LITMIR.BIZ

      I checked with Theresa on my way out that night. No one had heard from Lucy. Mary in HR had called the police, who drove over to Lucy’s house in the outer reaches of the city by the ocean. They had looked in the windows and seen no signs of disturbance. Since no one except us had called them they were going to contact her sister in St. Louis before breaking in.

      When I arrived home I flopped down on the living room couch in front of the window. I could never look at this view without thinking how lucky I was to have an apartment in Pacific Heights, the nicest neighborhood in San Francisco. The view of Angel and Alcatraz Islands was like looking into a jewelry case, emeralds tossed on the blue velvet background of the San Francisco Bay, framed by the Golden Gate Bridge.

      Before I became Kimberley’s roommate I had been living alone in the converted attic of a dilapidated three-story Victorian in the Excelsior district, between a check-cashing store and a Popeye’s Chicken. At night the flashing red Popeye’s sign punctuated my dreams at two-second intervals.

      Despite the obvious charms of this urban lifestyle, when I read a notice on the company’s electronic bulletin board saying that someone wanted to share a two-bedroom apartment in Pacific Heights for $800 a month I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Or at least to Kansas, where apartments probably still cost less than $2,000 a month, the going rate for a studio in San Francisco. It took me a while to figure out why the rent was so cheap, but when I did, it still seemed like a sweet deal.

      It turned out that Kimberley’s father, Edward Bennett, a plastic surgeon, owned the building, as well as several others. Kimberley’s mother was high society, from an old San Francisco family, the Prestons. Trudi Preston Bennett’s people had come west in the Gold Rush of 1849. Edward Preston’s roots were not nearly so deep, but that didn’t keep the family out of the Chronicle’s society pages. San Francisco’s “in crowd” was not nearly so persnickety about pedigree as their East Coast counterparts. They couldn’t afford to be, since a hundred and fifty years ago the whole town was up to its neck in mud.

      The Bennetts didn’t like their precious girl living alone; in fact they wanted her to live with them in the family home, a colonnaded Georgian Revival mansion at the top of Pacific Heights. The compromise was that she was allowed to live nearby, as long as she had a roommate for security. I wasn’t sure why she picked me, since I offered all the security of a Chihuahua puppy. Not to mention the fact that we are about as different as two people can get.

      All of Kimberley’s clothes were sorted by color and arranged from light to dark in her closet. Her shoes were stacked neatly with a photo of each pair pasted to the box. My clothes arrange themselves when I throw them on the floor, and I often search for ten minutes to find the mate to a shoe I want to wear. But as long as I confined the mess to my room our arrangement worked out.

      Three months after I moved in Kimberley was transferred from High Tech to my department, Consumer Products, with Lucy as her boss. This created a little more togetherness than either one of us would have chosen, but we seemed to be making the best of it, at least until today’s showdown. Macabre Factor was the only account we shared, thank goodness.

      I made a sandwich and a bag of microwave popcorn, the mainstay of my diet. “We” don’t eat in the living room, so I flipped through Kimberley’s fashion magazines in the kitchen. Then I watched TV until 10:00, took a shower, and headed to my room to find something to wear to the club.

      I plowed through my closet, pulling things out, looking at them, and then dropping them into piles that I fully intended to pick up later. Anything that wasn’t black wouldn’t do. Luckily that didn’t eliminate much of my wardrobe, since most my clothing was black, the preferred palette of both actors and advertising account executives. A lot of my stuff was also vintage, which didn’t work too well in a business that worshipped the new, but would be great for mixing with folks who favored floor-length gowns and cut-away frock coats. In the back of my closet I hit pay dirt: a beautiful Victorian silk mourning dress with long narrow sleeves that closed with a dozen tiny buttons, even a little train falling from a slight bustle in the back. I had found it a year ago in a used clothing shop on Haight Street and had paid two hundred dollars for it without argument. The silk was worn and there were a few tears at the stress points but that just added to its appeal. It was so Arsenic and Old Lace that I couldn’t resist it. I hung it reverently in my closet but never imagined there’d be an occasion to wear it.

      Now makeup. I had some Macabre Factor products: white base makeup, black eyeliner, a lipstick called “Coagulate,” and some greenish-black fingernail polish. But really, how far was I going to take this? Normally I wear just enough makeup to ease the contrast between my pale skin and dark freckles. I powdered my face with my own powder, lined my eyes with the Macabre Factor eye pencil, put mascara on my lashes. Finally I dabbed on a little Coagulate lipstick, which was red with a disturbing blue undertone.

      My hair was looking pretty good, thanks to the three products I’d applied to tame my curls. The McCaffrey hair, inherited from grandfather Seamus, is what an advertiser would term “irrepressible,” and what my mother called unruly. When I was a child my hair stood up on my head like a frizzy auburn halo, when it wasn’t arranged in braids so tight my teeth hurt. I used to pray every night that I’d wake up with straight hair. God never changed my hair, but He did eventually send me antifrizz crème. Stepping back from the mirror I surveyed my handiwork. I still looked a little too sanguineous to pass for a vampire, but I was pleased with the results.