Authors: Midnight Hour
halfway attractive woman he thought he had a chance with.
It would be a mistake to read too much into something that might mean nothing at afl.
“I’m going to have a bagel. Would you like one?” she asked politely.
“No, thanks. I’ve got cereal.” He was being polite, too, Grace reflected as she extracted a single frozen bagel from the bag in the freezer and popped it into the microwave for the required forty-five seconds. When the ping sounded, Grace hesitated only a moment before carrying her bagel, a jar of strawberry preserves, and her cup of coffee to the table. Instead of her usual place-that would mean sitting right beside him-she chose a chair on the opposite side of the table and sat down.
“The women’s section is around here somewhere,” he said with an air of abstraction, glancing around over the pages scattered across the tabletop as though he would help her find it.
“What are you reading, sports?” Grace inquired with perfect affability, locating and retrieving the front, general news section that she always started with.
He grinned, his attention sudderdy all on her, his eyes twinkling. He looked handsome, charming, and very endearing srnihng at her hke that, she thought with a worrisome pang in the region of her heart-and with conscious effort she did not snifle back.
“I knew that would get you. It was a joke, Grace. ” “Not funny, Detective. Using her professional acade of cool detachment as a shield, she took a sip of
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coffee as she checked out the section he held. “And I see you are reading sports.”
“I’m a Pacers fan, what can I say?” Still grinning, he returned his attention to his paper, then glanced at her again a moment later. “By the way, if you need an engraved invitation to call me Tony, consider you just got one.”
Not cafling him by his first name had been a deliberate choice on her part. She had tried to avoid even thinking of him that way. If she kissed him and called him Tony, she was well on her way to sliding down a very slippery slope. Their relationship was forever changed. Instead of being professi onal, it became personal, and she wasn’t sure she was ready for that.
So she avoided answering.
“What did you do with my gun?” She hadn’t seen it since he’d taken it from her last night.
He looked over at her speculatively. “You reafly want to know?”
“it would be nice, yes.”
“Then say, what did you do with my gun, Tony.” Grace met his look with a frown. “Are we childish or what?”
“Probably. Say it.”
if she balked, she made a bigger deal out of her use of his first name than she wanted to. She hadn’t exI
pected him to make an issue of it.
“What did you do with my gun, Tony.” She gave him a little, ironic smile.
1 1”That was hard, wasn’t it?” He tsk-tsked sympatheti cally. “You said it real well, though.”
“My gun?”
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“It’s on the top shelf of the closet ‘In the dining room. Unloaded. The magazine with the bullets is on top of your china cabinet. While I’m here, do me a favor and leave it there, would you, please? The thought that you’re going to grab a gun and come running if trouble strikes gives me the wiflies.”
Before Grace could reply to this, Jessica walked into the kitchen. Damp hair pulled back from her face and secured at the nape with a barrette, obviously fresh out of the shower, she was dressed, too, in jeans, and an oversized purple sweatshirt with the legend “ere are you, Leo? scrawled across the front in pink. Glancing from her mother to Marino and back, she headed toward the refrigerator with a wan “Hi.”
Both returned her greeting. Grace even managed to hold her tongue when Jessica sat down with a Diet Coke, a piece of cheese, and a quick, challenging look for her mother,
Jessica had to learn to manage her own disease.
“Did you sleep well, sweetie?” was all Grace said. Jessica nodded, then shook her head. “Kind of I woke up a couple of times, thinking about Godzifla.” Her gaze went to Marino. “What … happened to him? His body, I mean. Did the cops take it?”
Marino nodded. “Some tests need to be run on it. Why?”
“I want to bury him. In the backyard, under the forsythia in the corner. I don’t want him to Just be … thrown away.”
Jessica had taken neither 2 bite of cheese nor a sip of her soft drink, Grace saw. Her daughter was obviously
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hurting, and her heart ached in sympathy. But she needed to eat-
“I’ll make sure you get the body back for burial, if you like,” Marino said.
Jessica nodded, and took a small sip of Diet Coke. Grace concentrated on eating her bagel and drinking her coffee. After a moment, Jessica ate her cheese, then went to the pantry for a box of cereal. When her daughter returned to the table with a bowl of healthy grains, Grace took care not to appear the slightest bit interested.
“What homework do you have for tomorrow?” she asked instead.
Jessica shrugged, spooning cereal into her mouth. “Not much. Spanish vocab. An algebra sheet-I’ll do it tonight.”
Grace nodded, finishing her bagel. Tonight, too, they would have to talk, and by then she hoped she would have come up with some kind of effective punishment for her daughter’s transgressions. So far, she’d been too tired and too preoccupied to think about it.
Obviously discipline was not one of her strong points.
“Okay, ladies, how about we talk about today’s agenda for a minute,” Marino said, glancing from Grace to Jessica an1d back as he folded the sports section and laid it on the table. “I have to go to My house, feed the dog, pick up some clothes and other necessities, and that kind of thing. Since I can’t leave you two, I suggest you come with me. Any objections?”
“You have a dog?” Jessica looked interested. “What kind? A police dog?”
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“No, Kramer’s a mutt.”
“Kramer?” Grace looked at him, fascinated. She realized that she was curious to see his home, and his dog, and anything else that might tell her something in fact.
about his character. Eager, 1
“Remember Seinfeld? I named her that because her life is one perpetual bad-hair day.” He looked faintly sheepish. Grace grinned.
“We’d love to come meet Kramer,” she said. “Yeah, we would,” Jessica echoed.
“Anytime you’re ready, then.” He rose, picking up his dishes and carrying them over to the sink, where he rinsed them and put them into the dishwasher. Grace ollowed suit.
and Jessica f
“Where’s your car?” Jessica asked curiously when they were backing out of the driveway some fifteen minutes later. It was a beautiful October day, sunny and crisp, with a cloudless blue sky. The only reminder of the last several days’
rain was the occasional puddle that dotted the Pavement, Grace felt her spirits lift as the trio left the house behind, and only then did she realize just how worried and upset she had been. In the car, Jessica was in the backseat. Grace drove. Marino was in the front passenger seat. He had volunteered to drive, but Grace, with a superior lift of her brows and a negative shake of her head, had turned him down.
“Did anybody ever mention to you the possibility that you rriight be kind of a control freak?” he had murmured in Grace’s ear then, while Jessica climbed into the back and just before he’d walked around to the passenger side. Grace hadn’t had a chance to reply.
“I parked it around the corner,” Marino said in an—
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swer tojessica’s quest, on, craning his neck both ways as Grace pulled into traffic, just as if he were the one doing the driving. Noting that, Grace made a face at him. Talk about control fireaks, she mouthed silently, because of Jessica in the back. That he -nderstood was clear by the sudden quirking of his mouth into a smile. “We’ll pick it up later, maybe on the way back.”
The house Marino directed them to was in Victorian Village near the university. Undergoing a revival, it was a thriving community of hundred-year-old houses. The area was an interesting rnix of residents and housing values, with everyone from corporate vice presi —in huge, completely restored ‘dents with families
brick homes that sold in the mid-six figures-to small, shotgun-style frame houses favored by singles and students who could most politely be described as fixeruppers. Marino’s house was one of the latter. It was a one-story, gray-frame house, with a covered concrete stoop and a single, large, many-paned window looking out onto the street. Similar houses were close on either side. An elderly woman swept the stoop of the porch next door. As Grace pulled up to the curb and parked-there were no driveways-the woman turned, paused with her sweeping, and watched the three of them get out of the car.
“Out all night again, huh, Tony?” she called with a wave and a cackle as he followed Grace and Jessica up the short, cracked concrete walk that led to his stoop.
“Working, Mrs. Crutcher, always working,’ I he yelled back with a good-humored grin.
“That’s what you always say,” Mrs. Crutcher retorted with an answering grin and a dismissive gesture-,
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she returned to her sweeping as Marino unlocked the door and they entered the house.
Grace’s first impression was that it was shabby but neat, with the faintly musty smell of a place in need of a good airing. The walls were plain white and largely unadorned. The furniture-a brown tweed-upholstered couch and a tan Naugahyde recliner in the living room-was worn but serviceable. A braided rug covered the floor, a TV stood on a stand in one corner, and a nonfunctioning fireplace was fronted by a brass and wire screen. Paperback books filled the shelves built into alcoves on either side of the fireplace. A mirror had been hung over the mantel, which except for a single small, framed photograph, was de void of decorative bibelots.
“Where’s your dog?” Unlike Grace, Jessica evinced no interest at all in the house or its contents.
“In the backyard,” Marino said with a glinting smile. “Go out through the kitchen.”
He led the way through a second room directly behind the living room-originally intended as a dining room, Grace thought, but outfitted with a desk, a zhair, a computer, and overflowing bookshelves as a Jen or office-to the kitchen, a small square room with three walls given over to white formica cabi,iets, white counters, and white appliances. The fourth xall, covered with red-and-white windowpane-plaid )aper, contained a door with a glass pane and a tall -ectangular window, both topped with a red-andmhite-gingham frill. A glass-and-wrought-iron table ind two wrought-iron chairs with red seat covers stood n the middle of the room. The tabletop was piled high
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with mail. Beyond the kitchen, Grace got a glinipse of what looked like two bedrooms, with white walls and beds and not much else.
“Out there.” Marino smiled at Jess, ca, pointing to the door. Without waiting for any further permission, she crossed to the door, opened it, admitting a gust of fresh air, and stopped on the threshold as she was greeted by a sharp bark.
Marino moved to stand behind her for a moment, said, “Yo, Kramer, I’m home,” over her head to the unseen denizen of the yard, and then headed toward the bedrooms.
“I’m going to shave real quick and throw some things into a bag. Make yourself at home,” he said over his shoulder to Grace.
“A puppy!” Jessica exclaimed rapturously at the same time, and disappeared down the steps into the yard.
Grace followed Jessica and stood in the doorway for a moment looking down. The kitchen door opened onto three gray-painted wooden steps, which led down into a narrow, grassy side yard. This part of the yard ran along the length of the house before expanding into the backyard proper, where from her vantage point Grace could see part of a detached frame garage painted gray like the house. A door in the back of the garage opened onto the yard, while the front, with what she assumed was the car entrance, opened onto an alley that ran behind the house. in one corner of the yard, a small, apparently dead rose garden reached with bare, thorny branches toward the sky. A chain-link fence covered with weedlike vines surrounded the
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property, making a right angle into the side of the house just beyond where Grace stood at the top of the steps. Directly below her Jessica knelt. She was being jumped on and slavishly licked by a pair of dogs who were carbon copies of each other except for the fact that one was knee-high while the other was about a fourth the size. Both were brown and white and so furry thatjust about the only way to tell one end from the other was that the back of each had a wag to it. Grace’s second glance found small, pointed ears attached to the tops of their heads, and busy pink tongues at work on any part of Jessica’s person they could reach. Long tufts of white hair springing from where, in humans, eyebrows would be, allowed only an occasional glimpse of two pairs of liquid-brown eyes.
i”Oh, Mom, aren’t they sweet?” Jessica exclaimed with a glance up at her mother. Jessica was wreathed in smiles, and Grace had an idea that Marino’s stock had just soared sky-high in her estimation. Having never owned a dog—her father had equated dogs with mess when she was growing up, so their family had never had one, and later she had been too busy with school and work and Jessica to even consider acquiring oneGrace was not so sure about the sweet part. In fact, she had never felt really comfortable with pets at all. Jessica, on the other hand, adored all animals. She was holding the puppy on her lap while Kramer rolled onto her back, legs kicking in the air, for a tummy rub, which Jessica gladly supplied.
“Mom, ask Detective Marino what the puppy’s name is,” Jessica requested with another upward glance. She was grinning from ear to ear, looking hap—
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pier than Grace would have thought possible, considering the trauma she had suffered through the previous night.
Grace nodded and withdrew from the doorway. In the near bedroom she caught a quick glimpse of movement through the partially open door, confirming Marino’s location.