The Santa Ana wind whipped up, hot and dry as a kiln, the kind of night that makes quiet housewives caress the edge of their carving knives. I sat in Mona’s apartment, watching her watch herself; a platinum blonde with eyes like pool water—clear, blue, and shallow enough to drown a beetle. She’d applied lipstick, giving her reflection in a gilded mirror a brief nod, like she were greeting her only genuine friend.
“Do you think this shade of red makes me look dangerous, Frank?” her pouty lips slick as fresh paint.
“You look like a crime scene,” I leant back in an Eames lounge chair, nursing a glass of rye.
She laughed, a tinkling sound that held no more warmth than a block of dry ice. A private investigator’s opinion didn’t matter, only that I admired the view. To Mona, the universe was a gallery, and she was the masterpiece on display. The rest of us? Dust on the frames.
I was there because of Ivan Whittaker, a publisher who’d died three weeks earlier, leaving a penniless wife. The latest in a trail stretching back over twelve months, a tidy little graveyard of guys with high opinions of their own virtues, but they all carried the same heavy cargo of sin and money. The common denominator, besides a cold slab down at the county morgue and the inability to keep their peckers in their pants, a scrap of paper tucked into silk-lined pockets.
Mona’s telephone number.
I’d reached for the phone. Finger hovering over the dial, heavy as a lead pipe. I knew better than to get tangled up with a woman who collected dead millionaires like gold charms, but twenty bucks a day plus expenses buys a lot of amnesia, and my rent was a month overdue.
“Ivan was so boring,” she sighed, adjusting a diamond necklace, Whittaker’s grandmother’s, parading it like a scalp. “He wouldn’t shut up about his marital troubles. As if I had nothing better to do than listen to a middle-aged man complain. Honestly, Frank, his departure was a charitable act on my part.”
“Charitable,” I repeated, my hand drifting toward the pocket where my.38 slept. “The D.A. has another word for it. Murder”
She turned her head; her gaze was sharp enough to cut glass. “I much prefer culling. Men are like cheap jewellery. Nice when draped over you, but eventually they lose their sparkle. They want things. Attention. Empathy. Love even.” She spat out the last two words as if she had tasted a bad oyster.
I looked around the room; a museum devoted to her ego. Photos of Mona on every surface.
“You’re sick, Mona.”
She stood up, gliding toward me. Her perfume smelled of crushed gardenias.
“I’m perfect, Frank,” she whispered, leaning close enough that I saw my reflection in her dilated pupils.
Suddenly, my knees turned to jello. My head spun. She’d spiked my drink.
She smiled, already turning away, completely forgetting I was even there.