The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty by Amanda Filipacchi

up.
    My friends all glance at one another, undoubtedly trying, as I am, to decipher who among them is the killer.
    I look at Jack, yearning for his help, but uncertain he’s innocent.
    I say, “I guess one of you asked someone—or hired someone—to make this phone call?”
    I find the concept of someone being hired to make this phone call terrifying. It makes the whole thing seem like a bigger, more serious production: there’s personnel involved—staff! Who knows, maybe the killer has hired an assassin as well, or many, to do the dirty work. And to think that all this is being orchestrated by someone in this room, someone who is looking at me right now with affectionate eyes and a familiar face—a beloved friend. Unimaginable.
    “Probably,” Jack says.
    Georgia nods.
    “I don’t appreciate what you’re doing,” I say to the mystery killer among us. “Don’t you care that you’re making our lives miserable, devastating our group, probably even destroying it? And don’t you care about how much you would hurt Lily, perhaps even ruin her life, if you killed Strad? Assuming she’s not the killer.”
    I doubt my words are persuasive. I’m sure the killer was aware of these risks when he/she made the decision to kill Strad, and yet must have concluded Lily would still be better off if Strad were dead.
    LUNCH IS OVER and we each go home. When I arrive at my building, Adam the doorman has his hands in his pockets. When he sees me, he opens his jacket and flashes me his white T-shirt on which is written “Bitch” in big red letters.
    I look around. Lucky for him, no one saw him.
    I spend the afternoon making preparations for the evening of Strad’s possible death, four days away. (“Evening of Strad’s death” is what we got into the habit of calling it. This isn’t a sign of resignation—it’s simply shorter than including the word “attempted,” or “possible,” but now that I think about it, calling it “Friday” would have been even shorter.) I start making things safe.
    I must anticipate every trick the killer might pull.
    My apartment, since yesterday, has been off limits to my friends.
    This morning I placed an ad on the NYU website, looking to hire a few students to help me search my apartment for any weapons the killer might have already planted there.
    I will, of course, frisk my friends when they arrive on the night of the dinner.
    My brain is so muddled from stress that I haven’t been able to focus on anything except getting things safe for the dinner. My work has suffered. I’m supposed to be creating a hat that goes with the quirky green velvet outfit I finished two days ago. Ordinarily, I’d be able to come up with an original hat concept in less than twenty minutes. But now my mind has deteriorated almost to the point of asking myself, “What’s a hat?”
    I take a walk down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square Park, trying to imagine every weapon the killer might think of using, and I dismiss the ones I assume I don’t need to worry about, such as a gun—which frisking would detect—and a vial of poison—which I plan to guard against by keeping my friends away from the food until it’s served. A wire to strangle Strad would be easy to smuggle in but does not worry me because getting strangled takes a couple of minutes and we’d have more than enough time to pull the killer off Strad. More dangerous are the weapons that can be used in a split second, such as blades, especially razor blades. They’re simple to sneak in and they’re quick. But perhaps most importantly, a blade was the killer’s weapon of choice the first time around.
    AT NIGHT, I wake up in cold sweats. My friends are not the types to do anything very bad, much less kill someone, but I’m aware we don’t always know people as well as we think we do, and Gabriel is not the type to lie. So I try to figure out, yet again, which of my friends murdered the man from the bar.
    Jack is, of course, the most obvious,