“She’s just drunk. Look how big that pitcher is. She drank almost all of it.”
“What if she took something else?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Sleeping pills. Painkillers. And look how sunburned she is. She must have been out there all afternoon.”
M.J. woke up when we turned a cold shower on her. “Stop. Stop!” She covered her face with her hands and curled on her side in the group-size shower stall.
“Mary Jo Hollander, what did you take today?” Bitsey exclaimed in her sternest I-am-the-mother-around-here voice.
“Tequila. Leave me alone.”
“What else?” I turned the cold up to full blast.
“Nothing!” She squealed in protest. “Nothing else.”
“No pills?” Bitsey demanded, her blond hair beginning to droop in the spray from the five-point water delivery system. “Mary Jo! No pills?”
“Nooo!”
Bitsey and I shared a look. As one we decided to believe her. So I turned off the water, Bitsey found some towels, and together we got M.J. dry and changed and into bed. This was beginning to be a bad habit. After that, completely done in, we threw ourselves onto the twin couches in the living room.
Bitsey kicked off her shoes. “She shouldn’t be living alone.”
“We both live alone.”
“I don’t live alone.”
I massaged my left ankle, which still hurt from my adventures with the iron fence. “Your kids are gone. Jack’s never around. Face it, Bitsey, you’re just as alone as me and M.J.” I knew I was being mean for no reason, but I was in a pissy mood.
“On the rag are you?” Bitsey was a sweetheart, but she wasn’t totally defenseless.
She was no match for me, though. “At least I’m not too old to still have a period.”
She glared at me. Bitsey was very sensitive about the impending death of her forties. She’d gone through the same tortures when she was thirty-nine and her first daughter went off to college. Forty was old! Four years later her middle girl went off without too much trauma. But the baby had left last August, she’d turned forty-eight the next month, and according to her gynecologist, she was officially in menopause. She hadn’t yet recovered from any of it.
I knew she’d be okay once she actually turned fifty. But we had another year and a half till then. Despite my nasty mood, I probably shouldn’t have made that last crack.
“At least I won’t die alone,” she finally said, but without any real venom in her voice.
I hugged a silk-tasseled pillow to my chest. “Sorry.”
She nodded. “Me, too.”
We sat in silence, surrounded by the self-conscious splendor of M.J.’s home. Pure California posh. By day it was bright and elegant: white everything—floors, walls, carpets, furniture; art in every shade of red; and the bright green of potted palms and ferns. By night the lighting turned everything amber, dark emerald and the color of blood. Dramatic.
You’d think as M.J.’s best friend I would have been consulted on the decor. But Frank Hollander used a big interior design firm from L.A. for everything: home, restaurants and his latest venture, a boutique hotel in San Diego. Despite my professional jealousy I could appreciate the house’s artistic merit. But it didn’t suit M.J. She’s a big softy at heart, so that slick, polished look didn’t come naturally to her. She had to work at it.
“I’ll stay with her tonight.”
“Good idea,” Bitsey said. She sighed. “She needs to get out of here.”
“You mean a vacation?”
She shrugged. “Something like that.”
“The trouble is, if she leaves—even for a week—Wendy and Frank Jr. would be in here with the locks changed. Possession is nine-tenths of the law and all that.”
Prophetic words. Hours later, after we forced two cups of strong coffee into her, M.J. spilled all. “He left me with nothing. Well, practically nothing,” she wailed, sitting cross-legged on the bed.
It was a garbled tale, interrupted by a bout of vomiting and lots of tears. By the time we had the gist of it, M.J.’s head was beginning to clear. “All those years,” she muttered. “Seventeen years of marriage and he betrays me, not only with that…that freak of nature woman-wannabe, but he lied about taking care of me. The kids inherited the corporation, and everything belongs to it—the restaurants, the hotel, even my house. And my car, too!”
“Wreck it,” Bitsey muttered.
I swiveled my head to stare at her. “Wreck it? You mean the car?” M.J.’s Jaguar sedan is the most gorgeous hunk of metal and leather you’ve ever seen.
Scowling, yet also looking like she wanted to cry, Bitsey nodded. “Wreck the car, wreck the house, wreck his reputation.”
M.J. sat up against the leather upholstered headboard of her Ponderosa-size bed. Vindictiveness in Bitsey was enough to sober anyone. “Wreck my car?”
“Wreck the house?” I said. “What do you mean?”
Bitsey got up, turned her back on us and stared out at the pool and the cunningly lit courtyard that surrounded it. “He deserves to be punished.”
“He’s dead,” I pointed out. “That’s pretty significant punishment, don’t you think?”
She shook her head. “It’s not like we have to lie about him. The truth will do just fine.” She turned around. “Maybe a little public humiliation will teach those horrible kids of his to mend their ways while they still can.”
Personally I didn’t think Frank Jr., Celeste and Roger would learn anything from a stunt like she was proposing except to hate their father’s second wife even more than they already did. But what the hay. “I’m in. Heck, I’ll spread the word to everyone I know about Frank and how he really died. I’ll even write a damned press release and send it to every media outlet in Southern California—if that’s what M.J. wants. But Bits, the Jag? I don’t think I have it in me to wreck the Jag.”
I was trying to lighten the mood, but it wasn’t working, at least not with Bitsey. She planted her fists on her hips. “I say burn down the house and drive the car into the pool. What have we got to lose?”
I swallowed hard. I had never seen Bitsey so furious. It wasn’t like the stomping around, cursing fury I was prone to. I might fly off the handle, but Bitsey was too much the genteel Southern lady for that. Instead she was cold and bitter, very scary for such a truly nice person. Struck dumb by her outrageous suggestion, M.J. and I could only follow her as she headed for the kitchen.
“We can plant evidence to implicate Frank Jr. as the arsonist,” she went on. She was serious.
“And you know how to do this?” I asked. “Don’t you watch CSI? You can’t hide something like that.”
“We wouldn’t be hiding it. That’s the beauty of it all. We’d just make Frank Jr. look guilty. Or better yet, Wendy. They deserve it. And after all, they’ll be the ones to collect the insurance. I’m sure she can think of a hundred ways to spend that much money.”
She turned on the steam attachment of M.J.’s elaborate espresso machine. M.J. and I shared a look. Bitsey might be an avenging arsonist, but she made a damned good espresso.
It was after midnight. I had no business drinking coffee, even decaf with lots of milk. But we were avoiding liquor for M.J.’s sake, so coffee it was. We sat in the breakfast nook of M.J.’s kitchen, one of the only cozy rooms