A Crazy Little Thing Called Death (25 page)

“Obviously, she had a soft spot for you. She was fond of your grandmother.”

“Yes, but—well, I’m flabbergasted. Surely her collection belongs in a museum.”

“Some of it, certainly. Now, listen,” he said. “You know I’m not a man who asks many favors, but this is huge for me, Nora. Penny Devine’s collection must be one of the most comprehensive in the nation. She started buying clothes from Chanel in 1949.”

I found myself laughing dizzily. Exhausted yet relieved about Michael, I allowed myself a moment of pleasure. “What’s the favor you want, Dilly?”

“Dear heart, you must let me help you unpack the collection. If I see those clothes, I can die a happy man.”

“Done,” I said.

“I should warn you.
Vogue
is going to call. So will the Metropolitan Museum. They’ll all want a peek.”

“You’re the man for me, Dilly. The stuff arrived a little while ago.”

“You have it now?” He was startled. “I’ll bring breakfast tomorrow. I’ll bring champagne!”

Which is how I found myself entertaining the
crème
of Philadelphia’s fashionistas the following morning.

B
ut not before telephoning Ben Bloom to tell him that Vivian Devine kept tigers on a piece of rural property in Bucks County. I finally reached him just as I finished brushing my teeth that night.

Bloom said, “Say that again.”

I tapped my toothbrush on the sink and repeated my information.

“Tigers?” He sounded dumbfounded. “You mean, like tigers from a zoo?”

“I don’t know where Vivian got them. Judging by the way she collects abandoned house cats, I assume she thinks she’s rescuing them from abusive circumstances.”

“Wait a minute. Tigers?”

“Yes,” I said patiently. “I can give you the address, and you can look for yourself.”

Bloom spoke to someone with him—I thought I heard the sound of traffic, too—and then he came back on the line. “Okay,” he said. “Anything else?”

“You mean about the murder, or about the attempt on Michael’s life?”

“Listen, Nora, I thought I was doing you a favor when I told you about that.”

“You did. I didn’t like hearing it, but,” I said slowly, “I’m glad you told me.”

“I figure if you know what’s going on, you might take better care of yourself.”

Drily, I said, “Thanks, Detective. I appreciate your concern.”

“Nora?”

I waited.

He said, “How about forgiving me? So I made a mistake today, telling you the way I did. Everybody’s entitled to be forgiven once. And I’m trying to do the right thing.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” I said.

I hung up. My feelings for Ben Bloom were hard to define most of the time, but tonight I didn’t like him one bit.

I considered phoning Michael’s hospital room to say good night. I missed him. I missed his laugh. I missed his warm body in my bed. I didn’t want to wake him, however, if he was already drugged and asleep.

Peeking out the window curtains, I noted that Michael’s crew remained on alert at the end of my driveway. Nothing short of an army was going to get past them.

I climbed into bed and turned out the light. I knew I’d been taking out a lot of aggressions on Michael lately. Misdirected anger, perhaps. Sometimes we made tender love, but at other times it was something very different. I had a lot of emotions about losing our baby, I knew. And about the complexities of Michael’s life and his unwillingness to put his family business completely aside to make a future with me. I wished he could be good.

I had often wished he could be a clean-cut cop, like Ben Bloom.

Except Bloom didn’t seem all that clean anymore. Once again, I’d let him manipulate me.

In the morning, I phoned the hospital early and spoke with Aldo, who said Michael was talking with his doctor at that moment and couldn’t take my call. I got dressed in jeans and an old white dress shirt that had been my husband’s. I made myself some oatmeal and ate every bite. I observed that Emma had left already. No note in the kitchen, of course, but her truck was long gone.

In the sunshine, I went out to the barn to check on her livestock and discovered four adorable ponies grazing in the paddock. They trotted over to the fence to meet me and poked their inquisitive noses through the rails. Emma’s leggy jumper, Mr. Twinkles, ambled over, too, and he nuzzled my hair.

“You’ll always be my favorite,” I told him as I patted his neck.

At nine thirty, a sumptuous get-well-soon gift basket arrived with a card to Michael from Lexie. The basket was heaped with fruits, exotic vegetables, two bottles of wine and a box of chocolate truffles—all tied up with an elaborate ribbon.

At ten, Dilly showed up carrying a wooden case of cold champagne. Fashion icon Kaiser Waldman gamboled into the house on Dilly’s heels, swinging a walking stick and wearing a tweed jacket in a flamboyant shade of green, riding boots with elaborate buckles and a pair of trousers that bloused at his knees. The designer removed a pair of square and very dark women’s sunglasses to look around the foyer of the house. The gilt mirror that had been a gift from Ben Franklin to my great-great-something grandmother particularly caught his attention. Then his gaze fell to the worn Persian rug on the floor.

Kaiser said, “
Mon Dieu
. My uncle had the château with the floor that tilted exactly like this one. The whole place fell down four years ago, like the house of cards.”

Following Kaiser bounded a slim younger man I didn’t know. He carried a large folding piece of furniture and had luscious blond hair layered to reveal a pair of diamond earrings. His face was beautifully sculpted, with a generous, full-lipped mouth curled catlike at the edges. He wore Seven jeans that had clearly been purchased in the misses department, and the message printed on his T-shirt said
I
’
M AN OPRAH SHOW WAITING TO HAPPEN
.

“Nora, this is Arturo.”

He put down his burden and shook my hand with a flutter of eyelashes. “Call me Artie, doll.”

“How nice to meet you.”

“I look familiar, don’t I? I’m an actor. But today I’m just obliging Kaiser. I mean, who could say no to the master?”

Over his shoulder, Dilly said, “I don’t know about his acting, but Artie’s the best tailor in Philadelphia.”

Then Dilly found his way into the sitting room, and we heard him cry, “Gentlemen! In here!”

The three of them froze in reverential poses as they gazed at the altar of Penny Devine’s wardrobe boxes. Then they took a synchronized pace forward to peer down into the open steamer trunk and the cascade of lace that tumbled out of it.

“Nora,” Dilly rasped. “Champagne glasses! At once!”

I supplied glassware, and Artie conjured a gallon of orange juice and a bottle of Cointreau. He mixed mimosas in a handy flower vase and poured for everyone. Kaiser reclined grandly on the sofa, unbuttoning his tweed jacket to get comfortable for a long stay. He tucked a pillow under each elbow.

“You may begin,” he announced when he was ensconced.

At which point Dilly and Artie took turns pulling one garment after another from the wardrobe boxes.

Kaiser winced at a yellow silk dress from Dior. “How can the woman look anything but foolish in that shade? You see? Even Dior was fallible!”

“But a turning point in his career, don’t you think?”

“The downturn,” Kaiser said darkly.

Dilly nodded with resignation and draped the yellow dress over a chair. To me, he said, “That one doesn’t belong in your closet, dear heart. Granted, some of these things should probably go to a museum. I know a curator here in the city, definitely the best person to take charge of the clothes and make something lasting out of them. But you should keep a few pieces. You’ll wear them and treat them right. Penny knew that.”

Artie gave a cry of rapture as he found a black number twinkling with rhinestones and beading.

Which sent Kaiser into a fit of headshaking. “No, no, no, no! Too much with the sparkles! Gaultier had no sense of propriety in his early years!”

“Who wants propriety?” Artie demanded.

“What was de la Renta thinking?” Dilly plucked up a dress of orange organza. “For a woman of Penny’s years?”

“During the fat phase,” Kaiser said knowingly. “You see the ploy? Focus on the décolletage, and the eye will not wander elsewhere. Penny was always fighting the fat.”

Dilly located a long wisp of peach-hued silk embroidered with delicate fronds and appliquéd fruit.

Kaiser clasped his hands in ecstasy. “There she is! Carolina Herrera at the pinnacle of her artistry! I must see it on the body!”

Dilly and Artie turned to me.

“The body?” I asked. Involuntarily, my hand strayed to the open collar of my shirt and closed it tightly. This particular body had been through a pregnancy and a miscarriage and an emotionally triggered weight loss that made me feel flabby, not slim. The last thing I wanted to do was play fashion model.

“Dear heart,” Dilly said with great kindness, “it’s not like we haven’t seen our share of women, you know.”

“And it’s not you we’re interested in,” Artie added. “No offense, doll.”

“Strip down,” Kaiser commanded. “We must see the Herrera!”

At which point Artie began unbuttoning my shirt and I found myself slipping into an evening dress that weighed no more than a summer nightgown. Unwillingly, I wiggled my jeans down underneath the dress and kicked them across the floor. The Herrera felt like gossamer floating around me, though, and my heart lifted.

I had, of course, worn my grandmother’s couture so frequently that I had already experienced the phenomenon of fine workmanship on the human body. My spine straightened to the posture my childhood ballet teacher had insisted upon. My shoulders went level. My chin somehow lifted to a point in space slightly above normal. And my breath caught high in my throat.

Artie cleared away my coffee table and set up a folding mirror with three panels. I stood in the middle of it and looked at myself.

Kaiser frowned. Dilly and Artie stood back to eye me critically.

“The breasts,” Kaiser said.

“Hm,” said Dilly, nodding.

Artie leaped forward. He had slipped a pincushion on his wrist, and he plucked a pin from it. In an instant, he lifted my right arm and began nipping pins into the fabric as fast as an expert typist tapping the keys of a typewriter. He worked his way under my breasts and emerged on my left side before jumping back to study the result.

The dress met with Kaiser’s approval. He waved his hand like a dauphin. “The Herrera is salvageable. Keep it. What’s next?”

For the rest of the morning, I stood on the wooden champagne case in my tallest Jimmy Choos while Dilly and Artie fluttered around me like a couple of Disney bluebirds.

“Good Lord!” Dilly cried when he whipped out a purple spandex number with an outer-space theme. “Didn’t Penny wear this to the Oscars?”

“The year she knocked Joan Rivers on her ass!” Artie clapped his hands at the memory. “Oh, how I prayed for a catfight! But in a wonderfully ironic moment Russell Crowe broke them up before the fur could really fly, and—oh, sweet Carol Burnett, it’s a Bob Mackie! Do you think it might fit me?”

“You’re seven feet tall in heels,” Dilly said. “Of course it won’t fit you. Besides, the color is so garish we’d have to help you write a suicide note if you actually got the thing to zip. But Nora, do try it on. Humor us.”

“I’ll look like a drag queen, Dilly.”

“Better you than Artie,” Dilly said. “He’s got the shoulders of a linebacker.”

“I
was
a linebacker, I’ll have you know,” Artie said. “Take off your bra, doll. Bob Mackie is all about built-ins.”

Artie helped me writhe into the slippery, sequined creation. It was one of the Cher-inspired dresses with a neckline that plunged to Panama and a back that showed nearly every single vertebra in my spine. The eye-popping purple made me think of electrified grapes.

I hitched up the skirt and climbed onto the champagne box to display the final product.

Dilly said, “I can’t imagine Penny Divine buying this horror.”

From his crouch on the floor, Artie said, “The morning papers say Penny may not be dead after all. The tabloids will go crazy.”

“So who,” asked Kaiser, “is really the dead woman?”

I wondered if my information from Bloom was supposed to be a secret, but I decided probably not. “Actually, it’s not a woman at all.”

Artie looked up from my hem, intrigued. “The papers didn’t say anything about that! It’s a man?”

“In drag,” I said. “Acrylic nails, lady’s watch—Penny’s watch. Someone wanted the police to believe it was really Penny.”

Dilly had been watching me. “Who do you think it is, Nora?”

“My bet’s on Kell Huckabee, a man who used to work at Eagle Glen as the caretaker. He disappeared a while back, and—”

“Kell?” Artie’s eyebrows rose.

“Huckabee?” Dilly was just as startled. His glass slipped from his grasp and shattered on the floor, sending a thin spray of champagne across the floor. “Oh, how clumsy of me!”

He got down on his knees and began mopping up champagne with his handkerchief. “I’m so sorry! I’ve broken one of your lovely glasses.”

“Don’t worry about it, Dilly. How do you know Kell Huckabee?”

Kaiser and Artie exchanged a cautionary look.

“The suspense is unbearable,” I said. “How do you know Kell?”

“Drugs,” Artie admitted.

That surprised me. “Cocaine? Heroin?”

“No, no, Kell Huckabee sold performance drugs in gay clubs. A little Ecstasy, but mostly that new underground drug called MaxiMan. All the young guys love it. Makes us hard for a whole weekend.”

Dilly finally glanced up from collecting broken bits of glass, looking pained. “Don’t be crude, Artie. You promised to behave if I brought you along.”

“Sorry, but it’s true. You pop one MaxiMan at a club on Friday night, and you’re good to go until way past
60 Minutes
on Sunday. It’s the latest thing for gay men. That, and a swing in the shower.”