All or Nothing by Elizabeth Adler Page B

is what our woman is really like.”
    “Take a look in the closet, why don’t ya, honey. Check out her clothes. With your know–how you should be able to get a fix on her.”
    The good–size walk–in closet was jammed with stuff, and to Marla, mostly it looked like work outfits. Little silky suits and dresses, skirts and jackets. Decent quality but not expensive. “About what a young woman in her position could afford,” she told Al. “Except, wow! Just take a look at these.”
    She took out half a dozen dresses and held them up for him to see.
    “Mmmm, what my mother would have called “housedresses,’” Al said, inspecting the frumpy floral prints, the long sleeves and the little white collars. “Now, why would a woman like Laurie buy outfits like that? Unless she was living two different lives.”
    “Three!” Marla said, delving into the back and emerging with a batch of lace and silk: short skirts, bustier tops, a strapless black sheath and that bright–blue lace number she had noticed Laurie wearing the night she had spotted her with Steve on the terrace at the Hotel La Valencia. She didn’t have to look at the labels to know what they had cost.
    “Where would she get the money for these?” She fingered a supple suede designer jacket from a Rodeo Drive store.
    “And while we’re at it, where did she get the money to buy this condo?” Al looked around at the well–designed apartment with its wall–to–wall white carpet and granite and marble fixtures. “
And
she drove an expensive car. Our Laurie must have come into money a couple of years ago.”
    “She inherited it,” Marla guessed. “Her mother died, she got the family jewels.”
    “No chance. I’m willing to bet there were no jewels in the household she grew up in. Wherever that was,” he added, frowning. He stared gloomily out of the window at the rain, running his hands through his hair, worrying about Laurie Martin. Who the hell was she? As well as
where
the hell was she? Dying for a cigarette, he picked up a handful of jelly beans from a glass dish on the coffee table.
    “That’s evidence you’re tampering with, buddy.” The police detective was grinning at him. “Heard you’d given up smoking. Starting to put on a few pounds now, huh, bud?”
    “He could use it. Unlike some people I know.” Marla glanced pointedly at the detective’s beer belly.
    He grinned as he shook a cigarette out of a pack and made a big show of lighting it up. “You folks finished? I’m about ready for a coffee and a doughnut.”

18
    Al was checking with Laurie’s coworkers at the real estate office, trying to find out what kind of a person she was. Friendly? Flirty? Flighty? Or lonely? Solitary? Aloof? Meanwhile, Marla had been delegated to visit the Baptist church Laurie attended in Laguna Beach.
    The Reverend Bones Johnson suited his nickname perfectly, a skeletal young man whose white dog collar bagged around his scrawny neck and whose mild blue eyes had a faraway expression.
    As though he was already in another world, Marla thought, exasperated. She had already asked him twice what he knew about Laurie Martin and both times he had begun to answer and then wandered off the subject into his feelings about the ministry and his congregation.
    “Yes, Reverend, but about Miss Martin.” She brought him back to the point again, keeping the impatience out of her voice with a mighty effort. This was getting her exactly nowhere. Trust Giraud to have given himself the plum job talking to the coworkers and left her to pick up the pieces with this wacko minister. “Did she attend church regularly.”
    “Laurie Martin?” His eyes widened, as though surprised they were talking about her. “Ah, yes, poor young woman. Yes, she came here often. Pretty much every Sunday. Except when she was working. She was a real estate agent, you know. . . .”
    Marla raised her eyes to heaven. “Yeah, I know.”
    “Sometimes on Sundays she had an open house or took