Social Death: A Clyde Shaw Mystery by Tatiana Boncompagni Page B

political leanings and how this could affect her father’s alliances, but she didn’t live in a tower a thousand feet in the air. She had lovers. I’m telling you, you can’t keep something like this a secret.”
    “Well, we can try, can’t we?” she said crisply. “And if you truly cared about her, you’ll do the same. This isn’t your decision to make, Cornelia.”
    There were two knocks on the door. Sabine stuck her head around it. “Everything’s set,” she said, her bright tone cutting through the tension like a knife. “Would you ladies care to follow me?”
    The interview lasted fifteen minutes. There were tears, tissues, and lots of usable footage, all of which would be proprietary to our network and help us get back on top of the competition. On any other story, I would have felt relieved. But on this one as soon as we wrapped I was out the door, more determined than ever to find my best friend’s killer. I kept thinking about that cryptic text she’d sent me. It’s time you know the truth . My gut told me it had to have something to do with her murder.

S utton Danziger lived on a stretch of prized waterfront property in one of Greenwich’s most exclusive neighborhoods. Her home, a massive gray stone structure, was situated between two equally gargantuan homes, neither of which were marked by mailboxes or numbers—for security reasons, no doubt—and had it not been for the row of Aston Martins and Bentleys parked in Sutton’s circular, pebbled drive, I wouldn’t have known at which of the three mansions I was expected for dinner.
    The door opened before I stepped out of my taxi. Before me stood a large black man dressed in khakis and a denim shirt. There was a cellphone clipped on one side of his belt, on the other, a gun holster. “Your name?”
    I gave it to him. Then he gave it to someone else over the phone, and five minutes later, after subjecting my bag to a quick search, I was escorted through vast marble halls into a vaulted-ceiling living room. The sleek, custom-made furniture was seemingly designed to complement but not compete with the art on the wall, as was the quartet of stiff-backed women perched on the room’s silk-velvet couches. The four of them were dressed in neutral tones like taupe and bisque, and I wondered which of them I was going to have to sweet talk into giving me information on Rachel Rockwell. The men, apparently, were elsewhere in the cavernous house.
    Eyeing me in the doorway, Sutton moved to the arm of her couch, patting the seat next to her. I took her place, accepting a glass of Champagne one of the servers proffered from a white lacquered tray. The women were introduced one by one, but their names blended into each other, much like their voices. I endured a good twenty minutes of banter—a reminder of why I stayed away from school-related functions—before asking Sutton for a tour of her home.
    A few minutes later, we were standing on a pair of zebra rugs in Sutton’s study, a vast distance from the living room. She lifted her gaze to the wall behind her desk. “Rauschenberg,” she said in a whisper, though her point had come across loud and clear: Sutton, like almost everyone else at the Livingston School, came from money, but nothing like what she had now, and she wanted to make sure I’d noted the difference.
    “Lovely.” I pretended to admire her painting before asking which of her friends knew Rachel Rockwell. “Vanessa Cox, the blonde,” Sutton said, repositioning a penholder on her desk.
    “They were all blond, Sutton.”
    She rolled her eyes. “She was sitting right next to you.”
    “Oh.”
    “You’re not going to be rude, are you?”
    “Oh jeez, Sutton. No.”
    She tucked a strand of pin-straight hair behind her ear. “No talk about blood, semen, or child molesters.”
    “What about feces?”
    She scowled. “You know what I mean. Nothing gross. And easy on the booze. OK?” She gave me a knowing look that told me she hadn’t