V is for Vengeance (Kinsey Millhone 22)

Carefully, she surveyed the room. There were signs of Thelma everywhere. If Nora had hoped for evidence, here it was. She looked down at the silver tray that rested on her countertop, feeling her lips purse as she picked up her hairbrush now threaded with Thelma’s dye-coarsened red hair. She opened one drawer after another. Thelma had helped herself to a little bit of everything. Cold creams, Q-tips, cotton balls, expensive colognes. Nora made a point of keeping track of what she used in this house and what she needed to replace. She could have recited, item by item, the exact status and placement of her toiletries.

She checked the cabinet under the sink. Thelma must not have expected anyone else to examine the contents of the wastebasket, where she’d tossed the paper wrapper and lollipop stick from a tampon she’d inserted. Cheery news, that. At least the sow wasn’t pregnant. The cleaning ladies came on Monday. Thelma must have intended to remove all traces of her stay by then.

Nora went straight to her walk-in closet and flung open the double doors. To the left, there was a climate-controlled closet-within-a-closet where she kept her cocktail dresses and her full-length gowns. The room was intended for fur coats, but since Nora owned none, she used the space for her wardrobe of designer creations, elegant classics by Jean Dessès, John Cavanagh, Givenchy, and Balenciaga. She’d put together her collection by patiently scouring estate sales and vintage clothing stores. The dresses had been bargains when she bought them, picked over and ignored in favor of what was trendy at the time. Now the interest in early Christian Dior and Coco Chanel had created a secondary market where prices were through the roof. A few of the gowns were too large for her now—the size 6’s, 8’s, and 10’s she’d worn before the weight came off. She’d considered having them altered but felt that resizing would affect the integrity of the design.

She slid dress after dress aside, working her way down the line. When she found the white strapless Gucci, she removed it, still on its hanger, and inspected it carefully. Some of the beading had come loose, crystals and sequins missing, and there was now a tiny split in the seam where Thelma’s fat ass had stressed the threads until they popped. She held the fabric to her nose, picking up the lingering musk of Thelma’s perspiration. Of course, she’d been nervous. She’d co-opted Nora’s husband. She’d helped herself to Nora’s clothes, her jewelry, and anything else she fancied. Thelma was impersonating a woman of class, and she’d gone through a major bout of flop sweat because she knew what a fake she was. For the first time, Nora felt rage and she leveled it at Channing. How had he tolerated this trollop, this corpulent interloper, stepping into her shoes?

She returned the Gucci to the hanging rod. She could see now that Thelma had been trying on a number of her cocktail dresses, perhaps debating which of them to wear that night. Two she’d rejected, tossing them over the back of the velvet slipper chair. She must have realized she had no prayer of squeezing into the 4’s. Instead, she pulled out Nora’s three Hararis, one of which she hadn’t yet had occasion to wear. Nora could picture the scene. While Thelma pondered her choices, she’d hung them on the retractable caddy Nora used for clothes when they first came back from the dry cleaners. The Hararis were more forgiving than the more form-fitting of Nora’s clothes, diaphanous layers of silk, in pale smoky blues and coffee tones, overlaid with gray. Each ensemble consisted of multiple pieces: a body slip, a vest that flowed from the shoulder to an irregular hem below. The separates were interchangeable, meant to be worn in varied combinations. There was something sensuous about the way the fabric settled against the skin, transparent in places so that the body was both disguised and revealed. Maybe Thelma thought her sagging, cellulite-ridden arm flaps would look especially fetching in such a getup.

Nora removed six hangers from the rod and folded the dresses across her left arm. She removed another handful and laid them on top of the first. She carried them downstairs and out to the car, loading first the trunk and then the backseat. The gowns were surprisingly heavy, well constructed, many of them so densely embellished with crystals and beads that the weight of them was palpable. It took her six trips before she’d successfully stripped her closet of all her evening wear: full-length gowns, cocktail dresses, the entire collection of haute couture fashions in every shape and size. The provenance didn’t matter. Nora removed every garment that might have been at all suitable for the dinner dance that night.

It cheered her enormously to imagine the sequence of events. Thelma and Channing would leave the office early, maybe 5:00 instead of the usual 7:00 P.M. The drive home would take an hour or more at the height of the rush hour traffic, which would be particularly heavy along Pacific Coast Highway. By the time they arrived at the house, it would be 6:00 or 6:30, and all the nearby dress shops would be closed. Maybe they’d have a drink before getting dressed. Maybe they’d make love and then take a shower together. Eventually Thelma would turn her porcine attention to what she’d be wearing that night. Buoyed at the prospects, she’d fling open the double doors to the closet. Right away, she’d realize something was wrong. Baffled, she’d open the climate-controlled closet-within-a-closet, which was virtually empty. Thelma, the buxom, lumbering, pot-bellied slob, would find herself with nothing to wear. Not a stitch. She’d shriek and Channing would come running, but what could either of them do? He’d be as horrified as she was. Someone had entered the house and walked off with thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of formal wear. What would he tell Nora? And how would he appease the wailing Thelma, whose evening was ruined? Her crappy little condominium was in Inglewood, thirty miles southeast, not far from the Los Angeles International Airport, so even if (by some miracle) she had something adequate at home, she’d never make it in time. The dinner dance was being held at the Millennium Bilt-more in downtown L.A., forty-nine miles away, distances it would be hopeless to navigate at that hour.