Chapter 3 #4
At that, he got up, looked over at Kate, and asked, “Need anything else from me?”
“No, I don’t think so,” she replied. “If so, I can contact you privately.”
“Perfect,” he replied, giving her a nod.
“We may not have had all that much to do with John because of the work from home thing,” Madrid added, “but we were with him day in and day out on calls and meetings.”
The older man heading for the door then added, “And we didn’t have any personal issues within the group over it. At least I’m not aware of any. I’m just hoping you can get to the bottom of this quickly.” And, with that, he walked out.
Kate let everyone else leave, except Bill. She and Rodney and Bill were all alone now.
Bill got nervous, shifting from one foot to the other.
She motioned for him to sit down, more because he was starting to piss her off with his shuffling back-and-forth.
He grabbed a chair and sat down way too quickly. “I don’t know why you’re so mad at me.”
“Because you were given specific instructions to not say anything to anybody,” she snapped, still trying to tone down her anger.
“John’s family hasn’t been informed yet, so I could hardly have you telling all his coworkers.
” He didn’t really seem to understand how important that could be.
Kate huffed out a large sigh. “Anybody here could have potentially picked up the phone, just to offer condolences, and contacted the family before they were officially notified.”
“Oh,” he said, frowning, “I didn’t think of that.”
“No, you didn’t,” she snapped at him yet again. “All you could think about was passing gossip.”
He turned beet red at that. “I wasn’t trying to pass gossip. He was my friend. I was shocked and upset at everything going on. I wasn’t trying to cause trouble.”
“I’m so glad to hear that,” she quipped, “because it certainly seemed as if that’s exactly what you were trying to do.”
“No, no, no, no.” He shook his head. “I really wasn’t.”
She stared at him for a long moment. “If I find out differently …” She let her words hang in the air, but no way was he off the hook. “Now, I need to ask you a few other questions. What did you know about the girlfriend?”
He shrugged. “She hasn’t been on his radar for quite a while. Maybe six months or so now,” he said. “So, I wouldn’t think she had anything to do with this.”
“I didn’t ask you if she had anything to do with it,” she snapped, her tone hard. “I asked you about the girlfriend.”
“Right,” he muttered, trying to back up a little in his chair. Then he sobbed ever-so-slightly. “Look. This is really hard for me. He was my friend.” He sobbed some more. “And now I feel as if somehow I’m being accused of something.”
Her eyebrows shot up, and she asked, “You mean, other than not listening and not doing what you were told?”
He flushed bright red and muttered, “Yeah, other than that.”
“That remains to be seen,” she declared. “Let’s get through these questions so I can move on.” By the time she finished drilling him with more questions, he looked exhausted.
When she dismissed him, he got up slowly and conceded, “I don’t really know that much about him, do I?”
She glanced at her notes. “Everything that you gave me was pretty generic. So, I would say, you don’t know him that well, considering you called him a friend.”
He nodded. “I only just now realized how much I really didn’t know about him,” he shared. “And that’s a pretty disconcerting thought.”
“Why is that?” she asked.
“I thought he was my best friend,” he told her. “But if I didn’t even know how to answer most of the questions you just asked, what kind of a friend was I?”
“Or maybe,” she replied, “you should ask yourself, What kind of a friend was he?”
*
As Simon walked into the lobby of his apartment building, Edgar, the on-duty doorman, looked over at him.
The usual big smile on his face quickly turned to concern. “That bad of a day?”
Simon shrugged. “I didn’t think so. Yet I got to tell you, I am pretty thrashed right now.”
“And you look it,” he confirmed bluntly, with the comfort of an old friend and somebody who had been around Simon in both good and bad times. “You’re looking as if life was a little bit too much today.”
“And yet,” Simon replied, with a wry smile in Edgar’s direction, “it seems as if it was a good day. So, I’m not sure when it all went south. Right now, I just want to go home, have a shower, and crash.”
“And what about Kate?” Edgar asked him. “Is the detective coming tonight?”
He pondered that and noted, “I imagine she is. The repairs to her apartment are still being disputed, in terms of what the insurance will and will not cover.”
Edgar snorted. “It got shot up by somebody trying to kill her, so they need to cover the cost of those repairs. Isn’t that what insurance is supposed to be for? Of course they have to cover it,” he declared, scandalized at the thought.
Simon chortled. “That’s the thing about insurance companies. If they can get out of paying, they will find a way.”
“But how is that her fault?”
“Something to do with the fact that she’s a cop.”
“And yet how many other cops in the city have had their apartments shot up?”
He laughed. “Those are very good arguments, and I wish I had an answer for you. However, as it stands right now, it’s all still up in the air.
So, I had a talk with one of our adjusters today to see if I could take a look at it and provide an opinion.
He told me that he would contact somebody about it, but I haven’t heard back.
” He yawned, gave a hearty headshake, and added, “I am heading up.”
“Do you want me to let you know when she comes in?”
“No, I’ll know as soon as she gets to the top anyway,” Simon noted. “I don’t think she’ll be in all that early either, since she’s got another case.”
Edgar whistled. “I would like to say, Oh, good, because she’s always the best at what she does. But then I think, Oh, crap, that means somebody just died.”
“Exactly,” Simon replied, with a tired look in his direction.
He made it upstairs. As soon as he got into his apartment, he took off his jacket, pulled off his tie, tossing it right on top of his jacket, and kicked off his shoes.
He had no idea what was going on, but he knew he was about to drop.
He just tried to get up here as fast as he could without raising any alarm bells.
Edgar had been working here for a long time, and, if he thought something was wrong with Simon, Edgar would have offered to get him upstairs.
Simon was trying to hide his psychic side and what came with it, but definitely he had to consider it in terms of how much he would let people in on his gift.
Edgar knew the bulk of it, but that didn’t mean Simon wanted his doorman to scrutinize him with wary eyes every time he entered the building, checking if something else was coming on.
Most of the time, Simon himself didn’t even know if something else was heading his way.
He wanted to make it to his bed, but the couch was looking a whole lot closer, and he already felt the room starting to spin as everything disappeared from his sight.
He had just managed to drop down flat on his face onto the couch when the room itself completely vanished.
He was suddenly standing in this strange room. … It was so dark that he couldn’t even describe it. Maybe a basement. Why here? He wasn’t sure who was here or what was even happening.
He was completely under the spell of this vision and had absolutely no way to control it. So he listened. He heard a woman praying, fervently almost. He was trying not to come up with an answer because that was a guaranteed way to get bad ones.
He ended up second-guessing everything that he did after that because he questioned whether these were his thoughts or the other person’s thoughts. But here Simon was, listening to her, seemingly praying for something. He heard caterwauling. He heard wailing.
It was all very emotional, whatever it was.
And then came heavy footsteps, as if somebody were coming downstairs, and her prayers got frantic, either afraid she would be caught or the person coming terrified her. Simon winced, knowing that it could be any number of things, and the bulk of them wouldn’t be good.
Almost immediately the light went on, but the vision was still hazy, the room down here still dark.
A man spoke, his tone soft. “I understand your grief. Yet you must not drown in it. Perhaps you can stop now and return to the living?” the man asked.
He was calm. He was collected. His tone held no hint of violence, just seemed … disciplined.
The woman replied, barely in a whisper, “Yes, yes.”
“Good. Now let’s get back upstairs.”
She got up slowly.
Even with a light on, Simon couldn’t see anything around her. Yet she seemed to be familiar with this location, well enough that she could walk it in the dark, which she appeared to be doing right now.
Confused, Simon was not sure what he was even looking at or why he was here. Even when they went upstairs, they seemed to enter a storage room. It was dark and hazy here too. Simon did not recognize this place.
The man spoke to the woman, “Surely you can see it clearly now.”
“Yes, of course,” she muttered. “I just needed a little more time.”
“You’re always welcome as long as you know where you belong. I understand a crisis of faith.”
“I know,” she replied, her voice now calm, peaceful, so different from earlier. “It’s God’s will.”
“Exactly. It’s God’s will that you be … as God intended you.” After a pause, he added, “You just have to believe.”
With that final word, the entire image just faded away. And someone shook Simon, hard.