A slim, gray-haired woman in her sixties was sitting on one of the sofas, reaching for a cut-glass bowl filled to the brim with plump macadamia nuts. I eyed the nuts hungrily. I couldn’t wait to grab some.

(Yes, I know I’d just finished a Whopper with fries. What can I say? I’m disgraceful.)

“Hi, Doris,” Pam said to the gray-haired woman. “Meet my friend Jaine. Jaine, this is Doris Jenkins.”

“Welcome to the madhouse,” Doris grinned.

Like Pam and Rochelle, she wore hardly any makeup, making no attempt to cover the laugh lines that gave her face a comfortable lived-in look.

I plopped down on the sofa and helped myself to a handful of macadamias.

“Jaine’s a writer,” Pam said. “She’s helping me with my resume.”

“A writer? Really? I’m impressed. Writing’s like pulling teeth for me.”

“Me, too,” I said. “But that doesn’t stop me.”

“So,” I said, popping a nut in my mouth, “Pam tells me you guys all met at the L.A. Racquet Club.”

“That’s right,” Doris said. “I remember it well. I’d just dropped 185 pounds of ugly flab.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I got divorced.”

It was an old gag, but it cracked her up. She laughed, a loud, raucous laugh.

“Happiest day of my life, getting rid of that bum.”

At which point, an exceedingly attractive guy in his twenties came sailing into the room with a tray of margaritas. I blinked in surprise. What was a guy doing here?

“You must be Jaine Austen,” he said, setting the margaritas on the coffee table. “Love your books.”

Usually I groan when people hand me that line, but this time I found myself smiling. There was something about this guy that I liked. Not in a sexual way, though. My lightning powers of deduction told me he was gay.

Especially when he said, “I’m Colin Lambert, the club’s token gay guy.”

“How did you meet the others in the club?” I asked. “Do you belong to the racquet club, too?”

“Oh, no. I’m Marybeth’s indentured servant. Well, technically I’m her design assistant. But it feels more like slave labor when she calls me at three in the morning and asks me to ‘skedaddle’ over to her place with some fabric swatches. Which is what she did last night. No joke. Three in the morning.”

He sank into the sofa with a sigh.

“I need a drink,” he said, reaching for a margarita.

“So do I, sweetie!” boomed a loud whiskey voice. “So do I!”

I looked up and saw a tall blonde with big hair, big lips, and big boobs to match. She looked like she was in her early thirties, but this was L.A., the plastic surgery capital of the world. For all I knew, she was on Medicare. She swept across the room in a cloud of expensive perfume.