The Perfect Woman (Rose Gold Book 2)

by Nicole French

  “Someone is going to turn up,” I said. “And I’ll bet my last dollar it’s Calvin Gardner.”

  Derek continued to study me. “Zola, don’t take this the wrong way, but…did you ever think that maybe he’s not actually the guy?”

  The look on my face must have told him I abso-fuckin’-lutely hadn’t.

  Derek worried his jaw around a little bit. “Look, Zola. I—I don’t know how else to say this but to come out and ask. Could your attachment to Nina Gardner be fucking with your judgment here?”

  If I had looked up any quicker, my head might have popped up. “I’m sorry, what? What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Yeah, I know. The lady doth protest too much. Or in this case, the irritated fuckin’ prosecutor.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. It was just a question, man.” Derek held his hands up in surrender. “I’m not saying I know anything. I’m not saying I’ve seen anything. And to be honest, I don’t really want you to tell me if I’m right. Because if I am, that puts me in the weird spot of having to report you to Ramirez and your bureau chief. Since you’re the only paper pusher I’ve ever liked, I don’t want to do that.”

  I snorted. The animosity between the NYPD and the prosecutors’ offices in the city was legendary.

  “Fuck you,” I said. “I’m not a fuckin’ paper pusher, and you know it.”

  Derek shrugged, though he cracked a good-natured grin all the same. “The point remains. Is there any chance you want this guy to be guilty more than he is?”

  “King, we already took it to trial. It’s not just me that needs the guy to be guilty of more than a single count of aiding and abetting.”

  “Yeah, but what if he’s not? Just because you got a thing for his wife doesn’t mean he’s the worst guy on the planet, Zola. I know you want him to be more than one of Carson’s lackeys, but I gotta be honest, my friend. I’m not sure it’s there.”

  We sat together in silence, ruminating over the possibility. I knew Derek was right. So far, the evidence against Calvin Gardner was weak, and nothing more had come up in the last three weeks.

  And yeah, there was a girl involved in my investigations, possibly swaying my judgment (though I was never going to admit as much to Derek). But I couldn’t shake the idea that this went beyond my feelings for Nina. My gut hadn’t led me astray once in seven years at this job. I wasn’t ready to concede the first time. Not yet.

  “Look, we still have another month until trial, more if I can extend discovery. I have an idea.” I nodded as the rest of it came to me. “I want to come back to the person associated with the Pantheon.”

  Derek scowled. “Zola, we covered this already.”

  “Yeah, but don’t you see? That’s where whoever owns Pantheon made his big mistake.” I nodded again, sitting up straight. “He named a dead man, but everything associated with the LLC is still running like he never died. Pantheon wasn’t included in his will either. Which means the person or people who actually own Pantheon are still alive.”

  Derek blinked. “Okay…”

  “Don’t you get it?” I clapped my hands together. “You can’t know someone if you’re dead, King. They have to change it by law, and we can ask them to do it. The owner names a known compatriot, and boom—we have a whole new suspect with a whole new bunch of connections, not to mention weaknesses to exploit.”

  Finally, Derek’s eyes brightened. He nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay, so you’ll…”

  “You just keep watching those houses, keep interviewing people at all the other fronts, and file a request for the known associate, my friend. Within a month, we’ll have a new target. And this case will be back on track.”

  I

  Prospettiva

  Then

  Chapter One

  May 2008

  The subway screamed overhead as Nina Evelyn Astor de Vries stepped onto the corner of Sixty-Seventh and Roosevelt, smack in the middle of Jackson Heights. Queens. Out of habit, she pulled out her sunglasses—a cheap pair purchased at CVS just for today. Flimsy and uncomfortable, unlike her favorite Guccis tucked deep in her purse, but without the name brand recognition. Because nothing about today was normal. She wasn’t normal.

  Nina had worn nothing but designer name brands and couture since she was ten. Had made semi-annual trips to Milan and Paris with Grandmother and Mother since she was twelve. And now she was standing in the middle of Queens in a pair of ill-fitting Gap jeans and a “Big Apple” baseball cap atop her golden blonde hair, hoping to God no one would spot her for the fraud she was.

  The neighborhood was only twenty minutes from the Upper East Side, where Nina had grown up, but it felt like another country. The fact was, Nina was sheltered. Spoiled. Naive in the worst possible way. And the reality of that hadn’t really struck her until she had left the streets of the Upper East Side for college and spent the last year studying abroad. Wellesley, of course, was still a fount of privilege, but was at least something different. Florence wasn’t exactly the developing world either…but it certainly wasn’t New York. Nina hadn’t expected nine months in a foreign country to completely turn her perspective on its axis. But it had. It had changed everything.

  There, she was no longer an Astor, or Nina de Vries, daughter of not just one but two centuries-old New York families. She was simply Nina. A girl in a class. A woman walking along the Arno. No one special at all.

  Perhaps she might have stayed.

  If only.

  Nina closed her eyes and saw the face that haunted her dreams, day and night.

  Giuseppe.

  Or Peppe, as his students called him. Just barely an inch taller than her. Slight and willowy, his shoulders stooped from years of bending over his books. A few hints of silver threading his otherwise shiny dark hair. Skin the color of soft, pounded leather, a pair of glasses perched over a patrician nose. Not a particularly handsome or young man, but one who became utterly beautiful when he talked about the great artists of Florence. His deep eyes crinkled at the edges and danced. His hands came alive.

  Two weeks into Nina’s course on classical Renaissance art, Peppe had lectured on Botticelli and took the class to the Uffizi to see the master’s work.

  Long after the class had moved on, Nina stared at the Birth of Venus, absorbed by the curling strawberry blonde hair of the naked goddess and her unabashed curves as she stood on her shell. The fullness of her breasts, her thighs.

  She had turned to find her professor equally entranced.

  “Hypnotizing, is she not?” He stared at her while he spoke, waving his lithe, graceful hands toward the picture.

  It was the first time Nina had imagined those hands on her. The first time she had imagined or wanted anyone’s hands on her at all.

  Principessa.

  That was what he called her, even before he learned who and what she was. The first time was when Nina had wandered to his office hours wanting more information about Botticelli and other masters. She was his principessa a few weeks later when he took her on a private tour of the lesser-known art hidden in Florence’s cathedrals, then kissed her in the shadow of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore while the Arno river shushed in the distance. And again in the golden light of his family’s deserted olive farm after making love to her in the cool spring night for all of Tuscany to witness. Once more when he had told her goodbye at the train station, cupping her face between those beautiful hands and promising her he would never forget her in a thousand years.

  She couldn’t stay with him, nor him with her. Nina had a family to return to, and so did he. Two daughters and a wife, all waiting for him in their apartment near the edge of the city. A life that in her heart Nina knew could never be hers, but that she had wanted badly, nonetheless.

  She pressed a hand over her stomach, over the remainder of that dreamlike farewell.

  If only.

  “Hey, lady! Get out of the road!”

  Nina opened her eyes just in time to stop herself from falling
into the street. Two cars and a taxi blared loudly as she stepped backward on a sharp breath and bumped into someone else.

  “Oh my! I’m so sorry,” she said to an elderly Asian woman taking small, solid steps.

  “Need some help, sweetheart?”

  A warm hand steadied Nina’s arm, and she looked up to find a pair of dark, kind eyes twinkling with interest. A delivery worker, stopped mid-shift, unloading boxes of produce into the basement of a Dominican restaurant. He was handsome in that way some of her friends liked—the ones who engaged in short-lived affairs with their doormen or cleaning crew members, trying to avoid (or maybe provoke) their parents’ ire.

  Such affairs never lasted, and, to be honest, Nina found them distasteful. The way her friends used men like these as objects, not people. And the way they used them back, like trophies, not women. They lasted a few weeks, a month or more. If there was any trouble, money took care of it. And if there wasn’t, even better.

  Nina had managed to avoid those sorts of things, instead allowing her cousin Eric to act out enough for both of them. Truthfully, she had always enjoyed the way he goaded their grandmother, the matriarch of their great New York family, whenever she forced them through another etiquette lesson or dance class together. But while Eric was like a brother, he was also the dashing heir to the de Vries family fortune. His boyish misbehavior was chalked up to strength of character. Permitted, even if not fully condoned. Nina, on the other hand, couldn’t leave the house with a hair out of place.

  Rules were always different for women.

  Even so, Eric wasn’t always the golden boy. Nina remembered his face the first time Grandmother had told him that Penny, his Greek girlfriend from a working-class neighborhood, was utterly inappropriate for him. She remembered his stubbornness when he had kept seeing Penny and even brought her with him to Dartmouth the following year. She remembered the fiery defiance when he had announced their engagement last Christmas, just a few months before his graduation.

  “He won’t get away with this,” her grandmother had said privately to Violet, Nina’s mother, once the couple had left.

  Five months later, days before Nina had arrived back in New York, Eric had found the girl lying in the bathroom of their apartment, both wrists slit to her elbows. This after months—no, years—of harassment and embarrassment, courtesy of the de Vries family and their friends. So the rumors went.

  Nina had never needed her cousin more than she did now. For, truthfully, she had never been more terrified of her own kin. Of what they were capable of.

  But Eric was gone, done with the lot of them.

  She couldn’t blame him.

  But she did wish he were here.

  “Oh, no, thank you,” Nina said, pulling away from the man’s warm, if slightly greasy touch. “I know where I’m going.”

  “Well, try not to get run over, honey,” he replied with a cheeky grin, then disappeared underground with his box of limes.

  “Yes,” Nina murmured. “I’ll try.”

  Pulling her cap farther over her face, Nina turned around, looking at the street signs to get her bearings. The corner was overwhelmingly green—not from plants, but from the green iron castings of the elevated train tracks and the green-painted entrance to the Roosevelt Street subway station, which spanned nearly the entire block. It took her a moment to figure out where she was—she didn’t dare bring out her phone. Most people in this neighborhood didn’t seem to have iPhones yet. Nina didn’t want to bring attention to herself, if at all possible.

  She crossed the street, sidestepping cabs and people, and all the other forms of life here in Queens. She turned a corner and made her way down a quieter street, grateful that her hat shaded her face from the suddenly glaring sun.

  One block, two. And then, there it was. The address on the slip of paper. A nondescript brick building with graffiti on the bottom and a simple glass door marking the clinic’s entrance.

  God, was she really here? Her of all people? Standing in front of this grungy building?

  Nina wasn’t stupid. She had taken enough history and women’s studies classes to know exactly how common abortion was. Women had been trying to figure out how not to carry unwanted children since the beginning of civilization. What made her any different?

  But that was the problem in a nutshell. Was this child really unwanted?

  No.

  Nina’s vision blurred with sudden tears. This had been happening more and more over the last few weeks. Pregnancy hormones, according to the internet, meant a lot of uncharacteristic crying along with sensitive nipples, morning sickness, and general all-over puffiness. She had told Grandmother she’d picked up a parasite in Italy, and the old woman seemed to believe her. For now.

  Nina turned suddenly and tripped over a large crack in the sidewalk.

  “Shit,” she muttered as she pulled herself upright, leaning against the crumbling brick. The word felt strange in her mouth—Nina never swore, following her grandmother’s edicts to a T. “Oh, damn.”

  She stared at her heel, which had broken clean off. Even in jeans, even in a cap, Nina hadn’t completely been able to eschew her clothes completely. With an extra three inches that made her taller than most men in the city, heels made her feel powerful. Even ones like these, purchased at the same ninety-nine-cent store as her hat.

  She could just hear Grandmother now: “Cheap is as cheap does. We get what we pay for, my girl, do we not?”

  “Nina?”

  Nina’s head jerked around in a panic, though her vision was still blurred with tears she now swiped at viciously.

  “Nina Astor, is that really you?”

  As he approached, the stranger became slightly familiar, but his name eluded her. In all honesty, the man himself wasn’t particularly memorable. Everything about him was average. In heels, she topped his height by several inches, which meant he was likely no more than five foot six, five-seven at most. His light brown hair was thinning at the temples, cut slightly too long so a few thin strands waved in the hot summer breeze. His body, clothed in a poorly fitted beige suit, had the sagging look of a man who spent too much time behind a desk and not enough at the gym.

  But it was his face that was most mediocre of all. Nina thought of the one drawing class she had taken as part of her art history major. They had learned about the composition of bone structure, how to identify the lines in a face that gave a subject its foundations. This man’s face was perfectly round, with two small eyes, a thin mouth, and a weak chin lightly dusted with graying stubble. He reminded Nina of an oatmeal cookie that had too much butter. The kind that, when baked, could not retain its shape, but would simply melt outward on the pan.

  “Calvin Gardner,” the man helpfully supplied as he reached Nina and held out a hand. “I was with Craig and Jeffries Fund, helping your dad with an investment. Or trying to. Christmas Eve, 2003.” He winked. “I made you laugh by the punch bowl, remember?”

  “Oh,” sniffed Nina. “Oh, yes. That’s right.” She didn’t remember at all. So instead, she cleared her throat. “I, um, I use de Vries now.”

  She vaguely remembered meeting this Mr. Gardner at some dinner party or another the last time her father had visited from London, maybe four or five years ago. Her father hadn’t had time to spend with his daughter at Christmas, so Nina had been shuttled to a business party and watched men like this one beg for his attention all night.

  If there had ever been a night to run off with a busboy… Perhaps she might have if she had thought her father would have cared at all.

  Nina tried to suppress the rest of the memories. How she had begged her grandmother for the rights to her maternal family’s name rather than her absent father’s. Or how she had only been given permission with the awareness that it wouldn’t change her chances at inheritance.

  She’d get a trust like every other female member, but the de Vries fortune and company were patrilineal. Meanwhile, its single heir had run away in fury.

  Fuck Eric
, Nina thought with sudden vengeance, the word sounding as strange in her head as it would have on her lips.

  “Nina?”

  She shook her head, yanked back to the present.

  “It’s really too bad that deal never went through,” Mr. Gardner was saying, chatting on about the night they apparently met, though his words didn’t translate as Nina’s own mind started to cycle.

  Had he seen her hand on the door?

  Had he seen her about to cry?

  Did he know why she was here?

  Gardner’s eyes flickered to the title on the door, clearly printed in peeling white letters: Clinic: Abortion Services and Other.

  There it was. Plain as day.

  “I—oh.” His small brown eyes flew back over Nina, landing on her stomach, where her right arm was clasped around her waist.

  She dropped it immediately, all sorts of inappropriate language flying through her mind. Well, if he hadn’t known before, he did now.

  To his credit, though, Gardner’s face softened.

  “Ms. Ast—de Vries,” he said. “Nina. Do you—can I help you with something? Is there someone we should call?”

  Nina glanced around. “I—oh, no. There is no one here.”

  That, she would realize later, was her first mistake.

  Mr. Gardner’s head tipped. “Really?”

  “Really,” she insisted weakly. “And you know, Mr. Gardner, I should probably be going…”

  He took her wrist before she turned away completely. Nina stopped and stared at it.

  It had been two weeks, four days, and seven hours since someone had touched her. Since Peppe had slipped his hands around her neck and pressed his lips to her cheeks at the train station, one at a time, before letting her go.

  Buon viaggio, principessa.

  “You don’t need to be ashamed,” Mr. Gardner said, glancing at the door again and then back at Nina. “I don’t judge. Really.”