If Looks Could Kill (2 page)

There didn’t seem to be anyone on the sidewalks at this hour, just people walking their dogs, and cabbies hurrying out of
delis with blue-and-white disposable coffee cups. The last time I’d been outside on a Sunday this early was about a year ago
and I’d been coming home, doing the walk of shame in a black cocktail dress. At 23rd Street we turned right, drove all the
way to the end, and picked up the FDR Drive. As we sped alongside the East River, the sun burned a small hole through the
clouds, making the river water gleam like steel.

I tried to read the front page of the paper, but I couldn’t concentrate. I kept wondering if I’d totally blown things with
K.C. by tossing him out for the sake of some silly nanny who’d most likely spent the night in a shagathon and would soon be
returning home with a major case of beard burn. I’d actually met Heidi on several occasions. She was a stunningly pretty and
aloof girl from Minnesota or Indiana who’d been imported to take care of Cat’s two-year-old son, Tyler. In fact, I had just
seen her on Thursday night when I’d been at Cat’s house for a party and she’d appeared briefly in the front hallway to rifle
through a closet, searching for Tyler’s jacket. She had looked through me as if we’d never met before. I was certain that
by the time I got to Cat’s house Heidi would have surfaced and I’d be back in a taxi, spending another $15 on a ride home.

The only consolation was that I was getting an early start on the day. Besides, I really didn’t have much choice but to indulge
Cat on this one. She was not only my friend, but also partly responsible for the fantastic little career I had today, at the
age of thirty-three. She’d made me a contributing writer to her magazine,
Gloss
, one of the so-called Seven Sister magazines, which had once specialized in running recipes for chicken dishes made with
cream of mushroom soup and profiles of women who’d spent the best parts of their lives trying to get toxic dump sites removed
from their towns, but under Cat had metamorphosed into something worthy of its name—a juicy, glossy thing with sexy fashion
portfolios, down-and-dirty guides to making your husband moan in the rack, and fascinating crime stories and human dramas.
And I got to write those stories. Not the make-him-moan ones—but the crime stories and human-interest dramas, tales about
serial killers and vanishing wives and coeds killed and stuffed in fifty-gallon drums by the professors they’d been having
affairs with.

I was grateful to Cat, but it was fair to say she got her money’s worth. I was good at what I did, and my stories pulled in
readers and won awards, and a book publisher just recently decided to package twelve of them together as an anthology.

Cat and I met seven years ago, at a little downtown magazine called
Get
, circulation seventy-five thousand, which focused on New York City happenings—the arts, culture, society, scandal, and crime,
not necessarily in that order. Up until then I’d been at newspapers, starting, after college at Brown, on the police beat
at the
Albany Times Union
and moving on to the Bergen County
Record
in New Jersey. I loved anything to do with crime, though I’m not sure why. My father died when I was only twelve, and my
ex-husband once suggested that my fascination with the macabre was born then. I’m more inclined to think it stems from an
experience I had as a high school freshman. Someone began leaving nasty notes for me in my desk and in my locker, and rather
than just take it, I methodically figured out who the sender was (a girl), and the thrill that came from solving that mystery
was totally empowering. Eventually I realized that magazines would offer me more stylistic freedom than newspapers, and I
found my way to New York City and the newly created
Get
.

I met Cat, known as Catherine then, the first day on the job. She was deputy editor, four years older than me, and though
she supervised mostly the celeb and arts stuff, not the gritty pieces I wrote, I got to see her strut her stuff in meetings.
She took a liking to me, maybe because I didn’t fawn over her like so many people, and over time she began coming into my
little office, closing the door and confiding in me about office politics and the complications that came from dating several
men at the same time, including a married one with two kids. She had recognized me as a secret keeper, a rare breed in New
York. Once, I even flew to Barbados with her because she wanted to keep Jeff, whom she’d been dating for four months, hot
and bothered. What did I get out of the relationship? I was totally dazzled by her, by her ambition and total self-assurance
and the fearless way she asked for what she wanted.

After I’d been at
Get
for just a year, the editor in chief resigned in a major snit because the owner was pressuring him to kill a snarky story
about a friend. The ten of us remaining on staff stood around in the hall that afternoon, wondering what the hell we should
do, until Cat suggested we should all quit, too, in a show of solidarity. And so we did. That night we gathered in a bar with
the editor, who bought us rounds of drinks and told us we’d be talked about in journalism schools for years to come. I wanted
to feel giddy and important, but all I could do was wonder if I still had dental insurance, since I was only halfway through
a very nasty root canal treatment. Cat, on the other hand, looked preternaturally calm, leaning against the bar with her martini
and a cigarette. Three days later it was announced that she was the new editor in chief of
Get
.

I didn’t speak to her for five months. Eventually she wooed me back, with some explanation about a magazine being more important
than the people who ran it and by giving me the chance to write even bigger stories. Catherine had become Cat by then, the
editor who could seduce any writer into working for her and knew if an article was good, as someone once wrote in a profile
of her, if her nipples got hard when she read it. She became an It girl in the media world, and just over two years into her
tenure, the owner of
Gloss
used an electric cattle prod to force Dolores Wilder, the sixty-seven-year-old editor in chief, to “gracefully” retire, naming
Cat as her hot new replacement. Each of the Seven Sister magazines, which included
Women’s Home Journal
and
Best Home
, was close to one hundred years old—or long in the tooth, in the opinion of some—and if they were going to survive, they
needed fresh blood like Cat. She’d extracted a promise from the owner that she could turn the magazine on its head in order
to modernize it. Within days she had offered me a contract to write eight to ten human-interest or crime stories a year as
a freelance writer and had even given me a tiny office on the premises. I could still write for other places, including travel
magazines, a sideline of mine. I’d been yearning for the freedom a freelance gig would offer over a staff job, and the arrangement
thrilled me.

We’d kept the friendship up, though like I said it was a kind of weird one. Occasionally I’d be tempted to keep my distance,
when the selfish bitch part of her personality reared its ugly head. But then she’d do something fun and amazing, like leave
a bag on my desk with an ice pack and a thirty-gram jar of caviar.

By now the taxi had exited the FDR Drive at 96th Street, and from there we headed down Second Avenue and then west on 91st
Street to Cat’s block between Park and Madison, a neighborhood known as Carnegie Hill. It was an elegant, treelined block
of mostly town houses, some brownstone, some brick, one painted a soft shade of pink. Catty-corner from Cat’s house was an
exclusive private lower school, where children were often delivered and picked up in black Lincoln Town Cars. I paid the driver
and climbed out of the cab, careful with my coffee cup. The street was empty except for a man wearing a yellow mack and walking
a pudgy Westie in the direction of Central Park. A cool light wind began to blow out of nowhere and there was suddenly a snowfall
of pink blossoms from a tree on the edge of the sidewalk. Petals landed on my sweater, my shoes, even in my hair.

As I brushed them away, I scanned Cat’s town house, looking for signs of life. It was a four-story white brick building with
black shutters, erected, she once told me, in the 1880s. The main entrance of the house was on the second floor, through a
double set of black painted doors at the top of the stoop. On the first floor under the stoop was a separate entrance to the
nanny apartment, which you reached by going down several steps from the sidewalk and walking across a small flagstone courtyard.
There was a seven-foot wrought-iron gate that opened to a vestibule under the stoop and the door to the apartment. I stepped
closer to the house, leaning against the wrought-iron fence in front of the steps to the courtyard area. From there I could
see a faint glow coming from the two front windows of Heidi’s apartment, creeping out from around the edges of the closed
wooden shutters. Ahhh, so all was well after all. Obviously, the hung-over Heidi had been jarred from her slumber while I
was being bounced over the potholes of Manhattan. I wondered if I’d at least be offered a croissant before I was sent on my
way.

I
CLIMBED THE
stoop to the second floor and rang the bell. Cat answered almost instantly, as if she’d been standing there waiting behind
the big double doors. She had on black capri pants and an oversize white shirt, and her long, thick blond hair, which she
almost always wore down, was pinned up on top of her head with what appeared to be a set of ivory chopsticks. She was wearing
absolutely no makeup, something I’d never witnessed before. Her skin was pale and tired, with faint circles under her blue
eyes, and for the first time since knowing her, I noticed that her lips were covered with small, pale freckles.

“So I take it everything’s okay now,” I said.

“What do you mean?” she snapped.

“With Heidi. She’s here now?”

“No, no.” She pulled me by my wrist into the foyer and closed the door. “Why are you saying that?”

“Her lights are on. I assumed she surfaced.”

“But don’t you see? That’s the point. Her lights are on, she’s supposed to be home—but she’s not answering the door.”

“And you don’t think that at the last minute she could have decided to spend the night at somebody else’s place? Twenty-one-year-olds
do that sort of thing.”

“She’s twenty-two.”

“Whatever. Does she have a boyfriend?”

“She did. But they cooled it a few months ago. Besides, she promised to be here. And like I said, she’s always reliable.”

“I thought she got weekends off. Why would you need to see her at eight on a Sunday morning anyway?”

“I needed to talk to her. About Tyler. Just some general stuff.”

Odd answer. But this didn’t seem like the moment to pursue it.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s open the door to her apartment and see if we can make any sense of this.”

“You think I’m being hysterical for nothing, don’t you?” she asked.

“I’m sure everything’s fine, but on the other hand, you’ve got a bad feeling and we need to check things out.”

Cat lowered her head and pressed the tips of her fingers into her temples. Her nails were the color of pomegranates, and they
were as shiny and hard as a lacquered Chinese box.

“Will you do it?” she pleaded softly, taking her hands down. “I mean, will you go in the apartment? I’m scared. If there’s
anything the matter, you’ll know what to do.”

“Sure,” I said. “Why don’t you get the key.”

I followed her through the open double doors on the left wall of the foyer, through the khaki-colored dining room, and then
into the kitchen, all white and stainless steel and, though not very big, designed to perfectly suit the demands of a caterer.
She yanked open a drawer and began rummaging around for the key.

“Has Heidi ever shown any signs of having a problem with alcohol?” I asked as I waited in the middle of the room.

“You mean, could she be lying down there in an alcohol-induced stupor?” Cat said, looking up. “I don’t have any reason to suspect
that she’s a big drinker—or that she uses drugs. But you don’t always see the signs. She
has
been acting kind of funny lately—distant.”

“When was the last time you actually saw her?”

“On Friday night, when I got home from work.”

“Friday?”
I exclaimed. “I thought you said you spoke with her yesterday.”

“I did, but by phone. I had to go to East Hampton yesterday. We’re co-sponsoring that film festival at the end of the summer
and I had a planning meeting out there.”

“You went out there on a
Saturday?”
I said. East Hampton, the very chic and expensive beach community, was more than a two-hour drive from the city.

“It was the only time I could squeeze it in. You know what my life is like. Where is that damn key?”

“Okay, so you come back, when? At the end of the day?”

“Actually, this morning. I was too tired to drive back last night, so I got a room out there and left before six this morning.
Here’s the key.”

I started to turn toward the foyer, but Cat stopped me.

“This way,” she said. “There’s an entrance downstairs, off the library.”

It made sense that there was an inside door to the nanny’s apartment, but I had never seen it. I trailed Cat through the kitchen
into the living room, which was at the back of the house. It was a big, square room, almost every inch of it—walls, sofas,
chairs, drapes—done in different shades of white and cream. Two sets of French doors opened onto a balcony, overlooking the
garden behind the house. Along the right wall a staircase, with a wrought-iron banister, led down to the library. Cat descended
it, with me right behind her.

Though the deep red–painted library faced the garden, too, the second-floor balcony prevented it from getting much sun, and
it was dim in there this morning, except for the light from two swivel lamps above the couch. The front wall was lined with
bookcases, but as I stepped off the last stair into the room, I saw that a section of the bookcase was actually a two-foot-thick
door, which had been pulled out, revealing a plain wooden door behind it. I’d been in the room a dozen times and never known
the bookcase was anything more than a bookcase.