Killer Heels (27 page)

“So what do we do now, while we’re waiting for Will to call back?” Tricia asked.

“We could go thank Officer Hendryx again so Molly could run into Detective Edwards.”

“No, thank you. I don’t think daily doses of Detective Edwards are all that healthy.”

“I feel sorry for the poor guy,” Tricia offered.

“The poor guy? How does he get to suspect me of murder and come off as ‘the poor guy’?”

“You’re not thinking it through. He’s torn between desire and duty, trying to do his job but completely distracted by you. It muddies his thinking.”

“Tricia, this is me and Edwards, not
The Four Feathers
.”

“Why do they keep remaking that movie? It gets worse every time,” Cassady opined. “There should be a law controlling what movies can be remade and how many remakes will be allowed per century. I mean, really.
Psycho
. What was Gus Van Sant thinking?”

“You’re the intellectual properties lawyer. Write one,” I suggested.

Tricia squinted at us both. “Are we done discussing Detective Edwards already?”

“I am,” I said.

“Cassady?”

“Tricia, I can hear her grinding her teeth from here. I think she needs some time away from him. Absence makes the heart all hot and bothered, right?”

“Then let’s go shopping.”

Cassady nodded. “I cleared my calendar.”

I hesitated, feeling a traitor to my gender, but also wondering if I should be back in the office, picking up what intelligence I could there.

Cassady repeated. “I cleared my calendar.”

“Thank you,” I acknowledged, “I just think—”

“You don’t want to go back to the office. You can’t talk to Will there. You’ll only draw Yvonne’s ire and Gretchen will want to sit next to your desk and weep all afternoon and Peter will call to see how you’re doing and you’ll have to talk to him as well.”

“Peter,” I groaned guiltily. I still hadn’t dealt with him.

“Later,” Tricia assured me.

Cassady didn’t acknowledge either interruption. “That’s why you’re going to come with us and help me with a few loose ends for the reception and also make sure Cassady has something to wear that won’t cause cardiac arrests at the church.” Tricia looked me in the eye and dared me to argue.

It is hard to argue with a well-thought-out plan. Especially because she was right. I didn’t want to go back to the office unless it was absolutely necessary. I could check on Gretchen’s progress on Nachtmusik at the end of the day, but I was pretty sure she wasn’t going to get anywhere. Higher-priced heads than hers were behind this mess. And the more distance between Yvonne and me, the better. No question there.

So I signed on. “Sounds great.”

And it was great. Spending time with Cassady and Tricia is like going to a spa for the soul. I feel better, happier, smarter after I’ve been with them. We alternated between items on Tricia’s to-do list and looking for an outfit for Cassady—and whenever possible, looking at shoes for all three of us.

We were down at Balenciaga which is like shopping on the holo-deck of the Enterprise with its shifting light and surreal mix of store and art gallery. I’m always a little intimidated there, but Cassady insisted. She was trying on this amazing pair of ankle boots with great tucks in the leather and stunning heels. I actually found myself trying to imagine those shoe jewels from the ad on Cassady’s shoes. They’d work. It was a cool idea. I hoped the company making them wasn’t involved in this whole Teddy mess.

My cell rang. I answered it quickly, automatically, not stopping to think who it might be. “Hello?”

“Cassie?”

I almost told him he had the wrong number, then I realized who it had to be. “Yes?”

“This is Will Cervantes at Nachtmusik. You called?”

Yes! “Will, thanks for getting back to me so quickly.”

Cassady stood up so fast that she almost impaled the salesman’s hand with her heel. Tricia hurried back from where she’d been eyeing a pair of slingbacks. Cassady mouthed, “I’ll take them” to the salesman, just to make him go away, and she and Tricia crowded next to me to hear the conversation.

“I’m not really sure I can help you,” he began.

“Money’s not an object.”

There was a significant pause. “What’s your timetable?”

“Sooner than later. Maybe we could meet, go over the particulars face to face. I know it’s so last century, but I hate doing business on the phone.”

“I’m a little jammed up myself,” he parried. If he was involved in Teddy’s death somehow, of course he was jammed up. But I had to convince him that it was worth taking the time to meet me.

“Help me out here and I can promise you a pretty steady stream of work,” I lied. I don’t like toying with people’s dreams, but I was kind of in a hurry.

“I have some commitments this afternoon,” he said. “It would have to be tomorrow.”

I didn’t want to wait, but I didn’t want to press too hard and scare him away either. “No way you can do it today?”

“No. I’ve got other deadlines.”

He had no idea how intriguing I found his choice of words. I paused so he could think I was agonizing before I answered. “Then I guess it’ll have to be tomorrow. Where and when?”

“Two thirty? We’re right off West 14th, down in the meatpacking district. Above Vinnie’s Grill.”

Somebody lucky enough to snag a miserable walkup in a rundown neighborhood that then exploded into the “new SoHo.” There might be more to this guy than Alicia had let on. “Thanks. See you then.”

I hung up quickly so he wouldn’t have time to reconsider.

“I’m going with you,” Cassady announced as she paid for the ankle boots.

“I’ll arrange to be there, too,” Tricia added.

“You can’t both keep skipping work for me. I’ll be fine.”

“Don’t argue. It gives you crow’s feet,” Tricia warned.

So I gave in and we continued with our errands, with me concentrating on not thinking about anything but shopping. It worked in five- to ten-minute stretches and I thought that was pretty good.

We had blown through the afternoon and Tricia’s to-do list and were contemplating cocktails when my cell rang again. It hadn’t rung at all since Will’s call, mainly because Tricia and Cassady were with me and didn’t need to call me, and the magazine was apparently able to limp along in my absence. I wondered if it might be Will again and I didn’t want to answer it in case he had reconsidered, but then I remembered I do have other friends and a life outside of all this weirdness and it might actually be a call about something else.

I said hello and heard nothing but static. What I thought was static, anyway. I said hello again and realized it wasn’t static, it was hoarse, ragged sobbing. “Who is this?” I glanced at the display pad on my phone, but I didn’t recognize the number. “Who is this?” I repeated, not sure if I should be worried about someone I knew or annoyed by a crank call.

“Molly …” the weeper finally said. “Oh God, Molly …”

“Who is this?” I repeated, willing the person on the other end of the phone to pull it together and answer me.

“Gretchen …”

I should have known. I should have recognized the sobbing, given all I had heard in the last couple of days, but this had a raw quality to it that was new. “Gretchen, I need you to take a deep breath and tell me what’s wrong.”

“You better … come …”

“Gretchen, did Yvonne fire you?” A fresh wail keened out of the phone and I jerked the phone away from my ear for a moment. “Gretchen, what the hell is going on?”

“Yvonne’s dead.”

15

I don’t like déjà vu. Probably because in my line of work, you go to all sorts of extremes not to repeat yourself, so that little glitch feeling of having done or said all this before isn’t a pleasant one.

Yet here I was Friday morning, standing before the assembled staff of the magazine and talking about untimely passings and service times to be announced and how awful it all was. Somehow it had fallen to me to find the words to explain something that made no sense, even to me. Why was Yvonne dead? How far did this mess go?

Tricia, Cassady, and I had rushed to the hospital as soon as I hung up with Gretchen. I didn’t want to get into the whole story on the phone, I wanted to talk to Gretchen face-to-face.

It was a pretty banged-up face. Gretchen was sitting on a gurney in the St. Vincent’s ER, holding an ice bag to the back of her head, a bruise blossoming on her right cheek, her lip split, her eyes swollen from crying. She started hyperventilating when she spotted the three of us doing a strength-in-numbers approach on a nurse who asked us to please wait outside. Finally, Cassady identified herself as a lawyer and us as her associates and the nurse gave up and let us pass.

“What the hell happened?” I asked. The whole cab ride over I’d been trying to line everything up. If Yvonne had killed Teddy, then who had killed Yvonne? How deep did this go, how big was it that it warranted two murders? As if anything warranted two murders.

“She needed a new outfit for Teddy’s funeral,” Gretchen sobbed.

“You went shopping?” My voice almost squeaked with disbelief. Sure, I had recently succumbed to Gretchen’s tears and gone out with her, but Yvonne, rest her soul, was made of stronger stuff than I. No way waterworks and wheedling had moved her.

Gretchen’s lip curled, either in scorn or from the sheer power of her sniffing. “I didn’t say that. She needed to go out and that meant someone had to come along and carry her bags and juggle her cell phone and wineglass and zip her up in the back.”

“Fred bailed?”

“He said he couldn’t participate in anything that might involve Yvonne being naked.”

“Understandable,” Tricia murmured.

“So she picked you?” I asked, trying to make it sound inquisitive and not mean.

“I’m an assistant, remember? Never, ever more than an assistant. What better way to rub my face in it?” Gretchen’s nostrils flared in indignation, but that made her nose start running again, so she went back to sniffing. Tricia mercifully produced tissues from her handbag and gave them to Gretchen.

“So you felt you had to go,” Cassady prompted.

Gretchen nodded. “She wanted to take the Jag and come to Chelsea.”

“Her Jag? Why not a cab?” I asked. Driving didn’t seem practical, but that’s coming from someone who believes parking prices in Manhattan are a conspiracy to bankrupt the American people. The only thing worse than being extorted for a daily parking space is being extorted for a daily parking space and then leaving it during the day to be extorted for a short-term space somewhere else.

Gretchen shrugged. Her mouth jerked like she was trying to force a smile, but it didn’t come off. “At least I got a chance to ride in it.” It was a classic XKE, an automotive work of art. Yvonne drove it to attract men, but it was still a beautiful car. “So she pulls onto this little side street, says she knows a great lot, and these guys come out of nowhere …” Gretchen gestured, indicating that the guys had walked in front of them, as her sobs increased in speed and volume.

“I know this is hard, honey,” I coaxed, selfishly wanting her to finish.

“Yvonne slammed on the brakes to keep from hitting them. They started yelling, she started yelling, one of them banged on the hood which really freaked her out. Then all of a sudden, the other one—really big guy—rips open Yvonne’s door. I tried to help her, but the other guy opened my door.”

“He waited until you were distracted,” I offered, hoping it sounded comforting rather than patronizing.

“Of course,” Cassady prodded, leading me to believe it hadn’t sounded comforting at all.

I opened my mouth to offer a defense of myself this time, but Tricia gave us both a silencing look. “I’m listening,” Tricia said, taking Gretchen’s hand. “What happened then?” To me, Tricia was employing the same even tone she’d use to coax a client torn between gazpacho and con-sommeé. But such was her charm that Gretchen squeezed her hands and continued without acknowledging our interruption.

“I smacked my head on the pavement. I pretended they knocked me out ’cause I thought they might think I was hurt worse and freak and run. But Yvonne wouldn’t get out of the car.”

“She fought them?” I interrupted again, absurdly thinking of an article we’d run only two issues before about safety basics for women in the city. “Give them the car” was pretty high on the list, but I guess “Don’t think you’re invincible” should have been even higher.

“She called them all kinds of names and she wouldn’t get out of the car. I was just sitting up to tell her not to argue …” She clamped her free hand over her eyes, willing the memory away, but it didn’t work. “The big guy shot her,” she finished in a whisper.

Tricia gently hugged her. “I’m so sorry.”

I felt numb. My brain didn’t want to move forward. Was this connected to Teddy’s death? It had to be. It was just too weird to think that this might have happened independently, some cosmic justice stepping in because we weren’t going to figure it out for ourselves.

Gretchen had already talked to the police at the scene, so we just had to wait for the doctors to release her. The main concern was a concussion, but Gretchen swore she’d go home and take it easy and her roommate would keep an eye on her, so the ER doctor let her sign herself out.

Tricia wanted to escort Gretchen home, but Gretchen insisted that she just wanted to be alone for a while. So we put her in a cab, then hailed one for ourselves and went out for a morose round of cocktails. None of us was very enthusiastic about dinner, so we split up early and went home. I soaked in the bathtub so long that I had to add new hot water twice, but I still couldn’t figure it out. Loan sharks? Drug dealers? Nothing made any sense. But violent death doesn’t make any sense, so maybe that was the whole problem right there.

The next morning, I went in early. I had to tell Fred and then I had to send him home, he was so freaked out. Gretchen came in with a little makeup on her bruises and an air of crushed optimism that was palpable. She’d told people bits and pieces of what had happened by the time I called everyone together, but there were still gasps throughout my little talk as the staff tried to grapple with this double-whammy.