- -
- 100%
- +
“And then it’s stale.”
She nodded urgently as she would at a clever child. “That’s it exactly. And someone has to be in the kitchen to do all that, to spoon it all out and put it on the table. But I cater.”
“You bring it over and spoon it out and put in on the table.”
He might have just suggested that she shot McGaffney herself. She pulled her spine straight again. Somewhere Raphael thought he heard fingernails scraping down a blackboard.
“I prepare on the premises,” she said stiffly.
“You took all this food over there and cooked it for McGaffney, and served it.”
“Yes. I do all the elegance and service and variety of eating out, but in the privacy and comfort of one’s own home.”
“So how much did this cost him?”
“Two hundred and eighty seven dollars. Plus tax.”
Raphael felt his brows climb his forehead. “McGaffney paid three hundred dollars to have dinner at home with Allegra Denise?”
“He did unless his check bounces. What’s wrong?” She didn’t like his expression.
“Why?” he said, almost to himself. “Why would he do that? Did he call you himself to set this up?”
“I don’t remember. But I can tell you in a minute.”
She got up and disappeared down a short hallway. Raphael waited, wondering. Why hadn’t McGaffney just taken Allegra out, especially for that kind of money? Obviously, he had wanted to be alone with her. But why?
Sex came readily to mind. But knowing Allegra, McGaffney would have gotten that regardless. So he must have had something important to discuss with her. Inside word on the Eagan clan?
Kate came back with a notebook. “He called me himself,” she said, waving it at him.
Raphael nodded. “When?”
“Two days ago. On Wednesday at three forty-seven p.m.”
“You wrote down the time?”
“Of course.”
“Why?”
Why not? There was no specific reason for it, but it didn’t hurt to do, and who knew when she might need the information, like now? She stared at him without answering.
Raphael looked at her a moment too long. She made a good witness, but her ingrained sense of perfection was irritating the hell out of him. “Did he say why he wanted to engage your services?”
She seemed to think about it fiercely. “No.”
“Nothing,” Raphael clarified.
“He just said he was having a lady over.”
“Did he say where he had gotten word of your business?”
“No, but I had a great review in the newspaper in June. Ever since then, I’ve been doing four or five dinners a week. I’ve even had to cut back on my hours at the diner.”
“You cook at a diner, too?”
She nodded.
“Why? If you’re doing five of these dinners a week, you’re knocking back maybe fifteen hundred dollars, right?”
“Wrong. That’s before costs. And paying the help. And taxes.”
“Who helped you tonight?”
“No one.”
“Then what does your help do?”
Kate sat back and rubbed her forehead. “Four out of five clients call already knowing what they want. You know, they’ll request lobster or…or just something specific. They call with these silly, preconceived notions of what a gourmet meal should be. If I have to cook to their prerequisites, I can’t always orchestrate it so that I can do the whole thing myself. I can’t be serving if I need to be in the kitchen doing something to whatever’s simmering there. On those occasions, I pay a second pair of hands to serve.”
“How many employees do you have?”
“Two now. They’re on call. If one can’t do it, the other one generally can. Actually, I just hired Beth four days ago.”
Raphael’s antennae twitched. That was convenient. It would bear some looking into. “Beth who?”
“Beth Olivetti.”
“Who’s your other employee?”
“Janaya Thomas. She’s been with me for about two months now.”
“But no one was with you tonight?”
“No. I just told you that. McGaffney gave me carte blanche to prepare whatever I wanted so I could streamline the meal.”
“Okay. Let’s move on to that. To what you did tonight.”
Kate nodded, sitting forward again. She didn’t entirely understand all his questions, but she was beginning to enjoy this—in a matter of speaking. It was intriguing, she admitted, watching him work through what had happened. “I didn’t hear anything.”
His eyes narrowed. “Let me ask the questions, okay?”
“But that was what you were going to ask next, right?”
It had been, but he’d be damned if he’d say so.
“Anyway, I didn’t. I just took the steaks to the dining room and there he was. Splat in the salad.”
“No gunshot.”
“No.”
The killer had used a silencer then, Raphael thought. But she’d been right there in the kitchen, through a solitary door. “What about a…like, pffting sound?”
She thought about it. “I didn’t hear anything like that. But then, there was the matter of the dog.” As soon as the words left her, Kate felt her face go scarlet.
Raphael sat forward, his eyes narrowing sharply. “What dog?”
Kate got to her feet unsteadily. She looked warily at the door, where the little beast had once slept religiously whenever Shawna had gone out. Love, murder and mayhem. Belle had trailed those things behind her like a banner. And she had also saved Shawna’s life.
As she had saved Kate’s tonight.
It had been Belle, Kate realized. Because if she had taken those steaks to the dining room—the first steaks, twelve and a half minutes earlier—she could very well have walked in on the killer. McGaffney’s skin had still been warm when she’d felt for his pulse. He hadn’t been dead long.
Her heart caught, and Kate hit her chest with her fist to start it again. “Uh, I had just finished the steaks,” she explained. “The first steaks, that is. There was a crash. She…this dog…came in through the back door I’d left open. She got up on the center island somehow and stole a steak and knocked one of my plates over. I had to cook two new ones.”
Raphael frowned. “A dog came in and stole a steak.”
“Correct.” She really bit that word off.
“Did McGaffney have a dog?”
“Not that he mentioned.” She bit her lip. “I don’t think it was his.”
“So where did it come from?”
“I just told you that. The back door.”
“Uninvited?”
“Well, I certainly didn’t offer her a nine-dollar-a-pound tenderloin!”
“Maybe it smelled the food.” Raphael frowned. There was more to this, he realized. Unless he badly missed his guess, something really bothered Kate Mulhern about this dog. “Go on.”
Kate shrugged meticulously. “There’s nothing left to say. The whole thing set me behind twelve and a half minutes.”
“Knock it off,” he growled, deciding to get a little rough with her.
Kate flinched a little. “Knock what off?”
“You’re hiding something.”
“I am not!”
“Honey, I’ve been asking questions like this for a lot of years and I know evasion when I see it.” Her eyes wouldn’t quite meet his, he thought. Then she surprised him.
“Okay!” she cried. “Okay. You want to know the truth? I know that dog.”
It wasn’t what he had been expecting. “So you’re saying what—it followed you there or something?”
“Or something.” Then she gave a giddy laugh that bordered on the hysterical. “Four months ago, my roommate was walking to work. Some homeless woman stopped her and gave her a dog. That dog. And while Shawna was trying to figure out what to do with it, she was mugged.”
“Yeah?” Raphael frowned, wondering what this had to do with anything.
“And Gabriel Marsden rescued her.”
“Gabriel Marsden, the writer? The ex-cop?”
“The one who was on the run from that crazed Broadway producer at the time. The producer who was trying to kill him.”
Raphael was starting to get it. A little. He remembered the story. It had captivated newsmongers for broadcasts on end.
“Shawna ended hooking up with him and they spent the better part of two weeks running for their lives.” Kate took a deep breath. “With the same dog I saw tonight.”
Raphael felt dazed. This was turning into the oddest witness interview he’d ever conducted. Why didn’t that surprise him?
“Shawna named her Belle. Belle saved their lives—a couple of times, actually. And then she just disappeared into Manhattan once Gabriel and Shawna had brought the killer down.”
More cop jargon, Raphael thought, wincing.
Kate didn’t tell him that Shawna and Gabriel had become convinced that the Chihuahua was…well, some kind of an angel. “Anyway,” she finished quickly, getting back to McGaffney, “when I went out there the first time, with the appetizers, McGaffney and Allegra were just sitting there talking. And when I took those plates back, I thought they might be getting, well, tipsy.”
“Tipsy,” Raphael repeated. Another word he rarely heard in normal conversation.
“They’d gone through one bottle of the wine already. His glass was empty.”
He didn’t want to admit that her powers of observation were extraordinary. But she must have picked up on something in his expression. Kate shrugged.
“It’s my job. I keep trying to gauge how things are going, you know, to pick up on any little telltale signs. I still feel a little anxious about all this. Success isn’t all that comfortable to me yet.” Then, for the first time since he had met her, she smiled.
The reflex was crooked, a little self-deprecating. And it changed her face. He realized for the first time that there was usually something hard and determined about her jaw, and that it was part of what had been irritating him from the moment he’d found her perched on Allegra’s back. But when she smiled, everything changed. There was a dimple at the left corner of her mouth—just one, without a matching counterpart. She looked wistful and soft.
He cleared his throat. He didn’t want her to have a dimple. And if she did, then he damned well didn’t want to notice it. “What about the next time you went to the dining room?”
“That would have been to take them their salads. And another bottle of wine.”
“And after that?”
“I went back to get their salad plates. She was gone that time.”
“Gone where?”
“He said to ‘the little girl’s room.”’ Her expression told what she thought of that particular euphemism. “I took her salad—he wanted to keep his. I went back to the kitchen to finish up with the steaks, and…” She trailed off.
The dog, Raphael remembered. Then when she’d finally gone back after that, McGaffney had been dead. “So he was killed between the time you went to pick up the salad plates and the time you took the entrees out.”
Kate was subdued. “Yes.”
“If we could nail down just how many minutes passed—”
“We can. I served the steaks medium to medium rare, at McGaffney’s request. They were two inches thick. Twelve and a half minutes in the broiler for the first set, then the dog did her thing, and it took me twelve and a half minutes to do two more steaks.”
“Twenty-five minutes.” He didn’t know whether to be irritated with her again or amazed.
“Actually, less than that. I do most courses ten minutes apart. So I went to get the salad plates when the first steaks had been in the broiler for two and a half minutes.”
Raphael stared at her, figuring out the time of death. She’d called 911 at eight-eighteen. Therefore, McGaffney had still been alive, by her calculations, at approximately seven fifty-five. Give or take thirty seconds.
She was a very dangerous woman to have left alive.
“Other than that, I was in the kitchen the whole time,” she said. “I try to remain as unobtrusive as possible. So all I can tell you for sure is that the killer didn’t come in through the back door.” She frowned. “Are we done?”
For the first time, Raphael saw violet smudges beneath her eyes. He was reasonably sure they hadn’t been there half an hour ago. “We’re done. For now.”
“Good.” She looked at the mantel clock as she got up and headed for the kitchen. “I have to get up in five hours.”
He didn’t like the sound of that. In fact, it sounded a lot like an alarm was going to go off somewhere in this apartment at roughly six o’clock in the morning. Raphael followed her with his eyes. “What for?”
“I work at the diner from seven to eleven. The breakfast rush.”
“Not tomorrow, you don’t.”
He should have recognized the warning signs by now. The way her shoulder blades shifted. The way she turned to him and stared.
“I can’t call in on a morning shift. They won’t have time to get anyone to replace me.”
Raphael came off the love seat. “What if you were sick?”
“I don’t get sick.”
“What, you’re Superwoman?”
She sniffed again. “No. I’m just reliable.”
“Well, get over it.”
She took a step toward him. “I will not. I have a life!”
“Not for the foreseeable future, you don’t.”
“I work!”
“So do I.” He was getting angry again. “You make fifteen hundred dollars a week! What the hell do you need a diner job for?”
“I don’t make fifteen hundred a week! I told you, there are costs. I’ve got employees to pay!”
That still left her clearing probably eight or nine hundred a week. This was insane.
“And I’ve got an obligation,” she added.
“You work a second job you don’t need because of an obligation?”
“Yes. No. Well, not entirely.”
She made that sound again. It wasn’t a sniff, not exactly. It was more a sharp intake of breath.
“I work two jobs to save money for my restaurant.” And it galled her to say so, to let him in on…well, her dream. But his expression turned thoughtful, and he surprised her.
“Honey, my guess is that you might be better off just doing what you’re doing.”
The thought had occurred to her, too, just recently, since business had picked up so radically. Dinner For Two had been intended as a means to an end. But then, she’d never really expected it to take off the way it had.
She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of agreeing with him.
Kate turned off the light in the kitchen, then went and sat on the sofa near the pile of blankets and pillows she’d put out for him earlier. He sat beside her. Not too close, she noticed with that achy stirring in the area of her chest again. Well, she was used to that.
She looked at him out of the corner of her eye in the thin darkness. His eyes made something curl in the pit of her stomach. He was gazing thoughtfully at nothing, seeming to see only his own thoughts. But they were good eyes, she thought grudgingly, even when they hardened, like now.
Kate pulled her gaze away. “Just tell the press I didn’t see anything. Then it won’t be necessary for you to watch over me. These…these mobsters will read about it in the paper, then you can go on your way and I’ll go mine.”
Raphael laughed. “Sure. That’ll work.”
She drew herself up indignantly. “I fail to see why not. It’s the truth.”
“You think these guys are of a mind to say, well, if the cops say it’s so, then it must be so?”
Put that way, it sounded ridiculous. “I don’t want you here! I don’t want you underfoot. You’re going to…to complicate everything!”
“That’s me, honey, one big complication.” Raphael got to his feet again, feeling absurdly burned, just as he’d begun to feel sorry for her again. “All right, let me tell you how this is going to be. In five hours, you’re going to call the diner. You’re going to tell them you’re not going to be in for a while, days at least. Take an unplanned vacation.”
Kate opened her mouth to argue, then she closed it again prudently.
“Then you’re going to stay figuratively handcuffed to me while I work this case, while I figure this out. Because that’s about the only way you’re going to get your precious life back. At the moment, I’m the only prayer you’ve got.”
It made her stomach roll over queasily. But Kate rallied. “Your job is to watch over me, correct? Isn’t that what Mr. Plattsmier said? That means you follow me. So I suggest you get some sleep so you’ll be on your toes in order to do that. I’m a busy woman.”
Kate stood from the sofa and walked toward the hallway. She tried not to hurry, as if she wanted to escape his reaction. As she passed the sideboard and the little lamp, she reached and flicked it out, plunging him into darkness.
“Good night.” Then she went to her bedroom and slammed the door shut behind her. Purely for the satisfaction of it, she threw the lock just as hard.
Chapter 4
The exclamation of Kate’s bedroom door shot through Raphael’s head like a bullet. His accommodations sent his mood spiraling downward even more.
He bunked down on the sofa to find that there was a popped spring in the middle of her center cushion. In the thin darkness, it took on the proportions of the tire of a truck. The darkness was incomplete because a yellow neon sign pulsed right outside her living room window and wouldn’t let shadows gather. Raphael considered closing the blinds but the August breeze was like the breath of an aging dowager—warm, fitful and without substance. Scant as it was, if he blocked it, he would suffocate.
Kate Mulhern didn’t seem to own an air conditioner. Or if she did, she was hogging it for herself in her ramparted bedroom.
Raphael rolled, putting his back to the window, and punched his fist into the pillow. Then his cell phone rang. He sat up, grabbed it from the coffee table and snarled into it.
“Are we having fun yet?” his partner asked.
“She’s a lunatic!” Raphael considered adding a string of adjectives but his mind went blank. He felt that overwhelmed by his situation.
“And here I’d thought she’d be just your type,” Fox drawled.
“Yeah? What type’s that?”
“Breathing.” It was a low blow. They both knew the reason behind Raphael’s somewhat frenetic dating patterns this past month. “It wasn’t your fault,” Fox said a silent moment later.
Raphael’s tone turned caustic. “You taunt a killer, you can’t expect him to strike back, is that it?”
“You didn’t taunt him. We were closing in on him. Damn it, Rafe, you’re smarter than this. What are you going to do, spend the rest of your life never going out with a lady more than once because some scumbag might decide to make her pay for her association with you?”
That was pretty much exactly what he had decided. There was no doubt in Raphael’s heart that Anna Lombardo’s blood was on his hands. Gregg Miller had targeted her, had chosen her, had strangled that calm, cool light right out of her eyes because of him. To warn him off. But Raphael was damned tired of talking about Anna tonight.
“What did Allegra have to say?” he asked.
Fox sighed, but he changed the subject. “Not a word worth repeating. She saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled nothing. She says she was in the bathroom and when she came back, Phil was dead.”
It was pretty much what Kate had said. Raphael got up from the sofa. His stomach was rumbling. He headed for her kitchen.
“How about why McGaffney opted to dine at home tonight?” he asked finally. “Did Allegra have any insight on that?”
“Sure,” Fox said. “Something about her knickers.”
“That’s a crock.”
“It is. He wanted to ply her for information about what Charlie Eagan’s boys have been up to. We know that. But we’ll never get her to say so.”
Raphael flicked on the kitchen light. He opened Kate’s refrigerator, then stared.
“You still there?” came Fox’s voice.
“She’s got her leftovers labeled.”
He saw a plastic container that said Beef. Raphael grabbed it and pried the lid off. Red and rare. He found bread, then horseradish sauce in a small glass jar that said Horseradish Sauce. He made himself a sandwich. As an afterthought, he grabbed a carton of milk from the refrigerator, as well. He opened a cupboard door. Where the hell were her glasses? He found metal utensils that looked like they could have been used in the Inquisition, but nothing resembling an object that one might drink out of. Disgusted with Kate’s orderliness, he swigged from the carton.
“Did Allegra mention a dog?” he asked, swallowing.
“A what?”
“A dog.”
“No,” Fox said slowly, “I can’t say that she did. Why?”
“There was one there tonight. Seems it wandered in through the back door while the lady was cooking. It stole a steak off one of her plates and beat it.”
“A dog,” Fox repeated.
“Right.”
“You’re thinking that it was some kind of a setup to divert the caterer’s attention?”
“Well, it’s weird, what with the timing and all.”
“We’ve come across some far-fetched things over the years, but I think that’s reaching.”
Fox was probably right. “Damn, this is good.” Raphael swallowed another bite of the sandwich and marveled. Then his voice darkened. “Let’s wrap this thing up, pal. I don’t know how many days of Betty Crocker I can stand.”
“I’ll make the rounds of Eagan’s men in the morning.”
“I’ll take McGaffney’s boys and see what I can find out there.”
“Not to bring up a sore subject, but what about the caterer?”
Raphael licked the last crumb of sandwich from his finger. “She’s coming with me.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Damned right it is.”
Suddenly, the last of the caffeine rush from her coffee left him and Raphael was bone-tired. “I’ll check in with you at midday,” he said and disconnected.
He hit the light switch in the kitchen and flopped down on the sofa again. He stuck the whisper-thin pillow beneath his backside to provide some minimal padding against the torture spring. He covered his eyes with his forearm to shut out the pulsing yellow light, then, instantly, he slept.
The next thing he heard was her screeching.
Kate had not ever known that a man could snore in such a fashion. Oh, she’d heard it spoken of, joked about. But the constant, deep sound that came from her living room all night was beyond the realm of her wildest imagination.
Sometime just before dawn she got up to stuff an extra blanket against the crack beneath her bedroom door to buffer the sound. It helped a little, but she was still agonizingly aware that he was out there. He was invading her life, her world, her plans. Pervading everything that was precious to her, making her stay home from work. Or at least he was trying to. It remained to be seen who would be the victor in that little battle.
“Damn you, Phillip McGaffney,” she muttered just as the alarm went off.
Kate rolled over and slapped her palm down on top of it. Then she was instantly contrite. Phillip McGaffney was dead. What kind of problems did she have compared to that?
Then a particularly resonant rumbling came from under the blanket beneath her door. At least McGaffney had not been forced to spend the night with Raphael Montiel chainsawing away on his living room sofa, Kate thought sourly. It was just possible the man had gotten the better end of the deal.
At least Montiel had left her alone. He hadn’t—
Hadn’t what? A thin laugh escaped Kate’s throat. He hadn’t been suddenly overwhelmed with lust for the single woman just beyond the locked and blanket-bulkheaded door? Not likely, Kate thought. He’d spent most of their interview the night before watching her with those green eyes squinting ever so slightly. Like she was a bug or a microbe on a slide, something he couldn’t quite identify. He had not once glanced at her with anything resembling a gleam in those eyes.
“It doesn’t matter,” she muttered, getting to her feet, swaying slightly from fatigue.
Kate knew her assets, and she also knew that a man like Montiel would never appreciate any of them. She’d tangled with his type before—a man with that same lazy, confident sense of power—and she had been left almost literally at the altar by him in favor of a flighty, vapid, though admittedly physically perfect exotic dancer. She swiped a hand over her head to smooth her wild curls. Then she went grimly to the closed bedroom door.