Unsympathetic Magic - Laura Resnick [11]
“Eyes front, soldier,” I said irritably.
His gaze shifted to my face, where Jilly’s makeup was probably making me look like a tubercular raccoon by now.
“Sorry.” Lopez gave my overall appearance another quick appraisal, then said, “Are you really that hard up for money?”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” I snapped.
He smiled wearily. “I take it you got a job?”
He meant an acting job, of course. As a detective in the Organized Crime Control Bureau, as well as a personal acquaintance of mine, he presumably knew that I still waited tables regularly at Bella Stella, which had been my day job in recent months (though it mostly involved working nights). It was a famous restaurant in Little Italy that was owned by a woman with close connections to the Gambello crime family. Lopez had been involved in investigating a Mafia murder that occurred there in May. I had witnessed the hit, and the subsequent strange events surrounding that murder had ultimately led to Lopez breaking up with me—before we’d even really started a relationship.
“Yes, I got a job,” I said. “A TV guest spot. One week of work.”
Stella Butera, owner of Bella Stella, had given me the whole week off for D30 without any fuss or complaint. Stella was good about letting her singing servers schedule our restaurant work around our professional opportunities, and it was one of the reasons I liked working for her.
“TV, huh?” Lopez tilted his head. “And you’re playing—let me guess—a Benedictine nun?”
“Yes. I suppose the outfit gives it away,” I said sourly, recalling some of the insulting comments that the arresting officers had made tonight, assuming that I was exactly what I appeared to be.
“Well, I’m glad you got work, Esther. But the sixty-four thousand dollar question is,” Lopez said, “why were you wearing your hooker costume and soliciting tricks on Lexington Avenue?”
“I was not soliciting tr—”
“I got a call from the desk sergeant here saying—”
“I told them what I was doing!”
“—that a crack whore who claims to be a friend of mine was stopping cars on Lexington and reaching into the windows to grab the drivers’ crotches.”
“I was not grabbing crotches!”
In my agitation, my voice got loud. I shushed Lopez, stopped speaking, and glanced over my shoulder to see if I had woken the other resident of my cell, an overweight young African-American woman who was lying on a bench and snoring loudly. She had been like that ever since I was put in here, and her tough appearance made me very reluctant to risk disturbing her.
Lopez folded his arms across his chest and leaned one well-muscled shoulder against the bars of my holding cell. “One man told the cops that you tried to steal his phone.”
“Well, I did do that,” I admitted in a subdued voice.
He sighed wearily and ran a hand over his face. “I assume there’s a perfectly logical explanation for all this, Esther?”
“I got you out of bed, didn’t I?” I said with regret.
“Nah, I was out shooting hoops when my phone rang in the middle of the night.”
“I’m really sorry about this.”
“What the hell were you doing?” he said.
The mingled exasperation, bewilderment, and concern in his tone were all too familiar to me. It was the essence of why he wouldn’t date me: He thought I was crazy and possibly felonious. And although that was completely inaccurate, he nonetheless had some justification for thinking it. Moreover, I had to admit that involvement with me seemed to be bad for him. In order to protect me on previous occasions, he had done things that violated his better judgment, his duty, and his honor—such as concealing evidence in a homicide investigation, lying to his superiors, and filing false reports. Lopez didn’t like the choices he had made to shield me, and he was afraid he’d make more of them if we remained involved.
And now I was going to ask him to get the charges against me dropped and expunged. They were bogus charges, of course; but it was still a lot to ask, all things considered.
I said to him, “Look, you’re the