With soft, cool fingers, he brushed the hair from my face. “You don’t have to be nervous, Kate.”
“But I am.”
Michael moved to the left and gently tucked the pillow around my head. Then propped himself on an elbow next to me and began stroking my body with a slow, soft touch. “You tell me when you stop feeling nervous, okay?”
In the end, I didn’t have to tell him, it was obvious. But Michael didn’t rush anything, even then.
“I want you to enjoy this,” he murmured, his breath warm on my neck.
“I am,” I murmured back, and later, curled beside him, my head nestled in the hollow of his shoulder, I told him again. “I don’t remember when I’ve felt this good.”
“I wasn’t a complete incompetent then?”
“Hardly.” I ran a hand over his chest and down to the inside of his thigh, feeling the hard curves of his body beneath my fingers. “In fact, you were terrific.”
“So were you, Kate. I can’t begin to tell you how terrific.”“Yes you can—go ahead and try.”
But he just grinned. “You hungry?”
“You mean food?”
“I invited you for lunch, didn’t I?”
“It wasn’t just a ploy to get me into bed?”
“That too, but I did get stuff for lunch. In case you said no.”
I sighed contentedly. “Maybe later. I don’t think I’m ready to move just yet.”
“Good, neither am I.”
We nestled in comfortable silence, soaking up the pleasure of intimacy. After a time Michael leaned across and kissed me on the chin.
“Kate?”
“Hmm.”
“I know it’s a little late to be asking, but are you on the pill or anything?”
I shook my head. “But it doesn’t matter, I’m already pregnant.”
There was a moment of absolute stillness, like the ringing silence that follows the crash of good crystal. Then he rolled onto his back, hands behind his head, and stared at the ceiling.
“Jesus, Kate, you might have said something earlier.”
“The timing never seemed quite right”
“Well, you certainly waited for an opportune moment.”
“Does it bother you?”
“Of course it does. I guess. I mean, it should, shouldn’t it?”
In truth, it had barely crossed my mind. And that was a frightening realization. During all those moments when I’d entertained erotic fantasies of Michael Stone, I’d never once thought about what came next. A bright, blinding flash of passion—and then a Hollywood fadeout But in real life there is no fadeout.
“I’m sorry.” I longed to reach out and touch him, but I was afraid he would pull away.
“When were you going to tell me?”
When I knew you better, I thought But that was a heck of a thing to say to a man who’s lying naked in bed with you.
“Or maybe this is just a quick roll in the hay for you,” he said coolly. “No need to get personal. Just have your fun and be gone. Is that what you’re thinking? Because that’s certainly not the way I see it.”
“And that’s not the way it is.”
Michael continued to stare at the ceiling, his jaw tensed.
“Really, I am sorry,” I said again, this time braving a quick kiss. “It’s just that it’s kind of an awkward thing to bring up, in these particular circumstances I mean.”
He grunted and then, with a shy smile that reached all the way to his eyes, rolled back to face me. “Actually,” he said, “it wouldn’t have made any difference. I’ve been thinking about this since that first morning I met you. And lately, I’ve thought of little else. You could have told me you were from another planet and I wouldn’t have cared.” His eyes skimmed the length of my body. “You don’t look pregnant though.”
To my eye, I did, but he had no way of knowing that the rounded belly and full breasts before him were not the real me. “Not quite two months,” I told him. And then, without meaning to, I also told him about Andy and how mixed up everything was. My eyes began to smart, and then suddenly, unexpectedly, my cheeks were wet with genuine tears.
“Geez, Kate, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make things harder for you.”
“You haven’t,” I managed to burble between shallow, uneven breaths. “You’ve made me very happy.”
Michael leaned over and kissed me again, on the forehead. “I can make you even happier,” he said. “Want me to show you?”
<><><>
We did, finally, get lunch. And Michael was absolutely right about his omelet’s. They were superb. We sat on the little deck off the kitchen, balancing our plates on our knees, stealing kisses between bites.
“What are you thinking?” he asked, spearing a piece of mushroom with his fork.
I shrugged. “Nothing much.”
“Then why are you frowning?”
“Was I? I’m sorry. It’s not the company, I assure you.” Setting his plate on the bench next to him, Michael reached for my free hand and held it between his own. I could feel him looking at me even though my head was turned. “You’re the first woman I’ve been with since Barbara left,” he said slowly. “The first woman I’ve wanted to be with.”
I nodded and smiled weakly, not trusting myself to speak.
“I don’t want to rush you, Kate. I know how hard it is. And I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable.” His voice was soft and low, like a gentle summer rain. “But I can tell when something’s right.”
“Please, let’s not talk about it now.”
“We’re going to have to talk about it sometime.”
I nodded. “But not right now, okay?”
With a quick squeeze, he released my hand and leaned back, stretching his long frame. “Okay. What shall we talk about then?”
“Tell me what’s new with the investigation,” I said, taking a bite of lettuce.
“Good grief. Here I am feeling like a million bucks, and you have to bring up that” But he laughed and resumed eating.
“Well?”
“Let’s see. I told you yesterday about there being no one in Robert’s office who drives a Jeep Cherokee.”
I nodded.
“Then there’s Mrs. Aldridge, over on Chestnut Street, who says when she was at Pepper’s one afternoon, a man selling driveway cleaner came to the door and turned belligerent when Pepper declined a demonstration. Mrs. Curtis, who lives a couple of houses to the east of you, reports a ‘suspicious-looking Mexican boy’ delivering fliers to the houses on the street. We still haven’t been able to locate Tony Sheris, but we’ve run a check on him and he comes out clean.” Michael gazed at the cloudless sky for a moment. “Oh, and we’ve questioned a lot of Pepper’s friends. No one has any idea who she might have been seeing. Exciting stuff, no?”
“So Tony’s not a suspect and Robert is?” I asked, cutting to the core of the matter.
“We’re not ruling out anyone just yet.”
I took a deep breath, and then, somewhat reluctantly, told him about Daria’s conjecturing. It all sounded pretty farfetched, but Robert had lied to me about the car, and it was becoming pretty clear that something had been troubling Pepper.
Michael rocked back in his chair and listened, grinning goofily. When I finished, he leaned forward so that his face was only inches from mine. “You have the most amazing green eyes,” he whispered. “They’re soft and deep, like the first grass of spring.”
“And you,” I told him sternly, “have the most amazing way of changing the subject.” But I fluttered my lashes and turned my “amazing green eyes” to meet his gaze. “I take it you don’t think much of Daria’s scenario.”
Michael shrugged. “Anything’s possible.”
We sat in silence for several minutes. Michael continued to look steadily in my direction, the hint of a smile playing at the comers of his mouth, while I searched my mind for a safe topic of conversation.
“Tony’s behavior still strikes me as suspicious,” I
said finally. “Why would he just pick up and leave like that if he wasn’t involved in Pepper’s death?”
“Who knows.”
“Surely there must be someone he was friendly with. Someone who knows where he’s gone.”
“No one we’ve been able to locate.” Michael sat up straight and took a long gulp of beer. “You’d really rather talk about all this stuff, than us?”
“At the moment anyway. Murder’s a lot less scary.”
A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Okay, we’ll do it your way.” He stood and walked to the railing. “Tony moved to this area about eight months ago from Minnesota. He graduated from high school last year with mediocre grades, but he was never a troublemaker. His mother was killed when he was ten, and his dad’s an alcoholic who works odd jobs only long enough to buy another bottle. Somehow Tony seems to have come through it all in one piece. People from his home town have only nice things to say about him, although no one seems to have known him all that well.”
“What about the apartment in Berkeley?”
“The manager says he was an ideal tenant. Kept the place clean and never caused any trouble. Doesn’t know where he’s moved to though.”
I thought of the fresh, young face at the back of the church. The high cheekbones, the sun-bleached hair, the timid manner. He certainly didn’t look like a killer, but why else would he just disappear like that?
“Have you tried asking at nurseries or garden centers?” I asked. “He must have worked for someone besides Pepper.”
Michael shook his head. “Not that we’ve been able to discover, although he did take on some cleanup work for the city and he helped on a small landscape job for one of the spec houses Burt McGregory is building.”
“McGregory!” I sat up and cleared my throat. “That’s the man who threatened Pepper, you know, because of her involvement with the Save Our Hills Committee.”
Michael’s eyes narrowed, and he cocked his head to the side. “Yes, I do know,” he said evenly.
I slouched back down. “Sorry.”
He studied his bottle for a moment, picking at the label with his fingernail. “Tell me once more, how long had you known Pepper?”
“Two years. Roughly.”
“Did she talk much about her past?”
“I’m sure she must have, but I don’t remember anything in particular. Why?”
Michael appeared to be weighing something. “Same rules as before. This is strictly confidential, okay?”
“You think just because I slept with you, I can’t be trusted? Maybe it was all a ploy to get the inside scoop on Pepper’s murder for the Walnut Hills Sun?”
A gentle smile crossed his face. “No, that’s not what I think.”
“Good. So tell me what this is all about.”
“Pepper Livingston wasn’t who she pretended to be.”
“Who is?”
He looked mildly annoyed. “Her real name was Rosalie Simms, and she was raised in Ohio, not on Long Island. She ran away from home when she was sixteen, was arrested once for petty theft and twice for prostitution. Along the way she also made a couple of porno films, strictly low-grade stuff.”
“There’s any other kind?”
He patted my knee. “There certainly is.” Then he removed his hand from my knee and rubbed his chin. “In nineteen-seventy-five she was peripherally involved in an armed robbery in which two men were killed. By cooperating with the DA, she got off with parole, but her testimony put her boyfriend behind bars.”
“You’re joking. ”
“You think I’d joke about something like this?” He was clearly offended.
“No, I guess not.” But I didn’t see how it could be true either. The woman he described was nothing like Pepper. “There must be some mistake. Maybe somebody who looked like her or had the same name. I never believed Pepper was her given name anyway.”
“No mistake. We’d have had all this sooner except for some glitch with the central computer.” He fell silent a minute, then added, “That’s not all. The boyfriend, Jake Turbino, has just been released on parole. He arrived in San Francisco two weeks ago.”
“Oh, my God, poor Pepper.” As stunned as I was by Michael’s revelations, what I felt most was a new found sympathy for this woman, the friend I had never really known. “You’ve questioned him? This Jake Turbino?”
Michael glared at me, but there was a twinkle in his eye. “Of course we’ve questioned him.”
“And?”
“Says he didn’t even know Pepper, Rosalie that is, was living in California.”
“Certainly you’re not going to—”
Hand raised in protest, Michael interrupted. “No, we’re not going to let it go at that. Jake was apparently a model prisoner, though. Took Jesus Christ as his savior and all. Swears he bears no grudge for the years he spent in prison. But he can’t, or won’t, tell us what he was doing the night she was killed.”
Michael went inside for a moment and came back with a manila folder from which he extracted two photographs.
“This is the guy. Have you seen him before?”
Taking the photos, I turned so that my body blocked the glare of the sun, and studied them. They were obviously prison shots. Head only, one full face, the other a side view. Jake had dark eyes, hair dusted with gray, and surprisingly delicate features despite his heavy frame. Definitely not a mobster face. Something about the mouth caught my attention, but the longer I looked the more certain I was that I had never seen the man before.
“No, I don’t recognize him.”
Michael retrieved the pictures and stuck them back in his folder. “We’ll be asking other neighbors and friends of Pepper. Hopefully we’ll be able to find someone who does recognize him.” He looked pleased, like a cat with his eye on an unsuspecting canary. “This just may be the big break we’ve been waiting for.”
We carried the dishes into the kitchen, where Michael insisted we leave them for him to wash later. Wrapping my arms around his waist, I pressed my head against his chest. The scent of beer and sex and aftershave mingled in my head and filled me with a curious sense of peace.
“Thanks,” I said, faltering somewhat with even so simple a statement.
“It’s nothing. I do dishes all the time.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Oh?”
“It was the nicest lunch I ever had.”
He kissed my forehead, and then the tip of my nose. “Likewise,” he said softly.
Then he drove me home.“When’s your next day off?” Michael asked as he turned the car onto my street.
“Saturday. But Anna’s home then.”
“Send her to a friend’s.”
“It’s not that easy.”
He looked skeptical.
“She has her own, very strong, opinions about how she does and does not want to spend her days.”
“So be persuasive,” he said.
I leaned over and kissed him quickly, then got out “I’ll try.”
The phone was ringing as I let myself in. Guiltily I raced for it, worried suddenly that something had happened to Anna. What if the hospital had been trying to reach me all afternoon? Calling repeatedly, frantically, the whole time I was giving way to unbridled lust.
But it was only Susie Sullivan calling to invite me to a dinner party for Robert. “Nothing elaborate,” she said. “But I do think the poor man needs our support. I was over there the other day to take him a lasagna, and he just seemed so . . . so lonely. Oh, wait a minute, there’s a call on my other line.” The phone clicked and I was left holding a silent receiver until she returned. “Sorry, wrong number. Anyway, I thought I’d call a few of his friends, though of course I don’t want all couples—that would be just too uncomfortable for him. And, well, I thought you’d be the perfect person to ask.”
Perfect, I thought, because I was only momentarily single and clearly not perceived as competition. I wrote down the date, told her I’d have to
let her know. Then, picking up the mail from the counter where I’d dumped it in my rush to reach the phone, I sat down at the table. Among the bills and advertisements was a card from Andy, who was indeed in Switzerland. As usual, he’d written to Anna, describing for her a bicycle trip he’d taken through back-road farm country. Vertically up the side of the card, he’d scribbled a P.S.—Give Mommy a hug for me. I miss you both.
I stared at the blue ink until it grew blurry in front of my eyes. Grabbing the orange juice glass I’d left on the table earlier that morning, I threw it with as much force as I could muster, so that it shattered loudly against the kitchen wall. And then I burst into tears.
Chapter 13
“Yes, of course, we’ll come take a look,” Daria chirped, holding the receiver away from her ear and grimacing in my direction. “That’s correct, no charge for the visit. Yes, this afternoon will be fine.”
She hung up and returned to the stack of bills in front of her, proffering only a cursory greeting. “Morning, Kate, did you enjoy your day off?”
“Very much.”
Absently, she nodded and began punching at the calculator with the tip of her pencil, missing entirely the self- satisfied smirk I was unable to suppress.
“That was Art Somebody,” she said without looking up, “the new owner of Zoey’s Cafe in Berkeley. He’s changing the motif from Middle Eastern to chrome and glitz, and wants some stuff for the walls.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“That’s what we’re supposed to tell him. But nothing costing big bucks. I told him you’d drop by this afternoon.”
I groaned. “You’re all heart.”
“Which reminds me, Sondra Van Horn will be here in about an hour. She wanted to start looking through our stock right away. I tried to convince her to wait a few days to give you a chance to pull some things, but she insisted. Don’t fret about it, though. Just show her something.”
“Actually, I’ve already pulled a couple of pieces and I have a few more in mind.”
Daria raised her head and looked at me over the top of her reading glasses. “My, haven’t we been efficient”
Murder Among Neighbors (The Kate Austen Mystery Series) Page 15