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Tiffany gasped and then shrieked.
“I came to see you because I need your help.”
She was sputtering uselessly.
“I am not a killer. I am just an ordinary book editor who wants to go back to work. Can you understand that?”
Tiffany Nixon just glared at me.
“I’ve done my homework, Miss Nixon. The Jesse column was not the first time you fabricated a story.” I was bluffing here—Alyssa hadn’t found anything else. “That’s a big deal in the newspaper business. It would cost you your job and no one else will ever hire you.”
“There is no point in my going for this. You’ll just come back again. Blackmailers never quit.”
I hadn’t expected this. “Blackmailers usually want money. I don’t.”
She crossed her arms and her eyes went squinty with anger. “You want me to run a column saying I don’t believe you are guilty, right?”
I shook my head. “No. I want to tell you some very interesting things about this case. If you follow up on the information I give you, Annabelle’s killer is going to panic and make a mistake.”
I was scared to death. If my scheme backfired and Tiffany went to the police with the fact that I tried to blackmail her, whatever public support I had would disappear in a flash.
Tiffany looked interested, but she was still frowning. “I’m listening.”
“Look, Miss Nixon. I was arrested on evidence that was purely circumstantial. There’s a good chance that I won’t be convicted of the crime but that is not good enough for me and Annabelle deserves better, too. I want my name cleared and the real murderer locked up. All I’m asking you to do is a little investigative reporting—who knows what you’ll turn up?”
Her hands were now balled up into fists at her side. This was not a woman who took bullying well. “Start talking.”
And so I did.
While scrubbing my makeup off that night, I glanced in the mirror. The woman who gazed back at me was someone I no longer knew.
33
THOSE WELBURN GALS
There was nothing I could do except be patient. Tiffany’s column appeared every day but she didn’t write anything related to the case until two weeks later. It was worth the wait.
WAS SARAH SOBBING WITH GRIEF FOR
FIFTEEN MINUTES?
by Tiffany Nixon
Sarah Jane Welburn and Mike Rizzelli met seven years ago at a wedding reception. He was the caterer and she, the bride’s old college chum. It didn’t take long for them to become an item (those Welburn gals sure don’t marry up, do they?) and their own wedding followed just a year later.
The new Mrs. Rizzelli kept her maiden name professionally and continued on with her work as an interior decorator for the Park Avenue set. Her firm, Le Magnifique, flourished over the next two years just as the forty-year-old, family-owned firm, Rizzelli Caterers, began a decline. She told her friends that Mike began to drink.
According to their neighbors on West End Avenue, the couple often had loud arguments that went on for hours.
The last fight in the apartment occurred five months ago, shortly after eight a.m., and it was so heated that someone called the police. By the time the police got there at eight-thirty, no one was home. Mr. Rizzelli was gone and Sarah Jane Welburn Rizzelli had hailed a cab for a trip to her sister’s home.
According to my source, who shall remain anonymous, the argument between Sarah Jane and Mike had something to do with Annabelle. In fact, after Mike stalked out, Sarah Jane called Annabelle and “really laid into her.” She was on the phone “screaming and sobbing like a crazy woman.”
We’ve been told that Sarah Jane arrived at The Dakota at nine, too late to save her sibling, who had been strangled in her own bathroom. Annabelle’s doorman called 911 at nine-fifteen.
Why didn’t Sarah Jane call the police and what was she doing for fifteen whole minutes?
The column set off a firestorm of articles over the next few days. Keith, Mama, and I were elated as the press stumbled over themselves in an effort to upstage each other. “CAIN AND ABEL?” ran a headline in the News. The venerable New York Times featured a prim article alluding to Annabelle’s rumored affairs but it was the New York Comet that showed Victor Bell on the front page, trying to duck the camera. The headline above him screamed “IS TH
