Social Death: A Clyde Shaw Mystery (11 page)

“When you say over with, does that mean you’re never going to drink alcohol again?”

“I can have one drink and stop myself.”

“What about the times when you don’t? What’s happening then?”

I spent much of the next few weeks in Elaine’s office trying to figure out the answer to that question. We started with my childhood, and more specifically my mother, Tipsy, who had earned her nickname in gin and vodka and who had passed down to me a love of both. Tipsy, who had left me abandoned and bereft, with low self-esteem and too many questions, all of which led me to seek comfort in the arms of boys and, later on in life, make risky choices, like screwing strangers I met in dark bars. I drank and slept around, and hated myself for it.

“Tell me about the scars,” Elaine said, pointing at the thin white lines etched across my wrists. They were barely visible now, but in the right light you could still see them.

“I wasn’t trying to kill myself.”

“Just punish yourself?”

I shifted in my seat.

“When was the last time you cut yourself?”

It was after a trip to Guatemala with Olivia. “Six years ago.”

“Good,” she said. “That tells me something.”

“What?”

“That you are capable of recovery. You stopped that behavior. You can stop this one.”

By the end of my stay at Hilltop, Elaine and I had agreed that once I returned to the real world, I needed to go to AA meetings, find a sponsor, and do the whole twelve steps to help maintain my sobriety. I also needed to continue my work on the couch.

Back in New York, I had good intentions. I saw a shrink on Fifty-seventh Street and went to beginners’ AA meetings at a church on East Forty-third. But my new psychologist was a jerk, and the meetings, with my hectic schedule, were hard to make on a regular basis. I quit them all after a few months. I was convinced I had a handle on my issues—which I had, for two and a half years and counting—and that I was better off leaving my past where it belonged.

I stood waiting in the lobby of the FirstNews building. Delphine pushed through the rotating door accompanied by a man. She was wearing a charcoal skirt suit that flattered her tall, athletic frame, a navy silk blouse, and no makeup. Her thick, chestnut brown hair was pushed back with a headband and fell in a heavy curtain to just above her collarbone. A gold bracelet with a diamond-studded clasp encircled her strong wrist, and two large diamond stud earrings twinkled at each ear. She saw me standing by the reception desk and walked straight over.

“Cornelia Shaw, it’s been a long time.” Up close, I could see that her hazel eyes were red, and that she wasn’t entirely makeup-free. A thick coat of pigment did its best to conceal the dark circles beneath her eyes.

“Delphine, I’m so sorry. I know how you must—”

She held up her hand. “Don’t, really, or I’ll just start up again.”

That’s right, save it for the camera
, the producer in me thought.

The man next to her shifted his weight in his shoes. He was mostly bald and short. He also looked familiar. “This is Prentice Maldone,” Delphine said, introducing us.

I shook hands with the head of Maldone Enterprises, a fast-growing conglomerate that owned and operated a string of newspapers and television stations in second-tier cities. I’d read an article on Bloomberg that said Maldone was planning on giving the Tribune Company—which had a similar business model—a run for its money. The article hadn’t named any of Maldone’s acquisition targets, but it was fairly obvious he wasn’t hanging around our lobby to offer his condolences.

“Nice to meet you,” Maldone said. He had a flat Midwestern accent—if I had to guess, I’d say from Iowa or Illinois—and small blue eyes that probably missed nothing. “Are you with the network?” he asked.

“I’m a segment producer for
Topical Tonight
.”

“Very good,” Maldone said.

Delphine grabbed the gold chain strap of her handbag and looked at me. “How long has it—” her voice trailed off as she worked the math.

“Two years.” We said it at the same time. The last time had been at a birthday party for Olivia at Orsay, a popular Upper East Side restaurant. I’d been sober half a year.

Maldone touched Delphine’s arm lightly. “I’ll see you soon.” Then he nodded goodbye to me and entered one of the elevators on his own.

“Shall we?” I said, cocking my head in the same direction.

She pressed her lips together tightly and nodded.

While Delphine went through makeup and hair, I went in search of Alex to make sure he was prepped for his interview. He wasn’t at his desk, or in the studio. I was about to call him on his cell when I spotted him in the kitchenette, chatting up Sabine. She was leaning into him, her pretty face lit up like Fifth Avenue on Christmas. I knew that if I didn’t break them up then and there, he’d have her legs in the air by the end of the week—maybe sooner.

“Hey Alex.” I stepped between them. “Any more scoops from
Pump-me-Hard
?”

He laughed it off, but his cheeks had turned beet red. “Penny Harlich’s covering the Kravis story for GSBC. Clyde thinks because I talk to the competition, I must be sleeping with it,” he told Sabine.

I planted my hands on my hips. “All the more reason for you to stay as far away from her as possible. I don’t like the idea of you swapping tips with her. Saliva, that’s your business. But that’s where the reciprocity should end until this story is over.
Capiche
?” I turned back to Sabine and left her with one parting comment. “You’d better watch it, dear. This one has an appetite for fresh meat.”

“You know, Clyde, I wouldn’t have pegged you for a rumormonger,” Alex called from behind me.

“You know you love me,” I yelled back, circling my way back to the green room.

Delphine was still in makeup so I went back to my desk and dialed Panda. This time he picked up. “How’d you like Ehlers?” he asked.

“I would have liked him better if he gave me time of death.”

Panda chuckled. “I bet you would have.”

“Please, Neal. I need to know it.”

He sighed. “ME says 10:25, but you didn’t hear it from me.”

That was a little more than four hours after she sent my text, and about twenty-five minutes after Olivia arrived back at the Haverford with Rachel. It was also an hour before that lady said she spotted Rachel on the street arguing with a man. “Pastrami’s on me next time,” I said before hanging up.

Delphine sat on a lumpy love seat in
Topical Tonight
’s so-called green room. No green here, just beige wall coverings, some worse-for-wear seating options, a coffee table covered with ancient issues of
New York
and
Time
and three near-empty candy bowls, plus a machine that spat out coffee, hot chocolate, and hot and cold water. Would you like anything?” I asked, gesturing toward the machine. “Water, tea?”

She’d removed her jacket and her sleeveless navy blouse exposed a pair of muscular arms. “Nothing, thanks.”

Delphine looked away, her hands balled up in her lap. I could tell she didn’t feel like talking, but I had questions I couldn’t ask her while anyone else was present and certainly not while we were being taped.

I sat on the cushion next to hers. “What do you think happened?”

She angled her body back toward mine. “Clyde, don’t make me do this with you. I’m here because someone has to be. Please don’t make this any harder for me.”

“You know you’re the only one I can talk to,” I said, lowering my voice to a whisper.

“Please, Clyde,” she repeated, her nostrils flaring as she grabbed both of my hands in hers. “I can’t.”

I set my jaw, soldiering on. “Have you told the police?”

“Why would I?” she asked.

“Because of Rachel. Someone’s going to figure it out if they haven’t already.”

She released my hands, looking away again. “I doubt that.”

“What about when the police find Rachel? You don’t think she’s going to talk?”

She pressed her lips together. “There’s nothing I can do about that.”

“Delphine, I was visited by one of the detectives. He asked me if Olivia was in a relationship. I was thinking that now might be the perfect opportunity to get it out there.” I paused to give her a chance to respond, but none came. After a long silence, I ventured, “Isn’t it better coming from you, a family member, than someone else? And on our network?”

She jerked her head toward me, her body language freshly combative. “How? No one knew.”

“Plenty of people knew. Olivia respected your family’s wishes, given their political leanings and how this could affect her father’s alliances, but she didn’t live in a tower a thousand feet in the air. She had lovers. I’m telling you, you can’t keep something like this a secret.”

“Well, we can try, can’t we?” she said crisply. “And if you truly cared about her, you’ll do the same. This isn’t your decision to make, Cornelia.”

There were two knocks on the door. Sabine stuck her head around it. “Everything’s set,” she said, her bright tone cutting through the tension like a knife. “Would you ladies care to follow me?”

The interview lasted fifteen minutes. There were tears, tissues, and lots of usable footage, all of which would be proprietary to our network and help us get back on top of the competition. On any other story, I would have felt relieved. But on this one as soon as we wrapped I was out the door, more determined than ever to find my best friend’s killer. I kept thinking about that cryptic text she’d sent me.
It’s time you know the truth
. My gut told me it had to have something to do with her murder.

S
utton Danziger lived on a stretch of prized waterfront property in one of Greenwich’s most exclusive neighborhoods. Her home, a massive gray stone structure, was situated between two equally gargantuan homes, neither of which were marked by mailboxes or numbers—for security reasons, no doubt—and had it not been for the row of Aston Martins and Bentleys parked in Sutton’s circular, pebbled drive, I wouldn’t have known at which of the three mansions I was expected for dinner.

The door opened before I stepped out of my taxi. Before me stood a large black man dressed in khakis and a denim shirt. There was a cellphone clipped on one side of his belt, on the other, a gun holster. “Your name?”

I gave it to him. Then he gave it to someone else over the phone, and five minutes later, after subjecting my bag to a quick search, I was escorted through vast marble halls into a vaulted-ceiling living room. The sleek, custom-made furniture was seemingly designed to complement but not compete with the art on the wall, as was the quartet of stiff-backed women perched on the room’s silk-velvet couches. The four of them were dressed in neutral tones like taupe and bisque, and I wondered which of them I was going to have to sweet talk into giving me information on Rachel Rockwell. The men, apparently, were elsewhere in the cavernous house.

Eyeing me in the doorway, Sutton moved to the arm of her couch, patting the seat next to her. I took her place, accepting a glass of Champagne one of the servers proffered from a white lacquered tray. The women were introduced one by one, but their names blended into each other, much like their voices. I endured a good twenty minutes of banter—a reminder of why I stayed away from school-related functions—before asking Sutton for a tour of her home.

A few minutes later, we were standing on a pair of zebra rugs in Sutton’s study, a vast distance from the living room. She lifted her gaze to the wall behind her desk. “Rauschenberg,” she said in a whisper, though her point had come across loud and clear: Sutton, like almost everyone else at the Livingston School, came from money, but nothing like what she had now, and she wanted to make sure I’d noted the difference.

“Lovely.” I pretended to admire her painting before asking which of her friends knew Rachel Rockwell. “Vanessa Cox, the blonde,” Sutton said, repositioning a penholder on her desk.

“They were all blond, Sutton.”

She rolled her eyes. “She was sitting right next to you.”

“Oh.”

“You’re not going to be rude, are you?”

“Oh jeez, Sutton. No.”

She tucked a strand of pin-straight hair behind her ear. “No talk about blood, semen, or child molesters.”

“What about feces?”

She scowled. “You know what I mean. Nothing gross. And easy on the booze. OK?” She gave me a knowing look that told me she hadn’t forgotten about her thirtieth birthday party, the one where I’d gotten plastered and screwed her twenty-year-old half brother.

I crossed my heart. “You have my word.”

My dinner companion had recently divorced and was a master golfer and successful businessman. He also had wandering eyes and, as the night wore on, hands. Thankfully Sutton had also seated Rachel Rockwell’s friend across from me, at a distance from which I was able to watch her get progressively more hammered with each glass of Chateau something. By the end of dinner, Vanessa Cox was, as they say, well into her cups. She excused herself from the table during dessert, and I followed, catching her on her way out of the guest bathroom. It didn’t take long to get her talking.