David’s eyes narrowed in confusion. “Oh. Thanks. Appreciate that. It’s just … not what I thought you were going to talk about.”
“It’s not,” I admitted, “but I wanted to say that first.”
David’s eyes narrowed further, this time in pain. “Crap, Molly. Don’t play with me.”
“I’m not.”
“I can’t handle it right now. If you’ve got something to say, say it.”
I usually saw David in a social setting where he was infallibly charming and smooth. It was a bit of a shock to be up close and too personal when the effort to be anything approaching charming was obviously beyond him. How much of the David I knew—thought I knew—was an act? The only way to find out was to keep pressing. “Okay Why’d you break up with Lisbet?”
“What’re you talking about?” David’s voice leapt up in volume and shrillness, but I squeezed his arm and he cleared his throat and dropped it back down. “We didn’t break up. Who’s saying we did? We had a fight, that’s all.”
“Then where’s her engagement ring?”
“Ask the police. They haven’t given back any of her personal effects yet. Believe me, my father’s ready to send a private guard down there to sit on the emeralds until they do.”
“It wasn’t on her finger.”
He stopped walking, fortunately not too close to any one group. “Someone stole her ring? Someone killed her to steal her ring? That’s crazy. Is that what happened?” I could see in his eyes a moment of elation when everything made sense, but they quickly clouded over again with confusion.
“But what idiot would take her diamond and leave the emeralds behind?”
“That’s not what happened. Her engagement ring was in the wastebasket in your bedroom. Nelson found it this morning.”
David lurched away from me, heading toward the beach. I stayed with him, though I understood his desire to walk away from everything about now. “Whered you leave her?”
“Is this an interrogation?” The idea seemed to both amuse and infuriate him. He stopped clumsily and turned on me, his face pale except for the bags under his eyes. “You going for a scoop, Molly?”
“Not at all.”
“You’re not working on a story.”
“No.” Eileen had called, but I hadn’t accepted, so I wasn’t even lying, which was always nice.
David glanced back across the lawn from whence we’d come. “My sister put you up to this. The things you let her do to you.” He shook his head as though I were suddenly the one under investigation.
“Excuse me?”
“C’mon. Craig Fairchild.”
I flinched at the memory immediately, but it took me a moment to remember that David had also attended that horror of a cocktail party. “One blind date from hell doesn’t constitute a pattern of abuse.”
“He vomited on the caviar.”
“Which has nothing to do with what we’re talking about.”
“Except Tricia’s ideas aren’t always the best. She can ask me her stupid questions herself. I didn’t kill Lisbet.”
“I know that, David,” I said to placate him.
It didn’t work. “Bullshit. You suspect me just like everyone
else around here suspects me. My own parents can’t even look me in the eye. Everybody’s figuring, ‘Aw, man, David went off the deep end and now Lisbet’s dead.’”
I expected him to lurch away again, but he vibrated in front of me, waiting for some sort of response. “Why would people expect you to go off the deep end?” I’d seen David rowdy, but never violent.
“I’ve got a temper. So what. I didn’t kill her.”
“Make her mad enough to take her ring off?”
David took a deep breath, as though he could suck back in all the energy his anger was radiating out. “You saw the … performance. She was a mess. It was embarrassing and you do not do that to my parents. I had to go upstairs and tell her to get a grip. Lisbet went off on me ‘commanding’ her, threw me out of the bedroom. I left. Took a long walk. When I came back, she wasn’t in the room. I looked all over and finally found her—” His voice cracked as he groped for the words.
I shook my head to let him know he didn’t have to continue. “You left her alone in the room. Wearing the ring.”
“And about to pass out, I thought. I figured I’d see her in the morning, moaning for coffee and sunglasses, not …” He screwed his eyes shut and shook his head vigorously, wanting to erase the image of Lisbet in the pool. I waited, trying to show respect for his pain and also trying to figure out what piece of the puzzle to pursue next. Suddenly, he grabbed my upper arm hard and pulled me tight against him. “Figure out who did this so I can get to them first.”
The sudden ferocity of his tone was alarming. “Stop it.”
“David, let go of her, people are watching.” Tricia had glided across the grass to warn us. As I turned to look at her, I could see the mosaic of bunched people laid out across the lawn, with at least half of them turned to peer at David.
And me. But David was the one who’d gotten angry and the one who could least afford that sort of public display at the moment.
David released my arm. “You’re not even sure I’m innocent.”
“Don’t get paranoid,” I said quietly, trying to imbue the words with a moral surety I didn’t feel at the moment.
He hung his head. “I’m sorry. It’s all making me crazy. And this”—he gestured to the guests—“what is this supposed to be?”
“People showing their respect,” his sister responded with admirable evenness. “You could stand to do the same.”
Rage flashed in his eyes again, but a whole lot of upbringing kicked in and he tamped it down quickly. The concept of being buttoned down took on a whole new meaning before my very eyes. “Perhaps,” David said, in overly measured tones, “you could tell me what exactly it is that’s expected of me right now and I’ll comply.”
Tricia’s lip curled in a direction I didn’t know was possible. “Don’t Dad me, David. It won’t accomplish anything positive.”
Suddenly feeling like an intruder, I eased back to let them have it out in private. I’d gotten everything I was going to get out of David at the moment anyway; I was going to have to find a hole in his story before I could challenge it.
So I headed back across the lawn to intrude on another conversation. I’d thought the most I might return to would be Cassady grilling Kyle on his plans for the rest of the weekend or, perhaps, the rest of his life, just in the interest of keeping me well informed. What I returned to was Cassady trying to communicate with only her eyebrows that I should hurry my buns across the lawn because Kyle was engrossed in intense conversation with Detective Cook.
The parents had moved on to work their way across the lawn one group at a time. Kyle and Cassady were where I’d left them, but now Detective Cook had joined them. She seemed dressed for business this time, with a gray department store pantsuit, white cotton blouse, and utterly sensible black pumps.
“Good morning, Detective Cook,” I said as I walked up, thinking the sweet approach might catch her off—guard. Besides, I needed to go easy with Detective Cook if I expected to learn anything useful from her. Not catfighting in front of Kyle was worth considering, too.
But the Hand blew that nice little plan right out of the water. Rather than acknowledging me or even just ignoring me, Detective Cook reached back with her left arm and gave me the Hand. The “wait just a minute, young lady, grown-ups are talking” Hand. The “I’m on Safety Patrol and you’ll stop when I tell you to stop, little dork” Hand. Detective Cook even combined the Hand with leaning in to finish what she was saying to Kyle in lower, more intimate tones. What could one little catfight hurt?
Cassady diplomatically gestured to the house. “Maybe we should go inside and see if there’s anything we can do to help.”
“I’m helping right here,” I said, ladling on a politeness I wasn’t feeling.
“And that fascinating theory is based on …” Detective Cook didn’t even turn to look at me, she just glanced back over her shoulder. Kyle gave me another warning look, but I returned this one. Why should I let this woman snark away at me and not respond? She was an officer of the law, fine, but she was also a leggy blond who was standing a little too close to my … male friend of an extremely intimate nature.
Then again, did I want to give her the satisfaction of knowing how far under my skin she was getting? Maybe a sudden change in course would help keep her off-balance. While I would have found it quite pleasurable to yank her hair out by the handful at this juncture, I refrained. “Hope,” I chirped. “I’m hopeful I’ll find a way to help.”
I couldn’t get a feel for whether my change in attitude since the wee hours this morning was disarming her, but it was making Kyle very nervous. He knew I was up to something and he wasn’t sure what it was. And all it was was a fairly blatant attempt to distract Detective Cook, from me and from Kyle.
However, all I succeeded in doing was eliciting a steely stare over the top of her sunglasses. She tipped her head forward and the sunglasses slid a little down the bridge of her nose, then stopped as if she had them trained. “I want your cooperation, not your help, thank you,” she replied coolly.
“Then you have a suspect? And a cause of death? And a murder weapon?” I pursued.
With each question, Kyle’s face got a little darker. But Detective Cook listened impassively until she was sure I was done. “This is an ongoing investigation and I’m not at liberty to share that information with you.”
“So you don’t have any of those.”
Detective Cook looked at Cassady and Kyle in frustration. “Is she always this bad a listener?”
“She’s a good listener,” Cassady answered quickly.
I nodded in affirmation. “It’s a big part of my job. Don’t you find the same?”
“Molly,” Kyle ventured, “there’s probably a better time—and way—to compare notes with Detective Cook.”
“No, this is actually a fine time,” Detective Cook corrected him as she marched over, grabbed my arm in almost
the exact spot where David had grabbed it, and marched me away from Kyle and Cassady. As I twisted in her grasp to keep my footing, I caught a glimpse of Cassady starting to follow us and Kyle stopping her. There was an explanation I was going to look forward to.
Especially since I wasn’t sure I was looking forward to the one I was about to get from Detective Cook. “Since you have a ‘friend’ who’s a homicide detective, you must not have some issue with cops in general,” Detective Cook began. “So why can’t you get out of my face?”
I literally dug my heels in, throwing my weight back so the four-inch heels of my Stuart Weitzman Dramahalt pumps dug into the soft lawn and yanked us both to a stop. Detective Cook fumbled for her footing while I silently hoped serving as a drag anchor wouldn’t ruin the black satin on my shoes. Nevertheless, extreme situations require extreme gestures.
I decided to let the “friend” thing go for a moment—just a moment—and concentrate on the larger question. “
Me
in
your
face? I’ve been a heck of a lot nicer to you than you’ve been to me.”
Detective Cook let go of my arm but looked like she was thinking about going for my throat. “‘Nice’ isn’t in my job description. I have to be good, I don’t have to be nice.”
“What about being right?”
Detective Cook bared her teeth at me in a grim approximation of a smile. For a moment, she resembled a lioness ripping the flesh off an innocent zebra. I, of course, was feeling very pro-zebra. I was about to tell her so when she blindsided me. “What’s the deal with your ‘friend’ anyway?”
“Excuse me?” I took a moment to pull my heels out of the soil and pull my thoughts together. Was she deliberately changing subjects to hide a larger intent?
“Is he single or are you two a couple?”
How dare she ask a question I didn’t dare ask? I did my best to mask my surprise with a more generalized offense. “How can that possibly be relevant?”
The lioness’s smile got bigger and lazier. Contented even. “Don’t want to classify it or can’t?”
“Don’t want to get your own life or can’t?”
Detective Cook’s mouth contracted into a tight knot of discontent. “You’ve got a hell of a lot of nerve giving me attitude when you’re withholding information.”
“I am not,” I protested sincerely. How could I withhold information when I didn’t have any yet? Suspicions and feelings aplenty, but no information. “If I had information, I’d give it to you. You think David Vincent did this, but he’s innocent.”
“And your impassioned stance is based on …”
“Lisbet wasn’t wearing her engagement ring when she died. She and David had a fight after the party last night, she took the ring off and threw it away. I think she went off and got into a fight with someone else, not David, because he didn’t know she’d taken off her ring and he would’ve noticed that. Even a guy would’ve noticed that.”
“So you’re suggesting …”
“Someone else killed her. Someone who was irrationally upset with her behavior last night.”
Detective Cook thought a moment, then picked up on my train of thought. “Someone who resented the way she’d acted and the way it reflected on David.”