Killer Pancake

“Don’t tell me,” I replied evenly. “Bob Woodward as Elizabeth Taylor. In a Marlboro ad. No, wait. Doing the roof scene from Mary Poppins. Except you don’t look like Julie Andrews, either.”

She blew a smoke ring and gestured for me to have a seat. The two-foot-square platform contained litter that could only be hers: an M&M bag, a Snickers wrapper, an empty can of Jolt cola. Of course, Frances was too much of a skinflint to spring for a ticket to the food fair. Which made her enthusiastic cream/rouge/lipstick/concealer/foundation/mascara shopping spree this morning all the more intriguing. I brushed 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.”