02 The Viking Funeral by Stephen J Cannell

Author:Stephen J Cannell [Cannell, Stephen J]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

28

Candy Kiss

Her room was full of shiny masonry, Italian terra-cotta, and Spanish tile. Expensively framed but marginal abstract art hung on the walls. Like everything else in the desert, this junior-executive suite had a pastel-peach color scheme. Except Lisa’s suite was without the magnificent views of the valley or the golf course. Shane could see a lit tennis court out the main window and hear the steady thunk-thonk of a singles match, mixed with energetic grunts and squeaking shoes. The match was obscured behind a green screen that hung on the chain-link fence a few yards from the window. The shadows danced and lunged on the colorful canvas like ghostly memories.

Lisa was still with Petrovitch. Shane looked at her telephone and again considered making a call to Filosiani. But he didn’t want the LAPD number to show up on her bill, so he decided to wait. Instead, he took the opportunity to get to know her a little better.

He started his search where most cops do—in the bathroom, where you often learned personal secrets. Lisa’s bathroom was no exception. She had the standard beauty aids: eye shadow, makeup brushes, and Vaseline; two round metal hairbrushes, each tangled with honey-ash strands. He pulled several loose. There were no dark roots—a natural blonde. Lipsticks by Lancôme: Iced Amethyst and Bronze Fire. No eyewash or contact-lens case, so it seemed the jade-green color came direct from the factory. Then he found two small, brown plastic compacts stuck way down in the webbing of her cosmetic travel case. The powder inside was not from Revlon, but Colombia. Fine and white, it dusted the mirror. Shane ran a wet index finger across the stuff and tasted it….

Bingo. El diablo!

Lisa St. Marie kept that high-strung motor of hers redlined with toots of Inca whizbang.

Shane closed the compact and put it back where he found it.

Well, he mused darkly, there are worse things than snorting coke…you could always punch a round through your girlfriend’s heart.

He moved through the rest of the place.

The closet contained mostly expensive designer stuff. She either did very well at All-American Tobacco or General Puffenguts bought her a lot of high-priced collectibles. The shoes were strictly from the Imelda Marcos shelf: Prada, Charles David, Manolo Blahnik.

Her jewel case was locked inside the flimsy key-locked room safe, which Shane opened easily with his picks. The case was just a small leather box, but with impressive contents. Shane wasn’t much at appraising jewelry and wished he had Murray Steinberg there to scan them with his loupe, but they looked authentic—expensive settings glittering with designer elegance.

He closed the safe and kept snooping.

The refrigerator was where he found Lisa’s moonwalking kit. The heavy artillery was tucked in the freezer compartment behind the ice trays: amphetamines, methamphetamines, and, oh yeah…some MDMA2. So maybe Tremaine had called that one right. Maybe Lisa had sabotaged the deal with Jody so she could knock down the price with Shane.

There were also some tabs of something that Shane thought looked like LSD, making them the only ingestibles.

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