If Looks Could Kill (33 page)

“God, we’re all just flabbergasted over here about what happened,” she said as soon as I identified myself. “Is the one who
died that young blond girl who was around the night of the party? I can’t believe I actually
saw
her.”

“I’m not sure which blond girl you mean, but it was Cat’s nanny.”

“What happened? How did she die?”

I played dumb and steered the conversation around to that masterpiece
Love at Any Cost
. She confirmed that Nancy was in New York, but it wasn’t part of any major publicity plan. She was simply going to be reading
one of the two stories of hers from the book—tomorrow afternoon at a small bookstore on Madison Avenue. It was part of a “tea
and reading” series. I jotted down the details and signed off.

Last, but hardly least, I called Kip’s office and got his voice mail this time. I left a message, asking that he call when
he got in.

Over the next couple of hours I worked on my Marky story, reorganizing several sections and filling in some holes. I was close
to finishing it, but I could tell I wasn’t going to make it by the end of the day. I found myself distracted by the noises
outside my office, by everything I’d learned this morning.

At about a quarter to five, I called down to Cat’s office to see if she was back. According to Audrey, she would not be returning
to the office today. She was in a town car someplace, and no, she did not have her cell phone on.

As soon as I put down the phone I heard a sound behind me and turned to see Kip standing in the doorway. He looked tired and
cranky. His clothes—his standard chino pants and Ralph Lauren polo shirt, today in lemon yellow—were totally rumpled and saggy,
as if he’d picked them up from the bedroom floor this morning and worn them for a second day in a row. There were so many
nicks on his chin that it looked as if he’d shaved on the subway.

“What’s up? Stacey said you seemed desperate to see me.” There was an edge to his voice that wasn’t the least bit pleasant.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, trying to sound relaxed. “There’s something I wanted to ask you. Is this—”

“Just shoot. What is it?”

“Actually,” I said, lowering my voice, “it’s kind of private. Would you mind closing the door?”

He looked as if he were going to refuse, but he stepped farther into the room and pushed the door closed with the heel of
his hand.

“Here, why don’t you sit,” I said, pointing to the spare chair. He blew out a big puff of air and did as suggested, making
the chair groan with his weight. He was sitting so close to me that I could see every freckle on his face.

With everyone else I’d spoken to, I’d danced around the subject of the murder, but Kip was cagey and I’d decided earlier that
I’d have to be more direct with him—otherwise I’d end up with nothing. Yet it scared me.

“I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but I accidentally got involved in this whole situation with Cat’s nanny,” I said,
plunging in. “She was from the Midwest and she doesn’t have any family here. Cat asked if I could help her tie up any loose
ends regarding Heidi—you know, see if she had any bills to pay or any unfinished business.”

As soon as I said the name Heidi, he tried to freeze his face, to restrict any expression from forming there, but he couldn’t
keep his blue eyes from doing a jig.

“And your point is . . . ?” he said, crossing one leg over the other and swiping at his pants leg a few times.

“I’m not sure exactly how to say this but . . . I know you were involved with Heidi and I was hoping I could ask you a few
questions—in complete confidence.”

“What are you talking about?” He was almost snarling, and his skin, except for the freckles, looked whiter than usual, as
if he’d had the blood in his face drained. I felt the onset of claustrophobia.

“I promise—I don’t intend to say anything to anyone. But there are some things I need to know for my own edification.”

“You’re crazy. I don’t know where you’re getting your information.” He made a motion as if he were about to launch out of
the chair.

“I know about you and Cat, too—the afternoon in Litchfield,” I said. “I also know you went up there thinking that Heidi would
be there and you had—you got involved with Cat so she wouldn’t put two and two together.”

“Jesus,” he said. He looked over at the door, as if gauging the heft of it, to determine if our conversation could be overheard
by anyone outside in the hall. “Have you told Cat this, your little theory?”

“No, and I have no intention of doing so.”

“Why not? Aren’t you two such good girlfriends, sharing all sorts of little secrets together?”

“What would I accomplish by doing that? It would make a mess for you—and Cat would only be humiliated. Like I said, I just
need to know a couple of things about Heidi.”

He paused, lips pursed. Then, to my surprise, he morphed into Pooh Bear.

“Look, let’s go get a drink someplace, okay?” he said. “I don’t want to get into this here.”

A moment of panic. I didn’t want to go with him anywhere. But I realized that nothing bad could happen to me in the middle
of Manhattan—it wasn’t as if he could shove me in the trunk of his car and speed off. On the way in the elevator he suggested
Trattoria Dell’Arte, a trendy Italian restaurant on Seventh Avenue across from Carnegie Hall, and we walked the three blocks
there in silence. The restaurant was starting to get jammed with pretheater diners, but the bar was empty and we took two
seats at the end, away from the main part of the restaurant. I ordered a beer, Kip ordered a Jack Daniel’s, neat, and lit
a cigarette.

“Okay,” he said, waving the match until the flame went out, cigarette still in his mouth. “I’ll cut to the chase. I did have
a little fling with Heidi. But it was no big deal, and it lasted all of a minute.”

“How did you even meet her?” I asked.

“I’d seen her around the office, you know, bringing stuff to Cat. At the time I thought she was jail bait, some sixteen-year-old
au pair from Europe, and I didn’t do anything other than
look
. Then, around the first of the year, Cat had the dinner party for that airline safety guy whose book we excerpted. I was
getting bored and drifted into the kitchen, and she was in there, picking at the leftovers. We just started talking. I realized
she was like twenty-two, not sixteen.”

“And you called her after that?”

“She called me—I swear.” He paused to take a sip of his drink. “I don’t go around trying to be a bad boy, despite what people
think. I had no intention of starting up any pursuit. But, like I said, she called, claiming she needed some advice, and I
agreed to meet her. She made it very clear when we met that she wanted more than advice. My marriage has been in the toilet
lately and I didn’t feel like saying no. You’ve been married. You know how fucked up things can get and how crazy it can make
you.”

“Where did all of this take place? In Heidi’s apartment?”

“First of all, there’s no ‘all of this.’ ” He took a long drag on his cigarette and another sip of bourbon, licking his lips
when he was done. “We probably saw each other ten times over the period of a month or so, and no, never at Cat’s house. Do
you think I’m nuts? I wasn’t going to take any chances. I’ve got a friend who’s in Hong Kong, and I use his pad when I stay
in the city nights. I was very cautious. The irony is that in the end I nearly got caught bare assed by Cat.”

“What did Heidi want to ask you?”

“What?”

“You said when she first called you she was looking for advice.”

“She wanted to know how to break into the TV business.”

“You’d told her you used to be a producer?”

“Yeah. But I know jack shit about what she wanted to do, which was become a VJ on MTV. Let me tell you, she started to get
real frosty when she eventually realized I couldn’t help her.”

“Were you upset?”

“Relieved, actually,” he said. That was tough to buy.

“You didn’t mind being blown off by a gorgeous girl like her?”

“I didn’t like the fact that she beat me to it. But I’m not bullshitting. I’d begun to wonder how I was going to extricate
myself from the whole situation without sustaining any damage. Before I get the chance, she starts to pull away. And that
was just fine with me.”

“But if she was cooling it, why did she invite you to Litchfield in March?”

A shake of that Boston terrier head. “That wasn’t a planned thing. I was in Cat’s office one day and I heard her talking to
that maid of hers, explaining that Heidi was going to be up at the house with a friend and that she and Jeff had some event
in the city. I had a big blowout with my wife on Saturday morning—I must have done something really, really disgusting, like
take a shower without the curtain in the tub—and I just decided on a whim to drive up there, see if she’d help me lick my
wounds. I nearly freaked when I saw Cat. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“You couldn’t have just said you were in the area and decided to pop in.”

“I was carrying flowers and a bottle of Taittinger. If I’d seemed surprised to see her, she would have realized that I was
balling Heidi. My ass would have been grass—and I’m sure she would have made sure my wife found out. But Cat never found out.”

“What would your wife do if she knew?”

He stubbed out his cigarette hard in the ashtray. “Besides hack off my nuts, torch my car, and take me to the cleaners in
divorce court? I’m not honestly sure. Look, what’s the point of the inquisition, anyway? I don’t get what your fascination
with Heidi is.”

“Like I said before, I found the body and got involved early, and now I’m sort of invested and I want to make sure all the
loose ends are tied up. Has it been hard for you—her dying?”

It caught him off guard. “Yeah, of course,” he said, red eyebrows shooting up. “I’m not a monster. I slept with the chick
and I feel lousy about what happened to her, especially after reading that it wasn’t supposed to be her.”

“Did you ever give her a Tiffany bracelet?”

“What?”

“A gold bracelet—from Tiffany?”

“Sure,” he said sarcastically. “I just put it on my personal account at the store.”

He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to get rolling,” he said, and drained the rest of his bourbon.

“One more question. Were you worried that if Heidi somehow found out what happened between you and Cat, she’d tell Cat the
real story?”

“No, not a chance. Why would she do that, anyway?”

“Cat was her boss.”

“You haven’t been listening. Heidi was a total opportunist. She’d be shooting herself in the foot if she told Cat. She needed
her for the job—at least for the time being.”

“Right.”

“You got this?” he asked, sliding off his stool. “I better fly.”

“Yeah, I’ve got it,” I said.

“I can count on you, right? To be discreet. You said I could.”

“You haven’t been listening. Absolutely.”

He tore out of the restaurant while I settled the bill. I didn’t know whether to buy his story or not, that his relationship
with Heidi had been nothing more than sport fucking. Kip, from what I knew, was a fabulous liar. I’d once heard him tell a
freelance writer that a piece she’d written brought to mind Truman Capote and then announce an hour later in a meeting with
Cat that reading it was like undergoing bone surgery without anesthesia. Of course, even if it
had
been only a casual fling, he still might have killed her—if she’d threatened to squeal to Cat. Or maybe he’d misrepresented
how Heidi felt. She could have been head over heels about Kip and when she sensed she was about to be blown off, she could
have gone psycho and announced that she was going to tell his wife about what had been going on. Kip, of course, could easily
have left the Kiss on my desk. Or here was an interesting thought: Maybe his wife had done the dirty work. She’d been at the
party that night, slurring her words.

There was one thing I
was
sure of. Kip was no dummy, and if he was the killer, he might have guessed by my line of questioning that I was on to the
fact that Heidi was the one who was supposed to die. I may have put myself in real danger.

After collecting my change, I checked my voice mail for messages. There were two. First, Leslie’s assistant, haranguing me
again about expense reports. The second, at five-fifty, was from Cat—and she sounded freaked.

“Bailey, this is urgent. Something bad has happened. Leave your cell phone on—I’ve got to talk to you.”

I
STOOD OUTSIDE
the restaurant trying to imagine what might be the matter. Cat had sounded borderline hysterical when she’d left her message.
Had she stumbled upon a clue about the poisoning? Had something happened with Jeff? Had someone done something to scare her,
as they had me?

I tried her house on my cell phone, even though I figured that if she’d been there, she would probably have said so. Carlotta
answered and informed me that Cat wasn’t home yet and she had no idea where she was or when she going to turn up. When I asked
her if everything was okay at the house, she explained that the powder room toilet was leaking again and that she was waiting
for a plumber to come and fix it. Something told me that this wasn’t the crisis that had Cat in such a tizzy.

Halfway up the block I sat on the edge of a short wall outside an office building, fished out my address book from my purse,
and, after finding Cat’s cell number, punched the numbers. People streamed by me on their way home, to Carnegie Hall, or to
bars and restaurants in the area. From where I sat, I could see the red and yellow and blue neon billboards of Times Square
a dozen blocks farther south, pulsing and gyrating. The air felt heavy, spongy, as if it would rain soon. After the fourth
ring her voice mail picked up and I left a message saying that my phone was now on and I’d keep it on till I heard from her.
I tossed the phone back in my bag and calculated what my next move should be.

Obviously Cat was someplace she couldn’t be reached and I’d just have to wait to hear from her. Chances were that she’d arrive
back at the town house before long, and I’d end up going
there
to help her tackle whatever trouble had reared its head. Rather than go home to the Village and then have to come all the
way back uptown, I decided to head toward the Upper East Side and hang there until I heard from her.