Private Dick Casefile 01 - Lily White Rose Red

opened it up, using the smaller key on the ring, and went through it. Mostly circulars and bills from department stores. I crammed it back into the box and locked it. Nothing for me.
    I walked up the stairs, not wanting the elevator boy to remember me. Marguerite lived on the fourth floor at the top. The apartment had that empty feel that they get when the occupant hasn’t been there for a while. If I’d wanted to take up housework, the furniture needed a good dusting, but other than that it was tidy. When she’d handed over the key, Lily told me she couldn’t bear to clear up her daughter’s things just yet.
    Marguerite Saint-Ville had lived up to her name in decorating her apartment. It was a little overwrought for my taste. Curtains trimmed heavily with fringe, gold-framed mirrors and crystal chandeliers in the Lily White, Rose Red: Grey Randall, Private Dick Casefile #1
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    living room. The walls were painted Nile green, which probably made a nice foil for Marguerite’s coloring, while all the furniture was covered in white satin, with pink velvet pillows chucked everywhere.
    I could picture her languishing on the divan in a negligee with a drink in her hand, trying on her idea of sophisticated. I bet she learned it where we all did, the movies. If she’d still been alive, I could imagine sharing a laugh over it with Lily, but Marguerite was so young, it was tragically pathetic. Considering Lily’s impeccable taste, maybe Marguerite would have grown out of it eventually.
    But I wasn’t here to scope the place out for Better Homes and Gardens . This was Marguerite’s refuge, and I had to hope that somewhere, she’d left a clue as to who all these nameless but dangerous boyfriends were. From what Suzy Velvour and Max Hamilton had told me, I got the feeling she had the itch for older men.
    Maybe from growing up without a father, but maybe people would say the reason I was queer was due to the same thing. Sometimes people were just people, no rhyme or reason to it.
    The living room was a wash; it looked like a movie set and was about as personal. The kitchen was small, and the only thing I learned there was Margie didn’t cook. She didn’t own a single pot or pan, not even a percolator for coffee. She did have a collection of takeaway menus, though. The freezer needed defrosting, but other than that, it was empty except for an empty ice cube tray stuck in the ice.
    Dining room, bathroom, and linen closet all came up zero. That left the bedroom, the inner sanctum. It made sense if there were anything personal, that’s where she would have kept it.
    I was thorough. I even stripped the bed and lifted the mattress to check under it, which was no easy task, given the canopy draped with fussy silk curtains trimmed with velvet ball fringe. Then I had to struggle with the dust ruffle so it hung straight when I made the bed again. Her closet gave off the faint scent of roses. Her clothes hung there neatly arranged in the colors of the rainbow, with her shoes lined up below. I noticed she favored stilettos, like her mother. Her underwear was organized in silk-lined boxes inside the bureau drawers.
    I don’t know if the police had asked Lily to leave everything alone, or it was just that she couldn’t stand to visit the apartment now 116

    CATT FORD

    that her daughter was dead, but on Marguerite’s vanity amongst the bottles of perfume, next to a framed and signed photo of Lily smiling (not the same one she’d given me), stood a jewel box. I looked over the contents of the case; I’m no expert on gemstones, but Suzy was right.
    There weren’t any rhinestones, at least as far as I could tell.
    In the bottom drawer I found some letters, but they were all from Lily, written over a number of years and placed in a velvet box that had probably held chocolates at one time. I made a note to tell Lily about that. Evidently whatever trouble there was between them, Marguerite still felt some connection to her mother. Either she didn’t keep any of her bills or she didn’t pay them herself, because the letters were the only reading material other than a few glossy magazines in the living room.
    Maybe she had no secrets or they were too dire for her to reveal them even to herself. No keepsakes, letters, cards, not even a bouquet of dead flowers. It was like she had created a setting for the woman she wanted to be. Her mother’s high heels might have been too big for her to fill, and I got the picture of a young