If Looks Could Kill (5 page)

“That’s beautiful,” she said sarcastically, throwing back her head. Most of the hair that had been held up with the chopsticks
was down now, cascading around her face. “I suppose that means they think we’re hiding something and they want to catch us
in a lie?”

“No, it doesn’t mean that. Cops interview bystanders and witnesses separately because if they’re in the same room, they often
unconsciously try to make their versions fit together.”

“Look, I haven’t had a chance to say this yet, Bailey, but I don’t know how I could have coped today without you.”

“I’m glad I came. Your instincts turned out to be totally valid.”

There was something I wanted to ask Cat, and this finally seemed like the right moment, but before I could, the doorbell rang.
She went off to answer it, and a minute later Leslie Stone was striding through the kitchen.

Thirty-eight years old, with brown eyes and thick brown hair worn in a China chop, Leslie was considered attractive, but personally
I didn’t get it. Her nostrils were as big as kidney beans, and when I looked at her I always felt as if I were face-to-face
with a fruit bat. Today she was all decked out in a beige, rayony pantsuit and strappy sandals, looking as if she’d been dragged
away from a brunch in Santa Barbara. I hated being catty at a time like this, but I noticed that she had packed on some pounds
since the last time I had paid close attention to her thighs. My problem was that I just didn’t
like
Leslie. As a freelancer I was fairly immune to her bullying, but whenever possible she harassed me about deadlines and my
travel expenses. Her husband had made a killing in the stock market a few years back and then cashed out, and the only reason
she worked, people claimed, was that she loved being in charge and telling people what to do.

“Start from the beginning,” she demanded as she parked herself on one of the kitchen bar stools. The look she shot me registered
irritation, as if I must be partly to blame for the mess. Cat took her through everything that had happened. While they talked,
I excused myself and headed off to the powder room that was tucked under the hall stairs. I took my time, washing my hands,
splashing water on my face, and putting on some blush and lip gloss I found in a basket in the cabinet under the sink. I stared
at my reflection in the mirror. I looked about as bad as I felt, tired and drained and wigged out from the whole experience.
How had the morning turned out this way? What could possibly have killed Heidi? And where was K.C. now? I wondered.

When I emerged from the bathroom I found that two young and very blond women from the PR agency had arrived, and they launched
into a long discussion with Cat and Leslie about how to handle the inevitable press scrutiny, eventually including on speaker
phone the head of the agency, who was safely out of town for the weekend. Lunch was ordered. We had drawn the drapes in the
dining room, but I took a peek out occasionally. The ambulance had departed, but now there were other vehicles parked outside,
including a van from the ME’s, and people were traipsing in and out of the apartment below. There were gawkers outside, too,
an ever-changing cluster on the sidewalk. So far no TV news trucks.

At about twelve-thirty, Jeff turned up—alone, having dropped off Tyler, he said, with friends in the city. He had his hip
fashion photographer thing going—green cargo pants, white T-shirt, V-neck camel sweater—but he looked extremely distressed
and white as a ghost. He and Cat hugged, and she clung to him even when he was ready to let go. He wanted to know everything,
from start to finish, and she took him off to the kitchen.

Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. He was without qualification an absolute hunk. About six feet one and amazingly buff, he had hazel eyes,
a full, sensuous mouth with a small cleft in the middle of his lower lip, and slightly wavy brown hair worn longish, just
lower than his chin, and generally tucked behind his ears.

As a photographer he specialized in fashion, and as far as I knew after several years on his own, his career was in high gear.
He didn’t have Cat’s level of success, but then again he was six years younger than her. As for their marriage, it appeared
solid, despite predictions to the contrary from people who thought she couldn’t last with a guy who had never read a novel
all the way through. But Cat had had her fill of moody Wall Street millionaires and prickly Renaissance men. What she desired,
she’d told me, was a guy who did one thing extremely well and wanted to spend the rest of his time with her, who was easy
to be with and never made her walk on eggshells, who liked massaging the kinks out of the back of her neck—and who knew how
to make the sex so good that the neighbors would wonder some nights if they should phone the police. Jeff was that man. Though
I liked him enough, things had always been slightly awkward between the two of us. Maybe because I found his looks so disconcerting.

At about two I finally decided I’d better beat it. I felt bad for Cat, because of the jam she was in, and I wanted to help
her. I also wanted to be in on the action. But I was beginning to feel like a fifth wheel. Cat preferred what you might call
a compartmentalization approach to her friendships. We all served specific needs, with no one person responsible for too much.
Right now Cat was preoccupied with damage control, which wasn’t one of my specialties.

It would have been helpful to have a chance to talk to Jeff before I left, but Leslie was currently monopolizing him. I figured
I’d do better leaving now and calling or coming back later. I told Cat I was splitting and said to call me if she needed me.
Picking at a pasta salad as one of the blond spin doctors yammered away next to her, she acknowledged my departure in a state
of distraction.

I found my sweater on the hall table, though I didn’t recall leaving it there. As I started to open the front door, Jeff stepped
out into the hallway.

“You okay?” he asked with just a trace of his Tennessee roots. “Cat told me how you found the body.”

“I’m hanging in there. But what about you? This must be very sad for you.”

It was hard to tell, though, exactly
what
he was feeling. He looked more agitated than anything else.

“Of course,” he said quickly. “And this is going to be awful for Tyler. What do we tell him, for God’s sake?”

As I started to ask him another question, one of the PR babes popped her head out into the hall.

“I wouldn’t hold that door open if I were you,” she chided me.

Jeff gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and I hurried away, down the steps. A TV news van was attempting to park out front,
which would give me time to outdistance anyone climbing out of it, but a young guy on the sidewalk with a tape recorder and
mike descended on me. I sprinted away, toward Park Avenue, where I flagged down a taxi.

As soon as I’d collapsed into the backseat, I realized that my head ached, my back and legs ached, and my brain ached, too.
There were so many unanswered questions about Heidi’s death. What had made her sick? Was she a drug user? Had she been alone
last night? Why hadn’t she called anyone once she began to get violently ill? I also had questions for Cat, things that had
been bugging me all morning. Why had she spent the weekend in the Hamptons while her husband was up at their country home?
Why had she needed to see Heidi at the crack of dawn on Sunday? And what had made her so terribly certain that something bad
had happened?

I was anxious to hear the answers to those questions, but the thought of them scared me. Something told me that over the next
few days, Cat’s life was going to become a big ugly mess.

T
HE
GLOSS
MAGAZINE
editorial offices occupy the entire tenth floor of a building on Broadway at 56th Street and center around a large open area,
nicknamed “the pit,” which holds the cubes for the photo, art, and production departments as well as for some of the junior
writers and editors. The space once consisted of traditional offices, but Cat had had it redesigned about six months after
she’d taken over, remodeling it in the style of a classic newsroom. I don’t think she ever expected anyone to come running
through yelling, “Stop the presses! Gwyneth Paltrow screamed for mercy during a Brazilian bikini wax!” She did it, she said,
to create the perfect combination of noise, energy, envy, and sexual chemistry. From what I could tell, she’d more than succeeded.

When I slunk into
Gloss
on Monday at around nine, with my blueberry scone and large container of coffee, the pit was practically deserted. The photo
editor, wearing a black shirt with a ruffle down the front, was sitting at his desk leafing through
W
, and about eight cubes away one of the production guys was opening a window. A low level of attendance was standard for any
morning at
Gloss
before ten, but I had assumed—wrongly—that on this particular day a few people might have surfaced early to hear more about
the death on 91st Street. At the far end of the pit, Cat’s office, with its front wall of glass, was pitch dark.

I hung a left and headed down the long main corridor toward my office. I nearly jumped when, passing the alcove with the copy
machine, I discovered “Kip” Kippinger, the deputy editor, photocopying pages of a book. He was about my age, a former producer
at
Good Morning America
who’d been lured to
Gloss
about a year ago to oversee the articles department. A magazine person by background, he’d made a temporary foray into TV,
and though I think he’d produced mainly health segments on topics like irritable bowel syndrome, the way he talked you’d have
thought he’d overseen the coverage in Kosovo. His arrival at
Gloss
had created a stir because he was one of the only straight guys on the premises (though with a wife and two kids in the suburbs),
and he was considered superattractive: a redhead, with milky, freckled skin and blue, blue eyes. No one seemed to notice that
his head, at least as far as I was concerned, was too small for his body. I found him arrogant and smug, and his editing reflected
that (he’d once suggested in a sex piece he’d overseen that a way to compliment a guy in bed was to ask him: “Do you have
a license to carry that?”). Fortunately, because of my tenure at
Gloss
, my articles were still overseen by Polly, the executive editor.

“Morning,” I said.

“Aren’t
we
in early,” he remarked, not at all pleasantly. It was the kind of passive-aggressive remark I never knew quite what to do
with.

“I could say the same to you.”

“You hear the news?”

“You mean about Cat’s nanny?”

“Yeah, what’s up with that, do you know?” He had a scowl on his freckled face, as if he were afraid the death was about to
cause a major wrinkle in his day.

“It’s in the papers,” I said, cocking my head toward the two newspapers sticking out of my tote bag. “I was just about to
sit down and read what was going on.” I scurried off down the corridor before he could say anything else. The last thing I
felt like doing was taking Kip up to speed on what I knew.

I rounded one more corner to my office. I was back in an area of the floor with a more traditional layout, where the fashion
and beauty departments were situated and the senior text editors had their offices. My tiny space had once been a small reference
library, but with
Gloss
’s reincarnation into a slick, hip women’s magazine focusing on what was happening
right this minute
, there wasn’t much need for tomes like the
Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature
, and the books had all been put in storage. The room was about eleven-by-seven, with a window that looked out onto an air
shaft and a pie-wedge view of Broadway, but I loved the cocoon feeling of it, as well as how off the beaten track it was at
the magazine. Besides, as a freelancer, I was lucky to have been given an office at all.

I tossed my bags and leather jacket onto the straight-backed chair in the corner and popped the lid off my coffee. Settling
down at my desk, I turned my attention first thing to the two New York tabloids I’d picked up at the newsstand.

MYSTERY DEATH OF MEDIA STAR’S NANNY. That from the
Daily News
. It was in the banner section across the top. The
New York Post
, however, had turned over all of page one to Cat’s calamity, and they, of course, had the more outrageous headline: NANNY
DEAD IN MEDIA BOSS BASEMENT.

Below the headline was a shot of Cat dashing along a sidewalk, appearing totally frazzled. The picture, at least a year old,
had obviously been selected from the photo archives so that it would appear as if the
Post
had caught up with her fleeing police headquarters.

Inside each paper the story continued, but only with sketchy details, both hinting at an overdose. There were several
clichÉd “Ms. Jones is deeply saddened” kinds of quotes supplied by a “spokesperson,” indication that the spin doctors had
worked at full throttle after I left Cat’s. Both papers had a shot of the town house, and the
Daily News
featured Cat’s stock press photo, a sexy shot with her hair at its blondest and fullest and her lips as pouty as a plum.
There was something hilarious about the incongruity of the stock shot with this story. The caption might as well have been
“My nanny just died, but I’d love to get laid.”

It appeared from perusing the papers that there hadn’t been any major developments in the story since I’d left Cat’s yesterday
afternoon. If there had been, the press hadn’t been privy to them—and neither had I.

I’d gotten home at about five the night before, after a long walk through the East Village. I felt edgy from all the coffee
I’d drunk and suddenly in desperate need of company. But after fifteen minutes of calling, it was clear I wasn’t going to
dredge up anyone on such short notice. Even my regular crisis manager, Landon, my seventy-year-old gay next-door neighbor,
was MIA. Usually I have advance plans for Sunday nights, but I’d stupidly left this one open, hoping that K.C. would wake
up Sunday morning and refuse to leave my side. As I sat holding my phone, I imagined him moored on Long Island Sound, boinking
some girl on the deck of his sailboat as the sun began to sink.