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Raphael’s antennae twitched. That was convenient. It would bear some looking into. “Beth who?”
“Beth Olivetti.”
“Who’s your other employee?”
“Janaya Thomas. She’s been with me for about two months now.”
“But no one was with you tonight?”
“No. I just told you that. McGaffney gave me carte blanche to prepare whatever I wanted so I could streamline the meal.”
“Okay. Let’s move on to that. To what you did tonight.”
Kate nodded, sitting forward again. She didn’t entirely understand all his questions, but she was beginning to enjoy this—in a matter of speaking. It was intriguing, she admitted, watching him work through what had happened. “I didn’t hear anything.”
His eyes narrowed. “Let me ask the questions, okay?”
“But that was what you were going to ask next, right?”
It had been, but he’d be damned if he’d say so.
“Anyway, I didn’t. I just took the steaks to the dining room and there he was. Splat in the salad.”
“No gunshot.”
“No.”
The killer had used a silencer then, Raphael thought. But she’d been right there in the kitchen, through a solitary door. “What about a…like, pffting sound?”
She thought about it. “I didn’t hear anything like that. But then, there was the matter of the dog.” As soon as the words left her, Kate felt her face go scarlet.
Raphael sat forward, his eyes narrowing sharply. “What dog?”
Kate got to her feet unsteadily. She looked warily at the door, where the little beast had once slept religiously whenever Shawna had gone out. Love, murder and mayhem. Belle had trailed those things behind her like a banner. And she had also saved Shawna’s life.
As she had saved Kate’s tonight.
It had been Belle, Kate realized. Because if she had taken those steaks to the dining room—the first steaks, twelve and a half minutes earlier—she could very well have walked in on the killer. McGaffney’s skin had still been warm when she’d felt for his pulse. He hadn’t been dead long.
Her heart caught, and Kate hit her chest with her fist to start it again. “Uh, I had just finished the steaks,” she explained. “The first steaks, that is. There was a crash. She…this dog…came in through the back door I’d left open. She got up on the center island somehow and stole a steak and knocked one of my plates over. I had to cook two new ones.”
Raphael frowned. “A dog came in and stole a steak.”
“Correct.” She really bit that word off.
“Did McGaffney have a dog?”
“Not that he mentioned.” She bit her lip. “I don’t think it was his.”
“So where did it come from?”
“I just told you that. The back door.”
“Uninvited?”
“Well, I certainly didn’t offer her a nine-dollar-a-pound tenderloin!”
“Maybe it smelled the food.” Raphael frowned. There was more to this, he realized. Unless he badly missed his guess, something really bothered Kate Mulhern about this dog. “Go on.”
Kate shrugged meticulously. “There’s nothing left to say. The whole thing set me behind twelve and a half minutes.”
“Knock it off,” he growled, deciding to get a little rough with her.
Kate flinched a little. “Knock what off?”
“You’re hiding something.”
“I am not!”
“Honey, I’ve been asking questions like this for a lot of years and I know evasion when I see it.” Her eyes wouldn’t quite meet his, he thought. Then she surprised him.
“Okay!” she cried. “Okay. You want to know the truth? I know that dog.”
It wasn’t what he had been expecting. “So you’re saying what—it followed you there or something?”
“Or something.” Then she gave a giddy laugh that bordered on the hysterical. “Four months ago, my roommate was walking to work. Some homeless woman stopped her and gave her a dog. That dog. And while Shawna was trying to figure out what to do with it, she was mugged.”
“Yeah?” Raphael frowned, wondering what this had to do with anything.
“And Gabriel Marsden rescued her.”
“Gabriel Marsden, the writer? The ex-cop?”
“The one who was on the run from that crazed Broadway producer at the time. The producer who was trying to kill him.”
Raphael was starting to get it. A little. He remembered the story. It had captivated newsmongers for broadcasts on end.
“Shawna ended hooking up with him and they spent the better part of two weeks running for their lives.” Kate took a deep breath. “With the same dog I saw tonight.”
Raphael felt dazed. This was turning into the oddest witness interview he’d ever conducted. Why didn’t that surprise him?
“Shawna named her Belle. Belle saved their lives—a couple of times, actually. And then she just disappeared into Manhattan once Gabriel and Shawna had brought the killer down.”
More cop jargon, Raphael thought, wincing.
Kate didn’t tell him that Shawna and Gabriel had become convinced that the Chihuahua was…well, some kind of an angel. “Anyway,” she finished quickly, getting back to McGaffney, “when I went out there the first time, with the appetizers, McGaffney and Allegra were just sitting there talking. And when I took those plates back, I thought they might be getting, well, tipsy.”
“Tipsy,” Raphael repeated. Another word he rarely heard in normal conversation.
“They’d gone through one bottle of the wine already. His glass was empty.”
He didn’t want to admit that her powers of observation were extraordinary. But she must have picked up on something in his expression. Kate shrugged.
“It’s my job. I keep trying to gauge how things are going, you know, to pick up on any little telltale signs. I still feel a little anxious about all this. Success isn’t all that comfortable to me yet.” Then, for the first time since he had met her, she smiled.
The reflex was crooked, a little self-deprecating. And it changed her face. He realized for the first time that there was usually something hard and determined about her jaw, and that it was part of what had been irritating him from the moment he’d found her perched on Allegra’s back. But when she smiled, everything changed. There was a dimple at the left corner of her mouth—just one, without a matching counterpart. She looked wistful and soft.
He cleared his throat. He didn’t want her to have a dimple. And if she did, then he damned well didn’t want to notice it. “What about the next time you went to the dining room?”
“That would have been to take them their salads. And another bottle of wine.”
“And after that?”
“I went back to get their salad plates. She was gone that time.”
“Gone where?”
“He said to ‘the little girl’s room.”’ Her expression told what she thought of that particular euphemism. “I took her salad—he wanted to keep his. I went back to the kitchen to finish up with the steaks, and…” She trailed off.
The dog, Raphael remembered. Then when she’d finally gone back after that, McGaffney had been dead. “So he was killed between the time you went to pick up the salad plates and the time you took the entrees out.”
Kate was subdued. “Yes.”
“If we could nail down just how many minutes passed—”
“We can. I served the steaks medium to medium rare, at McGaffney’s request. They were two inches thick. Twelve and a half minutes in the broiler for the first set, then the dog did her thing, and it took me twelve and a half minutes to do two more steaks.”
“Twenty-five minutes.” He didn’t know whether to be irritated with her again or amazed.
“Actually, less than that. I do most courses ten minutes apart. So I went to get the salad plates when the first steaks had been in the broiler for two and a half minutes.”
Raphael stared at her, figuring out the time of death. She’d called 911 at eight-eighteen. Therefore, McGaffney had still been alive, by her calculations, at approximately seven fifty-five. Give or take thirty seconds.
She was a very dangerous woman to have left alive.
“Other than that, I was in the kitchen the whole time,” she said. “I try to remain as unobtrusive as possible. So all I can tell you for sure is that the killer didn’t come in through the back door.” She frowned. “Are we done?”
For the first time, Raphael saw violet smudges beneath her eyes. He was reasonably sure they hadn’t been there half an hour ago. “We’re done. For now.”
“Good.” She looked at the mantel clock as she got up and headed for the kitchen. “I have to get up in five hours.”
He didn’t like the sound of that. In fact, it sounded a lot like an alarm was going to go off somewhere in this apartment at roughly six o’clock in the morning. Raphael followed her with his eyes. “What for?”
“I work at the diner from seven to eleven. The breakfast rush.”
“Not tomorrow, you don’t.”
He should have recognized the warning signs by now. The way her shoulder blades shifted. The way she turned to him and stared.
“I can’t call in on a morning shift. They won’t have time to get anyone to replace me.”
Raphael came off the love seat. “What if you were sick?”
“I don’t get sick.”
“What, you’re Superwoman?”
She sniffed again. “No. I’m just reliable.”
“Well, get over it.”
She took a step toward him. “I will not. I have a life!”
“Not for the foreseeable future, you don’t.”
“I work!”
“So do I.” He was getting angry again. “You make fifteen hundred dollars a week! What the hell do you need a diner job for?”
“I don’t make fifteen hundred a week! I told you, there are costs. I’ve got employees to pay!”
That still left her clearing probably eight or nine hundred a week. This was insane.
“And I’ve got an obligation,” she added.
“You work a second job you don’t need because of an obligation?”
“Yes. No. Well, not entirely.”
She made that sound again. It wasn’t a sniff, not exactly. It was more a sharp intake of breath.
“I work two jobs to save money for my restaurant.” And it galled her to say so, to let him in on…well, her dream. But his expression turned thoughtful, and he surprised her.
“Honey, my guess is that you might be better off just doing what you’re doing.”
The thought had occurred to her, too, just recently, since business had picked up so radically. Dinner For Two had been intended as a means to an end. But then, she’d never really expected it to take off the way it had.
She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of agreeing with him.
Kate turned off the light in the kitchen, then went and sat on the sofa near the pile of blankets and pillows she’d put out for him earlier. He sat beside her. Not too close, she noticed with that achy stirring in the area of her chest again. Well, she was used to that.
She looked at him out of the corner of her eye in the thin darkness. His eyes made something curl in the pit of her stomach. He was gazing thoughtfully at nothing, seeming to see only his own thoughts. But they were good eyes, she thought grudgingly, even when they hardened, like now.
Kate pulled her gaze away. “Just tell the press I didn’t see anything. Then it won’t be necessary for you to watch over me. These…these mobsters will read about it in the paper, then you can go on your way and I’ll go mine.”
Raphael laughed. “Sure. That’ll work.”
She drew herself up indignantly. “I fail to see why not. It’s the truth.”
