If Looks Could Kill (12 page)

Audrey had set up the list by category: press, the book publishing company staffers, fiction writers featured in the book,
Gloss
staffers, miscellaneous editors from other magazines. I decided I’d cross a line through anyone who couldn’t possibly be
a suspect and star any names that demanded more scrutiny.

I started with the book publishing company, a small house that specialized in fiction. A gaggle of their employees had apparently
attended—the editorial director, the sales and marketing director, the editor and her assistant, and what appeared to be the
entire publicity department. Publishing companies rarely threw book parties anymore because of the expense, and this group
had obviously been thrilled to get out and gobble up some red potatoes stuffed with crème fraîche and caviar. I distinctly
recalled Cat saying before the party that she had never met a soul from the company—or in her words, “This is the first and
hopefully the last time I’ll ever set eyes on any of them.” I put a pencil line through each of their names.

Next there was press. I’d heard it had been as tough to round up anyone as it is to get a grease stain out of rayon pants,
but in the end a little arm-twisting on the part of
Gloss
’s PR agency had produced a few bodies, including a reporter from
People
, one from the AP, and a producer for
The View
. As far as I knew, Cat had never met any of them. I put a line through their names. Also in attendance was one of the gossip
columnists for the
Post
—a guy who sometimes ran bitchy items about Cat with headlines like CAT IN A SPAT and PURRRFECTLY AWFUL. Cat despised him,
but I couldn’t picture
him
with a motive for killing
her
.

The biggest group of all at the party were the
Gloss
staffers. The magazine business could be cruel, and editors often took a psycho delight in gossiping about each other, but
it was hard to imagine anyone actually being a murderer. They gave out kill fees, they didn’t kill. Yet the murderer could
easily be someone from
Gloss
.

All the senior staff from
Gloss
, plus Audrey, had been invited, though not everyone had showed. The photo editor and art director, for instance, had wiggled
out of going, and so had the beauty editor, who was on maternity leave. Leslie, Polly, Rachel, and Kip had come, as had Sasha,
the fashion editor, who was now in Palm Springs with those orange stilettos. I thought for a second about each of them. None
had displayed any hostility toward Cat recently, at least not that I’d witnessed. Earlier in the day, though, Cat had been
extremely curt to Rachel on the phone. Worth checking out.

The
Gloss
copy editor and his associate also had attended, which had surprised me that night, since neither was on what you’d call
Cat’s A list, until I remembered that both had worked at the magazine under Dolores and she had undoubtedly invited them.
They were practically the only ones left from her era. Cat had followed a scorched-earth strategy when she was hired at
Gloss
, with special emphasis on leveling the fashion and beauty areas, and also the food department, where they had still been
creating recipes for crown roasts and Swedish meatballs. When possible, rather than out-and-out fire people, she had relied
on her intimidation skills. The two members of the copy department had survived in part because they were good, in part because
they wouldn’t get in Cat’s way of recreating the magazine. Were they bitter? I wondered. Though I didn’t know either especially
well, the only thing they ever seemed annoyed with was working late during closing.

At the last minute, because of a mediocre response from the press, an additional dozen
Gloss
staffers had been invited, in order to pad the room. I could see their names as add-ons at the bottom of the list. They were
mainly senior editors in fashion, beauty, and articles. Could one of them have an ax to grind? Cat was a demanding boss, frequently
abrupt, generally on the far side of tactful in her comments. She liked talent in people and she encouraged it, but that meant
she often had pets, which left some people feeling excluded. There was no one in this group I felt 100 percent comfortable
eliminating because I didn’t have enough info at this time.

There were also two spouses on the list: Kip’s wife, Jane, who was slurring her words by seven-thirty, and Leslie’s husband,
Clyde, the zillionaire, whom I’d found myself smushed up next to in the library at one point. He was a moody guy, though attractive
in a Heathcliff kind of way, with curly black hair, black eyes, and skin as smooth and white as candle wax. Trying to make
conversation, I’d asked him for some investment advice.

“It would be a disservice to offer you simplistic tips over cocktails,” he said, snootily. “Surely, you’re too smart for that.”
His tone suggested he thought I had all my money in a passbook savings account. I put a pencil line through both his name
and Kip’s wife’s because I couldn’t imagine either having a motive.

Also on the list were about a dozen editors from other magazines, mostly women, who had worked with Dolores at
Gloss
over the years. A few, I knew, had been fired by Cat. Was one still holding a grudge? I would have to run their names by
Cat.

I was almost done. The last “group” were four of the authors whose romantic short stories were featured in the book and who
had been nauseatingly toasted that night by Dolores as “women who knew how to tell a love story in a way that could make your
legs turn to jelly and your heart swell.” Three of them, all over fifty, didn’t even write short stories any longer. I put
a pencil line through each of their names. The last one, however, a fortyish woman named Nancy Hicky, who for obvious reasons
wrote under the pen name Nancy Highland, was still churning out romance novels and seemed to have a chip on her shoulder.
I’d had the misfortune of being cornered by her early in the evening. “You’re with the
new
crowd?” she’d asked bitingly, and then demanded I tell her “why in God’s name you’ve decided to drop fiction.” I suggested
she pose that question to Cat, who had made the decision, and scampered off in search of another drink. As angry as she was,
however, it was hard to imagine it would propel her to murder.

Last, but certainly not least, there was Dolores, who had been displaced by Cat and apparently never hidden the fact that
she loathed her. To set the record straight, her being kicked to the curb by the owners of
Gloss
was hardly Cat’s fault. She was around sixty-three at the time, and the magazine, the least up-to-date of all the “Seven
Sisters,” had been on a slide for at least the final seven years of her twenty-two-year reign. She’d grown out of touch with
both the times and her readers and had been running the magazine on automatic pilot. Some of her last issues carried endless
pages of instructions for ugly craft projects, and her household hints columnist had once suggested using a tampon if the
wine cork had been tossed accidentally. One of her last covers had featured the cover line “Our Pasta Cookbook: Need We Say
More?”—which suggested she’d been hard-pressed to summon, in her lifetime, one more fun and fetching phrase about fettuccine.
She’d earned her termination (and was damn lucky to have been given a phantom job as company consultant), but Cat, I must
say, had rubbed Dolores’s nose in it, bad-mouthing the old
Gloss
whenever she got the chance. She was fond of referring to Dolores’s era as the
“Gross
magazine” days. Dolores, in turn, never passed up an opportunity to complain publicly that
Gloss
today was “rude, crude, and lewd.” She certainly deserved to be on the short list of suspects.

Interestingly, Dolores’s husband had been missing in action. I vaguely remembered hearing someone say a slipped disk had laid
him up.

Speaking of husbands, there was someone at the party who wasn’t on the list: Jeff. I’d noticed him shortly before I left,
though he may have been there earlier. At really hotsy-totsy parties Cat gave, those with big names and celebrities, Jeff
would play co-host, but at an event like this he might make only a brief appearance or not even bother. He’d seemed slightly
bored that night—I’d caught him once wrinkling his nose in distaste as a waiter passed a tray of toast points with seared
foie gras.

I was back to what I’d been mulling over earlier. Was everything really okay with Jeff and Cat? And a far scarier question:
Was there a reason he wanted her out of the picture? Though I was no longer focusing on Heidi, it did appear that she’d been
seeing someone secretively. Could that person have been Jeff, and could he have tried to eliminate Cat so he could be with
Heidi? It was hard to believe—certainly on Sunday he hadn’t looked like a man who had accidentally poisoned the love of his
life—but nonetheless I needed to find a way to lift the lid on Cat and Jeff’s relationship.

I had now crossed off the names of the people who appeared to have no reason in the world to eliminate Cat Jones from the
planet—and I still had a pretty long list. I thought back on the party, trying to remember if anything seemed odd or suspicious.
Nothing stood out. I obviously wasn’t going to make much headway until I went over the list with Cat the next day.

At seven I tucked the fax sheets into my purse and headed over to Landon’s apartment with a bottle of good California Cabernet.
As I knocked on his door I got a whiff of the wonderful aromas emanating from within and realized that I hadn’t eaten a decent
meal since Saturday night.

“You are very sweet to do this,” I said to Landon as he swung open the door. “I need your food and I need your wisdom.”

“Well, darling, you didn’t give me much time, so it’s just roast chicken,” he announced in his deep, sexy voice. “There’s
only so much magic I can do with just a few hours’ notice.” Five feet nine, trim, with light brown eyes and closely-cropped
curly silver hair, Landon was more youthful looking than any seventy-year-old I’d ever laid eyes on. He ran a company that
designed and renovated building lobbies, but somehow he managed to stay tan as a walnut most of the year. He was dressed tonight
in his typical casual but dapper fashion—tight blue jeans and an off-white cotton boatneck sweater. For an apron he’d tucked
a waffled green-and-white-striped dish towel in the front of his pants.

“Well, it smells fab, especially considering what I’ve been smelling the last few days.”

“Do I want to know?” he asked, leading me into the kitchen, where he poured me a glass of champagne from a just opened bottle.

“Cat’s nanny? I was the one who found the body. It was pretty gruesome.”

“My God,” he said, eyes wide in surprise. “I had no idea you were involved. What in the world happened?”

“Well, there’s lots to tell, and I could use your advice, but I’d love to just relax and chow down first. I feel I need a
little time away from all of it.”

“Fine, fine. Take your champagne into the living room and we’ll just chat for a bit. Besides, I’m dying to ask you about that
handsome young stud I spotted you with in the street early Saturday evening as I was driving off.”

“Oh,
him,”
I said sardonically, falling into an armchair.

“Not Mister Right, then?”

“I don’t know
what
he is,” I said. “Correction: I know he’s great in the rack, but I don’t know what else. Thinking about him makes my cheeks
flush and I may have a crush. What I’ve begun to suspect, unfortunately, is that he’s Mister I’ll Never Commit, maybe even
a cad. Which is too bad, because for the first time in two years my heart doesn’t feel as vestigial as my appendix.”

“Well, I’m not a psychotherapist, but maybe you’re not as ready as you think.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, maybe you’re attracted to him because he
is
a bit of a cad and you know he’ll never want a relationship.”

“Oh, God, who knows? I thought you were supposed to be recovered from a divorce in two years. Sometimes I feel I’m just flopping
around, like a big tuna that’s been hooked and hauled onto the deck of a boat. Let’s talk about you. What’s happening with
that guy Mitchell?”

“We had a lovely dinner, and he said he’d call—but nothing. I left a message on his machine and haven’t heard a thing.”

“Well, don’t call again.”

“I know, I know. I should be more of a
Rules
girl, but I can’t help myself. Usually when I don’t hear from someone I do something totally insane—like send clippings of
articles I think they’ll be interested in.”

“Well, then I suggest you stop your home delivery of the
Times
for a few weeks,” I said, smiling.

He excused himself and retreated to the kitchen to check on the chicken and I had a few quiet moments to sip my champagne.
I always loved being in his place. It was a twobedroom, originally similar in layout to mine, but he had gutted it, breaking
through the dining area into the extra bed-room to create a large, loftlike living space, with pale gray walls, pickled gray
parquet floors, and gray sofas and chairs. The other furniture, all antiques, was dark wood, a striking contrast. He had beautiful
drawings on the wall, including one by Mary Cassatt that his mother had left him.

Though we had lived side by side through the eighteen months of my flash fire of a marriage, I hadn’t known him then, except
to exchange small talk in the hallway. When the marriage was over, when I’d come up for air and stopped contemplating a header
off my terrace, one of our hellos turned into a glass of wine, and soon after we were hanging around the Village together.
I had more in common with my friends from Brown and people I had met at
Get
and
Gloss
, but due to sheer proximity, Landon had become one of my closest pals.

The meal that night was to die for—despite Landon’s protestations that he’d been hindered by a shortage of time. Besides the
chicken, there were roast potatoes with rosemary, green beans, and carrots cooked with pecans and brown sugar. We ate with
the door to the terrace open, and though it had grown cooler, the spring air felt wonderful. Afterward, instead of dessert
he served a selection of cheeses. It was the perfect excuse to have a third glass of Cabernet.