“He was with me when I got the message. It would’ve been even more awkward to shake him.”
“He was with you?” Cassady repeated, not quite as quietly as I would have preferred.
“He wanted to talk. About what to get Molly for her birthday.”
“Six months away,” Cassady pointed out.
Tricia shrugged and started picking her cuticles, a sure sign she was lying.
Somehow, I’d plopped Tricia right in the middle of something I wasn’t even sure I knew about myself and I didn’t want to keep her there any longer. As we exited back into the waiting room, I turned to Kyle and asked, “Could we talk for a minute?” I pointed to a grouping of chairs away from the main traffic patterns of the room.
“Can I join in?” Detective Donovan asked.
“No,” Kyle said before I even registered that Detective Donovan was standing there. Kyle took me by the arm and walked me firmly over to the chairs I’d pointed out. “Are you done?” he asked quietly as he released my arm.
“I’d like to talk to Wendy—”
“You don’t understand my question.”
He let the statement hang in the air between us so I could study it, fully appreciate all its dimensions, and realize why my answer was wrong. It took me a moment, but then my error shivered through me. Kyle wasn’t talking about my being done for the moment. “You mean, am I done with the article?”
“I mean, are you done trying to get yourself killed?”
I almost protested that no one was shooting at me—for a change—but I was learning enough to keep that observation to myself. “I just want to cover the story,” I said simply.
“And what does Mulcahey want?”
“To beat me to it.”
“What else?”
“Nothing else.”
“Then why didn’t I know he was back until now?”
“Because I didn’t think it was important.” Which was true. Possibly not completely true, but somewhat true. There might be other blocks, Freudian or otherwise, involved, but in the greater scheme of things, especially in the scheme of Kyle and me, it wasn’t important. “I’ve been trying to get rid of him,” I said, hating that that wouldn’t be clear to Kyle.
“I could see that.” He nodded, not looking at me.
There was something in his voice I hadn’t heard before. “Are you being snarky?” I asked, not doubting that he was capable but surprised that he’d go there.
“No, I’m being frustrated.” Now he looked at me and his blue eyes were blazing with a passion I would’ve been delighted to see under more pleasant and intimate circumstances. “One thing you learn early on as a cop, it’s really hard to protect someone who doesn’t want to be protected.”
“That’s not it,” I protested, “I just want to see this story through. You know what I have riding on this assignment.”
“Too much.”
While I groped for breath and an answer, Detective Donovan inserted himself into our tête-à-tête, which felt like it was verging on a mano a mano. “Sorry to break this up, Edwards, but I need to talk to Ms. Forrester, since she’s such a great detective and all.” Some people can’t be snarky; they’re too mean and it leaches all the humor out of anything they say, especially when they’re trying to be funny. It’s like trying to drive a car with no lubrication—you just get high-decibel screeching.
I was prepared to leap in and defend myself, saving Kyle from the trouble, but he spoke first. And told Detective Donovan, “She’s all yours.” He walked away, throwing back over his shoulder, “I gotta go back to work,” and I honestly wasn’t sure whether it was for my information or Detective Donovan’s.
I wanted to run after him, yell, and/or cry, but none of those options seemed particularly viable while Detective Donovan was standing in front of me with his notebook open and Kyle was disappearing down the hallway without even half-glancing back. I chewed on the inside of my lip for a moment to refocus, then gave Detective Donovan my most professional smile. “What can I tell you, Detective Donovan?”
“Was Mulcahey at Willis’ apartment looking for Willis or for you?”
“There’s absolutely nothing going on between me and Peter Mulcahey,” I told Detective Donovan with all the bite I’d held back from Kyle. “I had no idea he was going to … do whatever he was trying to do. There’s no conspiracy here to be uncovered, Detective. It’s an unfortunate collision of people on intersecting paths, that’s all.”
“So why were you there?”
“Working on my story.”
“Wendy says you followed her.”
“I felt she was hiding something. Like her involvement with Ronnie. Which she was.”
“Why, do you suppose?”
“So she doesn’t look like an opportunistic slut to her coworkers.”
Detective Donovan’s eyebrows wriggled briefly, but he refrained from further comment. “And is she?”
“I don’t know yet. What do you think?”
“I think you’re off-track. This still sticks to Gwen Lincoln and as soon as we find the gun, we’ll be able to prove it.”
“No wonder you like Wendy. She and Ronnie will not only endorse your candidate, they’ll probably campaign if you ask them nicely.”
“But you don’t agree.”
The problem was, I wasn’t sure anymore. Something about seeing Wendy screaming on the floor in the fetal position had shaken her validity as a murder suspect. But it still made sense that it was one of Garth’s Girls. The perfume, the injuries which could have been from someone forcing him to drink for his charm, the two gunshots … Gwen would have been more to the point, because she was killing out of anger. Garth had been killed more slowly, deliberately, out of vengeance.
“You’re not sharing,” Detective Donovan continued, incorrectly interpreting my silence.
“I don’t know anymore,” I finally said, honesty being the shortest distance between two problems or something like that. There was also the chance that if he thought I was stumped, he’d back off a bit.
This time, his eyebrows just knotted. “We don’t have to be on opposite sides here.”
“I didn’t know there were sides. Just points of view,” I said politely.
“Yeah, well, there are sides and I like people to be on mine,” he stated with no politeness at all. “If you and Mulcahey aren’t going to play nicely, I don’t want you playing at all.”
“Then maybe I better take my ball and go home,” I said, endeavoring to end things on a pleasant note.
“Don’t go any farther than that.”
“Detective Donovan, are you asking me not to leave town?”
“Telling you, Ms. Forrester. Good night,” he said and walked away. But his attempt at making a forceful and intimidating exit was undercut by his stopping to turn back and salute Tricia, Cassady, and Aaron with a tip of his notebook to his forehead.
Cassady swept the other two over to me immediately. “Was he nasty or seductive?”
“I’m not sure he was either. Or can be either,” I said.
“He’s not without his charm,” Tricia said.
“His charm is at home in his attic,” Cassady countered.
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Tricia said, “because I asked him to be my guest at the gala.”
THE TRUE ALLURE OF A martini glass lies in its creation of the illusion that you could lean forward and plunge your entire face into it, bathing yourself in the cool, refreshing liquid of your choice that shimmers there, and wash away cares, tears, and maybe even a wrinkle or two. Or, in more dire moments, stick your head in and shock yourself awake, like the crazy guys in the movies with the sinks filled with ice cubes. I contemplated the Rob Roy that shimmered before me and decided, while the whisky facial was tempting, my current problems would be best addressed by pouring the whole thing down the front of my blouse because it would give me a splendid reason to go home and throw things around my apartment for a couple of hours instead of attempting to carry on a conversation with Tricia, Cassady, and Aaron.
After Detective Donovan’s departure, I’d pressed my cell phone number on the post-op nurse and begged her to call if Peter needed anything, and we’d decamped to the Lenox Lounge to attempt to take stock of the evening. Even in such cool and classic art deco surroundings, with smooth jazz floating in from the Zebra Room, it was a frustrating task. I felt somewhat like a camp counselor with fifteen minutes to go before the parents drove up, trying to figure out how I
was going to explain that all my campers had wound up drunk, pregnant, or communist in the short time they’d been in my care.
While it was tumultuous in my head, it was relatively quiet in the club. We’d reached that quiet part of the evening when people are either eating dinner or getting a second wind, not pushing quite so hard to charm their companions or conserving energy to look for new companions, murmuring rather than shouting, pacing themselves for the final leg of the marathon and kindling the desire to cross the finish line with someone full of excitement and potential. This particular race doesn’t necessarily go to the swift, but often to the slick or clever or persistent. Still, it’s hard to opt out and say you’re not going to run.
Cassady and Tricia were allowing me time to gather my thoughts because they were engaged in a fierce debate of their own, centered on, as Cassady delicately put it, “What the hell were you thinking, inviting that vulture to the gala?”
“Aaron,” Tricia said in response, “I’m sure you’ve already discovered that one of Cassady’s more endearing traits is her tendency to beat around the bush.”
“Tricia,” Aaron replied, matching her tone uncannily, “I’ve found that the best way to control the results of an experiment is to limit the number of variables introduced.” He gestured for her to keep it between the two of them and turned to me. “Too many variables diffuse your attention. Follow one thing at a time, right?”
Though my experience with physics was limited to some pretty shaky experiments in high school, I knew what he was getting at. You had to be sure of your hypothesis going into an experiment and seek to prove only that, or you cluttered your mind and endangered the experiment with extra interactions and reactions which were more measurable in how distracting they were than in how they impacted the results. You wound up proving nothing.
Was that my mistake with Garth’s death? Had I gone in with the wrong hypothesis and now lost sight of the original question in my drive to get the facts to conform to my suppositions?
Oddly, when I’d been looking at people I knew as murder suspects, it was such a shocking concept that I’d had a hard time committing to suspecting anyone. This time, trying to follow the twisted relationships, I found everyone similarly tainted and no one emerging as the leading suspect. No one had an extraordinary reason to kill Garth; they all had equally good ones.
So was I missing someone’s reason or had I missed a suspect altogether? If I was going to salvage either the story or my ability to tell it, I needed to shed some biases and take a fresh look at all the players. And while I appreciated Aaron’s empathy, the one guy I really wanted to discuss all this with was probably at home that very moment, changing the locks or at least short-sheeting the bed.
But I’d have to dwell on that cop later, because Tricia and Cassady were getting quite animated in their discussion of the other one and I felt some responsibility for keeping that from getting out of control.
“He’s not even that cute,” Cassady was protesting as I returned my attention to their conversation.
“Don’t try to be quaint. That’s not the only reason to ask a man out,” Tricia answered.
“Of course not, but in this case, there are no other redeeming qualities in evidence,” Cassady said.
Now it was my turn to lean in to Aaron. “Should you be exposed to trade secrets so early in your association?”
He smiled. “Education is never wrong. Painful sometimes, but never wrong.”
Cassady arched an eyebrow at both of us. “And I suppose this all makes sense to you.”
“It’s too much to ask that other people’s decisions make sense,” Aaron answered.
“Though I hesitate to ask, I’m sure she has her reasons,” I agreed.
“Why would you hesitate to ask?” Tricia frowned.
Now I hesitated to answer, hoping to minimize the number of people I loved who would be angry with me by midnight. “Your reasons are your own,” I sidestepped. The idea
of Detective Donovan joining us at the gala was noxious, but I clung to the notion that Tricia knew what she was doing.
“Hasn’t it occurred to anyone that it is possible to date for the common good?”
I was comforted that neither Cassady nor Aaron seemed to understand that one any better than I did. “I must have been sick and missed that week in Social Studies,” I said after a moment.
“Maybe I asked him to the gala simply so we could keep an eye on him while keeping an eye on a number of suspects all at the same time.”
“Economy of effort. Commendable,” Aaron said.
“Seriously?” I blurted. “You asked him out to help me finish my article?”
“You’d do the same for me,” Tricia said confidently.
“I’m not so sure,” I said, then hastened to revise my statement when she looked at me with dismay. “I mean, now that you’ve introduced me to the concept, yes, I would, but I’m not sure that particular form of sacrifice would’ve occurred to me on my own.”
“Does bring a whole new meaning to ‘above and beyond,’” Cassady said tartly.
“My faith in your taste in men is restored and I thank you all for your support and assistance,” I said, toasting them. But before I could get my glass to my lips, my eye was caught by something both unexpected and somehow not altogether surprising—the sight of Wendy and Lindsay walking across the room toward us, glasses in hand.
While Manhattan is densely populated enough that you can go for days without bumping into people you know, there is also the neighborhood effect, in which you tend to trip over the people who live and work on the same circuit you do. I supposed that it wasn’t that surprising for us to cross paths with Lindsay and Wendy here, since we’d come straight from the hospital and they probably had, too. And yet, this wasn’t exactly across the street. We’d bypassed other places to come here and it seemed a little odd that they’d picked it, too, as famous as it was. It seemed even
odder that, given the evening’s previous events, they intended to join us. I was happy to see Lindsay, but I never would’ve expected Wendy to be interested in a friendly drink.
So perhaps she wanted a less than friendly one. “What are you doing here?” Wendy asked sharply as they stopped before us.
“Collecting signatures for a petition to stop rhetorical questions,” Cassady responded.
“Hi, Lindsay. Wendy, how’s Ronnie doing?” I asked quickly, scrambling to climb to higher ground. “I’m so sorry—” I began, remembering a moment too late the insurance company warning not to say you’re sorry after an accident because it can be used later to indicate you believed you were in the wrong.
“You should be,” Wendy replied, proving the insurance companies right.
“I’m so sorry the strain is taking a toll on him,” I said, determined to clarify that I was in no way apologizing for my actions.
“They’re keeping him overnight, monitoring him for a bit,” Lindsay said smoothly. “I’m sure it’s just a precaution and he’ll be fine and Wendy can finish getting him up to speed in no time.”
Wendy furrowed her brow at me, knowing putting her finger to her lips would be too obvious. No one knew? I wasn’t sure whether that merited applause or a psych evaluation, but it was impressive. Deciding to keep my peace in order to keep the peace with Wendy, I sat back in my chair and waited for her to make the next move.
“I think he’ll be all right, at least until that miserable friend of yours turns his life into utter hell,” Wendy said.
Nice move. “I don’t know that Peter’ll be in a hurry to do that,” I said. “He’s got some issues of his own to straighten out.”
“He’s the criminal!” Wendy said emphatically, but Lindsay hushed her gently and eased her into a chair she had somehow spirited away from the table next to us. They were
going to join us without even asking, not that we would’ve sent them away, but letting the question hang in the air would have at least given us all the opportunity to acknowledge how awkward and unproductive this encounter was going to be.
“It’s a difficult situation all the way around,” I said as Lindsay pulled up her own chair. I made introductions around the table as she settled herself and Wendy at the table in the maternal manner her colleagues had mentioned. I half-expected Lindsay to hold her drink for her while Wendy took a swig. We all let the uncomfortable silence settle on the table for a moment, then I took the first plunge, wondering if I could make investigative questions sound like small talk. “So, Lindsay, how’d you get caught up in all this?”
“I called Wendy about a client problem, she told me what had happened, where she was, and I wanted to come see how I could help. When Ronnie was settled in, I thought a drink might help relax her. Great minds run in the same channel,” she said with a diplomatic smile to all of us. “Your friends have joined you, too.”
The thing was, I knew how happy I was to see my friends and I wasn’t sure how happy Wendy was to have Lindsay with her. She was accepting the ministrations, but didn’t seem to be deriving a lot of pleasure from them. Not that Lindsay seemed to mind; she was serenely attentive, like a lady-in-waiting pleased with her station in life. Or the gawky girl who gets to hang with the cheerleaders because she’s tutoring them all in math. Maybe part of Lindsay’s mothering the other Girls was her way to fit into their little cult, since she hadn’t been participating in the main event.
“The true measure of a friend is that you can call her from a hospital, a police station, or a wedding chapel,” Tricia said, trying to find a comfortable groove for the conversation, “and she’ll come, no questions asked.” She shot me a look across the table, confirming with a nod that she was willing to do all three.
Lindsay smiled in agreement. “That’s what makes our little
group so special. We’ll do anything for each other. Right, Wendy?”
Wendy’s face crumpled suddenly as she struggled not to cry. “Right,” she said quietly, then took a deep breath and composed herself as best she could.
Lindsay squeezed her hand encouragingly. I wondered how much she really knew about what her friends were willing to do for each other, to each other, with each other.
Wendy suddenly steeled herself sufficiently to announce, “Listen, Molly, I want to be perfectly clear about one thing. If you screw things up for Ronnie, I’ll destroy you.”
“Don’t take this out on Molly,” Lindsay said.
“Amen, sister,” Tricia nodded to Lindsay.
“I’m being completely sincere,” Wendy said to all of us, but with her glare focused on me.
Cassady rapped on the tabletop. “As a lawyer, I’d like to advise you against saying inflammatory things that people will take huge delight in testifying to at a later date.”
“Are you threatening me?” Wendy asked.
“No, because I’d rather not stoop to your level,” Cassady answered.
“Women are fascinating,” Aaron interjected.
“Wendy, what do you think you’re going to accomplish by being belligerent with me?” I asked, wishing it sounded more diplomatic than it did. The volume in this little discussion was creeping up and we were starting to get those slow, sidelong looks from people at the other tables, the ones that communicate just how big a jerk they think you’re being without a single word.
“And what are you going to accomplish by decimating Ronnie?” Wendy continued.
“I’m not trying to hurt Ronnie, I just want to know what happened to Garth, and if either of you is involved, that’s part of the story,” I said emphatically.
“Ronnie didn’t do anything!” Wendy proclaimed, now officially too loud and drawing full-on glares from surrounding tables.
“Wendy,” Lindsay breathed.
“And I didn’t do anything either!”
“Wendy,” Lindsay repeated, a little stronger.
“Maybe Ronnie’s been right all along,” I said. “You don’t suppose Gwen shot Garth so she could be with Ronnie and then decided to go after Ronnie when she realized he was cheating on her with you?”