Over Her Dead Body (12 page)

And then there were the gossip items. Her looks fueled lots of speculation: Had she had her nose slimmed? Her forehead Botoxed? Most perplexing of all, had those awesome, mediagenic boobs been a gift from God or a plastic surgeon? But the most ink had been used for rumination on her love life. In the last six months alone,
Buzz
had run five cover stories about her marriage (number three) to not-nearly-as-successful-as-her actor Brandon Cott. A February cover described the star’s yearning for a baby (
EVA: “GOD, PLEASE GIVE ME A BABY
”), with an insider claiming that the couple was exploring adoption. In May there were hints of marital discord (
IS IT
OVER
?
—EVA’S SECRET HEARTACHE
), along with rumors of flings on both their parts.

I thought back to the discussion I’d witnessed between Brandon and Kiki. Clearly there was trouble brewing in Eva’s marriage, because Brandon hadn’t seemed to give a damn about the embarrassment his early departure would cause that night. I suddenly recalled something significant that Brandon had said to Kiki—he had wondered where she’d been during the evening. Had Kiki snuck back to Mona’s office to follow up on their heated discussion at the party?

I returned to my reading. Unlike stars who swear that they loathe media attention, Eva apparently thrived on it. She never seemed to dodge the paparazzi and was always eager to provide a quote. I’d been at
Buzz
long enough to learn about the dreadful dangers of celeb exposure, but Eva demonstrated no concern that her public might one day experience Eva fatigue. I mean, the woman showed up at the premiere of animated Disney flicks when she wasn’t even one of the voices.

I looked through the last four issues particularly carefully, focusing on “Juice Bar.” There was absolutely nothing nasty on Eva, at least by “Juice Bar” standards. So what had made Kiki so ticked? Something that
Buzz
had
yet
to run?

“Jessie, have you got a minute?” I said, interrupting her train of thought. “Can you think of any reason Eva Anderson would be pissed at
Buzz
?”

She straightened her back, something Jessie did when she was curious or surprised, the way other people widened their eyes.

“Not off the top of my head,” she said. “For the most part I think we’ve been pretty decent to her, considering that she’s far more talented at launching fragrances than she is at either singing or acting.”

“Why did Mona treat her with such kid gloves?”

She let out a deep breath. “Mona always loved Eva. I think part of what made Mona so good at her job is that she’s—she
was
—star crazy. She filled the magazine with all the stuff she was dying to know—whether Brad cheated on Jennifer in their marriage, how much Kirstie Alley eats a day. She was especially obsessed with Eva, don’t ask me why. Eva is half Mexican, half Danish, and Mona was some crazy mix, too, I think. Maybe that’s what she related to. But I don’t think she was such a big fan of Brandon’s, at least lately.”

“What do you mean?”

“She dissed him at one of the daily meetings recently. She seemed irritated with him, though I have no idea why.”

“Is there any way for me to find out what triggered that?”

“Mary Kay might know. You know her, right—our consultant on the West Coast? Hilary might know, too, of course, but Mary Kay would be more likely to tell you.”

“Got it,” I said.

“Where are you going with all this? My curiosity is piqued.”

“Just trying to get a sense of the dynamics at the party last night.”

“You’re not thinking Eva could have killed Mona, are you? She was surrounded by bodyguards the whole night.”

“I’m not really trying to figure out who did it. I’m just trying to describe Tuesday night as well as I can.”

“Come on, Bailey. Your reputation precedes you.”

“They’ve got half of NYPD on this. They don’t need me.”

I returned the back issues to the storage room and glanced at my watch. The day was slipping away from me. I had hoped to reach Katya before the end of the afternoon, but I still hadn’t received a number from Nash. I decided to stop by his assistant’s desk to see if I could move the request along faster.

Like Mona’s main assistant, Nash’s assistant, Lee, was more the classic secretary type—a middle-aged woman who could reportedly type a hundred words a minute and wore her jet black hair in a cut just an inch longer than most men’s. She was also apparently brilliant at securing Nash a table at any restaurant in New York. She was setting down the phone as I arrived, and she looked weary for the first time since I’d known her.

“Nash is at a meeting, Bailey. He’ll meet you at your location.”

“I know, I’m going to be heading out shortly. I was actually stopping by to see if he’d been able to locate the number for Katya, the cleaning lady who was injured last night.”

“He didn’t say anything to me about it.”

“It’s awfully important. I really need to interview her for my piece.”

“Hmm. Let me call someone I know in building maintenance. He may be able to track it down for me through the cleaning company.”

I returned to my desk so I could pack up before my meeting with Nash. Jessie was gone, and from the look of things on her desk, she may have split for the day. But Ryan was finally at his desk.

“Hey, Ryan,” I called out to him. “Got a minute?”

“Just,” he said, sounding as though he really didn’t.

I started to ask him if he’d be willing to head down to the conference room with me so we’d have some privacy, but there was a fair amount of noise in the office that would provide cover; besides, he didn’t seem in the mood for doing me any favors. I crossed the few feet to his workstation with my notebook in hand and perched on the countertop above his file cabinets. I’d never been so close to him, and for the first time I noticed that his pale blue eyes were rimmed with a darker blue. That effect, along with his sharp, beaked nose, gave his looks a hard, unfriendly edge. He shifted his lean body in discomfort, and I sensed he was feeling that I’d invaded his space. I eased into a standing position.

“You were at the party last night, I hear,” I said. “Did you see anything worth noting?”

“Worth
noting
?” he asked with a trace of disdain. “You mean, did people get smashed? Or were Eva’s nipples showing through her dress again? Or did anyone slip Kimberly Chance a hundred dollars thinking she was a hooker?”

“Worth noting in terms of Mona’s murder,” I said, keeping my voice neutral despite how obnoxious he was being. “Did you see the confrontation between Mona and Kiki Bodden?”

“Nope. I missed it.”

“You saw Kimberly around, though?”

“At one point. She was pounding drinks back at the bar in a pair of low riders. You can recognize that butt crack from a mile away.”

“Did you ever see her and Mona speak to each other?”

“Nope.”

“Did you see Mona leave the party? She apparently came through the back door.”

“Must have missed that, too.”

What a jerk, I thought. It was as if he were trying
not
to help me. I was pretty certain my next question wouldn’t elicit much of a response, either.

“Okay, on another note,” I said, “I was wondering if you wanted to talk about our pieces—so that we could avoid overlap.”

“Why would there be any overlap?” he asked suspiciously. “My story is about Mona’s life and career. There’s nothing in it about the murder.”

“Well, we’re just . . . Okay, never mind. I guess if there’s any problem, Nash will take care of it in editing.”

“Yeah,” was all he said, and turned back to his desk dismissively. He’d never been particularly nice to me, but this was a new level of curtness.

I stepped back to my desk and started to pack up all my stuff to take home. I wasn’t anywhere near ready to start a first draft of my article, but hopefully I’d make enough progress tomorrow to begin before the end of the day. I scooted my notebook and composition book into my tote bag and then reached for the folder with the invitation list. It wasn’t there. I sifted through the scattered magazines, junk mail, and pieces of paper on my desk, but the folder was nowhere in sight.

Someone had taken it.

CHAPTER 7

W
hat I really wanted to do at that moment was give myself a swift kick in the head. It had been, in the words of the late Mona Hodges, “f—king stupid” of me to leave the folder with the guest list on my desk. I should have known better, not only because I was a reporter, but also because I worked at
Buzz,
which employed people so snoopy they knew when you were ovulating. The worst part of the whole thing: I was going to have to ask Nash for another copy.

But what concerned me just as much was
why
someone would take it. Was it out of pure curiosity? Or competitiveness? Only Ryan and I were covering the story—if you excluded the party sidebar—so it wasn’t as if I’d had something in my possession that other reporters on the staff coveted. And speaking of Ryan, he’d been so curt moments ago. Had he taken the list to see what I was up to?

Trying not to give away my discomfort, I glanced discreetly back in Ryan’s direction. He was staring at his computer screen with a scowl on his face, as if he were a day trader who didn’t like the way things were going down. After a second, I sensed him watching me out of the corner of his eye.

I resumed my preparations to clear out for the day, and as I did I stole a glance toward Nash’s office. Lee was talking on the phone. If I was lucky, she had a copy of the party list and I could talk her out of it without Nash being the wiser. I walked over to her desk, my purse and tote bag slung over my shoulder.

“Oh, Bailey,” she said, hanging up the phone. “I’m so glad you didn’t leave yet. That was Nash. He’s been delayed in Mr. Dicker’s office and he’s going to have to postpone your meeting.”

“Did he say when he wants to reschedule?”

“He just said he’d try to do it tomorrow. He’s got so much on his plate right now. He’s supposed to not only run the magazine but deal with Mr. Dicker
and
the police.”

I told her I understood completely, hoping that my agreeableness would make her more likely to take pity on me in my current jam. I explained the situation of the missing guest list with one teensy-weensy alteration: I said that I needed another copy because mine was sopping wet with spilled coffee.

She didn’t bat an eye at my request. All she did was step into Nash’s office and return with what I assumed was a copy she’d made earlier. As I waited for her to return from the copier, I glanced over toward the pod. Ryan was staring directly at me.

I didn’t totally mind being blown off by Nash. I was both mentally and physically fried from the events of the past twenty-four hours. I thanked Lee for her help and headed out. Though the floor had been bustling only moments earlier, it was quieting down quickly. My guess was that people felt creepy being on the premises—perhaps they even feared for their own lives.

When I arrived home, my apartment felt like a car that had been baking all day in the parking lot of a shopping mall, and I quickly flipped on the air conditioner to high. As I was drawing my blinds against the setting sun, I heard a knock on my door. I knew it had to be my seventy-year-old gay next-door neighbor, Landon; he must have heard me come in. A second later, I was staring at his face through the peephole.

“You poor dear,” he said as I flung open the door. “I’m dying to hear everything. Are you in need of sustenance?”

“God, yes,” I said. “And I feel too wrung out to even wash a lettuce leaf.”

“Well, I’m about to throw a steak on the grill. Are you up for something thick and juicy?”

“Absolutely. Though it’s been so long since I’ve seen anything fitting that description, I may not know how to handle it.”

I requested that he give me thirty minutes so I could take a quick shower and change my clothes. As soon as I closed the door, a little part of me regretted having said yes to the invitation. My aching body craved the couch, plus I wanted to review all the notes I’d taken that day. But I also knew that it would be helpful to spend time with Landon, and not just because he was a fantastic cook with a fantastic wine cellar. Conversing with him for an hour or two would help clear my head and enable me to return to my work with a fresh eye.

I had struck up an acquaintance with Landon soon after my divorce. I had some great girlfriends who offered their shoulders for me to cry on back then, but I was embarrassed to hang with them after my husband blew town. They’d listened to me foolishly rave about the guy, given up their Labor Day weekends to come to my wedding on Cape Cod, and bought me Tiffany place settings—and then my marriage had ended up lasting about as long as a car fire. Of course, at the time I had no idea my husband was a compulsive gambler, the kind of guy who would bet on anything short of a cockfight. But I looked so stupid
not
knowing. I kept imagining my friends’ comments to their other pals and significant others: “Couldn’t Bailey
tell
?” “Weren’t there any signs?” “Isn’t she a
reporter
for god’s sake?” Besides, so many of my friends were starting to have babies by that point, and the last thing I needed in my postmarital melancholy was to hear someone describe how many centimeters dilated she was by the time she arrived at the hospital or how raw her nipples were from breast-feeding. Landon asked me for a drink one night, and for a while it just became easier to have
him
as a buddy.

I peeled off my clothes, showered, and slipped on a pair of shorts and a cotton T-shirt. Before I left, I took out my notes from my interviews and left them on the pine dining table at the end of my living room. When I returned from dinner, they’d be ready and waiting for me.

“So tell me everything,” Landon said as I sat on his terrace, the steak sizzling and popping behind us on his Weber grill. He was wearing shorts, too, a madras pair teamed with a navy polo shirt. He was the preppiest gay man I knew, and tonight, with his walnut-colored skin and close-cropped silver hair, he actually
looked
like Ralph Lauren. “I know that your boss was a bitch, but did she really deserve to die?”

“It looks as if it were done in the heat of the moment. Mona was probably having a contentious discussion with someone and things escalated. The person got angry or upset and smashed her in the head.”

“Any ideas about who might have done it? Other than the entire population of Manhattan?”

“Oh, I’d venture to say she cut an even wider swath than that.”

I told him then about Robby and how right now, at least, all signs were pointing in his direction.

“Do you think he did it?” Landon called over to me as he flipped the steak with a long pair of silver tongs.

“God, I hope not. I’m not what you’d call a super close friend of Robby’s, but we’re pals and he’s always struck me as such a sweet guy. But that’s so often the case with crimes like this. They’re committed by people you’d never imagine capable of such things. With career criminals and psychopaths it’s only a matter of time before they kill someone. They set the family cat on fire at age nine and then progress inexorably from there. But someone who commits this kind of crime might never have done a violent thing in his life. It just takes the right set of circumstances. You know, when I found out that my ex-husband had hocked my jewelry, I fantasized about shoving him off the terrace. Who knows—if we’d been standing on it at the time I learned the truth, I might have done just that.”

“Of course, I would have come forward and said I saw him leap,” Landon said. “Let me just get a platter for the meat.”

Taking my glass of Cabernet with me, I stood up from the table and walked toward the railing of the terrace. The sunset just moments ago had been positively Turneresque—filmy yellows and oranges that had bled across the entire sky—and now that same sky was a swirl of dark blues and black. I let my eyes roam over the skyline and all the wooden-shingled water towers, and then glanced down to the courtyard fourteen stories below.

“Calculating how big of a splat your ex would have made if you’d pushed him?” Landon asked, emerging through the door with a white ceramic platter.

“Not at this particular moment. Did I ever tell you the story about my brother Cameron and the girls on the seesaw?”

“No, but it sounds perfectly poetic.”

“After my father died, Cameron and I went to stay with my aunt in Boston for a week or so. I think my mother thought we could do with a change of scenery, but we felt totally abandoned there, considering that my little brother was back home with her. Well, my aunt lived in a fancy apartment building, about twenty stories high. Every day Cameron would look down below at this little playground in the park. I finally asked him what he was staring at, and he told me he was looking at two girls in red coats on the seesaw. He wondered why they never went inside. I looked down and I realized that there were no girls—what he was seeing was a red circle painted on each side of the seesaw.”

“That’s what my sister used to call an optical
confusion.
”

I smiled, considering the phrase. “I didn’t have the heart to tell him that there were no girls in red coats,” I continued. “I hope he didn’t obsess about them for very long.”

We ate our steak along with an arugula-and-Parmesan salad and touched on other topics of conversation: Landon’s upcoming trip to Nantucket, a lobby he was designing for a small hotel in Florida, and our super’s newest toupee, which made his head look as if it had been laid with strips of sod.

“Speaking of men, how’s your love life?” Landon asked.

“Not so great. I’m having a hard time finding what I’m looking for.”

“And that would be . . . ?”

“I was hoping to have a great summer fling. Back in May I kept picturing myself meeting some guy who was visiting Manhattan just for the summer—you know, some paleontologist who was, let’s say, a guest lecturer at the Museum of Natural History. And we’d have this passionate romp for three months and then he’d go back to the University of London or wherever paleontologists go.”

“So just a sexual thing?”

“Not exactly. I was hoping for some good conversation, too. I’m a girl. I’ve got that stupid chat gland, so sooner or later I’m always overwhelmed with the urge to converse.”

“But what if you fell in love?”

“I wouldn’t let myself. I told Jack that I didn’t want to commit to anyone right now, and I meant it.”

“And you don’t think you might discover that you really
are
ready to commit—it was just that Jack was the wrong guy for you?”

“Ooh, don’t say that. It hurts my heart to think that. Besides, it’s all a moot point anyway. I haven’t met anyone. There seems to be a paucity of decent guys around this summer.”

“Maybe they’re all at
foreign
universities as guest professors. What about at work?”

“No way. There are a few straight guys there, but I just can’t picture myself with a man whose job involves keeping tabs on Jude Law’s love life or what shoes Cameron Diaz was wearing at the Oscars. Do you think it could possibly be an age thing? You know, I was walking across Washington Square Park the other day and this guy wearing a
fanny pack
tried to pick me up. Please tell me that it was just a fluke and has nothing to do with the fact that I’m over thirty and this is what’s in store for me.”

Landon laughed. “Is a fanny pack that terrible?” he asked. “Maybe he was just the outdoorsy type, the kind of guy who likes to ride a bike up a mountain. Now if it were a
money belt,
then I would have worried.”

He forced himself up to fetch coffee, and when he returned our conversation swung back to Mona’s murder.

“If Robby didn’t do it, then who did?” he asked.

“Well, it certainly doesn’t seem as if anyone could have walked in off the street and committed the crime. There was too much security last night. So it was either somebody from
Buzz
who hung around or someone who snuck over from the party.”

“Are you going to play Nancy Drew and try to figure it out?”

“Of course I want to know who did it,” I admitted. “But my main priority right now is to report the story and follow whatever developments unfold over the next days.”

He offered me another glass of wine, and because I was feeling so relaxed suddenly—and enjoying a wedge of key lime pie left over from his recent dinner party—I was momentarily tempted to accept. But I declined, knowing that I had work to do. I hugged Landon good night and let myself back into my apartment.

My notes lay spread on the table, beckoning me. I popped two Advil and before sitting down grabbed some pencils and an empty black-and-white composition book. Whenever I’m working on a piece, I always use a composition book to jot down questions to myself, along with pertinent quotes from people and incongruities that surface. There’s something about the combination of a composition book and a newly sharpened number two pencil that always jump-starts my brain—and allows me to scrutinize the situation from fresh angles.

Before touching pencil to paper, I read through all the notes I’d taken during my interviews that day. I circled interesting details here and there, like Lyle Parker’s comment about the murderer thinking, How
dare
you? and the revelations about Kimberly and Kiki. When I was all done, I cracked open the composition book and wrote out a timeline for Mona on the last night of her life.

7:00: Mona goes into her private bathroom. Misses phone call from Mary Kay.

7:05 (or so): Mona leaves office. Walks with Amy to stairwell. Says she’s going to Dicker’s office. Amy tells Carl to go into the party without Mona.

7:05: Robby calls me.

7:15 (or so): Mona arrives at party; is ambushed by Kiki.

7:30: Spanky leaves
Buzz.

7:34 (or so): Mona leaves
Track
party for her office—Travis sees her go.

7:50: I leave for
Buzz.

7:55: Robby arrives at
Buzz,
Harrison lets him in.

8:02: Robby says he leaves
Buzz.

8:20: I arrive at
Buzz.

8:28: I hear moaning, discover Katya and Mona.

My game plan tomorrow would be to flesh out the timeline by talking to as many more people as possible—including Mary Kay and Tom Dicker, though I’d have to handle Dicker delicately. As of right now, it appeared that Mona had spent only a few moments in Dicker’s office (“Was he not there?” I scribbled), come back downstairs, attended the party just long enough to be bitched out by Eva’s publicist, and then returned to her office just in time to take the call. Had the call come through? Or had she already been attacked by the time the phone rang? The police would know this by now from examining the phone records. I wouldn’t know until I spoke to Mary Kay. Once I had that piece of information, I’d have a better idea of the time of death.