Over Her Dead Body (31 page)

CHAPTER 17

I
wasn’t meeting Beau until seven-thirty, so after I arrived home and before I showered, I sat outside on my terrace, watching the dusk creep up on the city and trying to relax. I’d even made myself a cup of green tea, using a teabag from a gift basket someone had given me ages ago. I felt a little ridiculous sipping it, as if I were suddenly leading my life according to the pages of the new and improved
Gloss
magazine that Cat was busy creating, but I just needed something to help slow down my brain.

I hadn’t lingered at my meeting with Cat. I appreciated her trying to help me, and I liked the fact that things were starting to normalize between us again—but I’d been anxious to be on the move. I returned home, then headed for the gym. I told myself that thirty minutes on the treadmill would not only rev up my heartbeat, but might also kick my mind into fast gear, allowing me to determine what I should do with the bombshell about Dicker. But there seemed to be no obvious next step. I certainly wasn’t going to show up on the eighteenth floor again and try to grab a few minutes with the guy as I had the other day. Unless, of course, I wanted to end up losing my gig at
Buzz
and being escorted out the building by security.

So my next tactic had been to give my brain a breather—hence the green tea—but unfortunately it wasn’t working, either. I couldn’t stop thinking about the murder. I had viable suspects—Kiki and Brandon and now Dicker again—but I didn’t know how to flush out any more information about them. I also didn’t want to lose sight of Kimberly. She claimed to have an alibi but I’d not yet been able to verify it. It seemed that the only thing I could do was wait: to see how the police responded to the information that Nash provided about Jed Crandall’s auction, and also, to my chagrin, to learn what Ryan was cognizant of—once he shared it with Nash.

Finally I forced my thoughts away and considered the night ahead with Beau. I’d been looking forward to our encounter all day, but at the same time I was nervous. Ever since my marriage had blown up, I’d been pretty wary with new guys, and more times than not I seemed to fixate on one minor problem, which would eventually lead me to reject a perfectly decent man. It might be something as ridiculous as the fact that he had goofy-looking patch pockets on the jacket he’d chosen to wear one night.

About a year after my divorce, I met this charming and successful architect, and though he didn’t exactly make my knees buckle, I found him attractive and incredibly easy to talk to. He took me out to dinner twice, and then, for date three, he suggested we drive north on Saturday afternoon to pick apples and admire the fall foliage. I rendezvoused with him at his place, and when I was using his bathroom before we hit the road, I happened to notice a tube of something called Boil-eze on a shelf—and that was the beginning of the end for me. I began to ruminate about where in the name of God the boil
was.
His back? His leg? Or, worse, his
ass
? And how could anyone even go into a store and buy something called Boil-eze and leave it out on display? The phrase
drain a boil
suddenly forced its way into my mind, nearly making me retch. On the drive up the Taconic State Parkway, I could barely look the guy in the eye, and by the end of the day this little tic I’d acquired had ballooned into a full-blown distaste for the poor man. He sensed something was off, but he had absolutely no idea what it was. In fact, if he’d thought for a hundred years, he still wouldn’t have figured it out.

But with Beau, I wasn’t being the least bit skittish, and that worried me.

The restaurant he’d suggested had a French-sounding name and was located on Gansevoort Street, just off Ninth Avenue in the middle of the meatpacking district—and only a stone’s throw, actually, from Soho House. I was tempted to walk there because it was nearly a straight shot west of my apartment building, but it would take a good half hour and I didn’t want to arrive all sweaty and withered looking. I hailed a cab and arrived five minutes early, ahead of Beau.

It turned out to be a Moroccan restaurant: brick walls, banquettes covered with bright red kilim rugs, and those Moroccan lanterns with colored panes of glass. It was dim inside; light came only from the lanterns and little votive candles tucked into notches in the walls where a few bricks had been removed. Because it was hot, the door to the street was open, framed by long, pulled-back drapes, and it created the sensation that I was walking along a street in Marrakech. Except that the view from the door, once you were inside, was more Parisian in feeling—you could see the red awning of the French bistro Pastis and loads of people sauntering across the broad stretch of Ninth Avenue.

I had just opened my mouth to ask for a bottle of sparkling water when Beau strolled through the doorway. He was wearing a moss green-colored polo shirt and black jeans, and his hair was damp, as if he’d stepped out of the shower only moments before. My heart did this kind of crazy thing, like someone in a straitjacket flinging himself around the walls of a padded cell.

“Hi there,” he said, smiling as he pulled out the wooden chair from the other side of the table. I half expected he would kiss me, even on the cheek, but he didn’t—maybe because I was already sitting down and it would be awkward. “You look fabulous.”

Fabulous was too strong a word, but I did think I looked hot. I’d chosen this pale yellow sundress, sort of low cut, and these cool sandals in blue and yellow. As I’d left my building, I’d worried that it might have been a little too F. Scott Fitzgerald for the meatpacking district, but the night was so warm, it was nice not to have anything on my arms or legs.

“Thank you. So do you, I might add.”

“I hope this restaurant is okay. I never asked you what kind of food you like—besides pasta with clams, of course.”

“Everything. And I love Moroccan food. Have you ever been there?”

“No, but it’s high on my list. That’s the one drawback of spending so many years in Asia. I’m a little behind on exploring the rest of the world. Have you actually been there?”

“Yes, I spent a wonderful week there. Marrakech, Fez. I even stayed one night in a tent out in the Sahara.”

“You didn’t go alone, did you?”

“No, I went with another girl, another travel writer. I do these travel pieces sometimes. You don’t make much money on them, but the trips get paid for and it’s been a cheap way to stay in great accommodations.”

“So you’re a traveler at heart.”

“I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t travel. Besides the fact that I love it, I have to have something to talk about besides corpses.”

God, my words sounded clunky, as if I were on a blind date with someone my mother had set me up with as opposed to a man who had already spent half of one night inside me.

The waiter dropped off menus and a wine list, and Beau diverted his attention from me to select a bottle. I watched his gorgeous brown eyes scan the list of wines. He seemed to handle everything with total self-assurance and also an easiness born of not worrying about what others thought. I felt short of breath just looking at him. I just had to find a way to regain the wonderful, effortless rhythm of our conversation the other night.

As the waiter departed, Beau leaned into the table and stared long and hard at me. Then he slid his hand across the table and held the fingers of my right hand lightly in his own fingertips.

“So is this bracelet from one of your many travels?” he asked, gazing at the pale yellow stones.

“Yes,” I said, wondering if he could feel how hard my pulse was pounding. “From Ecuador.”

“Where’s your next trip going to take you?”

“I’m planning to go to Italy this September. Rome and Florence.”

“I bet it would be really fun to be off on an adventure somewhere with you—though I fear I might never want to get out of bed.”

I felt myself blush.

“Well, we’d have to eat eventually, so we’d be forced to order room service,” I said. “That way you’d at least have the opportunity to taste the local cuisine.”

“Good point. And perhaps occasionally take a walk, to deal with the kinks in our legs.”

“Right.”

“You know, I don’t think I ever really told you how much I thoroughly enjoyed the other night. It was quite the unique experience.”

I could feel even more blood rushing to my cheeks. In a minute it was going to be hard to distinguish me from one of the red kilim rugs in the room.

“Unique? Why? Because generally when you pop in unexpectedly on women you barely know, they don’t let you bed them?”

He laughed in this funny, knowing way, and I realized that the opposite was probably true—that women always let him bed them, no matter what the circumstances.

“Not just that,” he said. “The whole experience. One minute I was talking to a real estate agent who couldn’t stop snapping her gum and the next minute I was eating under the stars with you.”

And after that I just relaxed. A tape of haunting Middle Eastern music played in the background, and it almost seemed as if we were in an exotic place light-years away from Manhattan.

We both ordered this lemony chicken dish, with some kind of spice that totally evoked North Africa for me. Over dinner we talked about the plot for his movie, where else I’d traveled over the past few years, Buddhist monks. He asked me about my marriage and I gave a few short general answers: lawyer; went to Brown, too, but ahead of me, and we didn’t meet until an alumni event in New York; had no idea where he was at the moment. I left out the “bookies were calling in the middle of the night threatening to set him on fire” details for fear of freaking him out. He said more about his own romantic history this time. He’d ended a pretty serious relationship in December because she had accepted a long-sought-after job in London.

Eventually we found our way to Mona’s murder.

“I can’t believe I’ve gone all night and haven’t asked you about it,” Beau said. “Is there any news?”

“No, except my friend Robby has been cleared.”

“Did you get your story filed or whatever the language is?”

“Uh-huh. But now I’m working on the follow-up. It’s a little bit tricky for me because generally I don’t like to go into the office more than two or three times a week, but during this period I feel I need to be there every day. Can I ask you a totally off-the-wall question?”

“Did
I
do it? No. I’d never even heard of Mona Hodges until last week.”

“
Almost
as off the wall as that. Do you think there’s any chance Thomas Dicker could have?”

“
Dicker?”

“Yes, Dicker.”

“Wow. I know he’s often referred to as a killer, but I never thought it was supposed to be taken literally. But why would he kill this Mona chick? I thought she was helping to revive his media empire.”

“She’d apparently been offered a very big job elsewhere and had decided to take it. I’m thinking that in a moment of anger he might have just lashed out at her. You’ve been with him a couple of times. Do you think he could have done it?”

“He’s got a short fuse, that much I know. I didn’t experience it directly, but I heard him on the phone with someone and it wasn’t very pretty. Sure, I could see it. Not premeditated, but in a flash of rage—like you said. Do you want me to ask him?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m going to meet with him again this week. I’m not that interested in the project, but I thought I’d hear him out. I’ll just come right out and ask him—while he’s got a large piece of steak in his mouth—did you kill Mona?”

I laughed. “Actually, if you want to help me out, there
is
one thing you can do.”

“Just say it. I’d love to play Dr. Watson to your Sherlock Holmes.”

“It would be only normal for you to ask Dicker about the case. After you’ve made a general inquiry, can you just mention in passing that you heard a rumor that Mona was going to be leaving, that she had accepted this job producing reality television shows? I’d love to know his reaction—whether he looks as if he knew or didn’t know.”

“Consider it done. My life won’t be in danger, will it? They’re not going to find me torn limb from limb by the hound of the Baskervilles?”

“Not unless you plan to go traipsing across the moors of Devonshire,” I said, smiling.

I liked that he wanted to play Dr. Watson. It meant that he found what I did exciting, that he wanted to be helpful. A little part of me, though, was worried about how fast things were moving. It was feeling less and less like a fling by the minute.

After he’d paid the bill, we walked out into the sultry night. Dozens of people were strolling along the sidewalks, coming in and out of the restaurants that lined Ninth Avenue and Gansevoort. The boisterous noise of diners spilled out onto the streets from the open windows of Pastis.

“Feel like another espresso?” Beau asked. “Or a brandy? We could stop here at Pastis. Or I could serve you either at my place.”

Just hearing him say “my place” made my knees weak.

“Sure. I mean, your place sounds great.”

His apartment was on the tenth floor of a fairly old building in Chelsea. At one glance I could see that it was nice, really cool, in fact—what you might think would belong to a guy of his age and profession, but you never make that mental leap in advance because there are so many times when you walk into a man’s place and discover that he’s got an extensive trucker hat collection on display or that the only piece of art is one of those dartboards with the tiny cupboard where darts are stored.

There was only one side-table lamp on in the living room, but I could see well enough because of the city lights that splashed through a row of three big windows. The walls were a soft white and the furniture was mostly black leather, but the rug was a smashing-looking primitive design in blue and black and orange. Lining the walls were black-and-white photographs, mostly, it seemed, scenes from the Far East. Off the living room, behind French doors, was a small, nearly darkened room, which was probably meant to be a dining room; but Beau had set it up as an office, with a round wooden table as a desk.