Lust, Loathing and a Little Lip Gloss (17 page)

I pulled the robe on as I took the stairs two at a time. “Marcus,” I said as I hurriedly unlocked the door, “don’t tell Anatoly that—” and then I shut up because when I had the door fully open I could see that Marcus wasn’t there. Instead there was a police officer.

I straightened my robe, hoping to God that I hadn’t inadvertently given him a peek at what was underneath. “Can I help you?” I asked as coolly as I could manage.

The officer coughed into his hand in an obvious attempt to suppress a laugh. “Yes, I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m Detective Allen. We met on the night Enrico Risso was killed.”

“Is everything all right?”

Detective Allen and I both turned at the sound of Anatoly’s voice. Unlike me, Anatoly had the sense to put his clothes back on before coming down. He looked past me through the door and then, seeing who was there, quickened his pace. “Good to see you again, Detective Allen,” he said, proving once and for all which one of us had the better memory for names and faces. “Is everything all right?”

“I’m glad you’re both here. I wanted to talk to both of you a little more about the circumstances that led you to discover Enrico’s body. Do you have a moment?”

I got the feeling that he was asking us about our availability for the sake of politeness, not because he thought we really had a choice. Anatoly waved him in and I carefully closed the door behind him.

Detective Allen took a seat on the couch. “Just moving in, I see,” he said, gesturing to the boxes. “Don’t envy you that. Moving’s a bitch.”

“Mmm-hmm.” I glanced back at the door, wondering if we were about to be interrupted by Marcus.

“I won’t be long,” Detective Allen said, reading my impatience correctly. “You said that Maria Risso went into Enrico’s apartment first. Did you two wait in the hall?”

“For less than a minute,” Anatoly said, stepping beside me and draping his arm around my shoulders, subtly helping keep my robe in place. “We could see Enrico’s feet from our vantage point in the doorway. As soon as Maria raced inside and found him she screamed and then we both came in after her.”

“So you would say she was in the kitchen with the body by herself for around thirty or forty seconds?”

“I would say more like twenty, twenty-five,” Anatoly offered.

“You would concur with that?” Detective Allen asked me.

“I…I really don’t know. I guess I’m not as good at estimating time as Anatoly is. I could tell you it was less than a minute.”

“Enough time for her to close a kitchen window,” Detective Allen noted. “Ms. Katz, you said you saw Maria earlier in the evening at a dinner party?”

“Um…well, it wasn’t really a dinner party…” Mr. Katz came down the stairs with a feline glower. He swished his tail meaningfully toward the kitchen. I pretended I didn’t understand and turned back to the detective. “It was more like a…a meeting.”

“What kind of meeting?”

“Right, well,” I hedged. Anatoly sighed and shook his head. We both knew there was no way I was going to get out of humiliating myself. “It was a séance,” I finally blurted out. “I hosted a séance.”

“I see,” Detective Allen said, and took a little notepad out of his pocket.

“The guy who’s selling me this house, Kane Crammer, he said I had to host a séance if I wanted escrow to go through,” I added quickly. “He actually made it part of the contract. I could show it to you if you like.”

“That would be good,” Detective Allen said, as he continued to make notes.

Anatoly dropped his arm and I went to the bookshelf, reached on top of it, feeling around until my fingertips landed on a manila folder. I pulled it down and handed Detective Allen the paperwork. He read it carefully while I went to the next room to pacify my pet with Natura Tasty Herring for Kitties. By the time I came back to the living room the detective was going over the document for a second time in what appeared to be amused disbelief.

“He really
did
make it part of the contract,” he said. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

“I didn’t know anyone would
want
to do that,” I grumbled.

“Good point.” Detective Allen put the folder down and made some more notes. “So you had never met Maria Risso before that night, but you invited her because Kane wanted you to?”

“No, she wasn’t actually on the guest list. She kinda crashed the party.”

“I see,” the detective said again. “And what was her demeanor?”

I considered lying for Maria’s sake, but Detective Allen would surely talk to the other people at the dinner party and I couldn’t risk having my account vary radically from everyone else’s. “She was agitated,” I admitted. “But she said she was upset because she hadn’t been invited.”

“But her husband had been,” Detective Allen prodded.

“Yes, but like I said before, he never showed up.”

“And you were talking to him on the phone when he called someone a—” he checked his notes “—a fucking bitch, is that right?”

“Yep, that’s what he said.”

“And then a few hours later Maria was at your house, uninvited in place of her soon-to-be ex-husband.”

It was clear that Detective Allen had already made up his mind as to who the killer was. I glanced over at Anatoly, hoping that he would say something that might take the spotlight off of his client, but he remained silent.

Detective Allen closed his notebook and offered me a smile. “That’s all the questions I have for you right now. However I would like to have a list of all the people who attended that séance.” He smirked slightly, unable to say the last word of the sentence with a straight face.

“I’ll make one now,” I offered. “Do you mind if I use your notepad?”

Detective Allen handed it over and I jotted down all the names of the Specter Society before going to get my cell phone so I could give him the numbers of the members I knew. He perused the list, thanked me for my time and left.

Anatoly closed the door after him and turned to me. “This is a first. You managed to talk to the police without falsely incriminating yourself.”

“I know!” I moved over to the couch and plopped myself down. “I don’t even think I’m a suspect. I’m always a suspect!”

It had started raining again and Anatoly turned to the window and watched as splashes of water made patterns against the glass. “Does this mean you don’t have to worry about Kane not selling to you?”

“I don’t know. If Kane finds out I’m off the police’s radar then maybe. If it did mean that, would you be happy for me?”

The only response I got was from the rain, which had increased its tempo. My cell phone blasted out the first few lines of “It’s Raining Men.” “That’s Marcus,” I said quietly before picking up.

“Honey, I slept in, forgive me?”

“You never sleep in,” I said suspiciously. “Not when you’re alone.”

“Yes, well, last night after we parted ways I went to this darling little bar, and at the bar was this darling little man, and—”

“Say no more. When will you be here?”

“An hour?”

“Perfect. I have my own darling little man to deal with at the moment.” Anatoly looked over his shoulder and sent me a lethal glare. “Make that darling big man,” I corrected quickly. “My darling, big, burly man.”

Marcus laughed and we said our goodbyes before I turned my attention back to Anatoly. I was about to make a joke about Marcus’s promiscuity, but something in the way Anatoly was looking at me made me nervous. He didn’t say anything and I found myself wishing that Marcus wasn’t running late so he could interrupt the moment.

“You’re upset with me,” I finally said. “Why?”

“You’re lying to me. I don’t know what you plan to do with Marcus today, but it has nothing to do with eating.”

“You don’t know I’m lying to you,” I said huffily.

“You’ve lied to me before. All the time.”

“And you’ve never lied to me?” I countered. “When we first met, you told me you were a contractor! You, who can’t even build a house made out of Legos!”

“I thought you were a murderess at the time.”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“You didn’t think any better of me.”

“No, but…” I sighed and threw my hands up in the air. “What are we arguing about? All this happened years ago.”

“Exactly. And I was hoping that by now we would have moved past that kind of thing. But we haven’t, because here you are, lying to me again.”

I pressed my lips together and considered my options. “You’re right,” I said cautiously. “I’m not going to brunch with Marcus. I’m sorry I lied to you about that.”

Anatoly nodded. “What are you planning?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Does it matter?”

The rain had turned into a storm. Hadn’t there been sun earlier, when Anatoly had climbed into my bed and caressed me with those amazing hands of his? What had happened to the sun?

“It’s the sin of omission,” he said coldly.

“It’s not a sin if you tell people you’re omitting something,” I snapped. “Check your Catholic theology.”

Anatoly wasn’t amused. “Does this have to do with Scott?”

“What?” I asked, totally taken aback. “What? You think this is about Scott?” And suddenly I was laughing. I laughed so hard and so long that even Mr. Katz felt compelled to leave his food bowl to investigate the commotion.

“This isn’t funny.”

“Oh, I beg to differ. I have always been the jealous one in this relationship—and now it’s you! You’re jealous of
Scott! Scott
the man who I hate more than…well, more than any person who hasn’t yet tried to kill me.”

“You must have cared about him a lot in order for him to make you that angry,” Anatoly noted. “Now he’s found you a house to buy. A house that you refuse to walk away from.”

“Have you lost your mind? Scott’s connection to this house is the house’s only drawback! The only thing that man makes me want to do is scream!”

“I make you scream.”

“I’m not talking about the kind of screaming that happened this morning in the bedroom.”

“Neither am I. We have a history of driving each other crazy. I used to think that our frequent arguments would break us up, but now I understand that you are attracted to antagonism. You enjoy fighting. And you seem to enjoy fighting with Scott a lot.”

“Anatoly, we’ve been over this. I’m not attracted to Scott. I don’t want to fight with him. I want to hurt him, and if I can’t do that then I want to get him out of my life as quickly as possible. And he will be out of my life once escrow closes. I just have to find a way to make that happen.”

Anatoly took a second to register this. “Is that what you and Marcus are going to be doing today? Finding a way to ensure the closing of escrow?”

“Anatoly, I told you I’m not going to say anything about what I’m going to be doing with Marcus, but I will tell you that I will not be seeing Scott today or any other day that I don’t absolutely have to. Can you trust me?”

Anatoly raised an eyebrow. “You’ve never asked that of me before.”

“That’s because I’m frequently untrustworthy. I know that. But not when it comes to fidelity.” I stood up and walked over to him. I let my hand slip over his chest. “You make me happy,” I said softly. “You’re it for me.” And all of a sudden I knew. I was totally and absolutely in love with him. But I didn’t say it…I couldn’t say it just yet.

Anatoly covered my mouth with his. “I trust you,” he said between kisses.

He stopped and fingered the neckline of my robe before leaning in for one more kiss. Minutes after that he was gone. He didn’t ask me any more questions. He trusted me.

As I showered, it occurred to me that now that I was no longer a serious suspect it was possible that none of my secret plans were necessary. Maybe Kane would relax and let me stay here without my having to prove anything.

But I doubted it. Kane was a megafreak, and you couldn’t trust megafreaks to be reasonable.

Something else was nagging at me, too. I didn’t
want
Maria to be arrested. I had no idea if Maria had been angry enough to kill Enrico, but I felt fairly sure that she wouldn’t have used a scythe. Maybe a handgun or even a knife, but I just couldn’t visualize her wrapping a curved blade around her ex-husband’s neck. That required a twisted mentality, and Maria, despite her best efforts, was really just a conventional, albeit wealthy, woman with an interest in the whimsical and a chip on her shoulder.

After cleaning myself up, I managed to gather my mass of hair up behind my head and secured it with a clip. Several wavy locks refused to be confined, but I didn’t argue with them. I liked what I saw in the mirror. It was the reflection of a woman in love.

Downstairs, in the guest room, which was slowly becoming my office, I found a yellow legal pad in a box labeled “paper-stuff” and brought it, along with a box of granola bars, to the dining-room table. Why I had packed granola bars in a box labeled “paper-stuff” was beyond me, unless of course I was making some kind of subconscious statement about their taste. But I was hungry and this was easy.

With a sigh I unwrapped my breakfast and wrote the names Kane, Maria, Lorna, Al and Venus all on the top of different pages. Under Kane I wrote the words
may have had opportunity to kill Enrico. May
being the operative and annoying word since I didn’t really know what Kane had been doing before the séance. There was also the problem of what I was now sure were Enrico’s last words. In jest, Marcus would occasionally call one of his boyfriends a bitch, but I couldn’t imagine someone applying the word to Kane.

I chewed on my lip for a moment before taking my pen again to Kane’s page. On it I wrote
Oscar???
Oscar definitely merited three question marks. Did he factor into this? Officially Oscar had died of natural causes, but there’s a reason why they tell cardiac patients not to ride roller coasters. Had someone tried to bring Oscar’s heart attack on? He was Kane’s father, so surely Kane had access to his house. Kane was probably strong enough to move around the furniture, but would he do that to his own father? The thought made me want to throw up my granola. But I couldn’t rule out the possibility.