Nick examined the toes of his dress shoes and slipped a hand in one pocket. "Let"s just say that Dominique would be in a regular morgue, if the law didn"t think she died under mysterious circ.u.mstances."
I nodded, my throat too tight to speak.
With every floor the elevator climbed came a stronger smell of disinfectant.
We got out on the sixth floor where no amount of the stuff would be able to cover the smell of death.
Kyle began to pace the length of the mahogany- trim waiting room, circa 1930. Hands behind his back, he was so focused on the black-and-white floor tiles, he seemed to forget our existence.
"Kyle," I said. "Why didn"t you identify your mom last night?"
He closed the s.p.a.ce between us and wrapped his arms around me, his body wracked with one tightly wound shiver. "That would have made it real."
I had no control over the sob that rose in me.
Maybe I was older than him, after all. On the other hand, maybe when we lose our mother, we"re all ten years old inside.
"Jaconetti?" a suit across the room called. "Is that you? I heard you were in town today."
A couple of men in FBI-type suits came to shake Nick"s hand. "Did the Bureau send you?" a fed with a buzz cut asked.
Nick performed the introductions, but I was so freaked at being in a forensics morgue, Dom"s body stiff and cold nearby, I keyed into Kyle"s fear of making it real.
Foul play had contributed to Dominique"s death, I thought, absorbing the info, maybe for the first time, and as I did, I saw her switching those jars. Why?
Then I realized the intros were over and I had no names to put with faces. So I examined Nick"s cronies, specifically their hair, or their lack thereof, and dubbed them Buzz and Shinola.
"DeLong," Buzz said to Kyle. "So you"re family? My condolences. We"re looking into the lost diamonds. The boys in blue over there are investigating cause of death. Don"t worry. We"ll compare notes."
Hah. I knew from Nick and Werner that these two diverse arms of the law both wanted to come out on top. Both wanted to be the ones who solved the case. In other words, they wouldn"t like sharing info, and there would be no fraternizing without persuasion.
Nick gave me a rea.s.suring look. I gave him a trusting nod.
A woman in medical whites came out and motioned Kyle forward. He hesitated, looked back at me, and I took his arm to accompany him into a smaller office.
When we got there, Nick came up beside us.
Eve waved through the gla.s.s from beside the elevator. I didn"t blame her for standing as far back as she could.
The a.s.sistant medical examiner, according to her badge, showed us a photograph that I didn"t at first recognize.
When I did, I found myself floaty and leaning hard into Nick at my back, his hands tight on my arms. He squeezed them harder and harder. The uncomfortable constriction was the only thing that kept me from pa.s.sing out. Smart fed.
"Can we have a gla.s.s of water over here?" he asked.
Man, he knew me well.
Even as I sipped the water, I tried to talk myself out of floating to the floor in blessed oblivion. This is not about you, Cutler, I told myself. Get a grip.
In the photograph, the blotches on Dominique"s face ranged from burgundy to purple, the skin around her eyes the worse, her nose, cheeks, and lips triple their normal size.
That ghost hadn"t been kidding. She had lost her earthly beauty in a very big way. Sadness took over my weakness and the sight of her made me mad. I was gonna find the sonofab.i.t.c.h who did this to my friend.
Kyle cleared his throat more than once and swallowed hard before he could get his jaw to work. "She looks like she was stung by bees."
"Can you give me a positive ID?" the woman asked. "Is this Dominique DeLong?"
"Yes," Kyle said with a catch in his voice. "That"s her."
"And you are?" the examiner queried, as she filled out a form.
"Kyle DeLong, her son. May I ask what killed her?"
"I"m sorry. It"s not up to me to say. I do the preliminary lab report. My boss does the official medical examiner"s report. The FBI and the police put that together with officers" and detectives" reports, witness statements, and evidence, and then maybe they tell you what happened."
I tore my gaze from my poor beautiful friend"s marred face. "But you do think it was murder?"
"It doesn"t matter what I think, Ms. DeLong."
I didn"t correct her a.s.sumption that I was family. What did it matter?
She turned to Kyle. "I can tell you that with your ID of the deceased, we"ve finished and we"ll be releasing Ms. DeLong to the funeral home within the hour."
"Good," Kyle said. "I made arrangements this morning." He took out his cell phone and called the funeral parlor. Closing it, he said, "The wake and interment service are tomorrow."
"Why so soon?" I asked.
"I want it dignified. It"ll be more respectful and less like a circus, if we keep the spectators down to a minimum. The longer we take, the more fans show up."
"Right. Of course."
Nick continued to hold me as we went to meet Eve in the waiting room. "Who would want to harm Dominique?" I asked.
Kyle made a mocking sound. "I"m afraid the list is as long as my arm." Then he opened that arm, and Eve walked into it.
Fifteen.
They came as if there might never be anything like it again: They were in mod clothes, Victorian suits, and granny gowns, old west outfits, pirate costumes . . .
-CHARLES PERRY The doorbell to Dom"s Fifth Avenue mansion overlooking Central Park began to ring at seven, and frankly I feared that it would never stop.
The characters who came to offer Kyle their condolences outlandishly attempted to outdress each other, and would once have been called the "radical chic."
At another time in fashion history, the faux-grieving rubberneckers vying for a glimpse at the twisted steel of Dom"s metaphorical but deadly "car accident" were known as Bohemians.
As far as I was concerned, they were slimy, scaled predators leapfrogging each other to reach the lower rungs of the ladder to success.
However typed, there were some legitimate artists and designers, interspersed with leeches and, for the most part, no-talent hangers-on. Some had genius, some had style, but most had their claws bared in one form or another in an industry that chewed up wannabes and spit them on dirty sidewalks to be tread upon by the uncaring hordes.
Speaking of which, I"d managed to secure my brother-in-law"s family home, Cortland House in Mystick Falls as the venue for the Dominique DeLong Memorial Vintage Fashion Show for charity. Hordes would attend that, too, just to get a look at Dominique"s things, not to mention getting inside the gaudy Vancortland palace, which, to be fair, my sister"s husband hated, though that"s where he was brought up.
Kyle pulled all the right strings so that Dom"s vintage collection fashion show would be advertised in the news tomorrow, along with all the gory details of her death.
It seemed irreverent, but Dom herself had said she wanted it done while she was still news. So I went ahead and set it up.
I sighed and looked around, feeling like I"d become one of them.
To think that someone in this room might have killed Dom for money, or sport, or for a step up that infamous ladder with the razor sharp rungs.
I saw very few signs of sincere grief, except in one poor soul weeping in the guest bath off the foyer. "Can I get you a gla.s.s of water or something stronger?" I asked.
"Oh!" She wiped her eyes with a tissue as if she shouldn"t have been caught there. "No, thank you. I just . . . miss her. We talked, her and I, about everything."
"I"m sorry," I said, extending my hand. "I should introduce myself. Maddie Cutler. I"m a friend of Dom"s."
The grief-stricken woman"s eyes widened and she curtseyed. "Ms. Cutler, I"m Ms. DeLong"s personal maid, Kerri O"Day, and I"ll be at your service while you"re here. They"ve given you her room, you see. It"s not my place to grieve openly so I apologize."
"Well, Kerri, I find it refreshing to see someone other than her son and I grieving. Feel free to let your feelings show. I respect you for them. Do you think that you might be up to answering some questions about Ms. DeLong later?"
The freckle-faced girl curtseyed again. "Thank you, Ms. Cutler. Of course."
I hooked my arm through hers. "Don"t ruin your knees on my account with curtseys. I"ve never had a maid in my life. No need to wait on me. Think of me as a friend. We have something in common, our friendship with Dom."
Kerri looked around as if someone might have heard, and when no one pounced, she nodded.
"Are there any other friends of Dominique"s here?"
Kerri leaned close. "In name or in truth?"
"People who really cared about her."
"Phoebe and Mr. Kyle care, as you said. Higgins, in his own way. Not many, miss."
"Mad. Call me Mad or Maddie."
"You shouldn"t be seen with me, miss," she whispered.
I watched her open a door that I presumed led to the service stairs.
Kerri had confirmed my suspicions. People were here to gossip or rub elbows with the stars and probably for food and champagne. Indeed, some acted like this was a celebration, instead of a time when condolences and consolation were called for.
The person or persons, however, who most interested me, were the one or two who might be here to make sure that Dominique DeLong was really dead.
First in line in the making-sure department, Ursula Uxbridge, Dominique"s understudy, held court dressed to be seen in a frothy black Oscar de la Renta paired with shiny red Casadei heels. Overdress too much?
I had managed to change in the downstairs powder room from the red suit into a little black dress a la Sabrina by Givenchy with racy David Evans platform sling-backs. I managed to grab a chatelaine finger purse with a lipstick in it before Higgins took our bags upstairs.
I caught Ursula alone and spoke to her before introducing myself. "Do you think that Dominique will actually be missed?" I asked.
A sly one, Ursula hesitated long enough to mentally calculate her answer while she a.s.sessed whether I could move her career forward or not. If she decided not, her answer wouldn"t matter at all, and we both knew it.
"Dominique will be a hard act to follow," Ursula said diplomatically. "But I"ll do my best to live up to her talent and make her proud."
It was all I could do not to applaud. As for grief, that never entered her shrewd expression. "Well played," I said, clinking champagne gla.s.ses with her, and I walked away.
I worked the room while some of the men and women in blue stood on the sidelines with full plates, adding suspects to their lists. Others openly questioned the guests.
Nick ignored his FBI buds for the wannabe models, or actresses, or both, all of them drooling over him. I figured it happened all the time when he was on a.s.signment, him charming a bevy of babes so they"d spill national secrets, or so I"d always imagined.
Didn"t mean I had to like it. I shouldn"t be jealous, though. He was simply grilling them in his own hunkalicious way.
We were free agents after all, on or off. Didn"t mean he had to flaunt it.
Afraid I"d go for some cat"s throat, I went to sit beside Kyle on the sofa.
Considering the size of the crowd who were supposed to be offering their sympathies, him sitting alone with Eve was nothing short of narcissism on the part of his visitors.
Eve leaned intimately over Kyle toward me, so he had a good view of her cleavage. "Hey, Mad," she asked, "want me to handle Nick? You know, break it up?"
"Break what up?" I asked, as if I hadn"t noticed.
"Boy toy"s harem, of course. You"re green and you know it. Let me take care of it, please? It"ll be fun."
I gave her a half nod, so I"d only feel half guilty.
She winked. "Don"t worry, it won"t hurt a bit."
Sixteen.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.
-MISS PIGGY "Poor Nick," Kyle said. "What do you think she"ll do to him?"
"G.o.d only knows, but she can"t stand him, so if she cozies up to him, don"t think anything of it."
She got in Nick"s face. "You b.a.s.t.a.r.d," she hissed. "Playing the field, again, in front of everyone, flaunting your infidelity."