Secrets in Death (In Death #45)(41)

“I need to clear some decks, Nadine. I’m going to give you what you want, but I need what I need.” She flicked a glance at Trina. “You don’t have to be here.”

“Yeah, I do.” She held up another cape. “Sit, and I’ll deal with your hair while you get what you get.”

“No.”

Trina tipped that hair-heavy head again. The tower stayed firm. “I do it here and now or I come to your place and give you a full treatment, which anybody with eyes can see you could use.”

Just as Eve feared. “I’m working.”

“You’re working and that’s talking and you can talk sitting on your ass.”

“Oh, sit down, for God’s sake.” Nadine threw up her hands. “A trim and shape isn’t torture. And neither of us has time to waste.”

“So you say,” Eve muttered. “I’m going to ask questions. You might not want the person who paints up your face to hear your answers.”

“About Larinda Mars?” Nadine’s snort didn’t fit her serious-reporter image. “Please. I’ve got absolutely nothing to hide, from you, from Trina, or anyone.” To prove it, Nadine took another seat. “You need what you need, I need what I need. Sit down and give Trina what she needs, and we’re good.”

Eve didn’t like it, but she sat, as the idea of Trina wheedling into her house—and she damn well would—equaled a lot worse.

She immediately felt ridiculous when Trina whipped the cape over her. “Your relationship with Mars,” Eve repeated, balking when Trina picked up a bottle and started spraying the contents on her hair. “What’s that? Why? Stop it!”

“Do you want to ask me questions or ask Nadine questions? It’s just water.” Trina rolled her eyes, currently royal purple framed in thick black lashes tipped with red.

“I didn’t have a relationship with Mars,” Nadine began. “We worked in entirely different areas. I never worked with her, and we didn’t drink from the same pool.”

“Not entirely true,” Eve corrected, trying to ignore whatever was happening to her hair. “She was gossip—a lot of that drank from the celebrity and entertainment pools. You joined that pool with the book and the vid. And you’re up for a whatsit.”

“Oscar.”

“Why Oscar? Why not Harold? Or Tod?”

“There’s an actual answer for that, but I’ll skip it because you have a point on the other.” Nadine swiveled her chair Eve’s way. “I gave her a couple of interviews attached to the book, and the vid, along the way, as it was to my advantage, and because I’m a good soldier. The station wanted it. But that’s not a relationship.”

“You’d have been at some of the same events, parties.”

“Yes. We didn’t really socialize. I didn’t like her, if that’s what you’re after. She’s dead, and I’m sorry, but I don’t like her any more now than I did when she was breathing.”

“Why?” She asked for form, for procedure. Eve knew Nadine well enough to understand just why.

“Because she was sneaky, underhanded—which aren’t actual flaws in a reporter—but add disloyal, toss in shaky ethics, and top it off with downright mean. She booted two interns just this past year, sent them both off in tears. Fired her last assistant and went out of her way to bad-mouth her to screw with her chances of getting another job.”

“I need those names.”

“You don’t seriously believe—”

“I need them. What else, who else?”

Taking a minute to settle, Nadine breathed out slow. “She went after my people—my admin, my researchers. Subtly and not-so, because they wouldn’t give her information on me. And she tried strong-arming me to get to you.”

Forgetting Trina, Eve swiveled in the chair to face Nadine directly. “When? How?”

As they sat face-to-face in front of the mirror, Nadine’s foxy green eyes met Eve’s.

“The first time? After you saved my life—the first time there, too. After you kept Morse, that prick, from killing me. She brought me a damn fruit basket, tried to play the concerned colleague, which was bullshit so thick she could have smothered in it.”

“You know your bullshit,” Trina said as she worked, earning a quick smile from Nadine.

“I definitely do. What she wanted was dish, and I could respect that to a point. I was, for her purpose, a story. But she wanted details about you and Roarke, wanted more access to you, into your home, into your personal lives, and I said no—not through me. She…”

Nadine rolled her fingers in the air. “We’ll say intimated she could spin the story of my experience, and what happened that night, to twist us all up. Maybe we all set Morse up, maybe you had a reason to want him taken down. I told her to fuck off and spin away. She didn’t like it.”

“Never occurred to you to mention it to me?”

Nadine sent Eve a straight, heated stare. “I handle my own.”

“Okay. Did she come back on you?”

“No, and I shrugged it off. Until the book hit, and the vid deal. She pushed again, hard. Pointed out to me a handful of stories in the tabloids about my personal life, the speculation you and I banged each other or—”