Blackbird 02 - Dead Girls Don't Wear Diamonds (8 page)

"I know," he said.

"First Todd, and then Rory. And now this."

He was quiet, and the river slipped past us. When I'd first met Michael, he had already perfected an expect-the-worst-of-life sense of humor that was engaging but also kept people at bay. But I'd seen past that to the wary light at the back of his eyes. I'd been drawn by an emotional vulnerability, maybe, and he'd seen the same in me. I'd let him take care of me when Rory died. But I'd gotten too close for comfort, too entangled with this man who was very different from anyone else I knew. He kept a roll of bills in his pocket instead of carrying credit cards, and he slipped off late at night to meet men with nicknames like Mad Dog. He ran businesses he wouldn't talk about and he had appetites for food and wine that made me think his other hungers must be just as daunting.

Half the time, I didn't understand where he was coming from. So I'd ended things with him. Trouble was, he hadn't gotten the message. Or maybe I wasn't delivering it clearly enough.

I said, "I heard what you did to the Tacketts."

"What?"

"You bought Harold and Eloise Tackett's estate."

"Yeah, I did. Twenty-two acres."

"And the house. That house is one hundred and fifty years old."

He nodded. "Yeah, it's a wreck. We're probably going to have to knock it down."

I faced him. "Sometimes I think you're from another planet."

He looked genuinely surprised. "What?"

"You told Harold Tackett you would put his family's home to good use. You promised him. That house was designed by his great-grandfather and built by stonemasons brought over from Italy—probably relatives of yours. Craftsmen, artists. Plus, Franklin Roosevelt stayed there once. And now you're talking about bulldozing it."

"I'll do something nice with the ground. I've got a couple ideas cooking and they're both—"

"I don't understand you!" I cried. "Harold has been forced into an assisted-living facility and Eloise is going along just to take care of him, and you are so blind that you can't—"

"They sold it to me!" Michael's voice rose to match mine. "They didn't want it anymore!"

"You took advantage of two sweet, trusting, generous old people!"

"Took advantage? I paid them exactly what they asked, Nora. They would have sold it to somebody eventually. Why not me?"

"Because you have no respect for the history or— or the sensibility of a wonderful old family. What are you going to do with that property? Open another used-car lot?"

"Are you still mad about that? All of Blackbird Farm would be gone if I hadn't come along."

He was right, of course, but hearing him say it just made me angrier. "What are you going to do with the Tacketts' home?"

"I don't know yet," he said. "We might put some houses up there."

"A housing development? You mean a bunch of plastic buildings with above-ground swimming pools and—"

"What is with you?" he demanded. "Nobody's allowed to have a nice home but you and your crazy family?"

"My crazy family?" I repeated. "Who do you think you are? I read about your brother in last week's paper!"

"Yeah, well, he's in jail now, so society is safe."

"From him, maybe."

His brows snapped down. "Wait a minute. Are you saying that me buying an old house is the same as illegal gambling? Which has no victims, I would like to point out, so—"

"You're kidding, right?"

"You're upset about my brother? I haven't seen him in years! Him or my father."

Which was as disturbing to me as anything the New Jersey Abruzzos had been caught doing in recent months. How did anyone stop communicating with his family? He might as well have amputated his arm. All right, so my own parents had run off to faraway lands, but at least they telephoned regularly.

Destroying a family's history was bad enough. But the fact that Michael hadn't laid eyes on his own father in a decade still stunned me.

It made me wonder what other kinds of emotional cruelty he could be capable of.

And I'd had my share of that already.

Chapter 5

That evening I hoped to put my troubles on hold by going to a party. Before I went out, I put on one of my grandmother's oldest Madeleine Vionnet crepe dresses. It had been designed in the thirties with a fish-scale motif done in fringe that scalloped all the way down the back like the tail of a slim and sexy mermaid. Its original emerald-green color had faded to a subtler shade of sage that set off my auburn hair quite nicely. Even so, I wasn't exactly feeling festive.

But I tucked my notepad into a shell-shaped handbag and attended a dinner at a Center City hotel to honor people who supported the zoo. Zoo employees dressed in safari duds greeted guests at the ballroom door. Inside, I chatted with a smattering of young socialites who liked the low ticket price and the chance to wear animal-print items from their wardrobes. A crowd of corporate representatives also seemed to be in attendance thanks to donations given by their companies.

The real zoo enthusiasts were the people with pizzazz, however. I directed an
Intelligencer
photographer to snap a few shots of the big players amid the imaginative decorations, then mingled during the cocktail hour to gather some quotes for my piece.

Unfortunately, everyone wanted to talk about Laura Cooper's death, and rumors ran rampant. I
overheard one young man asking whether it was true Laura had slit her own throat, for heaven's sake, and in the center of one large group of bankers, I heard a woman loudly describing how she'd spoken with Laura at a nail salon only two weeks ago.

Thankfully, I soon came upon Marian Jefferson, a poet who wore stunning African headdresses and championed a neighborhood literacy program that was the first cause to get me out of the house after Todd died. Her droll husband, Ezekiel, a specialist in kidney transplants at Children's Hospital, favored purple ties and Democratic politics. He often wore a stickpin with the word "muse" inscribed on it. Also at the table were their friends the Hilliards—both doctors—and the Smythe-Rhines, who brought along their nine-year-old daughter who declared she wanted to be a veterinarian when she grew up. Because of the uneven number at the table, I joined them. The presence of the child caused us all to avoid discussing Laura Cooper, and after many compliments about my fish tail, we had a lively conversation about pets. Daneesha Smythe-Rhines was very sad to hear I was pet-free.

During the after-dinner speeches, however, Ezekiel fell asleep beside me, and I admit my mind wandered, too.

Laura had been dead less than forty-eight hours. Had she really drowned herself? It seemed impossible to me. Almost as impossible as her compulsion to transform her appearance. And why me? If someone killed her, was there a connection to me I wasn't understanding?

I also wondered how the Washington people had reacted to Laura's death. Was Jack Priestly in charge of damage control?

And what about the family? What was Flan feeling?

I glanced around the ballroom. I had expected to see Tempeste Juarez among tonight's guests, but even she was not bizarre enough to attend a party after a family loss.

As the master of ceremonies got up to drone, the Hilliards both claimed to have been paged by their respective hospitals and ducked out early. The Smythe-Rhines slipped away, too, citing the need to get their daughter home to bed. As soon as the child was gone, Marian leaned over her husband and whispered to me, "It's a damn shame about Laura Cooper."

"Yes, just dreadful."

"Bullshit." Ezekiel's deep voice rumbled in his chest.

"Hush, now," said Marian. "Don't speak ill of the poor girl."

"Poor girl? What are you talking about?" Ezekiel opened his eyes. "That girl stole your Kikuyu necklace, and you said you'd never forgive her."

"I said no such thing."

"Did, too."

"Well," Marian said, looking flustered, "I can't be sure she stole it."

"You said there was nobody else in the bathroom when you took it off," Ezekiel said. To me, he added, "Marian loved that necklace, but she always took it off to brush her teeth. In case she dribbled. She's got a thing about her teeth, you know. Always brushes after a meal, even one like this. You wait. In ten minutes, she'll run off to the ladies' room and get out her toothbrush."

"Hush, now," Marian whispered, although less fiercely than before.

Ezekiel grinned. "It's why she's got such a nice smile."

Marian poked him to be quiet, but she was gentle.

After the master of ceremonies finished introducing the next speaker, we politely applauded. Marian leaned across the table as she clapped her hands. "We built a new house last year. Laura Cooper designed our closets."

Her husband said, "You said you'd never fill 'em up, but you did."

"She did a good job for us even though she was only a part-time employee for the contractor." Marian good-naturedly ignored her husband. "I told her she ought to be doing more than closets. Like kitchens, maybe."

"Don't get started on kitchens," Ezekiel moaned. "I never want to hear about marble countertops again."

"That's why I was so hurt," Marian said. "That she could take something from me after we'd worked so well together."

The three of us pretended to listen to the speaker for several minutes, but my mind began to whir. When the speech concluded, I leaned toward Marian once more. "Did you get to know Laura very well?"

"Not really. She worked hard, though. She's an expert in the extras—wine cupboards and safe rooms and Jacuzzis—things the contractor wants to tack on to the project."

"All that junk's ridiculous," her husband added. "What do we need a wine cupboard for? I just keep a few beers in the icebox alongside the mustard."

"She kept telling us that all our neighbors had the extras, and we should, too," Marian recalled. "She seemed genuinely concerned—not just that we could increase the value of our property by adding things, but as if we were doing ourselves a disservice by
skipping the status symbols. She was very concerned about appearances, I think."

The evening's keynote speaker got up to talk, so I didn't have another opportunity to ask my companions for further insight into Laura's character.

When I got home that night, I filed the zoo story with my editor via e-mail. Stan Rosenstatz, the features editor and therefore my boss, always fired back a quick thanks when I filed on-line. I think he felt guilty for encouraging me to stay out of the office and away from Kitty.

Afterwards, I found myself worried about Flan. I didn't want to intrude on the family and decided it was too late to telephone his mother, Annabelle Cooper, for information.

Unable to sleep, I spent another hour working on the details of a Big Sister/Little Sister outing I had volunteered to organize when my friend Lexie Paine had been forced to step aside due to business commitments. But my heart wasn't in the project that night. I kept thinking about the Coopers.

On Sunday morning, I tried phoning Annabelle. No answer, but that was no surprise. She was a loyal churchgoer. I told myself I'd try again later.

Sunday's newspapers were plastered with stories about Oliver Cooper's nomination and Laura Cooper's death. I read in the car on the way to a brunch while Reed Shakespeare drove.

Before Rory Pendergast's death just a few months earlier, when he had hired me to work for the
Intelligencer,
he had also arranged for a car and driver to take me to the social engagements that I covered. Since I didn't drive—due to my unfortunate tendency to faint at inopportune moments—Rory's kindness
was a godsend. The company he contracted was owned by Michael Abruzzo, not surprisingly, considering the two of them had quite a conspiracy going, but the driver turned out to be Reed, a young student who was working his way through college. It had taken months to get Reed to speak more than monosyllables to me.

So I was triumphant when he held the car door open for me and actually said, "Are you really going to wear that?"

Reed didn't grasp the concept of vintage couture dressing. That morning I had dug out of my grandmother's collection a really wonderful St. Laurent Mondrian-inspired dress and short matching coat. Blocks of red, blue and yellow on a white background were crisp and surprisingly contemporary. I was stretching the season a little, maybe, but the weather was still warm and sunny. By his expression, however, Reed indicated he'd rather be seen with a shedding llama.

"What's wrong with it?"

"Nuthin," he said at once. Then, clearly losing the struggle to keep his thoughts to himself, he burst out, "Just—can't you wear something normal once in a while?"

"What's normal?"

"You know. Plain. Not all this weird stuff."

Reed never put on anything but neat-as-a-pin blue trousers and a white dress shirt with a tie, unusual for a young man whose contemporaries wore baggy shorts and Fubu basketball shirts, so I wasn't sure what he considered weird. I said, "I'm going to a party, Reed. Don't you get dressed up to go to parties with your friends?"

"I don't go to parties." He closed the door and walked stiffly around the car to get behind the wheel.