“You weren’t supposed to.”
“How did you even know where we were having dinner?”
“I got here yesterday afternoon, parked down the block from your apartment, and waited until you came out, so spit-and-polished you could’ve been a groom. I followed.” He shrugged as though it had been too easy. “The dinner seemed to go okay.”
“If you don’t count the smoke coming from Talia’s ears.” He explained about the manuscript. “That ticked her off. She didn’t like me schmoozing Elaine, either. She sees me as an opportunist who’ll prey on Elaine’s affections and her bankroll.”
“Now there’s an irony.”
“Tell me,” he said. “Anyway, as I’m sure you saw, I followed Talia home, but didn’t talk to her after parting company at Elaine’s. Jasper was on the porch. We exchanged good nights.”
“Why wasn’t he at the dinner?”
Drex explained but stopped short of sharing his certainty that the untimely illness had been a fabrication devised to give Jasper an ideal opportunity to search the garage apartment. Informing his partners of that would only contribute to their distress. They were already discontented over something, or Gif wouldn’t be here.
If they had issues with either him or the situation, they should have aired them, talked them over with him, rather than to go about checking up on him so underhandedly. He didn’t like it. Not one bit.
“Why, Gif?”
“Why what?”
Drex gave him a droll look. “Something has your noses out of joint, or you wouldn’t be here.”
Gif grimaced as though troubled by intestinal gas. “That dinner date you arranged worried us.”
“How come?”
“You were reluctant to talk about it.”
True. He hadn’t elaborated on the plans for the date because he didn’t want his cohorts questioning his reasons for setting it up. Which indeed had been questionable. But Gif could sense an evasion and sniff out a lie from a mile away, so his straightforward answer came as no surprise to Drex.
He felt a mix of admiration and agitation. “It pisses me off that you two appointed yourselves my babysitters. Did you come to see if I was behaving myself? What are you going to do? Put me in timeout? Am I grounded?”
“Don’t get riled.”
“I’m already riled.”
“Then I had just as well lay it out there.”
“Do.”
“Did you arrange this dinner just so you could spend more time with her?”
“Yes! So I could spend more time with her and her husband. Who we believe to be a serial killer. Isn’t that why I’m here?”
Gif raised his hand in a peacekeeping gesture. “We just wanted to make sure that your eye was still on the target and not on…something else.”
“And now you can be sure. Go home.”
Gif tugged on his earlobe. “The wasn’t the only reaso
n for my coming.”
“What else?”
“Not what, who.”
“Rudkowski?”