A Body to die for

enough to blame Alex. He was the one who got her involved. I went back outside into the exercise room. Jack sat on the white couch and tugged absentmindedly at his leggings. I slapped him across the face. “What was that for?” he demanded.
    “Now my engagement is off,” I said.
    “I didn’t know you were engaged!” Jack said like he was happy for me. “That hurt, Wanda.”
    “She’s alive,” I said. “For the moment.” I flashed to the times I wished she’d drown in a vat of boiling schmaltz. It was just a whimsical fantasy, I told myself. I never really wanted her to get hurt.
    Jack cupped his cheek calmly. “Is this just incredible bad luck, or does disaster precede my every step? My whole life has been spent stumbling from one foible to another. I should make the world a better place and crawl under a rock and die.”
    I wondered how he had gotten from “it’s all my fault” to “kill me now.” I said, “Don’t flatter yourself, Jack. Your weight to the cosmos is about the same as a snail.” I was in no mood to reassure him. “Why’d you come back here after I told you not to?” I asked. “No reason.”
    “Stop lying.” He looked at me, all wet eyed. “You came up here for a reason, and I want to know what.”
    “I thought Ameleth would be here.”
    “Stupid, Jack.” I was losing patience. The cops and paramedics would be here in seconds, and I didn’t want to be around when Falcone got a look in the Jacuzzi. I grabbed Jack by the collar of my flower T. “You came here looking for something important.” The missing drugs? The hidden formulas? Top-secret beet cocktail recipes?
    “A cigarette, really,” he said. That was important. “I’ve been so stressed out,” he continued. “I really needed one. I’d have bought a pack, but you didn’t give me my money.”
    I slapped him on the other cheek. It felt swell. I said, “Don’t move.” I left him on the couch and went into the office to hunt in his desk for the stale pack of Marlboro Mediums. Just hearing the word cigarette, I felt every pore of my body scream for a drag. The sound was deafening.
    Ameleth’s office was in order. I half expected to find the computer on her desk humming or clothes strewn everywhere. If I had to bet, I’d say Leeza never even stepped foot in this part of the suite. I wondered if she was beaten somewhere else and deposited in the tub. But it looked like she’d been pushed in there. Assuming the murderer and Leeza’s attacker were the same person, then he or she might have a literary inclination toward circular structure. I respected that. I walked behind the partition to get to Jack’s cubicle. Squeezing past the school teacher desk, I opened the bottom drawer. I remembered from before that it stuck. I gave it a good hard yank. The drawer popped out, sending me crashing into the cork wall. It shook, but didn’t fall. The contents of the drawer spilled all over the golden carpet. I saw a seep stain. I lifted the drawer. The bottle of Bajan brandy lay in pieces underneath it—the metal rollers on the drawer bottom had smashed the glass.
    I slurped up what I could and hunted through the rest of the drawer’s spilled contents for the pack of cigarettes. Under a stack of press clippings on Little Jackie Watson, tennis prodigy, I found the crumpled soft-pack. All the cigarettes were broken in half. A book of matches was tucked into the cellophane. I fished out the longest butt and lit it. The smoke swirled around my tongue like cotton candy. Stale cotton candy, but just as well. I looked at the mess I’d made. Ordinarily, I’d say fuck it. But the cops would see it and Falcone would think the batterer had rifled Jack’s desk. I took a long drag. I carefully picked up the chunks of broken glass and threw them in the drawer. I scooped the papers and pens back in, too. I started to put the drawer back on its rollers.
    That’s when I saw a green spiral notebook masking-taped to the bottom of the top drawer of the desk. This had caused the jam. I ripped it out and flipped through. Page after page was covered with practically unintelligible scrawl, but I took chemistry in junior high. I knew scientific formulas when I saw them. I shoved the notebook under my sundress. I fitted the bottom drawer back into the desk and I ran into the exercise room. Jack was taking a hike on the treadmill. “Nothing like that good old endorphin rush to make you forget about your troubles.”
    “Is there no