Free Shoe Addicts Anonymous by Beth Harbison Page A

something caught between her teeth.
    “You have something….” Helene pointed at her teeth.
    “Excuse me?” Pam looked at her blankly.
    Helene narrowed her eyes and bent toward Pam, looking more closely and saying, “You have something caught between your front teeth.”
    It was during the infinitesimal fraction of a second in the middle of the word teeth that Helene realized exactly what it was stuck between Pam’s front teeth.
    It was a curly black hair.
    And without a shred of hard evidence, Helene was 100 percent certain it belonged to Jim.
    “I do?” Pam asked, still unaware that the person before her had figured out she had pubic hair caught in her teeth.
    “It’s…” Helene hesitated. There was no way to say it. And with the apparent certainty that it belonged to her husband, there was really no reason to say it. “It’s nothing,” she said. “Trick of the light.”
    “Oh. Okay.” Pam gave a fake smile, clearly displaying the hair between her teeth.
    Yup, there was no doubt about what it was. Even proper DAR women like Nancy Cabot would be able to tell. And there were plenty of them here tonight.
    Helene was almost going to enjoy that.
    “Do you know where I can find Ji—Senator Zaharis?” Pam was hanging herself, and Jim, with every word.
    Whether it was the wine or the past ten years, Helene couldn’t say for sure, but she answered, “Last I saw him, he was in the hallway by the foyer, talking to someone.” She should have cared, but she didn’t. At the moment, she didn’t care about anything much.
    She’d shoplifted.
    And gotten caught.
    And her husband’s assistant, who called him by his first name—and who, come to think of it, had been missing, along with Jim, for some time after they arrived at this party—had a black pubic hair stuck between her front teeth.
    It wasn’t a good night for Helene.
    “Mrs. Zaharis, we meet again.” It was the photographer, Gerald.
    Maybe Helene’s buzz was wearing off in the wake of the administrative assistant revelation she’d just experienced, but suddenly Gerald looked a lot less handsome and a lot more feral.
    “We do,” she answered him, accustomed to answering at these events in as charming a manner as she could muster.
    At the moment, that consisted of we do .
    “I was sorry we were interrupted earlier.”
    She was entering a cynical mode. Something about this guy, his persistence, and the fact that he seemed to be everywhere she looked tonight, disconcerted her. “Why is that?”
    “Because we weren’t through talking.”
    “We weren’t?”
    He looked at her coolly. “No, I was going to tell you about one of the more interesting photo sessions I’ve had lately. In fact, it was just yesterday.” He hesitated a moment longer than a kind person would have. “Did you do anything interesting yesterday?”
    Apart from getting caught shoplifting? “Not that I can recall.” Her alcohol haze was burning off.
    “That’s funny,” Gerald said. “Because you figured prominently in the more interesting part of my day.”
    Helene looked at him. “Me?” She had a bad, bad feeling that she was going to get an answer she didn’t like.
    Gerald nodded. “I was at Ormond’s department store yesterday. It’s their semiannual sale, you know.”
    “Is it?”
    They both knew she was bluffing.
    He nodded, playing the game. “I took a few shots there.”
    “Photos, you mean.” She arched an eyebrow. “Or were you drinking tequila in the men’s room?”
    He chuckled. “Good thing I wasn’t, or I would have missed a damn good story.”
    “You don’t look like the sort of guy who’d find anything of interest in Ormond’s.” She grazed an eye over his Super-Mart–quality suit. “Were you just passing through on the way to the parking lot?”
    “As a matter of fact, I was. I’d gone to get a battery for my camera at one of those fancy jewelry stores. It always drove me crazy that I had to get a fussy little battery like that