“I can’t do that,” I said, without explaining the reasons, without even understanding the reasons myself.
“What’s your favorite time of year, Matt?” He kept his eyes on mine. I wasn’t sure if he was falling in love with me or trying to see if he’d made a mistake letting me go.
“I’m beginning to think this isn’t about sex,” I said.
“After what we just did, how you can say that?”
“I mean the murders. I don’t think the murders are about sex.”
He nodded, but didn’t say anything. A good cop wouldn’t. I decided to give him a break and change the subject. “We hardly know anything about each other.”
“Actually, I know a lot about you,” he said. I imagined it was true, too.
“Okay, I don’t know much about you. Where’d you grow up?”
“Cerritos.” I wasn’t too familiar with the area, but I was pretty sure it was a suburban area down near Orange County.
“School?”
“Cal State Long Beach. Criminology. You want my GPA?”
“I’d say it was above three point eight.”
“Three point nine two.” He was smart, obviously. But more than that, his high GPA meant he knew how to play by the rules. He probably liked playing by the rules. Saving me must have gone against every instinct he had.
I remembered the feeling I’d had about Hanson when I was at Hollywood Station giving my statement. “Do you think your partner’s in love with you?”
He laughed. “She knows better.”
“She wouldn’t be the first woman who knew better but fell anyway.”
“She’s protective of her partners. We all call her Mama Lucy.”
“Do you think she has something to do with the murders?”
“No. She’s just wrong about you, that’s all. She’s stubborn.”
“And she thinks you’re wrong about me.”
“She doesn’t want to be my partner anymore,” he said.
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said.
“She doesn’t trust me. Thinks I have a thing for you. That I’m letting it cloud my judgment.” He looked miserable, almost as though he was in pain. “It might be true.”
My heart bounced around in my chest. He had a thing for me. Well, obviously he had a thing for me, if only the momentary kind. But the look on his face told me this might be the longer kind. The kind that didn’t go away after a quickie.
“When this is over…” I said, as I noticed a cab pull up in front of my house.
“Yeah, when this is over…” Tripp walked out the front door and got into the cab. I watched as they drove off.
I wasn’t sure how to feel about what just happened. Deciding to forgo the second pitcher of Margaritas, I drank a few glasses of water to help my body deal with the alcohol.
Booze. That’s all it was. The thing with Tripp. I’d been drinking, so something that was really very trivial took on a bigger importance than it normally would have. We jacked each other off. Didn’t mean anything. I was definitely not falling for the cop who had been trying to put me in jail and who now seemed to be trying to keep me out of jail.
My phone rang. As I wandered around looking for the cordless, I hoped it was Tripp wanting to talk more, wanting to come back. But it was Sonja, calling to tell me that my job was officially kaput.
“But nothing’s happened,” I said. “I haven’t been arrested. And even if they do arrest me, we have this thing in America called innocent until proven guilty.”
“This really has nothing to do with what’s happening to you. This is about the re-engineering.”
“That’s an outright lie, and you know it.” There was a silence. I had breached one of the unwritten laws of corporate America. Never call a liar a liar.
“I was afraid you’d be unpleasant about this,” Sonja said.
“Why shouldn’t I be unpleasant?”
“I’ve managed to get you two months severance. Plus your unused vacation time, of course.”
“Is that what everyone’s getting in the re-engineering?”
“No. I got you more.” That gave me a little sympathy for her. Not because she’d gotten me more money, but because I knew the only way she’d gotten it was to fight for it.
“It’s not going to be easy without me,” I told her. She didn’t reply, so I hung up and made that second pitcher of Margaritas.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The next morning, the alarm went off and my head nearly exploded. I struggled to turn it off while trying to remember why I’d wanted to get up at quarter to seven when I didn’t even have a job anymore. Then I remembered. I had some place to be.
Saint Dominic’s was on Melrose near Larchmont. The church looked to be about four stories tall, brick, and had concrete curlicues at the top. Attached on one side was an even taller bell tower. I hurried up the front steps and found myself in a small lobby. The doors were open to the main church. The service hadn’t begun.
In the center of the lobby was a standing basin with what I assumed was holy water. On one wall, I noticed a plaque explaining who St. Dominic had been. It didn’t say when he’d lived, but he was the son of a blacksmith who dreamed of becoming a priest. Unfortunately, he died at the age of fifteen. He was the patron saint of juvenile delinquents. I had been brought up as a lukewarm Christian. The Catholic church was a different planet.
The mass was at seven-thirty. I flicked on my phone and saw that it should start in about six minutes. I went into the main church and took a seat in one of the last pews. There were about ten other people scattered around. An organist was playing somewhere I couldn’t see, possibly in a balcony above me.
A few minutes later, the music changed and everyone rose. They all had hymnals in their hands. I grabbed one from the back of the pew in front of me.
