Killer Pancake

her wrapper-debris into a small pile on the asphalt roof and sat.

She took another greedy drag on her cigarette, then blew a thin stream of smoke upward, “So where’s your escort? He was kind of cute for a rent-a-thug. What’d he catch you doing anyway?”

When I opened my mouth to reply, my stomach howled in protest. I ignored it and said, “Nothing. Security’s just suspicious, that’s all.”

She lifted one eyebrow. “Suspicious of a caterer?”

“Maybe they were suspicious of the wrong person,” I countered. “Look, Frances, I’ve seen your duct-taped sneakers and secondhand clothes. I know you’re a tightwad and proud of it. I even heard you wrote an article on what a ripoff all makeup is. For someone with your thrifty bent, you sure bought a lot of cosmetics today.” I watched for her reaction, but behind the unaccustomed makeup, she was stone-faced. “Isn’t it about time you told me what you’re doing with Mignon?” I pressed. I was getting lightheaded from hunger, but I was weary of Frances’s evasions. “Why the sudden interest in cosmetics at a Denver department store, when your beat is Aspen Meadow, forty miles away?”

She smiled, leaned over, and picked up one of the red shoes to crush out her butt. “You keep asking me that,” she said, then smiled slyly.

If I didn’t eat soon, I was going to pass out. I tried to think. Frances didn’t care about Claire as a person, and she certainly couldn’t be convinced to have any sympathy for a grieving Julian. I needed another angle.

“Okay, Frances, here’s the deal,” I announced grittily. Caterers could be just as tough as small-town reporters. “To you, this whole thing is a story. What kind, I don’t know. But my assistant, Julian Teller, wants to know what happened to his girlfriend. He needs to know what happened to his girlfriend. And I need to know, because Julian Teller is like family, not to mention that he’s running my catering business right now. The guy is having a very hard time. He’s simply not going to be able to function until we get this cleared up.” If then, I added mentally. Over at the food fair, a group of teenagers in T-shirts, ragged shorts, and scruffy high-top shoes shuffled along devouring pizza. They stopped by the open tent where the jazz band was finishing up its set I took a deep breath, which was unwise: The aroma of the pizza sauce, garlic, and melted cheese made me dizzy with hunger. “So. If you don’t tell me what you’re up to, I’m going to march right into the Prince & Grogan offices and tell them who you are and where you’re from. Then, in case there’s no action, I’m going to get on the phone with every Mignon executive in Albuquerque—”

“Tell me, Goldy,” Frances interrupted blithely, “do you ever listen to jazz?”

“Jazz? Of course I do. So what?”

“Y’ever heard of Ray Charles?”

“Frances, what on earth is the matter with you?”

“Ask a simple question, you get a simple answer.”

Frances was losing her grip. Perhaps it was the lethal combination of Marlboros and M&Ms. Then again, maybe she was trying to be clever by pulling her usual routine. She invariably changed the subject to get away from whatever they didn’t want to discuss.

“Tell me what you’re doing with Mignon,” I demanded fiercely.

“Investigative reporting. That’s it, I swear.”

“I don’t think an atheist can swear,” I snapped. “It doesn’t mean anything.” When she chuckled, I insisted, “What kind of investigative reporting?”

She sighed and readied for the Prince & Grogan bags at her feet “Your husband isn’t the only one with medical training. I did a year of med school before turning to journalism—”

“Excuse me, but that’s the ex-husband.”

“Sorry.” Her mournful look was accentuated by the heavy makeup Harriet Wells had applied around her eyes. Here we were, I reflected, two normally unadorned women who’d been outwardly transformed to look like a couple of hookers—and just so we could get information. “By the way, Goldy, I was wondering something.” Frances lit another cigarette. “Did you hear that your ex-husband beat up his new girlfriend last night? She called the cops and we picked it up at the Journal, on the police band. Seems she slid his Jeep into a ditch during the storm, where it stuck in the mud. The doc got really pissed. She’s across the street in the hospital with broken ribs and bruised arms.”

An image of this poor, pained woman, a new girlfriend I wasn’t aware of, floated up in my mind. The Jerk had always been able to find fresh female companionship. When a current girlfriend didn’t work out, or ended up in a problematic place like the hospital, he would quickly find a replacement, I thought about Arch. Although he knew why I’d divorced his father, Arch had never witnessed the violence that had destroyed my marriage. If his classmates at Elk Park Prep heard about this incident from a tabloid-type article by Frances in the Mountain Journal, which I wouldn’t put past her …

I demanded, “Are you going to run a story about it in the paper?”

Frances took a deep drag. “Nah. The publisher’s wife is pregnant and John Richard is her doctor. The wife wants the publisher to hold off on running any story until she delivers.”

A headache nagged behind my eyes. “Look, Frances, John Richard’s not my problem anymore. What’s the deal with the department store? I have to go get something to eat, and then I need to go visit a friend in the hospital.”

She pretended to look puzzled. “Not the girlfriend—”

“Frances! What are you up to?”

She set her face in steely anger and tossed her butt in an arc across the roof. “I’m investigating the false claims of Mignon Cosmetics to make women look younger. Period.”

I was incredulous, partly at Frances’s own naivete. “You’re kidding. That’s it?” She frowned and nodded. “Was Claire Satterfield helping you?” I asked.

“I didn’t even know who Claire Satterfield was before the accident,” Frances replied. Her tone indicated that she sure wished she had known Claire. Just think of all the information a Mignon sales associate could have provided….

“But why did you bother to find out she’d had other boyfriends? Why do you think she was deliberately run down?”

“Background, Goldy, background. The claims are what’s news.”

“But for heaven’s sake, those claims are not news. This so-called story has been in books, newspapers, magazines, on radio and television. Haven’t you read any Naomi Wolf? Get real.”

“What are you talking about?” she said bitterly. She blew smoke out her nostrils. “I beg to differ.”

“Look, Frances,” I said. “In their hearts, women know all this outrageously expensive goop doesn’t make them look younger. But the cosmetics people try to guilt-trip every female in the country into feeling they have to do something to take care of themselves. Otherwise, these companies want women to believe, they’ll grow old and ugly. They’ll never have money, a husband, a white picket fence, a lover, a fur coat, a station wagon, and somebody to drive away with when you get a flat tire. That’s the name of the cosmetics game.”

She glared at me and held the cigarette aloft. “Foucault-Reiser is the parent company of Mignon. F-R has been experimenting with cosmetics for thirty years. And experimenting in ways you would not believe,” she added darkly.

In my mind’s eye, I saw heaps of rabbit carcasses. Hard to take on an empty stomach. “Well, I guess I sort of would—”

Heedless, Frances went on: “Foucault-Reiser launched the hideously expensive Mignon line five years ago, with all kinds of wild claims, fancy packaging, and questionable products. Control the destiny of your face. Like hell. Large pink plastic jars of cream didn’t sell, so Mignon switched to dark green glass jars with gold lids, the kinds of containers you imagine once held royal jewels and medieval potions. The message was: This is magic stuff. Sales took off.”

I nodded and remembered eons ago, when Arch asked if he could have one of my empty perfume jars for a Dungeons and Dragons prop.

Frances reached into her bag and pulled out a bottle of makeup. “Nobody wants a jar of mud—otherwise known as foundation—with a little white plastic top.” She wrenched the shiny cover off the lid, revealing—sure enough—a white plastic top. “But they put a tall gold top over the white plastic so that consumers will think they’re getting something of infinite value. And then there’s perfume …”