Читать книгу I'll Be Seeing You - Beverly Bird - Страница 9

The coffee was good. It was rich and dark, the way he liked it. After an hour, Raphael agreed to another pot, as much to give her something to do as for the fact that he needed the caffeine.

He watched her unload the red wagon and put things away, then rearrange it all in the cupboards and drawers. When she was done, every spice bottle faced forward, its label visible. He felt his eyes bug a little as he observed the process, and something happened to his blood pressure. Then finally the clock on the window seat began to chime midnight.

Her shoulder blades shifted under that starched white cotton as though she was bracing herself. “Okay, let’s get this over with. I’m tired.”

He wouldn’t argue with her on that one. Raphael leaned forward to take the tiny tape recorder from his jeans pocket and put it on the coffee table.

She cleared her throat carefully. “I’ll ask you again. Am I a witness or a suspect?”

“You’re a witness unless you say something that would indicate otherwise.”

“What if I lawyer up?”

It happened again, yet another facet of temper. This one was a small man standing inside each of Raphael’s temples, battering with tiny, hot fists. “Lawyer up,” he repeated.

“Ask for a lawyer.”

“I know what you meant.” He clenched his jaw. “How about if you leave the cop jargon to me?”

“Fine.” Kate dropped onto the sofa opposite the small love seat he’d chosen. She clasped her hands together and bracketed them with her knees. Her eyes widened as he went through the routine for the tape—his ID, who he was interviewing, the location and the time.

He thought, in spite of himself, that she really did have beautiful eyes. The slant of light from the fringed lamp made them look almost black again, and they shone.

“Okay. First question. What were you supposed to be catering tonight?”

Kate blinked at him and said nothing.

“Care to have me repeat the question?”

“Of course not. I heard you. You just never struck me as stupid.”

Raphael turned the tape off with a deliberate snap. “Can we leave the personal opinions out of this?”

“I wasn’t—”

“Just answer my questions!” He lowered his voice. “Like you would if you were in one of those books you said you liked. You know, the ones where they lawyer up.”

“Then you might try questioning me like they would in those books. What do you think I was catering? It was food. You ate some of it.”

More tiny fists, Raphael thought. Boom-boom-boom at his temples. With a careful, precise motion, he turned the recorder on again. “There was no party in that house tonight. What did McGaffney need a caterer for?”

“Allegra, I would imagine. I didn’t ask. It’s none of my business, except in the respect that it affects what I serve and how I serve it.”

Raphael pressed his thumbs against the little men inside his head. “Ms. Mulhern. I’ll ask again. What were you catering?”

Kate flopped against the sofa cushions, looking at him disbelievingly. “Filets with orange béarnaise sauce for the entree. The appetizer was oysters Rockefeller, followed by a hearts-of-palm salad. Well, you saw what he did to that.” Raphael reached for the tape again, and she hurried on. “We never got to dessert, but I had pears in a caramelized brandy sauce for that course. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“All this for two people?” Raphael clarified. Something in his jaw ticked again.

“That’s what I do.”

“You cater for two people.”

“That’s my niche. Otherwise, I’d be just like every other caterer in Philadelphia. I needed to do something different if I was going to stand out, make my mark.” She shrugged. “I’ve gone for as many as dinner for six, but then it starts negating my purpose.”

Raphael began to understand. “So you do take-out dinners.”

Kate stiffened. “Of course not. Restaurants do takeout. But what do you get? Food in little cartons that someone has to reheat—”

“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.