Part 21 (2/2)
”You don't seriously think your husband and I . . . ?” Eve sipped her beer, because she couldn't finish her sentence.
Lolique chuckled. ”Honey, I'd sell you the schlub if I could keep his money and get away with it.”
”I. Don't. Want. Him,” Eve said. ”Never did. Never would.”
Lolique looked puzzled. Bad for wrinkles. ”Who is your boyfriend?”
Eve hesitated. ”Vinney Carnevale.”
Lolique slapped the table. ”You are so screwed.” She chuckled. ”I didn't know,” she said. ”I did not know.” She got up fast and without grace. ”Potty break or I'll pee my pants.”
The flamboyant columnist waved to her adoring public as she crossed the bar. I turned to Eve. ”You and the councilman?”
She returned my skepticism. ”You and Jaconetti?”
”Seriously,” I said. ”Is she trying to pin the fire on McDowell?”
”She seriously is, but what did she mean by saying I was screwed? For dating Vinney? I figured that out, but she meant something entirely different, in a nasty way. Mad, why did we find the councilman's sweater at Vinney's the night of the fires? What can that mean?”
”That means,” I said, ”I can't wait to get my hands on it to see if Sampson's death was in any way connected to . . . Gwendolyn's.”
Eve frowned. ”Who the h.e.l.l is Gwendolyn?”
Thirty-two.
The only real elegance is in the mind; if you've got that, the rest really comes from it.
-DIANA VREELAND ”I suspect that Isobel is Gwendolyn,” I whispered. ”Shh. Here comes trouble with a capital L.”
After a few more Manhattans, Lolique listed like a sail-boat in a high wind, and though she wanted to drive her Beemer when we left, I took her keys from her. ”We're taking you home. No arguments.”
”Where to?” Eve asked.
”To my castle, Jeeves,” the six-foot s.e.xpot said as we folded her into Eve's little sports car.
”The name is Eve and where may we find your castle?”
Lolique ticked off a set of convoluted and confusing twists and turns. ”If you drive off a cliff into Mystic River,” she said when she finished, ”you've gone too far.”
”Great,” Eve mumbled as she started her car. ”Directions from an inebriated bimbette.”
”I wasn't with the Bimbettes, I was one of the Florettes, a troupe of world-cla.s.s exotic dancers. That's where I got my stage name, LaFleur-that's French for the flower. And that's where the old goat rescued me. He said I made him laugh, so he pried me off my pole and carried me to his castle, like a rich prince in an antique Jag. Then he took off his hair. Rude awakening.”
I snorted.
Eve grinned, reached over, and gave me a playful shove.
As we drove through the farthest reaches of the Mystick Falls woods, Lolique was lying on the tiny backseat of Eve's Mini Cooper, her legs in the air, walking her spikes across Eve's closed convertible top.
Eve looked in her rearview mirror. ”You put a hole in my roof, you'll pay for it.”
”I can afford it. I'm rich!”
Lolique said the word ”rich” the way Tony the Tiger says ”great.” But it was obvious that flaunting her money was part of her celebrity persona. Still, you'd think she'd be herself once in a while. Though she did say that she was ”what you see is what you get.”
After an aborted rendition of ”We're in the Money,” she laughed. ”We've got his money, and her money, even her father's money.”
”Who is the her, in 'her money'?” I asked.
”Saint Belle, the perfect.”
Belle? Isobel? I turned in my seat to look back at Lolique. ”I thought your husband's first wife was named Gwendolyn?”
”Gwen-do-lyn,” Lolique said with snark, like the drunk she was. ”No wonder she hated her first name.”
My heart raced to the point that I had to hold my chest to keep it in there. Gwendolyn Isobel. G. I., the first two initials in the ring. Except that Lolique had said Belle, not Isobel.
Heck, I thought I might have spoken the name of the person whose dresses were cut into quilt squares. Isobel could have been Belle's mother for all I knew. True, the man the woman spoke to in my vision had hair, which time could surely erase, but he'd seemed to dislike the woman so much, he'd never call her a saint.
According to the portrait at the dealers.h.i.+p, the ring definitely belonged to McDowell's wife, and since I found the ring in the quilt, that could have been the quilt that Gwendolyn Isobel and the man whose face I never saw were talking about. But the bones, who knew?
”Lolique, were those her clothes you gave me? Isobel's, I mean?”
”Screw the goat!” Lolique said with a military raise of her fist. ”He wanted them locked in the attic forever, but I picked the lock on the wardrobe and gave them to you. Expensive. Couldn't bring myself to . . . burn-”
Silence.
”Did she pa.s.s out in the middle of a sentence?” Eve asked.
I looked in the back. ”Yep.”
”With her legs in the air?”
That turned my attention. We burst into stifled laughter.
”Stop it,” she said, ”or I'll have to-”
”Pee your pants?” That was a long-standing joke of ours. I'd done exactly that once on Halloween when we'd sneaked out after dark, peeked in a window, and came face-to-face with a witch, Aunt Fiona to be exact.
”No, smarty. Pull over until I can drive again.”
”I'll drive,” Lolique said, punctuating her offer with a snort and a snore.
Following her pre-coma directions, we found ourselves on a narrowing, sandy lane lined with bushes, ripe with rose hips. ”We're lost,” Eve said.
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