Over Her Dead Body (11 page)

“Come on, Hilary. You heard what Nash said. I have to file a story.”

“Yes, it
was
Mona,” she admitted. “Who told you that, anyway—Jessie? I notice that you two have gotten pretty friendly lately.”

God, what was
with
this chick? I wondered. I felt tempted to ask for permission to treat her as a hostile witness.

“Did Mona have something against Kimberly?” I said, ignoring her question.

“She liked her initially, but then she hated how she let herself go. But mostly it was just because Mona enjoyed making up nicknames. She’s the one who came up with Lara Thin Boyle and Monica Lewdinsky.”

“What was Kimberly up to last night at the party?”

“She was boozing it up at the bar for a while. I went over to her to try to get a quote about her arrest, and she told me that we were monsters and to stop hounding her. After that I lost sight of her.”

“Do you think she might have wanted to have a few words with Mona last night?”

“My, my. I see where you’re headed with this, Bailey. It’s possible, I suppose.”

“You said Mona disappeared after the confrontation with Kiki. Do you think that’s when she came back to the office?”

“Maybe—because I never saw her after that. Mona’s policy with parties was to come late and leave early. She likes—or should I say she
liked
—to go to those sorts of things because she wanted the press, but she was hopeless at party chat. That’s the funny thing about her that most people never knew. She hated interacting with strangers. I was driving in a limo with her once and the air-conditioning was too high. You know what she did? She called the limo company on her cell phone and had the
dispatcher
ask the driver to turn it down.”

“But you never saw Mona leave?”

“I believe I just said as much, didn’t I?”

I thanked her for her help and asked if she could provide a number for Kiki.

She shifted toward her computer and tapped a few keys. Then the printer whirred. She held out a limp hand in anticipation, her cantaloupe-colored nails glistening almost as much as her lips. When a piece of paper was half through the printer, she snapped it out the rest of the way.

As I accepted the sheet from her, I mentioned that I might circle back and talk to her at some point during the next couple of days.

“Sure,” she said perkily, as if I’d just requested her recipe for crab dip. “Anything I can do to help.” If I were really lucky, I’d never have another reason to speak to the girl again in my lifetime.

On my way back to the pod, I went in search of Mona’s assistant Amy. She was back from helping Carl and had been set up in the office of someone out on assignment. I found her staring listlessly at a piece of paper. She was so short that her shoulders were barely visible above the borrowed desk. Whereas Mona’s main assistant, Betty, was a forty-something executive secretary, Amy was in her early twenties, the classic editorial assistant who’d graduated from someplace like Georgetown or Barnard and was hoping to rise through the ranks. From what I’d heard, Mona had required the person in this spot do everything from be backup secretary to write her speeches to go on quests to fulfill her quirky food cravings, and the job turned over every four to five months. Amy had arrived at
Buzz
shortly before I had. On more than a few occasions, I’d seen her looking ready to bawl.

I rapped on the door frame and her head shot up.

“Hi, Amy,” I said. “I don’t think you were at the meeting this morning, but I’m going to be covering Mona’s death for
Buzz.
I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“Okay,” she said morosely. “I guess I really don’t have a choice, do I?”

“I don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable,” I said, stepping into the office. “I just need some basic information for my piece.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s been such a zoo. I’ve had a million reporters calling wanting to get sordid details about Mona. Do you know that one guy from the
New York Post
even asked me if it was true that Mona used to borrow clothes from designers and then say she couldn’t give them back because she’d gotten her period. Isn’t that disgusting?”

“It’s not true?”

“Between the two of us, it
is
true, but that someone would actually ask me such a gross question on the phone just blows me away. Plus I’ve had to help Mona’s husband with the funeral arrangements and all that.”

“Carl must be awfully upset,” I said, slipping into a seat by the desk.

“Yeah. And not only is he hearing from everybody who knew Mona, but he’s got all the press calling him, too. After I finished talking to the police this morning, I spent three hours at Mona’s apartment just answering the phone and helping him with arrangements. If Betty were here, she’d be doing it, but she’s still on vacation in Spain.”

She had a habit of repeatedly tucking her chin-length brown hair behind her ears as she spoke. Each time she did it, her hair would immediately fall forward again.

“Will Betty fly back for the funeral?”

“No. I mean, she got a special deal on the airfare and she’d have to pay way more to get an earlier flight.”

It was enough to make you feel sorry for Mona.

“What I’d like to do,” I told her, “is to retrace Mona’s steps last night. Did you leave the office first or did Mona?”

“Well, I was
supposed
to leave by six because Tuesday’s the early night, and I knew Mona’d be going to the
Track
party. But then she didn’t leave till after seven for the party, and I was stuck here.”

“Did her husband pick her up?” I asked, beginning to jot down notes as she spoke.

“No, he called from the reception area and she told him she’d meet him out there.” Amy rolled her eyes and let her mouth sag open. “And then she kept him waiting out there for at least fifteen minutes.”

“What was keeping her so busy?”

“She was waiting to hear from Mary Kay Mason. You know, that old consultant for us out in L.A.? They’d talked earlier in the day, and I think Mary Kay had some important tip or something for her. She was supposed to call back before the end of the day, but we hadn’t heard from her. Even though I left messages on the woman’s cell, her home office number, and her home number, Mona kept having me try them over and over. Mona was one of those people who think that if they press the elevator button a hundred times, it’s gonna come faster. Mary Kay finally called at seven.”

“How long did Mona speak to her?”

“That’s the thing,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ears again. “Mona was in her bathroom when Mary Kay called. It turned out Mary Kay was about to go on a live radio show, so she couldn’t hold. She said that Mona should be at her desk at seven forty-five.”

“And she’d call her then?”

She twisted her mouth, thinking. “That’s what she meant, I’m sure. But what she said was just, ‘Tell her to please be at her desk at seven forty-five.’ Maybe she was a little annoyed that Mona kept trying to call her and then was in the bathroom when she finally called back.”

This explained why Mona had returned to her office last night. But it was an odd way for Mary Kay to have phrased her instructions. I wondered if she could possibly have been arranging a meeting for Mona with someone. I’d have to speak with her to find out.

“So what happened after that?”

“I got up to leave right after that, and Mona walked out with me—I figured she was going to come back from the party to take the phone call. Or maybe she was going to blow off Mary Kay. That’s the kind of thing Mona would do. She once had me spend the entire afternoon trying to track down this Gucci bag. They didn’t have it at the Fifth Avenue store, so I had to go to the one on Madison and then she made me drive out to a mall in New Jersey, where I found it. And then in the end she didn’t want it.”

“But you saw Mona go into the party?”

“First, she
had
to see Mr. Dicker. As I was leaving, she went up the stairwell to his office—it’s two floors above us.”

It couldn’t have been a very long visit. Max had seen Mona at the party at around seven-fifteen.

“Do you know what the meeting was about?”

“No. It must have been some impromptu thing, though, because it wasn’t on her calendar. And she wasn’t looking forward to it, I’ll tell you that. She said, ‘Wish me luck,’ when she walked off. She hated the fact that he kept his nose in what she was doing. She thought he was a total asshole.”

Boy, was that ever a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

“What about Carl?” I asked, suddenly remembering the husband cooling his heels in reception.

“Oh, Mona told me that when I went through reception I should tell Carl to go into the party without her and that she’d meet him in there later.”

“He take it in stride?”

“I guess. He didn’t look that happy, but he went into the party anyway.”

“They have a pretty good marriage?” I asked casually, hoping not to look too obvious.

“Yeah, I guess. He called her twenty times a day. Sometimes she’d put him on hold forever.”

“Just a couple more questions. Who was still at
Buzz
when you left?”

“Practically nobody. There were two people in the art department. One, that guy they call Spanky. He told me he wasn’t staying much longer. There was another guy there—some freelancer. I don’t know how long he stayed.”

“Harrison?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Look, you’ve been very helpful,” I told her. “This is the last thing. I need a number for Mary Kay—and then I’ll be out of your hair.”

I knew Mary Kay Mason only by reputation. She was a former B actress who morphed into a gossip columnist and, most recently, into Mona’s L.A. consultant. The theory I’d heard was that because Mary Kay was a free agent and reported directly to Mona, her presence helped prevent
Buzz
’s West Coast bureau chief from becoming too big for his britches. Sixty and single, Mary Kay was apparently a piece of work.

“Sure,” Amy said, spinning through a giant Rolodex that clearly had belonged to Mona. “But you’ll have to wait till later to reach her. She’s on a flight to New York even as we speak. Mary Kay wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

“Thanks,” I said, accepting the notepaper she handed me. “Let me know, too, will you, if there’s anything I can help
you
with. This must be a very tough time for you.”

“Yeah, well, what am I gonna do?” she said ruefully, shrugging. “I just thank God I wasn’t still in the office when that crazy person showed up there last night.”

“Do you have any idea who could have killed Mona?” I asked.

She sighed and allowed her body to droop. “Everybody’s saying that Robby might have done it,” she said. “I guess that makes sense. I mean, Mona was wretched to everybody, but yesterday she was soooo awful to him in particular.”

“You overheard?”

“Of course. I sit right outside her office. She didn’t just fire him. She told him
why
she was firing him. She must have used the word
clueless
about ten times.”

“Did Robby threaten Mona in any way?”

“No, he just slunk out of her office like a kicked dog. But I heard he got all feisty in his office later. That was the way it always was. People would love to rant about Mona behind her back, but when they were face-to-face with her, they were meek as sheep.”

Before I left, I mentioned to Amy that I’d been trying to get in touch with Carl and asked if she’d help arrange an interview for me. As I walked back to the pod, her phrase kept echoing through my mind—the one about how no one had the nerve to confront Mona to her face. Well, last night someone finally had.

I placed a call to Dicker’s office once I was back at my desk. The idea of talking to him made me anxious, but it was going to be a necessity so I could confirm Amy’s version of events and be sure of my timeline. With icy politeness, his assistant informed me that she would have to get back to me. Based on her voice, I was pretty sure she could have played the receptionist in one of those movies about a futuristic company that is secretly turning people into robots or harvesting their organs for experiments with aliens.

I tried the number the art director had given me for Harrison but reached only voice mail. I had better luck with Travis, the
Track
columnist. He was not in the office, but I was given a cell number for him and he confirmed that he’d seen Mona slip through the back door at seven forty-five or just before. He’d been in his office, rather than at the party, and had glanced up just as she’d strode by.

Next I called Kimberly’s cell phone again—still voice mail—and then Kiki’s office. Some guy answered the phone with the name of the agency and told me, truthfully or not, that Kiki was out of the office. I left a message saying I was from
Buzz
and that I wanted to interview her for my article. Something told me not to hold out a lot of hope of hearing from her.

If she didn’t return my call, though, it was going to be tough to figure out what the tiff had been about. No one had apparently been close enough to overhear it. I wondered suddenly if the answer might lie in the pages of
Buzz.

I tucked my notebook into my drawer and walked down to the room where the back issues were stored. I gathered up the last nine months’ worth and lugged them back to my desk.

There turned out to be an absolute ton of stuff on Eva. In fact, it was fair to say that not a single issue of
Buzz
appeared on the newsstand without at least two items on her. It didn’t rival the page count of
The Lord of the Rings
trilogy, but it felt close. There were the endless red-carpet shots—Eva, with her long, glossy brown hair, in Versace or Dolce or Cavalli or in the occasional “vintage” dress, all with deep V necklines that showcased her broad shoulders and big, perfectly shaped boobs. There were also endless tips from her stylists and makeup people. She apparently couldn’t go a day without wiping her face with a glycolic acid pad, and part of the reason for the incredible glow of her skin was that she used
two,
not one, shades of bronzer. Oh, so
that’s
the secret, I thought.