Dial Om for Murder Read online

  They were interrupted as Lula Mae and Monster got into it. Or, more exactly, Monster yelped and scrambled for the doggie door while Lula Mae smugly investigated his abandoned dinner bowl.

  “Lula Mae,” yelled A.J. “Bad kitty.”

  Andy snickered. “And she acts like she doesn’t even care.”

  “She doesn’t care.” A.J. balefully eyed Lula Mae, who was now twitching her whiskers in finicky disgust at Monster’s dinner. “She doesn’t even like dog food, but she swaggers in here with her broken beer bottle and threatens poor Monster. I think he’s on the verge of a breakdown.”

  Andy was chuckling as A.J. rose and cleared their plates. It had been another very good dinner. Andy wasn’t eating much, he was mostly cooking for A.J., and she was appreciative, but she was also starting to wonder how much longer they were going to continue to play house. As fond as she was of Andy—and as concerned as she was—her lunch conversation with Jake had made her eager to have her privacy again. The fact that she was spending Friday night with her ex-husband . . .

  “What did you want to do this evening?” She dumped the dirty dishes in the sink and ran water over them.

  Andy shrugged and then his gaze sharpened. “We could try calling Lydia Thorne.”

  A.J. turned off the water and rejoined him at the table, propping her chin on her hand. “What a super idea! Who wouldn’t love to spend a quiet evening chatting with a psycho stalker? Then again, we could always just play Scrabble.”

  “Well, I wasn’t thinking purely of our pleasure. Our names were mentioned in an article about Nicole’s problems with her fan club.”

  A.J. sat up. “You’re not serious.”

  “I wish I wasn’t.”

  “I can’t believe anyone would bother to drag that up. It was years ago.”

  “They don’t have anything else to talk about,” Andy said. “There haven’t been any major breakthroughs in the case so far.”

  A.J. groaned and ran her hands through her hair. “Did the papers really mention our agency?” She raised her head to stare at him.

  Andy nodded wearily. “Don’t worry. I realize it’s not your problem. You’re out of it now. I bought your share of the business.”

  A.J. said quickly, “Of course, it’s my problem too. And, anyway . . . I’m as curious about this as you are.”

  “You are? Seriously?”

  “Process of elimination, right?” she said staunchly. “Maybe we can cross her off the list once and for all.”

  This seemed to cheer Andy up. He went off to find the phone number, presenting it to A.J. a few minutes later. “You want to call from here? I’ll get on the other phone and listen in.”

  Now presented with the deed, A.J. felt slightly uneasy. “You know, she’s probably not going to answer. . . .”

  “Sooner or later, she has to.”

  He seemed so touchingly sure. A.J. said reluctantly, “Should I leave a message if she doesn’t pick up? Andy, I have no idea what to say to this woman.”

  “It’ll come to you,” he assured her, moving down the hall to the other phone.

  A.J. gazed after him in disbelief. She shook her head and then quickly dialed the number before she had time to chicken out.

  The phone rang once, twice—and to A.J.’s utter shock someone picked up. A deep voice, which could have been—but was not necessarily—feminine, said sleepily, “Hello?”

  “Lydia?”

  There was a pause and the voice said warily, “Who’s asking?”

  “This is . . .” A.J. blanked for a second and then pulled a name out of thin air. “This is Alice Hart. I’m the . . . the current president of Nicole Manning’s fan club. I was wondering if I could talk to you for a few moments.”

  “Why?” The voice was harsh, but A.J. was now certain “Lydia” was a woman.

  “Well, after the terrible tragedy of Nicole’s death—” A.J. broke off as Lydia burst into raucous laughter.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I’m not! That conniving bitch deserved exactly what she got.” Lydia finished starkly, “I don’t have anything to say to you or anyone else.”

  The phone slammed down.

  The dial tone buzzed in A.J.’s ears for a few heartbeats before she held the receiver away as though she could stare down the line.

  “Holy Hell,” Andy called from the other room. “So much for letting bygones be bygones.”

  “One thing for sure: whatever happened between Lydia and Nicole, Lydia hasn’t forgiven her.”

  Andy appeared in the doorway. “Too bad you couldn’t keep her on the line.”

  “Yes, what a darned shame! We were really hitting it off.” A.J. replaced the receiver. “I have to tell Jake about this call. At the very least, Lydia Thorne’s attitude is . . . suspicious. He’ll want to question her further.”

  Andy looked thoughtful. “He’s not going to be happy if he finds out you’ve been meddling in his case.”

  “That’s what I keep telling all of you!”

  His blue eyes met hers solemnly. “The thing is, if you tell Jake about Lydia, there’s going to be an argument, and if during that argument you neglect to tell him about Jane . . .”

  A.J.’s eyes widened. “I . . . see what you mean.” Only too well. In fact, she had already trespassed into this ethical no man’s land during their lunch that afternoon.

  “I’d wait till you can make a clean breast of it,” Andy advised into her stricken silence. “It’s not like we really have anything at this point. Sure, Lydia Thorne’s attitude is suspicious, but Jake already knows that she hated Nicole.”

  “Very Machiavellian,” A.J. said shortly, and it wasn’t a compliment.

  Seventeen

  Barbie Siragusa lived in a monster mansion by the Delaware River. Fans of Barbie’s Dream Life were aware that the property included a custom movie theater, popcorn machine, an indoor swimming pool, and an even more spectacular outdoor pool enhanced by waterfalls, caves, and a Jacuzzi. There were tennis courts behind the 35,000-square-foot house and a large wine cellar with a sit-down tasting area where regular viewers had enjoyed a memorable episode in which pals of Oz Siragusa had filled nearly forty-five minutes of prime time with embarrassing personal revelations as they drank themselves stupid (not that anyone could really tell the difference). There was also a full-sized professional gymnasium and a personal trainer on staff although Barbie preferred to work out at Sacred Balance. Barbie always enjoyed an audience.

  A.J. was grateful to see that no television cameras were in evidence when she and Elysia arrived on Saturday afternoon.

  Barbie greeted them from a lounge chair positioned beside the azure blue waters of the seventy-foot lagoon-style pool. Flawlessly made up, she wore a shirred emerald green Roberto Cavalli swimsuit with a spectacular diamond-shaped jeweled ornament across her midrif. If she truly was pregnant, she hadn’t yet begun to show. She certainly didn’t act pregnant. Granted, the jury was still out on the effects of light to moderate drinking in the first weeks of pregnancy, but the martini Barbie was guzzling was obviously not her first.

  “Can I offer you some foreplay?” she offered lazily, then laughed at A.J. and Elysia’s expressions. “Cocktails, ladies. Don’t get your hopes up. Vanilla infused vodka, Golden Pear liqueur, and sour lime.” She held up her glass. It winked like distilled sunshine in the light.

  “Very pretty,” Elysia remarked. She didn’t look a lot older than Barbie in her gauzy tangerine Shay Todd romper. Not that the idea of one’s mother in a “romper” wasn’t scary. “D’you know, I’ve never yet come across two identical recipes for foreplay.”

  Barbie guffawed, nearly spilling her drink. “You make it too easy!”

  “Do I, ducks?” Elysia murmured, meeting A.J.’s eyes fleetingly.

  Barbie laughed again. “She’s so cute,” she informed A.J. “Like one of The Golden Girls . . . only with that limey accent.”

  Elysia arched one eyebrow, and A.J. had to bite her lip.

  �
��Help yourself, by the way.” Barbie gestured lazily to the pitcher on the bar at the end of the patio. Her gaze never left them, though, her hard, unexpectedly alert eyes watching over the rim of her glass. “So, to what do I owe this honor?”

  “I’ve been reconsidering my decision about allowing you to film at Sacred Balance,” A.J. said. This was the story she and Elysia had cooked up to gain entrance to the castle, but surprisingly they hadn’t needed it. Barbie had agreed to see them without any convincing.

  Now she sat up straight—or at least as straight as the lounge chair permitted. “Is that so?”

  “Yes.” A.J. couldn’t help watching as Elysia wandered over to the bar set up and began to fill a tall glass with ice using a pair of silver tongs. She had far too many distressing memories of her mother in similar circumstances . . . parties, graduations, A.J.’s wedding . . . She said automatically, “I’m not making any promises, but I thought I should give you the chance to explain your side of it.”

  Elysia poured a glass of tonic water, added a squirt of lime and returned to the tableau by the pool. She smiled cheerfully at A.J.

  Folding gracefully on the foot of one of the lounges, she said, “All publicity is good publicity, that’s what I told A.J.”

  “That’s right,” Barbie exclaimed. “That is exactly right. I’m trying to do you a favor, that’s what you don’t seem to get. Just because a lot of Hamptons rejects don’t want to see their fat asses on TV!”

  Elysia made a little sound like a hiccup, but when A.J. and Barbie stared at her, she was unruffledly sipping her tonic water. A.J. said carefully, “Well, I have to admit that now that Nicole is gone—”

  “I knew it!” Barbie was up and pacing beside the pool in one lithe movement. “I knew the whole time that hag Nicole was behind your refusal.”

  “What do you think it was Nicole had against you?”

  At the same instant, Elysia inquired, “I suppose she resented your attitude toward her relationship with that handsome young rascal, Izzie.”

  Mother and daughter locked gazes. “Ozzie,” A.J. said, and Elysia bowed her head, graciously conceding a point.

  Barbie had frozen in her tracks. “There was nothing between Oz and Nicole. Nothing.”

  “So we heard,” Elysia agreed. “Why do you suppose Nicole broke it off like that?”

  “He’s just a kid!” Barbie cried. “What would he want with a tramp like her?”

  Elysia’s expression rearranged itself into sympathetic lines. “ ‘The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.’” She sipped her tonic water and added, “Shakespeare.”

  “Does Pascal know the Bard is stealing his material?” A.J. murmured.

  Barbie was stalking up and down the side of the pool. “It’s because of Oz’s dad. The police want to pin this on him because of Sam. The sins of the father. That’s what they think.”

  “One never hears about the sins of the mother,” Elysia remarked. “I wonder why. After all, I think mothers have far greater influence on their children. At least when I . . .”

  “Do you think Nicole was using Oz to get at you?” A.J. interrupted.

  Barbie came back to the chaise lounge and dropped down on the flowered cushions. “Nicole was a vampire. She fed off other people, off their energy and talent and love. She never gave a thought for anyone but Nicole.”

  “You don’t think she was ever serious about Oz?”

  “Oz is a terrific kid, don’t get me wrong,” Barbie said. “But he is a kid. His main interest in life is tennis. And cars. And partying with his posse. It wasn’t serious for him. And it sure as hell wasn’t serious for her. He was never anything more to her than a fling.”

  One hundred and thirty-seven text messages in the course of a few hours seemed to indicate a certain level of seriousness on Oz Siragusa’s part—or maybe just adrenaline—but A.J. didn’t think it would be useful to point this out.

  “And, after all,” Elysia drawled, “Nicole did have that deliciously earnest J.W. waiting for her at home.”

  Barbie snorted. “Waiting at home for her? That’s a laugh. I don’t think it’s a coincidence Mr. IDA is always off working in foreign countries. Think about it.”

  “Mr. IDA?”

  Elysia explained, “International Documentary Association.”

  “Oh.” A.J. had been thinking about Nicole’s relationship with J.W. Safe to say, if there had been an affair with Oz Siragusa—and it seemed pretty certain that there had been—there were significant problems in Nicole’s relationship with J.W. Young.

  And wasn’t that underlined by the fact that J.W. had apparently resisted divorcing Jane Peters?

  She waited for Barbie to bring up the fact that she was supposed to be carrying J.W.’s baby, but Barbie didn’t say a word.

  “They weren’t married,” A.J. said. “Nicole and J.W. Either one of them could have walked out at any time.”

  Barbie opened her mouth, but the French doors leading onto the flagstone courtyard swung wide. Oz Siragusa stepped out.

  “Speak of the handsome young devil,” Elysia murmured. Barbie threw her an unfriendly look.

  “What are you doing, baby?” Barbie called.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” Prince Charming returned. “I’m going for a swim.”

  “I’m entertaining some people right now.”

  “So entertain!” He tossed his plum-colored towel to one of the lounge chairs and dove into the pool, clean as a knife.

  Barbie met A.J. and Elysia’s twin gazes and shrugged. “Kids these days.”

  “They’re so precious at that age,” Elysia agreed.

  They did not glean anything much more useful than that from Barbie, and when Oz eventually pulled himself out of the pool and stalked, dripping, back into the house, the royal audience was ended—Mrs. Big Bopper seemingly recalled to her maternal duties.

  “I’ll call and let you know one way or the other,” A.J. promised vaguely in answer to Barbie’s demand for permission to bring her film crew back on Monday morning.

  “Don’t disappoint me,” Barbie said. She was smiling, but the effect was similar to a shark viewing something scrumptious flailing in the water.

  Neither A.J. nor Elysia spoke till they were in the Volvo heading back to Starlight Farm.

  “What do you think?” A.J. asked as the summer scenery slid by.

  Elysia said slowly, thoughtfully, “Not sure.”

  A.J. threw her mother a quick look, glad—if a little taken aback—that they seemed to be on the same wavelength.

  “Ditto. I was sort of betting on Barbie. Don’t you think it’s odd she didn’t say anything about carrying J.W.’s baby?”

  “She hasn’t formally announced her pregnancy, has she? Probably saving it for prime time. It’s not as though the two of you were close.”

  “No, but she seems to be the one who started the rumor of her pregnancy, so why wouldn’t she take the opportunity to spread it to us?”

  Elysia shook her head.

  “Unless she’s given up on trying to pull her story off? If Jane is right, it wouldn’t be hard for J.W. to puncture that balloon.”

  Elysia said, “She doesn’t strike me as the type to think very far ahead of her mouth.”

  “The thing is, if she’s not pregnant with J.W.’s child—and I don’t think she could be—that probably means there was no affair, which eliminates one motive for her wanting Nicole out of the way.”

  “Barbie hated Nicole. Still hates her. She doesn’t strike me as the type to plot and plan, but she might strike out in a fury.”

  “I don’t think anyone could have plotted or planned to whack Nicole with an ice sculpture,” A.J. pointed out.

  “No. But by the same token, it couldn’t have been an accident. No one accidentally picks up an ice sculpture and coshes someone over the head.”

  “Not premeditated, but deliberate.”

  “I think so.”

  “When she left the studio, Barbie
was in a fury. If Nicole had been standing in the middle of the road, I think Barbie would have mowed her down. But to drive twenty-something minutes and still be angry enough to kill when she arrived at Nicole’s? And at that point she would have to be intending Nicole harm because she’d have to sneak past all the servants and caterers.”

  “Hmmm. Possibly.” Elysia seemed to look inward. Considering how she might pull off such a crime? “There’s the chance that she simply walked in unnoticed, argued with Nicole, and bopped her over the head.”

  “Can you really picture Barbie walking in unnoticed anywhere?”

  “There is that.”

  “It’s possible that someone might have walked in unnoticed. There were so many people wandering around that afternoon it would be easy—well, possible anyway—to overlook one more. I mean, that’s Jane’s story right?”

  “Certainly if that someone happened to be dressed like a delivery person or one of the caterers . . .”

  “That brings us back to premeditation.”

  Elysia was silent.

  “Are you so completely convinced of Jane’s innocence?” A.J. probed delicately.

  “I am. Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Elysia flicked her a look. “I have an instinct for these things, pumpkin.”

  “Mother . . .”

  “No, no. I know what you’re going to say, but it’s true. I’ve known Jane since she was a kid. I only worked with her twice, but we just . . . connected. You know how that happens with some people?”

  A.J. nodded tightly. She did know. It was a little hard hearing how her mother had instantly connected with Jane Peters when she hadn’t tried to connect with her own daughter, but . . . what the hell.

  “We became friends. I believe her.”

  “Okay,” A.J. said. “I respect that. I do. But I knew Andy all through college. He was my best friend and my business partner. We were married for ten years—and I had no idea he was gay. No clue.” Well, she had had many clues, but she hadn’t recognized them for clues at the time. “And I would have said that I knew Aunt Diantha very well—I think Lily would have said she knew Aunt Di very well—but neither of us expected her to leave the studio to us in joint partnership. Even people we think we know can surprise us. And not all of those surprises are happy ones.”