Killer Cocktail (8 page)

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Authors: Sheryl J. Anderson

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #Amateur Sleuth

BOOK: Killer Cocktail
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Which is what Tricia had asked me to do.
The night before, after Detective Cook busted me with my cell phone out on the patio, we’d had quite a little chat. I’d done my best to be professional and respectful, but you didn’t have to be an advice columnist to see this woman wore both a semiautomatic and a whole lot of issues strapped to her hip, and it was hard to tell which was deadlier.
Standing outside, she’d pushed me for details about whom I was calling and why, until Cassady had objected to both the tone and the direction of the questions. In an effort to keep things from getting any more agitated for anyone, I’d thrown myself on the grenade and suggested that if Detective Cook had specific questions, she should ask them and get it over with. I could tell by the curl of Cassady’s lip that she didn’t approve of my strategy in the least, but I suggested she keep an eye on Tricia and let me take care of this quickly. Cassady reluctantly withdrew and the detectives and I adjourned to the small sitting room where they had talked to David.
“So you’re a friend of the sister,” had been her warm and imaginative segue to the heart of the matter. We were all trying to be on our best behavior, but the strain was already showing on both sides. Part of it was the setting. It was a
narrow, stuffy room with red brocade Victorian couches and dark oriental wood, the only incongruous touch being the Vaio laptop on the desk. My guess: an ex-husband’s smoking room, inspired by some vague memory of a bordello in a since-forgotten emerging country that his corporation ran.
Detective Myerson sat off to one side, outside the pools of light cast by the brass lamps. It seemed instinctive for him to shun the light. He kept his notebook open and his eyes on the ground, deferring to his partner. That seemed less instinctive than beaten into him.
“Tricia and I go way back,” I said, trying to be amiable. I knew I shouldn’t antagonize her, but Detective Cook was just one of those people who brings out the combatant in me. Not that I ever enjoy being questioned about anything more vital than “More iced tea?” It’s just with some people, it’s like a chemical clash, but instead of provoking the fight-or-flight mechanism, it provokes the slap-or-snub reaction.
“You know the family, too?”
“Spent time with them over the years, yes.” I tried to think of this as a job interview instead of any species of interrogation. If I put my best foot forward, perhaps I could quell my growing desire to kick her in the shins with it.
“How well do you know David?”
So he still topped the suspect list, even after they’d talked to him again. “Fairly well, socially. Well enough to know he didn’t do it.” I thought of David standing with us beside the pool, trying not to look at Lisbet’s body. The hunch of his body, the slackness of his face—it was the picture of defeat. He was destroyed. He didn’t kill her.
“So you were asking someone about fingerprints because …”
“David’s the boyfriend and you’re going to look at him first.”
“So, preparing to defend him, you called …”
I’ll admit, I thought “my boyfriend,” but I knew better than to say it. It’s a tricky enough word when you’re my age, but it’s especially tricky when it has yet to be validated by use in his presence.
“A good friend of mine.”
“And this friend knows about fingerprints because …”
“He’s a homicide detective.”
It was the first thing I’d said to her all night that surprised her. Detective Myerson didn’t so much as glance up from his notebook, but Detective Cook stopped playing with the brass cigarette lighter she’d picked up off the console table and looked at me with new sharpness. “Really”
“Really” I could see her trying to figure out how good a friend I might be with a homicide detective, but I wasn’t about to fill in any of the gaps for her. “Did the Vincents ask you to bring this detective in as a consultant?”
“You’re joking.”
“She doesn’t joke,” Detective Myerson said quietly, a conclusion I should have reached all by myself, much earlier.
Detective Cook cut him a deadly look, but she made no effort to disagree. What she did was sit down next to me in an intensely uncomfortable caricature of friendship. “You know, my job’s hard enough in a town where everyone has a lawyer on the end of a very short leash and they stonewall public servants for recreation. The last thing I need is some tanked-up party girl coming all the way out here just to go down hard on my watch. The second-to-last thing I need is some perky Nellie Bly starting her own investigation and getting in my way”
She was chafing from whatever weight Aunt Cynthia had already thrown around and was suspecting there was plenty more where that came from, rightly so. Still, that wasn’t a
battle I needed to get dragged into. But for Detective Cook to leave me alone, I had to promise to leave her alone.
I gave Detective Cook the most sincere smile possible under the circumstances. “You find me perky? Thank you.” I stood and considered trying to shake her hand, then decided not to press my luck. “Detective Cook, I won’t get in your way. I just made a phone call to calm my friend. To allay her concerns about clearing her brother of the suspicions we all know you have about him. I’m sorry if I offended you and I appreciate your taking the time to explain. Now, I assume you’d prefer that I stay far, far away from you so let me start right now.”
I turned and walked toward the door, expecting to hear “Wait a minute” at best and a bullet whizzing past my ear at worst before my hand reached the doorknob. But the only sound was Detective Myerson clearing his throat—at whom, I’m not sure—so I opened the door and walked out.
I’d barely gotten five yards down the hallway when Tricia came zipping out of the drawing room with Cassady right on her heels. Tricia’s perfect complexion was marred by two crimson patches on her cheekbones; she’d been crying. Cassady looked pretty composed, just anxious to know what had happened. I told them briefly and quietly.
Tricia put her hand on my arm. I thought I could feel it trembling. “So do they think it’s Davey?”
“I’m not sure they have a theory yet,” I answered carefully.
“Molly, I need you to figure out who killed her.”
I hesitated. It wasn’t that I had just given my word that I’d stay out of the way. I didn’t want to promise anything before I thought it all through myself. And before I had a viable suspect to suggest in place of David. “Tricia …” I attempted.
“Remember what happened last time,” Cassady warned,
but I wasn’t completely sure to which one of us the comment was directed.
“She was right,” Tricia insisted.
“In the end,” Cassady said.
Tricia shook her head. “I can’t just stand back and watch. Whoever did it, I need to know.”
Cassady slid Tricia’s hand off my arm. “Why don’t we all get a good night’s sleep and talk about it in the morning?”
The night’s sleep had not been terribly good and here it was, morning, and to further complicate matters, here was Kyle. Who had come all the way out to the Hamptons on the basis of one impulsive phone call. Which both impressed and puzzled me.
“It’s not so much about solving it,” I explained to him. “I just want to give Tricia something to hold on to. She’s freaked.”
“Because she thinks he’s guilty or because other people do?”
The Pause is no better in person than it is on the phone. Still, I had to employ it because I didn’t want to lie to Kyle, but I didn’t want to paint too bleak a picture either. “She’s confused and upset.”
Kyle nodded, adding up the nonanswer and the Pause. “Which is why you called about the fingerprints. Besides it being the simplest way to get me down here.”
“Yeah. Whenever I see a dead body, it makes me think of you.”
“I’m not used to such flowery compliments.” He sighed and buried one hand deep in his pocket. The other hand pinched the sides of his lower lip together, which meant he was trying to make a decision. After a moment, he released the lip and nodded, having reached one. I expected him to give me a quick kiss on the cheek and say good-bye, but he
said, “There don’t seem to be any usable prints on the body. They haven’t gotten much in the way of trace evidence off her yet, but that only makes it look worse for your boy.”
It took me a moment to realize he was reporting, not speculating. “You’ve already talked to the police.”
Kyle nodded again. “You visit somebody’s backyard, you check in and say hello first.”
“Doesn’t sound like you stopped at hello.”
He shrugged in semisurprise. “She was pretty forthcoming.”
She. Of course. How could I have expected anything different? And how could I have not been there to engineer that meeting, to control the topics of conversation, to make sure they didn’t take a shine to each other? “You talked to Detective Cook?”
“She’s the lead, she’s the one to talk to.”
“Yeah, I’ve already had the pleasure.”
Kyle tried to squash it, but his amusement danced right up to the Big Blues. “She mentioned.”
“And?”
“How can I help?”
“Change the subject back to Detective Cook.”
Kyle stepped closer, eyes still laughing. “C’mon. Why do you want to talk about her?”
“Why don’t you?” .
He stepped even closer. Was he teasing me, soothing me, or distracting me? It was sort of working on all three levels. “Because she’s just trying to do her job, but she obviously ticked you off in the process. They teach us at the academy, crossfire’s deadly.”
“So you’re keeping your head down?”
He lowered his head to demonstrate, then turned it into a masterful approach for a kiss. Just as his lips touched mine,
the door boomed open and Tricia sailed into the room, full of caffeine and angst.
“You came!”
In her rush to embrace him, I doubt she even realized she’d interrupted what was promising to be a delicious, much overdue kiss. Instead, she planted a sweet peck of greeting on his cheek and squeezed his hands. “Thank you so much.”
“Tricia,” I warned.
She looked at me, perplexed, then looked back at Kyle, even more so. “You are here to help?”
“He came to tell me to behave,” I said.
“To make sure you were all okay,” Kyle said firmly, not interested in opening up a debate of his motives. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“But you can help,” Tricia continued stubbornly.
“Tricia, there are rules. It’s not my case. Not even my jurisdiction.”
Tricia hadn’t let go of his hands yet and I was trying to figure out the best way to distract her while there was still some circulation in Kyle’s fingers. “Let’s take it one step at a time, Tricia,” I urged.
“Cook seems like a very smart detective,” Kyle said.
Tricia and I both said “Oh?” at the same time. The trouble was, her “Oh?” was a pretty, round little sound, full of hope and trust. My “Oh?” was a flat, grating tone, full of envy and dread. Tricia didn’t hear mine, she was so focused on Kyle. But Kyle did and tilted his head slightly as though checking the calibration of his ears to make sure he’d heard it correctly.
“He didn’t do this, Kyle,” Tricia said with a little more calm. “Detective Cook has to see that. She has to know how much Davey loved Lisbet, how happy they were to be getting married. It was a dream.”
I knew how much Tricia had disliked Lisbet and it made me love Tricia even more to see her engineering enthusiasm for a relationship she had seen as awful, all in the hopes of helping her brother.
Kyle took a deep breath, framing a statement that I was pretty sure was going to take some of the hope out of Tricia’s “Oh?” But before he could get it out, Nelson walked in from the hallway and closed the door behind him.
“Nelson?” Tricia finally let go of Kyle’s hands and stepped toward Nelson, who paused by the door for a moment, framing a statement of his own. “What is it?”
Nelson walked in closer to us. His face was grim and there was a droop to his shoulders that I wouldn’t have thought was physically possible, given his usual ramrod posture. “Pardon my intrusion, but something has come to my attention and I thought I should bring it to yours. I was packing Lisbet’s things, preparing for her parents’ arrival. I found this in the wastebasket.” He held out his closed fist, fingers down. Tricia held her hand out underneath. Nelson opened his hand and a four-carat solitaire framed by terraced baguettes dropped into Tricia’s palm.
“Lisbet’s engagement ring?” Tricia looked like she might cry. “She wasn’t wearing it?”
Over Tricia’s bowed head, Kyle’s eyes met mine. Why do you take off your engagement ring and throw it in the trash, especially when its fair market value could sustain the economy of a small Caribbean nation for a year? Why else? That’s the problem with dreams. They end.
Death certainly brings out
the worst in people. Not that there aren’t plenty of folks who make absolute fools of themselves at weddings or sob their way through christenings or show up for their college graduations with hangovers that would cripple a lesser being and manage to sit through three hours of pomp and circumstance in the blazing sun without ralphing and still plaster on a smile and kiss Grandpa when they’re done. But death brings out a raw panic in people that translates itself into such bizarre behavior that I was beginning to think it’s a good thing you don’t get to go to your own funeral. At least you end the day with your reputation more or less intact. As long as you didn’t die under embarrassing circumstances.
Not that this was Lisbet’s funeral. It was the champagne brunch that was supposed to have kicked off a day of engagement celebration and frivolity—swimming, golf, tennis, and drinking, not necessarily in that order. But given the circumstances and thanks to Aunt Cynthia’s masterful working of the phones, it had morphed into a memorial gathering of people who were still trying to absorb the news that Lisbet was dead. Aunt Cynthia had been so organized in her calling, in fact, that most of the guests had heard the news
from her and not from the police; they were a step behind her in contacting the guest list and making their inquiries.
“And it was too late to cancel the caterer,” Cassady hypothesized as we milled on the lawn and watched other guests arrive in varying degrees of shock, grief, and disbelief. Aunt Cynthia had at least persuaded the caterer—or promised to pay him extra—to switch to more muted linens, so people were wiping their tears with dark blue napkins instead of the fuchsia and yellow Lisbet had originally requested.
Lisbet’s parents were still inside with the Vincents. They’d arrived shortly after Kyle, and Aunt Cynthia had quickly cloistered the four parents to give them a chance to talk privately. Lisbet’s mother, Dana Jeffries, had appeared to be deep in the grip of some major tranquilizer when Lisbet’s father, Bill McCandless, had walked her into the house. Bill looked pretty haggard himself, but his gait had been stiffened by Crown Royal, not softened by Xanax.
Mr. and Mrs. Vincent had requested that Cassady and I station ourselves on the lawn to encourage the guests to congregate there. It didn’t seem to matter that we hardly knew anyone. It was the principle of party physics in which guests are drawn by the gravitational pull of other guests into a central space until an overpowering force, such as the bar opening, interrupts that pull. I theorized most of our gravitational pull was due to Cassady’s sheer Tadashi accordion-pleated top and mesh skirt.
While Cassady and I aerated the lawn with our high heels and tried to remember faces and names from the night before, Kyle and Tricia were touring the grounds. This had been explained to Aunt Cynthia as an introductory tour for a friend from the city. But when I volunteered to go along, its true purpose was made clear: Tricia was literally showing
Kyle the lay of the land in the hopes that he would discover something to compel him to help us figure out what had happened to Lisbet.
I wasn’t sure we were going to convince him to help. One of the things I admired most about Kyle was his commitment to his job. It still bothered him that he and I hadn’t started our relationship under the most pristine of circumstances and I could actually respect that in the moments that it wasn’t driving me nuts. But this was a lot more complicated, especially because Detective Cook was liable to have him strung up by his badge if she caught a whiff of impropriety.
It was also more complicated because David didn’t look as innocent as I wanted him to be. It was only connect-the-dots at this point, but the lines from walking out of a party where your fiance has embarrassed your upstanding, uptight family to a row in your bedroom that ends with her throwing your expensive engagement ring in the trash to a fight poolside where you catch up with her and crack her skull open were pretty easy to draw. If I was sketching them in, Detective Cook was bound to be going over them with an indelible marker.
Cassady returned from charming one of the young men who was circulating with the cocktail tray and handed me a Bellini. “Apparently at least a few bottles of champagne escaped consumption last night.”
I took the glass but paused, not sure I was ready to start quaffing quite so early. There was so much buzzing around in my head I was concerned about adding champagne to the mix.
Cassady noticed. “Why didn’t we get invited on the garden tour?”
“It’ll be faster for Tricia to show him around without us tagging along,” I attempted.
“Did he tell you not to come?”
“Not precisely.”
“What was the approximation?”
“‘You wait here. We won’t be long.’”
Cassady winced and took a sip of her drink. “So what’s up?”
“He doesn’t want us to get involved.”
“How Freudian is that?”
“I mean, he doesn’t want you and Tricia and me getting involved in investigating this crime.”
“Of course.”
“But we already are.”
“Are we back to the first ‘we’?”
“I wish I knew.”
“I know he drove out here in the middle of the night based on a brief-and-tearless phone call. Gotta count for something. Quite a lot, as a matter of fact.”
I didn’t have a good answer for that so I decided to have a sip of my drink after all. And to change the subject. “Why did Lisbet take her ring off?”
“How can you be brave enough to solve a murder and still too much of a coward to deal with your feelings about a man?”
I moved from sip to swig. “You should be proud I know my limitations. I figure out what I can.”
Cassady raised her glass in momentary resignation. “Lisbet took off her ring because she was mad at David.”
“He’s the one who should have been upset.”
“Maybe he told her to take off the ring.”
“A man wants the ring back, you don’t throw it away”
“True. You throw it at him.”
“And he puts it in his pocket, not the trash.”
“And then three months later, you see it on the pudgy
finger of some corn-fed Midwestern cow at a breast cancer benefit and you’re supposed to laugh it off.”
I waited the obligatory three seconds to make sure she was done. “Whatever happened to him?”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
She knew exactly whom I was talking about, his home and work addresses, current availability, and last girlfriend, as well as what she was wearing and what he was drinking the last time she’d seen him. But you gotta let a girl have her pride. “Where is David?”
“That wasn’t his name.”
“David Vincent.”
“Of course. Because I’m so far past the other thing.”
David hadn’t emerged from the house yet, not that I blamed him. In his position, I would have locked myself in the attic, even if my crazy old governess was up there sucking the marrow from pigeon bones, and refused to come out. But maybe David hadn’t read as many gothic novels as I had.
I was ready to venture back into the house and subtly search out David when Kyle and Tricia returned from their tour. They seemed somber, but composed. While Cassady and I were improvising wardrobe, attempting to show respect for a tragic situation while living out of suitcases filled with party frippery, Tricia had fortuitously packed her black jersey Ellen Tracy contrast trim dress and Prada black velvet bow pumps. With her hair clipped back, she looked entirely appropriate.
And Kyle looked fantastic. Maybe it was caused by the same sea breeze that was tousling his hair, but I felt a marvelous chill along my spine as he walked toward me. Was I overthinking his weekend reticence? Did I need to keep moving forward and pray for the best? If I was willing to do
it for Tricia and David for the sake of an investigation, why wasn’t I willing to do it for the sake of …
Oh yeah, there’s the central problem. How do you do something for love when your mind rebels at simply thinking the word, even as a gorgeous man walks across a rolling Southampton lawn toward you with a hint of a smile playing at the corners of his fabulous blue eyes? Just because he hadn’t said it, I couldn’t say it or think it or act on it?
Cassady, thankfully, said something before I did. “Got it figured out, Kyle?”
Kyle slid his hands into his pockets and twitched a quick grin to acknowledge Cassady’s joke. “Large open area, lots of people, minimal trace evidence. They have their work cut out for them.”
“They?” Cassady asked.
“The local professionals,” Kyle replied, his implication that the matter should be left to them undeniable.
“I still want Molly to talk to Davey,” Tricia said quietly. “I think he’ll tell her things he won’t tell you because you’re a cop and won’t tell me because I’m his sister.”
“They do call her column ‘You Can Tell Me,”’ Cassady pointed out.
“If you insist on doing something,” Kyle said, his tone growing sterner, “you’re going to give the ring to Detective Cook and explain why it wasn’t on Lisbet’s finger. And then leave it alone. All of you.”
Tricia said, “Mother,” very crisply and forcefully. I thought she was offering him an uncharacteristically profane opinion on the matter, but then I realized she was acknowledging her mother. Mrs. Vincent was walking across the lawn behind me, escorting one person I wanted to see and two I didn’t—David and Lisbet’s parents.
David looked like a duck being delivered to the hunter’s
feet by a couple of black Labs. He’d tried to go all country gentleman with the Ralph Lauren slacks and sweater, but his appearance was still beyond bedraggled. He was ashen and morose and looked ready to cave in on himself.
And what do you say to a couple when they’ve just lost their child? Especially when, as she walks up to you, the mother is spewing bile into her cell phone. “I can’t talk to you anymore. I have to mourn my dead daughter.”
Dana Jeffries had regained some color under the pallor with which she’d arrived that morning, largely thanks to Estée Lauder. The rest of her was packed into a black Max-Mara pantsuit with her blindingly white shirt collar open far enough that you could see that the dermatologist had done his best to help her lie about her age, sandblasting the sun damage off her chest and not just off her face. Her hair had been stripped so blond that it was almost transparent and her green eyes were small and dull.
She snapped her phone shut and turned to her husband, who looked like he hadn’t been sober in two marriages. Bill McCandless had a tennis player’s hard-baked tan but you could still see all the broken blood vessels in his nose and cheeks. His Armani suit and perfectly groomed and dyed hair were immaculate, his gold bracelet and signet ring were incandescent, but his smile was crooked and his blue eyes were pale and rheumy.
“That bastard!” she exclaimed.
“Which one, hon?” he asked blandly.
Dana spun to include us all in her outrage. “A certain production designer, who will remain nameless until my lawyers can file the papers to sue his ass, the man I hired to design their West Coast engagement party, is not only claiming he’s pay or play, he says he doesn’t do funerals.”
Bill held out his hand for her phone. “Let me get my
people on this right away.” He punched a number into the cell phone and turned his back on us.
Mrs. Vincent, who had been visibly stiffening during this exchange until she was approaching some form of paralysis, managed to nod in our general direction. “This is David’s sister Tricia and some of her friends.”
Tricia held out her hand and Dana grabbed it between both of her own, like a crocodile chomping down on a dove. “Thank you for understanding the enormity of our loss and being here today to support us,” Dana oozed.
As Tricia managed to come up with a warm memorial anecdote to tell Lisbet’s parents, which I strongly suspected she was making up as she went along, I seized my moment. I leaned over and whispered to David, asking if I could talk to him for a moment. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kyle trying to get my attention without getting anyone else’s.
“What about?” David whispered back.
“Guess.”
David shot a look back over at Tricia, who glanced away from Dana long enough to implore him to go with me. Kyle edged away from Tricia in an effort to head me off at the pass, but Mrs. Vincent thought he was stepping in closer to her, put her arm through his, and returned her attention to Tricia’s touching story. Kyle weighed the ramifications of his next move just long enough for me to put my arm through David’s and hustle him away.
Conscious of all the other little knots of people populating the lawn, I propelled us on a course that snaked around them like some demented slalom, moving fast enough that no one would invite us to stop, but slow enough that no one would think we were running away.
I’d always enjoyed David. Of course, I’d never had to
clean up after him the way Tricia had. Still, I felt awkward about just diving in with all my questions. “I’m so sorry,” I said genuinely, wanting to start from a solid place.

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