Killer Blonde by Elaine Viets Page B

the night a graveyard glow. I’ve been listening to spooky stories and scaring myself, Helen thought.
    But she was never sure about Margery. She did know Margery was not fond of the police. Whenever possible, she solved the problems at the Coronado without calling the cops. There was some history there that Helen didn’t understand.
    â€œDid I what?” Margery demanded again, and Helen’s last questions about Margery’s role in the murder died in the cold moonlight.
    â€œDid you find out why Chris, her lover, never came forward?” Helen said. “Maybe they really did run off together. Otherwise, why wasn’t she looking for Vicki?”
    â€œBecause they’d had a fight right before Vicki’s death and broke up,” Margery said. “Chris never wanted to see Vicki again. She said so. I knew that because Chris called her once. It was the only time she called Vicki at the office. I happened to pick up the wrong extension and heard them fighting.”
    Right, Helen thought.
    â€œWhen Vicki missed her own birthday dinner, Val called Chris looking for her sister. Chris knew she’d be the number one suspect if her lover was mysteriously missing, and the law was not kind to homosexuals. Chris really did take off for San Francisco. She lived happily ever after with another woman. I ran into the couple on a trip a few years ago.”
    â€œDid you ever see any signs that Minfreda felt guilty about what she’d done?”
    â€œWas she wracked with murderer’s guilt?” Margery said. “No, not that I could tell. I think she was glad Vicki was gone. I certainly was. Our office was a better place without her.
    â€œBut the murder and the double promotion did make Minfreda crazy. She started believing she was all-powerful. Minfreda flirted outrageously with the boys. Really, it was shameful, and they were married men, too. I was disappointed in her behavior. I think she may have actually had an affair with Jimmy.
    â€œShe ignored the deserving women in our office, and even made fun of the hardest workers. Minfreda’s pretty blonde head got fat on all that flattery.”
    â€œIt’s almost as if, after killing Vicki, she turned into her,” Helen said.
    â€œMaybe,” Margery said. “Or maybe all that gorgeous blonde hair went to her head. Or maybe she thought she could get away with anything.
    â€œMinfreda forgot that hard work got her promoted. She started coming into the office late and leaving early. She took long, boozy lunches with Jimmy, Bobby, and Irish Johnny while the rest of us slaved at our desks. People were starting to say that she was no better than Vicki, and maybe a little worse.
    â€œThe last straw was when Minfreda started ordering me around like I was some kind of servant. I didn’t mind picking up her dry cleaning and taking her shoes in for new soles. But one day she handed me her grocery list. She wanted me to do her shopping on my lunch hour. She was one of those nitpicky shoppers, too. ‘I want the Smuckers grape jelly in the six-ounce size, not the eight-ounce,’ she told me. That kind of stuff can make you crazy. I wasn’t going to put up with it.
    â€œI went to the store, all right. I put one brown bag on her desk and said, ‘They were out of everything but this.’
    â€œMinfreda opened the bag. Inside was a WORLD’S BEST BOSS coffee mug. A nice thick mug.
    â€œMinfreda turned pale when she saw it. ‘Thank you, Margery,’ she said. ‘That will be all for today.’
    â€œThat was all, period.
    â€œMinfreda became a lot more polite to the women in the office. She stopped flirting with the men. She no longer went for three-hour lunches with the boys. Most days, when she didn’t have a lunch meeting, she brown-bagged it at her desk. She stayed later and worked harder than all of us put together.
    â€œHer behavior became perfectly professional. All in all, she was