Cat In A Leopard Spot

Chapter 38

Murder Wears a New Face

The outer office tabletops were buried by Paris Vogue, Elle, and Vanity Fair. Also with discreetly faceless bound folders filled with disgusting before and glorious after photos.

Temple spent ten minutes filling out a clipboard with her medical history. Then she was invited into an inner office for an interview with a nurse.

The walls were filled with photos of women who had been transformed by surgery into plastic perfection. Although all were admirably slender, smooth, and gorgeous, none were as extreme as Leonora.

The nurse was a brusquely blowsy woman, so unlike an advertisement for Dr. Mendel’s procedures that you instinctively trusted her. She must be good to look like this and work here without undergoing continual reconstruction. Forty unneeded pounds pushed the buttons on her bodice to the breaking point. Her hair was a strawberry blond frizzle too undisciplined to be anything but natural, and good humor radiated from her unperfected features.

“How did you hear about us?” she asked.

This was better than a Broadway opening. Temple walked right through and to center stage.

“Leonora. Leonora Van Burkleo recommended you. Well, she recommended Dr. Mendel. Very, very highly.”

The nurse’s warm expression did not so much chill as grow sober.

“Her cheekbones,” Temple explained, pointing at her undistinguished pair. “I would die to have cheekbones like that.”

“She almost did,” the nurse muttered as she jotted something down on Temple’s information sheet.

“I beg your pardon? Oh. You mean she was in an accident and had to be reconstructed?”

“Yeah. Household accident.” Her mouth twisted.

“How terrible! Well, she didn’t mention anything to me. Is that why her new look is so exotic? She needed a lot of reconstructive work?”

“Dr. Mendel reconstructed her whole face.”

“And she didn’t specifically ask for the, ah, feline look?”

The nurse laughed bitterly. “Old Van Burkleo might say she asked for it.” Her at-first friendly eyes were blinking nervously. Her entire plump figure radiated throttled fury.

Temple, bewildered, stumbled on conversationally. “It must have been a very serious fall.”

“Several.” The woman’s haystack of hair hid her face as she bent over the papers.

What was she implying? Leonora had fallen down, repeatedly. Drugs? A drinking problem? One or the other so severe that she required full-face plastic surgery? Had asked for it?

“Look, honey.” The nurse looked up, her eyes glaring. “I don’t want you breathing a word of this to Mrs. Van Burkleo or Dr. Mendel. It’s none of our business. But I can’t have you…Listen. Your cheekbones are fine. You don’t need implants. You don’t need anything. Get out of here. And just be glad you’re not that poor, poor woman.”

“Leonora? But she’s rich and, and—”

“You don’t want to look like her, hon, even just in the cheekbones. Everything that’s there today is the only thing modern surgery could do to repair years of battering. If she wants to make a fashion statement out of mutilation, I guess it reasserts some sense of pride, but I can’t let innocents come in here wanting to copycat a tragedy. Young people today. Be happy with who and how you are!”

The woman handed Temple’s info sheet back to her and walked out of the consultation room.

Temple sat there stunned.

Staggered.

Domestic abuse. She remembered suddenly another face, one that had been on the TV news when she was a kid: Heidi…no, Hedda. Nussbaum. That terrible case where that demented abusive lawyer had killed an adopted little girl. Hedda Nussbaum was the woman who had lived with him. Temple’s mind still carried the before-and-after news photos of Hedda, how over the years her features had been pounded like veal scallopini until they were blunter and more swollen than any old-time prizefighter’s mug. Just like Leonora’s ersatz big-cat look.

This put a whole new complexion on the case.

Leonora Van Burkleo had motive one for murder, even if you were tempted to call it justifiable homicide.