Killer Pancake

body, I rode down the escalator.

The Mignon counter looked as if a bomb blast had hit it. Tape held together the web of remaining glass. Plywood covered the bare spots. The broken blind was also haphazardly covered with strips of plywood. Harriet Wells, her blond hair frothed up in another of her twists, her Mignon uniform crisp, was tidying up. She looked up at me with a surprised, happy face.

“You’re the last person I expected to see here!” she said with a high, tinkly laugh. She sat on her stool beside the counter and scowled. “This is always a slow morning.”

I shifted the printout around and said, “Listen, Harriet, I’m looking for a receipt that I might have dropped in here the other day, when Nick fell—” She tilted her head at me appraisingly, then closed her eyes and shuddered. “—anyway,” I went on, “the purchase wasn’t for me, it was for someone else, and now they’re wanting the receipt, and blaming me that I lost it.”

Before she could answer, a male customer came up to the far side of the counter and began to test perfumes. Harriet slid off her stool, came over to the counter and reached underneath for a Tupperware container of muffins.

“Are you hungry?” she asked with a bright smile.

My stomach reminded me that I had had quite a bit of caffeine and nothing substantial in the last three hours. “Of course. Especially for something you’ve baked.”

“These are made with sour cream,” she confessed as she took the top off the container. “But see if you can guess the other ingredient. You’re so good at that.”

I took a bite. Sour cream, though fattening, was a good ingredient for keeping things fresh. I even had a pound cake recipe that required that the finished cake be wrapped for twenty-four hours before being served. The muffin was buttery, rich, and delicious. It was flecked with tiny bits of green that tasted like mint.

“Can’t tell what it is,” I said, then looked down at the customer testing perfumes. It was Reggie Hotchkiss. My heart sank.

“Okay, Harriet,” he crowed. “Tell me what was so important you had to see me on a Sunday morning.”

“Look in the trash, if you want,” Harriet said over her shoulder. “This shouldn’t take long … I never tell Hotchkiss a thing. You can try in front of the counter too, although the cleaning crew’s been in to vacuum up all the glass and … you know.”

Did I ever. I scooted behind the counter and slipped the computer paper out of my blouse. What a relief. I just hoped Harriet hadn’t seen it When Reggie quizzed Harriet and sprayed one cologne on his right arm, the other on his left, I looked up at the security camera. From where it was positioned, it could take in the entire front of the counter, the cash register—at right angles to the counter—and the file cabinets and storage areas behind the counter.

Harriet was murmuring questions to Reggie, and he replied more expansively and loudly to each inquiry. Eventually he began to yak about perfume, citrus versus floral, pine versus patchouli. He seemed to be ignoring me, but I’d seen him do that before. I took another bite of muffin.

First things first. I put the computer paper beside the large blue ledger that I’d seen Dusty flipping through Thursday, the first day I’d visited the Mignon counter. Then I squinted at the file drawer. I remembered Dusty writing down all the information about my complexion and putting it on a client card. Would it be filed under my name or Dusty’s? I took another careful bite of muffin and slid open the file drawer. Routt. Satterfield. Wells. Each file was jammed with the cards. Dusty had the least, Claire’s file bulged, and Harriet had the most, which would make sense since she’d been working for Mignon the longest. I wondered if Dusty’s was slender because she hadn’t been working there as long as the others or because she was less successful. Or could it be because she’d been moving client cards over to Hotchkiss Skin & Hair?

Harriet looked around to see what I was doing. I held up the muffin with one hand, while making an enthusiastic okay sign with the other. She nodded, rolled her eyes in exasperation, and turned back to Reggie. He seemed to be enjoying making Harriet uncomfortable. I slid the file drawer closed and walked over to the trash receptacle. It was empty. My eye fell on the ledger and printout. I struggled with my conscience for thirty seconds, then opened the ledger first. If Claire was a top sales associate that Reggie was trying to get rid of, the proof should be in there, and be easier to read than the printout. Maybe they would subpoena the ledger at Reggie’s trial.

I reached over and helped myself to another green-speckled muffin as I turned the ledger pages and tried to decipher them.

“Goldy!”

I looked around. Dusty was standing by the lipsticks looking disheveled and tired, but ready to work in her Mignon smock. “Why is Reggie Hotchkiss here on a Sunday morning, do you know? What are you doing here? My God, look at this mess.”

I felt immediate guilt. What was I doing, anyway? “I’m just looking at this sales ledger. Show me what’s what as compared to the printouts, will you? Did Claire have good sales?”

Dusty glanced down at Reggie and Harriet, then said, “Well, I guess so.” She moved to the ledger. “She was getting there. Let’s see.” She flipped expertly through the ledger pages and then ran a gnawed fingernail across a row of columns. “April, I had eight hundred in sales, Claire had fifteen hundred twenty-two, Harriet had—whoa! three thousand and fifty.” She flipped a page. “May, I didn’t do so hot. Six-fifty. Claire had two thousand eighty and Harriet had twenty-five hundred. See? That’s what happens when the weather’s warm. People don’t shop.”

“Were you planning to take your clients over to Hotchkiss Skin & Hair?” I inquired.

Dusty put her finger to her lips and looked both ways. Harriet and Reggie were indeed watching us. “Shh! You want to get me into trouble?”

“Tell me this,” I said in a very low tone. “Did you take the receipt out of my bag at Hotchkiss Skin & Hair while I was getting my facial?”

“Goldy! God! What’s the matter with you? What receipt?”

I decided to cast the bait out one more time. “I’m sorry, I guess it’s just because of your grandfather, and because you were expelled from Elk Park Prep. For stealing.”

She colored deeply. “Ex-cuse me?”

“Well, why were you expelled from Elk Park Prep? Wasn’t it for stealing?” I had a sudden, devastating thought. “Or because you were pregnant? With Colin?”

She turned around and closed the book with a dramatic thwack. “I’m like … who told you that?”

“Well, Julian wasn’t sure….”

Dusty rolled her made-up eyes dramatically. “It wasn’t for stealing. And my mother was pregnant, not me. I told you, the woman does not know the meaning of birth control. I was expelled for drinking. I mean, Julian should know, he was there!”

“For drinking.”

“Yes—in that stupid bio class we had together. We had to do some dumb test about chlorophyll. We were putting sugar into grain alcohol and then placing strawberry leaves in the solution, and then we had to wait for something to happen, God knows what. I mean, it was way boring.” She lifted her hands and shook them like a frustrated Italian shopkeeper. “So I figured, hey. We’ve got strawberries, we’ve got sugar, we’ve got booze. We’ve got daiquiris! So I … Goldy, what’s wrong?”

What was wrong? My knees felt rubbery. My hands were trembling. Damn, but I must be more tired than I thought.

“Okay, look,” I said impatiently. “Just show me how the printout compares to the ledger. Please,” I added.

Dusty flipped the ledger back open and then shuffled the fingers of her free hand through the printout. When she came to the right pages, her pretty face wrinkled in puzzlement as she looked first at the ledger, then at the printout, then back at the ledger.

“Something’s wrong here,” she said, exasperated. “The printout has Claire’s figures for June much lower than what she put in the ledger, because of some big returns—”

There was a sudden pop. I looked incredulously at the top of the sales ledger. It had been torn … it had been shot.

Dusty looked over her shoulder and grabbed me.

Pop! went another bullet, smack into the glass case containing makeup. The glass