“Hello,” I said softly.
“Babe!” He spun around on his bar stool. Every time he smiled at me his smile seemed to grow. I couldn’t take my eyes off his mouth. I would sit in my office and try to conjure his face in some silly daydream, and I could never recall it. I wanted to memorize at least one part of his face so I could remember it when the urge arose.
He grabbed his jacket from the stool. “Quite a fancy place,” he said. “Should we get a table?” He walked behind me and slid the camel-hair coat off my shoulders.
Kristen, the owner’s wife, seated us at a table in the adjoining, more private, room, and Mike placed both his hands on the table between us as if ready to use them in a flash. The pinky ring I had noticed the day he came bounding through the conference room doors was catching the chandelier sparkle in its square green stone.
I lowered my head and stared at his large, powerful-looking hands.
“Is that a class ring?”
“My partner’s from when I was a street cop.” His index finger tickled my hand as if asking for permission to come closer.
“Let me guess. You were going steady and your partner broke it off, so you kept the ring.”
“I thought you worked with cops at the AG’s.”
“So?”
“And you don’t know about cops who wear their partners’ rings? Shame on you. ’Cause you’re gonna feel like an earth slug when I tell you.”
The waiter came to take our order and turned to me. “Hey there, Mari,” he said. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”
I explained to Mike, “I’ve been here on a few dates.” Then to the waiter I said, “I’ll have what he’s having,” and I nodded toward the wineglass in Mike’s hand.
“So you want to know why I’m wearing my partner’s ring, or not?” Mike said.
“I can guess now. He got shot in the line of duty and you were with him. Right? And you feel guilty because you should have been able to protect him.”
Mike tried to smile, but it was more of a grimace. Absent the sparkle, his smile was introspective. “Oh, he’s dead all right, but not while ‘in the line.’ He was my best friend and my partner. And I was a young asshole. His wife shot him right in front of me.”
I sat there like an idiot with my mouth open. “Dead?”
“I thought I could talk the gun out of her hand. Thank Christ they had no kids.”
“Why did she shoot him?”
He shrugged. “Because it was more emotionally satisfying than divorce. I went to their house in the middle of a brutal fight. She came at us with his gun. I should have pushed him out of the way, confused her or something. But no, I think I’m gonna charm her with my sweet talk. She started shooting at him and then aimed at me.”
Two fresh glasses and Mike’s bottle of wine appeared on our table. I was surprised he’d ordered a special vintage. Had he done it just for me? Mike wasted no time clicking his glass to mine and taking a good hefty swig like it was a bottle of cold beer.
“And you got away, so you feel guilty?”
He looked past me, focusing on the memory. “I ran to wrestle the gun out of her hand as she was shooting at him like he was the target at a firing range. Fucking bitch!”
Swearing seemed to wake him from his trance. “Sorry . . . I always get angry when I think of it. Anyway, I guess I should have stayed with him and kept talking to her, instead of running toward her to get the gun away, but I wasn’t thinking clear. I did what I thought was right at the time. But I don’t do guilt. It’s a wimps-ass waste of time that doesn’t change a thing.”
I glanced outside to the park across the street and suddenly my mind transported me back to my old desk at the AG’s office, typing with one hand and smoking a cigarette with the other, while “Beetle” Mulroy explained to me how he and his accomplice jacked up cars at two in the morning and shoved blocks under them to remove wheels and tire rims while the owners slept upstairs with open windows. This cops-and-robbers shoptalk with Mike was making me miss the girls. I craved one of Shannon’s Camel cigarettes. Or maybe it was the female company I was craving, and the dank stench of the Fez, or one of our other, even raunchier hangouts.
In one clean, self-destructive sweep, I pushed my untouched wine away. “I need a Grey Goose martini, dry.”
“You sure?”
I nodded.
Mike motioned for the waiter and emptied my wine into his glass. I ordered the drink and sucked it down like lemonade at a church picnic. “Another one.”
Mike raised his eyebrows.
“Don’t start counting my drinks, damn it.”
“Hey, no, not me!” He put his hands up in surrender. “I’m usually the one trying to get the girls drunk. It’s just that . . . I don’t want you blaming me—”
“How freaking lame. Would I do such a dippy thing? I’m starting to relax for the first time in weeks.”
“You’re lucky you’re with me and not with some big ugly brute who’ll take advantage of you.” He huffed the atrically, then paused. “My place or yours?”
About an hour later, three green swizzle sticks, covered in my fingerprints, still pierced my uneaten olives. They lay on the table in front of me like prosecution exhibits A through C, proving beyond a reasonable doubt that I had downed three vodka martinis at a rate of approximately one every twenty minutes. Corroborating evidence were the three red pimentos that flanked my bread dish like dead goldfish. My cold halibut and white beet salad were pushed to the side of the table next to Mike’s neatly half-eaten skirt steak. He was hunched over the table, holding one of my hands with both of his. When had his hands made that final journey to mine? Our foreheads were almost touching. He was mumbling all sorts of silly nonsense to me and I was slobbering over his mushy words like a giddy teenager.
“You’re different,” he was saying. “Special . . . like I told you that first day. You’ve got something about you—”
“If you say ‘class’ I’m walking out the door.”
“Engaging. That’s what I’d call it. Like the minute you walk in a room you engage people. They just automatically want to know who you are and what you’re all about. And it’s not just me. I see it happen with other people too.” Mike’s deep blue eyes were starting to sparkle again. “And you always leave me wanting more.”
I took a sip of Mike’s wine. “I have to go to the bath-room,” I said.
“You want some coffee?” he asked as I slid off my chair.
I shook my head. “I’ll be back in a minute.” I felt him watching me walk away.
The bathrooms were in the back of the restaurant down a carpeted corridor. After I flushed the toilet, I heard the outer door open, then bang closed. I came out of the stall and saw Mike standing with his back to the door, blocking the entrance. His eyebrows were furrowed as if he were getting ready to break bad news.
“Come here,” he whispered.
I stood by the stall, not moving, assessing his expression. No smile, no softness—almost a grimace of pain. Like he was going to tell me about another dead student.
“Come here,” he repeated.
I shook my head.
“Enough fooling around, babe.”
I shook my head again, slower this time, and he came bounding toward me, grabbed me and twirled me around, backing me up against the door to keep it closed.
“McCoy, what—”
Before I could finish, he covered my mouth with his large palm. The green ring sparkled beneath my eyes. With his hand still covering my mouth, he brought his sweaty face to mine and rubbed it along my forehead. One by one he lifted his fingers away from my lips, and as each finger rose, he kissed underneath, then took my top lip in his mouth where he sucked it gently and rolled his tongue under it. “Baby . . . baby,” he whispered as he mouthed my lips.
I tried to squeeze out of his grip, duck under his arms. I tugged hard on his hair, pulling his head back, away from me.
“Ow! Goddamn it!” He grabbed my hands by the wri
sts and twisted them until I let go of his hair. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“You scared me. I thought you came in to tell me about another murder or something.”
He backed away. His lips spread slowly into a smile. “Geez, and all I wanted was a kiss.” He lowered his head and waited for my response. “Not even a little one?”
He inched closer. Then closer. He kept his eyes on mine as he lowered his lips to my neck.
I let his mouth burrow into my collar as I laced my fingers back into his hair. But this time I pulled him closer, kneading my fingers through the thick shiny tangle of his head while his fingers snuck under my bra to my nipples.
He pressed his palms down the length of my body to my thighs, and then reached around to my ass and pulled me toward him. From his chest to his groin to his knees, he was hard against me. Harder he pushed into me, pressed me into the door as if he were trying to squeeze me through to the other side.
“I crave you,” he whispered. “You want me to stop? I’ll stop if you want,” he breathed.
I reached into his jacket and under his shirt to wrap my arms around his thick firm waist and back. I felt his shoulder muscles tense as he pushed against me and I pulled myself into him. He forced his hand between us and unzipped my trousers, and then his own, and we instinctively worked against all reason and gravity to weld ourselves inseparably together.
“Hello? Anybody in there?” a woman called from out-side the door.
“Out of order,” I moaned. “Use the men’s room.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Edith Made Me Do It
CALL IT A MISTAKE, but I let Mike come home with me to my brownstone floor-through on Benefit Street. He was duly impressed with the twelve-foot ceilings and marble floors of the old building—at least for the five seconds he saw them before spending the rest of the evening under the covers with me. . . .
Okay, so I knew I shouldn’t be bedding coworkers—blame it on Edith Piaf and a gaggle of Grey Goose.
Of course that was a pretty damn lame excuse for an ex-prosecutor. Any brain-dead defense lawyer would have pummeled me in court if I’d tried to use it there, but I had this tendency toward overemotional screwups and, well, there you have it.
IT WAS SNOWING the next morning when we awoke. Mike tried to convince me I needed more bed rest, but I sent him home to shower and pulled myself out of my warm, albeit sticky, bed.
I walked through falling snow from my car to Langley. In New England the worst snows come in February and March, when twelve-hour blizzards are commonplace, followed the next day by a tenacious spring. But for me the sun was shining bright that morning.
“She cannot find a nice American boy?” Rita said in lieu of “Good morning.”
My attention was riveted to the envelope Rita had dropped on my desk. Unfortunately, she wanted a few minutes of my time for some good old-fashioned schmoozing.
“My daughter goes to Belize on vacation and comes home engaged to a native. From the pictures she has shown me, this is a beautiful man, but how will she live in Belize?”
“What is this?” I held up the envelope.
“From Mike.” Rita was straightening her hair in my mirror again. “And I will not be able to attend the wedding of my own daughter because I have to work. My vacation time is gone. I hope he has the money to support her, because I will not do it. I am finished paying. I have been working here twenty-eight years!”
“It’ll probably blow over, Rita. These island romances usually do. When did Mike leave this?” I said, still fingering the sun-kissed envelope.
What I wanted was a quick answer and her quicker exit from my office so I could read the little love lyric in my hand. There were times I liked nothing better than sitting around with Rita, sharing one of her exotic teas and hearing her Holton stories, gossiping, trading secrets. But I was premenstrual; my hormones were raging, and all I could think of was the wet tongue that had licked the gummed flap closed.
“I did not see Mike come in,” she said. “Perhaps he dropped it off before I got here. Do you think you can help me get extra vacation if I must go?”
I gave up on the envelope and looked at her seriously. This was the first time Rita had asked me for help on anything. I was flattered. We had finally begun to reverse roles into the proper order.
“Rita, I’ll do everything I can, including covering for you if you want to sneak off for a long weekend. Just say the word. I’ll even talk to Carlyle if that’s the problem.”
She smiled. “I will let you know if this saga continues.”
Rita graciously walked out. And as soon as she left, I ripped open the thing in my sweaty hands. It read, and I quote:
Hey babe, we’re not done. Important matters to discuss—like when can we run away together? “O, Wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?” Mike
First French, now Shakespeare. Hopefully Mike was in fact Romeo and not a Lothario. But in either case, I was so hot for him I didn’t even care if he pulled an Othello on me.
My phone rang and I stuffed the note into my pocket. Let Rita pick up, I thought. Take a message.
The empty white envelope was sitting ripped open on my desk. I tore it in two, and then fourths and eighths, and threw it in my trash, and then picked it back out again because ripping an envelope into pieces, in and of itself, might look suspicious.
Suspicious of what?
I made a mental note to requisition a shredder.
“Knock, knock,” Rita pushed my door open. “It is me again.”
I stuffed the pieces of envelope into my other pocket.
“Yes, Rita, come in.”
“Miss Barton called and wishes for you to call her back. She says she cannot reach Dr. Becker. And two messages from your friend Beth. She would like you to call her.”
I located Emily Barton’s data sheet on my desktop and scrolled to her campus telephone number. I hadn’t heard from her since our last meeting, and I realized I’d been remiss in not contacting her after Elliot had told me of her “decision” to take the semester off.
I dialed her dorm room and several rings later a soft broken voice said the last syllable of hello as if she had begun talking before she picked up.
“Emily? It’s Marianna Melone.”
“I’m on the phone.”
“Can I hold?”
“No.”
“Call me back.”
Silence.
I gave her both the extension to my direct number and my cell number. “Please call me back, Emily. I just want to talk to you, I promise.”
“Thank you, Miss Melone. Bye.”
I had about as much chance of hearing from her as . . .
The phone rang on my private line. I grabbed it after a half ring. “Hello.”
“Mari? It’s me—”
“Laurie, can’t talk now.”
“That GHB? Same chemical composition in both girls.”
My other line was blinking. “Exact?”
“From the same batch.”
“Okay, so that means we know the same guy killed both girls. So what?”
“Didn’t you tell us the guys use it on campus over there?”
“Yeah.”
“Then get a sample of what they’re using and we’ll match it up.”
“Yeah, Laurie, sure. No sweat. How the frig am I going to do that?”
“Well . . . I don’t know, Mari. But you’re more creative with those things than I am. And from what you say, it shouldn’t be too hard for you to get raped over there. Just pretend you don’t want to get laid by one of those preteens and see if he tries to spike your Red Bull.”
“Bye, call you later.” I pushed the private line button. “Hello?”
“Miss Melone?” Emily was crying now, choking sobs.
“Emily? What’s the matter?”
She may have been trying to talk but I heard nothing but sobbing.
“Lippitt House? I’ll be there in a minute.”
I ran
the six blocks to Lippitt and up the front steps. I buzzed Emily’s intercom, ready to call one of the security guards to open the doors if Emily was feeling antisocial—or was already neck-deep in a gas oven.
Someone buzzed me up. I ran up the four flights to Emily’s room and banged on the closed door. It was unlocked and I bolted in to find her on her couch crying in her hands.
I sat next to her. “Emily?”
She didn’t answer me but didn’t have to—the Veritas newspaper article with her name splashed across the front page was sitting on the coffee table.
She finally cracked out some words. “I can’t face anyone after this.”
“Tell me about Sherman’s parties.”
“Rod and Cory live together in a large apartment off campus.” She looked at me.
“I know the ones. Overlooking the water.”
She nodded. “These parties are not just students. Sometimes they have Cory’s Hollywood friends there. Famous, rich, powerful. And he was so nice at first. Sweet, and—oh, but you already know all this.”
I assumed she meant Cory, though “sweet” was certainly not a description I would use. “And you slept with him voluntarily at first?”
She nodded. “Only a few times and then I wanted to stop. He scared me—got real ugly.”
“Explain.”
She buried her face in her hands again. “He got rough. Like crazy rough.”
“Like in hitting you?”
She shook her head violently. “I can’t talk about it. It’s too embarrassing.”
Since she had no visible bruises, I could only guess what she meant by “rough.”
“I tried to avoid him—both of them. I missed classes to avoid him. He was calling me all the time. Sometimes sweet, but after a while mean and nasty, making fun of me because I was avoiding him. At first he seemed weak, very needy, as if he needed a mother rather than a girlfriend. But then he wanted me to pretend to hurt him, hit him. And he would want the same from me. It got really sick.”
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