High Noon Page 0,161

you've got to sneak money into a separate account-a husband who's out of town a lot while you're kicking around arranging flowers and taking lady lunches."

"Affair."

"We are not only attractive public servants, but cynical ones."

"Hmm." Phoebe ran it through her head as they rode the elevator down. "I don't see the dead wife as the love of his life. Strikes me as he's more or less x'd her out like he might a canceled meeting. But if she had a lover... maybe one she was planning on running off with. Broke open that piggy bank."

"Wrong time, wrong place. Her shooter and his cohorts are doing life, but that might not be enough for a brokenhearted lover. Have to blame somebody."

"And everyone got out alive but her. I didn't get a medical team in, not in time."

"Couldn't," Liz corrected. "I read the file, too, Phoebe."

"If someone was in love with her, if someone was eaten up by guilt that she went to the bank because of him, 'couldn't' wouldn't mean squat. Let's track down Angela Brentine's friends, her hairdresser, her personal trainer. The kind of people an unhappy woman talks to. If she had a lover, one of them knows."

"I can get the best friend." Liz took out her phone as they crossed the lobby and stepped outside. "I've got a friend with the paper. I'll ask him to pull up the report on the Brentine wedding. Best friend was probably maid of honor, or certainly in the wedding party."

"Aren't you handy to have around?"

"The guy I used to live with thought so, until I showed him the door."

Glynis Colby was a long beanpole of a blonde in jeans and a linen shirt. Her photographer's studio claimed a corner of the third floor of a rehabbed house near Greene Square. Various props, including an enormous teacup and an army of stuffed animals, were stacked around the walls. She called her assistant-a little guy with a streaked ponytail and a cherubic smile-Dub when she asked him to get everyone a cold drink. "I still miss her. It's been three years and counting, and I'll see something and think, I've got to call Angie. But she's not here."

Here was the emotion Joshua Brentine had lacked. "You were friends a long time?" Phoebe asked her.

"Since we were fourteen. Glyn, Angie and Dub-the unholy trinity. We were going to be famous together."

"I know your work," Liz put in. "You took pregnancy photos of a cousin of mine. They were gorgeous. Then she came back with her little boy. You've got a good reputation-deservedly."

"We do pretty well, right, Dub?"

He gave her hand a squeeze after he'd set down glasses. "Angie? She was the sweet part of the heart."

"We had this concept," Glynis continued. "Angie specialized in wedding photography, I'd do pregnancy and children. A fun way, we thought, to generate repeat business. Plus, she just loved doing weddings, had such an eye for them. And Dub..."

"I'd run the business."

"I was under the impression that Angela wasn't working at the time of her death."

"No. Joshua didn't like it. Or us." Glynis slanted her gaze toward Dub, wiggled her eyebrows suggestively. "Bad influences."

"He hated me more," Dub put in. "Homophobe."

Glynis poked him in the arm. "Oh, you just like to be number one. He hated me just as much. I was the slut."

"I was the gay man slut. That trumps. He met her at a wedding she was working," Dub continued. "Big society deal and a huge coup for us."

"We'd only been in business for about eight months."

"She was beautiful. Really beautiful, and I meant it about the sweet."

"And she had enormous charm. Joshua swept her right off her feet." Using both hands, Glynis made a broad, swooping gesture. "Acres of flowers-heavy on the pink roses she liked best. Candlelight dinners, romantic getaways. Six weeks later, she was engaged. Three months after that she was Mrs. Joshua Brentine."

"Then it started." Dub's mouth tightened as he picked up the story. "He pressured her into quitting her work. How could she snap pictures-as he put it-at weddings when, if the wedding was important enough, she'd be a guest?"

"And she had a duty to blah, blah, blah," Glynis said with a shrug. "She gave it up, gave it all up for him. She adored him. He didn't like her socializing with us, so he made it difficult. Manipulating's a Bren tine specialty. So we'd grab lunch now and then, and she wouldn't tell him, or we'd have dinner when he was