by Dale Mayer
She sniffled several times and then said, “I need a tissue.”
He gently released her, walked over, grabbed a box on the coffee table, and brought it back to her. He slipped a finger under her chin, tilted her head up so he could look into her eyes. “You know it’s okay to let go sometimes, right?”
She reached for the tissues, blew her nose, and, with another one, dabbed at her eyes. She motioned at his shirt. “Your shirt is covered in mascara.”
“It’ll wash,” he said without a care.
She stared at him, startled. “You don’t care that I ruined your shirt?”
He walked over to the sink, opened the cupboard beside it, pulled out a glass, and filled it with cold water, placing it in front of her.
She stared down at it, wondering at his thoughtfulness, but picked it up and took a long drink. It helped ease the coarseness in her throat. “It’s really hard.”
“It is,” he said, his voice firm, yet gentle. “Anytime we lose someone close to our heart, it’s hard. It’s always hard to say goodbye.”
Her eyes filled with tears again. Patiently she brushed them back. “It seems like all I do is cry.”
“It seems to me like all you’ve been doing is holding back the tears,” he said, pointing out what she’d been trying to ignore. He opened the fridge and said, “What about food?”
“I don’t think I can eat,” she confessed. He turned to look at her and frowned. She shrugged. “I had the croissant at breakfast, but that’s it.”
He whistled, turned back to the fridge, rummaged a bit, and pulled out vegetables. She watched in dulled surprise, her mind sorting out what he was doing.
When he grabbed a knife and started chopping, she said, “You’re cooking?”
He nodded. “You need to eat.”
She half smiled. “Is this what you always do for all your suspects who come off the suspect list?”
“I’d spend my days cooking then,” he joked. “This detective work is what I do in life. Remember? It’s the seedy, dark side of life, and there’s no good way to tell people that they’ve lost somebody they cared about. It’s always left up to us to try to handle the ugly details.”
She thought about that and nodded. “That sucks.”
“It does,” he said, “until I can also bring closure by finding out who did this.”
She watched silently as he chopped broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, and onions, then rummaged in her cupboards for a pan.
“Are you looking for a frying pan?”
His head popped up, and he glanced out of the pan cupboard. “A wok, actually.”
She pointed to a long cupboard off to the side.
With a smile he bounced in that direction, crouched before the cupboard, found a small wok, and brought it out with a smile. “Glad to see you have one. Do you cook?”
She shrugged. “I used to. I don’t really have time anymore.”
“Good food keeps up your energy,” he scolded lightly.
She shrugged listlessly. “I don’t think I care.”
“And that’s right now,” he said. “Any chance you have any protein in the fridge? I didn’t see any.”
“No, I don’t think so,” she said. “There are eggs, although I don’t know what you’d do with them.”
He looked over at her with a smile. “Well, watch and learn.” He pulled out several eggs, whisked them in a small bowl, put a little bit of oil on the bottom of the wok, and heated it up. He poured a bit of egg in it, swirled it into a pancake crepe-looking thing. As soon as it was done, he flipped it onto a plate and did several more. As he took them off, he rolled them up, cut them in half, and arranged them on the side of a plate.
She looked at him with interest. “Now what?”
“You have to have some protein,” he said, and he turned the heat on under the oil again and asked, “Do you have any nuts?”
“Cashews,” she said cautiously.
He followed her instructions to get the cashews, nodded when he saw they were raw, and said, “Perfect.” With the oil smoking in the bottom of the wok, he lifted it, swirled the oil around gently, and dumped in a mess of cashews. He roasted them very quickly, then put them off on a plate, and he added more oil to the wok and tossed in all the veggies. While they sautéed in the pan, following her further directions to where he’d find other ingredients, he added a little bit of starch, water, and spices. Stirring, he heated the mixture into something.
She watched with interest, her stomach grumbling with joy when she saw real food heading her way. “I’m sorry that I don’t have chicken or beef or something like that.”
He nodded. “The eggs will do for the moment.”
As soon as all the veggies were done to his liking, and the sauce had thickened a bit, he tossed the nuts back in and stirred quickly to coat them. Then he served up two platefuls, and he laid all the egg crepe things in a series of rolls on the side of each. He handed her a plate with a fork. “Now eat.” He brought his plate around next, sat down beside her, and forked up a bite.
She took one taste and stopped with her fork midway to her plate. “That tastes wonderful,” she said.
“It’s what real food tastes like,” he said with a smile.
She shrugged. “I’m just so busy.”
“That’s no excuse for not taking care of yourself.”
“Yes, Mother,” she said in a dry tone. She focused on the food, picked up one of the little egg roll things, and took a bite. “What makes it taste so different?”
“The sesame oil.”
She quickly ate up the food on her plate. Not until the last couple bites did she realize just how full she really was. She managed to get down those final bites, but, when she pushed away her plate, she said, “Now I’m stuffed.”
“So you should be. It’s a lot of vegetables and a little bit of protein,” he said. “You should sleep well on that.”
She picked up her glass of wine and wandered to the couch, where she’d been napping earlier, and sat back down, but this time she didn’t collapse quite so badly. She looked at him, looked at the wine, and said, “Pour yourself a glass, if you can.”
“I have a long night, so I’ll hold off,” he said. “Do you mind if I put on the teakettle?”
“You drink tea?”
He shot her a look. “I drink coffee, tea, herbal teas. I drink a lot of things,” he said, “and, yes, red wine is one of them, although I do like a whiskey at night.”
She laughed at that. “Sure, put on the teakettle. I’ll take a cup of tea up to the shower when I go.”
“Is that a hint that I’m not to stay?”
“It’s a hint that I can’t keep my eyes open much longer,” she stated. “And you had a reason for coming by. What is it?”
“Can’t I just come to check on you? Make sure you’re okay?”
“Well, you can,” she said. “But, chances are, that wasn’t the reason.”
“No, it wasn’t,” he said. “Just more questions.”
“Of course. Such as?”
“Fenster and Gruber.”
“Both men I fired,” she said. “I presume Anita told you?”
“Yes,” he said, “she did, and that’s the information we need to know.”
“Have you gotten anywhere following up on them?”
“No,” he said. “I was hoping you could give me some contact information.”
“I have no clue,” she said with a shrug. “They came from the same company that Frankie works for, so maybe ask him?”
“I can do that,” he said. “Was there any ugliness over the firing?”
“I wouldn’t say so. When people are caught dead to rights in doing the wrong thing, it’s hard to walk back from that.”
“Okay. Anybody else but more along a relationship angle?”
“Not really,” she answered. “There have been people over the years but nobody recent.”
“Did you ever see that strange man who said those weird things to you again?”
>
“No,” she said. “I haven’t.”
“Nothing else has happened these last few days?”
“Except for the fact that I really struggled to work today. Then I couldn’t focus, and Naomi was bitchier than usual, but maybe that was because I was more tired than usual.” She shook her head.
“I wanted to ask about the new models that you’re trying out. Have you contacted them?”
“I believe an email went out, yes,” she said. “Why?”
“And did it go out to just the four?”
She shrugged. “I have no idea. You’d have ask Anita. What has this got to do with anything?”
“I just don’t want them to become targets.”
She stared at him. As his thoughts slowly filtered in, her heart constricted. “Is that what you think will happen?” She put her wine down, hopped up to her feet, and paced. “Am I supposed to stop working?”
“No, because I don’t think that’s the answer.”
She spun on her heels and glared at him. “Answer to what? Some psycho is out there skinning torsos off people who he’s murdered. What’s to understand about any of this other than he’s just plain crazy?”
“No doubt he’ll probably claim insanity as a defense when he goes to court,” Richard said quietly. “However, he is doing this because of his own logical-to-him sequence of ideas and beliefs. And we need to figure that one out so that we can stop him from doing it again.”
She took a deep calming breath and said, “As far as I know, Anita contacted the four models, but I can’t be sure that she didn’t contact a few others. I gave her four names and two other possibilities, so she may have contacted them as well.”
“And have you heard from Fenster or Gruber at all in the last couple years since you fired them?”
She shook her head. “No, but you’ve got to understand there’s a line of defense to keep that world away from me so I can work. So again, you’d have to ask Anita.”
“Any association with Frankie?”
At the quick spin in conversation, she stared at him. “What about Frankie?”
“How long has he worked for you?”
She shrugged. “A couple years maybe. I don’t know. Ask Anita.”
He gave a warm chuckle. “When you go into your art, you really don’t see anything else, do you?”
“Possibilities,” she said. “Endless possibilities. But that’s all.”
There was silence for a moment as the two stared at each other, and abruptly he said, “I’ll go now. I want you to get that shower and go to bed.”
“Yes, after you leave.” She tried to keep her tone less sarcastic than normal, since really he had come in and taken care of her with actions that left her reeling from the compassion she’d seen in his gaze. And had felt in his arms. “But I’ll take a shower and go to bed because I want to, not because you told me to.”
He flashed her a grin. “Good. As long as you do it, I’m fine with that.” Just then his phone rang. He looked down, saw it was somebody that he needed to get answers from, but it wouldn’t be pleasant.
She could tell from the odd look in his expression.
He lifted the phone and said, “Richard here. What’s up?” He nodded, his gaze zinging toward her. “Yeah, I’ll tell her. I’ll be right there.”
“What’s the matter?” she asked, when he hung up.
“Naomi was attacked in an alleyway tonight.” He held up a hand as she gasped and jumped to her feet. “She’ll be fine.”
“Was it the same guy?” she cried out, her hand going to her mouth. How horrible. Naomi might not be her favorite person, but no one deserved what happened to Elena.
“I’m not sure yet,” he said. “I have to go interview her.”
“Where is she?” she asked, looking around. “I should go with you.”
“No,” he said. “This is for us to do. You need to go to bed and to get some sleep.”
“After this?”
“For all I know, it’s a plain old mugging,” he said. “She went to a bar. We don’t know that it has anything to do with you.”
She took a slow calming breath and started to relax. “That’s a good point. Naomi does hang out in a lot of bars. Not necessarily nice ones either.”
He nodded. “Exactly. Now go to bed.” He walked over to her, wrapped his arms around her, gave her a very gentle hug, and said, “And please look after yourself.”
Touched, she gazed up at him with misty eyes, saying, “I will. I promise.”
He chuckled. “You’ll promise, but you still won’t do enough of it. However, I’m hoping, after tonight, maybe you’ll do a little more.” He reached down and kissed her gently on the temple. “A lot of people are counting on you. Remember that.” And then he disappeared out her front door.
She stared at the closed door, wondering how her life had just suddenly gone off-kilter. Or maybe it had already gone off-kilter with Elena’s death. But something about his actions tonight, his words, that little kiss on her temple, had helped move things back in the right direction again. Either way, she felt measurably better.
And it was definitely time for her shower and then bed.
*
Richard strode away from Cayce’s door, wondering at his very uncharacteristic inclination to mother her. But something had just been so endearing and so broken about her when he’d seen her at her doorway that he couldn’t do anything else. But now, as he stared down at his phone again, double-checking the information he’d received, he hated that he was suspicious, but what the hell was going on with Naomi?
He finally made it across town to the hospital twenty minutes later. As he walked in, Andy met him at the entrance. His face was grim.
“What does she have to say?”
“Apparently she was at a party,” Andy said, “drinking and having a good time, when somebody told her about a job he wanted her to work on, and he coaxed her outside. She thought she was going out the front door but admitted that she’d had a lot to drink, and he took her out the back door. She didn’t see the blow coming, but she took one punch to the jaw and went down.”
“And then what?” Richard asked, as he strode inside the emergency hallway heading toward where he assumed Naomi was waiting for them.
Andy said, “Apparently another couple was having sex outside, and, when Naomi’s guy hit her, the other couple screamed, and Naomi’s guy took off.”
“I can see that working too,” he muttered.
“Right?”
“So, did she have a lucky save because she’s not the third victim in our possible trio here, or was it something completely random?”
“We don’t have any way to know at this point,” Andy said. “She’s not looking like her normal self.”
“Well, that leads credence to there being an attack.”
“I know. I had the same thought myself. But, just because she comes off brass and brutal, it doesn’t necessarily mean she could have set herself up for something like this.”
“No, of course not.”
As it was, she was getting up and walking toward them. Richard frowned. “Should you be leaving?”
“Like hell I’m staying,” she growled.
“Isn’t it early for you to be at a bar?”
She gave him a hot stare. “I like to live at the bars,” she said smoothly. “You got anything to say about that?”
“No,” he said. “What time did you leave the art world tonight?”
She shrugged. “It was mostly an afternoon get-together leading to an evening drink thing. I left at nine, and I was at the bar maybe forty-five minutes when this guy approached me.”
“Can you give us a description?”
“Well, if you two would talk to each other,” she said, “you would know that I already gave Andy a description.”
Richard looked at Andy.
Andy held up his notepad. “Six feet tall, red hair, heavy makeup.”
“In other words, you couldn’t ident
ify him.”
“I’ve never seen him before in my life,” she said. “I like men. I know men. And this was one I hadn’t seen before.”
“Do you think he was just a whack job? Do you think he had another reason for hitting you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He glared at her. “Tell me exactly what happened in the conversation between you two.”
She gave a negligent shrug. “He said he had a job for me. I assumed it was art because that’s my world. I followed him. I thought we were going to the front door, but instead we headed to the back door. And that’s when he clocked me.”
Something about her words didn’t ring true. He turned to look at Andy. “Did you get a description of the guys who stopped the attacker?”
“I have their contact information,” he said. “They were also pretty inebriated. They may have forgotten by the time we get to them,” he said.
“I was thinking of that too. Let’s head over and grab them first.”
“What about me?” Naomi said sarcastically. “Or does what happened to me just not matter?”
Richard turned and looked at her. “I presume you already told everything to Detective Ganderwahl—that’s Andy. You’ll need to come to the station to file a report.”
She faltered at that and frowned. “I don’t think I want to file a report,” she said. “It’ll impact my ability to get work.”
He stared at her in surprise. “And why is that?”
“Because people who cause waves,” she said, “are not people who others want to work with.”
He could understand that, but, at the same time, if she had been attacked, they needed to find the perpetrator. “We can’t catch him,” he said, “if we don’t have your cooperation.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said. “Right now, I just want a drink.”
“A drink?” They let her walk between them, and she headed toward the exit.
Richard frowned. “Shouldn’t you go home?”
“I am going home,” she said. “I have booze there too.”
“Can we give you a lift?” Andy asked, concerned.
She waved him back. “I’ll take a cab.” She was dressed somewhat. And looked a little bizarre, being half painted and half not. But she disappeared out the front door with the casual, confident stride of somebody who wasn’t fazed by her appearance.
