I wasn’t sure we were going to convince him to help. One of the things I admired most about Kyle was his commitment to his job. It still bothered him that he and I hadn’t started our relationship under the most pristine of circumstances and I could actually respect that in the moments that it wasn’t driving me nuts. But this was a lot more complicated, especially because Detective Cook was liable to have him strung up by his badge if she caught a whiff of impropriety.
It was also more complicated because David didn’t look as innocent as I wanted him to be. It was only connect-the-dots at this point, but the lines from walking out of a party where your fiance has embarrassed your upstanding, uptight family to a row in your bedroom that ends with her throwing your expensive engagement ring in the trash to a fight poolside where you catch up with her and crack her skull open were pretty easy to draw. If I was sketching them in, Detective Cook was bound to be going over them with an indelible marker.
Cassady returned from charming one of the young men who was circulating with the cocktail tray and handed me a Bellini. “Apparently at least a few bottles of champagne escaped consumption last night.”
I took the glass but paused, not sure I was ready to start quaffing quite so early. There was so much buzzing around in my head I was concerned about adding champagne to the mix.
Cassady noticed. “Why didn’t we get invited on the garden tour?”
“It’ll be faster for Tricia to show him around without us tagging along,” I attempted.
“Did he tell you not to come?”
“Not precisely.”
“What was the approximation?”
“‘You wait here. We won’t be long.’”
Cassady winced and took a sip of her drink. “So what’s up?”
“He doesn’t want us to get involved.”
“How Freudian is that?”
“I mean, he doesn’t want you and Tricia and me getting involved in investigating this crime.”
“Of course.”
“But we already are.”
“Are we back to the first ‘we’?”
“I wish I knew.”
“I know he drove out here in the middle of the night based on a brief-and-tearless phone call. Gotta count for something. Quite a lot, as a matter of fact.”
I didn’t have a good answer for that so I decided to have a sip of my drink after all. And to change the subject. “Why did Lisbet take her ring off?”
“How can you be brave enough to solve a murder and still too much of a coward to deal with your feelings about a man?”
I moved from sip to swig. “You should be proud I know my limitations. I figure out what I can.”
Cassady raised her glass in momentary resignation. “Lisbet took off her ring because she was mad at David.”
“He’s the one who should have been upset.”
“Maybe he told her to take off the ring.”
“A man wants the ring back, you don’t throw it away”
“True. You throw it at him.”
“And he puts it in his pocket, not the trash.”
“And then three months later, you see it on the pudgy finger of some corn-fed Midwestern cow at a breast cancer benefit and you’re supposed to laugh it off.”
I waited the obligatory three seconds to make sure she was done. “Whatever happened to him?”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
She knew exactly whom I was talking about, his home and work addresses, current availability, and last girlfriend, as well as what she was wearing and what he was drinking the last time she’d seen him. But you gotta let a girl have her pride. “Where is David?”
“That wasn’t his name.”
“David Vincent.”
“Of course. Because I’m so far past the other thing.”
David hadn’t emerged from the house yet, not that I blamed him. In his position, I would have locked myself in the attic, even if my crazy old governess was up there sucking the marrow from pigeon bones, and refused to come out. But maybe David hadn’t read as many gothic novels as I had.
I was ready to venture back into the house and subtly search out David when Kyle and Tricia returned from their tour. They seemed somber, but composed. While Cassady and I were improvising wardrobe, attempting to show respect for a tragic situation while living out of suitcases filled with party frippery, Tricia had fortuitously packed her black jersey Ellen Tracy contrast trim dress and Prada black velvet bow pumps. With her hair clipped back, she looked entirely appropriate.
And Kyle looked fantastic. Maybe it was caused by the same sea breeze that was tousling his hair, but I felt a marvelous chill along my spine as he walked toward me. Was I overthinking his weekend reticence? Did I need to keep moving forward and pray for the best? If I was willing to do it for Tricia and David for the sake of an investigation, why wasn’t I willing to do it for the sake of …
Oh yeah, there’s the central problem. How do you do something for love when your mind rebels at simply thinking the word, even as a gorgeous man walks across a rolling Southampton lawn toward you with a hint of a smile playing at the corners of his fabulous blue eyes? Just because he hadn’t said it, I couldn’t say it or think it or act on it?
Cassady, thankfully, said something before I did. “Got it figured out, Kyle?”
Kyle slid his hands into his pockets and twitched a quick grin to acknowledge Cassady’s joke. “Large open area, lots of people, minimal trace evidence. They have their work cut out for them.”
“They?” Cassady asked.
“The local professionals,” Kyle replied, his implication that the matter should be left to them undeniable.
“I still want Molly to talk to Davey,” Tricia said quietly. “I think he’ll tell her things he won’t tell you because you’re a cop and won’t tell me because I’m his sister.”
“They do call her column ‘You Can Tell Me,”’ Cassady pointed out.
“If you insist on doing something,” Kyle said, his tone growing sterner, “you’re going to give the ring to Detective Cook and explain why it wasn’t on Lisbet’s finger. And then leave it alone. All of you.”
Tricia said, “Mother,” very crisply and forcefully. I thought she was offering him an uncharacteristically profane opinion on the matter, but then I realized she was acknowledging her mother. Mrs. Vincent was walking across the lawn behind me, escorting one person I wanted to see and two I didn’t—David and Lisbet’s parents.
David looked like a duck being delivered to the hunter’s feet by a couple of black Labs. He’d tried to go all country gentleman with the Ralph Lauren slacks and sweater, but his appearance was still beyond bedraggled. He was ashen and morose and looked ready to cave in on himself.
And what do you say to a couple when they’ve just lost their child? Especially when, as she walks up to you, the mother is spewing bile into her cell phone. “I can’t talk to you anymore. I have to mourn my dead daughter.”
Dana Jeffries had regained some color under the pallor with which she’d arrived that morning, largely thanks to Estée Lauder. The rest of her was packed into a black Max-Mara pantsuit with her blindingly white shirt collar open far enough that you could see that the dermatologist had done his best to help her lie about her age, sandblasting the sun damage off her chest and not just off her face. Her hair had been stripped so blond that it was almost transparent and her green eyes were small and dull.
She snapped her phone shut and turned to her husband, who looked like he hadn’t been sober in two marriages. Bill McCandless had a tennis player’s hard-baked tan but you could still see all the broken blood vessels in his nose and cheeks. His Armani suit and perfectly groomed and dyed hair were immaculate, his gold bracelet and signet ring were incandescent, but his smile was crooked and his blue eyes were pale and rheumy.
“That bastard!” she exclaimed.
“Which one, hon?” he asked blandly.
Dana spun to include us all in her outrage. “A cer
tain production designer, who will remain nameless until my lawyers can file the papers to sue his ass, the man I hired to design their West Coast engagement party, is not only claiming he’s pay or play, he says he doesn’t do funerals.”
Bill held out his hand for her phone. “Let me get my people on this right away.” He punched a number into the cell phone and turned his back on us.
Mrs. Vincent, who had been visibly stiffening during this exchange until she was approaching some form of paralysis, managed to nod in our general direction. “This is David’s sister Tricia and some of her friends.”
Tricia held out her hand and Dana grabbed it between both of her own, like a crocodile chomping down on a dove. “Thank you for understanding the enormity of our loss and being here today to support us,” Dana oozed.
As Tricia managed to come up with a warm memorial anecdote to tell Lisbet’s parents, which I strongly suspected she was making up as she went along, I seized my moment. I leaned over and whispered to David, asking if I could talk to him for a moment. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kyle trying to get my attention without getting anyone else’s.
“What about?” David whispered back.
“Guess.”
David shot a look back over at Tricia, who glanced away from Dana long enough to implore him to go with me. Kyle edged away from Tricia in an effort to head me off at the pass, but Mrs. Vincent thought he was stepping in closer to her, put her arm through his, and returned her attention to Tricia’s touching story. Kyle weighed the ramifications of his next move just long enough for me to put my arm through David’s and hustle him away.
Conscious of all the other little knots of people populating the lawn, I propelled us on a course that snaked around them like some demented slalom, moving fast enough that no one would invite us to stop, but slow enough that no one would think we were running away.
I’d always enjoyed David. Of course, I’d never had to clean up after him the way Tricia had. Still, I felt awkward about just diving in with all my questions. “I’m so sorry,” I said genuinely, wanting to start from a solid place.
David’s eyes narrowed in confusion. “Oh. Thanks. Appreciate that. It’s just … not what I thought you were going to talk about.”
“It’s not,” I admitted, “but I wanted to say that first.”
David’s eyes narrowed further, this time in pain. “Crap, Molly. Don’t play with me.”
“I’m not.”
“I can’t handle it right now. If you’ve got something to say, say it.”
I usually saw David in a social setting where he was infallibly charming and smooth. It was a bit of a shock to be up close and too personal when the effort to be anything approaching charming was obviously beyond him. How much of the David I knew—thought I knew—was an act? The only way to find out was to keep pressing. “Okay Why’d you break up with Lisbet?”
“What’re you talking about?” David’s voice leapt up in volume and shrillness, but I squeezed his arm and he cleared his throat and dropped it back down. “We didn’t break up. Who’s saying we did? We had a fight, that’s all.”
“Then where’s her engagement ring?”
“Ask the police. They haven’t given back any of her personal effects yet. Believe me, my father’s ready to send a private guard down there to sit on the emeralds until they do.”
“It wasn’t on her finger.”
He stopped walking, fortunately not too close to any one group. “Someone stole her ring? Someone killed her to steal her ring? That’s crazy. Is that what happened?” I could see in his eyes a moment of elation when everything made sense, but they quickly clouded over again with confusion. “But what idiot would take her diamond and leave the emeralds behind?”
“That’s not what happened. Her engagement ring was in the wastebasket in your bedroom. Nelson found it this morning.”
David lurched away from me, heading toward the beach. I stayed with him, though I understood his desire to walk away from everything about now. “Whered you leave her?”
“Is this an interrogation?” The idea seemed to both amuse and infuriate him. He stopped clumsily and turned on me, his face pale except for the bags under his eyes. “You going for a scoop, Molly?”
“Not at all.”
“You’re not working on a story.”
“No.” Eileen had called, but I hadn’t accepted, so I wasn’t even lying, which was always nice.
David glanced back across the lawn from whence we’d come. “My sister put you up to this. The things you let her do to you.” He shook his head as though I were suddenly the one under investigation.
“Excuse me?”
“C’mon. Craig Fairchild.”
I flinched at the memory immediately, but it took me a moment to remember that David had also attended that horror of a cocktail party. “One blind date from hell doesn’t constitute a pattern of abuse.”
“He vomited on the caviar.”
“Which has nothing to do with what we’re talking about.”
“Except Tricia’s ideas aren’t always the best. She can ask me her stupid questions herself. I didn’t kill Lisbet.”
“I know that, David,” I said to placate him.
It didn’t work. “Bullshit. You suspect me just like everyone else around here suspects me. My own parents can’t even look me in the eye. Everybody’s figuring, ‘Aw, man, David went off the deep end and now Lisbet’s dead.’”
I expected him to lurch away again, but he vibrated in front of me, waiting for some sort of response. “Why would people expect you to go off the deep end?” I’d seen David rowdy, but never violent.
“I’ve got a temper. So what. I didn’t kill her.”
“Make her mad enough to take her ring off?”
David took a deep breath, as though he could suck back in all the energy his anger was radiating out. “You saw the … performance. She was a mess. It was embarrassing and you do not do that to my parents. I had to go upstairs and tell her to get a grip. Lisbet went off on me ‘commanding’ her, threw me out of the bedroom. I left. Took a long walk. When I came back, she wasn’t in the room. I looked all over and finally found her—” His voice cracked as he groped for the words.
I shook my head to let him know he didn’t have to continue. “You left her alone in the room. Wearing the ring.”
“And about to pass out, I thought. I figured I’d see her in the morning, moaning for coffee and sunglasses, not …” He screwed his eyes shut and shook his head vigorously, wanting to erase the image of Lisbet in the pool. I waited, trying to show respect for his pain and also trying to figure out what piece of the puzzle to pursue next. Suddenly, he grabbed my upper arm hard and pulled me tight against him. “Figure out who did this so I can get to them first.”
The sudden ferocity of his tone was alarming. “Stop it.”
“David, let go of her, people are watching.” Tricia had glided across the grass to warn us. As I turned to look at her, I could see the mosaic of bunched people laid out across the lawn, with at least half of them turned to peer at David. And me. But David was the one who’d gotten angry and the one who could least afford that sort of public display at the moment.
David released my arm. “You’re not even sure I’m innocent.”
“Don’t get paranoid,” I said quietly, trying to imbue the words with a moral surety I didn’t feel at the moment.
He hung his head. “I’m sorry. It’s all making me crazy. And this”—he gestured to the guests—“what is this supposed to be?”
“People showing their respect,” his sister responded with admirable evenness. “You could stand to do the same.”
Rage flashed in his eyes again, but a whole lot of upbringing kicked in and he tamped it down quickly. The concept of being buttoned down took on a whole new meaning before my very eyes. “Perhaps,” David said, in overly measured tones, “you could tell me what exactly it is that’s expected of me right now and I’ll comply.”
Tricia’s lip curled in a direction I didn’t know was possible. “Don’t Dad me, David. It won’t accomplish anything positive.”
Suddenly feeling like an intruder, I eased back to let them have it out in private. I’d gotten everything I was going to get out of David at the moment anyway; I was going to have to find a hole in his story before I could challenge it.
So I headed back across the lawn to intrude on another conversation. I’d thought the most I might return to would be Cassady grilling Kyle on his plans for the rest of the weekend or, perhaps, the rest of his life, just in the interest of keeping me well informed. What I returned to was Cassady trying to communicate with only her eyebrows that I should hurry my buns across the lawn because Kyle was engrossed in intense conversation with Detective Cook.
The parents had moved on to work their way across the lawn one group at a time. Kyle and Cassady were where I’d left them, but now Detective Cook had joined them. She seemed dressed for business this time, with a gray department store pantsuit, white cotton blouse, and utterly sensible black pumps.
“Good morning, Detective Cook,” I said as I walked up, thinking the sweet approach might catch her off—guard. Besides, I needed to go easy with Detective Cook if I expected to learn anything useful from her. Not catfighting in front of Kyle was worth considering, too.
But the Hand blew that nice little plan right out of the water. Rather than acknowledging me or even just ignoring me, Detective Cook reached back with her left arm and gave me the Hand. The “wait just a minute, young lady, grown-ups are talking” Hand. The “I’m on Safety Patrol and you’ll stop when I tell you to stop, little dork” Hand. Detective Cook even combined the Hand with leaning in to finish what she was saying to Kyle in lower, more intimate tones. What could one little catfight hurt?
Cassady diplomatically gestured to the house. “Maybe we should go inside and see if there’s anything we can do to help.”
“I’m helping right here,” I said, ladling on a politeness I wasn’t feeling.
Killer Cocktail Page 8
