If Looks Could Kill (25 page)

After we paid the bill, I offered to walk her back to Chelsea. Swearing her secret was safe with me, I hugged her in front
of her apartment building and wished her good luck. I started home at a much brisker pace than we’d walked earlier, zigzagging
south and east.

When I reached Sixth Avenue and 18th, it hit me that I was not far from Jeff’s studio, though I couldn’t remember the exact
address. I’d been there once in the famous courtship days—Cat had asked me to tag along while she popped in to tantalize him
in a dress the size and sheerness of a gauze bandage. I used my cell phone to call directory assistance and found that his
studio was on 19th Street between Fifth and Sixth. Cat had said he’d be working this afternoon; and if I went by his studio
and found him there, it would be an opportunity to spend time alone with him. I wanted to hear him talk about Cat and the
murder and see what leaked out. I walked back north a block and then headed down 19th Street until I found his building.

The block, like others in the neighborhood, is filled with studios and residential lofts that were once small factories. There’s
a cavernous feel to the neighborhood. The wide, tenstory buildings are layered with soot and do a good job of blocking the
sun.

Jeff’s building was about three-quarters of the way toward Fifth, a dingy-looking place with a photo lab in the ground-floor
space. The sidewalk in front was littered with trash and old newspapers. I opened the first door, stepped into the vestibule,
and scanned the intercom for the buzzer to his studio. He was on the sixth floor, along with a company called New Century
Video.

I felt uncomfortable ambushing him this way, but I also knew that caught off guard, he might give more away. I pressed the
buzzer and waited. Nothing. I tried again. Still no reply. I was about to turn on my heel when a voice, unrecognizable because
of the crackling, came over the intercom. It was male and I thought he said, “Who is it?”

“Jeff ? Hi, it’s Bailey. I was in the neighborhood and wanted to talk for a minute—if you have a minute.” Brilliant.

There was a pause, and I wondered if he hadn’t heard me or maybe the person who’d answered wasn’t Jeff. Suddenly the buzzer
on the door went off and I pushed through the vestibule into a dusty gray lobby.

It took a few minutes for the elevator to show up on the ground floor. I could hear it grinding above me somewhere, obviously
moving between floors, and when it finally settled on the ground floor I expected someone to step out, but it was empty. I
rode up to six, the elevator clanging as we passed each floor.

As I walked in the dim light of the corridor toward Jeff’s studio, I saw that the door was ajar an inch, with the dead bolt
released so that it wouldn’t slam shut. I pushed it all the way open and stepped into the studio.

It was smaller than I remembered, about 1,500 square feet, with the front end set up like a small reception area and the middle
area a big open space filled with studio lights and tripods and a large roll of backdrop paper mounted on the lefthand wall.
There were windows along the long wall to the right, covered with city grime. It was absolutely silent, as if someone had
turned off the sound. No sign of Jeff, though a gooseneck lamp on the desk had been switched on and there was another light
in the small office that he had built into the space at the back.

“Jeff?” I called. “Anyone here?”

He stepped out of the office silently, pulling the door closed. He was wearing an olive green T-shirt, baggy khakis hanging
low on his hips, and no socks or shoes. As he walked toward me, he let his hands swing at his sides. Jeff was the kind of
guy who never nervously touched his face or his hair.

“To what do I owe this honor?” he asked. There was an edge to how he said it, and he didn’t appear delighted to see me, though
when he reached me he leaned forward and brushed my cheek with his lips. They felt chapped, the kind of chapped you get from
a weekend on a sailboat.

“I hope I didn’t pull you out of the darkroom or anything,” I said. “I had lunch with a friend nearby and ended up on this
street and thought I’d just pop in. Cat had mentioned you were working today.”

“I’ve got film to edit,” he told me. “Not the most fun way to spend a day like today. You’re here to rescue me, then?”

Hmmm. Not sure what to say to that.

“There’s something I wanted to ask you about, actually.”

“Sit,” he said, pointing to a black leather sofa against the wall. “Want anything to drink? I may have a beer myself.”

“Sure, that’d be good,” I said.

As Jeff sauntered back toward the end of the loft, to an area with a small counter and refrigerator, I walked over and perched
on the edge of the leather couch, avoiding the slash in the cushion with the stuffing coming out. My desire for a beer at
this hour was about as intense as my urge to clean out my wallet, but I figured sharing a drink might diminish the awkwardness.

As he kicked the refrigerator door closed and turned around, he glanced back toward the office for a split second. Was there
someone
in
there? I wondered. It had seemed odd earlier when he’d pulled the door shut.

He walked back toward me carrying two Coronas by their necks, stopped at the desk, where he patted some papers until he located
a bottle opener beneath them, and popped off the tops. He handed a bottle to me and plopped down on the couch. After taking
a long swig of his beer, he leaned into the sofa, draping one arm across the back. His biceps actually strained the sleeves
of his T-shirt, and it was clear he’d been working out lately in a serious way.

“What kind of work are you doing these days?” I asked after taking a half sip from my beer bottle. “Still concentrating on
fashion?” The studio had the look and feel of a vacant lot.

“A mix,” he said. Another swig of beer.

“I don’t want to keep you. But I’ve been so worried about Cat lately and I thought it would help to talk to you.”

“What help could I possibly be?”

“Well, for starters, have you got any ideas whatsoever about who might want to harm Cat?”

“Well, we both know she’s ticked off a fair number of people in her day. But no one specific rushes to mind.”

“You’ve never gotten any weird phone calls at home or anything like that?”

“Nope. Not that I know of, at least. Maybe you ought to ask Carlotta.”

He seemed peevish, annoyed, but I couldn’t tell if it was from my barging in on him or from something else entirely.

“I was away for a few days,” I said, “but I heard the papers had a story linking the case to Tucker Bobb’s death.”

His beer bottle was halfway to his mouth, but he paused and shot a glance in my direction.

“Cat told me you’d been out to Pennsylvania and didn’t think there was a connection.”

“I’m not a hundred percent positive,” I said quickly. “But there doesn’t
appear
to be a link.”

He smiled a bad-boy smile. “That puts me back on the suspect list, then, doesn’t it?”

“The police aren’t treating you that way, are they?” I asked.

“No. Not yet, anyway. Though they spent a lot of time with me one day this week, asking all sorts of questions. Maybe I ought
to tell them that I’m the one person who knows that Cat actually prefers Maison du Chocolate. Or at least I’ve always assumed
I was.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Making a joke.”

“Did you get the feeling the police had formed any ideas about who might have done it?”

Again the sly smile. “They didn’t seem interested in sharing any of their thinking with me. Though I will say they couldn’t
disguise the fact that they viewed me more as the resident boy toy than king of the castle.”

I decided to go down another road entirely and see what happened.

“I keep forgetting the fact that you guys aren’t just dealing with the threat against Cat, but with Heidi’s death, too. You
must feel awful about that.”

“Of course,” he said, staring into the Corona bottle. “And guilty.”

“Guilty? Because Heidi ate what was meant for Cat?”

“Yeah,” he said. “And because if Cat had been there, like she was supposed to be that weekend, maybe Heidi would have had
someone to turn to when she got sick.”

“What do you mean, like she was supposed to be? I thought she had to go to East Hampton.”

“When Tyler and I left for the country, it was because she needed us out of her hair so she could work,” he said. “The next
thing I know, she’s calling from Long Island. But then you know as well as I do that it’s tough to keep up with Cat.” It was
said with bemusement, but there was a soupçon of bitterness underneath.

He took a big sip of beer and wiped his bottom lip with the edge of his hand. Then he slid down into the sofa and stretched
out his legs in front of him. His feet, I noticed, were very tanned. I also saw that the second toe on each foot was slightly
longer than the big one. I had read somewhere, probably in
Gloss
, that it was supposed to indicate something about a man—that he had a need for control, maybe. Or that he told lies easily.
Or maybe it was that his penis was unnaturally long.

“This must all be very scary,” I said quietly.

“You bet. Having Heidi die, having someone leave a box of poison in your home, that’s pretty serious stuff. And the worst
part of this whole thing is Tyler. What if he’d somehow gotten those chocolates off the table? We drove him up to Cat’s mother’s
in Massachusetts yesterday, and he’s going to stay there until things chill here. If they ever do.”

There was an uncomfortable silence, and I pondered where I should go with the conversation next. Buying time, I started to
take another swig of beer when Jeff leaned slowly in my direction, his right hand extended. For one terrifying instant I sus-pected
he was going to pull me toward him and kiss me. Instead he tore a ragged piece of foil off the neck of my beer bottle.

“We don’t want you to cut your lip,” he said, flicking it onto the floor.

I was barely halfway through my beer, but it was clearly time to beat it—before things went from bad to worse.

“Well, look, I appreciate you talking to me about this,” I said, rising. “If there’s any way I can help, will you let me know?”

He stared at me without offering a reply but lifted himself up from the sofa. When I looked around for a place to set my beer
bottle, he pulled it gently from my hands, glancing at how much was left.

“Remind me next time to offer you an Evian water.”

“Sorry—beer makes me sleepy if I have it in the middle of the afternoon,” I said.

“Well, we wouldn’t want that, would we?”

He walked me toward the door, and as he opened it with his right hand, his left grasped my shoulder and he leaned down and
kissed me on the cheek again, the chapped lips prickly on my skin.

As we stood there, I noticed for the first time that there was a coat tree behind the door, with a turquoise coat, nylon or
rayon, hanging on it.

“Stop by again,” he said as he closed the door on me. He didn’t sound as though he meant it.

Out in the hallway, it was so silent it seemed as if someone had turned off the sound. As I waited for the elevator, I considered
the turquoise coat. It might have been left behind by a model or stylist one day or even by Cat. Or maybe it belonged to someone
who’d been sitting in the little office, someone waiting silently and patiently for me to get the hell out of the studio.

B
OOTY CALLS
. I hadn’t wanted to admit this to Polly, but not only did I know what a booty call was, I’d also been on my share of them
over the years. In fact, as I sat on my terrace just before dusk Sunday evening, sipping a glass of Saratoga water and watching
a sprawling, five-alarm sunset, I realized that my plans for the rest of the evening could more or less be defined that way.

It’s not how I’d planned for the night to unfold. I’d left Jeff’s studio in a state of agitation, preoccupied with the many
questions that had been churned up from my clumsy encounter with the man with the too long second toe. For starters, I couldn’t
shake the idea that someone had been sitting in the back office, waiting for Jeff to come padding back in his bare feet, and
if that was the case, who the hell was it? A model or stylist he was shagging from time to time when the mood struck? Or someone
he had more serious designs on? Was there any chance it’d been Cat, laying low so she could hear the reason for my mystery
visit? That didn’t seem likely, considering the snippiness in Jeff’s tone when he had discussed her.

And what exactly was going on with him and Cat? The hint of disenchantment and “boy toy” comment had startled me. I also didn’t
like what he’d said about Cat’s mad dash to the Hamptons last weekend. To me she’d made it sound like a prearranged business
trip, but that wasn’t the version Jeff was presenting. Maybe Cat really
was
having an affair.

Other questions: What was up with Jeff’s work? Did he even
have
any? What had happened to his reportedly red-hot career?

And the most important question of all: Was there a problem big enough in the marriage that could have propelled Jeff to try
to murder Cat? Had the size of her success compared to his galled him into doing it? Or maybe another woman was the motivation.
A divorce would mean kissing good-bye the comfy lifestyle he’d grown accustomed to, but killing Cat and making it appear like
a plot against editors would allow him to have his cake and eat it, too. The thought made me shiver.

On the way home I stopped off at a gourmet food store on University Avenue and bought ingredients for penne puttanesca—ever
since my plan to have it for lunch had been derailed, I’d felt a craving too big to ignore. I dropped the bag in the kitchen
and then checked my answering machine. Four messages—a record for me on a Sunday. The first was from Landon, calling just
before he left Bucks County for New York to say he was alive and unharmed and would try again later. Jack Herlihy had returned
my call, and my mother had left a brief hello from abroad. And one hang-up, number blocked. My phone stalker had taken most
of the weekend off but was now back on duty. The call had been made
since
the time I’d left Jeff’s studio.