Little Black Book of Murder

by Nancy Martin

  The intern guarding Gus’s lair cheerfully told me he’d gone out, so with the feeling I’d just earned a reprieve, I went to my desk. Before settling in to write the profile of Zephyr with the thin set of facts I felt comfortable sharing, I sorted through my mail. The mound of invitations that had arrived told me that the social season was building once again. Two invitations held gifts meant to entice me to attend the events—­a helium balloon and a box of chocolates.

  Although I wasn’t supposed to accept bribes, I wrote a quick thank-­you note to the chocolate giver—­an old friend who wanted me to attend her brother’s early-­retirement cocktail party, which I had planned to attend anyway. And I wrote a regretful note to the balloon person who was trying to drum up guests for a clown-­themed party for a disease of the week. Clowns tended to unnerve me. What was really behind that icky makeup? And if I wrote about every disease fund-­raiser, as worthy as they were, I’d never have room for anything else. Clown pictures didn’t play well in print anyway. But I carried the balloon across the floor to the desk of my friend Mary Jude, the food page writer, whose son Trevor might get a kick out of it.

  Back at my desk, I tried doing a search through the Intelligencer’s archive for information about Zephyr’s financial health. I found more gossip-­column snarking about her bouncing checks, but nothing else. Then I saw an item about the prenup Zephyr had signed before marrying Swain Starr. The amount of money she inherited upon his death was tied to the number of years she remained married to him. If they were married less than five years, she got zip. I wasn’t sure how long they had been married, but I could look that up.

  I assumed Zephyr had money of her own—­modeling was a lucrative line of work, for sure—­so the five-­year thing seemed only prudent. Or was it hiding something else?

  Swain’s vasectomy. I remembered Marybeth’s rude crack about him spending weeks sitting on ice packs. He had no doubt been enduring the discomfort so he could create more children with Zephyr.

  Before I could look up their wedding date, my phone rang.

  “Nora? It’s Sam.”

  My friend from the hotel didn’t sound happy. I said, “Hi, Sammy, what’s up? Do you need those Hermès scarves sooner than you thought?”

  “Forget the scarves. I’ll be lucky if they keep me in the show.”

  “What?” I finally heard the tone of his voice. “Sam, what’s wrong?”

  “I got fired this morning,” he snapped. “The hotel told me to take a hike. Because of what you wrote in the newspaper.”

  “What?”

  “You can’t hide behind that stupid fake name, Nora. Gilda Greygoose? Who do you think you’re fooling with that? I know you wrote that stuff about the hotel—­about Zephyr getting escorted out by the police and her husband’s son getting himself featured on the hotel security cam. Well, thanks to you blabbing, I’m out of a job.”

  “The hotel fired you?”

  “And Freddy. The manager needed about two seconds to figure out where you got the information. I never said it was Porter Starr on the tapes. And now Porter says he’s going to sue the hotel. I saw him on the noon news on TV.”

  I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach. Gus had taken my meager information and turned it into something bad enough to get my friend fired from his job.

  “Sam, I’m so sorry. It’s not what you think.”

  “It isn’t? Can you honestly tell me you didn’t run straight back to your desk to write what I told you—­in confidence?”

  “I told you I was working for the paper. Look, I’m sorry.” Making excuses wasn’t going to help either one of us. I said, “I take full responsibility. I’ll talk to your manager. Maybe there’s some way I can—”

  “Forget it,” he said, his voice catching in what sounded like a sob. “I don’t want you making things worse. You, of all people! I thought I could trust you, Nora. Just—­please stay away from me, okay?”

  He banged down the phone.

  I sat for a horrible minute, hands shaking, trying to think of something—­anything—­I could do to make it right. I had screwed up. I had hurt a friend—­someone who had been kind to me when I really needed help.

  I felt like crying. Or kicking myself.

  I’d done it. I had blabbed to Gus, just as Sammy said. It was my fault he had lost his job. And I knew how awful that would feel. Unemployment sounded like a fate worse than death. How would Sammy pay his rent? Pay for food? I had to help him somehow.

  But I didn’t have any spare cash, either. I’d have rushed across the city to press a few months’ worth of grocery money into his hand—­but I didn’t have it to give.

  Slowly, I put my phone back into my handbag.

  And became aware of a person standing next to my desk.

  Gus said, “Bad news, luv?”

  He slid his hands into the pockets of his trousers and lounged against the side of my desk, smiling down at me with something distasteful lurking in his eyes.

  I said, “Now’s not a good time to talk to me.”

  He laughed. “You think you have a choice?”

  He used one foot to hook the swivel chair from the next desk and scoot it over to mine. “Let’s see your Zephyr piece.”

  “It’s not written yet.”

  “Okay.” He sat in the swivel chair and wheeled it closer—­so close that I had to scoot my chair out of his way before he practically pulled me into his lap. He fired up my computer with a flip of the button. “Give me what you have in dictation, and I’ll type.”

  “I don’t work that way,” I said. “I need time to form my thoughts.”

  He gave me a raised eyebrow. “Time to form your thoughts? Who are you, Charlotte Brontë?”

  I could barely hold back a scream. “I can’t believe you took my words and twisted them around for today’s story. All I said was a young man in a hat—­and you turned it into libel about a lovely woman with principles and a boy who doesn’t deserve bad treatment from the press.”

  He leaned back in his chair and linked his hands behind his head. “What’s got the dingo in your knickers?”

  “A friend of mine—­the hotel employee who talked to me, who told me about Zephyr—­he was fired today. Fired for telling me what I asked—­what he thought was in confidence—”

  “He talked to a reporter and thought his golden words were protected by—­what? A magic force field of confidentiality?”

  “I’m his friend!”

  “You’re a reporter,” Gus snapped.

  “You assumed the man in the hat was Porky.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  I got out of my chair and tried to walk away, but I was trembling with anger and shame and fear for Rawlins in his baseball cap. I had to stop beside the desk to catch my balance.

  I said, “I can’t do this.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “I can’t rat on my friends.”

  “Then be more careful.”

  I glared at him, but he gave me a steady, challenging stare in return.

  Calmly, he said, “You can’t resign. You don’t have that luxury. You have to stick with the job.”

  “Right now,” I said over the slam of my pounding heart, “I can’t think of a person I despise more than you.”

  “Get in line.” He noodled with the computer’s keyboard, frowning at the screen. “Now tell me what you know about Zephyr.”

  “Are you kidding?” My voice went up a notch. “You want me to compound my mistake by telling you—”

  “We’ll call her the hillbilly supermodel,” he said, already typing as he ignored my outrage. “Born in a West Virginia holler to a barefoot baby mama and—”

  “Don’t say that. Any of it. It’s insulting.”

  He kept typing. “That’s where she was born, right? And she is universally known as the hillbi
lly supermodel, isn’t she? And her mother was fifteen when she was conceived? That’s public record. So that language is dead set. In your notes about her husband, you said she cried over a bunch of dead chickens. We can use that to—”

  “Are you going to twist everything into something lurid and sensational?”

  “That’s what sells papers.” His fingers stopped moving on the keyboard, and he finally looked up at me. His face was hard, his green eyes searing. “Get down from your high horse and get with the times, Miss Blackbird. Or you’ll turn to moldering dust like all your high-­society pals.”

  “How can you—”

  “We’re in a new era, Nora. Everybody has money, not just the people who came to this fertile land two hundred years ago with their noblesse oblige and the rest of their paternalistic, slave-­owning, feudal-­lord crap. In fact, if you want to get really rich and powerful today, you get down in the dirt and fling it at as many people as you can. That nong Porky Starr isn’t going to sue the newspaper. He’s going to ride the publicity like a surfboard. Face it. You are a dinosaur, young lady. A dying breed. You just haven’t noticed, because you’re too busy trying to keep up appearances.”

  “I don’t care how I appear,” I said. “I care about honor and integrity. And you’ve taken mine and walked all over it.”

  “I’m teaching you how to do your job. You’re bloody lucky, too. The rest of the idiots around here I fired.”

  I almost said something vile. The words were in my mouth. I spun away from the desk and headed for the ladies’ room. I had to pull myself together before I said something that would humiliate me more than he had already done in print. Skip Malone looked up from his computer as I passed, but I hurried on, determined not to break into tears or shrieks of rage in public.

  I banged the door behind me and went straight to the sink. I wrenched the faucet handle, and a gush of cold water splashed out. I bent down and cupped water in my hands. In the mirror, my face looked white.

  The next second, the door swung open, and Gus barged into the ladies’ room.

  He said, “Don’t walk away from a fight. Not unless you’re admitting defeat.”

  “You can’t come in here.”

  But he marched in, turned off the water and banged on the towel dispenser. He shoved a paper towel into my hand. “I expected more from you.”

  “I don’t know what I expected from you, but I see an ethical bone in your body is not among your—”

  “My ethics are fine. I know exactly what I will and will not print. But I also know how to write a story that will sell papers, so hustle yourself out to your desk and let’s have a lesson, shall we?”

  “I’m not going to sit still while you type a lot of lies about Zephyr.”

  “Do you even know her? Why do you care so much about her precious feelings? She was the last person to see her husband alive, so she probably killed him!”

  “We don’t know that. And we’re not going to insinuate so in the newspaper—­not with my name in any way attached to the story.”

  “We’ll lay out the facts and let the public decide.”

  “We should allow the police to collect the facts, and a court will decide.”

  For a second, I thought the argument was over.

  Gus didn’t speak. But he was angry—­I could see it. He glared at me. A vein throbbed in his forehead, and his hands were tightly fisted. I thought he might explode from the tension inside.

  Instead, he seized my wrist, pulled me close and kissed me.

  His mouth was hot, his body tense. He said something against my lips—­I don’t know what. And his other arm came around me, holding me like a band of steel.

  I twisted, pulled back and slapped him. Hard. Across the cheek.

  It was instinct—­a bad one. Incredibly stupid, but heaven knew I didn’t have a single sensible thought in my head at that moment.

  I stepped back and collided with the sink, holding my breath. I had the back of my hand against my mouth as I stared at him.

  He stepped back and cleared his throat, his palm against his cheek where I had clobbered him. He said, “I suppose right now stand-­up sex with me is off the menu.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “Don’t try to joke your way out of this.”

  “You have a powerful arm. Did you learn it from your thug boyfriend? Do you hit each other on a regular basis?”

  I shouldn’t have struck Gus, I knew that. I never did that kind of thing. Once again, he’d pushed me far out of my comfort zone.

  He took his hand away from his lip and discovered a fleck of blood on his palm. I had hit him hard enough to cut the inside of his cheek against his teeth. As he looked at the blood, he said, “I guess I’ve given you reason to sue me for harassment, haven’t I? You Yanks are a litigious lot.”

  I could, I realized. I had a case.

  Someone knocked on the outside of the bathroom door. From the hallway, I heard Skip Malone’s voice. “Nora? You okay in there?”

  I held Gus’s gaze as I said, “I’m finished. I quit. You’ll have my letter of resignation before the end of the day.”

  Gus didn’t argue with me. He stepped aside, allowing me space to walk past him.

  I did. I left the bathroom and almost collided with Skip in the hallway. He already had one hand on the door, coming inside to rescue me. To him, I said, “Thank you, Skip. I’m fine.”

  I didn’t look fine. I saw it in Skip’s face.

  I picked up my coat and my bag and left the building.

  Out on the sidewalk, rush hour had started. People were filing out of their workplaces, heading for home in a wave of anonymous humanity. A bus lurched past, followed by a surge of traffic. Head down, I walked quickly, feeling a thousand emotions, none of them good. Already, the adrenaline in my system was thinning out. I felt my legs trembling. My mouth tasted awful. I remembered how Gus had felt against me—­strong and impulsive.

  I hadn’t expected such a move. It came out of the blue.

  Or had it? I was part of a generation that—­still, after all the politically correct training—­felt guilty when a man came on strong. Had I given him any signs? What about me made him feel he could grab me? Kiss me? Was it some Australian thing I didn’t understand? Or had it been the tiniest bit my fault?

  While I wrestled with guilt and outrage, my cell phone rang. I was crossing the street at the time, so it wasn’t until I stepped onto the curb and stopped that I took a look at my phone’s screen.

  Gus.

  I let the call go to voice mail. Standing still for a moment, I tried to calm myself.

  Pedestrians brushed past me. People going home from work at the end of the day. I was out of a job, though. As broke as ever, but now without a paycheck, too. I wasn’t sure how I could afford to pay any of my bills, but it had been the only thing I could do. I told myself that over and over. I’d had no choice. I’d had to resign.

  But it was scary as hell. Standing on the corner, I got the shakes. Unemployment. Now what was I going to do? How would we manage? Michael was on house arrest. My family would be no help. What if I couldn’t get a job waitressing?

  My phone rang again. This time, when I checked the screen, it was Libby’s name on the caller ID.

  I answered.

  “Nora, Nora,” she cried. The rest of her sentence was so garbled with hysteria that I couldn’t understand a word.

  “Lib? Slow down.” I plugged my other ear to hear her better. “I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

  She shrieked in my ear. I could hear the frantic emotion in her voice.

  “Take it easy,” I snapped. “Is it Max? Is something wrong with the baby? Or Lucy? Libby, I can’t understand—”

  “Rawlins,” she managed to say clearly. “It’s Rawlins!”

  But she burst into tears and hung up on me.
/>   I called Michael, my hands shaking almost too hard to dial.

  He said, “You better come home.”

  “What’s wrong?” I cried. “Libby just called. She was hysterical.”

  “It’s Rawlins.”

  “Oh God,” I prayed, thinking the worst.

  “Libby says he’s been arrested,” Michael said. “For the murder of Swain Starr.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I telephoned Emma next.

  Emma said, “Libby just called me. She says the cops arrested Rawlins. For murder!”

  “I know, I know. Is she okay?”

  “She’s out of her gourd. They took him out of school a couple of hours ago. She asked me to pick up the twins. What’s with you?”

  “I don’t know. I—­I—” I rubbed my forehead, trying to massage some sensible thoughts into my brain. “I just quit my job.”

  Emma cursed again. “Lousy timing, Sis. Libby is going to need cash. If Rawlins really is arrested, she’ll need money for bail, money for lawyers. This is going to be expensive. I’ve got a few bucks, but—­hell,” she said on a sigh. “What’s this going to cost?”

  “Surely Libby has some savings?”

  “You’re kidding, right? Let’s remember who we’re talking about.”

  Of course Libby would have no savings. After her husband died, she took the last of their bank account and flew the kids to Disney World. The rest of the time she lived on carefully spaced payments from the life insurance policies of her dead husbands.

  “Why’d you quit your job?” Emma demanded. “The boss finally get to you? Can you afford to be prissy about him?”

  Gus’s behavior had been one deciding factor, but not the primary reason. I didn’t want to admit my ethical failings or that I felt pushed into overlooking my personal values. And I certainly didn’t want my sister thinking I was too feeble to handle a little job pressure.