Bad Publicity

by Joanne Sydney Lessner

  Dorothy pursed her lips. “Depends. Angus and Barnaby will be able to retire in style, but for the rest of us, it’s a case-by-case thing.”

  “I imagine you’re especially concerned,” Isobel ventured.

  A surprised laugh escaped Dorothy’s lips. “Why me?”

  “Isn’t one of the new sister PR firms in healthcare?”

  “Fisher Health. I left them to work here.” Dorothy’s eyes crinkled appealingly at the corners as she smiled. “At the risk of sounding immodest, I think they’d jump at the chance to have me back. So I’d say I’m in a pretty secure position.”

  “You seem to be in the minority,” Isobel said.

  Dorothy made a modest, noncommittal sound and rattled Isobel’s notes. “Anyway, thanks for this. I appreciate it.”

  Isobel returned to her desk to find Liz struggling to button her coat over her belly.

  She gazed down at her midsection and sighed. “I was so hoping to make it through the winter without having to buy a maternity coat.”

  “You could just wrap yourself in a sleeping bag,” suggested Isobel.

  “Ah! Success!” Liz cried, securing the last button.

  “Do you have a second before you go?”

  “Sorry, gotta run.” Liz hurried toward the door. “Hubby is taking me out to dinner tonight. I’ve been saving up all day, so this will count officially as meals four through six!”

  Isobel glanced at her watch, surprised to see it was almost five. Time for her to shove off, too. She wanted to decompress at home before her audition for Hugh Fremont. One unexpected benefit of the day’s surprises was that Isobel had forgotten to obsess about it. She was careful to refer to it, even to herself, as an audition, although she harbored hopes that it might turn into a date. She retrieved her coat and was shutting down her computer when she heard a heavy tread on the spiral staircase. Two male voices caught her attention, and the lower one sent an involuntary shiver of pleasure down her spine. She canceled her computer shutdown and watched her desktop restore. Then she resettled at her desk, pulled her ponytail tighter and pretended to busy herself.

  Mike Hardy, the HR director, came into view with James close behind him.

  “Hi, Isobel,” Mike said.

  “Hi, Mike. James! What brings you here?”

  “I was in the neighborhood and I thought I’d poke my head in.”

  She eyed him dubiously.

  “I gather that little kerfluffle with the AP reporter got cleared up?” Mike asked.

  Isobel caught James’s frown and quickly said, “It had nothing to do with me.”

  Mike slid his stocky frame sideways to let Penny Warren pass. James had once told her he thought Mike looked like a chess piece. All Isobel could think was pawn to rook four and wondered if James was thinking the same.

  “James and I were just discussing the possibility of adding another temp or two,” Mike said. “We’re not in a position to hire anybody right now, but as you can see, there’s plenty of work. We’d also like to officially make your assignment open-ended. James explained that you’re an actress, and I’m sure you can work it out to come and go whenever you have to. What do you think?”

  That sort of arrangement was actor/temp nirvana. The only thing better was a direct freelance contract without a temp agency as a middleman. She chanced a look at James, but his expression was unreadable.

  “I’d like that. Thanks.”

  Mike beamed. “Great!” He clasped James’s hand and gave it a hearty shake. “James. Good to see you.”

  “Yeah, you, too.”

  “You look like you’re ready to go, Isobel. I’ll walk you out,” said James.

  As soon as Mike was out of earshot, Isobel said, “Walk me out?”

  James inclined his head in amusement. “Do you always work with your coat on?”

  She felt her face grow warm. “What are you really doing here, James?”

  “You don’t believe I came by to see Mike?”

  “Not for a minute.”

  “I thought maybe we could grab a bite to eat,” he said, with a too-casual shrug.

  Isobel peered at him. “What’s going on?”

  He gave an exasperated sigh. “You’re impossible. I just have a few things to tell you, that’s all. Some stuff Jayla told me.”

  “Jayla? You’re speaking again?”

  “Briefly. Anyway, I thought we might have dinner.”

  Isobel inclined her head. “Like a date?”

  “Like dinner.”

  Isobel shook her head. “I’d like to, but I have plans tonight. An audition, in fact.” She caught his expression and clucked at him. “Don’t look so surprised.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “Do you really care?” She softened. “It’s a revue of original songs. Let’s go, and you can fill me in on the way out.”

  She switched off her computer again and straightened some papers on her desk, while he examined a series of framed press placements on the wall.

  “Impressive stuff,” he said.

  “Recent events aside, I get the feeling they’re actually pretty good at what they do around here.”

  Dorothy emerged from her office, waving a copy of a magazine in Isobel’s direction. “For Plastics in Medicine—” She paused and looked from her to James. “Oh, sorry, you’re leaving. We can talk tomorrow.”

  “See? It’s like I actually work here.” Isobel flashed a proud smile as Dorothy retreated.

  James turned around. “Who was that?”

  “Dorothy in healthcare. I landed her two bylined articles today.”

  “Aren’t you ready yet?”

  Isobel slung her bag over her shoulder. “Now I am. Let’s go.”

  But before they reached the door, Mike Hardy came clattering down the spiral steps, waving his arms frantically.

  “Wait! Stop!”

  Isobel and James whirled around.

  Mike looked distinctly less ruddy and cheerful than he had when he’d left them a few moments ago. In fact, he looked utterly panic-stricken.

  “You can’t leave. Nobody can. The police are on their way. Angus is dead.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Would he ever be able to visit Isobel at her place of work without running into the goddamn cops?

  James paced back and forth, while Isobel sat at her desk, nervously shuffling papers.

  “Will you sit down? You’re making me nervous,” she said.

  “Stop messing with those papers. You’re making me nervous!”

  Isobel gave a frustrated sigh and stood up. “Fine! Will you please just tell me whatever it was you wanted to tell me?”

  “I don’t want to be overheard.”

  She thought for a moment. “Liz is gone. We can use her office.”

  “What about the cops?”

  “If they can’t find us, they’re pretty crappy cops.”

  It was hard to argue with that, so he followed her a few paces down the hall into the vacant office. She shut the door behind them and put her hands on her hips.

  “Okay. What’s going on?”

  He cracked his knuckles. “It’s not really that much.”

  She eyed him. “But it was worth coming by to tell me in person? Or were you just looking for an excuse to buy me dinner?”

  He felt the heat rise to his face. “Who said I was buying?”

  She laughed. “You’re a gentleman at heart, James. I know that about you, even if you don’t know it yourself. So what’s the scoop?”

  He pulled over the visitor’s chair and sat down. Isobel perched on the edge of the desk.

  “There’s a woman who works here, Kit someone.”

  “Kit Blanchard.”

  “Did you know she and Jason were related by marriage?”

  Her eyebrows rose in surprise. “No kidding! Is that how Dove & Flight got his business?”

  “According to Jayla, yes, although Kit didn’t work on the account.”

  “She wouldn’t. She does cons
umer products.” Isobel smiled a smile he’d seen before and didn’t much like.

  “What?”

  “Kit was having an affair with Aaron Grossman who did work on the account. It seems to have ended today, and not amicably.”

  “And you know this how?”

  She shrugged. “I overheard them.”

  He folded his arms. “You mean you eavesdropped.”

  “No! I honestly happened to be walking past Kit’s office to the coat closet and heard them. I can show you where her office is and where the closet is if you don’t believe me—”

  “Okay, okay!” He held up his hand to stem the flow. “So what do you think it means?”

  “Kit and Jason? I don’t know. But they had a relationship apart from work, and that’s exactly the kind of connection I was looking for. I knew there was something!” Isobel pressed her fingertips together in a pyramid shape and shut her eyes.

  “You’re thinking. Stop that.”

  Isobel’s eyes popped open. “What if Jason knew she was having an affair with Aaron, and he planned to tell—wait, how are they related?”

  “She’s married to his brother’s wife’s brother,” he said slowly, working it through. “But if Jason knew about the affair and was threatening to expose Kit, why would she dump Aaron after Jason was dead?”

  “Guilty conscience?”

  James shook his head. “More likely he’d simply outlived his usefulness. Besides, no matter how you slice it, it’s a pretty drastic leap from the simple fact that they’re related to a motive for murder.”

  Isobel picked up a snow globe from Liz’s desk and turned it upside down. “I guess. Okay, what else you got?”

  “Your friend Katrina was dating Jason.”

  The color drained from Isobel’s face, and James couldn’t help but feel satisfaction at having caught her off guard.

  She shook her head so vigorously her ponytail smacked her cheek. “She was not.”

  “You sure about that?”

  Isobel hesitated. “How do you know?”

  “Jayla told me.”

  Isobel let out a derisive squawk. “And you think she’s telling the truth?”

  “Why would she lie to me?”

  “I don’t know!” Isobel huffed. “Maybe because she killed Jason?”

  He laughed. “You just don’t like her. That’s what this is about.”

  She set the snow globe down. “No, you don’t like her. Katrina and Jason were not dating. I’m sure of it.”

  But her last words were colored by a tiny tremor that told him she was far from sure. He stood up, pushed the chair back to where he’d found it, and opened the door.

  “Where the hell is everyone?” James made a wide, clumsy gesture in an attempt to take in the entire floor. “Why are we the only ones here?”

  “Liz left to meet her husband for dinner, and Aaron left in a grouchy mood because his office floozy dumped him.”

  She brushed past him, leaving him to shut off Liz’s light and close the door.

  “Isobel!”

  “What?”

  He followed her back to her desk. “Don’t you think you should keep your voice down?”

  “Oh, yeah, the floozy left too,” she stage-whispered. “I think Katrina and Penny are here somewhere, and as far as I know Dorothy is still in her office. Freaky Wilbur is probably lurking around, too, like the Luddite angel of death.”

  “Well, they can’t keep us here all night!”

  At that moment, they heard footsteps on the spiral staircase and Detectives O’Connor and Aguilar appeared. They slowed as they approached James and Isobel.

  “Well, well, well. We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” said O’Connor in his lilting voice.

  “Top o’ the evenin’ to you, Officer,” James said, before he could stop himself.

  O’Connor’s face remained a blank, but Aguilar gave a disapproving grunt.

  “Just a few questions, and then you can be on your way,” O’Connor said. “When did you arrive here, Mr. Cooke, is it?”

  As if he didn’t know.

  “Around five.”

  “Did you enter on this floor or the one above?”

  “The one above. I came to see Mike Hardy, the HR director. From the moment I got here, I was with him or with Isobel. He escorted me downstairs when we were finished with our business.”

  “And your purpose here?”

  Don’t lie to the cops, he reminded himself. Ever.

  “Mike and I had things to discuss, and I thought if I came by, Isobel might join me for dinner.”

  He saw her smirk out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t give her the satisfaction of noticing.

  O’Connor shrugged in surrender and moved on to Isobel. “Can you tell me about your movements this afternoon?”

  “I was mostly down here. I took a break for coffee, and then I went upstairs. Barnaby called me into his office to ask me about some work I did.”

  O’Connor made a note. “And did anything in the conversation seem to surprise or upset Barnaby?”

  “We were talking about Angus.” Isobel hesitated. “No, that’s not entirely accurate. We were talking about who might have wanted to sabotage the firm’s merger with ICG. See, everyone knows Barnaby wanted to sell the firm and Angus didn’t. But something happened—a big story was leaked to a reporter—and I got blamed for it.”

  James shot her a look, but her eyes remained fixed on O’Connor.

  “Did you now?” O’Connor asked lightly.

  “I was able to prove it wasn’t me. But that left Barnaby wondering who else it might have been. I never even said Angus’s name, but I saw Barnaby glance at a photo of him.”

  O’Connor nodded sharply “All right, then. You can both go.”

  “That’s it?” Isobel asked. “What happened to Angus? How did he die?”

  “Let’s just say it was a gray area between a heart attack and suicide,” O’Connor said.

  “What does that mean?” James asked.

  “Apparently, after Isobel left him, Barnaby went into Angus’s office and they argued,” O’Connor explained. “Shortly after that, Angus suffered a heart attack. Where it gets tricky is that he seems to have chosen to die.”

  James and Isobel exchanged a glance. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “There was a brief window of a few minutes when Angus could have called to his secretary for his heart medication, but she swears he didn’t,” O’Connor said. “Instead, it seems he spent the last moments of his life writing this.”

  O’Connor gestured to Aguilar, who held up a plastic evidence bag. Inside was a ripped piece of Dove & Flight letterhead with Angus’s already irregular handwriting looking even more fragile than usual.

  James and Isobel leaned over and read the note:

  For the good of the firm.

  “He died holding the pen,” said Aguilar.

  “For what it’s worth, the medical examiner doesn’t think the medicine would have saved him even if he’d gotten it in time. It was a massive coronary,” O’Connor said.

  “What did Barnaby say to him? Does anyone know?” asked James.

  O’Connor raised an angular, red-haired eyebrow at him. “Have you ever heard that man speak? Even when he isn’t shouting, you can hear him in New Jersey.”

  Aguilar consulted his notes. “His assistant heard him scream, and I quote: ‘This was our last chance to cash in, and you fucked it up by calling the AP. I suppose you killed that Whiteley kid, too.’”

  “Well, it’s possible,” Isobel said.

  James shot her a warning glance, but as usual, she ignored him and plunged on.

  “Angus and Jason met for coffee in Starbucks the morning Jason died. Angus could have had his digoxin with him and slipped it into Jason’s coffee there.”

  James saw O’Connor’s posture stiffen, while Aguilar’s normally placid expression grew alert.

  “What makes you think there was digoxin in his coffee?” asked O�
�Connor in a steely voice.

  “Is this going to take much longer? I have to be somewhere,” James broke in.

  O’Connor held out a restraining arm. “Let Ms. Spice answer the question, please.”

  Isobel appealed to James, and he sighed in her direction. “Just tell them the truth.”

  “A few days after Jason died, James happened to get a temp request from the Office of the City Medical Examiner, and he sent me. I was delivering some records and Jason’s death report was sitting right there on the table. His name caught my eye, and I saw it right before the secretary snapped it up. Digoxin was one of the substances listed as a cause of death by poisoning.”

  “Aguilar, confirm that Ms. Spice was at the ME’s office that day.” O’Connor turned back to Isobel. “Whom did you work with there?”

  “Randy and Eva. Oh, and Wanda.”

  O’Connor waved dismissively in Aguilar’s direction. “Never mind. I know Wanda. She’s Daley’s assistant.”

  “Tell us more about this meeting in Starbucks. I must admit, that’s a piece of information we hadn’t uncovered,” said O’Connor.

  Humility in a cop, if you could call it that, thought James. Then again, he hadn’t uncovered it either. He felt a flash of annoyance at Isobel for not filling him in first.

  “I wasn’t there, but Katrina saw them.”

  “Which Starbucks?”

  “The one right around the corner on Lex. Katrina wasn’t the only one there. She said Penny and Dorothy stopped in, too.”

  “You’d think if one of them saw Angus Dove slip something into Jason Whiteley’s coffee, they might have thought to mention it,” O’Connor said thoughtfully.

  “Unless they didn’t realize what they saw,” Aguilar pointed out. “And we didn’t question them about Starbucks.”

  O’Connor turned to Isobel. “Are those three still here?”

  “I’m not sure about Katrina and Penny, but I think Dorothy is still in her office.”

  “We’ll start with her, then. Maybe we’ll get some answers.” O’Connor snapped his notebook shut. “Then we’ll finally be out of your hair.”

  And not a moment too soon, thought James.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  It was well after seven when Isobel finally left the office. As she raced toward the subway, she called Hugh to apologize for being so late. She hadn’t wanted to call in front of James, but he hadn’t left her alone for a second.