Size 12 Is Not Fat (Heather Wells 1)

I hadn’t meant to just blurt it out like that. I’m pretty sure Cooper would have been more subtle. But I just…well, I got kind of mad, I guess. About him being so flippant about it. Roberta’s and Elizabeth’s deaths, I mean.

I guess a real investigator doesn’t get mad. I guess a real investigator keeps a level head.

I guess I’m not destined for that partnership in Cooper’s business after all.

Chris seems to have frozen, his feet rooted onto one black and one white tile.

But his grip on my waist doesn’t loosen. If anything, it tightens until suddenly, we’re standing hip to hip.

“What?” he asks, and his eyes are so wide that the blue-gray irises look like marbles floating in twin pools of milk. “What?” he asks, again. Even his lips have drained of color.

My face is only inches beneath his. I see the incredulity in his eyes, coupled with—and, shoddy investigator that I might have been, even I can see this—a slowly dawning horror.

That’s when it hits me:

He doesn’t know. Really. Chris had no idea—not right up until I’d told him just then—that the two dead girls in Fischer Hall were the ones with whom he’d, um, dallied just days before.

Is he really such a man-slut that he’d known only the first names—the nicknames—of the women he’d seduced?

It certainly looks that way.

The effect my announcement has on Chris is really pretty profound. His fingers dig convulsively into my waist, and he begins to shake his head back and forth, like Lucy after a good shampoo.

“No,” he says. “That’s not true. It can’t be.”

And suddenly I know that I’ve made a horrible mistake.

Don’t ask me how. I mean, it’s not like I have any experience in this kind of thing.

But I know anyway. Know it the way I know the fat content in a Milky Way bar.

Christopher Allington didn’t kill those girls.

Oh, he’d slept with them, all right. But he hadn’t killed them. That was done by someone else. Someone far, far more dangerous…

“Okay,” says a deep voice behind me. A heavy hand falls on my bare shoulder.

“Sorry, Heather,” Cooper says. “But we have to go now.”

Where’d he come from? I can’t go. Not now.

“Um,” I say. “Yeah, just a sec, okay?”

But Cooper doesn’t look too ready to wait. In fact, he looks like a man who’s getting ready to run for his life.

“We have to go,” he says, again. “Now.”

And he slips a hand around my arm, and pulls.

“Cooper,” I say, wriggling to get free. I can see that Chris is still in shock. It’s totally likely that if I stick around awhile longer, I’ll get something more out of him. Can’t Cooper see that I’m conducting a very important interview here?

“Why don’t you go get something to eat?” I suggest to Cooper. “I’ll meet you over at the buffet in a minute—”

“No,” Cooper says. “Let’s go. Now.”

I can understand why Cooper is so anxious to leave. Really, I can. After all, not everybody deals with their exes by, you know, sleeping with them on the foyer floor.

Still, I feel like I can’t leave yet. Not after I’ve made this total breakthrough. Chris is really upset—so upset that he doesn’t even seem to notice that there’s a private eye looming over his dance partner. He’s turned away, and is sort of stumbling off the dance floor, in the general direction of the elevators.

Where’s he going? Up to the twelfth floor, to his father’s office, to hit the real liquor—or just to use the phone? Or up to the roof, to jump off? I feel like I have to follow him, if only to make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.

Except when I start to go after him, Cooper won’t let me.

“Cooper, I can’t go yet,” I say, struggling to free myself from his grip. “I got him to admit he knew them! Roberta and Elizabeth! And you know what? I don’t think he killed them. I don’t think he even knew they were dead!”

“That’s nice,” Cooper says. “Now let’s go. I told you I have an appointment. Well, I’m late for it as it is.”

“An appointment? An appointment?” I can hardly believe what I’m hearing. “Cooper, don’t you understand? Chris said—”

“I heard you,” Cooper says. “Congratulations. Now let’s go. I said I’d bring you here. I didn’t say I could stay all night. I do have actual paying clients, you know.”

I realize it’s futile. Even if Cooper did change his mind and let me go, I don’t have any idea where Chris has disappeared to. And how smart would it have been, really, for me to follow him? I mean, considering what happened to the last couple of girls with whom he’d—how had I put it? Oh yeah, dallied. Hey, maybe I should be an English major. Yeah. A novelist, AND a doctor. AND a detective. AND a jewelry designer…

Cooper and I slip outside. I don’t even have a chance to say good-bye to anyone, or congratulate Rachel on her Pansy. I’ve never seen a guy so eager to get out of one place.

“Slow down,” I say, as Cooper hustles me to the curb. “I got heels on, you know.”

“Sorry,” Cooper says, and drops my arm. Then he put his fingers to his mouth and whistles for a cab that’s cruising along West Fourth.

“Where are we going?” I ask curiously, as the cab pulls to the corner with a squeal of its brakes.

“You’re going home,” Cooper says. He opens the rear passenger door and gestures for me to get inside, then gives the driver the address of his grandfather’s brownstone.

“Hey,” I say, leaning forward in the seat. “It’s just right across the block. I could’ve walked—”

“Not alone,” Cooper says. “And I have to head in the other direction.”

“Why?” I don’t miss the fact that Marian the Art Historian has just slipped out the library doors behind us.

But instead of walking over and joining Cooper on the curb, she shoots him an extremely unfriendly look, then hurries off on foot toward Broadway.

Cooper, whose back is to the library, doesn’t see the professor, or the dirty look.

“I’ve got to see a man,” is all Cooper will say to me, “about a dog. Here.” He shoves a five-dollar bill at me. “Don’t wait up.”