloth.

Frenchie’s memorial buffet consisted of pretzels, Cheezits, and a mammoth jug of Costco scotch. It’s a good thing he hadn’t spent a lot of bucks on the spread, because—aside from me—nobody had shown up.

I grabbed a handful of pretzels and took a seat on a large overstuffed sofa across from a fake fireplace whose electric logs glowed like burners on a hot plate.

“Who’d you say you were again?” Owen asked, squinting at me.

“A business associate of Frenchie’s.”

He scratched his head, sending a small shower of dandruff to his shoulders.

“I can’t understand why more people didn’t show up at the church. You’d think they would have wanted to come.”

“Only to make sure she was really dead.”

Of course, I didn’t really say that. I just tsk-tsked sympathetically and stared into the phony fire.

“Aw, who am I kidding,” he said, draining the scotch from his beer stein. “I’m not really surprised. Most people didn’t like Frenchie. She could be a real bitch. But God, how I loved her.”

Clearly the Costco scotch had loosened his tongue.

“I left my wife and kids for her. Just packed up and moved out. After eighteen years of marriage. Arlene didn’t deserve to be treated that way. No, she didn’t. But what can I say? I was crazy in love.”

He hauled himself up from his armchair and weaved his way to the buffet table. I watched, fascinated, as he poured himself another steinful of scotch.

“I knew Frenchie was only interested in me for my money.”

Money?
I wondered.
What money?

“I was rich when she met me,” he said, as if in answer to my question. “I’d made a fortune in a dot-com startup company. When Frenchie and I were first married, we lived like kings. A five-bedroom house in Beverly Hills. Beach place in Malibu. All this furniture,” he said, gesturing around the room, “came from the beach house.”

“It’s very nice,” I said, trying to keep up my end of the conversation.

“But we all know what happened to the dot-com bubble,” Owen said, plopping down into his armchair. “Poof!”

He took a frighteningly large gulp of scotch, to get him through that awful memory.

“Once I lost my money, it was all over. Frenchie had no use for me. She cheated on me right and left and didn’t bother to hide it. I should’ve hated her, but I didn’t. I couldn’t stop loving her. It was like she had me under a spell or something. Like that movie with Marlene Dietrich, where she sings ‘Falling in Love Again’.”

“The Blue Angel.”

“Yeah, like
The Blue Angel,
” he said, taking another mammoth gulp of scotch. I could practically see his liver corroding before my eyes.

“Let me get you something to eat,” I said.

“Nah, nah,” he said, waving me away. “Not hungry. I could do with some scotch, though. Get me some more, will ya, hon?”

He held out his stein, like an alcoholic Oliver Twist.

“Really,” I said. “Let me fix you something to eat.”

Before he could stop me, I made my way into his tiny kitchen. I rummaged around the mostly empty cupboards until I found a can of tuna. Somehow I managed to toss together a tuna salad sandwich on a stale bagel.

“Here,” I said, handing it to him. “You’ve got to eat something.”

Reluctantly he took a bite.

“You know, for something you whipped together on the spur of the moment, this is really pretty bad.”

Look who was talking. The Cheezit King.

“Eat it anyway,” I ordered. “Or I’ll make you another.”

I waited till he’d finished eating, then got down to business.

“I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but the police think Becky Kopek killed your wife.”

“Sweet little Becky?” He looked genuinely surprised. “That’s impossible.”

“Do you have any idea who might have done it?”

“No, not really. Lots of people disliked Frenchie. But I didn’t think anybody hated her enough to kill her. Arlene probably would have wanted to kill her at one time. But she’s remarried now. To a gynecologist. She says my leaving her was the best thing that ever happened to her. So it couldn’t be Arlene. I figure whoever called Frenchie that night must’ve done it.”

“Somebody called her?”

“Yeah, she got a phone call from Passions’ alarm company. They said someone had broken into the store. So she drove over. But it turns out the alarm company never called her. Whoever made the call was probably luring her down there so they could kill her.”

“Did she say whether it was a man or a woman on the phone?”

He shook his head. “Nah. She just grabbed her keys and ran. And that was the last I ever saw of her.”

His eyes filled with tears, and the next thing I knew he was sobbing onto his bagel crusts.

Somehow I managed to get him to lie down on the sofa. Then I wrapped some ice in a towel and put it on his forehead.

By the time I’d grabbed a handful of Cheezits and made my way to the front door, he was snoring like a buzzsaw.

I sat in my Corolla, munching my Cheezits (and the Quarter Pounder I’d bought to go with them), and puzzling over that phony phone call from the alarm company. If someone wanted to lure Frenchie to the store to kill her, why didn’t they bring a murder weapon? How could they know in advance that she was going to be wearing lethal heels? Maybe they lured her to the store intending only to confront her, but then things got out of hand, and the next thing they knew they were going for her jugular.

Then again, maybe Owen was lying. Maybe there was no call. Maybe Frenchie went to the store to get some work done, and Owen followed her. His grief seemed genuine, but who knew? Maybe all those affairs of hers finally got to him. After years of being cuckolded, had he assuaged his bruised ego with a deadly fashion accessory?

It was only speculation, of course, but it made sense to me.

I popped the last pickle slice from my burger into my mouth, then put the car in gear and headed off to pay a call on my next suspect, Maxine the bookkeeper.

Chapter 14

M
axine’s apartment was out in the valley, on a busy street in Sherman Oaks. The sign out front read
Luxury Apartments.
I gazed up at the beige stucco building with the rusted hibachis on the balconies. If these were luxury apartments, I was a size 2. First Malibu Villas, and now this. What was it with these apartment building owners? Hadn’t they ever heard about the concept of truth in advertising?

I parked out front and headed up to
Luxurious Arms,
as I was now calling it. The front path was littered with discarded Thai take-out menus. I found Maxine’s name and apartment number on the directory. Luckily someone had left the door open, so I didn’t have to buzz Maxine and ask her to let me in. Something told me she might not have said yes.

The lobby was a small square room with gold-flecked mirrored walls. I pressed the button for the elevator. As I waited for it to show up, I thought of Maxine’s tearful apology to Grace on the steps of the church. She’d begged Grace to forgive her for behaving “so horribly.” What the heck was that all about?