So Pretty It Hurts

Chapter 13

It actually felt good to be outside because the cold air was like a compress against my red-hot cheeks. As I hurried toward the subway, Beau returned my call. I blurted out the story to him.

“Bailey, this is all going to work out,” he said reassuringly. “They can’t possibly end up buying this story.”

“But right now it’s my word against Devon’s mother’s, and they seem to have no confidence in my word.”

“Can you think of anything you said to this woman that she might have misconstrued?”

“But that’s the point, I never spoke to her. She’s making the whole thing up.”

“Look, I want to see you as soon as possible, but I’ve got six people showing up at my studio any minute. What if we meet at my place at about ten?”

“That would be great. I guess I’ll just go home first and try not to throw myself off my terrace.”

“I’ve got an idea,” he said after a pause. “Do you have my key with you? You can go straight to my place. There’s food in the fridge, and you can make yourself dinner.”

“Uhh, sure. I’d love that. Thanks.”

“You know where the wine is. Just open a bottle. I’ll call you right before I leave.”

For some reason just talking to Beau had eased my misery a little. Plus, I felt a quick giddy rush from his suggestion that I let myself into his place. A few weeks ago we had agreed to exchange keys to each other’s apartments just in case one of us arrived before the other, but as of yet there had never been a time when it was necessary. Encouraging me to go to his pad alone tonight seemed to nudge our relationship forward a little.

As I hurried to the subway, I called Jessie and filled her in on what I hadn’t been able to share in the office.

“I can’t effing believe this,” she whispered. “What are you gonna do?”

“Try to get to the bottom of it. I don’t want to put you in the middle or jeopardize your situation, but will you keep me posted if you hear anything?”

“Of course.”

“And use your cell to call me, not your office line. You don’t want them to know you’ve been talking to me.”

Twenty-five minutes later, I was turning the key in the lock on Beau’s front door. It felt positively weird to be entering his place by myself. As I opened the door, I caught traces of the exotic, musky fragrance Beau wore and the lingering scent of wood smoke from the fire the night before. I flipped on a light, pulled off my coat and boots, and took a couple of deep breaths, trying to chase away the feeling of doom.

In the kitchen I rummaged through the fridge and turned up a few ingredients for a salad. I threw them into a bowl, made a vinaigrette dressing, and then opened a bottle of wine. It was simple fare, but I didn’t need to think too hard. I brought my plate and wineglass into the living room, set them on the coffee table, and after grabbing my composition notebook and a pencil, plopped onto the floor with my legs spread along the length of the table.

My mind had been racing since I left Nash’s office, trying to grasp what was going on, but my thoughts had all been a terrible jumble. Now, in the warm solitude of Beau’s tenth-floor apartment, with the city sounds so muffled I could hardly hear them, I finally had the chance to try to sort out the mess.

From my vantage point, there were a couple of reasons that Sherrie Barr might tell people I’d been trying to extort money from her. One, she was hoping she’d pocket some dough from it. Perhaps in a drunken stupor she’d convinced herself that if she claimed someone on the Buzz staff was harassing her, management would turn over cash to shut her up. But that didn’t explain how she had my phone number.

I decided the more likely scenario was that someone had convinced Sherrie to do it in order to create trouble for me. It would have to be someone who had sway over Sherrie and/or was offering her big bucks to do it.

If so, why? Because I was digging deeper into Devon’s death and looking aggressively for answers?

I set down my fork and reached for my pencil to make a few notes. Just then Beau’s landline rang from his office, making me jump. I wondered if I ought to pick up in case it was Beau, but I realized that he would have called my cell phone. After four rings the machine picked up, and seconds later, I heard a deep, slightly imperious-sounding voice that I recognized instantly as Beau’s mother. I’d met her only once, at lunch, but it was a voice you couldn’t forget.

“Sweetheart, give me a call later, will you? I’m trying to nail down our Christmas plans. I told your brother and sister we’d discussed the Caribbean, and they’re both game. Your father doesn’t care where we go, as long as it’s warm. But do let me know for sure. It’s going to be hard to find a flight as it is.”

Funny, my name hadn’t been raised at all. If Beau’s family hightailed it to some posh Caribbean resort for the holidays, would I be asked to join them? Highly doubtful, it seemed. I should have known. Beau’s mother had been perfectly pleasant to me over lunch, but hardly embracing. I had the feeling she didn’t like the idea of Beau with any girl, but something about me particularly set her off. I figured she considered that my job reporting celebrity crime was just a few notches above doing lap dances at Scores.

What would I do for the holidays if Beau took off for a hot spot like St. Kitts or Jamaica? My mother had called two weeks ago and announced that she’d been invited to spend Christmas week in Mexico—in San Miguel de Allende—with a retired professor she’d once taught with. Figuring I might want to be with Beau, she’d asked if I’d mind. I’d given her my blessing, assuming I would be hanging with my new boyfriend.

I took a swig of wine and returned my gaze to my notebook, trying to concentrate on Sherrie Barr. Damn, I thought. Why did I have to overhear that call?

Two minutes later the phone rang again. Great, I thought. Maybe it was his mother again, calling back to remind him to take his Flintstone vitamins or floss his teeth. But it was a different female voice: flirty and fun—and with a British accent.

“Hello, Beau, it’s Abigail,” she said. “I’ve been back from Turkey for about a month, and it’s taken me this long to clean the grime from under my nails. My thesis is done, and I’m coming to New York for some holiday shopping. I’d love to see you. Can you give me a call?”

My heart was in my throat as she rattled off a UK number.

“Oh, André sends his best, by the way,” she added. “I bumped into him in London recently. You remember him, right? He was the German student who stayed in the room next to ours.”

Room next to ours? If my legs had felt liquidy during my phone call from Nash, my entire body now seemed like a big floppy cloth doll. I flung my head back onto the rug and just lay there, unable to even move. In fact, I was barely able to breathe.

I could not freakin’ believe it. When Beau had headed for Turkey, I’d imagined the worse—namely a gorgeous archaeology student, brown as a nut from the sun, totally falling for him. But later, after we reconnected, he shared stories about Aphrodisius, and it had seemed as if the experience there had been almost monastic. Far more dust than lust—and all supervised by an elderly German. He’d even talked about lying in bed a few nights wondering what in hell he was going to do about us. I guess he’d forgotten to point out that while his brain tossed around thoughts of me, there was a chick named Abigail lying butt naked in the crook of his arm.

Summoning every ounce of energy I could find, I propelled myself onto my feet. I carried the dishes into the kitchen, resisting the urge to hurl them at the wall. After pulling on my coat and boots, I departed, slamming the door so hard that one of the pictures hanging in the corridor bounced a couple of times.

As I hunted down a cab, I called my next-door neighbor Landon, and to my relief he was home.

“I’m in one of the worst jams of my life,” I said. “Please tell me you don’t have an apartment full of dinner guests.”

“I have a miserable cold, but I’d love to be of assistance. Come now. Just wear a mask.”

I stopped at my apartment first, dropped off my stuff, and grabbed a bottle of brandy from the cabinet where I kept my paltry liquor supply.

“Don’t hug me, don’t even come close,” Landon croaked after he’d opened the door. He was wearing the kind of comfort clothes people fall back on when they’re sick—saggy-bottomed jeans, an old cream-colored zip-up cardigan. “This thing is nasty.”

“Are you sure you’re up for a visit? You sound awful.”

“Yes, the distraction will do me good. Plus, you sounded horrible yourself. What’s going on?”

He ushered me into his lovely living room and took a seat across from me. Even under the weather, Landon, at nearly seventy, looked great, with his short-cropped silver hair and small trim body. He dabbed a crisp white handkerchief to his nose and then urged me to tell him everything.

I described the weekend at Scott’s, giving him the major highlights, then relayed the troubles with Nash, and ended with the nightmare at Beau’s tonight. Landon dabbed at his nose a few times and cleared his throat.

“Bailey, I think you need an attorney,” he announced.

“An attorney?” I exclaimed. “What am I supposed to do? Sue Beau for alienation of affection?”

“No—an attorney to deal with the situation at Buzz.”

“I don’t have the money to pay some high-priced Manhattan lawyer—they’re like seven hundred dollars an hour. Plus, I might make things worse if I bring in legal counsel at this point. The main thing I need to do is find out why this woman is saying this shit. I think someone put her up to it.”

“Any ideas who?”

“It’s got to be one of the people who was at Scott’s last weekend. The person knows I’m digging around about Devon’s death, and they want me to stop. And they must want to stifle me because there’s something to find, something they want kept under wraps. I’m not certain what that is, but I suspect it’s the fact that this person wanted Devon dead and put the diuretic in her water bottles.”

“But that means this person is dangerous. You’ve got to be careful.”

“Don’t worry, I will.”

Landon let out a little moan. “But you’ve said before that you were going to be careful, and then the next thing I know you’ve got some wild Russian chasing you through a basement with a knife.”

I managed a smile. “In this instance I have no choice but to proceed on my tippy toes. That’s the only way to smoke out the killer, and besides, I can’t let Nash find out I’m poking around after he told me not to.”

I untucked my legs from under me and strolled over to the antique cabinet where I’d set the brandy bottle.

“I’m having another splash—are you sure you don’t want one?” I asked. “Or should I make you a hot toddy?”

“Maybe just a thumb full, thanks,” he said. “Tell me more about Beau? Where do you go from here?”

“Where do we go? I don’t know. Maybe nowhere.”

“But let me play devil’s advocate for a second,” he said. “When Beau left for Turkey, didn’t he tell you that he wasn’t sure if he could make a commitment? It wasn’t till he returned that he said he was ready.”

“That’s right.”

“So technically he did nothing wrong. It’s not like he was cheating on you. And at the time you were involved with that strapping actor, Chris whatever-his-name was. Going to bed with a guy as good-looking as Chris wouldn’t be considered mere infidelity by most people. It’s more along the lines of treason.”

“But I’d been dumped.”

“Like I said—you and Beau were both free agents really.”

“Agreed—technically Beau did nothing wrong. But the whole thing just doesn’t feel right to me. He goes to Turkey and he’s conflicted about what he wants in regards to me, so the way he deals with it is to shag the dig-site slut? It just comes down to the fact that I don’t feel I really know Beau. He’s Beau Regan, International Man of Mystery.”

“Bailey, dear, I wish I could help, but I think you’re just going to have to figure this one out for yourself,” Landon said. “Personally I’d kill for a man of mystery right now. I’d even take a man of misery. We all have to figure out what we can and cannot tolerate.”

I couldn’t blame Landon for not having all the answers, but somehow I’d hoped he would. I slunk back to my apartment feeling absolutely morose. There was a concerned message from Beau on my cell wondering where in the world I was, since he’d found traces of me in the apartment but no explanation as to where I’d disappeared to. Then there was another message, clearly after he’d played his answering machine and realized what I’d heard, saying we needed to talk as soon as possible. I felt no urge to talk it out at the moment, mainly because I didn’t know where I stood in my own mind. Instead I pulled out the desk chair in my tiny home office and began to make a game plan about how I was going to save my ass at work.

One possibility would be to confront Sherrie Barr directly. A search of the white pages online turned up no phone number, but property records indicated she owned a home on Brackton Street in Pine Grove. And yet it was hard to imagine that if I confronted her, she’d spit out the truth. Better to keep focusing on the houseguests; obviously one of them was involved.

I picked up my cell phone and tried Jane again. This time she answered.

“I was hoping we could meet first thing tomorrow,” I said. “I’ve stumbled across some important information that I thought would interest you.”

I figured that bait would entice her regardless of whether she was the killer because she was anxious for dish she could load her book with.

“Can you give me a hint at least?” she said in her typical crabby tone. “You make it sound so clandestine.”

“I think it’s best to do it in person.”

“I have to be at Devon’s apartment all morning tomorrow—I guess you could come by there.”

“What’s going on there?”

“I told her mother I’d take care of some stuff.”

So Jane was in contact with Sherrie. Interesting tidbit. I agreed to meet her at ten and took down the address on Spring Street in SoHo. After I signed off, I left a message on the cell number Tory had given me for Tommy. I tried to sound kind of flirty—which I thought might help guarantee a response. As for Christian, I decided since he also hadn’t returned my call from earlier, I would just show up at his office tomorrow for a chat. I remembered from my Google search that First Models was also in SoHo, so I could combine a trip to Devon’s apartment with a pop-in at the modeling agency.

I changed for bed and crawled under the covers, hoping that being wrung out with fatigue would guarantee I’d fall asleep almost instantly, but I ended up flopping around on the bed like a sturgeon hauled onto the deck of a fishing boat. I’d been dogged by insomnia for nearly two years after my divorce, and I dreaded a recurrence of the problem. But there was no fighting it tonight. My anxiety over my job situation, Beau’s Turkish delight, and the murder of Devon Barr formed a perfect storm that kept sleep at bay for hours.

The next day I apparently looked as bad as I felt, because when Jane opened the door to Devon’s place, her eyes widened.

“Are you okay?” she asked, her voice tinged with morbid curiosity rather than concern. “You’ve got, like, huge circles under your eyes.”

“I’m just a little under the weather,” I said. “I was with a friend who had a cold and I might have caught it.”

“Well, don’t give it to me,” she snapped.

Interestingly, Jane looked better than when I’d last seen her. The snarly expression was gone, her hair appeared to have been tamed with a flatiron, and she had a spring to her step as she led me from the entrance hallway. Devon’s death seemed to be agreeing with her.

“I read your story,” she said as we walked. “The one online. How come you didn’t write up the stuff I told you about Cap and Devon? You sure seemed juiced up when I mentioned it.”

“To be perfectly honest, I haven’t been able to verify it. Cap vehemently denies it.”

“Well, of course he would,” she said defensively. “He’s hardly going to cop to it.”

“And you’re sure you saw it? Could they have just been talking?”

“I saw what I saw,” she said crossly, but there was hardly a ring of truth to her tone.

We were in the middle of the living area now, a huge, open loft space with honey-colored wood floors, white pillars, and an exposed sprinkler system on the ceiling. At the near end was a seating area with an L-shaped sofa, and at the far end, an ultra-modern, spare-looking kitchen featuring all stainless steel appliances. Between the two areas was a sleek metal dining table and eight chairs that looked like they might never have been used. A huge abstract painting took up one wall. And that was about it. The place looked barely inhabited.

“How long had Devon lived here?” I asked.

“About two years. I know—not very homey, is it? But she traveled all the time, so I guess that was her excuse. She has a place in London, and I hear that’s nicer. Not that she ever invited me.”

“So her mother called and asked you to take care of a few things?” I said.

“She says she wants to be sure all the valuables are protected. Yeah, right. She just wants to guarantee that no one else gets their dirty little paws on them. Plus, I’ve got household bills to go through. Cap asked me to stay on the payroll and take care of stuff for a while.”

“So you’re dealing mainly with Cap, not Christian?”

“Well, Cap was her manager,” she said, as if I’d failed the Supermodels 101 course in college.

“I just wondered. I figured there’d be loose ends to tie up with the modeling agency.”

“Cap will take care of that. Devon probably wouldn’t want me talking to Christian anyway.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“I think she’d gone off him lately.”

So Jane was clued into the situation, too. “How do you know?”

Jane shrugged. “She ignored him all weekend.”

“And you have no idea why?”

“Nope. And it doesn’t matter now, anyway.”

“Tell me about Devon’s mother,” I said. “What’s she like, anyway?” I asked it evenly, not taking my eyes off Jane’s face.

“TP type. You know, real trailer park. I don’t know if she actually lives in one—I only met the woman once, when she came to New York—but she had single-wide written all over her. Chain-smoker face like a dried prune.”

“I hear the funeral’s private—are you going?”

“I would soooo love to get out of it, but I have to show. It’s back in her hometown in Pennsylvania. I guess it’s about a two- or three-hour drive from here.”

Of course, you’re going to go, I thought. You’ll be able to gather more grist for your tell-all. I was dying to ask if she knew where the service would be, but I didn’t want her to know I was giving any thought to possibly going out there myself.

“Look,” she said. “Can we hurry this along? I thought you had some top-secret news you wanted to share.”

“There are a couple of things I need to discuss with you.”

“All right, why don’t you come back here?” she said, cocking her head toward the back of the apartment. “We can talk while I keep working.”

I followed Jane, walking past an all-white master bedroom with clothes flung over nearly every inch of the bed and furniture. It was the only part of the apartment that seemed lived-in.

“In here,” Jane said, indicating what appeared to be a second bedroom that had been turned into a fairly basic office. There was a simple desk with a flat-screen computer, several filing cabinets, and cardboard boxes haphazardly strewn near the walls. A small window offered a view of the rooftops of SoHo, studded with shingled water tanks and soot-covered chimneys. Jane plopped down into the chair at the desk and motioned that I should help myself to a white folding chair.

“Soooo?” Jane said impatiently as she tore open a piece of mail.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard the news yet. Devon died of heart failure due to her anorexia.”

“I guess us fatties don’t have it so bad after all. So is that why you came here? To tell me something I already knew?”

“No, but before I share, I wanted to pick your brain. I’m wondering if something might have exacerbated Devon’s condition.”

“Like what?” Jane said. “She saw outtakes from a photo shoot and decided she needed to crash-diet?”

“No, not exactly. Certain drugs can make the condition worse. Remember we talked about the ipecac? Well, diuretics can create problems, too. Did you ever know Devon to take any?”

“Nope.”

“And you never saw anything like that in her bathroom?”

“There were two places that were off-limits to me. Her purse and her bathroom. So if she was stockpiling anything like that, I wouldn’t know.”

“There’s no harm in taking a look in her bathroom now, is there?” I asked.

“Shouldn’t the police be the ones checking it out?”

“Well, they’re over two hours away. And if we find anything, we can turn it over to them. It will help in their investigation.”

“Sure,” Jane said after a moment. She seemed curious suddenly, and I wondered if she was thinking that a discovery could help her book pitch. “Why not? The master bath is off her bedroom.”

I followed her back down the hallway and into the bedroom. While I stepped gingerly around some of the clothes on the floor, Jane kicked stuff away with her feet as if it was trash.

“The cleaning lady comes in later today,” she said. “Sometimes I think Devon liked to leave her as big a mess as possible.”

The bathroom was huge, white, and spa-like, and the entire area behind the sink was wall-to-wall mirror. Just as in the bathroom Devon had used at Scott’s place, there were upended beauty products scattered on the countertop. I glanced down at them, searching for any kind of prescription drugs, but there were only cosmetics, skin care products, and an ashtray full of cigarette butts.

“What about in the medicine chest?” I asked, cocking my head toward it. Jane yanked open the door. It was crowded with more beauty products, but the middle shelf was devoted only to drugs. There was Ambien and Zantac and a couple of bottles of over-the-counter painkillers. No sign of any diuretic. A large white bottle was behind the front row, and delicately I reached behind and plucked it out. Prenatal vitamins, prescribed by a Dr. David Stein on Park Avenue. Date: October of last year. As I glanced toward Jane to check out her reaction, I saw her dark eyes widen in surprise.

“What the hell?” she asked, gawking at the label. I noticed that her face now had a sheen of sweat, as if the space was making her feel overheated. “Oh, wait, don’t some chicks take these to make their hair glossy?”

“Actually Devon was apparently pregnant last year, and then miscarried,” I explained. “I take it you didn’t know.”

“What? No, no, I—I didn’t know,” she sputtered. I could almost see her brain churning.

This might be the moment, I realized, to go for a blunt approach and see what Jane coughed up.

“That tidbit should be of real interest to you, right?” I said. “I mean, it’s a nice little element to add to your book.”

She’d still been staring at the label, but now she spun her head toward me in surprise, her nostrils flared.

“I hope you’re not going to deny it, Jane,” I said. “You’ve been busy for weeks trying to sell a book about Devon.”

She smirked and shrugged a shoulder.

“So what?” she said. “It’s a free world and I can write what I feel like writing—just like you can.” Her tone was a mix of defensiveness and defiance, like a shoplifter who’s convinced she deserved the stolen clothes as much as the rich girl who would have paid for them.

“Except that I’m not making stuff up so that it comes across as more salacious,” I said quietly.

“What are you talking about?” she demanded. I could tell she was getting agitated. The sheen of sweat on her face seemed to be glistening even more now.

“You invented the stuff about Cap and Devon. Probably to make Devon’s life seem juicier.”

“Oh, please,” she said. “You’re just jealous ’cause I beat you to the punch with the book.”

I shifted my position slightly, feeling less than comfortable with her in the contained space of the bathroom. And then I noticed something—the ripe, sour smell of sweat. It was the exact same odor that had been thrown off like a stink bomb by the person who sent me tumbling down the stairs.