Tiffany gripped the edge of the table and struggled to her feet. She threw me a look of triumph and bowed like she was taking a curtain call; only, she kept going. Her face struck the table nose first, accompanied by a loud cracking sound, while blood splashed onto the glass surface from the modest bullet hole between her breasts.
Faye was on her knees beside Barron. She found the key to the handcuffs and freed herself, then hurried over and threw her arms around me, pressing her body tightly against mine while her lips played thank-yous over my face and neck.
She released me, saying, “I’m sorry about putting your life at risk tonight. They’d have killed us — me, for certain — if you hadn’t stepped up to the plate the way you did. I owe you my life, Hyland with an H, and I always repay my debts.”
Her lips found mine again, briefly, before she went after the flash drive, clutching it like a winning lottery ticket before she stashed it and the .22 in a pocket of her robe, which she didn’t bother closing. She was in the process of handing over my driver’s license when I said, “Is it true what they told me about you?”
The question caught her off guard. She reared to attention and crossed her arms over her breasts. “If they said I was a federal agent setting them up for a bust, yes,” she said. I shook my head.
“Look, later I’ll show you my ID and my gratitude, but right now the phone is over there. Call nine-one-one while I throw on some clothes.” She wheeled around and fled the room, and—
That was the last I saw of Faye Allyson.
Or Doreen Kyle.
The cops sent me home after I told them enough about what I knew to satisfy them that I’d innocently wandered into some kind of lovers’ quarrel that would not be untangled until Doreen Kyle turned up. Two federal agents arrived at my door the next day, flashing badges and phony smiles. They got the same story. I didn’t mention the flash drive either time. I played dumb when the agent chewing a lump of gum surreptitiously asked about “Faye Allyson” and answered their questions about Million-Dollar Money Machine, most dealing with Honeychile Lane, the cover girl who operated the money-machine lever.
It took a few weeks before the story a columnist for the Los Angeles Daily tagged “The Mystery of the Missing Mistress” faded into a few paragraphs on the back pages of the news section, then disappeared entirely. By then, I’d received enough media attention to get work doing research for Jeopardy and Who Dies Next? a reality pilot for Fox.
The jobs lasted a couple of months and I was able to catch up on outstanding debts before the money ran out and I went back to feeding myself after funeral services.
Every so often, I slugged the flash drive into my computer and wondered what I’d learn were I able to bust the password.
Wondered who the customers were and the small fortune the drive would bring if I knew where to sell it.
Wondered if I’d still be alive had Barron and Tiffany learned that what I’d handed them was blank, a last-second substitution I made before leaving home, planning to use my “Oops!” as an excuse to see Faye Allyson again.
Most of all, I wondered about Faye, who had skipped out of Noel Webster’s love nest leaving behind ambiguity and unanswered questions.
And me.
I was trying to decide between another Beluga on blini or the Kobe beef on toast points at the gathering for Martin Gardener, the real-estate tycoon who’d made his billions turning Indian desert wasteland into gambling spas, when some sixth sense made me turn around.
The woman sauntering toward me from halfway across the tented courtyard was my kind of beautiful, tall, lean, and lanky, her body as sublime as a building designed by Frank Gehry, sending temptation inside a black mourning dress that quit mid-thigh and contained swaying breasts that cried for attention. Her platinum-blond hair piled high to give fuller display to an angelic face promising heaven on earth. Her green eyes flashing lustful signals to go with equally dangerous lips that I recognized even before they connected with mine.
“Hello, Faye,” I said, when I could breathe again.
“Not Faye,” she said. “Helena.”
“Elena?”
She shook her head and brightened the tent with her smile. “Helena. With an H. Same as Hyland with an H.”
“You’ll always be Faye to me,” I said, reaching into my pocket for the flash drive I always carried with me against this moment.
Distilling the Truth
by Marilyn Todd
Copyright © 2006 Marilyn Todd
Art by Allen Davis
Marilyn Todd’s name will forever be linked in most readers’ minds with Ancient Rome. Her twelfth book in the series whose protagonist, Claudia Seferius, solves mysteries while plying her trade as a wine merchant was published in January. (See Sour Grapes/Severn House.) In this short story, however, Ms. Todd chooses for her setting Cognac, France, the town in which she recently settled, and a time in the not too distant past.
The instant Marie-Claude’s husband told her that he’d compiled a dossier detailing the chief inspector’s corruption, complete with dates, names, and times, then placed the file personally in the hands of the commissioner, she knew it was all over. No wonder he waited until he’d finished his tartiflette to tell her what he’d done. She’d have thrown the damned dish on the floor and to hell with dinner, and he could have whistled for his île flottante as well. As it was, she didn’t hear him out. What on earth was the point of lengthy explanations?
“You’re a fool, Luc. No one likes a whistle-blower.”
“I didn’t join the police to be popular.”
“It’s the end of your career, you know that? They won’t keep you on in Paris after this!”
“Blackmail, extortion, what was I supposed to do, Marie-Claude?” He laid down Le Figaro and turned his gaze to her. “For years, Picard has been preying on the very people he was meant to protect. I couldn’t simply turn aside.”
“And I’m sure the commissioner shook your hand and thanked you warmly for your efforts.”
One side of Luc’s face twisted uncomfortably. “Not exactly, no.”
“You see? No one likes a whistle-blower. They’d rather close ranks and have a bastard in their midst than admit to one bad apple, and you already know my feelings about the commissioner.”
Like when they were invited over to dinner and she overheard him talking to her husband in his study when she went to find the bathroom.
“Your wife is truculent, selfish, and a pain in the cul, Luc—”
The rest was drowned by children’s laughter upstairs, but who cared? That was the last time she’d eat at that pig’s house, she told Luc, and if her husband felt bad about making excuses when future invitations arrived, then so much the better. She wanted nothing to do with a man who insulted her, and it wouldn’t have hurt Luc to have stuck up for her, either.
“—couldn’t agree more, sir—”
Truculent and selfish, her cul. She pushed her thick curls back from her face. She had married too young, that was the trouble, and to a man ten years older than herself at that. Admittedly, after six years Luc was no less handsome and his back was as strong, but that type of love can’t sustain a marriage indefinitely. And when he wasn’t working all the hours le bon Dieu sent, he had his head stuck in a file or wanted to talk politics, and not even French politics, either. Honestly! Who cared whether rich diamond deposits had been found in Siberia or how many communists this Senator Mc-Whatever-His-Name accused in the American State Department? What was going to actually change people’s lives were things like the new television transmissions that were now coming out in colour, not some piece of paper signed by Egypt and Britain over a canal in Suez that Luc insisted was going to have far-reaching consequences. But however exasperated Marie-Claude got with her husband, she’d never once known him to lose his temper.