“What’s going on?” Silas asked. “I said your name about ten times, and you didn’t even hear me.”
“Sorry,” I told him. “I was preoccupied.”
“Is Octavia bothering you at work? Do I need to threaten her lizard?”
“You shouldn’t go near Grosvenor,” I advised. “She got five stiches in her hand after he ‘nipped’ her on New Year’s Day, and she called it ‘his latest infraction.’ That means there were other bites in the past.”
“Is she pissing you off?” he persisted. “Go ahead and say something terrible, like, ‘She did try my patience today.’”
“No, she was fine. We actually had a very nice lunch together.” I described it for him, and also what had happened afterwards, about the black SUV. “She always sees conspiracies and tricks, but I think it was just some guy driving. I don’t think it was him,” I said, and Silas didn’t have to ask who I meant by that.
“Dax hasn’t been at any of the clubs. No one’s seen him,” he told me. “I cornered two of his little friends—”
“What?Why?When?”
“Lots of questions,” he commented. “It was last weekend, after you and Lyra were asleep, and I think the one guy’s name was Terry. I’m not too sure, but it didn’t matter because he was useless. The only thing he told me was that he heard Dax was back in Chicago, where he grew up.”
“Ok. That makes sense,” I said, nodding.
“Why? What do you mean? What do you know?”
“Lots of questions,” I commented back, and he put his hands on my hips and squeezed. That was a particularly ticklish area, atleast on me. It led to me squealing and throwing the dish sponge by mistake, so that took a moment to clean up.
“Tell me about Dax,” he said as I wiped the last bit of water from the floor, and he took care of the suds on the ceiling.
“Well, I just thought the whole thing was weird.”
“You being with him? Yeah, it sure was, since he’s a—”
“I mean, I thought it was weird that he suddenly had money,” I explained. “He had enough to pay for a song about me, and that meant hiring someone to write it first, then perform it and produce it, too.”
“And to get it played,” Silas added. “That’s how songs get started. Someone’s slipping a few bills to the DJs.”
“But Dax didn’t have any money of his own, since his business wasn’t going well,” I said.
“Because he was terrible at it and didn’t really want to work.”
“And you had told me about him spending on other things, too,” I continued, “like how he had paid for the guys to go to my office building to scare me. It didn’t make sense.”
“Maybe he’s selling weed, something like that.”
“No, because he can’t keep drugs around without using them all. He’s like that with liquor, too. He stole a bunch of bottles from the Château Moderne but he drank it before he could offload it. So I had to wonder, where was he getting money? It wasn’t from me anymore, since I had closed our account. I canceled the credit card, too, and I was pretty sure that he wasn’t keeping much stashed away. He’s a very poor saver,” I explained. “Andhe’s too scared to involve himself in real crime, especially after he saw so many of his relatives going to prison.”
“Where was he getting it, then?”
“There was only one possibility,” I said. “His mother.”
“His mother,” Silas repeated. “Really?”
“They fought all the time, but she would have done anything for him,” I answered. “He talks about how he had such a tough life but he actually grew up in a very nice house. She worked hard to provide for him.”
“In that song, he says that he was raised on the street.”
I nodded. “She didn’t like that when I played it for her. She hadn’t heard the song, because it never got popular in Chicago and then you made it go away.” I watched him flex his fingers and then fold them into fists, and I got an idea about how he’d accomplished that—he’d done more than issue the stern talking-to that he’d described to me. “I called her after you got jumped. That was it, the final straw.”
“It wasn’t enough that he treated you like crap, tore up your apartment…sorry. Go ahead and tell me the rest of the story. You talked to his mother?”
It had been a hard conversation, because we’d never gotten along. In her opinion, I’d never been good enough for her only son, and she’d let me know that many times (especially during the weeks that she’d stayed in our one-bedroom apartment with us). “She didn’t want to talk at first, because she only wanted to yell about how I’d ruined his life. He had told her the same storyabout how I verbally abused him and all that other nonsense from the song.”
