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Of course, I would have felt even better if the murder hadn’t happened so close to home.
Free Vibrator With Every Purchase Over $100
I didn’t bother to suppress my laughter when I read the sign perched on Guilty Pleasures’ front display table.
Dena emerged from the back of the store wearing a pair of black boot-cut pants and a Castro long-sleeved shirt. Considering her small size, the bold abstract on her top should have overwhelmed her. It didn’t. She gave me a quick hug before gesturing to the sign.
“What can I say? When you’re right, you’re right.” She shrugged. “So are you here to shop or visit?”
“Visit,” I said absently as I toyed with a penis-shaped water bottle. “Do you have time for a short break?”
“Barbie, I need you to watch the floor while we go in back.”
A Puerto Rican woman with heavy black eyeliner and dressed in a kind of dominatrix-style vinyl outfit looked up from straightening a stack of crotchless panties and gave Dena a cheerful smile.
I followed Dena into a small office connected to her stockroom. “That woman is not named Barbie.”
“I don’t care if she wants to be referred to as the Cabbage Patch Kid, that woman knows more about sex toys than any other employee I’ve ever had. It’s like she has a Ph.D. in erotica.” Dena removed a stack of invoices from a padded folding chair before offering it to me and seating herself at her desk. “So what’s up?”
“I met a guy.”
“A guy you want to date?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Glory hallelujah, it’s a miracle! My God, Sophie, if you had gone any longer on this celibacy kick of yours, I would have staged an intervention.”
“I can only imagine what that would have looked like.” I fingered an odd-looking Beanie Baby with five legs that had been left on top of a small filing cabinet. Wait a minute. “Dena…your Beanie Baby seems to be rather…um…excited.”
“It’s not a Beanie Baby, it’s a Weenie Baby. I’m going to put them out tomorrow. I know they’re going to blow. No pun intended. So tell me about your new love interest!”
“Well, he’s not perfect. He doesn’t appreciate Caramel Brownie Frappuccinos.”
“Sophie, I’m going to let you in on a secret…there are a lot of people who don’t appreciate Caramel Brownie Frappuccinos. Hell, I give him ten points just for not frequenting Starbucks. That place is a fascist corporate monster.”
Dena has an odd point system that she uses to rate men. I have never figured out what the scale is, but the men I’ve dated in the past were clearly on the low end. “Sorry, he frequents Starbucks, he just doesn’t buy Frappuccinos.”
“Okay, five points.” She tapped the number five on her desktop calculator.
“He does have an accent.”
“What kind?”
“Russian.”
Dena turned back to her calculator and pressed Plus Five.
“Yeah, it’s very slight—you have to listen for it—but the way he says certain words…like when he pronounces his name, Anatoly, it’s really very sexy.”
“Anatoly…I like that.” She added, three more points.
“Mmm. Anyhow, he’s somewhere in his mid-thirties, about six foot, dark hair, brown eyes, very physically…fit.” Dena raised her eyebrows before adding fifteen. “And he’s got the most incredible hands I have ever seen—you know, big, strong, and just a little rough.”
“Shit, you’re turning me on just talking about him. Twenty points for the big hands. I think we’re up to an overall score of forty-eight. That’s a new high for you.”
“Yeah, he’s definitely eye candy. I wasn’t sure what I thought about him at first—personality-wise he’s a little rough around the edges.”
“I thought you just said you liked it rough.”
“Hands, Dena. Rough hands.”
“Whatever.” Dena turned away from the calculator and swiveled back and forth in her wheeled chair. “Look, the guy obviously does it for you, so when are you going to jump him?”
“Do you ever bother even pretending you believe in traditional courtship?”
“It’s hard to spout puritanical ideals when you own a sex shop. You didn’t answer my question.”
“I’m going out with him this weekend. He’s new to the city so I’m going to play tour guide for a day. You know, ride the cable car, go to the top of Coit Tower, all the stuff I openly denounce as beneath me but secretly long to do…then maybe I’ll jump him.”
“Sounds like fun.” Dena’s smile changed to one of mischief. “Hey, the guy I’m dating just moved here too.”
“Right, I remember you mentioning him…the ‘notch in your bedpost’ guy.”
“Yes! Sophie, he’s sooo fucking hot. Easily scores over fifty points. He’s intelligent, has a goatee, works as a bartender in the Lower Haight, so you know he makes a mean martini, plus he just has a different approach to things, you know? He doesn’t automatically conform to all the dictates of society.”
“In other words, he’s a sociopath.”
“Funny,” Dena said. “He is not a sociopath. He is perfectly sane…or…he sort of is. Okay, I’m sure there are some people who think he’s a little crazy, but they just don’t get him. He’s just…different.”
“Oh my God, you’re dating Michael Jackson.”
“I am not dating Michael Jackson. Besides, it’s not like he has long conversations with his cat or anything like that,” she said, and graced me with her most antagonistic grin.
I responded by giving her the finger.
She laughed and checked her watch. “He’s supposed to meet me for lunch in a few minutes, so if you hang out you’ll get to meet him.”
“Oh, I can’t wait for this.” I repositioned the Weenie Baby so that he was balancing on his two heads. “Speaking of bizarre things…”
“We weren’t.”
“Okay, sorry, that came out wrong. I just want to tell you about something weird that happened to me last night.”
“Does it involve some kind of sexual foreplay with your Russian love god?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“I came home last night and there was a broken glass on the floor.”
“Uh-huh, so your cat knocked over a glass.” She glared at the overhead fluorescent light that had begun to flicker. “He’s always knocking stuff over. Maybe if you didn’t feed him twenty-four–seven…”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Dena, it was the way the pieces were scattered…it almost seemed like the glass was dropped in the middle of the room.”
“What are you saying? Do you think someone was in your apartment?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was anything taken or out of place?”
“No.”
“So you think someone broke into your flat, dropped a glass and left?” Dena was wearing an expression that she usually reserved for Mary Ann.
“Right, it doesn’t make sense, I know that. But here’s the thing…do you remember my book Sex, Drugs and Murder?”
The condescension disappeared. “The broken-glass-in-the-kitchen scene.”
“You do remember.”
“It was the first indication Alicia Bright had that someone had been in the house.”
“Exactly. Of course, that’s stupid.”
“It’s at least highly unlikely.”
“There’s more.”
Dena swallowed visibly and waited for me to continue.
“I got a note in the mail a little over a month ago, no return address. It was typed, and it contained just one sentence, ‘You reap what you sow.’ And then last night, before the whole glass thing, I got a whole bunch of prank calls. The person calling didn’t say anything threatening. He—or she—just called and hung up.”
“Okay, that’s it. You need to call the police.”
“And tell them what? That someone sent me a note in the mail that is, for all intents and purposes, perfectly benign? That I got a few hang-ups? Or that I found a broken glass in my apartment that may have been knocked over by my cat?”
Dena pressed her palms into her thighs and studied the discarded price tags on the floor. “All of the above?”
“Dena, I told you this because I wanted you to calm me down and bring me back to reality, not so you could further bolster my paranoia.”
“Sophie, if there’s a chance that someone is stalking you, the authorities should be alerted.”
“Great, now we are both being paranoid.” I ran my fingers through my hair, inadvertently tearing it as I went. “Look, I even cut my finger when cleaning up the glass, the way Alicia Bright did.” I held up a bandaged finger for Dena’s inspection. “Do you think that was planned too?”
“Okay, I get your point.” Dena chewed her lower lip. “Still…”
“Dena?” Barbie peeked her head through the door. “Your maaaann is here.”
“Oh good, I do get to meet him.” I stood up and waited for Dena to do the same.
“Sophie…”
“Dena, it’s fine, really. It was the cat. Now come on, you have an introduction to make.”
Dena put her hands on her hips and paused for a moment as she tried to figure out what her next move should be. Finally she shook her head in defeat. “Fine, I’ll let it go for now. Let’s have you meet Jason Beck.” She took my arm and guided me onto the selling floor, and there he was.
Mr. Velvet Pants.
CHAPTER 5
“One look at Kittie’s car told Alicia that there was more to the story than she was letting on.”
—Sex, Drugs and Murder
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” Dena did a quick double take. She had every reason to be offended—I was being rude—but what the hell was she thinking?
The freak smiled. “Sophie and I met last night,” he said. “I ran into her at a gallery south of Market.”
“A gallery?” asked Dena. “I thought you were…”
“Going to participate in the vampire games? I did, but I was a little early, so I crashed an opening. It wasn’t worth the effort. The stuff being exhibited was the kind of shit people buy to match their thousand-dollar couch. No message at all.”
Okay, we needed to back up a bit. “The vampire games?”
“Right, let me explain that one.” Dena slipped between Jason and me in an attempt to ease some of the mounting tension. “Once a month a group of people—”
“Vampires,” Jason corrected.
“Right, okay, let’s call them vampire people.” Dena folded her hands under her chin. “Anyhow, a whole bunch of vampire people get together and act out some kind of vampire story. It’s often based on a novel or a movie.”
“Have you read much about vampires?” Jason asked. He stepped to the side so we could have a full view of one another again.
“I’ve read Dracula and The Vampire Chronicles.”
“Then you know a lot about the creatures of the night. I often get to play the part of Dracula.”
“Really.”
“Yes, I am Dracula.”
You are insane is what you are. I examined Jason’s current ensemble. The velvet was gone and in its place were a pair of black suede jeans, a white dress shirt with the breast pocket not so carefully cut off, and the motorcycle jacket from the night before. Dena was right, Jason had a different approach to things.
“Last night, how did you know my name?”
“Well, when I was at Dena’s place I was looking through her bookcase and noticed that she had several titles from you, which sort of threw me off ’cause Dena’s not the type to buy into that whole bestseller thing. She’s more an Anaïs Nin type than a Jane Austen chick. So I got curious and flipped one open and saw your autograph. You wrote a pretty detailed message, so it stuck in my head. I recognized you from the picture in back.”
Dena shook her head. “I don’t remember that.”
