“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 againstthe 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.
CHAPTER
Eight
Idid forget my hat. If by “forget” you meant “stuffed so far in the back of my closet that it practically went into the next apartment, where Sandra Gelman’s teacup Pomeranian would probably use it as a tiny, very unfashionable dog bed.”
“So sad,” I told Gabe, doing my absolute girlfriend best to sound regretful. He removed his, resting it in his lap.
“It doesn’t work if it’s only one of us,” he said. “I just look like a douchebag.”
As opposed to us both wearing them, in which case we would’ve looked liketwodouchebags. Much better. I gave him a sympathetic smile. “Sorry.”
Neither of our outfits would’ve worked with a tan fedora (to be fair, the only real outfit that works with a tan fedora is a 1950s-style suit, but to make that work you really have to look like Humphrey Bogart). I’d styled us to hopefully blend in with the arty crowd tonight, which Humphrey Bogart would not. I was wearing a skirt from Rita Ngo, a fashion designer I’d discovered last year when she was graduating from FIT (I’d almost busted with pride when she invited me to sit in the front row of her very first Fashion Week show); its black-and-white plaid pattern was splashed over by bright red, yellow, and blue graffiti, which was actually very delicate embroidery. Gabe wore a well-fitted blackT-shirt and loose, ripped jeans with a lion medallion above the knee from Henri Maquet, a gift I’d bought for him that was really a gift to myself (of a fashionable boyfriend).
Gabe couldn’t stop rubbing the lion medallion as we sat in the back of a black car, which was coasting down the west side of Manhattan toward Brooklyn. “You know, we could’ve just taken the subway. There’s a stop a block over from the gallery.”
We CoUlD’vE jUsT tAkEn ThE sUbWaY. Suuuure. When I got my trust fund back, I’d resolved never to take the subway again, except maybe for photo ops or ironic purposes or for the brochure of my nonprofit, where I wanted to look very Humble and Of The People.
“What?” Gabe asked. Whoops. I hadn’t meant to snort in his face like that. “The subway really isn’t that bad, you know. You survived taking it all last year.”
“I also survived getting an emergency appendectomy, and I’d rather not repeat that experience,” I said. “Remember the showtime dancer who almost kicked me in the head? And the time it was brutally hot in the station and the train was delayed, so I sweated through one of my only outfits when I couldn’t afford dry cleaning and the washing machine was in your building’s murder basement?” I paused, shuddering a little from the horror.
“As I recall, you bribed me with cookies into doing your laundry.”
“Yeah, and you put one of my cashmere sweaters in the dryer.”
Gabe rolled his eyes, shifting in his seat. What, was the buttery leather of the car seat too comfortable for him? Was the whirring of the air conditioner too calming in contrast to the subway’s clamor of headphones-less people playing annoying videos on their phones and crying children and staticky announcements over the speakers that nobody could understand but that, by virtue of not understanding, might leave you unaware that the train was skipping your stop and send you sailing blissfully unawareinto another borough? (Yes, I was speaking from experience.) “It didn’t have a tag sayingnotto put it in the dryer.”
“Custom-made couture typically doesn’t have tags, Gabe.”
