Tak’s truck wasn’t in the lot. I approached the door to the restaurant and prepared myself for the experience of dining alone. The table, I knew, would accommodate eight people. Me being a party of one, I’d be slotted into an empty seat at a table of strangers. I didn’t mind—I never had. Sometimes sitting with strangers felt more comfortable than trying to force conversation with people I already knew. I ducked into the restroom out front and then approached the hostess station.
A woman greeted me. She had long, straight, brown hair streaked with gray, and was dressed in a green linen dress that ended just above her ankles. Tasteful flat brown sandals were on her feet. She wore very little makeup and her natural attractiveness shone through. Despite the creases by her eyes and laugh lines by her mouth, there was a youthfulness about her that kept me from pinpointing her age.
“How many?” she asked.
“One.”
“Name?” She bent over the seating chart with a pen.
“Margo. Margo Tamblyn,” I said.
She looked up quickly and smiled. “Follow me,” she said.
She led me to a back table with three couples. Two empty chairs sat along the side of the table. I thanked her and sat in the chair to the right, leaving an empty chair between me and the couple to my left. Some people preferred their privacy, even in such a festive location. I scanned the menu, looking for my usual—sesame chicken—and cringed when someone sat in the chair next to me. I focused on the menu even though I already knew what I was ordering.
Dining alone in Japanese steak houses had become a way for me to practice being myself among strangers. Odd as it seemed, I was comforted by the anonymity of the people around me. But tonight, I couldn’t stop thinking about the accusations against Ebony. I picked at my salad, rolling the single grape tomato around the bowl with my chopsticks, while the chef sliced and diced our food. He finished the whole presentation before I was done with my soup.
A woman in a kimono stepped up to my left. She held a black and red laminate tray. One by one she picked up my plate, my salad, my bowl of fried rice, and my glass of water.
“I’m not done,” I said.
She nodded. “We have a better room for you,” she said. “Come with me.”
Three conversations stopped. Six pair of eyes watched me stand up and follow the woman to the side of the room. She went behind a large screen and I followed. I hadn’t known there were private rooms in the back until she slid a wood-and-muslin panel to the left and exposed a low table flanked by even lower seats. She set the tray on the table and bowed slightly. I reciprocated. Moments after she left, Tak appeared in the doorway.
“Mind some company?” he asked. “Don’t be mad,” he said quickly. “My mom told me you were eating alone. If you want to be alone, I’ll get out of here.”
“Your mom?”
“The lady who took your name at the door.”
“How’d she know who I was?”
“I may have mentioned your name around the house,” he said. He picked up the menu and studied the entrees with phony concentration.
I set my menu down and folded my hands in front of me. “I’m a big teppanyaki fan, so if you need me to recommend something, just let me know,” I said. He set down his menu and shook his head.
“I mean it. You didn’t ask for me when you came in, so if you prefer to eat alone, I’ll leave.”
I turned to face him and felt the weight of worry surround me like a giant, waterlogged teddy bear costume. I put my hand on his upper arm. “Stay,” I said.
He put his hand on top of mine. “Okay.”
We sat on opposite sides of the table. A man poked his head into the room. “I’ll have what she’s having,” Tak said. The man looked at my plate and disappeared.
“Do you want to talk about Ebony?”
I set my chopsticks down. “She didn’t do it. Any of it. I don’t know why someone is out to get her and make it look like she did, but I’m going to—” I stopped abruptly. I still didn’t know how much I could trust Tak. If he was here to pump me for information for the detective, I wasn’t going to deliver.
“Remember how I told you that I was on leave from my job in the DA’s office?” he asked. “That was only partially true. It’s true that I’m on leave. The part that I left out was that it wasn’t entirely my choice.”
Tak took a drink of his water. “I became friends with one of the prosecutors. We both put in long hours and sometimes ran into each other after work. He had some structural issues with his house and asked me to come over and take a look. When I got there, he introduced me to his girlfriend. She was a county judge.”
“They’re hardly the first two people who met in a work environment and started a relationship,” I said.
“In most companies, interoffice relationships are frowned upon. In the DA’s office, that issue is magnified. Hal asked me not to say anything. Susan was up for pension in a few months and she was planning on leaving the bench after that.
“A couple of weeks later I heard a rumor that a judge was showing favoritism to one of the county prosecutors. That judge was Susan. When I asked Hal about it, he said opposing counsel was spreading the rumor so the case they were working on would be tossed.”