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Cream—the best little tonic in the world.” Her look was mischievous enough to make me believe her.
    Viveca Dane was a pistol and I was having fun. I began to wish she was my client instead of her more illustrious peer.
    I gestured toward the foyer at her back. “Would you mind if I come in for a minute?”
    â€œTo do what?”
    I opted for candor. “Talk about Chandelier Wells.”
    Her mood darkened to the color of peat. “That bloated old bitch. What do you want to know that you couldn’t read in the Enquirer ?”
    â€œWhatever you’ve got to tell me.”
    â€œHow long have you got?”
    I looked at my watch. “Two hours.”
    â€œHellfire, big boy. That won’t even get me through the third Bloody Mary.”
    She backed into the building and motioned for me to join her. The house was silent and dark, an obedient ox waiting for permission to stir. We ambled through a narrow hallway and into a sitting room that seemed to serve as a public parlor. Viveca Dane flipped on a ceiling light and asked if I wanted some coffee. I said I did if it was no trouble. As reflexively as a blink, she said she was too old for most kinds of trouble, invited me to make myself at home, and said she’d return in five minutes after she’d slipped into something more comfortable. Among her other attributes, Viveca Dane had a graduate degree in Mae West.
    â€œThe flowers are real, by the way,” she said on her way out, referring to the spectacular floral arrangements sprouting out of ornate glass vases on three different occasional tables. “Courtesy of an anonymous admirer.” With that little hint of lubricity, she disappeared down the hall.
    The room was low-ceilinged and the heavy velvet shades were drawn tight across the light, but it was somehow quite cozy nonetheless, a hive of memorabilia and art deco furnishings. The former included a row of framed book jackets above the sooty face of the mantel, most in the style of a risqué Norman Rockwell, and a host of framed photos of Viveca arm in arm with a variety of local luminaries, from Joe Alioto to Carol Doda to Jerry Garcia. A baroque frame displayed a letter from a famous New York publisher accepting what must have been her first book; another framed a fan letter from Erma Bombeck; a third held a portion of a page from a review in the August 22, 1979, Seattle Times that compared her work to Colette’s.
    The furnishings were as assertive as the mementos. At least five lamps were in evidence, with shades ranging from fringed damask to stained glass. The tables were shiny with lacquer, each bearing a slightly different hue, rendering the light in the room subtle and elusive and no doubt flattering to Viveca Dane’s complexion. The couch and the chairs were tufted and tucked, the wall sconces were of brass and colored glass, and the hearth was tiled in a purple-and-black motif that resembled a sign of the zodiac. The overall sense was of flair once-removed, a museum rather than a homestead, a relic that had slipped from stylish to passé without the owner’s notice. But the aura of obsolescence vanished the minute Viveca Dane returned to the room.
    She’d been gone fifteen minutes, not five, and the transformation was remarkable. Her hair was now a sculpted crown, courtesy of an indiscernible wig. Her face was as unmarred as a bust of white marble, her figure was petite and even provocative in snug slacks and a sweater of a dusky gray that offered a vale of décolletage. Her eyes gleamed like the cut glass in the lighting fixture that was twinkling above her head. In a quarter of an hour, Viveca Dane had dropped twenty years off her age and added two tons to her gravitas. I wondered if she gave lessons. Past her prime or not, she was clearly a force to be reckoned with. I began to take her seriously as a suspect.
    She sat on the couch across from me and crossed her shapely legs. Her slippers