Death Runs in the Family Read Free

enough and pushed free of her grasp. He hopped down from her lap and sauntered off toward the bedroom with a careless flip of his long, graceful tail. Baba followed, giving a toss of her luxuriant tail for good measure.
    Maybe if I’d had a tail, I’d have done the same thing. But I didn’t, so I stayed put.
    In that instant, I reevaluated Kelli’s persona. Once you got past a face looking like it had been drawn upon by the more colorful contents of a crayon box, she was quite pretty, with a gorgeous kind of coloring that takes your breath away. I’d put her hair down to Clairol’s finest but knew then it was a natural pale blonde. Her eyes, huge and round, were the bluest blue I’ve seen outside a Paul Newman movie, even when red-rimmed and surrounded by running black mascara. Barely out of her teens, there was a residual sweetness to her that bad taste had yet to tarnish.
    Still, she was absolutely everything my classy, conservative, and well-bred mother would find appalling. Lila Hamilton Alvarez’s idea of bad taste hovers around the lines of an art gallery showcasing Andy Warhol’s work. I just had to get Mom and Kelli together one of these days. Then stand back and watch.
    “So tell me about Nick,” I said, getting up for a second cup of coffee. “He’s a real estate agent or something?” I noticed I could move my eyebrows again. Things were looking up.
    “He’s what they call a broker. And he was good. We had lots of money, even after the recession. He bought me a new Mercedes convertible for my birthday. Yellow. But something happened, and he had to close the office. And oh, I don’t know, everything fell apart about six weeks ago.”
    “How so?” I said, resuming my search for Aspirin.
    “Bills were piling up. We got behind in our mortgage payments. We had to sell my car.” She shook her head. “He wouldn’t let me go back to work, either. I offered, but Nick said no.”
    “What type of work did you do?” Bingo! I found the Aspirin bottle hiding behind the sugar.
    “I was a blackjack dealer at the Royal Flush Casino. That’s how I met Nick.” A fleeting smile crossed her lips for the first time, I guess at the memory.
    “You don’t look old enough.” I crammed three pills in my mouth, took a slug of coffee, and sat back down.
    “I’m twenty-two. I’ll be twenty-three in a couple of months.” I realized I was the same age when I married Nick. Glad to see I was part of a pattern here.
    “Then he went to work for a bank as a courier or something, I could never figure out what, but when I asked him…”
    Her voice faded out. Maybe she was talking, maybe she wasn’t. I couldn’t tell. I waited. She reached out a hand and touched one of mine. Still looking down at the floor, she began to pour her heart out, loud and clear.
    “Nick told me you were the best thing that ever happened to him.”
    I blanched. What kind of man makes a statement like that to a current wife about his ex?
    “Nick said if anything happened to him, I was to come to you. He said you’re the only person in the world he trusts.”
    I froze. What the hell is the matter with the man?
    “He also said you were the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.”
    Okay, it’s official. The man’s a bozo.
    She looked up at me with appraisal in her eyes. “I guess I can see why he’d think that,” she said, her baby voice riddled with doubt.
    “Now wait a minute.” I checked out my reflection in the stainless steel toaster and ran fast fingers through hair looking like it had been combed with an eggbeater. “I usually look a little better,” I said, with a feckless laugh that sounded like the death rattle of a soot-clogged moped. “I’ve had a tough night. I was up until two-thirty knocking back
    margaritas and tequila sh ooters with the girlfriend of a missing-in-action software designer, hoping to get her to tell me where the M.I.A. was.”
    Kelli nodded a little too enthusiastically, as if she were the unwilling