A Crazy Little Thing Called Death

by Nancy Martin

  She shrugged. “They stay away from each other. He doesn’t like her in the house because she’s such a slob. Give her five minutes in a room, and she’ll start a collection of newspapers to use for her smelly cats. So he forbids her to step into his house.”

  “Where does she live? Good grief, not in that awful little mobile home behind Potty’s mansion?”

  “Yep.”

  “Alone?”

  “I’ve never seen anybody else go in that hellhole.”

  “What about Julie?”

  “The kid? She lives over the garage. She doesn’t talk much. She’s a little spooky, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You’re okay,” Nuclear said, after staring intently into my face. “I didn’t expect that. I figured you came around hoping to get some of Potty’s dough.”

  “That’s not my concern,” I said. “I just want to know what happened to Penny.”

  “So I have a shot at the whole enchilada?” Nuclear asked.

  “As much as anyone, I guess.”

  “I can keep Potty happy,” she said. “As long as I get the kind of sex I like someplace else.”

  At which point she opened my towel and planted a hot, wet, sloppy kiss on what’s gently known as my bikini line.

  I fled.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Fully dressed and partially recovered, I staggered out into the street, pulling Reed’s cell phone from my handbag. I tried Lexie first.

  Her assistant said she was back in her office. “But she’s leaving for home in a minute. She asks if you’d meet her there.”

  “At home?” Startled, I checked my watch and found it was only midafternoon. Lexie never left her office until the end of business on the West Coast. “Is she sick?”

  “No,” the assistant said carefully. “Shall I tell her you’ll meet her?”

  “Yes, by all means.”

  When I disconnected the call, Aldo appeared at the back of the town car and gallantly opened the door for me. “You’re all pink,” he said.

  I directed Reed to Lexie’s place, and he took a circuitous city route to avoid the worst of the traffic. His strategy didn’t work. Reed muttered, but drove sedately through the jam. We got off the expressway and crossed the river, which was dirty and swollen with spring rain, then wound our way down to Boathouse Row, where Lexie lived.

  At a curve in the river, several boating clubs still maintained the Victorian-style boathouses where they kept racing shells, kayaks and canoes. At night, the picturesque houses were illuminated with strings of white lights that glowed on the surface of the river. On warm weekends, the clubs were thronged with members who enjoyed water sports on the river.

  “Nice,” Aldo said. “Classy.”

  Reed pulled into Lexie’s narrow driveway. Although the other buildings on Boathouse Row had been long since grandfathered in for boating clubs, Lexie had managed to acquire one of the more fanciful houses for her own. I often wondered how she finagled that astonishing real estate transaction, but I didn’t dare ask. I assumed strings had been pulled somewhere along the line. Her family, city leaders and philanthropists for generations, had not been above asking for a favor now and then.

  Lexie was climbing out of her BMW when we arrived. She carried a bulging briefcase and wore her darkest glasses. Her face, I noted, was paper white.

  And she didn’t greet me with her usual exuberance. “Sweetie,” she said when I got out of the car, “I don’t know whether to kiss you or kill you.”

  “Lex, what in the world is wrong?”

  “Come inside,” she said, “and I’ll open a few bottles of scotch. I plan on getting good and drunk.”

  I gave her a hug. “Honey, whatever the problem is, I’m on your side.”

  Lexie’s house might have been adorably quaint on the outside, but the interior was sleek and modern—the better to display choice pieces from the art collection she had amassed on her own and inherited from her mother, a formidable collector of international stature. My friend liked to rotate her favorite paintings and sculptures, and today her living room gallery was dominated by a Gauguin. The hot, tropical colors slathered on the sarongs of island women seemed to echo Lexie’s mood.

  “Samir!” she bellowed. When no answer came, she muttered, “Where the hell is that man? I didn’t hire him to spend his time playing tiddly-winks!”

  Lexie’s houseman—as efficient as an English butler and less chatty than a samurai warrior—usually appeared like smoke when Lexie got home from work. But today, the house was silent.

  I said, “I didn’t see his car in the driveway. He must be running errands.”

  She kicked her stilettos off onto the white carpet and threw her briefcase down onto the white slipcovered sofa. A glare of afternoon sunlight streamed into the room from the tall windows that overlooked the river. We could hear the rush of the water without opening the French doors. The sound seemed to fuel Lexie’s temper.

  She headed straight for the kitchen. I caught up with her just as she was pulling an expensive bottle of scotch from her liquor cabinet. Her expression was stormy.

  I took the bottle from her and put it back. “Lex, booze isn’t the answer. Let me make some tea, and we’ll talk. It’s Crewe, right?”

  “Goddamn right, it’s Crewe. Who the hell does he think he is?”

  “Your friend?”

  “Bullshit!” She paced the kitchen.

  “For crying out loud, tell me what happened! I heard you went to lunch with him. What could he have done to—”

  “He kissed me, that’s what he’s done! And I don’t appreciate being manhandled by a—a horny goat with delusions of fairy-tale love!”

  “Crewe manhandled you?”

  Lexie stalked out of the kitchen, too infuriated to explain. I followed her doggedly back across the living room, down the hallway to her bedroom. There, her sterile white sanctuary was graced by a tall John Singer Sargent painting of Lexie’s great-great-grandmother and her teenage sister. Both women wore white dresses, which looked charming next to the billowing white curtains at the nearby windows.

  I sat on the bed while she slammed open the door to the walk-in closet. I thought about Crewe’s assault charge and wondered if there was a side to the charming restaurant critic I hadn’t seen yet.

  When Lexie snapped on the closet light and disappeared inside, I called, “What happened, exactly, Lex? Was he really rough with you?”

  I heard her slapping hangers on the rod. At last, she said, “He wasn’t rough.”

  “What, then?”

  She came to the closet doorway and stripped off her suit jacket. “He wasn’t rough. He surprised me, that’s all. And I hate that.”

  “Where did this happen?”

  “In Louie’s.”

  “In a restaurant? He kissed you in a restaurant?”

  “Where else?” she snapped. “He never goes anywhere except restaurants! At least this time he wasn’t dressed in one of his ridiculous disguises!”

  “Lex—”

  “I told him I have no intention of starting a relationship. Not with him, not with any man. My life is busy. Very busy. I run a large financial concern, and I have no time for personal issues.”

  She ripped her silk sweater over her head and threw it on the floor. Then she bent to snatch it up again and went back into the closet. She shouted, “I’m not an available woman! I told him that!”

  “And he argued?”

  “No, of course he didn’t argue! He just—He said—oh, hell!”

  I waited, and in a moment, she came out of the closet wearing a pair of yoga pants and her bra. She carried a black sweater.

  I grabbed her hand and pulled her to sit on the bed. “Just tell me,” I said calmly. “Tell me what happened, and I’ll help. Take a deep breath.”

  She sat down obediently. And she breathed. Then she said, “He asked if he could kiss my hand.”

  “He—? Lex,” I said, “that doesn’t sound so bad
.”

  “After I clearly stated I wanted no part of a relationship? For him to act like that?”

  “It wasn’t exactly the act of a—what did you say? A horny goat.”

  “Well, where does he get off doing the Sir Walter Raleigh routine? I don’t want a man in my life!”

  “I know, honey. I’m sorry.”

  “You put him up to this!”

  “Lex, I felt sorry for him. I feel sorry for you! I’m sorry he feels so much, and you feel so—differently. I’m sorry, sorry, sorry. But you can hardly be angry at him for asking permission to kiss your hand. Really, doesn’t it show how considerate he is?”

  “He knows, doesn’t he?”

  “Knows what?”

  “That I was raped.”

  “I never told him.”

  “But he knows. I can see he knows.”

  “Lexie, it doesn’t take Sam Spade to figure out that something caused this—this extreme unwillingness to have anything but professional, business contact with the opposite sex.”

  She fell back onto the bed and put her arm over her eyes. “Oh, damn,” she said unevenly. “Damn, damn.”

  “Do you want me to talk to him? To tell him you really aren’t interested?”

  She lay unmoving on the bed for a full minute in silence. Then, “No.”

  “Tell me what I can do,” I said. “I want to help.”

  She sat up finally. There were no signs of tears on her face. She was in control again. “I don’t know what anyone can do.”

  “Is it time for more therapy?”

  She shuddered. “God, no. I’ve been therapied so much I know all the lines by heart. No, it’s up to me. I just don’t know….”

  I hugged her around the shoulders. “Take it slowly.”

  “How can I? One lunch date, one kiss on my hand, and suddenly I can’t finish my day at the office? This is no way to do business, Nora.”

  “I bet you have a few people at the office who can take up the slack.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know how you do it.”

  “Do what? I’m not running an investment firm, looking after millions entrusted to me by my clients.”

  She grimaced. “I know. But weaving the threads of your life. You’re always coping with twenty different things at once. That’s all beyond me.”

  “A few things are beyond me, too,” I said, thinking of my trip to the sauna with Nuclear Winter. “But most of the time you don’t have a choice. At least, I don’t seem to.”

  She looked into my face finally. “I heard Raphael Braga is in town.”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t mention that when I stopped by your house.”

  “I was going to. Then—well, Michael came home.”

  Lexie absorbed that information and noted my expression, too. “And you’ve seen Raphael, haven’t you? Spoken with him?”

  “I—yes.”

  “Sweetie, is that wise? I remember the contract you signed. You have a legal obligation to stay miles away from him.”

  “He wasn’t supposed to come back to Philadelphia, either, so he’s in violation of the agreement, too.”

  My friend studied me askance. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing important. At least, not before he drugged me.” I told her all about drinking the spiked champagne.

  “Oh, my God!”

  “I’m okay. I was rescued before he could—before anything happened.”

  “Thank heavens. That’s my worst fear. Did you—well, did you ask him about Carolina?”

  “He says they’re separated.”

  “And the child? It’s a girl, right?”

  “She’s with Raphael’s parents in Brazil. Her name is Mariel.”

  Lexie frowned. “Nora, when you helped Carolina when she couldn’t get pregnant—I know it was a time in your life when these things weren’t so important to you.”

  At last I could discuss it. Here was Lexie, who’d been through it with me back in college. She knew the whole story, and had helped me figure out what to do then. Perhaps she could help me now, too.

  “It seemed so easy,” I said. “I went to the hospital, and a doctor took some of my eggs, and it was as simple as having a routine exam, almost. And the legal contract—the promise that I’d never try to meet the child or have any communication with her—it didn’t seem so earth-shattering.”

  “You were twenty years old! And doing something nice for a friend who needed help.”

  I nodded. “His parents were so insistent they have children right away. And when Carolina discovered she couldn’t, Raphael demanded a divorce. She was so crazy in love with him. It all seemed so romantic at the time.”

  “Seems downright medieval now, doesn’t it?”

  “But to a college girl—one like me, who always thought true love conquered all…I don’t know. I wanted to help.”

  “And now,” Lexie said, “you’ve had two miscarriages. And you want children of your own.”

  “I do.”

  “And Michael.” Lexie smiled. “I suppose he wants a whole platoon of little Corleones, doesn’t he?”

  I found myself trembling then.

  It was Lexie’s turn to hug me. “Oh, sweetie.”

  “Thing is, Lex, I’m afraid to tell Michael. I haven’t told him about helping Raphael and Carolina have a baby.”

  “Darling, why?”

  “Because of something he said. Libby—oh, you don’t have to hear the whole story, but in one of her nutty moments, Libby said she’d be happy to be a surrogate mother if we decided to have children that way—”

  “Oh, dear!”

  “And Michael said—he said he didn’t want any Frankenstein babies.”

  Lexie winced. “Ouch.”

  “I know. It was awful.”

  “Nora, if he didn’t know, if he was simply responding to Libby—”

  “He said something similar months ago. Underneath everything else, Michael is a devout Catholic. He still goes to Mass, to that church with the ultraconservative priest. He’s had it beaten into his head there’s no other way to have children except how God intended.”

  “Well, God wouldn’t have let man invent the wheel if He didn’t think we’d come up with a few other ideas on our own.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  “Are you going to tell Michael? About Raphael and Carolina’s kid?”

  “My kid,” I corrected. “He’s going to think of her as my kid.”

  “Well, yes, but…not really. What you did for your friends has no bearing on your life with Michael, does it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know how he’ll react if I tell him, so maybe I should keep it a secret. He doesn’t really need to know. And yet,” I said slowly, “I may not have any other children, Lex. That little girl in Brazil might be the only child I’ll ever have in the world.”

  Seriously, she said, “But you’ve agreed to stay away from her.”

  “I know.” I put my hands over my face. “I start thinking about all this, and my brain just goes in circles. Things are different now. Carolina and Raphael aren’t together.”

  “So that gives you the right to swoop in? Darling, you must be Raphael’s worst nightmare.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If he thinks you’re going to steal his daughter—Nora, it’s a wonder he didn’t try to poison you! He’s probably scared to death of you.”

  That possibility hadn’t occurred to me. Maybe Raphael was only protecting his daughter. I said, “I don’t know what to think. My hormones are still making me crazy.”

  Sounding amused, she said, “Maybe we need that drink, after all.”

  “What a mess,” I said. “When did our lives get so damn screwed up?”

  Together, we sat in silence, contemplating our situations. Then she said, “This calls for hot chocolate.”

  “With marshmallows.”

  Lexie put on her sweater and a pair of velvet slippers, and we went bac
k to her immaculate kitchen, where she pulled two white mugs from the cupboard. I found skim milk in her perfectly clean refrigerator, and we combined the cocoa and sugar in a saucepan on her stove. We took the finished product out onto her deck overlooking the river, and we sat in a pair of teak chairs, wrapped in cashmere shawls she had brought outside.

  We turned our faces up to the afternoon sun, and I told her about Michael’s broken leg.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “Tigers! In the middle of Bucks County!”

  I told her everything I had pieced together so far.

  “So Vivian Devine keeps tigers on a private preserve?”

  “She collects all kinds of cats, in fact. I saw a serval cat in her house, too. We knew she’d been collecting dead animals, and turns out, she’s got a whole zoo to feed.”

  “It’s a wonder Michael wasn’t eaten! Have you told the police?”

  “I’ve been trying to reach Ben Bloom all day. He doesn’t answer. I assume he discovered something interesting at the autopsy of Penny Devine’s—uh, hand. But I’ll tell him about the tigers right away.”

  Lexie quelled a shiver by sipping hot chocolate. “The whole Devine story gets more peculiar every day. I did some research for you, too.”

  I sat up straighter. “Tell, tell.”

  “You know the whole history of Devine Pharmaceuticals, right? That the three siblings inherited their grandfather’s drugstore, and Potty built it into a pharmaceutical giant. Well, he needed capital to do that.”

  “So he borrowed money from Penny.”

  “He didn’t borrow it. He gave Penny a fifty percent interest in the new company. All three siblings own the original Devine Pharmaceuticals, and Penny owned half free and clear. Then, like other companies, they wanted to grow bigger yet, but even Penny didn’t have the millions to make that happen. So they issued stock, and the company went public.”

  “But Penny still owned a big share, right?”

  “The biggest. It was assumed those shares would revert to Vivian and Potty upon her death, but a little bird in the legal community tells me that Penny’s will says something completely different—that her shares are supposed to go to her son.”

  “Son?”

  “You heard right. Her illegitimate son, the child she gave away.”