by K. A. Tucker
“The Supreme Court judge Theodore Higgins?”
“Retired now. Still uses his business card, though.”
I pull the tail of my gown over the threshold a second before the door would have shut on it. It’s already happened to me once, with the limo door. I’m lucky I didn’t cause the two-thousand-dollar dress any damage. I plan on offering it up for auction to a charity. “For when he’s out on the town, picking up dames?”
Her giggles echo through the cramped, empty foyer. “I haven’t gone on a date in nearly twenty years.” She pauses. “Maybe I shouldn’t have agreed to it.”
“You just danced with the man for hours. I think you can handle a cup of tea.” I pause. “Unless that’s code for something else, in which case I really don’t want to know.”
Ruby titters like a little girl as my eyes drift over the rows of little metal mailboxes to our right, landing on “C. Gonzalez” with a dip in my heartbeat. I haven’t collected her mail once. I haven’t even thought about it.
Ruby’s box, “R. Cummings,” is directly below Celine’s. Without even thinking, my gaze scans over the other boxes, searching the names, until I find his near the bottom right corner.
“Oh my God.” I stare at the sticker. “Did you know?”
“Did I know what, dear?”
————
The sound of my two-thousand-dollar dress tearing as I catch the hem on the fence barely registers. Neither does the cold December night, my faux fur white stole a beautiful but useless addition to my ensemble.
He didn’t answer his apartment door. That’s where I marched to first, after ushering Ruby to her place. I stood there and banged on it until someone hollered “go away!” from another apartment.
I figured I would try the roof. Turns out Grady’s quite predictable.
He’s lying in his hammock, his head covered in a toque, a joint held burning between fingers of one hand. Flames lick the sides of his little fire pit, the glow from it catching his eyes as he watches me approach. I’m not sure if him smoking weed is going to help this confrontation or make it worse.
“Aren’t you a sight,” he murmurs, his gaze trailing over me as I weave around the chairs and planters, slipping slightly on the snow-coated roof, my heels not meant for outdoor winter wear.
He lifts the heavy wool blanket up to make room for me. “Did you enjoy your charity ball?”
“Were you one of Celine’s clients?” I blurt out. I’ve never been one for subtleties, but I’d like to think I’ve kept my head through these last few weeks, biding my time and biting my tongue with Jace. Clearly, the situation with Grady is a more emotional one for me, given how intimate we’ve become in such a short period of time.
His first name isn’t even “Grady.”
I don’t know what his first name is.
But I do know now, thanks to his mailbox, that it starts with a “J,” and Celine had a client she called “Jay,” and that means that maybe Ruby is wrong and Jace wasn’t lying to me tonight at all.
My words seem to hang in the air for a moment—either unreceived or incoherent—until I wonder if I actually really said them out loud.
“What? . . . I mean,” Grady’s face twists with confusion, then comprehension, and then shock, “what?”
“Were you one of Celine’s clients?” I say slowly.
He doesn’t answer me right away.
“Did you pay Celine for sex?”
His deep chuckle is not exactly the reaction I expected. When he sees the look on my face, he finally stops. “Oh, you’re serious?”
“Yes, I am.” I take a few steps closer, to get a better look at his face. “Because someone told me that you were.”
“Who?”
“It doesn’t matter. Just answer the question.” The longer this goes on, the more suspicious I become.
“Well, it kind of does matter, because some asshole out there is filling your head with lies!”
Finally, a reaction from the always calm and collected Grady.
“So you’re saying it’s not true?” There’s a part of me that’s calling “bullshit,” but it seems to be battling with something equally loud.
My heart.
Celine was the one to listen to her heart. I’ve always been better at listening to my head.
“Seriously, who told you something like that?”
I sigh. “The guy that Celine was seeing. You met him. He came by the apartment last week.”
“The one with his hand on your knee. Yeah, I remember.” It’s such a subtle dig. Did he really care about that? I had already forgotten about it. “And he just offered this information to you?”
“No. I accused him of being behind Celine’s murder. Then he told me about you. It’s a long story . . .”
Grady butts his joint into a can of sand to put it out, and then reaches back to tuck his hands behind his head in a relaxed fashion. “Sounds like someone who’s trying to misdirect your attention.”
“Maybe.”
“Not that I want to disparage myself, but I think he looks more like the kind of guy who could afford a high-end hooker than I do.”
“Escort,” I mutter softly—though, in the end, I know that he’s not wrong.
“Frankly, I’m kind of offended that you’d believe that so quickly.”
“I didn’t. But then I—” I cut myself off. I’ve divulged many facts to Grady with complete ease in recent weeks. I felt comfortable with him since the first night up here. But suddenly that comfort has been replaced with unbalance and distrust. I need to be a better poker player. And I can’t ignore what Jace told me tonight, simply because I don’t want it to be true. Especially since so much of what he told me adds up.
So if it’s true, and Grady just lied directly to my face about being Celine’s client . . . what else could he be lying to me about? Could he have been the one to feed Celine enough drugs to make her overdose? Why would he want to kill her? To what end?
For the dragon vase.
That would explain why I didn’t find it in Jace’s place that night. Maybe Jace didn’t take it after all. Maybe Grady did. He has keys to her apartment. He has access. But . . . what the hell does Grady even know about valuable antiques, or what to do with them?
“But then you what?” Grady probes.
I swallow the painful ball forming in my throat. “Nothing. I think this investigation is going to drive me insane.” My clutch vibrates in my hand. That has to be Doug. I sent him a text earlier, on the drive back from the Waldorf, to update him on my encounter with Jace.
“Come on. It’s cold. And you’re beautiful.” Grady lifts the end of the blanket up again. Beckoning me to the warmth, and to him.
Had I not seen that “J” on the mailbox, I might have written Jace’s words off and accepted the invitation.
Now I merely offer him a tired smile. “Good night, Grady.”
I wait until the outside door is shut to dig my phone out and call Doug. I need him to tell me that my gut is wrong and Grady isn’t lying to me.
CHAPTER 30
Maggie
“Let’s play this out.” Doug’s fingers strum against Zac’s desk, the diary open in his free hand. Zac is busy clicking away at his keyboard, trying to hack into Grady’s network. He must have one, given that he has a camera sending a live feed from the rooftop to his apartment.
So far, it’s proving a lot more difficult than Zac expected. Which begs the question, why?
“ ‘Jay’ as in ‘J. Grady’ meets up with Celine in a hotel room. Introduces himself as ‘Jay’ and she’s surprised because she knows him only by his last name.”
“That’s all he’s ever gone by. Even Ruby didn’t think much of it.”
“ ‘And I just spoke with him at the office earlier today,’ she wrote in here.”
“But Grady has no reason for being there.”
“ ‘What if he tells someone what I’ve been doing to make money? I need that job!’ ” Doug recites.
“There’s some sort of connection to work and Grady. There must be.”
So far, Doug isn’t quashing my worry that the man I’ve been sleeping with is a filthy liar.
I groan in frustration. If Celine had just outed people in her goddamn diaries like a normal person, we wouldn’t be going through all this. “Why wouldn’t they admit to knowing each other?”
“Role-playing,” Zac pipes up, his eyes scanning over my dress without shame. I highly doubt this living space has seen anything more upscale than a pair of jeans and a button-down flannel shirt before I started coming here. Doug answered on the first ring and demanded that I meet him outside my building right away, so I just kept going on down the stairs from the roof, not bothering to stop at the apartment to change.
“Okay. Fine. So, they decide to stay in character,” Doug agrees. “It’s easier for her . . . he gets off on it . . . then what? Do they see each other again? How often? At this hotel or somewhere else? Zac, forget that for a minute. Check out the hotel’s reservation log. Everett said he saw her at the Waldorf with the old man, right? Start there.”
“Date?”
Doug scans the top of the diary page. “July sixteenth.”
Zac’s thick fingers fly over the keyboard, and what looks to be an internal hotel system pops up. When he looks over and sees my shock, he shrugs. “We do a lot of hotel room checks in this line of work so . . . I already know all the loopholes.”
For a moment, I forget why I’m here and try to wrap my head around Zac’s level of access. “Aren’t you worried about getting caught?”
“I’m the gingerbread man,” he sings, smirking. “I’ve been in their system a hundred times. The trick is to not touch anything. Especially money.” A few more clicks and then, “Nothing at the Waldorf.”
“Try the other luxuries. Trump, the Plaza, the London, Langham.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know the drill.”
“I’ll be back in five. I need some fresh air.” Doug pulls a pack of cigarettes out and runs up the stairs.
Which gives me the opportunity, the few minutes I need. “Zac . . .”
“J-Man said something about the feed from his security camera being missing, didn’t he?” Zac says, never lifting his fingers or eyes from the monitor as he jumps from system to system.
“Would you know anything about that?”
“I know absolutely nothing about how a technology genius the likes of which no one has ever seen must have waited for the sleeping baby to wake from his drug-induced nap to ensure that he was not in fact murdered, and then wiped out all traces of Ms. Evil ever being there, not only from J-Man’s security video but also from the building’s video.”
“So all that stuff Doug said, was he just covering his ass?”
“He meant it and he was covering his ass.” Zac shoots a sideways glance to me. “What Doug doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
So Zac did this of his own accord. I sigh. “I owe you, big-time.”
“You do.” His gaze wanders over to the slit in my dress.
“Not happening. Ever.”
“A simple thank-you would suffice.”
“Thank you.”
“And maybe some new equipment,” he adds, before he’s stopped by Doug’s pounding feet. A waft of cigarette smoke trails in with him. That wasn’t five minutes. That wasn’t even one minute.
“I want to know everything there is to know about J. Grady. Where he was born, what he eats, where he shops. The more I think about it, there’s something not right with him,” Doug demands. I guess nicotine really does help Doug think.
“If I find a reservation, I can pull up his credit card bill,” Zac says.
“Seriously, is nothing safe online?” I mutter.
“You know what they say about getting on a good hacker’s bad side . . . don’t.”
“Do you have his fingerprints?” Doug looks at me.
“Yeah, in my back pocket.”
He rolls his eyes. “In the apartment. Has he touched anything in there?”
The mattress, which was pitched, but he had gloves on. The window, the night he came in . . .
Me.
He’s touched me.
I shudder. “I’m not sure.”
“I need his fingerprints. I’ll see if I can lift some from around the building.”
“Okay, hold on. We don’t even know if Grady’s worth this level of scrutiny yet. Consider our source of informa—”
“Found him.”
I turn to see the name “James Grady” on the screen.
My heart sinks.
CHAPTER 31
Celine
July 16, 2015
I inhale deeply, forcing my anxiety down, and then knock on the door.
I’ve met clients at the Langham twice before. It’s one of a handful of high-end hotels that I agree to, as a requirement of Larissa’s. No seedy motels, no private homes. No backseats.
It’s probably my favorite. The décor is classic, the details are elegant, and the doormen are discreet.
I stick a piece of spearmint gum in my mouth while I listen for the approaching footfalls.
The door finally opens . . .
And I stifle my gasp.
We stare at each other for a few agonizingly long and painful seconds before he steps back to make room for me to enter.
I’m frozen in place. Do I walk in? Do I say there’s been a mistake and leave?
Finally he smiles at me, a secretive lopsided smile. “Call me Jay.”
“Maggie,” I manage to get out, even though we both well know that’s not my real name.
I can’t believe this is happening. I’m sure this moment is changing his opinion of me. It’s definitely changing my opinion of him. Is this a complete coincidence? Did he somehow figure out how I make money?
“Well, Maggie . . . Your secret is safe with me.”
His words, spoken softly, remind me that I’m standing in the middle of a hotel hallway and anyone in the rooms nearby can hear this conversation. A quick glance out their peephole and they’ve seen our faces. I have two choices: I either leave or step inside.
If I leave, will my secret stay safe with him?
Taking in a deep breath, I step inside.
And prepare to offer my services to my building super.
CHAPTER 32
Maggie
December 14, 2015
The brakes on Doug’s Ford Taurus squeak as he pulls up to the curb outside Celine’s apartment building. It’s two in the morning.
And I know that Grady lied to me.
On July 16, the same night that Celine met a new client who she was familiar with, and who introduced himself as “Jay,” Grady rented a hotel room at the Langham under the name James Grady.
Was it just that night, though?
I watched Zac go through every high-end hotel reservation from July through November. There were no more rooms booked by a James Grady beyond that one.
“No reservations means either he didn’t see Celine again, or they weren’t meeting at hotels anymore.” Doug leans forward to study the fire escape in the alleyway. “Ruby may not have heard any man coming to Celine’s door, but that doesn’t mean none came to her apartment.”
My stomach tightens, the same way it did the first time Doug suggested that Grady and Celine had used the fire escape to maintain discretion and minimize cost, especially if he became a “regular” that Celine knew and trusted.
He used the fire escape when he came to me, claiming he didn’t want to disturb Ruby. He had even called it “more romantic” than using the door.
At least he didn’t leave any bills on the table for me.
It still doesn’t make sense. “Do you really think he could afford her?”
“Not with what Zac found in his bank account, but he could have another one somewhere else. But he’d also have to be making some serious cash outside of this gig,” Doug reminds me. “Zac will get into his electric bills to see if he’s growing
enough marijuana. I’m guessing that’ll be a dead end though.” Doug purses his lips. “I still think he has a connection to Vanderpoel that we don’t know about yet. There’s a link and we’ll find it.”
It’s late, and I’m exhausted, and yet I know that I won’t be falling asleep anytime soon, so I’m reluctant to leave the warmth of Doug’s car. “So, what’s the plan going forward?”
“You and I are going to walk into that building as if nothing is out of the ordinary, and then, after we part ways, I’m going to go and lift some prints off his door handle.”
“Right now?”
“Zac’s busy digging up everything he can remotely,” he goes on, dismissing my shock. “And you are going to stay the hell away from that guy. I know you’re angry, but don’t say another damn word to him about Celine. You’ve already put the guy on high alert.”
“He was definitely on a high when I left him,” I mutter sarcastically. “Maybe he’ll forget.” I’m furious with him for lying to my face.
And disgusted that he would use Celine like that.
And hurt, which is pathetic, given how casual our “relationship” was.
“Don’t count on him forgetting that. Not when he was trying to cover up the truth. But is he doing it out of pride, or respect for her, or because he’s hiding something else?”
Neither of us have come right out and said it yet. “Do you think he could have had something to do with her death?” Could Grady actually be capable of that?
Doug raps his fingers against the steering wheel in thought. “I’ve learned never to underestimate anyone and you shouldn’t either. And if there are potentially millions of dollars involved . . .”
“But this is Grady! He assumed everything she had was old crap. There’s no reason he’d think that vase was valuable.”
“Unless she told him it was.”
“He said he hated money . . . ,” I murmur, more to myself.
“Who did? Grady?” Doug lets out a derisive snort, but then he frowns. “When did he say that? How often do you two talk?”
“Not often. I don’t know how it came up. So, what now?” The last thing I want Doug finding out is that I’ve been sleeping with a suspect. Possibly our prime suspect.
