“They’ll run you out on a rail, girl.” She skimmed her shirt and bra off, making a pile on the floor. Her legs had narrow lines down the sides from the seams on the running tights, and there were wrinkles on her torso from her shirt crumpling against it. Her toenails glittered gold as she climbed into the shower and stood in the water collecting in the bottom of the tub. Every three weeks she poured a bottle of clog remover down the drain, starting anew the battle against shedding hair. It was almost time to do it again.
Sunday, she promised. Sunday, she would clean the bathroom.
Twenty minutes later, wrapped in a towel and scowling at the uninspiring contents of her closet, she amended Sunday’s plans to include laundry.
“What are you doing here?”
Margrit ducked her head at the greeting, looking up again with a hint of humor dancing in her eyes. “Hi, Tony.” She’d lingered at the Homicide doorway, waiting to be noticed before entering; more than one semifamiliar face had given her a quick smile of greeting while she watched the detective who was, as Cole had surmised, her off-again lover. After weeks apart, as usual, Margrit found his warm Italian coloring and strong features surprising. Rather than making the heart grow fonder, distance made it forgetful, blurring the edges of good looks into something more white bread and bland.
Humor infused the thought. If anything, the man she’d met in the park the night before should be the white bread one, with his pale skin and paler hair, his bone structure so well shaped it might have been carved by a sculptor. Tony, by comparison, was vivacious and alive, especially now, with anger drawing his eyebrows down and bringing more color to his cheeks.
“No.” The detective got to his feet and leaned his weight on his desk, making it less a barrier and more a tool of aggravation. “You don’t get to walk in with a cheerful ‘Hi, Tony’ when you haven’t called for three weeks and I don’t even know what I’ve done wrong this time.” His hair was shorter than the last time Margrit’d seen him, clipped just the wrong length and making his ears look too big for his head. Margrit threaded through gray desks and patches of winter sunlight as he spoke. She reached him and leaned across his desk until their heads were only inches apart, answering quietly.
“You didn’t call, either, Tony. All right? Are we even?”
“No, we’re not.” His knuckles turned white from pressure before he dropped his chin to his chest and muttered, “This isn’t the place to talk about it.” A Brooklyn accent came through strong in the last words, spoken so fast Margrit leaned in another few centimeters to make sure she caught every word. “What are you doing here, Margrit?”
“Official business, actually. I wasn’t just dropping by.” Too late she realized the impact of her phrasing, but the words were spoken. He looked up, only a hint of injury visible in his brown eyes. “Tony-”
“Forget about it. What is it now, another hardened criminal to get off?”
Margrit felt her own knuckles turning white as she leaned too hard against the desk, afraid to allow herself to speak for several long seconds. “This is why it never works, Tony,” she said, all but under her breath. The argument was as old as their relationship, two people separated by the same justice system. “Can we not do this right now? It’s not going to change anything. I’m still going to go down to my job at the Legal Aid offices when we’re done talking, just like I do every day. But right now I need to talk to you.”
“You know, if you want a low-paying lawyer job, you could go work for the D.A.’s office prosecuting these bastards instead of getting them off.”
“Tony!” Margrit brought his gaze up with the sharpness of her tone, then held her breath until she trusted her voice again. “I talked with the guy you want to bring in for the Central Park murder last night.”
Personal insult and injury bled out of Tony’s face, replaced by professional interest tinged with anger and concern. “When?”
“Last night. Right before the murder. I was out running.” Margrit lifted a hand to stop the lecture before it began. “Shut up, Tony, and just let me finish, okay?” She watched him set his teeth together, holding the pose a moment before he gestured for her to take a seat. Margrit did, crossing her legs at the knee and brushing invisible lint off the slacks she’d finally selected. “The park lights bleached enough that I don’t know what color his eyes were. Light colored, blue or green, but they could’ve been yellow. Same with his hair. Pale, practically white under the lights. We talked for about thirty seconds. I can probably give a good enough description for an artist.”
Tony sighed explosively. “I’ll get one. Does Russell know you’re going to be late?” At Margrit’s nod he sighed again and picked up his phone, punching in a four-digit number and requesting a sketch artist before hanging up and turning a dark expression on Margrit again. “Why didn’t you call me last night, Grit?”
She pressed her fingertips against her eyelids, trying not to disturb the makeup she’d applied to hide signs of the nightmare she’d had. “Because I hadn’t called in three weeks,” she muttered into her palms. “Because our conversations always turn into fights. Because I didn’t know what to say. I don’t know, Tony. I didn’t know how to call.”
“Picking up the phone and dialing the number is a good start, Grit, and ‘I just met a murderer’ would have been one hell of an icebreaker. A guy’ll forgive a lot for that.”
“Especially when he’s a homicide detective.” Margrit took her hands away from her eyes, looking at the spots of soft brown eye shadow left on her fingers. “Cole’d already lectured me on running in the park, and I didn’t want more of it. I hadn’t talked to you in weeks. I didn’t know what to say. A bunch of stupid reasons. I guess it was easier to face you in sunlight.”
Tony cast a wry look at dirty, glazed windows and the thin morning light struggling through them. “In that case I’m surprised I saw you before March.”
“Tony…”
“Over lunch,” he said quietly. “Can we talk over lunch?”
Margrit lifted her eyebrows. “Are you going to be able to take lunch?”
Chagrin crossed the detective’s face and he let a shoulder rise and fall in a shrug. “I didn’t say it’d be lunch today. Look-dammit.” The last word came out softly before he stood and gestured past Margrit to a bald man approaching his desk. “Margrit Knight, this is Jason Webster, our sketch artist. You’ll be working with him on describing our suspect. Later,” he added sotto voce to Margrit. “I’ll call you later.”
She’d ducked out of the police station at ten-thirty, well before the promise of “in after lunch” she’d made her boss. Enough time to hurry home and change into workout clothes and take a daytime run in the park. It’d make everyone happy: she would get to run, and neither Cole nor Tony would have to worry.
A compulsive check of her cell phone told her Tony hadn’t called. Not that a couple hours with the sketch artist properly qualified as later, but Margrit checked a second time. As if she’d misread, she teased herself, but the mockery had more sting to it than she liked to admit to. She pushed the phone back into a zip-top pocket on her hip and lengthened her stride again, trying to capture the sense of freedom running in the park usually brought her.
It escaped her for once, her sneakers pounding out the syllables: ir-rah-shun-al. Irrational to expect him to have called already; irrational to hope it.
She went around a corner and splashed through a puddle that would be ice after dark. The whole relationship was irrational, always bordering on disaster, always coming back together. It wasn’t just the sex that kept them coming back for more, although that didn’t hurt. There was some inherent challenge they saw in one another, something unnamed that Margrit wasn’t sure she wanted to label.
What drove them apart was easier to quantify. They stood on opposite sides of a flawed legal system. It made for an endless bone of contention, but never quite enough to keep them apart for good. Some days that seemed important. Today, abruptly, it didn’t. Margrit pulled her phone out again and dialed the detective’s number.
“How about dinner tomorrow?” she asked his voice mail. “I’m sorry I haven’t called, Tony. I want to talk about it, okay?” She hung up, good humor restoring itself, as she darted around other joggers, feeling lithe and quick. Within moments, she was in a flat-out run, focusing on the horizon, nothing in the world but her harsh breathing and the ricochet of her feet against the pavement. Her blood felt hot, burning in her hands and cheeks, as tears brought on by speed blurred the corners of her vision.
Reaching the end of her route brought her to a violent stop, skidding and tripping over her own feet in the spasms of muscles pushed hard enough that they no longer knew how to do anything but continue forward. Margrit walked it off, stopping to flip her ponytail upside down and gasp for air after the numbness faded from her
