The PMS Murder (17 page)

You’ll be happy to learn that I Just Said No to the croutons, gloppy ranch salad dressing and giant chunks of cheese that were calling my name.

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Laura Levine

When I’d stuffed more greens into my container than I’d eaten in the last five years, I trotted over to the checkout counter, feeling quite proud of myself. I thought back to my lunch with Sam and Andrew, and how unappetizing the idea of a salad had seemed to me then. Now it seemed like the only sensible thing to be eating.

Maybe I’d finally reached the stage in life where dieting would be doable. Indeed, I’d probably reached a certain level of maturity necessary to start a healthy eating regimen and stick with it.

I paid for my salad and headed out the door, barely glancing at the Reese’s Pieces at the checkout counter.

It looked like Prozac wasn’t the only one with willpower in our family.

Back home, I tossed some Healthy Halibut Guts into Prozac’s dinner bowl. She proceeded to peck at it daintily, like a supermodel on a dinner date.

Instead of wolfing down my meal standing up over the kitchen counter as I usually do, I decided to eat my diet dinner in style, another diet tip I remembered reading.
Eat your food slowly at the dinner
table with a beautiful place setting. You’ll eat less and
feel fuller
.

So, clearing away a pile of unpaid bills, I put a pretty rattan placemat on my dining table, poured myself a teensy glass of chardonnay, and laid out my salad on a festive Christmas dinner plate my mom had sent me from the shopping channel.

(Service for four, only $69.95 plus shipping and handling.)

Then I put a Tony Bennett CD on my stereo and sat down to eat. Or, shall I say, dine.

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I took my first bite, chewing slowly, savoring all the natural tastes of the vegetables. How wonderful it was, I told myself, to be eating food that wasn’t drenched in ketchup and salt.

I savored each and every bite of that meal. Okay, I savored the first three bites. After that, I couldn’t help myself. I was starving. I tore into those vegetables like Bugs Bunny in a carrot patch. Before I knew it, I’d eaten every last morsel of the salad and was scooping the dressing off the plate with my finger.

By now Prozac had finished most of her halibut and was back on the living room sofa, taking an after-dinner pass at her genitals.

I eyed her leftover halibut hungrily. Actually, it didn’t look all that bad. Hadn’t I always been curi-ous about how cat food tasted?

Don’t get upset. Of course, I didn’t eat it. What sort of desperado do you think I am? I would never sink so low, for heaven’s sake. Besides, Prozac was watching and I knew I’d never get away with it.

I walked over to where she was lying on the couch, looking perfectly content.

“How the hell do you do it, Pro? How do you stay on that godawful diet of yours?” She looked up at me and yawned.

Nothing to it. For thinner hips, just zip your lips.

“You’re really beginning to get on my nerves.

You know that, don’t you?”

I headed to the bedroom to distract myself with some television.

But wouldn’t you know, everywhere I looked I saw food. Lucy was eating that big plate of spaghetti in the booth next to Bill Holden, Emeril was cooking scampi swimming in garlic butter, and every station seemed to be playing the same com-166

Laura Levine

mercial for the all-you-can-eat chicken parmigiana dinner at the Olive Garden restaurant.

I couldn’t take it any more. I grabbed a sweater and headed for the door.

“I’m going out for a walk,” I announced to Prozac.

You can’t fool me. You’re going for ice cream.

“You are so wrong,” I insisted.

And she was. I did not go out for ice cream. Absolutely not.

I went out for Reese’s Pieces.

I was sitting in my car, digging into my Reese’s Pieces, when my mind drifted back to my conversation with Pam.

I suddenly had the feeling that she’d said something important, that she’d given me a valuable clue. But for the life of me, I couldn’t put my finger on it. Exactly what had she said? Just that Marybeth was a terrible driver and that Colin had stolen a tip at a restaurant.

Of course, by now you’ve probably already figured it out. But I didn’t. Not right then, anyway.

I headed home and hurried to the bathroom to brush my teeth so Prozac wouldn’t smell the chocolate on my breath.

And that’s when it hit me, while I was brushing my teeth. Something that Pam said came bubbling up to my consciousness:
Marybeth was an accident
waiting to happen.

I raced to the phone with toothpaste still in my mouth.

“Pam,” I said, when I got her on the line, “it’s me, Jaine.”

“Are you okay? You sound funny.”

“It’s just toothpaste in my mouth. Look, I need THE PMS MURDERS

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to ask you something. I know Marybeth was a terrible driver, but was she ever actually in an auto accident?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

“Try to remember.”

“Well, now that you mention it, when I first joined the PMS Club, Ashley was driving Marybeth to all the meetings. Do you think it’s possible she’d had her license revoked?”

“Yes,” I said, “I think it’s very possible.” I got off the phone and hurried to my computer, where I logged onto the
L.A. Times
archives.

What did Doris say her husband’s name was? Glen.

That was it. Glen Jenkins.

I typed in his name. Seconds later, a story popped on the screen about a terrible car crash on the San Diego Freeway. Tied up traffic for three hours. Several people were injured, one of them seriously, a Mr. Glen Jenkins.

The driver of the vehicle that caused the accident: Marybeth Olson.

So. Marybeth was the one who’d put Glen Jenkins in a wheelchair.

I whistled softly. It looked like Doris had just taken the lead away from Colin in my Murder Suspect Sweepstakes.

Chapter 17

When Doris answered the door the next day, she knew the jig was up. She had the same look in her eyes The Blob had when I caught him watching football in my Victoria’s Secret teddy.

But unlike The Blob, Doris wasn’t the least bit flustered.

“Hello, Jaine,” she said, gazing at me with steady gray eyes.

I handed her the printout I’d made of the
Times
article.

“Want to tell me about it?”

“Sure.” Cool as a cucumber. “Come on in.” This time she didn’t try to hustle me to the kitchen. She led me straight to the living room. We sat opposite each other on matching chenille sofas, under the portrait of Doris and Glen holding hands in happier days.

“So you know the truth,” she said. “Funny, it’s actually a relief. It’s been hell keeping it bottled up inside me for so long.”

She put her feet up on the coffee table, and I was surprised to see that she was wearing pink bunny slippers. No-nonsense Doris in bunny slip-THE PMS MURDERS

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pers? I guess you never know what people are going to wear in the privacy of their own homes, a lesson I should’ve learned after that episode with The Blob and my teddy.

She glanced down at the
Times
article, and her eyes grew hard.

“That bitch walked away from the accident without a scratch. And poor Glen never walked again.

We never heard a word from her. No apology. No flowers. Not even a crummy get-well card. For two years, I watched my husband die, day by day, all because of Marybeth.”

She picked up the printout and crumpled it into a tight ball.

“After Glen died, I hired a private eye to track her down. I joined her gym and ingratiated myself with her friends. Eventually they asked me to join the PMS Club. I wasn’t planning to kill her. Not at first, anyway. In the beginning, I just wanted to see what kind of person could walk away from a tragedy like that without a second thought. I thought that maybe once I got to know her she wouldn’t be so bad, that I’d discover something about her that would explain her actions.”

She shook her head, waving away that notion.

“But I hated her from the minute I met her. She was everything I feared she’d be, and worse. And so I knew I had to kill her.”

Omigosh. She was confessing. Right here and now. The case was over. All I had to do was get her to sign a confession, and I could start working at Union National with the adorable Andrew Ferguson!

“I was going to drain the brake fluid from Marybeth’s Porsche. Have her die in an auto accident.

It would be poetic justice.”

She smiled grimly.

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Laura Levine

If I ever wrote a memoir, I knew what the title of this chapter would be:
The Killer Wore Bunny Slippers!

“But each time I tried to do it,” she said, “I lost my nerve. It’s not easy draining brake fluid from a car without attracting attention.”

“So then you decided to poison her with peanut oil?”

“No,” she said. “Then I got lucky. Somebody else killed her for me.” She gave her bunny slippers a happy wiggle. “All’s well that ends well, eh?”

“So you didn’t put the peanut oil in the guacamole?”

“Nope,” she said, her eyes glinting steely gray.

“Wasn’t me.”

With that, she picked up the crumpled
Times
story and tossed it into the fireplace.

So much for her confession. I thanked Doris for her time and left her alone with her memories of Glen.

As I walked out to my Corolla I couldn’t help wondering: If Doris had lied so convincingly about being divorced, who’s to say she wasn’t lying about the murder?

Maybe she didn’t change her mind about killing Marybeth.

Maybe all she changed was her murder weapon.

Now I had two suspects with motives, but not a shred of proof that either one of them doctored the guacamole. The only fingerprints on that damn bottle of peanut oil were Rochelle’s.

Feeling frustrated by my lack of evidence, I decided to drive out to the beach to clear my head. It was an overcast day, cool and gray, the perfect day THE PMS MURDERS

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for walking and thinking, with no TV to distract me.

I drove out to Malibu and parked on the Coast Highway, then scrambled down a steep pebbled path onto the beach.

Hardly anyone was there. Just a few dog walkers and hardy joggers, tossing up clumps of wet sand as they ran. I took off my shoes and walked along the shoreline, sand squishing between my toes.

The cool, damp air felt great on my face. True, my hair was frizzing like a Brillo pad, but I didn’t care.

It was worth it.

I walked along the shoreline, turning things over in my mind. And after forty-five minutes of deep thought, I reached an important insight: Dog poop doesn’t smell nearly as bad at the beach as it does in town.

What can I say? My mind wandered.

Annoyed at myself for having frittered away forty-five minutes, I headed back to the Corolla.

I started the car and was about to merge into traffic on the Coast Highway when suddenly I heard an earsplitting explosion. Now I’ve seen my fair share of action flicks, so I know a gunshot when I hear one. Someone was shooting at me!

With Herculean effort, I managed to keep my cool and steered the Corolla into the ongoing stream of cars on the highway.

Yeah, right. You know me better than that. I im-mediately flew into an advanced state of panic and barely missed ramming my Corolla into a Mer-cedes SUV. The charming trophy wife behind the wheel flashed me an impressive set of diamonds as she gave me the finger.

I gunned the accelerator, once again trying to merge into traffic, when another shot rang in the 172

Laura Levine

air. Why the hell wasn’t anyone stopping to help me? I could only pray that one of those cowards whizzing by on the highway would call the police.

Suddenly the Corolla started bumping errati-cally. Damn. The shooter had blown out my tires. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was stranded, alone on the shoulder of the road with a would-be assassin.

I crouched down in my seat and peeked out the windows, looking for the gunman. But all I saw were joggers on the beach. Then I checked out the rearview mirror and let out a terrified scream. Staring back at me was a wide-eyed derelict. Omigod, how did he get in my car? What did he want from me? Had Marybeth’s killer paid him to kill and/or seriously maim me?

With my heart pounding, I sneaked another peek in the mirror. Strange, the derelict looked somewhat like me. I looked again. Oh, good heavens, it
was
me. My hair had gone completely haywire in the fog, giving me that finger-in-the-light-socket mental patient look.

When my heart finally stopped racing, I took another look outside. Still no sign of any gun-toting bad guys. But I wasn’t taking any chances. No way was I getting out of my car. I got out my cell phone and called 911.

Five minutes later, a squad car pulled up.

Two Malibu cops, tan enough to moonlight as lifeguards, got out of the car. One of them approached my window while the other started ex-amining the tires.

“Someone tried to kill me!” I wailed to the cop at my window. “They shot out my tires.”

“Nobody shot your tires,” his partner said, kneeling over the front passenger tire.

“What?”

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“Come here and see for yourself.” Somehow I managed to pry my knuckles from the steering wheel and walked over to the front of the car.

“Looks like you ran over a box of nails.” Indeed, my front tires were studded with dozens of industrial-strength nails.

“Gosh, it sounded just like gunshots,” I said, making a mental note to never again jump to conclusions based on movie sound effects.

The cop who discovered the nails shook his head, disgusted.

“What sort of jerk throws nails on the highway?”

“Probably kids,” his partner said. “Probably thought it was funny.”

Maybe it was kids, I thought. But maybe not.

Maybe it was someone who wanted to intimidate me, and get me to stop my investigation.

No, I’d bet my bottom Pop Tart that the person who’d tossed those nails in the path of my car was Marybeth’s killer.