So Pretty It Hurts bwm-6

by Kate White

  “Like I said—you and Beau were both free agents really.”

  “Agreed—technically Beau did nothing wrong. But the whole thing just doesn’t feel right to me. He goes to Turkey and he’s conflicted about what he wants in regards to me, so the way he deals with it is to shag the dig-site slut? It just comes down to the fact that I don’t feel I really know Beau. He’s Beau Regan, International Man of Mystery.”

  “Bailey, dear, I wish I could help, but I think you’re just going to have to figure this one out for yourself,” Landon said. “Personally I’d kill for a man of mystery right now. I’d even take a man of misery. We all have to figure out what we can and cannot tolerate.”

  I couldn’t blame Landon for not having all the answers, but somehow I’d hoped he would. I slunk back to my apartment feeling absolutely morose. There was a concerned message from Beau on my cell wondering where in the world I was, since he’d found traces of me in the apartment but no explanation as to where I’d disappeared to. Then there was another message, clearly after he’d played his answering machine and realized what I’d heard, saying we needed to talk as soon as possible. I felt no urge to talk it out at the moment, mainly because I didn’t know where I stood in my own mind. Instead I pulled out the desk chair in my tiny home office and began to make a game plan about how I was going to save my ass at work.

  One possibility would be to confront Sherrie Barr directly. A search of the white pages online turned up no phone number, but property records indicated she owned a home on Brackton Street in Pine Grove. And yet it was hard to imagine that if I confronted her, she’d spit out the truth. Better to keep focusing on the houseguests; obviously one of them was involved.

  I picked up my cell phone and tried Jane again. This time she answered.

  “I was hoping we could meet first thing tomorrow,” I said. “I’ve stumbled across some important information that I thought would interest you.”

  I figured that bait would entice her regardless of whether she was the killer because she was anxious for dish she could load her book with.

  “Can you give me a hint at least?” she said in her typical crabby tone. “You make it sound so clandestine.”

  “I think it’s best to do it in person.”

  “I have to be at Devon’s apartment all morning tomorrow—I guess you could come by there.”

  “What’s going on there?”

  “I told her mother I’d take care of some stuff.”

  So Jane was in contact with Sherrie. Interesting tidbit. I agreed to meet her at ten and took down the address on Spring Street in SoHo. After I signed off, I left a message on the cell number Tory had given me for Tommy. I tried to sound kind of flirty—which I thought might help guarantee a response. As for Christian, I decided since he also hadn’t returned my call from earlier, I would just show up at his office tomorrow for a chat. I remembered from my Google search that First Models was also in SoHo, so I could combine a trip to Devon’s apartment with a pop-in at the modeling agency.

  I changed for bed and crawled under the covers, hoping that being wrung out with fatigue would guarantee I’d fall asleep almost instantly, but I ended up flopping around on the bed like a sturgeon hauled onto the deck of a fishing boat. I’d been dogged by insomnia for nearly two years after my divorce, and I dreaded a recurrence of the problem. But there was no fighting it tonight. My anxiety over my job situation, Beau’s Turkish delight, and the murder of Devon Barr formed a perfect storm that kept sleep at bay for hours.

  The next day I apparently looked as bad as I felt, because when Jane opened the door to Devon’s place, her eyes widened.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, her voice tinged with morbid curiosity rather than concern. “You’ve got, like, huge circles under your eyes.”

  “I’m just a little under the weather,” I said. “I was with a friend who had a cold and I might have caught it.”

  “Well, don’t give it to me,” she snapped.

  Interestingly, Jane looked better than when I’d last seen her. The snarly expression was gone, her hair appeared to have been tamed with a flatiron, and she had a spring to her step as she led me from the entrance hallway. Devon’s death seemed to be agreeing with her.

  “I read your story,” she said as we walked. “The one online. How come you didn’t write up the stuff I told you about Cap and Devon? You sure seemed juiced up when I mentioned it.”

  “To be perfectly honest, I haven’t been able to verify it. Cap vehemently denies it.”

  “Well, of course he would,” she said defensively. “He’s hardly going to cop to it.”

  “And you’re sure you saw it? Could they have just been talking?”

  “I saw what I saw,” she said crossly, but there was hardly a ring of truth to her tone.

  We were in the middle of the living area now, a huge, open loft space with honey-colored wood floors, white pillars, and an exposed sprinkler system on the ceiling. At the near end was a seating area with an L-shaped sofa, and at the far end, an ultra-modern, spare-looking kitchen featuring all stainless steel appliances. Between the two areas was a sleek metal dining table and eight chairs that looked like they might never have been used. A huge abstract painting took up one wall. And that was about it. The place looked barely inhabited.

  “How long had Devon lived here?” I asked.

  “About two years. I know—not very homey, is it? But she traveled all the time, so I guess that was her excuse. She has a place in London, and I hear that’s nicer. Not that she ever invited me.”

  “So her mother called and asked you to take care of a few things?” I said.

  “She says she wants to be sure all the valuables are protected. Yeah, right. She just wants to guarantee that no one else gets their dirty little paws on them. Plus, I’ve got household bills to go through. Cap asked me to stay on the payroll and take care of stuff for a while.”

  “So you’re dealing mainly with Cap, not Christian?”

  “Well, Cap was her manager,” she said, as if I’d failed the Supermodels 101 course in college.

  “I just wondered. I figured there’d be loose ends to tie up with the modeling agency.”

  “Cap will take care of that. Devon probably wouldn’t want me talking to Christian anyway.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “I think she’d gone off him lately.”

  So Jane was clued into the situation, too. “How do you know?”

  Jane shrugged. “She ignored him all weekend.”

  “And you have no idea why?”

  “Nope. And it doesn’t matter now, anyway.”

  “Tell me about Devon’s mother,” I said. “What’s she like, anyway?” I asked it evenly, not taking my eyes off Jane’s face.

  “TP type. You know, real trailer park. I don’t know if she actually lives in one—I only met the woman once, when she came to New York—but she had single-wide written all over her. Chain-smoker face like a dried prune.”

  “I hear the funeral’s private—are you going?”

  “I would soooo love to get out of it, but I have to show. It’s back in her hometown in Pennsylvania. I guess it’s about a two- or three-hour drive from here.”

  Of course, you’re going to go, I thought. You’ll be able to gather more grist for your tell-all. I was dying to ask if she knew where the service would be, but I didn’t want her to know I was giving any thought to possibly going out there myself.

  “Look,” she said. “Can we hurry this along? I thought you had some top-secret news you wanted to share.”

  “There are a couple of things I need to discuss with you.”

  “All right, why don’t you come back here?” she said, cocking her head toward the back of the apartment. “We can talk while I keep working.”

  I followed Jane, walking past an all-white master bedroom with clothes flung over nearly every inch of the bed and furniture. It was the only part of the apartment that seemed lived-in.

  “In here
,” Jane said, indicating what appeared to be a second bedroom that had been turned into a fairly basic office. There was a simple desk with a flat-screen computer, several filing cabinets, and cardboard boxes haphazardly strewn near the walls. A small window offered a view of the rooftops of SoHo, studded with shingled water tanks and soot-covered chimneys. Jane plopped down into the chair at the desk and motioned that I should help myself to a white folding chair.

  “Soooo?” Jane said impatiently as she tore open a piece of mail.

  “I don’t know if you’ve heard the news yet. Devon died of heart failure due to her anorexia.”

  “I guess us fatties don’t have it so bad after all. So is that why you came here? To tell me something I already knew?”

  “No, but before I share, I wanted to pick your brain. I’m wondering if something might have exacerbated Devon’s condition.”

  “Like what?” Jane said. “She saw outtakes from a photo shoot and decided she needed to crash-diet?”

  “No, not exactly. Certain drugs can make the condition worse. Remember we talked about the ipecac? Well, diuretics can create problems, too. Did you ever know Devon to take any?”

  “Nope.”

  “And you never saw anything like that in her bathroom?”

  “There were two places that were off-limits to me. Her purse and her bathroom. So if she was stockpiling anything like that, I wouldn’t know.”

  “There’s no harm in taking a look in her bathroom now, is there?” I asked.

  “Shouldn’t the police be the ones checking it out?”

  “Well, they’re over two hours away. And if we find anything, we can turn it over to them. It will help in their investigation.”

  “Sure,” Jane said after a moment. She seemed curious suddenly, and I wondered if she was thinking that a discovery could help her book pitch. “Why not? The master bath is off her bedroom.”

  I followed her back down the hallway and into the bedroom. While I stepped gingerly around some of the clothes on the floor, Jane kicked stuff away with her feet as if it was trash.

  “The cleaning lady comes in later today,” she said. “Sometimes I think Devon liked to leave her as big a mess as possible.”

  The bathroom was huge, white, and spa-like, and the entire area behind the sink was wall-to-wall mirror. Just as in the bathroom Devon had used at Scott’s place, there were upended beauty products scattered on the countertop. I glanced down at them, searching for any kind of prescription drugs, but there were only cosmetics, skin care products, and an ashtray full of cigarette butts.

  “What about in the medicine chest?” I asked, cocking my head toward it. Jane yanked open the door. It was crowded with more beauty products, but the middle shelf was devoted only to drugs. There was Ambien and Zantac and a couple of bottles of over-the-counter painkillers. No sign of any diuretic. A large white bottle was behind the front row, and delicately I reached behind and plucked it out. Prenatal vitamins, prescribed by a Dr. David Stein on Park Avenue. Date: October of last year. As I glanced toward Jane to check out her reaction, I saw her dark eyes widen in surprise.

  “What the hell?” she asked, gawking at the label. I noticed that her face now had a sheen of sweat, as if the space was making her feel overheated. “Oh, wait, don’t some chicks take these to make their hair glossy?”

  “Actually Devon was apparently pregnant last year, and then miscarried,” I explained. “I take it you didn’t know.”

  “What? No, no, I—I didn’t know,” she sputtered. I could almost see her brain churning.

  This might be the moment, I realized, to go for a blunt approach and see what Jane coughed up.

  “That tidbit should be of real interest to you, right?” I said. “I mean, it’s a nice little element to add to your book.”

  She’d still been staring at the label, but now she spun her head toward me in surprise, her nostrils flared.

  “I hope you’re not going to deny it, Jane,” I said. “You’ve been busy for weeks trying to sell a book about Devon.”

  She smirked and shrugged a shoulder.

  “So what?” she said. “It’s a free world and I can write what I feel like writing—just like you can.” Her tone was a mix of defensiveness and defiance, like a shoplifter who’s convinced she deserved the stolen clothes as much as the rich girl who would have paid for them.

  “Except that I’m not making stuff up so that it comes across as more salacious,” I said quietly.

  “What are you talking about?” she demanded. I could tell she was getting agitated. The sheen of sweat on her face seemed to be glistening even more now.

  “You invented the stuff about Cap and Devon. Probably to make Devon’s life seem juicier.”

  “Oh, please,” she said. “You’re just jealous ’cause I beat you to the punch with the book.”

  I shifted my position slightly, feeling less than comfortable with her in the contained space of the bathroom. And then I noticed something—the ripe, sour smell of sweat. It was the exact same odor that had been thrown off like a stink bomb by the person who sent me tumbling down the stairs.

  Chapter 14

  Rank sweat was rank sweat, and it might be hard to tell one person’s from another, but a little voice in my head was screaming that it was Jane I’d smelled Sunday night.

  Any satisfaction I felt from my eureka moment was trounced by the fact that I was currently alone in a bathroom with her. If she’d purposely shoved me down the stairs, she might not think anything of harming me now, and I could feel my heart starting to pump harder, urging me to hightail it the hell out of the apartment.

  “I guess the bottom line is that we’ve all got to do what works for us,” I said as casually as I could manage. I began to ease my way toward the door, hoping she wouldn’t sense my sudden panic. “From one writer to another, though, I’d be careful. People sometimes sue if you make them mad enough about what you’ve written.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” she said sarcastically. Please, I thought, as I took a step out of the bathroom, don’t let her tear out the shower rod and try to crack my skull with it—or go for my jugular with the cuticle nippers. Thankfully, she didn’t seem to be reading my mind.

  “Look,” she said. “Like I said, I’ve got work to do. . . .”

  “Understood,” I said. She led me back to the front door, and as soon as I stepped into the hall, she slammed the door hard behind me.

  I felt a rush of relief. I jabbed at the elevator button several times, knowing I wouldn’t feel totally safe until I was out on the street.

  On my way to the apartment I’d noticed a small French café just up the street, and now I hurried over there. I found a table, ordered a cappuccino, and took out my composition book. I jotted down my conversation with Jane as word for word as I could remember.

  The more I thought about it, the more sense it made that Jane was the one who’d scratched the barn doors. The vandalism had occurred roughly an hour after Jane left my room, an hour after I’d told her that Devon’s saga lacked the kind of layers a story needs to go big-time. Jane probably decided a scary, middle-of-the-night swashbuckler during the weekend Devon died would help make the story more enticing to potential publishers. Hell, it might even help get the whole thing optioned for a movie.

  What I didn’t have any sense of was whether Jane had slipped the Lasix into Devon’s water. Interestingly her sweat attack in the apartment had occurred when I’d brought up the diuretic, but on the other hand, some things didn’t add up. If Jane had killed Devon by doctoring her water, it would have been smart to lie low afterward, not create any more drama—and let everyone assume that Devon had died naturally. By tearing through the halls at night and trying to terrify people, Jane had fostered the idea that something sinister was going on at the barn. Which meant to me that she might have been Zorro, but not the murderer.

  And yet, if she was nutty enough to run around in the dead of night in a poncho with a rusty farm tool, she might not be ratio
nal at all.

  I’d been staring off as I mulled all of this over, and for the first time my eyes snagged on something across the room: a guy with longish brown hair, drinking an espresso at one of the small wooden tables. He looked a little like Beau, and suddenly the events from last night, which I’d temporarily sandbagged from entering my brain, all came flooding back. I’d been avoiding Beau, but sooner or later I was going to have to return his calls. He’d made it clear that he wanted to talk things over. I just didn’t know where talking was going to get us. After Devon’s death, I’d brushed away my worries about his trip to Arizona—because it felt so good to share with him all the awful stuff about the weekend—but the problem hadn’t really gone away. The bottom line was that no matter how much time I spent with Beau, he continued to seem elusive and mysterious to me. He was even planning on spending the holidays with his family rather than me. That didn’t seem like a man who was fully committed.

  I checked my watch. As I’d determined earlier, it was just a short walk to First Models, and this seemed like as good a time as any to ambush Christian with a visit. But before I headed over there, I decided to phone Beau. I just couldn’t bear going any longer without confronting the situation.

  No one was sitting close to me in the café, so I took out my BlackBerry and made the call. I didn’t hear any background noise when he answered, which suggested he was still at home rather than at his studio.

  “Hi, it’s me,” I said, not knowing how else to begin.

  “Where are you, anyway?”

  “SoHo.”

  “So you’re not home, after all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I dropped by your place about fifteen minutes ago. The doorman said you’d gone out, but I thought you might have bribed him into saying that if I came by. I suspected you were really up in your apartment stewing.”

  “Stewing? That expression kind of implies I’m doing a slow boil over something unnecessarily.”

  “No. I was just acknowledging that you’re obviously pissed. But to just go incommunicado makes me think you’re making a lot more of this than you should be.”