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“Excuse me,” Cohen speaks up. “I need to speak to my client privately. We’re going to step outside of your office for a chat.”
“Yes, I probably won’t make a break for it and leave the country and change my name and start a new life,” Ruby says dryly. “No promises though.”
“Ha ha, my client is such a joker,” Cohen barks out a fake laugh as she stands up.
“Yes, she is. So are her friends,” Detective Ahearn says, shaking his head. “And now I have a New York Rover in my office. What a day.”
Ruby and Cohen leave the office.
He and I already worked her story out. I told Cohen what time to say she showed up at my apartment, how she came in disguise through a side door because we’ve been keeping our relationship secret, and what movie we watched together, and exactly what we ate for dinner. She’s going to say she took the subway there, paying cash for her tokens, so nobody can ask what taxi service she took, because they’d be able to track that kind of thing down.
Cohen will be with her the whole time she’s talking, and he will cut Detective Ahearn off if he asks her any questions that he and I haven’t gone over.
This way, when Detective Ahearn questions us separately—which I am sure he will do, even as starstruck as he is right now—we’ll have our stories straight, but we won’t go into detail and let him trip us up.
When the door closes behind Ruby and Mr. Cohen, I turn to see Detective Ahearn eagerly shoving a notepad at me.
I sign it, “To my good friend Detective Ahearn! Thanks for being one of New York’s finest.” That’s what cops are called in New York. The cops are New York’s finest, and the firefighters are New York’s bravest.
“So, you and Ruby James really are...” He trails off.
“Dating,” I say. “She was kind of seeing that idiot Nick Ruckman”—it takes everything I have not to call him Fuckman, or Fuckface, or Little Bitch—“and she didn’t want to break up with him before finals and upset him, but she and I started seeing each other recently. We’ve known each other for quite a while. You may have seen pictures of us in the press before, a few months back. We were just friends at first. I guess I was a shoulder to cry on because she was just so sick of Nick, and so desperate to figure out a way to get rid of him, and then things kind of developed from there.”
“Fascinating.”
I arch an eyebrow. “So. Nick gets arrested for filing a false police report?”
He sets the notebook down. “Well, the investigation is still in the early stages.” He straightens his shoulders, adjusts his tie, and sits down behind his desk. “Tell me what you guys were doing last night.”
“Well, I’m not going to go into a lot of personal detail, but I can tell you this much...” I tell him the story that the lawyer and I agreed on, including what time she came, what we ate, and the movie we watched.
“You are sure that she didn’t leave the apartment at any point? Even after you fell asleep?”
“Number one, without getting specific, there wasn’t much sleeping.” I grin. “And number two, I have an alarm system on my apartment, which I turned on after she came in, and she doesn’t have the code. If she’d left, she would have set the alarm off.” He’s taking notes.
He looks up at me. “Okay then. Wow. You’re dating Ruby James. So, you used to date that model Saskia, right?”
So, he’s a superfan.
“I mean, we kind of had a thing for a few months,” I shrug. We had a friends-with-benefits thing where she dated me for the publicity and I dated her because I don’t like one-night hookups and it was basically just convenient. We didn’t even break up. We just got bored with each other and called each other less and less, and then I saw a news article saying she was dating some movie star, and I felt nothing but relief.
“So what happened there?” Detective’s Ahearn’s eyes shoot up. “She was smokin’!”
“Ruby’s hot,” I say indignantly, and then I wonder why I’m defending her.
He shrugs. “Yeah, she is, I guess, in a more understated way.”
“I like understated.” I’m not lying about that.
“You just always seemed to go for the models.” He’s really, really a superfan. It never ceases to amaze me how involved people get in the private lives of the Rovers team members. “And that Mason! Are the rumors true? Is he really settled down? I never thought I’d live to see the day.” Jeez, it’s like listening to an old lady reading the gossip column.
“He’s living with Ruby’s sister, yes. He’s off the market for good.”
“All right. Well, I need to question Ruby now, without you in the room. And I don’t mean to be a jerk, but her story better match yours if I’m going to let her go today.”
“It will,” I say cheerfully. Mr. Cohen and I have made sure of that.
Whistling a happy tune, I walk out of the office.
