Killer Deal

by Sheryl J. Anderson

  Now I was starting to get angry. I loved my job and I wanted the man I loved to respect that—and me. I wasn’t saving the world like he did, but I was trying to make a difference. “Okay, I didn’t turn down the opportunity to talk to Donovan. But he made the offer and I’m trying to do my job.”

  “Makes one of you.”

  “What?”

  “He’s a lousy cop, Molly. He plays politics instead of working a case and this could be the one that blows up in his face. I don’t want to see you get dragged into some stupid, humiliating mess because he’s a jerkwad.”

  “How does his being a bad cop threaten me, other than his giving me lame information?”

  “You can’t stay out of harm’s way when you’re working with a good cop, what’s gonna happen with a shitty one?”

  My father says certain efforts are like banging your head against a brick wall: it’s so nice when you stop. I hadn’t realized I was carrying a little knot of resentment in the pit of my stomach until it unfurled in a rush of warmth. I’d misjudged Kyle’s motives completely. He wasn’t trying to keep me off his turf, he was trying to keep me safe. “I’m not going to team up with him,” I said quietly, “I’m just going to talk to him. Get his perspective.”

  Kyle shifted unhappily. “I’m not asking you not to, because that wouldn’t be right and because you wouldn’t stop anyway,” he said flatly, “but I am gonna tell you, it’s a pretty lousy idea. There’s no way the department’s not going to look bad here and I hate to think of you being part of it.”

  “Part of the mess or part of pointing it out?”

  “Both. I got two words for you: O.J.”

  I could almost see the gremlins scurrying at our feet, dragging the bricks and mortar in to start building a wall between us. “Do you want me to cancel with Donovan?”

  “Damn it, I want you to be a nurse.”

  Stunned, I stared at him while I tried to figure out a more intelligent response. I knew this was about safety, about conflicts of interest, but it was still hard to hear him saying he wanted me to be something other than what I was and certainly something other than what I really wanted to be. He took in my expression and shook his head, struggling with his own thoughts. I couldn’t bear to think where this conversation might go, so I wrenched it in a new direction. “Is this about the uniform?” I asked after a moment.

  “Yeah,” he said, trying to muster a smile, “it’s all about the uniform.”

  “The shoes, too?”

  “Nah, I hate the shoes.”

  We both stared at our own for a few moments. Battle lines had been drawn, but we were crawling toward the DMZ. Leave it to me to thump on a landmine to see if it’ll go off. “I so hugely admire what you do and I’m sorry Donovan doesn’t do it as well. But I want to understand as much about the case as I can.”

  Kyle’s eyes came up slowly, some of their warmth restored. “Don’t let him play you.”

  I nodded. “I won’t.”

  Kyle’s hand shot up behind my head, his fingers twisting in my hair as he pulled me to him with a sudden and almost painful firmness. Startled, I tilted my face wrong and our teeth collided. I committed to the kiss anyway, but he laughed and released me, throwing his arms out in surrender. “When our timing’s off, it’s really off.”

  I laughed back, tapping my front teeth, hoping we were on solid footing again, at least for the moment. “Good way to lose a tooth.”

  “Ask your new friend Donovan about that,” he said, stepping away from me.

  “About what? Are you telling me you’ve kissed Wally Donovan?”

  Kyle sighed and said, “Call me as soon as you’re done,” before heading down the sidewalk, vanishing around the corner before I could say anything else. I felt like I’d successfully swerved to avoid a pothole, though I wasn’t quite sure my wheels had regained traction yet or how close to the shoulder I was. But I was pretty sure we’d kicked up some serious gravel.

  I was still working on getting back to cruise control when I got upstairs to the office, only to be greeted by someone sitting at my desk. Since I come and go all day, people often snag my desk for a moment or two to grab a phone call, talk to the people who sit near me, or eat particularly fragrant lunches in a place where they won’t have to contend with the fumes for the rest of the day. So someone being in my chair wasn’t that startling, it’s just that the person in the chair usually works at the magazine. Today’s squatter worked at Willis Worldwide. At the reception desk.

  Having enraptured my neighbor Carlos, she was deep in conversation with him, the two of them leaning into each other so they were almost forehead-to-forehead. While she was being earnest, he was trying to figure out where her tattoo started. Nevertheless, it gave me a moment to rack my brain in a futile search for her name. Had she ever told me? I didn’t think so. Had I ever asked? My bad. Why was she here? I couldn’t imagine. Her System of a Down T-shirt and Diesel jeans were both tight enough that I could tell she wasn’t carrying a weapon, unless it was nestled down among the tentacles, and that gave me hope I could handle whatever had brought her to my desk.

  “Hope I’m not interrupting,” I said by way of greeting, setting my bag on my desk. She jumped up so suddenly Carlos almost snagged his nose on her décolletage, but he snapped his head back just in time.

  “Remember me? I’m Kimberly, from Ronnie Willis’ office? I’m sorry I came by without calling, it was kind of an impulse and I hope it’s okay because you sort of said I could,” she said as Carlos frowned at me for intruding on what he had thought was a promising discussion and rolled back to his own desk.

  “Of course, Kimberly, it’s nice to see you again,” I said, resisting the impulse to say her name three or four more times so she might think I’d known it all along. I couldn’t remember saying anything that might encourage her to drop by unannounced, but given the events of the morning, I wasn’t eager to disgruntle anyone. And if Kimberly was bringing me pearls of wisdom from Willis Worldwide, I was eager to check them out.

  “It’s just, there’s this situation I wanted to ask you about, these friends of mine, and I was coming over this way anyway, so …” She shrugged at the machinations of Fate and her acceptance of them. Intrigued and puzzled, I suggested we move to the conference room, disappointing Carlos but guaranteeing me as much privacy as one ever gets at Zeitgeist.

  Our conference room is a nook of blond wood and linen accents, a little homier than the Willis conference room. Kimberly ran her hand appreciatively along the highly polished table before curling up into a chair as though we were settling in for quite the chat. I thought about sitting across the table from her, make things official, but decided to sit next to her and make things more friendly. Much easier to pick people’s brains when they think you’re a friend.

  “So what can I do for you, Kimberly?”

  “I’ve been thinking I should talk to you, ever since you came in to see Uncle Ronnie.”

  I blinked slowly, not sure if I should betray surprise. While her incongruous presence at the front desk now made slightly more sense, I was sure she hadn’t mentioned they were related and neither had Ronnie. What other secrets might she have to share? “What did you want to talk to me about?” I asked, trying not to sound too hopeful.

  “This situation.” She clacked her tongue stud on her teeth a moment, weighing a decision. “With some … friends of mine.”

  “So you mentioned out front. Could you be more specific?”

  Clack, clack, another decision. “Remember that letter that we were talking about, the one you can’t tell me about who wrote it, but I still know?”

  I nodded enthusiastically to cover my disappointment that her business call was about column stuff, not about my interview with her boss. I’d be attentive enough to be polite, but move her gently but firmly along so I could get back to work. “Right.”

  “This is actually about someone else.”

  “Okay.” I glanced at the wall clock because glancing at my
watch would have been rude. She had three minutes to get to the point.

  Clack, clack. “Suppose you were working with someone you knew pretty well.”

  “Okay.”

  “Maybe even someone you were, like, related to.”

  I didn’t know how to make it clearer to her that she had my full attention now, short of announcing it on the office intercom. I leaned in like she was about to tell me a delicious secret. Oh please, oh please. “Okay.”

  “So you know things about this person that no one else knows.”

  “Such as?”

  “That his wife broke her mother’s best china platter over his head at Easter dinner because she found out he was having an affair and now the whole family is going to have to find a different place to have Easter because Granny’s not going to let them back under her roof all at one time, ever again, because she’s still pissed at them. Or something like that.”

  Plausible deniability is just as important in a family as it is in government. You promise to keep a secret, but then you realize it serves the greater good to let that secret slip, yet you want to still be able to sit at the table, should Granny ever invite everyone over again, and not feel like a traitor. Kimberly wasn’t playing around, she was making a deal with her conscience—and I was the beneficiary of that deal.

  “I bet it would be hard not to think about that every time you saw that person. Especially if it had only happened last Easter,” I added, looking to establish a time frame.

  She nodded, her mouth pulling into a thoughtful frown. “And then what if you found out that this guy you were so close to was about to start working with the person he’d had the affair with?”

  Granny could’ve broken the platter over my head at that point and I wouldn’t have even blinked. “I think I’d be concerned,” I answered carefully, “especially if the man and the woman were supposed to work together really closely. Like partners or something.”

  “Exactly.”

  I wanted to shout “Goal!” or at least throw my arms up in the touchdown signal, but I kept my hands folded in my lap and considered how it changed my view of the world to know that Ronnie Willis and Gwen Lincoln had had an affair as recently as last Easter. It meant passions were high and fresh when Garth and Gwen began their divorce and Garth and Ronnie began their merger. Did Garth know any of this? And was that why he was dead? “It’s a tricky situation,” I said after a deep breath.

  For the first time since we’d sat down, Kimberly looked me in the eye and I could see she was trying not to cry. This was hard for her, but I knew if I told her she’d done the right thing or said anything to verify directly that she was ratting out her uncle, she’d bolt and not only would I never get to talk to her again, she might tell her uncle he needed to stop talking to me, too. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “It’s not your responsibility to do anything,” I assured her sincerely, placing my hand on hers. She’d given me a fascinating new piece of information, the least I could do was try to help her find some peace of mind.

  “I don’t want to see anyone else get hurt.”

  I held my breath as I asked the next question, like a child approaching a butterfly poised on a flower. “Anyone else?”

  “It took his wife months to stop crying and it would be awful to have her go through that again if things started back up, don’t you think?”

  “Absolutely.” I dared take one step closer to the butterfly. “Did anyone else get hurt?”

  “Granny’s still pissed about the platter.”

  “What about the partner? The woman? Did anyone in her life find out? Or get hurt?”

  She started to shrug, then stopped with her shoulders drawn up so she looked, for a moment, as though she were drawing herself up to lunge at me. I held my ground and her gaze as solidly as I could.

  Her eyes got huge and wounded and wet. “That’s not what I’m saying at all. Not that I’m saying anything to begin with. I came to ask you your advice, how to handle this, not to have you think terrible things about him. I love Uncle Ronnie.”

  “Of course you do or you wouldn’t be here trying to find a way to help him,” I answered quickly. “You want to protect him, right?”

  “He didn’t do anything bad.” Tears coursed down her cheeks, dragging rivulets of mascara behind them. “I came here to find out how to keep him out of trouble, not get him into it.”

  I tried to ease her back into her fake perspective again and give her a chance to catch her breath. “But suppose there’s someone he knows, someone he used to be close to, who did do something. And now he’s getting close to her again. I can see why you might get worried.”

  The tears continued to flow as Kimberly tried to process the thought that Gwen Lincoln could have committed murder for dear old Uncle Ronnie. I squeezed her hand. “It’s nothing you put in my head,” I assured her, “I’d wondered it before.” She’d just helped me solidify the motive, but I couldn’t tell her that. Poor kid was upset enough already. “If you wrote me a letter, I’d tell you to keep the communication lines open with this man and make sure he knows that you want to help him. Don’t press him, just let him know you’re on his side. And stay away from her.”

  “When did you start giving relationship advice in the flesh, Molly, and what’s your going rate? Shouldn’t your clients pay the magazine directly?” Eileen had appeared in the conference room doorway, not unlike the monster swinging suddenly into view in Alien: You knew she was around here somewhere, but you tried to forget about her until she blocked your way out.

  “Excuse me, I’m just taking a moment to speak with a friend,” I told her, squeezing Kimberly’s hand again in reassurance.

  “Spend all the time you want with her. You’ve got more free time than you know what to do with because I’m killing the article.” She turned her icy grimace of a smile to Kimberly for a moment. “Waterproof mascara, dear. It’s not a new invention.” And she slithered out of sight again.

  Much as I would have liked to leave Kimberly there in the conference room and tackle Eileen in the hallway, I forced myself to be a grown-up and a professional and see Kimberly to the elevator, by way of my desk so she could grab some tissues and Carlos could give her his card. I made her promise she’d call me if she needed to talk about this again and I made her promise she wouldn’t talk to anyone else about it. “There are people who would use this against Ronnie,” I whispered.

  “You won’t?”

  “I won’t,” I promised, readjusting my theory to feature Gwen in a big fat solo.

  The moment the elevator doors closed, I flew back to Eileen’s office as fast as my kate spades could carry me. Suzanne made a noble effort to get up and bar my way—more for the martyrdom points than out of any genuine affection for Eileen—but I didn’t slow at all and Suzanne, smaller and less committed than I, ducked back out of the way and let me barge into Eileen’s office. She even closed the door behind me as I proclaimed, “Eileen, I just got started!”

  “And look at what you’ve already done!” Eileen grabbed her bony hips with her bony hands and stood her ground. I pulled up before I ran her down.

  “I’ve been interviewing people. And they’re the ones that keep bringing up the murder, not me,” I said, wanting her to appreciate the effort it was taking on my part to play by her rules. “As a matter of fact, someone just gave me a very tasty tidbit and I’d like to get to work at pursuing it because it’ll have a major impact on the article.”

  “There’s no rush, since it’s canceled.”

  “Eileen, please don’t do this.”

  Eileen shook her head in frustration, sending her chandelier earrings swinging madly. “I told you I didn’t want you turning this into something involving people charging into the office with guns.”

  I took a fraction of a moment to plug in those new coordinates. But now that I understood what her real issue was, we could fight more fairly. “The Jack Douglass incident was unfortunate. But I’m fine, thank you ve
ry much for asking. More importantly, I had nothing to do with his appearance this morning and he didn’t come here.”

  “No, but this could be his next stop.”

  “I don’t think he could care less about the two of us or even pick us out of a lineup. The really crucial thing here—I don’t think he’s involved in Garth’s death.”

  “That’s not what Ronnie Willis says.”

  Of course not. If Ronnie was covering for his lover Gwen, Jack made a very handy scapegoat. “When did you talk to him?”

  “He called me. Hysterical. Gwen told him about the whole drama and he thinks he’s next on some sort of corporate hit list.”

  Of course she did and of course he did. “Which, other than telling me a lot about Gwen and Ronnie’s relationship for the article, doesn’t have anything to do with our happy little group here at Zeitgeist.”

  “On the contrary. Ronnie wants Emile to cancel the gala and we cannot let that happen.”

  If I had to reset my coordinates one more time, I was going to fall off the map. Right over the edge where it says: Here there be dragons. And they draw a little picture of Eileen. Belching smoke.

  “Why not? It could be an intriguing development to include in the article on Gwen—the impact of scrapping the gala on the perfume’s launch, her new business profile, her relationship with Emile. It’s pretty interesting. And beyond maybe having to delay an ad for Success for one issue, we don’t have any investment in the gala anyway.”

  “Speak for yourself, you selfish girl.”

  Oh, yes. How foolish of me not to have Eileen’s debut as a runway model in the forefront of my mind where she believed it belonged. I once heard a story about an actor who played the doctor who escorts Blanche to the sanitarium at the end of A Streetcar Named Desire; legend has it he told friends the play was about a dedicated doctor who rescues a troubled young woman after she has a breakdown. The heart of the story all depends on where you’re standing on the stage. And where would Eileen ever be but front and center?

  But what was getting lost in Eileen’s solipsistic tantrum was what Ronnie thought canceling the gala would accomplish—for him, Gwen, and/or Emile. Ronnie apparently thought he’d be presenting himself as a glittering target to Jack Douglass or anyone else in on the grand conspiracy if he went out in public. But canceling was such a mistake for Gwen and Ronnie’s ascendancy to running the agency and hurtful for Emile, as one of their prized clients. “How could killing the article help that?”