Felix seemed to misinterpret my silent struggle with my conscience as a bout of shock or offense of some sort. He gave me a pitying look and said, “I’m sure this all sounds crazy to you. I imagine you had a totally normal childhood with the white picket fence and all that,” he remarked.
I nearly choked on my tortilla chip. If he only knew. My childhood was about as far from the typical American upbringing as a person could get outside of Hollywood, but the last thing I felt like doing was telling Felix all about my crazy family.
My family. Crap!
“My sister!” I exclaimed, standing up and nearly upending the table in my panic. “I just remembered my sister’s in town this weekend. She’s probably frantic. I left with the cops in such a hurry, I didn’t even grab my phone.”
He stood. “It’s okay, take it easy. Here, call her and let her know you’re on your way.” He handed me his phone.
I stared down at it and realized I didn’t actually know Sage’s cell phone number anymore. I’d become so dependent on my contacts list, I couldn’t have called her if I’d wanted to. I met his eyes with a helpless look. “I don’t have her number memorized.”
“Okay, hey no worries. We’ll get you home in no time.”
His put a hand on my shoulder and started guiding me toward the gate.
“What about this mess?” I asked, glancing behind me at the half-eaten meal we’d left behind.
“I’ll call the service. Come on.”
We jogged all the way back to his car.
6
On an ordinary day—that is, one where I wasn’t freaking out about leaving my sister (and possibly two little kids) hanging and worrying about being charged for my boss’ murder—I would have spent the hair-raising car ride from the taco shop to my apartment alternating between musing about whether Felix was romantically interested in me and offering up prayers that we didn’t die in a fiery crash, as his speedometer inched closer and closer to triple digits. But, as things stood, I was glad that he drove with no regard for the law or our personal safety. I was so panicked about Sage that I had my seatbelt unbuckled and was halfway out of my seat by the time he squealed to a stop in front of my building.
“Thanks!” I shouted over my shoulder, as I sprinted up the stairs. It wasn’t until I was jiggling my key in the temperamental front door lock that I processed the fact that he’d been leaning across the front seat, his eyes closed, when I leapt from the car.
He was moving in to kiss you, you idiot.
I turned and shot him a look over my shoulder, mortified by the prospect that I’d offended him without even realizing it. He didn’t look put out. Instead, if anything, he looked moderately amused. He draped his right arm over the back of the empty passenger seat, gave me a short beep and a broad smile, then zoomed out into traffic.
I shoved thoughts of Felix out of my mind and raced up to the fourth floor, taking the stairs two at a time. I pushed open the heavy fire door and burst into the hallway, panting. I’d planned to sprint down the hall to my apartment and grab my phone to call Sage, but when I saw the crowd assembled in front of my door I drew up short.
A frazzled-looking Sage, two small, tanned, and tow-headed beauties with enormous blue eyes, and Detective Drummond all stared at me.
“Rosemary,” Sage practically shouted, “where have you been?!” She loped down the hall and half-tackled, half-hugged me.
I squeezed her back, tightly, and inhaled the gingery scent of whatever shampoo she was using on her bouncy, copper-colored hair. “Sage, you wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had,” I whispered.
She pulled back and gripped my arms, piercing me with a look. “I heard some of it. Amber Patrick’s been murdered?” she said in a hushed voice.
“Yeah, and Captain America over there thinks I did it,” I whispered, cutting my eyes toward Detective Drummond, who appeared to be deeply engaged in a rousing game of paddy cake with Skylar, while Dylan looked on, rapt.
Sage shook her head. “Detective Drummond? No, I don’t think he does. He seems like a good guy. But his boss …” she trailed off and started gnawing on a ragged cuticle with her teeth.
I slapped her hand lightly and pulled her finger out of her mouth. “Stop that.”
Detective Drummond raised his head and met my gaze. “Where’s your boyfriend?”
I could feel Sage eying me curiously. I took a deep breath and exhaled then said, “Felix Patrick isn’t my boyfriend.”
The police officer raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Really? Someone ought to let him know.”
“Felix?” Sage murmured beside me. “Have you been holding out on me?”
I huffed. “No,” I said out of the side of my mouth. Then I turned my attention back to LAPD’s finest. “He’s a friend. Or maybe he’s just a concerned citizen who objects to the way your department seems to be hell-bent on railroading me. Anyway, what are you doing here? Were you hoping to break in and execute an illegal, warrantless search while I wasn’t home?” My voice sounded stiff and angry even to me.
Great, Rosemary, make him think you have a bad temper. That’ll help your situation.
Beside me, Sage sort of muttered under her breath. I couldn’t make out the words, but I got the impression that she also may have thought my jab was ill-advised.
I ignored the anger flashing in Detective Drummond’s eyes and walked over to crouch in front of the kids. “You must be Dylan,” I said to the boy.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said in a shy voice.
“And I’m Skylar!” his sister piped up.
“Hi, Skylar.” I looked from one round little face to the other. “My name’s Rosemary. I’m Sage’s big sister.”
“We know,” Skylar informed me seriously.
“Are you a bad guy?” Dylan wanted to know.
I glared at Detective Drummond as if to say ‘see what you’ve done?’ He matched my gaze with a calm, impassive look. I was surprised to note that his brown eyes were flecked with gold. What he said next was even more surprising.
He took Dylan’s hands in his own and said, “Now listen up. This is important. In this country, no one is bad guy until a judge and a jury say so. Understand? And your nanny’s sister, I don’t think a judge and jury will ever say she’s a bad guy. I think she might just be mixed up in something she doesn’t quite understand.”
Dylan nodded solemnly.
Skylar considered this information then turned to Detective Drummond and asked, “So are you here to help her?”
“If she’ll let me,” he told her.
Sage had come over to stand beside me. She arched her brow and gave me a look that suggested she believed him. I bet she’d feel somewhat less charitably toward the good officer if he’d dragged her out of bed and down to the police station for a fun morning of being treated like a criminal. But I held my tongue. And, if I’m being honest, the solemn, serious way he addressed the kids’ worries melted my heart just the teensiest bit.
I stood and motioned for Detective Drummond to do the same. He gave the kids one final reassuring smile and then rose to his feet.
“If that’s true, I guess I should apologize for my crack about the warrantless search,” I said in a magnanimous tone.
He nodded.
I smiled. Good; I’m glad that’s out of the way, I thought.
“Go ahead,” he said.
“Go ahead?” I echoed.
“Go ahead and apologize,” he told me, catching me in the same behavior I’d called Felix on less than twenty-four hours earlier. Detective Drummond pursed his lips and tried to hide his amusement.
I didn’t bother to hide mine. I threw back my head and laughed then said, “Well played. Let me clarify. I’m sorry for the crack about the illegal search. And I would really appreciate some help.”
His lips curved into a genuine smile. “Good. Take care of your visitors and then we’ll talk.”
* * *
It took me what seemed like forever to convince Sage to leave—she was
worried about me, afraid to leave me alone. Finally, I promised to meet her and the kids at the Santa Monica Pier and to keep my phone charged and handy then shoved her and the two blonde cuties out of the building. I hustled Detective Drummond into my apartment and headed for the kitchen.
“I need some tea,” I told him as I plugged in the electric kettle. “You interested?”
“You have loose tea and milk?” he asked in return.
“No milk,” I said, recalling the sad state of my fridge. “Why?”
“I can make a mean chai.”
I shot him a disbelieving look over my shoulder.
“What?” he said.
“You don’t look like the chai type.”
“Chai’s a type?”
“Whatever. You just strike me as more of a black coffee kind of guy,” I said.
He let that go. Instead he said, “Sure, I’d love some tea. So, Sage is your older sister?”
I dug around in the cabinet and found the little wooden chest of fancy teas I’d liberated from the kitchen at my parent’s resort. As I placed the selection of teas on the wobbly IKEA table, I gave him a questioning glance. “No, I’m the oldest. Why?”
“She seems very maternal, the way she was clucking over you. I figured she was used to taking care of you.” He shrugged and flipped through the tea packets, settling on a hot pepper/mint/green tea combination.
I plucked a vanilla chamomile packet out of the pile and tore it open. “No. I’m the oldest. Sage is in the middle. And our baby sister is Thyme.” I waited for the stupid joke, but it never came. I blinked. Sage had once informed me that she’d spent three months keeping count: upon hearing our names, eighty-seven percent of men and seventy-two percent of women responded with a lame crack. What she expected me to do with this information, I’d never known, but I figured that’s just the way accountants’ brains work.
“Huh. Well your younger sister sure is concerned about you,” he observed.
The kettle beeped to let me know the water was hot. I sort of missed the whistle of a stovetop kettle, but convenience trumps nostalgia. I grabbed two mugs from the cabinet overhead and plunked them down on the counter. “Of course she is. You’re trying to pin a murder on me.” I turned to face him.
He held up his hands in a gesture of appeasement. “Listen. What I said to those kids is true. I don’t think you killed Amber Patrick. But I do think you know more than you’re letting on about her death. And, yes, someone’s gone through a fair amount of trouble to make it look like you killed her. So, what we need to figure out together is who and why.”
I clamped my lips together and crossed my arms.
He took in my defensive posture for a moment and then shrugged. “It’s your move, Rosemary. Detective Sullivan’s in a hurry to clear this and get the freaking paparazzi out of her hair. If I don’t give her another viable suspect, she’ll do exactly that and move on with her life.”
I sighed but softened my stance—literally and figuratively. “What exactly do you want to know?” I sighed as I poured the hot water into the mugs and passed him one so he could steep his teabag.
I watched with a mixture of horror and fascination as Detective Drummond dumped a metric buttload of sugar from the sugar bowl on the table into his mug. “Who else knew about her food allergies? And had access to the kitchen? And had a reason to want to kill her?” he asked, shoveling still more sugar into his tea.
I was still staring at the sugar bowl. The thought of drinking the mess in his mug made my teeth ache.
“Rosemary?” he prompted.
I shook my head. “Sorry. I got distracted there watching you fixing your tea.” I dragged my eyes away from the sugar bomb in his hands.
He reddened. “I’m a southern boy. I do like a sweet tea,” he admitted.
“You don’t say? But I don’t hear an accent.”
“I’ve been out here for a long time, since right after high school. It only kicks back in when I’m back home. Anyway—means, motive, opportunity? Any thoughts?”
I stirred my tea and thought about his questions. “Well, everybody knew about her nut allergy.”
“How?”
I lowered myself into the chair across from him. My kitchen table was so tiny that our knees touched underneath. He discreetly scooted his chair back—and banged directly into the oven. “Tight quarters,” I said with an apologetic smile before answering his question. “Amber made it a point to educate everyone who came into the house as to her food allergies, sensitivities, and preferences.”
“What exactly do you mean by ‘everyone’?”
“I mean she wanted to make sure that nobody introduced any products that contained nuts or wheat, among other verboten items, into her environment in any capacity. That included her massage therapist, her hairstylist, the maid, and, of course, me. Not only did she not want to eat any nuts, she didn’t want to touch anything that had been remotely near a nut.”
“Was her allergy that severe?” he asked.
I entertained the thought of making the obvious joke that she was nuts but decided not to pick that low-hanging fruit. “I honestly don’t know. It could’ve been. Or she could have simply been being overly dramatic about it because she was overly dramatic about pretty much everything.” Subtlety hadn’t been Amber’s forte.
“It sounds like you didn’t like your boss very much,” he remarked.
Despite the fact that his tone was nonjudgmental, even gentle, I stiffened. “She was a hard person to like,” I finally said, cringing at how defensive I sounded.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. She was mean to the people who worked for her, dismissive of the people who she worked with, difficult toward the people who she worked for, and generally only turned on her pleasant persona when the cameras were rolling and she was being paid to be charming.”
“Why didn’t you quit?”
No way was I getting into that whole mess with the LAPD. “I need the money,” I said in a flat voice that left no doubt the topic was off-limits.
He raised an eyebrow but moved on without prodding. “So would you say she had a lot of enemies?”
“I don’t know about enemies, but there certainly were a lot of people who had their differences with her.”
“What about her relationship with her husband?” he pressed, taking a great, big gulp of his tea.
“What about it?” I stalled as I considered how to answer the question in a way that was at least fair to Pat, who apparently was going to continuing employing me.
He leaned forward with interest and our knees bumped again. “Sorry,” he mumbled.
I waved off the apology and said slowly, “I heard she was openly carrying on an affair, so I wouldn’t rate it as a great relationship.”
“Did they fight a lot?” he asked.
I thought he’d be more interested in the affair, but he was the law enforcement expert—maybe it’s never the lover. “Like I said, she was generally nasty. She fought with Pat, sure, but she fought with everyone.”
“Does that include your friend Felix?”
I ignored the sarcastic emphasis on Felix’s name and answered the question honestly. “Yes. I don’t think Felix got along any better with Amber than did the rest of us.”
“Hmm. Okay, back to the bit about the boyfriend —”
“I told you he’s not my boyfriend,” I snapped, cutting him off.
He reached for his tea and gave me a lazy smile. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much. I wasn’t asking about your boyfriend, I was asking about Amber’s boyfriend.”
I took a drink of my own tea to cover my embarrassed discomfort. I was about to confess that all I knew about Amber’s purported affair had come from Felix when the image of the swarthy Italian playboy next door popped into my head. “Well it’s an open secret that Amber’s cheating on Pat, apparently. And last night, when I was leaving to get in my car to go home, one of the neighbors was lurking around the house. He scared me half to death.�
�
“When was this?”
“It had to be almost one in the morning.”
“Who was it?”
“Antonio Santos. You know, the racecar driver?”
“The Eurotrash playboy who hawks the stinky body wash?”
“That’s the one.”
“And it didn’t occur to you to mention this little tidbit to me and Detective Sullivan this morning?” he exploded, his voice vibrating with barely contained anger.
“I honestly didn’t think of it until just now. I’ve had a sort of disorienting day,” I said pointedly.
He had the decency not to argue the point. “What happened with Santos?”
“Like I said, he startled me. He said he was meeting someone.”
“Did he say who?” Detective Drummond asked. He drained his mug and returned it to the table with a thud.
“No, he didn’t. At the time, I sort of thought he was meeting another one of the household staff members, but now I wonder. Maybe he was there for Amber.”
I could see him weighing that possibility. Given Santos’ reputation, it certainly seemed plausible to me.
“You think he killed her?”
“I have no idea. Maybe? Or maybe Pat had had enough of her adultery.” I shrugged. As much as I wanted the police to move away from the notion that I’d killed Amber, I wasn’t comfortable offering up another juicy suspect. They could do their own legwork.
He eyed me closely. “Is there anything else you forgot to tell us this morning?”
I gnawed on my lower lip, hesitating. I didn’t want to be the one to tell the investigators about Felix’s outburst, but I didn’t want Detective Drummond to find out from someone else and think I was holding out on him. I needed this guy to help me. After a moment, I exhaled slowly and said, “Well, there is one other thing. It’s probably nothing …”
“What is it?” he said in a tone that suggested he was irritated, but not surprised, to learn that there was more I hadn’t told him.
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