LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Lance, Lance.” I felt as though I was rousing a person from sleep.

      “What?” He looked up and into my eyes. A CAT scan was less probing than Lance’s gaze.

      “I’m a hoping-to-be-involved woman.”

      “Hoping-to-be-involved? Just exactly what is that supposed to mean?”

      “It hasn’t actually been…ah…consummated yet.”

      His eyes drilled me. “You poor faux-virgin. May I ask who the lucky swine is?”

      “No,” I said, still irritated that I wasn’t allowed to name Kurt Hancock as my possible significant-other-to-be.

      “No? Ah, come on,” provoked Lance.

      “He wants it to be our little secret. He’s a high-profile guy. He doesn’t want the gossip or the press.”

      Lance smiled and kissed my hand. “I’m sure that whoever he is, Miranda, he’s a complete and utter bastard and not nearly good enough for you. I know men.”

      “Yes, Mommy.”

      “Let’s kill Matilde off once and for all, okay? Can you make it tomorrow?”

      I nodded.

      “Oh, and remind me to pay you tomorrow.”

      “Pay me tomorrow, Lance. Please, pay me.” I could see that KLM jet edging eastward.

      This time tomorrow I would be a different woman. Yes, Matilde would have her pig farmer, but I would have been had and had again by Kurt. Finally.

      Chapter 3

      Off with the Doc Martens and back into the Adidas. I thought I was so smart, running everywhere and talking all my employers into working around my schedule. I was like a jigsaw puzzle. Some of the pieces were connected but the outlines still visible, and other pieces were still missing. I was not a complete picture.

      I ate one of Grace’s shrimp, rocket and lemon-pepper mayonnaise croissants as I power walked back in the direction of Davey Street. It was so delicious, and I was so hungry that for a moment I considered marrying Grace and forgetting all about Kurt Hancock.

      I hurried through the door of Little Ladies Unlimited—a cleaning company housed in a big bleak one-story concrete block. Inside, there was just the barnlike unadorned storeroom where all the equipment was kept, and the tiny office, from which Cora, the owner, took all the client calls and kept everything running smoothly. At the end of the ranks of industrial vacuum cleaners, the other two women on my cleaning team were standing at the coffee machine. They were having a hot debate about whether drip or plunge was better.

      “No contest. Plunge,” I joined in. “Now, whose husband are we talking about?”

      “Coffeemakers not husbands,” said Fern, smoothing down her brassy scouring-pad hair with a tiny hand. She was smiling. “And on that subject, Miranda, when are you going to get yourself a husband?”

      “I’m only twenty-six,” I said, “I’m not ready to be buried alive yet.”

      “Hell, I was married at nineteen,” said Fern, “and I’ve had twenty-one great years.”

      “You are so full of crap sometimes, Fern McGrew,” said Betty.

      Betty was big and muscular, and always wore lumberjack shirts. There was something in her attitude that reminded me slightly of my roommate Caroline. Caroline was smaller, a size sixteen, so she could buy her clothes off most racks. Betty only bought hers off the racks at Mr. Big ’n Tall, but when it came to tough-assdom, they could have been mother and daughter. Betty had been a sled-dog trainer in the Yukon before she got sick of the snow and moved down to Vancouver.

      Betty barged on, “‘Great years,’ says Fern. Miranda, get her to tell ya about the great time she had when her great husband goes and gets himself that stupid little slut on the side, and the great fights they has about it and the time he puts her in the hospital because he’s broke her cheekbone with his great big fat fist.”

      “Every couple has its little ups and downs,” said Fern, but she was looking at the floor.

      Betty leaned in to confide. “I gets the word about Fern here bein’ in hospital, gotta have surgery ’cause them little pieces of cheekbone is gonna get into her bloodstream otherwise and finish her off good-style once and fer all. So what does I do? I goes over to their place, and there’s old Cliff sittin’ on the couch swillin’ a beer and watchin’ football like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. I hauls him up onto his feet and drags him out into the street. He’s wearing just his socks, no shoes, huh, and lookin’ pathetic. Then I lets the whole street know what he’s done, as if they doesn’t know already, and then I whacks him one across his cheekbone an’ I sends him flyin’ into somebody’s recyclin’ bin. The neighbors wasn’t too happy about that but they wasn’t gonna take me on neither. He never done it again, I can tell ya. Am I right, Fern?”

      Fern nodded and said, “He’s been a pussycat ever since.”

      Wow. Betty and her two meaty fists. Kurt would have to stay in line.

      Cora came out of her office. She was a petite woman with a mass of platinum, back-combed hair in a white hair band. That day she wore tight white pedal pushers and a white angora sweater. She was in her forties but so youthful you wouldn’t know it. She looked as if she’d stepped out of a Sandra Dee film. All she needed was a surfboard under her arm and she was complete.

      She grinned and said in a singsong voice, “Better get going, girls. This one’s a Special.”

      We all groaned.

      Betty grabbed her loyal Hoover while Fern and I loaded up our multipocketed aprons with our sprays and cloths. Fern was on dusting, I was on bathrooms and kitchens, and Betty was vacuuming. We were like soldiers going into battle.

      We hurried out to the company car, loaded the equipment into the back and climbed in. With Betty behind the wheel, we whizzed down to The Bachelor’s place on Burrard. He lived on the twenty-eighth floor of a twenty-nine-story steel-and-glass high-rise overlooking English Bay.

      We cleaned his place every week but today was a Special. Specials were more than just the regular Little Ladies cleaning job. They were expensive and meant we had to do anything that needed to be done. Within reason. As soon as we stepped inside his apartment, we knew The Bachelor hadn’t been operating within the confines of “reason.” He’d been partying.

      “So what would you say’s going on here?” I asked as we surveyed the scene.

      “Lazy drunken slob,” announced Fern.

      “Barnyard animal,” confirmed Betty.

      To start with, The Bachelor had a round bed and not-too-clean moss-green sheets twisted this way and that. At the chest of drawers, I imagined him emptying the contents of his pockets every night, since it was covered with pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters, sticky half-sucked peppermints, condoms still in their foil wrap but well past their expiry date, and numerous crumpled bits of paper with girls’ names and telephone numbers. Similar goodies sprinkled the brown-stained wall-to-wall carpet as well. The mirror tiles above the bed had some interesting spots on them, as though they’d been spritzed by quite a few bottles of fizzy stuff.

      Meanwhile, the fridge held about fifty bottles of beer and a block of mold. No doubt he ordered in whenever he didn’t eat out. Interesting encrustations covered most of the kitchen, detailing The Bachelor’s gastronomic history for the week.

      Back in the living room, there were suspicious-looking marks on his black couch. And his one weeping fig was half-dead. His shoes and socks were all over the place: on top of radiators, on the dining-room table, under the couch. One sock was stuffed into the weeping fig’s pot.

      In the bathroom, I figured he had a nightly struggle getting his willy to cooperate and aim into the toilet rather than all

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