Tallie smiled, but he didn’t—if anything, his expression turned darker. Then she noticed Detectives Riley and McKinley in front of him.
“Ms. Blankenship,” Detective Riley said.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“We need for you to come with us.”
She swallowed hard, feeling sick. In her peripheral vision, she saw Felicia and Jané join the group.
Grasping at the straw that this somehow concerned something other than Jerry Key, she said, “Is this about the wiretap on my phone?”
“Wiretap?” Felicia asked, her eyes rounded.
Riley looked annoyed. “We’re still looking into the wiretap. But we were finally able to access Ron Springer’s cell phone voice messages.”
“You found Ron?” she asked, hopeful.
“No,” McKinley offered. “But we did find a message that you left on Thursday for Mr. Springer asking for his assistance. You said you were having some ‘issues’ with Jerry Key, and that you needed his advice. You said you were supposed to meet Mr. Key later that night…the night he was murdered.”
Tallie felt faint. She’d completely forgotten about leaving that message for Ron. Her vision blurred. She reached out to brace herself against something…anything, and met with a solid arm. She blinked Keith’s face into view. The hurt and betrayal she saw there took her breath away. “Keith—”
“Don’t say anything,” he cut in, his jaw hard. “Not here.”
“This way, Ms. Blankenship,” Detective Riley said.
“Wait,” Felicia said, stepping up. “I’m going with Tallie.”
“Felicia, don’t!” Jané hissed.
Felicia wheeled on Jané. “You’re going too, Jané. We’re not going to let Tallie face this alone.”
The detectives looked at each other, eyebrows raised.
“We didn’t kill him,” Felicia said. “Jerry was alive when we left the hotel room.”
“Felicia, shut up!” Jané said.
“We’ll talk about this more down at the station,” Riley said. “But Ms. Blankenship has worse trouble.”
Tallie looked up—how could this situation possibly be worse?
“Your coworker Kara Hatteras was found strangled in her apartment, and her doorman says you were the last person to see her.”
Her jaw loosened and she gasped for air. “Kara…is…dead?”
“Yep. Ms. Blankenship, you’ll ride with Lieutenant Wages.” He looked back to Felicia and Jané, who were equally slack-jawed at the news. “You two, come with us.”
“Wages,” Riley said, and Tallie watched as Keith made eye contact with the man. “Advise your friend here that anything she says to you can be used against her.”
Keith’s mouth tightened. “Yes, sir.” He swung his gaze to Tallie, but his eyes were flat and hard. “You heard him. This way, please.”
Chapter 29
It was smart thinking, Tallie concluded, to equip the police cars in New York City with barf bags. She filled one on the way to the station. At different times, Keith looked frustrated, sympathetic, sick, and angry. He didn’t speak except to tell her that if she needed for him to pull over, she should say so. But he did hand a handkerchief through the barrier for her to wipe her face.
She arrived at the police station purged and petrified, and Keith led her to a room for questioning, where she was given a bottle of water and made to wait alone. Her eyes kept darting to the dark mirrored windows covering two walls, wondering which was the two-way mirror that allowed her to be observed from the other side. And was Keith watching? God only knew what he thought of her.
“Sometimes the ones you least suspect commit the most serious crimes.”
While she waited, she kept thinking about Kara, strangled. Tears welled in her eyes. Ron…Jerry…Kara…why was this happening?
The door burst open, admitting McKinley and Riley, both of them looking somber.
“Where’s Felicia and Jané?” she asked.
“They’re being questioned,” Riley said. “And now it’s your turn. Do you want to tell us what happened Thursday night?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything.”
And she did. How she had met Jerry that morning in her office, how he had invited her to meet him later and she had agreed. “But I was having second thoughts, which was why I left the message for Ron.”
“Why were you having second thoughts?”
“Because I had the feeling that Jerry had more in mind than business cocktails.”
“He was hitting on you?”
“It’s hard to say, but I was uncomfortable.”
“So why didn’t you just cancel your meeting?”
“I was going to,” she said. “Then the publisher came to tell me that Jerry had requested that Gaylord Cooper be moved to another editor. I assumed that meant the meeting was canceled.”
“The other editor was Kara Hatteras?”
She swallowed against a constricted throat. “That’s right.”
McKinley consulted handwritten notes. “We’re told that you and Kara Hatteras didn’t exactly get along.”
“Kara was…difficult. She didn’t get along with very many people.”
“Why do you think that Mr. Key asked that the manuscript be given to her instead of you?”
She told them about Kara’s elevator ride down with Jerry.
“You think she traded sex for an assignment?”
“I really don’t know.”
“Well, what do you think?”
Tallie sighed. “From the remarks Kara made Thursday on the phone and Saturday when I was at her apartment, I’d say yes.”
“You spoke to Ms. Hatteras Thursday?”
“Yes, before I left the office. She asked me to bring the manuscript to her that night at her apartment.”
“Hm. That must have been when your assistant overheard you say something to the affect of ‘you won’t get away with this.’ ”
A guilty flush climbed her face. “I might have said something like that…but I wasn’t threatening her life.”
“Hold that thought. Let’s get back to Thursday night. What happened after you left work?”
Tallie told them that she’d met Jané and Felicia, and after a few drinks and airing grievances toward Jerry, they had concocted a plan to humiliate him.
“Whose idea was it?” Riley asked.
Tallie squinted and replayed in her head as much of the conversation as she could recall. “Jané’s, I think.”
“What was her grievance toward Jerry?”
“She found out that he had conspired with one of his clients to plagiarize from one of her authors.”
“And Ms. Redmon—what did she have against Jerry?”
“They were involved for a couple of months about a year ago,” she said. “But Felicia broke it off. A few nights ago, Jané told Felicia that Jerry was engaging in locker room talk about her. Then she found out that he had excluded her from a book auction.”
“Anything else?”
Tallie hesitated. There was so much between Felicia and Jenny…how much should she tell?
“Speak up, Ms. Blankenship.”
“Felicia told me that Jerry was having an affair with one of his clients, who was also one of her authors…a married author.”
“Did she say who it was?”
“No, and I didn’t ask.”
“And your grievance against Mr. Key?”
She sighed. “Just that he had pulled the Cooper manuscript.”
“Was that going to hurt your career?”
“Not enough for me to commit murder over,” she said dryly. “We only planned to humiliate him, get him in a compromising situation and take a photo, then send it to his e-mail list.”
“And is that what happened?”
“Yes, that’s all.”
“What happened, exactly?”
She pulled her hand over her mouth. “Jané called Jerry’s cell phone from a pay phone and said she was a
dominatrix and she wanted to come over with a friend. She told him to leave the door propped open and that he had to be blindfolded when she got there.”
“And was he?”
“Yes.” She wet her lips. “I don’t know a lot about the subculture of S&M, but Jané said that she’d heard some things about Jerry and that he wouldn’t dare ‘disobey.’ ”
“Jané Glass—is she into S&M?”
“You’ll have to ask her.”
“How well do you know her?”
Tallie told him about the three of them interning at Parkbench together. “We were friendly, but we weren’t friends.”
“And does she know Ron Springer?”
“Yes.”
McKinley heaved a noisy sigh. “This just gets stranger and stranger.”
“How do you think it looks from this angle?” Tallie asked.
He frowned. “Let’s get back to the hotel room. Mr. Key is blindfolded and strapped to the bed…then what?”
“Then Felicia used his cell phone camera to take a picture of him. Jané booted up his laptop, downloaded the picture, and sent it to his address book.”
“And all this time you were just watching?”
She swallowed. “I guess.”
“And what was Mr. Key doing?”
“He kept asking what was going on, but he thought it was all part of the game.”
“None of you spoke?”
She shook her head. “Jané was the only person who talked. She can change her voice and do all these accents.”
“He didn’t know it was the three of you?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Okay, the picture was sent—then what?”
“Then Jané called the front desk and asked that towels be delivered in thirty minutes so he would be found. And we left.”
“What time was that?”
“Around nine-thirty, I think.”
Riley checked his notes and twirled a pen in his fingers.
She lifted her hands, and her eyes filled with tears. “We thought it was going to be a big joke. Instead the next morning when we heard what happened…” Her voice broke off on a sob.
Riley scowled. “If you were so broken up about it, why didn’t you go to the police? Or tell us what happened when we first questioned you?”
“We were scared,” she said. “We knew how bad it would look.”
“It looks bad,” Riley agreed, then sighed. “But your stories match up. Are you willing to take a lie detector test?”
“Absolutely,” she said, exhaling with relief that they seemed to believe her.
McKinley grunted. “Ms. Blankenship, when you left the hotel, did you go straight home?”
“No. I was supposed to drop the manuscript off at Kara’s building. But when I got there, I realized I’d left my bag in a taxi, so I told her doorman I’d give it to her the next day, and I walked home, which was only a few blocks.” She bit her lip. “Keith—er, Lieutenant Wages can verify that part of my story. He was at my building when I arrived.”
“Now we’re to the part about the dead guy in the ceiling?”
She nodded. “I told Keith about my lost bag. He called the taxicab company for me and reported it lost. And he said he’d also file a police report for me.”
“I see. How well do you know Lieutenant Wages?”
“We met last Wednesday. Our mothers are old friends and they…thought we should meet.”
Riley waved to one of the mirrors. In a couple of minutes, the door opened and Keith walked in, his face unreadable. Tallie pressed her lips together to hold back tears.
“Lieutenant Wages, can you verify Ms. Blankenship’s story about Thursday night?”
He nodded. “It’s just as she said.”
“Did you notice any blood on Ms. Blankenship’s clothing?”
“No, sir.”
“And how was her demeanor?”
“She was upset about the missing bag.”
“But she wasn’t hysterical?”
“No, sir.”
“And what can you tell us about these two Shavel guys?”
Tallie listened as he told about the episode in the coffeehouse and the guy in the HV/AC unit, the men’s relationship, and the phone tap. He was so articulate and handsome that her chest swelled with admiration…and maybe something else.
Riley swung his gaze back to Tallie. “When was the last time you saw Kara Hatteras?”
She retraced her steps on Saturday, giving time estimates as best as she could remember. “Kara wasn’t very friendly,” she said. “She was smug about getting the assignment, and she made a crass remark about Jerry.”
“Did you think that she might have had something to do with his murder?”
Tallie frowned. “No…although when I arrived at her building Thursday night, her doorman said she had left a few minutes before.”
Riley scribbled on his notebook. “Did you go into her apartment Saturday?”
“No. She met me at the door, we talked for less than five minutes, and she told me she had to go because she was expecting someone.”
McKinley perked up. “Did she say who?”
“No.”
“The doorman said he doesn’t remember any other visitors for Ms. Hatteras that afternoon.”
“The doorman was outside by the curb smoking when I left,” she said, “and the desk was unmanned. Depending on how much the man smokes, he could have missed something.”
“Do you know why anyone would want to hurt Ms. Hatteras?”
“No. But she was a volatile person.”
Riley tossed down his pen. “Ms. Blankenship, have you heard from Mr. Springer?”
“No. Not since his call on Wednesday, like I told you before.”
“Was there history between Mr. Springer and Ms. Hatteras?”
“History?”
“A romantic liaison? Problems at work?”
“Not to my knowledge,” she said. “I don’t think they were good friends, but Ron recognized that Kara was adequate at her job.”
The men made frustrated noises and looked at each other, shaking their heads. Riley grunted. “Ms. Blankenship, we got thugs and wiretaps and bodies and a shit-load of unanswered questions—what the hell kind of trouble have you gotten yourself into?”
She glanced up at Keith, who looked as if he didn’t know what to believe. Her heart thudded in her ears and she swallowed hard. “A whole lot of it?”
Chapter 30
Bored with sitting, Felicia stood and paced the small room in which she’d been questioned. She glanced at her watch—2:00 P.M. Why were they keeping her? For the umpteenth time, she glanced at her purse and considered calling her mother. Julia would be furious if she didn’t, but frankly, she didn’t want to drag her mother into her mess…not when they’d just begun to gain ground on the mother-daughter front.
She’d told the detectives everything…almost. She’d told them everything about the night at the hotel…just not all of the events leading up to it. The fact that Jerry had excluded her from an auction and had conspired with one of her (unnamed) authors to plagiarize was plenty of background; she didn’t have to mention the fact that he’d broken her heart so cruelly, or that he’d sent a nude picture of her to taunt her, or that he was sleeping with one of her authors. If possible, she wanted to keep the Dannons’ names out of this; the book that Suze was revising was Felicia’s best bet for a big fall hit, and the best chance for all of their lives to get back to normal.
The door opened and she turned to see Detective McKinley enter. “Thanks for your patience, Ms. Redmon. Just a few more questions and you can be on your way.”
“Okay,” she said, although she didn’t entirely trust this man who reminded her of her father.
“You said that after you left the hotel, you went home and you were alone until Phillip Dannon came by to…drop off some paperwork, I believe you said.”
She crossed her arms, trying to keep her face passive. “That’s right.
”
“Well, I spoke with Mr. Dannon…and he backed up your story.”
Relief bled through her. “Of course.”
“Unfortunately, the way your doorman remembers it, Mr. Dannon didn’t leave that night, but early the next morning.”
Del. The man had a memory like a steel trap. She lifted one hand in a vague gesture. “My doorman remembered incorrectly, that’s all.”
He nodded, his mouth pursed.
“Is that all, Detective?”
“Actually, no. Your friend Ms. Blankenship said you told her that your old boyfriend Jerry was having an affair with one of your authors, who was married. What can you tell me about that?”
Felicia set her jaw against the flare of anger toward Tallie for opening a can of worms that would ultimately only make Felicia look more guilty. Then she affected a casual expression. “Oh, that. It turned out to be innocent. I saw them together and because of Jerry’s reputation, I jumped to the wrong conclusion, that’s all.” She shrugged. “My mistake.”
McKinley’s eyebrows shot up. “Your mistake, huh? Well, maybe you should give me the name of this woman so we can check it out ourselves.”
Her mind raced. “I’d rather not,” she said finally. “I don’t want my silly mistake to affect my working relationship with the woman. I’m sure you understand.”
The detective nodded slowly, but his eyes were lined with suspicion. “Sure, I understand. After all, if you thought this woman had something to do with the murder, you’d say so, right?”
“Right,” she said lightly.
“Especially since you’re so torn up about Mr. Key’s death that you threw yourself on the coffin at the memorial service.”
She crossed her arms. “I tripped. Is there anything else, detective?”
“No…that’s all for now. You’re free to go.”
She picked up her purse and coat on the way to the door.
“Ms. Redmon?”
Felicia turned back. “Yes?”
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