Social Death: A Clyde Shaw Mystery

by Tatiana Boncompagni

  She fluffed her hair. “How do I look?”

  “Perfect.” I stepped aside and asked Alex if we could meet up after he wrapped up filming. He glanced behind him to Sabine. She had her eyes trained on us. I waved and smiled. She did the same. “Say no more,” I told Alex.

  He caught the tightness in my voice. “Hey, I’ve been thinking about you.”

  “That and a buck fifty,” I said lightly, waving goodbye to Sutton and my old crew and walking away.

  Goodbye, indeed. Goodbye producers screaming in my ear. Goodbye, blowhard newscasters and prima donna correspondents. Goodbye, crime-scene gore. Now what? At times like these you’re supposed to think about the big picture, but I found it a hell of a lot easier to focus minute to minute. It was easier to think about going to Alex’s apartment and then mine, briefly, to pack my bags. It was easier to think about going to see my dad upstate and the really decadent slice of chocolate cake I’d buy on the way to the train station. It was easier to think about anything but Olivia. Or my job. Or Alex.

  I passed by a boutique with silver picture frames in the window and thought of the photograph of Olivia and me I’d taken from her apartment. Overhead the sky had turned slate gray. A few drops of rain fell on my shoulders and hair. I took refuge inside the store, digging for the picture in the depths of my bag. A sales lady glanced over my shoulder. She plucked a simple beveled-edge silver frame from a display table and handed it to me. I didn’t bother to ask the price.

  “Do you want me to throw that away for you?” She gestured at the envelope I was holding in my hand, one of the ones that had fallen from behind Olivia’s vanity. I’d stuffed the photo in it for safekeeping.

  I turned it over in my hands. The envelope was old and yellowed, and addressed to Charles Kravis. There was something familiar about it. “Wait,” I said, flipping the envelope over and back to the front again. There was no return address. But that didn’t matter. Looking closer, I realized I recognized the handwriting.

  It was my mother’s.

  And it was postmarked the year before I was born.

  In the drizzling rain, I walked back toward Alex’s apartment, losing myself in my thoughts, attempting fruitlessly not to jump to any conclusions. Maybe Charles Kravis and my mother were just friends. Maybe this meant nothing. But why then had no one ever told me they knew each other? And why would Olivia have had the envelope? Eventually I arrived at Alex’s apartment. I was in the living room, unbuttoning my suit jacket when my phone rang. I scrambled to answer it.

  “I’ve got something to tell you,” Panda said.

  “Is it about the case?”

  “We’re on our way back from the lab now. It took longer than expected. They wouldn’t hand over the information without a subpoena,” he said stiffly. “It turns out that Olivia wasn’t doing a paternity test. It was a sibling test.”

  A sibling test. It wasn’t difficult to take the next mental leap: My mother and Charles Kravis; an affair a year before my birth; a sibling test; a secret. It’s time you know the truth. This was why Olivia had a copy of my birth certificate in her desk drawer at work. I felt my stomach bottom out, my breath turn shallow. Was it possible? Could Olivia and I be half-sisters? I swallowed hard, my mouth suddenly dry. “What were the results?” I asked, but I already knew the answer.

  “Positive. Do you have any idea who she might have been testing? There are no names attached. They’re faxing over the results. Forensics will see if either makes a match with what we picked up at the scene.” There was a short pause. “Crap. Now?” Panda huffed into the phone.

  Police business. “Go. I’ll catch up with you later,” I said, hanging up the phone. I sank to the floor. A gray cloud moved overhead, submerging Alex’s living room in dull light. In the distance, a first bolt cracked against the sky. I heard the low growl of thunder, then the rain beating down on the cement floor of his balcony.

  I fumbled for my bag, ripping into the box holding the silver-framed photograph of Olivia and me. There we were: Same smile, same red-tinted hair, same smattering of freckles across our noses. Our eyes were different, and face shape, and bodies. As we’d aged all those things became more pronounced. But when we were young, they used to mistake us for sisters. Old people especially. We’d laugh and look at each other and wish it were so. I gazed down at the framed picture as anger, grief, and guilt took over my mind, forcing out every thought except for one: Who didn’t want me to know I was a Kravis?

  My mother, for starters. She must have known about my true father and never told me, never even given me a clue. But she had to have been haunted by her guilt. To have had a child with one man and live a lie with another. Was this the reason she’d killed herself?

  “Life will teach you this in time,” she’d told me once, a lone moment of unvarnished candor. I was five years old, too young to understand, but not too young to remember. “Men make promises they can’t keep. Friends become enemies. It’s the people you trust the most who hurt you the worst.” She’d smoothed the copper curls off my face, pulled the covers of my bed up to my neck and called me by my pet name. “And do you know why that is, Princess Bumblebee?”

  I can’t recall what I’d said. Probably nothing.

  Her answer came in a whisper laced with regret. “Because we let them.”

  Charles Kravis was my biological father. My parents had always avoided discussing the fact that I was born less than nine months after their wedding, and I’d assumed it was because my dad had knocked up my mother. But there had been more to the story than that. The question was, had my father known? Suspected, at least? I looked down at my cellphone and started to dial his number and then stopped. This wasn’t a subject you broached any way other than face-to-face. Olivia must have thought the same thing: I’ll wait to see her in person. Then I’d canceled on her. And then someone had killed her. The police thought Andrey had killed her, and had a pretty good theory on why he’d done it, but what if it hadn’t been him? What if Olivia hadn’t been murdered because of Rachel, but because of me, and because of this secret that she’d uncovered about us being related? Again I asked myself who didn’t want me to find out I was Charles Kravis’s daughter. Who would have been willing to brutally kill not just one but two people to keep this secret?

  I heard Naomi Zell’s voice ringing in my ear, what’s your connection to this family anyway? And then my mind reached deeper, to the shadowy figure towering over me in the bathroom at Prentice Maldone’s party, to the strong hands pinching my cheeks, and the swish of hair against my face. Long hair. A woman’s hair. I flashed to another moment, to Delphine standing with Prentice Maldone in the lobby of the FirstNews building, her hand so tightly clenched around the strap of her handbag her knuckles had turned white.

  I dialed Panda on my phone. It went to voicemail. “Call me as soon as you get this. The party Prentice Maldone threw at that gallery in SoHo. You guys still have the surveillance footage, right? I need to know when Delphine and her husband left the party. I think she drugged me, and I think… I think she killed Olivia.”

  I hung up. Delphine must have found out about my past. She’d written JIFFY on my computer and destroyed all my belongings. I thought of those cracker crumbs Restivo noticed on my countertop. She’d waited in my apartment for me to come home from the benefit, just like she’d waited for Olivia to come home from dinner with Rachel. She waited.

  Inside my head, I heard an alarm bell ringing. Leave now.

  Another bolt of lightning lit up the sky, illuminating the room. On the wall, I caught a split-second of shadow.

  It was too late.

  The first thing I saw was the gun. Next the blue latex gloves. And finally the person wearing them. Delphine Lamont stepped out of Alex’s bedroom.

  I looked to the front door. It was deadbolted by my own hands. I looked behind me to the balcony. I could try climbing down, but Alex’s apartment was on the eleventh floor. If I fell, I’d die.

  “How did you get in here?” I aske
d, struggling to keep the tremor out of my voice.

  “Look at me,” she said, a sneering smile on her face. “Do I look like a burglar? A murderer? There’s no building in the city I couldn’t get into if I wanted to.” She took a step closer. “Now drop the phone.”

  I stared at the phone in my hand.

  “Drop it,” she repeated, taking another step. She was wearing the same clothes she’d worn to Olivia’s funeral: low-heeled designer pumps, a heavy gold necklace, and a beautiful black suit. Her thick brown hair was up in a blue hair net. She was going to finish me off now. My only hope was to stall her and call for help without her noticing. “Don’t come any closer. Don’t or I’ll scream,” I warned.

  She shook her head pityingly. Then she lunged for me, 140 pounds of muscle and rage railing on my body, wrenching the phone from my grasp. I grabbed for her hair, lost my balance, and felt her elbow connecting with my spine. A moment later I was on my hands and knees, blood dripping from my temple onto the rug. My head had slammed against the corner of Alex’s coffee table. I managed one ragged breath before Delphine nailed me at full force with the pointed toe of her shoe. She aimed the gun at my face. “Get up.”

  “Please don’t do this,” I begged, gasping for air. “I don’t want any money. I won’t ask for any. I promise.”

  She snorted. “Charles is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. If he knew he had another living daughter, he’d want you to have your share of it. But you don’t deserve it. You never spent a day with him in your life.” Her cold eyes were lit with fury. “He was planning on leaving Olivia everything. My mother was getting a pittance. Me, fucking $20 million. And I’m supposed to just accept it? I was entitled to more. And now I’m going to get it, everything except for what he’s giving that charity of hers. Do realize how much money is at stake here?”

  Outside the rain was coming down in sheets. Thunder growled from overhead. “Were you the one who opposed the merger?”

  “That was Naomi Zell. The rest of us realized the sooner we cashed out the better.”

  “How did you know to find me here?” I asked, still hoping to stall her.

  “There was a girl in the news van. Pretty. I don’t know her name. She was more than happy to give me the address.”

  Sabine. I knew she felt threatened by me, but she wouldn’t have done this on purpose. She, like everyone else, thought Olivia’s killer was behind bars. She’d assumed I was no longer in danger, and that Delphine, in her jewels and kitten heels, wasn’t a threat.

  Delphine kicked me again in the side, knocking the breath from my lungs. “Get up now and start undressing or I’ll shoot you right here. Do it slowly. And don’t try anything.”

  I reached for my first button with dread. Delphine wasn’t going to just shoot me. She had something else planned, something worse. My eyes searched the room for a weapon, anything I could use to get the upper hand. Nothing was in my grasp, but my keys lay just beyond, about a foot away from the coffee table. In self-defense, we’d learned to aim for the side of the neck: jugular vein, carotid artery, and no bone protection. I had to distract Delphine, throw her off balance, get her to lower her gun for a second if I was going to have a chance at nailing her in the right spot.

  I worked another few buttons on my blouse. “How did you know to pin it on the doorman?”

  Her face lit up with self-satisfaction. “Olivia suspected Rachel and Andrey might be messing around in her apartment. Turns out, she was right. I told her if she wanted, I could find out for sure, sneak into her apartment and catch them in the act. She wasn’t sure she wanted me to do that. But I didn’t need her permission. I have a key, and I knew how to get into the building unnoticed. From there, it was a fucking cakewalk. All I had to do was bide my time until Rachel and Olivia came back from dinner, then I tied the whore up in the closet and took care of Olivia in the hall.” The whole time she was talking I was slowly undressing. I’d so far removed my blouse, strategically tossing it so that it concealed my keys. They were my only hope.

  “Hurry up.” Delphine seemed to suddenly remember the task at hand. I removed my skirt and stockings and placed them on top of my blouse. She gestured at my clothes. “Now pick it all up and go to the bathroom,” she said.

  I did as I was told, scooping up my clothes and the keys. As soon as I had a firm grip on the largest key, I hurled myself on top of Delphine, bringing it down on her neck. She cried out in shock, staggering backward. We struggled. I felt the butt of her gun connecting with the side of my head, her knee with my ribs. I gasped for breath, my diaphragm protesting against the force of inhalation as I hit the floor.

  “Look at me,” she panted, the gun at my temple again. “This isn’t a fucking dress rehearsal.” She pulled me up by my hair and dug the barrel of the gun between my shoulders. “Walk.”

  “What are you going to do to me?” I whimpered, fear blunting the edge of my pain. I felt nothing, just a quiet panic eroding my sense of reality. For a moment I wondered if I might be dreaming, but then I heard the click of the gun’s safety being taken off.

  “Bathtub. Razors. You know the rest,” she said in a singsong. “No one will question it. You’ve lost your job. You’re all alone. You fucked the man who killed my stepsister. This wouldn’t exactly be the first time you tried to put an end to your pitiful existence, would it?” She pointed at my arms. “I saw the scars.”

  I turned to face her. “It won’t work. The medical examiner will see my wounds. The police will see the blood on the carpet. They’ll know there was a struggle.”

  “You stumbled and fell, picked up a few bruises on the way. Not unusual for someone on as many drugs as you are.” She shook a trio of pill bottles. Even at a distance, I knew what they were.

  “Those aren’t mine.” Georgia had thrown out all my painkillers when I was in rehab. She’d gone back to my apartment soon after she’d taken me to Hilltop and dumped all my drugs in the trash and all my alcohol down the toilet.

  “So what?” She threw them at me one by one. “Now start swallowing. You’re still good at that, aren’t you? Swallowing.”

  I squared my shoulders. “I’m not taking these.”

  “If I have to force you, I will.”

  I opened the first bottle and placed two pills on my tongue. “Faster,” Delphine shouted, pointing the gun at my face. I looked down at the handful of pills in my hand and wondered who would find my body first—Alex or Panda or Restivo? After I’d swallowed the last of the pills, Delphine prodded me toward Alex’s bathroom. The bath was full to the top, still steaming. On the sink, one of Alex’s razor blades had been dismantled. Three thin pieces of metal glinted against the green marble.

  “No one will believe I did this to myself,” I said.

  Delphine’s mouth twisted into a sadistic smile. “Why not? They say suicide runs in the family. And apparently so do other things.”

  Her words hit like a blast of cold water. “What does that mean?”

  “You remember what the other girls used to call you in high school?” She waited for my response.

  “How did you know about that?” By the time I was in high school, Delphine and Olivia were in a Swiss boarding school.

  “You don’t fuck half the Collegiate basketball team without word getting around.”

  “It was two. Just two of them.”

  “At the same time,” she snarled. And then, like a slow twist of the knife: “You are a slut and so was your mother.”

  How dare she. She hadn’t known my mother, her sweetness, her patience, the way she used to grip my hand when we crossed the streets, how gently she used to comb the knots from my hair, how she read to me every night until my eyes grew heavy and my breathing slowed. And then she’d kiss me on the forehead, pull the covers to my chin, and whisper in my ear how much she loved me—today, tomorrow, forever. I launched myself into Delphine, my fingernails tearing at her face, but it was like trying to tackle a seven-foot lineman. She threw me to the floor with ease.


  “People are going to see that,” I hissed, pointing at the long scratch I’d managed to inflict above her right eyebrow. “I’ve got friends on the force. They won’t give up until they bring you to justice.”

  “Shut up. No one cares about you.” Her lips thinned. “Your mother was supposed to get rid of you. She told Charles she would.”

  So Charles didn’t know he had a daughter, had never known. And then I remembered the look on his face at that Fourth of July party. You’re Tipsy Shaw’s daughter. He must have put two and two together. Is that why Monica had sent me back home to my father the next day? I grabbed the towel bar and pulled myself up to standing with effort. The pain and pills were starting to take their toll.

  Delphine cackled. “Olivia found the letters from your mother. After Charles’s second stroke, we had to help with the memoir. We were looking for documents, pictures, and memorabilia. Instead, we found a stash of old letters. I thought they were nothing. Some stupid old letters? Who the fuck cares. I had them in the trash. But Olivia dug them out and read them, and then she had you tested. She got your hair from your hairbrush. She was going to make Charles do right by you. I had to stop her. Charles is about to die. The fuck if I was going to lose my inheritance to his red-headed slut of a stepchild.”

  “Except I’m not the stepchild. You are.” I looked her dead in the eyes.

  “Enough,” Delphine shrieked.

  I felt the blood trickling down the side of my face, my brain swimming in a sea of medication. Stay awake, I commanded myself. But my belly had turned warm, my vision cloudy. My fingers tingled. I thought I heard my mother’s voice reading to me from a favorite book. It’s bedtime now, Bumblebee.

  “Get in.” Delphine’s eyes flicked to the water.

  I stepped one foot in the bath. “Too hot,” I protested. My ribs sang out in pain as Delphine pushed me down toward the water. It felt certain now, my impending death. A tear escaped my eye, and then another and another. I thought of my father, the one who had raised me; my mother, the one who had sacrificed everything for me; and Olivia, the one who had died for me.