Chapter 8 #4
“And yet it’s a workday.”
“He worked from home most days,” she replied. “So that doesn’t matter. I mean, he would just take the time off, but he does that anyway.”
“So, in other words, you are accustomed to coming over during the day and potentially …”
Angel held up a hand and nodded. “Yes, potentially.” She scrunched up her nose. “Obviously we don’t do anything to get him fired. But, hey, everybody likes a nooner.” Angel kept glaring, as if Kate were trying to steal her boyfriend.
Finally Kate asked, “May I see your texts to him?”
Angel stared at her, startled. “No, of course, you can’t.”
Kate nodded. “Okay, your verbal response is noted.”
“Noted why?” she asked, her tone openly hostile.
Kate regarded Angel and explained, “Because John Smith was found dead two, no, three nights ago,” she corrected herself.
Angel stared at her in shock. Then horror took its place. “What?” she stammered and sank down onto the couch, closest to where she stood. “No, that can’t be.”
“Why not?” Kate asked, turning to her again. “Seems he broke lots of hearts, and it’s possible some of his choices came back to haunt him. I mean, why couldn’t he be dead now?”
“It’s just not possible. He was here just the other night.”
“And yet you just told me that you didn’t see him.”
“No, I didn’t see him,” she confirmed. Then she closed her eyes and whispered, “No, this can’t be.”
“I need you to explain the comment you just made.”
Angel looked at her and replied, “I came by to talk to him, but he wouldn’t answer the damn door.
But I could hear somebody in here. I wanted to talk to him, but he wouldn’t answer.
I got mad, and it wasn’t until I realized that he really wouldn’t answer that I left.
Then I bombarded him with texts,” she stated, hanging her head.
“I wanted to know why he wouldn’t talk to me, why he wouldn’t answer the door. ”
“And this was Friday night?”
“Yes, Friday night,” she snapped, staring at her, now flushing. “I thought maybe we could have a nice little weekend to ourselves.”
“Right,” Kate noted, studying her. “And what time was this?”
She frowned and shook her head. “About eight o’clock, I think. I don’t know exactly but somewhere around that.”
“Okay. And you didn’t see anybody?”
“No, I didn’t.” Then she frowned. “Look. I thought somebody was here with him. I mean, it seemed as if somebody was here. The lights were on inside. I thought he was just being ornery, which is how he got sometimes. If you did something wrong, he didn’t forgive easily.
And he was the guy who would be like, You had your chance, and now you’re out. ”
“What about you? Were you out?” Kate asked.
“A few times,” she muttered, “because we’ve had many arguments over the last couple months.
But, for the most part, we always made up pretty soon.
A couple times when we didn’t, we would eventually.
… It was on again, off again.” She stared down at her hands, the tears just now creeping up.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” she asked, looking over at Kate.
Kate nodded. “Yes. What do you know about the other people in his life?”
“Nothing,” she said, bewildered. “But I should, shouldn’t I?
I mean, we went out for quite a while. You would think that I should know something.
” Kate didn’t say anything, just kept waiting while Angel talked.
“Only now, as I’m sitting here, staring at you, knowing you’ll ask all kinds of questions, realizing that I can’t answer them?
” She sobbed harder now. “I didn’t realize just how little I knew about his life. ”
“And yet you were friends for years, is that right?”
“More than friends,” she clarified, and then she winced. “But maybe not, maybe it was literally just …” She frowned and then whispered, “Maybe it was just sex. You’re making me rethink everything right now.” But the tears were still there, only they hadn’t dropped.
It seemed to Kate that Angel was still hanging on for the punchline of a joke that would never end.
“I don’t know,” Angel whispered. “I’m, I’m just as confused as you are right now.” She turned to Kate. “Definitely somebody was here Friday night. So, if not him, who was it?”
“I don’t know whether it was him or not,” Kate pointed out. “It depends on what the coroner comes back with as a time of death. If we have anything that’s close—”
“It could just be a neighbor who came over,” Angel suggested.
“It could be any number of things,” Kate conceded. “Yet I need a definitive answer from you as to whether or not it was you. If I do find out that it was you and that you’re lying to me,” she clarified, “it won’t go down well.”
“No, no, it wasn’t me. I, I saw him in the window,” she shared. “If you go out to the car park, you can see this series of windows, and it looked as if he was here and he was home.”
“So, you came in?”
“No, I contacted him,” she corrected, “but obviously he didn’t want to answer me. And now that just makes me feel even shittier.”
“Did he do drugs at all?”
“No,” she snapped a bit too forcefully. “He was against drugs because he used to do them. And he told me how it had completely messed up his life and how it took him years to get over it. So, he was very strict about his no-drugs policy.”
“Policy? Would you elaborate, please?”
“He had a very strict no drugs in the house policy.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Yeah, he was very specific about it. One time he was trying to help somebody from his past life who had a drug problem. He did an awful lot to get them off the drugs. But, when they fell back into that lifestyle again, he declined to help anymore, saying he’d done his part, but you couldn’t help some people,” she whispered.
“So, you’ve never seen him do any drugs on his own?”
“No, not at all,” she declared. “Anybody who says differently on that topic is lying.”
Kate was surprised at that. “People can be different, depending on who they’re with,” she suggested. “While he may not have done drugs with you, he might have with somebody else.”
“No way, he wouldn’t have,” she repeated in an incredibly forceful tone. “He was far more rigid than that. Drugs just didn’t have a place in his world, and, if they had a place in yours, you needed to move along.”
Kate just nodded and didn’t say anything.
“How did he die?” Angel asked, turning to her.
“I can’t share much in the way of details, as we’re still waiting for the coroner’s report,” she fudged. “However, drugs were in his system.”
She stared at her in shock. “No, no, you don’t understand.
” She started pacing, and then came to stand in front of her.
“John was adamant about that. I mean, early on I used to joke that we should just chill out and have some gummies every once in a while. He would get so irate at me for even mentioning it that I learned very quickly not to even joke about it or he would show me the door. So, if he has drugs in his system, somebody else must have done it.”
“And do you know anybody who would have given him drugs?”
“No, God no,” she muttered. “I’m not kidding. He was so against anything of the kind, so that’s a hard no. No fucking way.” Kate just nodded and didn’t say anything, as Angel started crying again. “And now you’ll tell me that I really didn’t know him, won’t you?”
“No, I’m not saying that at all,” Kate corrected, “because I really don’t know who this man is myself yet. I’m still trying to figure that out.”
“He was a good man.” Then she sighed and added, “He was a terrible playboy, but he was a good man.”
Kate’s eyebrows shot up at that. “Which is why you had such a long relationship with him, even though it was on again, off again?”
“Yes, because he was a good guy. He made good money, and he looked after his money. He didn’t waste it, blowing it on sports cars or gambling.
He did enjoy his booze,” she admitted, “and women. If John had a vice, it was the women.” Angel chuckled, tears brimming in her eyes.
“That was always the problem with us. Whenever we had a problem, it was usually because I couldn’t stand the fact that he always seemed to be looking for the next woman in his life,” she noted, fatigue in her tone, as the tears streamed down her face.
“I would take it for a while, and then I couldn’t take it for a while. ”
Kate sighed. “Okay, so here’s something I need you to be brutally honest about. Were you in a romantic relationship with John Smith? Or were you really friends with benefits?” Kate asked.
Angel stared at her. Once the sobbing started, it didn’t seem to want to quit.
When she finally got a hold of herself, Kate still stood here, waiting for Angel’s answer.
“W-When you put it that way,” she began, “I’m very much afraid that, as far as he was concerned, it was just friends with benefits.
But I really, really hope something else was there too.
Or maybe there could have been later in time.
I really, really cared about him,” she whispered, sinking back down onto the couch.
Angel never did say she loved him, which was an interesting side note to Kate. People tended to go on and on about how much they loved someone, particularly when they found out that someone was dead. But, in this case, that was not the case at all with Angel.
She stared off in the distance and muttered, “God, I’ve been such a fool.”
“Why is that?” Kate asked, still standing here, just waiting. It was a hell of a technique and tended to make people very uncomfortable. In an attempt to fill the awkward silence, they were compelled to talk, which seemed to be just the technique to use in this instance.
Angel shook her head. “You’re right. We were just friends with benefits. He got the benefit, and I was kept on a string.”
Kate asked, “And did you keep yourself on that string, or did he keep you on it?”
The tears came down even faster now. Angel eyed Kate and replied, “You really don’t pull any punches, do you?”