Killer Heels

by Sheryl J. Anderson

  Helen was dressed in a conservative black suit and clutching a black handbag like it was a life preserver. Her face was so completely drained of color, no doubt from weeping two days straight, that even makeup wasn’t helping. I wondered if the expression “widow’s weeds” came from the notion that there would be no more flowers for the woman who wore them. Helen certainly looked as though she believed that.

  I didn’t know if we were supposed to hug Helen, shake her hand, or say hello. Tricia hugged her, but Tricia hugs everyone, so that wasn’t a good barometer. Yvonne hugged her, too, but that was a guilty conscience at work. But I went ahead and hugged her myself so I wouldn’t look conspicuous in my difference. Apparently, I hadn’t been giving enough thought to my own conduct in this process if Edwards and Lipscomb were asking Yvonne questions about me. Damn Edwards.

  Or wait. Could this be like Yvonne’s note to Teddy—its meaning depended on how you wanted to read it? Could Edwards and Lipscomb be asking questions about how people were reacting to the death, people who were friendly with Teddy, and Yvonne kept pushing them toward me, mainly to push them away from her? I clutched that theory harder than Helen clutched her handbag and vowed to take comfort in it, at least for a little while.

  We trooped into the conference room—me, Tricia, Helen, Yvonne, and Gretchen. Fred half-heartedly offered to come take notes, but Gretchen said she could do that. Fred was happy to be spared.

  No surprise at all, Tricia did a great job of laying out the plans for Saturday so everyone was on the same page. She had fabric swatches, photographs of flowers, sketches of how things would be set up at the church and at the reception. Tricia remarked that we had been very fortunate in that a wedding had been canceled at the Essex House and we’d been able to grab their ballroom. Tricia and Helen had decided that the reception should be at the Essex House because, Helen told us, “It was a special place for Teddy and me.” She said it without irony or bitterness, which earned her major points in my book. She also said it without looking at any of us, which might have helped. How much did Helen know? Did she really want to know? Unfortunately, she was going to have to find out, but maybe the timing would work and she wouldn’t have to face it until after the reception.

  Helen produced a list from her handbag. “Tricia asked me to draw up a guest list for the reception.”

  “We drew one up, too. Friends of the magazine. Who adored Teddy. That you might not have had the pleasure to meet,” Yvonne said, waving her hand at Gretchen. Gretchen pulled a list out of a file. Just eyeballing the two lists, we were looking at three hundred people easy, and two-thirds of them were coming from Yvonne and Gretchen’s list.

  Tricia already knew the total number, since she’d needed it to select a room, but Helen seemed to be doing the math for the first time. She made a quiet, baby-bird sound of discomfort. Tricia reacted to it immediately, placing her hand on Helen’s arm. “Helen, are you all right?”

  “This is larger than I had imagined,” she said quietly.

  “We’re taking care of everything, Helen,” Yvonne assured her.

  It was like someone had flipped on a circuit breaker. Helen went livid before our eyes. “This isn’t about money, you bitch,” she spat, pinning Yvonne back in her chair with the force of her rage. “That might be a difficult concept for you to understand and that might make me feel sorry for you if I weren’t so damn busy feeling sorry for myself right now. I know what matters to a woman like you, Yvonne, and it’s not what matters to a woman like me. What matters to me you took away.”

  I was afraid to move, to breathe. Had Helen just accused Yvonne of killing Teddy? Edwards and Lipscomb shouldn’t have left so soon.

  “What do you mean?” Yvonne seethed.

  “You took away time I could have spent with my Teddy. Time I’ll never get back. Time that would have meant even more …” She tried to finish, but she couldn’t. She was crying too hard.

  Yvonne saw a moment she could play to her advantage and moved toward Helen to soothe her. But Gretchen was sitting right next to Helen and scooted up even closer, putting an arm around her shoulders before Yvonne could make her move. Helen didn’t even seem to notice. But Yvonne did. She made an angry gesture for Gretchen to get away from Helen. Gretchen looked her right in the eye and ignored it.

  The transference of emotion is a fascinating thing. When you can’t, for whatever reason, confront the true object of your rage, you take it out on the most convenient target. The target spends a lot of time trying to figure out what he or she did wrong to set you off like a Claymore mine and then, probably, turns around and does the same thing to someone else. It starts a chain reaction and that’s why they created the United Nations.

  Yvonne came out of her chair like one of those spring-loaded skeletons that jumps out of the coffin as you come up someone’s walk on Halloween. “Do what I tell you.”

  “You didn’t tell me anything,” Gretchen said in a voice I didn’t quite recognize. There was a little frost in it.

  “You know exactly what I wanted you to do. Now. Do. It.”

  “No.”

  My first instinct was to applaud. My second was to jump up and yell, “Don’t push her, she’s a killer.” I dropped down the list to my third instinct and said, “This is a very emotional time for everyone—”

  “That’s no excuse for insubordination!”

  The vitriol was flooding the room rapidly enough that even Helen noticed. “I don’t understand—”

  “How many times must I remind you? You are an assistant! You will always be an assistant!”

  Gretchen looked like she’d been gut-punched, but she didn’t let go of Helen. She spoke quietly but forcefully. “And you’ll always be a bitch.”

  “Get! Out!” Yvonne shrieked.

  I tried again to intervene. “Yvonne, please—”

  “You!” The talon was in my face for the second day in a row. I should have bitten it. “Can go, too!”

  “And you can get a grip!” I wish I could say I was emboldened by the new career path which Garrett Wilson had opened for me, but truth be told, I was just flat-out furious. “Gretchen’s out of line, but the emotions are flying pretty high right now, so I think that can be excused. It’s abundantly clear that this is hard for you, but I’m willing to bet it’s just a little bit harder for Helen and you should lift your gaze out of your own navel and recognize that other people have the right to grieve and they certainly have the right to comfort each other.”

  I had the big cat cornered and I braced myself for the teeth to be bared. Yvonne was ashen: I doubt any staffer had ever talked to her this way. Except maybe Teddy and we all knew what happened to him. She sneered at me. I half-expected a growl to come out when she opened her mouth. “Being an advice columnist does not make you the perfect judge of human nature.”

  “But I know more than you think I know.”

  Alarm swept across Tricia’s face before it went back to its professional calm again. She knew, or she was at least praying, that I knew better than to confront Yvonne right now, especially in front of Helen.

  Yvonne took a moment to read my face. I did my best not to give anything away. She was trying to figure out what I knew. The affair? The murder? The financial mess? Wasn’t she going to be surprised.

  Fred leaned into the doorway, a Christian inching his way toward the lions. “Excuse me?”

  “What?” Yvonne and I snapped in unison.

  “I’m very sorry to interrupt but there’s someone here to see you, Molly. She says it’s urgent.”

  It actually seemed like an ideal moment to leave and regroup. I turned to Helen. “Will you excuse me?” She nodded. “Tricia, I’ll be right outside.” She nodded, too, a little windblown by the proceedings. I gave Gretchen a look to let her know I was sure she could handle herself and followed Fred out.

  Cassady was waiting by my desk, surprisingly agitated for her. I quickened my pace, took her hand. “What’s wrong?”

  “That’s what
we’re going to find out,” she said with a sly grin. “I’m getting why you enjoy this whole seek-the-truth thing, even without the hot detective.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your ad agency. It’s bogus.”

  14

  Dear Molly, How do people manage to have affairs and not give themselves away? How do people learn to turn off the blush switch, cancel the stammer button, and put their conscience out to pasture? I think I could really enjoy the heightened passion, the regular sex, and the serious jewelry that come with messing around if I could just get past the notion that I would blurt out a confession the minute someone looked at me wrong. Is there somewhere I can take lessons? Signed, Lusty but Leery

  “She knows, doesn’t she.” I was in a cab with Tricia and Cassady, my heart pounding with guilt. “Yvonne knows that we know.”

  “Not to diminish her pain at losing her lover—” Tricia began.

  “Pain she fully deserves since she knifed him,” Cassady interjected.

  “But I think Yvonne is a little too self-centered to be picking up on your tension and extrapolating it to that extent,” Tricia finished calmly. She then stuck her tongue out at Cassady, but in a relatively polite fashion. Tricia does just about everything in a relatively polite fashion. Which is really cool, because she gets away with a lot more than those of us with more naked emotions. Tricia can rip off someone’s head, hand it back to them, and leave the room before they can say thank you.

  “I don’t get how she can walk around, having killed Teddy, and act like everything’s going to be fine. Especially when I lie to her about why I’m leaving the office and I figure God will punish me for doing that much.”

  “You have a moral compass and she does not,” was Cassady’s assessment. “A moral compass with some deeply twisted roots, but you have one and we love you for it.” I considered sticking my tongue out at her, but I knew it wouldn’t come close to the delicate gesture of contempt Tricia had made it. I rolled my eyes instead.

  It had nearly made me implode to wait for Tricia to finish her meeting with Helen and Yvonne after Cassady made her pronouncement, but Cassady insisted. Gretchen came out of the meeting not long after I did, went straight into Teddy’s office, and closed the door. I figured if Yvonne had fired her, she’d be wailing to get everyone’s attention and standing on a desk to announce her imminent departure. It was more likely she was just having a good cry; she deserved it, and I wasn’t inclined to share it.

  When Helen, Yvonne, and Tricia emerged some time later, they all looked somewhat depleted. Helen went right past us, headed for the sanctuary of the elevator. Yvonne slammed into her office, and Tricia practically draped herself over my desk. “Can I go home now?” she moaned.

  “No, you have a funeral to plan, but first—a mission,” I said, patting her hand briskly.

  She sat up and every hair on her head fell into place without her having to as much as flick a lock. It’s not fair. “Mission?” she said with more dread than I was expecting.

  “Come on. It’ll be fun,” Cassady encouraged.

  “More fun than mediating between Helen and Yvonne anyway,” I promised.

  “Ingrown pubic hairs are more fun than those two,” Tricia sighed. “But we settled everything except who’s going to cry more at the funeral. So I have a lot to accomplish today. How important is this mission?”

  “Crucial,” Cassady insisted. “Molly, go lie to your boss about where we’re going and let’s go.”

  Our cab was headed north. Cassady’s little bombshell about the bogus ad agency had grown out of some research she’d done on her own and some serious flirting she’d done with Officer Hendryx. She had started off looking for documents related to Nachtmusik, pursuing the theory that Yvonne or Teddy might be involved in the agency and doing kickbacks or money laundering or some other variation on white-collar crime that could have led to murder. She was hoping to find Yvonne or Teddy on the board of directors or as an officer of the company, some tangible link.

  What she found was nothing. Not just nothing connecting Yvonne or Teddy. Flat-out nothing. No business license, tax records, or articles of incorporation, no paper trail that proved such a company even existed. Just the phone number that had been in the file Brady had shown me.

  That’s where Officer Hendryx came in. Cassady, wearing a particularly alluring Caroline Herrera fitted jacket and skirt in pewter, no blouse, and a superb pair of scarlet Stella McCartney pumps with a heel that qualified as a deadly weapon, “dropped by” to say hello to Officer Hendryx and thank him again for being so understanding the night of Teddy’s death. The poor guy never knew what hit him, and Cassady walked out with a last name and an address matching the phone number plus a dinner date for a week from Thursday.

  I’d humbled myself sufficiently to ask if my name had come up in the conversation, especially in conjunction with the name of Detective Edwards. Cassady took a little more glee than necessary in telling me that neither one of us had come up at all.

  The address was uptown, in Morningside Heights. Not exactly the neighborhood of choice for advertising agencies in my experience, but I was prepared to be surprised.

  Tricia was prepared for the worst. At the very least. “What if this is all an elaborate cover for drug dealing or gun running or something worse? We should have brought the lovely detective with us.”

  Our cabbie, a bug-eyed rotundity who swore his name was really Jim Bond and refused to pinpoint his Midwestern accent for us because he was “trying to erase his past,” stopped the cab suddenly. “I can’t afford to be mixed up in no sort of illegal nonsense.”

  “Neither can we,” I assured him. “We’re just kidding.” That didn’t seem to mollify him much, but he didn’t put us out on the sidewalk, either. He drove us to the address we’d given him and deposited us in front of a brow-beaten apartment building still trying to maintain some dignity despite the ravages of time.

  We wanted Cervantes, Apartment 14. I pressed the buzzer for 14, debating how truthful to be when someone answered. But no one did. Wonderful.

  “Are they not home or simply ignoring us?” Tricia asked.

  “It’s gonna be a little tough to figure that out from here,” I admitted.

  Cassady scooted me away from the buzzers. “You don’t go to the movies often enough.” Using both index fingers, she pressed Apartment 9 and Apartment 26 simultaneously. Nothing. She added her middle fingers, now buzzing four apartments at a time. Still no response. Six. Eight. No answer.

  Tricia dared ask, “And this works in the movies?”

  Cassady growled and drove all ten fingers against buzzers like the Phantom of the Opera attacking the organ. She leaned into it, the buzzers shrilling together. “Somebody’s got to fall for it!”

  The buzzers made such a racket we almost didn’t hear the front door open. By the time that sound registered, the resident who was exiting had almost let the door close again behind her. She sneered at Cassady and reached as though to push the door closed, but Tricia darted past her and grabbed it.

  “Thank you,” Tricia smiled, manners perfect in any situation.

  The resident, a woman a few years younger than the three of us, was dressed in baggy khakis, a Tori Amos T-shirt, and a heavily pilled brown cardigan. She carried an armload of books and her hair was caught up in a bun fixed with pencils. A denizen of Columbia University, no doubt. She barely acknowledged Tricia, preferring to glare at Cassady. Cassady took her hands off the buzzers and put them on her hips. “What?”

  Ms. Columbia assessed our midtown dress and demeanor, then dismissed us with a shake of her head, which infuriated Cassady. “So I forgot his apartment number,” Cassady hissed.

  “Did you get his name?”

  Ms. Columbia had no way of knowing how rare Cassady’s look of surprise was, so she didn’t linger to enjoy it. As she walked away, Tricia and I made supreme efforts not to laugh and gave Cassady a moment to compose herself. “Women’s Studies. Graduate l
evel. Bet you fifty bucks,” Cassady huffed as she marched into the building.

  We walked through the squeaky front door, down a hallway with threadbare carpet and once-green walls that smelled of fabric softener and browning onions. Apartment 14 was at the end of the corridor with a cheerful little decal of a smiling angel stuck next to the peephole. We could hear a woman’s voice, speaking in rhythmic tones too low to understand through the door.

  I knocked and the woman’s voice didn’t stop, it just moved closer to the door. The closer it got, the more we could hear it. It was difficult to reconcile the image of a woman walking to answer the door with a sultry voice saying, “Yeah, right there, baby. Oh, that’s so good. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah!” As she screamed in climax, the door opened a little.

  The safety chain permitted us a glimpse of a gangly but attractive redhead in her early 20s, dressed in a Rhode Island School of Design T-shirt and low-rise jeans. Holding a paintbrush and wearing a hands-free telephone headset, she held up a finger for us to wait as she finished her phone conversation: “Oh, baby, that was fantastic. You’re amazing. You call me again soon, you promise? I’ll be right here waiting for you.” She purred and disconnected the call, then looked us over and frowned. “You’re not Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

  “Likewise, I’m sure,” I answered.

  “Sorry, through the peephole you looked like you had to be selling something and that was my first guess. I figured I’d give you a little taste of what I was selling and scare you off.”

  “Didn’t work,” Cassady noted.

  “Worth a shot,” the painter shrugged. “What can I do for you?”

  “I think there’s been a mistake,” Tricia began, but Cassady shushed her.

  I was inclined to agree with Tricia, but I pressed on, just in case. “Ms. Cervantes? We need to talk to you about Nachtmusik.”

  Her lip curled like she’d just taken a swig of coffee with rancid cream. “Oh, crap,” she said, leaning her forehead against the edge of the door. “You guys Charlie’s Angels or what?”