She pulled her hands from her pockets and surprised me by cracking her knuckles. Large semiprecious stones sparkled on her fingers. 'Well,' she said, 'you can't talk to Rebecca. She's at college, and I won't tell you where, so don't ask.'
'Look. You've already figured out that I'm not dangerous. Is there someplace we can sit down?'
Her eyes burned into mine for a moment. Norman Stillman would have killed for that gaze. Then she walked briskly past me and reached into the window, turning around the open sign. Before she did, I read the other side. It didn't say
'The flow?' I said.
'Skip it,' she said shortly, heading for the back of the shop. I followed her through a door behind the counter and into a back room. The smell, if anything, was more powerful in there. The shelves were jammed with stock, and what seemed like millions of identical books were stacked everywhere. She pulled out a chair, angled it around toward one of the stacks of books, and sat in it. 'Take a load off,' Chantra Hartsfield said.
'Where?'
'There.' She pointed and let the smile bloom. 'Don't worry, they'll hold you.'
I sat on the books. They sank slightly beneath my weight and gave off a vaporous sigh of aroma that literally made my eyes water. 'God in heaven,' I said. 'I feel like I've been sentenced to life imprisonment inside a flower.'
'These are my catalogs. I'm going national.'
I looked around at the stacks. 'If you'll excuse my saying so, they don't seem to be moving very fast.'
'It's a problem. I can't figure out how to market them.'
'What do you mean? Buy a mailing list from the Scientologists or somebody and send them out.'
'Yeah,' she said, 'that's just it. They're something brand new. They're the first scratch-and-sniff aromatherapy catalogs.'
'Smells like a great idea.'
'I think it is. But how do you control it? I mean, if an ounce of, let's say, chamomile will cure cancer of the colon in the right person, what effect would a scratch-and-sniff have on the common cold? I could put myself out of business.'
'Ah,' I said sympathetically.
She offered up a helpless smile. 'I'm not really much good at business.'
'Well,' I said, 'if you're selling chamomile to cure colon cancer, the profit margin must be pretty impressive.'
'I'm not selling dink,' she said without taking offense. 'You're sitting on my catalogs.'
I shrugged, a mistake in judgment that released several pounds of perfume directly into my nostrils. 'I'm not much good at business, either,' I said, fanning it away. 'Hey, do you know anything about computers?'
'I can't work a calculator,' she said. 'It's a dilemma.'
We commiserated silently for a moment, one failed businessperson to another. I shifted again, with the same result. 'Listen,' I said, 'why not sew them into pillow slips and sell them as whoopie cushions?'
She thought about it, shook her head, and dusted her hands together in a workmanlike fashion. 'So. Tell me why you're here.'
'Our friend Toby Vane. I've been assigned to keep an eye on him.'
'Assigned by whom? And for what reason?'
'By the company that produces his shows. To keep him from slamming any young women around for the time being.'
'Since when do they care? What do you do for a living?'
'I'm supposed to be a detective.'
'And you work for the production company?' There was an undertone in her voice I didn't understand.
'Yes.'
'For Norman Stillman Productions?' The undertone was pure acid now. She said the words as though she had to get them out of her mouth before they dissolved and choked her.
'Right.' I waited.
'Do you mind if I smoke?' she said. It was about the ninth time she'd surprised me.
'Not if you give me one, too.'
I got arched eyebrows. 'You don't look like a smoker.'
'Neither do you. But I'd smoke a highway flare to muffle these damned aromas.'
She gave me a staccato laugh, crinkling appealingly around the eyes, and opened a drawer in a little wooden desk to withdraw a package of the same long cigarettes Nana smoked.
She handed me one and lit them both with practiced precision. 'I can't smoke in the shop,' she said. 'Bad for the image. I learned about image the hard way. Image is the reason the geniuses at Norman Stillman Productions would want to keep me quiet.'
I parked that one for the meantime. 'What happened?'
'Very bad energies. Rebecca was just a kid. She had a crush on Toby Vane. Her stepfather told her about the thing at Ontario, and she wanted to go. I figured what the hell, and we went.'
'And Toby got his hands on her.'
'Well, that was easy under the circumstances. He was all charm. She was right in the front row, naturally.'
'Why naturally?'
She gave me her level gaze. It made me want to ask her out to dinner. 'That'll keep,' she said, waving a dismissive hand and fanning some lavender toward me. 'So he asked her if she wanted to see the car up close, and she did. Then he asked if she'd like to see his dressing room. I wasn't near her at the time. It was a big trailer that was parked right near the track.'
'I've seen it.'
'And the next thing I knew I felt something terrible sweep over me and found myself running toward the trailer. I was about a hundred feet away when the door opened and Rebecca fell out of it, down the stairs, and onto the ground. Her face was covered with blood.'
'He'd hit her.'
'He'd hit her many times. Her nose was fractured and her lip was split, and two of her teeth were broken. When I took her in my arms she coughed the teeth into my lap.' She gave me an apologetic smile. 'I don't mean to be dramatic, but that's what happened. She was hysterical. This was her hero. She had his pictures all over her room. They were signed. They said 'To Rebecca with love, Toby.' When I got home I tore them all down. She'd been taken to the hospital by then.'
'Where was her stepfather?'
'Oh, he was busy. He was busy for hours. He had to clean up after Toby. When he got home I told him I was leaving. By the time I got Rebecca out of the hospital I was already gone. I'd taken the apartment over this shop.'
'Who is he?'
'You really don't know?' I shook my head.
'Hartsfield is my first husband's name,' she said. 'In addition to being a widow, I'm deliriously happy to be the ex-Mrs. Dixie Cohen.'
I sat back, and the books creaked and let out an aromatic gust. The two of us smoked in self-defense. The silence stretched around us. In the street someone laughed drunkenly.
'So,' she said. 'Is there anything else?'
'Yeah,' I said. 'Charge for the catalogs. Three bucks each. That way you're ahead either way.'
She gave me a full-bore smile. 'I knew I liked you,' she said.
16
