Chapter 22 The Color Purple
The Color Purple
The rising sun was already glittering off the foam of the waves. Mitch and Anna stripped off their clothes. Despite the growing warmth of the morning, the water felt ice-cold against their skin.
Later, lying on the sand with his head resting on Anna’s stomach, Mitch felt her heartbeat pulsing gently beneath his neck.
An hour passed like that, while they were lulled by the sound of the waves.
Eventually they gathered their belongings, climbed back into the van, and drove into town, looking for a place to have breakfast.
Walking through the town centre, Anna stopped at a kiosk to buy the morning paper. Salinas’s face was on the front page. She folded the paper and slipped it into her pocket.
Once they were seated in a café, she put the paper down in front of Mitch and asked him to read her the article.
“He died an agonizingly painful death,” he read aloud, trying not to look too pleased.
“How exactly did he die?” Anna asked, dipping her toast into her café au lait.
“Poisoned.”
“How original,” she drawled, with sincere indifference.
Her eyes were crinkled at the corners, and she was smiling strangely.
Mitch tried to read her thoughts, wondering whether she was still there with him or if her mind had wandered to the broken burner and malfunctioning cold-room latch in her restaurant, hundreds of kilometres away.
“Aren’t you going to ask me if I killed him?”
“Did you kill him?”
Around them, the café went silent. The waitress setting tables nearby stopped short, a fork in one hand and a paper napkin in the other, her mouth hanging open.
“In that case, let’s not mention it again,” Anna declared calmly. She rose, took two croissants from a basket on the counter, returned to the table, and offered one to Mitch.
“Incredible, what the sea air does for the appetite. I should have moved here; people must be constantly hungry. I know I am. Anyway,” she added, pushing the newspaper aside, “now we know what the murder weapon was, but we still need to find a motive.”
“Salinas had plenty of enemies.”
“I’m sure he did. But the police only arrested one of them.”
“I gave them reason to. I kept circling around him. It was bound to raise suspicions.”
“Hmm. I think it’s a lot more complicated than that. And I don’t think they picked you at random to pin this on. Assuming you didn’t kill him, of course – though we agreed not to mention that anymore. Even if you did, it would be smart to look at other suspects.”
“Like the one who actually did it, for instance?”
“Exactly. That person – or anyone else – as long as it was actually a crime. What led to your arrest the first time?”
“I told you – I had books I wasn’t supposed to have in my shop.”
“No – I mean, how did the police find out you had those books?”
“An inspector had given me a verbal warning a few weeks earlier. I’d refused to take Anne Frank’s diary off my shelves, which would have been ridiculous and disgraceful. I’m sure his report gave the police enough cause for a raid.”
“How many cops showed up that day?”
“I don’t remember. Six, maybe eight.”
Anna propped her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her hands, gazing at the ceiling.
“Eight police officers because of a simple inspection report. That doesn’t make sense. I’ve seen restaurants get warnings from health inspectors – worked in places that got fined. At worst, they got a second visit a couple of weeks later, but never a full-on armed police raid.”
“Tyrants are more afraid of books than spoiled food, I guess.”
Anna gave him a pointed look. “Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that someone might have tipped them off?”
“Yeah, it has – but why would anyone do that?”
“To get you locked up. Is there anyone around you who might have had something to gain from getting you out of the picture?”
“I really can’t think of anyone. Sorry.”
Mitch found that he’d lost his appetite. He put his croissant down, uneaten. Anna, on the other hand, had demolished hers in two bites.
“The sea air,” she said, dabbing her lips with a napkin.
“The antique dealer, maybe,” Mitch mused. “He sold me the shop. I remember he wanted to rent the cellar from me, but I said no.”
“What was he like?”
“Not a very nice guy.”
“Not a nice guy,” Anna repeated. “Well, that’s a start.” She licked her lips. “You want to share a brioche? No, never mind – they’re too small.”
She went up to the counter again and returned with the entire basket of pastries, pausing on the way to speak to the waitress, who’d been wiping the same glass for the last ten minutes, staring fixedly at them.
“If you’re that interested in our conversation, get yourself a coffee and pull up a chair. Maybe you’ll come up with a good idea.”
The waitress shrugged and went back to setting tables.
“Sorry,” Anna said, sitting back down. “I inherited the I hate people who can’t mind their own business gene.”
“Is that a thing?”
“Sure. It’s a mutation of the I dislike people in general gene.”
“How did you convince that inspector to let me go?” Mitch asked, preferring to change the subject to preserve the mood of a day he was actually enjoying.
“You want the short version or the long version?”
“Long, please.”
“Well, like I said, given my past, police stations aren’t exactly my favourite places in the world.
So I took a few deep breaths before I went inside, and then I asked to speak to your arresting officer.
The guy at the desk wanted to know why, and his tone was so smug that it got rid of my nerves entirely and gave me my determination back.
I leaned in close to him and whispered that I had a very important secret to tell. ”
“Which was?”
“That I’d spent the whole previous day and night with the man they were interrogating.
I added that his superior officer surely had better things to do than waste his time questioning a suspect who couldn’t possibly have committed the murder he was trying to pin on him, and that it would be wiser to bring him up to speed before he used force to get a false confession – because if that happened, I’d have to tell the press everything.
He gave me a look, but he could tell I was serious. ”
Anna had rattled off the story in a single breath, and the speed with which she’d spoken made Mitch suspect that the police-station charade had been more difficult for her than she wanted to admit.
“You really want me to keep going?” Anna asked.
Mitch nodded. “Okay, so the inspector had me brought into his office, and I told him the exact same thing I’d told the duty officer.
He tried to catch me in a lie, said he wouldn’t let you go as easily as that.
Made me give him a precise timeline – where, when, what we were doing at the time of the murder.
I don’t think I’ve ever told you, but when I was a teenager, and even into my twenties, I used to play a lot of poker.
Poker’s all about bluffing, and bluffing is just the art of telling little white lies.
“At the start of a round, when you have a bad hand, you make a particular move – some kind of facial expression, or a nervous tic. You get the idea. And when you have a good hand, you do the same thing. Your opponents think they’ve got you figured, so they up the ante.
Then you take the pot. You following me? ”
“I’m trying,” Mitch said. “I just don’t see what this has to do with me.”
“Plenty,” Anna said. “I told the inspector that if he wanted me to answer his question, he’d have to tell me what time the murder took place.
He was too stupid not to go along with it.
I said that if it had happened around five o’clock or later, you couldn’t have been involved, because we were together in my soon-to-open restaurant, where you were helping me line up tables in diagonal rows – which, as everyone knows, is impossible for one person to do alone – and then we’d had dinner together in the kitchen before heading back to my place. ”
“And he just took your word for it?” Mitch asked, astonished.
“You didn’t understand my poker analogy” Anna sighed.
“It wasn’t about him believing me. It was about finding out whether he was bluffing – and throwing him off his game before he was ready to show his cards.
I mentioned that the warehouse worker from the auction house, who I’d hired that afternoon, was there when you arrived, and he’d remember it was five thirty sharp because I generously paid him for the full hour.
When I started describing the worker, your inspector cut me off.
He looked defeated. Told me to go and wait for you in the lobby.
And you know the rest already. I decided to wait in my van instead.
All those uniforms were making me very uncomfortable. ”
“Didn’t he ask who you were?”
“Of course. I showed him my ID.”
Mitch was visibly shocked.
“Damn it, Anna! Given your record, you should never have taken such a risk!”
“Which one of us offered to be the other’s alibi first?” Anna countered. “You were ready to do it for me, and your past isn’t exactly a rose garden!”
“Yes… but… it’s not the same.”
“It’s exactly the same. It’s called being equals, and that’s the foundation of any real relationship.”
Mitch forgot all about his problems: the inspector’s face; the hour spent in the interrogation room, counting down his last moments of freedom; even the confession he’d almost signed.
Warmth swelled in his chest, moved through his arms, into his shoulders, up his neck, and flushed across his cheeks.
Anna had called what they had a relationship – which, for someone who knew the weight of words and what they could reveal when you paid attention to them, opened the door to another dimension.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“No reason” Mitch grinned.
She sat there across from him, her hair pulled back into a ponytail, her complexion glowing from the sea air, fingers tapping the table among the croissant crumbs – and the warmth he had always felt around her bloomed stronger than ever.
This time, he decided to act on it, leaning forward and taking Anna’s face gently in his hands.
The kiss was the first of a relationship now fully, irrevocably declared.