If Looks Could Kill (26 page)

Before I could let myself get freaked out about the hangup, I dialed Dr. Jack back. He sounded awfully chipper and not at
all annoyed that I was calling for more of his expertise.

“I’ve looked at all my notes on Marky and there are a few things I can’t make fit with what you said,” I explained. “If you
have any time early in the week, I’d love to ask you some more questions—and we could easily do it on the phone.”

“Tell you what,” he said. “I’m happy to help, but why don’t you let me buy you dinner. This way you can introduce me to another
place in the Village.”

Ahhhh. So he
had
been interested at lunch. I’d suspected as much when he’d requested the double forks, but his distraction later on had left
me doubtful. Now what? My life was too crazy these days for another romantic dalliance. I needed to help Cat. I needed time
to get K.C. out of my system. I didn’t like guys with such smooth skin. I couldn’t imagine dating a shrink. But before I could
form an excuse, I heard myself saying yes. Was I nuts? We agreed on seven the next night, and I told him I’d come up with
a restaurant choice and leave a message on his machine tomorrow.

I’d just set the phone down when it rang, startling me. Wondering if it was a hang-up, I picked it up and just listened, not
saying hello. To my total shock, K.C. was on the other end.

“Bailey?” he asked. “You screening your calls?”

“Hi. No. I’ve just been getting a lot of hang-ups lately. I didn’t expect anyone to be there.”

“I swear it’s not me doing it,” he said in mock defense.

“I believe you.”

“So tell me, was it something I said?” he asked. “If your cologne hadn’t been on the pillow, I would have sworn I’d imagined
the whole thing.”

Was he just feigning being hurt? I almost felt guilty. “I was leaving town,” I said. “I had to pick up my Jeep at the garage
really early.”

“Too bad. I’d been planning to make you a fabulous breakfast.”

“Right. I looked in your refrigerator. There was a six-pack of beer and a bottle of Tabasco sauce.”

“Buy.
Buy
you a fabulous breakfast.”

“Well, I guess I’ll have to take a rain check, then.”

“How about tomorrow morning?”

I laughed out loud. “Great, where should I meet you?”

“Well, it’s kind of a twofer. I buy you dinner tonight, as well.”

And that’s how I came to find myself sitting on my terrace pondering booty calls. I’d said yes, just as I’d said yes to Jack
Herlihy—though I was clearer on the reason. I was still infatuated with K.C. And maybe I’d underestimated him. He’d sounded
troubled by the fact that I’d run off Thursday night. Maybe he was more interested in a relationship than I’d sensed he was,
and maybe he just hated the game playing—the kind that involved calling for a date six nights in advance. And one more thing:
By saying yes, I’d be able to forgo a night at the Hotel Insomnia, dwelling on Heidi and the Hershey’s Kiss and the man who’d
come to Landon’s to scare me to death.

He arrived fifteen minutes late, looking especially roguish (tan pants, white button-down shirt, yellow cotton crewneck sweater
tied haphazardly around his shoulders, the top of his nose peeling from a sunburn). I’d changed into black slacks and a black
halter top, and as he kissed me hello in my living room, he untied the back of the halter, laughing, and let it fall to my
waist.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “If you’d told me you were thinking of wearing this, I would have warned you. There’s no way I can resist
this through an entire evening.”

He leaned forward but instead of kissing me, he ran his tongue around the edge of my lips. At the same time he began to caress
my breasts, his hands still cool from the outside. I was caught off guard by this turn of events. I’d been expecting hello,
are you ready to go? not this seduction in the middle of my living room, lights on, blinds up, half of the West Village able
to rubberneck. But when he began kissing me deeply, his tongue full in my mouth, I just let go, feeling my nipples harden
in his hands. There was something both tender and urgent in his touch, as if he wanted me bad but was going to take his damn
sweet time. He dropped one hand from my breast and slid it down my legs, over my black lycra pants. When he ran it between
my legs, I got so wobbly with desire I could barely stand.

“Hungry?” he asked, pausing.

“That depends on what you mean.”

Forty-eight seconds later we were in bed—and we never even made it out to a restaurant. At about nine we took a break and
I whipped up the penne puttanesca, which seemed appropriate. Doesn’t it mean whore’s pasta?

He was up at six A.M. because, he said, he had a seven A.M. business meeting—the promise of breakfast had apparently been
a bold-faced lie—and as soon as I’d let him out I felt my free-floating anxiety returning again. My appointment with Cat wasn’t
until ten, so I threw on some sweats and ran over to the gym, where I jumped on the treadmill for thirty minutes. Back home
I showered and drank two cups of coffee. At nine fortyfive I flagged down a cab on Broadway.

As the taxi wound its way toward the most western block of 26th Street, I realized that I had no clue what the photography
session was for. The only shoots for the magazine that I knew Cat dropped in on were the celebrity cover shoots when they
were done in New York, but she certainly would have mentioned it if I were going to be seeing some famous actress getting
her hair blown out and throwing a hissy fit about the clothes.

The studio was on the ground floor of a three-story building, and after being buzzed in through a doorway, I found myself
in the middle of a truck-loading area that I had to walk through in order to get to the studio space. A girl with short choppy
black hair and white skin opened the door.

“You’re with
Gloss
?” she asked before I could say a word. She had the slight lisp you get when you’ve recently had a tongue stud put in. I could
see the flash of silver in her mouth.

When I answered affirmatively she gave a little nod of her head, and as I stepped inside she raced off to pick up a ringing
phone. I found myself in a huge studio, with superhigh ceilings and exposed brick walls. The space up front had been sectioned
off as an office area—there was a large Parsons table that served as a desk, filing cabinets, and a refrigerator, a sink,
and a table spread with platters of breakfast food. It seemed a far cry from Jeff’s studio. Over to my left was a counter
with mirrors and makeup lights, where a guy dressed in black jeans and a Rolling Stones tongue T-shirt sat on a stool reading
Interview
. All the action was going on in the back of the studio, where the photographer was snapping away at someone who was standing
on gray seamless paper and couldn’t be seen from this angle. A fairly large crowd was buzzing around like bees back there—a
couple of assistants, a makeup person, a hairdresser with a spray bottle of water wedged into his back pocket. I also recognized
Josh, a stylist from
Gloss
’s fashion department. But no Cat anywhere in sight.

“I love it when you lift your chin like that,” I heard the photographer say. “Let’s do one more roll like that.” As he took
a step away from the tripod, I saw that the subject of all the attention was Cat herself.

Oh great, I thought. This could be all morning. I dropped my tote bag on the floor, scooped up a miniature bagel with salmon
and cream cheese from the food table, and walked over to the makeup counter.

“Is this for an ad campaign, do you know?” I asked the guy in the tongue shirt, whose eyes slid over toward me as I sat on
a nearby stool. Cat had mentioned a while back that she might be featured in an ad campaign for
Gloss
.

“Don’t think so,” he said in a British accent. “I believe it’s for that page where the editor says what she thinks about everything.”

“They’re shooting a picture for the ‘Letter from the Editor’ page?”
I exclaimed, having a hard time containing my stupefaction.

“Yes, right. I believe that’s it.”

Cat had a murder investigation swirling around her, but she’d decided to take time to update her head shot. It was the sort
of thing that redefined the notion of fiddling while Rome burned.

I’d taken only a couple of bites from my bagel when the action on the set came to a standstill. After a brief confab with
the photographer, Cat trounced over in my direction, towing the makeup person and Josh behind her. Her hair was super-f,
cascading around her shoulders, and she was wearing globs of makeup. Her lips, in fact, had so much gloss that you could almost
see your reflection, but underneath it all she looked exhausted.

“How long have you been here?” she asked as a greeting when she spotted me.

“Just a few minutes.” I said hi to Josh, who was sporting a sailor shirt and a pair of nuthuggers, pants so tight that the
only thing left to the imagination was genital skin tone. “So what’s the plan here?” I said, turning back to Cat.

“I’m done, I guess. I don’t think I can change clothes one more time.”

“You’re not going to wear the
Dolce?
” Josh gasped. He looked at her as if she’d just announced she was about to drown a litter of newborn kitties.

“I can’t. I can’t do this one more minute,” she said. “Will you tell everybody I said we’ve got enough.

“Besides,” she added, dropping into one of the makeup chairs and swiveling around to face the mirror, “I look like hell.”

The makeup artist walked over to a position directly behind her and rested the fingertips of each hand on Cat’s cheeks. “You
know what I’m seeing?” she said. “I’m seeing a lot of stagnant toxins in your face. They’re not draining because of stress.
Have you ever considered face reflexology? I could do a little right now.”

Cat stared at her without answering, as if she’d just been told something in Portuguese and didn’t understand a word. Then
she stood up and announced she was going off to change her clothes. In the reflection of the mirror, I saw the makeup chick
shoot a look to the guy in the tongue shirt. It was a look that said, “Have you ever met a bigger bitch in your life?”

A few minutes later Cat emerged in a fuchsia-and-white tie-dyed skirt and matching short-sleeved jacket. She suggested we
go to the corner and look for a place to have coffee, and to my surprise she even suggested we walk, which we did, with the
town car moving slowly alongside us, the way the Secret Service cars trail a president when he jogs. We found a place on Tenth
Avenue calling itself a deli/café, with an overhead fan and the smell of overripe bananas, like something out of a third world
country. We got two coffees at the counter and an ice water for Cat, then took them back to a small, round table. As soon
as we sat down, Cat burst into tears.

“Oh, Cat,” I said, squeezing her arm. “This must all be so awful for you.” In the background a radio played salsa music, oblivious
to her mood.

“Everything in my life is total shit,” she said, sniffling. “Tyler’s gone to stay at my mother’s, Carlotta looks like she’s
ready to quit any second, I’ve got a billion paparazzi around my house, and I’m going to lose my freakin’ job if I’m not careful.”
She took a paper napkin from the table, balled it up, and dabbed at her eyes with it.

“What do you mean you’re going to lose your job?” I asked.

“Newsstand sales stink. They’ve been moderately awful for months, and then this morning this guy from circulation, the one
who loves to pull wings off flies, called me at eight-thirty and gleefully told me that April is going to be a huge bomb.”

“A bomb? What constitutes a bomb?”

“Try nothing alive within five miles of the epicenter.” She began to cry again. “Harry’s already on my ass about that, but
this murder stuff has him apoplectic. I thought he’d be sympathetic or at least like the press coverage. The guy lives for
a mention in Liz Smith. But he thinks advertisers are going to run for the hills.”

“I know it must be hard for you to be at work these days and try to concentrate, but the more you can do to demonstrate you’re
in full control, the better,” I suggested, trying not to sound too nudgy.

“It
scares
me to be there. I feel so exposed.”

“Are the police making any progress? I hear they talked to people at
Gloss
on Friday.”

“Who the hell knows? And you know what Farley told me? Even when the tox reports come back, which apparently is going to be
in the next century, we may still never know what killed her. There are lots of poisons they don’t test for—including natural
stuff. That’s what makes me keep wondering about Tucker Bobb. Why are you so sure there’s not a connection?”

“Well, there actually
may
be a connection—but not a direct one,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Okay, let me explain,” I said. “Like I mentioned yesterday, there’s a chance Tucker died from eating poisonous mushrooms.
But based on the timing of his illness, he would have had to consume them in Pennsylvania, not New York. That means if someone
used the mushrooms to kill him, they fed them to him out in Pennsylvania. Of course, someone who was at your party could have
visited him out there. But it seems awfully unlikely.”

“So you’re saying the two incidents
aren’t
related.”

“Yes and no.”

“Bailey, you’re going to have to move this explanation along before I go insane.”

“Okay, sorry. Here’s the connection. I think the person who tried to poison you knew about Tucker’s situation and the mushroom
theory and decided to make it
appear
that they were related.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Probably to create confusion about the motive. If it appeared that someone was trying to kill more than one editor, it would
suggest a person who had a gripe against women’s magazines for some reason—or women’s magazine editors. The police would concentrate
on that angle and might ignore something of significance related to you personally.”

“So the person who tried to kill me hated me and only me.”