If Looks Could Kill (10 page)

My arm needed no twisting, and I agreed, taking a seat across from her in a creamy white armchair. I was anxious to hear anything
Detective Farley had to say.

“Okay, so what did you find downstairs?” Cat asked. “Talk fast.”

“Well, there wasn’t exactly a lot to go through. Heidi didn’t have much in the way of earthly possessions, did she?”

“You mean clothes?”

“Clothes, books, knickknacks. You’ve been in her room at some point, haven’t you? I can’t imagine you not sneaking a peek
at her setup. And don’t be coy, Cat. I know you.”

“The most I did was poke my head in occasionally. And I had Carlotta clean in there once a week. Our last nanny was such a
pig, we got mice.”

“Well, like I said, there wasn’t much to look through, but I did get a vibe that there was a new man on the scene.”

“Why?” she asked, her face expressionless.

“Couple reasons. She had some new jazz CDs, and since she appears to have had pretty mainstream music taste, my guess is that
some guy gave her the CDs or she bought them to be knowledgeable—for a guy’s sake. There was also a bottle of vodka down
there, in the freezer, and if we’re to believe Janice, that Heidi wasn’t a drinker, she obviously had the stuff stocked for
someone. And there was a box of condoms in her drawer—though it’s possible they were left over from her Jody days. Last, but
not least, she had a Tiffany box with a very expensive bracelet and diamond studs.”

“Really?”
she said, half question, half statement. Her voice was even, but her eyes widened slightly.

“I doubt very much that Jody gave them to her. Any idea where they came from? She didn’t pinch
those
from you, did she?”

“No and no.” But I could sense the wheels turning in her head as she processed the info, obviously trying to see if it added
up to anything—or anyone. I wondered if Jeff ’s name had flashed across her mind as it had briefly mine.

“Well, it seems pretty likely—”

At that moment the front doorbell rang.

“God, he’s here,” she said. “Let’s finish this later,” as if I’d even consider describing my amateur detective exploits in
front of Detective Farley.

Farley was all alone this time, and as Carlotta led him into the room, Cat and I both stood up at attention. He was in navy
blue today, this suit too tight just like the other one. He’d either gained weight since he’d been clothes shopping or he
bought them on the tight side because he liked the snugness, the feeling of having everything contained and controlled.

“Thanks for taking the time to see me on short notice,” he announced. He glanced over in my direction and gave me a knowing
look and a nod. “Miss Weggins.”

“Please sit down, Detective,” said Cat. “Can I get you a glass of iced tea?”

“No, thank you.” As he lowered himself into an armchair, he brushed imaginary lint off the taut pant fabric on his thighs.

“Do you know anything yet?” Cat asked, sitting back down again as I followed suit. “Do you have any idea what happened to
Heidi?”

“In a minute I’ll explain where we are in the investigation, but I need to ask you a few questions first.”

He reached inside his suit coat pocket and pulled out a notepad, flipping through until he found a blank page.

“You mentioned to me yesterday that Heidi and Mr. Radson—Jody Radson—had stopped dating,” he said, looking directly at Cat.
“Do you have any idea which one of them decided to call it off ?”

He got my full attention with the first question. If he was wondering who dumped whom, it meant that something fishy was up.

“Well, she never told me,” Cat said. “But if I had to guess, I’d say her.”

“And why is that?”

“Because she didn’t look that upset when she told me about it. Of course, it could have been mutual—but it so rarely is, is
it?”

“Mr. Radson—we spoke to him yesterday evening—said they had stopped seeing each other in January. Does that jibe with what
you know?”

“January?” she said, wrinkling her nose. “That sounds about right. Carlotta, my housekeeper, might know for sure.”

“Have you seen him around lately?”

“Yes, he came by the house sometimes. It was just a friendly thing now. He was here the other night, in fact, according to
my housekeeper.”

“Which night was that?”

“Thursday. Why are you asking this? What’s going on?”

What exactly, I wondered, did they suspect Jody of ? Could he have stopped by Saturday night while Heidi was home? Could he
have done something to harm her?

“We’re trying to determine if he might have given her a box of chocolates. Maybe in an attempt to win her back. Do you know
where she could have gotten a box of chocolates?”

I flashed back on the gold box of Godiva chocolates that had lain just a few feet from Heidi’s lifeless body, and I felt the
hair on the back of my neck go up.

“Not Godiva chocolates?” Cat asked.

“Actually, yes. That’s right.”

“Well, if you’re talking about a box of Godiva chocolates, they were mine. Why? . . . Did Heidi get sick from the chocolates?”

“So
you
gave her these chocolates?” he asked, ignoring her question.

“No, she seems to have snitched them. They were a gift to me—someone brought them to a party I gave Thursday night here at
the house. People know I’ve got a thing for chocolate. Heidi, I guess, took them downstairs with her at some point during
the evening.”

“Who were they a gift from?”

“I don’t know. They’d been left on the hall table by one of the guests. Why, what’s wrong with the chocolates?”

“Miss Jones, I get to ask the questions right now,” he said, not in a snippy tone, but one that told her to cool her jets
for a minute. “How do you know Heidi, as you say, snitched them?”

“Well, when I went to open the chocolates later, they were gone. I thought the caterers might have put them away someplace,
but I couldn’t find them anywhere. Then Bailey told me she had seen them in Heidi’s apartment.”

He snapped his head over in my direction. “When did you see the chocolates in the apartment?” he asked.

“When I found the body. I’d never been in the apartment before then,” I added defensively.

“Why would you mention them to Miss Jones?”

“It just came up,” I explained. “We were talking about Heidi while we waited for the ambulance. Because she’d thrown up, we
discussed what kinds of food she ate, and Cat said she sometimes snuck food out of the fridge and I mentioned the chocolates.
That’s all.”

He jotted a few notes. I was dying to know what was going on. Had the chocolates been doctored somehow? If they
had
been, it would mean
Cat
was the intended victim, not Heidi. Cat looked superagitated, but she took a deep breath and I realized that since she’d
found her pestering had proved ineffectual, she was about to try another tack. She lived by the principle that there was more
than one way to skin a cat.

“Look, Detective,” she said with her best sugar lips, “I’m relieved that someone of your caliber is on this case and I don’t
mean to be a nudge. But it’s obvious you have some concerns about the chocolates, and since they were left for me, I need
to know what the problem is.”

“I’m going to explain everything to you, Miss Jones,” he said. “But first I need a few more facts. Can you describe the box
you saw on the hall table?”

“It was the usual gold Godiva box. Except that instead of just some gold elastic around it, it had an artificial flower on
it as decoration—like they sometimes do around a holiday. The flower was pink, I think. A pale pink.”

“And you feel strongly that Heidi took the chocolates?”

“It’s just too big of a coincidence otherwise,” Cat said. “Someone brings me a box of chocolates. The box mysteriously disappears
off the hall table. A short time later a box of truffles turns up in Heidi’s apartment. Heidi, who can’t afford to buy such
things on her own and has a habit of pilfering sweets from us all the time.”

“Was Heidi around that night?”

“Yes, she was working. I needed her to watch my son, Tyler, while I gave the party.”

“I actually saw her in the hallway,” I interjected. “I saw her get Tyler’s jacket. In fact, she looked a little odd and I
couldn’t figure out why. Maybe it was because she thought I’d caught her.”

“Please,” Cat pleaded. “I can’t stand this. What is going
on?”

“All right,” said Farley. “There seems to be a problem with the chocolates. Most of the box had been consumed. We took the
ones that hadn’t been eaten in to examine, and we think they may be tainted in some way.”

“Tainted?” Cat said. “You mean
spoiled?
That’s pretty hard to imagine with Godiva.”

“The chocolates in the box weren’t actually Godiva chocolates,” Farley explained. “They’re truffles, but not the kind made
by Godiva. It looks as if they’re homemade and that someone took out whatever candies were in the box and substituted these.”

Oh boy. This was bad. Someone had wanted to kill Cat, and Heidi had died because of it. But I could tell Cat hadn’t fully
grasped it yet.

“But what exactly do you mean by
tainted?”
Cat asked. The sugar lips were gone now and she was speaking in the clipped, irritated way she used with someone who was
pitching an article idea but had failed in the first twenty seconds to make it sound sexy as hell. Underneath, though, I could
detect a swelling panic.

“We don’t have the final autopsy report—or the tox reports—but we believe there was something in the chocolates that killed
Heidi. It may have been some kind of poison.”

A look of astonishment began to form on Cat’s face.

“Wait a minute,” she said finally. “Are you telling me that my nanny died because she ate a box of poison chocolates that
were meant for
me?”

“I don’t want us to draw any conclusions right now—not until we get the autopsy report back and the tox reports. But it does
appear that the box was tampered with and that the chocolates may have caused her death.”

“This is incredible,” Cat exclaimed, using her hand to comb through the top of her thick blond hair. “It can’t be real—it’s
like a movie.” She stood up and took a few steps aimlessly around the room. “What do I
do?”
The last question seemed intended more for the gods than for either of us. Farley just sat there watching her pace, his lips
pressed hard together.

“Detective,” I said, leaning forward, trying not to sound as freaked as I felt, “when are you going to know for sure? How
long do all the tests take?”

“It’s a frustrating process in New York City because there’s a backlog,” he said. “We’ll get the autopsy report soon, but
the tox reports can take weeks.”

“Weeks?”
Cat screeched. “So for weeks I’m in limbo?”

“No, we’re proceeding with this situation as if it’s highly suspicious. We’ve already begun investigating. And of course,
with what you’ve just told me, we’ll start down a new line of inquiry—that if the candies were doctored in some way, you may
have been the intended victim, not your nanny. Tell me about this party that you had—you said it was Thursday night.”

“It was a boring book party—for a woman named Dolores Wilder,” Cat said, not hiding her agitation. “She was the editor of
Gloss
before me. She edited a collection of short stories from the magazine, and I got stuck giving her a party.”

“Is there anyone who could have been in a position to see who brought the chocolates? Your housekeeper, for instance.”

“I know Carlotta didn’t see anything. When I asked her later if she’d put the box someplace she said she hadn’t and she told
me she had no idea who brought them.”

“I want a list of everyone who attended the party—and I need it today. You can have someone fax it over to me. Have you had
any threats against you?”

“No. At least nothing out of the ordinary. People sometimes say they hate me, but that’s—that comes with the territory.” I
had thought for a split second that she was going to say, “But that’s always been the case.”

He told her to think about it, that something might come to her over the next day. She should consider, he said, whether anyone
had ever threatened her even in a veiled way, or if anyone at the party might have a grudge of some kind against her. He also
said that since the apartment was most likely a crime scene, the police would come back and examine it again.

“Don’t let the housekeeper go in and clean up,” he told Cat. “We need to keep it totally off limits.”

I wanted to shoot Cat a look, but Farley would have caught it.

He rose to leave and I thought Cat was going to dive to the floor and grab him around the ankle with both hands.

“You’re going? What about my situation? Am I in danger?”

He launched into his little mantra again about not jumping to conclusions, but he suggested that she keep a fairly low profile—and
he promised that he would be in touch. He also handed each of us a business card with his phone and fax numbers and told us
to contact him immediately if we had any thoughts, information, or concerns.

Wondering if there was anything he’d say or ask me out of Cat’s earshot, I volunteered to see him to the door. The only tid-bit
he offered was that since the case was starting to look like a homicide and he was a general precinct detective, he would
now be working with detectives in the homicide division. I felt my blood curdle at the word
homicide
. As he stepped out onto the stoop, he reminded me to get the party list over to him as soon as possible. I didn’t dare tell
him what I’d noticed in Heidi’s apartment. He’d kill me for having gone down there, and besides, if the police hadn’t yet
done a thorough search, they would now.

When I got back to the living room, Cat was lying on the couch, eyes closed, with a bag of frozen peas on her head, obviously
riding the first wave of one of her legendary migraines. As much as Cat had angered people over the years with her abruptness
and bitchiness, it was hard to believe she’d inspired someone to decide to kill her. I wanted to reassure her, to comfort
her, but I felt at a loss. I was anxious and scared and just plain dumbfounded by the fact that a murderer had been at the
party that night.