Little Black Book of Murder Read online

  When I didn’t respond, Emma said, “What do you want to do?”

  I wasn’t thinking straight. Rushing to Libby’s side to comfort her was my first instinct. Or going home to Michael to strategize. But he didn’t need my help for that. My first move should be to help Rawlins.

  So I said, “Can you swing by and get me before you pick up the twins?”

  “Sure. Where are you?”

  I told her, and she said, “I can probably get there in half an hour, depending on traffic. Sit tight.”

  “Thanks.”

  I stood on the corner for about ten minutes, trying to decide what to do. I was having major second thoughts. I could hear Crewe’s voice saying I should hang on to my job by my fingernails. I shouldn’t have quit. I should have been more professional. Rather than clobbering Gus for kissing me, I should have called a lawyer, then buckled down to work. Other people stuck with jobs plenty worse than mine.

  My phone jingled again, and I looked at the screen. Gus.

  I didn’t answer.

  A minute later, the phone rang again. Gus again. And again. And again. He was going to keep calling until I picked up.

  Finally, in exasperation, I answered.

  “Yes?”

  In my ear, he said, “I can see you from my office window. Shall I come down there to hash this out, or will you come back up here so we can discuss it in private?”

  I hung up.

  But I felt ridiculous standing there, knowing he could see me, so I shouldered my bag, walked back to the Pendergast Building and went up to his office. I went past his assistant without speaking and pushed through the door.

  Standing in the middle of the office, he said with perfect sincerity, “I’m sorry. That kind of thing isn’t in my repertoire, and I don’t know what got into me. That’s no excuse, of course. But I’m sorry for my behavior.”

  I closed the door, knowing the assistant had probably heard every word, but she didn’t need to hear any more.

  He added, “I don’t usually apologize, either, so I hope you appreciate that this is a first.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” I said. “Quitting my job was also a first.”

  “So why did you come back?” he asked, staying on his side of the office. “Which do you want? More kissing or your job?”

  Although I felt as if I were standing on top of a violent earthquake, I said calmly, “I’d like my job, please.”

  “Ah.” He didn’t look disappointed.

  I said, “Believe me, I’d walk out of here immediately if I didn’t need the money, but I do.”

  “Any demands?”

  He took me by surprise. “Am I in a position to make demands?”

  “You could have my head on a pike,” he said. “You could get me fired and splash my name in headlines worldwide. My father will be annoyed, but he can’t kick me any farther from home than I am now, so what does it matter? Still, the humiliation will be annoying.”

  The idea that I had such power startled me. And by something in the back of his gaze, I suddenly knew he very much minded being banished so far from his home and family. He pretended not to care what his father thought, but I knew it was a lie. The enraging Gus Hardwicke had feelings, too.

  He continued. “I am genuinely sorry, Nora. I was overcome. And I’m not usually knocked for a loop by women. I enjoy the fairer sex, but I follow the mantra of get in, get off, get out—­and nobody gets hurt. But there’s something about you.”

  “Let’s not get into that, please.”

  “I can’t help it,” he said, unable to suppress a smile. “You’re attractive enough, but it’s the look in your eye that compels me. You know you’re headed down a mountain on a runaway toboggan with your mob boyfriend, don’t you? But you like the thrill of it, despite your polite, ladylike ways. That’s very appealing.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. “My only demand is that we remain completely professional from now on.”

  “Done,” he said.

  “And although I recognize I am practically an amateur at this profession, there are lines I will not cross. I’ll do the job, but I must do it my way.”

  “Your way?”

  “Yes.” Gathering momentum, I said, “The only reason I’m good at my work—­the society reporting, that is—­is because of who I am. People open their doors to me, talk to me, share their secrets with me. I speak their language. I know the rules. But if I start turning into somebody else, my access will be denied. You need my society page. Advertisers like what I bring to the newspaper, and they support the Intelligencer.”

  “Your column is very lucrative for the paper,” he agreed. “And your online social reporting more than pays for itself.”

  “So I have to protect my reputation,” I said. “I have to be true to who I am. If someone is going to write about these people, it has to be me, who understands them from the inside.”

  “Rightio,” he agreed, composing his face into solemnity.

  “I’ll write the piece about Zephyr, but not today. I won’t write anything about her until I have new information—­information I can confirm and stand behind.”

  “Okay,” Gus said.

  I turned to go.

  “Nora,” he said. When I paused, hand on the doorknob, he went on. “You can learn from me. You need to start thinking like a reporter, and I can help you with that.”

  He was right, and I knew it. But it felt good to leave the office without acknowledging his offer.

  I met Emma a few minutes earlier than she had guessed. The traffic must have worked in her favor.

  When I climbed into her pickup, I had to move a six-­pack cooler off the seat to make room for myself. She snatched the beer cooler from me as if it were a jewel case loaded down with precious stones.

  Carefully stowing the cooler behind her seat while horns blew around us, Emma said, “Why are you looking so smug?”

  The six-­pack cooler gave me pause. I was dismayed to think she was drinking again, but she seemed sober enough. Her question distracted me from giving her the third degree. “I got my job back. On my terms, in fact.”

  “No more digging up scandals?”

  I fastened my seat belt. “Oh, I think there will be plenty of scandals to dig, but I’ll do the excavating with my own spade now. And I think it’s going to help Rawlins.”

  “How?” She pulled into traffic.

  I told her my new information about Zephyr—­that she’d killed her father and maybe it wasn’t such a big leap to killing her husband, too.

  “I thought you were on her side,” Emma said.

  “I am! She’s a nice person. But she killed her father. That’s a game changer.”

  “I dunno,” Emma said as she drove. “I’m still on Team Zephyr in this.”

  I looked at her with surprise. “How do you figure?”

  “Everybody wants to demonize the second wife. Okay, she’s younger and prettier than the first wife, but is that her fault? It’s easy to think of her as the villain, the home wrecker, but hey, maybe she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and a powerful guy fell in love with her. He was the one who decided to chuck it all to be with Zephyr, not the other way around.”

  “Some people would say she broke up a marriage, Em,” I said, knowing full well my little sister occasionally dallied with married men. “That she broke up a family.”

  She shook her head. “That marriage was already broken.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Truth is? In this kind of story, the guy is usually the asshole.”

  I wondered if Emma was changing her opinion of Hart Jones, her baby’s father. “Are you saying Zephyr didn’t kill her husband?”

  “Oh, she could have killed him. But if she did, I bet it wasn’t because sh
e was a low-­down, dirty home wrecker.”

  I saw Emma’s point. There was no earthly reason to suspect Zephyr. My own observation was that she had devoted herself to her husband. She appeared to be a paragon of high principles and gentle ways. She had absolutely no motive to kill Swain. I had to stay objective.

  I finally realized Emma wasn’t dressed in horsey clothes, but instead wore a short skirt with ballet flats and a clean sweater that managed to look feminine and rather pretty. I said, “Where have you been?” Something was up. My sexpot sister Emma didn’t dress like a Main Line soccer mom for no reason. “Have you been shopping for Filly Vanilli?”

  She groaned with frustration. “Do you know how hard it is to find one of those damn things? I went to a dozen toy stores! I wore my best jeans, my lowest-­cut shirt—­and I couldn’t get a second look from the dweebs who run those places. So I switched tactics. I can play sweet and nice.”

  “Really?” I said.

  I must have sounded astonished, because she snapped, “I pretended I was you. Please and thank you, the whole nine yards. But still, no dice. I’m gonna have to stake out a Walmart and hold up the joint when they get their next delivery.”

  “The racehorse trainer must really want that toy.”

  “Who?”

  “You said the trainer who gave you a job—­that he wanted the Filly Vanilli for his son.”

  “Oh, right,” Emma said. “Yeah, him.”

  She was keeping a lot of secrets these days. But we had a more pressing problem on our hands, so I let it go.

  The suburb of Manayunk hung on a curve of the Schuylkill River, bolstered by railroad tracks on one side and a jam of working-­class housing on the other. It had long been a neighborhood crowded with hard-­working immigrant families, but in recent years the usual signs of gentrification had taken over. Young hipsters sat at tables in front of coffee shops. Funky galleries beckoned with clever signs. The low rents drew the artistic class, and tourists followed. In a few years, though, the real estate values would rise and drive artists elsewhere, leaving a strong middle class behind again. Such was the ebb and flow of urban neighborhoods.

  Emma parked down the block, and we walked up ­­toward a former hardware store that had been converted into a fragrant shop that sold spices from barrels. On the second floor, the windows were painted with the name of a dance studio. But when we got to the top of the stairs, the dance studio’s sign had been covered over by a sheet of lined notebook paper onto which someone had scrawled Starr Hollywood Academy.

  We arrived on the landing at the same instant the door burst open and released a flood of chattering children. Emma and I flattened ourselves against the wall to let the tide roll past us and down the stairs. The kids were mostly girls, mostly in colorful dance and workout clothes. Their hair seemed to have been done by the same hand—­topknots embellished with sparkly accessories. They were all bright-­eyed and pink-­cheeked—­some singing snippets of a familiar tune from a Broadway musical. I heard a chorus of them yelping about living a hard-­knock life, but I had seen the parental vehicles waiting in the street below: expensive SUVs and fancy cars with bumper stickers advertising beach vacations and prestigious colleges.

  When the last of the singing poppets had brushed past us, Emma grabbed the door and held it open. “Ew,” she said, looking at her hand. “This handle is sticky.”

  “I guess the Starr Academy doesn’t hire a cleaning crew.”

  We walked into a large open space with a polished wood floor and a wall of mirrors behind a ballet barre. Although his name was on the sign outside, Porky Starr was nowhere to be seen.

  At the far end of the studio, a young man in tights and a snug T-shirt was calling a handful of lanky teenage boys into a circle. I spotted Libby’s twins among them—­both hanging back and grinning with evil purpose. If they were attending the class, they had not come willingly. Their instructor was encouraging them to close their eyes and breathe.

  To me, Emma muttered, “You close your eyes around those two at your own risk.”

  “The twins might benefit from some relaxation techniques.” I saw an open door, and I elbowed my sister. “Let’s look around before we take them home.”

  She followed me to the doorway, and we went into a short corridor. Through an open door, we could hear a voice.

  When I turned the corner, I came upon Porky Starr himself sitting at a wobbly card table in a makeshift office and counting money. For once, he wasn’t wearing his little hat. It sat on the edge of the table. I realized why he wore it, though. At twenty-­something, he was nearly bald. Beside his elbow sat a stack of checks. He didn’t look up from his task but continued to laboriously count cash in large and small bills.

  “Seven-­eighty, seven-­ninety, forty-­eight hundred!” He sat back in triumph.

  But when he looked up and saw Emma and me, he quickly masked his pleasure. “Parents aren’t allowed upstairs, yo,” he said. “It interferes with the learning process. You can pick up your kids outside.”

  “It’s me, Porter,” I said. “Nora Blackbird. This is my sister Emma. We thought we’d stop in and give you our condolences.”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah, hi. Thanks.”

  His disinterested gaze went past me and sharpened on Emma. Maybe her soccer-­mom look wasn’t quite as wholesome as I’d first thought. Her hair was slicked back from the perfect features of her face, and her mouth, untouched by lipstick, was sensuously full. Her snug skirt made no secret of her slim legs and narrow hips, and her form-­fitting sweater didn’t hide the fact that her bust size hadn’t diminished since her pregnancy.

  Porky scrambled to his feet and slapped his hat onto his head. “Yo,” he said, tipping the hat to a rakish angle before extending his hand to her. “I’m Porter.”

  “Yo?” she said. “What are you, a reject from the Backstreet Boys?”

  He seized her hand, raised it to his lips and kissed it.

  Emma snatched it back. “Hey, cut that out, kid! Before I kick your ass.”

  “Porter,” I intervened, “we’re very sorry about your father. It must have been a terrible shock.”

  “Yeah,” he said without tearing his gaze from my sister. “A shock. Even worse, we heard who did it to him. A kid whose twerpy little brothers are here in the program.”

  One look at Emma had emptied his head. He had forgotten who I was, forgotten my connection to Rawlins.

  “The program?” Emma said, likewise choosing not to identify herself as the aunt of the twerpy brothers or his father’s alleged killer. “You running some kind of rehab here?”

  “No, no, this is the Starr Hollywood Academy. I’m a talent scout. And I gotta say, even before I’ve heard you sing, you’ve got what it takes, baby.”

  Nothing pushed Emma’s hot button like being called “baby,” but before the steam began gushing from her ears, I said, “The murder must have been so upsetting to you and everyone else in the family.”

  For a second I thought I might have to get out my handkerchief and wipe drool from Porter’s chin. He responded to my condolence as though Emma had spoken it. “Yeah, everybody’s all broken up. But the arrest should calm them down a little.”

  “This arrest,” Emma said. “Who was the perp?”

  “Nobody important. And his kid brothers are total dipwads. They can hardly walk and talk at the same time. Besides, I think there’s something wrong with those two.”

  “So why keep them in your program?” Emma asked.

  Porky jerked his head to indicate the stack of money and checks on the table. “Man’s gotta make a living, baby.”

  Emma said, “The killer. He in your program, too?”

  “Naw, he’s just a hanger-­on. You know, a fan. Nothing cool about that.”

  “So why’d he kill your dad?”

  “Who knows? There’s a lot of crazy stuff that goes on in
our world. Fans can turn into stalkers in the wink of an eye, yo. Goes with the territory.”

  “Sounds like a pain in the ass, having fans.”

  “Yeah, it can be a drag. That’s why I’m looking to make a change.”

  “What kind of change?”

  “I got a call this afternoon, after my headshot ran in a newspaper. I might be up for another TV show. Hosting.” He couldn’t hide his pleasure. “You know, wear a suit, talk to the camera, introduce the talent. How hard can it be? I have an audition next week. You want to come along? Watch me work?”

  While Emma engaged Porky—­and she did it effortlessly, edging ­toward the door and leading him out into the hallway and ­beyond—­I leaned over the table and got a closer look at the checks. With one finger, I fanned them out to read the amounts. A hundred dollars, two hundred. Different amounts, but they all added up to considerable money. I knew what Porky was selling. Each of the kids who had gone rushing down the stairs wasn’t getting any real education or even the skills it might take to make a career in show business. But it was a chance to fantasize a life standing in the footlights.

  Beside the checks, the sheaf of papers appeared to be a stack of posters that advertised more Hollywood programs in other cities—­Pittsburgh, Cleveland, St. Louis. The dates were only weeks away. Porky was taking his make-­dreams-­come-­true show on the road. His face—­a headshot from his younger days—­decorated the top of the poster.

  But his office was as low rent as it got. His folding chair had a dent in it. Across the small space was a dusty beaded curtain that separated the room from a storage closet. Through the beads I could see a few boxes stacked there. The top one had been cut open. T-shirts lay in the box. I could see Porter’s face on those, too.

  His siblings must have been making millions working for their father. Why had Porky struck out on his own? Had he not been welcomed into the family business?

  There was one more check on the desk, facedown. With Emma practically hypnotizing Porky, I flipped over the check and took a look.

  And blinked.