If Looks Could Kill (16 page)

“Interesting. Well, look, I appreciate all the info.”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with
your
boss, does it? I read that her nanny had died somehow.”

“No, no,” I said. “Just curious.”

I hustled her off the phone with a promise to set up a lunch date in a few weeks.

At one I ran out to get lunch, a take-out order of California rolls from the Japanese restaurant down the street. On the way
back to my office, I made a loop through the corridors, looking again for the senior staffers. Polly, Rachel, and Kip weren’t
at their desks, Leslie had her door closed. Next I walked through the pit, just to measure the mood. It was like a beehive
that had been knocked to the ground by a baseball—phones jangling, people buzzing and shouting. The pit residents were always
hyper during final closing week, but I was sure today’s nuttiness was the result of word spreading about that nasty item in
the
Post
.

Back in my office, I devoured a California roll, read the finals of my girl stalker story, and then, with my door closed,
formulated some questions to ask Dolores. Shortly before two-thirty, I started to pack up my things, figuring I’d go straight
home from my interview. As I was separating some files to toss in my tote bag, Leslie sashayed into my office with a look
on her face that suggested she’d been combing through my expense report and discovered I’d overtipped a chambermaid while
out of town on my last story. I was eager to talk to her, but I wasn’t in the mood for getting chewed out. When she spoke,
though, she was friendly enough—for Leslie.

“I just read the final of your stalker story. It’s good.”

“Thanks. You holding up okay?”

“Well, as you can imagine, after that item in the
Post
today, people are in a total tizzy.”

“Do you think the guilty person
is
here?” I asked. I watched her intently as she answered.

“Well, we certainly can’t kid ourselves. Someone at that party did it, and half the people who were
there
work
here
. I’ve had the refrigerator emptied, and I’m going to discourage anyone from leaving food around. What do
you
think?”

“That sounds reasonable,” I said. “Of course, it gives people something else to buzz about, but on the other hand, you don’t
want to take any chances, either.”

“No, I mean what do you think about the situation as a whole? Do you believe the person who did it works here?”

“Leslie, I’m as baffled as anyone,” I said. I had no interest in sharing any of my ruminations with her. What I
was
still interested in was the story Cat had told me about Leslie’s jealous snit, but nothing about her demeanor suggested anything
antagonistic toward Cat.

“But I thought you were helping Cat,” she said. “Surely you must have some ideas.”

“Nothing—at least nothing at this point. Cat has more confidence in my ability to help than I do.”

She just stared at me, kidney-bean nostrils flared, and I could tell she thought I was holding back.

“Well, I’ve got stuff to do, and you do, too,” she said finally, with a trace of snippiness. “By the way, I hate to tell you
this, but that adoption story we had scheduled for August isn’t going to happen. We need your poltergeist piece.”

“You’re not serious. That means it was due a week ago. And I haven’t even started writing yet.”

“Cat wants it. We can crash it, so you’ve still got a
little
time. You’ll have to finish it in the next week. I’m sure it’s inconvenient, but life will be crazy here for the next few
weeks because of what’s happened and we’ll all have to make some sacrifices.”

I resisted the urge to throttle her from behind as she strutted out of my office. Did Leslie enjoy making me miserable when
she had the chance, or did she just give that impression?

This new development was going to force me to shift into high gear with my article, though I wouldn’t be ready to write until
I talked to the child psychologist tomorrow at lunch and got his perspective. Doing a quick calculation in my head, I figured
I could hole up at my place tomorrow afternoon to do the outline and then try to write as much of the piece as possible on
Friday and over the weekend. Somehow I would also have to manage to make room for helping Cat.

It was time finally for my interview with Dolores. I had thought she might want to meet in the “consultant” office she kept
on the second floor of our building, but her assistant had told me to show at Dolores’s apartment on Lexington Avenue at 70th
Street. As I bounced along in a taxi, I suddenly realized that I felt mildly anxious about the prospect of being in the same
room with her. I had that sensation you get in your stomach that makes you wonder if you somehow managed to swallow a peach
pit when you weren’t paying attention.

For starters, she was supposed to be a real pit bull. Even the people who had worked with her for years had a tough time summoning
any affection. According to one legendary story that had made the rounds at
Gloss
after Cat assumed command, Dolores had emerged from the office ladies’ room one day with the back of her dress tucked into
her panty hose and no one had bothered to tell her.

In addition to being fierce, she apparently had the attention span of a three-day-old rhesus monkey. Her staff, at least the
ones who’d wanted to get ideas green-lighted by her, had learned to boil down their idea pitches to one minute or less.

And last but hardly least, I was also disconcerted by the idea of sitting in the same room with the woman who was up at the
top of my suspect list. Would I be all alone with her in her apartment? What if she saw through my lie and realized what I
was up to?

The answer to the first question turned out to be no. A housekeeper opened the door, a woman of about sixty-five wearing a
half apron covered with faded cherries. She informed me that Mrs. Wilder would be with me shortly and led me down a narrow
corridor to the living room. As soon as she’d shuffled out of the room, I surveyed my surroundings. Dolores had run
Gloss
in the days when editors had plenty of prestige but not the power salaries they do now, and though Dolores’s place was roomy
for New York, it didn’t come close to Cat’s town house. Considering the number of doorways I’d counted off the hallway, it
was probably no more than a two-bedroom with a maid’s room.

The living room appeared to have last been decorated in 1964. It was filled with about four hundred yards of faded chintz—on
couches, chairs, pillows, windows, even as little curtains on the windowed doors of a mahogany hutch. There were several mirrors
on the wall, but practically no art, except for a large oil portrait of Dolores holding a cocker spaniel, who I suspected,
based on the old-dog smell permeating the apart-ment, was still hanging on by a hair somewhere on the premises.

I cooled my heels for about fifteen minutes, leafing through a two-week-old copy of
Time
on the coffee table. Finally, there was a gun burst of conversation down the corridor and a minute later Dolores blew into
the room. I jumped from my seat and stuck out my hand to greet her. She was a short, stocky woman, no more than five feet
one, which contributed to her pit bull persona, and she was wearing a fairly ridiculous getup today—red slacks and an orangy
blouse with a big loopy bow—that only exaggerated the lack of height. She’d let her short-cropped hair go totally gray, the
flat, drab shade of a highway guardrail, and her skin was heavily wrinkled and waffled under the eyes, like the skin of a
chicken. And the mouth—well, that was legendary Dolores. Due to either deteriorating eyesight or the disappearance of her
lip line with age or just pure orneriness, she always wore a big undefined smear of fire engine red lipstick, as if someone
had rubbed a thumb hard across her mouth after she’d applied it.

“Dolores, I so appreciate your seeing me,” I said as she plunked down on the sofa in the middle of the room and placed a hand
on each knee. I quickly took a seat across from her in an armchair.

“You’re a staff writer?” she asked before I had a chance to get in a question. “I’m surprised they have staff writers over
there anymore. That’s something everybody’s getting rid of these days.”

“It’s not actually a staff position,” I explained. “I’m a contributing writer. They keep a little office for me, and I write
some of the human-interest stories and—”

“Those are the only things I bother to read in the magazine anymore. Did you write the story on the clitoridectomies they’re
doing in Africa?”

“Clitoridectomies? I don’t believe
Gloss
ran an article on that subject. It might have been
Marie Claire
that—”

“It’s a terrible thing. And they showed the pictures—of girls being held down. Africa’s a hellhole. And it’s never going to
change.” She flung her arm across the back of the sofa, craned her neck around, and barked: “Madge? . . . Madge?” I assumed
she was summoning the woman who had answered the door, but it could just as easily have been the dog.

“Actually, I do a lot of crime stories, and they’re going to be collected in a book,” I explained as she turned back around
again. “You did such a great job with your anthology—I thought you might have a few words of wisdom for me.”

“On what kinds of stories to write?”

“No, no, I’ve already written them. There are about a dozen altogether, most of them crime stories. I thought you might have
some suggestions on packaging and marketing them. Anthologies can be tough to sell.”

“Stick the word
love
in the title.” She craned her head around toward the door again. “Madge, I need you . . . For God’s sake, where is that woman?”

“You’ve got ‘love’ in the title of your book, of course. Do you think it’s helped?”

“How would I know? It just came out two weeks ago. Of course, you work at the ‘newer, fresher, more
rel-e-vant Gloss
,’ so you might want to put the word
sex
in the title. What is it with her and sex? Is she
obsessed
with it?” I had heard from several people that Dolores never ever used Cat’s name when discussing her.

“Gee, I don’t know,” I said with a little laugh. “But speaking of
Gloss
, do you think having the book party was helpful in terms of getting press? Should I try to get someone to do that for me?”
It was a non sequitur, but I was pretty confident she wouldn’t notice.

“Oh, please, Billy. The only reason she had that damn party is that Harry forced her. And press? The dead nanny’s ended up
with all the press this week.”

It seemed pointless to tell her she had my name wrong. I was just happy that in less than a minute she’d ricocheted over in
the direction where I wanted to be.

“Well, that’s not Cat’s fault, of course.”

She let out a half snort, half laugh. “Oh, really? I wouldn’t put it past her, would you? Deep-six the nanny to deflect attention
away from me?”

Had she not seen the press today about Cat being the intended victim? Or was she just making me think she was in the dark?

“It was a terrible thing, though, wasn’t it?” I said. “To have someone so young die such an awful death.”

“The police were around
here
, you know? Asking all sorts of questions about the party. I take it they think someone from the party may have seen something
suspicious that night. I told them I didn’t know the girl personally and I didn’t see a damn thing.”

“I think they’re going to be questioning lots of people.”

“Well, they certainly didn’t clue me in on their game plan,” she said. She paused and pursed her lips so that the top part
stuck out like a duckbill. “With girls like that nanny, there’s usually lots of people who’d like to see them pay for their
sins. She went around asking for trouble and she finally found it.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, baffled about how she’d know anything about Heidi.

“She was what in my day we called a tart. One of my short story writers knew her. She once worked for her as a nanny up in
Westchester.”

“One of the writers at the party?” I asked, incredulous.

“Yes, of course. Nancy Highland.”

“I wasn’t aware of that,” I said.

She reached over to a pewter bowl on the coffee table to pluck out a cellophane-wrapped lemon ball and then jerked her head
back in my direction.

“Well,
she
didn’t kill the girl, for God’s sake, if that’s what you’re thinking. But she told me that nanny was a snake. Nancy remarried
a year or two ago and had this baby late—she’s forty-two, forty-three—and Hildy was her nanny for about the first six months.
Nancy has a son from another marriage, he’s about eighteen, and Hildy or Heidi or whatever her name is got involved with him.
Then she dumped him and he was ready to put a gun to his head.”

“Did Nancy see Heidi at the party?”

“She got a glimpse of her, and the girl got all flustered. Nancy knew she worked there, you see. She went to New York directly
from the job in Scarsdale. Nancy didn’t find out about the damage the girl had done, though, until after she’d left.”

All of this info about Heidi was intriguing, but I needed to drive the conversation back to Cat.

“I take it you haven’t heard,” I said, “but apparently
Cat
was the intended victim. Heidi ate some chocolates that were left off for Cat the night of your party, and it appears that
the chocolates contained poison.”

It took about three seconds for what I said to register with her, because she’d gotten preoccupied trying to scrape a stubborn
piece of cellophane off the lemon ball, but when it did her head shot up and she appeared completely stunned. She was either
the world’s best actress or it really was all news to her.

“What? Who told you that?” she demanded.

“Well, it’s been in the paper. I know it from Cat, too.”

“The cops kept asking—they don’t know who did it?”

“No, but it was obviously someone who attended the party.”

Her brain went into overdrive, but I couldn’t tell from looking at her what was going on in there. She asked me bluntly if
I had any more questions about my book.