High Heels and Homicide

Chapter 1

Maggie Kelly sat at the desk in the corner of the large living room of her Manhattan condo. Sort of sat. She actually was rather supported by her desk, her headset phone jammed down over her uncombed hair, her forehead pressed to the desktop, her arms hanging on either side of the chair. She looked rather like one of those collapsible dolls, one whose button had been pushed.

She spoke into the headset. «Okay, okay. Once more, with feeling. M, as in moronic . A, as in asinine . R, as in… as in—ridiculousl Margaret. It's Margaret . My name is Margaret Kelly, not Missy. How difficult can this be? You'd think my name was Schwarzenegger. What? No! Not Missy Schwarzenegger! Margaret Kelly! Oh, God—what? No ! Don't put me on hold. I've already been on hold three times, and I already know all the words to «It's a Small World.» Don't put me on—oh, hell…»

«Talking to your knees, my dear? There are some, myself not included, of course, who might consider that a tad eccentric. But, then, I know you.»

Maggie pushed herself upright to glare at Alexandre Blake, the Viscount Saint Just of her best-selling historical mystery series and currently known as Alex Blakely, her supposed distant relative and model for her fictional creation. He lived across the hall now, but had never seemed to be able to understand the concept of knocking first before barging in on her.

She liked having him around, now that she'd gotten her mind around the fact that, heck, he was here. But there were times when she wished he was more of an in and out—no, that might sound a little too sexual—a 'tess-constant presence in her life. Okay, that was better. Not great, but better.

«Why are you always barging in here when I'm at my worst?» she asked him, looking down, to see that she'd buttoned her pajama top incorrectly. Nothing new there… including the faded pajama top that had been her favorite since college, or maybe high school. Junior year. She wore it now over ancient sweatpants, the knees and seat of the pajama bottoms having worn through a few years ago.

«Feeling snarly this morning, my dear?» Alex asked, one well-sculpted eyebrow raised Clint Eastwood style. (She'd thought she'd recreated Jim Carrey's expressive eyebrows, but in the flesh, they were definitely Clint's.) The young Clint of the spaghetti westerns. Young and yummy Clint. And she ought to know, because hidden deep in one of the desk drawers was her physical description of the Viscount Saint Just.

There was a lot of the young Clint Eastwood in the Viscount Saint Just—the lean face, the slashes in the cheeks, the long, sleekly muscular frame—along with snippets of younger versions of Sean Connery (voice in those Bond films), Paul Newman (bluer-than-blue eyes), Peter O'Toole (nose), and Val Kilmer (mouth—oh, dear God, yes—Kilmer's mouth in Tombstone : «I'm your huckleberry.»).

Maggie had set out to create the Perfect Regency Era Hero, and she really did do good work, if she did say so herself.

Except for the arrogant part. The self-assured part, and maybe the brilliant-cutting-wit part. She might have gone a little heavy on those, at least she thought so once her fictional Perfect Hero had morphed into a living twenty-first-century man with all his early-nineteenth-century superior male sensibilities intact.

There were moments lately when she wondered if she could mentally incorporate a few more bits of Hugh Grant into the character of Saint Just, who already had a sexy shock of black hair, and then sit back and watch Alex to see if he'd change. Maybe a little something around the eyes—a small air of vulnerability, maybe?

It was a provocative thought, especially as she'd watched Grant in Love Actually late one Saturday night. Just she and her two cats and her burnt microwave popcorn with extra butter. She led such an exciting social life.

But that was beside the point, as was her on-again, off-again romantic interest in the gorgeous, perfect hero standing in front of her, which was currently very, very off .

«I have a good reason to be snarly,» Maggie said, adjusting the headset, the better to muffle the sound of some twit telling her that she could save time by contacting the company on the Internet. «Tried that,» she mumbled.

Alex made a small, circling motion with his right index finger. «Forgive the question, but is there someone on the other end of that?»

«There have been a lot of someones on the other end of the phone in the past…» she began, glancing down at her watch, to see that it was noon, «… the past forty-five minutes. And if I could talk to someone who has English as their first language, I would probably spend the first five minutes just sobbing my thanks into the phone. They call this a help line?» She turned in her chair, began shuffling through the mess on her desk. «Where's my I Love Lou Dobbs button?»

She felt Alex's hands on her shoulders as he slowly spun her around to face him. «Maggie. Concentrate. Tell me what you're doing… attempting to do.»

She swallowed. Nodded. Swallowed again. Pretended not to notice that someone inside the earpiece was now asking her, musically, if she knew the way to San Jose. «Okay. I'm on the phone with the airline. I get flyer miles every time I charge something with my credit card, and I want to cash them in for our flight. It might have been easier if I'd asked one of the agents for a kidney.»

«You didn't do that, did you, Maggie? That's crass.»

She rolled her eyes. «No, I didn't do that, and I know it's crass, as well as a cheap joke. But I'm going nuts here, Alex. I don't understand what they're saying, they don't understand what I'm saying—and I swear to God, nobody understands all the rules. Look,» she said, grabbing a card from her desk. «See this? This is a coupon for a free companion ticket. I buy one, you fly free. I buy two, two fly free. I understand this. This is fairly basic, right?»

Alex took the offered ticket. «Quite a few asterisks leading to several separate bits of barely readable print, aren't there? I do see the small K down at the corner. You've circled it.»

«Right. It's a K . But guess what? I need a U. An U . Whatever. You can have a K , but you can only use a U.»

Alex deposited the ticket on the coffee table. «I think I'm done understanding, thank you,» he said, wiping his hands together.

«Oh, no. No, no, no, you're just getting started . I can use the K if I use a U with it. The second person I talked to told me that. I'm eligible for a K , but not for a U , and I can't use a K without a U —but they sent me a K anyway, because I qualified for that one. If I spend another bazil-lion bucks, I can get a U to go with the K , but by then the K will have expired. Machiavellian in its brilliance, isn't it?»

«American ingenuity at the corporate level. The K did get you to pick up the phone, didn't it?»

«Don't interrupt. I don't actually need the K , or the U . The third gal I talked to told me I have enough flyer miles to go from here to Hawaii and back, and take half a football team with me. Except that there are only about six seats a plane that are available for free miles, so you have to book in advance. We're talking way in advance here, maybe a decade. So I've got about a million free miles I can't use, sucker offers with the wrong letter on them, and the ditz who just put me on hold knows how to pronounce Schwarzenegger, but doesn't know how to spell Margaret. That's it, Alex. We're not going.»

«You're only saying that because you're looking for an excuse not to fly at all. Because you're afraid of flight.»

«Damn straight I am. This whole thing is driving me nuts. Do we fly out of Kennedy for one price or go to Newark for a better price? Or, since we can't leave until after Thanksgiving anyway, do we fly out of Philly? But which is the right choice? Do I go for convenience? Or price? And then, just when I think, okay, out of Philly, the idiot on the phone who told me about the flight says, No, that one's booked, so I start thinking, Okay, maybe God wants me to fly out of Kennedy, maybe he knows something about the Philly flight. Then again, he could know something about the Kennedy flight. But then again, maybe God's just pulling my chain. I could be making a life-or-death decision here, and God's trying to be funny.»

Alex sighed. «Maggie, hang up.»

«Hang up? Are you kidding? I spent twenty minutes online trying to figure out when the hell I'd tried online before and made up a user name and password, because I sure couldn't remember them. Then, once I'd gotten a new password, the damn site wouldn't recognize my credit card number anyway, so I had to call, wait, talk, be put on hold, talk, be put on hold, talk, be put—I am not hanging up until and unless this woman figures out how to spell Margaret!»

«Since you already know how to spell stubborn . Very well,» Alex said, walking over to the credenza and pouring himself a glass of wine, as he had the Regency Era disdain for water. «Then you wouldn't be interested in knowing that thanks to my speaking last week with a representative of the production company, who happened to phone while you were out and I was here, doing nothing in the least nefarious, and after putting forth my personal recommendations on the matter, three airline tickets were delivered just minutes ago to my apartment. I, by the grace or possible cruel joke of God, decided on Philadelphia, by the way, with our return to Kennedy. We depart for Heathrow the Sunday after Thanksgiving, traveling in something called first class. And you Americans vow you aren't class conscious.»

Maggie just sat there, stared at him. «You… it's all… so I'm driving myself nuts for… damn it, Alex, why do you keep doing this to me?»

The man had the nerve to look innocent and the panache to carry it off. «Doing what, my dear?»

«Oh, don't get cute. You know darn well. Stepping in. Taking charge. Never getting ruffled. Always getting what you want. Making me feel like an idiot because I always do things the hard way. And you got three free tickets out of them? I mean, okay, me I can understand. I'm the author. They could certainly spring for a ticket for me. But you and Sterling? How did you finagle that one?»

»Finagle? I'm not familiar with the term, but I'm confident the Viscount Saint Just does not finagle. But, as I am your personal assistant and liaison with the press and Sterling is your spiritual advisor, it was, of course, only logical that we should accompany you.»

«And you're expecting me to swallow this? Oh, wait. The person who called? Female, right?»

«Why, yes. Miss Browning. She had a lovely laugh. Very like the soft tinkling of delicate silver bells tickled by the breeze of a clear spring day.»

«As I'm sure you told her.» Maggie made some sort of low, chuckling sound. «They don't even see you, and they go all gooey and do whatever you want them to do, just the way I planned you. Man, I'm good. But that's manipulative, Alex, do you know that? It's not nice.»

He shrugged, put down the empty wineglass. «In point of fact, it's a woman who doubtless spent the remainder of her day spreading her joy to everyone. It is also, my dear girl, three free first-class plane tickets to England. I believe we are all to be considered winners in the exchange.»

«Okay,» she said, giving up. «I'm the last one to be arguing over saving money. Unless you're actually going to start paying your own way around here, Perfume Man.»

Then she gave herself a swift mental kick because that blow had been below the belt. She knew better, she knew his vulnerabilities, because she'd created him. The Viscount Saint Just placed a lot of his pride on being self-sufficient, in all ways.

«Oh, God, I'm sorry, Alex,» she said quickly. «You've paid back every cent I advanced you when you first… first showed up. And you're paying off the mortgage on your condo. You're an honorable, upstanding—oh boy, I'll grovel later. She's back on the line.»

«Maggie, what are you—?»

Maggie held up a finger, motioning for him to be quiet. «Yes, yes, that's right. Missy Schwarzenegger. Two g's? Oh, right. Two g's. Boy, you're good. Uh-huh. Uh-huh, yes.

That's four round-trip tickets, first class, from Kennedy to Heathrow. And I'd like to add a leg from Heathrow to Oslo, back to Heathrow, and then to Kennedy. Oh, and I'll need two kosher meals and one diabetic meal. Uh-huh. And will there be room for the Way-Bac Machine? Uh-huh, Way-Bac Machine. That's W-a-y- capital B-a-c . No k . God knows we don't want anything with a k in it, right? Uh-huh. It's… it's kind of a… well, it's a necessity for one of the passengers. Uh-huh, my boy Sherman. You'll check? Yes, yes, of course I can hold.»

Feeling better than she had in, oh, at least an hour and twenty minutes, Maggie took off the headset and laid it on the desk. «That ought to keep her busy for a good ten minutes.»

«You are an evil woman, Maggie Kelly,» Alex told her when she grinned at him.

«Uh-huh. Yes. I know,» she said in the same too-sweet voice she'd just used on the phone, then slapped her hands on her thighs and stood up. «Then again, I suddenly feel so much better.»

«How gratifying for you. Who is Sherman? And what's a Way-Bac Machine?»

«Hang in a sec, I need a Popsicle.»

Alex was still standing, waiting for her when she came back from the kitchen, the thin, single-stick diet chocolate Popsicle in her mouth. She spoke around it. «I don't know how I'm going to exist without these while we're in England.»

«Really?» he said as she slowly pulled the thing out of her mouth.

«Hey, addictions are addictions, and I'm addicted to these things. Hardly any calories, and they satisfy my chocolate cravings, as well as give me something to do with my hands, my mouth, now that I don't smoke anymore. I don't know, I guess I'm into oral gratification.»

«Many of us are,» Alex said quietly, and Maggie tried very hard not to look at him.

She aimed herself toward one of the couches, collapsing into the soft cushions before taking a big bite of the Popsicle, the better to disguise its form, she imagined. «Back to the Way-Bac. Didn't you ever watch any of those tapes I bought for Sterling? The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show? It's an American classic. One of the recurring skits is 'Improbable History,' with Professor Hector Peabody and his boy, Sherman. The professor is a dog, see, and he has a boy, and Peabody teaches Sherman about history using the Way-Bac Machine to time travel and—» She stopped, looking at Alex's impassive face. «I'm not getting through, am I?»

Alex shook his head. «Perhaps another time? If I applied myself?»

«No, never mind. You either get this kind of stuff or you don't. And you'd get it, I know you would, if you watched the tapes.»

«I'll put that on my to-do list. In the meantime, are you happy with the travel arrangements? I could have made the departure date Saturday, but that would mean only two days with your parents, and I wouldn't want it to appear that you were in a rush to be away.»

«Yeah, we don't want to appear in a rush,» Maggie said, then sucked on the Popsicle once more, wondering how she was going to get through three entire days playing Happy Families. Since the thought was depressing, she changed the subject. «So, Mr. Transportation Arranger, how long will we be in jolly old England?»

«I'm not quite sure,» Alex said, seating himself on the facing couch. «It's something called an open-ended ticket, I believe. We'll be arriving just after the featured players in the cast and the director, and departing just as the shooting begins, if I understood correctly.»

«Because they don't want the writer getting in the way.

This trip is just flipping me a fish, hoping I'll be dazzled and keep my mouth shut,» Maggie said, nodding. «Long ago I was told that if you sell your book to the movies, take the money and run—never look back. They change everything, and not for the better, either.»

She took one last, large bite, knowing she'd never eaten a Popsicle so quickly, and hoped she wouldn't get an ice cream headache. She just knew she didn't want to watch Alex watching her as she licked and sucked on the thing. Not for another second. «I still can't believe we're going.»

«And if the filming hadn't been so abruptly moved from California to England, we wouldn't be, not with your fear of an earthquake the moment the plane landed. I do agree that everything seems so suddenly rushed, but I look forward to returning to England.»

Maggie closed one eye and lowered her head as she looked at him. «You've never been to England, Alex. I've never been there, so you can't have been there. Until you and Sterling somehow made a break for it out of my imagination, you've never been anywhere.»

«Have you tried to pop us back in, Maggie?» Alex asked, his expression suddenly serious. «Lord knows, these past weeks have been difficult between us.»

Mentally, Maggie was in her bedroom, her head under her pillow. «I… I'm really not ready to discuss that, Alex.»

«And when would you be ready? I had no choice, Maggie. It was a matter of honor. I am obligated, as a gentleman, to protect my own.»

She hopped to her feet. «There you go again. Your own? Since when am I yours? Who asked you to protect me? You… what you did… you—oh, forget it.»

«The man had a choice.»

«The man didn't know he was up against a freaking Scarlet Pimpernel! And do you know what's the worst?

You're not sorry. You don't see that you did anything wrong. A man is dead , Alex.»

«A man who would have ordered you and Sterling and me dead, then gone out to supper with his cohorts. I know. The past is the past, and the incident over and done. Shall we just agree to disagree on this one?»

«We're not debating politics here, Alex. I want… I want you to understand that I made you, and that means I'm at least partially responsible for what you do, even if you are doing this evolving stuff you keep talking about.»

Alex stood up as well, fished his quizzing glass out of his slacks pocket, and slipped the black grosgrain ribbon over his head. «So, I am not responsible for you, but you are responsible for me?»

«Yes… no! Oh, hell, I don't know.» She touched his arm. «I just know I don't want to go on like this. Being so damn polite to each other, dancing around each other, but not really being friends anymore.»

«We were never friends, Maggie,» Alex said, his voice low, intimate. «We were very nearly lovers. What is it the Comte De Bussy-Rabutin said? Oh yes. 'Love comes from blindness, friendship from knowledge.' Perhaps it would be better if we were to become friends first.»

Maggie wet her lips, tried to ignore that her heart had skipped a beat. «Start over, you mean? I don't know… I guess we could try. I mean, you're here. You're definitely here. I don't know if you'll disappear one day, you and Sterling, but for now? You are here…»

«And I've missed you horribly,» Alex said, moving fractionally closer. He lifted a hand to stroke her cheek. «I've missed your smiles, I've missed your laughter, I've missed our occasional forays into that something more we'd begun to explore in each other.»

He was doing it again. Oh, he was good. And, boy, she was easy. «Alex… please, you said we'd start over. This isn't exactly starting over. This is more starting in the middle, and much as I—oh, hell!»

Behind her, she could hear the loud buzz-buzz-buzz from the earpiece of her headset.

She recognized a lucky escape when she saw one, and took it, hurrying over to hit the Talk button on the phone, cutting off the off-the-hook warning.

«I guess I'm not connected anymore,» she said, trying to smile.

Alex smiled, too, and his smile hurt her. «No, we're not, are we? Well, if you'll excuse me, Maggie, I believe I should find my way to the bank, along with some other errands. I want to discuss something called traveling checks, for our trip. You understand.»

«Traveler's checks, Alex, not traveling checks, although, literally, that is what they are,» Maggie said automatically, reaching for the headset again, for the phone had begun to ring. «Takeout pizza for dinner?»

«I'm sure Sterling would enjoy that. I'll have him arrange an order for six o'clock. We could dine in our apartment, in front of the television machine, while I'm being educated in the matter of the Way-Bac Machine.»

«Perfect,» Maggie said, grabbing the headset, then turned her back on him as she hit the Talk button. «Hello? Oh, hi, Steve. Meet you for a late lunch? Ummm… I'm not sure. Where?»

She turned back, to see that Alex was still standing there. She grabbed the mouthpiece, squeezed her hand around it. «It's Steve,» she said, smiling as brightly as she could.

«My regards to the good Left- tenant,» Alex said, and bowed himself out of the apartment before Bernice Toland-James could ask a third time: «Maggie? Is that you?»

«I'm sorry, Bernie.» Maggie collapsed into her desk chair. «I don't know why I did that.»

«Did what? Oh, never mind. Look, I want to come over, okay? I've read the manuscript.»

«And?»

«And I'll bring lunch.»

Uh-oh. Instant panic, insecurity about talent being the curse of every writer. Had her talent disappeared? Had she ever really had any talent? Maybe she'd been faking it for years, and now it had finally caught up with her. «Bernie? What did you think of the book? You have a problem with the book? What's wrong with the book? Nothing's wrong with my book, Bernie. Is it?»

«Give me an hour. I'll be there in an hour.»

As she listened to the dial tone, Maggie considered, then discarded, the idea of collapsing headfirst onto her desk once more. «This day just keeps getting better and better…»