Chapter 8 #5
She shrugged. “Your friend was likely murdered. This isn’t personal, and I’m not trying to be difficult,” she pointed out. “I’m just asking questions meant to clarify a relationship that you told me was off and on for years. So, you tell me. What must I do to get you to tell me the truth?”
“I am telling you the truth,” Angel muttered, “but it’s the truth as I saw it, which now I realize isn’t necessarily the truth as he saw it.
Because you’re right. Now that I see it from your perspective, I probably was just there for him whenever he didn’t have somebody else,” she admitted, with an incredibly sad self-awareness.
“I always hung on, hoping that he would be there for me, that we had something solid, and that eventually he would stop looking at all these other women, thinking that I would be enough for him. But, … after all these years, if I wasn’t enough already, it wouldn’t change, would it? ” Angel asked Kate.
Kate shook her head slowly. “Not likely and it’s also quite likely that he continued to have all kinds of relationships on the side, particularly when he was not interested in settling down, and you probably didn’t know about a lot of them.”
She winced. “You’re probably right.” Angel stood up stiffly, as she stared at Kate. “I really don’t think I could do your job.”
Kate shrugged. “Unfortunately I see an awful lot of women just like you, who think that they are the one, that they’ve found the one, but what they have found is that they were …
only one of many.” Kate sighed. “I’m sorry because obviously that’s not what you want to hear.
But what I do still need from you is some idea of who else he might have been involved with because somebody was here with him that Friday night. ”
The tears stopped but the sobs kept coming.
Kate continued. “It could have been any number of his friends stopping by for a drink, but, knowing what I’ve just told you about him, do you think he would have done drugs?”
“No,” she snapped, “and I get that it probably seems I don’t know a damn thing about him, but I’m not wrong on that.
He was incredibly insistent on no drugs, as he used to do them, but that was a long time ago.
” She got up slowly. “Look. I need to go. I need to just go, just, just go,” she mumbled, her voice breaking yet again.
“Maybe you need to find a place to just sit and rest for a bit. I don’t want you out there driving in this condition,” Kate replied.
Angel collapsed back down. She stared at Kate. “I just … I really loved him.”
That was the first time love had been mentioned. Kate nodded. “And that’s a good thing because everybody needs and deserves to be loved.”
“Did he though?” Angel whispered back.
“Maybe John needed it but just didn’t know how to give it, how to show it,” Kate suggested.
“I don’t know who he was as a person, but a lot of times people are just that way because they can’t handle the thought of getting old, or they can’t handle the thought of not being the person in their head who they want to be.
They can’t handle the idea that maybe they’ll grow old and end up sitting across from somebody they don’t want for too many years down the road. There’s no right or wrong here.”
Angel nodded tearfully.
“I wouldn’t blame him for being with you all those years.
I wouldn’t do any of that,” Kate explained, “and neither should you. Your lessons were very much about the on-and-off-again part of your relationship. Somewhere along the line, when you’ve had a little time, you might want to ask yourself why you kept coming back, even though it was obvious that it wasn’t to have a real long-term monogamous relationship.
What was it about him that kept you coming back into a relationship that was going nowhere?
In the meantime, you need to answer my calls, in case I have any other questions. ”
Angel automatically stood back up, walked to the door, then turned to ask her, “Will you tell me if, … when you find out what happened?”
“You’ll hear it on the news for sure,” Kate noted, “but I won’t be making any direct calls. Phone the police once the case is closed, if it doesn’t hit the news.”
“Right,” she muttered, “no time for personal calls. Right.” Angel sent a bitter glance to Kate.
“I won’t be making such calls because I’ll already be working on the next twelve murders on my desk,” Kate declared, not giving an inch, “and you can bet that their families will be screaming for me to be looking after their loved ones too and to hell with making follow-up calls.”
Angel flushed. “You’re right. I’m, I’m sorry,” she muttered. “That didn’t come across the way I intended it to.”
Kate kept her mouth shut, escorting Angel to the door and locking it behind her this time.
As Kate returned to the main living room, she spied one of the couch cushions up ever-so-slightly, with something peeking out.
She walked over, bent down, lifted the cushion, and found a small diary inside. She smiled.
“Bingo.”
*
Simon sat down at the coffee shop, his morning going well, and, unlike a lot of his days recently, he had a minimal amount of problems to face.
Now, if only the bank meeting in one hour would go the same way, with his longtime bank advisor, David.
They would discuss some of the purchases he’d recently made and then juggle and shuffle around some money so that Simon had cash for the next set of renovation projects.
For the most part, these bank meetings were perfunctory, just a case of sorting out what was next and how to make things work.
However, Simon wasn’t so sure that this one would go the same way.
He wanted it to, as something had been off about the way David spoke on their last phone call.
The last thing Simon needed was a headache on that front right now.
As he sat here sipping his coffee, a woman walked over, smiled, and sat down at his table.
“Hey,” she greeted him. “I’ve seen you here quite a few times.”
He smiled and nodded. “Yeah, I’m working on a construction project around the corner, so it’s an easy stop on my way over.”
“Ah, that makes sense.”
They shared a little bit more small talk, but he just considered her being friendly. When Kate phoned a little bit later, he answered, and a look of disappointment filled the stranger’s expression. So his unidentified lady visitor then got up and left.
He smiled as he shared with Kate, “Thanks for saving me once again.”
Silence came on the other end for a moment. “Do I even want to know what that’s about?”
“No, probably not,” he agreed, with a smirk. “What are you up to?”
“I’m checking up on you,” she stated.
“Ah,” he noted, his smirk disappearing. “I’m having coffee before I head over to the bank for a meeting.”
“Oh right. You mentioned that was today,” she muttered, but now she was distracted.
“What’s going on?” he asked her.
“A friend with benefits popped into the murder victim’s apartment while I was there,” she began.
“Apparently somebody was here with our victim Friday night. She had come over to apologize after they’d had yet another argument in their long-standing strange relationship.
However, when she thought somebody was here, and John wouldn’t answer, she got pissed off and left.
So today she came over, ready to pick a fight with him, and found me instead. ”
“Oh, I’m sure that went over well,” he teased, laughter in his tone.
“Let’s just say that she left in tears, and she got a big reality check as to just what she was doing in that relationship with John in the first place,” she shared bitterly.
“I hate it when people look to me for answers to the universe, particularly when it comes to relationships. I don’t know the first thing,” she muttered into the phone.
“I know you don’t want me bringing this up,” he noted, “but I would say you’re doing just great in the relationship department.”
“Right,” she grumbled. “Yet you are correct. I don’t want you bringing that up. Anyway”—she sighed—“I was just calling to confirm all is well.”
“All is well,” he acknowledged. “I’m just sitting here having coffee. Then I’ll go take care of some banking business.”
“Right,” Kate noted, her tone skeptical. “Meanwhile, you haven’t had any other weird visitations from that woman?”
He knew exactly who she was talking about. “Nope, and hopefully there won’t be any visions right now either because I’m heading off to that meeting.”
“You don’t have any control over your visions? Even in case of meetings such as this?”
“Sometimes,” he shared. “Sometimes I can ward it off, and other times it gets complicated, but that isn’t really something I’ll worry about.
” He deliberately did not tell her about the incident at the top of the construction site.
He sighed. “I have enough things to worry about without bringing that one into the mix.”
She chuckled. “Okay, good enough.” Then she added, “This woman, … who was here today? Her name is Angel Delaware.”
“Does that matter?” Simon asked.
“No, I just wondered if that name meant anything to you.”
Simon noted nothing pushy about her tone but definitely a thread of curiosity. “No, I don’t think so,” he replied, “but if something comes to mind, I’ll let you know.”
“Sure, no problem,” she said.
Still, he felt something else was on her mind. He hesitated, then asked, “You sure there isn’t another reason for your call?”
“No,” she told him. “Really just to confirm you were doing okay.”
He winced at that because, of course, she worried about him. “That is not a reason I want you to call me, of course.”
“Then let’s just say that I was missing you.”
“I’ll take that one,” he agreed and ended the call, a smile on his face. He glanced around and realized that the time was going a little faster than he’d anticipated. He got up and then sat right back down, as if somebody put a hand on his chest and shoved him hard to sit down again.