there were scrapings of tissue and blood under his fingernails.”
“Evidence that he was defending himself against somebody,” Kevin said.
“Right,” I said. “And my guess is the pathologist will discover that the mystery assailant was Evan MacLeish.”
“Is that just a gut feeling?”
“No, but everything I’m going on is circumstantial. Evan was wearing makeup the day of the wedding, but I could tell he’d been in a fight, and when Gabe disappeared, Evan moved in a little too quickly with his explanation that Gabe was a hypochondriac who refused to deal with any doctor except his own in New York.”
“Certainly an avenue worth exploring.” Kevin broke off a chunk of marzipan the size of a baby’s fist for each of us.
“So where do we start?” I asked.
“First you have to Think Pig.”
“To catch the tiger, you must imagine the tiger.”
Kevin raised an eyebrow. “Excellent. Now working with marzipan is like working with Plasticine. Pinch off what you think you’ll need, roll it between your hands into sausage shapes, and give each little sausage a nip, a bend, or a flatten until it looks the way you want it to look.” Kevin made two balls, stuck the smaller one onto the larger, and smoothed it effortlessly into a snout. He made indentations for the eyes and then made and flattened two balls into ears. I started working with my own marzipan, copying what Kevin had done. He watched until he seemed to decide I could continue on my own. Then he broke off a larger piece of marzipan and worked it into a body.
“So we have ourselves a puzzle,” Kevin said. “If Evan killed Gabe, who killed Evan?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Then it’s a time for caution,” he said. “At this point, we don’t know much about anything or anyone.” Kevin shaped a solid little leg with his thumbs. “I had a battle with myself this morning,” he said. “Jill is my client, and in calling you I’m going behind her back and probably against her wishes. But you don’t have to be Eddie Greenspan to know that Jill’s the star suspect in this case, and she refuses to help herself.”
“She didn’t open up to you?”
“Not a crack. You could drive a tour bus through the holes in that story of hers about what happened last night. You know it. I know it, and, most significantly, the cops know it. I tried to make her aware of the importance of full disclosure to her lawyer, but no dice.” He transformed a ball of marzipan into a jaunty little bowler hat, placed it on his pig’s head, and filled the tiny eye indentations with white royal icing. “Jill’s protecting somebody,” he said.
“Not just somebody,” I said. “Her stepdaughter, Bryn. At least that’s my guess. I think when she went outside the night Evan was killed, she was looking for Bryn, and I think when she ran back inside, she was still looking for her.”
“Maybe I should talk to Bryn,” he said. “If she’s as crazy about Jill as Jill is about her, she won’t want to leave her new stepmother out to dry.”
“You’d be wasting your time,” I said. “From what I’ve seen the only person Bryn is crazy about is Bryn.”
“My grandmother always said every cookie has two sides,” he said. “Maybe Jill sees a side of her you haven’t.”
“As a rule, I’m with your grandmother, but so far what I’ve seen of Bryn is not appealing. I’m certain that when you called today she was listening in on another phone. And last night when Angus and I were out shovelling snow, we looked up and she was at the window. She taunted us about how she’d been watching us all the time, and we didn’t know it.”
“She’s a voyeur?”
“If she is, the pathology is understandable. Kevin, Bryn has not had an easy life. Gabe Leventhal told me that her father has been filming her from the day she was born – the movie of Bryn’s life was going to cap his career.”
“My God, no wonder she hated him.” For a beat Kevin was silent, then he peered at me thoughtfully through his wire-rimmed glasses. “And Jill’s hedging about what really happened the night Evan died because she’s afraid Bryn hated her father enough to kill him.”
I nodded. “So where do we go from here?”
“For starters, let’s get our hands on that footage before the police do. That’ll at least buy us some time to come up with a strategy for defending Bryn if we need one. Were Jill and Evan living together before they were married?”
“Does it matter?”
“It would if Evan kept projects he was working on at home. If he and Jill were cohabiting, as they say, she could just send a friend in to scoop up what we need.”
“But even if they didn’t live together before, Jill and Evan were married when he died,” I said. “She must have some rights.”
“Sure, but the scope of those rights could be limited if there was a pre-nup.” Kevin gazed sadly at the half- formed lumps of marzipan in front of me. “You’re not exactly wailing there, are you?”
“No,” I said.
“Your vision is clouded by anxiety,” he said kindly. He dotted his pig’s eyes with chocolate, dipped the bowler and base into chocolate, and handed the dapper little porker to me. “Take this one home to contemplate,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said. “So when do you want to talk to Jill?”
“This time out, it’s better if you do the talking. Friends can suggest things lawyers can’t.”
“For example, a friend could – hypothetically – recommend that if there was anything damaging in the footage of Bryn, Jill might want to get it out of harm’s way,” I said.
“No flies on you,” Kevin said approvingly.
“Thanks,” I said, “for the compliment and for the marzipan lesson. I’ll do better next time.” I wrapped my pig carefully and dropped it in my purse. “Who wants all these pigs anyway?”
Kevin checked the order on the bulletin board over his counter. “Dumped Dames,” he read. “Seemingly, an organization of ladies who do not go gently.”
Jill was standing on the front steps smoking when I got home. “How was your morning?” I asked.
“Shitty,” she said. “And yours?”
“Instructive,” I said. “I learned that Felix has the hots for you; that Tracy Lowell shares a home with the MacLeish family; that beta blockers can kill; and that I have no talent for making marzipan pigs.”
Jill doused her cigarette in a snowbank. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Okay,” I said. “How about this? Your next move is to pick up the phone and arrange to get everything about the projects Evan was working on at the time of his death out here.”
“You think Evan’s work might point to who killed him?”
“His movies cut close to the bone, Jill. Evan might have captured something on film that someone didn’t want revealed.”
Jill pulled her cigarette pack out of her jacket pocket. On the front was a vivid photo of a diseased lung. She glanced at it briefly and removed a cigarette. “Do you think there’ll be footage of Bryn?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably.”
Jill lit her cigarette. “Can you believe that I didn’t even know Evan was shooting that movie until the night of the rehearsal dinner?”
“How could you not know?” I asked.
“As it turns out, there’s a lot I didn’t know,” she said. “What’s that old saw? ‘Marry in haste; repent at leisure.’ My opportunities for penance seem to be coming at warp speed. I might as well tell you this because you’ll find out soon enough. Evan and I had a pretty heated argument after the rehearsal. When we got back to the hotel, I suggested we have a drink and hash out the question of the morality of what he was doing to Bryn. I thought the footage should be destroyed; Evan had other ideas. We went into the hotel bar, and I guess we forgot to keep the decibels down. The one shining nugget Felix and I uncovered at NationTV today was the fact that at least half a dozen people remember overhearing Evan and me fighting.”
“So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the police are expressing a more than casual interest in you.”
