Killer Heels

by Sheryl J. Anderson

  Gretchen nodded again, struggling to get her tears under control. “Teddy said they were a brand-new company with lots of promise. He talked to them a lot, even told the agency they could have the page facing you, Molly.”

  Teddy had often teased me that he could get a premium for the page across from my column because a survey had indicated I’m one of the first things people read. Me, their horoscope, and the diet tips. Everybody who offers quick answers gets an early look.

  “That’s great,” Brady interjected. “I hope they all get rich and famous. But what did Teddy do with their check?”

  I slid the artwork back to Gretchen. I knew what really upset her was the implication that Teddy hadn’t been doing his job properly, not the fate of this new company. Though it would be a shame for them to take a hit because Teddy was gone. It would also be a shame for Gretchen’s heart to be broken and Brady’s life to be miserable because Yvonne couldn’t handle her guilt over Teddy.

  “We still have a day or two, don’t we? Maybe Gretchen can help Wendy track down the check?” I asked, giving both Yvonne and Brady my best Zeitgeist cheerleader smile.

  Gretchen brightened immediately, looking to Brady for a reaction because she was smart enough not to look at Yvonne. Brady was smart enough not to answer until Yvonne did. I was smart enough to know I had done what I could and any further pressing on my part would backfire on us all.

  Yvonne wrestled with a couple of inner demons, then turned to Brady, snubbing Gretchen and me. “Friday. Close of business. Deal with it.” She swept away from the table and I didn’t get a chance to register Brady’s or Gretchen’s reaction because she swept me up with her and we were suddenly out in the hallway. “What does Tricia say?”

  “I haven’t spoken to her yet,” I said, pretending I didn’t have whiplash from the sudden change of subjects. But maybe we hadn’t really changed subjects at all. In a way, this was all about Teddy. And as soon as I could get somewhere and read the note, I’d understand why even better.

  “I want answers!”

  I had to bite the inside of my lip to keep from shouting, “Me too! And so do the police!” But I opted for an understanding nod and said, “Let me give her a call, see where she is in the process. Tricia is meticulous, she’s not going to make a hurried or ill-informed decision.”

  “I would hope not.”

  For an awkward moment, I didn’t know if I’d been dismissed or not. For an even more awkward moment, Yvonne glared at my hand in my pocket. The hand clutching the pieces of note in my pocket. She even snapped her fingers, expecting me to hold out my hand and divulge its contents. “So call her.”

  With great relief, I slid my hand out of my pocket, leaving the note concealed, and showed her my empty hand. “I don’t have my cell. Let me go back to my desk.”

  Yvonne gave the practiced sigh of a boss who employs only morons—and bosses who believe that never seem to notice that were that true, it wouldn’t say much for their skills in hiring and management—and stalked back to her office. I hung where I was, happy to create a little distance.

  What I also created, though, was the impression I was waiting for Brady and Gretchen, which pleased them both as they came out of the conference room. Brady actually thanked me before he trudged back to his office and Gretchen threw her arms around me in another one of her boa constrictor hugs. “Thank you, Molly.”

  “All I did was persuade her to wait a little, Gretchen. You think you can get this straightened out in time?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Teddy wasn’t skimming, was he, Gretchen?”

  Her eyes teared up before her hand could get to her mouth. Seemed like a genuine reaction. “See, this is what I was afraid of.”

  “I know and I’m sorry for asking. But I have to.”

  “Why?”

  An excellent question and me without an excellent answer. “For my own peace of mind. Because I liked Teddy,” was the best I could do, but Gretchen bought it. I was starting to understand the appeal of lying and getting away with it and that worried me. But I was grateful it worked in the moment.

  Back at my desk, I checked in with Tricia. She’d talked to Helen and the funeral was set for Saturday morning at St. Aidan’s Church with the reception site still undetermined. She’d already talked to three restaurants and four hotels near the church, but wasn’t done yet. “Please, not the St. Regis,” I implored.

  “Why not? That’s one of the places Helen requested,” Tricia replied. “I’m headed over there shortly.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I know it’s pricey, but I think she’s deriving some comfort from spending Yvonne’s money.”

  “It’s not that, it’s just … twisted.”

  “How so?”

  “Meet me there and I’ll explain.”

  “Can you do three o’clock?”

  “I’ll have trouble waiting until then.”

  Tricia girl-squealed into the phone and my ear throbbed. “How could I not ask first thing? How did the meeting with Garrett Wilson go?”

  “Great. I got it. I’ll tell you all about it at three.”

  “How lovely that some good will come out of this. Congratulations! Love you.”

  “Love you, too.” I hung up, grinning because Tricia and Cassady were more excited about the article than I was. Actually, that’s not true. They were just able to sit in their offices and scream in delight and I couldn’t do that.

  Especially because Gretchen was hovering over my desk. “Hey, Gretchen.”

  “I’m sorry to bug you, Molly, but I heard you and Yvonne talking about Teddy’s service and I wondered when it was going to be.”

  “Saturday at eleven with a reception to follow. We’ll make an announcement to the staff.”

  “That’s not much time.”

  “It’s what Helen wants and Tricia’s great at pulling things together on short notice.”

  “No, no, I meant that’s not much time for us to get ready.”

  “Us?” I asked gingerly, fighting off the image of Gretchen and me doing a soft shoe number on the main altar as our parting tribute to Teddy.

  Thankfully, Gretchen gestured to the magazine staff bustling around us, but I still wasn’t sure I got her point. My perplexed silence urged Gretchen on. “I don’t know what to wear,” she confessed in a stage whisper.

  I actually found her concern touching. It seemed to come from a real desire to be appropriate, not anything narcissistic. “There’s a reason the little black dress is the cornerstone of the female wardrobe,” I assured her.

  “I don’t have a little black dress,” her confession continued. “You know how it is, black hasn’t been black in such a long time—gray was last season’s black and taupe was black the season before—and somehow, I don’t have a black dress anymore.”

  “It’s Wednesday. You’ve got time. Talk to Caitlin, get some advice from her.” Not that Caitlin, our fashion editor, had dressed anyone over a size two in twenty years, but she still might have some good suggestions for Gretchen.

  Gretchen nodded but didn’t move. I had a pretty good idea of what was coming next, but I thought I might be wrong, might be flattering myself. So I stood in the middle of the street and let the truck hit me. “I was wondering … if you’d go shopping with me.”

  Asking a woman to go shopping can be like asking a man to go to dinner. It can even be worse. There are the same opportunities for rejection, for misunderstanding what level of intimacy is being assumed, for feelings being stomped on. But with two women going shopping, even if the asking part goes well, there is a whole pantheon of pitfalls awaiting as you discover how disparate your senses of style and your budgets really are, how leisurely a process you think it should be, how differently you treat salespeople. And where a man and a woman have to confront the issue of whether to sleep together after dinner, two women out shopping have to confront the issue of whether they know each other and like each other enough to share a dressing room.
Guess which one is usually the easier call to make.

  “Gee, Gretchen, I don’t know,” I stammered, looking at my watch and hoping it would be much closer to three o’clock than it was.

  “You have an appointment. It’s okay. I’ll figure it out.” Gretchen drifted away from my desk backwards, hands wafting apologies like a hula dancer.

  “No, wait,” I vamped, trying to figure out how to help Gretchen without encouraging any hint of dependence. “I do have an appointment, but if you can go now, I could hit a place or two with you first.”

  “I don’t want you to go out of your way,” Gretchen said, thrilled by the notion that that was exactly what I was going to do.

  “Where were you thinking of going?”

  “Panoply, over on Fifth.”

  The St. Regis is on Fifth. And she was looking at me with the earnest eyes of a kid who never got to be captain in kickball and choose the teams. This was important to her for some reason. “That’s actually on my way,” I vamped again.

  I was still vamping when we got to Panoply. I would have liked to walk because it’s easier to vamp when you’re walking—traffic noise requires that you repeat yourself a lot, other pedestrians distract you and allow you to go off on tangents, window displays demand that you stop talking about yourself and start talking about them. But time and distance forced us into a cab and into focused conversation.

  “Do you think they’ll ever figure out who killed Teddy?” Gretchen asked me before we’d gone half a block.

  “Yes,” I answered because I felt I had to.

  “Do the detectives have a suspect?”

  I dove for the first subject change that came to mind. “Every time I think of the detectives, I think of that Elvis Costello song. ‘Watching the Detectives.’ It’s been going through my head a lot lately. Have you ever seen him live? He’s amazing.”

  Gretchen smiled politely. “I prefer jazz.”

  “Well, now that Elvis and Diana Krall are together, maybe he’ll start doing jazz.”

  “What kind of music will there be at Teddy’s reception?”

  Nice feint as Gretchen drives for the basket. This was going to be harder than I’d thought.

  I tried several more times to change the subject, yanking us over to weather, movies, even politics, but Gretchen kept homing back in on Teddy and the funeral. I suppose she had a right to be obsessed, but it was frustrating me to the point that I nearly vaulted from the cab when it stopped in front of Panoply, thankful for the task of paying the driver and sending him on his way.

  I checked my watch again. I had enough time to go in with her and didn’t have a good enough reason not to. As I steeled myself to go in, I realized I’d made a mistake in the cab. I should be taking advantage of the situation. Instead of steering conversation away from Teddy, I needed to guide it toward specific information about Teddy, but subtly enough that Gretchen wouldn’t recognize the interrogation for what it was. With a new plan in mind, I happily followed her in.

  I have a love/hate relationship with shopping. I love looking through clothes, feeling the fabrics, listening to their rustling and the whisper of hangers and security locks across the bar. It’s great fun trying to discern the possibilities within each piece, imagining the magnificent fun I will discover if I can just get the right shoes with the right skirt and blouse.

  But I hate the salesgirls. That’s cruel of me, I know, but how cruel is it of them to stand there with their perfect little outfits on their perfect little bodies and ask if they can show me anything? Yeah, they can show me what they do with the two hours of their day that they’re not at work or in Pilates class.

  And now that they all wear headsets, they come off like some super-secret branch of Homeland Security, ready to call in the National Guard if I take the wrong pair of slacks off the rack: “You can’t wear those! Your butt will look huge! Put the hanger down and back away. Strike Team, I have a Taste Violation in Sector Four.”

  It’s enough to make you want to shop in the suburbs and deal with the bored teenagers. Of course, I used to be one of those bored teenagers, hence my bias.

  A chirpy little headset-wearer was upon us moments after we walked into the store. The store was spacious and airy with clothes hanging in isolated yet strategic locations. It was the mating of a walk-in closet with an airplane hangar. “Good afternoon, I’m Deirdre, can I help you find something special today?”

  Gretchen blinked at her and I went for the preemptive strike. “She needs a dress for a funeral.”

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” Deirdre said, her chirpy inflection not changing one iota. “You’ll find what you’re looking for over here.” Deirdre led us to a delicate rack draped with black fabric in various configurations.

  “Thanks. We’ll take a look and let you know,” I said with a really nice smile, but Deirdre still took offense, frowning at me as she huffed off, her DKNY slides making little tsks of disapproval on the hardwood floor.

  I moved hangers around like a picky eater pushing food around on her plate. “Gretchen, you don’t need to worry so much about protecting Teddy’s reputation. We all know he was a good guy.”

  Gretchen didn’t even look up from the dress she was examining. “I’m not so sure Yvonne thinks so.”

  “Well, the whole thing with Yvonne is so complicated. And I’m not talking about his personal life, I’m talking about the ad and all. You’ll get that straightened out. Teddy wouldn’t have screwed the magazine.”

  “No,” she echoed in emphatic agreement.

  “I mean, everybody pushes the envelope here and there—the occasional lunch on an expense account that shouldn’t be, that sort of thing. No one’s going to cause an uproar over those.” She nodded, watching me now, trying to guess where I was going. “Unless it was something big, like a house account somewhere.” Like the St. Regis, for instance, but I wanted to see if she’d say it first.

  She shook her head. “Teddy was a good man who did the right thing. He had such a big heart. You know that ad Brady’s all freaked about? A brand-new company that probably has its whole future riding on that ad and Teddy saw that and was impressed by it and wanted to give them great placement. Because Teddy believed that people deserve a chance, that there are talented people out there in the world besides Tommy Hilfiger and Kate Spade and those people might have something to contribute. And he knew how awful it could be trying to get your foot in the door, so he opened the door for them. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  I hadn’t expected Gretchen to clamber up onto a soapbox, but I was fascinated, so I just nodded and she kept going.

  “But of course, there are always spoilers like Yvonne who get all their joy out of stomping on people’s dreams and playing with the affections of good men like Teddy just because it makes them feel special. Even if she wasn’t the one who stabbed him, she killed him, Molly. She broke his heart and a man like Teddy couldn’t live with a broken heart.”

  Her passion knocked the air out of me. As I groped for a response, Ms. Headset returned, wearing her plastic smile. “Have you found anything?”

  “Yes,” Gretchen barked at her. “I found your clothes trite and derivative, overpriced and badly produced, and I wouldn’t wear them if you paid me.”

  Gretchen charged for the door and I hurried to catch up with her, waving to Ms. Headset over my shoulder. “I think we’re leaving.”

  I grabbed Gretchen’s arm once we were outside and made her slow down. “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Slow down a minute.”

  She stopped and burst into tears. “I didn’t see a thing I liked in there.”

  We both knew that had nothing to do with her tears, so I stood quietly by while she wailed. I smiled uneasily at the random passersby who looked askance at Gretchen’s wailing, but most people just kept walking. When the tears began to slow, I put one hand on her shoulder and hailed a cab with the other. “Maybe you should go home for a while. Everyone wil
l understand.”

  “No,” she sniffed, “I need to get the ad straightened out. That’ll make me feel better.”

  She’d pulled herself together for the most part by the time I got a cab to stop and I bundled her into it. “Hang in there. Everything will get sorted out and we’ll make it as right as we can.”

  As the cab pulled away, I started to hail another one for myself, then decided against it. The hotel was only a half dozen blocks down Fifth Avenue and I could use the walk. I needed to clear my head and my heart.

  One of the things I love most about walking in Manhattan is that it’s a way to be by yourself without being alone. The sidewalks are always full and you can enjoy the circus parade of people as they rush by, intent on the dramas of their own lives. You can smell anxiety in the air, but there’s hope and promise, too. You make your own way, unbothered or maybe unnoticed by your neighbors, but they’re right there, right next to you. Contact is a breath away. It’s a patchwork quilt that might not match anything in your home, but having it on hand is comforting. The thought alone keeps you warm.

  That had to be the hardest part of getting involved in a crime like this—fighting against that instinct for connection and keeping yourself from drowning in other people’s sorrow. Do this sort of thing too long and it had to harden your heart a bit, as a protective mechanism if nothing else.

  But how to reconcile that with Detective Edwards and his amazing kiss, which I had been trying very hard not to think about all day? Had the kiss been the mechanical, instinctive move of a hardened heart looking for action? Certainly hadn’t felt that way. Or had it been the kiss of a heart so aware of the frailty of life that it sought connection that much more forcefully? There was only one way to answer that question before I got too caught up in my own poetry. I had to kiss him again.

  12

  Tricia was waiting for me in the lobby of the St. Regis, a delicate splash of coral amidst all the gold and white opulence. “I don’t know what Helen was thinking,” she said before I’d even made contact with the brocade chair next to her. “You can’t have a funeral reception in a place that looks like a twelve-year-old’s wedding fantasy.”