Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-One
“Valentine, wait up!” Marla hissed as Kate dodged through the growing crowd of wedding guests vying for plates of bacon and heaping cups of coffee. “For fuck’s sake, you move like a hyperactive toddler on coke. What is it? What did you see?”
“Shhh,” Kate said, lurking along the fringes of the crowd and positioning herself in a shadowy corner to do what she did best. “I’m snooping.”
Marla gave her sweater a skeptical look. “Hard to be inconspicuous in that thing. Would you just tell me what you saw in the photo that’s got you all rattled?”
“The missing champagne glass,” Kate whispered. “In that last photo, it looked like Juliette was holding Kennedy’s glass.”
Marla’s brows shot up. “You think she’s our killer? I mean, it fits. The bitch is wound tighter than a corkscrew.”
“I need to talk to her,” Kate said resolutely. “Find out what she was doing last night, and where she was when Kennedy was knocked out. You want to come with me? I can show you the ropes for interrogating what I assume will be a very hostile suspect.”
“Sounds thrilling,” Marla said, “but wouldn’t it be better if I go poking around her stuff while you’ve got her distracted? Get some of that evidence you’ve been talking about?”
“Oh, right,” Kate said, crestfallen. She’d been enjoying having a sleuthing partner, even if it wasn’t Jake. “That’s a good idea, actually. But be careful. If Juliette really is our potential killer, she’s… well, a potential killer. Who knows what she might try.”
“I’ll be fine,” Marla said with a wave. “Besides, Juliette’s always trying to rattle everybody else. It’ll be good for someone to rattle her cage for once.”
Marla slipped off into the crowd and Kate circulated through the room, keeping one eye out for Juliette or any of her other suspects.
“It’ll never stand, of course,” said an older man in a silk smoking jacket. He’d amassed a small audience of like-dressed people with smooth foreheads and dark blue veins along the backs of their hands. “There’s too much precedent against her. Not that I’d want to go up against Rebecca Hempstead, mind you. She eviscerated her cousins over the inheritance rights. Left them poorer than they started.”
“It’s a bad look, I don’t mind saying,” sniffed a woman in a diamond- and-emerald necklace. “The press will have a field day with it, of course. It’s splashy and tacky, just like her. Always making a fuss, dragging the rest of us into it. They’ll be swarming the Dover benefit next month, you know. It’s obscene!”
“Can’t say I blame her, though,” said a man whose cheeks looked permanently red. “The latest batch of Hempsteads is a real mess. Kennedy’s an all right egg, but that boy Richard did an internship at Gary’s firm a few years ago and was a complete waste of space. Didn’t understand the first thing about advertising, much less working in an office. Gary said he’d show up in all sorts of states, drunk, high, who knows what.”
“You didn’t hear it from me, but how do you think Kennedy got the job at Simon Says in the first place?” said a woman in a raspy voice that Kate realized was Serena Archer. The picket line must have broken up already. “The girl is barely out of short dresses and here she is, running the entire marketing department! More like running it into the ground.”
Smoking Jacket Guy gave her a surprised look. “I’d heard from Simon that she was a star, a real up-and-comer.”
Serena snorted. “The only reason Simon would say that is because she gave him a healthy infusion of much-needed cash to grease the wheels. Oh, she tried to keep it quiet, but someone spilled the beans about Kennedy being a so-called silent investor in a rather nasty exposé in Pub Daily . The publisher’s been struggling for years, it’s no secret, and hardworking, high-earning writers like us have been carrying it on our backs with barely a thanks. And how does she repay us? By tanking our sales and ruining our careers! Well, it won’t stand, I tell you. She’ll find she can’t ignore us all when we come together in the mighty lion’s roar.”
“Was that your lion’s roar we heard outside?” said the man with red cheeks. He snickered into his glass. “More like a kitten’s meow, if you ask me.”
Serena sputtered mimosa and outrage in equal measure. “How dare you—Kate, tell him!”
“What?” Kate asked in alarm. She thought she’d been doing a good job of lurking, but as Serena fixed her gaze on her, she realized she was caught out. “I’ve got… things.”
“Scab!” Serena cried shrilly in an echo of their previous encounter outside. “You mark my words, scab, you’ll be one of us someday soon. Out on the streets with nothing but our author copies to keep us warm! You can’t escape us forever. Join the revolution!”
Kate hastily backed away, bumping into a man with a belly like a mall Santa and pirouetting around his wife, who was more perfume than woman. By the time she did a little dance to avoid colliding with a server carrying an urn of piping hot coffee, she was ping-ponging her way through the crowd in an increasingly unbalanced manner. It was around the fourth or fifth muttered “watch it” when she realized this could only end in disaster, which was when she ran chest to chest into someone carrying two full glasses of champagne.
“Oh!” she exclaimed as half the contents of one glass splashed down the front of her shirt, little bubbles rising and popping on the surface. “I’m sorry, it’s so crowded, I—Jake?”
“I might have to reconsider nicknaming you Cannonball Kate,” he said, though she couldn’t tell if his tone was teasing or angry. Her eyes dropped down to the two glasses in his hands, one now half-empty.
“You have… two champagne glasses.”
His mouth tightened, just the tiniest bit. “I do.”
“Oh,” she said, hating how small and sad her voice sounded. Not that Jake owed her anything (he didn’t), and not that she expected anything (she definitely didn’t), but the fact that he seemed to have already found someone else to spend his time with so quickly still hurt.
“Ugh, there you are,” said Juliette Winters as she snagged the full glass from Jake’s hand and knocked half of it back in one gulp.
Kate’s gaze wandered from Juliette back to Jake in shock. “The glass was for Juliette?”
“I sent him to find me one nearly half an hour ago,” Juliette said, giving Jake a frank look. “You’re lucky you have a beautiful face, because you’re a terrible waiter.”
Jake rolled his eyes. “A, I told you I wasn’t a waiter. B, I know you know who I am. You ran the marketing campaign on the Wandering Australian books.”
Juliette shook her head, polishing off the rest of her champagne. “That would have been Kennedy, I don’t do photography books. No, we’ve never met, I’m sure of it. I make a personal habit of remembering guys I might have sex with later.”
Jake choked on his sip of champagne as Kate blurted out, “He has a brother. Jake does. He’s a doctor. The brother, not Jake.”
Juliette looked her up and down with a critical eye. “I see what you’re trying to do, and you’re not subtle about it. But, you’re also not wrong. Tell me more about this doctor brother. What’s his specialty? If it’s feet, I’m out. Or vaginas. I’m competitive, but that’s masochism.”
“Charlie is a cardiothoracic surgeon,” Kate said, hoping Juliette wouldn’t ask for details, since she’d thought cardiothoracic was a dinosaur era when she’d first met Charlie.
But Juliette scrunched up her nose in distaste. “Charlie? No, that’s not happening. That’s a terrible name. Imagine calling that out in bed.”
“Juliette and I were just discussing how things have been going at Simon Says since Kennedy took over the marketing department,” Jake said, looking at Kate meaningfully. “Apparently, there have been some hiccups.”
“More like fuckups,” Juliette snorted.
Jake looked at Kate, tilting his head slightly toward Juliette with an emphatic expression. Which was when Kate realized, with a funny little lurch in her heart, that Jake had been investigating for her. Bringing Juliette a glass of champagne, loosening her up, getting her to talk.
“What kind of fuckups?” Kate asked innocently, giving Jake a wink. Except Juliette chose that moment to look at her, narrowing her eyes.
“What is that? What are you doing? Is this some weird tag team attempt to change my mind about you poisoning Kennedy last night?”
“No, it’s not.” Kate crossed her arms. “But I’m not the only one with a potential grudge against Kennedy, am I?”
Juliette gave her a desultory once-over. “Are you interrogating me, Nancy Drew?”
“I’m just asking questions,” Kate said with a shrug. “Why does that feel like an interrogation to you?”
Juliette’s mouth curled up in a slow, predatory smile. “Oh my god, you’re trying to pin this on me, aren’t you? Your plan must be going ass up if you think anybody would believe I did it. Okay, Veronica Mars, I’ll play your little game.”
“You sure do know the names of a lot of teen-girl detectives,” Kate said.
“Yeah, I was super into them as a kid,” Juliette said. “I like Loretta, too. She doesn’t think with her dick like all of Serena’s characters, and she’s not a total bitch like all of Marla’s characters. It’s one of the few Simon Says titles I actually enjoy reading. So, what’s my motive?”
“Knowing you? Revenge. Against Kennedy, and against me.”
“Revenge for what?”
“The promotion,” Jake said. “You and Kate had a falling-out over the cancelled book tour, and it cost you the promotion that Kennedy got. So, of course you’d want revenge against both of them for the slight.”
“Mmm, first of all, we didn’t have a ‘falling-out’ over the book tour,” Juliette said, holding up a finger in rebuttal. “I scheduled an extensive book tour involving fourteen bookstores in eleven cities, and Kate pretended to have mono at the last minute because she was going through a breakup. It was unprofessional, expensive, and damaged our relationship with several indie bookstores.”
Kate’s mouth dropped open, but Juliette wasn’t done. She lifted another finger, cataloging her next point.
“Second, it’s laughable you think that would cost me the promotion. Yes, I was at one point in consideration for it, but I removed myself from the running. The last thing I wanted was the albatross of all those little ninnies constantly running to me asking what they should do about every single book launch. Your book-three tour disaster taught me that much. My ambitions and my skills are higher than that, which I’ll be proving to all of you soon enough. And third, I was with Veeta at the time of Kennedy’s staged accident.”
“Veeta, right,” Kate said. “And what would Veeta say about the two of you breaking into someone else’s room last night, hmmm?”
Juliette hesitated the slightest bit, her only tell that Kate had truly surprised her. Her gaze narrowed. “What did that little narc tell you? I knew I couldn’t trust them.”
“Whose room were you breaking into, and why?” Kate demanded.
“Nobody and none of your business,” Juliette snapped back.
“I heard you say you were about to get everything you wanted, and one little idiot stood in your way,” Kate pressed.
Juliette crossed her arms, her gaze narrowing. “You were spying on me?”
Kate did her best to match Juliette’s stance. “What did you mean by ‘one little idiot’? Were you talking about getting Kennedy out of the way so you could get the promotion you thought you deserved?”
Juliette glanced around the room before bringing her gaze back to Jake and Kate. “I guess I can trust you two, considering you’ve been out of the country for six months and you had a very fake case of mono and a very real case of hiding in your apartment like a coward.”
“It was real!” Kate protested.
“So you do know who I am,” Jake said at the same time.
Juliette took both of them by the arm, steering them into a more private corner of the breakfast room. “Simon Says has a mole.”
“What, you mean the one above his lip?” Kate asked, confused. “What about it?”
Juliette sighed to the ceiling. “Not Simon Hsu. Simon Says, the company. Someone is leaking confidential information. Details of the sale, investor meetings, potential layoffs. I swear, a week hasn’t gone by without a blind item about Simon Says getting reported in the Pub Daily emails. Most of them have been unsubstantiated rumors, but a couple of them were about private, privileged information that only a mole could have access to.”
Kate had read a few of those emails, including the one Serena mentioned that claimed Kennedy Hempstead had become a private investor in the company. If that one had proved to be true, she could imagine which other ones might have stirred up panic within the publisher.
“Simon tasked me with finding out who it is,” Juliette continued. “When I do, he’ll make sure I’m compensated. I was checking out Serena’s room last night when you were snooping.”
“Why Serena?” Jake asked.
“You mean other than the little author riot she’s been stirring up out there this morning?” Juliette said dryly. “Well, I found out that Serena Archer isn’t her real name.”
“A lot of authors use pen names,” Kate reasoned.
“Yeah, but it’s not just a pen name, it’s a fake name. Like, her whole identity is fake. Serena Archer doesn’t exist.”
That was new information. “So, what is her real name?”
“That’s what I was trying to find out,” Juliette said. “People don’t make up false identities unless they’re trying to hide something from their past.”
Kate thought again of Serena’s tirade against Kennedy last night, and her cryptic comment about midnight. What was she hiding from her past, and could it have anything to do with Kennedy’s present predicament? Plus, Kate realized as Juliette counted off all the reasons that she wasn’t the one to poison Kennedy that her nails were painted a soft mauve. The nails in the picture were purple, and Kate didn’t figure she could have changed her nail colors that quickly. Which meant someone else had been holding the champagne glass last night. Could it have been Serena?
“Where is Serena’s room?” Kate asked.
“Why?” Juliette asked suspiciously. “Don’t go fucking things up for me, Harriet.”
“She was a spy,” Kate pointed out.
“And so were you, apparently.” Juliette huffed. “Fine, just don’t rat me out when you get caught or I’ll make sure there’s hell to pay. She’s on the second floor, east corridor, fourth door down. You don’t know me and we didn’t have this conversation.”
“But you know me !” Jake called after her as she wound her way through the crowd. He looked to Kate, frowning in worry. “What are you planning now?”
“Nothing to concern you,” Kate said primly. “You wouldn’t approve anyway.”
“Kate,” Jake said, in a warning tone. But she was already slipping out of the breakfast room, headed for the second floor. “Don’t do anything stupid… er than you already have!”