“But I keep getting caught,” she panted out, a little breathless from her sprint through traffic. “Except the other night, but I lost you for part of the evening, so I didn’t think I should count that.”
“The other night?”
“Yes, when you were with Selene Waites. And then you came out of the bar with Derek Nichole. I like him.” She frowned. “Well, I liked him better, before he started doing movies with so much cursing. I don’t like cursing.”
“You – you followed me to New York?” Tess had been trying to do a walk-and-talk, hurrying toward her car – and a meter that was due to expire any moment – but this conversation was worth slowing down for, even if it meant a twenty-seven-dollar parking fine. “All the way in?”
“Yes, although it seemed kind of cheating because you weren’t driving, so you wouldn’t have been as alert. I didn’t go into the restaurant-”
Tess made a conscious effort not to smile at the thought of Mrs. Blossom trying to make her way into that achingly hip eatery. That would have been something to see. Then again, they might have mistaken her for the latest drag queen to play Edna Turnblad in Broadway’s version of Hairspray and welcomed her as a star.
“And, you know, it’s so hard to park in New York, I just kept circling. I know that’s not a good technique – and if you had been in there a long time, I could have run out of gas – but I decided to commit, like you told me. I got lucky, too. I had just turned on the block when I saw you come out.”
“Did you pay attention to the time? Did you see him pick me up?”
Mrs. Blossom fished through her purse, a bright purple bag the size of a small suitcase, and pulled out a memo pad. “It was about eleven-thirty when you went in, ten to midnight when you came out.” She looked up from the pad, her eyes sorrowful. “Miss Monaghan, you looked like you’d been drinking. That doesn’t seem very professional.” Mrs. Blossom consulted her memo pad again, all Joe Friday just-the-facts seriousness. “At twelve-ten A.M. – should I use military time?”
“No, you can use A.M. and P.M.” Tess didn’t want to bother with the math.
“At twelve-ten A.M., the Town Car arrived at a hotel.”
“Name of the hotel?”
“The SoHo Grand.”
That was the hotel where Selene had been seen drinking later, where Derek Nichole was staying.
“I found a parking place around the corner and went into the bar, off the hotel lobby. It was tricky, because the lobby is on the second floor, and I couldn’t be sure I would see you coming and going, but I figured if I sat next to the window, I’d be able to see you leave. I went up there and had a nonalcoholic beer. It cost ten dollars! And they were so rude, made me wait forever, and it was loud. I don’t know why people go to places like that. But I could see the lobby from where I sat, and pretty soon, Derek Nichole and Selene Waites showed up, and they were given one of the sofas, although the table said it was ‘reserved.’ She’s so pretty in person. And little. Is she as sweet as she looks?”
“Hmmmmm,” Tess said, trying to be diplomatic. “What did they do?”
“They came in and ordered drinks – a beer for him, a cocktail for her, although she kept drinking cranberry juice – and they were talking very low to each other, kind of serious. I tried to hear what they were saying, but I wasn’t close enough. And then the bar closed, so I went outside and got in my car, and waited until I saw the Town Car come back. That was about four A.M., and this time, it was Mr. Nichole who brought you out.”
It was oddly embarrassing to think about Mrs. Blossom watching her drugged body being hauled around New York like a sack of potatoes. True, it wasn’t her fault that she had been dosed with roofies – or ketamine or GBH – but it was still humiliating. Where had she been during the interval, in Derek Nichole’s hotel room? If the two had wanted privacy, hadn’t that put a crimp in their plans? Was Selene that desperate to drink that she had to knock Tess out in order to party hearty? Nothing really added up. She thought about the multiple gossip items, her text messages to Ben – what was Selene doing?
“Wait a minute, Mrs. Blossom – are you sure Selene was drinking cranberry juice? The gossip columns said she was drinking it with vodka and Red Bull.”
“Oh, she ordered a drink, but she had a bottle of Nantucket Nectar with her, and she drank from that. The waitperson tried to give her a hard time about bringing in an outside beverage, so she tucked her bottle under the table and ordered a drink, but she kept sneaking sips from the bottle under the table and barely touched her drink.” She snorted. “I don’t blame her. They probably charge fifteen dollars for a glass of cranberry juice!”
They had arrived at Tess’s parking spot, but she was too fascinated by Mrs. Blossom’s story to worry about the meter. The woman may have signed up for the class to give herself something to do on Monday nights, but she seemed to be a bit of a prodigy. A woman such as Mrs. Blossom, properly trained, could learn to be so visible as to be invisible.
“Look,” Mrs. Blossom said, pointing skyward.
They were at the corner of Charles and Baltimore streets, where the downtown outpost of Johns Hopkins ran an old-fashioned electronic news ribbon around the top of the building. The headlines were written by the staff of the Beacon-Light, and they were well known throughout Baltimore for their wordy obtuseness and not infrequent grammatical errors. But the message that had caught Mrs. Blossom’s eye was crystal clear to Tess: MAN WANTED IN TV SET MURDER KILLED BY POLICE IN STANDOFF.
Part of Tess’s mind couldn’t help deconstructing the headline. “TV set murder” – that made it sound as if a large Magnavox had been the weapon. Besides, Greer hadn’t been killed on set; she had died in the production office, which was across town from the soundstage. But even as she picked those nits, Tess had no problem discerning the larger meaning – Greer’s boyfriend had been killed when police officers caught up with him. If running was a good marker of guilt, in Tull’s worldview, then resisting arrest was an unsigned confession. So, a dunker for Tull. The obvious answer was the obvious answer.
She was happy for her friend but disappointed that she would never have a chance to talk to JJ Meyerhoff about his ex-fiancée, Greer, and whether she had any connection to Mann of Steel’s problems.
Chapter 25
Ben should be happy. Well, not happy – Greer was dead, and now her fiancé, poor fucker, God bless him, had gone down in a hail of bullets. But it tied everything up, neat as a bow, and Ben was in the clear. Which was only fair, because he hadn’t actually done anything.
But what if someone else materialized? What if Greer had confided in someone? What if he was, in fact, in some sort of fiendishly creative hell where he had to live forever with the idea of someone else popping up, full of… insights. That had been Greer’s airy-fairy term. “I had the most interesting insight.” Even Greer had seen his side of things, though. Then again, it was in Greer’s interest to be persuaded, because it meant she could collect endless bennies from him with a relatively free conscience. It was a relief that she was gone. Like all blackmailers, she had already started angling for what she wanted next. The last few weeks, Greer had reminded Ben of The Leech Woman, a B horror film in which a woman found the elixir to eternal youth. The trick was that it required killing a man and harvesting some gland, and each hit of the youth juice provided a shorter lease on wrinkle-free immortality, so the woman had to kill more and more frequently, until she finally killed a woman in desperation, which turned out to accelerate the aging process. Greer had been getting greedy that way, insatiable.