The tall, stooped, lugubrious butler who’d been waiting for their order responded with a grave nod and a “Yes, Mrs. Ozmian,” before rotating with a distinct creaking noise and disappearing into the recesses of the fantastically vulgar and overfurnished apartment.

Harriman felt a distinct advantage over this woman, and he was going to press it for all it was worth. She was a type he understood, someone pretending to be a member of the upper classes and making a hilarious mess of it. Everything about her, from her dyed hair, to her excessive makeup, to her very real diamond jewelry—in which the diamonds were too large to be elegant—made him want to shake his head. These people never would get it. They never would understand that vulgar diamonds, stretch limos, Botoxed faces, English butlers, and giant houses in the Hamptons were the social equivalent of wearing a sandwich board on which was written:

I AM A NOUVEAU RICHE

TRYING TO APE MY BETTERS

AND I DON’T

HAVE A CLUE

Bryce himself was not nouveau riche. He didn’t need diamonds, cars, houses, and butlers to announce that fact. All he needed was his last name: Harriman. Those who knew, knew; and those who didn’t weren’t worth bothering about.

He had started his journalism career at the New York Times, where he worked his way up through sheer talent from the copy desk to the city desk; but a small contretemps involving his reporting of an incident that came to be known as the subway massacre, along with being outreported and outmaneuvered on the story by the late, great, and insufferable William Smithback, had led to his unceremonious dismissal from the Times. That had been the most painful period in his life. Tail between his legs, he had slunk over to the New York Post. In the end, the move proved to be the best thing to happen to him. The ever-vigilant, ever-restraining editorial hand that had muzzled him at the Times was far more relaxed at the Post. No longer was someone always looking over his shoulder, cramping his style. There was a sort of a slumming chicness attached to the Post’s brand of journalism that, he found, had not hurt him with his people. During his ten years at the paper, he’d risen through the ranks to being a star reporter at the city desk.

But ten years was a long time in the newspaper business, and his career had been sputtering of late. For all his feelings of condescension as he looked at this woman, he was still aware of a certain frisson of desperation. He hadn’t broken a big story in a long time, and he was starting to feel the hot breath of his younger colleagues on his neck. He needed something big—and he needed it now. And this, he felt, might just be it. He had the knack of sniffing out a certain kind of story, talking his way into seeing a certain kind of people. And that included the woman sitting across from him: Izolda Ozmian, former “fashion” model, social clawer-upper, gold digger par excellence, ex-trophy-wife to the great Anton Ozmian, who in her nine months of connubial bliss had earned herself ninety million dollars in a famous divorce trial. That, Bryce noted privately, came out to $10 million a month, or $333,000 a fuck, assuming they made the beast with two backs once daily, which was a generous estimate, considering Ozmian was one of those dot-com workaholics who practically slept in the office.

Bryce knew his instincts for a story were sharp, and this had all the makings of a good one. But these days he had to worry about his compatriots at the Post, those hungry young Turks who would like nothing more than to see him dethroned. He’d had no luck getting in to see Ozmian—which he’d expected—and the cops were being unusually tight-lipped. But he’d had no trouble getting in to see Izolda. Ozmian’s second wife was famously bitter and vindictive, and he had a strong sense that here was the mother lode, all tied up in a vicious and beautiful package, waiting to unload a bargeful of trash.

“Well, Mr. Harriman,” said Izolda, with a coquettish smile, “how can I help you?”

Harriman started off slow and easy. “I’m looking for a little background on Mr. Ozmian and his daughter. You know, just to help paint a picture of them as human beings—after the tragic murder, I mean.”

“Human beings?” Izolda repeated, an edge to her voice.

Oh, this is going to be good.

“Yes.”

A pause. “Well, I wouldn’t exactly characterize them that way.”

“I’m sorry?” Bryce asked, feigning dumb ignorance. “What way?”

“As human beings.”

Bryce pretended to take a note, giving her time to go on.

“I was such a naive little girl, an innocent model from Ukraine, when I met Ozmian.” Her voice had taken on a whiny, self-pitying note. “He swept me off my feet, boy did he ever, with dinners, private jets, five-star hotels, the works.” She gave a snort. Her accent had a pleasing susurrus of Slavic overlain with an ugly Queens drawl.

Harriman knew she hadn’t just been a fashion model: her graphically nude pictures were still circulating on the web and probably would be until the end of time.

“Oh what a fool I was!” she said, her voice trembling.

At that moment the butler arrived carrying two immense martinis on a silver tray, placing one in front of her and one by Harriman. She seized hers like someone dying of thirst and sucked down half a swimming pool’s worth before placing the glass daintily down.

Bryce feigned a sip. He wondered what Ozmian had seen in her. She was, of course, drop-dead gorgeous, thin, athletic, stacked, her body now curled up on the chaise longue like a cat, but there were a lot of beautiful women in the world he could have picked. Why her? Of course, there might have been reasons that only became apparent in the bedroom. As she talked, his mind drifted over various possibilities in that arena.

“I was taken advantage of,” she was saying. “I had no idea what I was getting into. He took a sweet foreign girl and crushed her, like that.” She picked up a frilly pillow, twisted it in the most alarming way, then tossed it aside. “Just like that!”

“What was the marriage like, exactly?”

“I’m sure you read all about it in the papers.”

Indeed he had, and in fact had written quite a bit about it himself. As she well knew. The Post had taken her side—everybody hated Anton Ozmian. The man went out of his way to be detested.

“It’s always good to hear it directly from the source.”

“He had a temper. Oh my gawd, what a temper! A week into our marriage—a week—he trashed our living room, broke my Swarovski Kris Bear collection, every single one, crunch crunch crunch, just like that. It broke my heart. He was horribly abusive.”

Bryce remembered the story. That was when Ozmian had discovered she’d been sleeping with her CrossFit trainer as well as an old boyfriend from Ukraine all along, and there was even a suggestion she had done both of them the morning of the wedding. So far, nothing new. She’d tried to claim he beat her up, but that was disproved in court. In the end she sued for divorce and pried ninety million out of his pocket, which was no mean feat, even if he was a decabillionaire.

Bryce leaned forward, his voice full of sympathy. “How terrible that must have been for you.”

“Right from the start I should have guessed, when my little Poufie bit him the first time she met him. And then—”

“I wonder,” he continued gently, steering the conversation, “if you could tell me something about his relationship with his daughter, Grace.”

“Well, you know she was from the first wife. She wasn’t mine, that’s for sure. Grace—what a name!” She gave a poisonous laugh. “She and Ozmian had a close relationship. They were both cut from the same cloth.”

“How close?”

“He spoiled her rotten! She partied all the way through college, only graduating when her father gave a new library to the school. Then she did a two-year Grand Tour of the Continent, sleeping her way from one Eurotrash bedroom to the next. Spent a year clubbing in Ibiza. Then she was back in America, burning through Daddy’s money, supporting half of Colombia’s gross national product, I’m sure.”

This was new. During the divorce, the daughter had been more or less off limits to the press. Even the Post wouldn’t drag a kid into a divorce like that. But she was dead now, and Harriman could feel his reportorial radar starting to ping big time.

“Are you saying she had drug issues?”

“Issues? She was an addict!”

“Just a user, or a genuine addict?”

“Two times in rehab, that celebrity place in Rancho Santa Fe, what was it called? ‘The Road Less Traveled.’” She gave another derisive snort of laughter.

The martini was gone and the butler brought her another unasked, whisking away the empty glass.

“And what drug was at issue here? Cocaine?”

“Everything! And Ozmian just let her do it! Enabler of the worst kind. Terrible father.”

Now Harriman came to the crux of the matter. “Do you know, Ms. Ozmian, of anything in Grace’s past that might have led to her murder?”