“Must be nice.”
“Beats waiting tables, I’m sure.”
He sighed. “I should have known you’d show up sooner or later. You always do.”
“I was having dinner with my boyfriend,” I protested. I hadn’t gone to Sambuca looking for Mendoza. Why would I? “And that’s not true, anyway. Usually, you’re the one who shows up.”
He didn’t respond to that, and I continued, “You showed up when David died, and you showed up when Mrs. Grimshaw reported me for suspicious behavior, and you showed up when Harold was shot?—”
“You called me when Harold was shot!”
“Well, of course I did,” I said. “What else did you expect me to do? Ignore it?”
He rolled his eyes, and I added, “It’s your own fault. If you had told me you were working at Sambuca, I would have stayed away.”
“There was no need to tell you. It’s none of your business what I do.”
I ignored what felt a bit like a stab wound to the heart. “Clearly not.” Or he would have been in touch at some point during the past three weeks.
He must have realized how I’d taken it, because he sighed. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m working.”
“Undercover, you mean?”
He shrugged, which was as good as admitting it.
“Who died?” He was a homicide cop, so it made sense that someone had.
“No one you know,” Mendoza said. And relented. “No one at all. Not so far. I’m on loan to the organized crime division.”
Organized crime?
“Oh my God,” I said.
He looked up. “What?”
“Greg suggested organized crime. I told him we don’t see much of the Cosa Nostra around here. I can’t believe he was right.”
Mendoza’s face hardened. “What do you mean, Newsome suggested? What does he know about it?”
“Nothing at all,” I said. “We were batting ideas back and forth. He’s a thriller writer, you know.”
Mendoza rolled his eyes. “Yes, I know. I looked into him when his brother died, remember? I figured, if anything made someone a good candidate for murderer, it was that.”
He didn’t wait for me to answer, just added, “So was Newsome the reason you ended up at Sambuca tonight?”
I shook my head. “I suggested it, actually. We were supposed to go to Fidelio’s.”
He sighed again, like I was making him very tired or something. “Let me guess. When you said you were with your boyfriend, what you actually meant was that you were snooping, and you were using Greg Newsome as cover. And he allowed it.”
“He was happy to do it,” I said smugly. “In fact, he offered to do it again. But of course he didn’t see you there, so he doesn’t know that you’re working undercover.”
“Right.” He nodded. “If you show up again, I’ll have you arrested.”
I snorted. “I’d like to see you try. There’s nothing illegal about having Italian for dinner.”
That didn’t seem to impress him, so I added, “By then it’ll be too late, anyway. Everyone in the dining room will have heard me say, ‘why, hello, Detective Mendoza; I didn’t expect to see you here.’”
“You wouldn’t.”
