Dead Write: A Forensic Handwriting Mystery (27 page)

“You want to cut a deal, is that it?” Jovanic said, giving up the argument.

Claudia could feel his grin. “Yeah, cut me a deal. I’ll go to Grusha’s party tomorrow night. That’ll give me a chance to see all the players at the same time. I’ll wrap up on Sunday, and from Monday forward, I promise to limit my involvement with Grusha to analyzing handwritings she sends in the mail. How does that sound?”

“Fine. Call the airlines, make a reservation, and come home.” His tone softened. “I want you here, babe. Where I can keep an eye on you.”

After they ended their conversation, Claudia was unable to get to sleep. She mixed a Jack and Coke from the tiny bottles in the minibar, threw herself on the bed and used the remote to switch on the TV. With old movies playing in the background, she ran all the complications of the Grusha assignment through her head again and again until she dozed off. The last thing she was conscious of before falling asleep in the early hours was a dinner party scene in
The Thin Man.
As her eyelids drooped, Nick Charles was announcing to the assembled guests, “The murderer is right here, sitting at this table.”

The cell phone was ringing, invading her dreams. At first, she wasn’t certain what the sound was. The noise had penetrated her sleep and in her groggy state she thought it must be the dinner bell in the movie. She didn’t know what time it was now, but one thing she knew for sure—she had not had enough sleep.

Except for the sliver of gray light penetrating the crack between the blackout drapes, the hotel room was as dark as pitch. Claudia groaned and felt around the nightstand for the phone. As she found it she noted that the clock radio read 7:19.
Too early.

“Hello?” Her voice sounded dry and croaky. Holding the phone to her ear with one hand, she sat up and took a swig from the bottle of water that she kept by the bed, trying to wake herself up.

“I’m going to kill him!” Grusha Olinetsky’s voice screamed through the phone. “
Chjort! Chjort!
I—vill—
kill—
him!”

Fully awake now, Claudia moved the instrument a couple of inches away from her ear. “What happened? Who are you talking about?”

Grusha’s voice rose to a hysterical shriek, switching to Russian. Hyperventilating.

Claudia raised her voice above the clamor. “Grusha, stop! I don’t understand what you’re saying. You’ve got to calm down!”

The matchmaker switched back to English, but the words came out as short gasps. “How could he do this to me? I cannot believe it. I am going to—”

In the background was another voice. Sonya. The assistant came on the line, speaking urgently. “Put on the TV, channel seven, quick.” Sonya sounded upset, but not in the out-of-control, panicky way of her boss.

“Hang on, I have to find the remote.” Claudia set the phone down and switched on the bedside lamp. Sometime during the night, the remote control had found its way under the covers and ended up at the foot of the bed. Digging it out, she turned on the TV and navigated the channels with a sense of foreboding, as if she already knew what would be waiting for her when she got to channel seven.

“Oh,
shit.
” The program to which Sonya had directed her was
Hard Evidence
, and the guest was Andrew Nicholson. She boosted the volume, her heart sinking.

A tall, slender blond, Nicholson was dressed in an expensive-looking dark suit with a red power tie. He looked ready to testify in court. Worse, he
looked
credible, and for the viewing audience, that was often enough.

“. . . and you wouldn’t believe some of the members she allows in,” Andy was saying in a gossipy tone. A dozen expressions animated his face as he spoke, using his hands for emphasis. “If they have money—and plenty of it—she’ll take
anyone.
And I mean
anyone
. And the handwriting analyst she’s using now, well . . . can you say ‘hired gun’?”

The camera panned to the studio audience, who were watching with avid attention. The camera moved to the show’s host. She looked directly into the lens, her mouth parted in counterfeit amazement. “Oh, my! This is just fascinating. We have to go to commercial now, but when we come back, handwriting expert Andy Nicholson will reveal more secrets about your handwriting and the dating service he once worked for. I’m Megan Jackson. Stay tuned;
Hard Evidence
will be right back.”

A commercial began to play and Grusha’s voice came back on the line, only marginally calmer. “I’ll kill that little
drecksack
. How dare he do this to me!”

Claudia wanted to remind her that Susan Rowan had warned her of Nicholson’s lack of ethics, but she doubted that
I told you so
would go over very well right now. And Jovanic had been right; Andy was gunning for her. Maybe not literally, but in a way that could be damaging to her career. Not only had Andy practically stolen the
Hard Evidence
gig right out from under her; he was now using the interview to get back at both her and Grusha. Narcissist that he was, it probably hadn’t occurred to him that his words might be grounds for a lawsuit.

“Can you call the TV station and threaten to file suit for slander?” asked Claudia.

“Sonya is calling my lawyer right now. Oh my god, what vill I do? What else vill he say? I vill have to cancel the party tonight. I cannot face my clients after this.”

“You can’t do that. Most of them aren’t going to see the show, and even if they do, you have to show them that he’s a lying piece of—” Claudia broke off, reminding herself that she was talking to her client. That meant she needed to maintain some semblance of professionalism, even though she’d only had a couple of hours’ sleep. She said, “If you cancel, he wins. You can’t let him win.”

“But how can I face them?”

“You are the
baroness.
After all you’ve been through, you can do anything.”

There was a long pause; then Grusha spoke in a stronger voice. “You are right. I vill not let that filthy swine destroy me.”

The commercials ended and the show came back on with a wide shot of the
Hard Evidence
set, Andy Nicholson relaxing in one armchair, Megan Jackson in the other, chatting and smiling. The camera panned across the applauding studio audience, zooming in on a close-up of the host.

After reintroducing Andy as the country’s foremost handwriting expert, which made Claudia want to puke, Jackson leaned in. Her expression was as hungry as a coyote chasing a rabbit as she urged him to continue “revealing the truth” about Elite Introductions.

But during the break, Andy must have thought better of what he had been saying. He began to back-track. “I don’t want to bad-mouth a colleague, so I’m not going to name names,” he said, raising his eyebrows in a way that suggested there was plenty to say, and he would love to spill his guts but was just too ethical. “You just have to be
very careful
how you choose a handwriting analyst. Especially if you’re an employer. Or in this case, a dating service.”

“The dating service you’re talking about is called Elite Introductions, isn’t it?” Megan Jackson prompted. She looked at the camera. “The owner of Elite Introductions is
Baroness
Grusha Olinetsky, the flamboyant Russian who sometimes appears as a guest judge on the popular dating show
Your Perfect Match
.”

“Clients pay obscene fees to get matched up,” Andy said, the camera flattering him. “But when I saw some of those handwritings—the people she asked me to analyze—well, I couldn’t in good conscience continue to work for her.”

“He is lying!” Grusha shouted, getting worked up again. “Sonya, what are you doing? Is my lawyer on the phone yet?” There was a pause while Sonya said something. “I don’t care how early it is! Claudia, what are ve going to do? He is hurting you, too.”

“Thanks, Grusha, I did hear that.” Claudia’s brain was spinning. “I’ll contact my attorney as soon as I get back to L.A.”

“What is that devil saying now? Oh my
god
!”

“. . . and she asked me to help her improve her handwriting,” Andy said, blowing any last pretense of client confidentiality. “She wanted to make it look more feminine, so I showed her how to add some embellishments—you know, twists and curlicues—to make it more girly.”

Megan Jackson, who had been sipping coffee, lowered her mug. “More
girly
? Why would she need to do that?”

Claudia held her breath. At the other end of her phone there was only the sound of Grusha’s quick breaths.

Nicholson gave Jackson an arch grin. “Well, that’s a long story, Megan.”

“And unfortunately, we’re just about out of time for this segment, but Andrew Nicholson, I hope you’ll come back soon and tell us the rest of this tale. It sounds fascinating. And now, after the break, our next guest . . .”

Claudia released a long sigh. At least Andy hadn’t totally outed Grusha. Somehow, he must know her secret. And he must have guessed that she would eventually learn of his appearance on
Hard Evidence
. What did he hope to gain?

Knowing Andy Nicholson, he might have done it purely out of spite. What a miserable piece of work he was. She thought of all the times they had crossed swords in the courtroom. If she were to waste energy hating someone, Andrew Nicholson would be at the top of her list.

Chapter 26

Cocktails on a Manhattan rooftop under twinkling lights. Or stars if you happened to look up. Potted ferns that belonged to warmer climes, somehow flourishing under space heaters that made the late-winter evening tolerable. Live jazzy music to chat by. A waist-high wall offered a view of other roofs—a city of roofs—from fourteen stories up. Romantic allure. What could be a better backdrop for an introduction to a potential love match than the roof of the building that housed Elite Introductions?

Two bouncers at the door looked like sumo wrestlers in T-shirts, their muscles bulging, shaved heads shiny under the lights.

Claudia had dressed for the occasion in black silk palazzo pants and a long beaded jacket over a gold shell. The outfit had been Annabelle’s suggestion. “You gotta take something fancy, just in case,” the girl had insisted. Having recovered from her pique over what she perceived as Claudia’s defection, she’d decided that it might actually be fun to stay with Monica for a few days. So Claudia and the girls had gone shopping, and now, seeing the results in the mirror, Claudia was glad she had listened to their advice.

The woman who called herself baroness smiled and floated graciously from one guest to another. Throwing her head back to laugh at something with a man who looked like Benicio del Toro. Dancing a few steps with someone she towered over in her six-inch heels. Excusing herself and hurrying forward to greet a new arrival.

To look at Grusha Olinetsky—fashionable in a simple black silk cocktail dress and diamond stud earrings, her black hair hanging loose, brushed back to accentuate high, full cheekbones that had probably been enhanced with collagen—no one would have guessed at her histrionics of a little more than twelve hours earlier. Knowing what she knew, Claudia thought she detected a certain brittleness under the coolly elegant facade that the matchmaker presented to her clients that evening.

She thought of the large sums of money these people had poured into Grusha’s coffers, all looking for their Mr. or Ms. Right. Every male guest she had met that night was a candidate for stud of the month: good-looking, bright, stylish, including the men over forty. The women were knockouts, too: self-confident, flirty, under thirty-five. Claudia fervently hoped that Grusha would not be introducing any of these Beautiful People to a killer.

Avram Cohen was among the first clients she had spied upon her arrival, but he had assiduously avoided her. She guessed that he was probably conjecturing whether she and Sonya had viewed the brutal video on his cell phone, and that he was embarrassed at the prospect.

He was currently giving the impression of being deeply absorbed in Aisha, the model whose handwriting Grusha had showed Claudia the day before in her office. And by all appearances, Aisha was lapping up his attention, engaged as she was in a great deal of smiling and fluttering of sable eyelashes. The lashes were far too thick and long to be natural, but they did an admirable job of framing the liquid amber eyes.

Dr. Ian McAllister moved among the guests, well-groomed and expensively tasteful in a dark suit. Claudia had refused his offer to pick her up for the party when he’d phoned midmorning, and his cold tone told her that he saw right through the lame excuse she’d made. Now he treated her to a sardonic smile, a reminder that he was on to her, before turning away to speak to a pair of identical twins in short dresses. Luckily, Claudia and Ian were both at the party to mingle, and from what she could see, he was mingling with great charm. So far, it had been easy to avoid being alone with him.

Donna Pollard sidled over to where she stood, watching the crowd. “Did you see who just arrived? Michele Frayer! Did you see her in
Somewhere, Everywhere
? She was absolutely amazing.”

“Didn’t she win an Oscar last year?” Claudia asked, admiring the elfin features and slim body of the award-winning actress. Michele Frayer was a top box-office draw. What was she doing attending an introduction party when she could crook her little finger and have any man in town slavering over her?

As if she had already verbalized the question, the psychologist leaned close and stage-whispered, “She doesn’t trust any of the men she dates, so she wants Grusha to find her the perfect soul mate. I interviewed her last week. I was so nervous!
Me,
interviewing the most famous actress on the planet. But you know, I think I might be able to talk her into therapy.”

They watched the actress slip her velvet bolero jacket from her shoulders and hand it to a uniformed attendant who had materialized at her side. Under the jacket, she wore a pewter-colored brocade mini-dress, the strapless back showing off birdlike shoulder blades.