They’d broken up, and bad times had followed for each of them in different ways. And then circumstances had thrown them back together and they’d connected on an even deeper level.
Now they were living together again, and Cindy was afraid.
Not by the closeness and the magic, but because she could see Rich loving her and them so much that he would want them to repledge their commitment and he would propose marriage again. Which, sadly, would bring them exactly back to their main point of conflict: Richie wanting kids. Which he wanted many of and soon. And Cindy figuring there was time for all that—later.
Take the last three weeks, for example.
She’d been working a hideous story about a man who’d killed his wife, mother-in-law, and two small sons. She had researched, written, and polished her five-thousand-word piece and had gotten it into Tyler’s in-box three minutes before closing today. Tomorrow she was taking off for a ten-day book tour.
And her book was a tremendous source of pleasure. Not just that she’d been a big part of solving a terrible crime, but that she’d written a book-length work that had been published and was, if not exactly catching fire, performing well. Her editor had asked her to sketch out new book ideas for the publisher. Which was holy freakin’ wow. A lot of great things were coming true, things she’d worked toward for years. Years!
But at the same time, she didn’t want to lose Richie. She loved him so much, had missed him so much, loved coming home and getting into his lap and holding him while they breathed and hugged out the tension of the day.
Oh, please, Richie, please don’t push this. Please don’t try to close the deal.
“This where you wanted to go, miss?” the driver asked.
“Yes. Totally. Thank you.”
Cindy paid the driver and went inside the restaurant. The maître d’, a man named Arnold, took her to the more private back room, a very pleasant space with exposed-brick walls and Venetian glass chandeliers and aromas of wonderful house specialties floating on the air.
She took her seat, ordered a double Scotch, and had made progress with her stiff drink by the time Arnold brought Richie to their table. Her lover bent to kiss her and swung down into his chair, cool air from the street coming off him along with the smells of detergent and shampoo. He just looked great.
“Umm,” he said, pointing to her glass of Scotch. “What’s the occasion?”
She shrugged. “I was kind of in a mad lather all day. Got my pages in to Tyler on time. And now I’m thinking ahead to tomorrow …”
“I know. Almost two weeks away from home. That’s why I wanted to have dinner at our favorite place. Have a little us time.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure. Because, shit, Cindy. I miss you already.”
Cindy pushed the glass away and took Richie’s hands.
“You’re the best guy I’ve ever known, ever. Ever.”
He pulled her toward him and kissed her—with meaning.
“God, Richie,” she said when the kiss ended. “I’m gonna miss you, too.”
CHAPTER 37
I MET YUKI for lunch at Grouchy Lynn’s in the Dog-patch neighborhood: a cute little greasy spoon with striped wallpaper and two-person booths and the best French fries east of the freeway. I ordered a club sandwich with everything and got my teeth into it while Yuki played with her salad.
Yuki has always been moody in the best possible way, meaning she can be sober and focused one minute, and in the next minute launch her contagious chortle, which could pull anyone’s bad day out of the basement. But since her near-death experience during her honeymoon a few months ago, and it was really near death for hundreds of people, I’ve hardly heard her laugh at all.
And she wasn’t laughing now when she told me she had taken a major fork in the road.
I pounded the ketchup bottle in the direction of my fries and said, “What fork?”
“I took the job,” Yuki said.
She put down her utensils, abandoned her salad, and told me about a not-for-profit called the Defense League and that her client was dead.
“Who is this dead client and what are you supposed to do for him?” I asked.
“His name was Aaron-Rey Kordell, and he may have been coerced by the police into confessing to a triple homicide he didn’t commit. Then, while awaiting trial in the men’s jail, he was murdered in the showers by person or persons unknown.”
I grunted. A big part of the job was to get confessions. Cops were allowed to lie, and it was conceivable that people got worked over or tricked and confessed to things they didn’t do—but not often. Not that I knew about.
Yuki was saying, “Lindsay, if this story is in fact true, if Kordell was coerced into a confession and was then killed while awaiting trial, this is going to be a case against the city, the SFPD, and probably the cops who interrogated him, for I don’t know how many millions.”
I stopped eating.
A lawsuit against the police department would be a disaster for everyone in it, no doubt about it. A disaster. As Yuki’s friend, I had to be a fair sounding board. But never mind me.
“Your husband is a lieutenant in the SFPD,” I said.
“I know that, Linds.”
“What does he say?”
“He’s pissed off. We’re barely speaking.”
“Oh, man. You’re pretty sure Kordell was innocent?”
“He was caught with the gun on him. He was fifteen. Low IQ. It would have been fairly easy to get him to confess. I’ve seen the video of the interrogation. The narcs lied their faces off, Linds. Like ‘Tell us what you did and then you can go home.’ Then they told him what he did—their version.”
Yuki went on. “It might help me if I knew why Aaron-Rey was killed. Did he just piss someone off in jail? Or was he killed to avenge the deaths of those drug dealers? Because that would go to him being guilty.”
“I hope I don’t live to regret this, Yuki,” I said, “but I’ll see who was in lockup at the same time as Kordell. See what I can see. I don’t promise anything.”
“Just promise that whatever happens, we’re still buds.”
“That I can promise,” I said.
CHAPTER 38
AT JUST BEFORE 5 p.m. that day, Yuki followed Officer Creed Mahoney through several steel doors and gates to the jail on the sixth floor of the Hall of Justice. From there she was escorted to one of the claustrophobic counsel rooms with high barred windows, reserved for meetings between prisoners and lawyers.
She’d been waiting for about ten minutes when the door opened and Li’l Tony Willis clumped into the room in chains from wrists to ankles, all five foot nothing of him, wearing an orange jumpsuit and two full sleeves of tattoos, twists in his hair and ’tude on his face.
“Who are you again?” Li’l Tony asked as Mahoney threaded his chains through the hook in the table.
“Fifteen minutes, OK, Ms. Castellano?” said Mahoney. “I’ll be back.”
The door closed and locked.
Yuki said to the man-boy wife beater, drug dealer, and possible killer sitting across from her, “I’m an attorney. Yuki Castellano. I want to hear about Aaron-Rey Kordell getting killed. What happened?”
“Are you kidding me? You want to ask me did I kill him? Because no, I didn’t. Got any cigarettes?”
“I hoped you might be able to tell me who might have killed Kordell, because that could be helpful.”
“To who? I got nothing to tell you because I didn’t do nothing to that retard. So if that’s all, this is good-bye, Ms. Cassielandro.”
“Here’s what I know. You’ve given evidence against Jorge Sierra,” she said, referring to a savage Southern California drug lord who was known as Kingfisher, a man whose whereabouts were unknown. Even his true identity was a mystery.
“You were one of his inner circle, weren’t you, Tony? Don’t bother to lie. I know a lot of cops and I know you cooperated. If Sierra finds out, you’re going to have a very short li’l life.”