my breasts was my lifeline, the only rope that could save me if this scarecrow in sweats decided to slip me something other than narcotics.
Winslow’s skinny limbs began to move. Every muscle in my own limbs stiffened, ready to fight him off if I had to.
But I didn’t have to.
The gamble was working. The man moved away. When he finally settled into a nearby chair, I released my held breath. He misunderstood the reason for my sigh.
“Good, isn’t it?” he whispered.
“It always takes a little while to kick in for me.” I opened my eyes. “You don’t mind if I hang until it does, do you? Like I said, my pain is bad.”
Winslow gave me a little smile—one junkie to another. “I understand.”
I scanned the dreary space, deciding the best way to prod more information out of Winslow was to goad him.
“You know, it’s hard for me to believe you and Breanne were a couple. She’s so dynamic. A woman with exquisite taste in fashion, art, wine—”
Winslow laughed. “She didn’t start out that way. When I met Breanne, she was a struggling journalist. She could barely afford the rent on her East Village walk-up.”
“That must have been a long time ago.”
“She was in her twenties. I was considerably older.”
“The first marriage for both of you?”
Winslow shook his head. “I’d been married for over a decade to a proper wife. I had two proper children, as well, and operated a proper pharmaceutical company.”
“So . . . how did the two of you meet?”
“Breanne interviewed me for a piece in New York Trends—”
“You mean Trend, right?”
“New York Trends doesn’t exist anymore. Breanne saw to that.”
“Oh, I see . . . so what did Breanne interview you about, exactly?”
“An antiwrinkle pill my drug company had developed. It was quite effective, in some ways revolutionary.”
“Wow. Sounds lucrative. So what happened? Did you two fall in love during the interview?”
“Love . . .” Winslow laughed. The sound was harsh and hollow. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes as if envisioning the past. “Breanne was stunning back then, dazzling, even more of a beauty than she is now. It was hard for me to concentrate with her sitting across from me. She seemed impressed by my background, my academic records at Haverford and Princeton, my ‘patina of refinement’ as she called it. She was flirtatious and seductive. And so we had sex, lots of it.”
“And you married her.”
Winslow opened his eyes. “I didn’t want to, but Breanne wasn’t content with being a mistress. She found a way to inform my wife about our relationship.”
“Was that really such a big deal? I mean, you probably weren’t happy in your first marriage, right?”
Winslow shifted his wasted frame. “The breakup of my marriage caused me problems. My family was unhappy. They settled the Winslow fortune on my ungrateful offspring. At the time, I didn’t care. I still had my company, and I had Breanne. It was enough for me. It was not enough for her . . .”
The man sighed, fished a vial of pills out of his pocket, and dumped a few into his mouth, swallowing them dry. Then he stared off into space.
Come on, Clare. Find another button to press . . .
“So why did you and Breanne break up exactly? It sounds like you had a pretty good thing going.” (If you can call a torrid extramarital affair capped by a heartbreaking revelation for the wife and kids a “pretty good” thing.)
“Breanne wanted more than just a marriage. She always wanted more. It’s her defining characteristic.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She worked at New York Trends, but she wanted her own magazine. So she convinced me to give her $250,000.”
“For what?”
“A pitch. That’s what she called it. A prototype and multimedia demonstration for Reston-Miller Publications.”
“So your money helped start her magazine. That was really nice of you.”
“Nice? I was a dim-witted dupe. Within a year the bitch dropped me like an out-of-season handbag. She started an affair with the photographer who shot her magazine’s first cover. Then she filed for divorce, the greedy little lying tart ...”
Winslow’s mood was getting uglier by the minute, and I wondered what he was on right now. While I needed to push him off balance emotionally, the drugs were heightening his agitation, and I was starting to worry about physical safety.
I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I wanted badly to nail this creep for Hazel Boggs’s murder. To do that, I had to get him to admit he