He Was Her Man Read Online Free Page A

Madeline up on the house phone.…
    “Oh, Olive!” Madeline clasped her to her bosom and gave her a big hug. “I know you’ll be my salvation.” Reluctantly she stepped into the Mercedes and pulled the door to with that solid kerchunk like a bank vault closing, and waving a sad little Miss America wave, drove off.

3
    THERE WERE TWO messages waiting for Sam at the hotel desk. The first one said, Call Harry. That was a laugh. What did he want, to fill her in on a forgotten detail of his trysts with Barbie? And how’d he know where she was, anyway? She handed the yellow slip of paper back to the desk clerk and said, “Could you burn this, please?”
    The second message was from Kitty telling her to get herself down to the baths. Now! So she dumped her bags in her room, stripped, grabbed up the monogrammed terry cloth robe and paper slippers the hotel had so graciously provided, and rang for the cute little gilded elevator, which took her to the spa on the Palace’s second floor.
    The reception area was a Moorish temple done in tiles of turquoise and maroon. Behind the desk the receptionist wore a platinum beehive and rhinestone cat eye glasses and called her Honey. She took Sam’s room number and pointed her through the pink curtains, straight back to the twenties. The waiting room sported wooden ceiling fans, walls of spanky clean white tile and gray marble, and mazelike floors of pink and white octagons.
    Kitty threw herself at Sam from a scalloped green metal lawn chair. “Oooooooh, I am so glad to see you!”
    The two old friends kissed cheeks and hugged. The top of the five-foot-two Kitty’s strawberry blond head tucked neatly under Sam’s chin. She said, “I know. I almost died without your smart mouth running in my ear the past twenty-four hours.” And that was true. The visit with Olive had been great, but nothing beat old friends.
    “Speaking of dying. I don’t know why you didn’t fly. Did it rain all the way? I was just sure you were roadkill by now. You all agitated, driving eighty miles an hour.”
    “I never topped seventy-five,” Sam lied. She was famous for her speeding tickets, and her impatience. “The driving was good, I needed to work off some nervous energy.”
    “Well, sit right down here and tell all.” Kitty patted the chair beside hers.
    So Sam repeated the tale of woe she’d shared with Olive and had already told Kitty the night before on the telephone, filling in more details. But woe was like that. You needed to twist it around and chew on it several times before you could begin to get the hurt out.
    Kitty fell back in her chair, her robe flapping. “I say shoot both the sons of bitches. Him and her.”
    “Oh, you always say that. But you don’t mean it.”
    “What the hell are you talking about? I never say things I don’t mean.” Which was a joke. Kitty was in the public relations business in New Orleans. She lied for a living.
    Sam said, “Let me remind you that twenty-odd years ago, back in school, when Jinx, this very same Jinx whose third engagement party you’re here for”—she held up three fingers—“ran off with Frank, my very best boyfriend in the whole world up until that time, you said the same thing. Shoot ’em. Moi, I agreed it was a superlative idea. Then, I start chatting up our friends in the Panthers about a gun, what did you do?”
    “I said you were nuts. Locked you in our dorm room. Reminded you that all that bourbon you used to consume made you forget the difference between Southern hyperbole and reality.”
    “So what does that say about my killing Harry and this blonde now?”
    “Says you’re sober, which means you’d know more about what you were doing, plus you have all that crime-reporting business under your belt. I’d say you could probably get away with it.”
    Sam laughed. “While I’m at it, you think I could get away with doing Jinx, too? Since I missed my chance the first time around?”
    Kitty got that prim look on her