'Til Death Do Us Part (10 page)

Despite a bottleneck near New Rochelle, I was back in my apartment by noon. I took a quick look around. My terrace was locked tight, just as I had left it, and nothing seemed amiss. I told myself I was being silly. But it made me wonder again about Jamie’s death. If she actually was murdered, how did the killer gain access to her apartment while she was taking a bath? Since there was apparently no sign of a break-in, he must have been either given a key by Jamie or let in by her. If she’d opened the door for him, why climb back into the tub? Could he have been her lover?

I hurriedly changed my underwear and threw on a pair of black pants, a white-collared shirt, and my black leather jacket. My first stop was going to be
Gloss
. I not only had my appointment with the deputy editor, but I hoped to find the food editor, Babette. Later I’d head to the Upper East Side for my meeting with Maverick.

As I was trying to tame my flyaway hair, which I’d recently grown out to chin length, the phone rang. It was Jack again.

“I thought you were going to call me as soon as you got back,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said. “I actually did just get back—I ended up making a few stops in Greenwich.”

“Bailey, you’ve got to let the police handle this.”

I appreciated Jack’s concern, but he was starting to sound a little like my mother.

“It doesn’t look like they’re going to,” I told him. “They apparently believe Ashley just fell off a stepladder. But it all feels too weird to me, and I can’t sit around on my butt not knowing the truth about what happened.”

“Well, we can talk about it when I get to the city,” he said. “Unfortunately, I’ve got a meeting late tomorrow and I’m probably not going to be able to get on a shuttle until seven. That gets me into New York about nine.”

“That’s okay. I’ll just wait for you here, then.”

Before I left my building I slipped a note under Landon’s door, asking if by any chance he could come for dinner that night. I was anxious to fill him in on everything that had happened and get his insight. He was always a wonderful sounding board when I was in the middle of some mayhem.

I took the N train to 57th Street and Seventh Avenue and walked the couple of blocks west and south to
Gloss
. Though there were snowbanks along the curb, they’d clearly shrunk over the last day or so and were now pockmarked and plastered with litter. It was cold as hell out, and it seemed that every woman who wasn’t wearing a fur coat had a colored pashmina scarf double-wrapped around her neck.

As a freelancer and contributing writer, I’m not really entitled to an office at
Gloss
, but because I produce so many pieces for the magazine each year—and because Cat and I go way back—I’ve been allowed to set up shop in a tiny office in the back of the floor. In the days before the Internet, it had been a storage space for research books.

Though there’s a back way to my office off the elevator, I usually go the long route through the “pit,” the large newsroom-style area that holds the cubicles for the art, photo, and production departments and a few of the junior articles editors. The newsroom setup is a little pretentious for a monthly magazine like
Gloss
—I mean, the only breaking news that people out in the pit ever deal with is whether they’re ordering Thai or Italian takeout for lunch—but the layout does generate a lot of energy and buzz. I like to swing through there to get a sense of what’s happening—and discover what kind of mood Cat has cast over the place on a given day.

As I walked into the pit that Thursday afternoon, the photo editor was on his way out, and when he spotted me he stopped in his tracks.

“Hey, I saw your name in the
Post
today,” he said, beaming. “In that story about Peyton Cross. That’s amazing.”

He was making it sound like something I should be proud of, as if they’d run an item saying I was a shoo-in for a Golden Globe nomination.

“Oh yeah, just great, isn’t it?” I said, though I wasn’t sure he detected the sarcasm in my voice.

“You know, the
Post
called here yesterday looking for a picture of you, but because they wouldn’t tell us what it was for, Cat said not to give them anything.”

“Thanks,” I told him. “I appreciate it.” Again, I wondered how the papers got on to the story so quickly.

I hurried across the pit and down two different corridors to my office. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw several people glance curiously in my direction. Obviously, word about the
Post
story had spread.

As I said, my office is toward the back of the floor—directly across from the fashion department space, a large room set up with a bunch of cubicles, almost like a mini version of the pit. Today the hallway outside was lined with two large racks of juicy-colored bathing suits. I knew, from having overheard last week’s chatter, that those suits were just back from four sunny days in Cozumel. Inside the room, two twenty-something editors were standing in front of a mannequin dressed in a satiny skirt and shirt, staring at it with the kind of reverence someone else would reserve for Michelangelo’s
Pietà
.

“Cat was looking for you,” one of them called out as I dumped my bags onto the extra chair in my office. They probably thought I’d literally start shaking in my boots at this news, but I was one of the few people on staff who was tremble-proof when it came to Cat.

I peeled off my layers of outerwear and checked my voice mail. The most recent message was from Landon, saying he’d love to have dinner—and that he’d be by at eight. There were several calls from friends who’d seen the
Post
item and wanted to be sure I was alive. To my dismay, the other six messages were from reporters: two from a woman at the
Daily News
who simply asked me to call her and four from a guy at the
New York Post
, who announced in a grave voice that he
urgently
needed to speak to me. He sounded as if he thought I might have critical information on the Kennedy assassination. I had zero interest in returning either call.

After grabbing a cup of coffee at the food station, I hurried over to see Cat. Her office is at the far end of the pit, and through the glass wall I could see her standing in front of her desk, talking on the phone. She motioned for me to come in.

Cat was in her late thirties but easily could have passed for ten years younger. Her shoulder-length blond hair was stick straight today, framing her gorgeous face. She was dressed in a sleeveless white wool minidress and thigh-high red patent-leather boots—a kind of
Mod Squad/Avengers
look that I assumed was totally au courant.

She signaled with one finger that she’d be just a minute longer. I took a seat on the brown Ultrasuede love seat and sipped my coffee. There was no denying that ours was an odd relationship. She was my employer, but she was also my friend—though we weren’t the kind of friends who got together over white wine once a week and bitched about the fact that the men in our lives drank orange juice straight from the carton. We’d met about seven years ago at a now defunct downtown magazine called
Get
, where I’d landed after I left the newspaper business to make my fortune (I’m joking) in magazines. Four years older than me, she was higher up on the totem pole, but I soon became her confidante. Not long after she’d scored the job of remaking
Gloss
magazine, she offered me a gig as a contributing writer. Her goal had been to turn
Gloss
from a tired women’s service magazine featuring frumpy clothes, make-your-own-deck instructions, and recipes that routinely called for a can of cream of mushroom soup into a sexy, exciting read for married women. From what I could tell, she’d succeeded.

Cat certainly had her fun, charming side, but she was also fiercely ambitious, demanding, and frequently brusque. Those words also could have been used to describe Peyton, yet the two women were very different. Cat could be tough as hell, but she rarely lost her cool or acted crudely the way Peyton did. I’d seen her be a bitch, but never a banshee. Plus, Cat wasn’t unrelentingly selfish like Peyton. She was there for her friends when they needed her.

After a minute of eavesdropping on the phone conversation, I realized she must be on the line with the new beauty editor. The previous one had bailed shortly after returning from maternity leave, and this one, from the scuttlebutt I’d heard around the office, was having a hard time acclimating to
Gloss
.

“Forget the homemade beauty routines,” Cat said curtly. “Our average reader is married with two little kids and a job. She barely has time to pee, let alone make a pumice of oatmeal and honey.”

Pause.

“Fine. I’m leaving at five, so I need the copy by then. And please don’t use the word
skinpert
. It’s doctor or dermatologist or skin expert. Skinpert sounds like some kind of sexual predator.”

She tossed the phone on the cradle and spun around in my direction.

“My God, I saw the
Post
story,” she said. “What the hell is going on?”

“I haven’t a
clue
,” I said as she took a seat across from me in a small armchair. “The story was basically accurate. Three bridesmaids dead. I was up in Greenwich yesterday when the third death happened—at Peyton’s farm. You know her, right? Peyton, I mean. I think I asked you that around the time of her wedding.”

“I’ve met her socially . . . ,” she said, letting the uncharacteristically noncommittal remark hang there.

“And?”

“I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but I wouldn’t call her one of my favorite people. She’s got this enormous sense of self-importance, and every conversation is all about
her
. I wouldn’t mind that if she were totally brilliant or if she were doing something to change the world. But despite what Peyton Cross thinks, knowing how to pipe Roquefort cheese into a snow pea pod doesn’t qualify you as the most fascinating person in Manhattan.”

It was amusing to hear her put down Peyton’s self-absorption, because Cat had been accused of having more than her fair share of it, too.

“I’m not offended,” I said. “I don’t have any blinders on when it comes to Peyton.”

Cat then pumped me for details about the situation. She wanted to know about all three deaths and what I thought of them.

“The police have concluded that they’re all accidents,” I revealed. “And yet it seems so far-fetched that all three women could have died in such a short time.”

“Are you wigged-out by this?” she asked.

“It’s unsettling, yes. And it bugs me that no one seems inclined to at least consider the possibility of foul play. The next thing you know, the
Post
will be doing a piece on the Bridesmaid
Suicides
. What do
you
think?”

She paused, gathering her thoughts.

“I don’t know enough to offer any real insight, but I admit, it does seem awfully strange. Years ago I read an article about intuition that said it’s really all about the ability to connect the dots. I can’t help but want to connect the dots with these three deaths. It seems as if they have to mean
something
.”

“Mean something. In what way?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I’m not going to sit around wondering about it. I’m going to look into all of it and see what I can find out.”

“Just be careful, please. This all sounds really spooky. And you’ve had enough excitement in the last year.”

As I started to leave, Cat touched my arm gently.

“Remember, if there’s a story in this, I want it.”

I should have known. Cat cared, she really did, but she never allowed it to interfere with her need to titillate her readers.

Rather than return to my office, I went in search of Babette. Her office and the test kitchen she worked out of were on another floor, along with test kitchens for several other magazines in the company. As I pushed open the door to the kitchen, I was relieved to see that Babette was there, sliding a pan into the oven.

“Mmm, what’s cookin’?” I asked as she turned around at the sound of my entrance.

“Well, what a surprise,” she said when she looked over and saw me. “Pork roast with a balsamic-and-Madeira sauce. What are you doing up here?”

Without bothering to go into too much detail, I explained my connection to Jamie and how I’d just learned what happened. I asked if she knew anything about the situation.

“It’s awful, isn’t it?” she said, stepping over to the sink and pumping liquid soap on her hands. “My mother always told me to be careful about appliances and water, but I’ve never actually heard of anyone dying that way.”

“Did you know her very well?”

“No, just to say hi to—you know, from seeing each other at industry stuff. This is awful to say, but she got on my nerves a little. She always seemed to be complaining about something.”