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go,” he said.
    Wendy looked relieved as they both climbed back into her van. It wasn’t until they were well on the road that she sprang the news that she had to make a couple of “quick stops” on the way downtown.
    “I allocated as many tasks as I could to my staff,” she explained, “but Bobbie’s still out with the flu, and a couple of my customers won’t let anyone but me handle their business. Then there’s Yoda.”
    “Yoda?”
    “You’ll see,” she said with an enigmatic smile that caused his objections to die a-birthing. She was breathtaking when she smiled, which wasn’t all that often, at least not in his presence. Then again, he hadn’t given her much to smile about.
    He kept silent during the trip to the dry cleaner’s to pick up some senator’s daughter’s clothes and deliver them to her town house. The stop at an art gallery where they restored paintings was educational. How did Wendy make such contacts, anyway? And had they come across any of the material stolen from the Art Deco Museum?
    They stopped at Eatzi’s, a gourmet restaurant/grocery store, for pistachio nuts, sirloin tips, and a cheesecake ready for the table. Wendy seemed to know everyone, and she whizzed in and out with unbelievable efficiency.
    “Put it on my tab,” she called over her shoulder to one of the white-aproned employees as she walked out without paying. As she stored everything in specially designed compartments in the back of her van, which prevented fragile items from rolling around andsmushing or breaking, she explained, “It’s much easier to shop at places where I have an arrangement like that. Standing in line to pay wastes loads of time.”
    The gourmet comestibles were delivered to the apartment of some yuppie, out to impress his date for that evening. Michael wondered if he’d ever been that young or that eager to please a woman. He didn’t think so. He used to barbecue hamburgers for Faye out on the patio and open a bottle of Chianti. That was about as fancy as it got.
    On the way to the next stop, his curiosity overcame him. “This is a helluva strange way to make a living,” he said. “How did you get into it?”
    She smiled. He imagined she heard that question a lot.
    “I didn’t set out to become a personal shopper,” she explained. “It just sort of evolved. The truth of the matter is, I love to shop. I can’t pass up a white sale. I read the inserts of the newspaper the way a financial analyst reads the stock quotes. My favorite place in the whole wide world is a shopping mall the day after Thanksgiving.”
    Michael’s blood ran cold. Wendy’s enthusiasm was just a little too reminiscent of Faye’s for his comfort.
    “And money’s like a river, right?” he couldn’t help commenting. “You just dip in and take whatever you need for whatever you want, ’cause there’s lots more coming down the pike.” That was how Faye had described it to him during one of the rare instances she had admitted she had a problem.
    But Wendy looked appalled at his suggestion.“Heavens, no. My clients usually put me on a strict budget. One of the lures of hiring a personal shopper is that you can actually save money because I hunt down the bargains you don’t have time to find.”
    That was a revelation to him. “So these rich people you shop for actually pay attention to how much you spend?”
    “You bet. For each client, I have to render an accounting down to the penny, complete with receipts.”
    That practice would have been alien to Faye, Michael admitted silently. She used to have clothes, shoes, and purses delivered to the office where she worked part-time as a secretary, so that he wouldn’t know how much she actually spent. She never remembered to record checks in the register, so they were continually overdrawing the account no matter how much money he put into it. She hid the credit card bills from him or “lost” them.
    “How long have you been in business?” he