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  WELCOME SWINGERS!

  Welcome swingers?

  What had Serenity come to? What had America, what had the world, come to? A swingers’ convention in the ballroom of the Grand Queen Hotel—in our little burg? How had I not heard about this? Not that I would have been interested, other than to bemoan the state of affairs. So to speak.

  Then I remembered. We had dropped the Sentinel after it gave Mother a scathing review for her version of Whoopi Goldberg’s one-woman Broadway show. The theater critic (also the head sports writer and the obit guy) had found Mother’s performance “wildly inappropriate.” He had a point, but it had been pretty entertaining, and for what it’s worth, the African Americans in the audience laughed their heads off.

  Still, I couldn’t believe I was looking at a bold public announcement of a swingers’ party like this. Nor could I imagine Serenity’s conservative Christian mayor not putting a kibosh on this affront to those family values he was always going on about.

  This thought had just crossed my mind when His Honor and his honorable missus, both beaming, stepped out of the elevator on its return trip, and walked past me arm in arm. They went cheerfully through the ballroom doors just as two of Mother’s gal pals—Alice Hetzler and Cora Van Camp—emerged, faces flushed with excitement, giggling like high school girls during a sock hop.

  If my mouth had been open any wider, somebody would have put a hook in it.

  I felt like the lead in a Twilight Zone episode who, just before Rod Serling came on for a final word, realized the quiet little town he was visiting was full of vampires.

  As Alice and Cora entered the ladies’ room, an elderly man came out the adjacent men’s, adjusting his trousers. Then I recognized him as a Romeo named Harold, the ex-army sergeant who had once asked Mother to marry him.

  Spotting me frozen by the elevator, Harold came over.

  “Man, what a gay old time this is!” he said, the forehead beneath the white crew cut beaded with sweat.

  That I refused to even think about.

  He was saying, “Too bad Vivian couldn’t make it.”

  “Well . . . she’s recuperating.”

  “Yeah, everybody says she got herself clobbered. Damn shame. But hey, little girl—maybe you and me could go partners.”

  My mouth was open, but nothing was coming out. I wasn’t even breathing.

  Harold went on, “But, then, what the hey—I bet you’ll be wantin’ somebody younger to hook up with.” He gave me a wink, then hurried back to the ballroom, change in his pockets jingling.

  I shivered. Was I in some alternate universe?

  Wes was nowhere to be seen, but my curiosity had the best of me—time to check the wild party out for myself....

  Inside the ballroom, I stood near the back wall, surveying the boisterous crowd of several hundred, mostly senior citizens but a scattering of younger and even much younger, too, many standing with drinks in hand, others seated at a dozen or so round cloth-covered tables placed on the periphery of the dance floor.

  Suddenly music blared from a DJ’s speakers, and couples young and old flooded the dance area to boogie to Louis Prima’s “Jump, Jive an’ Wail.”

  Oh!

  That kind of swing party.

  I laughed at myself, sensing someone coming up alongside me.

  “Brandy?”

  Wes, looking sharp in a black sharkskin suit, white shirt, and skinny black tie, took my hand and pulled me out onto the floor, where the jitterbug steps Mother had taught me came in handy, him twirling me every once in a while, me wishing I’d worn Mother’s old poodle skirt.

  A young couple next to us had come in full array—he in a zoot suit, she in ’40s-style dress with shoulder pads—and they really knew how to go truckin’.

  The song ended, and a slow number began.

  Wes held me close, though not terribly close, and asked with a smile, “Mad at me?”

  “What for?”

  “Playing this little joke on you. I know you’re nervous about our group, and I thought a little swingers’ joke might help.”

  I smiled back. “You don’t want to know what I was thinking, when I saw the mayor and his wife heading in here.”

  He chuckled, and held me closer, as we swayed to Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” sung by Sinatra back when he was still Frankie.

  Later, as the Voice’s voice faded away, Wes whispered in my ear, “Let’s get out of here, shall we? Leave the swinging to the old folks and the kids.”

  He took my hand and led me winding through the crowd, which dispersed onto the dance floor for “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” Couldn’t get away from Mother even when she wasn’t around....

  Outside the ballroom, I asked, “Where to? VIP Club? I’ve never actually been in there.”

  “Naw, we’ll do that some other time. We’ve booked the Executive Suite—the rest of the gang’s already there.”

  No doubt meaning Brent and Megan Morgan, Travis and Emily Thompson, and Sean and Tiffany Hartman.

  “Great,” I said, relieved we weren’t heading to the Roman Spa for a sybaritic bacchanal.

  One floor down, the Executive Suite was essentially a luxurious apartment—large sunken living area, full kitchen, dining room, and two bedrooms, each with a bath. I had been here before, just once, when Senator Edward Clark, my biological father, threw a party last summer for local campaign volunteers. (I apologize for not mentioning him earlier, but he has no function in this story. Or my life as of late, for that matter.)

  Wes entered using a keycard. On a table in the entryway was a glass bowl with cell phones in it. Had cell phones replaced house or car keys as the new way of picking a partner? This might not be Rome, but a sybaritic bacchanal still seemed possible....

  “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked, putting his cell in with the others. “They can be such a nuisance when you’re trying to have a good time.”

  “Ah . . . no,” I said, adding mine to the mix.

  But now if I did need Mother, or Tony, I had no life line....

  Wes led the way to the anonymously modern living room, its lighting subdued. The couples, dressed casually if expensively, were in little groups of three. Brent and Travis were talking to Tiffany over by a big window with a magnificent view of the Mississippi. Just down from them, where the window ended, Megan and Emily were chatting with Sean. Everyone had a drink in hand, and several were smoking.

  I said, “Hi, everybody,” and waved, and everybody but Tiffany returned my greeting. She seemed unsteady, and a little bleary, as if her drinking today had begun long before the party.

  Wes and I lounged in the sunken area on soft leather seating that rimmed the inner part of the square. A low table sat in the center with an assortment of liquor and wine bottles, glasses, and an ice bucket.

  “Care for something?” Wes asked me.

  “White wine would be nice.”

  He poured pale liquid from a bottle into a wineglass and got himself a tumbler of whiskey.

  “So,” I said, “I’ve been wondering . . . what’s kept you and your fraternity brothers so tight, when usually school friendships are sort of, you know . . . temporary.”

  He shrugged. “We just got along. And then I was in a position to help the guys out, really get them started on their individual paths.”

  “They really owe you a lot.”

  The boyish features broke out in a smile. “Ah, I owe them. Bank president for a best friend, how can a guy in business beat that? I was able to get Trav started in the real estate game, and that helps me land housing for new employees . . . especially important for executives. And Sean just needed a little start-up capital, and me guiding certain folks his way for investing. What wouldn’t a guy do for his best friend?”

  How many best friends did Wes have, anyway? I guess I knew the answer: three.

  Wes excused himself to use “the little boys’ room” and I was alone, but not for long. The well-stocked table near me was the watering hole where glasses
were filled and refilled, and beefy Travis came over to refresh a tumbler with bourbon. He did that sitting next to me.

  “So,” he said, a smile splitting his nicely rugged features, “you’re thinking about joining our merry band.”

  “Well, I haven’t been officially invited. But it looks like a friendly bunch.”

  “Oh, yeah, it is. Great people. You don’t need to worry.”

  “I don’t?”

  “No, nobody has to do anything they don’t want to.”

  “Not even play bridge?”

  He laughed. “Not even play bridge.” Then he became more serious. “How’s your mom doing?”

  “Better. I think the police think that what happened to her had something to do with Vanessa’s murder, and that Fowler woman’s.”

  He sighed. “Yeah, they questioned all of us. That ex-chief, and the current one, too. Wanted to know where we all were when Mrs. Fowler was killed.”

  “Ah. Just like TV—everybody needs an alibi, huh?”

  He raised and dropped his eyebrows, then sipped bourbon. “Apparently. No problem for me—I was at a real-estate closing with my attorney.”

  “Hope Sean and Brent are in the clear. It’s not like innocent people know they’re going to need an alibi.”

  “True that! No, Sean was home with Tiff by midafternoon.”

  Had he been? Mother made no mention of seeing him there. Of course, Tiffany hadn’t invited Mother in....

  “And,” Travis was saying, “Brent was still at the bank. Works right up to six. That old notion of banker’s hours doesn’t hold anymore, at least not for him.” He sipped more bourbon, shook his head. “Murders. What kind of way is that to live?”

  Then he and his drink were gone.

  Wes, on his way back from the restroom, had fallen into conversation with the Megan/Emily/Sean group. Maybe a minute later, Sean peeled away and came down into my sunken world where I was apparently guarding the liquor.

  “You look like a little girl lost,” he said, sitting too close for my liking as he poured himself more Scotch. “But don’t worry.”

  Nobody wanted me to worry tonight.

  He was saying, “This is strictly a consenting-adults type association. And very discreet.”

  “I suppose you all must be a little nervous,” I said, making a girlish face, “having the murder of Wes’s wife looked into.”

  He gave me a sharp, possibly alarmed look. “Why would we be?”

  I shrugged. “Well, you know how small towns are. And you’re all kind of royalty around here. People always like to take people like you down a notch.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know if that’s true anymore. Who really cares what other people do behind closed doors?”

  “Conservative small-town people,” I said. “The kind who do business with banks and brokerages and real estate offices.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Nothing. Just making conversation. Anyway, Travis said you were all cleared by the police.”

  Sean shrugged, swirled his drink. “Well, they talked to us. About where we were when that woman across from Wes got killed. And when your mother got mugged. How is she, by the way?”

  “Getting there. No memory of how it happened, though.”

  “Shame.”

  I shifted in my seat. “So I suppose the police talked to you guys about the golf club.”

  He frowned in confusion. “You mean the country club?”

  “No. Not exactly. I mean the golf club Mother was hit with. A putter.”

  Blood drained from his face. “Is that what she was hit with?”

  “Yeah. I supposed the police would’ve talked to you about that, considering that you guys are all golfers. They have tests they can make. If there’s blood on a putter, they’d find it.”

  He shrugged noncommitally. “Well, I guess they would. If you’ll excuse me, this isn’t my choice of cocktail conversation.”

  I gave him an embarrassed little grin. “Sorry. Won’t happen again.”

  He was barely gone when Brent showed up for more wine. He noticed my glass was half full and topped it up, gentleman that he was.

  He put a hand on my shoulder. Normally, I’d have plucked it off. But I was undercover, and—even if I would never be under the covers—I left it there.

  “You need a better escort than Wes,” the banker said. He was a hunk, all right, those chiseled features, that dark hair. I wondered if he touched it up.

  “I do?”

  “Guy brings a newcomer into the group and then abandons her to her own devices.”

  “I’m not sure I have any.”

  “Any what?”

  “Devices.”

  He smiled, sipped wine, and asked how my mother was. I said she was doing better.

  “Listen,” I said, “I heard something interesting.”

  “What about?”

  “These murders. Isn’t that what’s on everybody’s mind?”

  “Well, not tonight!”

  I scooched closer to him. “Come on. I just have one question.”

  “We’ll see if I have an answer.”

  “You’re a banker.”

  “Well . . . yes. I kind of like to think that, in Serenity, I’m the banker.”

  “You certainly are. My apologies. Anyway, that terrible Fowler woman . . . sorry to speak ill of the dead . . . but she tried to blackmail Wes. Did you know that?”

  He nodded. “Sure. Wes told us. Horrible woman. Sorry she’s dead, hate to see that kind of thing happen to anybody, but . . . horrible old gal.”

  “No argument,” I said. “But I heard she deposited ten thousand dollars in cash at the bank. Your bank. That means, or at least it could mean, that somebody else did pay her off.”

  He was frowning in thought. “You mean . . . whoever really killed Vanessa.”

  “Right. So my question is, I know it’s cash, but could that transaction be looked into?”

  “Not really.”

  “But if the police found a cash withdrawal at the bank in that amount, couldn’t that point to the killer? Well, I guess they’ve already tried that.”

  He stood and moved away from me, frowning. “Here comes Wes. Look, he’s had a rough time of it. None of this murder talk, okay? Give the guy a break.”

  Wes came down into my sunken lair and sat next to me. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to leave you in the lurch or anything. But I’m kind of the host.”

  “No problem.”

  Now he was the one sitting close, and he slipped an arm around my shoulders. “Look. This is just a kind of . . . meet and greet. You’re not getting yourself into anything.”

  “I’m not?”

  “No. We’d be . . . months away from that, if you’re interested.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “You see, we need to get to know each other better, before anybody else gets into the act.”

  Then he was nuzzling my neck.

  Now what the heck was I going to do? How do you tell a guy in a swingers’ group—who knows that you know full well what kind of party it is—that you think he’s being fresh?

  And did anybody even use the word fresh that way, anymore?

  Everybody else came down into the sunken area to join us. Maybe they all got thirsty at the same time. Maybe it was almost time to pick a cell phone out of the glass bowl....

  Shortly after everybody had settled in, a knock came at the suite’s door, a muffled female voice calling out, “Room service!”

  Wes drew away from me. “Somebody order food?”

  “Me,” Sean admitted, then nodded toward his tipsy wife. “Tiff needs something in her tummy besides booze.”

  “Says you,” she said.

  He got up and went to the door and opened it.

  A tallish woman in a man’s formal shirt with bow tie and black slacks wheeled in a food cart. She had long blond Veronica Lake–style peekaboo hair.

  “Where would you like this, honey?”

  �
�This way,” Sean said.

  The woman followed him with the cart over to the edge of the sunken area.

  “Please sign,” she said, handing him the bill and a pen.

  Sean gave her back the bill and pen, and she looked past him at me, drew back the hair to reveal her features, and winked. Peekaboo!

  Mother!

  “Where would you like the food?” Mother asked in a whispery seductive voice, fake hair back in place.

  Sean descended the steps into the sunken area and gestured to the central table. “Here would be fine.”

  Mother picked up the tray of hors d’ouevres, balanced it with one hand, following Sean, but missed the last step —she wasn’t wearing her glasses—and fell, her wig coming off, the tray going up in the air, then down on Sean.

  Sean, covered in shrimp sauce and guacamole, snarled, “You!”

  His wife was laughing. She was very drunk.

  Drunk enough to squeal, “You should have hit the witch harder, Sean!”

  “Thank you, dear,” Mother said to Tiffany with a self-satisfied smile.

  There was a mass effort to clean up the mess, but I took Mother by the arm and escorted her out, looking back at a stunned Wes to say, “I am so sorry about this! I need to get her home. . . .”

  We moved fast and soon were on the elevator where I was so thrown by both Vivian Borne’s disguised arrival and Mrs. Sean Hartman’s incriminating blurt, that I didn’t know whether to hug Mother or throttle her.

  She had only one thing to say on the ride down: “And that, my dear, is why you need a plan!”

  Finally I found a question to ask: “Was that pratfall on purpose? Or are you just blind?”

  “A true artiste does not reveal her secrets.”

  Then we were in the parking lot, but as I headed toward the Caddy, Mother yanked me toward another car—a Toyota with Tony sitting in the front seat.

  He leaned out the window. “How did we do?” he asked.

  Addressing Mother!

  “Home run, dear,” she said, and handed him her recorder pen. “Sean Hartman’s wife has something very interesting to tell you.”

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