Magic City Blues, page 11
“My brother,” she said. “Afghanistan. We don’t have to talk about it, do we?”
We didn’t. I had seen too many of those flags over the years. I didn’t want to talk about it either. What the hell was there to say?
The kitchen area was an alcove separated from the main body of the apartment by a waist-high bar and low, heavy wooden stools. I pulled one out and settled down, putting my elbows on the bar. D’Agostino looked around as if she were unsure of herself here in her own place. It was odd to see her that way. Normally she was sure of herself to the point of being cocky.
Game recognize game.
“I’m really bad at being a host,” she said. “There’s beer in the fridge. You want one?”
I did, and told her not to worry, that I’d get it myself. D’Agostino’s fridge was sparse, with some cold cuts, eggs, and a few vegetables that looked close to wilting. On the bottom shelf was a row of Good People brown ale. I grabbed two cans and tossed her one, nudging the fridge door closed with my hip.
We cracked our beers, and I noticed that our positions were now flipped. D’Agostino was seated at the bar, while I was standing in the kitchen. So much for gender roles.
“What?” She asked.
I shook my head.
“Amusing myself,” I said. “It’s nothing. Have you eaten?”
“I was thinking about sending out for pizza.”
I rested my hands on the bar. “I can cook.”
D’Agostino’s eyes narrowed. I raised my right hand in the Boy Scout salute and crossed my heart with my left hand. “I swear I won’t poison you.”
I rummaged through the kitchen cabinets, being careful to stay quiet, and found a medium-sized sautée pan that looked like it had never been used. Then I set to work with the eggs, cracking four of them into a cheap plastic mixing bowl. D’Agostino didn’t have a whisk, so I used a fork to scramble the eggs, then added a dash of cold water.
“I’ve never seen anyone do that before,” she said. I added salt and kept whisking away until the eggs were a uniform golden yellow.
“Little trick Alton Brown uses,” I said.
“Really.”
“Well, that’s what he said on TV.”
I cut up a quarter of an onion that was moldering in the fridge, and while I was getting my second beer I found some mushrooms that didn’t smell too bad. D’Agostino had a knife block on her counter that held knives whose blades looked like they’d never been used. I sharpened the biggest of them and then set about chopping the veggies fine. Over medium heat, I melted some butter in the pan and then added the mushrooms. Once they’d cooked, I added the little pile of onions. Soon the smell of the food filled the apartment, and my stomach moaned its hunger.
While I was working in the kitchen, D’Agostino didn’t say anything. She watched me work, and I tried to look competent as I moved.
I put the mushrooms and onions aside into a small bowl and made sure the butter still coated the bottom of the pan. Then I added about half the eggs. I wasn’t classically trained, so I couldn’t do the traditional French rolled omelet, but I paid attention and added some shredded cheddar cheese and some of the sauteed vegetables. When I was satisfied, I ran a spatula under one side of the omelet and flipped it. Then I slid the whole thing onto a clean white plate D’Agostino had taken down from an overhead cabinet.
I repeated the process while D’Agostino ate her omelet. By the time I sat down with my own plate, hers was empty.
“Oh my God,” she said. “That was incredible. Where did you learn to do that?”
I shrugged.
“I like to eat,” I said, and she laughed a little.
“I never learned. The way I grew up—it was just my Dad and us—he was a cop, too. And I’m sure you know how a cop’s life is. You do your tour, you’re tired but you can’t come down off the nervous energy. Your guard’s been up for ten, twelve hours, ever since you left your house. Dad would stop at a diner, have a cup of coffee, steak and eggs, whatever. He’d swing by the babysitter’s house and pick us up, take us with him.”
She finished her beer and got two more out of the fridge. Bless that woman. She cracked them both and handed me one. A third beer in this pleasant apartment with an attractive woman felt just about right. I finished the one I was drinking and watched the condensation bead on the new can next to me. It made talking about myself easier.
“I never knew my parents,” I said. “I grew up mostly in foster homes.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be,” I said, and silence spun out between us like a fine spider’s web, catching any words I might have said before they could leave my mouth.
Shit.
I cleared my throat and tried again.
“You’re a cop. You know what the foster system is like. There are a lot of good families out there, and I finally landed in one when I was twelve. Before that, it was … bad. I remember a lot of group homes, but a lot of times the details are hazy. Other kids would steal my clothes. I was always the smallest one. By the time I fought my way to the dinner table, everything would be gone.”
I hadn’t meant to let that out, never intended for the scared little kid I had once been to peek his way out of the cage in my soul where I kept him safely locked. It felt like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the room. I breathed in, I knew I had air in my lungs, but the flow of it had constricted and my chest felt like there was a wide iron bar lying atop it. At some point I realized D’Agostino had reached across the table and taken my hand in hers.
“Things change when you get in a good place,” I said. “But the thing is that you don’t change. Not at first. I was a scrapper from way back. When I got in with the Skinners, I didn’t have to fight for a place at the table. I started eating regularly. I put on size. Mike, the father, put me in karate. Figured if I was going to fight, I ought to know what I was doing.”
D’Agostino smiled a sad, knowing smile.
“It’s more, though,” she said. “You learn a lot of other things, too.”
I drank some beer. “Sure you do. You learn to follow through on a punch or a kick. You learn what hurts. You learn how. But you also learn self-control. It was probably the best thing Mike could have done for me.”
“What happened to him?”
“Car accident, coming back from Huntsville. The other driver was drunk, going the wrong way on I-65. They collided head-on. Mike died. The other guy was just scratched up and bruised, so he lived.”
D’Agostino didn’t say anything. Her hand was warm and dry on my own, and the beers had worked their way down into me so that I felt integrated and whole, and I said the rest of it.
“For a little while,” I said, and D’Agostino squeezed my hand hard. I looked at her face-to-face then, and her green eyes were soft and full with unspilled tears.
“Jesus,” she breathed, and looked away. But she didn’t move her hand.
“It was cancer for my Dad,” she said. “He was always a big guy, an Italian cop who liked huge meals, spaghetti with a lot of gravy—not the Southern kind, either, you know what I mean?—lots of red sauce. And a couple of cigarettes after, too. Toward the end of his career, he had packed on some pounds. By then he’d moved to a desk job and become more and more sedentary. And then he started losing weight. A lot of it. His uniform didn’t fit right anymore, and his equipment belt was down to its last loop within about three months. I finally got him to go to a doctor.
“By the time he got checked, it had, you know, metastasized. It was in his spinal cord, his brain.”
D’Agostino looked at me hard. “Cancer can let you last a long time. And it doesn’t just hurt you. It hurts everybody who ever loved you. And by then, Richard was in Iraq. First tour. He wasn’t—he couldn’t be here to help.”
Now I held her hand. The skin was soft, and I used my thumb to trace the narrow trail of veins along the back.
“I prayed,” she said. “I begged God to let him go. And then, you know, nothing happened. He just kept suffering. So we kept suffering. Richie was half a world away, so it was all on me. I was right there, I got the brunt of it.”
There was another long pause, and I swear that her soul looked into mine and found something there that was the same. Now her tears really did come, splashing onto the bar top. I looked away. D’Agostino was a tough-as-nails cop. If she knew that I saw her crying, I wasn’t sure she’d ever forgive me.
“The thing about cancer patients that are so far gone … they don’t do an autopsy.”
I squeezed her hand hard, the same way she’d squeezed mine. Around us the apartment was quiet, its stillness broken infrequently by the muted rumble of the refrigerator’s ice maker. Only the overhead light in the kitchen shone. I chanced a look at D’Agostino; she had her head turned away from me. I don’t know what she felt, but I guessed it was the same emotions that were running through me: shame and guilt mixed with relief at having told someone the awful thing that weighted down our souls like a millstone around our necks.
She turned to me, tilting her face up to meet my gaze. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, and her lips were parted slightly so that I could barely see her even white teeth. I leaned down without thinking about it—or at least not thinking much—and kissed her. She froze for just a second, and then she returned the kiss. Our bodies turned toward one another, hands scrabbling for purchase, bodies brushing against one another with the bursting energy of falling stars. I felt myself moan into her mouth, and she pulled away for a bare moment.
“Shhhhh,” she whispered. “Be quiet.”
“Make me,” I hissed, and her mouth was on mine again. We left the dishes on the counter unwashed and barely made it to her bedroom, stumbling a couple of times along the way. But we never broke the kiss. D’Agostino locked the door behind us and put her gun carefully into the small safe she kept on a shelf in her closet and turned to me.
I shucked out of my boots and tee-shirt. Barefoot, I was only a little taller than her. She ran her hands over the broad muscles of my chest, her slender fingers hesitating when they found the scars I carried there. But if her hands hesitated, her mouth never did. We broke the kiss once, when we moved from our feet to the bed. After that, everything was wanton need and desire, and when she reached her climax she dug her nails into my shoulders so hard that she drew blood.
Afterward, it took both of us a long time to come back to Earth from wherever the hell our lovemaking had taken us. I wasn’t asleep—not quite—sated, pleasantly satisfied and floating on the cloud of endorphins that were still hanging around. Laura—how could I think of her as D’Agostino anymore?—was saying something, and it took an effort of will to concentrate on what she was saying.
“Hmm?”
“Were you asleep?”
“No,” I said, and paused. “Not quite.”
She giggled, then grew more serious.
“Did we just make a mistake here?”
I thought about it for a little bit, reaching down to twine my fingers with hers so that she’d know I wasn’t falling asleep again.
“Maybe,” I said at last. “I don’t know.”
Laura nestled her head against my shoulder. I could feel her breath gently brushing the hairs on my chest.
“If it was, it’s a mistake I’d be happy to make again.” Her mouth reached for mine, this time her kiss was gentle. We’d left ferocity behind, and now we were two people reaching for tenderness in the dark. I turned toward her and put my arms around her, letting my hands trail along the line of her spine and down to her buttocks. She shifted one leg over me, hooking her ankle behind my knee, and leveraged us both into a half-roll so that she ended up on top. I broke the kiss with a groan.
“Laura,” I said. “I’m nearly fifty years old.”
She propped herself up so that she could look down at me in the dim light streaming from her closet door. She moved her hips back and forth gently, and I felt myself beginning to respond.
“You’re only as young as you feel,” she said, rotating her pelvis in small circles above me. I brought my thighs up to support her hips, and she leaned forward again to kiss me as we found our rhythm and began again.
The second time was better than the first, sweeter, with less urgency. And when we were done, we were no less spent than the first time, and I felt like I could sleep for a week afterward. I kissed the top of Laura’s head and felt her snuggle in beside me. Her breathing became deeper and more regular as sleep claimed her.
And then I closed my eyes, feeling the gentle susurration of her breathing, and let sleep take me, too.
Seventeen
“Here’s what I don’t understand,” Abby said. “Why would anyone want to hurt Britt?”
We were eating scrambled eggs with toasted rye and drinking Wild Roast coffee from thick china mugs, none of us talking about the fact that when D’Agostino and I came out of her bedroom that morning that Abby was waiting on one of the couches with a kind of triumphant, gloating grin on her face, as though we had confirmed something that she’d known long before either of Laura or I had understood it.
Laura chewed her toast thoughtfully, nodding along.
“We’ve been thinking that Britt had walked in on someone waiting for you,” she said. “Wrong place, wrong time. But what if he was the target? Who has reason to hate him?”
Abby put her fork down on her empty plate, then rose from the table. She crossed to the cabinet above D’Agostino’s sink and took down a nearly full bottle of Richland Rum and poured a liberal shot into her coffee mug, then freshened her cup from the pot. She left the cabinet door open, the bottle of rum on the counter.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” she said, retaking her seat. “I mean, no one at the tennis club likes him, but that’s because he’s a really good player. I mean he was, anyway.”
Abby looked away from us, mourning her fiancé, but her eyes were dry. She sipped at the fortified coffee in her mug and seemed to become a little calmer, as though the alcohol had reached a place deep inside her where love and need were one. I’d met Britt only once, and he’d been so much of a tool then that I couldn’t imagine anyone being truly broken up about his passing. Abby knew she should feel badly about his murder, but what we were mostly seeing was relief, I think. She wouldn’t have to marry him after all.
I couldn’t blame her for feeling that way. I also didn’t like myself very much for thinking about it.
Abby had asked a good question, though. We’d been going on the assumption that Abby had been the target. I’d been hired earlier in the day to protect her, and then Britt ends up dead in her apartment that night. It had seemed like the two things must be related. But if they weren’t, then Britt had been the target all along. We had to consider that possibility.
So that begged the question: Why?
When we’d tried to look through Britt’s house, we’d been stopped. Laura and Abby had been taken, and that had put us on the run. My instincts weren’t an investigator’s. My first thought had been to protect the women, to get them out of the way of harm and then backtrack. Of course, D’Agostino didn't need me to rescue her. She wasn’t a damsel who waited around in need of a big, strong man to help her. But even so, what if there were answers in Britt’s house that we could have found? Going back to his house would give us a next step to take, and in my experience it was better to do something rather than nothing at all.
“We have to stop reacting,” I said slowly, and the women looked at me. “I think we’ve been looking at this all wrong. My job has been to protect Abby. But you—” I looked directly at Laura—“should be investigating. Our strengths are different. If we’re going to find out who killed Britt, you’ve got the best chance of doing it.”
D’Agostino took a deep breath and blew it out through her mouth like a powerlifter getting ready to snatch a heavy weight. She turned her face to the ceiling and rubbed at her chin, thinking hard. I went to the coffeemaker and refilled my cup, eyeing the bottle of rum still on the counter. I added sugar and cream, and then went back for D’Agostino’s cup. I refilled it for her and brought both cups to the table. Abby held her empty cup out to me, a silent request for a refill. I went back to the kitchen, poured black coffee into her cup, and then set it down in front of her at the table.
She looked at the steaming mug, huffed softly, and hauled herself from her chair. She went to the counter for the bottle of rum and brought it back to the table. She drank a little coffee to make room, then poured in a dose of the liquor.
“I hate it black,” she said. “Abbadoo’s got to have a little something-something.”
I drank my coffee and reminded myself that Abby’s personal habits were none of my business, and that keeping my mouth closed was a technique of adulthood that I should work on. D’Agostino eyed the bottle of rum and cut her eyes to me.
“Okay, let’s talk about what we know: Carlton Doyle hired you to watch Abby. Later that same night, Britt Parker is killed in Abby’s apartment.”
“Right,” I said. “And we’ve been thinking that those two things are related, because Abby is supposedly in danger.”
“But maybe we’re wrong. Correlation isn’t necessarily causation. Britt was a lawyer, is that right?”
“Yes,” Abby said, and nothing more. She seemed uninterested in the conversation.
“So you have Doyle and Martin James—”
“And Becks Towson, don’t forget him.”
D’Agostino shivered. “I’d like to, but that would be really dumb. He’s too dangerous.”
We thought for a while. I got up from the table and refilled our coffee cups. Abby declined a refill, instead filling the cup nearly halfway with straight rum. She moved away from us to go sit on one of D’Agostino’s well-worn leather couches and sipped contentedly from the mug. When I took my seat again, my knee brushed against Laura’s, and she pressed her leg against me. She was wearing a pair of boxer shorts and a green and gold UAB tee and nothing else. It looked great on her. It felt good to be there in her space, feeling her move gently against me.
