Capriccio by Joan Smith

Marven didn’t go into Betty’s apartment. I couldn’t hear his questions, but her answers came fluting down the hall quite clearly. Mostly she kept saying “No!”, loud and clear. Once I overheard her say “hardly know him”. That was a lie, and maybe those “No’s” were also lies. I’d drop in on Betty Friske soon.
    As soon as the detective got into the elevator, I went rapping on Mrs. Friske’s door. She’s a divorcee, somewhere in her late thirties, and still attractive in a full-blown way. She should be; as far as I can tell, she spends all her time going to beauty parlors and shopping. The only people who call at her door are delivery men. She lives expensively and drives a Porsche.
    She already looked annoyed when she came to the door swathed in a Japanese geisha girl’s kimono with her red curls tousled picturesquely. I realized I should have taken time to rehearse my approach to her. Caught unprepared; I blurted out, “I’ve got to see Victor.”
    She stuck a cigarette in her mouth and inhaled before answering. Through the cloud of smoke, her sharp gray eyes gimleted into me. “Welcome to the club, Miss Mazzini,” she said grimly.
    “My name’s Newton. Cassie Newton.”
    She cocked a penciled brow at me. “Niece, I thought he said.”
    “On my mother’s side. Mom’s his sister.”
    “Sure,” she said, chewing back a smile at my cute guide’s uniform. “I have no idea where he is. I already told the police.”
    I looked over her shoulder, wondering how I could talk my way into her apartment to look for clues. She started closing the door. I could see a slice of a lovely living room in there all done up in flowing Art Deco, with furniture that belonged in a Fred Astaire movie or a bar. She must be getting some fantastic alimony. There was a hard-edged finish to Betty that said she wasn’t born to this lavish life.
    “If he turns up, let me know,” she said. “We have unfinished business, Victor and me. And he better turn up, or he’ll be sorry. So far I haven’t told the police anything. So far,” she repeated, with a very meaningful lift of her brows. She had a weird purplish-pink eye shadow on. Her eyes looked bruised.
    “Thank you,” I said, as the door closed firmly in front of me. I was sorry I’d bothered going—I didn’t need that implicit threat to make my day. What criminal business could my uncle be engaged in with that tart? But at any rate, I was convinced Victor wasn’t hiding out there. Or if he was, Betty Friske was a consummate actress.
    Before Sean came, I changed out of my uniform. It wasn’t particularly flattering, and if we went out, I didn’t want to wear it on the streets. I put on a cotton dress, navy with big white polka dots. The fresh coffee was filtered by the time Sean came.
    He was back in his tourist clothes; the jeans, boots, a checked shirt, jeans jacket tossed over his shoulder like a lasso, and the Western hat in his hand. All set to go herding cattle along Bloor Street.
    “Where’d you tether Trigger?” I asked.
    “My wheels are downstairs.”
    I felt mean, jibing at a man too innocent to even recognize sarcasm, let alone retaliate. “The police just left,” I told him.
    “Good, I’m glad you called them. What did they have to say?” he asked eagerly.
    I filled him in while we sat by the phone, having our coffee. During the next half hour, nobody called except Eleanor, and she had nothing to say except that the party went fine, just fine, and I mustn’t worry about anything. I told her the police had been here, and she thought it infradig of me to have spoken to them, I believe. “That was encroaching of them,” she exclaimed.
    “Ronald is so worried about you,” she said a little later, to my surprised gratification. I rang off as soon as politely possible and relayed the conversation to Sean, especially the part about Ron being worried.
    He soon got tired of sitting and asked what we were going to do about finding my uncle.