Little Black Book of Murder (16 page)

Carlo shrugged. “I deal with a lot of farmers. A few of them have screws loose. I suppose one of them might have felt his livelihood was being threatened. But killing Swain? I doubt it.”

“Maybe the Rattigans wanted their valuable Howie's Hotties breeding stock back again?” Crewe suggested.

“That would make one of the Rattigans . . . a murderer?” the chef asked, aghast.

Instead of worried farmers or angry hot dog heirs, though, I found myself thinking about Zephyr again. Carlo said she hadn't spoken much. But Swain brought her along when he pitched his pork to the restaurant owners. How had she felt about her beauty being used in an oblique way to help kill and sell animals? Remembering the way she had wept over chickens, I could guess how Zephyr felt about raising thousands of pigs destined to be slaughtered. She might have been happy to keep dairy cows—­no animals were hurt in the production of organic milk. But if she thought her husband was going to start killing large numbers of specially bred pigs, perhaps she might have wanted to find a way to stop him.

I saw Crewe looking at me with concern. I managed a smile. “Don't mind me. I'm just daydreaming. Finish your ice cream.”

“It's been a tough couple of days for you,” he said gently.

“Yes.” I gathered up my handbag and gave him what I hoped felt like a jaunty kiss on the cheek. “And this one isn't over yet. I must get to my office. Thank you for lunch, Chef. Your food was delicious. Just what I needed.”

I couldn't put it off any longer. Stiffening my spine, I went to see Gus Hardwicke.

T
he rain had given way to overcast skies, so I walked across town and thought about what I could write about the hillbilly supermodel.

I tried phoning Michael first.

“Yeah,” he said when I asked about the note he'd left on my laptop. “Sorry I forgot to tell you before you left. Things got busy. My guy in West Virginia had all kinds of information.”

Trying to decide how reliable the information might be, I asked, “How do you know this friend?”

“He's not a friend, just a guy. I met him inside. He ran a small-­time racket, riding around remote mountains on an ATV to buy prescription painkillers from grandmas, then turning around to sell the stuff to the grandkids. Got caught when he drove over a ravine, and the rescue crew found him with enough Oxy to sedate a herd of elephants, plus enough cash to buy the herd, too. Hell of a way to make a living, but it paid for his vacation home in Belize. I hear it's a nice place.”

I should not ask questions about Michael's prison acquaintances, I told myself. I never liked the answers.

I said, “What did he have to say about Zephyr?”

“Not the kind of stuff that gets printed in
People
magazine. She grew up pretty rough—­big family, isolated cabin, no central heat. It was a low-­rent chicken farm that went bust. She was the middle kid of, like, five sisters. When the chicken business went south, Dad started cooking meth. Mom died young—­likely beaten to death by her husband.”

I must have made a squeak of dismay because Michael said, “It gets worse. Zephyr took care of the younger kids. Her real name, by the way, is spelled with two
f
s. Zeffer. Eventually, two sisters went to jail for solicitation, one died of an overdose, the last one's getting rich in the meth business. At sixteen, Zephyr got into some kind of small-­time pageant thing with the help of a local, like, wedding store that gave her dresses for free, and she won, and that was how she got out and started modeling. Anyway, word is,” Michael said, summing up, “before Zephyr got off the mountain, she killed her father.”

My breath stopped. “She—?”

“Yeah. Plugged him with a shotgun during a family dispute in the middle of the night. You don't want to think about why that went down. Or what kind of a mess a shotgun makes at close range.”

No, I didn't. “Why hasn't anybody heard about this before?”

“She was never arrested. Dad was a shit everybody hated. One of the daughters—­fourteen years old—­was pregnant at the time of his death, so the local cop figured the shooting was justifiable. And once Zephyr got famous, the community rallied behind her. Proud of the hometown girl, they kept her secret.”

“How does your guy know all this?” I asked, hoping the story couldn't possibly be true. “Why is he talking now?”

“He's known it for a long time, but I guess the surviving sister made a move on his territory, cutting into his profit, so he's taking his revenge. Swears on a stack it's all true.”

“Why punish Zephyr for her sister's drug dealing?”

“That's the way it goes with those crazy drug people. No scruples.”

I let that judgment call slide. Instead, I thought about Zephyr killing her father. Whatever the horrible circumstances were, she had pulled a trigger once. Did that mean she was capable of killing her husband, too? Would committing murder be easier the second time around?

“Thank you,” I said. “Anything else?”

“That's as much as I could stomach.”

Far more than I could. I was feeling nauseated all over again. But I said, “Michael, Crewe says his newspaper is working on a story about a gangland war.”

“Oh yeah?” He sounded relaxed. “What gang?”

“Yours.”

“Oh hell,” he said, “there's no war going on. Just a few pissed-­off cousins making threats. If things get bad enough, somebody will tell Nonna, and she'll make us all come for lasagna and a lecture about going to confession more often.”

He made it sound so benign. And I wanted to believe him.

He added, “In your whole life, you never tasted lasagna worse than Nonna's. So nobody wants to risk the heartburn. This will blow over.”

“Okay,” I said uneasily.

“Gotta go,” he said. “Another call.”

I put away my phone and walked a little farther, thinking about Zephyr. I'd had no clue she had come from such a hardscrabble background. Yes, everybody had heard the barefoot-­holler story, but maybe nobody realized how true it was. That blank face she wore on runways—­so chic as she strutted before cameras wearing fabulous gowns—­had hidden some very unglamorous secrets.

But I couldn't write about it in the newspaper. I didn't have the right ruthless streak.

By the time I got to the Pendergast Building, it was late afternoon and the big newsroom was almost empty. The few reporters who remained on the staff were either in meetings somewhere or on their way home. Only Skip Malone, one of three sports reporters who still worked for the
Intelligencer
, sat at his desk. He had a phone pinned to one shoulder, and he was typing madly on his computer. Like the rest of us who remained at the newspaper, he was doing the work of two reporters. He glanced up when I walked past, though, and gave my red coat and boots a raised thumb of approval.

The intern guarding Gus's lair cheerfully told me he'd gone out, so with the feeling I'd just earned a reprieve, I went to my desk. Before settling in to write the profile of Zephyr with the thin set of facts I felt comfortable sharing, I sorted through my mail. The mound of invitations that had arrived told me that the social season was building once again. Two invitations held gifts meant to entice me to attend the events—­a helium balloon and a box of chocolates.

Although I wasn't supposed to accept bribes, I wrote a quick thank-­you note to the chocolate giver—­an old friend who wanted me to attend her brother's early-­retirement cocktail party, which I had planned to attend anyway. And I wrote a regretful note to the balloon person who was trying to drum up guests for a clown-­themed party for a disease of the week. Clowns tended to unnerve me. What was really behind that icky makeup? And if I wrote about every disease fund-­raiser, as worthy as they were, I'd never have room for anything else. Clown pictures didn't play well in print anyway. But I carried the balloon across the floor to the desk of my friend Mary Jude, the food page writer, whose son Trevor might get a kick out of it.

Back at my desk, I tried doing a search through the
Intelligencer
's archive for information about Zephyr's financial health. I found more gossip-­column snarking about her bouncing checks, but nothing else. Then I saw an item about the prenup Zephyr had signed before marrying Swain Starr. The amount of money she inherited upon his death was tied to the number of years she remained married to him. If they were married less than five years, she got zip. I wasn't sure how long they had been married, but I could look that up.

I assumed Zephyr had money of her own—­modeling was a lucrative line of work, for sure—­so the five-­year thing seemed only prudent. Or was it hiding something else?

Swain's vasectomy. I remembered Marybeth's rude crack about him spending weeks sitting on ice packs. He had no doubt been enduring the discomfort so he could create more children with Zephyr.

Before I could look up their wedding date, my phone rang.

“Nora? It's Sam.”

My friend from the hotel didn't sound happy. I said, “Hi, Sammy, what's up? Do you need those Hermès scarves sooner than you thought?”

“Forget the scarves. I'll be lucky if they keep me in the show.”

“What?” I finally heard the tone of his voice. “Sam, what's wrong?”

“I got fired this morning,” he snapped. “The hotel told me to take a hike. Because of what you wrote in the newspaper.”

“What?”

“You can't hide behind that stupid fake name, Nora. Gilda Greygoose? Who do you think you're fooling with that? I know you wrote that stuff about the hotel—­about Zephyr getting escorted out by the police and her husband's son getting himself featured on the hotel security cam. Well, thanks to you blabbing, I'm out of a job.”

“The hotel fired you?”

“
And
Freddy. The manager needed about two seconds to figure out where you got the information. I never said it was Porter Starr on the tapes. And now Porter says he's going to sue the hotel. I saw him on the noon news on TV.”

I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach. Gus had taken my meager information and turned it into something bad enough to get my friend fired from his job.

“Sam, I'm so sorry. It's not what you think.”

“It isn't? Can you honestly tell me you didn't run straight back to your desk to write what I told you—­in confidence?”

“I told you I was working for the paper. Look, I'm sorry.” Making excuses wasn't going to help either one of us. I said, “I take full responsibility. I'll talk to your manager. Maybe there's some way I can—”

“Forget it,” he said, his voice catching in what sounded like a sob. “I don't want you making things worse. You, of all people! I thought I could trust you, Nora. Just—­please stay away from me, okay?”

He banged down the phone.

I sat for a horrible minute, hands shaking, trying to think of something—­anything—­I could do to make it right. I had screwed up. I had hurt a friend—­someone who had been kind to me when I really needed help.

I felt like crying. Or kicking myself.

I'd done it. I had blabbed to Gus, just as Sammy said. It was my fault he had lost his job. And I knew how awful that would feel. Unemployment sounded like a fate worse than death. How would Sammy pay his rent? Pay for food? I had to help him somehow.

But I didn't have any spare cash, either. I'd have rushed across the city to press a few months' worth of grocery money into his hand—­but I didn't have it to give.

Slowly, I put my phone back into my handbag.

And became aware of a person standing next to my desk.

Gus said, “Bad news, luv?”

He slid his hands into the pockets of his trousers and lounged against the side of my desk, smiling down at me with something distasteful lurking in his eyes.

I said, “Now's not a good time to talk to me.”

He laughed. “You think you have a choice?”

He used one foot to hook the swivel chair from the next desk and scoot it over to mine. “Let's see your Zephyr piece.”

“It's not written yet.”

“Okay.” He sat in the swivel chair and wheeled it closer—­so close that I had to scoot my chair out of his way before he practically pulled me into his lap. He fired up my computer with a flip of the button. “Give me what you have in dictation, and I'll type.”

“I don't work that way,” I said. “I need time to form my thoughts.”

He gave me a raised eyebrow. “Time to form your thoughts? Who are you, Charlotte Brontë?”

I could barely hold back a scream. “I can't believe you took my words and twisted them around for today's story. All I said was a young man in a hat—­and you turned it into libel about a lovely woman with principles and a boy who doesn't deserve bad treatment from the press.”

He leaned back in his chair and linked his hands behind his head. “What's got the dingo in your knickers?”

“A friend of mine—­the hotel employee who talked to me, who told me about Zephyr—­he was fired today. Fired for telling me what I asked—­what he thought was in confidence—”

“He talked to a reporter and thought his golden words were protected by—­what? A magic force field of confidentiality?”

“I'm his friend!”

“You're a reporter,” Gus snapped.

“You assumed the man in the hat was Porky.”

“It wasn't?”

I got out of my chair and tried to walk away, but I was trembling with anger and shame and fear for Rawlins in his baseball cap. I had to stop beside the desk to catch my balance.

I said, “I can't do this.”

“Of course you can.”

“I can't rat on my friends.”

“Then be more careful.”

I glared at him, but he gave me a steady, challenging stare in return.

Calmly, he said, “You can't resign. You don't have that luxury. You have to stick with the job.”

“Right now,” I said over the slam of my pounding heart, “I can't think of a person I despise more than you.”

“Get in line.” He noodled with the computer's keyboard, frowning at the screen. “Now tell me what you know about Zephyr.”

“Are you kidding?” My voice went up a notch. “You want me to compound my mistake by telling you—”

“We'll call her the hillbilly supermodel,” he said, already typing as he ignored my outrage. “Born in a West Virginia holler to a barefoot baby mama and—”