Peter looked good, but he always looked good in that golden glow sort of way, with his bright blond hair and lapis eyes and crooked smile. He came off like Prince Charming, but in my experience thus far, he was more of a chocolate Santa: all shiny and sweet on the outside, hollow on the inside.
“The doorman said you were someone I’d ‘stopped dating,’” I said. Perhaps Peter didn’t appreciate the sharp distinction between “man I dumped” and “man I stopped dating” that I was making in my head, and given that I still had occasional guilt pangs about not breaking things off with more finesse, that was probably a good thing in the long run. And I really couldn’t see him admitting to anyone that he’d ever been dumped. But it was still annoying that it was his misapprehension of his status in my life that had led us to this awkward moment.
“It’s the truth.” His cool eyes narrowed. “And yet, I surprised you. That means there’s someone you’ve stopped dating more recently than you stopped dating me. Did you finally shake off the cop?”
“Go away, Peter.”
His delight was maddening. “You did. Damn, I have great timing. Invite me in.”
“I’m on my way out.”
He looked me over, starting with my semibrushed hair and moving a bit too slowly down to my bare feet. “Really.”
“Peter”—I sighed—”why are you here?”
He held up his copy of the Post, offering me my first look at the picture of me, Adam, and Jordan. It looked like a cross between a football tackle and Martha Graham choreography. The headline read:WHO’S COME BETWEEN THEM?
Peter pulled a mock frown. “What exactly is going on here?”
I almost didn’t want to know the answer, but still I asked, “What does the caption say?”
Peter read, “‘Jordan and Adam Crowley fight over a woman, or at least around one, after Jordan’s sold-out show at Mars Hall last night. Reps for both declined to comment or to identify the woman.”
Which meant someone asked Claire what happened and she told them she wasn’t going to talk to them. I’d known Peter long enough to be sure that the same approach wasn’t going to work with him. Closing the door and ignoring him would only challenge him to pursue whatever he thought the story was with greater vigor. “I’m doing a profile of Olivia Elliott.”
Peter held the newspaper close to his face and squinted, pretending to examine the page microscopically. “And where is she, exactly?”
I snatched the paper from him, not sure whether I should shred it on the spot or place it lovingly in my scrapbook. After all, I hadn’t done anything wrong, I’d just been standing between two famous semisiblings who had come to blows. And threatened each other’s lives. That still sat uneasily. It’s problematic to parse a statement that someone spews in the heat of the moment, but I kept coming back to Adam saying, “I can take care of that, too.” Too. Implying he had previously taken care of something similar. And since the topic at the time had been “the next one to go,” it wasn’t all that wide a conclusion to jump to Adam saying he’d been a part of someone else “going.” Was Olivia looking in the wrong direction by blaming Claire for Russell’s death?
I’d never been in this situation before, with this number of people simultaneously pointing fingers at one another and/or themselves over a death. Especially one that had been ruled accidental. Maybe it was all stress bubbling to the surface and hauling up years of emotional baggage with it. But it felt increasingly as though there were more to Russell Elliott’s death than met the official eye. Which meant it was a great story. Which meant I had to keep Peter Mulcahey far, far away from it.
So, feeling a little like Granny letting the Big Bad Wolf through the door, I invited him in. For a moment. “Let me grab my shoes and I’ll walk out with you,” I said, opening the door wider. He took back the newspaper, but he followed me in.
I led him into the living room, discreetly scanning table-tops and hoping I hadn’t left too much research in evidence. The cascade of CDs on the coffee table—everything I had by any of the Crowley men—was the most telling material visible, but I hoped it would escape Peter’s notice.
“Have a seat,” I suggested, pointing at the armchair farthest from the CDs and continuing on to the bedroom. My hope was that I could grab my shoes, handbag, and notebook and have Peter back out in the hallway before he started nosing around. “Just take a second.”
“You still haven’t painted,” he said, not sitting down and surveying the room with a slight frown.
“I keep changing my mind about the color.”
“Why don’t you like to commit?”
He couldn’t have stopped me colder if he’d beaned me with a book from my desk, where he stood now, baldly and boldly poking at the stacks of paper sliding into one another there. I leaned back toward the doorway, thinking about beaning him with the kate spade wedge I held in my hand and sorting through the various searing retorts that raced through my mind, ranging from, “Excuse me?” to, “I do so!”
Commitment had not been the issue in our breakup. If anything, he was the one not taking the relationship seriously, and I was already drifting away when I met Kyle. But there was no point in debating; he was fishing for a reaction, and I wasn’t going to give it to him. Instead, in a rare moment of restraint, I took a deep breath, put the shoe on my foot, grabbed the rest of my stuff, and strode back into the living room.
“Did you come to analyze me, or did you have something more journalistic in mind?” I asked as I continued past him. One of the advantages of a small apartment is that it doesn’t take long to show someone to the door. I opened it and gestured to the hallway. “Let’s go.”
He strolled past me, smirking. “When I saw the picture, I had to check on you.”
“In person.”
“I wouldn’t have seen the look on your face if I’d called.”
He pushed the elevator call button while I locked the door. There was something about him, there had always been something about him, that made me certain he was up to no good. “Let’s skip the foreplay, Peter.”
“It’s one of my strengths,” he protested.
“Have you taken a poll?” I asked. “C’mon, what do you want?”
Peter leaned in as though the empty hallway were filled with people and he needed to whisper a state secret. “I heard Adam Crowley’s coming into a lot of money.”
“How nice for him.”
Peter straightened up slightly. “And I was wondering, since you’re so close to him, if it had come up.”
“I am not close to him.”
Peter dangled the paper in front of me again. “Really?”
“Okay, here’s some inside info: Adam Crowley already has a lot of money,” I said with a sigh, stepping into the elevator.
Peter shook his head. “I hear most of Micah’s estate went to Claire, and she keeps everybody on a pretty short leash.”
“Quinn has you doing an article on Adam?” Peter wrote for Need to Know, Quinn Harriman’s relatively new monthly with aspirations that straddled the lad-mag and Manhattan insight genres.
“No, I’m doing an article on Ray Hernandez.”
“The club designer?”
Peter nodded. “And Ray says Adam’s backing his next venture. Soon as his cash comes in. But Adam’s being very mysterious about where that cash is coming from. If he didn’t mention a new revenue source, maybe these guys are up to something they shouldn’t be.”
I sympathized with Peter’s zest for looking for a deeper story but was irritated by his casual expectation that someone else would do most of the digging. “Or maybe Ray’s playing with you.” Peter shook his head doubtfully while I tried to remember: What exactly had Olivia said about Claire controlling the money now that Russell was dead? If Claire was getting more, did Adam think he was getting more, too? Who had the greater need—Claire or Adam? Were Peter and I on intersecting stories? “So?” I asked neutrally.
“I want to figure out if Adam’s fronting for someone el
se or if he’s planning a new album and investing his advance.”
So far, so good. I was thinking murder, and Peter was thinking finance. The trick was to keep our paths parallel for as long as possible. “I really didn’t get that much of a chance to talk to him last night, despite what you think that picture implies. However, in the event that I talk to him again while I’m working on the Olivia piece, I’ll see what I can find out.”
The elevator doors opened. Peter threw his arm around my shoulders as we walked out into the lobby, proclaiming, “You’re better to me than I deserve.”
“Got that right,” Kyle replied.
Kyle stood in the lobby next to Todd, who was frozen with the phone to his ear, a slightly panicked look on his face. I tried not to imagine the conversation that had preceded Todd’s picking up the phone, though given Kyle’s scowl, something about “There’s already a gentleman up there” had apparently been mentioned. Kyle reached over and helped Todd hang up the phone.
“Hey, Detective,” Peter said with a mockingly perplexed tone. “I thought you guys were …” He made a gesture that looked as if he were an umpire calling someone out at home.
Both men looked at me with disconcertingly similar expressions, expectant but still trying to be polite. “I never said that.” I didn’t know whether to say it defensively to Peter or apologetically to Kyle, and it tumbled out in some faltering, semifalsetto midrange. Kyle and I were never going to get back on proper footing at this rate.
“You didn’t correct me,” Peter pursued as I tried to picture how far through his right foot I could drive the heel of my shoe before Kyle restrained me. If he’d even try.
There was something slightly absurd about this whole situation. I was, on a purely technical level, a single woman. Aside from the fact that I was still in love with one of these men and could not get the other out of my life, neither one had any right to be quizzing me about what I was doing with my evenings, especially at a point in the morning when I’d had little sleep, zero coffee, and an argument with my boss. My hands planted themselves on my hips of their own accord as I tried to separate my annoyance with Peter’s caring from my delight with Kyle’s concern from my irritation at being quizzed.
“Not that I particularly owe anyone an explanation for anything, but I was keeping the conversation on business,” I said. “Just like now.”
“So we’re all here for work,” Kyle replied.
“We are?” I asked with alarm, given Kyle’s field.
“And what’s your business?” Peter asked him.
“None of yours,” Kyle replied.
Peter gave him a big and completely insincere smile. “I’d forgotten you’re funny. How’d I manage that?”
Kyle surprised us both by sticking his hand out to Peter. “Happens to the best of us. Why not to you.”
Peter glared at Kyle for a long moment, then shook his hand firmly. “I’d love to stay and play, but I have work to do.” He tossed a look back at me. “Let me know what you find out,” he said as he walked out of the building.
Todd followed Peter, or retreated from us, or a little of both, then clung to his post at the front door. Kyle and I stood in the middle of the lobby, looking at each other. Not touching, not talking. After our glorious moment of reunion at the Bubble Lounge, I’d hoped our next meeting would be a little more romantic. But it seemed it was our curse that practical matters had the darnedest way of interfering.
“What made him think we’d broken up?” Kyle asked evenly.
Giving up on my romantic fantasy, I clenched my teeth. “Maybe the fact that we had?”
“You told him?”
“Not exactly, but he used the phrase stopped dating, and I thought it was about you and me, not about him and me. He and me. Whatever.”
Kyle’s forehead furrowed quizzically. “We hadn’t stopped dating.”
“Yes, we had.”
“We’d paused.”
“Even a TiVo can’t pause that long without wearing something down,” I said, both bothered and amused by his decision to play semantics at this point. Two could indulge in that. “Why did you tell him you’re here ‘because of work’?”
“I am.”
“I’m work?”
Kyle smiled. “Don’t set yourself up like that. I’m investigating a potential assault,” he continued quickly, not giving me the chance to react to the first half of the statement before I was surprised by the second.
“What happened?”
“How ‘bout you tell me?” Kyle suggested, pulling the folded newspaper page out of his jacket pocket and opening it with a snap. I got the feeling I was going to see a lot of that picture as the day progressed.
“That’s not assault.”
“Do you fully understand what constitutes assault in the state of New York?” Kyle asked helpfully, turning the paper so he could look at the picture again.
“Are you making fun of me?”
“Not yet.”
“I was going to tell you. I’m not hiding anything. I’m not going to hide anything,” I said, trying to convey the full weight of the promise I was making.
“From anyone, apparently.”
“When did you start reading the Post?”
“When a stack of about eighteen copies turned up on my desk this morning.”
“You’re amused?”
“So far. But I’d really like to hear the whole story. Wanna have breakfast at the Carnegie Deli?”
He looked back at me with calculated timing, so I knew the choice was deliberate. Our first meal together had been breakfast at the Carnegie Deli. Of course, I figured out not long after he sat down that he suspected me of murder and I left without eating, but it was still knee-wateringly sweet of him to offer to take us back to our roots. It’s what we really needed if we were going to, as Dorothy Fields suggested, pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and start all over again. He was being gracious and open, and I couldn’t stand how much I had missed him.
So I had to answer: “I’d love to. But I can’t.”
He folded the newspaper back up. “Should I take that personally?”
“No, it’s work.” There was that curse again. “I’m meeting Olivia for breakfast.” I reached out for the newspaper, but he slid it back into his jacket pocket. “She’s the one who got me into this mess.”
“Yeah, but that’s one of your charms. You like being in messes.”
“I prefer to think of it as straightening messes out.”
He nodded, but he dropped his eyes. “That too.”
“Could we have lunch together?” I said, not wanting to plead but prepared to do so.
“I’d rather have dinner. We won’t be as rushed.”
“We do have a lot to talk about.”
“That too.” His eyes came up again and held me in place while he leaned in and kissed me with appalling restraint. “Let’s say Wild Salmon at eight?”
“Wonderful.”
He offered me his arm. “Think Todd would mind if I got you a cab myself?”
“He’ll live,” I assured him.
On the sidewalk, I tried to concentrate on how wonderful it was to be standing with him again, our hands intertwined, our bodies pressed gently together, our eyes locked. He was the one who said, “Why’re you having breakfast with her?”
“I’m getting to know her. I have to spend a lot more time with her to write this article.”
“Even though her dad’s death was accidental.” He said it with the finality of a math teacher reminding me of an important theorem right before an exam.
“The article’s about her, whatever happened to her dad.”
“Okay.” He raised his arm without his eyes ever leaving my face, and I heard the throaty rumble of a cab pulling up behind me. “Just be careful.” I started to smile, expecting another snarky comment about Adam and Jordan, but he continued quietly, “People in pain get desperate for answers. Don’t offer her false hope.”
I knew he
was right, and as he helped me into the cab, leaning in for a last quick kiss, I knew I should let it go at that. But somehow, I still asked, “So what would it take to get an accidental death investigated as a homicide?”
Lucky for me, he laughed. “Evidence.”
“How much?”
“Molly …”
“Just so I can tell her, if she gets too worked up.”
There was a little truth in that, so he answered, “More than you’re going to find, because the man’s in the ground and no one thinks he was murdered except his daughter, and she might be wrong. It happens. Leave it alone.” He kissed me again, hard, more in punctuation than passion, then closed the door and slapped the hood of the cab, as if I were a prisoner being taken away in a cruiser.
It took me two blocks to realize that the tingling sensation in my chest was not a result of seeing Kyle, but my phone trying to get my attention while I hugged my purse. Realizing I still hadn’t called Claire, I dug it out and retrieved the messages. The first was Tricia, laughing so hard about the picture that she could hardly speak. The second was from Cassady, and I expected more of the same, but it was an unexpectedly somber message, asking me to call her when I had the chance.
Laughs could wait. I called Cassady first and was surprised when she answered right away. “Are you okay?” I asked. I’d gotten used to her letting her voice mail do the heavy lifting now that she was so often busy with Aaron or catching up on work because she’d been busy with Aaron.
“I think okay is at least six blocks over from where I am,” she said darkly.
“What happened?” Anticipating a comment about the picture, I was puzzled by why it would upset her. I’d expected her to laugh even harder than Tricia.
“He stood me up.”
“Aaron?”
“Yes.”
This was huge. Cassady’s relationship with Aaron had been unfolding sweetly and smoothly; Aaron standing her up was out of character. But that was the lesser of the two hurts. The central issue here was that Ms. Lynch was experiencing something so rare that it might, in fact, be brand new. What man in his right mind would stand her up?
“Has this ever happened to you before?” I asked in disbelief.
Killer Riff Page 9
