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“I tried to save you one,” I said, thinking that with that much DEXTER IN THE DARK
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anguish he could only be referring to the calamity of facing an empty doughnut box. But he shook his head.
“Oh, Jesus, I can’t believe it. He’s dead!”
“I’m sure it had nothing to do with the doughnuts,” I said.
“My God, and you were going to see him. Did you?”
There comes a point in every conversation where at least one of the people involved has to know what is being talked about, and I decided that point had arrived.
“Vince,” I said, “I want you to take a deep breath, start all over from the top, and pretend you and I speak the same language.”
He stared at me as if he was a frog and I was a heron. “Shit,” he said. “You don’t know yet, do you? Holy shit.”
“Your language skills are deteriorating,” I said. “Have you been talking to Deborah?”
“He’s dead, Dexter. They found the body late last night.”
“Well, then, I’m sure he’ll stay dead long enough for you to tell me what in the hell you’re talking about.”
Vince blinked at me, his eyes suddenly huge and moist.
“Manny Borque,” he breathed. “He was murdered.”
I will admit to having mixed reactions. On the one hand, I was certainly not sorry to have somebody else take the little troll out of the picture in a way I was unable to do for ethical reasons. But on the other hand, now I needed to find another caterer—and oh, yes, I would probably have to give a statement of some kind to the detective in charge. Annoyance fought it out with relief, but then I remembered that the doughnuts were gone, too.
And so the reaction that won out was irritation at all the bother this was going to cause. Still, Harry had schooled me well enough to know that this is not really an acceptable reaction to display when one hears of the death of an acquaintance. So I did my best to push my face into something resembling shock, concern, and distress. “Wow,” I said. “I had no idea. Do they know who did it?”
Vince shook his head. “The guy had no enemies,” he said, and he didn’t seem aware of how unlikely his statement sounded to anyone who had ever met Manny. “I mean, everybody was just in awe of him.”
“I know,” I said. “He was in magazines and everything.”
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“I can’t believe anybody would do that to him,” he said.
In truth, I couldn’t believe it had taken so long for somebody to do that to him, but it didn’t seem like the politic thing to say. “Well, I’m sure they’ll figure it out. Who’s assigned to the case?”
Vince looked at me like I had asked him if he thought the sun might come up in the morning. “Dexter,” he said wonderingly, “his head was cut off. It’s just like the three over at the university.”
When I was young and trying hard to fit in, I played football for a while, and one time I had been hit hard in the stomach and couldn’t breathe for a few minutes. I felt a little bit like that now.
“Oh,” I said.
“So naturally they’ve given it to your sister,” he said.
“Naturally.” A sudden thought hit me, and because I am a lifelong devotee of irony, I asked him, “He wasn’t cooked, too, was he?”
Vince shook his head. “No,” he said.
I stood up. “I better go talk to Deborah,” I said.
Deborah was not in any mood to talk when I arrived at Manny’s apartment. She was bending over Camilla Figg, who was dusting for prints around the legs of the table by the window. She didn’t look up, so I peeked into the kitchen, where Angel-no-relation was bent over the body.
