Murders & Romance, page 20
Pete was looking over his handiwork one last time when the doorbell sounded. He nearly jumped out of his skin.
He rushed to the door and swung it open. For one single perfect moment, all of his anxiety melted away when Jada smiled at him.
He took her hand and kissed her cheek as he ushered her inside.
“I’m sorry, we’re late.”
“No, you’re not. You’re right on time.”
He smiled and looked her over. She was wearing a burgundy-colored dress that matched the shade of her lipstick and gave her a modest, chaste look. The kind of dress one might wear to impress the mother of the man you were dating.
“You look beautiful.”
“Thanks.”
“Hey, Pete.”
“Hey, Charlie, how’s it going? Up top.”
He raised his hand, and Charlie reached up and high-fived him.
“It’s going okay.”
The kid glanced around the entryway where Julieta stood nearby. Pete noticed Mateo hung further back, quietly watching everything.
“Jada, Charlie… this is my mother, Julieta Vega. Mamá, this is Jada Lopez and her son Charlie.”
“Hello, Señora Vega. It’s so nice to finally meet you. Pete says the sweetest things about you all the time.”
Jada shook Julieta’s hand.
“Well. My Pedro is a sweet boy.”
Julieta glanced at him, and Pete’s cheeks turned warm. He was only grateful that Ike wasn’t there yet to witness his embarrassment.
“Y esto debe ser...?”
And this must be?
Julieta let her question dangle and stared at Charlie, and Pete knew his mother was testing to see if the child knew any Spanish. Not embracing one’s culture was a deep-seated pet peeve of Julieta’s. She had always insisted on speaking their mother tongue in the house when he and Paulina were growing up.
“Yo soy Carlos. Pero prefiero Charlie.”
I am Carlos. But I prefer Charlie.
Julieta smiled broadly, and Pete knew Charlie’s perfect Spanish had just helped Jada clear a major hurdle where his mother was concerned.
“Welcome Charlie. It’s good to meet you.” Julieta gestured to where Mateo was hovering near the living room. “This is my grandson, Mateo. He’s just a couple of years older than you, but I think you’ll be great friends.”
She motioned for Mateo to come closer.
Mateo stepped over to them and gave Charlie a half-hearted wave.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Uh, you two have something in common.” Pete pointed to each of the boys, and in the back of his mind he couldn’t help but notice that his stomach felt so loaded down with bricks. He understood it. In his heart, he knew that this first meeting between the boys was every bit as important as the meeting of his mother and Jada. He wanted it to go well.
He needed it to go well.
“Charlie loves anime. And Mateo, you love comics.”
“That’s not exactly the same thing, Uncle Pete.”
Mateo gave him a deadpan stare.
“Well, no. But Charlie’s favorite show is My Hero Academia. And I know for a fact that you like that show too, and you’ve used it as inspiration for your own comics.”
He turned to Charlie. “Mateo likes to draw his own comic books. They’re really good! Mateo, why don’t you show him?”
He knew he was working too hard, and he could tell by the expression of horror on Mateo’s face that the kid didn’t appreciate being put on the spot. Pete opened his mouth to say something else and the doorbell sounded.
“Oh, thank God,” he huffed under his breath. “Excuse me.”
He hurried to the door and whipped it open.
Ike and Sidney smiled at him.
Okay, Sidney smiled. Ike just looked annoyed, which was normal.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” he whispered and waved them inside.
He ushered them into the living room, where the awkward silence greeted him like a dear invited guest.
“Ike and Sidney, you know Jada and Charlie, of course. But this is my mother, Julieta Vega, and my nephew, Mateo.”
Ike waved. “Good to meet you, ma’am.”
Sidney gave Jada a friendly hug and then shook Julieta’s hand, and Pete was instantly glad of the warmth she brought with her. Small talk seemed to be a specialty of hers, and it didn’t take long before she had his mother laughing at some comment she’d made.
Pete marveled as he watched her. To him, Sid and Ike were total opposites. A true odd couple. In fact, he often wondered what the heck she was doing with his weird partner in the first place.
But what did he know? They said opposites attract, didn’t they?
“Well, something smells delicious, Pete,” Jada said.
“Yes! Dinner is ready, so if you guys want to move to the kitchen.”
“Finally. I’m starving.” Mateo grumbled.
Pete shot him a look.
Julieta led them all to the kitchen, and Jada took Pete’s arm, pulling him to the side.
“Take a breath, Pete.”
“Huh?”
“It’s going to be fine. The boys. Your mom. It’s all going to be okay. So take a breath and calm down.”
“Are my nerves that obvious?”
“I feel like you’re going to explode at any minute.”
Pete laughed out loud.
“Okay, I get it. I know something that might help though.”
“What’s that?”
He leaned in and kissed her lips, his tongue gently teasing hers.
“I wanted to do that when I first opened the door, but we had an audience then.”
Jada smiled and touched his face.
Then he took her hand and led her to the kitchen with the others.
Earlier, when he was cooking, he’d watched as Mateo helped his mother put the removable leaf into the center of the round kitchen table, instantly enlarging it. Then he’d helped Mateo bring the extra chairs up from the basement. The furniture wasn’t fancy, but it was homey and comfortable and real.
Just like the meal he’d prepared.
Everyone took their seats and Pete noticed that Isaac looked extremely uncomfortable — shoulders hunched, elbows in close to his sides like he didn’t want to risk touching anyone.
“Mateo.”
When his nephew looked up at him, Pete used his hand to motion for him to scoot his chair a little to the left.
“What?”
Pete shot him a don’t-argue-just-do-what-I’m-telling-you glare, and gestured again.
Mateo glanced to his right and looked Isaac over.
“Ohh. You’re the weird partner Uncle Pete is always fussing about, aren’t you?”
Everything inside of Pete stopped — heart, blood, breath — done.
Heat radiated from his shoulders to his ears, and he knew that he had to be red as a tomato.
I’m gonna freaking kill that kid!
The thought floated through his mind just as Ike looked from Mateo to Pete, and back to Mateo again.
Mortified.
Pete was completely mortified.
“Yeah, that would be me,” Ike said, nodding at Mateo.
Mateo scooted his chair to the left.
Ike scooted his chair to the right, closer to Sidney. Then he looked back at Mateo and grinned.
“Thanks for the extra room.”
“Sure.”
Pete exhaled and turned to the food on the stove.
“So why don’t you like to be touched?” Mateo asked.
Pete swiveled back around.
“Mateo!”
“What?”
The kid looked genuinely innocent and curious, and Pete wanted to throttle him.
“It’s all right, Pete.” Isaac quietly cleared his throat and looked at Mateo. “Um, the simplest explanation is that… well, I um…”
“He has a condition that makes him super sensitive to physical touch. It’s really rare.”
Sidney jumped to Isaac’s rescue with an explanation that sounded more like a medical condition than psychic one, and Pete watched his partner heave a silent sigh of relief.
Mateo studied Ike for a moment longer, looking him over once more as if trying to spot the condition for himself.
“Cool.”
Pete shook his head and went back to his task.
“Is it true you live next door to Jada and Charlie?”
“That is true. We live right next door to each other.” Isaac nodded, and Pete glanced over, wondering why Mateo was questioning Ike so much.
“That’s actually how I met your uncle, Mateo,” Jada chimed in. “At Ike and Sidney’s house warming party a few months ago.”
Mateo nodded, staring at her stone faced. “So it’s their fault.”
Quiet descended over the table, and Pete turned to see everyone looking uncomfortable.
“That was a joke,” Mateo mumbled. He looked down at the table with a jeez-lighten-up glint to his eyes.
Isaac laughed and shot Mateo a look of appreciation that told Pete he liked the kid’s dark humor. Relief ran through Pete, and he carried food to the table.
He placed large platters and serving dishes of the meat, rice, beans, and tostones in the center of the table.
“We don’t stand on ceremony around here. Please help yourselves. All I ask is that you try some of everything.” He looked up at Ike. “I’m talking to you, Ike.”
“Have you met me? You should know by now that I like to eat. I’ll try anything.”
Pete filled everyone’s glasses with fresh lemonade before he finally sat down. Conversation stopped once all plates were full and everybody dug in. Pete glanced around the table, waiting for reactions.
“Wow. This is really good.”
“Thank you, Sidney.”
“Why am I eating raisins and green olives together in ground meat and thinking it’s delicious?” Ike asked the question with the most serious of expressions as he examined his food, and Pete couldn’t help but laugh.
“Because it is!”
“It’s the sweet and salty together. It works somehow.” Sidney nodded, agreeing with him. “What is this called?”
“It’s called picadillo. Very flavorful, but very simple. You’ll find variations of it all through Latin American cuisine. I love it over rice, like this. But it can also be used as a filling in pastelillos, or empanadas.”
“Pastelillos are the best!” Mateo exclaimed.
“My gramma makes those,” Charlie chimed in. “They’re so good.”
Pete was ecstatic to see the boys agree on something.
Jada looked at Pete, a sly smile on her face. “You cooked this?”
“I did.”
“No way.”
Her smile did things to him.
“I may not be as good a cook as you, or as mamá, but I know my way around a kitchen. Mamá made sure of that, right?”
He smiled at his mother.
“It was the only way I could be sure you wouldn’t starve once you moved out of the house.”
“And I learned from the best cook in the world.”
He winked at her. He was buttering his mother up, and she knew it. But he loved the proud smile on her face.
“Well, I would love any tips or recipes you’d care to share, Señora Vega.” Jada said. “Pete raves about your cooking all the time. I do okay in the kitchen, but I’m always looking to improve.”
“Oh, I’m sure you do just fine.”
Was Pete mistaken, or did he feel a frost moving in?
“Ah, well, Jada has a lot on her plate besides cooking, mamá. She works full time for a doctor’s office downtown. She’s the head nurse there; she oversees the other nurses and acts as the office manager. And on top of all that, she’s a great mom to Charlie.”
Charlie nodded in agreement as he chewed.
“Pete, stop. You’re making me sound like a saint.”
“Well, no, I just mean…”
“We know what you mean. And trust me, no one is as great as you just made me sound. But I do appreciate it.”
She smiled at him, and Pete’s insides turned into a gooey sticky mess.
“So, Isaac, Pedro tells me that the two of you will be getting a commendation for stopping a crime while you were off duty. What is this about?”
“Oh, well, a few weeks ago Pete and I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. It was a sexual assault in progress. I guess the victim said some nice things about us when she gave her statement, and that prompted our Lieutenant to recommend us for the award.”
Pete listened to Ike roll out the explanation like nothing extraordinary had happened that night. Like it hadn’t been his psychic abilities that had led them to the crime in question.
“Where did that happen?” Mateo asked.
“It was outside a bar on the east side,” Ike continued.
“I thought Uncle Pete said you don’t drink alcohol.”
“I don’t drink alcohol anymore.”
“Then what were you doing at a bar?”
“We’d gotten a tip,” Pete jumped in. “About this guy, the one that was about to commit the crime. We got a tip about him.”
It wasn’t a lie. They had gotten a tip. A tip from Ike’s psychic abilities.
“But how, if you were off duty at the time?”
“You are full of questions tonight. Eat your dinner.”
Mateo made a face and turned back to his dinner plate.
“So this award?” Julieta resumed her earlier line of questioning. “There is a ceremony we can attend, yes?”
“Usually, yes, ma’am. There’s a ceremony twice a year where they hand out those things and invite the officer’s family and loved ones. The officer gets a certificate he can frame and a medal in a fancy little box to display. And the tiny bar pin that comes with the medal looks impressive on the dress uniform.”
“Ah. I bet Pedro will look very handsome with the bar on his dress uniform.”
“You know, I just bet he will.”
Isaac grinned at him, and Pete rolled his eyes. Whose idea was it to invite his annoying partner to dinner anyway?
“Yeah, like when you got that commendation for saving the drowning kid at Lake Erie,” Pete pointed out. Turnabout was fair play after all.
“You did?” Mateo asked.
“Oh. Well, it was just a freak thing, really. Sidney and I were boating with my brother and sister-in-law when I saw these two kids on another boat fall over into the water. I just dove in and helped, that’s all.”
“Don’t be so modest, Ike.” Sidney touched his arm and looked at Mateo. “He swam nearly 175 yards out to where the boy had drifted, and pulled him back to the boat. Then he administered CPR to get the boy breathing again.”
“Whoa!” Mateo looked at Ike with big, round eyes.
“That’s almost two football fields!” Charlie sounded just as shocked.
Sidney nodded.
“Sidney exaggerates.” Ike looked at her and shook his head. “It was really only a few kilometers or so.”
“Don’t listen to him.” Pete grinned. “He’s just trying to protect his secret identity. See, he doesn’t know that he can fully trust you two yet.”
“Pete…”
Isaac’s tone held a warning of some kind, Pete was sure of it. But he couldn’t let the moment slip away from him. One good tease deserved another, didn’t it?
“It’s okay, Ike. They’re cool. You can tell them who you really are.”
Isaac sat back in his chair and eyed Pete.
“Who is he, Pete?” Charlie asked, sounding properly intrigued.
Pete sent Isaac a grin that said, ‘I win’, and Isaac glowered at him.
“Boys, you are looking at… Super Cop!”
“Super Cop?” Mateo’s tone indicated he was clearly unimpressed.
“That’s right. Ike here holds the highest closed case record in the entire Cleveland Police Department.”
“What’s that mean?” Charlie asked.
“That means that Ike has successfully closed more cases than any other detective in the city.”
“Really?” Mateo was now slightly impressed.
“Yep.” Pete answered.
Mateo looked at Ike. “So you solved more cases than anybody?”
Isaac sighed. “So they tell me. I don’t keep track.”
“How’d you do it?”
“How?”
“Were your psychic powers involved?”
A cannonball struck Pete in the gut.
Damn that kid and his questions, questions, questions!
“Psychic powers?”
Jada, Charlie, and his mom all spoke at once, and Pete just wanted to shrink down into the chair, slip away under the table and go hide. This is what he got for sharing things with his nephew.
Ike and Sidney looked at each other.
“You’re psychic?” Jada stared at Isaac. Then she looked at Sidney. “He’s psychic?”
“I’m really sorry, partner.” Pete glared at Mateo. “I guess I never told Mateo that you didn’t want the entire world to know.”
“Oops.” Mateo turned contrite eyes at Ike. “Sorry.”
Isaac set his fork down and reached over to take Sidney’s hand. They shared a look, and Pete finally began to realize that Sid was like an anchor for his strange partner. Opposites or not, she gave him something he needed. Something he lacked. And Pete suddenly understood the mystery of their connection.
Isaac made Sidney brave.
Sidney made Isaac whole.
“It’s all right.” Isaac glanced around the table. “Psychic is not a word I fancy. But unfortunately, it is the word that best describes it. And yes,” he looked at Mateo. “A lot of times my… abilities play a big role in my job.”
There was dead silence around the table and Pete really wanted to kill Mateo for making Ike uncomfortable.
“As long as you continue to watch out for my Pedro, I don’t care that you have the sight.” Julieta smiled at him.
“The sight. I haven’t heard anyone but my grandfather use that term.”
“That’s what we called it in the olden times,” Julieta laughed and then she looked Ike in the eyes. “La vista. La vista de la oscuridad? O la vista de la luz? Which one do you possess, Detective?”
Pete could only describe Isaac’s expression perplexed.
