'Til Death Do Us Part (29 page)

“Which is?”

“Get him to talk about himself. Just ask lots of questions about him, him, him, and before long he’ll be telling you
anything
you want to know.”

“Are they all like that? Total egomaniacs?”

He cocked his head, considering. “No, not all. The ones who just stumbled into it—you know, guys who got discovered on the street by a scout—they’re not like that. It’s just the other ninety-nine percent.”

Ten minutes later I was headed south on the number 4 train, which I’d picked up after taking the R to 57th and Lexington. As I was climbing the stairs of the Wall Street station, my cell went off and Chris was finally on the line.

“Sorry not to call you right back. They wouldn’t let us take a break, and they yelled at anybody who whipped out a cell phone.”

“Not a problem. Look, I’m all set to fly down there tomorrow morning. Do you still think we can hook up with this guy?”

“Yeah, I already took care of it. It turned out he was on this shoot with me today, and after I got your message I told him that you were coming down. He agreed to meet up with us tomorrow night at nine—at a place called the Sky Bar. Where are you staying, anyway?”

“At the Delano.”

“The Sky Bar’s at the Shore Club, just a short ways from the Delano.”

I hesitated for a split second before I asked the next question.

“Can I buy you dinner first—for the trouble you’ve gone to?”

“Sure. Why don’t we eat by the pool at the Shore Club. I’d feel better if we didn’t have to worry about getting there on time. Like I said, Kyle’s a bit of a flake.”

We agreed that I’d leave a message for him tomorrow, confirming that I’d arrived. He said he’d make a seven o’clock dinner reservation for us.

By the time I hung up, I’d reached Ravick’s. It was an old-style publike bar and restaurant in the basement of an 1800s building on Hanover Square, a tiny park that seemed left over from another era. I found the place packed primarily with guys in suits, obviously traders, brokers, and bankers fortifying themselves after a grueling day of winning or losing millions. The only Wall Street type I’d ever dated was an investment banker who went by the initials
K.C.
When he wasn’t shagging other women, he couldn’t have been more charming.

It took me five minutes of endlessly cocking my head up to catch the bartender’s eye. I ordered an Amstel Light that arrived icy cold. And then I waited. I’m pretty good with faces, but I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I’d recognize Brace.

He came in about ten minutes late, and I
did
recognize him as he stamped his feet by the door. I started to raise my hand to grab his attention, but before I had a chance I saw him scan the bar and pick me out easily with his eyes. I stiffened—those were cold, determined eyes. Could they have been trained on me in Jamie’s apartment and on the icy Greenwich road?

“Sorry to make you wait,” he said as he reached me. Up close I saw that his hair was more strawberry color than blond, kind of like Peyton’s, and it was receding slightly at the top. His skin was pale and freckly, and his eyes were the color of old pennies. Extremely creepy. Not my type, but two women near us at the bar swiveled their heads as if George Clooney had just wandered in.

“I guess I described myself pretty well,” I said.

“I saw you with Ashley,” he said, his face expressionless. “The day she died.”

He sloughed off his coat, letting it fall around the stool. He was wearing a navy suit, a white shirt, and an expensive-looking blue and green tie. He caught the bartender’s eye in a millisecond and ordered a “J.D. and water.” I also saw him catch the eye of one of the two women near us at the bar and hold it just long enough.

“What were you doing there that day?” I asked.

“Like I’m sure she told you,” he answered, smirking, “I was looking for some jewelry I’d given Robin. I wanted it—for sentimental reasons. But she claimed Robin’s brother had already hauled everything away.”

“You’re probably wondering why I wanted to see you,” I said, switching gears.

“I sure as hell wouldn’t be here if I
wasn’t
wondering that.”

“Then I’ll get right to the point. I don’t think Robin’s death was an accident.”

He smirked. “Oh, so you’re buying into this whole Curse of the Mummy thing?”

“No, I think she was murdered.”

“Murdered?”
he said. The two girls shot their heads back in our direction.

“Yes,” I said, my voice lowered. “And I think Jamie and Ashley were murdered, too.”

His drink arrived and I offered to pay, but he shook his head and tossed a twenty on the bar. He removed the red straw from the glass, flicking it fast a couple of times against the rim. Then he took a long sip, staring out into the sea of suits.

“You get your rocks off playing Nancy Drew or something?” he asked finally, looking back at me and licking his lips.

“I’m not interested in getting my rocks off. I’m interested in finding out the truth. I was in the wedding party myself, and I have no intention of being killed in some so-called freak accident this month.”

“Well, I don’t know shit about that whole wedding situation. I’d already been given the boot by that point.”

“But I heard you and Robin were considering a reconciliation.”

“I’m not gonna pretend differently—I was willing to try to make a go of it again. Robin and I had drinks a couple of times last summer and talked about it. At first she seemed open to the idea. Then she goes and pulls the plug. I made another stab at it back in October or November. But she’d moved on. I decided it was time for me to do the same thing.”

“During the times you had drinks together, did she ever say anything about being worried about anything or concerned for her safety?”

“Nope. But like I said, if your theory has anything to do with the wedding, I was out of the picture—”

“Forget the wedding for a second. All three women were bridesmaids, but maybe there’s some other kind of connection. Robin and Jamie were friends, and Robin was very upset about her death. Maybe someone killed Jamie, and Robin had some clue about it—so that the person had to murder her, too. Then the killer thinks Ashley might know information, too. It becomes this whole chain reaction thing, starting with Jamie.”

“It always comes back to Jamie, doesn’t it.” As he spoke, he had the look on his face that you get when you’ve just sniffed a carton of spoiled milk.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Robin got in
so
thick with her. It was Jamie this and Jamie that. Listening to her talk that way used to really chap my ass.”

Yuck
—I was going to have to work hard to drive that nasty image from my mind.

“Why do you think they became such quick friends?” I asked.

“Who knows why chicks do anything?”

“Hazard a guess for me, would you?”

“Okay. Robin had a real needy streak in her,” he said, staring into his drink as he spoke. “It’s what caused most of the problems in our marriage. She wanted me to be there 24/7, but I couldn’t always do that. I have a job that calls for wining and dining clients when I’m not on the Street. And of course, it didn’t help that she worked for the world’s fattest ego. We split, and then along comes this Jamie, who apparently was always flattering her, making her feel good. Robin ate that kind of shit up. But from what I could tell, Jamie was a user—and she was using Robin big-time.”

“How so?”

“She planned to open this gourmet food store downtown, kind of like the one Robin ran for Peyton, and it sounded to me like she was pumping Robin for any info she could. I bet once the store was open, she would have dropped Robin in a nanosecond.”

“It doesn’t sound, though, like the store was ever going to get off the ground. I don’t think she had any investors.”

“Oh, she had investors all right,” he said, staring into his drink before taking another long sip. “She’d even picked out the space—someplace on the Lower East Side.”

“You’re kidding—how do you know that?”

“Robin asked me to eyeball the business plan. Jamie had gotten a lease, and she had the money lined up.”

Now that
was
interesting. Both Peyton and Jamie’s neighbor Alicia had been under the impression that Jamie had still been struggling to pull it all together.

“So was it a decent plan?” I asked.

“I told her I had no interest in taking a look or in getting involved in Jamie’s little business.”

“It sounds like Jamie rubbed you the wrong way.”

He tore his gaze away from his drink and stared into my eyes. “I didn’t say that,” he said in irritation. “I said I had no interest in wasting my time on her business. And I said she was a user. But she wasn’t using
me
. I didn’t even know the chick.”

He glanced at his watch and took one big gulp of his drink, finishing it off.

“Gotta go,” he said, practically slamming the empty glass back down on the bar. He grabbed his coat the way a lion would grab a cub by the scruff of its neck and hurried to the door. Once again he hadn’t bothered with good-bye.

I sat there alone for a few minutes, finishing my beer, rolling what he’d told me over in my mind. Something kept nudging at my brain, the way our family dog used to paw at my leg when he saw me eating a doughnut, but I didn’t know what it was.

One thing I did know, though: I didn’t like Brace. Maybe it was my bias against Wall Street broker types. Or maybe it was those weird copper-colored eyes that seemed as out of place in nature as green dirt. I could understand why Robin had felt he wasn’t there for her in the marriage—he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who had much time for anyone. And boy, had he disliked Jamie. He had practically bristled when he’d talked about her.

The thing that had been nudging finally pushed through. It was something Ashley had said to me when she’d first told me about Robin and Jamie’s friendship: “They bonded over bad men.”

According to Brace, Robin had been susceptible to Jamie’s flattery and guidance. What if Jamie had discouraged Robin from getting back with her ex? Yesterday I’d dismissed the idea of Brace as a killer, because why would he have murdered Jamie? But perhaps he had killed because he believed she was all that stood in the way of his getting back together with Robin. And when he was finally sure Robin would never reconcile with him, he had killed her, too. And Ashley? Maybe he’d killed her because he suspected that she knew—or was about to uncover—the truth.

CHAPTER 15

S
INCE I HAD
no plans for the evening, I figured I’d spend it alone, ricocheting between feeling fretful about my stalker and glum over Jack; but Landon rescued me in the end—along with the best BLT I’d ever eaten. I’d finished my beer at Ravick’s and then bundled up for the trip home. The street traffic had thinned out by the time I emerged—the Wall Street crowd either headed back to the ’burbs or out for expensive dinners farther north. I lingered on the sidewalk in front of the pub just long enough to make sure that Copper Eyes wasn’t hiding in the shadows someplace, waiting to follow me. Then I grabbed the first cab I saw. I swiveled around so many times, checking out who was behind us, that the driver started eyeing me suspiciously in his rearview mirror.

I felt too jittery to roam the neighborhood for groceries, so I had the driver let me off right in front of my building, and I prayed there might be something in my kitchen worth consuming. But all I found in the fridge was an expired container of cottage cheese and some limp, ragged red-leaf lettuce that at first glance looked like the head of Medusa. It had been a while since I’d taken any Advil, and the bruise on my chest was starting to throb again. I was just about to throw myself down on the couch in despair when I spotted the message light on my phone. It was Landon, fifteen minutes earlier. “Are you
alive
?” he asked. “If you get home early, tap three times on the wall. Or stop by for a sandwich.”

Sandwich turned out to be an understatement. It was toasted Tuscan bread layered with crispy bacon, baby spinach, and actual red tomatoes he’d secured someplace. Each bite evoked summers spent on Cape Cod with my mother and brothers. Landon served them with red potatoes tossed in vinaigrette and a big bowl of Niçoise olives.

“I know it’s all wrong for mid-January,” he said, sitting across from me at his antique walnut dining table. He was dressed in jeans and a turtleneck fisherman knit sweater that almost engulfed his chin. “But these were the only ingredients I had in the larder.”