Free Deadly Dues by Linda Kupecek Page A

ago, with a letter opener in his back. And Gretchen had been right: that desk would never get clean. And who was this person at the other end of the phone?
    â€œLulu?” The impatient, petulant tone identified the caller. It was Sherilyn. Stan had left his Tupperware wife and twin Dobermans for Sherilyn five years ago. And suddenly she had become a producer, with no credits, no background, and as far as I could tell, no talent or brains. She had never called me before, so how was I supposed to recognize her voice? She must have dug through her casting files to get my number, or maybe she and Stan had posted my photo and contact info on their kitchen wall, where they had thrown darts at it. Now I was being really paranoid. I doubted I was on their radar enough to warrant that much attention.
    Some people said Sherilyn came from a good family who couldn’t figure out what went wrong, like the poor folks in The Bad Seed . Others said she was a sociopath. And still others simply thought she was Lucifer with blonde hair and pink lipstick.
    I barely knew her. We saw each other at parties and talked about nothing in order to avoid talking about anything too charged with tension. At the Arts Club reception, we had exchanged meaningful words about the garlic shrimp (which I was trying to stuff in my handbag to take home to Horatio, and she had caught me in the act, so I had to explain) and the music, but I had never actually spoken with her for more than five minutes at a time. Why on earth would she be asking me about Stan?
    â€œHello?” I said.
    â€œYou heard me, you bitch,” she snapped. “Where is Stan?”
    â€œHow should I know?” I snapped back, conveniently neglecting to mention that I had some knowledge of his whereabouts.
    â€œHe told me he was meeting you last night. And he never came home.”
    My anxiety at the revelation that she knew Stan had called me last night for a meeting was overcome by revulsion at the thought that she could think that I could be involved with Stan. I might be a disenfranchised, unemployed, nearly bankrupt, aging, former dog-food shill, but I still had standards.

Food For Thought
    Moments after Sherilyn had hung up on me, I was in the kitchen, rummaging in the fridge for anything that wasn’t Bow Wow Dog Food. It was after one in the afternoon, and time for some sort of lunch, to replace the sumptuous meal I had missed at La Mer. With a wonderful early Marian McPartland album playing in the background, I shoved around pickle jars, outdated probiotic yogurt containers, wilted celery, soft green peppers, and five large slabs of cheddar cheese bought on sale. I devoted a moment to praying that I wouldn’t eventually end up dining on doggie chow if I didn’t get those royalties that Stan had mislaid.
    I found a brown rice casserole that I had made earlier in the week, and sat elegantly on the kitchen floor, my back against the fridge, eating the clumps of aging rice and veggies delicately with a sterling silver fork (fifty cents, Saint Michael’s rummage sale, and I’m still looking for the rest of the set). It was cold, but still edible, which might have been overstating its virtues at this point in its career as a meal.
    Forced at last to contemplate the day, which unfortunately also required some cursory thought on the events of the night before, I was not heartened. I, along with my pals, had found the definitely dead body of a man who had done evil things to each of us. We had fled the scene in a totally amateurish way, no matter how many detectives Pete and I had played. My heart began to pound at the thought of the police breaking down my door in the next few days, waving guns and threatening me, the famous Lu of Doggie Doggie Bow Wow, with prison and worse. What if they still used rubber pipes to interrogate people? What if they used cattle prods or worse? What if they took away my lipstick? I suddenly realized that I was chewing my