Authors: Sheryl J. Anderson

Killer Deal (2 page)

BOOK: Killer Deal

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Which is why my heart skipped a beat when Eileen’s office door flew open just as I was walking to my desk. She stepped out with one hand extended portentously, like the Ghost of Christmas Future. A diminutive specter, barely five feet tall minus her Chloe wedges and clothed in an Elie Tahari chiffon skirt and paneled blouse, but scary nonetheless. “Just the person I was looking for,” she said, curling the hand slowly to summon me.

I resisted the temptation to look back over my shoulder, knowing that anyone who had been standing there was quivering under a desk by now. “Lucky me,” I said, wishing it were so.

“We were just talking about you.” Eileen flicked at her spiky black bangs as though the conversation had been exhausting, then gestured vaguely at her office. From where I stood, I couldn’t tell whether it contained other writers, editors, or a death squad. I wasn’t in any hurry to step up and find out.

The great thing about the bull pen in our office is that lives are played out in the open; the lousy thing about the bull pen in our office is that sometimes the life played out is yours. The wall-less floor plan, with row on row of desks, makes it physically impossible to keep a secret or tell a lie. Of course, when colleagues start sleeping together, they somehow forget those facts, making coming to work much more entertaining for the rest of us.

“What can I do for you, Eileen?”

“We need to talk about the Garth Henderson article.”

I ran through a couple of appropriate responses in my
head and chose the most polite one, since half the bull pen had stopped what they were doing to witness this exchange: “Excuse me?” Until recently, Garth Henderson had been a self-proclaimed “advertising rock star” known for his bold flair in both his campaigns and his social life. Then, three weeks ago, Garth Henderson became a corpse, having been murdered in one of the fancier rooms of the Carlyle Hotel. Specifically, he’d been shot once in the crotch and once in the head. In that order, apparently. No arrests had been made, but the police had spent quite a lot of time talking to his ex-wife Gwen Lincoln and to Ronnie Willis, whose advertising agency, Willis Worldwide, was poised to merge with Garth’s at the time of the murder. There was tremendous pressure on the police—primarily from Garth’s many influential friends—to make something happen soon and I was glad for Kyle’s sake that he hadn’t caught the case.

Garth Henderson had specialized in blurring the line between provocative and incendiary. His clients often got extra bang for their advertising buck because Garth’s campaigns, with their hefty dose of sexuality, received vociferous attention from the media. So you not only saw his ads in the places he’d paid to run them, but on news programs and in magazines that critiqued them, often finding them salacious and inappropriate. Clients generally found them hugely effective.

The only publicly unhappy client in recent memory had been Jack Douglass, the CEO of Douglass Frozen Foods. To launch Douglass’ new soy ice cream line, Garth and his agency had designed a campaign that featured a buxom young movie actress, best known for appearing on late-night talk shows in a drunken tizzy, apparently about to perform oral sex on a soy fudgsicle. The television commercial had shown her stripping the wrapper off the fudgsicle with mounting excitement, then slowly raising it to her mouth while she licked her lips. The tagline of the campaign was: C’
mon, you’ll like it. You know you will.

Sales had soared, particularly among college-aged men, but the critics and pundits had howled mightily. And Mr.
Douglass, a neo-con who was reportedly being wooed by heavy hitters to segue into a political career, found himself being excoriated by those very same wooers as the media tempest crescendoed. Even when it died down, Mr. Douglass’ political future was now said to be dim at best. But Garth Henderson signed several new clients.

“The Garth Henderson article,” Eileen repeated with that vinegary touch of impatience that makes us all love her so. “I have a new take on it.”

Apparently, the new take included actually doing it. When the news of Henderson’s death broke, all the murmurs of Gwen Lincoln’s name intrigued me. That only sharpened when the police investigation seemed to stall. I’d pitched the idea of an article on the couple—and the murder—to Eileen but she’d shot it down, dismissing Garth’s death as “when good divorces go bad.” So why this change of heart?

As I pondered that question and whether I dared ask it, a tall, angular man with marvelous cheekbones and a wild and thick head of sandy blond hair stepped out of her office. I placed the hair before I placed the face; it was Emile Trebask, the ascendant design demigod. You can find his reflection on some surface in all his print ads, smiling approvingly as dazed teenagers who have partially pulled on the clothes he designs grope each other for the camera. It’s become a game to find Emile when each new ad comes out—sort of like finding the “Nina”s in Hirschfeld’s drawings. Or perhaps more accurately, the fashionista’s version of
Where’s Waldo?

I was surprised to see him walking out of Eileen’s office. We go to people like him, they don’t come to us. Eileen smirked at my reaction, thinking I was impressed. “Molly, you know Emile, don’t you?”

Of course I didn’t. I’d slapped down plenty of cash over the past few years to buy his clothes, but I’d never met him. I’d have to do some serious social climbing to even approach his strata. Eileen knew that and, I suspect, was enjoying the fact. “Haven’t had the pleasure, Mr. Trebask,” I said, offering my hand.

He shook it gently, as though one of us might break. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me he was worried about. “Ms. Forrester, I’m so glad you’re going to be talking to Gwen,” he said with his famous clipped accent; it was much debated in the fashion press whether it was Swiss or Affected.

Proudly, I did not gasp. Not only was there suddenly an article on the Garth Henderson murder, but I was doing an interview with the prime suspect? What did Emile Trebask have to do with it? More to the point, what did Eileen get out of it? I smiled and said, “Thank you, Mr. Trebask,” while I tried to find the connection between all these interesting questions.

“I thought the world of Garth, a terrific talent, but to try to lay it at Gwen’s feet. It’s absurd. Gwen could not step on an ant, much less blow off someone’s balls.”

At first, the last word sounded somewhere between “bowels” and “bells,” so I thought he was trying to be discreet. When I realized he was being anything but, I bit the inside of my lip to maintain a professional demeanor and nodded. Mr. Trebask took that as encouragement to grow even more animated. “It’s very important people understand exactly what’s going on here.” Since I myself was a little confused on that point, I nodded again. “Gwen’s being made the scapegoat and that is not right. If we let people know the truth, then the police will have to look a little harder, won’t they, and allow people to get on with their business. And their lives.”

I refrained from nodding yet again while my memory frantically Googled itself for some connection between Gwen Lincoln and Emile Trebask. Then Trebask pressed a small glass vial into my hand and I remembered.

“Success,” he murmured.

Lifting the vial to my nose, I sniffed gently and smelled cedar and honeysuckle, undercut with something smoky and musky. The sweet smell of success indeed.

“It’s lovely,” I said. Success was going to be the first perfume in the new Trebask fragrance line and Gwen Lincoln was Trebask’s partner in the venture. She’d been an
executive at several cosmetics firms, but equally important, her first husband had died young and left her incredibly wealthy. There’d been a fair amount of talk after Garth was killed that he’d found some weak spots in their prenup and was going to wring her out in divorce court. She’d dodged a bullet and he hadn’t. Twice, actually. Or so that rumor had gone.

So had Emile come to Eileen looking for an article to prop up his business partner during a crucial time? It was a noble gesture on his part, but I couldn’t figure out what Eileen was getting out of it, which was always the pivotal part of any equation involving her.

Trebask lightly touched my hand again and, for a moment, I thought he was going to take his perfume sample back. “Your piece on the murder of Lisbet McCandless was very powerful. I’m sure you’ll do just as well here.”

“Thank you,” I said, still improvising.

“And you.” Trebask turned back to Eileen. Her reptilian smile grew, consuming even more of her tiny face than I’d thought possible. “You will be an amazing addition to my celebrity model lineup at the gala.”

“Emile, I’m so honored.”

The pieces slid into place with slimy ease. Horse-trading was alive and well at
Zeitgeist.
Trebask was looking for help in swaying public, if not police, opinion and Eileen had bartered an article in the magazine for an ego turn in one of Trebask’s fashion shows. Since he’d said “gala,” it was probably the show he was putting on to launch the perfume while raising funds for the Fashion Industry Mentor Project, which encouraged at-risk youth to consider careers in fashion through internships and mentorships. I’d donated money to them before and suddenly felt very protective of the organization, imagining teeny meanie Eileen prancing down the catwalk and pretending to be a model at their expense.

But I couldn’t dwell on that now, because I was grappling with the most thrilling part of this strange symbiotic seduction: I came out of it with a feature article assignment.

“Please let me know if there’s anything I can do, any door
I can open,” Emile said, squeezing my shoulder as gently as he’d squeezed my hand.

“Thank you, I will,” I said, already brainstorming on how to give Eileen and Emile what they wanted while doing what I wanted. I would find a way.

“You understand what I need here,” Eileen said flatly when she returned from escorting Emile to the elevator. I was waiting in her office, despite her new assistant’s efforts to bodily remove me from the sofa—if you can call it that. Sculpted slab would be more accurate. Eileen’s office is decorated like Andy Warhol and Yoko Ono attempted to set up housekeeping together. Everything’s bright and shiny and bold and there isn’t a single comfortable spot to sit in the whole place.

“An interview with Gwen Lincoln that mentions both the new perfume and the Garth Henderson murder, in that order,” I answered. She gestured for me to elaborate. “And that points to the distinct possibility of her innocence in the latter,” I continued gingerly.

“Good girl.”

Not to bite the hand that was suddenly feeding me, but I had to ask. “What if she’s not innocent?”

“Then you can have the cover.”

I wasn’t expecting that. “Didn’t you tell your new buddy we’d do an article to help his friend and partner?”

Eileen leaned against her desk and swatted at her bangs again. “Molly,” she said, her impatience moving from vinegar to venom, “haven’t you ever said something to a man just to make him go away?”

“Millions of times. I turn them away in droves.”

“Oops. Didn’t schedule time for you to try and be funny this afternoon. You’d better go.” She slithered behind her desk and perched in front of her computer. Not to do any work, just to remove me from her line of sight.

But I wasn’t going anywhere without more information. I had to know my boundaries, especially if I was going to push them. “But you did tell him we’d write an article to help Gwen Lincoln.”

“I did not. I told him we’d write an article
about
Gwen
Lincoln. Now, if he made poor assumptions about the contents and point of view, just because he thinks she’s innocent, he’s really the one in the wrong, wouldn’t you say?”

“So I have latitude here to consider her potentially guilty and investigate accordingly.”

Her icy green eyes slid in my direction for a moment, then zipped back to the screen. “Theoretically, but I doubt it will even be an issue. Why don’t we just wait and see if you get that far?”

The wave of adrenaline I’d been surfing dumped me on my head. Distracted by the potential of this article, I’d stopped considering Eileen’s point of view. “You’re assuming I won’t come up with anything.”

“I’m demanding that you come up with an interview. Beyond that, Molly, I won’t be holding my breath.”

I knew that was less a statement about Gwen Lincoln than one about me, but I tried not to rise to the bait. “If I’m going to touch on the murder at all, I’m going to have to look into it. I want to go into this interview armed with facts and no preconceived notion of anyone’s guilt or innocence.”

“If that’s your process, so be it. Honestly, Molly, this little hobby of yours is cute, though rather twisted, but let’s pause a moment and be realistic, shall we? Garth Henderson isn’t some corpse you’re related to. This is a high-profile murder that has stymied the police. It’s out of your league.”

So Eileen’s real issue raised its catty little head. She thought I was incapable of solving this mystery because I didn’t have any personal connection to the crime, as I had in my previous articles. She was, in her own twisted way, telling me I couldn’t do it. Which is a sentiment I take as a challenge.

“I’ll do it anyway.”

Eileen studied me for a long moment, then let her face slide into a sickly, curling smile like the Grinch looking down on Whoville. “I had no doubt.”

BOOK: Killer Deal

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