Killer Riff

by Sheryl J. Anderson

  How could I prove it was Claire? As Kyle had said all along, there wasn’t much evidence to work with. But if she’d gotten help from someone, like Gray Benedek, there might be a way to play them off against each other and force the weaker hand. Especially if it looked as though Adam were in trouble.

  I hoped Adam would be able to explain more about what had happened to him by the time I got back to the apartment, but he was so deeply immersed in a game of cribbage that he was reluctant to talk to me.

  Rather than sheltering a tense and quiet vigil, my living room had become the setting of a happy little house party. In my absence, Tricia and Cassady had arrived, hoping to surprise me, and declared themselves responsible for Kyle and Adam until I returned. Popcorn had been popped, shoes had been kicked off, cocktails had been mixed—for everyone but Adam—and the mood was much more convivial than when I’d departed. More on the order of the cool kids keeping an eye on the new exchange student than a group of interested parties keeping an eye on a wounded soul.

  Adam nursed a chai latte so large, I suspected Cassady had made it in one of my cereal bowls. His face was haggard, but it had returned to a color with some hint of life in it. Kyle told me that Adam was getting progressively more lucid but was still pretty hazy on where he’d been and whom he’d been with before he’d arrived on my doorstep. Tricia had kept him talking by asking him questions about growing up in a famous family, though Kyle pointed out that most of the stories put Jordan in the “punk kid brother” role, which Tricia found less than amusing. Cassady had been more interested in topics like the most embarrassing thing anyone had ever asked him to autograph.

  I told him I’d gone to see his mother, and his expression curdled. “Why would you do that?”

  “I was summoned.”

  “It was about me, wasn’t it,” he said flatly, setting down the latte with unsteady hands.

  “She accused me of bothering you,” I said, earning sidelong glances from the other three people in the room.

  “I’m sorry,” Adam said, managing a small smile.

  “That’s okay. I accused her of killing Russell Elliott.”

  I’m not sure who gasped loudest. I think it was a tie between Tricia and Adam, while Cassady and Kyle went for the more reticent dropping of the jaw.

  “Why did you do that?” Kyle asked tightly.

  “Because it all added up.”

  He pinched his lip and I knew he was already calculating if this put me in harm’s way, how it impacted Adam, whether to send Tricia and Cassady home. He looked over at Adam, prepared to say something diplomatic or to apologize for me, but the look on Adam’s face stopped him. It was the tight smile of a patient who’d been trying to convince himself the test results were going to be fine but knew deep down that they were anything but. “Adam?” Kyle asked with concern. Apparently, they’d gotten comfortable with each other in my absence. Maybe it was something about wearing my clothes.

  “It makes so much sense,” Adam said.

  “Way to honor thy mother and father,” Cassady said darkly.

  Adam shook his head, over and over, until Tricia slid onto the couch next to him and braced his head against her shoulder. “Russell must have told her ‘no’ one time too many.”

  “I’m not sure she meant to do it, Adam,” I said, explaining my theory.

  “And you told her that’s what you were thinking?” Kyle asked. He sighed heavily when I nodded. That was a discussion we’d be having later.

  “The piece that doesn’t fit is you,” I told Adam. “What happened to you tonight? Your mother’s not going to hurt you.”

  “An accomplice who’s double-crossing her?” Tricia suggested.

  “Or someone who’s on to her and trying to get back at her,” Kyle said.

  “Or someone with their own agenda and good timing,” Cassady voted.

  “No. No way. None of that,” Adam said with some force.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because the last person I remember being with is Olivia.”

  15

  “Do I look like enough of a slut?”

  “Not all my fans are sluts,” Adam protested.

  “Just the popular ones?” Tricia undid another button on her blouse, which was already perilously close to sliding off her torso.

  “I don’t want to spoil your fun,” Kyle said from his place on the couch beside Adam, “but there’s a lot to be said for the low-key approach.”

  “Where’s the challenge in that?” Cassady asked, tying her blouse so it exposed her enviably flat tummy.

  When Adam had told us that his last memory was being with Olivia, I asked him if they’d been at the SoHo Grand, a question that had thrown everyone, including him. I didn’t bother explaining about Kenny because Tricia gasped, “You and Olivia? Isn’t that some form of incest?”

  Adam grimaced. “We’re not sleeping together. She’s my therapist.”

  “And you meet her at a hotel?” Kyle asked, not buying it.

  Trying to summon enough energy to be agitated, Adam explained, “I don’t mind people taking pictures of me going into a hotel.”

  “But you do mind them taking pictures of you going to the therapist,” Tricia said.

  “How quaint,” Cassady said. “Rather have your fans think of you as a dog than a whack-job.”

  Adam looked at me in response. “How does it feel to have your life randomly taken out of context and judged?”

  I was sympathetic, but I couldn’t let us get sidetracked. “Was anyone else there with you this evening?” I asked, pressing ahead.

  Adam frowned, trying to focus. “Someone stopped by the table, but …”

  “Did Olivia leave you alone with that person?” Kyle asked.

  Adam’s frown deepened, but he came up blank. I grabbed the phone and dialed Olivia. Voice mail. I left a terse message that I needed to talk to her immediately and hung up.

  Kyle shook his head dismissively while I announced that I was going to go to the hotel and see what I could find out, but Tricia and Cassady warmed to it quickly. Adam didn’t look very happy, but then again, he might have just been nauseated again.

  Tricia and Cassady returned to rummaging through my closet in an effort to dress up like trashy rock groupies, even though I assured them there was nothing like that in my possession. But they quickly proved that trashy clothes, like dirty jokes, are all in the presentation. Roll a waistband, unbutton a shirt, or adopt a sneer, and the preppiest of outfits can become cheap and provocative. I took it as a sign of success that Kyle looked appalled when we emerged from the bedroom.

  “This is such a bad idea on so many levels,” he muttered to me as I pushed my skirt down as low on my hips as it would go.

  “The outfit or the idea?” I asked, startled by how cold my stomach was. I inched the skirt back up.

  “Yes.”

  “We’re just going to find out if anyone saw who was with Adam tonight, help him piece together how he got this way,” I said.

  “He probably got this way because someone wants to kill him,” Kyle said, his voice hoarse. “That’s not the kind of attention you need to attract.”

  “No one’s going to hurt me, I don’t have the tapes,” I said firmly, to convince us both.

  “They don’t know that. And you don’t have any backup, either.”

  Those two thoughts diverged in my whirling brain, and I went with the latter one. I wasn’t sure if he was offering, but I wasn’t going to ask. I couldn’t put him in that position, emotionally or professionally, if I wanted to keep him in his current position romantically. “I’m going to ask a couple of questions and then come right back.”

  “When’s the last time anything you did was that simple?” He plucked at his shirt, and I could tell he was thinking about changing his clothes and coming with us.

  “Someone needs to stay here with Adam,” I said, “and the three of us chatting up people in a hotel bar will be more inconspicuous than you going.”
<
br />   He squinted at my outfit. “‘Inconspicuous’ doesn’t apply.”

  “Thank you,” I said, coaxing both a kiss and a smile out of him.

  Actually, we didn’t stand out as much as we might have. Our definition of glamour fell smack in the middle of the spectrum represented at the SoHo Grand Bar & Lounge. It’s a marvelously warm space, full of rich fabrics, deep-seated chairs, and glowing light. The SoHo Grand Hotel calls it the neighborhood’s “living room,” and while it achieves that goal architecturally, my living room has never been host to such an eclectic and dazzling array of fashions and personalities. In our shiniest, shimmeriest best, we blended right in.

  Or as much as we can ever blend in when Cassady’s with us. She was showing extra cleavage and thigh this evening, and the men in the room came close to bearing her on their shoulders to a seat at the bar. Tricia and I did our best to keep up, but I had to walk more slowly than usual because I couldn’t get over the sensation that my skirt was about to fall down.

  The cocktail waitress arrived before we’d even put our purses on the bar, her tray bearing three tangerine martinis from a donor who wished to remain anonymous, at least for the moment. Again, a benefit of going somewhere with Cassady, especially when she’s dressed for the hunt. Cassady looked at me like a little kid who knows better than to ask for dessert because she hasn’t finished her vegetables. “We should say ‘no,’ right?”

  “If you don’t take them, I’m going to get such grief from the guys who sent them over,” the waitress said, her smile never wavering. She was lovely, with Mediterranean features, glowing olive skin, and amazing upper-body strength, because the tray didn’t so much as tremble as she held it out, waiting for our decision.

  “We can’t have that,” Tricia said, snatching the drinks off the tray and placing them on the bar.

  “Thank you.” The waitress smiled wearily. “You just saved my evening.”

  “Wanna do us a favor in return?”

  Her brow wrinkled in anticipation. “I really can’t tell you—”

  “No, something else. We hear Adam Crowley, the singer, comes in here a lot.”

  Her expression shifted to a sympathetic smile, and she looked us over. I held my breath, hoping our groupie-esque costumes would pass muster with her. “Yeah, he does, but you missed him.” She turned away from us, but Tricia slid a twenty onto her tray and she paused for a moment. “He usually comes in Mondays and Thursdays. Come back Monday.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name,” I said amiably.

  She smiled warily. “I know.” She held my gaze comfortably while I waited. After a full thirty seconds, her smile warmed. “Vicky.”

  I was pretty sure that wasn’t her real name, but we’d make do. “Was he alone, Vicky?” I asked.

  She pursed her lips. “Adam’s a really cool guy.”

  “Yes, we know,” Tricia said enthusiastically.

  “What I mean is,” Vicky clarified, “I don’t talk to the tabloids. Especially about cool guys.”

  Vicky: one; outfits: zero. Still, I wasn’t going to let her shake us loose that easily. “We’re not from a tab,” I said. “It’s just …” I looked around as though I were worried someone was going to overhear and dropped my voice confidentially. “A friend of ours said she hooked up with him tonight and we don’t believe her.”

  Vicky appeared offended on Adam’s behalf. “Yeah, don’t. She’s lying. He came in, had drinks with a couple of friends, and then left.”

  “How do you know our friend wasn’t one of his friends?” Cassady asked.

  “Because I recognized them both. One was Olivia Elliott, they’re super tight and they come in here a lot.”

  I couldn’t help it. “I heard they were more than friends,” I said with a significant waggle of my eyebrows.

  Vicky sighed. “I don’t think she’d mind, but it’s not happening. Trust me, working a job like this, you get a pretty good sense for those sorts of things.”

  Cassady’s eyebrows waggled now, more at me than at Vicky. “So you think Olivia likes him?”

  “That’s not any of my business,” Vicky said, shifting her weight back onto her heels in preparation for leaving us.

  “Okay, so who was the other person?” I asked quickly.

  “Not your friend, unless your friend’s a guy,” she said shortly.

  Ready to literally buy another moment of her time, I slapped a twenty on her tray. Her weight shifted back and forth a moment as she decided. “Older guy. Great cheekbones. He knew them well. I think he used to be a big deal.”

  Gray Benedek. Tricia, Cassady, and I exchanged looks, confirming that we were thinking the same thing. But why, after pressing charges against Olivia earlier in the day, was Gray having drinks with her and Adam in the evening? No one in this group had given any indication of being able to get over a grudge in under ten years.

  “Was it a pleasant conversation?” I asked.

  “More fun than this. Why?”

  Cassady slid a twenty onto her tray now, with more grace yet more insistence. “Because if Adam stormed out after a fight, he’s less likely to have hooked up with our friend in the lobby than if he went strolling out of here in a good mood.”

  “The guy pretty much carried him out,” Vicky said. “I was out front catching a cig and watched him pour Adam into a cab.”

  Cassady snagged her twenty off Vicky’s tray before Vicky could stop her. “Liar.”

  Vicky, Tricia, and I all looked at her with the same confusion. Vicky snatched back the twenty. “Am not.”

  Cassady pointed to the charm around Vicky’s neck, a pearl enamel ribbon. “That’s a lung cancer ribbon. You seem too smart to smoke, especially if you’ve lost someone to lung cancer.”

  Vicky touched the charm reflexively, then stuffed the twenty deep into her tip glass. “Okay. I followed Adam and the guy out because I was worried.”

  “About Adam being drunk?” I asked.

  “No, Olivia left them alone for a while, and the two guys got into a pretty nasty argument. They kept their voices down and everything, but you could tell it was bad.”

  “Where did Olivia go when she got up? Did you notice?”

  “Out in the lobby. She got a phone call, and I guess she wanted a little quiet.”

  “Or a little privacy,” Tricia suggested. It was true: Depending on who had called her, it might have been something she wanted to keep from Adam and/or Gray. And why not? These people kept everything from one another except their anger.

  “Oh, man,” Vicky said suddenly, “now I get it.”

  “Get what?” Cassady asked.

  Vicky pointed at me. “You’re the new girlfriend. From the Web site. And you’re checking up on him. Points for the extra effort and all, but you could’ve just asked. You wouldn’t be the first woman to come ask what her man’d been up to in here.”

  I wasn’t sure how to react, but I was determined not to laugh, even though Tricia and Cassady weren’t being very successful in hiding their smiles behind their martini glasses. “I’m not—” I began, but Cassady kicked the very pointed toe of her Michael Kors snakeskin pumps into the hollow behind my anklebone; I felt it all the way up to my molars.

  “It’s gotta be rough,” Vicky said sympathetically, patting me on the knee as if we were old pals.

  “Are you insinuating my friend is difficult to date?” Cassady asked.

  “No, it’s just that both Olivia and the guy were trying to get Adam to open up, confess his feelings.”

  “About her?” Cassady and Tricia asked in perfect harmony.

  “Makes sense.” Vicky shrugged. “Olivia kept saying, ‘It’s okay, you can tell me,’ and with the guy, it was all about ‘I need to know’ and all that male bonding crap. He even came up to the bar and asked Crissy to make some special drink because he needed ‘to loosen Adam’s tongue.’ “

  “Did you bring the drink to them?”

  Vicky hesitated, and Cassady got a twenty on her tray so q
uickly that it startled me. “I should’ve, house rules and all, but he took it.”

  Which meant Gray had had the opportunity to add something to it to really loosen Adam’s tongue. Maybe not to kill him, but certainly to force the truth out of him. The question was, what was Gray asking about, and what answer did Adam give?

  “I understand why you’re concerned. But I think they were encouraging him to be more honest with you, not to dump you or anything. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

  Tricia slipped another twenty onto her tray. “Thank you. And give the gentlemen who sent the drinks over this.” She placed a card beside the twenty. “My, this is an expensive place to drink,” she said as Vicky sashayed back to work.

  “You did not send them your business card,” I said.

  “It’s a card for a plastic surgeon. I’m doing his son’s bar mitzvah. Nice little ego check.” Tricia grinned as she sipped her drink.

  “Much as I’d like to stay and see who checks his hairline, we’re leaving,” I said, grabbing my purse and my resolve. “Toss ‘em if you want ‘em.” Tricia and Cassady, both too well raised to let a fine drink go to waste, grabbed their glasses and did just that. I joined them, just to be sociable.

  Martinis weren’t designed to be tossed, so we were feeling rather pleased with ourselves when we arrived at Olivia’s building and told the doorman that he needed to convince Olivia to see us immediately or the consequences would be grim and public. After a brief phone call upstairs, the doorman allowed us to go up in the elevator, but Olivia was waiting outside the door of her father’s apartment and did not hurry to invite us in.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to return your phone call,” she said preemptively as we got off the elevator.

  “That’s okay. I’m not here to see you,” I said, walking over to Claire’s door and banging on it.

  Tricia and Cassady were as surprised as Olivia, but they stood their ground while she dashed down the hallway to pull me away from the door. “But you had the doorman call me.”