Slugfest

Fifty-eight

“Gee, Emma, we’re going north, not south. Get in the car.” She did as she was told. We crawled down to the on-ramp and got there just in time to see Lucy’s silk scarf fluttering in the breeze and ultimately flying away like a giant bird.

“You owe me big-time.”

“That was a five-dollar purchased-on-the-street-from-a-Senegalese-guy scarf and you know it.”

Lucy and J. C. were an impromptu tag team, explaining to Emma that no matter what her father had done, she should at least hear him out. I didn’t know if it was working on her, but the brainwashing was getting to me.

“Okay,” I said. “I know you both have Emma’s best interests at heart, but she’s a big girl. Apart from the fact that she did just run into traffic—which is a major no-no at any age, by the way—she’s a grown woman. She knows adults make mistakes. She’s even made a few herself recently. If he can forgive her, maybe she can forgive him. Maybe they can patch things up, but it’s up to them, not us. So, lay off.”

“I’m sorry,” Emma said. “Really. I’ve never met women like you before. You’re amazing. You’re so normal.”

We rode in silence for the rest of the way, until we reached airport arrivals. When we pulled up to an attractive, older man with a thick mustache and longish gray hair Emma burst into tears. She jumped out of the car and ran to hug him.

“I can definitely see the appeal,” Lucy said, watching the reunion from inside the Jeep. “We still need to confirm the private plane business, but I hope she tells him how amazing we are. The normal part will be harder to sell.”

J. C. leaned forward from the backseat. “I don’t disagree with you, dear.”

Wrentham and Emma squeezed into the backseat and we resumed the drive to Jean Moffitt’s. The iron gates guarding her home opened automatically, revealing a small table manned by uniformed staff to welcome guests.

“I think I own that jacket,” Lucy said, looking at a parking attendant.

“You do. I just tried it on and it made me look like a busboy. That’s why I borrowed this one instead.”

“Please don’t tie that one to a tree. I didn’t pay for it myself, but it would have been very expensive if I had.”

Valet parking gave me a ticket and a map of the gardens and grounds. An official greeter, also in black pants and a white jacket, looked for our names on his clipboard. I was listed with two guests, but Lucy exercised some of her famous charm and it didn’t matter that I showed up with four. Wrentham, Emma, and J. C. showed them IDs, and they took our names.

“Has a Mr. Stancik arrived?” I asked.

Another quick perusal of the guest list. “I don’t see him on my list—oh, wait, there he is. A last-minute addition. He hasn’t arrived yet, madam.”

I asked about Reiger and Shepard, and they were both in attendance. Our group walked a few steps onto the terrace and we were surrounded by offers of food and drink.

“We are perfectly safe,” I said. “This is a huge party. All we have to do now is stick together and smoke out Mr. Rose. The police are on their way. Just don’t go off anywhere on your own.” I scanned the crowd for familiar faces. Turning around, I realized J. C. and I were already on our own. Lucy had followed a tray of hors d’oeuvres to a massive buffet overlooking a large pond. Emma and her father had disappeared.

“You did tell them we were perfectly safe,” J. C. said.

“And they listened to me? I was trying to make them feel better. We’re on a ninety-acre estate. Someone could die here and not be found for years.”

J. C. promised to stick close and we set out to find Kristi Reynolds, who might lead us to Scott Reiger, who I’d recognize but J. C. wouldn’t. “Look for a salmon-colored shirt,” I said, “he’s been wearing them all week. It has his company name on the breast pocket, SlugFest.”

Guests spilled over from the sunrooms to the terraces to at least three different levels of the property. The area was almost as crowded as the convention center had been. Spotlights surrounded what the map called the Great Pond, and their reflections glittered in the water like the phosphorescence you sometimes see on the beaches in the Caribbean.

“Ms. Holliday.” It was Jensen. “Mrs. Moffitt would like to welcome you and your guest personally.” I had a feeling he’d said that two hundred and fifty times that evening, but I didn’t care—he made it sound genuine and it was classy. He led us through a gaggle of people clustered around Mrs. M.’s chair, and we shook the papery hand and exchanged a few generic pleasantries.

“Tell me about your guest. Do we have the honor of meeting the famous artist herself?” J. C. did look artsy in her gussied-up sweat suit. I said no and left her to explain who she was. I took my drink to the fringes of the terrace, looking for the SlugFest man and the Bambi-no couple, when I felt something squarish and hard pressing into my back. I stiffened.

“Okay, where’s your badge?” Rolanda Knox playfully jabbed me a second time with her cell phone.

“That’s hysterical. You’re lucky I didn’t swing around and knock you off this terrace.”

“Are you surprised?” She entwined two fingers on her right hand. “Mrs. M. and I are like this. It’s my third year.”

I hadn’t expected to see Rolanda at the party but I wasn’t unhappy about it. “I’m glad you’re here. They’re here,” I said.

“Who—poltergeists?”

“All of them. The vandals, the blackmailers, the killers.”

“You left out the cyborgs, the Visigoths, and the Sharks and the Jets.”

“They may be here, too, I’ll have to get back to you on them. I just arrived.”

I gave Rolanda the shorthand version of the previous three hours and told her to keep her eyes peeled for Stancik and Labidou, who should have already been there. Off to one side I saw Scott Reiger and Kristi Reynolds locked in conversation. If Rolanda and I hadn’t heard them going at it the previous night, we might have thought they were getting on, but we’d heard the vicious things she could say with a smile. Lucy swung by with two glasses of something.

“Hello, hello. Take this. Sorry, I would have brought three if I had known.” She looked up into Rolanda’s face and the breezy demeanor evaporated.

“It’s okay,” Rolanda said. “You don’t need a badge for this party.”

“We’re watching Scott Reiger,” I said. “He’s one of the two guys I think could be our man. Out of nowhere he comes up with a perfect pest repellent? Not a scientist—not even a gardener. Remarkable.”

“Two years ago that sleazebag was hawking fat-burner pills eventually banned by the FDA,” Rolanda said.

“How do you know?”

“I overheard one of those girls in the ugly pink shirts. She also told her friend that Reiger asked her if she wanted to come into the convention center after hours to make a few extra bucks.”

“Sex?” Lucy asked.

“That’s what the kid thought, but Reiger said it was something else. She thought it sounded fishy, so she passed.”

Two people had pushed the cart that we thought had held Garland’s body. Was Reiger in on it with Kristi? One of his employees? Or was it Shepard and his wife? The long-suffering Lorraine?

“Is Kristi the one with the fake tan? What a diva,” Lucy said. “I saw her in the powder room. She had way more stuff in her arsenal than I do and that’s saying something. Most of it was still in boxes, too. Who tries new makeup at a party?”

Someone who just lost her makeup bag?

“Was she with anyone?”

“No, but she was yakking on the phone. To a man, I’d guess. I overheard her say the curse was over. She was laughing. I assumed she was talking about her period. My older sister used to call it that as a joke, I think.”

I didn’t know about Kristi’s cycle but I thought she meant the Javits Curse; and the only way she could possibly know it was over was if she had orchestrated it.