The Dark Glamour (666 Park Avenue 2)

blond moustache twitching strangely.
    Jane pulled the bills deftly from her purse and rested them on his wooden stand, still folded between her slim mahogany fingers. ‘The banquette near the back is fine,’ she told him softly, releasing the bills. They drifted down across his reservation book like a rumour, coming to rest just above his pale, dry hands. He hesitated briefly, and then they were gone before Jane had even seen his fingers move.
    ‘This way, please,’ he told her diffidently, leading her to the white-draped table she had suggested. She thought she heard an annoyed murmur from the line behind her, and she made herself remember to strut rather than slink.
    She slid along the soft brown leather of the bench; he moved the table in a bit closer to her and hurried back to his post. She saw his right hand move to his left sleeve as he went, and then to his inside jacket pocket, and smiled: Malcolm would be so proud of her. A shrill laugh pierced her reverie, drawing Jane’s somewhat jittery attention to one of Laura Helding’s friends, a woman with slick, professionally straightened hair, whom Jane faintly remembered as the wife of some athlete. Her bare bronzed shoulder was so close that it almost touched Jane’s. Laura herself was seated across the table from Jane’s neighbour, but Jane still felt sure that, if she wanted to, she could reach over and touch Malcolm’s second-cousin-in-law.
    So close,
she thought tensely,
but now what?
    As if in answer, a waitress arrived at Laura’s table with three Bellinis and a Bloody Mary.
Now I wait,
Jane realized with a sudden flash of insight.
Now I let her get a little tipsy.
Laura had always been even more outgoing than usual when she had a cocktail or three in her angular body.
    Jane suited action to thought, setting her purse on the table and picking up the menu. Over her fluffy Niçoise omelet (which was barely an omelet and not remotely Niçoise, to Jane’s authoritatively French eye, but was absolutely delicious all the same), she thought she noticed Laura eyeing the beading on the minaudière, and reminded herself that she wasn’t going into this mission completely blind. She knew a lot about Laura, after all: the woman liked private sales, loved one-of-a-kind anything, and loathed her husband in a good-natured sort of way.
    Jane took a sip of her water and then a sip of chardonnay, reached into the tiny purse, and dug around for her new Vertu Constellation phone. It had been expensive – shockingly, heart-stoppingly expensive – but during the nerve-racking days of choosing the spell and locating the Forvrangdan orb, Dee had managed to convince her that she needed a power accessory. At the time, Jane had grudgingly written it off as retail therapy, but now it was practisal in a whole new way: it was exactly the sort of accessory that Ella, socialite acquaintance of the Doran clan, would have. And since she couldn’t wear her engagement ring around the Dorans, of course, she would have to get comfortable spending money on other eye-catchers.
Plus, so pretty,
she cooed silently, stroking the smooth ceramic of its keys.
    Laura noticed it, too, out of the corner of her heavily lined eye, and Jane thought she read approval in her expression.
So far, so good.
But glances weren’t invitations, and Jane gritted Ella’s small, even teeth and dialled Dee.
    ‘I’m on my way to the interview with that caterer,’ Dee answered crisply. ‘Is everything okay?’
    ‘You’re late,’ Jane drawled, forcing herself not to hush her voice the way she normally would. The real players didn’t worry about who heard them. She tried to copy the light, lovely accent her old friend Elodie had spoken with a mix of British English, Haitian French, and boarding-school Swedish. The memory of the week the two girls had spent in the Dessaixes’ posh London home crashed over Jane like a wave, but she twisted the edge of the cream-coloured tablecloth between her fingers and fought down the nostalgia.
    ‘No, it’s at—’ Dee initially sounded confused, but then stopped abruptly and Jane guessed that she had caught on. ‘Oh my God, which of them is there?’
    ‘I don’t even care about your stupid excuses,’ Jane insisted, raising her voice a tiny bit more. ‘I can tell that you’re hungover, anyway.’
    ‘Well,’ Dee pointed out reasonably, ‘you
did
keep me up past midnight with your coma drama. Who wouldn’t drink, with such a crazy roommate?’
    Jane had