So Pretty It Hurts

“Wait, are you saying Devon had fertility issues?” I urged. Thornwell had mentioned a clinic but I’d assumed Devon had used one for artificial insemination.

“I really shouldn’t say. I’ve said too much all ready.”

“Look, Christian, I don’t have any prurient interest here. I’m not a gossip columnist. I’m just trying to figure out if someone murdered Devon.”

“Murdered? You can’t be serious.”

“It’s a possibility. And though I don’t think her pregnancy is connected, I want to investigate every angle. Help me out here.”

He let out an exaggerated sigh.

“Yes, she had some fertility issues,” he admitted. “To quote Gone with the Wind, ‘I don’t know nothin’ about birthin’ babies,’ but something wasn’t working perfectly down there. She got some kind of special treatment, and after a few months, voila. I don’t know what the treatment involved, but there was one month where she was too bloated to work. She ballooned to a size six or something.”

Sounded like she might have gone through in vitro. The drugs, I’d heard, could cause lots of swelling.

“Thank you,” I said. “That information may prove useful.”

“Speaking of useful, I really do have work to do. Do you mind letting me get back to it?”

“Of course. How are things going here, by the way? Devon’s death must be a blow to the agency.”

“It is,” he said. “But we have lots of fabulous girls.”

“I heard, by the way, that Devon had some issues with the agency lately—that she wanted Cap to take them up with Barbara Dern.”

I’d dropped it like a bomb in his lap, and I saw a breath catch in his chest.

“That is sooo not true.”

“But isn’t that why Devon was avoiding you last weekend? That she was miffed about something to do with the agency.”

He let out a little shriek. “I knew I should never have spoken to you,” he exclaimed. “Please leave now.”

He swiveled his body around dramatically in the chair and marched out of the room into the reception area, expecting me to follow. Not taking any chances, he punched the elevator for me, and before long I was out on my ass, just like all the girls who’d been deemed too thick in the thighs or chubby in the cheeks for First Models.

Now what? I thought as I left the building. I’d gleaned a few insights from talking to Jane and Christian, but I hadn’t come any closer to learning what I needed to know. I placed another call to Tommy and also left a message for Scott at his office. It was time to touch base with him again.

Back home, I cracked open my composition book once more. I scribbled down notes from my conversation with Christian and then reviewed the other notes I’d taken so far. Then I summed up what I had so far:

• Cap was suffering from lupus, which supposedly meant he couldn’t get it up and thus wasn’t able to have an affair with Devon. Since he wasn’t a spurned, angry, or jealous lover, it supposedly took away his motive. And Whitney’s too. But Cap might have another motive.

• Jane had most likely pushed me down the stairs—accidentally or not. But did that make her the murderer? Jane was also writing a tell-all book about Devon. It seemed like she might have lied about seeing Devon and Cap kissing to add more sizzle to the story. But would the need for sizzle make her want to kill Devon?

• According to Tory, Tommy had gone missing in action the night Devon had died. Had he dropped by Devon’s room? If so, why not summon help for her?

• Tory was hankering to work with Cap. Had she decided to eliminate Devon so he’d need to add another client?

• And then there was Christian. Despite his assurances that everything was peachy keen between Devon and him, she gave him the cold shoulder last weekend. Was Devon about to make trouble for Christian at the agency?

Regardless of the information I’d gathered, I still had no clue who had doctored Devon’s water. Maybe, I realized, I should work backward and focus instead on who had persuaded Devon’s mother to lie about me. If I learned that, I would probably know who the murderer was.

I picked up my phone and called Jessie.

“I was two seconds away from calling you,” Jessie said. “You doing okay?”

“I’ve been better. Anything up?”

“I’ve tried to hang near Nash’s office as much as possible, but I haven’t picked up anything. I did find out, though, where the funeral is.” She gave me the name of a church in Pine Grove and said it was scheduled for one o’clock on Saturday.

“Thanks for the info,” I said. “I bet by now the whole office has heard about my sorry little plight.”

“Yeah—you know what it’s like here. People know when you have a rash on your ass. But you’ll be happy to learn most people are greeting it with plenty of skepticism. They just don’t see you doing something like that.”

“Unfortunately they don’t have any clout in the matter.”

We chatted for a couple of more minutes, and then signed off, with Jessie promising to call if she learned anything else of value.

For the next hour I researched the houseguests I hadn’t yet Googled, hoping that some little detail would pop up and point to a motive. I found nothing online at all about Jane and only a couple of tiny, meaningless references to Tory. There turned out to be plenty of stuff on Tommy—photos of him flipping the bird at paparazzi, mug shots from his two DWIs, etc.—but nothing that shed light on the case.

Though Richard certainly didn’t appear to have motive, I needed to check him out regardless. There was a ton of stuff online by him and about him. I skimmed the most recent material for now, but didn’t find anything noteworthy.

I also searched for Scott. The comment my Buzz coworker Thornwell had made— about wanting to confirm a naughty piece of gossip about the music mogul—had been nagging at me. Maybe the guy had a real dark side. Perhaps Devon had stumbled onto ugly secrets about him while they were recording her album, and he knew it. He could have built the house party around her just to have an opportunity to kill her. If he did have a hidden life and weird sexual predilections, no one had squealed on him up until this point. All the press on him focused on what a genius he was in the music business.

I leaned back in the desk chair of my office and replayed Devon’s words to Cap: “You’ve got to tell her.” Cap had insisted that the woman Devon was referring to was Barbara Dern, head of First Models. It would be good to know exactly what the head of the modeling agency might need to know, especially about a booker. What could a booker do that would make a model fit to be tied? For a second I considered calling my old boss at Gloss, Cat Jones, but she didn’t deal with models directly.

Then another thought wormed its way into my mind. Chris Wickersham. He was the actor I’d had an on- again, off-again fling with before starting a steady relationship with Beau. He’d worked as a model before his big break in TV. Talking to him could shed light on the subject.

It could also create trouble for me with Beau. But at the moment I didn’t give a damn.

Chapter 15

It had been three months since I’d seen Chris in person, and in that time things had exploded for him—in the sweetest of ways. Morgue, the show he was costarring in, had premiered in late September and been a major hit in the ratings, turning him into the kind of guy who was designated as a hunk of the month in magazines like Cosmo. There had been several red-carpet shots of Chris in Buzz recently, and Leo had showed me a spread of him in