One O'Clock Hustle: An Inspector Rebecca Mayfield Mystery (Rebecca Mayfield Mysteries Book 1) (14 page)

She was ready to fight this battle. But if she did, she'd have to go it alone. Neither Sutter nor Eastwood would back her, of that she was sure. Her gaze intense, she asked, “If I did go after him, would you back me?”

His hold tightened on her. “If that's your choice, you know I would.”

She could feel herself being drawn to him, wanting to close the distance between them, but that would have been foolish for so many reasons. She forced herself to turn away. She hated it when he, who was all emotion and unfounded intuition, made her, who was the epitome of precise logic and practicality, feel like she was being irrational.

She took a few more steps, and rubbed the arms he had held. She hated when he made her notice his touch, notice it and like it. And want more.

Richie stared at her a long moment. He then called Shay, and afterward, poured them each a glass of cabernet. “Shay will be here in an hour or so. He'll bring his laptop and some special software.”

“Good.”

He handed her a glass. “
Salute
,” Richie said, holding out his glass.

She nodded. “
Salute
.” Their glasses clinked together.

As she sipped on the wine, her tension began to ebb ever so slightly.

“It's going to be all right, Rebecca,” he said. “Trust me.”

She couldn't help but think that was the problem. She did trust him. Probably way more than she should.

o0o

They sat at her small kitchen table. He had dished out dinner and now waited, watching her, as she took the first bite of spaghetti. “Oh, my God. This is really good!”

He chuckled. “Glad you like it.” He also began to eat.

She ate a couple more forkfuls. “I can get used to coming home to your cooking. You're spoiling me, Richie.”

“Why not? You work hard. You deserve someone to do things for you once in a while.”

“I don't know about that,” she said with a smile.

He drank down some wine. “I'm surprised you aren't married, or don't have a steady boyfriend. Are you divorced?”

“No. Never married.”

“Almost?” he asked.

She dug into the pasta before answering. “I guess you could say that.”

“What happened?”

“With the first, I was too young. Probably too innocent.” She tried to shrug it off and continue eating.

“The first?” He gave her a small smile filled with curiosity. “Tell me about it. I'm interested.”

Why not,
s
he decided. “Well, I still lived at home at the time, on my dad's farm. It was a decent size, nearly four hundred acres. My boyfriend—I guess you could call him my fiancé since we and everyone else assumed we'd get married—anyway, he lived on the adjacent farm.” She paused then, to make sure he was still interested.

He nodded, and waited for her to continue.

“While in my late teens, my folks separated, but didn't divorce. I stayed on the farm with Dad, and my younger sister moved to Boise with Mom. I guess Eddie liked the idea of marrying the daughter of a farmer—merging our lands, making good money, and all that. But after Dad died and Mom sold the farm, he didn't find me—a woman with no job and no home—nearly as interesting. Before long, we stopped seeing each other.”

“Is that why you left Idaho?” he asked.

“Thanks to Eddie, I realized there was a big world out there. In time, I got up the nerve to leave everything I knew.”

“I imagine it wasn't easy.”

She smiled and drank a little more wine as she thought back on those days. “I was scared to death. I mean, I was a farm girl, raised with potatoes and pigs. What did I know about the world? I adored my dad, and to lose him and a short while after, to realize how things had changed with Eddie … to say it wasn't easy is an understatement.”

“That Eddie has to be the world's biggest jerk,” he said indignantly. “I hope you haven't been pining for him all these years.”

She chuckled. “God, no! I'm long over him.” He refilled her glass. “But being a cop doesn't make for an easy love life.”

“So I've heard,” he said, digging into the meal with obvious relish.

She watched him as he ate, wondering not only why he was asking, but why she was answering. Maybe simply because he seemed to be a good listener. “I dated quite a bit when I first got to the city, but it took a few years before I met someone I could trust enough to let myself get serious about. We dated nearly a year. But as time went on, it became clear that the closer we got, the less he could accept that I was a cop.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“For one thing, I was close to my male partner back when I was a uniform. It's only natural when you ride together, and watch each other's back. But it bothered Will a lot. The relationship ended when I got shot trying to break up a domestic dispute. It was only a flesh wound, not serious at all, but Will said it was him or the job. I chose the job.”

“You loved him, but chose the job instead?”

She thought a moment, then decided to be honest. “Guess it means I didn't love him as much as I thought I did. As for the job, it's the best job ever.”

She half-expected some sort of disagreement from him. Instead, he nodded. “Do you ever regret the choices you made?”

She didn't have to think twice. “No.”

“You love your job that much, do you?”

“At this point in my life, yes.”

He nodded. “That's good. It's good to live a life with no regrets.” His voice sounded wistful. “You're lucky.”

“I wouldn't go quite that far,” she said. Then, not sure why she wanted to know, she asked, “What about you?”

“Oh, I've had plenty of regrets!” he said with a chuckle. “Let's clear these dishes. Shay will be here soon.”

“Just a minute! That's not what I'm talking about and you know it.” She helped him carry dirty dishes to the kitchen. “Were you ever married?”

“No.” He started to load the dishwasher while she scooped leftovers into plastic refrigerator containers.

“Close?”

“Yeah, you could say that.” He took off his platinum Rolex watch while he ran some hot, sudsy water into the pan he had cooked the sauce in, then took a nylon pad and began to scrub it.

“And?” Rebecca asked.

He paused a moment. “I waited a long time for the right woman. I'll admit, I enjoyed being single. But then, out of the blue one day, when I was thirty-four, I met someone. Someone special.”

Something about his tone of voice caused her to stop what she was doing. She almost didn't want to know, but at the same time, couldn't stop herself. Her voice soft now, she said, “What happened?”

His shoulders stiffened, and his hands paused. When he spoke, his voice sounded gruff and harsh, as if he was determined to get the words out, whatever it took. “Car accident. On the approach to the Golden Gate bridge. Deadly spot, that Doyle Drive. Lots of bad accidents there. All my life I had that fact drummed into me. It takes on a whole new meaning when one of the statistics is somebody you care about.”

Damn.
She hated that something like that had happened in his life, hated it that she should feel such sympathy for him. “I'm so sorry, Richie.”

He forced his attention back to washing up and scoured the pan until it was cleaner than it had ever been. “Yeah, me, too. It took a long time to get over that. Don't know if I have, or if I ever will.”

“Were you engaged to her?”

He rinsed off the pan and put it on the dish rack by the sink, but then left his hand resting on it as he said, “Yeah, for all of three days before she was killed. Before that, almost a year, I was afraid to ask, afraid she'd turn me down.” He drew back his hand and looked over the sink, as if wondering what he should do or say next. He rested both hands on its rim a moment. “Now, I see that was stupid. We could have had a lot more time together as a couple, being happy.”

She picked up a dishcloth and began to dry the pan. “It must have been horribly difficult to handle.”

“Yeah, difficult.”

He sounded irritated with her, irritated both at her questions and that he was answering them. The room fell absolutely quiet as he scrubbed the pot so hard Rebecca wondered if he'd put a hole in it. She said nothing, waiting. “If you really want to know, I drank too much, ate too much, and screwed around too much. No drugs, at least. I didn't do that. Somehow, Vito and Shay got me to stop. It wasn't easy, and definitely wasn't fast. They got me to drink less, eat the right foods, even go to a gym. I hate gyms. Guys like me, we don't go to gyms.” He shook his head. “I'm still not sure how they did it. Or why they bothered.” He put the pot on the rack.

“Maybe because they're friends.” She picked up the spaghetti pot to dry it as his words, his sorrow and disappointment settled deep within her heart. “You must have loved her very much. Very deeply. In a way, you're lucky for that. Sometimes  …” she hesitated, but then realized he was being honest and deserved the same from her, “sometimes I think I never loved enough.”

At those words, he glanced her way, as if surprised at such an admission and perhaps wondering if she meant to make it. She could feel his gaze on her, but she refused to meet it. He went back to washing up. After a while he said, “The best thing, if you ask me, is to make sure you don't get too attached to people.”

She nodded. “I learn that lesson every day in my job.”

He grinned. “Boy, what a pair of misanthropes we are!”

She gave him a small smile. “I'm glad you told me. It actually explains a lot.”

He was taken aback. “It does?” He lifted the wine bottle and saw they had killed it. He tossed it in the glass recycling. “Actually, Rebecca Rulebook, your dedication to your job—that explains a lot to me about your life as well.”

“Hmm … my life is supposed to be a closed, well-hidden book, opened to me alone.” She put the pots in the cupboard under the sink. “I don't know that I like this.”

“I can keep your secrets,” he said with a grin.

The dishes done, he washed the sink then spread the dishrag over the faucet to dry. “I do have to say, though, I understand your old boyfriend, Will.”

“You do?”

“Absolutely. I'm with him. I lost my fiancée and she was a bank loan officer. I can't imagine being married to a woman who walks towards danger every day.”

Just then, there was a knock on the door.

Shay unlocked it and walked inside before Rebecca even reached it. He looked from her to Richie as if noticing the odd vibe in the room, took in everything surrounding them, and without any change of expression, put his laptop on the kitchen table, and fired it up.

“Where's the thumb drive?” he asked.

Rebecca handed Shay gloves, put on a pair herself, and then removed the drive from the evidence bag. Shay studied it closely. He took some canned air and other implements to dry and clean it. Rebecca and Richie sat and watched him work.

Finally he plugged it into his laptop. It whirred, clunked, and then asked for a password.

“So far, so good,” Shay said. “As I suspected, it's password protected. I'll run my software to crack the password. Hopefully, Glickman wasn't too clever when he set it up.”

“Try ghostwriter,” Rebecca suggested.

“You think he'd use something so simple?” Richie asked.

“Absolutely. He was more proud of working on that than anything else. I can definitely see him using it.”

Shay typed it and the screen unlocked. He shook his head. “Damn! She was right.”

With that, he perused the file. “It's an Excel spreadsheet. How low-tech can you get? Take a look at this, Richie. You know several of these guys.”

Richie pulled up a chair to sit by Shay. He gave a low whistle. “They're the guys Glickman told us about, plus a whole lot of others—some are names, some only initials,” he said to Rebecca. “But now, we've got dollar amounts, plus wins and losses, to go along with all these people.”

“The monetary amount itself probably doesn't matter all that much,” Rebecca said. “Often, it's the little nobody's who think they should be special who do the most harm in this world.”

“True enough,” Richie agreed.

Rebecca stood behind Shay and looked over his shoulder at the list. Her gaze zeroed in immediately on “R. Am.” She was pretty sure who that must be. She could scarcely believe it when she saw he spent $75,975 on bets last year, but only won $47,338. “My God!” she muttered.

“What?” Richie asked.

“Nothing.” She lied. “It's a long list, that's all.”

“If these numbers are true,” Shay said, “Pasternak had a problem. The IRS cares when a gambler doesn't report his winnings. They don't give a damn if a person loses, and you can't report a loss anyway.”

“Looks like you're safe from the IRS, Richie.” Rebecca pointed to the name she thought was him and couldn't stop herself from grinning.

“Real funny.” Richie glowered. “Most years I do a whole lot better.”

“Right.” She loved how men liked to brag, even if it was over something illegal.

“And remember, Inspector, using a bookie isn't illegal in California,” he added.