Kitabı oku: «Straight Silver», sayfa 2
The club was quiet. Peak patron time was hours from now. A thin-haired man sat at the bar, stirring his drink with his pinkie, more interested in the clear liquid than the women dancing on the catwalk. A woman in her cruel forties slapped a cardboard coaster down as I slid onto a stool.
“Ginger ale.” Elixir of the reformed.
She brought the drink, cast me a resigned look and waited. Thirty-one-year-old community college coeds, even ex-strippers, don’t stop in at Club Oyster at the end of the day for a soft drink.
“I was a friend of Della Devine’s.” I held out my hand. “Silver LeGrande.”
A flash of recognition sparked in her pale eyes. She took my hand, didn’t give me her name, but she left my money on the bar. “I heard you left Billie.” Her gaze took me in and spit me out. “You looking for a gig here?”
I shook my head. “I’m going to college.”
She nodded, no expression. Enough years behind a bar and you heard it all. She wiped the counter. “Sorry about your friend.”
“Were you here this morning?”
Her eyes lifted to mine. “My shift doesn’t start until noon. As it was, by the time the cops got done scouring this place, we didn’t open until four.” She looked around. “Not that it matters. Something like this scares people. Business will be off for a while.”
“Police said the cleaning woman found her.”
“Cindy.”
A calico cat jumped on the bar. I started. The bartender backhanded the cat off the counter with a surprisingly elegant swat.
“Damn stray. Throw it out every night, but the girls keep feeding it, leaving it milk.” The bartender moved away and, with a similar grace, grabbed a bottle, poured another several clear inches into the empty glass of the man at the bar with the pinkie swizzle stick.
“Cindy works mornings. She doesn’t know many of the girls,” the woman said as she came back to me. “Couldn’t reach the manager. Called 911.
“Police said the woman saw the tattoo. Made her remember Della’s name.”
“Della Devine.” The woman smiled, her bridge work not bad. “I liked that name.”
I smiled back. “Me, too.”
“Police had Cindy find her file to see if there was family, friend, somebody to contact.” The woman paused. “Silver LeGrande,” she pronounced with the same surprising elegance she’d used to backhand the cat off the counter.
I sipped my ginger ale. “Did you know Della?”
“I knew her, but I usually work the early shift. She danced second shift. Better money.”
“How ’bout the other girls?”
The woman shrugged. “Sure, the late-night girls knew her. They’ll be coming in all shook up for a while, sipping something strong between sets. The ones that called in to see if we were open tonight said she was a good kid.”
“I heard she had her problems.”
The woman’s second shrug said, “Don’t we all?’
“Some of the girls will be here in a couple hours. They might be able to tell you more.” I couldn’t fault the woman for clamming up. Self-preservation comes before sympathy.
“What about them?” I looked at the girls working the poles. “They know Della?”
“Lucy worked with her.” The bartender tipped her head toward a blonde, her breasts disproportionate to narrow hips and fireplace-poker legs. “The other girl hasn’t been here that long.”
“Anybody else called? Been by? Family maybe?”
“You and the cops. That’s it.”
I finished my ginger ale and felt forlorn even with bubbles up my nose.
“Get you something else?”
I snapped the rubber band against my wrist. Two years ago I’d been on the cusp of being a drunk. Some people twelve-stepped their way out. I’d snapped myself sober. Today the skin above my pulse was a mean black and blue.
“Thought I’d wait around, maybe talk to Lucy when she goes on break.”
“I’ll send her over.” The woman walked away.
“The girls have lockers? Some place to store their stuff in the dressing room?”
The woman turned back to me. “There’s a few lockers. Not enough for everyone on the busy nights. The girls share.”
“Mind if I take a look?”
“Don’t know that you’ll find much, but go ahead. Police have already been in there, but that don’t mean squat. Strung-out stripper strangled with her own G-string. The boys downtown have probably already chalked it up to karma.”
She was probably right. I doubted even Officer Serras with his sheet-smoothing hands would lose any sleep tonight over Della Divine.
The back room smelled of smoke and hairspray. Three wooden tables with large rectangle mirrors were covered with makeup bottles, hairspray cans, brushes. A stained couch occupied one corner. The coffee table in front of it was littered with overflowing ashtrays. The lockers were a line of five, industrial brown and scratched. The first held an oversize man’s shirt, a black bowtie and a cowboy hat. Two whips and a dog collar hung in the second one. It was a stroll down memory lane. I didn’t even know what I was looking for. If there had been any clues, some cop in the crime lab was earning his daily wage going over them now. I opened the third locker, peered inside. It felt better than doing nothing. On a hook hung a long red wig.
“Jane said you wanted to see me.”
I jumped, hit my head on the door edge, and swore like a sailor. A girl slumped into a seedy-looking chair in the corner, lit a cigarette, exhaled. She crossed her bony legs, her foot swinging. She’d seen me jump like a scared rabbit. She was one up on me, and she knew it.
“Silver LeGrande.” Emergency contact.
“Lucy.” She didn’t give a last name. “Jane says you knew Della?”
“We worked together at Billie’s.”
“You dance at Billie’s?”
“Used to.”
“Where do you dance now?”
“I don’t. I’m going to school.”
“What for?”
“I want to be an accountant.”
The girl studied me with a half-lidded gaze. Her robe was loose, adding an untidy air about her. She was much younger up close than on the stage. She inhaled, exhaled, didn’t offer up anything.
“How well did you know Della?” I asked her.
“We weren’t bosom buddies.” The words were tough. So was the girl’s face. Caring cost you in a club.
“You work the second shift?”
“Usually. I’m pulling a double tonight, filling in for one of the regular girls who got spooked by the whole deal.”
“What happened didn’t scare you?”
“I got three kids to feed.” The girl inhaled hard. “The show goes on.” She tapped an ash, ground it into the worn carpet with her foot.
“I heard she was pretty broken up about her brother’s death.”
“First I heard about it.”
“He was run over by a train few months back. Over near Fort Grant where he was stationed.”
The girl dragged on her cigarette until the end burned hot orange.
“Something like that, well, it could make a person…” I waited for Lucy to fill in the blanks. She didn’t. I tried to make it easy for her. “She was using when I knew her.”
The girl shrugged. “I’d seen worse.”
So had I. “You know why she came here?”
“The ambiance.” The girl gave a tight smile, proud of herself.
“Anybody she was seeing?”
The girl stood and went to the washroom.
“Maybe somebody special?”
“Yeah, they line up at the door here to sweep us off our feet.” I heard a small hiss as she pitched her cigarette into the toilet.
“How about any of the customers? Maybe one of the regulars? Someone who likes to get rough?”
Lucy came back into the room, plopped herself down at a dressing table, started applying blush with force. She caught my gaze in the mirror. “I already answered all these questions earlier for the police. What are you looking for anyway?”
I told her the truth. “I don’t know.”
I had surprised her this time. She smiled. For a moment she was just a young girl enjoying a grin. She reached for a hairbrush. “We worked together, that’s pretty much it. She was pretty tight-lipped, didn’t go around giving you her life story like there was some fat chance you’d be interested.”
“How about the other girls? Anyone she hung out with outside of work?”
“This is a strip club. Not a sorority house.” Lucy got up, went over to the lockers. “Listen, I wish I had something to give ya, but I don’t. There’s a lot of freaks out there. It happens every day.”
She opened a locker door, took out a fresh pack of cigarettes.
“So last night just happened to be Della’s turn?”
The girl glanced at me over her shoulder. No one had thought of me as naive for a long time…until now. “You got a better explanation?”
“Not yet.”
The girl gave a crooked smile, slammed the locker door. “I gotta get to work.” She opened the fresh pack of cigarettes, tapped one out and lit it. She didn’t move.
“Della was always bumming cigarettes off everybody at Billie’s. She do that to you?”
The girl went to the couch, sat on its edge. She crossed her legs and eyed me through the smoke. “Yeah, she was a pain like that.”
“She was always trying to quit.” I went on, hoping I’d hit a nerve. “Thought if she didn’t buy ’em, she wouldn’t smoke ’em.” Della flashed too real in my memory.
“Yeah, she did that here, too. Never helped her none. Don’t matter much now, anyway, does it?”
I couldn’t hold my gaze anymore on the girl with the swinging foot and the slack robe. I turned to leave.
“She used to let a lot of the girls borrow money though. She do that at Billie’s?”
I stopped, nodded.
“She’d never harass them about paying her back. She was good like that.” The girl tapped the ash off her cigarette and looked at me. “It was as if she didn’t care about the money.”
“You know anything she did care about?”
Lucy leaned forward and set the cigarette in the ashtray. She picked up a cosmetic bag, took out a lip pencil. “She was meeting someone last night. After her shift.” She lined her lips as she talked.
“You know who?”
She smacked her lips together twice. I snapped my rubber band.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t eavesdropping or anything like that. I came into the dressing room and heard her talking on the phone. Whoever it was, she was telling them she’d meet them after work.”
I schooled my features, concealing any excitement. Lucy could be playing me, after all. Some girls have a natural mean streak.
“Did you tell this to the police?”
“I’m telling you.”
“Why?”
“You go to college. You’re a smart woman.” Lucy picked up her cigarette. She took a long draw, stubbed it out and stood.
I found a pen, ripped a blank page out of my pocket planner which was easy since all the pages were blank. I scribbled numbers down. “This is my cell, this is my house.” I heard the hope in my voice and didn’t even care. I held out the paper to Lucy. “Just in case you or maybe one of the other girls wants to get in touch with me.”
She folded the paper, slipped it inside the cigarette pack’s cellophane wrapper. Ten chances to one it’d be thrown away with the empty pack, but those odds were all I had. I’d take them.
On my way home, I called the number Serras had given me.
“Serras.”
“LeGrande.” I answered as an equal. “What’s the current status on the Devine case?” Lesson I learned long ago—fake it and most people will follow your lead.
“We’re about to crack it wide open, doll face.”
Serras wasn’t most people. He was police.
“You find any family?”
The pause told me Serras was deciding exactly where I fit in. Not easy to waylay a cop. They’re paid to see right through you.
“How ’bout you?” He came back at me.
“What about me?”
“You got something for me? You learn anything at the Oyster you’d like to share?”
So they were cruising the Oyster. Good for them, although the manpower and case’s stature wouldn’t let it go on for more than a day or two.
“Yeah, I got a lecture on ‘life is a bitch’ from a chicken-legged number named Lucy.”
He chuckled. “You’re one up on us.”
“Trying to make me feel better?”
“No.”
I hadn’t thought so. I debated telling him about the phone call Della had made. Only because he’d tucked Della in as if wishing her sweet dreams.
“I did learn one thing.” Or maybe because I remembered his backside rumba and appreciated the effort. Still I was going to make him bite. A girl had to have standards.
Two seconds of silence passed until I heard “I’m here.”
I’d take it. “Della was heard making plans to meet someone after work.”
Another silence. “And?”
“That’s it.”
Serras wasn’t the type to sigh. He was the type to swear. Professionalism prevented him from doing either. Maybe Billie was wrong. Maybe Serras had decided to play by the rules. Damn waste of man if that was the case.
“I appreciate the vital information, Ms. LeGrande.”
He had a right to sound sarcastic. The tip had lost something in the translation. Still it was something for an ex-stripper, dyslexic, college coed on her first murder case.
“What do you got for me?”
He chuckled. He was warming up.
“There was a brother—”
“I knew that by lunch.” I took a turn at the sarcasm.
“Then you know he was recently killed.”
“A train hit him.”
“Investigation ruled it an accident.”
“This one won’t be so neat and tidy, though, will it, Detective?
“We’re trying to locate the grandmother through Social Services. If the adoption was never formal, there’ll be no formal record of it. We did find the victim’s birth record. No history found yet on the name listed under father.”
“What about the mother?”
“Last-known address showed nothing. No other listing has come up yet. She might have remarried, moved away. We’re still looking.”
“So far, a dead end, then?”
He shouldn’t have hesitated.
“C’mon, Serras, I gave you something.” I said it as if I believed that would work.
“You gave me nothing, LeGrande.”
“Okay, if I do find out something more, you get it first. Deal?”
“What exactly is your interest here?”
“Emergency contact.”
I liked his laugh.
“All right. One of the neighbors saw a guy leaving the victim’s apartment this morning. We ran the description of the man and the make of the car. We’re talking to him now.”
“Who is he?”
Serras didn’t answer.
“I could know him. Might know something about him that you guys could use.”
I was thinking up another lure to get Serras to give up the information when he said, “Name is Paul Chumsky.”
It was my turn to pause.
“You know him?”
“Sort of.”
Serras waited. I was becoming impressed by the man’s patience.
“I was married to him.”
Chapter Three
I figure everyone is entitled to one major mistake per lifetime. Mine was Paul Chumsky.
I got to the station and found Serras. He was looking as if he should have one of those warning stickers on him: Caution: Extremely Flammable Contents. May Spontaneously Ignite. Obviously Serras didn’t like surprises.
“You were married to Paul Chumsky?”
“I kept my own name.” Nobody queues up for strippers named Silver Chumsky. “You think Paul had something to do with Della’s death?”
“We’re asking him a few questions.”
Della may have been on a downward spiral, and Paul could have been riding shotgun, but murder? It wasn’t Paul’s style. Too messy. The final residue of the matrimonial sacrament kicked in. “Paul’s not a murderer.”
A drunk, yes. An unfaithful husband, definitely.
“That’s what he says. Says the victim and he had dinner at her place before her shift. She suggested he hang out. If it was a slow night, she’d get off early and they could get together back at the apartment. She’d give him a call from the club.”
“You already knew she was planning on meeting someone after work?” So much for my hot tip.
“I figured you were trying to impress me.”
“Would it be that easy?”
“No.” Serras’s glance told me I was getting under his skin. At this point, a win-win situation any way I looked at it.
“Said he waited at her apartment. Said he was pretty tired.”
Interpretation: Paul’s happy hour had started at noon instead of three. Youth, brashness and a slightly above-average talent had gotten my ex-husband to the semipro golf circuit, but he’d lacked the discipline and true genius to go further. When I met him, he’d had one mediocre season and knew it was his last. When I found myself pregnant, he proposed to me in what I always figured was one last desperate stab at immortality. He wasn’t with me when I lost the baby, but when I told him, it was the first time I’d seen a man cry. We lasted two years. We weren’t friends but we weren’t enemies. We just weren’t meant to be. Last I heard he was the resident pro over at the Meadows, a country club for Memphis moneybags. An ex-stripper with an ex-husband who’s an ex-semipro. If life were a tic-tac-toe game, I’d have it made.
“Claims he must’ve fallen asleep because next thing he remembers is waking up on Ms. Devine’s divan.”
A cop who could be cute. Serras was getting under my skin.
“He doesn’t remember anything else.”
Since my husband’s idea of sobriety is adding lime to his tequila shooters, for once he could be telling the truth. Blackouts can do that to you. I knew.
“He has a lawyer?” Ex or not, the man had rights—just not in my bed anymore.
“He hasn’t been charged with anything yet.”
Police lingo for “no evidence.” “You’ve got nothing to hold him?”
“He’s got no alibi.”
“And no motive.”
“He’s nervous. He put in a call to Michael Kingsley’s office. They sent an associate down to hold his hand.”
I raised an eyebrow. Michael Kingsley was a high-priced mouthpiece to white-collar criminals. Not washed-up golf semipros.
“So, maybe Della’s murder is more than an unfortunate incident?”
“Let’s just say, your ex-husband has already phoned for a ride home.”
“Can I see him?”
“Why?”
Cops. Always a question. “Catch up on old times.”
Five foot eleven ex-strippers. Always an answer.
Serras cocked his head toward the benches in the hall on either side of the front desk. “You can wait, but he might be a while.”
“Not if Michael Kingsley has his back and you guys have nothing on him but a sleepover.”
Serras assessed me with a lean gaze and looking as good as an underwear ad. “What’s your stake in this, LeGrande?”
I tried to decide if behind that hooded gaze I was a suspect. “You mean besides the fact my ex-husband was sleeping with a friend of mine who was murdered last night?”
He added another weapon. Silence.
Suddenly I felt truly tired. “Maybe it’s just a small, small world after all, Serras.”
A door opened. A group of men came into the hall. I saw Paul before he saw me. He was tan, fit, looking like a vote for the charmed life except for the puffiness around his eyes and a viciousness in his gaze that only a hangover and being held by the police could cause.
“Somebody else here to give you a ride, Chumsky.” Serras said as the group approached.
“Popular fellow,” one of the cops in the group remarked.
Paul turned, gave me the good smile that told me I’d already given him a ride. I didn’t smile back. Being reminded what a chump I’d been makes me testy.
My ex-husband dismissed his hotshot lawyer and came toward me. He stood too close. The viciousness left his face. “Hey.” His voice was low and for a moment, I forgave myself for falling in love with him once. I turned my head as he leaned toward me. His mouth fell onto my hair instead of my flesh with its still-intact nerve endings. I can be suckered by dogs, children and fools—but at least I know it.
“Good to see you still care, Silver,” he murmured into my hair.
“Don’t go getting all sloppy on me, Paul. What do you know about Della’s death?” I whispered.
“Nothing.”
I pulled away.
“Heard you got a new gig, Silver.”
Yeah. Emergency contact. I glanced at Serras and the others watching us.
Paul turned to them. “Am I done here, gentlemen?”
“Make sure you stay where we can find you, Chumsky,” a cop built like a side of beef said.
Paul raked his gaze over the cop, stopping at the skinny red scratches on his forearms. “She must have been a hellcat.”
The cop took a step. Serras put a halting hand on the man’s arm, across the scratches.
“Take your ex-husband home, LeGrande,” Serras advised.
I pushed Paul toward the door. We reached the exit, stepped out into the moist heat.
“Still the charmer.” I gave him that much.
“It’s a gift.”
“Pretty impressive legal counsel.”
“Kingsley plays at the club. I cut ten strokes off his game. He’s grateful.” Paul smiled. If an actor, he would have been cast as a gigolo or a second-rate hood. “You look good, Silver.”
“I didn’t come here for compliments.”
“Why did you come here?”
Good question.
“Feeling guilty?”
That’s the problem with marriage. People get to know you.
“You’re not responsible for Della’s death, Silver.”
“Then who is?”
“The police are trying to find out.”
“Della was a stripper who snorted in her off hours. The only family that has come up was run over by a train several months ago. They won’t even have her buried before the case comes off the role call, and you know it.”
“Listen, all I can tell you is Della and I used to get together, have a few laughs. Yesterday afternoon, we’d gotten together. She said she was going to try and get off early at the club. Why not stick around? I waited. When she didn’t call, I fell asleep.”
I stopped short. “Della didn’t call you?”
Paul gave me the same patient look he’d given me the first time I’d told him I wanted a divorce.
“It’s been a long day, Silver. C’mon, we’ll pick up my car, and I’ll buy you some dinner.”
“One of the girls that worked at the Oyster overheard Della make a phone call last night from the club to meet someone after work.”
“She probably did call me. I fell asleep and didn’t hear the phone.”
“Was there a message on her answering machine this morning?”
“Now that you mention it, it was beeping.”
He was lying. That marriage-getting-to-know-someone deal is a two-way street.
“C’mon.” He smiled. “You can interrogate me over Italian.”
Translation: pasta for me, a bottle of burgundy for Paul. But he was hiding something and I wanted to know what. I stretched out my rubber band to the point of breaking, let it go.
“Dino’s is still good,” I suggested.
“Fine,” Paul agreed. Food wasn’t his primary concern anyway.
We headed to my car. Paul folded himself into the compact. “How’s Aunt Peggilee?” He put on the country club charm.
“She’s at Margarita Mania at the Elks.”
Paul went all teeth. “She’s a live one, your aunt Peggilee.”
I had to agree.
“I thought Della was yanking my chain when she told me you left Billie’s for higher education.”
His sidelong gaze told me he was picturing me in a short plaid pleated skirt and loafers with ankle socks. Paul liked fantasy in and out of the bedroom.
“She might have been yanking some things of yours, but that was the truth. When you’d two get together anyway?”
“Met up with her one night at Silky’s downtown about six months ago. She was finishing her night. I was just starting mine.” He looked out over the dash. “Two old friends, that’s all. She’d call me every now and then. If I was free, we’d get together, have a few drinks, a few laughs.” He looked at me. “When’s the last you’d seen her?”
I steered into a one-way street. “A while.”
“She’d mention you now and then. She was all gung-ho on getting out herself.”
“Leaving Billie’s to go to the Oyster wasn’t exactly the direct route.”
We picked up his car. I insisted on separate cars. He followed me to the restaurant. Inside, the dim lights and the candles flicking in Chianti bottles made all the waiters look soulful. We were ushered to a round table for two. I ordered eggplant; Paul ordered a bottle of burgundy. I began another bruise on my wrist.
“After her brother’s death…” Paul shook his head. “Della wasn’t having an easy time with it.”
“Billie told me about it. Said police ruled it an accident.”
Paul said nothing, watched for the wine.
“Auntie says there is no such thing as an accident.”
The wine came with the bread.
“Is that what you think?” Paul tasted the wine. Satisfaction smoothed out his face.
I shrugged. “All I know is Della’s dead, and a few months earlier her brother dies also.”
Paul took another large swallow. “Coincidence.”
“Auntie doesn’t believe in coincidence, either.”
Paul smiled closemouthed, raised his glass. “To Auntie.”
“How was Della really, Paul?”
“You know Della. She always liked a good time, but when I caught up with her, after her brother’s death…” he stopped, drank. “Sometimes it stops being fun.”
Been there. Paul had never left. Della had. The hard way.
“Did she talk about it? Her brother’s death?”
“No.” He poured another glass of wine, drank half of it. I pushed the basket of bread toward him. He ignored it.
“She never said anything about it?”
I met his gaze hard. His pupils dilated. Could be the booze. Or he could be lying. Both, I decided.
“Maybe, once in awhile. After a night of it, when the speed was wearing off but the shakes hadn’t set in yet. Problem with junkies. If they don’t cut it with booze, they get high-strung.”
My ex-husband, lifestyle coach.
“What’d she say?”
He waved his glass. “The usual.”
“What would that be?”
“How unfair it was, what a good kid he was, how it should have been her,” Paul singsonged.
Last night it was, I thought. The waiter set my antipasto before me. I popped a cherry tomato, chewed a hot pepper until tears blurred my gaze. My ex-husband drank. Things were beginning to blur for him, too.
“Why do you think she wanted to see you last night?”
I received the choice smile that put him in the good graces of the country club’s male members and in the firm beds of their wives. “The usual.”
This time I didn’t have to ask him for a definition. Our meals came. Paul ordered another bottle of wine, pushed the pasta around his plate. I hadn’t eaten all day. I finished my salad, entree and several more bread-sticks, heartened by the return of my normal, lusty appetite. Obsessions seem to revolve around three main categories—drugs, sex or food—and presently the last one was the safest for me. Fortunately, at thirty-one, my five-foot-eleven frame with one-eighty curves could handle it for now although I knew it was only a matter of time before things would spread and soften and I’d be left with cats and cross-stitch and the weekly tabloids for relief.
I ordered espresso, Paul a double brandy. Paul was a drunk but he wasn’t a sloppy drunk. I’d never seen him get abusive or belligerent. He just sat up straighter, and I could tell by that gleam in his eyes he believed himself somebody significant. Paul couldn’t have murdered Della Devine.
I finished my espresso, caught the waiter’s eye.
“Another, ma’am?”
“You can bring the check.”
“No rush.” My ex-husband handed his glass to the waiter.
“Another double, sir?”
Paul nodded. “Have another espresso, Silver. It’s not often we get together.”
“That would be because we’re divorced.” I shook my head at the waiter. He left to get Paul’s drink.
“Not by my choice.”
I pushed my chair from the table. “I’ve got an early class tomorrow.”
“And I’ve got an early tee time. One more drink and then we’ll go.”
It was an old refrain, one I’d sung often before, too. Still Della was dead, my ex-husband was a drunk and my dreams were as tenuous as the rubber band on my wrist.
The waiter returned. “Give me another espresso,” I ordered. “Make it a double,” I decided, sounding cavalier, feeling crazed.
Paul’s smile said, “That’s my girl.”
Old husbands like old habits are hard to break.
An hour and a half later, careening on caffeine and Paul unsteady when he stood, we walked to our cars. He’d set his keys on the table when he’d taken out his wallet to pay the bill. I’d lifted them when he’d gone to the men’s room. He was patting his pockets now.
“C’mon, Paul, I’ll give you a ride home. You can pick up your car in the morning.”
He opened his mouth to protest.
“I’ll swing by before class, give you a ride.”
“No need. Just sleep over.”
A drunk is bad enough. A leering drunk was pure sorrow. I might never need another rubber band again. “Let’s get you home.”
“The night’s young, Silver.”
He was right. Eleven forty-five was when the fun began in the clubs. I continued to my car. I looked back. Paul wasn’t following me.
He shrugged, gave me a thin smile. “An empty house. An empty bed.”
An empty bottle, I thought.
“I’m going to hang out a little longer. Give me my keys.”
“You’re in no shape to drive.”
“Sweet that you care, honey, but you aren’t responsible for me any longer.”
“That doesn’t mean I won’t feel guilty if something happens to you.” I unlocked my car and got in. I rolled down the window.
“Admit it. You still care, Sterling.” He used my favorite nickname.
“One funeral per week is my limit.” I started the car. “Last chance.”
He came toward the car, although I knew he wasn’t coming with me. He was beyond persuasion. He leaned down. “Give me a kiss goodbye.”
I took it on the mouth this time. I felt he deserved that much. I watched him walk away, the man I’d once legally vowed to love. He headed toward a neon martini glass with a winking olive.
I WOKE WITH a caffeine headache. Auntie was sitting at the kitchen table with her soy milk and muttering to herself over the day’s stock market report. I poured a cup of black coffee. In for a penny, in for a pound. She let me take a sip before she asked with a skinny gaze, “Where were you last night?”
“Not shimmying to salsa.” Caffeine headache or not, I was mean in the morning. I sat down, instantly contrite. “Sorry.”
