Over Her Dead Body (30 page)

I gave him a few minutes to get settled and then sauntered into his office. I felt nervous, consumed by that weird free-floating anxiety you experience when you are sitting in your gyno’s reception area before your appointment, flipping through a four-month-old copy of
Time
magazine that has a cover story on global warming. But I didn’t have a choice. I needed to do this.

“Hey, Nash, have you got a minute?” I asked.

“Yeah, come in. I’m meeting with someone at ten-thirty, but I can spare a few minutes.”

“I came across some important information last night, and I wanted to share it.”

He’d been multitasking when I first spoke to him, thumbing through pink phone slips, and now he slowly raised his head and eyed me expectantly.

“What have you got?” he said.

“I know Jed led you to believe that Kiki didn’t know about his bombshell, but she did,” I said. “And my guess is that she knew he’d either told Mona or was about to.”

“Who told you that?” he asked, his expression suddenly cross. I had to be careful how I presented my information to Nash. I didn’t want him to think I’d been going behind his back, even though I had.

“When I had my talk with Kiki, she made a comment I found interesting and then I confirmed something with Jed and I put a few things together, and it’s pretty clear that Kiki knew that Mona would be receiving the hermaphrodite tip,” I said.

He eyed me warily, smart enough to be suspicious of a sentence that ran on that long.

“Do you really think Kiki could have killed Mona?” he asked eventually.

“
Someone
killed her, and there’s an excellent chance it was someone at the party that night,” I said. “So the next question is who had a motive. Kiki had one. So, for that matter, did Eva’s husband. When I arrived on the floor that night, Brandon was attempting to bolt the party. Maybe
he
was the one who had the fateful confrontation with Mona. I think we have to consider the two of them as viable suspects.”

“Well then, we don’t have any choice but to go to the police, do we?”

“Agreed,” I said, relieved. “I’ve been writing about crime long enough to know that there’s a real danger in trying to keep important information from the cops. It always comes back to haunt you.”

“Tell you what, though,” said Nash. “I want to be able to let Dicker know what’s going on. Let me try to grab him this morning, and as soon as I’ve given him the heads-up on all of this, I’ll call this guy Tate.”

“Fine,” I said, smiling. I wasn’t completely comfortable with Nash stalling for a few more hours, but I wasn’t going to buck it as long as he notified the cops sometime today. I turned, ready to leave.

“You know what this means, then, don’t you?” Nash said. I spun back in his direction. “If it’s true, it means that Mona died because of her job, because of some stupid gossip item. How fucking insane is that?”

“I know. And Jed will find someone else to give the information to anyway.”

“You know—” He caught himself and shook his head, as if he’d just found a good reason to hold off on what he’d been about to say.

“What?” I asked.

“Ryan . . . No, never mind.”

“What?” I asked again, feeling a big squirt of adrenaline.

“No, it’s nothing. I’m just thinking out loud. I’ll catch up with you later, okay?”

Damn!
I shouted to myself. Ryan had said something to him, dropped a hint. Nash wasn’t going to spill, though. And I didn’t think it would be wise to beg.

I turned around again, and things went from bad to worse: Hilary was standing in the doorway.

“I’ve got a ‘Juice Bar’ issue to discuss with you,” she said to Nash, ignoring me for the moment.

“Unless it involves a potential lawsuit, it’s got to wait,” he told her brusquely. Ouch. She tried not to look offended, but I could tell his remark had smarted.

“Cute pants,” she said to me as we exited the room side by side.

Except they weren’t, and she knew it. They were a pair that poofed out a little too much around the thighs, but they were the only clean thing I had in my closet, other than the dress I would be wearing to dinner.

“Good morning, Hilary,” was all I said in reply.

As I returned to my desk, my phone was ringing, and I made a dash for it. To my surprise, Robby was on the other end. As he said my name, I heard levity in his voice.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I’ve got some great news—I
think.
It looks like I may be in the clear.”

“Oh, Robby, that’s fantastic,” I said, feeling a rush of absolute relief. “Do they have a suspect?” It seemed crass to immediately ask that question, but I couldn’t contain myself.

“That I don’t know,” he said. “But they found me on the film from the security camera in the lobby, and apparently I was exiting the building with the letters in my hand not all that long after Mona was talking on the phone. That doesn’t exactly give me time to have gone into her office and killed her. Plus, the weapon is apparently missing and I wasn’t wearing a jacket, so it’s pretty clear I didn’t have it with me. They’re still being a little cagey with my lawyer—I think they can’t bear to give me up as a suspect—but we hope to learn more details later today.”

“I’m just so happy to hear all this. And I’ll definitely include it in the follow-up story. The more people who know you’ve been officially cleared, the better. Then you won’t have some cloud hanging over you.”

We agreed to meet in person within the next day or two so he could take me up-to-date on everything that had happened. After I hung up, I left a message for Tate to call me so I could hear any “official” statement from him.

I should have been ecstatic as I leaned back in my desk chair. Not only was Robby innocent as I’d always hoped, prayed, and mostly believed, but also the police were now going to be off his back. Yet I felt myself being swallowed up by a weird blue mood. It was due in part, I thought, to the fact that I was stalled as far as the story was concerned. Several possible suspects were staring me in the face, but I had no idea how to jump to the next level and uncover additional information about them.

Of course, on one level there wasn’t the same degree of urgency to learn the truth that there had been five minutes ago—before Robby had broken his news to me—yet I still had to discover who the murderer was. I’d found Mona, after all, and I wanted answers. Plus, there was a possibility the murderer was stalking me and wouldn’t stop until he or she was apprehended. And after everything that had happened so far, I couldn’t stand the thought of Ryan just swooping in and breaking the case wide open with whatever secret he’d dug up. It made me nervous, and more than a little jealous.

I glanced up from my desk. More and more people had drifted in, but Ryan’s desk was still empty. From my limited experience, he generally didn’t show his face on Tuesday mornings. I wondered if he was still asleep or charging around town chasing down information that would confirm whatever freakin’ theory he had.

I reached under my desk for my tote bag and dug out the file with the party invitation list, which I’d been carrying around with me ever since last week. There was a small section at the end that listed the fifteen or so
Track
staffers who had gone to the party. Using the directory on the computer, I found their extensions and jotted them down. With everything on my plate last week there’d been no time to talk to them. What I
could
do now was call them and quiz them about Kiki’s and Brandon’s whereabouts at the party.

Over the next hour, I managed to speak with most of them. Because I didn’t want to shoot off any red flares, I told those I did reach that I was doing a follow-up story that focused on the impact of Mona’s death on the celebrity world, and I wanted some additional information about the party. I was looking for color, I told them, tidbits about the night. I backed into questions about Kiki and Brandon by first inquiring about the atmosphere that night, Eva’s entourage, and so on. “How did Brandon and Eva seem to be getting along?” “Did he stay by her side?” “Did Kiki do a good job of handling Eva?” One of the people I caught on the phone was a senior editor who seemed so eager to talk that I asked if she wanted to meet at the coffee shop off the lobby rather than talk on the phone.

But my interviews produced little that was news. Several people had witnessed the spat between Mona and Kiki but reiterated that it had been so fast, no one had a clue what it was about. Afterward, Kiki had spoken briefly to Eva and then headed toward the bar. Someone said he’d thought she’d hung there for quite a while, but that was okay because Eva was sitting with people from the record company.

As for Brandon, most people remarked on the fact that he’d looked like a free agent that night, wandering from one spot to the next with all the patience of a hummingbird. What people weren’t able to do was attach a time to when they’d seen Kiki and Brandon at various moments and places, so I couldn’t determine if there were any gaps in their presence at the party, other than the time I’d seen them in the reception area.

There was one last question I laid on each person, and I felt like such a pathetic loser doing it. “Have you had a chance to speak to one of my co-workers, Ryan Forster? He’s working on another angle.” I’d been able to ask the question without Ryan overhearing me because he’d yet to show his face at work.

But he hadn’t made contact with anyone on my list.

While I was on the phone doing one of the interviews, Beau had called, leaving an address for a restaurant on Gansevoort Street. Even in my blue mood, I grinned stupidly.

It was four o’clock, and there seemed to be no reason to hang at work. I probably had heard back from all the people at
Track
I was ever going to hear from. I was dying to know if Nash had called Detective Tate yet, but I didn’t feel comfortable checking up on him. I was going to have to take him at his word.

“You splitting?” Jessie asked as I slung my purse over my shoulder.

“Yeah,” I said. “There’s nothing left for me to do here today. By the way, you don’t have any idea where our friend Ryan is, do you?”

She glanced back at his desk, as if that might provide an answer. “Looks like he took the day off.”

“That doesn’t seem likely, with all that’s going on.”

“Maybe he’s working on that big, big angle. I’ll ask around, see what I can find out. I’ll give you a call later.”

“My cell, okay? I won’t be home.”

She smirked at me in amusement. “Hot date?”

“Hm-hmm. With that guy you saw me talking to at Dicker’s.”

Before she could pump me for details, my phone rang.

“Bailey?” a vaguely familiar voice inquired. “Please hold for Cat Jones.”

“So you have someone place your calls these days?” I asked Cat when she came on. “That doesn’t seem very Zen-like.”

“Sorry, but I had no idea where you’d be. Look, I’ve come into some info you might want. Is it possible for you to stop by?”

“Info?” I said, surprised. “About what?”

“Dicker. But I don’t want to go into it on the phone. Can you swing by here on your way home?”

“God, Cat, I appreciate the call, but can we meet someplace else? I just don’t feel like stopping by
Gloss.
”

She sighed. “Okay. What about Café Jacqueline, the place down the street from here? Could you meet me there in fifteen minutes? I know you’re not that far from me.”

“Sure, that’s perfect.” It was the kind of spot that you went to for lunch when you didn’t want the tab for two to exceed $40. I was surprised Cat even knew about it.

I waved good-bye to Jessie and told her we’d talk more on the phone later. I was at Café Jacqueline in less than fifteen minutes, and I’d already gone through one cappuccino by the time Cat finally blew through the door. She drew glances from the crowd as she waltzed in, dressed in a pink, off-the-shoulder top and a yellow, pink, and green check pencil-shaped skirt with a row of amazing box ruffles that fishtailed back and forth as she walked, enough to add a draft to the room. I was glad I was sitting down and she couldn’t see the pathetic poof in my pants.

“Wow, I’m making a little progress,” she said. “You seem happier to see me than you did the last time.”

“Cat, come on. You know I’m not mad at you. . . . You seem in a good mood.”

“Really? If someone had told me when I was twenty-six that my career would one day consist of planning features on things like the healing power of an organized purse, I would have stuck an ice pick in their heart.”

“So what’s this news that you’ve heard?” I asked after she’d had time to order her own cappuccino.

“I know you were interested in the whole Mona/Dicker dynamic, so I made a few inquiries. I figured it was the least I could do.”

“Thanks,” I said, though with Cat you were always smart to suspect there was some hidden agenda. “What did you find out?”

“You know how I mentioned to you that she’d been stalling on her contract? Well, she apparently had a huge offer to produce reality TV shows and was about to take it.”

“
What?”
I said. This was a total contradiction to what Carl had told me.

“Why seem so surprised? I’d mentioned the other night that it might be a possibility.”

“It’s just that someone told me the opposite—that she was staying at
Buzz.
”

“I’ve got this on pretty good authority. What she
did
do, apparently, was dangle her offer in front of Dicker so that he upped his offer to her, and then she used that to finagle even more money for the new job. I hear there was no way he could match the final TV offer. She was going to make a boatload of money.”

So Carl had totally misled me. Why? I recalled that schmaltzy, Hallmark-card line he’d tossed out about Dicker, about how he was really a good guy. I wondered if Dicker had offered Carl some kind of payment, one of those death payments that companies occasionally slipped to families when an executive died. That way, he could count on Carl not bad-mouthing him in any way.

Whatever the reason, I was back where I’d started with Dicker. He’d had a very good reason to bop Mona on the head.