Motion for Murder (27 page)

"Yes. A new outlook." She followed me into the living room, grimacing at the Phillies game on TV. "Maybe I'll go to the barbecue after all."

I hit Mute. "Ken's married."

"I know." She grinned. "But Wally's not."

"Sher
"

"I'm keeping Frankie's ring. Just so you know."

"Okay," I said.

Her shoulders lifted and fell. "It's just that sometimes I think it'll never happen for me. I want it to happen for me."

Touched, I put my hand on her forearm.

"I mean, Wally's got to have decent sperm, right?"

I pulled my hand back. "Please," I said. "Please." I hardly knew where to go from there. Please don't go to the barbecue? Please don't take up with the Boy Lawyer? Please don't put pictures in my head that only Valium can remove?

"I don't know." She sighed hugely. "Maybe I'll just go home and watch Lifetime."

"Better idea," I said.

"Mention me to Wally," she said. "Tell him all about me. Will you tell him all about me?"

"Down to your bra size," I assured her.

"Okay." She smiled, pleased. "You're a good sister, Jamie. You know you'll be my maid of honor when it finally happens for me."

"I'm busy that day," I said.

On Friday morning, I was sitting bleary-eyed in my car jabbing my key at the ignition when Curt knocked on the roof and leaned into the open window. "Got a minute?"

Clearly he'd just gotten back from his run. He was wearing a T-shirt and shorts with a towel slung around his neck. He looked like every item on the dessert menu wrapped in black cotton. I had more than a minute for a man who looked like that. I had a lifetime.

He opened the door and slid into the passenger seat on a faint musky breeze. His eyes seemed dull and tired, and tiny lines stitched his lips tighter than normal. "Found out a little something about your friend Hilary."

I lifted my gaze from his shorts and opened my mouth to say "She's not my friend" but something stopped me. Probably the gravity of his expression. In an instant I could tell he'd talked to his brother. In all the years I'd known him, Curt had never discussed Cam's work with me. Our relationship had always been easy and our conversations light. That seemed about to change.

"She's got herself a new career," he said. I switched on the air and rolled the windows up, although I already had a chill. "She's making movies. The kind you don't show the kiddies on rainy days."

I stared at him. "Porn?" He nodded. "Hilary Heath is making porn movies," I repeated, in case I'd heard him wrong, or he'd said it wrong, or the earth had skidded off its axis when I wasn't paying attention. "That makes no sense."

"Turns out Heath didn't leave her with a whole hell of a lot in the way of financial security."

I thought instantly of Janice and her claim that Dougie had lost his last few trials.

"But porn," I said. "I just can't see Hilary Heath in an X-rated movie."

"You won't." He ran the towel over his chest. A rush of heat hit me. I ratcheted the air up a little higher. "She's playing director. And producer. And she's recruiting, so you're not allowed to play in her sandbox anymore."

"Recruiting."

"Shopping for talent. Such as it is."

I couldn't help but wonder how much talent Curt possessed. I sat up straighter, wondering what was wrong with me. Two minutes ago I'd been in a fog from the July heat. Now I was wide-awake and just plain hot. "Wait a minute," I said. "Paige left early two days ago for an audition. You don't think
"

"Sure I do," he said. "Those Black Orchid girls aren't exactly known for their shyness."

The thought of Paige and Hilary as a team was more shocking than the thought of Sherri and Ken as a couple. But in a twisted way, it made sense. Both moved in the same world. They had a common denominator in Dougie. They hated each other but loved money. It was inevitable that sex would bring them together.

Curt reached for the door handle. "I'm gonna go shower up. You'd better get to work."

I'd have rather watched him shower up, but I settled for watching him cross in front of the car and let himself into the house.

Suddenly I no longer felt up to facing the parade of demanding clients at the office, let alone the people who worked there. It seemed I didn't really know anyone. Not that I'd held an angelic image of Hilary Heath, but her descent into porn was still surprising. Paige's participation was less shocking. For her, it probably represented a lateral promotion.

I backed down the driveway, my mind buzzing. Now the man on the second floor of Hilary's house made even more sense. He was probably an actor, auditioning for one of her films. Did she use her own house as her studio, her own bedroom as her sound stage? And who operated the camera? I eased the car to a stop at a red light as another thought struck me. Hilary had said she had an offer for me. What was it Curt had told me? She was
recruiting.
Maybe I was being recruited. But for what? I wasn't much of an actress. I didn't have the memory for dialogue, and I didn't have the body for porn.

My thoughts shifted to Dougie and I wondered if he'd known of his wife's aspirations. Maybe she hadn't even known of them when he was alive. Need, financial or otherwise, often drove people to do desperate things. I hoped she at least got her daughters out of the house before the camera rolled. They'd already lost their father; they deserved better from their mother.

Playing hooky hadn't been on my conscious agenda, but before I knew it, my car turned away from Parker, Dennis and stopped in front of Leonetti's Bakery, where I bought a bag of sesame bagels and a tub of strawberry cream cheese before heading for Voyager Park. I had some thinking to do. If it got me fired, I didn't think I'd be worse off for it.

I found an empty bench under some maple trees near the children's playground and spent the next hour eating bagels with cream cheese and watching children play. Tomorrow was Ken's barbecue. I had the bathing suit and Sherri's dubious directive for extracting information from the lawyers and absolutely no desire to attend. But as long as I was part of the office, there was no graceful way out of it. I'd just have to consider it a favor to Ken; I still adored him, even if he'd let my sister run roughshod over his dignity.

Thinking about all of it made my head hurt. I spread cream cheese on the last bagel, took a bite, and let my mind shift to Curt. That made me a lot happier. The man was something of a mystery to me, and I'd always liked a good mystery. Especially when it came wrapped in black running shorts with legs like his. Before that good-night kiss, I hadn't realized Curt
had
legs. Since then, my gears hadn't been meshing quite right when it came to him. This morning I'd realized it was because they needed a good oiling.

The bagel bag was empty. I crumpled it into a ball and gathered up my plastic knife and tub of cream cheese and deposited all of it into a nearby waste can. I hadn't done much thinking, and I'd found no answers, but I finally felt strong enough to go to work.

Ken's estate took up almost five acres of prime landfill-free real estate that might otherwise have been developed into yet another Jersey strip mall. He'd managed to build it miles away from civilization as I knew it. Without traffic lights and stop signs to guide me, I took three wrong turns before finding the access road that served as his driveway. There, a brook babbled along beside me for a distance before veering off to chase shadows into the woods. That struck me as a better use of the day than attending the barbecue, but I kept driving anyway. Eventually the driveway curled into a giant U shape in front of the house, which was huge and white and columned, squatting on a gentle grassy slope. Climbing out of my car, I could see red-painted stables behind the house. The faint smell of horses and freshly cut grass and old money wafted toward me on the summer breeze. Nice place to come home to.

Six other cars were parked at various points along the U in apparent order of worth. The lawyers' BMWs were closest to the house. I indulged myself in a quick peek as I passed by. A tennis racquet and tennis balls and black trial bag in Wally's back seat. Bottled water in Howard's cup holder, a few unopened envelopes on the passenger seat. Like their owners, there was nothing interesting there.

Behind the house, a lush green backyard stretched the length of a football field, interrupted at roughly the thirty-yard line by an enormous in-ground pool. Janice and Donna were huddled together under a giant striped umbrella at a poolside table. Missy was sunning herself in a hot pink bikini on a bilious green float. In accordance with the office hierarchy, the lawyers were keeping their own exclusive company on the overstuffed patio furniture, close to the food and drink.

The grill was already smoking, and Wally was at the helm with a giant spatula in one hand, a bottle of barbecue sauce in the other. He didn't look too happy to be there. The apron clashed with his J. Crew ensemble, and his perfectly arranged hair had been steamed into flatness, making him look about fifteen. All he needed was the acne.

Which was where Paige came in. More accurately, Paige's chin zit, which entered my line of sight a few seconds before the rest of her. She'd dabbed and painted and powdered, but not even Maybelline could conceal Mt. Everest. She was slouched miserably on a lounger off to the side, tilting her unsmiling face up toward the sun, but it was going to take more than some UV rays to solve her problems. It was probably the stress from her new profession. Served her right.

"Jamie." Ken bent to kiss my cheek. He looked wonderful in white slacks and a navy shirt and loafers. "Thank you for coming. Did you have any trouble finding the place?"

I shook my head. "You're very lucky to have this much property. It's beautiful."

"Eleanor needed it for her horses. Do you ride?"

"Once," I said. "When I was twelve. I fell off."

He smiled, showing chemically whitened teeth. "Well, if you want to get back on the horse, my groom will be happy to saddle up Silver Coin for you. Until then, there's plenty to eat." He gestured to the buffet table set up just outside a beautiful set of French doors. "Help yourself."

Wedding receptions had nothing on Ken's buffet table. Cakes, cookies, and condiments of all sorts rubbed elbows with pasta salad, potato salad, fruit salad, and plain old garden salad. Wine, soda, beer, and bottled water sat on a smaller table to the side. I could eat for a month from the buffet table alone, and better than I normally did left to my own devices.

Wally came over to retrieve the barbecue sauce. "I'll take a breast," I told him.

"You could use it," he muttered, proving that team spirit was a myth.

So much for my new eighty-dollar bathing suit making an appearance. I bypassed the low-cal fruit salad and loaded a plate with pepperoni slices and cheese squares and potato salad instead.

"So I had to tell her we couldn't handle her case," Howard was telling Ken when I rejoined them. "It's a pity. What a beautiful woman."

They must be talking about Victoria Plackett, Dougie's pet client. I perched on the edge of a lounger, the plate on my lap, to nibble and eavesdrop.

"That's just one example," Ken said. "He also brought in Angelo Fasini, remember?"

Howard snorted. "His only million dollar verdict. Fasini was a daisy growing in a field of crap."

This was beginning to sound like Dougie bashing, and I didn't like it. At least Ken seemed to be standing up for his dearly departed partner. "The truth is," he said, "I owe a few of my golden years to Douglas. The wife and I will retire very comfortably thanks to him."

"You've got to be kidding." Howard wiped barbecue sauce off his fingers onto a wad of napkins. "He accepted a broken shoe case."

"Don't forget that Tiddle creep." Wally waved a plate loaded with barbecued chicken breasts in front of them. "He belonged to Doug, too. I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with him."

"Try being honest," I said. Wally gave me a look that said no chicken would be coming my way for a very long time. Gee, I'd been lucky to win him in the secretarial lottery.