by Harper Lin
And what better way to think than to share Ethiopian cuisine with a handsome man?
Three
We set out in Octavian’s black Mercedes. He had been a stock broker before retirement, obviously a successful one.
Once we had pulled out of my street and were heading across town I felt much better. I didn’t want to involve Octavian in all this, whatever “this” was, but I couldn’t tell him of my secret life in order to warn him, either. Several political careers and the fate of more than one Third World nation hinges on the fact that virtually no one knows who I really am.
Yes, I know that sounds like a boast. It’s not.
The Adowa Restaurant was brightly painted in red, yellow, and green. The walls sported posters of smiling natives, a spectacular waterfall, and some odd churches that were set in large pits on a rocky plain. Upon a second look I realized that instead of being built up, they had been excavated out out of the bedrock, a sort of construction in reverse.
A gorgeous young African woman with long cornrows brought us into the dining room. There was a tense moment when she directed us towards a low table covered with an ornate brass tray. There were no chairs, only cushions on the floor. They looked quite comfortable and traditional, and impossible to rise from.
Perhaps Ethiopian senior citizens have better knees than the average American.
The gal eyeballed us and moved us over to a less authentic table that actually had chairs.
Perhaps I’ve gotten ethnocentric in my golden years, but chairs are a darned good invention.
We settled in. The place was about a third full, mostly with couples who looked like they were on dates. I spotted only one family. The two parents were eagerly trying to get a pair of teenaged twin girls interested in their food. The girls looked identical, and had identically bored expressions on their faces. It was obvious they had no interest in enjoying a cultural experience.
My son Frederick had been like that. He didn’t even like Cinco de Mayo, saying Mariachi music made his ears hurt. Taco Bell was about as ethnic as he would go. I always knew he was destined for the suburbs.
“So how was your week?” I asked to drown out a pair of identical teen voices whining in identical fashion.
Octavian let out a sigh.
“A bit dull, to be honest. I miss the club.”
“I miss it too,” I lied. The club he referred to was an illegal gambling den run by some mobsters. This little romance with Octavian was actually a result of my infiltrating the club in order to investigate the murder of one of its members. I was greatly relieved to discover Octavian wasn’t the culprit. I found the real murderer and shut down the illegal operation at the same time, much to the detriment of my new boyfriend’s social life.
The mention of the club gave me a cold, unsettled feeling in the pit of my stomach. When I busted the place, with the reluctant assistance of Cheerville’s police chief, I got spotted by the mobsters’ special security man, someone went by the charming street name of “the Exterminator”. You could hear the capital letter in the way the mobsters said it. I didn’t know what his real name was, where he was from, or any other information. Just a fleeting glimpse from a passing car, and a rugged, soulless face sizing me up.
Could it have been the Exterminator who had broken into my house?
That seemed unlikely. The mobsters had already lost. Some had been killed and the rest had cut and run. Those who had run had gotten away. The trail had gone cold and the police had all but given up on pursuing the case.
So why would the crooks add to their troubles by committing murder? Despite all their faults, people in organized crime were rarely vindictive with police or normal citizens. It didn’t pay. There was no reason to rub me out, so why would they?
But I couldn’t discount the possibility that it had been the Exterminator. The timing was so close. Besides, in the five years of my retirement my cover had never been blown, and no one from my past had come back to haunt me.
“You look happy,” Octavian said.
I realized I was smiling. Yes, a case always makes me happy. Some people can’t retire. I’m one of them. One might think I’d be happy to leave that life behind and enjoy a well-earned rest. Not everyone can handle being attacked one minute and going on a date the next. I thrive in that sort of atmosphere.
“It’s just so nice to be out and active,” I replied as honestly as I could.
Octavian looked around. “Nice decor, isn’t it? And the food is delicious. My son took me to an Ethiopian place in Boston. I must admit that I was dubious at first, but it’s excellent food. Spicy, but flavorful spicy, not ‘blow the top of your head off’ spicy.”
The waitress brought some water and the menu. I looked through it and saw pictures of various gloppy concoctions of different colors. Unusual names such as doro wat and lega tibs were written beside them.
“Perhaps you should order since you’ve been here before,” I said, handing the menu to him.
Octavian sat up a little straighter. Nothing like being put in charge to bolster a man’s ego.
“Do you have any dietary restrictions?” he asked.
“I’m a gluten-sensitive ovo-lacto pescatarian.”
Octavian’s face fell. “What on Earth does that mean?”
“I’m not sure, but it’s the trendy thing nowadays, isn’t it?”
“I spend time with people my own age so I don’t have to follow the trendy thing.”
“I got that from television. If you want to know about video games, my grandson has taught me all sorts of interesting and useless trivia.”
“I hardly watch TV any more and when I see my grandkids I take them to the park with a strict no video games rule.”
“Good man. To answer your question, I don’t have any allergies and I’ll eat anything that won’t try to eat me back.”
Octavian studied the menu again. “We’ll get a sampler so you can try out a bunch of things. We’ll get the doro wat, the shiro de kibbe, and some vegetables. Plus my favorite, lega tibs. That’s beef. No meal is complete without beef.”
I jumped a little at that last statement. James used to say the exact same thing. A little bundle of guilt and excitement wrestled inside me. Octavian ordered and we chatted pleasantly while I tried to keep things cool. I wondered if he felt the same mixture of feelings that I did. Probably. Any time he spoke of his late wife it was with a note of adoration. They had enjoyed a good life together. His happy go lucky style these days hid what must have been a fair amount of pain. No one our age didn’t feel it. We had all lost people near and dear to us by this point in our lives.
The meal was as good as Octavian promised. It came on a platter of spongy bread called injera, which tasted a bit like sourdough. You ate with your hands, ripping off a piece of bread and using it to grab portions of the gloppy piles arranged around the platter.
Octavian had been right; Ethiopian food offered a nice balance of spices without ever getting too hot. The lega tibs were a bit on the edge, but I left those mostly to the carnivore at the table. I liked the doro wat, a bright red chicken stew, and the shiro de kibbe, while a bit rich for my taste, was an equally delicious mixture of butter and chickpeas.
The best part came after. Instead of just giving you a coffee to perk you up after your meal, the Ethiopians put on a whole coffee ceremony. That young Ethiopian gal came back with a brazier that she set on the floor next to our table. She sat on a cushion next to it and roasted the beans right in front of us, wafting the rich aroma into our faces with a reed fan. Then she ground the beans and brewed the coffee. It was rich, sweet, and strong, and came with popcorn of all things. All in all, an excellent meal.
The company was good too. Octavian was quite the charmer, and could talk on any variety of subjects while still remembering to allow a lady to speak. He asked me all sorts of questions about my past and I fell into the usual cover story of being a government bureaucrat involved with international development. That explained my extensi
ve travels without getting too close to the truth. I had told people this story so many times that I almost believed it myself. I even had a stock of completely bogus anecdotes, funny stories that never happened about people who didn’t exist.
I could go on all night about my fake life. It used to be as automatic as breathing, but now I felt a slight unease that increased throughout the meal. It took me a while to realize what exactly I felt.
It felt like I was lying, not the lying that was necessary for survival in my old career, but the base deception of someone I cared about. I had felt the same way when spinning tales of my fake life to my son, his wife, and their child. While it was even more necessary to keep them in the dark about my double life in order to protect them, it had never sat well with me. They were too close to my heart for all those necessary lies not to feel like deceit, and I didn’t want barriers between myself and those important to me.
So why was I feeling that way when giving alibis to Octavian?
Oh dear, could I really be falling for someone that hard, at my age?
Four
Arnold Grimal, Police Chief of the City of Cheerville, did not look happy to see me. The last two times I had visited him, I had upset his easy routine of issuing parking tickets and directing traffic by dumping him with nasty cases of cold-blooded murder. When I assured him there hadn’t been a murder this time, he looked relieved. When I told him I had been the target of one, he looked almost smug.
Police Chief Grimal was in his middle fifties, a good 15 years younger than me, but he did not look much healthier. His paunch draped over his waistline so much that it hid his belt. That paunch was currently being expanded with a takeaway box of sweet and sour chicken that he was actually using chopsticks to eat. I would have not been surprised if he had used his hands.
Further evidence of bad habits was written all over his face in the form of red splotches on his nose and cheeks. The sure sign of a heavy drinker, although not, as far as I had seen, on duty. Grimal may have been an underachiever, but he was not a total screw up.
Grimal’s hair had gone thin on top yet retained its sandy color. Like many men going bald, he had tried to divert the eye with facial hair—in his case a thick moustache that might have been fashionable back when bellbottoms and mood rings had been popular. It only seemed to highlight his baldness. Not as bad a choice as a comb over, but a close second.
“Are you sure he was trying to kill you? He could have been a burglar,” the police chief said. Even as he said it he sounded like he didn’t believe it himself. Burglaries were rare in Cheerville, and I had been at the center of too much trouble for Grimal not to believe in an assassination attempt.
“He moved like a professional, and he came straight for the room I was in with a knife. He wanted to be silent, but painful. The knife had a serrated edge.”
Grimal wrinkled his red nose in disgust. He did not care for the darker side of police work, like the real crimes where people got hurt or even killed. It upset his stomach, although this time it didn’t stop him from shoveling some more sweet and sour chicken down his gullet. I guess my near-death experience offered no threat to his digestion. On the desk in front of him lay a fortune cookie. I wondered what it said.
“Any idea who could have done this?” he asked as a drop of red sauce fell from his lower lip and landed on his tie. It joined stains from some yellow and brown food that had probably constituted breakfast. Soon he’d have a broad enough palette to rival Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
“Plenty of ideas. You’re not going to like my top candidate.”
Grimal grunted, a simian sound that expressed that he agreed that he wouldn’t like what I said next, but would believe what I said, and that would make it worse and the whole thing was going to be far more trouble than he wanted to deal with, and the worst of it all was that he had no choice about helping me and really would just prefer it if I moved to some more active precinct where they could handle my double life so he could live in peace.
Quite an eloquent grunt, really.
Nothing came after the grunt. Grimal was the kind of cop who didn’t ask questions he didn’t want the answers to.
“I think your old friends from the casino are back,” I said.
Grimal plopped the chopsticks back in the cardboard box and glared at me. The effect was somewhat ruined by the spray of sweet and sour sauce that hit his shirt, looking oddly like a miniature shotgun blast.
“They weren’t my friends,” Grimal said.
I treated him to a level gaze. Since my shirt wasn’t covered in Chinese food, I had a distinct advantage in the I Want To Be Taken Seriously department.
“You looked the other way because of your brother-in-law,” I told him.
Said brother-in-law was Travis Clarke, the county coroner, who had been deep into debt with the mobsters and had gotten his debt forgiven by writing off a murder victim’s death as suicide. With a single phone call I could take away Grimal’s and Clarke’s jobs, and their liberty.
And Grimal knew it.
The police chief shifted in his seat, deep in thought. That wasn’t something he was accustomed to. At last he said,
“How do you know it was him?”
“I don’t, just a hunch.”
Grimal gave me another of his eloquent grunts. This grunt told me he didn’t much care for my hunches unless I could back them up with some solid evidence. He didn’t want to deal with the mobsters again. Grimal had gotten off relatively lightly and was afraid that following up any leads on the Exterminator would be like kicking a hornet’s nest.
The man expressed more with his grunts than his words.
“How’s the shoulder?” I asked.
Grimal had gotten shot in our previous run-in with the casino mobsters. I was hoping that mentioning that fact might revive any flickers of alpha male pride that he must have had when he had joined the police force all those years ago.
A false hope, it turned out.
He rubbed his shoulder and glanced up at the award he had received from the governor for heroism in the line of duty. Next to it was a collage of newspaper headlines praising his “fine police work” and “bravery under fire”. I didn’t mind his taking all the credit—he did come in and help at a critical moment, after all—but I felt I deserved some loyalty in exchange for my generosity.
“Still hurts,” he muttered.
“Don’t you want to get back at them?”
“We killed a bunch. We’re even.”
The “we” was not quite accurate, but I let it slide. I tried a different tactic.
“Need I remind you that—”
Grimal glared at me again.
“That you have the head of the CIA on speed dial and you can have my job any time you want? Yeah, I know all that,” he snapped.
Finally, a bit of feistiness! Maybe there was some hope for him after all.
I reached into my purse and pulled out a ziplock bag containing the bloody toilet paper.
“When I clonked him on the head he bled on my floor. See what the lab can do with this,” I told him.
He took it gingerly. “The DNA database is huge. It takes ages to get through, and if the perp hasn’t been arrested in the last few years, he won’t even be on it.”
“I know, but it can’t hurt to check it out. Run a test and see if it comes up with anything.”
Grimal nodded reluctantly and put the ziplock bag in his desk drawer. I wondered if I would ever see it again. Not that it mattered much. I had only given him half of the bloody toilet paper. The rest was safe in another ziplock bag in my refrigerator. I wasn’t about to trust someone like Grimal with the only evidence I had.
“But why would he come after you?” Grimal asked. “He got away, and the casino is gone. There’s no money in hurting you.”
I shrugged. He had a point. It didn’t make sense that the Exterminator would come calling. The damage to the organization had already been done.
Unless they feared there
would be more damage.
Perhaps this was bigger than we thought. Instead of simply a small, pop-up organization of a few men moving from city to city, maybe the Cheerville casino had only been one branch of a much larger organization. If that were the case, then the Exterminator, being the organization’s chief of security, would want to get rid of me as a threat.
I told Grimal my idea. He thought for a moment, doubt clouding his face, and then his eyes went wide.
“They might come after me!” he said. His voice went up an octave and his words came out as a warble, never a good thing to hear coming out of a man’s throat.
“They might,” I replied, relishing his look of panic. Actually I doubted they would go after him. I was the much easier target. An unknown grandmother gets killed during a break in? All too common, sadly. A recently decorated police chief gets killed during a break in? That would set off a nationwide manhunt.
No, they wanted to kill me to send a message to him.
“They might go after my family, too,” he said in a tremulous whisper.
“They might,” I said, and the fear that I wanted to instill in him shot through me. What if they decided to go after Frederick and Alicia? Or even my grandson Martin?
Good thing they were in the Bahamas, but they were coming back at the end of the week.
I had to get this thing solved before then.
“We need to get on this fast,” Grimal said, echoing my words. He took the ziplock bag back out of his drawer. Suddenly it had become a priority.
“Check on that, and see if there are any leads on other illegal gambling operations in this state and surrounding states,” I told him.
He frowned at me. “Don’t tell me how to do my job.”
