Mike pulled out my chair with an elaborate flourish. “Madame,” he said, and kissed the back of my neck when I sat down.
Before he could go away, I pulled him down to me by the hand, brought his face to mine. “Everything is beautiful,” I said. I still had a lump in my throat and a vague sense of foreboding.
“You only think so because it’s dark in here. Couple more days, though, and it will be beautiful.”
“I wasn’t referring to the house.” I raised his hand to kiss the backs of his fingers.
“If you don’t stop now, the food will get cold.”
“Better call the waiter, then.” I let him go, but he lingered long enough to curl my toes before he went to fetch the caterer-wrapped meal from the kitchen.
Salad, pasta something, chocolate mousse, and fresh raspberries. It looked nice, but I could hardly swallow anything except the dry champagne. I couldn’t take my eyes off Mike across the table from me. The thing is, I was trying to imagine growing old with that face beside me, across from me, all around me all the time. It is a world-class face, so I must be a hard sell. I was very unsettled.
Mike’s plate had hardly been touched, either. Marsalis, pere et fils, were playing “The Very Thought of You.”
Mike watched me, without saying anything, as I picked up my glass of champagne and walked with it over to his side of the table. He leaned back in his chair and looked up at me, questions in his expression. When he held out his arms to me, inviting me onto his lap, I shook my head.
“Dance with me,” I said. As he led me around the freshly sanded floor, I kissed him, beginning at the point of his chin and working along his wonderful, craggy face all the way to his ear. When I got there, I whispered, “I love you, Mike.”
He responded by nuzzling my neck. I had chills that had nothing to do with the breeze coming through the open windows. From somewhere, while we danced, he pulled out a small gold box and offered it to me on his upturned palm. My stomach did a roller-coaster fall; I was grateful I had foregone the pasta. I lost the music and stepped on his foot.
“What is that?” I asked. I didn’t really want to know, and I did not touch the box on his hand.
“Open it,” he said, smiling like a kid at a birthday party, embarrassed when the birthday girl got to his gift, but excited, too.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t trust small boxes.”
“Open it. Trust me.”
Well, I trust Mike, so I did it, I opened the box. Inside, under the cotton, I saw a flash of gold in the candlelight and nearly chickened out. When I finally pulled away the cotton, I found a shiny new key attached to a gold heart by a heavy chain. The heart was engraved with an M and had a clear stone set on either side of it. It was pretty. I think I was relieved it wasn’t a ring, but I can’t be sure.
“Whose M is it?” I asked, holding it up, spinning the heart in the flickering light. “My initial, or yours?”
“It’s ours. This is the key to the front door of our house.”
“Thank you.”
“What did you think was in the box?”
“I hadn’t a clue.”
“You were nervous about it.” He said this with tooth-sucking, teasing sureness.
I said, “Are you going to dance with me or are you going to try to pick a fight?”
“Of course, there are a lot of M words. I guess it could stand for a lot of things. Want me to list a few?”
“No.”
“I want to talk about M words.” He took me in his arms again and danced me across the room and out onto the brick patio. His voice was next to my ear. “There’s, mar…” He drew it out sadistically. “…igolds. And, marbles. Don’t forget Margot-a funny name to give a little baby.”
“The only thing funny here is you, big guy.”
“Ready to dip?” He dropped me backward, pulled me up again, finished with a spin that brought us face to face. With our noses almost touching, he said, “Margot Eugenie Duchamps MacGowen?”
“What?”
“Marry me.”
Chapter 26
Fire lit the sky for miles. Like a giant pointer, a fat white plume reached up out of its center and disappeared into the cloud cover. Six helicopters circled the area, shining their big spots down into the middle of the red glow, saying, “Here it is.” We could see exactly where the fire was. The problem was getting to it.
The freeways for miles on all sides were nearly impassable, the surface streets were at gridlock. We were near Overland Avenue, somewhere on the Westside, trying to find a way through. Mike blasted his horn in frustration before he gave up and veered off to drive the shoulder. He bounced us through potholes, over road debris and various car parts. It was uncomfortable, scary as hell, but we did progress past the solid, unmoving mass of cars.
“You weren’t friends?” I asked, holding on to the dash.
Mike frowned as if he’d swallowed something distasteful. “No. He’s a one-way kind of guy. I don’t think he has any friends. Something about him, the things he talks about, I guess-I don’t know. I worked a tough case with him, but I kept my distance.”
“What kind of things?”
“Schemes.” He nearly sideswiped a station wagon to avoid a crater. When the Blazer stopped bouncing, he took a breath. “Always involved in some sort of deal, gonna get rich, gonna blow town. Nothing ever seemed to pan out, though. And he was a lush.”
I was trying to relax; the worst thing you can do in a collision is brace yourself-snaps your bones. I asked, “Was he competent on the job?”
“Maybe he was once, or he wouldn’t have been promoted. He knew what to do, but he’d get drunk, lose track of things. I was new to the division and he sort of attached himself to me. Probably because no one else would work with him.”
“I read the Conklin investigation files. I didn’t see his name on much of it.”
“Totally H.U.A. all the time.”
I said, “I forgot my glossary.”
He risked taking his eyes off the road long enough to give me his tough-guy smirk. “Head Up Ass.”
I said, “Oh.”
“It was a piece-of-shit case to begin with. The trail was a year old. Jerry asks to be assigned to do the year review, the lieutenant doesn’t trust him, but he has to give him something to keep him busy. So the lieutenant says, sure, take it on, and here’s the new kid on the block-me-to be your bun boy. I knew Jerry didn’t expect a damn thing from me. For damn sure he never thought I would pull it together.”
There was open space in the middle of the next intersection. Mike, holding down the horn, blasted through it to effect a left turn. We took a lot of the evil eye and not a few middle-finger salutes, but we made it.
When we were back on the shoulder, I said, “There is a body?”
“Yes.”
I picked up the telephone. “What’s Michael’s number?”
“Why?”
“I have to talk to him.”
“He’s okay, Maggie. Calm down. Michael and his mom went up to her folks’ place in Arrowhead.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I already called.”
Mike rode the center line down Rose Avenue, crossed Sepulveda in the no-man’s land between the end of a red light and the flashing on of a green. Fire trucks, police cars, paramedics vehicles, and news vans blocked the street, and we were still two blocks from the equipment storage yard where Jerry Kelsey kept his trailer. Where flames still shot ten feet into the air.
By a combination of skill and dumb luck, Mike got in among the official vehicles without major damage and found a place to stop.
I was out of the Blazer and running toward the storage lot, ankle-deep in dirty run-off water, a fine spray falling from overhead, when Ralph Faust grabbed me, spun me around.