Her laugh was dark. "I'm not sure about anything, Murphy. But if you'd like to take him home with you, the whole thing will be settled for the foreseeable future. But don't forget that he likes to roam around the streets in his underwear scaring church organists, and that when he gets frightened he swings."
Murphy went back to his eggs, cutting them into bites small enough to satisfy an anorexic. Timmie drank the very last dram of coffee in her cup. The sun, making it past the next-door neighbor's, splashed sun-catcher colors on a dingy wall. Murphy tried hard to focus on food rather than the easy sensuality that had so quickly vanished from Leary's movements the minute her father had been brought up. He missed it. He also wondered at it.
"I know it's an imposition," he said, "but would you mind driving me back home? I want to start making background calls."
That made her laugh as she dropped her cup on the table with a thunk. "Not unless you're better with a metric wrench than I am. My car died last night, and I'm going to have to spend the morning trying to find out why. You might as well use my phone."
He tried smiling again. "You're holding me against my will?"
"Of course not. I'm laying odds you won't make it down my front steps without ending up on your nose. I also don't think you really want to be seen at work looking like Rocky Raccoon."
His smile grew into near-genuine proportions. "You know far too much about male egos, Leary."
Her eyes still looked sore and tired. "More than you'll ever know, Murphy."
"All right, then," he said. "Let's work together. If you or Dr. Adkins can gig the hospital computer for more information on those patients and I can get more background on the business angle, we can maybe find out exactly what the death rate might have to do with the bid by GerySys. Working together we can get answers in half the time."
She was already shaking her head as she climbed to her feet. "Not today. I have a car to fix, a costume to sew, and after that, I don't care if Alex Raymond is the Green River Killer, it's Halloween. I am spending the evening with my daughter. Tomorrow's soon enough."
"Okay, then," he said, a lot slower following to his feet, his plate only partially emptied. "I'll start. When you get the phone bill, forward it to the paper. Sherilee'll be happy to pay for a scoop like this. She's been smelling expose since I hit town."
That brought Timmie to a dead stop, her cup caught between her hands and her gaze off somewhere out the window. Murphy didn't have to ask why.
"Leary?"
Timmie turned to face him, and Murphy wondered if she knew how frightened she looked.
"You can still back out of this. It could protect your dad."
Out in the living room, the doorbell chimed. Neither of them turned to it. Timmie Leary stood there in the doorway to her kitchen as if caught in warring winds, her hands wrapped tightly around that old brown coffee mug, her posture taut.
"I'll tell you something, Murphy," she said, her voice way too soft. "This may sound ugly, but I'm getting real tired of always having to balance what's right against what's good for my father. Just once I'd like to act without having to worry about how it will affect him."
Murphy heard the anger, saw the sorrow, and couldn't think of a thing to say, except the obvious. "I didn't think you'd been back that long."
The door chimed again, more insistently this time. Timmie seemed to come back to life. She smiled with the kind of bleakness Murphy knew too well. "Don't kid yourself," she said. "You know that lovely picture Alex likes so much of Dad and me walking hand in hand when I was a little girl?"
Murphy nodded, the perfect straight man.
"I was the one leading him, Murphy."
And then she walked out to answer the door, and Murphy was left behind wondering why he was so surprised.
* * *
It was Cindy. Of course it was, Timmie thought, pulling the door wide to let her in.
"I don't know what to do," Cindy was saying before the door was even open. "That asshole's dropped me. Dropped me. After what I've given him. Timmie, what do I do?"
Timmie saw the tears that streaked Cindy's mottled face, the bedraggled state of her hair, and thought, Oh, what the hell. It was easier than talking to Murphy about her dad.
"Come on, Cindy," she said, turning her blithely back in the direction of the front yard. "Let's go work on my car."
"I don't want to work on your car!" Cindy wailed, distress lifting her voice like a curtain in high wind, then dropping it into misery. "I just want to feel better."
Any other morning Timmie might have been surly. But Cindy hurt. Timmie could hear it in every syllable. So Timmie smiled and put an arm around her shoulders and guided her away from Murphy, who didn't need to hear this. "I know, hon. But the sunshine will help. And I can teach you to be self-sufficient enough not to need another asshole again as long as you live."
"You do that," Cindy said, sniffing, "and I'm your slave forever."
It seemed to work. Not only did Cindy not notice Murphy in Timmie's house, but within twenty minutes they'd discovered Cyrano's problem and been joined by Ellen, who bore with her the name of a lawyer who was just dying to get her teeth into a delinquent husband.
"I was cleaning out some things this morning," she said by way of explanation. "And I came across this. I guess I just never had the guts to use her when I still could... Cindy, are you okay?"
Which gave Timmie the perfect chance to skip on up to the house to use the phone. The good news was that the lawyer was interested. The bad news was that, of course, she would cost money. Timmie bit the bullet and hired her when she said that since Timmie had filed her need to move with the California court, Jason's latest paper chase was nothing short of imbecilic and could be taken care of in short order. Timmie hung up feeling better than she had all night.
"Did you know that Mary Jane Arlington was head nurse at that Boston nursing home your golden boy ran?" Murphy immediately asked, puffing away on a cigarette he must have found under her father's bed as he made quick shorthand notes on a pad of paper he was balancing against his leg. "Her name was Mary Jane Freize then, but it's her. My old editor's sending pictures."
Timmie glared at him. "It's Halloween," she reminded him. "Tell me tomorrow."
So even with Murphy on her phone and her friends in the driveway, Timmie spent the rest of the day without having to deal with anything more than Cyrano's distributor, the cranky bobbin on her sewing machine, and the fact that Ellen and Cindy didn't seem happy unless they could play endless games of "my love life has been more screwed up than yours."
As for Murphy, he was deemed a little too frightening to be answering any doors, so he got dropped off the minute Cyrano was in service and Timmie's friends were out the door. He lost any grace points he'd earned by smiling at Timmie's ugly little car and saying, "Oh, look. I have a Cabriolet, too." His Cabriolet, of course, wasn't a 1983 Peugeot. It wasn't even rusted.
And that evening, with the clouds scudding in appropriately creepy fashion across an old yellow moon and jack-o'-lanterns lit into leers, Timmie took a very excited Scheherazade out to trick or treat in a costume that billowed and sparkled when she whirled. Since sundown signaled a temperature drop, Scheherazade had to deal with a coat over her lovely outfit, but at least she didn't have to worry about being ambushed by wayward straight pins.