Killer Cocktail Read Free Page A

to watch it erupt. But ever the lady, Tricia struggled to keep it all inside and lifted her glass instead. “To my brothers and their god-awful taste in women,” she toasted.
    We clinked glasses in assent. In all the years we’d known Tricia (the three of us met as college freshmen thirteen years ago, but please don’t do the math), David and Richard Vincent had excelled at involvements with nightmarish women. Richard had gone so far as to marry Rebecca Somerset two years ago. Rebecca’s mom was electronics money, her dad was shipping money, and Rebecca was an heiress cum designer cum disaster. She was famous in a large number of nonintersecting social circles for consistently inappropriate and boorish behavior. I’d had the pleasure of seeing her in action at a fund-raiser
where she sat next to the Chilean consul’s wife at the head table of a five-k-a-plate banquet, loudly critiqued the poor woman’s dress and jewelry all through dinner—holding up the Chilean consul’s mistress as a paragon of style—then tried to redo her hair during the keynote address.
    After a very public romance, Richard and Rebecca eloped to Jamaica and Tricia’s mother literally took to her bed for a week. Richard and Rebecca had made it a whole thirteen months before splitting up—a full trip around the rocky cape of the calendar so they could ruin every holiday once, was Tricia’s theory—and the Vincent family was still reverberating, six months into the separation.
    And now David was apparently engaged to Lisbet McCandless, one of the few women in America capable of making Rebecca look good by comparison. Lisbet was second-generation Hollywood, the spawn of a movie director and a studio executive, both famous for their tempers and sexual flexibility. Lisbet had been a sitcom star as a child; as a teenager, she drifted into a series of films quickly forgotten despite Lisbet’s willingness to do nudity.
    Now in her twenties, Lisbet had worked her way back on to television, basic cable at least (rumor was, her mother was having an affair with the network executive who ordered the show). She played a rocket scientist who stumbles upon a government cover-up of life on Venus—the only thing that was covered up on the show. It was a huge hit, thanks mainly to the plunging necklines on Lisbet’s costumes, and the success put Lisbet back on top of the tabloid heap. Lately, she’d gotten into so many public brawls with other starlets that her father had shipped her out to do off-Broadway during hiatus as career rehab. David had met her shortly after her arrival in New York and they’d been paparazzi fodder ever since. And now they were engaged.

    I put on my most optimistic expression. “So, your parents are throwing them a huge party. They must be pleased about the whole thing.”
    Tricia scrunched up her face. “Mother’s terrorizing the staff and Dad’s taking way too many meetings. They’re not happy.”
    “Then why the big party?”
    Tricia sighed. “Apparently, Rebecca and Richard have one common belief left, which is that my parents were opposed to their marriage and undermined it from Day One.”
    “Smart parents,” Cassady said.
    “But in their shell shock, Mother and Dad apparently feel that if they make a big show of supporting David and Lisbet, those two won’t be able to accuse them of the same thing when their marriage blows up.” Tricia’s eyes narrowed. “And blow up, it will.”
    “If it’s a big family thing, do you really want us there?” I asked.
    “You’re more family to me than some of the piranhas in my gene pool. Besides, if you don’t come, who will join me as I sit with my bottle of champagne in the corner and sip and snipe?”
    “Sounds like my kind of weekend. Count me in,” Cassady volunteered.
    “Could be fascinating,” I had to admit.
    “Thank you. I feel so much better about going now.” Tricia smiled genuinely and did seem immensely relieved.
    Which is why, that Friday, I was