Erica Orloff: The Golden Girl

Maddie stared at the photos. Claire had been so much a part of her life—her first friend at boarding school. After high school, they’d gone to Harvard together, roomed together, gotten an apartment together. She hadn’t imagined a time when they wouldn’t be together. But that was before the dinner nearly six months ago that changed her entire world….

“How’s your soufflé?” her father asked her.

“Excellent.”

“And yours, Claire?”

Claire nodded, but despite her friend’s famous sweet tooth, Maddie had noticed how she’d just picked at her dessert.

They were seated in the upstairs dining room of 412—an exclusive restaurant in Manhattan so pricey and discreet that it was simply known by the number on its door, and no other markings delineated it as a restaurant. Its number was unlisted. The upstairs dining room was for the clientele even an establishment like 412 distinguished as the most elite of the elite. Jack Pruitt and his daughter, Maddie, were regulars.

“Maddie,” her father began. “You know I would never hurt you for anything in the world.…” He hesitated and sipped at his Glenfiddich on the rocks. His sandy blond hair was streaked with an elegant silver, though it was still full and thick. His broad shoulders and wrinkleless skin made him appear ten or even twenty years younger. “But sometimes, just like in business, things happen. They’re not personal, but people do get hurt.”

Maddie felt the color drain from her face. Something was very wrong when Jack Pruitt, who prided himself on having the charm of a showman mixed with the coldness of a viper, began talking about feelings. It wasn’t the Pruitt style.

“So,” he continued, “there’s no way to say this gracefully. Claire and I have fallen in love.”

“What?” Maddie looked at Claire. “When? I mean…God…what? Claire, you’ve mentioned nothing to…” But Maddie’s question had stopped as the previous few months swirled around her. All Claire’s late nights with her father, ostensibly going over the latest legal filings. She’d joined Pruitt & Pruitt as in-house counsel, and Maddie had felt relieved at first that there was someone in the legal department she and her father could trust implicitly. Now she felt like a fool. Her supposed best friend had been sleeping with her father. It felt so sordid.

Maddie pulled her chair back from the table, as Claire, usually so eloquent, stammered, “Please, Maddie…we didn’t even realize it was happening at first. It started innocently, I swear to you.”

“Nothing,” Maddie whispered as she rose stiffly from the table, “is innocent. We’re all grown-ups, but don’t insult my intelligence. At some point during your affair, each of you had a time when you could have stopped and said that it wasn’t worth betraying me. Or you could have told me when it started, not hid it, lying to my face. But both of you carried on. For that, I can never forgive either of you.”

She gathered her purse and suit jacket and left the two of them in stunned silence.

Maddie shut her eyes at the memories. That Monday, at the office, Claire had desperately tried to see her. She’d dropped by Maddie’s office, her dark eyes welling slightly when she looked at Maddie’s desk and saw that all the photo frames of the two of them—and Maddie’s father—had been put away. Maddie had cut her friend from her life. Her father, she had to deal with professionally. But even that relationship had grown chillier. Of course, the ever-confident swagger of Jack Pruitt never faltered—and he never apologized or raised the issue with his daughter again. He and Claire became a visible couple, and all of the city—especially the gossip columnists—had buzzed. Had the beautiful corporate attorney, decades his junior, finally snagged the most eligible bachelor in New York? Could Maddie’s closest confidante end up her stepmother?

Maddie winced at the memories and rose from her bed and went to the bedroom window, looking out on Manhattan, the city whose skyline she was helping to shape with her real-estate ventures. The waterfront warehouse where her father said Claire was killed was in New Jersey—and it offered a spectacular view of Manhattan across the waters of the Hudson River. Maddie had been bidding against Ryan Greene, her real-estate nemesis and flirting friend, for the land. But there was no reason for Claire to have been there. In fact, aside from Madison and Jack Pruitt, few ever knew for sure of the hush-hush dealings of Pruitt & Pruitt’s real-estate division. They were secretive because as soon as word got out as to what they were bidding on, competitors rushed to vie for the same building or land. But whoever had murdered Claire knew about the warehouse—and Claire knew about it, albeit without her needing to visit it.

Maddie puzzled over this. Who would have suggested meeting Claire there? Who did Claire trust enough to meet in an abandoned warehouse? Though Maddie thought her father was capable of many things, murder wasn’t one of them. But she knew that wouldn’t stop him from being suspect number one when the police looked into the slaying of the beautiful Claire Shipley, his much-younger lover.

Chapter 3

“Madison, darling?”

“Yes?” Maddie said into her private cell phone and sipped her coffee. Her voice was raspy from lack of sleep.

“Renee.”

“Hi, Renee…” Madison said a bit unsteadily. Renee had recruited her into the prestigious Gotham Roses, appealing to her sense of philanthropy. The Pruitt Family Trust was known for doling out millions of dollars in charity each year—and Madison was instrumental in choosing the charities. But Gotham Roses was more personal—a chance to actually go out and do something for the charity of her choice. Nonetheless, she and Renee were acquaintances only. And now, Madison guessed that she quite possibly was about to be kicked out of the Gotham Roses for dragging their name through the mud. Already the front pages of the two major New York daily papers were covering the murder—and her father’s affair with her former best friend—in gory detail.

“I’m so, so sorry to read of your friend’s murder.”

“Thank you,” Madison murmured.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“No. I’m skipping the office today and working from my home—the better to avoid the phalanx of reporters outside my place. Two nearly ran me off the road last night.”

“They can be awful…. I felt like they were a school of sharks encircling me during Preston’s trial six years ago,” Renee said sympathetically, referring to her husband who Renee always maintained had been framed for financial misdealings at his family’s investment company. “Do you think you can slip away, though?”

Here it comes, Madison thought. “Sure, Renee.”

“Wonderful. I’ll expect you for tea then, whenever you can get here.”

Madison hung up. She had told her housekeeper, who usually came twice a week, to stay home. A pot of coffee sat on the corner of her desk, and Maddie had been drinking cup after cup of the French roast. She hadn’t slept at all the previous night, tossing and turning and sighing. She wasn’t the crying sort—she had been raised to be coolheaded. But her heart ached.

Maddie rose from her desk and stretched. She hadn’t needed to dress in her usual office attire. She most often favored Chanel suits, or black classic suits from other designers, with silk blouses—always with feminine details, whether that meant a sexier cut, or unusual buttons, or French cuffs. She liked heels that raised her from her usual five foot seven to close to five foot eleven. She mused that if you wanted to play tough in New York City real estate with the big boys, you had better be able to look them in the eye.