by Dale Mayer
“How was she killed?”
“Beaten and shot,” Raina said quietly. “I didn’t get any details about how long before the bullet the bruises were there.”
Jenny’s lower lip trembled. “I don’t even know anyone with guns.”
“Unfortunately a lot of people do.” Reyes’s voice was a little harsher. “How many other people knew her?”
Jenny looked surprised briefly. “You mean, how many people in my world knew about her?”
He nodded.
“Not many. My brother, an ex as I said before, and I have a couple girlfriends I used to go to and cry on their shoulders when Reana and I had difficulties. They’re another gay couple, Susan and Brenda. They knew about her.”
“Is there any chance they would have had anything to do with her death?” Raina asked, leaning forward.
Jenny shook her head vehemently. “Oh, no. They’re not that type of people at all. They’re very gentle, and they didn’t know her personally. They just knew of her. And, yes, they were definitely angry at her at times. Angry at the way she treated me,” Jenny said defiantly. “And they kept telling me how I shouldn’t go back to her. Once they understood I really loved her and would do anything to make it work, then they were there for me.”
“Who helped you move out?” Reyes asked.
“My brother. He also helped me buy my new home. It’s another townhome but closer to work, closer to him.”
“Do you know anything about Reana’s financial situation?” Raina asked. “About her will?”
Jenny stared at her in surprise. “No, I don’t. I presume everything would go to you and your mother.”
“I don’t know,” Raina said. “It’s possible. But it could also be that you’re listed too.”
“Great,” Jenny said. “That’ll have the police crawling all over me.”
“You’ll have to talk to the police anyway,” Reyes said. “I told them about finding the two of you in bed, that that was the reason for my breaking it off with Reana two years ago. They were determined to pin her murder on me and didn’t believe she had a girlfriend.”
Jenny nodded. “Of course I’ll talk to them,” she said wearily. “Hopefully they’ll find out who did this and fast.” She started to stand.
“Will you please talk to them soon?” Raina asked impulsively. “We could go to the station with you.”
Jenny stopped in the act of straightening up. She stared at them both. “This is really important, isn’t it?”
“Very,” Reyes said in a rough tone. “The police are seriously looking at me. And, while they’re looking at me, they’re not looking for who really killed her.”
Jenny thought for a moment, then nodded. She glanced around the coffee shop. “Can we do it now then, before I lose my nerve?”
Raina jumped to her feet. “Absolutely. Why don’t we all go in our vehicle, and then we’ll drive you back to yours.”
She hesitated and then shook her head. “I’ll feel better if I have my own wheels.”
“I understand that,” Raina said. “I’ll come with you, and we’ll meet Reyes there.” She glanced at Reyes. “Are you okay with that?”
Reyes hesitated. He wasn’t exactly sure why, but something about the situation didn’t feel right. Yet he could find no obvious problem. What they really had to do was get Jenny to the police station. But what if Jenny had killed Reana, and now he was leaving Raina alone with Jenny?
“That’s fine,” he said slowly. “I’ll follow the two of you.”
They rose and exited the coffee shop. He got into his Jeep, waiting for the two women to get into the small Audi Jenny drove. He noted the vehicle and realized she didn’t appear to be suffering for money if she drove a car like that.
The trip was slow. Lots of traffic, as it was now just after eight in the evening, and rush hour was still heavy. With his cell phone mounted on the dash, he called Ice and brought her up to date.
“Well, that’s great that you found Jenny,” Ice said. “The guys have already started tracking the cameras around the brownstone from six o’clock forward to see what Reana’s movements were last night. So far nothing concrete is showing up. Her phone didn’t end up there on its own.” Ice spoke to someone in the room with her. “We’re on this. You get to the police station and have Jenny confirm your story. That’ll go a long way to having the police back off of seeing you as their main suspect.”
“That’s what I’m hoping,” he said. “But there’s still likely to be a lot of resistance to letting me go as I seem to be their only suspect.”
“They don’t have any reason to hold you,” she said.
“Did you get to the store? To sort through the plants?”
“Your mother apologized to me. Seemed sincere. She’s supposed to tell you that she’s sorry too.” Ice chuckled. “I’ve been talking with my dad here, and we have a big list of plants we think will do well. I’ll talk to your father tomorrow and see what he might have available.”
“That would be good,” Reyes said. “I keep hoping this headache will have a quick resolution, but I’m not so sure it will be.”
“It doesn’t matter how long it takes,” she said firmly. “Life happens when we least expect it.” On that note she ended the call.
Still smiling, he followed the women to the police station. They both parked in the back lot. He got out and waited for them to join him. Jenny looked even more unhappy at the idea of approaching the police station. He stepped up, slipped an arm through both women’s arms and said, “I really appreciate you doing this, Jenny.”
She sighed. “You don’t need to worry that I’ll run away. I have to do this for Reana’s sake, if nothing else.”
“I’m sorry she was never open about your presence in her life,” Raina said. “It would have been nice to have known you years ago.”
Jenny nodded. “That’s what I told her. All those years we wasted were years we could have bonded as a family.”
“How did your brother feel about your relationship?”
“He didn’t particularly like it much,” Jenny said. “Not because it was a lesbian relationship—because that’s what I’ve always had, and he has accepted that—but I think it was more because of Reana herself.”
“They didn’t get along?” Raina asked in surprise. “Everybody gets along with Reana.”
“The problem was, she flirted with him,” Jenny said. “I knew it was just her way, but my brother didn’t take it so well. He saw it more as a betrayal of her relationship with me. He also didn’t understand how Reana could want to be with both men and women at the same time.”
“That’s because life is never as clear-cut as we’d like to think it is,” Reyes said.
Inside the station, he walked up to the reception desk and asked to speak to Detective Burgess.
The harried receptionist looked at Reyes and sent a message announcing him. He walked back to the bench seating and sat down. It took a good ten to fifteen minutes, to the point he wondered if he would have to return to the front desk and ask again, before Detective Burgess walked out.
He raised an eyebrow. “What can I do for you?”
Reyes could feel Jenny stiffen beside him. Reyes stood and said, “I’d like you to meet Jenny Bengals. This is Reana’s lover. And she has been since I found them in bed over two years ago.”
The detective’s gaze turned on Jenny. He studied her for a long moment. “Is that true?”
Jenny nodded. “Yes, it is. I’ve been moving out of her place this last week. It’s been a week since I spoke to Reana.”
He led them into a small room, where he asked the three of them a bunch more questions. It wasn’t anything new as far as Reyes was concerned. But he wasn’t sure from the look on Raina’s face.
He turned and whispered, “Are you okay?”
The detective focused on her. “Is something else bothering you?”
Raina hesitated and then nodded. “Actually there is.”
Chapt
er 10
Raina wasn’t exactly sure how to explain it. She looked at Jenny. “Do you have any idea if Reana said something to my mother?”
Jenny frowned. “I don’t think she did. Your mother was one of the concerns that held Reana back from going public. You and your mother.”
“Me?” Raina asked in surprise. “I would have been totally okay with it.”
Jenny studied her for a long moment and then gave a clipped nod. “I believe you, but Reana didn’t. She said she had an image to uphold, and she wouldn’t have taken your laughter and mockery well.”
Raina stared at her. “I would never have mocked her for making a life choice like that. All I ever wanted was for her to be happy. And I wasn’t exactly sure that she would ever be happy, being the person she was. She was always very critical and judgmental.”
“And again I think that was just with you,” Jenny said. “With me, she was a very different person. If you can imagine, we used to play an awful lot of computer games together. Also we liked watching movies and eating popcorn. We spent hours and hours together just talking, doing our nails, spending time together. It wasn’t a competition between us. I think she always felt that she had to compete with you.”
Raina sagged in her chair. “Are you serious? There was no competition. She was always the best, the oldest, the prettiest, the smartest …”
Jenny laughed out loud. “And she would have said that she wasn’t in any way those things, that something was wrong with her because she was gay, that she wasn’t very smart, and that’s why she was so loud. She was always trying to cover up, trying to distract people from seeing her insecurities. Whereas you were always quiet and confident. You stayed in the background because you were okay to be in the background. She wasn’t. She was always trying to eclipse you because everyone loved and admired you. So she was louder, bigger, brighter as a defense mechanism.”
Raina felt like she’d been struck across the face. She stared at Reyes and then back at Jenny. “Seriously?”
Jenny nodded. “Absolutely. She loved you to distraction, but she also said she hated you because of who you were. She wanted to be that same self-confident person, that person who was at peace on the inside, so she could walk through life and not get distracted and disturbed by everything going on around her. Everything upset Reana. Except when she was with me. During the time we spent together, it was like she could truly be herself, and she didn’t have to put on all these different personas that other people expected from her.”
“I can’t believe that’s what she was like with you,” Raina said faintly. “How absolutely exhausting it must have been for her otherwise.”
“And terrifying,” Reyes said. “Is there anything worse than feeling like you’ll be found out at any moment?”
Jenny looked at him and nodded. “Exactly. That’s how she felt all the time. She never could really relax and be who she was. She was completely stressed out, always believing something was wrong with her, and everybody would know. And that’s what she couldn’t face. She fully believed that she would lose her clients, that she would lose her friends. And everybody would mock her for her life choices.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” Raina said, “because it’s not true. She was everything to me, and it’s just so devastating to hear this. She never had to be like that. It was exhausting to be around her all the time. I always felt so inferior and so unloved. By my mother and Reana.”
“And yet, that’s how Reana felt as well. She felt like she wasn’t 100 percent perfect, 100 percent beautiful, 100 percent on and vibrant and alive. If she wasn’t, then something was wrong with her because everybody expected her to be that way. But she couldn’t keep it up. So she would come to me. I would allow her to just drop it all and to become herself, not that I did anything special to make her feel that way. Sometimes she would just curl up in my arms and cry because it was so exhausting.”
That brought tears to Raina’s eyes. She clasped her hand over her mouth and wrapped her other arm around her chest. “That’s so not how I would have wanted her to live,” she whispered.
“I told her that. I told her that she needed to trust in who you were, that she needed to trust in the love of sisters and her mother. But she said her mother was the worst. Her mother felt something was wrong with people like us—therefore, with people like Reana. How your mother would never accept such a flaw in Reana.”
“That’s true,” Raina said. “My mother has very strong feelings on that subject.”
“Reana couldn’t tell you in case your mother found out. She knew your mother wouldn’t accept her as she was.”
“But I would have understood,” Raina cried out passionately. “Reana could have trusted me.”
“But you had a different relationship with Reana than with your mother. There was still that jealousy because you were normal. Because you weren’t lesbian.” A sad bitterness in Jenny’s tone broke Raina’s heart.
“But that was a battle neither of us could win,” Raina cried out. “She had you, and she felt so good with you, so calm and so at peace. It would have made such a difference in her life.”
“Which is why that letter you gave me has helped in how I view her,” Jenny said gently. “I’ll grieve for what we could have had, but at least now I know she finally came around to loving me first and foremost.”
“Letter?” the detective asked.
Raina realized he’d been listening to them all along. His gaze went from one to the other as they continued to discuss her sister and the broken relationships she had cultivated.
“We went to the neighbor’s house, asking if they had seen my sister and when because the brownstone was completely cleaned out. The neighbor said Jenny had moved out, and a piece of mail had been misdelivered to her place. It was a letter for Jenny. And, yes, I opened it. It’s through that letter we found out how to contact Jenny.” She motioned to Jenny. “And, when we connected, I gave her the letter. It was my sister’s apology, telling Jenny how much Reana really loved Jenny and that Reana was willing to go public to keep Jenny in her life.”
“So I gather in all that, you didn’t kill her?” the detective said bluntly to Jenny.
That startled a cry from her throat. “No,” she said. “I loved her. She was everything to me.”
“But she wouldn’t become one with you, would she?” he said. “You moved out, broke up, so there had to be a lot of pain and anger.”
Jenny shook her head. “Pain, yes. Anger, no. Just loss,” she said quietly. “And grief, overwhelming grief. And now so much more grief. While Reana was alive, there was always hope she would come to her senses and return to me. But to know she did come to that point but is now gone, … I’m not sure how or if I’ll ever recover.”
Reyes nodded. “I think we’ve all come to an understanding of who Reana was.”
“That’s all fine and dandy,” the detective said, “but we’re not getting any closer to knowing who killed her.”
“She was badly bruised and beaten, you said. Did those occur at the same time? Or is it possible she was beaten up earlier and then shot later?”
“No, it was all at the same time,” he said. “And the beating, although it showed up as lots of bruising—as you know, a lot of damage—it wasn’t too extreme.”
“Meaning, her attacker could have been a female?” Reyes asked.
The detective looked at him, assessing. “Yes, I suppose it could have been. It also could have been a guy who wasn’t used to being violent. A boxer would have probably caused a lot more damage. This person, male or female, wasn’t skilled in that way. It looked more like he took out his temper on her.”
“And that would be so typical of the way she lived,” Jenny said. “She seemed to do nothing but pick fights with everybody around her.” She glanced over at Raina. “And that goes back to her not being happy with who she was. She was living a twisted life, wanting to be one way but forced to be another.”
“But only fo
rced in her own mind,” Raina said wearily. “I’m trying to figure out what happened to my mother now too.”
“What’s wrong with your mother?” Jenny asked.
“She potentially tried to commit suicide this morning. And, yes, that was probably after hearing the news of Reana’s death.”
The detective nodded. “Nobody made that call here. I did check.”
“No. We can put that down to my mother,” Reyes said. “She broke the news to Melissa.”
“That must have been devastating for her,” Jenny said. “Did she not stay and help her for the first few hours?”
“Unfortunately my mother just made a phone call. And when I dropped off Raina, so she could break the news to her mother, Raina found her mom unconscious on her bed, having ingested several bottles of pills.”
“That’s terrible,” Jenny murmured. “Not hard to understand though.”
“It isn’t, except for the fact that my mother was completely afraid of the glass balcony doors in her bedroom. They were always locked, and she kept a pole blocking the doors from being opened from the outside. But when we got there this morning, the doors were open and so was the window. That was incredibly unusual for her.”
“So you think somebody was in there at that time? Or somebody was there beforehand?” Jenny asked in confusion. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I,” Raina said with a heavy sigh. “And, though I had a chance to speak to my mother, she wasn’t very aware of her surroundings.”
“No wonder.” Jenny stared at Raina. “I’m so sorry. I’ve lost Reana, but you’ve lost both Reana and potentially your mother.”
“My mother is expected to survive the overdose,” Raina said quietly. “But I’m not sure mentally or emotionally she’ll ever be the same again.”
*
Reyes checked his watch, looked at the detective and asked, “Do you have what you need? I’d like to take Raina back to the hospital, so she can be with her mother.”
