So Pretty It Hurts (15 page)

“
Why
, do you think?”

He did a little pose before speaking, lifting a shoulder and pursing his lips. “She was lonely. Being a supermodel looks like oodles of fun, but it can be a solitary existence when you’re not actually working. You travel all the time, and you never know who your real friends are. And Devon had never had much luck with men. She picked bad boys who liked to take machetes to their hotel rooms and eventually cheat on her. You know that expression, don’t you? ‘Show me a beautiful woman, and I’ll show you a man who’s tired of fucking her’? That seemed to fit Devon to a T.”

“If she wanted a baby so badly, why not try again?”

“She probably didn’t want to go through it all again. It was just too much work.”

“Did she have morning sickness or something?”

“No, I mean before that. All the—” He caught himself and clamped his mouth shut.

“Wait, are you saying Devon had fertility issues?” I urged. Thornwell had mentioned a clinic but I’d assumed Devon had used one for artificial insemination.

“I really shouldn’t say. I’ve said too much all ready.”

“Look, Christian, I don’t have any prurient interest here. I’m not a gossip columnist. I’m just trying to figure out if someone murdered Devon.”

“
Murdered
? You can’t be serious.”

“It’s a possibility. And though I don’t think her pregnancy is connected, I want to investigate every angle. Help me out here.”

He let out an exaggerated sigh.

“Yes, she had some fertility issues,” he admitted. “To quote
Gone with the Wind
, ‘I don’t know nothin’ about birthin’ babies,’ but something wasn’t working perfectly
down there
. She got some kind of special treatment, and after a few months, voilà. I don’t know what the treatment involved, but there was one month where she was too bloated to work. She ballooned to a size six or something.”

Sounded like she might have gone through in vitro. The drugs, I’d heard, could cause lots of swelling.

“Thank you,” I said. “That information may prove useful.”

“Speaking of useful, I really do have work to do. Do you mind letting me get back to it?”

“Of course. How are things going here, by the way? Devon’s death must be a blow to the agency.”

“It is,” he said. “But we have
lots
of fabulous girls.”

“I heard, by the way, that Devon had some issues with the agency lately—that she wanted Cap to take them up with Barbara Dern.”

I’d dropped it like a bomb in his lap, and I saw a breath catch in his chest.

“That is
sooo
not true.”

“But isn’t that why Devon was avoiding you last weekend? That she was miffed about something to do with the agency.”

He let out a little shriek. “I knew I should never have spoken to you,” he exclaimed. “Please leave
now.
”

He swiveled his body around dramatically in the chair and marched out of the room into the reception area, expecting me to follow. Not taking any chances, he punched the elevator for me, and before long I was out on my ass, just like all the girls who’d been deemed too thick in the thighs or chubby in the cheeks for First Models.

Now what? I thought as I left the building. I’d gleaned a few insights from talking to Jane and Christian, but I hadn’t come any closer to learning what I needed to know. I placed another call to Tommy and also left a message for Scott at his office. It was time to touch base with him again.

Back home, I cracked open my composition book once more. I scribbled down notes from my conversation with Christian and then reviewed the other notes I’d taken so far. Then I summed up what I had so far:

• Cap was suffering from lupus, which supposedly meant he couldn’t get it up and thus wasn’t able to have an affair with Devon. Since he wasn’t a spurned, angry, or jealous lover, it supposedly took away his motive. And Whitney’s too. But Cap might have another motive.

• Jane had most likely pushed me down the stairs—accidentally or not. But did that make her the murderer? Jane was also writing a tell-all book about Devon. It seemed like she might have lied about seeing Devon and Cap kissing to add more sizzle to the story. But would the need for sizzle make her want to kill Devon?

• According to Tory, Tommy had gone missing in action the night Devon had died. Had he dropped by Devon’s room? If so, why not summon help for her?

• Tory was hankering to work with Cap. Had she decided to eliminate Devon so he’d need to add another client?

• And then there was Christian. Despite his assurances that everything was peachy keen between Devon and him, she gave him the cold shoulder last weekend. Was Devon about to make trouble for Christian at the agency?

Regardless of the information I’d gathered, I still had no clue who had doctored Devon’s water. Maybe, I realized, I should work backward and focus instead on who had persuaded Devon’s mother to lie about me. If I learned that, I would probably know who the murderer was.

I picked up my phone and called Jessie.

“I was two seconds away from calling you,” Jessie said. “You doing okay?”

“I’ve been better. Anything up?”

“I’ve tried to hang near Nash’s office as much as possible, but I haven’t picked up anything. I did find out, though, where the funeral is.” She gave me the name of a church in Pine Grove and said it was scheduled for one o’clock on Saturday.

“Thanks for the info,” I said. “I bet by now the whole office has heard about my sorry little plight.”

“Yeah—you know what it’s like here. People know when you have a rash on your ass. But you’ll be happy to learn most people are greeting it with plenty of skepticism. They just don’t see you doing something like that.”

“Unfortunately they don’t have any clout in the matter.”

We chatted for a couple of more minutes, and then signed off, with Jessie promising to call if she learned anything else of value.

For the next hour I researched the houseguests I hadn’t yet Googled, hoping that some little detail would pop up and point to a motive. I found nothing online at all about Jane and only a couple of tiny, meaningless references to Tory. There turned out to be plenty of stuff on Tommy—photos of him flipping the bird at paparazzi, mug shots from his two DWIs, etc.—but nothing that shed light on the case.

Though Richard certainly didn’t appear to have motive, I needed to check him out regardless. There was a ton of stuff online
by
him and
about
him. I skimmed the most recent material for now, but didn’t find anything noteworthy.

I also searched for Scott. The comment my
Buzz
coworker Thornwell had made—about wanting to confirm a naughty piece of gossip about the music mogul—had been nagging at me. Maybe the guy had a real dark side. Perhaps Devon had stumbled onto ugly secrets about him while they were recording her album, and he knew it. He could have built the house party around her just to have an opportunity to kill her. If he
did
have a hidden life and weird sexual predilections, no one had squealed on him up until this point. All the press on him focused on what a genius he was in the music business.

I leaned back in the desk chair of my office and replayed Devon’s words to Cap: “You’ve got to tell her.” Cap had insisted that the woman Devon was referring to was Barbara Dern, head of First Models. It would be good to know exactly what the head of the modeling agency might need to know, especially about a booker. What could a booker do that would make a model fit to be tied? For a second I considered calling my old boss at
Gloss
, Cat Jones, but she didn’t deal with models directly.

Then another thought wormed its way into my mind. Chris Wickersham. He was the actor I’d had an on-again, off-again fling with before starting a steady relationship with Beau. He’d worked as a model before his big break in TV. Talking to him could shed light on the subject.

It could also create trouble for me with Beau. But at the moment I didn’t give a damn.

Chapter 15

I
t had been three months since I’d seen Chris in person, and in that time things had exploded for him—in the sweetest of ways.
Morgue
, the show he was costarring in, had premiered in late September and been a major hit in the ratings, turning him into the kind of guy who was designated as a hunk of the month in magazines like
Cosmo
. There had been several red-carpet shots of Chris in
Buzz
recently, and Leo had showed me a spread of him in
Detail
s, wearing a three-thousand-dollar Gucci leather jacket.

We’d met almost two years ago, when he was bartending at a wedding I’d attended, something he’d done back then to supplement his income as a model and struggling actor. We had a flirtation over a number of months, and then finally fell into bed together this past September when he was shooting his show in New York. Our attraction had been intensified then because we’d shared a passion—finding the person who had killed his friend Tom Fain. But when Beau arrived back from Turkey, I’d been forced to make a torturous choice. In the end I’d picked Beau over Chris—not only because of my fierce attraction to Beau but also because of the inherent drawbacks of a relationship with Chris. For starters, he was ten years younger than me. And he was the new “It” boy, the kind of guy women everywhere would be trying to poach—right out from under my nose. I didn’t feel up to dealing with that on a daily basis.

I wondered if Chris would return my call if I left a message for him now—he had been pretty miffed when I’d told him about Beau. I wondered, in fact, if he even had the same cell phone number. The way his career was going, he’d probably already had to change it two or three times to keep the riffraff at bay.

So I was kind of shocked when, after I punched in the number I had for him, his voice announced, “It’s Chris, leave a message.”

“Hi, this is Bailey,” I said. “You’re probably less than thrilled to hear from me, but there’s something you could help me with, and I’m hoping you’ll return my call. Thanks.”

I left my number, too, just in case he’d angrily purged it from his phone.

Another shocker: he called back just fifteen minutes later, while I was brewing a cup of coffee in the kitchen.

“You’re probably the last person I was expecting to hear from today,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Thanks for calling back. I wasn’t sure if you would—you know, considering everything that happened.”

“Come on, Bailey. I can’t begin to repay you for what you did after Tom died. I wasn’t happy when I last saw you—but I still owe you.”

“I love your show, by the way. And you’re really terrific in it.”

“The hours are generally brutal, but needless to say, we’re stoked it’s a hit. So what exactly do you need my help on?”

He was being perfectly pleasant, but he was also making it clear he wasn’t interested in chitchatting with me.

“I’m working on the Devon Barr story—I’m sure you heard about her death. I desperately need information about the modeling business. I wouldn’t have bothered you but I’m in some serious hot water at work, and it could get worse.”

“If you don’t get the story, you mean?” he said. There was a trace of cynicism in his tone. Chris had never loved the fact that I worked for
Buzz.

“I wish. But that’s not it at all. Devon Barr’s mother has accused me of trying to extort money from her. I’m trying to figure out why she’s saying that.”

There was a pause. Was he weighing my words? I wondered.

“I’m in the middle of something this afternoon, but I have to be uptown later for dinner with a producer,” he said. “It’s about a movie I could end up doing during our hiatus. I’ll have about thirty minutes before then; I could meet you somewhere. Are you at your office?”

“No, I’m at home. I’m persona non grata at
Buzz
for the moment. Can you meet me at the coffee shop in my building?” It didn’t seem smart to ask him to come to my apartment. He might take it the wrong way.

“Sure,” he said. He promised to be there at seven fifteen. That would give me time to reach Beau’s place by eight.

I felt even more keyed up when I disconnected. On top of everything else that was going on, the idea of seeing Chris again tightened the big fat knot in my tummy. He was funny and caring and absolutely gorgeous, and despite how crazy I was about Beau, I still felt a weird connection to Chris. When I watched his show, particularly the episode in which he’d kissed a murder victim’s grieving sister, it had been hard not to reminisce. I’d thought about his amazing body. And what it had been like to have that body next to me in bed.

Deep down, I wondered, did I have some ulterior motive for wanting to see him? I immediately chased that thought away. Chris was more familiar with the modeling business than anyone I knew.

At around five, as the sky was darkening, I phoned Nash, figuring it would be a good time to find him in his office. His assistant Lee, probably the oldest person at
Buzz
by about fifteen years, answered and asked me to hold. Though she was polite when I announced myself, I detected a trace of pity in her voice. There was no pity in Nash’s voice, however, when he finally came on.

“What’s up?” he asked, almost curtly. Not a good sign.

“I was just checking in, seeing if you’d learned anything.”

“About?”

“About why Devon’s mother made up that story about me.”

“It’s still being investigated,” he said.

“But how? Wouldn’t you want to see my cell phone records to prove I never called her? I can provide them.”

“I can’t go into specifics, Bailey. You must know that.”

As I hung up, I realized the cold, hard truth. He didn’t have faith in me. I’d busted my butt for him for over six months, breaking stories, generating buzz about
Buzz
, but he didn’t feel he really knew me or was sure he could trust me. My whole body suddenly felt like a big tub of Jell-O.

I tried to distract myself by jotting down a few questions to ask Chris. While I scribbled, trying to fight off a new groundswell of anxiety, Scott finally returned my call.

He started with the same curt “What’s up?” that Nash had snapped at me. Obviously a call from me these days was about as welcome as a rat sandwich.

“I’d love to grab a few minutes of your time,” I said. “Some details have emerged regarding the weekend that I think you ought to know about.”

“Such as?”

“Can we do it in person?” I said. “I could swing by and see you tomorrow?”

“Oh, I guess you
Buzz
reporters have to be concerned that your phones might be hacked by other tabloids,” he said sarcastically. Then a sigh. “All right. But I don’t want to meet at my office.” He suggested a place called Café Euro on Fifty-seventh and Seventh at eight the next morning.

I still had an hour to kill before Chris arrived, so I poured a glass of wine and took a steaming hot bath. Rather than helping, the mix of heat and alcohol only made me lightheaded and kick-started a headache that had been threatening all day. It also churned my thoughts up even more. What a big fat ugly awful mess I was in, I realized as I lay with my head back, staring at the flickering flame of the candle I’d lit. I began to wonder if Landon was right, that for the professional part of my problems, I needed a lawyer. But hiring a high-priced Manhattan attorney would seriously leach my savings.

No, I was going to have to clear my name with detective work, and that meant heading out to Pine Grove on Saturday. Certainly I wasn’t going to learn anything by confronting Sherrie Barr. She’d clam up fast, and if Nash found out I’d approached her, my ass would really be grass. Instead I’d have to play the spy and hopefully discover who Sherrie seemed closest to.

Of course, even when I proved I wasn’t guilty—and I
would
prove it—the revelation wouldn’t erase the fact that Nash had failed to trust me or lend me his support.

Though I’d promised myself I wouldn’t make any special effort for Chris’s visit, once I’d heaved myself out of the bath, it only made sense to change for the night—I’d be heading over to Beau’s place after Chris left, anyway. I threw on clean jeans, a navy blue V-neck cashmere sweater, and my riding boots. Nothing special, nothing that suggested I was harboring impure thoughts. Though I felt a twinge of guilt as I headed down to the coffee shop on the ground floor of my building.

Chris arrived right on time, and after a moment’s hesitation, I stood up halfway and we kissed each other on the cheek. His appearance caught me by surprise. On one level he looked the same: green eyes, thick brown hair, that beguiling cleft in his chin, great body. But there was a difference. He exuded a whole new level of confidence than when I’d last seen him. Not that Chris had ever been tentative, but he held the space around him now as if there was nothing that could undermine his self-assurance. So this is what happens to you, I thought, when you become an overnight sensation playing an investigator with the New York City medical examiner’s office, and every girl you meet wants to jump your bones.

“Do you want anything to eat?” I asked.

“No, I’d better just do coffee,” he said. “I really need to be out of here by about seven forty-five.” He shrugged off his brown leather jacket—not unlike the one he’d worn in
Details
—and laid it next to him.

After we ordered, I cut to the chase. I quickly described the weekend at Scott’s, my theory about Devon’s death, and how my career was now in jeopardy.

“It kills me to think of you in such a jam, Bailey, but what could I possibly do to help?”

“One of the guests last weekend was Devon’s booker, and it’s possible Devon was upset about something he was doing,” I said. “From what you know, is there anything a model booker could do that might tick off one of his clients?”

He leaned back into his chair, thinking. Because of the worried look on his face, I couldn’t help but flash back on the night in mid-September when he’d stood in my living room, experiencing the full impact of the news about the death of his close friend Tom. We’d hugged each other in consolation, and moments later we were tearing each other’s clothes off.

“Well, the thing that makes you angriest with a booker is when he—
or
she—doesn’t seem to be working hard enough for you,” he said finally. “Bookers always concentrate the most on their major stars, and it’s easy to get short shrift if you’re not in that league. Of course, bookers would like to make money off
everybody
, but they only have so much time and energy, so they tend to focus on the models with the clearest potential. Devon was a superstar and a real priority for the agency. But she wasn’t getting any younger, and her booker’s attention may have been slipping a little as he concentrated on upcoming girls—the ones who would make big money tomorrow.”

“I wondered about that. Anything else? Anything not aboveboard?”

“Most of the bookers I worked with—and remember, I was never some supermodel—were great to deal with. But I do remember there was one guy in my agency who was there one minute and gone the next. The rumor was that he’d gotten caught skimming money from the agency somehow, and he was booted out on his ass.”

“Any idea how he was doing it?”

“No. I actually probed a little because I was curious, but no one knew anything. Most of the guys I worked with weren’t exactly rocket scientists.”

“Do you remember his name?”

“Jason something. I’d call the agency for you, but they’d probably clam up and deny the whole thing to me.”

We spent the next minutes catching up—Chris answering my questions about
Morgue
, me answering his questions about my book. Finally he checked the time on his iPhone.

“I probably should split now,” Chris said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more helpful. I think the bottom line is that there must be opportunity for some hanky-panky, because at least one booker tried it.”

“Thanks,” I said. “You’ve given me something to think about.”

There was an awkward moment as I wrestled with my coat. One of the sleeves was partially inside out, and as I tried to punch my arm through it, I realized I looked like someone writhing in a straitjacket. Not a sight, I realized, Chris would ever be treated to on dates with hot young starlets styled flawlessly by Rachel Zoe. Because by now, those were surely the girls he was dating.

As we made our way to the front of the coffee shop, a female customer, clearly recognizing Chris, went bug-eyed at the sight of him.

“I guess you get that a lot now,” I whispered.

“Yeah,” he said. “People sometimes insist we met at a party when they don’t realize they actually know me from the tube. It’s not a pain yet or too intrusive. But all it would take is one date with someone like Blake Lively or Jessica Biel—and my life as I know it would be over.”

“Or one of the Kardashians,” I said, smiling.

“Excuse me for not inquiring about
your
love life,” he said after a few moments, “but I’ll spare myself the torture.” We were outside now, on the sidewalk in front of my building.

“Chris, you could have anyone in the world you wanted.”

“Yeah, maybe,” he said, smiling ruefully. “But you’re the one who knocked my socks off, Bailey.” He leaned down and kissed me on the cheek again, but more tenderly this time, placing one hand on my shoulder as he did.

“If I think of anything, I’ll call you, okay?” he said.

With that he sprinted toward Broadway. I watched as he flagged down a cab and slid in effortlessly.

And then I heard my name called. Startled, I spun around. To my utter shock, Beau was standing behind me.

“Wh—what are you doing here?” I stammered. He was wearing a long camel-colored overcoat and a brown scarf wrapped around his neck.

“It’s almost eight o’clock,” he said with frustration. “We agreed to meet now.”

“But I thought I was coming to your place,” I told him. I realized suddenly that we had never really nailed down the details.

“Whatever,” he said dismissively. He seemed pissed, and it wasn’t hard to figure out why. “That guy there. Isn’t that the actor you were seeing?”