Deadly Beloved(22)

“Julianne, I didn’t even know what she was doing for a living.”

“Oh. Yes. Well. Anyway, I’ll have to go through her agent, but I’m sure it can all be arranged. And I was thinking that maybe I’d invite a few members of the press too, you know, because—”

“Ah,” Liza said.

“I don’t know what you mean by that.” Julianne was stiff. “Ah.”

“Ah, now I understand what all this fuss is about. Why you want to give this party.”

“I want to give this party because Karla is a good friend of mine and I haven’t seen her in ages.”

“I never thought Karla was that good a friend of yours.”

“She was one of my closest. And so were you. We were almost a family, the four of us—”

“Six,” Liza said automatically.

“Whatever. We were almost a family, and now you’re saying God knows what. Honestly, Liza, that attitude of yours is going to get you in trouble.”

“It already has. On several occasions.”

“Well, then. You see what I mean.”

Liza kicked her right shoe off and listened to it land with a thud on the floor. She began to work her left shoe off with the toes of her right foot, digging at the shoe’s heel the way some people used toothpicks to dig at their teeth.

“Don’t you wish you could find out what Patsy MacLaren thought about all this?” Liza asked Julianne. “Wouldn’t you just love to hear it?”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

“Sure you do. Patsy MacLaren, relegated forever to obscurity. Karla Parrish, getting famous as a photographer. Karla Parrish getting famous as anything. Do you remember the things Patsy used to say about Karla?”

“Patsy and Karla were very good friends,” Julianne said.

The second shoe was off. The two shoes lay like dead white jellyfish on the carpet.

“Patsy MacLaren was never a friend to anyone,” Liza said, “and certainly not to awkward, drab girls who didn’t know how to dress.”

“Really,” Julianne said. “The things you think about to say. And I don’t see what good it does obsessing about poor Patsy now. She’s not even around for you to take it out on.”

“I think it’s a very good idea that she’s not around.”

“Well, I miss her,” Julianne said, “and you probably do too, if you’re honest about it. And besides, it’s hardly her fault that she’s—relegated to obscurity, as you put it.”

“I’ve got some work to get done around here,” Liza said. “Call me back when you’ve got some details on this thing.”

“Oh, I will. I will.”

“Say hello to Karla for me if you get the chance.”

“You can say hello to Karla yourself. At the party.”

“I’ve got to go, Julianne.”

Julianne said something else that Liza didn’t hear. Liza hung up and spent a moment staring at the phone, as if it would tell her things she needed to know, like how she could be almost fifty and still not satisfied with her life. Her parents’ generation had made such a point of trying to grow up. Maybe she should have made a point of it too, so that she didn’t feel adolescent and geriatric at the same time, staring at white shoes on a blue carpet.

Crap, Liza thought, standing up and heading for the small kitchen at the back.

It really was too bad there was no way of knowing what Patsy MacLaren would have thought about Karla Parrish making a success of herself. It really was too bad that Patsy had sunk out of sight and left not so much as a ripple in the water.

Still, Liza thought, sometimes you had to admit it. Sometimes life really did work out just the way you wanted it to.





9.


FORTY-SEVEN MINUTES LATER, AT precisely eighteen minutes after four o’clock, a black Volvo station wagon parked on the second level of a Philadelphia garage began to rock. The noise it made was so distinctive, the man in the glass ticket booth at the garage’s entrance began to get disturbed. He was worried that there were vandals in the garage, or teenagers looking to steal something they could sell for serious money. The neighborhood around there had been going to hell for years. The man put out his cigarette on the cement floor of his booth and stepped out into the air. He lit another cigarette and rocked back and forth on his heels. Maybe he ought to go back into the booth and call the cops. Maybe he ought to just walk away from there, take what money he could and leave. He wasn’t supposed to be smoking this cigarette. Nobody was supposed to smoke on duty in the garage. He took a deep drag and started up the incline.

The Volvo was parked in one of the spaces that faced that ramp. He saw it as soon as he came up over the rise, bucking and shuddering, as if somebody were having trouble with a standard transmission. For a moment he thought that must be what it was. Somebody was having trouble getting their car started. Then he saw the driver’s seat behind the wheel and realized that no one was there. The car was absolutely empty and the locks on the doors closest to him were pushed all the way down.