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she could afford. She sounded a little disappointed when I called to say I was finished at the jail, but when I told her my plans to visit Claire’s house, she perked right up.
    “Bring me,” she said. “That place will be
nice
. And what’s this business about borrowing her clothes?”
    “Calm down,” I said. “Cocktail dresses and four-hundred dollar shoes weren’t part of her offer.”
    “I’ve barely put a dent in the second floor of this fabulous mall,” she said. “What time are we going to Claire’s? We have appointments at noon.”
    I remembered Vince and his half-laughing warning. “Pedicures?”
    “Negative,” she said. “Highlights for me. Wax for you. And, listen, before you—”
    “No.”
    “—refuse to go, the waxer is—”
    “
No
.”
    “—Diana’s daughter.”
    I hung up.
    She called me right back. “I met her during a smoke break at the funeral yesterday. Start thinking about what you’ll say.”
    I didn’t want to think about hot wax anywhere on my body, much less what I would say to the daughter of a potential murderer as she applied it to me.
    “Back to our plan,” I said. “Richard got some police cronies to take over Diana’s surveillance…sort of a second job thing, I guess. That freed him up, but I’m still too edgy to include him at Claire’s. How about we meet at her house and stay until it’s time for your appointment—”
    “
Our
appointment
sss
.”
    “—Then we’ll head to Tone Zone and see what we can learn. Diana usually goes around lunchtime. We may cross paths.”
    It took some prodding before Jeannie would agree to skip the rest of the Galleria, but the prospect of seeing the inside of a decadent River Oaks home was too much. Finally she broke down and asked for directions. We agreed to meet at Claire’s.
    I arrived in the neighborhood first. My slow drive through one of the oldest, most affluent communities in Houston was strangely quiet. Except for the occasional dog walker, everyone seemed to be cocooned in stately mansions that ran the gamut from old Tudor to Victorian to contemporary, and service vehicles on every street underscored the upkeep required to maintain appearances. Trucks and trailers for various landscape architects and vans belonging to general contractors, sprinkler services, and painters reminded me how much additional cost, beyond the inconceivable mortgages, an upper crust lifestyle demanded.
    Enormous oaks, easily over a hundred years old, towered overhead forming an arboreal tunnel for passing motorists like me. In their shade, some homeowners had suspended children’s swings in front yards, their ropes often tied off from perches as high as twenty or thirty feet. The maturity and abundance of these trees, many with trunks covered in lush ivy, certainly made an impression, but to a grassroots Midwesterner like me, the shock value was in homes large enough to be hotels. Evidently, Monday was trash day because residents had deposited recycle bins on their curbs, a detail that somehow humanized them for me.
    In Hollywood, I’d once paid forty dollars for a tour of the stars’ homes and been disappointed to find so many of them obscured from public view by high and thick shrubbery. By contrast, Houston’s elite proudly shared sweeping views of their estates, opting instead to simply keep their front drapes drawn and, where applicable, their gates closed.
    I passed three properties in a row, all some variant of the White House, before finding Claire’s cul de sac which, like everything else in the neighborhood, was super-sized, more like a traffic circle on steroids. Wide, tall, and deep, Claire’s house was clearly spacious, but I was relieved it wasn’t as sprawling and over-the-top as those on nearby White House Row. I eased my car around a laundry service van and pulled into her extended drive, which curved to the right and ended in front of a three-car detached garage with an upstairs apartment I thought might be some