Raiders of the Lost Corset Read Online Free PDF Page B

decision. In a way she felt getting a new car would be a betrayal of her poor lost Z.
    “No, I haven’t had a chance. Been taking the Metro.”
    “You think about the police auction, like I told you?”
    “Good advice, Broadway.” Lacey would never love another car the way she had loved the Z. Maybe it was better that way, she thought. It would be easier to say good-bye to some clunker the next time some miscreant needed a getaway car. “After all, who wouldn’t want some drug lord’s land yacht with a body in the trunk?”
    “You take care, Smithsonian. You wouldn’t want to run out of luck. How did that lucky saying of hers go? ‘Bloody thread, don’t get dead’?”
    “Very amusing. I don’t feel so lucky today.”
    “You’re lucky as hell. You hang out with victims, you stumble over crime scenes, yet you’re still here. In my book, that’s lucky.”
    He finally smiled a big ivory smile that lit up his face. “You think of any of those crazy fashion clues you like to come up with, you give me a call. Got it?” He favored her with one more suspicious look. “I doubt you will, but you could get lucky again.”
    “Don’t worry, Broadway.”
    You can read all about in The Eye. In “Crimes of Fashion.”
     

Chapter 4
    “I’ve got some bad news, Mac.” Lacey stood at the office door of her editor, Douglas MacArthur Jones. She remained standing so she could run away if necessary.
    “Bad news, Smithsonian?” He looked up from a pile of newspapers. Reading glasses were perched on his nose above the bushy mustache that made him look like a stern black G. Gordon Liddy.
    “I thought you were gone for the day.” Her editor scowled and reached for his bottle of Maalox. He waved it at her. “Do I swig now or later? The suspense is killing me.”
    “Magda Rousseau is dead. I just came from her apartment.”
    “Dead? Dead as in heart-attack dead?” He looked straight at her over his spectacles. “As in natural-causes dead? Please tell me she’s dead because she was an old lady and her number came up and her heart gave out.” His expression dared her to contradict him. He gestured for her to enter the office and sit down. “She was old, right?”
    “Yeah, she was really old, Mac. Really, really old. About your age,” she lied. Lacey slipped into the room, closing the door. She realized it was now or never to save this story — and her trip to Paris. She removed a stack of newspapers from one of the chairs.
    She piled them on Mac’s desk, dusted the seat with her hand, and slid onto it. “Magda told me she was poisoned. Then she warned me not to drink the wine, which she had been drinking. I suppose she could have been kidding. Or wrong. She might have been stabbed, too. But just a little.”
    “She told you she was poisoned? She was alive?”
    “Barely. And then she —” Lacey choked up, but she controlled it. “She died. And I didn’t poison her, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Mac glared at her. Lacey glared back at him.
    “No, of course you didn’t poison her! That would be too easy.”
    He slapped his desk with an open hand. Dust rose from the stacks of Eye Street Observer s resting there. “Damnation, Smithsonian. I suppose this little tableau also included police, paramedics, yellow crime scene tape, all your usual fashion accessories. What is it about you?” he muttered. “It’s been nothing but death, death, death, ever since you took over the fashion beat.”
    “Technically, that’s not true,” Lacey said, keenly attuned to the facts of her job situation. “It started well before me, with Mariah ‘the Pariah’ Morgan, our late and unlamented fashion editor. You remember, don’t you, Mac, when she died in her chair and you stuck me with this beat? And how long did it take you to notice she was dead?”
    “It wasn’t that long. I thought she was taking a catnap.”
    “Eight hours! She was in full rigor mortis! They had to roll her out in her chair.”
    “It