Camilla T. Crespi - The Breakfast Club Murder (34 page)

“Now I do.” Lori gave Margot a smile of reassurance. “I’m sorry I didn’t before.”

“Don’t blame yourself. I’m a good actress.”

Lori laughed. “That’s the career you should have gone for.” But as a good friend, she should have seen through Margot’s bluster, the way she should have understood Beth’s loneliness. Lori hugged her knees to her chest in imitation of Margot. “I think Warren was equally proud of having landed gorgeous, funny, generous, not in the least bit dumb you.”

“Then why did he continue seeing her?”

“He wanted another feather in his cap? Having two women made him feel on top of the world? Who can figure what makes a man act like a jerk? Then once you left, I imagine he got very angry you wouldn’t forgive him. And he’s a proud man. He kept seeing Valerie to show you and maybe himself that he didn’t need you.”

“He wants us to get back together, but I’m not sure.”

“Do you still love him?”

“I thought for a while I had stopped. I’ve been feeling young and excited again. Do you remember that feeling? Waking up in the morning, expecting something wonderful to happen, but not knowing what?” Margot had her head down, talking to her knees. “Then something not wonderful happened, and I felt like yesterday’s trash, but now I think all I wanted to do with all my dating around was get back at Warren. He’s the one I still love, but the problem with being cheated on, it shakes your belief in people. I don’t know who to believe, who to trust. I’m always questioning what everyone says. It’s awful. You know what I’m talking about.”

“Unfortunately I do.”

“If I go back to Warren, how do I know he won’t cheat on me again?”

“I can’t answer that. I doubt that Warren could.” Lori didn’t think much of Warren any more, but she told Margot that he did love her and Valerie could no longer do any harm. “It’s up to you to take the risk. If you love him.”

“I do.”

“If you’re sure, forgive him.”

A gust of wind lifted Margot’s hat off her head. She didn’t seem to notice. “Warren did call Valerie when she was driving the girls back. He told me last night and that you’d asked him about it. You’re not thinking he killed Valerie, are you?” There wasn’t a speck of doubt in her eyes.

Lori shook her head. “I don’t see motive.” Unless Valerie was blackmailing Warren to stay with her. Unless killing her was the only way of ridding himself of her and getting Margot back. Yesterday she had thought Warren was not dangerous, but who knew? She was glad Margot was staying over with the girls.

Margot ran a hand through her hair and looked around for her hat. It was floating out with the ebb tide, Gertie swimming after it. “Good girl!” Margot called out. “Bring it home. Those two detectives, Scardini and Mitchell, found out about the affair, and they’ve been buzzing around Warren with their stingers out. They even asked me if I’d killed her to get my husband back. Thank God I have an alibi.”

Lori remembered what Callie had told her. Margot had gone out shortly after the girls came home. “What is your alibi?”

“You’re going to get angry.”

Lori didn’t think she had any anger left over. It was all aimed at Rob. “Margot, just tell me.”

“I left the girls alone and drove to the Rye Hilton, which is in the other direction from where Valerie was killed. The bartender knows me and confirmed my story.” Gertie dropped the hat in front of Margot, who gave her a quick pat on the head. “The girls are thirteen, they’re fine by themselves. Please don’t be upset with me.”

So that was Margot’s lie of omission, Lori thought as she grabbed the hat before it floated back out. She had left Jessica alone in the house at night a few times, but only to pick up a pizza or go to the store. Never more than thirty minutes. “Next time tell me beforehand, okay?”

Margot crinkled her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“Accepted. Does Warren have an alibi?”

“No. That’s what I’m worried about. God, I’m completely soaked.” Margot swung her knees down in the water and stood up. She held out a hand to help Lori up. “Let’s go change.”

“I have nothing to change into,” Lori admitted. She was wearing yesterday’s slacks with a clean shirt.

“I’ll lend you something.”

“I’ll never get into it. I’ll use your dryer.”

As they walked back to the house, all three trailing water, Margot said, “The detectives wanted to know what Warren’s phone call was about. He says he told Valerie that he wasn’t going to see her again. Do you think that’s true?”

What he had said to Valerie didn’t matter anymore, Lori thought. Warren wanted his wife back and Margot wanted him back. Voicing her own doubts would accomplish nothing. She said, “Why should Warren lie at this point?”

Lori was back in Hawthorne Park by four thirty in the afternoon, after promising Jess and Margot that she’d be back on Saturday to celebrate the Fourth together. She headed straight for the supermarket to shop for tonight’s gnocchi dinner with Alec. She looked forward to the evening. He would bring a welcome pause, a sense of peace. No, not peace. A sense of fun, Lori remembered, seeing him in her head again with the smile that was both quiet and mischievous. She found him sexy, despite his preference for men. Maybe because of it. “Nothing makes you drool like something out of reach,” Ellie liked to say, but she was talking about the roasted peppers her aging stomach couldn’t digest any more.

In the produce section, Beethoven’s notes rang out. An older fellow shopper gave her a dirty look as Lori scrambled through her purse to find the loud phone. Lori had called Ellie on her drive down to say everything was fine. Beth she had saved for later, when she was home. It would be a long conversation and she wanted to concentrate on her driving.

“How did it go?” Beth didn’t like to wait.

Keeping her voice low, Lori told Beth about her visit to Rob’s office and her overnight stay with Warren and the girls. While she talked, phone clutched in one hand, she continued to shop with her free arm. A dangling microphone would have made life easier at this moment, but Lori refused to use one, convinced people talking into them looked like they had no one in the world except their crazy selves. Whatever happened to her, however real that image might become once Jessica left home, Lori did not want to look the part. She and Margot had a similar need to keep up a front. Maybe all single women did.

While Lori handpicked four large impeccable russet potatoes, she told Beth that she had resolved a few puzzles: Rob had admitted being in debt and hadn’t paid back the people who had invested with him. In the pasta and sauces lane, she added that Jonathan was one of those investors. Rob owed him a million dollars of Mrs. Ashe’s money and, if Rob was to be believed, had told her, Lori, a lot of lies. She hated to admit it, because Jonathan had been charming and fun in a smarmy way and she had almost gone to bed with him, in fact had wanted very much to go to bed with him, but, “We have to consider him a suspect now. He’s got plenty of motive.”

“The police haven’t arrested him so he’s got to have an alibi,” Beth said, always ready to reason through things, an ability Lori knew she didn’t always have. She took a carton of Pomi crushed tomatoes from the shelf and remembered Margot’s alibi— drinking in the bar of the Rye Hilton where the bartender knew her well. Margot wasn’t one to go to bars alone. Who was she drinking with that night? Not Warren. She had admitted he didn’t have an alibi.

“Earth to Lori—come in, Lori?” Beth said.

“Sorry, I was thinking.” Lori pushed her cart to the refrigerated cheese bin at the back of the store. She needed mascarpone—a thick, rich, soft cheese not unlike cream cheese—which was the one ingredient she hadn’t guessed while eating gnocchi della regina in Rome. “I was thinking about Margot. She’s been seeing someone. Do you think it could be Jonathan?”

Beth didn’t answer right away. Lori pictured her frowning slightly while her brain received the question, spun the words around like Lotto numbers, then spit out the winning answer.

“You’re not interested in Jonathan anymore?” Beth asked.

“You were right. I’m not interested in cheap fun.”

“Margot dating Jonathan would explain her reaction in the coffee shop when you told us you’d gone out with him,” she said.

“What reaction?” Lori hadn’t noticed anything.

“She didn’t like it. Then Margot got nasty with Jan. That was right after you told us. She left abruptly, too.”

Lori remembered Margot’s surprising tears crying in her kitchen last Saturday, while she was preparing for Mrs. Ashe’s dinner. She had thought Margot was upset about telling the police she hadn’t been able to reach Lori on her home phone when Valerie was murdered, but then Margot had talked about Jonathan. “Do you like him?” she had asked.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Lori now asked Beth.

“I didn’t want to spoil your fun with Jonathan. I thought she was jealous that she hadn’t gotten to him first.”

“She’s not that petty. You know she isn’t.”

“Petty has nothing to do with it. I was jealous of you when you were married, that your husband was still alive and mine was not. I’m sure you’ve been jealous of someone sometime or other.”

Lori had to laugh. “Yes, of your strength.”

“My strength? That’s a good one. Anyway I’ve made my point. What else?”

“The night Valerie died,” Lori said, “Margot left the girls at home alone and went to bar of the Rye Town Hilton. She could have had a date with Jonathan.”

“Ask her.”

“I will.” She would call her after she’d gotten the sauce under way. Lori unearthed the mascarpone from under a pile of Brie and added it to her cart. She was done shopping. It was time to go home and cook. “I’ve got to go home. Alec’s coming over for dinner.”

“That’s great,” Beth said. “Listen, Lori, remember that Rob’s a good liar so take what he tells you with a grain of salt.”

“He told Jonathan to stop seeing me.” She explained that was probably why Jonathan had planned to cancel the weekend getaway, except she had done it first.

“Rob’s jealous now that he’s wifeless. Give him a few days and he’ll ask to come back home.”

Lori didn’t tell Beth he already had asked. Only for a few days, though. As if her home was a hotel he could come in and out of at will. It was too humiliating for Jess. For herself. Which reminded her of Margot’s “lies.” Walking to the car, she filled Beth in on what Margot had told her on the beach that morning. Beth’s reaction was a low whistle, followed by silence and then, “What a mess we get ourselves into over men.”

There was no answer at Warren’s house. They were probably all in town having an early dinner before the concert. Lori left a message on Margot’s cell. She remembered she still hadn’t talked to Seth to get his version of what had happened between him and Rob the night of the murder. She punched in his number.

Janet answered and told her he wasn’t home, that she didn’t know where he could be reached. “I’ve told you everything that happened,” she said in an angry tone. “He’s not going to solve the murder for you. He didn’t kill Valerie. Leave him alone. Please. We’ve had enough questioning from the police.”

Lori stopped stirring the sauce. “Jan, please understand. Maybe there’s something he knows without being aware of it. If he goes over it with me, maybe—”

“Maybe nothing. He’s gone over it a thousand times. You can take his story, shake it to death, and all that’s going to come out is the same story. Please, Lori, just leave us alone for a while.” The anger in Janet’s voice eased. “Seth and I have a lot of sorting out to do between ourselves.”

“Oh Janet, I didn’t stop to think.” Lori was chagrined. She was being so self-involved that she hadn’t thought about the state of Janet’s marriage. Seth taking his wife’s inheritance money on the sly was as bad as having an affair. Maybe. “I’m so sorry you’re going through this. Is there can anything I can do?”

“I’m just so angry at him.”

If their marriage broke up, they would both be devastated, Lori was sure of it. “You are each other’s backbone, try to remember that.”

“Backbones can break,” Janet said. “I have to go.”

“I’ll see you at Callie’s on Monday?”

“I don’t know.”

“Please try,” Lori said, hoping she hadn’t ruined a friendship. “Good luck.”

“Good luck to you, too.” Janet hung up.

Lori put the potatoes to boil. She could understand Janet’s anger at Seth, at the murder, at the two years she had struggled for money, at anything that had put her once well-ordered life in jeopardy. Janet’s anger at her, Lori—did it have anything to do with being afraid of the questions she might ask Seth? Did Janet have doubts about his story? Seth had reason to kill Valerie. As did Ruth and Jonathan. But Seth had somehow known about the will, and he had been the one to call Rob at Pastis to make an appointment so that Valerie had to drive the girls home. An appointment with Rob to which he had not shown up. Did he instead follow Valerie?

The sauce was gurgling on the stove, filling the kitchen with the sweet smell of tomatoes enhanced with onions, celery, carrots, and a hint of nutmeg. The basil, lemon zest, and mascarpone would be added just before serving, along with a few dollops of butter and some grated nutmeg. When the phone rang, Lori was bent over the kitchen counter. She had just finished kneading the mashed potatoes, eggs, and flour into a mound of firm, moist dough. Now she was dividing the dough into six equal pieces to then roll them out into long snakes, which she would cut into three-quarter-inch pieces. She would have more gnocchi than she needed for dinner, but she planned to freeze the rest for when Jessica came home. Across the room the phone kept ringing while Lori went to the sink to wash her hands. She heard the click of the answering machine pick up as she grabbed a towel and rushed to catch the call.

“Lori, Kate here. I’m so sorry, I—”

Rob’s secretary. She sounded as if she’d been crying. Lori lifted the receiver so quickly it hit her ear. “Kate, I’m here. What’s wrong?”

Kate inhaled loudly. “They arrested him.”

Lori felt a suffocating weight move down her body, like concrete being poured into an empty shell. “Rob?” she managed to squeak.