Sheryl J. Anderson

I always knew I’d make my mark on the world. I just didn’t expect it to be one of those chalk outlines they draw around dead bodies. Of course, the chalk came later. It started with the blood. But that’s the price you pay for wearing open-toed shoes in Manhattan. You never know what you’re going to step in.

It’s actually Cassady’s fault that we went by my office when we did, and I’m not above using that to guilt her into buying me a new pair to replace the ones that soaked up all the blood. But then, Cassady Lynch is a lawyer and she’s got a much stricter view of liability than I do. So I suppose the shoes will just turn into another one of those debit/credit things you pile up with girlfriends over the years--sweaters that got stretched out, cars that got dented, boyfriends that got stolen. But shoes that got trashed at a murder scene--brand new Jimmy Choos, mind you, the Cat 85mm’s with that gorgeous blue striped fabric and fabulous heel, that cost me more than I can bear to think--probably demand a whole budget line item all their own.

I suppose I could have told Cassady no. But that’s pretty much a superhuman feat and it’s not successful very often, for me or anyone else, so it’s not surprising that I caved. What started the whole deal was I was trying to describe this hideous piece of art The Publisher had just installed in our offices and Cassady said it couldn’t possibly be as awful as I was making it out to be. Granted, there were several mojitos fueling the fires of art criticism, but I stood my ground. It was one of the uglier pieces I had ever seen. Cassady insisted that I take her to see it right away. She said she wasn’t going to be able to concentrate on dinner with the images of this abomination dancing in her head.

Cassady took some art classes when we were in college, but then she tried to submit her boyfriend for a midterm exam. She’d stripped him--remember, it’s very hard to say no to her--and painted this “Guernica”-like mural all over his body, leaving only his genitals unpainted because, as we all remember from Goldfinger, he would have suffocated otherwise. Cassady said it was a political statement. I contend that she was bored and looking to get kicked out of the class. They were going to give her an incomplete, but she threatened to launch a whole freedom of expression brouhaha and walked away from it all with a B. She’s amazing that way.

Small wonder she persuaded me to leave Django and walk over to the office. I work for Zeitgeist magazine, which is right down Lexington Avenue. You can find us wedged between Marie Claire and Cosmo at your finer newsstands and markets. We do the whole lifestyle thing, but we like to think we have more of a sense of humor than the competition. God knows it takes a sense of humor to survive in our business, and I mean both the magazine business and the business of being a single woman in New York City. And those are both big businesses. In fact, they may support every other one. Single women drive the economy of this city and the magazines report on it. Everything else is just an offshoot, a subcontractor. The restaurants, the bars, the shops, the shrinks, the florists, the designers, the garment and jewelry districts, the theatres, the gyms, the hotels… Detect a pattern? If they don’t exist because of the needs and wants of single women, they exist to employ the men that single women need and want, which accounts for the lawyers, doctors, and stockbrokers. And the whole subset of baby stuff and nannies and houses in Connecticut is there to inspire the single women to put up with the single men. It’s a delicate economic model, but it seems to be working.

I have to admit, it was my idea not to turn on the light right away. I wanted to go for a sort of “tah-dah” moment and snap the light on to reveal the grotesquery in all its glory in a blaze of track lighting. There was a fair amount of outside light bouncing in through the windows and off all the chrome and acrylic in the bullpen that vast middle ground where those not deemed office-worthy sit at desks with nothing to protect them from learning way too much about their colleagues. There aren’t even glorified bulletin boards masquerading as cubicle walls to give people the illusion of their own space. Everything’s out in the open--desks, filing cabinets, sexual preferences, dating disasters. The overheard phone conversations are the most colorful thing in the bullpen.

So while we favor a lush, vibrant palette in print, we’re just this side of institutional in our office design. The Publisher believes comfortable people don’t work fast enough. He must believe the same thing about rich people, because he’s not turning any of us into them. The press calls him a business genius. I guess “miser” is too old-fashioned.

I know my way around the office well enough that I wasn’t concerned about tripping over anything. The assistants’ desks are laid out in diagonals--on the bias, as Caitlin, the fashion editor, likes to point out--to keep the floor plan from looking too much like an insurance company, but it’s still simple to navigate. I just didn’t expect Teddy to be lying on the floor with a knife in his throat. One moment, I was leading Cassady through the darkened bullpen and the next, I was aware of my foot squooshing. I knew immediately that I had stepped in something that was not going to be good for my shoes, but I was thinking more along the lines of yogurt someone had somehow spilled and neglected to clean up. I stopped suddenly, my toes curling up like cocktail shrimp.

“What?” Cassady said impatiently.

“I stepped in something.”

“If it’s on the floor at this hour of the night, it’s disgusting. Don’t touch it. Where’s the light switch?” Cassady started to feel her way toward the wall.

“I’ll get it.”

“No, stay put. You don’t want to track it around or grind it into your new shoes, whatever it is.”

As Cassady groped for the switch, I bent over to see what I could see in the dark. All I could tell was that there was a large pool of something dark on the carpet and a big pile of something against one of the desks. Then Cassady found the light switch and I realized that the darkness on the carpet was blood and the big pile was Teddy Reynolds, advertising director for Zeitgeist. I think I already mentioned the knife.

Now, I believe I deserve points for not fainting, puking, or even screaming. I only made a delicate sound of concern. Of course, Cassady later described it to Tricia as “the sound a Yorkshire terrier would make if you threw it against the wall. Hard.”

Cassady came running back over, took a look, and said, “Holy shit.” But then, it was a different experience for her. She didn’t know Teddy.

“You know him?” For some reason, she was whispering. I nodded as she helped me up, noting my right foot planted firmly in the pool of blood. The red was already soaking in and discoloring the blues in the fabric. “That’s never going to come out.”

“Isn’t it shallow to be thinking that way at a moment like this?”

Cassady shrugged. “People handle grief in different ways.” She grabbed the phone on the nearest desk.

“Call Tricia on her cell. She has an event tonight.” Good times, bad times, you call your girlfriends first.

Cassady squinted. “You’re kidding, right?”

Actually, I wasn’t. “Who else?”

“I thought I’d start with the police.” Cassady dialed 911. You can always count on her to have the logical reaction, even in times of extreme stress. Granted, she doesn’t always follow through with the logical reaction, especially when a man is involved, but at least it occurs to her. Not all of us have that particular gift.

I stared blankly at the menu at Carnegie Deli and secretly hoped that Detective Edwards was about to stand me up. What was I going to tell him? Helen was innocent because there was food in her fridge? Because she seemed nice? Wanting to be helpful and being able to be helpful seemed to be drifting farther and farther apart at the moment. But before I could sort it all out, he was sliding into the seat across from me, looking better than I was prepared for. “Good morning. I was afraid you’d stand me up.”

I tried a whimsical look, but it felt more like a twitch. “Why would I?”

“Better offer?”

“Didn’t get one. But I haven’t checked my messages in the last hour or so.”

“Please don’t.” He smiled lazily and pushed the menu out of the way without looking at it. I put mine on top of his. He clearly knew what he wanted. I didn’t have a clue, but I was developing a taste for figuring things out on the fly.

“How was Helen Reynolds when you left her?”

Oh, fine. Right to business. I actually felt a flicker of disappointment, but then again, I had been the one to insist that this was not a date. Served me right. “About the same. Her sister came in from Queens and that helped. You don’t still suspect her?”

“I thought we were having breakfast so you could tell me what you know.” He upped the wattage on his smile, but now there was a touch of warning to it, too.

“Helen didn’t do it.”

“What makes you so sure?”

I figured he’d scoff at the paella, so I went for a more psychological approach. “She wants vengeance on whoever did do it. And she wasn’t faking.”

“You know her that well?”

“No, I know real emotion when I see it.”

His smile loosened a little and I waited for the smart response, but the waitress intruded. He ordered an everything bagel, toasted, and coffee. I thought about doing the same, then thought about the number of times poppyseeds wind up between your front teeth, even when you’re being careful, and ordered a bowl of fruit and coffee. It seemed a shame to order so simply when the smells of steak and eggs and maple syrup and melting butter meandered through the whole place, but I wanted to make sure he understood that I understood that this was a working breakfast. And yes, I am also one of those girls who think twice about eating hearty in front of a guy in the early stages.

“Refresh my memory. How long had you known Teddy?” He was playing with his pen against his closed notebook, turning the pen end on end. He kept his eyes on mine, but I kept glancing down at the pen, less distracted than avoiding the Big Blues for a moment.

“Three years. I’d heard of him before that, but I came to the magazine three years ago.”

“Heard of him?”

“An old friend of mine, Stephanie Glenn, worked with him at Femme. That’s where he was before Zeitgeist. In fact, Yvonne worked there, too. They go way back, she’s the one that brought him over to Zeitgeist. He had a great reputation, business-wise. It’s his social skills that got mixed reviews.”

“What’d your friend think of him?”

“She thought he was a hoot. But she didn’t work for him, which is where you find most of the people who weren’t big fans.”

“Did she sleep with him?”

I almost laughed, imagining Stephanie with Teddy. “No way.” Edwards arched an eyebrow. “She’s gay.”

“I see. Do you know who did sleep with him?”

“Why are you back on that?” It was fine for me to be obsessing about the possibility of Teddy’s rancid romantic past, but I was doing it as a journalist and a student of human behavior. Edwards was doing it as a cop and that road could only lead back to, “You do still suspect Helen.”

“At this stage, I suspect everyone. Statistically, the wife goes to the head of the class.”

“You’re wasting my time.”

“So point me in another direction.”

“I think it was someone he knew pretty well. Someone who knew he worked weird hours. Someone who was furious with him.” Like his wife who had just discovered he was sleeping around on her, but not her. The thought clanked around noisily in my head, but I refused to say it and prepared myself for Edwards saying it.

Instead, he asked, “Why furious?”

This was a test, right? He knew the answer and wanted to see how keenly observant I was capable of being. Fine. I resisted the impulse to begin with “Well, duh,” and said, “Because she left the knife in his throat.”

Edwards stopped tapping his pen and looked at me oddly. Had I failed the test? Didn’t it make perfect sense that you’d leave the knife behind only to make a statement? Sort of like signing a painting. “If you stabbed someone in a moment of anger or passion, don’t you think you’d realize what you’d done and pull the knife back out, to clean or hide the knife if nothing else? To leave the knife in there--that’s rage. The ultimate ‘screw you, Teddy.’”

The pen started tapping again, but slowly and deliberately. “She?”

“What?” I’d hoped for an “exactly, my dear Forrester” or something a little more indicative of how well we were doing.

“You said ‘she left the knife.’ Why?”

“Because Teddy was a bully, but a coward. He wouldn’t have gotten close enough to an angry man for a man to stab him like that.”

Edwards didn’t react at all for a moment, then nodded. “Our analysis of the blood spatter indicates that Reynolds was in the doorway of his office, probably leaning against the frame, and was stabbed with an overhand thrust from a lower angle.”

I raised my hand, trying to figure that one out. “So she’s shorter than he was.”

Edwards watched my hand. Keenly aware that my nails were a mess, I dropped my hand back into my lap. Edwards’ eyes slid up to mine. “How tall are you?”

I almost told him, but for once, my brain worked faster than my mouth. “Excuse me?”

“How tall are you?”

“You’ve got to be kidding.” He didn’t shake his head, didn’t smile, didn’t look away. I felt like Carrie as the pig’s blood hit the top of her head. Of course Detective Edwards didn’t want to take me to the prom because I was cute. He thought I was guilty.