Killer Heels (23 page)

“And then Teddy invites Yvonne here, probably thinking he can make it up to her, but he winds up dead.”

I looked around at the thousands of dollars worth of fresh flowers in the lobby alone, the exquisite furnishings glittering regally under all the chandeliers, the intensely rich people coming and going, all to the accompaniment of Gershwin tunes being played on a grand piano back in the bar. Exceptional, but to die for? Or kill for?

“Why’d she wait a week to kill him?” Tricia asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe he pleaded for a second chance.”

“Do you think he got it and blew that, too?”

“Could be. I think I have her ‘Dear John’ letter in my pocket.”

Tricia growled in vexation. “Why do you keep mentioning the good stuff as an afterthought?”

“I’m not sure what the note says. I need to reassemble it.”

“They have very nice tables in the bar here. Let’s go.” Tricia grabbed my wrist and made to march me off to the lobby bar, but Paul returned at that moment.

“Thank you for waiting, ladies. Your brother’s account is handled by a third party.”

“That wouldn’t be
Zeitgeist
magazine by any chance, would it?” I asked.

“You didn’t hear it from me,” Paul cautioned.

So Teddy was cheating on the boss and billing it to the company. Talk about living dangerously—and paying for it. We thanked Paul profusely and moved off to the bar. This counted as an acceptable reason to start drinking early.

We picked a table near the piano, figuring that the music would cover our conversation, hushed though it was. Tricia felt that the landmark status of the hotel demanded a classic drink and ordered a vodka gimlet. I suspected we had a rough evening ahead of us and ordered Glenfiddich neat.

I’d been twisting so many mental puzzles around in my head that it was actually soothing to have a physical one to spread out across the table. Whoever had torn up the note had done it very precisely so all the pieces were about the same size. Tricia called Cassady and told her to come meet us, listened to a lot of guff about the bar at the St. Regis not being Cassady’s kind of bar, then buckled down to help me move the tiny pieces around until we started to get a sense of what Yvonne had written.

We were just finishing the reconstruction when Cassady arrived. We could tell she was approaching from the way all the businessmen lifted their heads from their drinks for a moment, like lions around the watering hole catching a new scent in the air. And she wasn’t even dressed up. It’s one of the reasons she doesn’t like this kind of bar—you can’t exactly slip in unnoticed, you have to walk right through the middle of everybody. Not that Cassady doesn’t like being noticed sometimes, but most of the time she can’t be bothered.

She gave us each a quick kiss on the cheek, sat down, and sniffed our drink glasses. “What’s going on here?”

“The ambiance demanded it,” Tricia explained.

Cassady beckoned to our waitress, ordered Grey Goose on the rocks, and held her arms out to the sides. “Am I supposed to roll up my sleeves next?”

“We actually have it almost put together,” I told her. Tricia brought her up to date as I carefully laid in the last few pieces of the note.

“I knew you were on the right track with Yvonne,” Cassady said when Tricia was done.

“But the reasons might be more complicated than I thought,” I warned, scanning the completed note.

“They can be downright medieval as long as you get the right person. Court-ordered psychiatrists will take care of the rest,” Cassady assured me.

“So what does it say?” Tricia asked.

We all hunched over the note, pressed as closely together as possible, lab partners all trying to peer into the microscope at the same time. The note read:

Dear Teddy,

This has to stop. I can’t allow it to continue. I have given you ample fair warning but you have persisted and left me no choice. I’m not happy about this decision, but I can’t see any other answer. Forgive me. In my heart, I will always be—

Yours, Yvonne

I walked us through it. “So she gives him this note and his answer is to tear it up and put it back in the music box with the cardkey. He wanted her to meet him here and give him one more chance.”

Cassady shook her head in disagreement. “Seems like an awkward way to fire someone.”

“Fire?” Tricia and I looked at each other, making sure we both found that a ridiculous interpretation.

“She’s not going to fire him, she’s going to break up with him,” Tricia explained.

“She’s going to kill him,” I corrected them both.

“You think this is a death threat?” Cassady asked. “You’re jumping to that conclusion because you know what happened.”

“Read the note,” I responded. Problem was, while Cassady read the note again and tried to imagine it coming from the killer’s point of view, I read it again from the point of view of a boss forced to fire a friend and lover for embezzlement and, possibly, other infractions. It worked both ways. Then I read it a third time with Tricia’s more romantic interpretation. That worked, too. Damn.

“So who’s right?” Tricia asked.

“Maybe we’re all right,” I suggested. “They aren’t mutually exclusive feelings. Maybe the combination pushed her to homicide.”

Cassady hummed thoughtfully. Tricia clapped her hands quietly. “Good work, Molly.”

But was it? Something about this wasn’t right. There was still a piece missing. I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Since I didn’t respond, Tricia turned to Cassady. “Didn’t she do a good job, Cassady?”

Cassady jingled the ice in her drink for applause. “A little free in her handling of evidence, but a good lawyer will be able to work around that. As long as the cops are scrupulous once she hands it over.”

“Cops?” I echoed automatically, still searching to identify what was nagging me.

“You’ve already gone above and beyond, you don’t have to arrest and try her by yourself, Molly. We have people who are paid to do that. I hear some of them are even intensely cute.”

Edwards. Was I ready to talk to Edwards? It all added up in my head, but when I thought about telling him, I felt more nervous than I’d been with Garrett. It was even more important that Edwards buy my story than Garrett. So I had to nail down this extra piece first. As my mother always said, “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost.”

Shoe. The ad. That was it. That was the missing part. If Yvonne suspected Teddy of financial impropriety, why wasn’t she telling Brady that? Why was she giving Gretchen time to try and straighten things out? Did she really not know that he had been skimming or kicking back or whatever was going on with that ad? Was she hoping to protect Teddy out of guilt after his death? Or was Yvonne involved too and hoping that, if third parties “discovered” the problem, she could blame it all on Teddy and walk away unsullied?

“Have either of you heard of a company called Nocturne ?” Tricia and Cassady shook their heads and I described the product in the ad Brady had shown me.

“What a terrific idea,” Tricia sighed enviously. “Don’t you hate that, when someone comes up with a cool idea that makes so much sense that you should have thought of it quite some time ago?”

“Who’s behind it?” Cassady, ever the commerce maven, was already flipping through her mental Rolodex.

“I don’t know.”

Cassady took her little Coach leather notepad and Tiffany silver memo pen out of her purse and scribbled down the name. She asked me for the name of the ad company, too, and wrote that down. “Let me make some inquiries.”

“‘Inquiries’ is so much more ominous than ‘phone calls,’” Tricia observed.

“Same thing, I just bill ‘inquiries’ at a higher rate,” Cassady explained. She closed her notepad with the little flip of the wrist that she’d learned from Officer Hendryx Monday night and smiled. “This is pro bono, don’t worry.”

“It’s about money,” I said with increasing certainty. “The love affairs might be part of it, added fuel to the fire, but this is about money.”

Tricia nodded. “That would explain why she didn’t kill him when she caught him here with Camille.”

Cassady was watching me with cool appraisal. “You need to call Edwards. You need to make him aware of what you know.”

“For Helen’s sake,” Tricia added.

“And for her own,” Cassady told her. “If she sits on this too much longer, we’re getting into obstruction and all sorts of other unpleasant areas.” She turned back to me. “You need to call him. Unless you really don’t think you’re right.”

That last little bit was Cassady issuing a challenge more than giving advice. She said it because she knew it would cut through everything else and make me pick up the phone. Which I did.

Tricia nudged Cassady. “Look. She has him on speed dial.”

Cassady nodded in approval. “Every single woman in Manhattan should have her shrink, her colorist, her favorite restaurant, and a police detective on speed dial.”

My mouth was suddenly dry. I took a sip of my drink and, of course, he answered the phone as I was swallowing. But as I choked, I realized it wasn’t him. “Homicide, Lipscomb.”

I tried to find my voice and my cool, but both were pretty shaky. “Detective Lipscomb, this is Molly Forrester. I spoke with you—”

“Yes, Ms. Forrester. What can I do for you?”

“Is Detective Edwards available?”

“I’ll see.” Detective Lipscomb put me on hold and I couldn’t help imagining Edwards standing right next to him, the two of them counting off some male-endorsed amount of time before Lipscomb picked the phone back up and told me Edwards couldn’t talk to me because he’d had time to think about how stupid he’d been to kiss me and he didn’t have time for these complications and would I stop—

“Detective Edwards.”

Oh. I really had thought he wasn’t going to take the call. “Hi, it’s Molly Forrester.”

“Hello.” It was neutral, but it wasn’t cold. So far, so good.

“I’d like to talk to you.”

“Go ahead.”

“I’d prefer to do it in person.”

“That may not be possible.”

“You don’t want to see me in person?”

“It’s a matter of logistics,” he said and I realized Lipscomb was probably standing right next to him, filling in my half of the conversation for himself.

“If it helps, it’s about the case. Nothing else.”

“What about the case?”

“I have information I think you need.”

“You took something out of Reynolds’ office.”

“No. Well, I mean, there’s more to it than that.”

“Molly …”

“It’s not Helen. I know it’s not.”

There was a pause and I held my breath. Cassady and Tricia leaned forward, willing their support into me. Cassady also pushed my drink back into my hand in case I needed a more concrete form of support. I pushed the drink away and held my hand out for their hands instead. Cassady and Tricia each grabbed two fingers and clung.

“Nine o’clock.”

My stomach flipped for the fourteenth time that day. “Fine. Do you want me to come to the precinct?”

“No.”

There was another pause and I decided to time this one. “Would you like to come to my apartment?”

“That would be good.”

“Great. Do you need the address?” I asked, solely for the benefit of eavesdroppers. Tricia squirmed in her chair with delight and Cassady’s grip on my fingers increased by about 100 PSI.

“That won’t be necessary. Nine o’clock.”

“See you then.” I hung up and put the phone down on top of Yvonne’s note as a paperweight. “He’s coming to my place at nine.”

“That is so wonderful,” Tricia enthused.

“He’s coming so I can tell him about Yvonne,” I reminded her.

“For starters,” Cassady pointed out. “Who knows where things might lead?”

13

“Stay with me. Please,” I pleaded. I don’t like pleading, but it’s the only thing that works in certain situations. Not that it was working at all at the moment.

Cassady and Tricia were pushing me out of the cab, depositing me on the sidewalk in front of my building, and giggling with delight. We’d never made the transition to dinner, just started adding hors d’oeuvres to our cocktails, so here I was at 8:40, a little buzzed, a little hungry, and a little unsure of how to handle Detective Edwards when he showed up. So I was pleading with my two best friends in the entire world to please, please stay with me, and they were delighting in my apprehension.

“We’d only be in the way,” Cassady insisted. “You have work to do.”

“Important work,” Tricia emphasized.

“You have all your evidence?”

“All I have so far.”

“It’s enough to get him thinking. Remember, this is what he’s trained to do. Though I have no doubt he has other talents.”

That struck Tricia as very funny. They were clearly not getting out of the cab. They were beaching me and sailing off. So be it. “Remember that I invited you to stay when you call me tomorrow morning begging for details.”

“The kind of detail I want isn’t going to happen if we stay, sweetness.” Cassady closed the door, they both blew me kisses and drove off into the night.

Twenty minutes later, I was showered, changed into my most presentable Levis and lawn blouse, and fortified by a vanilla Coke and a dose of peanut butter—Jif, reduced fat but extra crunchy—eaten right off the spoon.

Ten minutes after that, I was pacing, twirling the empty spoon in my fingers, and chomping an Altoid. Edwards had my phone number and could call me if something had come up to prevent his arrival. And ten minutes late wasn’t all that late. Especially for a cop, I had to imagine. Still, it was making me nervous.

But not as nervous as the sight of Edwards in my doorway at 9:18 made me. I was braced for the big blue eyes, but his cheekbones seemed to have gotten higher and sharper since the night before. For a moment, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to pull this off.