“Nikki, you know I don’t like that kind of lang—”
I interrupted him. “And you know I don’t like being lied to. I think they had suspects and you knew about it. So why don’t you just tell me? What is there to hide? Who were the suspects and why weren’t they caught?”
His face turned red, starting with the tips of his ears and creeping all the way down his throat into the collar of his shirt. He stared hard at his hands, and I could practically feel the discomfort vibrating off him. “Okay, I suppose you’re old enough now.”
“You think?” I said.
“I didn’t want to burden you with it when you were young. You had enough to deal with, losing your mother like that. You didn’t need to know that they suspected . . .”
I was impatient and let him flounder for only a second. “Suspected who?”
He pressed the rim of his coffee cup in, fidgeting. “Me.”
I felt the world around me pulse green and gold. I had suspected Dad had something to do with Mom’s murder, but hearing him say it out loud was still a shock.
“They thought you did it?” My throat felt small and tight. Was this going to be the moment when I finally got honest answers? “Why?”
He shrugged. “They always suspect the husband first, right?” He shook his head at the ground and muttered, “Damn cops.”
“So what happened?” I asked, not wanting him to stop talking. But also definitely wanting him to stop talking. If my dad confessed to me, would I have to do something? Would I be able to turn him in? It seemed so cut-and-dry, so easy, when it was all theory. But now, sitting next to him—the man who’d brushed my hair and fixed my lunches and took care of me when I was sick—it seemed so much more complicated than that.
Still. It didn’t matter what he might have done to atone after the fact. If he was the one who had taken her from me, I would still hate him.
“They questioned me a few times and decided they had nothing on me. Then they let me go. And as far as I could tell, they closed the case. They were so certain that I’d done it and had just covered it up well enough that they couldn’t bust me, they didn’t even bother to really look at anyone else.”
“It’s getting hot,” we heard, and both turned to see Marisol clomping toward us on her impractical heels, fanning her face with her hands. The tension between Dad and me snapped away in an instant. Damn it.
Dad checked his watch. “Oops!” He hopped up on his feet. “We’re going to lose any semblance of good light if we keep sitting around. Nikki, you want to take the next few shots?”
That was it.
That was it?
He had been the one and only suspect in Mom’s case, and he just casually slipped it into a conversation before getting back to work? There had to be more to the story.
Vee’s voice floated across the street and into the alley. She’d moved on to a different song—one I’d never heard.
Seemed like everyone wanted to just move on.
Well, not me.
When was I ever like everyone else?
I stood and brushed the dirt off my butt. “Absolutely,” I said. I hooked my elbow through Marisol’s and marched her into position. “Let’s finish this.”
9
I LEANED ON Chris’s apartment buzzer, imagining the sound dragging him away from whatever it was he was doing. Honestly, I didn’t care if he was watching TV or asleep or on the freaking toilet. I needed his help, and I wasn’t going to wait around in the parking lot this time.
A breeze kicked up behind me. The sun had gotten too harsh for Dad’s photographing pleasure, causing shadows under Marisol’s eyes, and he’d called it quits for the day, but only after making me take about a zillion shots of her. As if I could concentrate on lighting and composition after the bomb he’d dropped on me.
I let my thumb off the buzzer, but only for a second. I peered through the double doors at the stark, industrial-carpeted stairs. Nothing. I jammed my thumb into the buzzer again.
Soon there was a thumping noise, and I saw Chris coming down. He was in a pair of baggy sweats and a ratty, stained T-shirt. His hair looked funky, like maybe he’d been lying down on it. His expression looked like he wanted to slap whoever was ringing his buzzer.
I let off the button and waited for him to open the door.
“What are you—”
I pushed past him and started up the stairs. “We need to talk.” I didn’t wait to see if he was following me. I knew without even looking that he would. Why was he the first one I always went to when shit got real?
Because maybe he didn’t remember, but I knew what we could accomplish as a pair. And I was sick of getting nowhere.
“You could have called. I was sleeping.”
“I could have,” I said, rounding up another flight of stairs. “But I didn’t. No time.” I jogged up that flight and threw open the door to his floor, my breath coming heavy. “God, would it kill your landlord to install an elevator?”
Chris took considerably longer to get up that second flight of stairs, and when he finally came through the door, he was limping a little, one hand protecting his ribs. Now that he was walking without his cane, it was easy to forget that he’d been mangled just a few months ago. I waited for him by his apartment.
“It’s open,” he said.
I went in.
The place was a wreck. Or at least for Chris it was. There were dirty dishes in the sink, a collection of empty beer bottles on the coffee table, lined up like soldiers, and several wadded, worn T-shirts taking up residence in front of the TV. And for the first time ever it didn’t smell like cologne or cleaner. In my bedroom, this mess would look normal, but he was fastidious.
“You okay?” I asked, looking around.
“Yeah, why?”
“No reason. It’s just . . . I’m used to it looking different in here.” I kicked off my shoes at the door; dropped my keys inside one.
He picked up four beer bottles and carried them, clinking against one another, to the recycling bin, and dropped them in with a crash. “Well, you’ll forgive me if I haven’t really been into housecleaning lately.” He rubbed his hand over his forehead a few times and then up through his hair. It stuck up. “Sorry. I . . . I have headaches. Bad ones. And I’m ready to get back to work.”
“That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about.” I climbed onto my favorite bar stool. It was here that I’d first found an application for the police force, meant for me. It was here that I’d first really known that Chris believed I could be something more than a fuckup.
He sat on the stool next to me. “I can’t wait to hear how my going back to work will benefit you.”
“Well, don’t say it like that.”
“What other way is there to say it? Isn’t that why you’re interested in me going back to work? So I can do something for you?”
I thought about it. He was right. And I hated that he was right. It made me feel like a self-centered jerk. But I didn’t have time to coddle feelings. “I need you to find a file for me,” I said.
“Nope.”
“What do you mean, nope? You haven’t even heard what it is yet.”
He stood, walked to the fridge, and grabbed a beer. “I don’t need to know what it is in order to know I can’t do that for you.” He twisted off the cap with the bottom of his T-shirt and tossed it into the sink. It rattled around a few times.
“Since when does ‘can’t’ keep you from helping me out?”
“Since I don’t remember pulling files for you before, and if I did, I was wrong to do it. You want to be able to pull files? Go to the academy. Get the job. Then you can pull all the files you want.”
“We’re not going through this again. I already told you I wasn’t going to do that.”