If Looks Could Kill (28 page)

I needed to get to my Marky story, to call her parents and ask them to comment on Jack’s theory that she was the poltergeist.
But before I did, I went on the Internet and ran a search on poisons. There was an endless array and, as Cat had said, many
natural ones that could be fatal. I discovered that curare beans, certain flowers like monkshood, and plants like hemlock
all produce severe vomiting and diarrhea, as well as paralysis, confusion, and delirium. Death can occur rapidly, within as
little as two hours.

Just reading the info brought back the sight of those sea foam green towels and Heidi, crusted in vomit, lying dead on the
floor. I shook my head to make the image go away.

For the next two hours I worked on Marky, tinkering with the lead until I felt I had something really compelling. Every so
often I’d saunter down toward Kip’s office, but as the afternoon wore on, there was still no sign of him, and his assistant
started looking at me the way a security guard stares at someone he’s sure is about to shoplift.

Around four my brain began begging for caffeine, and I headed down to the coffee station. The sight of it nearly made my eyes
bug out. Not only had Leslie, as promised, cleared away all the complimentary food for staffers—the microwave popcorn, the
Snackwell cookies, and bags of chips—but the teabags and coffee were gone, too. The only thing left was a box of wooden stirrers.

If anything was going to fuel mass hysteria around
Gloss
, it was a scene like this—all that was missing was a sign that read “Killer on Premises.” Of course, I couldn’t really blame
Leslie for the precaution.

And that brought me back again to what had bugged me about the whole situation—the haphazardness of it. Hadn’t the killer
been taking a terrible chance leaving the truffles on the hall table? Didn’t he—or she—realize that there was no guarantee
Cat would eat them? Or hadn’t the killer really cared who ate them as long as
somebody
died? If I could only make sense of this, I felt, I would be closer to knowing who the killer was.

A
T FIVE O’CLOCK
I did one last walkabout in the direction of Kip’s office. His assistant, jeans jacket over her shoulders, was stuffing a
few magazines into her backpack, preparing to flee.

“So what’s the deal—is he coming in?” I asked.

“Guess not.”

“Have you talked to him?”

“I called his house about an hour ago and no one answered. If he’d left for the city, he’d be here by now.”

“Maybe he’s at the animal hospital,” I said. As I walked away, I could tell that nimble mind of hers was trying to figure
out whether I’d said it sarcastically or not.

There was no point hanging around any longer, so I packed up my stuff. Though I hadn’t planned to come into
Gloss
the next morning, I would have to now, because I needed face time with Kip. What was the significance, I wondered, in his
vanishing act this afternoon? Polly had said he’d gotten real quiet after the police had talked to him on Friday, and now
he was missing in action. Did he have something to hide? Was he running scared?

When I emerged outside I saw that the skies had cleared, and it was now partly sunny and warmer. I took the subway home; it
was refreshingly uncrowded, and after stepping off the elevator on my floor, I went directly to Landon’s apartment and rang
the bell.

“My poor darling!” he exclaimed as he flung open the door. He was wearing a white polo shirt and a pair of khaki cargostyle
shorts, and he was about three shades tanner than when I’d seen him before the weekend. “How are you feeling? I’m just sick
about what happened.”

“I feel okay, really,” I said, stepping inside. “Have you talked to the police?”

“Yes. They’re clueless about who broke in. But they say they’re going to keep an eye on the house, drive by every so often.
I’m wondering if I should have an alarm put in. I was just about to fix a cup of tea, by the way—would you like one?”

“I’d love one, but unfortunately I’ve got to dash. I’m doing an interview in a little bit. But look, don’t get all caught
up in the idea of some two-thousand-dollar security system. I’m convinced it was someone trying to give me a scare.”

“Do you really think it could be related to that poor girl’s murder? Oh dear, I told you you shouldn’t be getting involved.”

“No, not Heidi’s death. I know I said that yesterday, but now I have my doubts. I don’t have time to go into it now, but I
rattled someone’s chains out there and I think she arranged for my chains to be rattled back. And my guess is that it was
a one-time thing and you don’t have to worry.”

“Well, I still don’t like the idea of you running all over town playing private
dick
. Something bad could happen.”

I poo-pooed his concerns, but as I let myself into my apartment, I played his words over in my mind. Something bad
could
happen. The mystery Kiss had been a warning. But I couldn’t turn back. I’d made a commitment to Cat. I wanted to know who’d
killed Heidi. And I was angry that someone was trying to scare me off.

There were no messages on my machine, no hang-ups, either. I spent about half an hour getting a few bills cleared off my desk
and throwing junk into drawers around my apartment. Before I knew it, it was time to dress for dinner. But
how?
I was feeling kind of weird about the evening. I couldn’t deny that I found Jack Herlihy intriguing, and when he’d called
I hadn’t been able to resist saying yes to his invitation. But that was before my Sunday night carnal carnival with K.C. Since
then I’d been feeling that I needed to see where things were going with
him
. Maybe he wasn’t as skittish as I’d thought. My life was too freakin’ complicated at the moment to get involved with more
than one guy, and for now that guy was going to be K.C.

What I needed to do, I decided, was to signal to Jack that I saw this evening not as a date, but as part two of our interview.
I decided to go with stretchy beige slacks, black flats, and a black cotton twin set. Attractive enough, but not sexy—the
kind of ensemble Laura Petrie might wear around the house.

Earlier in the day I’d left him a voice mail suggesting a Spanish restaurant on Thompson Street that served paella. The setting
was very old-style Village—quaint, but a tad down at the heels. The kind of choice that couldn’t possibly send the wrong message.

I’d told him I’d meet him at the restaurant at seven-thirty, and I sauntered over at around seven-fifteen. The sky was the
color of dark blue denim. Washington Square Park was packed, and as I walked by I could feel the nutty energy people were
experiencing now that spring was in full swing.

He wasn’t at the restaurant when I arrived, but they seated me anyway, in the corner by the front window, under a cheap oil
painting of a matador. I took out my notebook immediately and laid it on the table—a sign that I was here for business. I
was just ordering a glass of Cabernet when he rushed in, running his hand through his sandy brown hair. He was wearing a navy
blue sports jacket, more regulation style than the one he’d had on last week, a blue-and-white-striped oxford shirt, and tan
slacks, the sort of preppie date look rarely sighted south of 14th Street. I felt that little kick in the tummy again.

“You haven’t been here long, have you?” he asked, doing his best to arrange his long legs under the small table and offering
that very nice smile of his.

“No, no, just got here,” I replied.

“I kept going up and down the street looking for the place and finally realized I was one block over, on Sullivan. I’m determined
to know the Village like the back of my hand before the summer’s over.” As he flicked open his napkin and laid it in his lap,
I saw his eyes take in the notebook.

“How was your weekend?” I asked. “Did you go shopping for a pair of parachute pants on Eighth Street or some other fun Village
activity?”

“I should have. I need something black at the very least so I don’t look like such a tourist. But actually, I ended up going
down to Bermuda for the weekend. I left Friday morning and got back about midday yesterday.”

Hmmm. Wasn’t Bermuda a real couplesy place? Was this his way of hinting that he had a girlfriend and our dinner tonight really
was
about work? Had I been such an egomaniac that I’d misinterpreted his invitation? I should have felt relieved, but I didn’t.
I felt irritated.

“Just for pleasure?” I asked, trying to sound casual. “Or did you get called down to consult about some rich kid suffering
from a terrible problem, like a fear of sand and surf?”

He laughed. “You know, there actually
is
a phobia of waves. It’s called kymophobia.”

“Really?”

“There are hundreds of phobias—some totally bizarre. There’s a fear of fog—homichlophobia. And a fear of pup-pets—pupaphobia.
There’s even a fear of the figure eight—octophobia.”

“Did you have to memorize all the names in graduate school?”

“No.” He laughed. “I did it one day when I was supposed to be doing something else—like studying for finals. You know what
my favorite was? Lutraphobia—a fear of otters.”

“Otters? I can’t imagine that—they’re so cute. Oysters, maybe. I’ve never been able to swallow them.”

God, I couldn’t believe I’d said that. It was basically like confessing that I gagged easily. He was probably sitting there
thinking I also had a fear of performing oral sex.

“Well, maybe what you’ve really got is blennophobia—fear of slime,” he said. “Anything else? Anything that makes you hyperventilate
or keeps you up at night?”

Great, he’d known me for less than two hours total and he already could tell I was an insomniac.

“Not that I’d confess to you,” I said, laughing. “I’ve revealed too much already.”

The waiter lumbered over with my wine and Jack ordered a glass, too. When we were alone again I tried to get the attention
off me, asking him why he’d decided to teach rather than focus mainly on patients. As he talked, I studied his face and that
whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts quality to it. I wasn’t the only one who appreciated it. Three women eating together
at the next table had been gawking at him from the moment he walked in.

I asked a few questions about the special cases he handled, and I could tell by the way he was racing through the answers
that he wanted to flip things and ask me about myself, but I didn’t give him a chance.

“Look, speaking of troubled kids,” I said, “I need to ask you a few more questions about Marky.”

“Ahh, the merry little prankster.” If he was irritated that I was steering things toward business, he didn’t show it.

“What you told me was very helpful. And as I thought back on all the incidents—the ones I heard about and the ones I witnessed
myself—I could imagine how she pulled them off. At least most of them. But there are a few things I’m confused about. I’m
not sure how she could have done them.”

The waiter interrupted us, asking for our order, and at my prompting, Jack went for the paella, too.

“Okay, like what?” he asked as we resumed conversation.

“Well, while I was standing in the room with her and her parents, a stuffed animal went hurtling through the air. And earlier
in the day, two cups began to slide across the coffee table. Both times, Marky was standing on the other side of the room.”

He turned in his chair so that he was almost perpendicular to the table, crossed his legs, and then picked up his wineglass,
twirling it in his hand as he thought for a second.

“When you were a kid, did you ever learn any magic tricks?” he asked.

“I knew a few card tricks—and I could make a quarter disappear from my hand and come out of my ear.”

“With the ear trick, you probably relied on what magicians use for practically every trick they do—misdirection. Right?”

“That’s when you get the audience to look in the wrong place?”

“Basically, yes. The reason a magician is able to pull off his tricks is that intuitively our eyes want to go where the action
is. The magician waves his left hand in the air a few times and we fixate on that, not noticing that his right hand is discreetly
pulling off some feat.”

“You’re a magician in your spare time?”

He laughed. “I wanted to be one—at least at age eleven. I was obsessed for about two years. I even had my little sister convinced
I could make her disappear.”

“And this has something to do with Marky?”

“Sort of, yeah. I bet Marky’s relying on good old-fashioned misdirection to pull off her tricks. That’s what went on with
some of the cases
I
looked at. Take the stuffed animal. I assume you were talking to her parents at the time. Marky may not have purposely misdirected
you—she just waited for it to happen naturally. And when everyone’s attention was absorbed elsewhere, she hurled the toy across
the room.”

“Maybe,” I said. I had flipped open my notebook and was jotting down the gist of what he said. “Yeah, that’s a definite possibility.
Are you saying she might have studied magic?”

“No, no. I’m sure it’s just been something she’s discovered through trial and error. There’s another interesting thing about
misdirection, by the way. It can work with time as well. Often there’s a false beginning to a trick. That not only gives the
magician more time to pull it off, but it also makes it harder for you to understand how he did it.”

“Can you give me an example?”

He thought, pressing the tip of his thumb to his lips. He looked like a guy who had a slow hand in bed. Lots of time for you,
lots of attention.

“All right. Let’s say the magician does a trick where he changes a blue scarf to a red one. He wads the blue scarf up in his
fist and then he places it in a magic box of some sort. He taps the box with his wand or maybe he waves his hand over it,
and all the time the audience is looking intently, trying to see how he’s doing the trick with the box. But he’s already done
it. He substituted a red scarf for the blue one before he ever put it in the box. The real trick often begins earlier than
you realize. Maybe Marky set something up with the coffee mugs before anyone was in the room. I remember reading once that
if you put plates in a small puddle of water, they eventually will float across a table. Could be something like that.”