So Pretty It Hurts

Chapter 14

Rank sweat was rank sweat, and it might be hard to tell one person’s from another, but a little voice in my head was screaming that it was Jane I’d smelled Sunday night.

Any satisfaction I felt from my eureka moment was trounced by the fact that I was currently alone in a bathroom with her. If she’d purposely shoved me down the stairs, she might not think anything of harming me now, and I could feel my heart starting to pump harder, urging me to hightail it the hell out of the apartment.

“I guess the bottom line is that we’ve all got to do what works for us,” I said as casually as I could manage. I began to ease my way toward the door, hoping she wouldn’t sense my sudden panic. “From one writer to another, though, I’d be careful. People sometimes sue if you make them mad enough about what you’ve written.”

“Thanks for the tip,” she said sarcastically. Please, I thought, as I took a step out of the bathroom, don’t let her tear out the shower rod and try to crack my skull with it—or go for my jugular with the cuticle nippers. Thankfully, she didn’t seem to be reading my mind.

“Look,” she said. “Like I said, I’ve got work to do. . . .”

“Understood,” I said. She led me back to the front door, and as soon as I stepped into the hall, she slammed the door hard behind me.

I felt a rush of relief. I jabbed at the elevator button several times, knowing I wouldn’t feel totally safe until I was out on the street.

On my way to the apartment I’d noticed a small French café just up the street, and now I hurried over there. I found a table, ordered a cappuccino, and took out my composition book. I jotted down my conversation with Jane as word for word as I could remember.

The more I thought about it, the more sense it made that Jane was the one who’d scratched the barn doors. The vandalism had occurred roughly an hour after Jane left my room, an hour after I’d told her that Devon’s saga lacked the kind of layers a story needs to go big-time. Jane probably decided a scary, middle-of-the-night swashbuckler during the weekend Devon died would help make the story more enticing to potential publishers. Hell, it might even help get the whole thing optioned for a movie.

What I didn’t have any sense of was whether Jane had slipped the Lasix into Devon’s water. Interestingly her sweat attack in the apartment had occurred when I’d brought up the diuretic, but on the other hand, some things didn’t add up. If Jane had killed Devon by doctoring her water, it would have been smart to lie low afterward, not create any more drama—and let everyone assume that Devon had died naturally. By tearing through the halls at night and trying to terrify people, Jane had fostered the idea that something sinister was going on at the barn. Which meant to me that she might have been Zorro, but not the murderer.

And yet, if she was nutty enough to run around in the dead of night in a poncho with a rusty farm tool, she might not be rational at all.

I’d been staring off as I mulled all of this over, and for the first time my eyes snagged on something across the room: a guy with longish brown hair, drinking an espresso at one of the small wooden tables. He looked a little like Beau, and suddenly the events from last night, which I’d temporarily sandbagged from entering my brain, all came flooding back. I’d been avoiding Beau, but sooner or later I was going to have to return his calls. He’d made it clear that he wanted to talk things over. I just didn’t know where talking was going to get us. After Devon’s death, I’d brushed away my worries about his trip to Arizona—because it felt so good to share with him all the awful stuff about the weekend—but the problem hadn’t really gone away. The bottom line was that no matter how much time I spent with Beau, he continued to seem elusive and mysterious to me. He was even planning on spending the holidays with his family rather than me. That didn’t seem like a man who was fully committed.

I checked my watch. As I’d determined earlier, it was just a short walk to First Models, and this seemed like as good a time as any to ambush Christian with a visit. But before I headed over there, I decided to phone Beau. I just couldn’t bear going any longer without confronting the situation.

No one was sitting close to me in the café, so I took out my BlackBerry and made the call. I didn’t hear any background noise when he answered, which suggested he was still at home rather than at his studio.

“Hi, it’s me,” I said, not knowing how else to begin.

“Where are you, anyway?”

“SoHo.”

“So you’re not home, after all.”

“What do you mean?”

“I dropped by your place about fifteen minutes ago. The doorman said you’d gone out, but I thought you might have bribed him into saying that if I came by. I suspected you were really up in your apartment stewing.”

“Stewing? That expression kind of implies I’m doing a slow boil over something unnecessarily.”

“No. I was just acknowledging that you’re obviously pissed. But to just go incommunicado makes me think you’re making a lot more of this than you should be.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Look, Bailey, I can totally understand why it would tick you off royally to hear a phone message like that. But that girl means nothing to me. It’s not an issue for us.”

“But she meant something once, didn’t she?”

“What?” He’d sounded annoyed when he blurted out the word, but then his voice softened. “We need to talk face-to-face, Bailey. This isn’t something we should be dealing with over the phone.”

“Okay.” I said. “When?”

“How about tonight then? At around eight?”

“That should be fine. If for any reason I’m going to be late, I’ll let you know.”

“What’s happening with your work situation? Did you find out who’s trying to sabotage you?”

“Nothing yet. But I’m turning over every stone.”

“Okay, well, we can talk more about it when I see you,” Beau said.

We signed off, polite toward each other, but hardly gushing.

And yet it seemed, I realized, as if Beau truly wanted to work things out. I felt a momentary easing of my anxiety, like the relief you feel when you run a hand you’ve just burned under a stream of cold water. Good for the moment but most of the time it doesn’t last.

I paid the check, took a deep breath, and headed for First Models. The agency turned out to be in a sleek ten-story building that also housed an ad agency and some other random businesses. When I boarded the elevator, an insanely tall platinum-blond girl, who had to be a model, followed me inside. She was carrying a huge silver tote bag and in her right hand an itty-bitty Chihuahua puppy. She cooed at it a couple of times, and in response the dog flicked his tongue at her lips. It made me think of what Whitney had said about Devon. She’d wanted a baby for the same reason she’d wanted a dog: for the unconditional love it guaranteed.

The blond disembarked with me on four, where the elevator opened directly onto a small reception area. A receptionist sat at a desk, leafing through a copy of W magazine. To the left of the desk was a conference room with the door open. A woman was snapping pictures with a small camera of a gangly, red-haired girl who looked like she’d come directly from the Port Authority after a twenty-four-hour bus ride from the Midwest.

The blond model nodded at the receptionist, walked toward the door at the far side of the room, and swung it open. Before she closed it, I caught a glimpse of the nerve center of the agency: a large, loftlike room with several separate sections of workstations, about twenty desks altogether. One entire wall was papered with headshots. There were a bunch of people working in there, but I didn’t see Christian.

“May I help you?” the receptionist asked. She ran her eyes down my five-foot-six frame with a look that seemed to say, “Wait, you don’t think you could be a model, do you?”

“I’m here to see Christian,” I told her. “My name’s Bailey Weggins.” I glanced off to the right then, as if I was done talking and there was no reason for her to inquire, “Is he expecting you?” It was a trick I’d learned from an old reporter I’d worked with: when you don’t want someone to ask a question, indicate by your body language that you’ve said everything necessary.

It worked.

“Just a minute,” she told me and punched in a number on her phone. She announced my presence to Christian and then listened, scrunching her mouth up. After a moment she said, “Okay,” and set the phone back in its cradle.

“He said that unfortunately he’s working out a campaign for one of his girls right now, and he can’t meet with you,” she said. “But he’s got your number, and he’ll give you a call later.”

“Actually, I can wait,” I said, walking toward a cowhide-covered bench. “I have plenty of time.”

As I took a seat, she flashed me a look that was part annoyance, part uncertainty, as if she’d just stepped in gum and wasn’t sure how to get it off her shoe.

“That’s not such a good idea,” she said finally. “It’s open call day. There’s gonna be lot of girls here.”

“I’ll stay out of the way, I promise,” I said.

This time I was granted a big sigh. She stood up from her desk and, after opening the door to the main room just wide enough for her to enter, slipped inside. While I hung in the reception area, the redhead was escorted to the elevator by the woman who’d taken her pictures. It appeared she hadn’t received much encouragement because as she waited for the elevator in her stained cropped jacket, her lower lip was trembling and she looked close to tears.

Two minutes later the receptionist reemerged from the nerve center with Christian right behind her. He was dressed in black jeans and a black, supertight V-neck sweater, which revealed a chest that seemed as smooth and polished as candle wax. He glanced at me and then toward the now-empty conference room.

“Why don’t we go in there,” he said curtly and led the way.

Once we were inside, I noticed another door to the big room, this one partly open, and I had the chance to take a better peek. The people inside, mostly model bookers I assumed, tapped at their computers or spoke quietly into their phone headsets. I’d been expecting a place that looked and sounded as crazy as an office of Wall Street bond traders, with bookers shouting out the orders they’d just taken—like “I’ve got Becca on the twenty-eighth for CoverGirl. Shooting in Cabo”—but it was far more subdued than that. Christian quickly closed the doors to both the reception area and the booking room and then strode back to the table.

“I can’t believe you just came barging into where I work,” he said, all pissy.

“I did try to make contact by phone,” I told him. “But I never heard back from you.”

“Has it ever occurred to you that some people may not want to be included in one of your gruesome Buzz magazine stories? We’re not all media whores, you know.”

“It’s really not a media thing I’m pursuing at the moment. I’m concerned about Devon’s death, and I’m looking for answers.”

“Oh, are you all up in arms because I told you she didn’t have an eating disorder? I’ll be perfectly honest with you. I didn’t know she was having trouble again. I mean, she looked a little thinner to me, but I thought she’d just been working too hard—doing the album.”

“No, that’s not where I’m going. I think someone was trying to make her situation worse.”

He stared at me for a moment with his deep brown eyes.

“Oh, I see,” he said after a moment, arching his back and tapping his long slim fingers on his chest. “This is the part where you try to accuse the modeling agency of pressuring her to keep her weight down. We’re such evil people, aren’t we? I’ve got news for you. Though women say they want to look at real women in ads, they’re total liars.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not where I’m going either. Devon’s situation was probably aggravated by certain factors. One of them was ipecac. I saw a bottle of it in her bathroom the night she died, but someone removed it before the police arrived. Do you know anything about that?”

“I certainly know what it is. We’ve had girls who used it. But I had no idea Devon was one of them.”

“What about diuretics?”

“Are you asking if I know what those are, sweetheart?”

“I want to know if she was taking them. Do you know if she ever had a prescription for one called Lasix?”

“Not to my knowledge, no.”

“Did you ever see her crushing any kind of pills in her water bottle?”

“Good God, no. I can’t imagine Devon wanting anything to interfere with her precious water. She should have been entitled to stock in the company that produces Fiji water.”

“She was drinking a lot of bottled water last weekend and leaving half open bottles around. Did you ever see anyone go near one of them?”

His eyes widened.

“Oh, my. It sounds like you’re suggesting someone tampered with the water.”

“Possibly.”

“No. I never saw anyone else holding a water bottle. Other than Jane, of course. As Devon’s sherpa, she was always taking things to her master, including water bottles.” He paused and held a hand to his chest. “You don’t think Jane tampered with the water, do you?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“Jane resented the hell out of Devon. Devon was everything Jane wasn’t. I kept telling Devon to get rid of that girl, but she felt lucky that Jane hadn’t quit like everyone else. She held the world record at about nine months.”

“Speaking of nine months, you knew, of course, that Devon was pregnant last year.”

“Who told you that?” he asked, his tone indicating that it was the truth but that he was surprised I knew.

“I saw pictures of her last November. But if she’d carried to term, wouldn’t it have hurt her modeling career?”

“To some degree, yes, and I wasn’t overjoyed when she told me she was trying,” he said. “But I’m sure she would have rebounded quickly. Girls like Devon gain about a pound and a half during their pregnancies and look normal again in two weeks. And besides, there would have been no way to talk her out of it. Devon wanted a baby.”

“Why, do you think?”

He did a little pose before speaking, lifting a shoulder and pursing his lips. “She was lonely. Being a supermodel looks like oodles of fun, but it can be a solitary existence when you’re not actually working. You travel all the time, and you never know who your real friends are. And Devon had never had much luck with men. She picked bad boys who liked to take machetes to their hotel rooms and eventually cheat on her. You know that expression, don’t you? ‘Show me a beautiful woman, and I’ll show you a man who’s tired of fucking her’? That seemed to fit Devon to a T.”

“If she wanted a baby so badly, why not try again?”

“She probably didn’t want to go through it all again. It was just too much work.”

“Did she have morning sickness or something?”

“No, I mean before that. All the—” He caught himself and clamped his mouth shut.

“Wait, are you saying Devon had fertility issues?” I urged. Thornwell had mentioned a clinic but I’d assumed Devon had used one for artificial insemination.

“I really shouldn’t say. I’ve said too much all ready.”

“Look, Christian, I don’t have any prurient interest here. I’m not a gossip columnist. I’m just trying to figure out if someone murdered Devon.”

“Murdered? You can’t be serious.”

“It’s a possibility. And though I don’t think her pregnancy is connected, I want to investigate every angle. Help me out here.”

He let out an exaggerated sigh.

“Yes, she had some fertility issues,” he admitted. “To quote Gone with the Wind, ‘I don’t know nothin’ about birthin’ babies,’ but something wasn’t working perfectly down there. She got some kind of special treatment, and after a few months, voilà. I don’t know what the treatment involved, but there was one month where she was too bloated to work. She ballooned to a size six or something.”

Sounded like she might have gone through in vitro. The drugs, I’d heard, could cause lots of swelling.

“Thank you,” I said. “That information may prove useful.”

“Speaking of useful, I really do have work to do. Do you mind letting me get back to it?”

“Of course. How are things going here, by the way? Devon’s death must be a blow to the agency.”

“It is,” he said. “But we have lots of fabulous girls.”

“I heard, by the way, that Devon had some issues with the agency lately—that she wanted Cap to take them up with Barbara Dern.”

I’d dropped it like a bomb in his lap, and I saw a breath catch in his chest.

“That is sooo not true.”

“But isn’t that why Devon was avoiding you last weekend? That she was miffed about something to do with the agency.”

He let out a little shriek. “I knew I should never have spoken to you,” he exclaimed. “Please leave now.”

He swiveled his body around dramatically in the chair and marched out of the room into the reception area, expecting me to follow. Not taking any chances, he punched the elevator for me, and before long I was out on my ass, just like all the girls who’d been deemed too thick in the thighs or chubby in the cheeks for First Models.

Now what? I thought as I left the building. I’d gleaned a few insights from talking to Jane and Christian, but I hadn’t come any closer to learning what I needed to know. I placed another call to Tommy and also left a message for Scott at his office. It was time to touch base with him again.

Back home, I cracked open my composition book once more. I scribbled down notes from my conversation with Christian and then reviewed the other notes I’d taken so far. Then I summed up what I had so far:

• Cap was suffering from lupus, which supposedly meant he couldn’t get it up and thus wasn’t able to have an affair with Devon. Since he wasn’t a spurned, angry, or jealous lover, it supposedly took away his motive. And Whitney’s too. But Cap might have another motive.

• Jane had most likely pushed me down the stairs—accidentally or not. But did that make her the murderer? Jane was also writing a tell-all book about Devon. It seemed like she might have lied about seeing Devon and Cap kissing to add more sizzle to the story. But would the need for sizzle make her want to kill Devon?

• According to Tory, Tommy had gone missing in action the night Devon had died. Had he dropped by Devon’s room? If so, why not summon help for her?

• Tory was hankering to work with Cap. Had she decided to eliminate Devon so he’d need to add another client?

• And then there was Christian. Despite his assurances that everything was peachy keen between Devon and him, she gave him the cold shoulder last weekend. Was Devon about to make trouble for Christian at the agency?

Regardless of the information I’d gathered, I still had no clue who had doctored Devon’s water. Maybe, I realized, I should work backward and focus instead on who had persuaded Devon’s mother to lie about me. If I learned that, I would probably know who the murderer was.

I picked up my phone and called Jessie.

“I was two seconds away from calling you,” Jessie said. “You doing okay?”

“I’ve been better. Anything up?”

“I’ve tried to hang near Nash’s office as much as possible, but I haven’t picked up anything. I did find out, though, where the funeral is.” She gave me the name of a church in Pine Grove and said it was scheduled for one o’clock on Saturday.

“Thanks for the info,” I said. “I bet by now the whole office has heard about my sorry little plight.”

“Yeah—you know what it’s like here. People know when you have a rash on your ass. But you’ll be happy to learn most people are greeting it with plenty of skepticism. They just don’t see you doing something like that.”

“Unfortunately they don’t have any clout in the matter.”

We chatted for a couple of more minutes, and then signed off, with Jessie promising to call if she learned anything else of value.

For the next hour I researched the houseguests I hadn’t yet Googled, hoping that some little detail would pop up and point to a motive. I found nothing online at all about Jane and only a couple of tiny, meaningless references to Tory. There turned out to be plenty of stuff on Tommy—photos of him flipping the bird at paparazzi, mug shots from his two DWIs, etc.—but nothing that shed light on the case.

Though Richard certainly didn’t appear to have motive, I needed to check him out regardless. There was a ton of stuff online by him and about him. I skimmed the most recent material for now, but didn’t find anything noteworthy.

I also searched for Scott. The comment my Buzz coworker Thornwell had made—about wanting to confirm a naughty piece of gossip about the music mogul—had been nagging at me. Maybe the guy had a real dark side. Perhaps Devon had stumbled onto ugly secrets about him while they were recording her album, and he knew it. He could have built the house party around her just to have an opportunity to kill her. If he did have a hidden life and weird sexual predilections, no one had squealed on him up until this point. All the press on him focused on what a genius he was in the music business.

I leaned back in the desk chair of my office and replayed Devon’s words to Cap: “You’ve got to tell her.” Cap had insisted that the woman Devon was referring to was Barbara Dern, head of First Models. It would be good to know exactly what the head of the modeling agency might need to know, especially about a booker. What could a booker do that would make a model fit to be tied? For a second I considered calling my old boss at Gloss, Cat Jones, but she didn’t deal with models directly.

Then another thought wormed its way into my mind. Chris Wickersham. He was the actor I’d had an on-again, off-again fling with before starting a steady relationship with Beau. He’d worked as a model before his big break in TV. Talking to him could shed light on the subject.

It could also create trouble for me with Beau. But at the moment I didn’t give a damn.