Cross Your Heart and Hope to Die

by Nancy Martin

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cross Your Heart and Hope to Die

  A Signet Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2005 by Nancy Martin

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 0-7865-6341-9

  A SIGNET BOOK®

  Signet Books first published by The Signet Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  SIGNET and the “S” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Electronic edition: March, 2006

  Other books in the

  Blackbird Sisters Mystery series

  How to Murder a Millionaire

  Dead Girls Don’t Wear Diamonds

  Some Like It Lethal

  Have Your Cake and Kill Him Too

  “Slay Belles”

  in mystery anthology Drop-Dead Blonde

  In fond memory

  of

  Bernard Lefkowitz

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Renaissance Hotel in Pittsburgh is one of the most delightful hotels you’ll ever enjoy. Barbara McMahon and her top-notch staff will make you feel welcome and pampered. I couldn’t have finished this book without them all.

  It was my friend Lisa Curry who came up with a brilliant title. And at the last hour Sandy Stephens dashed to my rescue, along with Meryl Neiman.

  The other members of the Mary Roberts Rinehart chapter of Sisters in Crime have all offered support and lunches out. Thank you, Gina Sestak, Joyce Tremel, Kristine Coblitz, Cyn Crise, Becky Mertz, Mary Alice Gorman, Cynnie Pearson, Judith Evans Thomas, Jan Yanko, Judy Burnett Schneider, and Mike Crawmer. See you in Deep Creek!

  The real Monte Bogatz is a perfectly nice person, no kidding. Thanks for the use of your name, Monte! Hope your friends and family aren’t horrified. The real Sue Mandell and her generous husband, Steven Steinbock, deserve many thanks for their contribution to RICA. Surprise, Sue!

  As always, deepest heartfelt appreciation to Ramona Long and Sarah Martin—my first readers. And if I haven’t mentioned them lately, Ellen Edwards and Meg Ruley are the best team in the biz. Thanks, girls.

  And Lyle Lovett? You inspired me, honey.

  Chapter 1

  I was still in bed recovering from Christmas, when the phone rang.

  On the other end of the line, I heard the roar of a chain saw.

  No, on second thought it was the voice of my boss, Kitty Keough.

  “Get your coat, Sweet Knees,” she squawked. “And get your ass into the city right away. I need you to cover a fashion show that starts in less than an hour.”

  “Kitty,” I said, “I could use a little more warning when it comes to assignments.”

  “Oh, barf,” she shouted in the same dulcet tones as before. “Are you whining? Because nobody’s going to kiss your tiara in the newspaper business, honey. You want to stay at home and count silver spoons? Or you want to get paid this week?”

  I could hear the blare of traffic in the background and figured she was phoning from a taxi that careened through the snowy streets of Philadelphia, speeding Kitty to a high-society party that somehow outrivaled the assignment she was tossing over her shoulder to me. No doubt her brassy blond hair was blowing in the wind and she was whipping her driver with the moth-eaten feather boa she carried to formal events in the misguided belief that it lent glamour to her appearance. “Quit playing footsie with the Mafia Prince and get your butt in gear.”

  “He’s not—” I stopped myself from giving her further ammo to use against me and reached for a pen. “All right, give me the details.”

  Which is why I threw a fur coat over my nightgown, slipped on a pair of Chanel boots and headed out for an evening that promised to be legendary. It was go, or lose my job.

  And oh, baby, I needed the job.

  I applied lipstick and three coats of mascara while my sister drove into Philadelphia. Michael had other business to tend, so I’d called Libby to go with me. On the way, she told me about her new business venture.

  “Donald Trump says a successful entrepreneur has to be passionate about what she does,” she informed me as she fearlessly drove her minivan through the snow.

  “What does that mean?”

  “So I found my passion. My greatest wish is to electrify the romantic relationships of everyone I know.”

  “Electrify? Sounds like you’re selling vibrators.”

  “At Potions and Passions, we call them intimacy aids.”

  I nearly scratched my cornea with the mascara wand. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Adult products are a booming business! I’m an official Potions and Passions consultant now. I get my first shipment of sex toys this week. Except we’re supposed to say erotic enhancements.” With a charmingly demented smile, she asked, “Don’t you want to know what the buzz is about?”

  While she laughed, full of delight and adventure, I said, “Libby, why couldn’t you pay off your Christmas debt by going to work as a telemarketer or something? You could sell lawn mowers to bedouins!”

  “I’m not passionate about lawn mowers. I am passionate about sex.”

  For Libby, the path to self-fulfillment was a long, winding highway with many roadside attractions. Still a few years shy of forty, she already had five children, each one a life-affirming holy terror. She visited the graves of two husbands and at least one “very dear friend.” Before her children were born, Libby had been a rising painter, not to mention a founding member of the local erotic yoga society. But nowadays she was always flinging herself into diversionary pit stops that sometimes made me long to strangle her.

  “Anyway,” she said, “I need to make a living. I hate being penniless, don’t you?”

  Poverty was new to both my sisters and me. Groomed for debutante balls and advantageous marriages, we had been badly burned when our parents lit a match to the Blackbird family fortune. They spent our trust funds faster than drunken lottery winners could buy a fleet of Cadillacs, then ran off to South America to practice the nuances of the tango.

  Mama and Daddy left me to cope with Blackbird Farm—a difficult challenge in itself with its crumbling roof and ancient plumbing. But the $2 million debt of back taxes really threw me for a loop. Maybe it’s an old-fashioned notion, but I couldn’t let the family legacy be bulldozed to make room for a Wal-Mart, so I sold everything I could to start a tax repayment plan, and then I ventured gamely into the world of employment for the first time in my life.

  Okay, so I hadn’t been reduced to eating out of Dumpsters, but my lifestyle went from frocks and rocks to macaroni and cheese in a hurry. I had to get a job. My blue-blooded ancestors were probably rolling over in the Blackbird mausoleum, but now when Kitty Keough, the society columnist for the Philadelphia Intelligencer, called, I came running.

  “Why can’t Kitty go to this big-deal fashion show herself?” Libby asked. “It’s just her kind of t
hing, right? Famous people sucking up and free goody bags, too? Why send her assistant instead?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t say. It’s probably part of her plot to get me fired. But I have to go, don’t I?” I tucked the mascara back in Libby’s handbag and checked my watch. “And it starts in ten minutes.”

  “We’ll get there,” Libby promised, flooring the accelerator of her minivan. Snow blasted the windshield, but my sister showed no fear. Expertly, she dodged potholes and checked her cell phone for messages from prospective customers. “Meanwhile, we can plan your Potions and Passions party.”

  “My what?”

  “A home-based presentation to help today’s woman satisfy her innermost desires and express her feminine freedoms. See? This is the company bracelet.” She waved a stainless-steel band under my nose.

  “That’s a funny-looking bracelet, Lib.”

  “It’s a little plain, I’ll admit. And tight. But I wear it proudly. I’m going to be the best damn Potions and Passions consultant ever.”

  I was still looking at the bracelet. “Is it meant to go around a wrist?”

  “Where else would it go? We have an extensive product line of sensual candles, stimulating gels, educational items and, of course, our patent-pending ErotaLotion. Which has a divine texture, and even heats your skin. Can you smell the fragrance?”

  “That’s you?” I asked, thinking she had forgotten a gallon of Christmas eggnog in the back of the minivan.

  “If you host a party in your home, I can give you a ten percent discount on the first hundred dollars you spend. And the parties are fun. We play games with the products.”

  “Sounds like Tupperware for porn stars.”

  “Exactly! And doesn’t everyone secretly want to be a porn star?”

  “Uh—”

  “We’ll talk to some of your friends about hosting Potions and Passions parties, too. My calendar is wide-open.”

  “Lib, my friends aren’t exactly your core customer group.”

  “That’s where the party comes in. I can teach them! I’m a born instructor when it comes to sex. It’ll be great. Hang on,” she cried. “Here’s our exit!”

  She yanked the minivan across two lanes of heavy traffic and scooted down the exit ramp to the blare of horns behind us. “Oh, rats,” she said. “I meant to bring you some photos I took at Christmas. They turned out really well.”

  As exasperating as my sister could be, she always melted my heart with acts of kindness interspersed with her usual lunacy. Underneath her ditsy exterior thrummed a heart of purest gold.

  The snow lightened as we abandoned her minivan with a parking valet. Then Libby led the way to the door, her coat wide-open to reveal a leopard-print sweater with a neckline that plunged all the way to Panama. I said a quick prayer for my dignity and followed.

  A splashy fashion show wasn’t my usual beat. In my job I usually covered B-list events—quiet garden club luncheons, civic awards banquets, the occasional reception where Old Money philanthropists gave money to worthy but unfashionable causes. Kitty tended to nab the high-profile parties for herself.

  So I followed my sister through the mob of the fashionably thin, wondering why Kitty gave up a red-carpet night to me.

  “Keep in mind,” Kitty had lectured me early in our working relationship, “I’m the boss and you’re my assistant. You do what I say, or you can go back to drinking tea with the Kelly family.”

  I chose not to tell her that the Kellys weren’t big tea drinkers, knowing that my insider knowledge really lit Kitty’s fire. Instead, I did whatever she ordered me to do.

  For such a special fashion show, people had gussied up in their fanciest finery, and the resulting clothes could sprain an eyeball. Local Philadelphia TV stations filmed artsy tarts dressed in chic tatters as well as the dowagers in their winter tweeds and Hermès scarves. After their fifteen seconds of fame, everyone pressed past the cameras toward the entrance of a formerly grungy warehouse that had been dolled up for the occasion.

  “Are those the gift bags?” Libby shouted over the noise and music. She pointed to a scrum of well-dressed hunter-gatherers, all yelping like hyenas as they snatched goodies from a frightened assistant.

  “You could lose an arm in that mob,” I said, properly prudent.

  “You’re too dainty to use your elbows, I suppose. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Godspeed.”

  While Libby dashed off to grab the giveaway treats, I noted the warehouse had been lit up brighter than a Broadway premiere. Jewelry glittered, smiles sparkled. Rock-and-roll music thundered. And Kitty was going to be furious when she found out what she’d missed.

  Most dramatic of all, video images spun around us—on the walls, ceiling and bodies of the guests. Everywhere, we saw dancing pictures, moving, vibrating, undulating. Around me, people reacted to the images eerily reflected on themselves. A woman flinched at a rush of spiders that swept over her. A genteel man laughed as nude girls danced on the face of his companion. A tangle of naked limbs washed across a threesome of shocked ladies. The place was ground zero for Philadelphia’s artistic and social elite.

  A huge logo had been painted on the rear wall. The designer’s name.

  Brinker.

  Everywhere, the logo flashed at us. And with the logo smirked Brinker’s face—steely-eyed, lantern-jawed and sneery-lipped. For a man on the edge of fame and fortune, he looked contemptuously down on the people who had come to buy his designs. By tomorrow, the whole world was going to know his name, but his photograph conveyed how pleased he was to inflict a torturous new fashion on womankind.

  Brinker Holt, fashion phenomenon.

  Brinker Holt, son of a bitch.

  At the end of the velvet rope, a thug in full biker regalia guarded the guest list. Reptilian tattoos crawled around his thick neck and down his muscled arms. But despite his air of menace, he wore the new ubiquitous badge of authority at fashion events, an electronic headset.

  The bruiser took my press pass and made a show of glowering at it as if I were smuggling explosive shoes into an airport. “Just a minute,” he growled at me, then pulled his microphone close and spoke into it.

  “Problem?” a voice asked from behind me as I waited for the gatekeeper’s verdict.

  I turned around and found myself staring at Richard D’eath.

  “You’re Nora Blackbird, right?”

  We had been introduced only once or twice, and he’d given me the brush-off as soon as he learned I wasn’t a journalism school grad. “It’s nice to know I’m memorable,” I said dryly. “Hello, Richard.”

  Okay, I’ll admit Richard D’eath was good-looking. Handsome, even, if I were completely honest. But it was his reputation as an unstoppable New York newspaperman—bolstered by years of waging war on gangbangers, corrupt union leaders and at least one politician who tried to have him killed—that really made him drop-dead delectable. He was a defender of the innocent and downtrodden, the kind of man you half expect to run into a phone booth to don his cape now and then.

  Lately, though, Richard had been sidelined from his superhero crusade by injuries suffered in a dark New York alley while chasing down. . . well, not a story but a cab. Which ran over him and left him barely mobile. After eight months of treatment at the hands of a renowned Philadelphia specialist, Richard was still hobbling around with a cane, although he looked frustrated enough to break it over one knee and hurl the shattered pieces into a blazing fire.

  He wasn’t exactly Mr. Congeniality.

  Richard leaned on the cane in front of me. “Are you here to breach the fortress of fashion?”

  I heard the disdain in his voice, but endeavored to sound as pleasant as I could manage. “I left my sword at home.”

  “Too bad. Even you might need to protect yourself in this crowd.”

  The leading newspaper in Philadelphia had jumped at the chance to hire Richard for the short term while he recovered from his surgeries. I’d heard he took the job to keep busy
while he healed—at first writing from a bed and finally using a cane to do the legwork—making it clear that as soon as he could go back to his old life in a real city, he’d be history. He quickly found his niche exposing criminals and local politicians gone bad, but I heard he still hankered for the more exciting action of his old life. In the meantime, he couldn’t be bothered to mingle with amateurs.

  “You have a pass to get into this thing?” he asked, his attention already wandering to the hectic scene around us.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Can you get me inside? My press pass isn’t good enough. I guess nobody wants any real reporters here.”

  “Why, Richard. Do you hang out at the local Victoria’s Secret, too?”

  His gaze snapped back to me. “I’m not here to ogle supermodels. I’m working.”

  “When did you decide to leave the stratosphere and wade around the Style section?”

  He gave an impatient sigh. “I just want to get inside. Can you do it?”

  Libby returned to us at that moment, flush with the triumph of hand-to-hand combat. “Gift bags, and they’re loaded with goodies!” she cried. “Oh, look! Hooray!”

  With a delighted yelp, she came up with the prize—a pink plastic silicone figure eight.

  “What in the world . . . ?”

  The three of us stared at the contraption that Libby dangled from her forefinger.

  “What the hell is it?” Richard asked.

  “You don’t know?” I said. “It’s the reason everybody’s here. It’s the Brinker Bra.”

  “The what?”

  Libby said, “I don’t get it. This isn’t a bra. Where are the straps? The hooks? And I definitely need a bigger size.”

  “Jesus,” said Richard. “That’s what this show is for? Underwear?”

  “The Tempest in a C-cup,” I said, recalling the press release. “A revolutionary design made of a new silicone material engineered to cling to human skin. The figure-eight shape provides support for the female body. No need for straps or uncomfortable wires. One size molds to fit all and makes every woman perfect. It’s going to revolutionize lingerie.”