fourteen
“WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?” ALL SORTS OF scenarios ran through my head. Had the murderer broken into my house and planted a murder weapon in my refrigerator? Had Zorita hexed me, turning a pickle into a pickax?
Scythe, looking especially grim, reached onto the second shelf, extracted a clear Tupperware container, and held it between us. “This is what I’m talking about.”
Something green and fuzzy was growing on an unrecognizable mound.
“Penicillin cures,” I pointed out, folding my arms across my chest. He was standing a little too close for comfort. I had the list of suspects in my waistband to protect. I inched closer to the refrigerator door and away from him.
“Do you realize how many people are allergic to penicillin?” Scythe countered. “Slip this tasty morsel to someone like that, and he’ll go into anaphylactic shock. It’s all over.”
“When I do, I’ll make sure they hunt you down as accessory to murder.” I narrowed my eyes. “Youknow what they do to policemen in prison.”
He raised both eyebrows. “No. What? Care to describe it to me?”
I felt my face growing hot. I was not a prude. Why was my body doing this to me? I turned away, reaching to the wine rack on top of the refrigerator. “How about that wine?”
“Thought you’d never ask.”
I discerned a chuckle in his voice but did not turn around to see if a grin accompanied it. The Us-Them score was even now, with that comparing-my-leotardto-a-baby-onesie trap I set for myself, walked in, and let him spring. I’d have to stop doing that. Running my fingertips over the tops of the bottles, I debated my options. I didn’t want to go too expensive; that would seem like I was trying to impress him—wrong message. I didn’t want to go too cheap, because that would make me look, well, cheap. Why was I thinking about this so hard for a man I’d already decided was someone who wouldn’t know a pinot grigio from a Popsicle?
I paused at a mid-range French bordeaux. Nope, those French could be just too upright.
I drummed my pointer finger on a Chilean malbec. Oh, no, those South Americans were known for being hot, spicy, sexy. Another mis-message.
Still without looking at Scythe, I slid a bottle of Australian shiraz out of the rack—a mid-range import from a country that wasn’t passionate, wasn’t snobby. Nice, firendly, down-to-earth people, those Aussies. Besides, the wine tasted good.
After all this, he probably wouldn’t notice, and I’d given myself an extra gray hair for nothing. Trying to act nonchalant, I spun around and set the bottle on the counter.
“Where’s your corkscrew?” he asked.
Ah-ha, so he knew about corks.
“It’s in the drawer to your right.” I answered as I retrieved a couple of everyday wineglasses. Didn’t want to use the crystal. Wrong message again.
I tried not to watch as his hands worked the corkscrew, but I couldn’t help an occasional glance. Exceptional hands. As he slid the cork out, I found msyelf beginning to forgive his irritating habit of homing in on my vulnerabilities. Then he opened his mouth. “I can see why you didn’t use going to the grocery store as your excuse.”
“My excuse?”
“For not telling me where you really went.”
I didn’t try to deny it. I didn’t lie well on the spur of the moment, or even with a lot of prior planning. Obviously. “As if it’s any of your business where we went.”
He poured the wine without responding. His face was unreadable. My chaotic mind finally zeroed in on the insult he’d intended. “Hey, what do you mean?” I demanded. “Why wouldn’t I have been to the grocery store?”
“Because.” He put the bottle down on the counter and opened the refrigerator again. “You have an entire grocery store in here. What single woman eats this much food?”
“Remember, now,” I said acidly, “I’m not the skinniest woman on earth.”
“Even a six-hundred-pound woman couldn’t eat all this stuff. Portabello mushrooms, Havre cheese, an entire beef tenderloin, kalamata olives, New York cheese-cake, even kim-chee, for God’s sake. Unless, of course, there really is a Claude living here; he might be able to mow through all this.” Leaving the refrigerator standing open, he made a show of leaning into the stairwell that led upstairs to my bedroom and living area.
Ignoring the Claude comment—let him wonder—I tackled the criticism head-on. “In my family, we are taught to be prepared. We’re big—”
“Yeah, especially if all of you eat this way.”
“Very funny. I’m a member of a big, extended family. Every one of us has to be prepared for invasions—”
He looked askance into the refrigerator again. “Invasions of what? Dozens of Italian-Greek-Dutch-Koreans from the Bronx?”
I jutted my chin. “If you were hungry, you would be glad I had all that.”
“Who says I’m not hungry?”
“It doesn’t matter if you are. You aren’t inviting yourself to dinner, too.” I slammed the refrigerator door shut and grabbed my glass, sloshing just a tad over the rim as I sat down on the kitchen window seat I’d cushioned with an old Chihuahuan woven blanket. I was careful to sit squarely in the middle so he couldn’t get a wild hair and sit down next to me. Then I swung my feet up to the chair closest to me, crossing the right Justin over the left, leaving him no choice but the chair at the far end of the butcher-block table. I glanced out the window, watching the fruit bats swoop at mosquitoes in the ocher light of fading dusk.
“At this rate, we might both starve to death before I get what I came for.”
Huh? I met his laser stare and resisted the urge to swallow hard. I knew the only thing he wanted from me was information. I knew he was using innuendo to throw me off-balance.
My turn.
“You’ll go first, because I have more fat stores than you do and can live without food longer, as I’m not the skinniest woman in the world.”
“Would you drop that, already?” He ran his fingers through his hair in frustration. Ha! Score one for Reyn. He blew out a breath. He picked up his glass and promptly put it down again. He stalked to the kitchen table and looked down at me. “Good God, you’re like a dog with a bone. Give you a description made without really much of a thought, and you’re going to carry it around with you for the rest of your life?”
I tried not to let him see how smug I was about disturbing him. “Maybe.”
“Are you like this with everything?”
“Yes.”
“Great. So you won’t be letting go of this investigation unless I knock you over the head with a club.”
I jumped up, rose onto my tiptoes, and tried to meet him eye-to-eye. I narrowed mine. “I knew you were a Neanderthal.”
He reached into the breadbasket on the counter, grabbed a baguette, and held it over his head, waving it threateningly. In all fairness, he didn’t know I’d bought the bread a week ago, and it might be more harmful than he realized. “I’ll show you Neanderthal.”
Behind me, my kitchen door burst open, and a two-hundred-fifty-pound, five-feet-tall ball of fury dressed in rainbow spandex flew into Scythe with fists pounding. I recognized the bouffant snow-white hair and jumped out of the way as she pinned him against the windowsill, her hands wrenching the baguette away from him and jamming it up against the underside of his chin. I heard his head cluck against the window glass and cringed. Scythe had gone completely still, and I knew it was one of the only times I would ever see him truly surprised. I have to admit I took a moment to enjoy it.
“Mama Tru!” I admonished, only slightly belatedly. Mario’s mother lived catty-corner across busy McCullough Avenue. Her neighborly connection was the reason I got my house and at such a good price. But nothing in life is free. I consequently have no secrets and frequent interventions from the Trujillo clan.
“Cállate, Reyn,” she ordered without taking her glare off Scythe. “I won’t let the murderer kill you, too. It looks like I got here right in time. Hand me that butcher knife, and call the police.”
“Mama Tru, the police are already here,” I explained patiently. Mario’s mother tends to overreact.
“Why don’t they do something about this devil, then?” She paused to glance around while I hid a grin.
“Where are they, Reyn?”
“You’ve got him pinned against the window.”
She shot me a look. “Yeah, sure. Don’t worry, I get it, Reyn. You have to say that. His accomplice is hiding in your pantry with a gun trained on you, right?” I opened my mouth to speak, but she soldiered on, jamming the bread farther up, clunking his head against the glass again. “Escuche, hombre,and whatever amigos you brought with you. Now there’s two of us here, and one is a tough old lady who’s not afraid to go to heaven if her time’s come. If I have to die to save my Trudy’s amiga mejor, then it’s God’s will. So bring it on!”
Oh, Lord, Mama Tru was watching too much cable.
Scythe looked from me to Mama Tru and back again, silently pleading with me to do something. I gave him credit for respect for his elders, because he was easily strong enough to brush her aside with the sweep of a forearm, yet he didn’t move. I didn’t, either. He looked kind of cute with a petrified loaf of bread under his chin. Besides, until he got over his good manners and told Mama where to stick it, I had him where I wanted him.
Scythe must have seen it in my eyes, because for the first time, he looked scared. “Miss Sawyer…” he warned.
I smiled and sidled up to him. “We’ll let you go, Lieutenant, once you answer a few simple questions.”
He groaned.
“Where did you spend the afternoon?”
He squirmed a little. Mama tightened the baguette. Scythe gave up. “Searching Ricardo’s house.”
“What did you find?”
“That Ricardo was a clotheshorse, had expensive taste, and not much company unless he wiped down his house regularly. There was only one other set of fingerprints besides his. Are they yours, Miss Sawyer?”
“Good try, Lieutenant. They are mine only if they are the only pair to have survived from a big Christmas party there five years ago. My guess would be they belong to his maid. Ricardo is—was—an extremely private man. He told me that he’d never entertain again, that people were way too nosy, even with nothing to smell. If he did any entertaining, it would’ve been at someone else’s house.”
“Whose?”
“If I knew that, that’s where Trudy and I would’ve gone this afternoon.”
“So, where did you go?”
Uh-oh, I stepped right into that one, didn’t I? How could I throw him off the scent? I smiled. “To see a psychic.”
He rolled his eyes toward my second story and tried to shake his head, but my granny muscle tightened her grip and wouldn’t let him. He settled for another groan. “A psychic? You’ve got to be kidding.”
My smile widened. “Nope.”
“So, I suppose she told you the identity of the murderer?”
“Not exactly.” I had to be careful here. I didn’t want to lie to the police. That could get me in worse trouble than I was already in. By the same token, I didn’t want to give it all up. I could feel every petal and stem in the violet paper tucked into my back waistband. I wondered if he could see it with that damned laser vision of his.
“What does that mean?” Scythe paused for a moment, and I might have answered him with more than I wanted if he hadn’t sneered condescendingly and continued, “Did she give you the murderer’s astrological sign and favorite color? Did she tell you the killer was a cockroach in a previous life?”
“You have it backward,” Mama Tru interrupted. “I think if he killed Ricardo, he would be a cockroach in the next life.”
Scythe tweaked his eyebrows at Mama, and I could see he was reaching the limit of his patience. “I stand corrected, ma’am.”
I needed a distraction before Scythe pursued the psychic angle any further. Perhaps gratitude for saving him from the clutches of a senior citizen on a mission armed with week-old bread would do it. I put a hand on Mama Tru’s shoulder. “Maybe we should give the detective a break and let him get back to investigating, Mama Tru.”
“Is he really the police?” Her liquid brown eyes turned to me and looked so disappointed that I was tempted to lie. I swear, Mama Tru had that Catholic guilt thing down to an art form.
“I’m afraid so, Mama Tru. But you know how much I appreciate you being here in case the murderer was after me.”
“You know, Reyn, I was watching that pretty little gringa anchor lady on Channel Thirteen, and she made it sound like you were a suspect. So, if they want to lock you up”—she gave Scythe a suspicious look—“the police might be as dangerous to you as the murderer.”
Scythe’s whole body sighed. I watched his bicep dance at the cuff of his knit shirt as he reached up to rub the back of his neck. Hmm. He might be dangerous to me, all right, dangerous to my chastity.
“Don’t worry, ma’am,” Scythe said wearily. “We just want a little information from Miss Sawyer.”
“Really?” Brightening, Mama Tru cocked her head sideways. “What kind of information?”
Uh-oh. Mario got his blabbermouthity from somewhere, and it wasn’t his dad, for whom an entire sentence was a rare speech.
Scythe, no dummy, recognized an opportunity. He took one of Mama Tru’s soft, round hands in his, introducing himself. Mama Tru, coming under the spell of his charm, returned the introduction. Then he reached for the bottle of malbec and a glass, a crystal one. Ah-ha, so he had noticed my omission. “Can I get you some wine, Mrs. Trujillo?”
“Sí, Lieutenant. And, please call me Esmeralda.”
“You can call me Jackson, Esmeralda.”
Mama Tru was practically purring.
I should’ve been grateful for the distraction, but it ticked me off. How come she got the chivalrous knight, and I got the laser-beam hard-ass? I gave myself a mental slap. As they sat at the kitchen table, I weighed my options in escaping just long enough to hide the violet paper. I could excuse myself to go to the ladies’ room, but how would I explain having to back all the way there?
“How long have you known Ricardo, ma’am?” Scythe said in an exaggerated version of his dry West Texas accent. He was shifting into his interrogating-old-ladies mode.
“Oh, I didn’t know him.”
I could see Scythe visibly deflate.
“But,” Mama Tru added, “I do know a lot about him.”
“The police aren’t interested in rumors, Mama.”
“Wrong, Miss Sawyer,” Scythe corrected. “Many rumors carry a grain of truth in them.”
“Ha!”
“Ha what?”
“I guess you’ve never known a teenage girl. They can make up stories out of whole cloth without even a speck of truth, much less something as substantial as a grain.”
Scythe looked a little funny for a moment, but it might have been my imagination, because by the time I blinked, he had his game face on—unyielding. “We aren’t talking about teenage girls, are we, Esmeralda?”
“No, Jackson, I hear things about Ricardo from my son and from Delia Bonita.”
“Who used to be a teenage girl,” I pointed out.
“Who used to be a teenage girl? Mario?” Scythe slipped in.
I glared. He obviously didn’t appreciate my help, so he could do this on his own.
“Delia,” Mama Tru was saying, “still went to Ricardo for her hair. You know, he only did that for very special customers, ones he’d had around a long time.”
“I talked to Mario earlier,” Scythe said. “So I probably know all you can impart from his end. But what has Delia told you?”
I resisted the urge to pull out the paper to see if Delia’s name was on the list. I hoped so, or the whole Zorita thing was a hoax.
“Many, many things over the years. I can’t remember most of these.”
“That’s fine. What you do remember is probably what will be most important to me.” Scythe was endlessly patient. With her, not me.
“We went to Judy’s Tacos over on the south side after the last time she got her hair done. We go eat somewhere after her appointments, then run around shopping at the thrift stores.”
That explained the funky caftan. I’d thought they stopped making those things in the seventies.
Scythe laced his hands togther, probably to prevent himself from a dozen impatient gestures he was dying to make to get Mama to the point. His knuckles whitened. He nodded to encourage her to go on.
“We were at Neighborhood Thrift, going through the women’s dresses, looking for something for her granddaughter to wear to her cousin’s quincea?era, when—”
“Just a minute.” Scythe held up a hand. “You’re telling me that Delia pays how much to get her hair done?”
“Two hundred sixty dollars.”
“And,” Jackson continued, “shops for her family’s clothes at a thrift store?”
Mama Tru tsked. “Jackson, have you ever been to a thrift store?”
I resisted the urge to grin as I tried to picture Scythe picking through racks of jumbled clothes in a warehouse. He wouldn’t do it unless he were looking for a clue. In fact, I doubt he ever shopped for clothes, period. Maybe he got his girlfriends to do it for him. “No, I haven’t,” he answered.
“Last week, I found a silk organdy dress, brand-new with tags from Neiman Marcus, for nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. And it was senior citizen day, so I got twenty-five percent off that. No matter how rich you are, Jackson, you can’t pass up a deal like that. Besides, someone as cultured as you should know that sometimes the rich are the worse for being cheap.”
I threw Jackson a sidelong glance. He looked duly impressed with Mama’s insight but still impatient for the good stuff. We’d been talking fifteen minutes and had only found out the places to shop and eat on the south side.
“Did she happen to mention Ricardo while you two were out finding deals?”
“Oh, yes.” Mama nodded and took a swig of wine. I think she thought it was sangria, becuse she made a face like she’d been expecting the sweet watered-down drink and got dry tannin, thirteen-percent alcohol instead. “We passed a billboard for one of the open city council seats, and Delia mentioned that Ricardo seemed especially distracted by the local political race. She said in all the years she went to him for hair, he’d never even mentioned politics, but this time he was different. She said Ricardo was always so cool and smooth, but that day he as un hombre del fuego.”
“A man of fire? Why?” So Jackson knew some espa?ol.
“She didn’t know. It surprised her. You see, she’s the secretary—or what do they want us to call them now, executive assistants? Anyway, she is the executive assistant for the chairman of the Bexar County Republican Party. She said something to Ricardo she shouldn’t have, she said. Told him about someone who was about to announce to run in one of the races. She felt guilty about it, because Ricardo, he got a little passionate.”
My fingers wiggled. Down boys, you can’t pull out that list to check just yet. Patience is a virtue. Wait until the nosy policeman is gone.
Scythe shrugged. “People get passionate for all sorts of reasons. Did Delia happen to say which race Ricardo was focused on?”
She shook her snow-white head. “Lo siento. I didn’t ask. We started talking about the mariachis her daughter-in-law’s sister hired for the quinea?era. They aren’t very good, and they are very expensive, and—”
Scythe stood up and stuck his hand into his back pocket, extracting a card from his business card case. He took her right hand in his, put the card in her palm, and covered it with his left. “Thank you so much, Esmeralda. Please call me if you talk to Delia again or think of anything else. You’ve been a great help.”
Had Mama Tru run Scythe off so soon with her promise of endless chatter? If that was the case, I would have to keep her around.
Scythe looked down at the beeper on his belt, and I realized he was being paged. He pressed a button, obviously recognizing the number displayed. “I apologize, ladies, that I have to leave so soon.”
He carried his half-drunk glass to the sink, then walked to the back door. I jumped up, careful to follow behind him so he couldn’t see the paper. I was almost home free.
I thought.
“Reyn.” Mama Tru was looking at my back. She leaned forward with her hand outstretched to grab the paper. “You have something—”
I jumped and narrowly missed banging into Scythe. “Something to make for dinner. Oh, yes, Mama Tru, I do. I hope you’ll stay.”
“How about a thousand somethings?” Scythe muttered derisively. I knew my distraction technique would work. So much for my pride.
He had a hand on the doorknob when he turned, surprising me. This time, I did bump into his chest. Oops. He steadied me with a hand on my waist. There was a second I had to hold my breath. I decided it was because two inches to the west, and he would be touching my big clue. Although I might have been lying to myself, because for that second I forgot about the damned paper.
“Don’t think you’ve wriggled out of talking to me,” he said quietly. “I’ll be back.”
“I’ll be asleep.”
“Oh, Claude like to tuck in early?”
I grinned. “That’s right.”
“Guess I’ll have to wake you up, then.”
With the ghost of a grin, he was gone, leaving me to wonder how he was going to wake me and when. Damn.