When the alarm clock went off, I woke without any answers and with a crick in my neck. I subjected myself to the hottest shower I could stand, which loosened my neck a little but didn’t help with the holes in my theory. I forced a frappuccino and a nectarine into my stomach and then forced my body into a khaki skirt and a lawn blouse, hoping that some chemical interaction between all those natural fibers would somehow infuse me with the energy and goodwill I needed to go forth. Before I headed out, I called the hospital and was told that both Mr. Willis and Mr. Mulcahey were resting comfortably; I assumed that “comfortably” was more the hospital’s term than theirs.
I debated about calling Kyle and leaving another message, but I knew I could trust Ben to have delivered the one last night, which left the ball in Kyle’s lap. I was just going to have to wait. Not a hobby of mine.
But other people like to wait. Or wait for me, anyway.
In reviewing the night before, I’d decided I needed to have another conversation with Kimberly, Ronnie’s niece, and figure out why she was feeding some information to Peter and some to me. I wasn’t buying the worried niece persona anymore. She wanted something. Everyone in the solar system that rotated around Garth Henderson seemed to be constantly angling, looking for the move ahead, the step up, the inside information.
Maybe on some level all human interaction is a series of negotiations: What will it take to make us work together, sleep together, stay together? But it seemed to me that, for good or ill, a significant aspect of the social charter requires wrapping the bartering in a certain amount of sincerity, honest emotion, and a desire for meaningful interaction. With this group, it was the bare rapaciousness that was unnerving. And the thought that only micrometers separated them from anyone else I knew. Myself included.
I tried not to dwell on that last thought as I made my way to Willis Worldwide, opting out of my usual sport of people watching to ponder Kimberly’s angle on all this. Was she acting on behalf of her aunt, in defense of her uncle, or did she have some interest all her own?
I was so intent on those thoughts, I was walking with my head down to focus. Not the way to walk down the street in Manhattan. It’s like a wide receiver running his route with his head down—you miss too many options, too many threats, and you can’t plan an alternative route in time if you’re blocked. I should’ve kept my head up. Then I would have seen Lindsay coming.
Instead, I ran into her before I even realized she was there and started apologizing before I knew it was her. Not that I stopped apologizing, but the shock of recognition made me stammer a moment.
“Molly. Small world!” she said cheerily, as though we’d last seen each other at a spring tea to celebrate someone’s engagement.
“Tiny,” I agreed. Now, I’m a big fan of synchronicity—things happening for a reason—and had Lindsay been a man on whom I had a crush, I would have taken this third chance encounter in a row as a sign from Heaven that I should pursue him vigorously, or at least ask him to lunch. But because she was, instead, a woman affiliated with a murder I was investigating, I took it as a sign that there was no chance to this at all. “Where are you headed?”
“I’m picking up some material from Ronnie’s team for a new account,” she said, leaving me to consider asking why neither office had assistants or messengers available for such tasks. She pointed down the street. “I’m also picking up my shoes for tonight.”
Tonight. The gala. I couldn’t even summon up a smile. Did I really have to go? I didn’t have shoes or a dress, I hadn’t spoken to my date in over twelve hours, and the prospect of watching my boss strut her stuff, no matter how noble the cause, was less than enticing.
Lindsay tilted her head curiously, scanning my face. “You are still coming, aren’t you?” Her voice had gone a little tight and her smile, a little stiff. I knew it was a big night for the agency, with the launch of the perfume, but I couldn’t see how it could matter all that much to Lindsay if I came or not. “You don’t have a conflict, do you?” she pressed.
Her hand found my arm and squeezed harder than necessary. I rocked back half a step, jostled off balance less by her gesture than by the two thoughts in my head. Why is it important to you? and You’re following me. Quickly, they folded into one thought: What is so important to you that you’re following me?
We hadn’t crossed paths because of synchronicity, coincidence, or planetary influences. We’d crossed paths because Lindsay was following me. She and her husband hadn’t walked by the Carlyle on the way to Girasole coincidentally, she’d dragged him by because that’s where Kyle and I were. She’d brought Wendy to the Lenox Lounge because she knew I was there with my friends. And now she was here, in front of Ronnie’s office, because she knew where I was headed. Had she revealed herself to keep me from going in? Or to find out what I’d deduced since last night?
She shifted the pressure on my arm, trying to persuade me away from the entrance to Ronnie’s building. “Want to see my shoes for tonight?” she asked. “I don’t splurge on shoes very often, but I couldn’t resist this pair. They make me wish I was wearing a shorter dress, so they’d show more.” Why didn’t she want me to go in? Was she protecting Ronnie now, too? Was part of Lindsay and Wendy teaming up together last night to present a unified front in his defense?
I eased my arm from her grasp. “I really shouldn’t play hooky,” I said, inwardly grimacing at how phony it sounded. “But I can’t wait to see your shoes tonight.”
“Then you are coming,” she said, relieved.
“As long as I get my work done and Eileen doesn’t ground me,” I assured her.
She gave an expansive, sympathetic sigh. “Bosses will make you crazy.”
She ran her hand through her hair while I considered pulling mine out by the handful. “Hard to find one worth adoring,” I said.
Her hand froze in midsweep. I braced myself for an angry retort or a heartfelt speech, but it was just that the charm on her bracelet was snagged in her hair. I stepped closer to give her a hand, but she turned away a little, gesturing with her other hand that she could handle it herself. As she did, my eye was caught by how the link connecting the charm to the bracelet caught the light. Or didn’t, actually. The link was dull. Cheap. It didn’t match the rest of the bracelet. As though the charm had been broken off and then replaced somewhere other than Tiffany. Quickly. Before anyone could notice it was missing.
I made myself breathe evenly and not leap to any conclusions. There are lots of ways for a charm to get pulled off a bracelet. There are a number of rationales for having a Tiffany bracelet repaired somewhere other than Tiffany. There are plenty of reasons for killing your boss.
Lindsay misinterpreted my freeze for awkwardness. “It’s okay, I can get it,” she said, tugging for a moment and then just pulling until a little knot of her hair came free with it. She unwound the hair from the bracelet with sharp little twists of her hand. Looking around for an appropriate place to discard it, she didn’t find anything, so she tucked it in her jacket pocket. A place for everything and everything in its place, as my grandmother would say. Made me wonder what else Lindsay might have been capable of disposing of.
Picking a suspect on the rebound was certainly more dangerous than picking a man that way, but I suddenly couldn’t take my eyes off Lindsay. Had I mistaken immense self-control for calm, since I’m not terribly familiar with either one, and overlooked her completely?
Everyone thought so highly of her, relied on her, yet they kept her at arm’s length. The married one. The maternal one. The different one. As the Girls all cooed and clawed their way into Garth’s good graces by way of his bedroom, she’d been shut out. How maddening would that be, to see your peers succeeding because there was a shortcut you couldn’t take? People leap over a variety of moral boundaries in the course of a day, but this was a huge one. I could see why she hadn’t crossed it, but I could also see how it would strike her as unfair. Especially if there was the rumor that someone was going to be elevated after the merger. Sh
e’d told me she and Daniel were frantic about money. Still, the slope from frustrated to homicidal was pretty steep. Had she really climbed it?
Suddenly self-conscious that I might be staring, I plastered on a smile. “Thanks for the invite, but I really gotta go. So cool running into you.” Cool enough to give me goose bumps.
Her weight shifting uneasily, Lindsay smiled in return. “Absolutely.”
I shuffled a bit myself, the two of us in an awkward pas de deux, choreographed by anxiety. She didn’t want to head in any direction until she knew where I was headed and I was trying to figure out where to go so I could double back around and follow her. I wanted to be wrong about her because I’d enjoyed her company and I’d envied her relationship, but if I was wrong, I needed to find out as soon as possible.
Especially because she was picking up on it. “Are you okay, Molly?” she asked, stepping in a little and trying to take my arm again. I leaned away more than stepped away, not wanting to offend her or tip my hand any more than I might already have done.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just thinking of all the things I need to do. How ’bout you?”
“Great.”
“Great.”
“Good.”
“Yeah.”
We both paused in our fluttering at the same moment, locking eyes. What a fascinating place the world would be if we all said exactly what we were thinking all the time. If we didn’t withhold and lie and dissemble and sugarcoat, just laid the truth out, plain and unadorned, and people responded in kind. Would the planet be a calmer, happier place because we were all living in harmony? Or would it be calmer and happier because we’d all killed each other off ages ago?
“I’m going to have to come back here later, might even have to wait until Monday,” I said, breaking our face-off as gently as possible. “So glad I ran into you. I need to go get a dress. See you tonight.” I grabbed her hand to squeeze it in farewell and was surprised by how clammy it was.
She pulled her hand away quickly and gestured back over her shoulder. “Shoes,” was her farewell as she finally turned and hurried away. I moved to the edge of the sidewalk, as though preparing to hail a cab, but folded my arms and watched her. Watched her pass two shoe stores, then cross Madison. I was sure she hadn’t been imprecise about the direction of the shoe store, but that she’d lied to me about where she was headed. So why lie and where was she going?
I went north to cross Madison there, watching Lindsay the whole time, to the point that I tripped over a stroller being pushed by a nanny who called me all sorts of names in a language I couldn’t even identify and jostled more than my share of equally preoccupied walkers. Fortunately, no one took great offense or spilled their coffee on me. The only real damage I caused was snagging a guy’s iPod earpiece wire on my purse and unplugging him from his morning’s podcast, which displeased him greatly. But I couldn’t stop to apologize because Lindsay was disappearing down a side street.
Women in Manhattan invest a great deal of time, money, and energy in standing out in a crowd, but at that moment, I would have forked over big bucks for gunmetal sweats like they made us wear in college P.E., anything to blend in and become invisible as I hurried after Lindsay. But then I realized, dressed like that I’d probably stand out even more than I did now because there were plenty of my peers dressed like me out and about, but I hadn’t seen plain sweats in a long time. This was Big Apple camouflage: Dress like an individual to blend in.
Tailing someone on foot was new to me and I wasn’t sure how close to get. Not that she was watching over her shoulder; she was walking quickly, head down. As I began to worry that she really was only shopping for shoes and other items for the gala, she stopped. Not in front of a store but in front of a church.
It squeezed the breath out of me for a moment, considering that Lindsay was being driven to the confessional by her concern that I was figuring out her culpability in Garth’s death. Much as I wanted her to confess to me, I understood the impulse to settle accounts in her heart and soul first. But it didn’t look like an easy decision. Even from a block away, I could read her indecisiveness as she paused at the bottom of the broad sweep of the front stairs. After a moment, she steeled herself, ran up the stairs, and disappeared inside.
I drifted closer to the church myself, then kicked myself for my lofty spiritual digression. She wasn’t there to confess, she was there to see her husband. The church was St. Aidan’s, where Daniel’s group, Rising Angels, had its offices. I’d actually been to the church before, but had been so intent on following Lindsay this time I hadn’t recognized the block. She could have a million different reasons to drop in on her husband in the middle of the day. Could her actual reason have any significance to me? How close did I dare go to find out?
Now I was the one who swayed indecisively outside the church. There was no way I could pass it off as coincidence that I’d shown up at the church moments behind Lindsay and I couldn’t think of any questions to manufacture as a reason for following her that didn’t have big “I think you’re guilty” balloons tied to them. Was there some angle I could present that entailed my needing to talk to Daniel, something about the impact of Garth’s death on the families of his employees, the ripple effect of a homicide? No, if it felt like a reach to me, it was going to read like one to them.
Still, I couldn’t walk away. The concept of Lindsay being the one who snapped and took out her frustration, resentment, or something I hadn’t even considered yet was growing more compelling by the moment and I couldn’t leave without trying to gather more evidence. Hoping I’d think of something clever and enticing to say when I saw Lindsay and Daniel, I crossed the street and tried to keep my heart from thumping out of my chest as I started up the stairs.
I was seven steps up when I heard Lindsay’s voice at the top. A man’s voice, presumably Daniel’s, answered her. The center of my brain that improvises excuses and alibis went numb and the resolve flushed out of me like sweat. Glancing around madly, I backed down the stairs in search of some nook in which to conceal myself. Better yet, I spotted a street-level door to the left of the staircase. A weathered wood-burned sign over the doorway read: THRIFT SHOP.
I flung the door open and stepped in, just as Lindsay’s and Daniel’s voices dropped to my level. I stayed at the door, my hand wrapped around the knob, trying to catch my breath and praying they hadn’t seen me. I wasn’t proud of panicking, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t play my hand too soon for a variety of reasons—setting a killer off again being pretty high on the list.
After a moment, I decided Lindsay and Daniel hadn’t seen me, but just to be sure, I pried my hand off the doorknob and walked into the store. It was a claustrophobic warren of clothing, home furnishings, knickknacks, and books. Three older women with matching permed white hair and complementary cardigans sat stiff-backed behind the small cashier’s counter, two crocheting and one knitting. They were watching me oddly, but who could blame them since I was acting oddly. I smiled apologetically, attempting to put them at ease. “May I look around?”
The smallest of the three, a pink dumpling of a woman, nodded emphatically. “Help yourself, sweetheart. That’s why we’re here.” She gestured with a knitting needle that could easily impale me if I chose to misbehave. I couldn’t be sure if that was her intended message, but I wasn’t about to challenge her.
I thanked them and, surveying the various groupings and wondering which to poke through first, took a deep breath. Hovering above the musk of dust and wool and flannel, there was a strident layer of something so sharp and bright, it nearly made me dizzy. While I couldn’t pinpoint its source, there was no doubt of its identity. It was, as they say, the sweet smell of Success.
I turned back to them slowly, not wanting to make too much a deal of this or to startle the little one with the big needle. “Do you have perfume here?”
The middle one, a slender, reedy creature, tapped on the counter with her crochet hook. “A few bottles of White Shoulders and the
re’s half a carton of Britney Spears in the back.”
“But I smell something else,” I said, surprised that they didn’t.
“Oh, that,” the little one said. “Someone spilled something somewhere, but we couldn’t find it.” She pointed with the needle again, this time past me toward the outside wall of the shop. “Probably in those bags that haven’t been unpacked yet.”
Against the wall, a collection of plastic and paper bags were stacked in casual piles. Remembering the bags on Lindsay’s office sofa, I drifted toward the heap. “Any reason they haven’t been unpacked?” I asked lightly.
“Youth group’s supposed to do that,” the middle one said with a disapproving frown. “Haven’t gotten around to it.”
The third one, a solid block of a woman who hadn’t stopped crocheting since I’d entered, snorted. “Worthless bunch of snot-nosed brats.”
“Mind if I look through them?” I asked, still drifting toward the pile. The scent grew stronger as I drew closer, unless I’d fallen prey to wishful sniffing. I couldn’t decide which was headier: the scent or the possibility it was linked to Lindsay, the only point of intersection between the perfume and this church I could plot on my mental graph paper.
The Fates conferred wordlessly, then turned back and shrugged at me in unison. I took that as permission and knelt beside the heap. The smell evenly saturated the air here, so there was only one thing to do. Grab a bag and start digging.
I paused long enough to call Cassady and get voice mail, then call Tricia and get her. “Interested in a little shopping?” I asked. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that the ladies had returned to their sewing and whispering to each other.
“Let me check if I’m still breathing. Yes.”
I explained where I was and she said she was on her way. I pocketed the phone and unknotted the top of the first bag.
When Tricia arrived twenty minutes later, looking freshly laundered and coiffed, I was feeling stale and musty. The ladies perked up at her entrance; I don’t know why, since there was absolutely nothing about her Missoni ensemble that proclaimed her as a thrift shop habitué. Then again, Tricia does have that effect on people. Including me.
Killer Deal Page 23
