So Pretty It Hurts

haired girl who looked like she’d come directly from the Port Authority after a twenty-four-hour bus ride from the Midwest.

The blond model nodded at the receptionist, walked toward the door at the far side of the room, and swung it open. Before she closed it, I caught a glimpse of the nerve center of the agency: a large, loftlike room with several separate sections of workstations, about twenty desks altogether. One entire wall was papered with headshots. There were a bunch of people working in there, but I didn’t see Christian.

“May I help you?” the receptionist asked. She ran her eyes down my five-foot-six frame with a look that seemed to say, “Wait, you don’t think you could be a model, do you?”

“I’m here to see Christian,” I told her. “My name’s Bailey Weggins.” I glanced off to the right then, as if I was done talking and there was no reason for her to inquire, “Is he expecting you?” It was a trick I’d learned from an old reporter I’d worked with: when you don’t want someone to ask a question, indicate by your body language that you’ve said everything necessary.

It worked.

“Just a minute,” she told me and punched in a number on her phone. She announced my presence to Christian and then listened, scrunching her mouth up. After a moment she said, “Okay,” and set the phone back in its cradle.

“He said that unfortunately he’s working out a campaign for one of his girls right now, and he can’t meet with you,” she said. “But he’s got your number, and he’ll give you a call later.”

“Actually, I can wait,” I said, walking toward a cowhide-covered bench. “I have plenty of time.”

As I took a seat, she flashed me a look that was part annoyance, part uncertainty, as if she’d just stepped in gum and wasn’t sure how to get it off her shoe.

“That’s not such a good idea,” she said finally. “It’s open call day. There’s gonna be lot of girls here.”

“I’ll stay out of the way, I promise,” I said.

This time I was granted a big sigh. She stood up from her desk and, after opening the door to the main room just wide enough for her to enter, slipped inside. While I hung in the reception area, the redhead was escorted to the elevator by the woman who’d taken her pictures. It appeared she hadn’t received much encouragement because as she waited for the elevator in her stained cropped jacket, her lower lip was trembling and she looked close to tears.

Two minutes later the receptionist reemerged from the nerve center with Christian right behind her. He was dressed in black jeans and a black, supertight V-neck sweater, which revealed a chest that seemed as smooth and polished as candle wax. He glanced at me and then toward the now-empty conference room.

“Why don’t we go in there,” he said curtly and led the way.

Once we were inside, I noticed another door to the big room, this one partly open, and I had the chance to take a better peek. The people inside, mostly model bookers I assumed, tapped at their computers or spoke quietly into their phone headsets. I’d been expecting a place that looked and sounded as crazy as an office of Wall Street bond traders, with bookers shouting out the orders they’d just taken—like “I’ve got Becca on the twenty-eighth for CoverGirl. Shooting in Cabo”—but it was far more subdued than that. Christian quickly closed the doors to both the reception area and the booking room and then strode back to the table.

“I can’t believe you just came barging into where I work,” he said, all pissy.

“I did try to make contact by phone,” I told him. “But I never heard back from you.”

“Has it ever occurred to you that some people may not want to be included in one of your gruesome Buzz magazine stories? We’re not all media whores, you know.”

“It’s really not a media thing I’m pursuing at the moment. I’m concerned about Devon’s death, and I’m looking for answers.”

“Oh, are you all up in arms because I told you she didn’t have an eating disorder? I’ll be perfectly honest with you. I didn’t know she was having trouble again. I mean, she looked a little thinner to me, but I thought she’d just been working too hard—doing the album.”

“No, that’s not where I’m going. I think someone was trying to make her situation worse.”

He stared at me for a moment with his deep brown eyes.

“Oh, I see,” he said after a moment, arching his back and tapping his long slim fingers on his chest. “This is the part where you try to accuse the modeling agency of pressuring her to keep her weight down. We’re such evil people, aren’t we? I’ve got news for you. Though women say they want to look at real women in ads, they’re total liars.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not where I’m going either. Devon’s situation was probably aggravated by certain factors. One of them was ipecac. I saw a bottle of it in her bathroom the night she died, but someone removed it before the police arrived. Do you know anything about that?”

“I certainly know what it is. We’ve had girls who used it. But I had no idea Devon was one of them.”

“What about diuretics?”

“Are you asking if I know what those are, sweetheart?”

“I want to know if she was taking them. Do you know if she ever had a prescription for one called Lasix?”

“Not to my knowledge, no.”

“Did you ever see her crushing any kind of pills in her water bottle?”

“Good God, no. I can’t imagine Devon wanting anything to interfere with her precious water. She should have been entitled to stock in the company that produces Fiji water.”

“She was drinking a lot of bottled water last weekend and leaving half open bottles around. Did you ever see anyone go near one of them?”

His eyes widened.

“Oh, my. It sounds like you’re suggesting someone tampered with the water.”

“Possibly.”

“No. I never saw anyone else holding a water bottle. Other than Jane, of course. As Devon’s sherpa, she was always taking things to her master, including water bottles.” He paused and held a hand to his chest. “You don’t think Jane tampered with the water, do you?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“Jane resented the hell out of Devon. Devon was everything Jane wasn’t. I kept telling Devon to get rid of that girl, but she felt lucky that Jane hadn’t quit like everyone else. She held the world record at about nine months.”

“Speaking of nine months, you knew, of course, that Devon was pregnant last year.”

“Who told you that?” he asked, his tone indicating that it was the truth but that he was surprised I knew.

“I saw pictures of her last November. But if she’d carried to term, wouldn’t it have hurt her modeling career?”

“To some degree, yes, and I wasn’t overjoyed when she told me she was trying,” he said. “But I’m sure she would have rebounded quickly. Girls like Devon gain about a pound and a half during their pregnancies and look normal again in two weeks. And besides, there would have been no way to talk her out of it. Devon wanted a baby.”

“Why, do you think?”

He did a little pose before speaking, lifting a shoulder and pursing his lips. “She was lonely. Being a supermodel looks like oodles of fun, but it can be a solitary existence when you’re not actually working. You travel all the time, and you never know who your real friends are. And Devon had never had much luck with men. She picked bad boys who liked to take machetes to their hotel rooms and eventually cheat on her. You know that expression, don’t you? ‘Show me a beautiful woman, and I’ll show you a man who’s tired of fucking her’? That seemed to fit Devon to a T.”

“If she wanted a baby so badly, why not try again?”

“She probably didn’t want to go through it all again. It was just too much work.”

“Did she have morning sickness or something?”

“No, I mean before that. All the—” He caught himself and clamped his mouth shut.