“Not you?”
“Lieutenant Copeland is my boss,” Mendoza explained. “She’ll be handling Nick’s case.”
Jacquie nodded numbly. She looked like she was getting close to the end of her rope, and I shot a glance at Mendoza. He shot one back, and it looked like he was thinking the same thing.
“One more thing before we go,” he said. “We’ll be notifying Mr. Gomorra about Mr. Costanza’s death. Please don’t contact him before we do.”
Jacquie shook her head. She still looked numb.
Mendoza got to his feet. I did, too. The grief was thick enough to carve with a knife, but at the same time, I felt guilty for leaving like this. “Is there anyone I can contact for you?” I inquired. “Someone who can come sit with you, so you won’t be alone?”
She must have parents, maybe siblings. Certainly friends or coworkers.
For a second, I wasn’t even sure she heard me. Then, after the question had penetrated, she shook her head. “I’d rather be by myself.”
I looked down at her tear-stained face. Two months ago, I would have said something vicious. Right now, it was hard to remember why I hated her. Truth be told, once I got used to the situation, I was happier without David—cheating bastard that he’d been—and right now, she was just a grieving twenty-five-year-old who had lost someone she loved.
“Let me know if you need anything,” I told her, “or if there’s anything I can do.”
Mendoza gave me a flat look from across the room, but what else was I supposed to say? I couldn’t leave without saying anything.
We walked out and shut the door after ourselves, but he waited until we had rattled down the three flights of stairs and were outside the building before he spoke, and when he did, it wasn’t to chastise me about making promises I couldn’t keep. “That was quite a performance,” he said instead, blandly.
I turned to look at him as we stepped onto the sidewalk and headed for the corner. “You think she was acting?”
He looked back. “I think she might have been. That wasn’t the same person who stood up at your husband’s funeral and pointed the finger at you.”
He pulled out his keys as we turned the corner, and jangled them back and forth.
No, it hadn’t been. Not even close. “Wouldn’t that mean that this is real grief,” I suggested, “and the funeral was just shock? And anger.”
And fear that the police would think she was responsible for David’s death, so she had to deflect the blame onto me.
“Just because she was performing at the funeral doesn’t mean she isn’t performing now,” Mendoza said. He keyed his doors open, but instead of getting in, he leaned that excellent posterior against the side of his Jeep and faced me. “All it means is that she’s a good performer.”
“Surely you jest.” The performance—and yes, it had been one—at David’s funeral had been high camp, from the veiled hat and black-rimmed handkerchief to being escorted out by the two best-looking men in the audience.
“Think about it,” Mendoza said. “At your husband’s funeral, she was the other woman. Everyone was looking at her, judging her. She had to play a part—the heartbroken mistress, wronged and grieving. Now? Now she’s alone with us, and she knows I’m investigating a murder. Different audience, different performance.”
Maybe. But then again, maybe not. “You think she killed him?”
“I think it’s possible,” Mendoza said. “Did you happen to notice that she didn’t ask how he died?”
I hadn’t, until he mentioned it. “Couldn’t that just be because she was overwhelmed by grief and wasn’t thinking straight?” And not because she already knew the answer?
“You asked when I came to notify you about Mr. Kelly’s death,” Mendoza pointed out.
“But I was hardly overwhelmed with grief on that occasion, was I?”
It had been the best news I’d gotten since David left me, in fact. We were still married, and I still stood to inherit. Had he lasted one more day, until the divorce was final, I would have been left destitute.
“Be that as it may,” Mendoza said blandly, but with a glint in his eyes that made me think he remembered, as I certainly did, that I had opened the door for him in my bathrobe, with a glass of wine in my hand, when he came to notify me that my husband was dead. “Jacquie hired you to find out if Nick was cheating. You told her he wasn’t. But what if you were wrong? What if she found out on her own—saw something, heard something—and decided to take matters into her own hands?”
It was possible, I suppose. Or not impossible. However— “A bullet between the eyes seems a little much for a cheating boyfriend, don’t you think?”
“Maybe that’s the point,” Mendoza said.
“I don’t think she knows about the mob connection, though.” I certainly hadn’t told her.
