A deep, familiar voice breaks in on my meditations. I look away from the snoring junkie I’ve been staring at unseeingly, and up into Cooper’s calm, smiling face…and suddenly feel like throwing up.
“Heather,” he says, with friendly nonchalance, as he folds himself into the plastic chair beside me.
“Um.” That’s all I can think of to say. Swift, huh? After a lot of mental turmoil, I finally add, “Hi.”
Cooper gazes with mild interest at the snoring junkie. He looks, in his scruffy but form-fitting jeans and black leather jacket, good enough to eat. Better than Ho Hos, even. Cooper, I mean. Not the junkie.
“So,” he says, in the same conversational tone. “What’s new with you?”
I go cold all over, then hot. It’s totally unfair, the hold this guy has over me. And he’s never so much as asked me out! Okay, he asked me to move in with him, but, hello, that was out of pity. And I live on a whole separate floor. With a whole separate set of locks on the door. Which I’ve never actually used, but has he ever bothered to find that out? No!
“Nothing much,” I say to him, hoping he can’t see how my heart is leaping around inside my T-shirt. “Did, um, your dad call you?”
“No,” Cooper says. “Your friend Patty did. When she came to your office to pick you up for lunch, Magda told her what happened. Patty had the baby with her, or she’d have come herself.”
“Oh,” I say. I’d forgotten all about my lunch appointment with Patty. Glancing at the waiting room clock, I see that it’s after two. “Well.”
“What she couldn’t quite explain,” Cooper says, “is what, precisely, happened.”
Which is when it all comes spilling out.
I don’t want for it to. I don’t mean for it to. It’s just…well, I guess that’s why Cooper’s such a good detective. There’s something in his deep voice that just makes you blurt out everything you know…
Well, okay, not everything. I did manage to keep the whole part about what Jordan and I had done on Cooper’s hallway runner under wraps. Wild horses aren’t going to drag that information out of me.
Oh, and the part about me wanting to, you know, peel off Cooper’s clothes with my teeth, of course.
But the rest of it just comes out in this giant gush, the way the hot chocolate in the dorm cafeteria does sometimes, right after Magda’s poured the mix in but before anybody’s stirred it…
I tell him, starting with the lip-synch the night before, when I’d first begun to suspect that Christopher Allington was Elizabeth and Roberta’s killer, and ending with the geraniums cracking Jordan’s head open, skipping over the part in between where his brother and I made the beast with two backs in his foyer.
I’ve overheard Cooper in action with his clients a couple of times. The washer/dryer is on the same floor as his office, just off the kitchen, and I’ve been in there washing my control top underwear (I only wear it on special occasions, like customer service training seminars or cultural diversity awareness workshops) when he’s met with people who’ve hired him. He talks to them in this totally calm, careful voice…
…a completely different voice, it turns out, than he uses on his nonpaying clientele.
“Heather, are you insane?” He looks really mad. He sounds really mad. “You went and talked to the guy?”
It would be nice to think that the reason he’s so angry with me is because my near brush with death has finally made him realize his true feelings for me.
But I think all it did was reinforce his suspicions that I’m a complete and total whacko.
“Why are you yelling at me?” I demand. “I’m the victim here!”
“No, you’re not. Jordan is. And if you’d just listened to me—”
“But if I’d listened to you, I wouldn’t know that Chris Allington is the dangerous psychopath we’ve been looking for!”
“A fact of which you still don’t have any proof.” Cooper shakes his head. He has dark, thick hair that he hardly ever gets cut and that is always growing past his collar, giving him a distinctly nonconformist air, even without the whole private eye thing. “That planter could have been knocked over by anyone. How do you know the Allingtons’ gardener wasn’t watering the plants and accidentally knocked the thing over?”
“Directly onto me? Isn’t that just a bit of a coincidence? Considering the fact that I was just questioning Chris Allington the night before?”
I swear I see the corners of Cooper’s mouth twitch at this.
“I’m sorry, Heather, but I doubt your interrogation skills are such as to goad Chris Allington into a murderous frenzy.”
Okay, Miss Marple I may not be. But he doesn’t have to rub it in.
“I’m telling you, he tried to kill me. Why don’t you believe me?” I hear myself cry, before I can shut my mouth. “Can’t you see that I’m not a stupid little teen pop star anymore, and that I might just know what I’m talking about?”
Even as the words are coming out, I’m wishing them unsaid. What am I doing? What am I doing? This is the guy who, without my even asking, offered me a place to live when I had nowhere to go…well, okay, except the guest room in Patty and Frank’s loft.
But, you know. Besides that. How ungrateful can I be?
“I’m so sorry,” I say, feeling dry-mouthed with panic. “I didn’t mean it. I don’t know where that came from. I’m just—I think maybe I’m just upset. You know. From the stress.”
Cooper is just sitting there, looking at me with a totally unreadable expression.
“I don’t think of you as a stupid little teen pop star” is all he says, in a tone suggesting mild surprise.
“I know,” I say quickly. Oh God, why can’t I ever seem to keep my mouth shut? WHY?
“I just worry about you sometimes,” Cooper goes on, before I can say anything else. “I mean, you get yourself into things…. That whole thing with my brother—”
What whole thing? Did he mean…my relationship with his brother? Or last night? Oh please, don’t let him have seen the Post….
“And it’s not like you have anyone.” He shakes his head again. “Any family, or anyone to look after you.”