Jaine Austen Mystery: Killing Cupid Part 1

A Jaine Austen Mystery.

KILLING CUPID.

LAURA LEVINE.

For my brother, Michael, with love.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

As always, I am enormously grateful to my editor John Scognamiglio for his unwavering faith in Jaine, and to my agent, Evan Marshall, for his ongoing guidance and support.

Thanks to Hiro Kimura, who so brilliantly brings Prozac to life on my book covers. To Lou Malcangi for another eye-catching dust jacket design. And to the rest of the gang at Kensington who keep Jaine and Prozac coming back for murder and minced mackerel guts each year.

Special thanks to Frank Mula, man of a thousand jokes. And to Joanne Fluke, who takes time out from writing her own bestselling Hannah Swensen mysteries to grace me with her insights and friendship-not to mention a cover blurb to die for.

Thanks to Dr. Madelyn Graham, veterinarian extraordinaire. And to Mike O'Toole, whose Gondola Getaway is one of the most fun things you can do in Southern California.

Thanks to John Fluke, product placement guru and all-around great guy. To Mark Baker, who was there from the beginning. And to Jamie Wallace (aka Sidney's mom), the genial webmeister at LauraLevineMysteries.com.

A loving thanks to my friends and family for hanging in with me all these years. And a special shout out to all the readers who've taken the time to write me and/or show up at my book signings. You guys are the best!

And finally, to my most loyal fan and sounding board, my husband Mark. I couldn't do it without you.

Chapter 1.

There it was, waiting for me on my bedspread. An early Valentine's gift from my Significant Other.

Gingerly I picked it up.

"A hairball. How very thoughtful."

My cat, Prozac, looked up from where she was lolling on my pillow, beaming with pride.

I left another one for you in your slippers.

At this stage of my life, I was used to c.r.a.ppy Valentine's gifts. Mainly from my ex-husband, The Blob. I remember the Valentine's Day he came sauntering through the door with a slightly wilted bouquet of roses.

"For you, pickleface," he said.

He liked to call me pickleface. One of the many reasons we are no longer married.

The Blob never brought me gifts, not unless you consider a complimentary toothpick from Hop Li's Chinese Restaurant a gift. So my heart actually started to melt just a tad. Seeing a small envelope sticking out from the bouquet, I opened it eagerly, only to read the words:

Rest in peace, Esther.

With heartfelt sympathy, the Rosenkrantzes.

Nothing says Happy Valentine's Day like used funeral flowers.

So like I say, I was used to dreadful Valentine's gifts. But none as dreadful as the one I was about to get that day when Joy Amoroso called.

I was stretched out on my sofa, sc.r.a.ping Prozac's hairball out from my slipper, when the phone rang.

"Jane Eyre?" asked a woman with a decidedly phony British accent.

"Austen," I corrected her. "Jaine Austen."

"Yes, right. Whatever. This is Joy Amoroso calling. You've heard of me, of course."

Something in her tone of voice told me to answer in the affirmative.

"Um, sure," I lied.

"I need someone to write advertising copy, and Marvin Cooper gave me your name."

Marvin Cooper, aka Marvelous Marv, The Mattress King, was one of my biggest clients. What a sweetie, I thought, to have recommended me for a job. If I'd only known what h.e.l.l was in store for me, I would have smothered him with one of his Comfort Cloud pillows. But at that moment, I was thrilled at the prospect of a paycheck winging its way toward my anemic checking account.

"I a.s.sume you know all about my business," the phony Brit was saying.

"Of course," I lied again.

"Come to my offices tomorrow at ten a.m., and I'll decide if you're good enough to work for me."

What nerve! I felt like telling her to take her silly job and shove it. She may not have realized it, but she happened to be talking to the woman who won the Golden Plunger Award from the Los Angeles Plumbers a.s.sociation for the immortal slogan In a Rush to Flush? Call Toiletmasters!

Yes, I would have dearly liked to flip her a verbal finger, but "Okay, sure," were the lily-livered words I actually uttered.

"Good. See you tomorrow. Ten a.m. sharp."

And before even giving me her address, she'd hung up.

Who on earth was this presumptuous woman?

I was just about to head over to my computer to check her out online when there was a knock on my door.

I opened it to find my neighbor, Lance Venable.

A normally bubbly fellow with bright blue eyes and a headful of tight blond curls, Lance looked distinctly bubble-free as he trudged into my apartment.

"Oh, Jaine!" he sighed, summoning his inner Sarah Bernhardt, "I don't think I can face another Valentine's Day without a date." With that, he plopped down on my sofa, his arm slung dramatically across his forehead, very Marcel Proust Yearning for a Madeleine.

"Cheer up, Lance. We'll stay home, order a pizza, and watch Fatal Attraction like we always do."

"No, I'm afraid not even the thought of Glenn Close with a butcher knife is going to cheer me up this year. In fact, I was thinking of going to a weekend retreat at a monastery."

"A monastery? But you're not even Catholic."

"That's not the point. I need to meditate, to contemplate, to see how I look in one of those cowl neck robes. And besides, who knows? I just might meet somebody."

"Lance, you can't go to a monastery to pick up guys! They're celibate."

"So? I like a challenge."

The scary thing is, he wasn't kidding.

"But enough about my pathetic life. What's going on in your pathetic life?"

"For your information," I said, sc.r.a.ping the last of Prozac's hairball from my slipper, "my life does not happen to be the least bit pathetic. "But now that you asked, the most maddening thing just happened. I got a phone call from a mystery woman named Joy Amoroso, telling me to come in for a job interview without even giving me her address or the name of her company."

"Joy Amoroso!" Lance's eyes lit up. "I know all about her. She owns Dates of Joy, Beverly Hills's premier matchmaking service!"

He sprang up from the sofa, his lethargy a thing of the past.

"Be right back!" he cried, dashing out the door. Seconds later he was back, as promised, waving a glossy news sheet.

"The Beverly Hills Social Pictorial," he said, leafing through it. "I subscribe to keep track of my customers."

The customers to whom Lance referred were the wealthy dames who shopped at Neiman Marcus's shoe department, where Lance toils as a salesman, fondling billion-dollar bunions for a living.

"Aha!" he cried, finding the page he'd been searching for. "Here she is."

He handed me the magazine, pointing to an ad for the Dates of Joy matchmaking service.

There in the middle of the ad was Joy Amoroso, an attractive blonde sitting behind a desk, a statue of Cupid slinging his arrow in the background. At least, I a.s.sumed Joy was attractive. The picture itself was extremely hazy, as if it had been shot through a lens liberally lathered with Vaseline.

"When you get the job," Lance was saying, "you've got to promise you'll get me a date."

"I thought you were going to a monastery."

"A monastery? Why on earth would I go to a monastery when I could be going on a Date of Joy? I hear she's got a client list filled with gazillionaires."

"Don't get your hopes up. I haven't got the job yet."

"Oh, but you will."

And as very bad luck would have it, he was right.

Little did I know it then, but my Valentine's Day was about to go from Fatal Attraction to just plain fatal.

Chapter 2.

I found Beverly Hills's premier matchmaker several miles outside Beverly Hills, in the perfectly pleasant but distinctly less prestigious town of Mar Vista.

Housed in a three-story stucco office building between Ellman's Upholsterers and Jerry's Discount Flowers, Dates of Joy was a far cry from the swellegant mecca of matchmaking I'd imagined.

Nabbing a spot in front of Jerry's Discount Flowers, I made my way past buckets of drooping carnations into Joy's office building. There I stepped onto a musty elevator, where some industrious hoodlums had etched the walls with an impressive display of male genitalia.

I got off at the second floor and found Joy's office at the end of a dank hallway. In contrast to the oatmeal walls surrounding it, Joy's door was painted a bilious Pepto-Bismol pink, the words DATES OF JOY etched in flowery calligraphy.

I headed inside to find the walls painted the same Pepto-Bismol pink and lined with large framed blowups of happy couples gazing at each other, gooey-eyed with love.

At the time, I a.s.sumed that they were all Joy's satisfied customers.

Seated at a receptionist's desk was a goth pixie clad in black leather and a tasteful a.s.sortment of body piercings, her spiky hair a blazing shade of purple. And hunched over a computer behind her was a skinny guy in black horn-rimmed gla.s.ses held together at the hinges with duct tape. In his white short-sleeved shirt and yellow bow tie, cowlicks running riot in his hair, the guy had Computer Nerd written all over him.

"May I help you?" the goth pixie asked, looking up from her computer, a steel stud glinting merrily in her nose.

"I'm Jaine Austen. I'm here to see Joy Amoroso."

"Oh, right."

Was it my imagination, or was that a look of pity I'd just seen flit across her face?

"Joy will be right with you," she said. "Won't you have a seat?"

She gestured to a row of plastic chairs lined up against the wall. I plopped down into one and checked out the reading matter on a tiny coffee table in front of me. Along with the usual dog-eared issues of People was a thick loose-leaf binder.