Killer Pancake Part 10

"When you buy, rabbits die!" they shouted at the few customers brave enough to scuttle timidly past the saw-horses and into the store.

Worse, there wasn't a policeman in sight. But then a woman strode confidently to the store entrance. Oh, Lord. The woman entering through the highly polished doors thirty paces in front of me was Frances Markasian.

She had told me on the phone she was coming to see me at the mall food fair. She hadn't shown up. And yet here she was, going into Prince & Grogan.

My check could wait. I swallowed hard and decided to follow Frances. When I came to the sawhorses, the demonstrators surged forward and screeched.

"Are you dying for mascara?"

"Do you care that innocent animals are tortured for your makeup?"

One waved a sign directly in front of my face: DIE FOR BEAUTY it proclaimed, with a photograph of a pile of dead rabbits. I felt my face turning red, but I concentrated on getting through the doors on the track of the Mountain Journal's premier investigative reporter.

Someone's elbow jostled me and my ears rang from the shouted insults, but moments later, I was safely inside. I scanned the opulent store interior. Frances Markasian had made a detour into accessories and was fingering the various leathers of expensive handbags. Once again she was, as my parents would say, all dolled up. This time she sported a scarlet dress with a flared skirt, scarlet heels, and scarlet scarf twisted in some remarkably woven way through her ma.s.s of black hair. I quickly paralleled her step as she minced past a table display of wallets and headed for the far side of the Mignon counter. I slithered into the shoe department that faced that side of the cosmetics counter. Frances had spied on me so many times that I felt no compunction about seeing what she was up to this time. It had even become something of a game between us. Whatever today's game was, the fact that it required two disguises in three days made it extremely interesting.

"I'm here because I need help with my face," I heard Frances inform Harriet Wells. Dusty was waiting on a man I vaguely recognized-the tall blond fellow I'd seen in the shoe department that morning. Maybe he was an undercover cop.

Harriet looked at Frances and frowned. "What would you say is the skin problem you'd like to correct the most?" she asked politely.

Out in the aisle between the cosmetics counter and the shoe department, a five-tiered display of plastic boxes filled with a navy-blue and gold display of Mignon lipsticks, soaps, toners, and creams offered a hiding place. I ducked behind it.

Within moments, Harriet's voice rose slightly. She was trying to sell Frances some concealer, and Frances was making such uncharacteristically enthusiastic responses that I ducked around the plastic box holding the Fudge Mousse lipstick and Nectarine Desire blush for a better view. From there, I could watch Harriet without her seeing me, since all her attention was focused on Frances, who was whining, "But I just want to look younger." Uh-huh.

"This is Rejuvenation, the newest product to come out of Mignon's European labs." Harriet delicately gripped the pale, ribbed cylindrical bottle. "It has biochromes in it, and just look at what it's done for my skin." She lifted her free palm like a fan toward her superbly painted face. "I'm sixty-two," she declared with a sunny smile. "Rejuvenation will take two decades off your face."

"Sixty-two?" Frances echoed with loud incredulity as she s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably in the red spike heels. "I would have sworn you weren't a day over fifty-five!"

A tiny frown appeared between Harriet's eyebrows, then swiftly disappeared. I myself wouldn't have put Harriet's age over fifty.

"The biochromes penetrate to the deepest layer of the skin. They actually stop the aging process," Harriet announced proudly.

"Is that right? How much for a big bottle of that?" Frances asked brightly.

"Well," mused Harriet, "you need all the preparations to do the complete job. It's like the four basic food groups. First we start with the pre-cleanser...." Here she frowned at Frances and shook her head. "Here, you hold the Rejuvenation while I look for the right cleanser for your skin." She handed the bottle to Frances, who turned it, held it out at arm's length, and grimaced. Harriet groped beneath the counter. When she reemerged, she gave Frances's face a swift, shrewd a.s.sessment. "It really does look as if you have quite a bit of damage to your skin. Did your dermatologist send you?" When Frances shook her head, Harriet a.s.serted, "You could certainly benefit from one of our rejuvenating cleansers ..." and then she chided and explained and piled creams and cosmetics on the counter until Frances's tab was, by my reckoning, well over four hundred dollars.

I leaned in closer to Harriet and Frances, but was stunned to be interrupted in my eavesdropping by a stocky fellow who edged in beside me and asked: "What are they saying?" He smiled at me as if this were some kind of joke only the two of us were in on. He had dark brown hair and short, stubby fingers that he drummed on his knees as he crouched next to me.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I replied huffily, and straightened up.

"Is that your boyfriend?" he asked as if he hadn't heard my answer. His accent was flat and midwestern. His arms seemed too short for his body when he gestured knowingly in the direction of the tall blond man with Dusty.

"He is not my boyfriend. Would you please go away?"

He opened his eyes wide, as if I'd refused to laugh at his joke. Then he touched the badge on my white jacket. "Are you really a chef? I mean, you're wearing one of those coats. Is your restaurant here in the mall?"

"As a matter of fact, it is. Two of my coworkers are right nearby." Maybe I could frighten this guy away with the threat of numbers.

"Really?" He looked around. "They won't mind if I talk to their boss, will they? How long have you been here?"

"Look, mister, please, please, please go away-"

But the guy raised a thick brown eyebrow and didn't move. Emboldened by my ability to be convincingly dishonest at the hospital, I improvised wildly. "Actually, I work for the department store. You might have read about the accident we had in the mall garage day before yesterday?" He pursed his lips and nodded sympathetically. "That blond fellow over there is an undercover cop who's questioning a suspect, and I'm supposed to pay attention ... so can you please leave so I can do my job?"

He ran his hands over one of the plastic boxes stacked in front of us. "This is so much more interesting than shopping for my niece's birthday."

"Are you listening to me? At the moment I'm doing something extremely important and confidential," I said desperately. When he looked skeptical, I hissed: "Look buster, what I'm trying to tell you is I--work--for--store--security."

"No kidding?"

"No kidding."

He took me gently by the arm and said, "We need to have a talk."

"Get your fingers off me," I said fiercely, unwilling to give up my hiding spot without a protest. "Let go, or I will pull so hard that I'll drag you right out of the store with me! And the whole time I'll be yelling so loud, the security SWAT team will come running!"

The guy grinned. His grip on my arm tightened almost imperceptibly. "We need to have a talk real bad."

That did it. "Security!" I shrieked, and began to wriggle. I had a brief glimpse of Frances, Harriet, Dusty, and the blond guy gaping as I twisted and flailed and tried to shake the man's arm off me. In my thras.h.i.+ng, I fell against the piled boxes. The clear containers with all their lipsticks, creams, toners, and soaps tumbled. My tormentor braced his legs and continued to imprison me in a viselike grip.

"Security!" I screamed. I thrashed and felt my hose rip. "Help!" I called again. Why wasn't anyone helping me? "Somebody from security come now!"

The man leaned down. "Lady, I'm here," he said.

I've had humiliating escalator rides in my day. The afternoon of a banquet for Brunswick sales reps, I lost control of an oversize box of bowling-ball-size handmade chocolates. I shrieked in futile warning as chocolate globes pelted the escalator steps and ten fur-coated women went sprawling: a strike. Another time, two-year-old Arch threw up all over me and several nearby teenage boys. The boys were extremely unsympathetic. This in spite of the fact that at Arch's age they had probably also overindulged in hot dogs and milk shakes.

Unquestionably, though, this was the most humiliating escalator ride of my life. This stocky, brown-haired guy-this lackey who mumbled that his name was Stan White-was presumably taking me to Nick Gentileschi, head of security at Prince & Grogan. Once we were on the escalator, Stan released my arm and quickly stepped behind my back. It was obviously a practiced maneuver, the kind a policeman or a security guy makes when he thinks his perp might bolt. I can't say I wasn't considering it.

I tried to ignore all the staring people. They were below us, they were above us, they were pointing from the descending escalator paralleling ours. The usual high, excited hum of shoppers chatting about what they had bought or what they needed to buy ceased as the onlookers swiftly took in our little twosome-the cowering woman in the chef's jacket with a rent-a-cop parked right behind her. It was a particular challenge to ignore a gaping Frances Markasian. You could see the mental wheels whirring to compose a headline: Caught Caterer Cringes! Wife of Homicide Investigator Apprehended after Struggle by Fudge Mousse Lip Gloss.

"You are making a huge mistake-" I began to say.

Stan White shook his head regretfully. "Lady, if I had a nickel for every time I've heard that line...."

Well, this was just great. The steps moved inexorably upward, past the top of the Mignon counter with its display of s.h.i.+ny white bags stuffed with pink tissue paper, past the elephantine Chinese-style planters sprouting fake palm trees. Just don't let any clients see me, I prayed fervently.

No such luck. A large woman was leaning over the railing next to the escalator at the second floor landing, just above the cosmetics counter. When she straightened up, my heart sank to new depths. The last person I wanted to see at this moment was Babs Meredith Braithwaite. Even so, I might have avoided her if she hadn't inched over so that the security guy and I collided with her on our rough arrival at the second floor. We stared at each other. Babs's rust-colored suit trimmed with white was somewhat rumpled; her white blouse was hanging out. Her rust skirt slanted crookedly above her brown and white spectator pumps, as if the skirt were unzipped. Nor was her hair as meticulously poufed as it had been two days before. Today it looked like a windblown bird's nest. She was clutching her purse, which was open, as if it had been hastily s.n.a.t.c.hed up. She was panting. She looked as if she had just shoplifted a diamond brooch, when all she'd been doing was spying on the Mignon counter, or so I a.s.sumed. The nefarious possibility that I could sic Stan the Security Man on her occurred to me.

"There's somebody back there," Babs whispered in a trembly voice to Stan and me. Her hand rose toward the racks of gaily colored bathing suits. She added urgently, "Please help me." She looked the security guy up and down. "Do you work for the store?"

"Yes," said Stan curtly. "I'm with security."

"There's somebody back there!" Her cheeks were aflame, and it wasn't blush giving the color. I tried to look around Babs's wide body. Somebody back where?

Stan White touched my upper arm gently to guide me away from Babs and oncoming traffic spilling from the escalator. When I didn't move, he put his hands on his hips and set his mouth in a stern frown.

Babs whimpered, "Aren't you going to help me?"

Stan cleared his throat and pointed at me. "Are you with this woman?" he asked Babs. Confused, she shook her head. Stan concluded, firmly, "Then you'll have to find a salesperson. I can't help it if there's n.o.body back there."

"But," Babs said frantically, grabbing his arm, "there's somebody back there in the dressing room. You've got to come and help me."

Stan White perked up. This interested him. "Is it a man?" he asked. "In the women's dressing room?"

"It's somebody behind the mirror," insisted Babs. "I heard him cough." Reluctantly, she released Stan's arm.

"Lady, please." The security fellow shook his head, "We haven't done that kind of surveillance for years. It's against the law."

Babs clutched her purse. Her vivid cheeks shook with rage. "But, I'm trying to tell you ...! Somebody must have broken in behind the mirrors! Aren't you going to do anything? What kind of security guard are you anyway?"

Stan bristled. "Okay, look. I have to do something else first. Then I'll check the dressing room, all right? Please, we need to go."

"Go where?" she demanded shrilly. "What are you doing with this woman?"

"What we're doing doesn't fall under the Freedom of Information Act, lady."

Babs Braithwaite pressed her lips together. "This ..." She looked at me. What was I, exactly? "This ... woman is going to be catering an important function for us this weekend. She's also operating a booth at our Playhouse Southwest benefit, and we can't have her-"

"When's your party?" the security fellow asked amiably as he made a no-nonsense gesture to me to walk forward in the direction of the department store offices.

"Why, why-" babbled Babs as she hustled along beside us, past the j.a.panese china decorated to look like English bone, "-tomorrow," she finished breathlessly. She slapped her purse down imperiously on a table displaying Waterford crystal. An extremely large and undoubtedly expensive vase teetered, then, miraculously, straightened.

"It's Friday," Stan said wearily, without giving Babs so much as a glance. "I promise not to detain her more than twenty-four hours."

"But ... this department store! What is going on-" Babs wailed, while I thought, Twenty-four hours? I don't think so.

Stan White nudged me through a door that said SECURITY and slammed it with a satisfactory thwack on Babs Braithwaite's indignant face. A large, imposing man sat behind a large, imposing desk. I felt like the bad kid brought before the princ.i.p.al. Or, since the man who stared at me with such authoritative disdain seemed to be enthroned, make that a disobedient subject tossed in front of the king. From the scowl of the seated man, it was clear he was the one who decided whether the subject was thrown to the lions or was released to work again in the fields of the sovereign.

Stan White discreetly disappeared through a side door. I sat down and eyed the plaque on the desk: NICHOLAS R. GENTILESCHI, DIRECTOR OF SECURITY. Then I took in the man himself. Fiftyish, Nick Gentileschi had a face whose extraordinary pallor was set off by flat jet-black eyes. His dark, receding hair was slicked to one side, except for an errant strand that flopped rakishly over his high-domed forehead. If his suit cost more than fifty dollars, he'd been cheated.

"Sit," he commanded, gesturing to a wooden chair. Without protest, I obeyed. When Gentileschi said nothing further, I glanced around his windowless office. Like the other still-to-be-refurbished Prince & Grogan offices, the paint on these walls was a disintegrating aquamarine. The department store seemed to care about its appearance everywhere but in its offices, as if prospective employees and would-be criminals weren't worth the trouble of a lovely decor. On one wall someone had mounted a white-framed painting with a plaque underneath: PRINCE & GROGAN, ALBUQUERQUE. The style of the flags.h.i.+p store was Southwestern via Wonderland. The picture showed a multistoried pink stucco building complete with soaring columns, multistoried gla.s.s, and a bulging, gilded entrance. A Pueblo Indian wouldn't have recognized it as indigenous architecture, that was for sure.

"I didn't take anything, as you can see," I said defensively. "I was just looking around." I rubbed my arm. "Please call the police," I told Nick Gentileschi firmly. I wasn't really hurt. Nevertheless, I wanted to act miffed. I knew security people feared lawsuits like the plague. Maybe I should tell him Babs's story too, about somebody lurking behind the mirror in the women's dressing room. Then again, maybe not. I didn't want to confuse him. With an optimism I was far from feeling, I said, "I'm hoping we can get this all straightened out."

Nick Gentileschi raised his thin eyebrows and tapped a pencil on top of a camera on his desk. Vaguely I wondered if a hidden video camera had somehow monitored my not-so-surrept.i.tious surveillance of the cosmetics counter. "The police?" Gentileschi's voice grated like sandpaper. He dropped the pencil and began to jingle the keyring hanging from his belt. Then he turned his boxy, pale face sorrowfully toward the picture of the Albuquerque store. "She wants me to call the police." He grinned, revealing oversize, horselike teeth. "Now, that's one I haven't heard. You haven't stolen anything yet? You want to be cleared before things get worse? Or you have a friend at the sheriff's department?"

"Please, Mr. Gentileschi." Acting patient and sweet sometimes worked. I'd give it a whirl. "I know who you are, and Claire Satterfield was a friend of mine-"

The thin eyebrows lifted. "Is that right? A friend of yours? You ever go to her apartment for a party? Where did she live exactly ...?"

I sighed. "I didn't go to any parties, and I don't know where she lived, somewhere in Denver-" The heck with this. I wondered if I could remember my lawyer's phone number off the top of my head.

"Now, that's an interesting friends.h.i.+p when you don't know where someone lives. Claire was a party girl. Didja know that? Or didn't you discuss that either in your ... friends.h.i.+p?" He sneered the last word. My skin p.r.i.c.kled.

"Who do you think you are, the FBI?" I said angrily. "Are you going to make a call or not?"

He opened a desk drawer, got out a form, and then carefully selected a pen. His gleaming black eyes regarded me greedily. "What's your name and occupation?"

I told him, and he took notes. Then he s.h.i.+fted his weight, smoothed his Grecian-Formula-16 hair with the palm of his hand, and said, "Now, you listen to me, Goldy Schulz, the supposed good friend of Claire Satterfield. We have our ways of knowing what's going on in this store. I know what you were trying to do. I just need to know the reasons. If your answers aren't satisfactory, I'll call the cops myself."

"I can a.s.sure you my reasons won't be satisfactory, since I don't even know what they were."

He blinked impa.s.sively and, pen poised over his form, waited for me to say more. When I did not, he sighed, put down the pen, picked up the telephone, and raised one eyebrow, as if he were calling my bluff. "Who should I call at the sheriff's department? Another friend?"

"Homicide Investigator Tom Schulz."

"I know Schulz. Do you know Schulz? I suppose you're going to tell me you're his sister or something."

I chose not to answer. He wouldn't believe me anyway.

But to my relief he dialed the sheriff's department. After a few preliminary murmurings, he managed, thank heaven, to get through to Tom. I watched with no small amount of satisfaction as the security chief's features quickly registered first smugness ("Caught her acting suspicious by the cosmetics counter"), then discomfort ("No, she didn't touch any of the goods"), and finally embarra.s.sment ("No, she didn't hurt anybody or take anything"). But the moment of discomfort pa.s.sed just as quickly, and Gentileschi confirmed an appointment to meet with Tom later that afternoon. Then he thrust the phone across the desk at me. "He wants to talk to you," he said glumly.

When I took the receiver, I could hear Tom humming a dirgelike tune.

I said, "The great intellect-"

He was not amused. "Look, I said not like hitting the demonstrator. That means not like being picked up for suspicious activity by department store security."

"This is not my fault," I said in a low voice. After all, I was just trying to learn something to help Julian. No matter what the security people said about my presence, I had not caused trouble in the store. "I wasn't doing anything."

"Goldy, please remember, we're trying to work with this guy."

"I wish you the very best of luck in that particular enterprise," I said crisply. "Listen, Tom, did you check out that other person I asked you about?" When Gentileschi leaned over just slightly to catch what I was saying, I turned in the wooden chair.

"Double oh seven, what would I do without you? Okay, Miss G. We're already looking into Hotchkiss. He has a record and he runs a cosmetics place. But I will definitely tell the guys to ream his behind; And don't worry about Nick, he's an old friend of ours. Watch out though, he's got a reputation with women."

I turned back to look at the polyester-clad, dyed-haired man across the desk from me. "Must say, Tom, I find that extremely hard to believe."

He chuckled. "Okay, look. I don't know when I'm going to have another chance to talk to you while you're down there. And I've been hard to reach-"

"No kidding."

"But there is something you can do. Somebody I need you to talk to, a friend of yours. You think Dusty Routt is the one who might have hinted to Frances Markasian this Krill character was one of Claire's old boyfriends? He swore to us he didn't know Claire. Maybe Markasian was baiting you with an idea of hers, see if you'd bite."

"I'm seeing Dusty at lunchtime, once I get out of prison." I tried to give Nick Gentileschi a prim look. He smirked.

"Well, the organization called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals hasn't heard of Shaman Krill. And neither has the National Anti-Vivisection Society. h.e.l.l, even the SPCA swears they don't have a member named Krill. I don't know how long he's been an animal rights activist, but he hasn't been one long enough to earn him any kind of reputation. Our guys went to bring him in for more questioning, but he'd taken off from his demonstration buddies, and he wasn't at his apartment. And by the way, none of the demonstrators belong to any of those organizations. The legitimate organizations think Spare the Hares is some kind of wacko splinter group. Anyway. If you think Frances got the idea Krill was Claire's boyfriend from this Mignon sales a.s.sociate named Dusty Routt, I'd sure like to hear about it."

"Why don't your guys just ask her?"

"We've already talked to Dusty Routt. At length. She swears she's never heard of Shaman Krill. So either she's lying or your friend Markasian got the info from somebody else, or got it wrong about who the boyfriend was. And speaking of your friend Markasian-"

"You know that person in question is never going to tell me a thing. She'll protect her sources to the grave."

"Frances Markasian? Not tell a thing to my Goldy? Never." Tom chuckled again. "Feed her some doughnuts or something. You know, the way they loosen folks' tongues by slipping 'em a few drinks? How about a little sodium Pentothal in your chocolate truffle cheesecake?"

I told him I'd do my best and hung up. Truth Serum tiramisu was not in my repertoire, but never mind.

"Well, Mrs. Schulz," said Nick Gentileschi with that equine grin that made my skin crawl. "Whadya know? Seems you were just the person I was looking for." Then, without a hint of apology for the fiasco of my in-store "bust" and "interrogation," he shuffled through an untidy stack of papers next to the camera and retrieved a check. After scanning it, he handed it over: the balance due Goldilocks' Catering on the Mignon banquet. I stuffed it in my skirt pocket. Gentileschi went on with, "Sorry we didn't get it to you sooner. Personnel gave it to me when we heard your a.s.sistant went to the hospital. As you know, we're in the middle of a major crime investigation here. An unexplained death doesn't help the accounts get paid."