Killer Cocktail

by Sheryl J. Anderson

  On the drive back from the Hamptons, I’d filled Kyle in on the interesting folks we’d met Friday night, but more from the angle of good conversation than an examination of suspects. Now, what had passed for gossip was starting to look like muddy footprints leading in a definite direction. “I can’t think of anyone else. Can you, Cassady?”

  Cassady shook her head. “Not that you don’t have other enemies, but I think most of them have more class than this.”

  I nodded in agreement. “I considered Detective Cook, but I’m sure she’d be more creative. Like stake me on the beach at low tide. For that extra measure of satisfaction.”

  Kyle didn’t say anything for a moment, demonstrating much better impulse control than I have. “This is no time for jokes.”

  “To cope, it’s either jokes or tears and I thought this might actually be less distracting.”

  Kyle frowned. “Let’s try the tears, just for comparison’s sake.”

  Cassady shook her head again, this time at Kyle. “Trust me. You don’t want to see that. She’s a messy crier.”

  “Let me tell you about Veronica,” I said, a little louder than necessary, just to make sure the conversation didn’t drift any farther. I told Kyle about Veronica’s romantic past with David, the alleged liaison Friday afternoon, Lisbet’s calls to Abby, and our visit to the theater. Including the champagne bottle. As I said it out loud, it sounded coherent. Persuasive. Maybe even logical.

  He listened to it all carefully, his eyes fixed on me like a camcorder lens, not missing a thing. When I stumbled to a stop, having attempted to convey the creepiness of Veronica crying over the champagne bottle, he blinked once. Slowly. That part of the Kyle Enigma Code I had deciphered. He was trying not to lose his temper.

  “I was gonna tell you,” I hurried to assure him.

  “When?”

  “As soon as I had a little more to support my theory?”

  “Like another hole in your shoulder?”

  “I was hoping more like a confession,” I offered lamely, looking to Cassady for assistance. She was frowning in concern at Kyle’s tone; if he was this upset, this threat carried more weight than we’d been giving it.

  “Think carefully. What did you say to Veronica Innes to indicate that you suspected her of Lisbet’s murder?”

  “I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t even sure I suspected her until I saw the champagne bottle.”

  Kyle looked to Cassady, which she appreciated, but she couldn’t offer anything further. “I stepped out to … gather some information myself,” she explained.

  “Lots of theory,” Kyle muttered.

  “How much more do they have on David?” I asked.

  Instead of answering me, Kyle picked up the phone and handed it to Cassady. “Check your messages at home.”

  She took the phone uncertainly. “You don’t think I have one of these on my machine.”

  “Let’s see.”

  “You’re 02 on speed dial,” I offered, feeling a need to do something besides get increasingly cold.

  “Who’s number one?” Cassady asked as she dialed, throwing a look at Kyle.

  “My parents, thank you.”

  Pleased, Cassady started punching buttons as her machine picked up. She rolled her eyes once or twice as she went through the messages, but she didn’t seem bothered. She turned the phone off and handed it back to Kyle. “Nothing more threatening than boys who should know better asking me out again.” Kyle hung up the phone and picked up her handbag, a sweet little green Dolce & Gabbana hobo, which displeased her. “I don’t know whether you’re looking for gum or a gun, but I’m not carrying either.”

  Kyle didn’t open the bag, he just held it out to her. “Don’t talk to anyone about this. Including Tricia. Molly will call you in the morning.”

  Cassady refused to take the purse from hum. “What makes you think I’m leaving?”

  “Experience.”

  I started to protest, because I didn’t want either of them to leave. In fact, I was thinking about getting on the phone and inviting lots of people over for an extended party, because I wasn’t planning on sleeping for quite a while. But then Cassady just nodded and took her purse. Somehow, that was even more disturbing. That meant she agreed with Kyle that we could have a serious problem.

  Cassady hugged me and whispered, “Behave yourself,” in my ear.

  “Call me when you get home,” I requested.

  The eyebrow arched slyly. “But if you don’t pick up, how will I know it’s for a good reason?” With a wink, she swept to the door. “Keep her safe, Detective Edwards, or you’ll answer to me.”

  It was quiet after Cassady left. Not the comfortable, cozy kind of quiet, but the thick quiet that makes it hard to breathe. “What do we need to do now?” I finally asked.

  Kyle pinched his bottom lip, thinking and staring at the floor. I could feel the words building up in my throat, ready to spill forth whether or not they made sense, just to fill the silence. I swallowed hard to keep them down as Kyle walked over to me, took my face in his hands, and kissed me with such gentleness I almost wept.

  “Only thing on my list,” he said quietly.

  “Does someone really want to kill me?”

  “You evoke strong feelings in people.” He traced my cheekbone with his thumb. “I’ll take the machine to a buddy in the morning. But the most important thing to do right now is convince your caller that it worked and you’re scared.”

  “Not hard,” I had to admit.

  “And that you are going to back off.”

  The Pause happened before I could come up with something to fill it with. Truth was, I couldn’t answer right away. While I was genuinely disturbed by the threat on my answering machine, its existence had to mean that I’d ruffled the proper feathers and was on the right track.

  “Molly.” Kyle sighed my name in frustration and walked away. The benefit to having a small apartment is that he couldn’t go far, as long as he didn’t go out the door. Fortunately, he only went as far as the sofa. But he picked up his jacket, which he had laid there earlier, and held it in his hand. Was he leaving? “You have got to take this seriously.”

  “I know,” I answered, tapping my bullet scar nervously.

  “Because I do. And I can’t be a part of this—any of this—unless you do, too.”

  Wait a minute. How all-encompassing was “any of this”? Were we still talking about the threat on my machine or had we changed without signaling into a much faster lane? Did this have anything to do with the weekend stalemate? Though it didn’t change my answer, I realized. Whether he was asking about the investigation or our relationship, the answer was still, “I do.”

  He put the jacket down again. Adrenaline—or maybe sheer panic—fluttered in my throat as he turned back to me. “There are so many reasons this is a bad idea.”

  I walked toward him slowly, stopping a breath away. “List them.”

  He snaked his arm around my hips and closed the distance. “I can’t concentrate when you’re around.”

  “Is that on the list or a general complaint?”

  “Both,” he said, kissing me firmly. Hunger and heat had replaced the gentleness and reserve of our last few kisses and that was fine with me. I didn’t want to think about Veronica or David or Lisbet anymore, I just wanted to think about Kyle and me and how we were going to make this work long term because it was delectable and right and we were going to find a way to fix everything—

  Unless his phone rang.

  As immensely flattering as it was that he didn’t answer it right away, I felt like both a bad girlfriend and a bad citizen letting him ignore it. “Phone,” I whispered.

  “I know.”

  “Yours.”

  “Yeah.” With a deep breath, he stepped back from me and grabbed his phone. “Yeah,” he repeated into the phone. He pulled me against him with his free hand and I wrapped myself around him, imagining what piece of police business had to be dealt with quickly and effici
ently so we could have the night free and clear and I could ignore everything in it except him. Instead, I felt the muscles in his arm tense. “Where? … Okay … Yeah …”

  I kissed him on the cheek before I slid out of his embrace and picked up his jacket, determined to be good about this and not resent the intrusion of the real world on a night whose potential already had my head spinning a little. He closed his phone and sighed again. “Lipscomb says hi.”

  I held up his jacket and he slid into it, a comfortable gesture that I found oddly exciting. “Tell him I said hi back.”

  “Double homicide.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Get your stuff.”

  “What?” As much as I didn’t want to let him out of my sight, I had no interest in accompanying him to a crime scene. I was finding enough dead bodies without him. “I’m not going with you.”

  “No, you’re going to Cassady’s. C’mon, I gotta hurry.”

  “Okay, but why do I?”

  Kyle walked over to the console table and unplugged my answering machine with a sharp flick of his wrist. “Because I don’t want you to be alone. Somewhere else you’d rather spend the night?”

  “Yes, but that’s clearly not an option,” I answered, hoping he caught the compliment.

  “Thanks. Let’s go.”

  Fortunately, I hadn’t done a very good job of unpacking from the weekend, so it didn’t take me that long to toss stuff back in my overnight bag. Still, he was anxious enough to get going that he all but propelled me to the door once I was ready. “So were you going to stay with me tonight just because you think I’m in danger?” I asked as I locked up.

  “What do you think?”

  “That’s why I asked. I’m not sure what to think.”

  He smacked the elevator button, then kissed me with great conviction. “Think again,” he said, guiding me into the elevator.

  There’s something so magnificently romantic and perfectly New York about kissing in the backseat of a cab. Even a cab with duct tape holding the upholstery together, cheap incense burning up front, and a wiry young Cambodian practically giggling behind the wheel. There’s the sense of catapulting forward even as you’re wrapped around each other, something I’m sure was implanted in me by a film when I was young and impressionable—younger and more impressionable, anyway. Of course, I’m the one who had to buy a Danish and eat it in front of Tiffany when I first came to town, too. Still, it’s fabulous.

  As was the expression on Cassady’s face as she opened her apartment door. It wasn’t a smile of triumph, exactly, as much as an acknowledgment that she and Kyle had reached some new level of complicity, if not understanding. I felt like the MacGuffin in a Hitchcock movie, being handed off in a witty but urgent manner.

  “If she’s very good, can she watch television before I tuck her in?” Cassady asked, indicating that we should enter. I crossed the threshold, but Kyle stayed outside.

  “That’s fine. Just keep her off the phone.”

  “I have to go into the office in the morning,” I said.

  “Stay low-key and don’t talk about your theories,” he answered, holding up my answering machine to underline the point. He gave Cassady a look of gratitude. She nodded and he hurried back down the hallway.

  Cassady’s in a great building in the West Seventies. Her apartment is very inviting, lots of earth tones tying together a tailored but comfortable collection of Scandinavian Modern furniture with some strategic pillows and a wall of floor-to-ceiling bookcases that balances nice, big windows. It’s the kind of place where you want to curl up in a corner of the couch to talk about current events and maybe eat fondue. I’ve flopped on the nut-brown leather couch and poured out my heart more times than I care to admit, but tonight, I felt uneasy about even taking off my jacket.

  “This was his idea, wasn’t it?” Cassady eased me out of my jacket herself. I nodded. “He must genuinely be concerned about your safety.”

  This time, I shook my head. “How did Veronica figure this out? I thought we were careful.”

  Cassady pulled my overnight bag out of my hand and set it down on the floor. “We were,” she said, steering me to her kitchen. “But one of the benefits of being paranoid is that you spend a lot of time wondering who’s out to get you. And I’d imagine, after you kill someone, you’re bound to be paranoid.”

  In the kitchen, on the immaculate heather gray Corian counter, which complements all the stainless steel so nicely, there was a mad jumble of color. Cassady had pulled half a dozen liqueur bottles out of her cabinet.

  “That’s only just, since I haven’t killed anyone and I’m getting paranoid,” I acknowledged.

  “But people actually are out to get you, Molly. So you’re not paranoid, you’re perceptive. But you’re not going to get any sleep tonight if you don’t think about something else for a while. So here’s our arts and crafts project for the evening.” She gestured to the bottles. “Pousse-cafés.”

  I rarely have the patience to gently pour each liqueur on top of the other so they float in scrumptious bands of color and never mix, but I could see the benefit of concentrating on such a task now. And then downing the masterpiece when it was done. Cassady poured her first shot, then pushed the shot glass, a pousse-cafe glass, and the bottle of grenadine down the counter to me.

  “But if Veronica feels the need to threaten me, then she’s basically confessing she did it.”

  “Stop pondering and start pouring. You’re not doing anything more complicated than this tonight. Detective’s orders.”

  “Since when are you and Kyle on the same team?”

  “Since I figured out that he adores you almost as much as he should.” She didn’t look at me, just pushed the bottle of yellow Chartreuse to me, but I could still see her smile. And I adored her for it. Nothing like having someone out to get you to make you appreciate who’s on your side. Confident in that, I was prepared to relax and enjoy Cassady’s company and my pousse-café tonight. And not think about going to question the florist until morning.

  12

  “I should kill you myself.”

  Not a phrase to be bandied about lightly, especially among friends. Particularly among friends who are trying to solve a murder. But Tricia didn’t mean it lightly. She was furious. Also scared and tired and frazzled, but at the moment, she was concentrating on furious. I was concentrating on making sure our discussion didn’t turn into a floor show for my colleagues at Zeitgeist.

  Since I work at home a fair amount of time, I don’t have an office at the magazine. I have a desk out in the bullpen, the large, open central area of our Lexington Avenue office space, which is inhabited by the assistants and junior staffers. While the bosses sit in their offices and look out over the city through their glittering windows, we sit in row upon row of mass-produced desks and look in on the bosses through their narrow doorways. It’s how the caste system expresses itself in American business.

  I actually don’t mind being out in the bullpen—better access to snacks and gossip—but I’m forever finding other people’s stuff in my desk and on it. Still, I understand the lure of available space in a crowded, institutional setting and I try not to complain. Unless the stuff is smelly, obscene, or otherwise repugnant. Then I demand its removal. On the other hand, if it’s edible, especially if it’s chocolate, it’s fair game.

  Cassady had insisted on escorting me to work, a noble gesture slightly undercut by the fact that she had a meeting two doors down. She’d deposited me at my desk like a mother dropping off a kindergartner, despite my protests that Veronica wasn’t about to try to take me out in the vast and densely populated bullpen. Unconvinced, she’d all but lashed me to my chair before promising to call in a few hours to discuss a “secure location” for lunch and then departing with the fever of having a mission still radiating from her.

  Then, seemingly only moments later, Tricia was standing before me, pale and fragile. And furious. I’d turned off my cell so I didn’t have to think about
it ringing with another threat. But it hadn’t occurred to me, when Kyle had unceremoniously disconnected my answering machine, that a friend might call and, getting neither answer nor machine nor cell this morning, think the worst. Which Tricia had done.

  Then I, because I’m so good at it, made things even worse. “I didn’t think you’d worry because you didn’t know about the death threat.”

  “Death threat?” Tricia echoed with enough volume and passion that my colleagues rose and turned as one, like meerkats catching the scent of a predator as the savanna winds shift.

  I laughed as convincingly as possible, as though Tricia’s exclamation was the punchline to a hilarious joke. “I hadn’t heard that one,” I said, a little too loudly, waving dismissively to my coworkers with one hand and yanking Tricia down into a chair with the other. Once we were seated knee-to-knee, I kept the smile, but stopped laughing. “On my answering machine. I don’t want to talk about it here.”

  Tricia went rigid. “You think it’s someone here.”

  I tipped my head uncertainly. “No. But no one here knows anything yet and I’d rather keep it that way.”

  “Then you’d best get up and come with me now, because we have talking to do.” Tricia stood up again, a perfectly polite smile on exhibit for anyone who was still craning to see what we were up to.

  “Let me check in real quick, then we’ll go,” I said, pointing in the direction of my editor’s office.

  “Just don’t get sucked in to some lonelyhearts debate. This is more important.”

  “This is my job.”

  Tricia leaned in, her lips almost at my ear. “Are you getting death threats because you recommend honesty and good communication in a relationship?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Then this is more important.”

  “Point taken.” I hurried past three rows of colleagues who rushed to look engrossed in their work and presented myself at the desk of Genevieve Halbert, gatekeeper to the beast. Make that, personal assistant to the editor. Genevieve is a preternaturally perky young woman who either does some fairly heavy medicating in the morning or is just wired like no one I’ve ever met. She’s sorority-girl blond and pretty and comes off kind of buttoned-down, all Ann Taylor and Talbots, but she has a toothy, relentless smile and this eerie, irritating, monosyllabic chirp.