So Pretty It Hurts

Chapter 6

“You need to tell the police about this,” I told Scott. “Something’s not kosher here.”

He sighed. “All right, I’ll tell Collinson when we meet again.” He headed off, with Sandy in tow. When I reached the top of the stairs a minute later, I saw that Devon’s door was partially open and I could hear people moving around in there.

Back in my bedroom I checked out the Buzz Web site. My story was up. I also saw that the statement Scott and Cap had been working on had been released and incorporated.

I filed a brief update for Buzz, saying that Devon’s body was being examined and police were going over her room—other than that, there wasn’t much to say. I’d no sooner hit Send than one of the deputy editors called me on my cell to discuss coverage. She sounded more ornery than usual, probably from having been called into the office on Sunday.

“Why haven’t you included quotes from any of the houseguests?” she demanded.

“I’m keeping it all off the record up here,” I told her.

“What?” she barked.

“No one would give me a direct quote anyway,” I said patiently. “And if I don’t keep things off the record, people will stonewall me. This way I’m getting lots of info for background.”

“But you—”

“I have to go,” I said, cutting her off. For a woman whose greatest professional success up until now had been being called a whore by Snooki, she had a lot of nerve complaining about how I put a story together.

I checked my watch. I was dying to talk to Beau, and now would be a decent time to call him. I tried his cell, but there was no answer. I realized that he might be headed to the airport or already on the plane.

I kicked off my boots, collapsed into the armchair by the window, and propped my feet up on the ottoman. I needed a few moments to clear my head and just think. Devon’s death, regardless of the cause, was unsettling, but that wasn’t all that was bothering me. Like I’d told Jessie, there was something weird going on. Whoever had taken the keys and then pinched the ipecac from Devon’s bathroom had decided that the truth shouldn’t come out. Why?

And then there was the mystery call to extension seven. That continued to bug me.

After a while of trying to chill, I tugged my boots back on and made my way to the great room. There were certain people I was hoping to extract info from, and I figured the group might start to congregate again in anticipation of lunch. In the passageway I saw that the rain had morphed into a light drizzle. It was foggy out, almost steamy, obviously from the effect of the rain hitting the cold snow. I wondered what luck, if any, Scott was having locating a plowman. Or if the police were assisting in this mission.

The only person there turned out to be Richard. He was on the couch reading his iPad, a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses perched midway down his nose. He’d clearly just showered because his hair was still damp around the edges, slicked back on both sides, and he smelled of talc. On the table in front of him was a large glass of tomato juice with a celery stalk sticking out of the top. Still into the Bloodies, it appeared.

“You certainly don’t disappoint, Ms. Weggins,” he announced cockily when he saw me.

“In what regard?” I asked, pouring a cup of coffee.

“Your story is already up on the Buzz Web site. You’ve beaten everyone to the punch.”

“Cap and Scott knew it was being filed. I was straight with them.”

“I’m sure you were. It’s amazing, isn’t it, though? You so often seem to be around when a dead body turns up.”

“I guess I’m just a lucky girl,” I said.

“Whatever the reason, I’d be a little careful if I were you.”

“And why is that?” I asked, taking a seat in an armchair across from him. His provocative banter on the walk yesterday had been fun, but today it seemed slicked with meanness. I wondered if it reflected the number of Bloody Marys he’d consumed so far today.

“The police are always suspicious of too many coincidences,” he said. “Coincidences, you see, have a nasty habit of calling attention to something.”

“Ahh, good point,” I said. “Do you think I might be a psychopathic killer and not even know it?”

“Or just a ruthless opportunist,” he said, faking a smile.

I didn’t like his tone one bit, but I wasn’t going to get all pissy about it. I needed to be on his good side so he’d talk to me.

“Why not file a story yourself? Don’t you have a blog on the Huffington Post or someplace like that?”

“I’ve decided to go the more traditional route on this one. I’ll probably do a more in-depth story for Vanity Fair.”

“I look forward to reading it. How was your interview with the police, by the way?”

“Mercifully brief,” he said. “There was really nothing for me to contribute. I did get the feeling, though, that the police are considering foul play. You saw the body—what do you think?”

“There was no sign of that, from what I could see. Off the record, I’m thinking that her death might be connected to an eating disorder. She wouldn’t be the first model who died from one.”

He stared at me for a moment, not saying anything.

“Well, let’s face it,” he said finally. “The only thing she ever did with her food was rearrange it on her plate. It was like watching someone play three-card monte. One minute the green beans are here, and the next minute they’re over there.”

So Richard had observed that, too. “It might have caught up with her this weekend,” I said.

“Well, she never seemed ill, if that’s what you mean. Bored, yes—unless Tommy was around to lock eyes with—and a tad tipsy last night.”

That was possibly the best example in history of the pot calling the kettle black.

“Do you think there was anything going on between Devon and him?” I asked. “Or was it just for show?” I suddenly remembered something Richard had said at breakfast the day before. “I mean, you mentioned yesterday that you’d heard people scurrying around in the hallway during the night. Maybe they reconnected.”

“Haven’t a clue, since I never opened my door. She did seem to come and go a lot, always disappearing. She may have just been sneaking off for a ciggie all those times. You know how models love to smoke.”

“Do they? I wouldn’t know.”

He shrugged his shoulders irritatedly, as if my cluelessness annoyed him. “You just have to look at the paparazzi shots. Kate Moss is always waving a cigarette.”

He checked his watch suddenly, an obvious gesture of wanting to be done with our conversation. He stuck his reading glasses in the V of his sweater, flipped over the cover of his iPad, and rose to leave. Had I done something to make him so eager to exit?

“You’ll excuse me, won’t you, Bailey? I’ve got to go cancel my dinner plans for tonight.”

“Do you have an update on the road?”

“Our lovely hostess Sandy informs me that a plow is headed this way. But I’d been planning to be back in the city by five, and there’s no way that’s going to happen.”

“One question before you go. Did you, by any chance, call extension seven last night? Just before two thirty?” I was tipping my hand, but I needed to know if he was the caller.

He paused midmovement. By the expression in his red-rimmed eyes, I could tell that the question greatly intrigued him.

“Ahhh, is this an important clue you’re giving me a hint to?”

“Not really a clue of any kind. As you may have heard, Devon called that girl Laura for water during the night. About an hour and a half later the phone rang again, but no one was there. Devon was dead by then.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you. Now if you’ll excuse me.”

What next, I wondered? I needed more answers, but there wasn’t a soul in sight. People were obviously in their rooms, catching up on sleep or praying for the plow to arrive.

When I reached the foyer downstairs, planning to return to my room yet again, I noticed that several rain ponchos had been hung on a row of pegs on the wall. Having viewed the weather only from windows over the past twelve hours, I decided to grab a poncho and head out to the deck.

It looked surreal outside, like a scene from a movie about a planet in a distant galaxy. Fog rose from the ground in patches all through the woods, as if there were smoldering brush fires. It had stopped raining, and the temperature seemed to have dropped again.

I took three steps out onto the deck and jerked in surprise when I spotted Tommy in the far right corner, the same spot where Cap and Devon had stood late Friday night. He was jacketless, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth and a cell phone to his ear. It couldn’t have been a private call because he didn’t bother to lower his voice when he spotted me.

“Fuck it, man,” I heard him say. “I’m not going to do that. So just fuck it.”

The person on the other end must have offered a plea on his or her behalf, because Tommy listened for a bit, his face pinched.

“Like I said, fuck it,” he said finally. “I’ll talk to you later.”

He flicked the cigarette over the rail of the deck and dropped the phone into the pocket of the oversize white shirt he wore above jeans so tight the only thing left to the imagination was genital skin tone.

“Hi,” I said, walking toward him. “You want a poncho? There’s a bunch of them inside.”

“Why would I want a poncho? It stopped raining.”

Okaaay.

“How you doing?” I said, trying again. “This must be pretty upsetting.”

“Ya think?”

I wasn’t sure what to try next. He seemed to be making it clear he didn’t want to talk to me. But then he leaned back against the wet wooden rail of the deck and looked at me intently, as if we were two people who had things to say to each other.

“Devon was my lady for six freakin’ months, you know,” he said. “We weren’t an item anymore, but we were—I don’t know, connected still on some cosmic level.”

“Why did you break up?”

He shrugged. “I got a little distracted on my summer tour, if you know what I mean. That didn’t sit well with her at all. I couldn’t stand the nagging, so I took a powder.”

“And now you’re with Tory?”

“Yeah. For now. My IQ is shrinking just being with that bitch.”

“Any guesses about how Devon died?”

“Nope. She was as fit as a horse as far as I knew.”

That was a stretch, considering she had probably weighed about ninety-five pounds sopping wet.

“I mean, she smoked, she drank,” he added, “but she didn’t do hard drugs, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Was she anorexic or bulimic?”

“A lot of these model chicks are all fucked up about their eating. I brought out a can of Reddiwip once with Tory, just for a little fun, and she practically went insane. I think she thought the calories were gonna be absorbed through her nipples.”

“But what about Devon?” I asked, trying not to let a picture form in my mind of Tory and Tommy in the sack with a bunch of sex props. “Was it more than just counting calories?”

“She never did anything on my watch. But from what I hear, it’d been a problem when she first started out. She was younger then—and she had a shitload of pressure on her. Everybody wanted her—she was the biggest model in the world.”

“Do you know any reason Devon would have been scared this weekend?”

“Scared? What are you talking about?” He stepped closer, and in the harsh light I saw how deep the grooves ran in his skin and the pockmarks from adolescent acne. He had the kind of looks only groupies and models seemed to love.

“I caught her crying in the woods around midday yesterday,” I explained. “She told me she was frightened—but she didn’t say why.”

He shrugged, wrestled a butane lighter and pack of Salems out of his jeans pocket, and fired up another cigarette.

“In case you didn’t notice, Devon was a bit of a mind fucker,” he said, after shooting a razor-thin stream of smoke out of the corner of his mouth. “Maybe she was just playing with you.”

“It didn’t seem that—”

“I can’t help you, then. Like I said, there was still this connection between us, but it’s not like we talked anymore.”

“I had the feeling this weekend that she might want to restart the relationship—she seemed to be flirting with you.”

He snorted, as if I had no clue what I was talking about.

“Didn’t you hear me?” he said. “Devon was a master mind fucker. She liked playing with me, just like she liked playing with everyone else. Why’re you so interested, anyway? Tory said you’re a reporter for one of those tabloid magazines. Shouldn’t you be trying to track down some story about a woman giving birth to wolves?”

“I work for a different type of rag than that.”

“You good at what you do? You look like you’d be good at what you do.” He ran his eyes up and down my body, letting them rest on my poncho. If I wasn’t careful, he was going to suggest we hunt down a squeeze bottle of Hershey’s syrup and spend the afternoon together.

I was thinking it might be just the right moment to take my leave, especially since it had begun to rain again—or make that sleet. Icy slivers of rain were suddenly bearing down on us, stinging my face. As I started to say good-bye, I heard a door nearby bang open. When I turned around, Tory was standing there, wearing only a pale yellow top and black leather leggings. She looked about as friendly as a fer-de-lance.

“You’re standing out here, talking to her?” she screeched.

“I’m having a fucking cigarette,” he snapped.

“But you said you were coming back in five minutes.”

“Why don’t you just chill, Tory.”

“I need you to be with me right now,” she said, her teeth chattering from the cold. “I’m going out of my mind in this place.”

“You’re gonna need Botox if you keep scrunching your face up that way. Why don’t you go back to the room, and I’ll be there in a minute.”

“So you can be with her? You wanna fuck her like you wanted to fuck Devon?”

“How could I want anyone else when you’re so freakin’ brilliant in the sack?”

“I hate you,” she screamed with a hard, fast shake of her head. In the minute she’d been standing outside, her hair had become coated with sleet, turning it into a shiny black helmet. I decided it was about time to extricate myself from this lover’s skirmish, and besides, my feet were now soaked.

Before I could move, Tory turned and stormed back into the barn. Tommy watched the door slam and then moved closer to me, his body dripping wet.

“Why don’t we finish this later,” he said, though I wasn’t sure what exactly we were supposed to finish.

Rather than trail behind them into the foyer and possibly end up in the midst of round two, I descended the short set of wooden steps on the side of the deck and made my way toward the small barn. I pulled the hood of my poncho tighter, since the sleet was practically coming down in sheets now. As I looked up I saw Scott emerge from the direction of the outbuildings. He didn’t look like a happy camper.

“Anything up?” I called out.

“More problems with the damn road. I’ve got a guy out there now, and Ralph is feeling better, so he’s gonna help. The problem is, it’s starting to freeze again. We’ve got a layer of ice forming.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“Nope. Sandy’s putting out lunch now. It should be ready any minute.”

He hurried off, and I fought my way through the sleet, headed back to my room. Detective Ray was holding guard outside Devon’s door, sitting on the old straight-backed chair I’d seen at the desk in her room. The door was closed, and I assumed the crime scene personnel had departed.

“How’s the work going?”

“It’s going,” was all he said.

“Is Detective Collinson still here?”

“He’s returned to town with the coroner.”

Before entering my room, I tapped on Jessie’s door. She had creases on her left cheek that indicated she’d just finished napping.

“Where the heck have you been?” she asked. “You look like you’ve been out reporting on a hurricane.”

“I was just checking out the scene outside.” I relayed the bad news that Scott had told me about the road—and told her there was a chance that we might be spending another night on the property.

“Oh, great—though at least that keeps us at the center of the story. I’m on my way back to resume eavesdropping.”

I told her that I’d be up shortly, but as she started to leave I reached out and touched her arm.

“One more thing, Jess,” I said. I told her about the missing set of keys.

“That’s rich,” she said ruefully. “It’s getting more like a horror movie every second.”

Back in my room I checked the Internet to see how the word was spreading about Devon’s death. CNN and People were running several quotes from Cap, which implied he’d been in touch with them directly. CNN and the New York Post also had some very general quotes from Collinson, who said the cause of death had not yet been determined and was under investigation. And TMZ had a mix of quotes from fashionista types paying tribute, and gossipmongers speculating about the cause of death. One theory was a drug overdose.

As I stood up, I felt suddenly overwhelmed with fatigue. I’d had only a couple of hours of sleep the night before and it was now catching up with me. I fell on the bed, telling myself I would grab just a short catnap.

When I woke, my head was throbbing and my mouth was gritty. Staggering toward the bathroom, I checked my watch and was surprised to see the time. 1:14. I’d been asleep for over an hour. I needed to hustle back to the great room and see what was going on.

I opened my door and peeked down the hall. Detective Ray was no longer standing guard, but I saw that Devon’s door had been padlocked.

I couldn’t believe my eyes as I passed through the passageway. In the gloomy afternoon light the trees glistened, their snow-covered branches now coated in a top layer of ice. Though it was absolutely enchanting out, it meant none of us was probably going anywhere anytime soon.

Jessie and Laura were the only ones around. Laura was clearing away dishes on the counter, and Jessie had her feet up on one of the sofas, reading a book.

“How are you holding up, Laura?” I asked, coming up to her.

“Okay, I guess.” She didn’t make eye contact with me.

“After we realized Devon was dead and you went to get Scott, you never went back into Devon’s room, did you?” I asked.

“No, of course not,” she said. “Are you accusing me of something?”

“Someone went back into Devon’s room, and I’m anxious to know who it was.”

“Well, it wasn’t me.”

“Okay, fine. Any more thoughts about who the second person to call extension seven was?

“What?” she asked defensively.

“You told me you got a second call on extension seven—at about two thirty.”

“If I’d known who it was, I would have told you then.”

My, my, she seemed awfully testy.

I picked a sandwich off a platter before Laura whisked it away, and then joined Jessie on the couch.

“Where the hell is everybody?” I whispered. “Are they all holed up in their rooms?”

“Whitney and Cap were up here earlier. They each had a glass of wine and a sandwich and barely said two words. He looks weird, all pinched and stuff. The second detective—the one who was guarding the door—came by for coffee and then left, saying they hope to be back later to pick up the body. Oh, and Scott was up here for a bit. I couldn’t even look at him.”

“Any word on the road?”

“Not good. It seems like we’re all going to be bunking down here again tonight. By the way, at what point does a body begin to stink?”

“By tonight it’s going to smell pretty ripe.”

“Oh, fabulous.”

“I still need to talk to Christian and Tory. I guess I’ll wait around here for a while, and then I might have to start banging on a few doors.”

“Laura mentioned that Sandy was going to be serving an early dinner—at around six. So people should start to surface then.”

For the next few hours, Jessie and I hung in the great room, drinking coffee from an insulated carafe that Jessie had brought over to the coffee table. At around five, with darkness descended, we suddenly heard a burst of noise from the level below, as if three or four people were talking at once. It took me a minute to realize that it was the television in the media room. I went downstairs to check out who was there.

Christian was alone in the darkened room, staring at CNN on the screen.

“You okay?” I asked.

“About as well as can be expected,” he said, not taking his eyes off the screen.

“I assume you’ve spoken to people at the modeling agency, right?”

“Of course. Everybody’s in shock—total shock. But I don’t know if I should be talking to you. You’ll just feed it all to Buzz.”

I gave him the off-the-record line I’d offered everyone else.

“Well, I don’t have much to talk about anyway,” he said, finally looking at me.

“This must be a blow to the agency.”

“Absolutely. Devon was one of our top girls.”

“Were you close to her?”

“Of course I was close to her,” he said, flicking his hand back and forth over the collar of his tight beige crewneck. “I’ve been her booker since she was nineteen.”

“I thought she started even younger than that.”

“She did—she was with another agency the first couple of years, but I convinced her to come with us.”

“Is that common, to make a switch?”

“It can be. Contracts in this business are never iron-clad. I mean, Devon was grateful to her old place. One of their scouts had spotted her in a bus station when she was sixteen. But they never saw her full potential. I don’t believe in starting at the bottom and working your way up. I think you start at the top, and if it doesn’t work, you keep going down a level and find out where it settles. From the very beginning I sent Devon out to the top photographers. They loved her. By the end of the year she’d made over a million dollars.”

“When did Cap come into the picture?”

“A few years later. When you make that much money, you need someone like him. Especially if your momma’s a drunk and you’ve got a no-good stepdaddy.”

“Were Cap and Devon tight?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Was it a good working relationship?”

“He absolutely doted on her. She was his prize client.”

“Friday night, you were talking about how models are often screwed up about their eating. I take it Devon had an eating disorder of some kind.”

“No, that was over and done with. A lot of girls in their teens suffer from that.”

“But clearly Devon was experiencing a relapse lately.”

“Oh, please, I knew you were going to do this. You’re just looking for dirt. You won’t attribute it to me, but it will still end up in that rag.”

“I’m only interested in the truth. If she died due to an eating disorder, that’s going to come out anyway.”

“Like I told you, that wasn’t an issue anymore.”

“And she wasn’t scared or worried about anything this weekend?”

“Scared? I have no clue what you’re talking about. Devon wasn’t scared of anything.”

“Just one more question. Did you call extension seven during the night?”

“Extension seven? You mean to say I needed a shirt pressed or something? Hardly. What is this anyway? You’re starting to sound like Miss Marple.”

Suddenly the TV screen grabbed our attention. It flickered a few times, and then suddenly died. The room was now in total darkness.

Maybe, I thought, the freezing rain had knocked out the satellite dish. And then from a distance I heard Jessie yell, “Bailey, where are you?” and I glanced toward the hallway. There was no light coming from anywhere. The power had gone out. Great, just the hell what we needed.