Killer Heels (35 page)

Cassady pursed her lips doubtfully. “What guarantee do we have that she won’t wind up missing him?”

“None, but the Hamptons are known for their ability to distract. That’s why we’re going to Southampton. This weekend.”

I winced. Weekend getaways had contributed heavily to my current state of romantic frustration, so it wasn’t a favorite concept at the moment.

Ten days ago, I’d suggested we go somewhere for a weekend, just the two of us. He hadn’t said anything for a long time and then had said, “We’ll see.” I could hear the squeal of brakes and feel the whiplash. Since then, we’d had a couple of vaguely unsatisfying phone calls. Clearly, I’d made him uncomfortable. How uncomfortable was the question.

But perhaps it was a question best pondered somewhere out of town in the company of my two best friends. I tried to remember the balance on my credit card. “It’s the first week of May. When does the season start?”

“Doesn’t matter. We’re going to my aunt’s house.”

Cassady and I exchanged a look, confirming that we were troubled by the same thought. “Aunt Cynthia?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Aunt Cynthia of the ever-fluctuating last will and testament?” Cassady asked.

“The same.”

“The Aunt Cynthia who got drunk at your grandfather’s funeral and stood on the dining room table and sang ‘We’ll Meet Again,’” I continued, just to make sure that we were all, in fact, talking about a woman we had heard Tricia vow she would never speak to again unless under court order.

“That’s her.”

Cassady and I wavered, uncertain of the etiquette involved in saying the next thing. I took the plunge. “But you hate her.”

“Yes, but she has a great house,” Tricia insisted, a little too brightly.

“Oh, I get it. She’s going away and you’ve bribed the housekeeper to slip you the keys for the weekend,” Cassady said.

“No. She’s going to be there. The whole family’s going to be there.” Tricia’s smile stretched to the point where I feared it might permanently torque her small face like a bad facelift. “And if you guys don’t come with me, I could very well wind up being the one singing on the dining room table.”

Cassady shrugged. “Well, I can’t miss that. Count me in.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“That’s Molly’s way of saying that she’d love to come, too,” Cassady teased.

“Well, of course I’d love to, but I don’t get it. If Aunt Cynthia’s doing the whole black sheep thing, why’s the entire family trooping down there and why don’t you just plead heavy workload and not go?”

Tricia’s smile faltered. “It’s David’s engagement party.”

The Vincents are a fascinating family. New England blue-bloods, super-Republican, the closest thing to aristocracy I’ve ever met. Tricia jokes that her ancestors came over on the advance ship
before
the
Mayflower,
to make sure the Colonies were suitable and that everything had been set up properly; planning and controlling are in her blood. Her parents live in Connecticut, but they also keep an apartment in the city because they’re constantly coming in for some function or another. They’ve always been lovely to Cassady and me. Tricia’s crazy about them, but they also make her crazy. Her favorite brother, David, is a case in point. She adores him, would walk out on the president to take a call from him, but David acts first and thinks second and usually calls Tricia to clean up third.

“They got engaged?” Cassady asked.

Tricia’s smile disappeared altogether. “Her parents are throwing some huge party in L.A., but Mother and Dad decided to up the ante and throw them a proper engagement party here first. Mother doesn’t think those show people on the Left Coast respect social ritual. But Mother and Dad’s little project turned into a whole weekend that turned into too many people for the house in Connecticut. Obviously, someone didn’t put the scotch away soon enough and got on the phone with Aunt Cynthia, and you guys have to come because I don’t know how I’ll get through it otherwise.” The fingernail of her right index finger dug into the cuticle of her right thumb, Tricia’s classic sign of distress.

“Of course we’ll be there,” I assured her, taking her hand in mine to stop the digging.

Then, because it is Cassady’s gift, she said the thing we were all thinking. “He’s really going to marry that bitch?”

For just a moment, I thought that glow beneath Tricia’s Dresden doll exterior was going to reveal itself to be molten lava and we were going to watch it erupt. But ever the lady, Tricia struggled to keep it all inside and lifted her glass instead. “To my brothers and their god-awful taste in women,” she toasted.

We clinked glasses in assent. In all the years we’d known Tricia (the three of us met as college freshmen thirteen years ago, but please don’t do the math), David and Richard Vincent had excelled at involvements with nightmarish women. Richard had gone so far as to marry Rebecca Somerset two years ago. Rebecca’s mom was electronics money, her dad was shipping money, and Rebecca was an heiress
cum
designer
cum
disaster. She was famous in a large number of non-intersecting social circles for consistently inappropriate and boorish behavior.

After a very public romance, Richard and Rebecca eloped to Jamaica, and Tricia’s mother literally took to her bed for a week. Richard and Rebecca had made it a whole thirteen months before splitting up—a full trip around the rocky cape of the calendar so they could ruin every holiday once, was Tricia’s theory—and the Vincent family was still reverberating, six months into the separation.

And now David was apparently engaged to Lisbet Mc-Candless, one of the few women in America capable of making Rebecca look good by comparison. Lisbet was second-generation Hollywood, the spawn of a movie director and a studio executive, both famous for their tempers and sexual flexibility. Lisbet had been a sitcom star as a child; as a teenager, she drifted into a series of films quickly forgotten despite Lisbet’s willingness to do nudity.

Now in her twenties, Lisbet had worked her way back on to television, basic cable at least (rumor was, her mother was having an affair with the network executive who ordered the show). She played a rocket scientist who stumbles upon a government cover-up of life on Venus—the only thing that was covered up on the show. It was a huge hit, thanks mainly to the plunging necklines on Lisbet’s costumes, and the success put Lisbet back on top of the tabloid heap. Lately, she’d gotten into so many public brawls with other starlets that her father had shipped her out to do off-Broadway during hiatus as career rehab. David had met her shortly after her arrival in New York and they’d been paparazzi fodder ever since. And now they were engaged.

I put on my most optimistic expression. “So, your parents are throwing them a huge party. They must be pleased about the whole thing. If it’s a big family thing, do you really want us there?” I asked.

“You’re more family to me than some of the piranhas in my gene pool. Besides, if you don’t come, who will join me as I sit with my bottle of champagne in the corner and sip and snipe?”

Which is why, that Friday, I was overpacking my overnight bag and wondering when—possibly even, if—I should call Kyle and tell him I was going away. He was trying to wrap up a case so I had no expectation of spending the weekend with him. When we’d last spoken, he’d said he didn’t know when we’d be able to get together. So if I called him now and told him I was going away for the weekend, would it seem like I was forcing him to revisit the subject of our going away? I didn’t want to seem punitive. Or worse, clingy.

Fortunately, I was spared the agony of examining this ethical dilemma by the fact that Kyle chose that moment to call me.

“Hey.” He said it warmly, but gave me no indication of whether he was standing in the middle of his office or in the middle of a pool of blood. “This a bad time?”

I opted for the breezy, no-big-deal approach. “No, actually good timing. I’m on my way out. What should I bring you back from Southampton?”

There was a pause. Brief, but still discernible. The Pause is risky, more for the recipient than for the pauser. Resist all you want, you’re still going to read something into the Pause, a problem that can feed on itself when the pauser realizes he’s paused and starts wondering about what you’re reading into his pause. You’re on one end of the phone, thinking he’s bracing himself to tell you bad news, to get his lie in proper order, to struggle against his desire to declare undying love. And he’s on his end, perhaps doing any one of those things, but maybe just stifling a sneeze.

Communication is the foundation of any good relationship, God help us.

“The weekend?”

I made sure I didn’t pause. “Uh-huh.”

“Going alone?”

“Does that affect your request?”

“Among other things.”

I liked that answer, and did my best to detect jealousy lurking around the edges. “Tricia’s family’s having a thing and she wants Cassady and me to come along and protect her.”

“Hazardous duty.”

“Only for my liver.”

“One of
those
weekends.”

“With any luck.”

“So you’re hoping to get lucky this weekend?”

“Ah. You can take the boy out of the interrogation room, but you can’t take the interrogation room out of the boy.”

“Or evasion out of the girl.”

“I’m going down to keep Tricia from telling her aunt what she really thinks of her. My sole mission.”

“Aunt’s a piece of work?”

“Putting it nicely. You may have heard of her. Cynthia Malinkov.”

“Any relation to Lev Malinkov, the developer?”

“Ex, with an emphasis on big alimony.”

“You’re a good friend.”

“It’s my only shot at heaven.”

He laughed. It was a great sound, especially because he didn’t do it very often. I stayed quiet, which I don’t do very often. It didn’t really constitute a Pause, because I was giving him the opportunity to say something in addition to the laugh. I was also realizing that he hadn’t said why he called.

“You underestimate yourself,” he said, and I could tell he was still smiling.

“Chronically.”

“Have a great time.”

“You haven’t answered my question. Or told me why you called.”

“You sure you didn’t call me?”

Now I laughed. “Not really.”

“I don’t want anything. Just call me when you get back.”

“But why’d you call?”

“Tell you then. Stay out of trouble.”

“I’ll do my best.”

He sighed and I knew he was remembering the circumstances of our first meeting. “Try harder.”

In retrospect, he gets to look all brilliant and psychic, which isn’t entirely fair. Of course, if any of us had realized how the weekend would end, we would have all stayed in Manhattan, even if we did nothing more exciting than sit in my apartment eating cold Chinese takeout and playing cribbage. But life is never that simple. Thankfully.

KILLER HEELS

Copyright © 2004 by Sheryl J. Anderson and Mark Edward Parrott. Excerpt from
Killer Cocktail
© 2005 by Sheryl J. Anderson and Mark Edward Parrott.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Cover photo-illustration by Jennifer Carrow.

eISBN 9781466820982

First eBook Edition : April 2012

EAN: 80312-99256-9

St. Martin’s Press hardcover edition / May 2004
St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / July 2005