Some Like it Lethal

by Nancy Martin

  He glanced up and actually smiled. “I’m not worried about her,” he said. “She’d survive a nuclear blast.”

  “Don’t pretend you’re worried about me.”

  “I am.” His hand stayed where it was, but the pressure changed to something more gentle. “You’re upset about your sister. And I don’t think you understand the seriousness of the situation Abruzzo’s got himself into this time, either.”

  “I don’t think he’s done anything wrong.”

  “Everybody in his family has. Gambling may be the least of it. He’s got to be mixed up in some of it, too. But he’s smarter than the rest and stays under the radar. The big fish swim deep, you know.”

  I tried to pull away, but his touch tightened again.

  “Nora,” he said. “You’ve already had one big tragedy in your life. Don’t let yourself get dragged into another one. Abruzzo is not a domesticated animal. Let me help you.”

  He radiated all the good virtues a policeman ought to have. Soft-spoken and gentle, yet with an underlying strength that felt bulletproof. Maybe he was a paragon among men, the kind good girls ran away from home to be with. I felt something stir inside me, but I couldn’t decide what it was.

  The phone rang.

  I disengaged my hand and got up to answer it, half fearing it might be Michael calling again just when Detective Bloom was here to take credit for tracking down America’s Most Wanted.

  But in my ear, Emma said, “It’s me.”

  “Oh.” I turned away so Bloom couldn’t see my face. “Hi, Rawlins. How are you?”

  “What?” Then she said, “Oh, shit. The cops are there.”

  “You’re right.” I hoped my tone sounded unsuspicious. “Where are you?”

  “I can’t say. And they’re telling me I can’t talk long or this call could be traced. I’m fine, okay?” her voice quavered and she laughed without amusement. “I’m not fine, but don’t worry about me.”

  “We are, though.”

  “I know. And I—I appreciate anything you can do to help. Please, I just need to know if I did something stupid. I can’t stand it if—” She caught a gasp, and I knew she was choking back tears. “Never mind. I’ll explain everything when things settle down.”

  “I’ll do what I can, you know.”

  “Thanks. I—Thanks, Sis. I’m okay, that’s all I wanted you to know. Don’t worry, really. I’ll call again when I can. I gotta go. I’ll be in touch.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell your mom you’re fine.”

  “Yeah, right,” she said, and hung up.

  I couldn’t believe I’d heard her voice. My hands were shaking when I disconnected the call.

  Bloom looked up at me and said, “It was her, wasn’t it?”

  Chapter 8

  Libby came downstairs, and using the full force of her goddess-given obnoxiousness, she managed to send the police packing.

  “Emma’s safe,” I told Libby when we were alone again and Spike was running around the kitchen peeing wherever he could smell the footprints of strangers.

  “We need to find her!”

  “No, we need to make things safe so she can come home by herself.” I picked up Spike and tried to think logically. “If we find her, the police will, too. For the moment, the best thing we can do is prove she’s innocent of murder as well as blackmail.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “I have some ideas. I just hope I don’t make things worse by asking the wrong people the wrong questions.”

  “Things can’t get any worse for Emma.”

  I thought Libby was wrong about that, but forcing her to see the light wouldn’t help the situation.

  I set my plan in motion by phoning Reed, and he came in the town car. Libby reluctantly went home to stand guard at her house in case the police showed up with a warrant to search there. Spike let himself be hastily stuffed into my handbag, and we set off on my mission.

  My first stop was Rittenhouse Towers, the condominium where Claudine Paltron lived with her husband Osgood, the Zapper Czar. Their doorman informed me that the Paltrons were out. Osgood had gone jogging—information the doorman managed to deliver without laughing. I knew better. No doubt Osgood had wandered up the street to find a Sunday brunch that served bourbon.

  Claudine, reported the doorman, had probably gone to the rehearsal hall. She had been carrying her work-out bag when she left. I needed to speak to Claudine about her blackmail experience. Most of all, I hoped she could guess who took the pictures. If Rush had been the blackmailer, surely he hadn’t taken the pictures himself—at least not the photographs in which he appeared. For my theory to work, he must have had an accomplice. And maybe Claudine knew who.

  Reed drove over to Broad Street and past the Academy of Music to the cultural district and a double town house that had been expensively refurbished into a no-frills rehearsal hall for the ballet company and two city dance troupes. To my surprise, the stage door was unguarded and unlocked on a Sunday morning. I slipped inside and found myself in an echoing stair-well. Above, I could hear the music of a rehearsal piano, so I went up the stairs.

  In the second-floor rehearsal hall, a perspiring and stormy-faced young man and an ethereal girl in a performance-quality tutu were pounding through the steps of a pas de deux with JoJo Welch, the ballet company’s longtime director. The pianist appeared to be reading a newspaper while the explosive JoJo shouted a tirade at the dancers. I did not disturb their work.

  The stairs had not been swept in years. I was struck by how sordid rehearsal spaces could yield such incredible beauty onstage.

  On the third floor, the staircase opened into a loungelike area with faded sofas and ragged overstuffed chairs for dancers to use between sessions. Three smaller rehearsal halls opened onto the lounge, but their lights were turned off.

  On one of the sofas lay an amazingly handsome young man. With one arm thrown over his head and his face turned toward the light slanting from the window, he appeared to be sleeping. He was dressed in expensive black trousers and a black turtleneck sweater with the sleeves pulled up. His Prada shoes hung over the edge of the sofa.

  He heard my steps and sat up.

  “Oh.” I said. “Hello, Dougie.”

  I was fleetingly sorry that I hadn’t found Claudine right away. But Dougie was almost as good. Maybe better.

  Douglas Forsythe sat up on one elbow, ran one manly hand through his shining hair and assumed a pantherlike pose right off the glossy pages of a men’s fashion magazine. He’d been a model in his youth. Now over thirty, he had been forced to seek other employment and occasionally found work as a personal trainer, I’d heard. He hoped to be “discovered,” went the rumor, and find himself wildly successful as a movie actor. Mostly, however, Dougie managed to survive without a formal job.

  “I’ll bet a thousand dollars,” Hadley Pinkham had once predicted, “that Dougie Forsythe ends up getting shot by somebody’s husband.”

  I should have taken the bet. Instead of being shot, Dougie became best known around town for being stabbed by the fifty-something socialite DaisyAnn Hicks when she discovered he’d given her one of the less dire sexually transmitted diseases. There was an immediate run on antibiotics among some ladies who regularly lunched at the Four Seasons, and DaisyAnn went to jail. During the trial coverage, Dougie took a liking to being a celebrity. He quickly ascended through the ranks of attention-starved rich women until he reached Claudine, whose fame satisfied his ambition.

  Personally, I didn’t see the attraction. Dougie’s smiling face was as handsome and empty as that of a game show host.

  “Hey,” he said. “Aren’t you the newspaper lady?”

  “Yes,” I replied patiently, having introduced myself to Dougie at least half a dozen times since taking my newspaper job. “I’m Nora Blackbird.”

  He snapped his fingers and got up with a photogenic smile. “Yeah, right. Howya doin’?”

  “I’m looking for Claudine, actually. Have you seen her
?”

  “She’s upstairs. Talking to some guy in his office. Secret negotiations.”

  Not so secret anymore. I decided Dougie must need jumper cables to start his brain every morning.

  Dougie sighed. “She said she’d be done in time to get some lunch, though. You want to wait?”

  “Thank you.” I wondered how tricky it might be to get him to talk about Claudine’s blackmail. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  “Nope.” He took a pack of Nicorette gum from his trousers pocket and popped a piece into his mouth. “You doing a story on Claudine for the paper?”

  “Just some fact-finding.” I sat on the edge of one of the chairs, a safe distance away. “How is she enjoying retirement?”

  “Oh, you know. She’s antsy. Needs something to do, she says. I told her I could keep her plenty busy, but you know how women are.” He strolled closer and tried his smile on me again.

  I managed not to fall at his feet and tear my clothes off. “She’s been under a lot of strain, I understand.”

  “Yeah, a lot.”

  “She’s lucky to have you for a friend.”

  Another grin, less attractive this time. I realized he was trying to get a read on my personality. “Sure, I’m good at relieving strain.”

  “She must have been very upset when the ordeal started.”

  “Oh, yeah.” He caught my drift and began to nod. “I’m not supposed to say anything about it, but when the first envelope came, she ran yelling and screaming over to my place like I had something to do with it. But I got her calmed down.”

  “You saw the envelope?”

  He winked. “I saw everything.”

  “A white envelope?”

  “And some very hot pictures, if you know what I mean.” Dougie preened at the memory. “We looked good.”

  I said, “Did Claudine guess who was behind the photographs? Who took them, I mean?”

  “Nope, we didn’t have any idea.”

  “You are a model, though. You must know dozens of photographers.”

  “Sure. Even a few of the guys who do art stuff. But I have no clue who did those pics of me and Claudine.”

  “Do you know when they were taken?”

  “At a party we went to at some guy’s house. Claudine and me ended up in a bedroom with all the coats, you know?” Dougie tried to look shy about his participation in the tryst. “We had a little fun, see, and I guess somebody saw us and snapped the pictures. I’d like to know who it was, actually. I’d take some copies. You know, for my portfolio.”

  “Do you remember who attended the party? Any of your photographer friends?”

  He shrugged. “Loads of people were there. A lot of dancers because it was after her final performance. I talked to a few of the girls while I waited around for Claudine to get rid of her husband.”

  “Do you remember anyone else? Was Kitty Keough at the party?”

  “Who?”

  I could check Kitty’s schedule on the newspaper computer to find out where she’d been the night of Claudine’s final curtain. “It doesn’t matter. Anyone else there? Besides people from the ballet? What about some donors?”

  “Sure, some of the usual people. Mostly old ladies.”

  “What about Rush Strawcutter? Do you know him?”

  “The guy who got killed at the foxhunt thing? No, I don’t remember him being there.” Dougie began to comb his fingers through his hair again. He knew he didn’t like my questions, but he wasn’t sure why.

  “Did you know Rush well?”

  “A little, maybe.”

  “I understand he and Claudine used to be close.”

  “That was a long time ago,” he snapped.

  Pushing Dougie’s buttons seemed to be working, so I said, “Rush was a nice guy. I imagine that he remained friends with Claudine after they broke up as a couple.”

  “They were never a couple. Not really.” Dougie’s brow began to glow with perspiration. “Claudine says they only talked.”

  “But Claudine is a sensual woman. I’m sure she and Rush—”

  “He wasn’t the full package. I’m the one who’s got everything she wants. If she wants somebody to talk to, she can talk to me now.” Dougie’s voice rose to an agitated whine. He stood very tall over me. “I’m the man. I’m the one she wants.”

  “I’m sure you are,” I said, rising to my feet. I wanted to put more space between us in case his temper flared. I didn’t know him well enough to guess his reaction if I really pressured him. I’d try again sometime when we weren’t alone. I checked my watch. I needed to phone Libby to learn if Emma had shown up yet, anyway.

  Besides, I felt as if just talking to Dougie was causing my brain cells to atrophy. “Well, thanks, Dougie. I appreciate your help.”

  He frowned. “You’re not going to wait for Claudine?”

  “I’ll catch her another time.”

  “Listen,” he said, stepping closer. “I hope you don’t tell her about what I said. I think I was supposed to keep quiet about that stuff.”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.”

  Suddenly, he was looming and seemed taller than before. Lower voiced, he said, “I mean it. She’d be upset.”

  “Really, Dougie, I won’t say a word.”

  Upon close inspection, I realized his eyes had a mean pinch at their corners. He said, “I’d do anything for her. So let’s just forget we had this little talk.”

  I felt instinctively that Dougie’s performance was just that: a performance. But I wondered uneasily how far he’d take the role.

  I said good-bye and hurried down the steps, wondering exactly what qualified as the “anything” he’d do for Claudine.

  Out on the street, a little flurry of snow was drifting in the cold afternoon air, transforming the city into a pretty snowglobe. I glanced both ways, then crossed the street to the curb where Reed had parked the town car.

  But just as I reached the car, another vehicle sped up to me and stopped in the middle of the street. A soprano horn beeped twice in a friendly greeting. I turned to look.

  “Hey, kitten.” Hadley had rolled down the window of his vintage MG convertible and leaned out attractively. “Want to have a hot buttered rum with me somewhere?”

  “Hadley, I didn’t think you got out of bed before five on Sunday afternoons.”

  “I just came from worshipping at my favorite religious institution, but Lord and Taylor didn’t have my shirt size today, can you imagine? Come on. Let’s go for a spin. I want to hear everything you’ve heard about Rush Strawcutter’s demise.”

  I hesitated. I wanted to call Libby, but somehow I knew Hadley would be a good source of information. I put up one finger to ask for a moment, then I spoke to Reed, thanking him through the open car window and telling him to go home for the night.

  Reed looked across the street at Hadley. “Who’s the guy?”

  “An old friend.”

  “I’m not supposed to leave you with anybody suspicious,” he reminded me.

  “Your jefe is on another continent,” I said, meaning Michael. “I’ve known Hadley since we were kids.”

  Reed looked unconvinced. “You call if you need me.”

  When he reluctantly agreed to go, I took Spike with me and crossed the street again.

  Half a minute later, I was sitting beside Hadley in his low two-seater sports car, cozy beneath the canvas roof. Spike popped out of my bag and braced his paws on the dashboard to look out the windscreen. His stumpy tail vibrated madly. Hadley rattled the gearshift, and we roared off down the street with the wind whipping snow through the badly fitted windows. Spike barked with excitement.

  In equally high spirits, Hadley was wearing a tan leather-collared field coat over wool trousers and a jaunty sort of cap that an English country gentleman might keep by his back door. Over the roar of the engine, he said, “This car is so old it doesn’t even have seat belts, so hang on for dear life. And it’s freezing, I know. There’s a lap blanket o
n the floor, if you need it. Or is that animal of yours enough to keep you warm?”

  “I’m fine.”

  He grinned attractively at the sight I made sitting with Spike in my lap. “You’re not one of those women who gets a dog just to see if she can stand to have children, are you?”

  “Think I could keep a baby in my handbag?”

  “You could, but he’d turn out more twisted than I am. Hold on!”

  I grabbed Spike and clutched the dashboard as we rounded the next corner, going too fast. In the next instant, the latch on the glove box gave way, and the door fell open. A snowstorm of little yellow papers fell into my lap. Spike forgot about the view and began to tear into the pile.

  “What’s all this?” I wrestled paper out of Spike’s jaws. “Hadley, these are parking tickets!”

  “Just stuff them back where they came from, kitten. I never met a parking ticket I felt like paying, but I love to see my collection grow. Oh, now and then I pay one, but I write someone else’s name on my check. I love playing with their heads.”

  “Wait—these are all unpaid?”

  He nonchalantly waved one hand, exquisitely clad in a buff leather driving glove. “Who has time to take care of details? What are you doing in town this morning, for heaven’s sake? Or have you been out all night, you little devil?”

  “I tried to see Claudine Paltron.”

  “The dead swan? What on earth are you seeing her about? Did she take the artistic director’s job or not? Honestly, by the time she accepts, that story will be such musty news nobody will care. She has no sense of timing. Never did. Did you see her?”

  “No, she was busy. Dougie was there.”

  “Ah, the Incredible Hulk. He belongs in a recliner with a Pabst in one hand and a television remote in the other. And he probably measures his penis when nobody’s looking.”

  I heard the anger beneath his mocking tone. “Why do you dislike him so much?”

  “Do I? I suppose I do. Because he’s nothing but an accessory. Claudine doesn’t need a pink poodle on a rhinestone leash when she’s got Dougie on her arm. The man is useless.” Hadley gave a short laugh. “Besides, he looks better in clothes than I do, which I cannot forgive.”