“She should be,” Jackie said, reaching for her glass again. “Married to a hunk like you.”
Human conversation is something I have studied diligently, since it makes no sense at all to me unless it follows the comfortable path of cliché, which it does ninety-nine percent of the time. So in order to fit in, I have learned the formulas of small talk, and I must follow them or I am lost in a jungle of feelings and impulses and notions that I do not share. I am blind to nuance. But I would have had to be deaf and dumb as well not to realize that Jackie was paying me a compliment, and I groped for an appropriate response, only managing to say, “Oh, thank you,” which sounded pretty feeble, even to me.
Jackie clutched her glass with both hands and looked out across Biscayne Bay. “Sometimes I catch myself wondering,” she said. “You know. Like … maybe I should have found a nice guy like you and settled down. Had a real life.” She went very still, just holding the glass and staring at the horizon, and I watched her. I admit I was surprised to hear what sounded like wistful regret in her voice—after all, she was beautiful, rich and famous, a star, and even the most levelheaded observer would have to say she had just about everything one could wish for.
And to her very great credit, she proved to be rather levelheaded herself, because she gave a small laugh and shook her glass. It rattled; it was empty, except for the ice. “I know,” she said. “It’s not very convincing, even to me. Besides, I’ve met plenty of nice guys and none of ’em made me want to give this up.” She made a rueful face and set the glass on the table. “Plenty of not-so-nice guys, too,” she said. “But the real truth is, I wouldn’t trade my life for anything.”
“Not even a Greek arms dealer?” I said.
“Not even two,” she said, smirking at me. “And anyway, those guys are horribly possessive, so I’d be like his property, you know. I guess they have to be that way, but …” She shrugged. “That doesn’t work for me.”
She looked at me, and I looked back, and the moment seemed to stretch past what was comfortable, but I couldn’t think of anything appropriate to say, and since she didn’t appear to feel uneasy with the silence, I decided not to, either. Behind us the sun was just starting to sink into the horizon, and the water in front of us had that golden glow it gets at sunset, and that reflected up onto Jackie’s face, and I suppose onto mine, too. Finally, the corners of her mouth went up into a smile, and she said, “Anyway. We should probably think about dinner. Are you hungry?”
I might have said that of course I was hungry; the mighty engine that is Dexter’s body runs perpetually at a very high level, and requires regular fuel. But I settled for a polite, “Actually, I am a bit,” and Jackie nodded, suddenly looking very serious.
“All right,” she said. “Is there a really good place nearby? The network is paying, so don’t be stingy.”
Truthfully, my taste in food tends to be more robust than refined, but in any case, there were other considerations at the moment that were more important than what might be on the menu. “Um,” I said. “How about room service?”
Jackie raised an eyebrow at me and started to say something, then seemed to catch herself. “Oh,” she said. “You mean because …” She frowned and shook her head. “You think it might be dangerous to go out,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s getting dark, and I have to assume he’s figured out where you’re staying by now.”
“Oh,” she said again, and she seemed to deflate a bit, slumping down into her chair and letting her chin sink onto her chest. “I keep forgetting,” she said. “I was just enjoying …” She sighed heavily, which seemed like a strange reaction, unless she really wanted a fancy high-priced dinner. “Anyway, room service is fine. Since you are”—she waved one hand vaguely—“looking after my safety.”
“That is why I’m here,” I said.
She looked at me just a moment too long. “I’ll try to remember that,” she said. And before I could figure out what that meant, I heard a kind of scrabbling noise coming from the direction of the suite’s door.
“That’s—” she started to say, but I held up a hand and cut her off, listening hard for a second. There was no doubt; somebody was trying to open the door and get in.
We had not ordered anything yet, and since Jackie had been here almost a week I didn’t think the management would be sending up a fruit basket. That left one very obvious and unpleasant possibility.
I got carefully to my feet and pulled the Glock from its holster. “Dexter,” Jackie said. “I think it’s—”
“Lock yourself into the bathroom,” I said. “Take your phone, just in case.”
“But I just—”
“Quickly!” I hissed at her, and I moved rapidly and silently toward the door, making sure the pistol’s safety was off and holding it in the ready position, just the way my adoptive father, Harry, had taught me so long ago. I don’t like guns—they’re noisy and impersonal and really leave very little room for true artistic expression. But they are effective, and Harry had taught me how to use them as only a combat veteran and career cop could teach, and with a weapon as good as this one I could put holes in things at a very good distance.
In this case, however, I was hoping I wouldn’t have to shoot. So I hurried across the floor to one side of the door, holding myself and my Glock in readiness.
As I got there the door began to ease open slowly, almost shyly; whoever it was, they were being very careful not to alert anyone that they were coming in. Unfortunately for them, I was already alerted. With my left hand I grabbed the edge of the door and yanked it open. I stepped quickly around, snatched at the arm holding the doorknob, and jerked hard, and as a head of short brown hair followed the arm into the room I slid behind and pressed the barrel of the Glock into the right ear.
A clatter of papers, keys, cell phone, and a Starbucks cup fell to the floor, and as they hit I heard a soft moan of terror, and I looked at what I was holding at gunpoint.
She was a square, plain-looking woman in her mid-thirties, wearing large Elton John-style glasses and a lightweight tropical sundress, not at all what I had pictured as our killer, and she was trembling violently. “Please,” she croaked. “Please don’t kill me.” There was an unpleasant smell, and I looked down at the floor by my feet. Coffee was puddling out of the Starbucks cup, and a pool of urine around the woman’s feet was growing to meet it—and spreading now toward my shoes, too, a very nice pair of New Balance running shoes, practically brand-new.
“Please,” the woman whispered again, and she was shaking so hard now I could barely keep the gun in her ear.
“Ahem,” said Jackie, and I looked up. She was standing about ten feet away, looking at us with an expression of real concern. “That was very impressive,” she said. “I mean, it’s nice to see you really know what you’re doing, but …” She bit her lip. “I, uh, I tried to tell you,” she said, and nodded at the woman I had captured.
“Um …” Jackie said with a kind of appalled flutter of her hands. She gave an embarrassed half smile and waved one hand at my prisoner. “Can I introduce my assistant, Kathy?”
I looked at the woman I was holding. She was still trembling, and she looked back at me with wide and terrified eyes. “Pleased to meet you,” I said.
TEN
IF YOU ARE JACKIE FORREST AND YOU ARE STAYING AT THE Grove Isle Hotel, you do not get the kind of room service normal people must put up with, even very rich normal people. I have stayed in some very nice hotels, but it always takes somewhere between one hour and three days to get a response to a call for service. And when help finally arrives, it is usually one surly man with a bad back who only speaks Urdu and refuses to understand the simplest request unless he sees dollar bills of a large denomination.
But for Jackie, the hotel had apparently hired a team of Olympic sprinters with a pathological need to please. Within thirty seconds of Jackie’s call for a mop, a trio of young women arrived, eager and smiling. They wore hotel name tags that sa
id NADIA, MARIA, and AMILA, and they fell on the puddle as if they were starving and it was manna rather than urine, while poor Kathy was still staggering away from the door and collapsing into a chair.
One of the maids, Amila, looked strangely familiar, and I stared longer than one really should look at a hotel maid mopping up pee. She looked up and smiled at me and then tossed her head, flinging her golden hair to one side. “I make my hair as Chackie,” she said shyly, with a very thick accent from some Central European country. “Very important star, yes?” She glanced over to the chair where Jackie was soothing Kathy’s nerves.
And sure enough, it was true. Amila had styled her hair just the way Jackie did, which explained why she had looked familiar. “It’s very nice,” I said, and Amila blushed and returned her attention to her mop. She and her business associates had our little accident cleaned up in no time. They put the Starbucks cup, keys, and the cell phone on a side table, and they vanished, still smiling and leaving behind no more than a pleasant lemon smell, before Kathy managed to say, “Oh, God,” more than two times. Amila paused at the door, briefly, and looked hungrily at Jackie. She touched her own hair, sighed, and disappeared into the hall.
Kathy said, “Oh, God,” another twenty or thirty times while Jackie cooed at her in an attempt to soothe her jangled nerves. I am sure it is very unsettling to have a gun jammed into your ear, even a gun as nice as the Glock, but after five or six minutes of monotone monosyllabic misery, I began to wonder whether Kathy might be overdoing it a bit. I hadn’t actually shot her; I’d done no more than grab her and point the pistol. But the way she carried on you would have thought I’d taken out her liver and offered her a bite.
Still, she finally calmed down enough to stop saying, “Oh, God”—and she immediately switched to staring at me and saying, “You bastard. You horrible bastard. Oh, you bastard.”
Jackie glanced at me to see if I minded the rough language, and when I shrugged she twitched me a quick smile and went back to soothing Kathy.
“Dexter is here to protect me, Kathy,” she said. “I’m really sorry; this is my fault; I should have told him you were coming.”
“Oh, God, that bastard,” Kathy said, cleverly combining both of her annoying chants.
“It’s my fault,” Jackie said. “I am so sorry.”
“My phone!” Kathy choked out. She leaped out of the chair. “My God, if you ruined my phone …!”
“I’m sure it’s all right,” Jackie said.
Kathy jumped over to the side table where Amila had put her things. “All of your appointments! The contact list—everything!” She grabbed up her phone, and Jackie followed behind and took her arm, leading her back to her chair. But Kathy refused to sit until she made sure the phone had not been ruined by exposure to her own urine.
“It works,” she said at last. “Oh, thank God, it still works.” And she glared extra hard at me, as if I was the one who had peed on it. “Bastard,” she said.
“All right, Kathy, we’re all right now; everything’s fine,” Jackie murmured.
It was several more minutes before Kathy calmed down enough to resume normal human behavior. I filled the time by reholstering my Glock, bolting the door, and sitting down on a chair on the opposite side of the room from Kathy and her tedious meltdown. But even the most irritating things must end, and eventually Kathy remembered that she was, after all, an employee—and an employee who had wet herself in front of her boss, too. She finally fluttered to her feet and began to babble apologies to Jackie, alternating them with venomous glares at me. She straightened the heap of papers she’d brought in, reminded Jackie about a couple of telephone interviews in the morning, and finally stumbled out the door and away with one final hateful glower at me.
I secured the door behind her and turned to see that Jackie was watching me with a kind of amused caution. “What?”
She shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “Just … sorry about that. Poor Kathy really is very devoted to me. Very good at her job.”
“She must be,” I said. “If you let her pee on your floor.”
Jackie giggled, a sound that was as contagious as it was surprising, and I found that I was smiling in response. “She did pee, didn’t she,” Jackie said.
“If she didn’t,” I said, “Starbucks coffee has gone way downhill.”
Jackie giggled again, and started to sink down into the chair where Kathy had been sitting. She caught herself halfway down and jerked upright. “Oh!” she said. “That’s, um—I think I’d prefer a chair with a dry seat.”
“Good thinking,” I said, and I watched Jackie move to one end of the couch, where she sat down and relaxed into a kind of contented sprawl. She sighed, and then she glanced at the heap of papers Kathy had piled on the end table. She immediately tensed up; her shoulders went up an inch and the half smile fell off her face.
“The letters,” she said.
It may have been the strain of being called a bastard so many times, but I didn’t know what she meant. “What letters?” I said.
Jackie nodded at the papers. “From him,” she said. “The psycho. Kathy brought them for you.”
“Oh,” I said. It was very thoughtful, even though I really didn’t want them.
Jackie kept looking at the pile with an expression that was halfway between loathing and anxiety.
When nothing else happened for a full minute, I cleared my throat politely. “Well,” I said. “Should we order some dinner?”
Jackie looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read, for just a moment too long, before she finally said, “All right.”
Dinner was a somewhat somber affair. The chummy, lighthearted mood of cocktail hour had vanished, and Jackie spent most of the meal staring at her plate, picking at the food without actually eating very much of it. That was a shame, because it was really very good food. I had ordered tournedos of beef; I’d always wondered what a tournedo was, and when I saw it listed on the menu I decided there was no time like the present to find out. I knew it was some kind of beef, so it seemed like a rather low-risk gamble, and it turned out to be two very tasty chunks of beef, cooked in a wine-and-mango sauce. I was fairly sure that mango was not part of the original recipe—after all, what’s the French word for mango?—but it was a nice addition, and I had no trouble eating everything, including a large mound of garlic mashed potatoes and a helping of broccoli, steamed just right.
Jackie had stone crab, or at any rate, she had it served to her. She cracked a claw open and poked at it for a while before she nibbled at one small chunk, without even dipping it in the melted butter. She also ate one spear of grilled asparagus, and half a forkful of wild rice. Altogether, though, it was quite clear that she was having trouble with the whole idea of eating. I wondered briefly whether she would think I was rude if I offered to finish her meal for her—after all, stone crab does not grow on trees. But upon sober reflection, I decided it was not quite the thing.
That was the last chance for sober reflection of any kind that evening, since Jackie had ordered a bottle of wine for each of us—red for my tournedos and white for her crab. The shyness she exhibited toward solid food did not extend to the wine, and she had finished about three-quarters of the bottle by the time she pushed her plate away. On top of the mojito she’d had earlier, it should have made her very unsteady, but her movements seemed perfectly crisp and her speech did not slur, what little there was of it. For the first part of the meal I didn’t really notice how quiet she was, since my attention was all on my plate. But as the happy sounds of eating began to slow down, I became aware that no conversation arose to take its place, and I watched as Jackie slouched over her plate in moody silence and played with her food without eating.
Even the excellent dessert didn’t improve her mood. I had something called Decadent Lava Cake, which was very good, although the decadence escaped me. Jackie had ordered a kind of crème brûlée, but once again she didn’t really eat it. She picked a small piece of caramelized cr
ust off the top and crunched on it, but that was all. I began to wonder whether perhaps she took vitamin shots in secret; she certainly didn’t eat enough to sustain human life.
The waiters came and cleared away the wretched refuse of our meal, and I bolted the door behind them. Jackie still sat at the table in a kind of introspective slouch. I wondered how long it would last. I wondered if I should do something to help her snap out of it. If so, my study of daytime TV drama gave me two clear choices: either therapeutic release by getting her to talk about it, or cheerful chatter to change the subject. But it was impossible to say which one was right, and in any case, I couldn’t be sure it was actually in my job description.
And seriously: What was my real role here? Earlier this evening we had been chatting away like true pals, but I was not really a friend—she had probably just been putting me at ease. After all, she was a rich and famous person—a star, in fact—and I was no more than a modest and unassuming forensics geek with an interesting hobby. As far as I knew, this was a situation Emily Post had never covered, and I did not know how to proceed. Should I keep things formal and businesslike, because I was a technical consultant turned bodyguard? Or was I now an employee—and if so, should I follow Kathy’s lead and pee on the floor? After a mojito and most of a bottle of wine, that option was starting to look appealing, but it would almost certainly nudge the tone of the evening in an unclear direction, so I decided against it.
So I stood there uncertainly, watching Jackie stare into blank, bleak space for what seemed like a very long time. But finally her head snapped up and her eyes met mine. “What,” she said.
“Nothing,” I said. “I just wasn’t sure, um …” And I realized I wasn’t even sure what I wasn’t sure of, so I stumbled back into awkward silence.
Jackie smiled with just the right side of her mouth, a kind of rueful acknowledgment. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “Sorry.” She shook her head. “I guess I wasn’t very good company for dinner.”