“What is it?” I asked.
“Maryann West is dead.”
I started to laugh.
“Arsenic,” he said.
I stopped laughing. “You’re serious.”
The light gilded his sable eyelashes and the peppery stubble on his cheeks. He’d dressed, but hastily, and though I supposed Dev would always look beautiful to me, today he cast a ragged, overdrawn shadow. I sat up and stretched in the tangled sheets, and the detritus of my old life eddied beneath me, flaking already to dust. Dev cast a glance at my naked breasts, dark nipples contracting in the warmth of the sun and his presence, and shook his head with a wondering smile.
“I need to go to the precinct. She was poisoned, of course.”
“Victor likes arsenic.”
“When he doesn’t like you,” he said, and I flinched. Then, “I know. I’m sorry. This is … nothing is what I thought it would be. You’re not what I thought you would be. But I look back on myself then and all I can think is how foolish I was.”
“You were young,” I said. Like Adam, I felt my nakedness now.
“I was. Yet old enough.” I had five years on him, which meant Dev had been twenty when he played his pipes and took me from the city. Only youth could be that brave, or that stupid.
“I wanted you to be right about me.”
“I did too, Pea.”
“And now?” I started shivering.
He turned from the window and sat heavily on the edge of my bed. “The trouble,” he said, “is that I wasn’t right about me. I had no business judging you then, and I certainly don’t now. All that’s left for me is to atone—”
He stopped himself and took my hand. He smiled, painfully but genuinely, and rested his head on my lap.
“Pea, I won’t leave you unless you want me to. It’s too late.”
I couldn’t tell if happiness or resignation thickened his voice, but for now I didn’t care. I buried my fingers in his hair. We stayed in that layered, familiar silence until his breathing eased and I could think, He’ll stay, at least a little while. My eyes fell on that slip of paper, resting on the sill, the one that had told him of Maryann West’s death.
“What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why Victor would poison that woman when he went through so much trouble to make sure I’d have the kill.”
“He didn’t have a choice,” Dev said. “Maryann turned herself in to the police last night. Just after she visited you, I’d guess.”
“The police?”
“She wanted to confess, she said. She had dirt on Victor, she said. Someone brought her to an interrogation room and an hour later she was dead. Arsenic in her coffee. One of the men on vice squad must be in Victor’s pay. Valentine will have our heads for this.”
“Dirt on Victor,” I repeated, bemused. “Last night, she said something strange. She said that the ones with the hands that Trent had spotted for Victor, she said that we didn’t die in pain, she could promise me that. How would she know that? How is that even possible?”
For a brief moment, as soon seen as gone, Dev looked haunted with pain. “It isn’t,” he said shortly. “But since she was the one selling nitrous oxide and devil knows what else to Victor for a decade, which he used on those he killed, I presume that’s what let her sleep at night.”
“But she didn’t sleep,” I said softly. “Not since I killed her man. She was working for Victor too? All this time?”
He shook his head. “She stopped a few years ago. Got caught stealing at her job—got fired. She was a dental assistant.”
“Dental assistant? They see that many narcotics?”
He shrugged. “Dirty secret of the profession.”
“Did she tell them—you—anything important?” I was thinking of her strange smile and her hint of revenge.
“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s why I have to get there. And Pea, depending on what she said…”
He looked sadly at me and I understood. If she had given the police enough information about Trent’s murder, I would have to run. After last night, I could no longer count on Victor’s protection.
And besides, “I have to try again,” I said, as though I were swallowing medicine. “I can’t leave town with him still in it.”
Dev closed his eyes briefly. “And your heart?” he said lightly.
“Oh, that old thing? Let it break. It hasn’t been any good to me for a decade.”
His hands curled to fists on the mattress.
Some strange fear entered me, then, whether for him or for myself, I couldn’t tell. “What’s the matter, Dev?” I whispered.
The taut anger left him as quickly as it had come. He shrugged in self-reproach and levered himself from the bed. “I’ll call you as soon as I learn anything. Lock the door this time, yeah?”
I stood. His tie wedged under my right breast and my knee slid along the smooth wool of his pants as we kissed. Then I gave him his hat and he gave me a sad half smile before we said goodbye.
Tamara came by a few hours later, just banged on the locked door until I woke up from my nap and opened it without checking the peephole. Her makeup had smudged into coon eyes and she wore a slip dress that she must not have had time to change from the night before.
“Well, at least she’s still alive!” she said, and then froze when she saw my carpet. “Is that … a bloodstain, Pea?”
“Nah,” I said, “just grenadine.”
I closed the door behind her and led her to the kitchen, which as far as I remembered bore no grisly reminders of my profession. Ex-profession.
“Phyllis! What is going on around here? You won’t answer my calls, neither will Dev, you’ve got a … stain on your carpet and
