“Allie. Allie. Allie.” Daniel’s honey flowed and we watched him tranquilize her.
I couldn’t stand it. I went into the kitchen to see if there was any dessert. There was a Sara Lee pound cake on the counter and a carton of Ashley’s vanilla ice cream in the freezer. I went back into the dining room.
“Dessert in five minutes, everyone,” I sang out, like Ina Garten. Everyone brightened up a little, as if this were a normal dinner party. Then one of the murder suspects came in to help the detective dish out ice cream, while the hostess snored and the host brought his bottle of Connemara to the table.
I started slicing pound cake with a dull knife and putting pieces on little crystal plates. The plates were old and fragile, like dragonfly wings, probably given by someone’s grandmother to the young and hopeful Freemans. I think Mrs. Freeman must have once had great charm and her life with that perfectly adorable man just sucked it right out of her. Daniel took the ice cream out of the freezer and for a few minutes we sliced and scooped.
“I don’t know you,” he said.
“You don’t.”
“Allison isn’t my girlfriend.”
“She’s my friend,” I said, pleased with myself.
Unfortunately, just then the lightbulb fizzled in the kitchen, leaving us startled and stumbling to find the switch. We were chest-to-chest in the half-dark and he put one hand on the back of my neck and the other around my waist and we kissed. We kissed like movie stars. We kissed until Albert called out, “Boys and girls! Dessert?” We carried plates through the swinging door.
Everyone gobbled their dessert. No one wanted to prolong the evening. Fiske and Allison cleared as Albert poured himself another drink, leaving his cake untouched. He lifted his wife’s head and slipped a napkin under her cheek, tenderly.
Daniel turned to me and said, “Let me give you a ride home. Please.”
“You’re very kind.” I rose quickly, thanked Albert, apologized silently to Mrs. Freeman, and went into the kitchen to say good night to Fiske and Allison and tell them I had a ride with Daniel. Fiske was thrilled. Allison frowned and dropped one of the pretty goblets. Fiske helped her pick up the tiny pieces. That’s right, I thought. Let him do that.
Daniel held my arm lightly as we walked out of the house. We both sighed, standing for a moment in the warm night, breathing in the honeysuckle above the roses, and the cut grass. Other people still tended the lawns on St. Ronan’s.
“This is mine,” he said, pointing to a little blue MG. “I finally got rid of that old Honda I was telling everyone about.”
The car was dashing and silly. It could only be driven by Bertie Wooster or a seventy-year-old geezer with a checked touring cap perched on his bald head. I would have thought a man like Daniel would drive a mud-splashed Jeep or a Maserati bought for him by a grateful old lady.
“Adorable. It’s not what I would have envisioned for you.”
“Nice that you envisioned me and my car. I know what you mean — I wouldn’t have picked it out myself, but it’s what I got and I can’t complain.”
I opened the passenger door and plopped in; it would have been just as easy to toss myself over the side. I wondered if he’d take me straight to my place or suggest a drive to the top of East Rock, a favorite stop for sex and suicide. If the world was run properly, all men who looked like Daniel would be wonderful human beings and all the good-for-nothings would look like Jim Fiske or worse, and women would be able to focus all of their energy on their children, their careers, and world peace.
“Dell, I want to be open with you.”
Oh, that’s never good. “Yes. Good, ” I said.
“There’s something, well, in my past which most people don’t know about. I don’t want people to know. But I wanted to tell you about it so you didn’t hear it from someone else. Because I like you, and... well, that’s it, really. I just like you.”
“Daniel, if there’s something you want to tell me, I want to hear it. I’m not a cop; I’m barely a PI. I’m mostly just a nosy person. I’m just curious. You can tell me anything.”
How do I know there’s no God? Because I wasn’t turned into a sizzling pile of ash right then and there.
He seemed indignant. “It doesn’t have anything at all to do with Bullfinch’s murder, Dell. It just doesn’t reflect very well on me.”
I nodded encouragingly, hoping that there’d be more excellent kissing and then he’d slip and tell me that he was Oliver Bullfinch’s bastard son and that he had killed him with the bronze bust.
He glanced and turned left, away from Whitney Avenue, away from the lights. I admired his beautiful forehead with one furrow creasing it, the thick golden-red brows, smooth fox fur above the strong Scandinavian nose, down to the movie-star jaw and the constellation of dimples from cheek to chin. Ridiculous. Like dulce de leche ice cream in human form.
“Can I ask you a question?” I was trying to keep my detective brain working while my downtown party district was figuring how we could take a little break from all this tedious good behavior.
“Sure. We’ll just drive. It’s easier to cruise and talk.”
“Did the cops question you?”
He frowned and pressed his foot down. The little blue toy took off like a kid was hurling it across the room. “Of course.” He smiled and put his hand on my thigh. “And would you like it if I told you what I told them?”
“I would.” And I would try really, really hard to concentrate.
“I was with Allison from two until about four. Then I went for a swim. Laps. You can check with her and with the kid at the desk at the gym. Lots of people saw me. I’m in the clear. Plus, I had no reason. I just got tenure.”
He shifted and patted my knee. It seemed premature to object. I didn’t want to object. I didn’t want to die, but he didn’t look like he was planning to kill me. Crush me, maybe, in his arms. Squeeze me where a woman wants to be squeezed. Please, I thought, let him not kill me too soon.
“I’m not like you — your professor father, your artist mother. You have a PhD of your own, is what Allison told me. You’re just slumming with this private-eye shit. I grew up in Rice, Minnesota, population seven thousand. The nearest big town was St. Cloud. My father drove a truck for the Prairie Potato Company and my mother worked at Katie Ann’s Country Pie. They are still there and I don’t visit the way I should. I got to Amherst because Katie Ann’s older brothers went there on hockey scholarships and she got them to take an interest. The MG was her brother Don’s — he died in May. If it wasn’t for Katie Ann and Don, I’d be the manager of Country Pie right now. When I got to Amherst, I had three pairs of pants, three shirts, one sweater, and my dad’s parka. No guitar. No bike. No car, no checkbook, and no ticket home.”
I felt his anger and loneliness, still hot after twenty years of practiced charm and simulated ease.
“I didn’t know what a salad fork was, you know? That was okay because at that time everybody who did know pretended they didn’t. But we all knew the difference between people who thought salad forks were bourgeois bullshit and people who just didn’t know what the hell those little forks were for. Anyway, my roommates were three very cool guys from Grosse Pointe and Hyde Park and Long Island. They were up and coming, and they made a consortium, started a business. Of course, I had no capital, so I was the legs. We sold dope and, for the first time in my life, I had money. I bought CDs. I bought a bicycle, I bought a box spring. I was as happy as a pig in shit.”