Lethally Blond (20 page)

“Is this Bailey Weggins?” asked a pompous, vaguely familiar voice.

“Yes, who’s calling?”

“Alex Ottoson. I want to see you.”

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised.

“Okay. Where—and when?”

“My apartment. Now. Central Park West at Seventy-fourth Street. How long will it take you to get here?”

“I’m actually only fifteen minutes away.”

“There’s a horde of paparazzi out front, so you need to use the service entrance around the corner. A few of the jackals will probably be positioned there as well, but my assistant will be waiting.”

Alex had of course read the
Buzz
Web site or been told about it and wanted to grill me on the subject of Locket’s fling with Tom. This would be the perfect chance for me to take a measure of him, yet it wasn’t going to be a pleasant situation. As I picked up my pace along the park, my eyes roamed the large dusty bushes off to the left, not unlike the one Locket had been killed near. It would have been so easy for Alex to follow her as she walked the dog—or catch up with her at a spot he knew she’d be. She would have been surprised to see him, but not necessarily alarmed. And he could have bashed in her head before she even knew her life was in danger.

There
were
paparazzi by the service entrance, as it turned out, about five of them, but the assistant, a slim Asian woman dressed in a black tunic, leggings, and pointy black ankle boots, was waiting just outside the door and whisked me by them. She led me up a flight of back stairs and then around to the front lobby. She said nothing at all to me as we rode the elevator and then only, “Please follow me,” after she’d unlocked the apartment door. I trailed behind her through the gigundo living room and down a long corridor lined with closed doors, a different route from the one Locket had taken when I’d visited her. The place was totally silent, tomblike, like a space belowground. At the very end of the hall, the assistant rapped on a door, and through it we heard Alex’s muffled voice announce, “Enter.” As I stepped into the large spare study, the assistant faded back into the recesses of the apartment.

Alex was sitting at a sleek black desk, with absolutely nothing on it but a phone. He wore a crisp white cotton shirt, long-sleeved, and a camel-colored cashmere sweater was knotted around his neck. Kind of spiffy for someone in deep mourning. He didn’t rise, and he didn’t offer me a seat.

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” I said.

“Let me cut right to the chase,” he said bluntly. “I want to know everything Locket told you about her relationship with Tom Fain.”

“I’m under no obligation to share with you what Locket revealed to me.”

“But you didn’t hesitate to reveal to the world that she was having an affair with Tom Fain.”

“She was about to go to the police with that information. It wasn’t going to be a secret any longer.”

“Was she in love with him?” His voice cracked slightly when he spoke, releasing a soupçon of pity in me.

“I don’t think so,” I admitted. “She said she never wanted to jeopardize her relationship with you.”

“Lovely,” he said, his voice thick with sarcasm. “And why, might I ask, would she share all this information with you?”

“I’d been looking into Tom’s death—not as a reporter, but because I’d found the body and wanted to know what had happened to him. I heard a rumor about her and Tom, so I confronted her. Were you aware of what was going on?”

“I had my suspicions, but no proof. Locket was quite the master of deception, and she could cover her tracks brilliantly. She visited some old friends the weekend Fain apparently died, and when I called they told me she’d gone antiquing. She even returned with several eighteenth-century silver serving spoons just to drive home the point.”

“Where were
you
that day?” I asked. If he was going to cut to the chase, so would I.

“Off the record—with a young lady. As I was last night.”

Oh, nice. Mr. Pot calling the kettle black.

“Have the police given you any indication of what they think happened to Locket?” I asked.

“All I know is from the doorman. She left to walk the dog about nine. I assumed she’d stopped by a friend’s. Now if you’ll excuse me . . .”

I wondered if I was supposed to see myself out, but when I turned toward the doorway, I saw that the assistant was back, hovering. Had a bell under the desk summoned her?

“Just one question,” I said to Alex as he reached for the phone. “How did you find out that Tom Fain had been in rehab?”

“If you must know,” he said, “Chris Wickersham’s agent in L.A. told us, though of course we had it verified.”

The news almost knocked the wind out of me. It had been
Chris
who had sabotaged Tom. The thought sickened me.

On the other hand, was it such a surprise? Perhaps I should have guessed the truth when Locket had told me what happened. I knew Chris was driven. He wanted fame and glory—what actor who heads for L.A. doesn’t? I’d even understood why he hadn’t come to my rescue on the set—because it might hurt his standing with the director. But betraying Tom was in a whole other league.

By the time the cab pulled up in front of my building, I felt miserable. I hobbled to the door in my wrinkled suit and scuffed slingbacks and offered Bob, the doorman, a pathetic hello.

“You just missed her,” he said.

“Who?” I asked, confused.

“Your sister-in-law. I let her into your apartment like you asked.”

“Like I
asked
?” I exclaimed, feeling a charge of adrenaline. “What do you mean?”

Bob stared at me, his eyes widening in alarm beneath the brim of his brown cap.

“You called me an hour ago. And told me to let her in.”

CHAPTER 16

I
paused for a split second to gather my wits, then charged across the lobby and around the corner to the elevator bank.

“Is everything all right, Ms. Weggins?” Bob called out behind me.

“I don’t think so,” I yelled back. “I never called you today.”

My heart was thumping hard as I rode the elevator to the fourteenth floor. I
hadn’t
called Bob, and for all I knew, one sister-in-law was in the Caribbean with my brother and the other was in Boston coping with her addiction to the Crate & Barrel catalog. That meant someone had phoned the lobby impersonating me. And that person apparently had shown up and spent time alone in my apartment.

I’d no sooner stepped onto the floor than the door of the other elevator slid open and Bob darted out.

“I got the porter to watch the door. Are you saying you weren’t the one who phoned here this afternoon?”

“No—and my sisters-in-law aren’t in New York now. What exactly did this person say when she called?”

“Just hi, that it was you, Bailey, and that you wanted me to let your sister-in-law use your apartment while she was between planes. We’re supposed to get written notes on stuff like that, but it was so clearly you who was calling. I wanted to do you the favor.”

He pushed back the brim of his cap, and I could see that his forehead was glistening with sweat. Poor Bob—he probably suspected he was going to get canned before the day was through.

“The woman who showed up here—what did she look like?” I asked. “And how long did she stay?”

“To be honest, I didn’t get a great look. She was on the tall side, maybe five eight or nine, though she may have been wearing heels. She had on big sunglasses and some kind of hat—like a fedora. And oh, her hair was peeking out a little from the top—it was blond. She stayed about thirty minutes. Like I said earlier, she left about fifteen minutes before you got here.”

“And you’re sure it was a woman?”

“Huh? You mean could it have been a guy dressed up like a woman? I—I don’t think so.”

“Okay, we better check my place now,” I said, glad Bob was with me. I had no idea what I was going to find there. Had it been trashed? Booby-trapped?

“You better be prepared for the fact that you may have been robbed,” Bob advised. “She certainly didn’t take your TV out of here, but she might have stolen cash or jewelry.”

But when I stepped into my entranceway with Bob at my heels and glanced around, nothing at all seemed amiss. We moved with trepidation from the living room to the kitchen and then back through the living room to the bedroom, the bathroom, and my tiny office. There were no rifled drawers, no cabinet doors flung open. And my small cache of jewelry, the pieces my ex-husband hadn’t managed to pawn, was still tucked in a nest of my thongs.

“Is anything missing?” Bob asked nervously.

“No, not that I can see.”

“Then what did she want?”

“I don’t know, Bob. I don’t know.”

“Do you want me to call the super?”

“That may not be necessary. Let me get settled in and I’ll take a closer look around. If I find anything wrong, I’ll let you know.”

Bob departed looking totally chagrined, his collar wet from flop sweat. I didn’t fault him for what had happened. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t freaked.

After I’d stripped off my suit and kicked my heels into the closet, I searched through my bedroom again, mostly through drawers, and I did the same in my office. My papers seemed in order. My laptop was in the exact spot I’d left it. Why had she come to my apartment? Who
was
she? She had to be a good actress or mimic—after all, she had managed to imitate my voice well enough that my doorman had assumed it was I.

There was an even more chilling question to consider. Was the mystery visitor related to the murders? If yes, it narrowed the field. It certainly couldn’t have been Deke disguised in a hat and sunglasses. Or Alex. But it might have been Harper. Or possibly someone in league with the murderer. Or maybe it didn’t have anything to do with the killings at all. But then why would someone go through the whole ruse and spend a half hour in my apartment the day after Locket’s murder?

I pulled on a pair of tan capris and a black jersey top and returned to my office. I called Detective Windgate and described on his voice mail what had happened. I asked him to call me the first chance he got, and I also left a message for Nash saying that there were a few new developments, but nothing that couldn’t wait, and I’d fill him in tomorrow at the office. Then I made calls to some of my contacts, coming up with nothing new.

By this point, my stomach was grumbling and my whole body ached from fatigue. I phoned Landon, hoping he was up for company because the thought of spending the next hours alone in my apartment gave me the willies. Ever so faintly, I heard his phone ring through the wall in my office, again and again until his machine picked up. It looked as though I were going to be on my own with whatever sorry provisions I could locate in my fridge.

On my way to the kitchen, I checked my terrace door, making certain it and the windows were still bolted. I started to relax just a little, realizing that no one was going to be able to gain entry.

Practically limp from hunger and exhaustion, I foraged through my freezer for a pork cutlet I had vague recollections of having tossed in there and finally discovered it, lying rock hard beneath a sleeve of frozen bagels. As I turned with it toward the microwave, my eye caught a flash of silver in the sink. Lying in the otherwise empty basin was a steak knife with a wooden handle. It was from a fancy set I’d received as a wedding gift, from some relative who had wrongly envisioned my ex and me savoring thick sirloins together for the rest of our lives on earth. I hadn’t noticed it earlier when Bob and I had done our sweep, but then I hadn’t looked there. I was sure I hadn’t put the knife in the sink. I hadn’t, in fact, used those knives in ages. The blade looked cold and menacing lying there by itself.

In all likelihood, the intruder had left the knife there. Had she used it to open something? I didn’t think so. I thought instead that the knife was a message:
I can hurt you if I want to, just like the others.
Perhaps it was even a promise.

I backed out of the kitchen, leaving the knife where it was, and left another message for Windgate, this one even more urgent. Though I no longer had the same appetite, I ordered a deep-dish pizza over the phone. While I waited for it to arrive—and for Windgate to make contact—I sat at my dining table with my composition book and began to write. Having a pencil in my hand gave me a small feeling of control.

I started by jotting down Bob’s description of the woman, and then I wrote a single name: “Harper.”
She
was about five nine, maybe five ten, the height Bob had assigned to the intruder. Her hair was short, but there were definitely pieces long enough to peek out from under a hat. And, I suddenly remembered, she had planned to be an actress once. Chris had told me that when he’d first come to me about Tom.

I certainly had every right to consider Harper a prime suspect. She’d led me to believe she’d been in L.A. that weekend, but she had actually rushed back, presumably because she had a bad feeling about Tom. She could have begun to suspect he was cheating on her—and she may have killed Tom without ever learning who the other woman actually was. When I’d hinted yesterday that it might be someone on the show, Harper might have convinced herself that it was Locket and confronted her in the park.

I’d become so preoccupied about my intruder that Alex’s revelation had escaped my mind temporarily—but now it popped into my brain like a sunken object finally shooting to the surface of a pond. Chris had cost Tom the part in the show, all because of his own fierce ambition. I imagined how it had probably happened: Tom had called Chris and told him about being cast in the show and suggested to Chris he get in to see the casting director. Chris had auditioned, had inferred somehow that everything wasn’t totally nailed down yet with Tom, and told his agent to leak the info about rehab.

The revelation made me both angry and sad. Angry because Chris had derailed Tom’s career. Was that why he’d wanted me to find Tom—out of wretched guilt? And sad because I really cared about Chris. I’d liked going to bed with him, I liked the way he made me laugh, I even liked his freakin’ omelet with aged cheddar. And now I could see he wasn’t the guy I thought he was. It would have been nice to call Chris for comfort tonight, to possibly spend the night at his place away from the nasty steak knife, but there was no way I’d do that after what I’d learned about him. I realized, in fact, that I had never heard from Chris this evening, despite the fact that when we’d had breakfast together, he’d implied we’d talk later. Tomorrow I was going to force him to tell me the truth.

As I sat staring at a blank page of my notebook, my pizza arrived, and no sooner had I paid for it than Windgate returned my call. I explained the whole situation about the intruder. When I was done, there was only silence on his part.

“Are you—” I started to say.

“Could it be a woman you know personally—someone from your own life?” he interrupted, his voice neutral. “A woman who’s trying to get back at you for some reason? Maybe she thinks you stole her boyfriend, for instance.”

“You mean a stalker?” I asked, trying not to sound as exasperated as I felt. “God, no, I don’t think so. There’s been no indication that anyone’s obsessed with me. And I’ve never stolen anyone’s boyfriend.”

“Okay, okay, just sit tight, then. I’m going to send an evidence collection team over to lift fingerprints. And I want you to be extremely careful, is that understood?”

As relieved as I felt that the police were taking the intrusion seriously, I was ready to crawl into bed and pass out. Now I was going to have to hang around my living room while guys brushed the surfaces of my apartment with fingerprint powder.

The smartest move, I decided, was to try to grab a catnap before the cops arrived. I took two bites of pizza and staggered over to the couch. Cell phone in hand, I sprawled out on the length of it. As soon as I’d closed my eyes, my cell rang again.

“Did I catch you at a bad time?” a voice asked. It was Beau Regan.

Yeah, I’m in the reverse cowgirl position with a dude, and it’s kind of hard to talk right now
was what I was tempted to say, but instead I just muttered something about eating take-out. I couldn’t even muster the gumption to lie and imply I was having a fabulous time.

“I heard about Locket Ford. You said she’d worked with that actor who died—whose death you were looking into. I wanted to make sure everything was okay with you.”

“Uh, that’s nice of you to call. To tell you the truth, I’m pretty sure the two deaths are related.”

“That’s what I wondered. Are you doing all right? You’re not in one of those hot spots you love to gravitate toward, are you?”

“Actually, I—” My voice caught, much to my chagrin. “Someone got into my apartment—and I think it might be the killer. The police are supposedly on their way to look for prints.”

“What do you mean, it might be the killer? What happened, exactly?”

I ran through it quickly for him. My voice caught again during part of my story, and I felt ridiculously wimpy. The last thing I wanted to do was make Beau think I was a “boo-hoo” kind of girl in need of rescue.

“Bailey, you can’t stay there tonight,” he said, my efforts apparently a failure. “I hope you’re not planning to.”

“I’m sure I’ll be okay,” I insisted. “It’s not like this person has a key. I don’t want to put out a friend on such late notice.” I wondered if he was curious why I wouldn’t bunk down with my “hard body.”

“Why don’t you stay at my place,” he said, his voice gentle.

My breath froze in my chest, like a paralyzed nerve.

“You could have the couch,” he added. “Or I could. I just don’t like the idea of you staying alone there. Remember, I was the guy who put the ice pack on your bruises last July.”

I was about to say no,
really
I was, because from the moment I’d left Beau on the sidewalk in Chelsea the night before, I had felt as if I were finally moving away from him mentally and no longer wondering if there was a snowball’s chance in hell for us. Staying at his place, even if only on the couch, would surely set me back.

But I also knew how freaked I felt and how much I didn’t want to be in my apartment contemplating 101 things someone could do with a steak knife. So I said yes.

While I waited for the evidence collection team to arrive, I zipped my laptop into its case and packed an overnight bag with the only other suit I owned. The cops finally showed at around eight-thirty. After explaining the situation to them and giving them the lay of the land—as well as letting them take my fingerprints—I beat it out of there. When they departed later, the door would lock behind them automatically. In the lobby, I arranged for the night doorman to go up to the floor after the police left and make sure the dead bolt was on with the key they kept to my place. Though I’d felt wasted earlier, my body had been totally recharged by adrenaline.

Only a day had passed since I’d seen Beau last, but now he looked far more rested. He was wearing tan cords and a yellow crewneck sweater, and his feet were bare. My tummy started to go all weird at the sight of him.

“I opened a bottle of red wine, thinking you might need it,” he said after walking me into the living room. “And I have a huge chunk of Stilton cheese my mother sent home with me.”

“Just what the doctor ordered.”

While he put things together in the kitchen, I sank into his sofa and took the chance to study the living room. The pile of papers that had been strewn about yesterday was now cleared away, and everything else was pretty much as it had been earlier in the summer: the sleek black leather furniture; the primitive-style rug in blue, black, and orange; the striking black-and-white photos of the Far East lining the white walls. There were several new photos, though, of what I assumed must be ancient streets in Istanbul, propped against the base of a wall. It made me nervous to prowl every inch of the room with my eyes—I’d once found a pink Daisy razor in the shower of a guy I was gaga for, squashing any hopes for eternal love, and I hated the thought of discovering bread crumbs from some chick here—but I couldn’t help myself.