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 crust 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.”
“Oh, well,” I said. “That’s all right. I mean, it was a very good dinner.”
She smiled again, using both sides of her mouth this time, although she still didn’t look entirely happy. “Right,” she said. “Glad you liked it.” She got up and wandered over to the sliding glass door that led out onto the balcony, and for a moment she just stood there looking out. I was afraid we were going right back into moody silence again, and I began to wish I’d brought a good book. But apparently she saw something out on the Bay that snapped her out of it; she suddenly turned around and, with a cheerful energy that was clearly forced, she said, “Well, then! It’s too early for bed. So what should we do?”