Killer Deal Read Online Free PDF

to get the clothing line going, so his pockets are more shallow than you might expect.”
    “Is it all business between them?”

    “I knew you were digging. Sorry to disappoint you, but Emile likes them young, blond, and male, which zeroes out Gwen. A meeting of the minds and the checkbooks, nothing more. What’re you up to, Molly?” Owen leaned across his desk with a conspiratorial grin. “This about Garth Henderson?”
    “Not yet.” I didn’t want to set the gossip train racing through The Publisher’s kingdom before I’d even started working.
    “Too bad.”
    “Why, what do you know?”
    “Gwen was the one who got Garth to poach Emile from Ronnie Willis. Said if she was going to partner with him, they should keep the business ‘all in the family,’ you know? Ronnie was furious.”
    “And now they’re all reunited. Minus Garth.”
    Owen nodded and sat back in his chair, licking at the whipped cream on his coffee in a way that would have brought half the bull pen downstairs to its knees. “Isn’t that interesting?”
    It certainly put the merger in a new light. I’d been surprised that it was even going forward but, in spite of an acrimonious, tabloid-fodder separation and pending divorce, Garth had not changed his will. I suppose when you’re divorcing someone, you’re so busy wishing him or her dead that you don’t think about dying yourself. Upon Garth’s death, his controlling interest in GHInc. had gone to Gwen and she was proceeding with the merger.
    But that meant that Ronnie Willis, who’d thought he was merging with an advertising genius, now found himself partnered with a former cosmetics executive. One who’d conspired to steal a major client from him. I was surprised Ronnie wasn’t invoking some key man clause to back out when the reputation of GHInc. had always been that it all hinged on Garth’s individual brilliance. There had to be some other inducement for Ronnie to go forward. More than recapturing Emile Trebask.
    “Where’d you hear this?”

    “Someone who works for Ronnie. And even more interesting, I hear he’s quite happy that the merger’s going forward.”
    So Emile and Gwen wasn’t the pairing to dwell on, it was Gwen and Ronnie. “Any other client fallout?”
    Owen shook his head. “Sitting tight so far. I also hear the staff at Garth’s place is solid, but Ronnie’s people are nervous.”
    “You’d think Garth’s people would be nervous, since their boss is the one who just got perforated.”
    “Yeah, but that’s love and this is business.”
    “You think it’s love? You think it’s Gwen?”
    “Why else shoot him where she shot him?” He gestured to his lap with a quick flinch.
    “To plant that thought in everyone’s mind.”
    Owen wagged his head a moment, rolling that thought around. “Hadn’t considered that. So you don’t think it’s Gwen.”
    “I think I’m keeping an open mind. Besides, that’s not what my article’s about,” I hurried to add, seeing the grin spreading across his face.
    “Of course not. But if you find you need to share some suspicions, you know where to find me. And how much I cost.” He toasted me with his coffee cup as I headed for the elevator.
    Back at my desk, I read until my eyes crossed, then loaded up all the paperwork, trying to suppress college flashbacks, and decamped for drinks with Tricia and Cassady. Of course, meeting them for drinks could induce college flashbacks, too, but of a happier sort. They were the ones who dragged me out of our dorm suite the night I was suffering writer’s block on a paper about Coleridge. Claiming to be my own visitors from Purlock, they took me to the neighborhood café where we ate hot pastrami sandwiches and drank kamikazes until I felt sufficiently inspired to go home and finish the paper. Thank goodness there hadn’t been any opium dealers on campus. That we knew.
    As Tricia and I settled in, the conversation turned to another crucial wrinkle in my investigation.