Brazen Virtue

come around to the point of being amused by her new job. Occasionally, he phoned her himself, on their personal line, to give her the chance to practice. He called himself Stud Brewster and made her giggle.
    Perhaps because of her maternal instinct or her genuine understanding of men and their problems, most of her calls dealt less with sex than with sympathy. Clients who called her on a regular basis found they could talk to her about job frustrations or the grind of family life and receive an easy concern. She never sounded bored, as their wives and lovers often did, she never criticized, and when the occasion called for it, Mary Beth could issue the kind of commonsense advice they might have received if they’d written to Dear Abby—with the bonus of a sexual kick.
    She was sister, mother, or lover, whatever the client required. Her clients were satisfied, and Mary Beth began thinking seriously about tossing away her little packet of birth control pills and taking that last turn at bat.
    She was a strong-willed, uncomplicated woman who believed most problems could be worked through with time, good intentions, and a plate of fudge brownies. But she’d never encountered anyone like Jerald.

    And he was listening. Night after night he waited to hear her voice. There was something gentle and calming about it. He was on the edge of being in love with her, and almost as obsessed with her as he’d been with Desiree. Roxanne was forgotten. Roxanne had been little more to him than a laboratory rat. But there was a goodness in Mary Beth’s voice, an old-fashioned solidity to her name, which she’d kept because she was too comfortable with it to play games. A man could believe what a woman like Mary Beth told him. The promises she made would be kept.
    Mary Beth was a different style altogether.
    Jerald believed her. He wanted to meet her. He wanted to show her how grateful he was to her.
    Early in the evening, late into the night, he listened. And planned.
    G RACE WAS TIRED OF hitting dead ends and being patient. More than a week had passed since the second murder, and if there was any progress in the investigation, Ed wasn’t sharing it with her. She thought she understood him. He was a generous man, and a compassionate one. But he was also a cop who lived by the department’s rules, and his own. She could respect his discipline while being frustrated with his discretion. The time she spent with him had a way of calming her, while the time she spent alone left her with nothing to do but think. So she too began to plan.
    She set up appointments. Her brief meetings with Kathleen’s attorney and the detective she’d hired shed no light. They couldn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know. She’d hoped, somehow, that she’d be able to dig up information that would point to Jonathan. In her heart, she still wanted him to be guilty, though in her own words, she knew it didn’t play. It was a hard belief to give up. In the end, she had to accept that however much Jonathan had been responsible for the state of Kathleen’s mind in the last days of her life, he hadn’t been responsible for ending it.
    But Kathleen was still dead, and there were other avenues to explore.
    The straightest, and most easily navigated, led her to Fantasy, Incorporated.

    Grace found Eileen in her usual position behind her desk. When she entered, Eileen closed the checkbook she’d been balancing and smiled. A cigarette burned in an ashtray at her elbow. Over the last few days, Eileen had given up even the pretense of quitting.
    “Good afternoon. Can I help you?”
    “I’m Grace McCabe.”
    It took Eileen a moment to place the name. Grace was dressed in a baggy red sweater, skinny black pants, and a pair of snakeskin boots. She no longer looked like the grieving sister in the newspaper photo. “Yes, Miss McCabe. We’re all very sorry about Kathleen.”
    “Thank you.” She could see by the tensing of Eileen’s fingers that she was bracing for an attack. Perhaps it would be best to keep the woman nervous and on guard. Grace had no qualms about stirring the guilt. “It seems your company was the catalyst for the attack on my sister.”
    “Miss McCabe.” Eileen picked up her cigarette and took a quick, jittery puff. “I feel badly, very badly about what happened to Kathleen. But I don’t feel responsible.”
    “Don’t you?” Grace smiled and took a seat. “Then I don’t suppose you feel responsible for Mary Grice