to Leah and—”
His phone rang again. This time it was in his pocket and he took it out only long enough to dismiss the call for a second time.
“Okay, seriously, who was that?”
“I told you.” He yanked open the refrigerator and took out some mayonnaise.
“You worked as a P.I. for an insurance company when you lived in New York,” I reminded him. It was one of the few things about Anatoly’s pre-Sophie years that I could remind him of. It was like he had given me an outline of his early life but only included all the parts one would number with roman numerals and left out everything that might be labeled with 1, 2, 3 or a, b, c.
“I didn’t work for her in New York. That number is just her cell phone.” He scooped out a few tablespoons of mayonnaise and dumped it in a small bowl before going back to the refrigerator and taking out some fresh basil leaves. This was becoming a very complicated sandwich.
“So you worked for her in San Francisco?”
“Sophie, if a client doesn’t give me express permission to discuss their case with other people, I can’t. It’s confidential even if I don’t work for them anymore.”
“You can’t even tell me if you worked for her in San Francisco?”
“No, I can’t.”
“Huh.”
Mr. Katz finally abandoned the oven and hopped up on the counter next to me. I gently ushered him away from the marinating tomatoes.
“We need to stay focused. Think about who might have it in for Dena. I’ll pick the brain of my contact and then we’ll compare notes,” he said. “Are you going to be spending tomorrow in the hospital again? Or do you have other plans?”
“I’ll be seeing Leah but other than that no plans at all.”
Fuck him. My plans were confidential.
CHAPTER 7
I never get jealous…unless some bitch steals my spotlight.
–Fatally Yours
I made up for the sleep I hadn’t gotten the night before by going to bed at a reasonable time and sleeping in. When I got to the hospital the next day it was well into the afternoon. I went straight for the gift shop. The clerk had told me the new issue of Rolling Stone was going to be in, and I had heard their cover story was on Johnny Depp, one of the very few mainstream actors Dena actually liked.
But I never actually got inside the gift shop because standing about ten paces in front of it were Amelia and Jason. For the first time, I realized that Amelia hadn’t actually come to see Dena the day before as she had originally promised. Now she was clutching a small tin of roasted almonds to her chest as she stared up at one of the two men she shared with Dena.
“It was too much,” she cried, neither of them seeing me as I approached. “I was hurt and jealous and—”
“Jealous?” Jason thundered. Inside the gift shop I could see the cashier with his hand on the phone, ready to call someone if the argument got out of hand. “Dena is in a wheelchair and you let petty jealousy keep you away?”
“For less than forty-eight hours!” Amelia protested. “Not even two days!”
“But for at least six of those forty-eight hours we didn’t even know if she was going to live! She could have died in surgery and you couldn’t even pull it together enough to answer your cell phone!”
Amelia shook her head wildly, causing her mass of long curls to whip across her back. “I had to process it,” Amelia said, her voice now coming out in a whimper. “I was already messed up when I got your e-mail—”
“Petty!” Jason said again. “What happened to free love? What happened to going with the flow and all that hippie, pseudo-Buddhist shit you’re always spewing? I don’t think I know who you are right now and I’m not fucking sure that I want to.”
A cry escaped Amelia’s lips and she shoved the almonds into Jason’s hands before running past him. She brushed past me but I wasn’t at all sure that she had recognized me as anything more than a blur.
I watched her retreat and then caught Jason’s eye. “Jason, what the hell?”
Jason’s hair was plastered back with some kind of gel and his pointed goatee was neatly trimmed, giving him the look of a hornless devil. “She was here all along,” he said, his voice strangled with emotion.
“Where? The gift shop?”
Jason blinked and then looked to the gift shop as if he had forgotten it was there. “I can’t believe she never went to Nicaragua,” he seethed. “I can’t fucking believe she was here the whole time! Right here in San Francisco the night Dena was shot!”
“Yeah, I know. I stopped by O’Keefe’s yesterday morning and she was there. I’m the one who told her what happened to Dena.”
“She told you that?” Jason stepped back, bumping his heel against the pale gray wall.
“Told me what? Jason, seriously, what’s going on?”
He reached into his torn army jacket, pulled out a BlackBerry and waved it in the air like it was the American flag. “I sent her e-mails that night! And texts and I left a voice mail, all on the off chance that she might check one of those things while in Nicaragua! I knew that if she got the messages she’d tell Kim and they’d be on the first flight back here. Amelia loves Dena.”
His last sentence was weighted with a heavy dose of sarcasm. He was now gripping his BlackBerry so tight the tips of his fingers were turning white. I quickly tried to piece together what he was saying. “You’re upset that she didn’t return your e-mails?”
“I’m upset because she didn’t get her ass to the hospital! I don’t care how fucking stoned she was! If anything the marijuana should have helped her be more clearheaded about what was going down!”
“More clearheaded?” I repeated. “Jason, you’re either being facetious or your short-term memory is so messed up you’ve forgotten what happens when you inhale.”
“It calms you!” Jason insisted. “We were all here freaking out and if Amelia was half the woman she says she is she would have come to us like a fucking mellow angel of ganja and soothed our fears! But she didn’t even come! I didn’t even know she was in the fucking country until today! We’re supposed to all be in a relationship and when Dena’s life was hanging in the balance she was fucking MIA!”
“Maybe she was in shock, Jason.”
“Bullshit. She even admitted that if you hadn’t come to O’Keefe’s yesterday she probably would have waited a few more days before contacting any of us! Can you believe that shit? She was jealous!”
“Of what? She wanted to be the one to get shot?”
“She thinks Kim and I both like Dena more than her. That she’s just the chick we do when Dena’s not around!”
I
