We headed toward the bedroom and began rifling through the drawers and closet, and I gave him the thoughts I’d already hashed out with Danielle. It felt weird to be in Rafe’s bedroom, which still smelled like Rafe, with a man who looked so much like Rafe but wasn’t Rafe. I remembered the last time I’d woken up in here, dawn just creeping through the slatted blinds and striping the cherry chest of drawers and Rafe’s chest and arms as he snored softly. A plip-plip sound had drifted in from the kitchen as the automatic coffeemaker kicked on. The smell of coffee followed moments later. The scent had half awakened Rafe and he’d turned to embrace me, his beard stubble rasping my face as he kissed me. I’d still had a ferocious case of beard burn when I walked in on him and Solange later that afternoon. I couldn’t face the bed with its rumpled sheets, so I drifted into the bathroom to search while Tav tore apart the bed, seemingly unaware of the conflicted thoughts and images chasing one another through my head.
We gave up forty minutes later without having found my love letters-Rafe must have trashed them-or the flash drive. Either the police had taken it along with the computer, Rafe had put it somewhere else (possibly planning to return it to Sherry), or someone else had lifted it. I discounted the possibility that Sherry Indrebo was wrong about where she’d left it; she didn’t strike me as a woman who got details confused.
“I will ask the police about it,” Tav said, offering me a glass of water in the kitchen when we’d finished.
Leaning against the sink, I swallowed it in one long gulp-rifling someone’s condo was hard work-and said, “Just don’t make them suspicious.”
“Never fear.” He grinned.
“Did they give you Rafe’s car keys, too?”
Tav nodded.
“Is the Lexus in the garage?” I didn’t see how Rafe’s car could be in its slot below the condo building when he’d been shot at the studio.
“No. My rental is parked in his space. Why?”
I explained my thinking and he disappeared into the bedroom momentarily, emerging with Rafe’s key ring in his hand. He lobbed it at me and I caught it. “You’re giving me Rafe’s keys?” I felt a spark of warmth at his trust.
“It is not his car, correct? So I have nothing to lose if you turn out to be a clever car thief.”
“Oh.” His prosaic logic deflated me.
“Search the car if you come across it, or return the keys to Ms. Indrebo,” Tav said.
I pocketed the keys. “I should go.”
“Let me buy you dinner. I would offer to cook for you, but my brother did not keep the refrigerator well stocked.” Pulling the fridge door open, he gestured at the mostly bare shelves that featured only a bottle of salad dressing, a carton of take-out Chinese, and some yogurts. “You can tell me about your compulsion to chase after aging punk rockers. I hear Rod Stewart is between wives again.”
I punched him on the shoulder. “Just for that, you can pick up the check.”
Over a delicious seafood dinner at a casual restaurant two blocks from the condo complex, I confessed to my initial assault on the mysterious limo and my conviction that its occupant knew something about Rafe’s death. “Or, if not his death exactly, something about why he was so worried these past weeks, why he needed money.” I sawed a small slice of bread from the crusty loaf the waiter had brought and ate it dry, watching jealously as Tav ripped off half the loaf and slathered it with butter. Watching my weight like a jockey was part of the price I paid for being a professional dancer.
“The limo’s license plates started with DPR,” I said, “which means it belongs to a diplomat.”
“From Argentina,” Tav said, setting his knife down slowly, his attention caught. “PR is the country code for Argentina.”
“How do you know that?”
“I was at the embassy earlier today, dealing with issues related to shipping Rafael’s body back to Argentina. The cars all had plates starting with SPR or DPR.”
“S for staff, D for diplomat,” I said. “See, it proves that limo had something to do with Rafe.”
“I must return to the embassy tomorrow,” Tav said. “Perhaps I can ask around and find out why someone from the embassy might be meeting with Rafael.”
“That’d be great.” Our food arrived then and we ate our meals-sole for me, crab cakes for Tav-in silence for a few minutes. I broke it to ask, “So what happened between you and Rafe that you didn’t keep in touch?”
Tav looked up from his plate, his dark eyes serious. He seemed to be looking at something past me, but after a moment, his expression lightened and he focused on me. “It wasn’t so much what happened between me and Rafael as what happened between our parents. My father took up with Rafael’s mother, Suzette, when I was only three. She was in Argentina to study tango-she was a dancer, too-and it was love at first sight for her and my father.” His grimace betrayed what he thought of that. “He divorced my mother to marry her. I split my time between the two households, spending the school year with my mother and my summers with my father, Suzette, and Rafael. When I was nineteen and Rafael was sixteen, my father and mother decided that they were meant to be together after all and he divorced Suzette to remarry my mother. You can see that Rafael came by his womanizing honestly,” Tav said with a wry smile.
“What a plate of emotional spaghetti,” I said.
He gave me a puzzled look.
“Everything all tangled up and stuck together.”
“That’s exactly how it was. Suzette returned to America-she was from Texas-and took Rafael with her. He was angry, so angry, with my mother and his anger leaked over onto me.” Tav said. “I do not know if Suzette forbade him to keep in touch, or if he was not inclined to do so, but I did not hear from him for several years. Not until after Suzette died. Breast cancer.”
“Rafe never told me any of this,” I said, saddened by this evidence of our lack of true intimacy. “I mean, I knew he was semi-estranged from his dad and I knew his mom was dead, but I didn’t know the details.”
“Did he talk about me?”
I hesitated a moment, on the brink of a comforting lie, then said, “Never.”
“Ah, well.” He scooped some crab cake onto his fork and fell silent.
I half reached out a hand to him, but drew it back, glad he hadn’t seen it. I felt like I knew him because he was so like Rafe in some ways; I had to keep reminding myself that I didn’t know him at all.
“And you?” Tav interrupted my thoughts. He was smiling at me over the rim of his wineglass.
“Me?”
“Family? Siblings?”
“My parents divorced when I was fifteen. They both live in the area and I see them pretty often. My dad’s remarried. Two sibs-a brother and a sister. No half siblings, stepsiblings, or ex-husbands. Rafe’s as close as I ever got to marrying.” On the verge of asking if he was married, I became aware that our conversation had shifted from investigating Rafe’s murder to first date sorts of topics. Uncomfortable with the segue, I finished with, “So when do you think you can get hold of your embassy contact?”
“Monday.” Signaling for the check, he pulled out his wallet.
I pushed a twenty across the table to cover my share and was slightly surprised when he accepted it without comment. Did that mean he needed help financially? Or was he an enlightened man who accepted women as equals? Rafe had always insisted on paying when we went out, even though we made roughly the same amount. It had seemed charming at first, gallant, but then had grown irksome.
Tav and I walked back toward the condo and my car in near silence, each absorbed by our own thoughts. We said good night on the sidewalk and I was halfway home when I realized we hadn’t discussed Graysin Motion at all. I hadn’t asked him to let me have a say if he decided to sell his half of the studio. I didn’t want to end up with Mark Downey as a partner, or any other well-off student with more money than talent (and we had a lot of those), or a stranger who didn’t know a foxtrot from a fox hunt. I banged the steering wheel and vowed to make it our first topic of conversation the next time we met.