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Still, she finally calmed down enough to stop saying, “Oh, God”—and she immediately switched to staring at me and saying, “You bastard. You horrible bastard. Oh, you bastard.”
Jackie glanced at me to see if I minded the rough language, and when I shrugged she twitched me a quick smile and went back to soothing Kathy.
“Dexter is here to protect me, Kathy,” she said. “I’m really sorry; this is my fault; I should have told him you were coming.”
“Oh, God, that bastard,” Kathy said, cleverly combining both of her annoying chants.
“It’s my fault,” Jackie said. “I am so sorry.”
“My phone!” Kathy choked out. She leaped out of the chair. “My God, if you ruined my phone …!”
“I’m sure it’s all right,” Jackie said.
Kathy jumped over to the side table where Amila had put her things. “All of your appointments! The contact list—everything!” She grabbed up her phone, and Jackie followed behind and took her arm, leading her back to her chair. But Kathy refused to sit until she made sure the phone had not been ruined by exposure to her own urine.
“It works,” she said at last. “Oh, thank God, it still works.” And she glared extra hard at me, as if I was the one who had peed on it. “Bastard,” she said.
“All right, Kathy, we’re all right now; everything’s fine,” Jackie murmured.
It was several more minutes before Kathy calmed down enough to resume normal human behavior. I filled the time by reholstering my Glock, bolting the door, and sitting down on a chair on the opposite side of the room from Kathy and her tedious meltdown. But even the most irritating things must end, and eventually Kathy remembered that she was, after all, an employee—and an employee who had wet herself in front of her boss, too. She finally fluttered to her feet and began to babble apologies to Jackie, alternating them with venomous glares at me. She straightened the heap of papers she’d brought in, reminded Jackie about a couple of telephone interviews in the morning, and finally stumbled out the door and away with one final hateful glower at me.
I secured the door behind her and turned to see that Jackie was watching me with a kind of amused caution. “What?”
She shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “Just … sorry about that. Poor Kathy really is very devoted to me. Very good at her job.”
“She must be,” I said. “If you let her pee on your floor.”
Jackie giggled, a sound that was as contagious as it was surprising, and I found that I was smiling in response. “She did pee, didn’t she,” Jackie said.
“If she didn’t,” I said, “Starbucks coffee has gone way downhill.”
Jackie giggled again, and started to sink down into the chair where Kathy had been sitting. She caught herself halfway down and jerked upright. “Oh!” she said. “That’s, um—I think I’d prefer a chair with a dry seat.”
“Good thinking,” I said, and I watched Jackie move to one end of the couch, where she sat down and relaxed into a kind of contented sprawl. She sighed, and then she glanced at the heap of papers Kathy had piled on the end table. She immediately tensed up; her shoulders went up an inch and the half smile fell off her face.
“The letters,” she said.
It may have been the strain of being called a bastard so many times, but I didn’t know what she meant. “What letters?” I said.
Jackie nodded at the papers. “From him,” she said. “The psycho. Kathy brought them for you.”
“Oh,” I said. It was very thoughtful, even though I really didn’t want them.
Jackie kept looking at the pile with an expression that was halfway between loathing and anxiety.
When nothing else happened for a full minute, I cleared my throat politely. “Well,” I said. “Should we order some dinner?”
Jackie looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read, for just a moment too long, before she finally said, “All right.”
Dinner was a somewhat somber affair. The chummy, lighthearted mood of cocktail hour had vanished, and Jackie spent most of the meal staring at her plate, picking at the food without actually eating very much of it. That was a shame, because it was really very good food. I had ordered tournedos of beef; I’d always wondered what a tournedo was, and when I saw it listed on the menu I decided there was no time like the present to find out. I knew it was some kind of beef, so it seemed like a rather low-risk gamble, and it turned out to be two very tasty chunks of beef, cooked in a wine-and-mango sauce. I was fairly sure that mango was not part of the original recipe—after all, what’s the French word for mango?—but it was a nice addition, and I had no trouble eating everything, including a large mound of garlic mashed potatoes and a helping of broccoli, steamed just right.
Jackie had stone crab, or at any rate, she had it served to her. She cracked a claw open and poked at it for a while before she nibbled at one small chunk, without even dipping it in the melted butter. She also ate one spear of grilled asparagus, and half a forkful of wild rice. Altogether, though, it was quite clear that she was having trouble with the whole idea of eating. I wondered briefly whether she would think I was rude if I offered to finish her meal for her—after all, stone crab does not grow on trees. But upon sober reflection, I decided it was not quite the thing.
That was the last chance for sober reflection of any kind that evening, since Jackie had ordered a bottle of wine for each of us—red for my tournedos and white for her crab. The shyness she exhibited toward solid food did not extend to the wine, and she had finished about three-quarters of the bottle by the time she pushed her plate away. On top of the mojito she’d had earlier, it should have made her very unsteady, but her movements seemed perfectly crisp and her speech did not slur, what little there was of it. For the first part of the meal I didn’t really notice how quiet she was, since my attention was all on my plate. But as the happy sounds of eating began to slow down, I became aware that no conversation arose to take its place, and I watched as Jackie slouched over her plate in moody silence and played with her food without eating.
Even the excellent dessert didn’t improve her mood. I had something called Decadent Lava Cake, which was very good, although the decadence escaped me. Jackie had ordered a kind of crème brûlée, but once again she didn’t really eat it. She picked a small piece of caramelized cr
ust off the top and crunched on it, but that was all. I began to wonder whether perhaps she took vitamin shots in secret; she certainly didn’t eat enough to sustain human life.
