A Little Night Murder (Blackbird Sisters Mystery) - Softcover

As I waited in the frigid backseat of a limousine, watching the front gate of a women’s prison on an otherwise beautiful July afternoon, I wondered if I could tap politely on the door and ask the warden to please incarcerate my sister. Just for a few days of peace and quiet.

She was sitting beside me, skimming the newspaper and driving me crazy. Which I could do nothing about, because I had asked her to do me a favor, and as usual she’d agreed faster than she could touch up her lipstick.

“Why on earth,” Libby demanded, “are some men so infatuated with their man parts that they take pictures?” She rattled the offending newspaper. “Really, Nora, here’s another story in your paper about a fellow who photographed himself and sent the picture to fourteen women in his workplace. His colleagues called him Thunder Dick. I think that probably just encouraged him, don’t you?”

Distracted, I said, “Uh-huh.”

“If Mr. Dick truly wanted to arouse the interest of a woman, he should have photographed himself washing dishes. Now, that’ssexy! These days, a picture of a man lathered up with Palmolive suds would make me faint with desire.”

“Uhm,” I said.

“But maybe he could be pictured without his shirt.” She began to stare off into the distance, her eyes going dreamy, her lips turning slack. “Bare chested. With a splash of lotion on his skin to catch the candlelight. Because—”

I finally began paying attention. “Are you having a stroke?”

“—let’s face it,” she said as if I had not spoken, “the right lighting can conceal a lull in a person’s gym routine or a temporary overindulgence in burritos. What is it about men and burritos? I find it puzzling, don’t you? I mean, why have a burrito when you could have chocolate? Does That Man of Yours use lotion?”

I blinked, pretty sure I’d missed something important. “What?”

Libby finally folded up the paper and sighed. “Nora, your hormones have addled your brain. By the time your baby is born, you won’t be able to keep two thoughts in your head at the same time.”

During the past several months, she had repeatedly volunteered to help guide me through my pregnancy. So far, her most practical advice was for me to scrub my nipples to toughen them up for nursing.

“I’m a little distracted at the moment, Libby.”

She pointed out the front-page article that had started her rant. “Why is your newspaper on such a penis kick this summer? I liked it better when journalists got obsessed with fun things like movie stars and shoes. Why don’t you write a nice article about summer sandals?”

I love my sister—both of them, that is—but sometimes I wish we were back in the days when I could lure Libby into a closet with a Butterfinger bar and lock her up for ten minutes of solitude. My solitude, that is.

In the front seat, the chauffeur had been studiously ignoring my sister’s rambling discussion of male anatomy. But suddenly he said, “There she is, Miss Blackbird.”

The door of the stark prison building opened from the inside, and my best friend stepped out into the sunlight. If her first instinct was to wince at the searing sunlight, she suppressed it. But then, Lexie Paine, as close to royalty as anyone in Philadelphia got, was all about self-control. She put on a pair of very dark glasses and squared her shoulders. Then, wearing the same black Armani suit she’d worn in court the day she’d confessed to manslaughter, she walked briskly toward the fence that separated the free world from the prison where she’d been incarcerated for nine and a half months. She carried a ragged manila envelope, which I presumed contained all that remained of her considerable fortune.

“She doesn’t look fat at all.” Libby leaned over me to peer out the window. “I hear they serve white bread at every meal in prison. I might as well glue white bread directly to my thighs. One jaywalking citation and I’d be a poster girl for Jenny Craig.”

I opened the car door and bailed out onto the hot, cracked asphalt of the parking lot. “Stay here,” I said to Libby. “And remember what I told you. No reporter can find out where Lexie is going, okay? Don’t tell a soul.”

“What do you take me for? I am perfectly capable of keeping a secret when it’s—”

I closed the door on my sister’s next volley of claptrap.

For the past several days, since hearing of my friend’s upcoming release, surprising Lexie had seemed like a good idea. Now, though, I had every expectation she might slap my face and hitchhike out of there. For my role in her incarceration, I might have deserved that.

She walked straight through the gate, and from behind her sunglasses she said coolly, “Nora, I knew you were pregnant, but isn’t this overdoing things just a bit?”

“Maybe a little.” Noting that she did not hug me, I said, “Lex, we need to get in a car right away.”

Lexie did not obey my request. She stood still, back stiff, head high. I could not see her eyes behind the glasses. Back when she was young, after a blue-blooded cousin broke her bones and assaulted her, Lexie had reinvented herself into the girl who’d never be a victim again. She became the smartest student in her Ivy League class. Then a powerful woman who crushed the competition on Wall Street. Now that she’d been to prison, I wondered how she planned to reinvent herself one more time.

She said, “Why should I get into your car?”

“Because you’re going to be the hottest news story of the summer,” I said, “and you’d hate that. We’re trying to protect you from the reporters. Lex, please get into the car.”

A long, awful moment stretched, and I wondered whether the most important friendship of my life had ended.

“No,” she said. She turned her face up to the sun. “No. Just for a minute, let me breathe.”

With her face tilted to the sunlight, she reached out and took my hand. Clutched it, really, and her chilly facade crumbled. “Thank you, sweetie. I was afraid my mother might show up today, and there are times when you just can’t face your mother. You’re such a welcome relief, I can’t tell you.”

I felt the bubble of tension break in my throat. She had stuck by me during the worst time of my life, and I intended to do the same for her.

For now, I said, “I brought Oreos.”

She laughed unsteadily and let me go. “You’re a lifesaver. But you shouldn’t be doing this. It’s not going to be easy being my friend now.”

“You think I’m a stranger to scandal?” I asked with a smile.

“Good point.” She removed her sunglasses and brushed something that might have been a tear from the corner of her eye. “Your tribulations have made you stronger, haven’t they? All right, let’s go—but why three limos?” She gave the three idling black cars and two hired taxis a composed inspection.

“Television trucks are waiting out on the street, and so are about a dozen print journalists. There’s even one man with a camera on a motorcycle. We’re going to do our best to lose all of them before they can figure out where we’re going. And Libby’s going to stage a scene to attract their attention.”

Libby chose that moment to rap her knuckles on the car window and wave brightly at Lexie.

Lexie waved back, trying to conceal her trepidation. “What kind of scene?”

“I thought it best to leave the details to her. But I’m sure whatever she dreams up will do the trick. This way.”

Lexie followed me to the second limousine. “Has your beau plotted all this?”

“It was a team effort. Ready now?” I opened the rear passenger door for her.

Our escape was touch and go. I thought the reporters spotted us. But in the rearview mirror we saw Libby bail out at a traffic light and feign a shrieking meltdown—scattering the contents of her handbag, which might have included several rubber snakes. Later she told us that reporters called an ambulance because they thought the chauffeur was having a heart attack. I also learned that my sister scored a date with a traffic cop who stopped to help.

A few days after that, Lexie was still successfully concealed from the press, although lounging around the pool at her mother’s summerhouse felt more like a vacation at a luxury spa.

“Who knew you had such a cunning side?” Lexie said, seated in her bathing suit at a glass-topped patio table under a striped umbrella.

I was drifting in the cool bliss of the swimming pool, on a large pink noodle. “It’s a recessive gene I inherited from my parents.”

“Ah, yes,” Lexie said. “Are they still in Argentina, avoiding tax extradition?”

“They’re on a cruise at the moment. I imagine them stowed away in a first-class cabin and dining with the captain every night.”

“They certainly know how to live the good life,” Lexie said. “So does my mother. Not that high living made her a bad parent. She did help me avoid the creepy math tutor who kept wine coolers in his briefcase. And her advice about majoring in business instead of fashion merchandising was very sound, too. But to her dying day, she’ll shout that going to jail was my own fault. And she’d be right. I think I need help, sweetie. You have to help me relearn all the lessons of civilized society. You always do the right thing.”

Maybe because I was floating so comfortably, my first thought popped out unbidden. “I try to do the right thing because I screwed up once. And Todd died.”

She set her tea down on a table, and she got serious fast. “Your husband got himself killed with drugs and stupidity, Nora. That wasn’t your fault.”

It felt like my fault, though. I hadn’t done enough, hadn’t dragged him to the right doctors, hadn’t locked him up or tied him to a bedpost—anything to keep him away from cocaine. In my worst moments, I feared I had enabled him.

I didn’t want to make the same mistake with Lexie—do nothing, that is. When I’d heard a judge intended to release her for reasons too complicated for anyone to understand yet, I had telephoned her formidable mother and asked to be the one to pick her up. I suggested Lexie be allowed to go into hiding at her mother’s palatial summerhouse on the Delaware, just a half hour’s drive from downtown Philadelphia and a few miles from my home. Here, I intended to keep watch on my friend.

Except for the occasional cutting remark that seemed to pop out of a hard, angry place inside, she seemed to be a little better every day. My biggest concern was that Lexie was being denied her best recovery strategy—her work. She’d heal faster if she could be allowed back into her office.

But that was impossible.

Lexie went on. “For a woman so concerned about appearances, my mother certainly has no qualms about her own reputation. She’s on her fourth husband—have I told you? The polo player went back to South America, so she married a yachtsman from Newport. She’s an enthusiastic wife, but mothering never suited her. Does that worry you, sweetie? The possibility of evolving into a terrible mother now that you’re hatching one of your own?”

“Most of the time I’m too hungry to worry,” I said. “Tell the truth. Do I look like a manatee?”

She tilted down her sunglasses to make a better examination of me wallowing in the water in all my pregnant splendor. Diplomatically, she said, “That swimsuit is very flattering, Nora.”

She looked elegant in a black bathing suit with a black lace cover-up designed by an artist who knew how to make a woman’s nearly naked body look chic, not tarty. I, on the other hand, was simply glad there were no harpoons handy, since it would be easy to mistake me for a great white whale.

I said, “I have eight weeks to go. We Blackbird women get big early.”

“Well, you look happy,” she said. “Having a family has always been important for you, hasn’t it? Just don’t let it overwhelm you, please. Women who have nothing to discuss but diapers bore me to tears.”

She wasn’t herself, I said inwardly. It wasn’t her nature to be hurtful. She had spent the last months holding back her thoughts and emotions. Letting other people make all the decisions for her must have been excruciating for a woman who had commanded a fast-paced investment firm. But her usual control had cracks now, and I was the recipient of her lapses in kindness. This phase would fade, however. After Todd died, I had been alternately a crazy bitch on wheels or a lump under the coverlet. Lexie moved in with me—against my wishes—and fed me, talked with me, stuck by me until I could function again.

She slipped off her cover-up and waded down the steps of the shallow end. With the seemingly unshakable composure of herMayflower forebears, she put her palms flat on the surface of the water and canted her face up to the sun again. Her black ponytail hung down between shoulders just starting to tan. She inhaled a deep, cleansing breath of fresh air and let it out on a sigh.

She said, “The press continues to be baffled about my whereabouts?”

“So far, so good.” I didn’t want to bother her with the details, but there was a full-scale hunt going on—complete with baying hounds and irate letters to editors from former clients whose fortunes had been ruined by the millionaire investment whiz who got out of jail thanks to a team of mobbed-up lawyers.

“I’m grateful for your help, Nora,” she said. “Although I miss my own digs.”

“This is the right place for the moment,” I said.

“I’ll probably have to sell my house, you know. To help with the Cause.”

“I hope not, Lex.”

She shrugged. She had taken to making light of her effort to repay all the clients who’d been swindled by her former partner at the Paine Investment Group. I knew she was obsessed with getting the hundreds of stolen millions back into the hands of investors who had trusted her firm with their life savings. After all, she said, it was her name on the brass plate that still hung on the building in the center of Philadelphia, not her larcenous partner’s. But it was going to take time. And sacrifice.

Meanwhile, she admitted to feeling guilty about her luxurious hiding place. Her mother’s mansion—one of many pieds-à-terrearound the world—stood on a Bucks County bluff overlooking the river. This little-used summerhouse was only a convenient few miles down the road from Blackbird Farm, my family’s formerly grand but now crumbling estate. The differences between the two properties included air-conditioning—my house had become a sweltering oven in July—and the sumptuous swimming pool, which had been built before the Great Depression by one of Lexie’s robber baron relatives. It resembled a Roman bath. The mosaic on the bottom of the pool depicted a Bacchanalian banquet scene. The surrounding garden was guarded by two marble Praetorian Guards, spears in hand, glaring stalwartly off into the woods behind the mansion.

Indoors, the great house’s many gracious amenities included a billiards room with cigar burns courtesy of J.P. Morgan, a salon where polo teams could be plied with cocktails and a servant’s wing with forty numbered bells in the hallway. That wing was currently empty, since Lexie couldn’t afford more than the services of her longtime houseman, Samir, who had taken a deep pay cut to continue to loyally shop, cook and keep house. Lexie confided to me that he had accepted the job offer because he was writing a book i...