10 Lethal Black Dress (33 page)

CHAPTER 40

Lacey met LaToya at the
Greek place
around the corner for a quick bite after work. She didn’t want to take too
long. She had to get back to the galleys.

“Hey, girlfriend,” LaToya said as they sat down. “Heard you
had a visit from Detective Broadway Lamont recently.”

“He came to see me. Someone accused me of murder.”

“Oh please, I already heard all about that. You ain’t no
murderer. Get to the important parts. How did that big handsome man look? Did
he ask about me?”

Their gabfest was mostly about LaToya’s romantic chances with
Broadway Lamont. It suited Lacey. She didn’t have to keep up her end of the
conversation, except with an occasional comment and nod. She encouraged LaToya
to keep the ardor turned on low. Broadway struck her as the type who’d rather
do the pursuing than be pursued.

Turtledove was staying in the background, but Lacey was aware
of his presence. He was another big guy who didn’t want to get too close to
LaToya. She had once expressed an interest in the tall, dark, and handsome
Turtledove and probably would again. It was funny how big, tough guys could be
afraid of women.

Help, help, she might attack me with a love bomb!
As
far as Lacey was concerned, they were big babies. Part of the problem was there
were far too many attractive, smart, capable women in D.C. The few comparable
men simply had their pick. It was too easy for them.

As LaToya chattered on about men, men, and more men, Lacey
wondered about her phantom rock thrower. Reporters shouldn’t need hired muscle
trailing them. Nothing had happened to her since the Riverbend incident. Maybe
it really was just a couple of kids, as the park rangers had said.

#

When Lacey returned to
The Eye
, the newsroom was
relatively quiet. Most of the newspaper had been put to bed. In the early hours
of the morning, the printing plant would be humming, churning out the morning
print edition, but that was off-site in suburban Maryland.
The Eye
would
fully awaken at dawn when the first reporters started arriving, the ones with
hard news beats and early deadlines. There were few perks to Lacey’s fashion
beat, but a more flexible schedule was one of them.

Mac was already home with Kim and the girls. Most of the reporters
had filed their stories and were gone. The couple of reporters on night watch
duties held court in the break room, on the other side of the floor. Lacey
didn’t see them. Nobody was left in the LifeStyle area. The cleaning crew were
finished vacuuming and emptying wastebaskets. In her section of the newsroom,
most of the bright overhead lights were turned off. A few desk lamps had been
left on.

A light was on in Felicity’s cubicle, though she was nowhere
to be seen. Left behind, practically glowing in the lamplight, was some sort of
pink strawberry cake confection, which Felicity had named in her column a “Pink
Sky Angel Food Cloud Cake.” Lacey thought that was too many words, too much
pink, and certainly too much sugar. No doubt it figured prominently in the food
editor’s wedding plans. It was half eaten, with the food editor’s signature
note: EAT ME!

The seductive pink monument to excess awaited more
worshipers. After debauching the day staff with fattening muffins and cookies
and glazed doughnut groom’s cakes, Felicity was now after the night crew.

What is her ultimate plan?
Lacey wondered.
World
domination?

Across the floor, a few late-shift editors were working in
their offices, down a hallway that couldn’t be seen from the newsroom. Their
doors were shut. They weren’t bothering anyone. They were waiting on news from
overlong Congressional hearings and a review of a new play. It was unusual that
press night for a play was so early in the week, but sometimes that happened.
It was bound to irritate the local critics. Tamsin Kerr would be one of those
most irritated.

Lacey’s cell phone rang. It echoed in the empty newsroom and
startled her. The number told her it was Vic, checking in with her. “You okay?”

“I’m fine. Turtledove has nothing to do tonight.”

“Just the way I like it. He’s watching the building, moving
around. It’s a nice night to hang out in Farragut Square.”

“The guard at the front desk knows to let him in if he gets
bored. You could probably just let him go home. I am perfectly safe.”

“Famous last words.”

“I love you too.”

“I’ll pick you up around eleven.”

“See you soon.”

She set her phone on her desk. Lacey hoped Gerhardt Hopewell
would call her back. Did he know more about the silk? How much was left and where
did it end up? How did it wind up in the fatal dress? There was a feeling in
the air of things undone, of events yet to happen. She had pulled a lot of
threads, but she hadn’t been able to weave them all together yet. She wanted to
write the final Lethal Black Dress story. Not rehash the past with
Terror at
Timberline
.

Lacey sat down and turned on her desk light against the
gloom. She pulled the galleys out of the envelope. It carried a triple byline: Douglas
MacArthur Jones, Lacey Smithsonian, and Anthony Trujillo. All three parts of
the story converged in a cold cabin in Colorado. Leaning back, she propped her
feet up on the bottom file drawer. As she read, she found she was turning the
pages as fast as she could. A paragraph of Mac’s popped out at her.

It was
February on Colorado’s Western Slope. The air carried a bone-biting cold,
despite the bright blue skies. A wild pony appeared on the ridge overlooking an
old cabin, a cowboy camp left over from the days of cattle drives. It might
have been a magical scene, if what was waiting in the cabin wasn’t a nightmare.

Could be worse.
She flipped to Tony’s section, which
detailed the various victims’ disappearances and the law enforcement efforts to
connect them and solve the case. His account was based on the facts and the
police department’s and sheriff’s accounts.

The first
woman disappeared one night in the spring. Her family was not overly concerned.
She was known as a party girl. She would eventually come home. And she did,
eventually. In a body bag.

Could be better.
Lacey read on, taking just one break
to make a fresh pot of hot decaf coffee. She returned to the sound of her desk
phone ringing. Gerhardt Hopewell had finally called back. She checked the time.
It was ten-fifteen.

“I was afraid this would be too late to call,” he said. “I
have a poker game on Tuesday nights, you see. Bunch of old geezers. At least
we’re the early-to-bed types.”

“No, it’s fine. I’m still at the office. Thanks for getting
back to me.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I have a few questions about Jillian Hopewell.”

“Jillian? My goodness. It’s been years. First, some art
gallery calls me about her. And now you. Is this about that showing they had of
her paintings?”

“In a way. I wanted to ask about her paintings on silk. The
green silk.”

“Those.” He was quiet for a moment. “I remember those.”

“Did she dye the fabric herself? I’m asking because that dye
was no longer commercially available. And it was known to be toxic as far back
as the mid nineteenth century.”

“Tell that to Jillian. I tried. It just made her more eager
to do it herself. She mixed the dyes and the paint herself, out in that damn
shed of hers. She was obsessed with it, obsessed with Cezanne, obsessed with
doing everything the way he did it a hundred years ago. It didn’t matter if it
was obsolete or if it damaged her. She was all about suffering for her art.”

“Was there a lot of it? The silk? Yards of it?”

“Not just yards. Bolts of it.”

“All Paris Green?”

“Most of it, anyway. She made a big batch of the green stuff.
Probably way too much. Eventually Jillian got tired of the silk and went back
to canvas.”

“Sounds like there might have been a lot of green silk left
over.”

“There was. As far as I know. We were splitting up at that
point. I tried not to comment on her excesses. What is this all about?”

Lacey filled him in briefly on Courtney Wallace’s death and
the Madame X dress with the Paris Green lining. “The expert opinion is that the
dress lining material was likely to have come from the same source as the silk
in one of her paintings.”

“Dear God.”

“I’m sorry to upset you.”

“Don’t worry. I’m getting old, but the shock won’t kill me. I
always wondered if the dye and that paint and everything affected Jillian in
some basic way. Like the Mad Hatter. In the head, you know. She was always
fragile physically, but as time went on she increasingly made no sense.
Painting for hours and days on end, as if it would save her soul or something.
Holing up in that little shed of hers, mixing up God knows what kind of toxic
mess. She talked of immortality. She should have been worried about her own
mortality. By the time we split up I didn’t know her anymore.”

“She was a good painter,” Lacey said.

“But not a great one. Jillian could never accept that. How
did you know about the silk painting? I
thought the show was just her
canvases. All they wanted from me was a little background for the brochure,
where she liked to paint, her artistic influences, things like that.”

“The show was just the canvases, but I’ve seen a couple of
the Riverbend landscapes elsewhere, on that beautiful green silk.”

“And now you tell me a woman is dead. But how could it be
Jillian’s silk? It was so many years ago, and I don’t even know what happened
to it. We were divorced when she died. She was in bad shape. Sick, unhappy, no
money to speak of. I let her stay in the house. I always thought it was too
small for the two of us, especially as she insisted on keeping her studio
there. Paints, brushes, easels, canvases everywhere, paint all over the place.
I could barely turn around in it.”

“Do you have a guess what might have happened to the silk?”
Lacey prompted.

“The trash, I would have thought, but it could have gone to
her family. I sold the house, but they took care of things when she died.
Apparently not very well, from what you told me. But I was done, burned out. I
washed my hands of her and her things.”

“Her family.” Lacey’s antennae went up. “Where are they? What
was their name? All I could find on the web for her was Hopewell, your name.”

“Jillian had a lot of names, a lot of husbands. No children,
though. I was the last one of four husbands. You would think I could take a
hint, but no. I had to find out the devil behind the angel mask.” He took a
deep breath. “You ready? Her full married name was Jillian Susanna Nelson
Brighton Holstein McIntyre Hopewell.”

“Nelson was her family name? Jillian Susanna Nelson?” Lacey’s
scalp tingled. “Was she related to a Zanna Nelson?”

“Who is that?”

“A television reporter here in Washington, D.C. Late
twenties.”

“I wouldn’t know. Jillian’s family lived in Washington at one
time. I only met her parents, and they’re long dead. But Nelson is a common
name. Late twenties, you say? This Zanna Nelson would have been a baby when
Jillian died. Might be a niece or something.”

“Yes, you’re right.” Lacey tried to sound calm, but she was
agitated. She stood up at her desk and paced. She thought she heard a sound.
Perhaps the editors down the hall were stirring.

“One thing about Jillian,” Gerhardt Hopewell went on. “When
she was good, she was very, very good—”

“—And when she was bad, she was horrid?” Lacey completed the
couplet for him. He laughed. She thanked Hopewell, promised to let him know how
the story turned out, and hung up.

And when she was bad she was horrid.
Just like Zanna
Nelson?

The sound in the hall came closer. Someone was coming down
the hallway toward her cubicle. Whoever it was, she was clomping her way nearer
in a pair of high-heeled shoes that were at least a size too large for her.
They thumped on the carpet, slapping their soles against the floor.

Where the illuminated hallway met the darkened newsroom,
Lacey saw the silhouette of a woman. The woman stepped into a pool of lamplight
by the door.

“Hello, Zanna.”

CHAPTER 41

“Hello, Lacey Smithsonian, fashion reporter.
Fashion reporter on a second-rate newspaper. Working late? Not a very important
job, is it? Not like being on TV.”

“Second-rate?” Lacey asked. “Most people think
The Eye
is third-rate.” Zanna didn’t laugh. “What do you want, Zanna? It’s a little
late for an interview.”

Zanna stepped in, closer to the light. She stopped right
across the desk from Lacey. They stood looking at each other. Zanna’s skin
looked flushed. Her hazel eyes were glazed; they gleamed in the half light. She
was wearing a length of the Paris Green silk wrapped around her throat like a
long scarf.

“Not too late for a fashion reporter though, is it? Or maybe
it is too late.”

“How did you get in?” Lacey asked. “There’s a guard at the
front desk. She would have announced you. I would have gone down to sign you
in.”
After I called the police. And Vic. And Turtledove.

“If I was stupid enough to go through the front door.”
Zanna’s cupid’s bow of a mouth pursed into a smirk. “But I’m not stupid. Not
like a pathetic, stupid, fashion reporter.”

This is going well. Has she been drinking?
Lacey
didn’t smell alcohol. Still, something was very off in Zanna’s manner.
Is
she high on something? Is it the Paris Green?

“I came in through the garage. You’d be surprised how men
will open a locked door for you and hold it to let you into the elevator, when
you bat your eyelashes and say you forgot your key card. I just waited for the
right stupid man to come along.”

Zanna sounded very proud of her accomplishment. She lurched
unsteadily on the unfamiliar five-inch heels. They didn’t fit. Not her feet or
her style.

“Why did you come here tonight, Zanna?”

“To talk to you, Ms. Fashion Reporter. I have something to
show you. I have to explain something to you that you are too stupid to
understand.”

That figures. I don’t have enough editors telling me where
I’ve gone wrong
.

“I’m sure you’re right. You’re the smart one,” Lacey said.
“So tell me.”

“That’s right, I am the smart one. Courtney was stupid. She
thought she was going to save her career by being a fashion reporter. What a
ridiculous idea! Fashion reporters are
stupid
.”

“I’ve had my share of stupid moments,” Lacey agreed.
This
might be one of them.

“I’m glad you agree.” Zanna giggled. The odd sound echoed in
the empty newsroom.
Certainly someone will come back to the newsroom any
minute now. Right?

Lacey’s attention was drawn back to the too-big shoes. Black
suede with shiny silver spike heels that flashed in the lamplight. Expensive
and tall. Lacey had seen them in the YouTube video, worn by another woman. A
dead woman. They looked dangerous. Were they dance shoes, tango shoes?

Lacey wasn’t interested in a tango or a tangle with this
woman. She wanted Zanna gone. She wanted to call for help. She wanted the
cavalry. She started to reach slowly for her cell phone on her desk. It was
closer than her desk phone, but still out of reach.

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll fall in those shoes?” she asked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. These are fabulous
shoes.” Zanna tottered even as she said it.

“But they aren’t your shoes, are they, Zanna? Those are
Courtney’s shoes. She wore them to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
That’s where I’ve seen them before. On her feet.”

“You noticed her shoes? I suppose that’s the kind of thing a
stupid fashion reporter would notice. She had big feet, the bitch. Well, they
aren’t Courtney’s anymore. These are my shoes now. In fact, I came to show them
to you. Do you like them?”

“Did you steal them? So you could walk a mile in Courtney’s
shoes?”

“She deserved it. She took my career. All I took was her
lousy shoes!”

“And her life?” Zanna giggled again, and that told Lacey
everything she needed to know. “Courtney was your friend.”

“Friend? I hated Courtney. She was always so lucky. So
perfect. So blond. It didn’t matter how stupid she was, with that blond hair.”

We agree on one thing
. “Eric says it wasn’t luck. He
says she had whatever magic it took to look good on television.”

“Eric doesn’t know anything. He’s just a cameraman.”

“Wasn’t it enough that you helped plant the story that got
her kicked off the investigative team?”

“You figured that out? Good guess. I’m pretty smart, huh?
Well, it was in a good cause. That senator and that Thaddeus Granville person
are lousy cheating bastards. You couldn’t have known it was me, because I was
so slick. Courtney didn’t even know she was getting the information from me.” A
small vein in Zanna’s forehead started to throb. Her face colored. Her voice
climbed higher and then cracked. It wouldn’t sound good on television. “I
nearly brought down a stupid senator. I brought down an empty-headed blonde.”

“Good work, outsmarting all the stupid people. I suppose it
was an anonymous call? Like the one you made about me?”

“Keep guessing.”

“I’m tired of guessing, Zanna. It’s time to go home. Let’s
call security and get you a ride somewhere safe.” Lacey leaned forward for her
phone and Zanna pushed her back, hard, with both hands.

“You don’t know how I did it! You’re not smart enough to know
that. I’m smarter than you are. Can’t you see that? I belong to Mensa, did you
know that?”

I’m sure this is a proud moment for all Mensans everywhere
.
Lacey told herself to stay calm. She eyed her phone, now as far out of reach as
her desk phone.

“You’re not a member of Mensa, are you?” Zanna sneered.

“Just the Newspaper Guild.”
And what has it done for me
lately?

“I’m in SAG-AFTRA. That proves I’m smarter than you are.”

“You proved you were smarter than Courtney too, didn’t you?”

“I merely wanted the world to see she was a bad reporter,”
Zanna shouted. “Courtney didn’t belong in television. She took the job I should
have had. I should be on camera every night, not her.”

On camera. It was true, and sad, that only a certain kind of
face seemed to work in broadcast news. Zanna’s face was symmetrical, well
proportioned, traditionally beautiful, but on camera it seemed smaller, bland
and lifeless, even forgettable. In contrast, Courtney’s carved cheekbones,
shark-like smile, and pushy personality had always been striking and memorable
on camera.

Lacey was seeing a glimpse of the Zanna that Eric Park had
seen on a night long ago, hysterical because she wasn’t invited to a
journalism-insider party. In Zanna’s face, Lacey could also see Peter Johnson.
Jealousy beyond reason. Pure and simple and scary. And maybe something more.
Some
people once used small doses of arsenic as a drug, a stimulant. Is she flying on
an arsenic high?

“She was stupid and you’re stupid too.” Zanna was getting
louder. Lacey thought she should encourage that.
Louder, please!

“Speak up, Zanna, I can’t hear you. Perhaps I’m not the
smartest person in this room, but I did figure out how Courtney’s dress ended
up with a poisoned lining.”

“If you were so smart, you would think about what she took
from me. She stole from
me
. My job, my life, my career.”

“Is that why you killed her?”

“Don’t you know? It wasn’t murder. It was a freak,
one-in-a-million accident,” Zanna said. “That’s what everybody says. That’s
what the cops say.”

“Until you threw a rock at me in Riverbend Park. And then
told the police I had something to do with her death. It all backfired, Zanna.
Don’t you realize? I went to the Correspondents’ Dinner with a Metropolitan
Police Department homicide detective! He was with me when you slammed into that
waiter. It’s on Eric’s video clip. No one else was wearing that particular mustard
color. Just you.”

Zanna wobbled on her sky-high heels. “You got him to leak
that stupid clip, didn’t you? It doesn’t prove anything. You think you know
everything? Well, you don’t,” she screamed.

That should wake up the homeless people in Farragut
Square,
Lacey thought. Where the hell were the night-shift editors? Were
they deaf? Why didn’t they come out and see what was going on? Lacey’s desk
phone rang and both women jumped.

“Don’t answer that!” Zanna shouted. Lacey reached for it. Zanna
grabbed the phone and ripped the cord out.
Great. Just keep her talking.

“The silk belonged to your late aunt, Jillian Hopewell. The
artist. She was your aunt, right? You even covered her show at the gallery. Did
you tell your viewers you used your aunt’s poisoned silk to commit a murder?”

“No! No one knows she was my aunt. How do you know that? How
did you find out about the silk?” Zanna’s lower lip trembled. “I know. You
guessed. Like everything else you guessed at. It was the perfect murder. No one
could have known. No one knew that silk was dangerous.”

“Except me.”
Stupid fashion reporter here
.

“Shut up.”

“Tell me about the silk,” Lacey said, retreating toward
another cubicle. There were desk phones all over the newsroom, she just had to
reach one with enough time to dial 911.

“I brought some of it for you. It’s a present for your neck. That’s
why I came, Lacey.” Zanna unwound the green silk from around her throat and
held it up to the light. Lacey approached, in spite of herself. “I heard all about
it when I was a little kid. My poor tragic aunt, the crazy artist. It was the
paints and dyes she used that killed her. We all knew that. That stuff was in
my parents’ basement for years. Poor dead Aunt Jillian was proof it could kill.
Here, take it, it’s for you.” She reached out to Lacey, as if to drape it
around her shoulders like a scarf.
Like a noose.
Lacey saw the beautiful
green silk coming for her and took a step back.

“It belongs with you. You’re the killer and that was your
weapon. You keep it.”

Lacey heard a quiet cough. Someone else was in the newsroom,
somewhere. Perhaps just coming through the doorway. Zanna snapped the silk taut
like a garrote. Lacey couldn’t take her eyes off of it.

“I have more. I knew someday it would come in handy. For
instance: When I wanted to get rid of the woman who stole my life!” She wrapped
it around her hands, playing with it, almost like a cat’s cradle.

“Courtney. How did you get her to take the fabric?”

Zanna smiled. “So easy. If you’re a moron like Courtney. I
told her the old lining had to be replaced, but a new lining could be even
better. Prettier. Green to match her eyes. I told her she had such pretty green
eyes, and she just lapped it up. Doesn’t that make you want to vomit? I told
her I could help her. I had some vintage silk that might work.” Zanna laughed
again, longer this time and louder. “I even found her the Madame X dress with
the ripped lining. I showed it to her online and made her think it was her idea
to run out and buy it. Courtney was like a magpie with something shiny.”

“You handed it to her like a perfect red apple from a witch.”

“But Courtney was the witch. Don’t you see that?”

Lacey’s cell phone jingled on her desk. Probably Vic or
Turtledove. It was still too far away to make a lunge for it, with that green
garrote waiting for her. Zanna looked at the phone and smiled. She shook her
head
no
and waggled a finger. She slid the phone farther away on the
desk. It stopped ringing.

Zanna didn’t see Lacey’s hand slowly reaching for her big red
ceramic FASHION
BITES
mug. She rested her hand near it, keeping the desk
between them. She hoped her fresh coffee was still hot. Lacey cheered herself
with the thought that whoever had slipped into the newsroom might be calling
for help right now.

Zanna fell silent. She must have been thinking the same
thing. She locked eyes with Lacey.

Without dropping her eyes, Zanna lifted one foot behind her
and grabbed one stiletto-heeled shoe. Then she kicked off the other one. She
hefted the shoe in her hand. The silver spike heel looked like a silver dagger.
She raised it high and pointed it right at Lacey. The silk fluttered out of her
hands and fell over the phone on Lacey’s desk.

“I think this adds a nice symmetry, don’t you think,” Zanna
said. “Courtney died by the dress. You’ll die by this stiletto. You are just
dirt under my feet, both of you.”

Wiedemeyer’s words about the notorious spike-heel murder
story he was writing earlier came back to Lacey: “
Poor bastard didn’t have a
chance… P
ithed like a frog in a tenth-grade science class.”

“I get the symbolism,” Lacey said, backing up a little. “Live
by the shoe, die by the shoe.”

“Would you shut your mouth?! You think you’re funny? You’re
not! You’re going to die! You think that’s funny?”

“Not really.” Lacey was mad. She was tired of listening to
this woman. And even though she knew she should have kept quiet, she just
couldn’t. She leaned forward on her desk, still eye to eye with Zanna. She
reached for her phone, hidden under the silk. “You’ll never fill Courtney’s
shoes. Don’t you know that? She was the real deal, a blond TV diva. Zanna
Nelson is just an imposter!”

Her right hand finally found her cell phone, a lump under the
silk, just as it jingled again. Zanna growled and swung the stiletto down at
Lacey’s hand. The heel impaled the silk and the phone beneath it, the spike
sliding right between her fingers, nailing the phone to the desk with a crunch.
It went silent. Lacey jumped back before Zanna could swing again and nail her
hand to the desk. She grabbed for her coffee mug instead of her phone.

“Don’t move,” Zanna commanded, but Lacey was not in the mood
for taking orders. Zanna lunged toward her over the desk, stiletto heel raised
high. Lacey threw semi-hot coffee in the woman’s face and followed it with a
backhanded mug to the side of her head. It was a glancing blow. Zanna grunted
and went down, but she bobbed back up like an inflatable punching bag.