Read Too Pretty to Die for Free Online

one-track minds. Too much smut on MTV.”
    “I don’t even watch MTV,” I said in my own defense, wanting desperately to get off the subject of rods and drills altogether. “Miranda DuBois,” I reminded her. “She’s passed out drunk and all alone, and I don’t want to leave her, not after the episode at Delaney’s. I was hoping you could phone her mother and get her over here. . . .”
    “No can do,” Cissy said in Southern singsong.
    No can do ?
    Those were words I didn’t often hear from Her Highness of Highland Park, the woman I always thought could do anything . Was she being snippy because I’d jumped to the conclusion that she and Stephen had been canoodling?
    “Mother, if you don’t want to help, just say so,” I ran off at the mouth, my cheeks flushed. “I’ll phone Mrs. Santos myself.”
    “Oh, no, you won’t,” Cissy said, “because she’s not home. She’s not even in the country. Debbie’s in Brazil, incommunicado, taking a two-month vacation. She’s at Club Suture. She needed some time to relax in the sun.”
    Ah, Club Suture .
    The code for “having some work done.”
    ’Tis the season, I mused.
    And Brazil was a hot spot for those wanting a face-lift, liposuction, rhinoplasty, or boob job on the QT. It ranked up there with Dallas and L.A., vying for rights to the title of “Plastic Surgery Capital of the World.”
    If you were lucky, your Brazilian surgeon would give you a face-lift for half the cost of having it done in Big D; then he’d arrange for you to recuperate for a month afterward at a spa on a beach without the noise of TVs, laptops, or phones, being waited on hand and foot by dark-skinned boys in Speedo bikinis.
    Those South Americans knew how to do it up right, I decided. If I were wrapped in gauze from head to toe, drinking liquid meals through a straw and too bruised to move, I’d at least want something nice to look at through my swollen peepers.
    “Why don’t you call one of Miranda’s friends?” my mother suggested, and I groaned.
    “That’d be great, if she had any pals after tonight,” I said. “No one wanted anything to do with her after she took a potshot at Dr. Sonja and hit the Picasso instead. What’s even more shocking is that Miranda’s not sleeping it off in a jail cell.”
    “Oh, dear, yes, she’s very fortunate indeed”—my mother sniffed—“if anyone had put a bullet in my Picasso I’d have them arrested in a blink. Unless it was one of his napkin doodles, which aren’t worth the price of framing, if you ask me.”
    Which I hadn’t.
    “It wasn’t a napkin doodle, and besides, it only damaged the frame. The sketch is just fine,” I said, and realized I was basically making excuses for a crazy woman whom I’d never even liked. Ah, well, someone had to do it, right? “I don’t imagine anyone really believes Miranda wanted to kill the good doctor.” Not on purpose, anyway. “She just needed to release some steam.”
    Some people did yoga. Some got drunk and threatened their cosmetic dermatologists with loaded .22s.
    “Why don’t you stay with her, Andrea?” the Ann Landers of Beverly Drive advised, and I sat upright in the pink seat, about to howl in protest. Before I had a chance to put the kibosh on that swell idea, she continued, “Or better yet, bring her here. Sandy and I can look out after her, at least for one night. The poor girl sounds like she could use a little mothering.”
    Smothering sounded more like it.
    Sandy Beck was my mother’s personal secretary and had been with her for as long as I’d been alive. Sandy had her own suite in the house on Beverly and pretty much supervised operations there, and I knew Cissy would rather die than do without her. As would I, since Sandy was as much a part of my family as any blood relation.
    Miranda might benefit from Sandy’s homemade pancakes in the morning; if she could keep them down.
    “Stephen’s just about finished with the rod, and then he’s leaving, so