Once More With Feeling (2 page)

"Like?"

"An early dinner."

"Where?"

She tapped her disappointing nails.
"Aureole," she said at last, choosing a place where he would have
to mortgage his soul for a last-minute dinner reservation. She
studied him from under her lashes. "If you have the clout to get us
a table. But then I have to be back here to go over tomorrow's
script. I'm not at all happy with the new writers Desmond
hired."

Something blacker than sin glistened in his
eyes. "You're sure you don't have time to come to my place instead?
We could send out for something."

"I am absolutely sure." She stood up slowly.
A strict Catholic upbringing provided the inspiration for this
particular exhibition. As a young teen she had learned to rise from
her chair one inch at a time, so slowly that the nuns at St. Mary's
had grown impatient and passed over the fact that her skirt was
rolled at the waist and just a foot short of paradise.

Those years of practice served her well now.
Casey's weight shifted to his heels and his gaze shifted, too.
There wasn't a man anywhere who could resist Gypsy Dugan's legs.
She ignored the fashion mavens--just as she had ignored the
nuns--and wore her hems where she wanted them: smack dab in the
middle of her thigh.

Casey's gaze drifted downwards as slowly as
she unfurled. From his pained expression she knew that he disliked
this particular performance, but he was helpless not to become a
one- man audience. "What about after you've finished here?" he
asked.

"It will be very, very late." She placed her
index finger against his lips. "Too late. But don't let that stifle
your creativity."

He didn't kiss her finger, he sucked it into
his mouth and nipped it with his sharp pirate's teeth. Then he
blended back into the shadows.

Gypsy's dressing room was her sanctuary. The
temperature was exactly seventy-two degrees year round, and there
was always fruit juice and mineral water waiting on ice. Tito
Callahan, the media mogul for whom
The Whole Truth
was just
one juicy tidbit in a banquet of television and newspaper holdings,
had commissioned his personal decorator to redo the dressing room
as a surprise bonus after the negotiations on her last contract.
The walls were aubergine satin, and the Persian rug was fine enough
to adorn a sultan's harem.

Today, after taking care of the thousand and
one details that signaled the official end of her working day,
Gypsy closed the door behind her and went straight to her dressing
table.

The clothes she wore were on loan to the
show from a Madison Avenue boutique, and she stripped them off and
left them exactly where they landed. She considered changing into a
black dress that she kept for such moments, a sleek, form-fitting
tube with crisscross straps that left little to the imagination.
But Casey thought entirely too much of himself, and she didn't want
him to believe she was dressing up to please him. Instead she
slipped into her street clothes, unfastening two of the buttons on
her red silk blouse and replaced the simple pearl studs in her
earlobes with with a spray of faux rubies that would have glared
like searchlights on camera.

She had thrown a towel over her shoulders
and was creaming her face when someone knocked. The sound was too
hesitant to be Casey's, but it was familiar, all the same. "It's
not locked." She attacked the cream with a wad of tissues.

The door opened a crack. "Are you
decent?"

"I'm never decent."

Desmond Weber, the show's executive
producer, closed the door behind him and stood with his back
against it. He was a man in his mid-fifties with the sturdy build
of a linebacker carried incongruously on a jockey's short legs. His
wiry gray hair was clipped and contoured with poodle precision; his
nose was a classic pug and his eyes were as soulful as a cocker
spaniel's. Gypsy glanced at him, then turned back to the mirror.
"I'm a work in progress here, so you don't have to blockade the
door. I'm not going to run."

Desmond moved farther into the room. "I
thought the taping went well."

"You know what? It would have gone better if
you'd given me some stories with meat on them. Cripes, Desmond, how
many more segments are we going to do on that poor homeless woman
from North Carolina? Don't you think digging up her date for the
senior prom was a bit much? She's dead. Does anyone care whether
she got roses or carnations that night?"

"Yeah. Our audience cares."

"Then they're bigger idiots than I
thought."

"Hey, aren't we in a charming mood?"

"We certainly are not." She stroked
concealer under her eyes. These days it had become her first line
of defense. She might not be sleeping worth a damn anymore, but she
wasn't going to tell the world.

"Have you noticed that everyone's tiptoeing
around like you're an unclaimed suitcase ticking sixty beats to the
minute?"

"They're just doing their jobs quietly, the
way they're supposed to."

"You're never jumpy. And suddenly, you're
jumpy as hell. Everybody's noticed. Everybody's worried."

"Everybody's wondering how they can use it
to scramble up the old career ladder!"

"Come on, Gyps. Not everyone's as motivated
by misfortune as you are."

She was silent, because he was right. She
knew she had a gold-plated reputation for ruthlessness, although
everyone agreed it was never personal. Gypsy wasn't unkind. She was
simply obsessed with herself.

"Is it your . . . security problem?" Desmond
asked.

She abandoned the concealer for
custom-blended foundation. "At least you didn't say my imaginary
security problem."

"Come on. I know you think it's real."

"Why yes, now that you mention it. Nearly
spilling one's guts on a Fifth Avenue sidewalk can give a person
those kind of fantasies."

"Look, I know it was hard, traumatic even,
to watch somebody you knew and respected drop dead right beside
you--"

"Yeah. Particularly when you think that the
gunman who killed him was taking aim at you, too." Gypsy glanced at
Desmond again. "And don't tell me that none of the witnesses
believe anyone besides Mark was the target. I've read the police
report myself. I know what it says. But I was standing right beside
him."

"Look, we're taking your fears seriously. If
there's any chance that the man who shot Mark wants to take you out
as well, then we have to protect you. You're being watched
twenty-four hours a day."

"Right. And the only thing I can be sure of
is that next time, if I'm the victim, I'll go to my glory with an
audience."

"We've hired the best men out there."

"And not a one of them could have kept Mark
from getting shot." Usually Gypsy saved her reminiscenses of that
moment for the middle of the night when her Xanax wore off, but now
the whole scene flashed through her mind.

Mark Santini had been hired the previous
fall as
The Whole Truth
's newest director. A promising young
man with energy and ideas to spare, he had taken Gypsy to lunch
several weeks before Christmas to discuss a new concept for the
show, and they had chosen a restaurant some blocks from the studio.
The day was unseasonably warm, and afterwards Mark suggested that
they walk along Fifth Avenue to see the holiday windows. Half a
block from St. Patrick's Cathedral a man stepped out in front of
them and blasted a hole through Mark's cashmere overcoat. Gypsy
watched in horror as Mark slumped to the ground. Then the man
lifted the gun in her direction.

And he smiled.

"He didn't shoot you," Desmond reminded her.
As he spoke the door opened behind him, but despite the subject
under discussion he didn't even turn to see who it was. Security at
the studio was high-tech and inpenetrable. There were too many
competitors in the lucrative world of investigative news to risk
media espionage.

Gypsy's gaze strayed to the man at the door.
Her voice changed subtly. Now she sounded bored. "We'll never know
why Mark's killer didn't pull the trigger again, will we? Maybe the
gun jammed. Maybe he realized he didn't have time to get off
another shot. He was gone before anyone could ask for an
explanation."

"Or maybe he just didn't have any reason to
kill you," Casey said from the doorway. "The cops have a pretty
good idea why this guy might have wanted Mark dead, and it doesn't
have anything to do with you."

Gypsy knew the prevailing theory. Mark's
extended family was rumored to have murky ties to organized crime.
His death had all the traits of a Mafia hit, a lesson, perhaps, to
some distant uncle or cousin who had gotten out of line.

She shrugged carelessly and uncapped her
mascara. As far as she was concerned, the conversation had ended.
Desmond was the only person to whom she admitted her worst fears.
Casey was another matter.

"No more of this tonight," she said. "I'm
sure your watchdogs will keep me safe, Desmond. Besides, when I'm
in Casey's hands, I never have anything to worry about except
Casey's hands." She redid her lipstick, then reached for a bottle
and spritzed her cleavage with a new fragrance that claimed to
contain synthesized human pheromones.

"Try to lighten up a little, will you?"
Desmond asked. "Especially on Nan."

She wrinkled her brow in mock sympathy.
"Poor little Nannie-poo. Has the wicked Gypsy woman hurt her
teensy-weensy feelings again?"

"Just ease up on everybody, Gyps. It'll make
my life easier, and in the long run, that's good for you."

She waved Desmond out the door. "Go tell
whatever watchdog is lurking in the shadows tonight to take his
dinner break. Casey will take over my care and feeding for a while,
won't you, Casey?"

"With something like pleasure." Casey waited
until the door closed before he crossed the room. Gypsy rose to
greet him, but he didn't embrace her until she rested her forearms
on his shoulders. The game was hers to call, and she had made
certain that Casey realized it from the start.

He was a tall man, but she was a tall woman.
It was just as well, since she couldn't imagine gazing up at him
with adoring eyes. She liked her lovers nearly nose to nose; she
never wore anything lower than three-inch heels.

He lowered his head, and she smelled the
spicy essence of Polo Blue. Casey's lips were warm against hers,
but the kiss was not all that she had expected. There was nothing
rakish or demanding about it. It was almost . . . gentle.

She pulled away and her eyes narrowed.
"What's that about?"

He didn't answer for a moment. She could see
something like a struggle behind his perpetually cynical
expression. "I know you're scared," he said finally.

"Do you?" She stepped back, one perfectly
arched eyebrow sailing high above the other. "Well, you're wrong.
I'm angry. I just don't like the fact that my daily life's been
affected by all of this. But I'm not scared. I've never been scared
of anything in my whole life."

"Everybody's scared of something."

"Bull." She paused a heartbeat or two to
recover. "Gypsy Dugan's not like everybody else. She's in a class
all by herself."

"Even Gypsy Dugan's afraid of dying."

"Gypsy Dugan isn't going to die. She's
planning to live forever." She said the words, and for the moment
they lingered in the air, they were true. She had no intention of
meeting her maker. In spite of the fears she had voiced to Desmond,
it was simply inconceivable.

"We're all going to die. Even the reigning
sexpot of the television tabloids. We'll just have to do everything
we can to make sure it happens later rather than sooner."

One corner of her lips turned up
provocatively, and she wiped her lipstick off his mouth with her
thumb. "Don't worry about me, Casey. I've got an incentive to stay
alive. I hear they've reserved a place down below for women like
me. If I want heat, I'll wait out eternity on a yacht in the
Mediterranean."

There was no sure way to tell if a man was
sleeping with another woman other than to catch him in the act.
Elisabeth had never followed Owen to his paramour's apartment or
hired a private detective to snap photographs through discreetly
veiled hotel windows. She hadn't detected the scent of unfamiliar
perfume on his perfectly tailored suit jackets or discovered
lipstick stains on his shirt collars. In the past weeks, as the
possibility of Owen's infidelity had nagged at her one long lonely
night after the other, she had watched and waited. She hadn't
snooped, and she hadn't interrogated.

But she was almost sure she knew who the
woman was.

"I'm glad you scheduled an evening for me at
home." Owen came out of his bathroom freshly showered and wrapped
insecurely in a towel. "I've been gone so much recently that I had
to stop in the village to get directions to our house."

She was surprised he would so casually go
right to the heart of her suspicions. In the past two months Owen
had been home not more than a dozen nights. Theoretically he kept
an apartment in Manhattan just for those occasions when he had to
work late or entertain clients. These days Elisabeth suspected a
different kind of entertaining altogether.

"All those meetings. I just don't know how
you keep it up." Elisabeth didn't even blink at her own double
entendre. Her tone was sympathetic. She sat on the bed in his
bedroom and resisted twisting the bedspread into a noose.

He honored her with his most charming smile.
"Well, I'd never be able to do any of it without you. If you didn't
see to our social life, I'd probably be a hermit and somebody
else's assistant to boot."

She accepted the praise with a gracious nod.
Owen's ultimate success was due to his unmistakable brilliance and
little else. But he had achieved it faster because of her family
background and contacts. He was the poor son of Polish immigrants
with an "American" name that was only three generations old. Their
marriage had assured immediate access to some of New York's finest
families. On her darkest days she wondered if that had been his
major reason for proposing to her.