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is supposed to go everywhere. But showing up for a funeral in a little black cocktail dress simply does not demonstrate the proper respect. Unless the funeral is in a bar.
    Wearing black seems appropriate, but it could be presumptuous if you’re not a member of the immediate family, especially if none of them is wearing black. Your display then casts doubt on the family’s grief—a breach of etiquette.
    On the other hand, Stylettos’ stylists almost always wore black and owned few clothes in anything remotely resembling a color. Lacey assumed they would look like true mourners anywhere, even at a picnic. Not that they would be caught dead at a picnic.
    The April weather had taken a cool turn. Lacey selected a marine-blue wool crepe dress with princess lines and deep black cuffs, which she wore with dark stockings and black heels. She grabbed her favorite black wrap jacket, a vintage find from the Forties. She loved the clothes of that era. With vintage clothing, Lacey felt as if something of the original owner remained. There was a bravado about those clothes, a swagger that was both feminine and functional. They were classic. No matter how she tried, she could not rustle up the same feeling in a Lycra miniskirt and a tube top.
    She always chose Forties clothes when she needed strength of character. The gabardine jacket had beautiful set-in shoulders and fine top stitching. It fit beautifully. Lacey considered it a work of art, and the union label attested to its creation by a member of the now-historic International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which had morphed into UNITE, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees. Lacey wondered how much they paid a woman to make a work of art like this in 1945. Whatever it was, they couldn’t have paid her enough. A vintage gold and pearl lapel pin finished the look. She tucked a lace hanky in the pocket, just in case she felt weepy. She got emotional at the worst times, reading sob stories in her own newspaper, for instance, or watching sappy commercials on television, especially during the holidays. Blubbering at the funeral of a near stranger was well within her realm of possibility.
    Going to the funeral would merely encourage Stella’s detective delusion. But she had already advised Lacey that she would be picking her up at nine-thirty, and there was no graceful way to back out. Lacey left a message at the paper that she would be in after lunch. She waited outside the front door of her apartment building. The dogwood buds were almost ready to pop open and scarlet tulips bloomed along the brick walkways.
    Lacey’s car was in the shop. Again. Her beautiful silver and burgundy Nissan 280ZX was deteriorating before her eyes, causing her pain and betraying her trust after she had poured thousands of dollars into the ungrateful hunk of steel. And it was starting to wear rusty accents around the doors and wheel wells, not a good sign in this humid swamp. But she loved driving it. The way it hugged the road and highway access ramps was a dream. It was not a car to scorn, even though it spent more time at Asian Engines than it did at home.
    Paul, her mechanic, was intimately acquainted with the Z, having laid his healing hands upon its every moving part. She had yet to meet the man who would understand her as well as Paul understood her Z.
    A car that looked like a crazed windup toy pulled into the circle drive of her building, driven by the relentless Stella. Lacey prayed she wouldn’t have to help pedal the stylist’s new pride and joy, a tiny red-and-white BMW Mini Cooper with a giant American flag on the roof. Stella wore a black leather jacket and a black beret with a pin shaped like a broken heart. With a pair of sporty aviator sunglasses and a long red silk scarf, she looked like a bomber pilot on a mission of mercy. It was as if she belonged to some strange female army where they dressed with style and lived to break men’s hearts. Maybe a French army: the