by Beverly Bird
“Not tonight it’s not.”
Kate made a strangled sound.
She went around to the driver’s side of the van. When she got behind the wheel he tapped on the passenger side window. Kate ground her teeth together. She shot the key into the ignition and let the big engine rumble. “See you on Willings,” she muttered. Then she put the van in gear and rolled off, resisting the urge to look at him in the mirror.
Raphael jogged through the town house and out the front door onto Willings Alley. Until this night, until this very moment, he hadn’t known there could be so many facets to his temper. He felt reasonably sure that in the last hour he’d experienced all of them. The little fool! She’d driven around to the main alley by herself like there was no possibility whatsoever that someone could have waited on the corner for her, to end it then and there.
His Explorer waited for him. Raphael jumped behind the wheel with a second to spare before her atrocity of a vehicle lumbered into the alley. She beeped at him and kept on driving. Raphael swore and made an illegal U-turn to follow her. She was the most irritating, stiff-spined, starched, tsking, hardheaded, cop-show-watching, nosy fool he’d met in his fourteen years on this job. And she’d sat on Allegra.
Raphael grabbed the radio handset from his dashboard. “Who’s got Allegra?” he demanded when he got reception and was patched through to the watch commander.
“Vince Mandeleone,” said a disembodied voice.
Mandeleone. Fox’s rookie partner for the month. He wasn’t a rookie to the department, but to the Robbery Homicide Unit. “I’m back with Fox in two hours.” Even Raphael thought he sounded like a jealous lover.
“Yeah, that’s the word,” came the voice soothingly.
“So how come they’re not sending Mandeleone back down?”
“He did some good stuff this last month. They’re keeping him up.”
That was okay. Raphael didn’t want to hurt the kid, he just wanted his own space back. But something stuck in his craw. “They’re letting him question Allegra?”
“Hell, no. I thought you meant who was making sure she doesn’t get whacked over this. Fox is going to spend some time with her first before Mandeleone takes her home and bunks on her sofa.”
“That’ll last one night.”
The voice cackled. They all knew Allegra, by reputation if not by experience.
“Anyway, Fox said to tell you to keep your cell phone with you. He’ll touch base as soon as he’s finished with Allegra.”
“Will do.” Raphael signed off.
He was beginning to get a feel for things here. When Plattsmier had assigned him to the caterer, all he’d heard was his own blood rushing in his ears. But now he could see how things would play out.
In two hours, he and Fox were legit again. They would be running this investigation. Raphael was just going to have to do his part with the rigid little brunette in tow.
She was going to be his personal albatross for a while. There was no getting around that. The commissioner wasn’t going to let bygones be bygones quite yet. But Plattsmier, damn him, had accommodated them all—Raphael and the commish and himself as well. The commissioner would get his extra ounce of Raphael’s blood by saddling him with the witness. And Raphael was on the case so it had a prayer of getting solved.
The panel van tucked into the driveway of a garage just ahead of him. He stopped the Explorer in front of the entrance. A moment later, he saw her heading up the tunnel again, coming toward him on foot. Her head was down and too much of that crazy hair spilled forward to hide her features. Not bad features, he thought grudgingly, as he remembered them. Small, almost delicate. Then his eyes narrowed. For the first time he realized that she was towing a small red wagon behind her, and it was loaded.
Raphael drove a shoulder against the Explorer’s door and flung it open. He left the SUV idling in the street and jogged around it to meet her.
Whatever he had been about to say died in his throat when she looked at him. Her eyes were huge and bleak. They were indigo, he realized, more blue than blank.
“I don’t even know your name.” She whispered it as though it were the saddest thing in the world.
“Montiel.” His voice was hoarse. Probably, he thought, with the restraint it took not to try to comfort her again. Don’t touch me. He never made the same mistake twice.
“No, I meant your first name.”
“Oh. Raphael. Rafe’ll be fine.” Then it struck him. He hadn’t questioned her yet—that was by design. Once he’d gotten the lay of the land from Plattsmier, he’d known he’d do better to wait until midnight. But he hadn’t even asked her name. He opened his mouth, and she cut him off as though reading his mind.
“It’s Kate. Kate Mulhern.”
“Kate.” It was pretty. It made him think of sunflowers and Kansas. Oh, hell, maybe she wasn’t that bad.
She waited for him to offer to take the wagon from her. It was heavy and hard to pull. It would be an overture, she thought, an olive branch of sorts so maybe they could get through this night somewhat amicably until his superiors let him leave her alone again. But he only watched her.
Kate pulled her shoulders back. She moved around him, dragging the wagon.
“So how fast do you think you can run with that thing behind you, Kate Mulhern?” His voice took on an edge again.
“As fast as I have to. But it’s got to come with me. I’m not leaving it in the van, no matter…no matter…” She trailed off without pausing in her march.
What had happened tonight, he finished for her. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out if she was as cold as the moon in January—what kind of woman would have the presence of mind to sit on Allegra after finding a body in her salad?—or if, in fact, she was falling apart. He didn’t have the chance to ask her. She whipped around the corner of the garage entrance with the wagon, out of sight.
Raphael had to run to catch her. She stopped in front of glass doors on the corner. Pale light spilled from a dim lobby. He looked at his Explorer.
“Don’t move an inch until I come back.”
He went to the SUV. He parked it illegally in the nearest space and stuck his PPD card on the dashboard. It would do for the rest of the night.
He grabbed his cell phone and a tape recorder from the glove box and went to where she stood. She yanked open one of the glass doors and pulled the wagon in after her. It started to swing shut again before Raphael followed her, and it almost took off his nose.
He had a spare moment to look around the lobby. There were a handful of hot spots—a lot of fake ferns in one corner that could conceal a man, and a reception desk that someone could easily hide behind. There was no doorman.
Kate was punching the elevator button. He caught up with her.
“What’s through there?” He nodded at a nearby door.
“Stairs.”
“What floor do you live on?”
“The third.”
There were too many ways up, he thought. He didn’t like it.
“The elevator stops running at midnight,” she said, as though reading his mind.
“Sounds like a real witching hour.”
She looked at him quickly, and he thought she might smile. Then the elevator opened, and she simply nodded and towed the wagon inside. Raphael stepped in after her.
The elevator spit them out on the third floor. She moved down a short corridor and thrust a key into the lock of a door.
The apartment was something of a hodgepodge, and it startled him. He’d expected something stark and agonizingly organized. Rigid, maybe stuffy. Instead, there was a lot of wood, none of it matching. An old sideboard sat against one wall—it had been pressed into service as an entertainment center—and an afghan that was the color of the sun was draped casually over the back of the sofa. The rear wall was all windows, open to the summer night. The sounds of the city were close—a horn blared briefly, tires rolled over asphalt, a dog barked somewhere. It felt like a home.
“You live alone?” he asked. “No kids, no husband?” Extra people, he thought, would complicate things.
“No, there’s no one. My roommate moved out in April.”
She pulled the wagon into a tiny kitchen sectioned off from the main room by a breakfast bar. When she looked at him again, her eyes seemed very dark, almost black. She’d left one light on in the living room, but all it did was throw shadows across her face.
“How long are you going to be here?” she asked.
She bit off the ends of her words as though she was in a hurry to get them over with, he thought. But her voice was low, vaguely throaty. Raphael shrugged as though it had touched his skin. “I don’t know.”
“You’re sleeping on the sofa.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
That stung, even knowing, as Kate did all too well, that she was not the kind of woman who stirred men to passion. “I meant,” she said, “that this is a one-bedroom unit.”
“And I meant that the sofa’s just fine with me.”
Her hands were shaking again. Kate looked at them, then she fisted them on the counter. “You’re waiting to question me until after midnight, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
Kate looked at a mantel clock that sat on the sideboard turned entertainment center. Healthy green plants were piled on either side of it. She took a deep, fortifying breath. “Then I’d better put on some coffee.”
Chapter 3
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?”