She shouldered her way through the crowd crossing Madison Avenue as she headed east to Lexington. Then there was the meeting with Killian. A book on scandals in the craft beer biz. He held out the promise of murder, intrigue, industrial espionage, and deep deceit. As he sat there across from her in his tight jeans and stone-washed denim shirt, he sipped something mysterious in a Starbucks cup and agreed to her terms: a two-page overview, table of contents, plus two sample chapters. By agreeing, what he gave her was a slow nod. Whether he thought she was being utterly reasonable or a complete piece of editorial shit, she had no way of knowing—but that was typical of her time in Killian’s company.
He had the scrappy look of a Hollywood action hero. Harrison Ford with a crooked tooth. Bruce Willis who took maybe one too many fights out the back, for real. He looked so damned artless she suspected what she was looking at was really the highest form of artfulness and that she, Val Cameron, full-time editor and sometime sap, was just another conquest. On the bright side, a conquest very far down the hall from any bed. And then, as she had a flash of an image of his short, shaggy dark blond hair touching all the tenderest parts of her, she wondered if that was indeed the bright side.
The guy unsettled her. So she circled the wagons.
And he knew it. So she stacked the circled wagons row upon row and shot him a look over her own Starbucks cup—what could be less mysterious than an Americano?—that dared him to leap. When he licked some foam off his lips—she liked to think it was from a cappuccino and not something either inherent to Killian or just a product of the fuggy air in her closed office—she neatened up a stack of bookmarks that were already perfectly stacked.
“You interest me, Cameron,” he had said softly, his dark gray eyes running their own itinerary across her face and shoulders, looking, it struck her, for soft spots.
With deliberate slowness, she pushed away the bookmarks and looked him right in the eye. “I don’t have to interest you, James, to be your editor. On the contrary,” she went on, pushing back her chair to signal the end of the meeting, “you have to interest me.” On the one hand, she didn’t want to release even a dram of ambiguity into the air. Not on that score. As she stood up with as much grace as possible, she saw him shoot her a swift and troubled look, then gone, like sunlight crossing a cobweb. Now you see it, now you don’t, a whole world of enterprise and entrapment.
Somehow she kept a straight face as she motioned James Killian, who slung a light-colored jacket over his shoulder, to the door. She had unsettled him. If Ivy had been there at that moment, she would have fist-bumped her. Suddenly Words on Fire’s scribbling action hero stepped in front of her, effectively blocking his own exit. In an instant she took in a tattoo peeking out from the open collar of his shirt, inked initials just below his collarbone. She took in his long torso and perfect height for someone just as tall as she was, with or without heels. She took in some rough old business on his face that might make more interesting telling than scandals in the beer trade. And she took in a patchouli smell that took her to a bazaar in Burma or someplace she’d never in this lifetime see. On a single breath, she said, “Something else, James?”
A beat. “A drink?”
“It’s ten a.m.” Valjean, ever practical.
He smiled. “I meant later.”
“I’ve got a full work day,” she said, when that wasn’t really the point, “and I don’t think it’s a good idea.” Was there an opportunity to slip around him?
He looked mocking. “We can talk business.”
“We can do that here.” She sounded breathless.
“Not what I meant,” Killian added with a short laugh. Then one arm went to her waist, gently eased her aside, and opened her office door. His fingers lightly brushed her jaw. “Maybe another time.”
Beyond track changes, she had no skills for this man. “There’s all the time in the world,” she said with a false brightness, hardly knowing what she was saying. At that precise moment in time all she wanted was to get to her eleven a.m. meeting with the guy in human resources about hiring an assistant for Ivy.
“That is true,” James Killian told her. As he leaned close to Val, she stood perfectly still.
“Don’t cross the line,” she warned him, her voice low.
“The problem with me is,” he whispered, “I never even see the line.” Then he kissed her on the cheek in a way that made a slow and disturbing statement and was gone.
Val got ten blocks before she knew she was no good for the next twenty, and walked slowly down the subway steps, hanging tightly to the railing. Nothing more from Cleary on Adrian’s murder, no other call from Bale to enlighten or explain the earlier one…and a meeting with James Killian that made her poor office feel more like an antechamber either to Hell or a room at a Motel 6 somewhere off the Jersey Turnpike. If she didn’t think Killian’s Plumb Lines or buzzy beer book was going to land her at the molten top of the publishing heap for even just a little while, she would seriously consider handing him off to her seventy-something gay colleague.
At her stop, she propelled herself out of the crowded rush-hour car and scuffed quickly up the steps to 51st Street. Suddenly she had a hankering—must have been Killian’s power of suggestion—for a tall Sapporo beer and a regular sushi dinner at Sushi You. On the chance she was free, she’d give Aunt Greta a call. Making their customary trades of eel for yellowtail sounded to Val like just about all she could handle. “Evening, carissimo,” she called out to the doorman loud enough to get him to pop an earbud as she passed.
“Buona notte, Signorina,” he said, clutching his heart lightly with the exaggerated affection they had both grown to enjoy.
Alone in the refurbished elevator—mirrors and brass trim had for some reason seemed to the landlord like a proud upgrade—she sank back against the wall and closed her eyes. Down the fifth floor hall to the left was 5-B, her home for nearly a dozen years. The thick, carpeted corridor sucked away noise like a blotter, which helped with the overly loud Pandora station yowling at her that Jumpin’ Jack Flash was a gas, gas, gas, courtesy of her stoned Stones-loving neighbor in 5-A. Two key turns and she stepped inside her very own two-bedroom apartment, sniffing the heady homemade pomodoro sauce seeping like Bolognese ectoplasm from Mrs. Dellarosa in 5-C. As the keys slid from Val’s hand into the milk glass swan candy dish that had belonged to the grandmother she had never known, Val stood very still.
Something was off.
In two seconds, she knew it was her.
Not even reveling with Greta at Sushi You, where Japanese was the first language, would revive her. Adrian was dead, but Val still had to go to work and cosset authors who got weirder by the year. Adrian was dead, and Val still had Verizon and Visa and Con Ed bills to pay. Adrian was dead, and no amount of sleuthing could help her deal with her pain, let alone Bale’s. There were still Americanos and yellowtail and the reliably heart-clutching doorman in the world, and she thought maybe those things should offset the rest, but at 6:23 on that particular day, they did not.
In the spare bedroom, she kicked off her shoes and headed for her small, burled maple secretary to stick her State Farm homeowner’s policy premium in the tortoiseshell tray—also from the unknown grandmother—that she used for bills. “Maybe it’s time to call Tali,” she muttered. Although damned if she could sort out all the present situations. Val was at that moment in time incapable of triaging anything new in what had become her life over the past several days.
As her hand reached to pull down the front of the secretary, something she did daily, what with her iPad and bills and the printed out manuscript of whatever Ivy had passed on to her from the slush pile, she pulled it back. Hardly breathing, Val leaned closer to inspect the point of the intersection between the part of the desk that folds down and the frame itself.
Something was off, and—her heart started pounding—it wasn’t her after all. She kept the fold-down
front of her antique secretary always just a little bit ajar. Over the years something in the frame had warped just enough to make the shelf shut tight when closed all the way, nearly impossible to open without shaking the whole piece of furniture.
Val had lived with it for too long, until one day she had gripped the sides and yanked hard enough that she broke off a hinge. An expensive trip to an antique restoration service made her come up with another method of getting into her desk: if she left the fold-down shelf just the slightest ajar, no problem. And it had become her habit. She knew to a centimeter just how close to completely shut she could push it before incurring another trip to the restorers.
And yet here it was, completely shut up tight.
Her first instinct was to jimmy it open, hinges be damned, just to see what else was wrong. But her hands seemed to lose all feeling as they approached the desk. She felt twitchy with the need to see what was inside—or what should have been inside and was now missing—but she needed to be able to show the desk to Bale and Cleary, without having disturbed a thing.
Then her eyes settled on the Murano Millefiori paperweight on the side table under the window that looked out over Second Avenue. It had been her mother’s, and Val used it to control the overflow paperwork. She loved the paperweight; it was classic and colorful with its glass-blown bouquet of tiny buds. But in only one position from where she’d glance over from her desk were the slender, glass-blown stems of the buds visible. With the slightest turn in either direction, they disappeared, and all she would see was a profusion of buds.
Val sat down hard in her desk chair, just to be sure, and stared at the jumble of papers on the side table. She was pretty sure the table itself hadn’t been moved. Or the papers. But all she could see in the Murano paperweight were the buds. Slowly, Val walked to the table, moving in a semicircle until the stems appeared. The paperweight had been turned a full 180 degrees. The stems were now facing her window five stories up from Second Avenue, catching what was left of the late afternoon light. To be fair, she could tell they looked better that way, but she needed them to face her as she sat working at her desk. For now, she knew better than to touch them. Better than to touch anything in a home that had been violated.
Val spun, wondering what else the intruder had touched. Or handled. Or taken. But she damn well didn’t want to spend one minute more in a place that now looked completely unfamiliar to her. Whoever had broken in had to be a pro with a slick set of lock picks. Not so much as a mark on the front door. Right now, without looking for further evidence, she knew that if it hadn’t been for the desk and paperweight, she might never have known someone had been there.
In the bathroom, she swept a few items into a cosmetic bag, and quickly pulled an ivory-colored retro dress with a fitted bodice and full skirt from her closet and a clean pair of underwear from her dresser and dropped them into a raffia tote in the shape of a scallop shell with Key West emblazoned on one side and The Conch Republic on the other. For a bad moment, she stared at her things and wondered if his hands had fingered them, deciding, maybe, what to take, what to leave. Fighting a rush of nausea, Val flung her purse into the raffia tote and bolted toward her front door. Outside. Outside she’d figure out what to do. She grabbed her keys from the swan, locked her door behind her, and ran to the elevator.
Call the cops, she thought as she darted out of the elevator on the ground floor. No doorman at his stand. Had he seen anything? Seen anybody? There he was, helping her arthritic neighbor from 4-C into a cab, hanging on to his cane with the silver dragon’s head until he was safely inside. Call the cops. No, call Aunt Greta. It was Greta who would tip some rum into a cup of steaming cocoa, tuck her in on the pull-out couch, and tell Val one more time how she and her sister Claire, Val’s mother, had borrowed a boyfriend’s white Delta 88 and driven all the way to Mobile, Alabama to register black voters. Claire was just eighteen, and Greta sixteen, and their folks had had fits, but let them go.
She could sleep at Greta’s.
But she couldn’t ignore what had just happened.
And maybe calling Cleary would be the second thing she would do as she pulled out her phone at a fast walk up 51st with no idea where she was headed. She’d have to call the cops, because even though Val felt her body shrink at the thought, she knew in some small part of her the only reason her apartment had been broken into had something to do with Adrian. Adrian and the stolen Crown. Adrian’s murder. Adrian’s phone, beside the Crown, the only other thing stolen from the crime scene. The phone with no passcodes. The phone with her friend Val Cameron’s name in the contacts. Match that up with the last call Adrian had made—to Val—then the killer knew about her.
Knew how to reach her. Somehow, how to find her.
Had Val Cameron become someone’s loose end?
She stood on the corner of Third Avenue and stared at her phone. Any minute now she’d begin to cry, but before that time she had a call to make. There was only ever one call to make, she could see that now as she looked around her, wondering if she was being followed. The killer felt a couple of important steps ahead of her and the day had suddenly turned cold. She pressed the number and waited.
“Val?”
“Somebody broke into my apartment,” she told Antony Bale before her throat got too tight to talk. “I’m scared.”
“Did you call the cops?”
“Not yet.”
“Is there a coffee shop nearby? Or a bar?”
Val did a slow half turn. “There’s BXL East,” she said into her phone, “on 51st, south side of the street.”
“I’ll meet you there, Val, in twenty minutes.” Then: “Maybe sooner, depending on the cabs, okay?”
The light changed and the crowds on the curb hustled across, barely avoiding each other in the crush. “Where are you? Should I meet you somewhere else?” Narrowly nosing her way around a small Ryder truck, which she managed to buff to a shine with her skirt, Val loped to the south side across the street toward the bar.
His voice softened. “I’m at Adrian’s.”
“I can come over,” she offered, passing the bar’s sidewalk seating and grabbing the door handle. “I can help.” It suddenly seemed terrible beyond words that Bale was working alone in Adrian’s apartment, just beginning the long, painful sifting through his sister’s belongings. All Val could picture was a peculiar heaviness to everything her beloved Adrian had left behind. The Netsuke honey pot man on her teak bookshelf. The red and gold silk shawl from a bazaar in what the stubbornly classical Adrian enjoyed calling Constantinople. The framed seventy-eight vinyl of the “Dixie Jass Band One-Step” recorded on the Victor label. A wildly colorful signed lithograph by Paul Jenkins. A stack of napkins a ten-year-old Adrian had kept as a final souvenir from the Automat the week before it closed for good. Paper, vinyl, ivory, silk—everything felt ponderously the same without Adrian, strangely both priceless and worthless all at the same time.
“No, stay put, Val. We’re going back to your place.”
And that was definitely the bad news. “My place?”
“Let’s see what else he was doing,” was all Bale said before he ended the call in the middle of saying goodbye.
20
It was all scrupulously small talk from the BXL East bar back to Val’s place. Bale was wearing the same long dark gray coat he had been wearing the day they met. Tucked under one arm was Adrian’s red and silver thermal lunch bag he and Val had removed from the scene of the crime. In the lobby, Val was grateful Bale didn’t catch the goofy look the doorman flashed her, along with two thumbs up, as they headed toward the elevator. As the two of them stopped in front of her apartment and she fumbled her keys, Bale laid a hand on her arm and shook his head. Wasn’t going in the whole point to this exercise? Val waited for an explanation.
Bale unzipped Adrian’s lunch bag, drawing out a periwinkle blue pair of her wool winter gloves that Val recogniz
ed. With a wry look, Bale drew them on, flexing his fingers, and then he spoke quietly against her ear. “Slip off your shoes. Once we’re inside,” he jerked his head toward the door, “no talking.” With that, he set a finger against his lips, and deftly pushed his way out of his own shoes. She did the same. Then he smiled tightly at Val and held out a hand for her house keys. Bale noiselessly unlocked her front door, pushed it open, and stepped aside.
Val slipped by him and looked anxiously around the foyer. When she turned around, Bale had already shut the door with just the merest of soft clicks, and stood momentarily getting the lay of the land. He eyed the kitchen, which didn’t seem to interest him, and stood scanning the furniture in her living room. Was he looking for other obvious signs of a break-in? Then he pressed his lips together, coming to some sort of decision, and with an utterly silent grace strode down the short hall to the bedrooms. Val followed.
When he headed into her bedroom, Val was grateful she had made her bed, and that the warm gray walls and glossy white woodwork made this room—for her money—the prettiest in the entire apartment. After she and Wade Decker had broken up—or drifted apart—or whatever it was they did that signaled the end, she had redecorated, even going so far as to buy a beautiful, minimalistic oak platform bed. Which, of course, necessitated new bedding. Which, of course, led to a new set of framed Klimt prints that harmonized it all. Now there was Antony Bale, lightly running a gloved hand under the overhanging lip of the nightstand. Then examining the underside of the rather opaque lampshade.
As he moved past her in the doorway, he pointed with a grim smile to the second bedroom where she had told him about the tell-tale secretary desk and the turned Murano paperweight. He went right up to the desk and set his hands on either side of the front that was now firmly closed up tight. With a quick glance at Val, he moved to the side table and crouched low enough to check out her story about the disturbed paperweight. A small nod.
A Killer's Guide to Good Works Page 14