Killer Cocktail

by Sheryl J. Anderson

  “What aren’t you telling us?” I asked her gently.

  “You’re the ones whispering.”

  I tapped her ragged thumb. “But you’re the one shredding.”

  She hid her hands behind her back like a small child. “How bad do you think it looks for Davey?”

  “The significant other is always the first suspect,” I told her. Kyle had taught me that. “But they’ll move on soon enough. The important thing is, we know he didn’t do it.”

  Tricia paused just a second too long before she nodded. That’s what the dark look was all about. She didn’t know he didn’t do it. Based on a lifetime of stolen toys, borrowed cars, and unpaid loans, you can believe a sibling capable of just about anything. Fine. But murder?

  I tried to tell myself I was overreacting, that grief had slowed Tricia’s reflexes, but Cassady was more wide-eyed than I was. “Tricia,” she whispered with a ragged edge of disbelief.

  Tricia shook her head viciously. “I know, I know, it’s crazy. I’m crazy. It just looks so bad.”

  “So does this.” Cassady gestured to the three of us, huddled between the Bösendorfer grand piano and the French doors as if we were planning which Andrews Sisters song to open our set with. The argument by the phone was still going on and Rebecca seemed to have nodded off against Richard’s chest. No one was even paying attention to what we were doing. “It looks like we’re plotting.”

  “That’s a guilty conscience talking. What would we be plotting?”

  “The best way to break it to Detective Ice Queen that she’s nuts to think David did this.” Cassady gave Tricia a stern look, lest she weaken and give in to paranoia again. “Because he didn’t.”

  Tricia nodded right on cue this time. “I know he didn’t.” She shifted her eyes to me and placed her small, cool hand on my arm. “What can we do?”

  I actually thought before I spoke. It wasn’t like I’d be volunteering to solve the whole mess. I could just call Kyle, ask a couple of technical questions, and try to be helpful. Participate on a consulting basis, as it were. “Let me call Kyle real quick.”

  Cassady glanced at her watch. “Things are back on solid footing, then.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You’re comfortable calling him at this hour of the morning when he knows you’re away for the weekend.”

  “I didn’t say I was comfortable. I said I was going to do it.”

  I slid my cell phone out of my pocket and eased out the French doors. The night breeze would have been more welcome if it hadn’t also carried the sounds of the crime scene investigation still going on at the pool. The individual sounds of people moving, talking indistinctly, taking pictures, zipping things open and shut, were mundane enough until you let them all come together and remembered what they were down there doing. Then the sounds became as oppressive as bombs exploding.

  I punched the speed dial for Kyle’s apartment, then canceled it before the “connecting” message had a chance to come up. Hesitating, I polished the display screen against the side of my cami. Was it presumptuous of me to call him at this hour of the night, even though it was purely for a technical reason and not, by any stretch of the overactive imagination, to check up on him? He’d understand that this was just appealing to his area of expertise. He might even find it flattering. Right?

  I punched the speed dial again. The machine picked up after only two rings. I checked my watch: 2:15 A.M. His message said, “I’m not here.”

  He often turned the ringer way down on the phone when he was sleeping, but left his cell phone on the nightstand in case they needed him at the station. I told the machine, “I hate to do this, but I’m going to call your cell and wake you up.”

  I speed-dialed his cell and prepared to be gentle and apologetic when his groggy voice said hello. But the first thing I heard when the phone picked up was voices. Lots of other voices. And when he said, “Hello,” it wasn’t groggy. It was energetic. He was having fun. At 2:15 A.M. Somewhere. Other than where I was.

  “Hi.”

  “I’m sorry, I thought I was calling you at home.” I couldn’t identify the background voices or tell if the hint of music was from a stereo or a jukebox.

  “Then why’d you call my cell?”

  “Because I called your apartment and got the machine. I thought you were asleep.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Clearly.”

  I had a sudden dreadful thought that he was working. “I don’t mean to interrupt.”

  “You’re not interrupting.”

  A clear female voice cut through all the background noise to call out, “Busted.” As much as I wanted to imagine the voice belonging to a female police officer about to inform a suspect of his rights, I highly doubted that even a woman who loved her job would say “Busted” to a criminal with that teasing, singsong tone.

  Kyle ignored the voice and asked me, “What’s up?”

  Cassady stepped out through the French doors. “What’d he say?” she asked urgently.

  “Nothing yet,” I told her.

  “So why the call?” Kyle asked.

  “I was talking to someone else,” I told him, wishing Cassady’s voice were deep enough to pass for male over a cell phone. I didn’t want to be jealous; I just wanted to know exactly who had said “Busted,” what she was wearing, and where both her hands were at this exact moment.

  “Everything okay?” he asked calmly.

  “I’m having a great time, how ’bout you?”

  Cassady rolled her eyes. “I can’t believe you!” I glared at her with all the irritation I felt for the Busted Babe and she huffed, folding her arms over her chest.

  “I’ve had better,” Kyle said.

  I wondered what BB thought of that evaluation. “I just have one question and then I’ll let you go.”

  “I’m not in a rush.”

  “I am.”

  “Okay.” He seemed amused. I wasn’t.

  “What does chlorine do to fingerprints?”

  I thought I heard the chair scrape as he sat up straight. His voice got taut. “What happened?”

  “Just a technical question.”

  “In my line of work, not yours. What happened?”

  “I don’t have a lot of time.”

  “What happened?” he repeated, more slowly and, from the sound of it, through gritted teeth.

  “There’s just a situation I’m trying to clarify.”

  “You still at Mrs. Malinkov’s? I’m on my way.”

  “I didn’t ask you to do that.”

  “Are you asking me not to?”

  Boobytraps are effective because you don’t see them, no matter how well you think you know the terrain. I scrambled to keep my footing. “No, I’m asking you about chlorine and fingerprints.”

  “And you want to know because … ?” I thought I heard Cassady ask.

  I waved her off. “Tell you in a minute,” I said, looking up to glare at her again. Cassady shook her head and pursed her lips to indicate that she had, in fact, said nothing. I sighed, realizing my mistake. “Thanks, talk to you later,” I said to Kyle and flipped my phone shut while he was in mid-exclamation.

  Detective Cook put her hand on my shoulder and said, “How about you tell me now?”

  4

  Dear Molly, Is turnabout really fair play? Just because I call the man in my life (notice my agile avoidance of the term “boyfriend”) in the middle of the night, does that give him the right to call me back before dawn? And just because I suspected him of an encounter with a UFO (Unidentified Female Opportunity), should he be able to perform telephonic bed checks on me? Will I be less grumpy about all this sixteen ounces of coffee from now? Signed, Sleepless Beauty

  I was determined to answer the phone with a sweet, pleasant voice. Even though said voice would be a complete sham because I felt miles away from both sweet and pleasant, but, as I told Cassady, staying up all night with a cop will do that to you.

  “Really? I thought staying up
all night with a cop made you happy,” Cassady yawned as I fumbled with the phone.

  “Different cop, different incentive,” I growled. I had just enough time to clear my throat and answer the call before it went to voice mail. “Good morning,” I said, hoping to disarm Kyle with long distance charm.

  “Clearly, you need a new dictionary, because I don’t understand by what definition this could possibly be a good morning. File a purchase order immediately. No, wait. You work at home enough. Buy one yourself. You can take a tax deduction. That should make you happy.”

  I flopped back on the bed, the gorgeous, comfortable bed I had only had an opportunity to occupy for a few hours after Detective Cook finished sharpening her teeth on me. The thought that this might be a phone call from Kyle had filled me with a mixture of excitement and dread. The thought that this might be a phone call from my editor had never crossed my fatigue-addled mind.

  “Hello, Eileen,” I managed, and Cassady sat bolt upright in the other bed with a whoop of surprise.

  Eileen Fitzsimmons was more than my editor. She was a blight upon my life. Not that her predecessor and I had been bosom buddies, but Yvonne Hamilton and I had found a method of working together and getting along that could pass itself off, to the generous observer, as amicable. Yvonne had given me a fair amount of leeway and I’d given her a sympathetic ear, even though most of the problems on which she held forth were caused by her abrasive personality and her lack of managerial finesse. But we’d made it work.

  With Eileen, it just felt like work. Chewing sandy clams kind of work. Eileen made things at the magazine far more difficult than they needed to be, mainly because she liked to see people exert themselves trying to please her. She seemed to equate it with affection.

  “Were you going to inform me at some point that you were down there with your little fanny parked in the middle of the juiciest story to happen in at least two weeks? Or were you just going to keep it to yourself and screw us over again?”

  Eileen always spoke smoothly, calmly, but with plenty of poison around the edges. She had cold green eyes and wore her black hair in spiky bangs that often got tangled in her eyelashes and she was always batting them away with the back of her hand like an agitated kitten grooming itself.

  “No, and there’s no story yet,” I said, wishing desperately for caffeine in any form. I had not gotten to bed until very late—more correctly, very early—and, thanks to Detective Cook, once I was in bed, I was too agitated to sleep. I was ready to suck on coffee grounds to give me the strength for the rest of this conversation. Across the room, Cassady rolled out of bed and headed for the bathroom. Yeah, a shower was going to feel good, too.

  “There’s a dead body there’s a story”

  “Who’ve you been talking to?” It was horrifying to think of the story having reached Manhattan already. I knew Mr. Vincent and Richard had been up even longer than I had, maybe all night, preparing a statement and girding the families for the onslaught, but it seemed a little early for it to have hit the news.

  “I have friends.”

  I resisted the impulse to express surprise. “Then they probably told you everything I know. The police are playing it pretty close to the vest.”

  “Isn’t that your specialty getting into policemen’s … vests?”

  I would have liked very much to hang up at that point, but, in the absence of a cooler head, the balance on my MasterCard prevailed. I gritted my teeth instead. “Did you call for a specific reason, Eileen, or do you always get up at six o’clock in the morning to give people grief?”

  “No. On weekends I usually don’t start until seven. Stay on this story.”

  “Excuse me?” When I got involved with Teddy’s murder, I hoped it would move me into serious journalism. It hadn’t occurred to me to do anything with Lisbet’s death. Yet. But Eileen asking me to follow the story didn’t really qualify. It didn’t even make much sense. “For which magazine?”

  “Ours.”

  Yeah, right. Immediately following the debut of Car and Driver’s baking column for NASCAR moms and the dads who love them. Zeitgeist is a “woman’s lifestyle magazine,” which means we write about the Three S’s: sex, style, and slimming down. Or, as Cassady insists, the Three F’s: fat, fashion, and … yeah, well, somehow Cassady can get away with talking like that. Cassady’s smoky voice and offhand delivery are like a British accent—they automatically make things sound more clever.

  Besides, part of the point of writing the article about Teddy’s death had been to get away from Zeitgeist. Just because that hadn’t happened didn’t mean it couldn’t happen the next time. If there were a next time. As long as the next time wasn’t for Zeitgeist. I could attempt to explain that to Eileen, but she probably wouldn’t follow it and she certainly wouldn’t agree.

  “Did we get bought out yesterday afternoon?” I asked instead.

  Sold out was more like it. Eileen had come over from Bound, a lad mag where she’d gotten a lot of attention giving interviews explaining, with that little cat purr of hers, how she knew exactly what men want and how to give it to them. That was information the Publisher felt women needed, so he hired her to take Yvonne’s place. Since she’d come to Zeitgeist, Eileen had been searching for a way to get her fingerprints all over the DNA of the magazine. I guess this was a start.

  “The Publisher and I have already discussed ways we might add a few teeth to Zeitgeist. This story will fit nicely.”

  “Assuming there is a story”

  “You already suspect something or you wouldn’t be working so hard to deny it. Keep me posted.”

  The line went dead before I could even remember the zip code for pithy, much less fling a zinger her way. I folded my phone back up and spiked it into the pillow beside me. This was not the way I’d planned to start my morning.

  Someone knocked on the bedroom door. I considered crawling under the comforter and humming Aerosmith songs until it stopped, but then it occurred to me that the knocker might have coffee. I attempted to untangle myself from my grouchiness and the comforter, and made my way to the door. Everyone in the household, and half the local police force, had already seen me in my pajamas, so a robe seemed totally superfluous. Particularly because I wasn’t sure I’d packed one.

  It was Nelson, looking appallingly alert and well pressed for such an early hour. I had a quick vision of him lying in his room in a coffin, manicured hands folded on his chest, fully dressed in his knife-pleat chinos and oxford shirt, awaiting his mistress’s call. “Good morning, Nelson,” I said, not knowing how better to hide my disappointment that he wasn’t carrying a samovar.

  “Good morning, Ms. Forrester. There’s a gentleman to see you.”

  “How can he be a gentleman if he shows up at this hour of the morning?” I asked, not so much expecting Nelson to have an answer as wanting Nelson to know I had enough couth to know this was awkward.

  “He has been a model of deportment thus far and I detect signs of a rough-hewn charm,” Nelson reported.

  “Really? Is he cute, too?”

  “That, of course, would be in the eye of the beholder,” Nelson demurred. He held out a business card. “He says you know him.”

  I spotted the seal on the card and almost didn’t take it. I squinted at Nelson. “Model of deportment, huh? So he’s not mad?”

  Nelson allowed himself a small smile. “He demonstrated no anger toward me. Not that he would have any reason to do so.”

  “Ah, but with me, he’s got what they call ‘just cause’ in his line of work.” I took Kyle’s card from him. “You can send him up.”

  Nelson’s brow only furrowed a millimeter, but his meaning was clear. So much for proving I had couth. Nelson ran a tight ship and I was violating crew rules. I did some fast math in my head. “Or you could tell him I’ll be down in twenty—make that fifteen—minutes.”

  Nelson’s brow relaxed and his smile crept a little farther up his face. “A gentleman never rushes a lady. Under any circumstan
ces.” There was a touch of vibrato in the way he said it and I didn’t know whether to blush or to tell Tricia she was absolutely right about the range of Nelson’s household duties. “I’ll see to the gentleman. Take your time.”

  I pulled myself into quite presentable form in twenty-three minutes. It would have been twenty-one, but Cassady insisted on trying to pile my hair on top of my head. First of all, my hair isn’t long enough and second of all, it wouldn’t so much as curl if I were electrocuted. “What is it with you and putting hair up all of a sudden?” I asked as I tried to wriggle into my skirt without knocking her off balance and causing her to rip out handfuls of my hair on the way down.

  “It’s what you do when you’re on vacation,” Cassady insisted. “And wear Lillys with no underwear.”

  “This isn’t Palm Beach. It’s the Hamptons.”

  “How much closer are you gonna get this year?”

  “Depends how much severance I get when Eileen fires me.” I executed a little plant-and-pivot I’d learned from playing basketball with my brothers and freed myself from Cassady and her comb. My hair collapsed back into the layered bob it’s been in most of my life. “See you downstairs.”

  Once downstairs, in the deep green drawing room we’d all huddled in the night before, I was greeted by the sight of a weary homicide detective consulting his watch. His square jaw was set, his amazing blue eyes serious. His perpetually tousled hair was worse than usual, but I couldn’t tell if that was from running his hands through it or from driving out here with the windows down. He looked fantastic in jeans and a casual jacket, but there was something tense in his stance. I didn’t know whether to kiss him or ask for his warrant. “Sorry to make you wait.”

  Kyle nodded, looking me over like he was struggling with a similar dilemma. Neither of us made the definitive move, so both of us hung back. Sexual tension is a powerful force. “So what’s up?”

  I resisted the impulse to make a joke about what it took to get him out of town. I didn’t need to mix two volatile subjects. I slid the ball back into his court. “Shouldn’t that be my question?”