If Looks Could Kill (40 page)

I called out good luck as the Beemer backed out of the driveway, but they were too distracted to notice.

Entering the house, I found the number where Cat had left it. I hadn’t a shred of interest in dining with Leslie, Clyde, and
two strangers, and my guess was that Leslie would be delighted to see me drop off the guest list if given the opportunity.
I punched the numbers and Leslie herself answered.

“Hi, it’s Bailey,” I said. “I appreciate your wanting to include me for dinner even without Cat and Jeff, but why don’t I
take a rain check. I want to be here when they come home and make sure everything’s okay.”

“Don’t worry, it’ll be an early night,” she said. “It’s really just a casual dinner. You’ll like this other couple.”

“I appreciate it, but it’s probably best for me to hang here.”

“I’ve made a ton of chili, and half of it’s going to go to waste,” she said peevishly. “Besides, I really need to chat with
you. Harry called me yesterday, and he’s not a happy man. I need your advice on how to get Cat focused again.”

I could see there was no way of wiggling out of the evening without pissing her off. And the Harry stuff alarmed me. I told
her I’d be there and took down directions.

Since I had Cat’s house to myself for a while, I decided to check out the bedroom Heidi had used on the weekends she’d visited.
It was a pleasant enough room, but it was small and set apart from the other bedrooms. It also had a forgotten quality, a
room used only as backup when the two main guest rooms were occupied. The only furniture was a bed, a bedside table, a small
dresser, and a whitewashed rocker. And the only accessories were a small clock, stopped at two-thirty, and a chipped yellow
vase, empty of flowers.

I pulled open the dresser drawers. Nothing but extra blankets and sheets, sitting on top of drawer lining paper that looked
as if it had been there since the Kennedy administration. Nothing in the musty closet, either, except what appeared to be
a garment bag full of Cat’s winter clothes. Heidi had slept in this room, but she’d left nothing behind. What had I expected?
A love note from Mr. X, signed with his actual name?

As I was shutting the closet door, I heard a sound, like a screen door closing. I took the back stairs down two at a time
and hurried to the front hallway. There was no one there. It was probably just one of those sounds old houses make, but all
the terror of my night at Landon’s came rushing back at me. There was something freakin’ Kafkaesque about the way I kept being
asked to people’s country homes and then left there alone. I took several deep breaths and did a quick scan of the rooms.
I was suddenly glad to be going to dinner at a house full of people.

There was an hour to kill before Leslie’s, so I retrieved my book from the screen porch and took it to the library, where
it was warmer and cozier. Though I’d calmed down, I found myself rereading the same sentences over and over again. Just before
seven, I went upstairs to change. Leslie had said dress casually, so I swapped my jeans for black slacks, a black shirt, and
a red leather jacket. Cat had forgotten to make any arrangements with me about locking up, so I made sure the back door and
screen porch were locked, but I left the front door unlocked—otherwise I wouldn’t be able to get in if I returned ahead of
them. I also left tons of lights on.

The drive to Leslie’s house wasn’t overly complicated, though I worried that later I might have trouble finding my way back
in the dark. Having seen Leslie and Clyde’s apartment, I was prepared for a big spread, and it was: three stories, shingled,
with a huge wraparound porch and none of the country charm of Cat’s home.

Leslie greeted me with an air kiss, not the sort of thing we generally exchanged, but then we weren’t in the habit of getting
together socially, either. She was wearing navy pants and a pink tunic-y top, obviously meant to be slimming but without success.
Clyde, she mentioned, was upstairs in his office, but he would join us soon. She led me through a large center hallway, past
a living room and a paneled study, and into the kitchen, a mammoth room done all in white so that it looked like a dispensary.
As she poured me a glass of white wine from the refrigerator, my eye fell on a big pot of chili on the stove.

“I thought we’d just do something casual tonight since my housekeeper is off,” she said, catching me looking at the food.
“It’s with ground turkey, by the way. In case you were worried there’s red meat in it.”

“Great.”

She asked if I wanted a tour of the house. Sure, I said. My calves were starting to ache from the bike ride, but I sensed
that no was not an option. I followed behind her from one big, high-ceilinged room to the next, including a small greenhouse
on the back, a damp and spongy room with a big drain on the floor. Her tour included a running commentary about the history
of the house and the work she and Clyde had done on it, and her voice as she spoke was bright and loud, making me wonder if
the glass of wine she was sipping might be her second, even her third. Maybe the call this week from Harry had rattled her.
If Cat was forced out of
Gloss
, Leslie would follow.

The tour ended at a room Leslie called the solarium, with three walls of glass windows.

“I thought we’d eat in here since the dining room table is so huge,” she said. In the center of the room was a wrought-iron
table. I saw that it had been set with only three placemats.

“It’s just the three of us?” I asked, not containing my surprise.

“What? Oh, can you believe it? The Bogards called just after I spoke to you. They were coming straight here from Manhattan
and their car broke down somewhere near White Plains. They’re not going to make it.”

“You should have called me. I would have taken a rain check and you two could have had the night together.”

“Don’t be silly. And besides, Clyde said he was looking forward to getting to know you.”

I nearly groaned out loud thinking of the evening ahead. It almost seemed as if Leslie had engineered the whole thing just
to get me alone to talk about Cat’s work woes. The only consolation was that it would be better than five hours alone in Cat’s
farmhouse.

Leslie led me back to the study and we settled there, a wood-paneled room that, like their library in New York, had swords
in brackets mounted around the room. It had turned dark out, and Leslie lit several lamps, which because their shades were
black cast puddles of light around the room. On the coffee table was a large tray of expensive-looking cheeses. I had only
picked at my lunch, and I was famished now. I set down my drink glass and helped myself to a cracker smeared with soft blue
cheese. I noticed for the first time there was music playing, something instrumental and soothing, so low that I couldn’t
determine exactly what it was.

“Tell me about the swords—are they something both of you collect?” I asked, wiping my fingers with a cocktail napkin.

“Oh no, not me,” Leslie said. “God forbid. It’s Clyde. They’re his passion.”

“Does he just like to look or does he know how to use them?”

“Actually, he’s quite a marvelous fencer. Or was. He was nationally ranked in college.”

“What are some of
your
passions, Leslie?”

“You mean,” she said, “when I’m not, as everyone at
Gloss
likes to say, kicking butt? I love being out here, actually—antiquing, gardening. I’m very proud of what I’ve done with this
place. Clyde and I have a wonderful life here.” It was said almost fiercely, defensively, as if I’d challenged her on it.

“I can see that,” I said as pleasantly as I could. “So tell me about the call from Harry. What’s going on?”

Her eyes registered annoyance, maybe because I’d changed the subject on her. I noticed for the first time that they were such
a dark brown, you could hardly see the pupils.

“He’s concerned, very concerned,” she said, glancing into her wineglass. “Do you blame him?”

“It’s hard to know whether I blame him when I don’t know the exact reason for his concern. Is it Cat’s safety he’s worried
about?”

“Yes. But he’s also worried about the magazine. All the negative publicity lately. It doesn’t help that newsstand sales have
been bad this year. And Cat’s been out of the office lately more than she’s been in. He tries to call her, and he’s always
told she can’t be reached.”

“Is that what he said?”

“Yes, I just said that.”

“But Cat told me she’d smoothed things over with him this week. She told me that yesterday morning. When exactly did you talk
to him?”

“Since then.”

“Today?”

“Yesterday.
Late
in the day.”

She was being evasive, but I wasn’t sure why. I wondered for a second if she was making the whole thing up. Or maybe there
was something more to the story that she wasn’t telling me.

While I considered how to probe further, Clyde strode into the room, drink in hand. He was wearing perfectly draped beige
gabardine pants, a white dress shirt, open at the neck, and another expensive-looking belt—this one appeared to have cost
the world several anacondas. I rose from the couch and walked across the room to greet him.

“Oh, please don’t get up,” he said, shaking my hand anyway. “Sorry for the delay.” He appeared to be in the same somber mood
he’d been in the other night.

“Everything all right, Clyde?” Leslie asked.

“Yes, fine,” he said crisply. He walked over to the bar and lifted the lid off a crystal ice bucket.

“You’re all set with your drink?” he asked, looking at me as he used a pair of silver tongs to drop two fresh cubes into his
drink.

“Yes, all set.” I noticed that he hadn’t asked the same of Leslie, whose wineglass was nearly empty. Maybe he thought she’d
had enough. After swishing the cubes around in the glass, he opened a wood-paneled cabinet and turned up the volume on the
stereo receiver. Music flooded the room, and he adjusted the sound down again, but not as low as before.

“I was admiring your collection of swords,” I told him as I sat back down again, looking for some way to move the conversation
along. “Are they from all different cultures?”

“Some are Asian,” he said. “But for the most part they’re Celtic—you can see from the markings. My mother is Jewish, but my
father was Irish. He started the collection—and I’ve just kept going with it. They have a power that’s quite breathtaking.”

I heard what he said on a ten-second delay, because all my attention was focused on the music now that I could hear it better.
It was jazz. Not traditional stuff, but the modern stuff that guys like Sun Ra and Ornette Coleman do. I let my eyes slide
down to the drink Clyde held in his hands. A short glass of vodka or gin. Fear rushed through my body, warm and liquidy. I
forced myself to say something, anything.

“It makes me think of
Braveheart.”

“Well, that’s right. This is exactly the kind of thing they were fighting with.”

“Why don’t we talk about it over dinner,” Leslie suggested, getting up. “Clyde has the most amazing stories about some of
the swords.”

“Can I use the bathroom first? I just want to wash my hands,” I said, overexplaining.

She showed me to a powder room off the main hall and said they’d meet me in the solarium. After locking the door, I lowered
the toilet seat lid and sat down on it, my mind racing. The jazz, the vodka, the income big enough for diamond jewelry.
Clyde
was the mystery man. I flashed on the book of Celtic symbols in Heidi’s apartment. At the time I’d lumped it with the other
new age books, but it hadn’t been that at all. It had been a guide of some kind. Heidi had probably bought it so she could
learn about the symbols on the swords and impress Clyde, just as she’d been learning about jazz—or maybe he had given her
the book to encourage her appreciation of his passion. So Heidi had moved up the food chain in the most impressive way. If
she could snag Clyde, she must have realized, she’d become queen of the castle.

That’s why she’d been so secretive—she couldn’t let Cat get wind of what was going on. That’s why she had felt uncomfortable
about going to
Gloss
—she didn’t want to bump into Leslie. And that’s why she’d wanted to be alone in the house in Litchfield for the weekend.
It would have been easy for Clyde to sneak off and be with her. But what had her chances been of ultimately snagging him all
for herself ? Maybe they’d been decent. He looked like a guy in the throes of some midlife turmoil, a guy ripe for a new life.

Had he killed her? Maybe she had recently found someone even better and dumped him like the others, leaving him enraged. Or
maybe he had wanted only a fling and she’d threatened to tell. He had been at the party that night and could easily have brought
the candy along.

Or, oh God, was
Leslie
the killer? She may have discovered the affair and realized that Clyde was in deep and that throwing a hissy fit was not
going to derail his infatuation.

Regardless of which one had done it, the other person obviously didn’t suspect—or else how could they be coexisting?

There was something else. I had been urged to come tonight, and I suspected it was because the killer wanted me here for a
reason. To harm me? It didn’t seem likely. He—or she—wouldn’t dare do anything violent in front of the other person. My guess
was the killer wanted to get a handle on exactly what I knew and what direction I was headed in. On the phone, Leslie had
prodded me to come tonight, refusing to take no for an answer. But she had also mentioned that Clyde was looking forward to
getting to know me. Maybe behind the scenes he had been the one pushing for my presence.

I had no idea which one was the murderer. But I was pretty certain that if I played along tonight, I’d know. All it would
take was seeing who was the most curious. Maybe the smartest thing would be to tear ass out of this hell house, but that would
certainly alert the killer that I was onto something. And if I left, I wouldn’t learn the truth.