“What makes you so sure?” he said, stalking toward me. His dark-blond hair stood out around his head and behind his black-rimmed glasses his green eyes were wide.
“Call it a hunch,” I replied, beginning to wonder if baiting him in this empty apartment was a very good idea. I mean, really, I didn’t know him hardly at all.
He made a scoffing sound and looked up.
Everything about him changed in an instant.
He seemed to do a double take and then he stood there silently, staring like he’d forgotten we were talking.
“Where did you get that?” he said, moving toward the aqua painted chest of drawers near the door.
“The dresser? At a secondhand shop.”
“No,” he said. “That.” He pointed at the little card with the picture of the beach that the man at the morgue gave me.
“Why, do you like it?” I asked, trying to keep my voice casual.
He looked at it for long moments, then shrugged. “It’s okay. I saw something like it at the mall the other day.”
“So it doesn’t mean anything to you?”
He turned away. “Why would it?”
“It belonged to the man who died.”
He seemed shocked. I couldn’t decide why. Was it because he wondered how I had it? Was it because he was lying and knew all along whose it was?
Or was it because he really didn’t know anything and didn’t know why I wouldn’t let it go?
“I thought you said no one knew who he was?” he said, not looking back at the picture, but looking at me.
“I went to the morgue to see if they would tell me anything. They still didn’t know who he was but the doctor there, he gave me that. He said it was in the man’s pocket.”
“You went to the morgue?” he asked, disbelief on his face.
“Yes. I thought I might get more in person than on the phone.”
“Why? Why do you care so much about someone who… who you didn’t even know?”
“But I do know him. Maybe not in the sense you mean but, I…” I shook my head, letting my voice fall away. He wouldn’t understand.
“But, what?” he pressed, finally looking interested in the conversation.
“I was with him when he died,” I said quietly. “I sat there with him after he did something that half the people I know wouldn’t do for me. I might not have really known him, but his final actions right before he died told me an awful lot about him.”
“You can’t judge someone offonething they did.” He argued.
“He stole from me, too,” I admitted, voicing something I hadn’t thought about until now.
“Stole?” he said, his voice hollow, but then he sat down on the coffee table right across from where I reclined on the sofa. I was right, he was more interested in this guy than he wanted me to believe.
I nodded. “When I got home from the accident that night, I took off my apron and my tips weren’t in there. At first I thought maybe I lost the money on the street during the commotion, but then when I was at the morgue the doctor mentioned he had twenty-four dollars in his pocket.”
“So?” He shrugged.
“So, that’s how much I was missing. Before the bus came I almost slipped and he caught me,” I said, watching him closely, remembering when he caught me in the diner the night we met how he said, “We keep meeting like this.”But he gave no reaction; his face was blank so I continued. “I think he probably picked my pocket.”
“And this is the guy you think of as a hero?” He scoffed, his eyes focused on the floor.
