by Nancy Martin
Dilly located a long wisp of peach-hued silk embroidered with delicate fronds and appliquéd fruit.
Kaiser clasped his hands in ecstasy. “There she is! Carolina Herrera at the pinnacle of her artistry! I must see it on the body!”
Dilly and Artie turned to me.
“The body?” I asked. Involuntarily, my hand strayed to the open collar of my shirt and closed it tightly. This particular body had been through a pregnancy and a miscarriage and an emotionally triggered weight loss that made me feel flabby, not slim. The last thing I wanted to do was play fashion model.
“Dear heart,” Dilly said with great kindness, “it’s not like we haven’t seen our share of women, you know.”
“And it’s not you we’re interested in,” Artie added. “No offense, doll.”
“Strip down,” Kaiser commanded. “We must see the Herrera!”
At which point Artie began unbuttoning my shirt and I found myself slipping into an evening dress that weighed no more than a summer nightgown. Unwillingly, I wiggled my jeans down underneath the dress and kicked them across the floor. The Herrera felt like gossamer floating around me, though, and my heart lifted.
I had, of course, worn my grandmother’s couture so frequently that I had already experienced the phenomenon of fine workmanship on the human body. My spine straightened to the posture my childhood ballet teacher had insisted upon. My shoulders went level. My chin somehow lifted to a point in space slightly above normal. And my breath caught high in my throat.
Artie cleared away my coffee table and set up a folding mirror with three panels. I stood in the middle of it and looked at myself.
Kaiser frowned. Dilly and Artie stood back to eye me critically.
“The breasts,” Kaiser said.
“Hm,” said Dilly, nodding.
Artie leaped forward. He had slipped a pincushion on his wrist, and he plucked a pin from it. In an instant, he lifted my right arm and began nipping pins into the fabric as fast as an expert typist tapping the keys of a typewriter. He worked his way under my breasts and emerged on my left side before jumping back to study the result.
The dress met with Kaiser’s approval. He waved his hand like a dauphin. “The Herrera is salvageable. Keep it. What’s next?”
For the rest of the morning, I stood on the wooden champagne case in my tallest Jimmy Choos while Dilly and Artie fluttered around me like a couple of Disney bluebirds.
“Good Lord!” Dilly cried when he whipped out a purple spandex number with an outer-space theme. “Didn’t Penny wear this to the Oscars?”
“The year she knocked Joan Rivers on her ass!” Artie clapped his hands at the memory. “Oh, how I prayed for a catfight! But in a wonderfully ironic moment Russell Crowe broke them up before the fur could really fly, and—oh, sweet Carol Burnett, it’s a Bob Mackie! Do you think it might fit me?”
“You’re seven feet tall in heels,” Dilly said. “Of course it won’t fit you. Besides, the color is so garish we’d have to help you write a suicide note if you actually got the thing to zip. But Nora, do try it on. Humor us.”
“I’ll look like a drag queen, Dilly.”
“Better you than Artie,” Dilly said. “He’s got the shoulders of a linebacker.”
“I was a linebacker, I’ll have you know,” Artie said. “Take off your bra, doll. Bob Mackie is all about built-ins.”
Artie helped me writhe into the slippery, sequined creation. It was one of the Cher-inspired dresses with a neckline that plunged to Panama and a back that showed nearly every single vertebra in my spine. The eye-popping purple made me think of electrified grapes.
I hitched up the skirt and climbed onto the champagne box to display the final product.
Dilly said, “I can’t imagine Penny Divine buying this horror.”
From his crouch on the floor, Artie said, “The morning papers say Penny may not be dead after all. The tabloids will go crazy.”
“So who,” asked Kaiser, “is really the dead woman?”
I wondered if my information from Bloom was supposed to be a secret, but I decided probably not. “Actually, it’s not a woman at all.”
Artie looked up from my hem, intrigued. “The papers didn’t say anything about that! It’s a man?”
“In drag,” I said. “Acrylic nails, lady’s watch—Penny’s watch. Someone wanted the police to believe it was really Penny.”
Dilly had been watching me. “Who do you think it is, Nora?”
“My bet’s on Kell Huckabee, a man who used to work at Eagle Glen as the caretaker. He disappeared a while back, and—”
“Kell?” Artie’s eyebrows rose.
“Huckabee?” Dilly was just as startled. His glass slipped from his grasp and shattered on the floor, sending a thin spray of champagne across the floor. “Oh, how clumsy of me!”
He got down on his knees and began mopping up champagne with his handkerchief. “I’m so sorry! I’ve broken one of your lovely glasses.”
“Don’t worry about it, Dilly. How do you know Kell Huckabee?”
Kaiser and Artie exchanged a cautionary look.
“The suspense is unbearable,” I said. “How do you know Kell?”
“Drugs,” Artie admitted.
That surprised me. “Cocaine? Heroin?”
“No, no, Kell Huckabee sold performance drugs in gay clubs. A little Ecstasy, but mostly that new underground drug called MaxiMan. All the young guys love it. Makes us hard for a whole weekend.”
Dilly finally glanced up from collecting broken bits of glass, looking pained. “Don’t be crude, Artie. You promised to behave if I brought you along.”
“Sorry, but it’s true. You pop one MaxiMan at a club on Friday night, and you’re good to go until way past 60 Minutes on Sunday. It’s the latest thing for gay men. That, and a swing in the shower.”
Confused, Kaiser said, “Only sixty minutes?”
“No, no, the whole weekend!”
“Dilly, you’ve cut yourself!”
He stared at his finger, which was oozing a tiny drop of blood. “So I have.”
Kaiser passed Dilly another handkerchief, which he used first to dab the tear of pain that had squeezed out of his left eye. Then he wrapped it around his bleeding finger. He had turned pale at the sight of his own blood.
“Are you all right?”
“Fine, fine. Don’t let me spoil the festivities. It was a silly accident. Let’s see the dress again. Spin around for us, dear heart?”
I obeyed, but asked, “Was Kell Huckabee gay?” Recalling my hot afternoon with Nuclear Winter, I asked, “Or bisexual?”
“Not that I know of.” Artie stuck a pin between his teeth and spoke around it. “But he obviously knew his most interested customers would be. I mean, does your average hetero really want to admit his problems to the corner pharmacist, let alone a drug dealer? For us, though, it’s just recreation. MaxiMan makes a good time.”
“Where did Kell get his supply?”
“I have no clue.”
But I could make an educated guess. Kell Huckabee got the drug from Potty Devine, who seemed to be passing it out like breath mints.
Dilly squeezed the handkerchief on his finger. “What are you thinking, Nora?”
That Potty Devine suddenly sounded like a man who could have wanted to keep Kell Huckabee quiet. If Devine Pharmaceuticals was trying to buy another company, they’d need everything to be spick-and-span. Which made me think of another Devine scandal avoided.
“Dilly, tell me again about the child Penny had.”
“It was many years ago, dear heart.”
“Did you ever hear what became of the baby?”
“Not a word.”
Kaiser rooted in the pockets of his jacket for a cigarette case. He opened it, then reconsidered smoking in the presence of the beautiful clothes and snapped shut the case again. “In the old days, the bastard children were given away. Adopted by servants.”
“In books,” Artie said, “an inconvenient child
went to distant relatives, remember? Very Jane Eyre. It was best to send the baby far, far away.”
“Nora,” Dilly said, “you’ll make yourself sick with all this worrying. Why not spend a day concentrating on these beautiful clothes?”
Before I could better explain my thinking, we heard a door slam and voices from the kitchen. I was trapped on the champagne case while Artie fiddled with the hem of the Mackie dress, so I turned awkwardly to see who was arriving.
“Woohoo!” Libby cried, barging into the room with her baby in arms and various scarves flowing from her neck. “Look who I found in the driveway!”
Chapter Nineteen
It was The Sopranos meeting Project Runway. Aldo came first, followed more slowly by Michael on crutches, and a couple of his hangers-on, including Delmar. They all stopped dead, staring at me on the champagne case with a flamboyantly gay man at my feet and the purple dress practically pulsing with garishness.
Dilly, Kaiser and Artie stared back at the mob crew, just as speechless.
“My goodness!” Hefting the baby on her hip, Libby was the embodiment of heterosexuality run amok. “Nora, you look like a starlet who picked the wrong stylist.”
“Hi,” I said to Michael, perhaps too cheerfully. “I didn’t expect you until later this afternoon.”
“A bunch of reporters showed up, so we took a back door.” Although stunned by my appearance, Michael pulled himself together and managed to hobble closer, clumsy with the crutches. His left leg was encased in an inflatable cast, and it hardly appeared substantial enough to protect the broken bone. His attention, however, was fully captured by the purple dress. “You,” he said, “look fantastic.”
Kaiser covered his mouth. Dilly managed to keep silent. Artie coughed.
The rest of the wiseguys stared at me as if I’d just strutted off an Atlantic City stage with the rest of the showgirls.
Aldo swung around and clouted Delmar upside the head. “Whadaya think you’re lookin’ at?”
“It’s nothing special,” I said firmly, already aware of Dilly’s amusement at the common man’s taste in women’s fashion. “Should you be in bed?”
“From the looks of things,” Artie muttered, crouched at Michael’s feet and gazing up at his tall figure, “he won’t be much good in bed for a long time. What a waste.”
I remembered my manners and introduced everyone.
Dilly, Kaiser and Artie couldn’t help staring at the notorious man in their midst. They took turns shaking his hand.
Libby said, “Kaiser, do you make bridesmaids’ dresses? Because I’d love to have a consult with you. I’ll nurse the baby and then we’ll discuss, okay?”
Kaiser choked, and I said, “Libby, would you mind making coffee when you’re finished—uh, taking care of little Max? Some of us are going to have blinding headaches soon.”
Dilly insisted Michael sit down and even jumped up to ease him into one of the leather chairs. Artie pulled the footstool close to make him comfortable. Aldo fetched a pillow. In seconds, Michael managed to have half a dozen people doing him services.
Libby went off to nurse her child, and Aldo dragged the two bodyguards into the kitchen.
Kaiser studied Michael with intent interest from the sofa. “You are the mafioso, yes?”
“No,” Michael said. “That’s my father. And you’re—what? Some kind of dressmaker?”
The world-famous fashion designer lifted his hands humbly. “The simple tailor, like my father, that is all. You are wanting to marry this nice young lady?” Kaiser waved at me.
“That’s the plan.”
Kaiser nodded. “It has chemistry, this match.”
Libby returned long enough to deliver a Ziploc bag full of crushed ice cubes to Michael. “For your hand,” she said. “It will stop the swelling. Next I’ll bring you some toast.”
“What happened to your hand?” I asked.
“Bumped it,” Michael said. “Go ahead with the fashion show.”
Artie held up a short black cocktail dress. “This one next!”
With Michael watching, stripping off the Mackie dress brought a stinging blush to my face. But he seemed distracted—probably from more pain than he admitted. In two minutes, I was back on the box, this time decked out in a short cocktail frock with a Chanel label basted discreetly inside.
Dilly sighed. “The quintessential little black dress.”
It was sleeveless with a simple round, topstitched collar, a cunningly nipped waist with a demure grosgrain ribbon, and a gently flared skirt that suggested my hips and skimmed my kneecaps. A good tailor could make it fit properly, but the bones of the dress were perfection.
For the first time, Kaiser got to his feet and made a sedate circle around me, staring at the dress with fixed attention. “Hmm.”
“Exquisite,” Dilly murmured.
“Drop-dead gorgeous,” Artie agreed.
“What do you think, Michael?”
He shrugged, cradling the ice pack in his hand. “It’s good.”
“It is good,” Kaiser proclaimed. “I will fit you myself! The garment must not be damaged by imbeciles.”
“Hey,” Artie protested.
Kaiser snatched the pins and set to work, tweaking, tucking, perfecting. He muttered in French and German, frowning, pursing his lips in aggravation. Artie watched closely.
“There’s something scratchy inside,” I said, wriggling.
“Nonsense.”
“No, really. I can feel it.”
At last Kaiser grabbed my bottom with both hands, making me jump. “What is this?”
I craned around. “It’s my—well—”
“It is something inside the dress!”
“I know!”
I turned the hem inside out and reached up inside the dress lining. My fingers struck a hard bit of metal that had snagged on a seam. With a struggle, I worked it free and held it up to the light.
A wristwatch.
A delicate one, made of white gold with PIAGET stamped on the tiny face. “Good heavens,” I said. “It must be Penny’s watch.”
Michael leaned forward. “Like the one we found at the polo match?”
“Not quite.” I tossed it to him. “Maybe the other watch was some kind of knockoff. That one is the real thing.”
Dilly said, “She must have lost the watch in this dress the last time she wore it.”
“But,” Michael said, turning the watch over in his hand, “her family said the other watch was hers.”
“They claimed it was,” I agreed, meeting his gaze.
“Time to phone Detective Gloom again?”
“I think so.”
Kaiser objected. “Not yet! The fitting is not complete!”
He attacked the dress again with expert fingers—first snatching pins from Artie’s hand, then slipping them one by one into the seams of the Chanel.
At last, he finally stood back in triumph. “Good!”
A little black dress by Chanel.
Fitted by Kaiser Waldman.
I could die a happy woman. Or at least a well-dressed one.
Libby arrived with more mimosas and toast. “Is that ice helping?” she asked Michael.
He flexed his hand. “Sure, thanks.”
Libby went to the CD player and turned on some music, so the party really began to swing. I used the chance to excuse myself and slip into the butler’s pantry between the kitchen and the dining room to phone Ben Bloom with my discovery of Penny’s watch.
I dialed Bloom’s cell phone, but got his voice mail. I left a message about the watch and told him to call me at home.
When I put the receiver back on the cradle, I found Dilly standing behind me.
He said, “I’m sorry about the broken glass, dear heart.”
“Oh, Dilly, think nothing of it.” I gave him a fond peck on the cheek. “It was nothing special. I’m so glad you came this morning.”
“So am I.” He took my hand and looked down at the gargantuan ring on my fing
er. “This is my first opportunity to meet your intended. He’s—not quite what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
Dilly smiled apologetically. “Something brutal. But he makes an effort to be pleasant.”
“He’s not brutal at all. And he’s more than pleasant.”
“I’m sure you’re right.” Dilly touched my gaudy ring. “Nora, I hope you know what you’re getting into. Sometimes we—all of us—experiment in times of stress. We want to see how the other half lives.”
“Dilly, are you warning me off?”
“Just giving you permission to change your mind if you need to. One youthful indiscretion doesn’t have to alter your life.”
I stiffened. “Do you mean ruin my life?”
“Don’t be offended. I’m clumsy at this, but—look, I’m trying to tell you that you can make mistakes and learn from them.” Suddenly Dilly had tears in his eyes, and his hand trembled. “I know you suffered a loss recently, so maybe you’re not yourself.” Dilly paused before saying, “But perhaps you lost your child for a reason. Perhaps it was for the best.”
Coldly, I said, “You have no idea how much I wanted that child, Dilly.”
“Maybe you did. But think, Nora. Any child you have with that man will always connect you to his—his family. Are you sure you want that?”
I said nothing.
Dilly went on. “Think about what you’re doing, Nora. Think about who you are. Who he is. Who your children will be.”
At once, I thought of the two thugs who had grabbed me in the street. Men who wanted to hurt me.
“Think of your children, Nora.”
We heard the front doorbell ring. Dilly gave me a kiss on the cheek and left me in the pantry. I heard Aldo go to answer the door. When he came back, he had Crewe Dearborne in his wake.
Crewe arrived in the sitting room, looking downright startled to find such a crowd. I wasn’t sure if Aldo playing the role of my butler shook him up or the presence of the fashionistas in the living room did it. He carried a flat canvas package, tied with string, and a grocery bag.
“Nora,” he said when he’d kissed my cheek. “There is a carload of gangsters checking ID at the gate. What kind of house party do you have going on?”