Lisa Scottoline - Lady Killer

And when she opened the door, her hand was shaking.

M ary stepped into her office, which reeked of perfume and cigarette smoke, Obsession with notes of Marlboro Lights. Trish Gambone was sitting in the club chair opposite the desk, facing away from the door. A curly tangle of raven-haired extensions trailed down the back of her flashy fox jacket, and she wore a black catsuit that ended in black boots, with stiletto heels that met the legal definition of a lethal weapon.

Trash? “Trish?” Mary closed the door behind her.

“Hey, Mare.” Trish looked up and swiveled around in the chair, barely over her crying jag. She looked like a streetwise Sophia Loren, but her lovely features were drawn with anguish and her flawless skin mottled under a spray tan. She dabbed a soggy Kleenex to eyes as brown-black as espresso, but they were bloodshot from tears.

“Are you okay?” Mary asked, hushed.

“What do you think?” Trish shot back, her voice thick.

Mary cringed, as if Trish had swung a machete and hacked off her self-esteem. She flashed on them both in their white shirts with Peter Pan collars, heavy blue jumpers with the SMG patch, and white stockings worn with navy-and-white saddle shoes, like Britney Spears before rehab.

“You look so professional.” Trish checked her out quickly. “Better than you did in school.”

“Thanks.” Kind of. Mary reminded herself that she wasn’t fifteen years old and there was no such thing as an esteem-whacking machete. She knew she looked better than she had in high school; she had a nice smile now that her braces were off and she’d grown into her strong cheekbones and nose, so that her husband used to call her striking, even beautiful. She’d traded her glasses for contacts, so her round brown eyes showed better, and she’d cut her thick, dark blond hair to her shoulders. She reached only five foot two, but she had a compact, curvy figure. All in all, Mary wasn’t a troll anymore.

“Sit down, will ya?” Trish blinked wetness from her eyes. “I’m so freaked, I’m runnin’ outta time.”

“So what’s the matter?” Mary walked around to her desk chair, sat down, and placed her phone messages on the stack of morning mail.

“I need help. I’m in real trouble.” Trish pursed her perfectly puffy pair of lips, their lipstick long gone. She had always been the sexiest girl in their class, but she looked older than her years. Dark eyeliner emphasized her eyes, and she still had the smallest nose that qualified as Italian-American.

“Okay, fill me in,” Mary said.

“First off, I’m not askin’ you for nothin’ I can’t pay for.” Trish swabbed at her eyes, leaning forward in the chair. Her fox jacket parted, revealing a killer body-curvy hips, a tiny waist, and breasts that had been a healthy C cup, even in sixth grade. “I’m not asking you to do anything free ’cause we’re Goretti girls.”

Don’t worry. “Okay.”

“I’m the top colorist at Pierre amp; Magda’s. I make good money. I know lawyers are expensive and I can pay in installments, like lay-away.” Trish pulled another Kleenex from a large black Gucci bag.

“We’ll work it out.” Mary became vaguely aware that she wasn’t looking directly at Trish, as if eye contact could be dangerous, like with Medusa. She picked up a pen and wrote on her pad, WHAT IF SHE CAN SMELL FEAR?

“I came to you because you were always a major brain.”

Mary wrote, WHICH YOU MADE FUN OF, BUT NEVER MIND.

“It’s my boyfriend, I gotta get away from him. I can’t take it anymore, I hate him, I just hate him.”

“That’s so terrible.” Mary wrote, THAT’S SO JUICY.

“He’s a bully.”

NOW YOU KNOW HOW IT FEELS.

“My mom had his number from day one, ’cause my dad used to knock her aroun’, and my girlfriends hated him, too. But I didn’t listen to any of ’em. You remember them-Giulia, Missy, and Yolanda.”

“Sure.” Mary suppressed an eye roll. Giulia Palazzolo, Missy Toohey, and Yolanda Varlecki. The Mean Girls, who evidently took literally the F in BFF.

“They all hate his guts. They been tellin’ me to leave him, but they don’t know the whole story. Lemme tell it in order or I’ll get messed up. It started with him screamin’ and yellin’ at me, all the time. He’s crazy jealous, even though I’m not runnin’ around, and he calls my cell like thirty times a day. If I don’t pick up, he calls the shop.” Pain etched Trish’s features, and she needed no encouragement to continue, the story pouring out with a force of its own. “He’s drinkin’ more and more, and that makes it worse. He calls me ‘pig,’ ‘whore,’ the whole nine.”

“That’s terrible.” Mary felt a pang of sympathy despite her better judgment.

“He won’t let me go out except to go to work. The house has to be perfect, the dinner on a table. His clothes have to be perfect. I even iron, everything perfect.” Trish’s words fell over themselves, coming out in an urgent rush with a South Philly accent. “Last year, he started hittin’ me, then he’d feel bad after. Now he hits me all the time, he never feels bad. If I do somethin’ wrong, he hits me. If I do it right, he hits me.”

“He hits you?” Mary forgot about payback. Trish was desperate, and she was beginning to understand why.

“He’s smart, too, he hits where you can’t see. Punches my belly, my back. Kicks me on my ass, or my arms, even when I’m on the ground. I tol’ my friends and my mom that he roughs me up a little, but that’s it. I didn’t tell how bad it is, or they’d go crazy. Last week, when he was drunk, he did this.” Trish reached for the collar of her catsuit, pulled the zipper down to her ample cleavage, and moved a heavy gold necklace and her black jersey to the side. Above her breast was a vicious, ugly bruise. “You see this? He bites me during sex. He likes that. It turns him on.”

Mary felt disgusted. She didn’t know where to start. “You have sex-”

“He makes me. I won’t show you the rest.” Trish zipped up the catsuit, her lower lip trembling. “Last week he said he was gonna kill me, and when I saw the look in his eyes, I knew he meant it. That’s when I realized, like, from a stupid Oprah show, that I’m abused. That girl on TV, that girl’s me.” Suddenly Trish’s voice broke and she stifled a deep sob, pressing the Kleenex to her nose. “You believe that? Me, livin’ afraid all the time, like a little mouse? Like you?”

Mary’s heart went out to her, despite the insult. “Did you take any pictures of your injuries?”

“Yeh, I kep’ a diary, too.”

“Good.” Mary was drafting a restraining order in her mind. She had gotten two in her time, in far less ugly cases. “Did you go to the doctor or the hospital?”

“No way.” Trish wiped her nose. “He told me he’d kill me if I did.”

“Your neighbors must hear it, when he yells.” Mary was thinking about potential witnesses.

“We live next to the corner store, Filantonio’s, only now it’s Korean and they don’t speak English. You remember, back in school, it was my corner.”

“I remember.” Mary didn’t hang on the corner, she memorized Latin declensions. But back to business. “Do they hear him yelling in the store, do you think?”

“No, he yells at night when they’re closed, and he has a gun. He carries it, a Glock.” Trish hiccupped another sob. “He points it in my face, he holds it to my head. Yesterday he stuck it down my throat, like he was gaggin’ me.”

Mary gasped.

“Don’t worry, I have a gun, too, a Beretta. I bought it a long time ago for protection, and I got one for the girls and my mom, too, for Christmas.”

In another mood, Mary would have made a joke. One size fits all.