Killer Heels

by Sheryl J. Anderson

“I know. You can say no if you want to.”

  Tricia’s hands seemed to be having a whispered conversation of their own, skittering back and forth across each other as she thought. I tried to anticipate the sticking point. Tricia loved a challenge, so that wasn’t it. I’d already mentioned the money/no object thing, so that wasn’t it. What was it?

  Tricia’s hands stopped, then softly wove themselves together. “It could help you with your investigation, right? Access to the guest list and all that sort of thing?”

  She’d caught me by surprise. I hadn’t thought of it that way and I never would have expected her to think of it that way. “Absolutely.”

  Cassady scoffed. “She’ll have this thing cracked long before the funeral. Just plan the damn party.”

  Tricia agreed that she would, but I could see the gleam in her eye. She was starting to like the thought of helping me. I liked it, too. It was a vote of confidence, which led me to start expounding on what I knew so far and to offer up my theory of murder as bad manners.

  The point I was trying to make was that just because Yvonne was acting normal—relatively—by the time I saw her didn’t mean that she couldn’t be a suspect. Particularly if Edwards was busy suspecting Helen and she had seemed far more normal than Yvonne. Though that was really an unfair comparison, given that she was far more normal than Yvonne, period.

  “So do you think Yvonne suspects that you suspect her?” Tricia asked. She shot Cassady a worried look. Cassady sensed it coming, looked up to receive it, and nodded in agreement.

  “What’s that about?”

  “You need to be careful, Molly.” Tricia wanted to help, but she was still concerned. I could respect that. When I stopped and thought about what I was doing, I was a little concerned, too. So I was doing my best not to dwell on it.

  “If Yvonne did kill Teddy, she did it because of romantic betrayal. Fit of passion and all that. Why would she want to hurt me?”

  “Because you’re going to prove she’s guilty of murder?” Cassady frowned at me like I was a child who’d pressed both hands against a hot stove and then had the nerve to cry. I was definitely not going to dwell on this.

  “It wouldn’t cross her mind. I haven’t said anything to her about the whole journalism deal.”

  “But she’s bound to find out about your meeting with Garrett Wilson at Manhattan about your investigative article. Good news travels fast, but gossip travels faster.”

  “Please. Like that’s going to happen.”

  “Like tomorrow at noon, sweetie.” Cassady chuckled in delight, a rich, throaty sound that I find infectious and charming, except when I’m the laughee. I’m sure I looked confused, which just made her chuckle harder.

  I looked to Tricia for help, but she was beaming almost maternally. She pointed back at Cassady with her chopsticks. “She did it, not me.”

  “Did … ?”

  “Got you a meeting with Garrett.”

  Every morsel of Chinese food I’d just scarfed down, plus a few major organs, somersaulted into one big knot in the middle of my abdomen. Garrett Wilson. Features editor at Manhattan. A man known for launching—and crushing—great careers. At a magazine that mixed brainy with trendy so well that both sides benefited—less geek, more chic. It was the perfect place for an article about Teddy’s murder but it never would have occurred to me to aspire to it. And now that Cassady had engineered a miracle that made such aspiration possible, I had no idea if I could pull it off.

  “I sat next to him at a first amendment thingy a couple of weeks ago, I insisted that he keep his hand on his own thigh, and he insisted that I take his card. I figured someone should benefit from the whole experience, so I called him.” Cassady got up from her desk and came at me, chopsticks raised. “And all it will cost you is one Szechuan dumpling.” She speared said dumpling from its carton beside me and retreated to her desk.

  “I don’t know what to say.” I was actually moved but I knew Cassady wouldn’t tolerate high-flung emotion.

  “My. Let’s all linger and enjoy this historic moment.” She winked at me and devoured the dumpling.

  Panic started to sneak into the picture. “I can’t tell him I think Yvonne did it. I can’t tell anyone that. Yet.”

  Cassady shook her head. “Sell him on the article being about the search, not about who actually did the killing. The fact that you’re going to come up with the identity of the actual killer by press time is just a marvelous bonus.”

  “Who are you going to tell about Yvonne?” Tricia asked evenly. She has this way of withholding judgment that makes you so aware of the thin ice beneath your feet that you wish she’d just come right out and tell you you’re being an idiot. In a polite and loving way. A helpful way.

  Still, I knew what she was getting at. “No one. Until I know more. All I have is a hunch at this point.”

  “And a purloined key in your pocket.” I’d shown them the picture and the key briefly before we ate. “Maarten” didn’t ring any bells with them, other than vacation fantasies, and they agreed that it looked like the Ritz Carlton in the picture. But maybe the key was … key. Cassady drummed her fingers against her cheek in a caricature of deep thought. “What do you suppose it unlocks?”

  “Yvonne’s chastity belt?” Tricia ventured.

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t look antique.” They chuckled and I dug the key out of my pocket, then pushed aside the law journals and periodicals swamping Cassady’s coffee table to create a space where they could both see it clearly. “It doesn’t have enough teeth for a safe deposit box or even a padlock.”

  Tricia started to pick it up and Cassady moved like she was going to smack her delicate hand. “Bad enough Agatha Christie has her prints all over it already, let’s go easy.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. Not only had I stolen evidence, I’d contaminated it. Assuming the key was evidence. Assuming that I was on the right track at all with my whole Yvonne theory. Assuming that I wasn’t in way over my head. But I didn’t want to get into all of that right now, so I just said, “Damn.”

  “We can work with this. There’s a reason you handled it, Helen asked you to pack his desk, so on and so forth, but you do need to go kinda easy from here on in,” Cassady cautioned. I appreciated the use of the pronoun “we.” Not that I wanted to drag either of them into harm’s way. Assuming I could even see harm’s way from where I was. Assuming—never mind, we’ve already been there.

  Tricia leaned in close to the key, making a show of not touching it. “You know what this reminds me of?”

  “Leaning over to put your nose on a glass coffee table reminds me of college, but I can’t believe that’s what you were going to say,” Cassady admitted.

  Tricia straightened up, but kept her eyes on the key. “You don’t know everything, Cassady. Most things, but not everything.”

  Cassady and I exchanged a look of appreciation that Tricia sniffed at. “We’re going to uncover all kinds of secrets here.”

  “My music box,” Tricia persisted.

  “That’s where you kept your coke?” Cassady persisted in return. “I can’t believe we never looked there.”

  Tricia deliberately turned so only I was in her field of vision, which just amused Cassady more. “I had a music box when I was little, really beautiful polished walnut. My father got it on a business trip to Vienna.”

  “And you wound it with a key like this?” I asked.

  “No, it had a drawer in it for keepsakes and the key that locked the drawer looked like this one.”

  We all stared at the key for a moment and all I could think of was Alice in Wonderland, when Alice has to get the key off the table, but the cake makes her too small and the drink makes her too big. Or is it the other way around? And, as Grace Slick pointed out, the ones that Mother gives you don’t do anything at all. “Eat me,” indeed. Had I already fallen down the rabbit hole?

  “So maybe Teddy gave Yvonne a keepsake box?” I ventured.

  “Or just somethin
g special to keep in her box,” Cassady said, enjoying the double entendre a little too much.

  “Must be pretty special if she was willing to kill him over it,” Tricia continued.

  “‘If I can’t have you …’” I suggested.

  “Think he was breaking it off?” Cassady asked.

  “Maybe Helen found out and told him to. That would explain why Yvonne thinks so highly of Helen these days.” I got to my feet as gracefully as possible. “I think it’s time to get back to the scene of the crime.”

  “Back to the office so soon?” Tricia stood like the perfect hostess, even though it was Cassady’s office.

  “Back to Femme. That’s where Yvonne and Teddy met, as far as I know. My friend Stephanie Glenn’s still there. Maybe she can tell me if that’s where they hooked up, too.”

  “Think Woodward and Bernstein learned all about people’s sex lives when they were chasing Watergate?” Tricia asked.

  “Honey. That’s why they call it Deep Throat,” Cassady assured her.

  “My brother insists Pat Nixon was Deep Throat.” Tricia said it with the pained smile of someone admitting to a great family scandal. And given that her brother had recently registered Democrat, I guess it qualified.

  “Okay, I have to leave before I start imagining the Nixons having sex in the Rose Garden. Thanks for lunch, I’ll call you.” I blew them both kisses and headed out, hoping that I was on my way to piecing together a story as opposed to making a fool of myself.

  Fortunately, Stephanie and I talked pretty frequently and emailed even more often, so it wasn’t a complete shock to her for me to call and ask if I could stop by. I hedged about giving her a reason on the phone and I think that intrigued her.

  Femme is two buildings down from Zeitgeist and as the cab passed our building, I had this little palpitation of guilt, as though Yvonne could see me hunched in the back of the cab, looking up at her window to see if she was looking down at me. A fragment of song from childhood bounced through my head: “I looked back to see if you looked back at me at the same time that you looked back to see if I looked back at you …” Now that I suspected Yvonne, did Yvonne suspect that I did? It actually gave me goosebumps to consider it.

  I met Stephanie Glenn five years ago when we were both writing for a mercifully short-lived magazine called Sonic. Brent Carruthers, this absolute freak who had been born into a maple syrup fortune, decided he was going to justify his existence by redefining New York culture. He had some theory about investing in cool businesses and then ensuring their success by pumping them in the magazine.

  He threw a lot of money around and got people very excited, so excited that they didn’t notice that he really had no idea what he was doing. The magazine was more an experiment in how many fonts could be crammed onto a single page before it imploded under the weight of its own pretension. Then Brent had to go into rehab and we found out how much of the maple syrup money had already been soaked up, and we all went and got other jobs having put out a whole four issues in nine months. But I met some cool people, so it wasn’t a complete waste.

  Stephanie landed at Femme shortly thereafter and had done a great job of ascending there. She was a contributing editor now, had a wonderful reputation, and had been on Today three times. As her assistant, an overly perky young man named Rico with two piercings in his left eyebrow, showed me to her office, I found myself honestly without envy about how well she was doing. I find that’s a pretty genuine reading on how much I like a person.

  Stephanie hopped up from her desk to greet me as Rico showed me in. Her office was lovely—not the corner but close to it, spacious, airy, Queen Anne desk, fresh flowers on the credenza, classic view of Lexington Ave. Good for her. She came right at me, arms open wide. Stephanie’s short and bouncy and rarely still, but it’s infectious, not grating. She’d gotten a perm since I’d last seen her and her dark blonde hair was a surprising mop of curls.

  “I love your hair,” I said as we hugged and she led me over to her couch.

  She poked at it, wrinkling her nose. “I lost a bet.”

  “At least you didn’t have to shave it.”

  She rolled her eyes. “We were about two shots short of that. So, this is such a nice surprise. Did Rico offer you something to drink?”

  “I’m fine. And I don’t want to stay too long, I know you’re busy.”

  She shrugged. “Nothing breathing down my neck. What’s up?”

  I hesitated. I should have given my opening statement more thought on the way over, determined in advance how much information I could offer Stephanie. I was just going to have to feel my way along. “Did you hear about Teddy Reynolds?”

  Stephanie sucked her top lip behind her bottom teeth and nodded. “I got an email from Francesca and I figured it was some ugly rumor, but then I talked to Mike Russell over at the Post and he checked it out for me. It happened right there in your offices?” I nodded and she shuddered. “Who found him?”

  “I did.”

  “Ohmigod.” Stephanie grabbed my hand and shuddered again. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded again. “I’m just trying to make sense of it all.”

  “Of course.”

  I took a deep breath. “Yvonne’s taking it pretty hard.” I paused, trying to read Stephanie’s reaction.

  Her top lip disappeared again and she nodded. “I can imagine.”

  I proceeded cautiously. “I’m trying to figure out … the best way to deal with her and I thought you worked with both of them over here and maybe you’d have some insight …”

  Stephanie nodded vigorously. “Did you know they were sleeping together?”

  I couldn’t help it. My eyebrows leapt up of their own accord and I squeaked out, “Really?”

  “That’s the whole reason he followed her when she moved to you. I mean, he’s—he was—good at his job and all, but they wanted to be close to each other.”

  There’s such an amazing difference between thinking something and hearing someone else say it out loud. When it’s just a thought rattling around in your head, you can dismiss it. It has no weight, no form, you can convince yourself that you made the whole thing up like Jacob Marley born out of the chunk of undigested potato. But then someone else says it and it takes on a painful, undeniable solidity and you’re staring your mortality right in the face.

  “You look shocked,” Stephanie said, patting my hand. “Sure you don’t want Rico to get you something?”

  “No, no, I’m fine. You know, I suspected, but I just wasn’t sure …”

  “They were very discreet, I’ll give them that. And Yvonne gets the credit for that because everyone knows Teddy’s such a dog.”

  I nodded, picturing the condoms in the drawer unrolling themselves and floating around like little ghosts. Don’t the French call the orgasm la petite mort, the little death? Not that this was really the time for pondering that cultural puzzle. “Right.”

  “I had my suspicions when they were here, but I only know for sure because Yvonne and I were at this wretched charity thing to keep the rainforest from killing the baby whales or something and we both sneaked off to the bar during the after-dinner speech and got polluted. It was actually great fun. You know, trashing old bosses and complaining about writers—not you, of course—and all that good stuff. But then she takes this sudden weepy turn about love and the meaning of life and she winds up telling me way too much about Teddy and their sex life and how he keeps cheating on her but she always lets him come back. It was pretty amazing. Total buzz kill, though.”

  “Speaking of cheating, do you think Teddy’s wife knew?”

  Stephanie thought a moment, then chose her words carefully. “Yvonne seemed to think she knew in theory, but not in specifics, you know?” Stephanie tilted her head thoughtfully and her lip tucked back in behind her teeth. “But maybe that changed.”

  Another vote for Edwards’ theory. I wasn’t sure there was any point in defending Helen to Stephanie. “How long ago did you and Yvonne ge
t soused?”

  “Maybe three weeks.” Wow. Current events, not history. So if Helen had just found out … Or if Teddy had decided to end it … Or both …

  “How long had it been going on?”

  Stephanie shook her head. “It started when they were working here, that’s all I know. Oh. And that at first, they only did it when they were out of town. Fashion shoots, that kind of thing.”

  “St. Maarten?” I ventured.

  Stephanie thought a moment, then nodded. “Yeah, we did a big travel-fashion combo issue and the main shoot was down there. Would’ve been about the right time. But after a while, they started justifying why they could do it in town.”

  In town, in the office, I was trying so hard not to visualize any of this. “No wonder she’s taking it so hard.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if she took to her bed with a load of pills and a crate of tissues.”

  Sounded pretty appealing to me, too. In fact, I needed to stand up before curling up on Stephanie’s sofa and weeping for a while proved irresistible. Why did I feel like crying? Stephanie had given me the information I needed, but I felt like she’d taken something away from me. What had I lost? Hope? Deniability? I needed to go.

  I squeezed Stephanie’s hand. “This helps. A lot.”

  “You want me to call her? Obviously, I won’t tell her we talked, but some extra sympathy at this point can’t hurt, right?”

  “You mean Yvonne, not Helen, right?”

  Stephanie blanched. “God, I didn’t even think about Helen. Isn’t that awful. I should call her, too.”

  “I’m sure they’d both appreciate it.” I stood and Stephanie stood with me. “Thanks.”

  “Sure. I mean, I can’t imagine how you must feel, having found him and all. I think it’s great that you’re thinking of Yvonne at a time like this.”

  I forced a smile. If Stephanie only knew in what context I was thinking of Yvonne. “Like I said, I’m just trying to make sense of it.”

  Stephanie walked me to her office door. “You know, when you do make sense of it, it would make a great article.”

  My smile grew a little less forced. “Really?”