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CHAPTER1
***SLOANE***
“Idon’t rate wines by cost,” he told her. He affected an upper-class accent whenever he discussed wines, his deepest passion. “The greatest ones are truly priceless. This bottle might go for a few thousand dollars, though it was given to me by Francois Blanche himself, as a gift when I visited him last summer. He told me to save it to share with someone special.”
The young woman blushed and let out a small titter as he poured the wine into her glass.
Every word out of Bradley’s mouth was all utter and complete bullshit. Despite his obvious interest in the subject, he didn’t know the first thing about wine, except a few words he’d picked up from the videos he watched on-line. And far from a thousand-dollar bottle of red that had been waiting in his closet for over a year for the perfect occasion, this was a five dollar bottle he’d picked up earlier that day from Trader Joe’s.
“But the taste of the wine,” he said, “is nothing compared to the taste of you.”
He took the glass from her and kissed her, making a grotesque sound as he moved his tongue into her face like a man using mouthwash.
“Mr. Burke,” the girl said, “aren’t you worried your wife is going to come home?”
He didn’t have a wife. He had a girlfriend. And, though he didn’t know it, he didn’t even have that anymore.
“She’s at the office,” he said. “She won’t be home until late.”
That wasn’t true. “She” was in the other room, ear against the door. And I know it because I was her.
I’d left the office early to pick up a nice bottle of wine and a reasonably-priced steak for our anniversary dinner, which would have been a waste of money even if he wasn’t fucking his secretary because he could never remember when our anniversary was, even after I’d put it on his calendar and spent the past several weeks reminding him it was coming up.
I walked in, was about to say his name, but I smelled the candles and heard the irritating moans of a smooth jazz saxophone coming from the other room. For a split second, I thought maybe he had remembered and had set up a surprise, but then I heard her voice. I’d recognize that Boston accent anywhere.
Worried that they might make a sound on the wooden floors, I removed my heels after I put down the groceries and held them in my hands, remembering that movie from the 90s where the woman stabbed the guy with her stilettos. When I first saw it, I thought it was pretty gruesome. Now the image of Bradley running around naked with a shoe coming out of him struck me as quite funny.
* * *
“What movie was that?” Courtney asked. She was my best friend at the Dynasty Real Estate company — a woman to whom I’d taken an instant liking.
“You know,” I said, “the one with the woman who gets the roommate who starts dressing like her and stuff? Then goes psycho?”
“Single White Female,” said Vince, one of the older men who was also listening in on the story. “It’s totally gnarly.”
“She kills a guy with a shoe?” Courtney asked.
“Right through the eye,” Vince said, reenacting it.
“Can we focus? I’m getting to the good part.”
“You kill him, right?” That was Abigail. The sweetest girl who, bless her soul, just wasn’t especially smart.
“Yes, Abigail,” I said. “I’m confessing to the entire office.”
She blushed, picking up on the sarcasm.
“You know, with the right jury,” Courtney said, “I bet you could have gotten away with it. I would have acquitted.”
“Murder’s still technically illegal in the state of California,” I said. “Even when the victim is a cheating son of a bitch who lies about wine to nineteen-year-olds to get them in bed.”
Courtney shrugged. “All I know is if he ends up missing, anybody asks I’ll tell them you were with me that night.”
“Thanks,” I told her, “But I’m over it. I’m done with him, and he can bang all the secretaries he wants now.”
“She was his secretary?” Vince asked, noticeably excited. “That’s so…” He looked around at the women in his vicinity. “…unethical. Very unprofessional of him.”
“Yeah, and he was my boss, too,” I said. “I would have been doing the world a favor, but I kept that door between us. As long as it was there, I wouldn’t be able to kill him.”
