Chapter Seven #2
I sighed. Of course she just wanted gossip. “Vienna was not arrested, at least last I heard.” I would’ve heard, right? Even if she hadn’t texted me back?
“Do you think she did it?”
“Yes, Mom. Of course I think my best friend did it. Are you telling me you don’t think your best friend’s murdered anyone? How pedestrian.”
“Honestly, Pomona.” My mom bristled. “You know with mine it’s a gray area.” But I’d shut her up, at least for a few seconds, and that was a victory. Those few seconds were enough time for my dad to get some words in.
Unfortunately, he seemed to have forgotten about his concern for me. He said, rather self-importantly, “It’s not a gray area because she used a beach umbrella and was technically found not at fault because it was such a windy day.”
“I’ve already had to testify to that enough,” Mom said.
“My skin looked terrible in that drab courtroom lighting. Thank goodness they didn’t allow photos, though it’s not like that sketch artist did me any favors.
Did you see how that man depicted my neck?
It was like I hadn’t even gotten that surgery. Well, surgeries.”
I sighed through my nose.
“Anyway, I was asking about your friend because apparently she was sleeping with Conrad Phlume.”
I popped bolt upright. “What are you talking about?”
My mom’s voice oozed with delight at getting to break the news. “My friend saw them out together at that stodgy old red sauce joint on Seventy-Fifth. All cuddled up together in a booth in the back. They both looked sick when my friend went over to say hello.”
My mom might have been terrible in a lot of ways, but she wasn’t a liar. At least not about things like this (her age was another story. She was the oldest-looking forty-year-old in the country, probably).
Which meant Vienna was the one who’d lied.
Not explicitly—I wondered what she would say if I confronted her directly about it, though she’d have to text me back for that.
But she hadn’t said anything about cozying up to Conrad Phlume during our whole time preparing this gala that was partially in his honor (but mostly mine).
“Hmm,” I said noncommittally. Really, Vienna?
Conrad Phlume? That’s who you have an affair with?
No. No way. Vienna had integrity. There was no way she’d knowingly help a man cheat on his wife.
Especially not if that man was Conrad Phlume.
“That poor woman,” Mom said smugly. “Getting cheated on like that again. Just like Denise Ryan.”
“It’s not her fault,” I said. “Either of their faults. Denise at least seems way happier without her ex.”
“She must be lacking something that would make him stay,” she said.
“Look at my marriage. Your father and I have been faithful to each other for thirty years. Meanwhile, in his first marriage, he cheated and left her behind, all sad and alone, because I was an objectively better person and partner.”
“That’s not fair,” I told her.
“How dare you say I’m a bad wife?”
I sighed. “That’s not what I said.”
“I’m just saying it as I see it,” said my mom. “She lost, and I won.”
“Dear,” Dad said. “Is being married to me for thirty years actually winning?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. That was probably the funniest thing my father had ever said, at least intentionally. As far as I was concerned, my parents deserved each other. His first wife had won that marriage by getting out. Which probably sounded terrible, but it was true.
At least this time my parents weren’t suspects! What a relief!
“Roberta thought so,” my mom huffed. “Remember how hard she fought the divorce?”
“She wasn’t exactly fighting the divorce,” Dad said mildly. “She wanted the Nantucket house.”
“I wanted the Nantucket house,” Mom spat.
“To be fair,” Dad said, “it had been in her family for generations.”
Okay, I had to get this back on track. “Is there anything else you wanted to discuss?”
“Honestly, Pomona,” Mom said. “Sometimes you can be so…”
Gabe squeezed my arm. I jumped a little.
I’d almost forgotten he was there, but his presence reminded me that, hello, I did not have to take this.
“I have to go,” I said, and pulled the phone away from my ear before my mom could neg me about how I couldn’t possibly have anything more interesting going on than talking to them.
It sounded cliché, but the moment my phone was down, it felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders.
I rolled them, relishing the sound of the crack.
“The funny thing is that Mom would trash Denise Ryan before the divorce too,” I told Gabe, and also Squeaky, who was purring so hard at my feet I was a little worried he might drill his way down through the floor and into the vacant apartment below us (the owner was holding out to sell for a better market, which was fine with me, because I didn’t have to feel guilty about doing a virtual solo tango class at ten p.m.).
“Whenever she’d see her at a gala, Mom would talk smack about how she was new money and she’d had the nerve to marry into it, not inherit it or make it—actually, the term she used was a lot grosser—and how she’d never be anything more than a bartender from Pennsylvania. ”
I hoped she’d steered clear of that talk around Jessica, who was marrying into our money by marrying my brother. Probably she hadn’t. God, I owed Jessica so many drinks.
Gabe said, “Not surprising coming from your mom.”
She hadn’t said much of anything about Gabe, at least around me—not because she hadn’t tried, because I would literally stand up and leave the room whenever she did—but I could only imagine she’d think way worse about him, since he was a man.
No matter that Gabe insisted on paying me rent and utilities so that he wouldn’t feel like he was freeloading.
No matter that, when we’d discussed the future, he said he was fine signing a prenup in regard to the family money.
I cleared my throat delicately. “By the way, did you see that spread in Vogue Italia? The one about fall weddings in Tuscany?”
He cocked his head at me, smirking a little. “It would’ve been hard to miss, considering you opened the magazine right to the spread and left it on the kitchen counter in front of my coffee machine.”
If there was one thing you (and countless journalists) could say about me, it was not that I was subtle. “What did you think?”
“It looked beautiful,” he said. “But I’m not sure a wedding in Tuscany is for me. Too picturesque. All those rolling hills make me queasy.”
I rolled my eyes, shoving him gently, shoulder to shoulder. “Rolling hills make you queasy?”
“I’m just speaking my truth.” But there was a sparkle in his eye. “Your cousin Freddy’s wedding in Jackson Hole, though? That was something.”
“I can work with that,” I said. We might not have been engaged yet, but I knew it was coming.
Nobody could date me for a year and not want to marry me.
And you could never start planning the party of a lifetime too early.
“Maybe during the early winter, when the snow is still sparkly. I’ll have Jessica as a bridesmaid, obviously, and Vienna…
” I trailed off. I was going to say Vienna would be my maid of honor, but what if… what if…
“Don’t go down that road, Pom. You have no idea if Vienna—”
“But she was hiding things from me,” I said. I swallowed hard, trying to keep down the tears threatening to choke me. My neck ached from the whiplash the turn in this conversation had given me. “Opal was my friend and she was a killer. Another person close to me can’t be a killer!”
“Oh, Pom.” Gabe wrapped me in his arms, pulling me close into his chest. I breathed in deep, his smell of lemon and soap and coffee endlessly comforting. “It’s not your fault, you know.”
“I know it’s not my fault.” I sniffled. “But what does it say about me if I keep welcoming killers into my friend circle? Nobody will want to be my friend.”
I felt a little like I was in elementary school again, the other girls giving me the cold shoulder because my pony bit some of their ponies during dressage practice. I couldn’t blame anybody or anyhorse for not wanting to dance with us after that.
“It’s not a reflection on you,” Gabe said into the top of my head.
“The universe is full of random chance. You being born into a billionaire family is probably less likely than you befriending two killers. There are more killers in the world than billionaires, I bet.” He let that discomfiting statistic sit for a moment.
I wondered what would happen if all the killers ganged up against the billionaires.
They’d totally win. Billionaires were soft.
“And you don’t know anything yet. One dinner does not an affair make, and even if she was having an affair with him, that doesn’t mean she killed him. ”
I took a deep breath. “Right. You’re right.” It just cemented the need to look into other alternatives. So that I couldn’t stew in the horrible maybe of it all. “That means we only have two main leads on this list, right? The scary bird artist and Bibi.”
“It’s going to be hard to get to Bibi, I bet.”
That was true, though I’d need to reach out at some point to see what was going on with the building Conrad had promised me.
I’d have to wait a respectful amount of time after the murder, of course.
Poking her on it today would be callous.
“The artist, then.” He was the only one who’d explicitly admitted to wanting to murder someone that night.
It would be irresponsible not to talk to him.
It turned out he was pretty easy to pin down—he had a show opening the next night. “It’s in Brooklyn.” I grimaced as I scrolled to the bottom of the online feature. “But at least it’s in one of the cool parts.”
“Don’t forget your hat!” Gabe said enthusiastically.