West knew about Ruby Sink. The word had traveled like electricity. Everyone in the police department found out Miss Sink was Brazil’s landlady, and when West heard the truth, she felt sick with guilt. She felt stupid and ignorant. Brazil’s so-called girlfriend had been a seventy-one-year-old woman who rented a row house to him. West felt absolutely terrible and for hours had been trying to think of what to say.
She drove through the Fan. Nothing was open, not even the Robin Inn. She parked in front of her town house and turned off the engine but didn’t get out. She looked at Brazil in the dark. Her heart stirred as she stared at his face, sharply defined by shadows from the streetlight.
‘I know,’ she said.
He was quiet.
‘I know about Ruby Sink. That she was your landlady. The landlady I heard you were seeing.’
Brazil turned to her, baffled.
‘Seeing?’ he said. ‘Where the hell did you hear something like that?’
‘The talk was all around the department from day one,’ West replied. ‘People told me you had a thing going with your landlady. Then I heard you on the phone with her and… well, it sounded like it was true, in a way.’
‘Why? Because I was nice to her when she paged me?’ Brazil said with emotion. ‘Because she was lonely and always bringing me cookies, cakes and things?’ His voice wavered. ‘Leaving them on my doorstep because I was never fucking home and never gave her the rucking time of day!’
‘I’m sorry, Andy,’ West said gently.
‘It’s like my mother.’ He dissolved. ‘I don’t call her. She’s so fucking drunk all the time and I can’t stand it and won’t listen to the awful things she says. I don’t know. I don’t know.’
West moved over and put her arms around him. She held him close to calm him. Her blood got hot and her chemistry woke up.
‘It’s all right, Andy,’ she said. ‘It’s going to be all right.’
She wanted to hold him forever, but suddenly the awkwardness of it overtook the magic. She thought of her age. She thought of his talent, of everything that made him so unusual and special. He was probably hugging her back because he was terribly upset, no other reason. His heart probably wasn’t pounding like hers. He probably wasn’t as aware of their bodies touching as she was. She abruptly pulled away.
‘I guess we should go in,’ she said.
Niles heard them long before they gave a thought to him. He was waiting by the front door when his owner and Piano Man walked in.
Piano Man took a moment to pet Niles, while Niles’s owner couldn’t be bothered. Niles stayed where he was, tail switching. He watched with crossed eyes and plotted as they went into the kitchen.
When they were out of view, Niles jumped up on the table in the foyer. He hooked a claw into the florist’s card. He jumped down, landing silently on three legs.
West did not think she could eat the sweet potato pie. She stared at the slice Brazil set before her. The idea that Ruby Sink had made it before her cold-blooded murder was too much for West to process.
‘I can’t throw it away.’ Brazil sat across from West at the kitchen table. ‘It would be heartless to throw it away. I just can’t. You couldn’t either, Virginia. She would want us to eat it.’
‘This is kind of sick,’ West said, blinking, focusing, looking at him. ‘I don’t think I can.’
Brazil picked up his fork. He flinched as he cut off the point of his slice. He raised it. He took a deep breath and put it in his mouth. West watched him chew once or twice and swallow. It surprised her that he looked enormously relieved. Tension left his face. His eyes brightened and got that fierce blue flame in them that she had learned to recognize and take very seriously.
‘It’s okay,’ he told her in a strong voice. ‘Trust me.’ He nodded for her to eat.
West had never backed down from a challenge, especially in front of him. It was one of the hardest things she’d ever done when she took a bite of that pie. It surprised her that it didn’t taste weird or dead or who knows what. She had no idea what she had expected.