19 Storytime

Andrea took a deep breath as she stood outside the interview room. She tucked a loose hair back and wished she had a mirror so she could check how she looked. Not that it really mattered what Kyle thought of her appearance. It was just good to look professional…

She could picture how he would look when she walked in. He'd be sitting there, hopeless and downcast. Then when he heard the door, he'd look up with optimism, but uncertainty, not knowing for sure if it was going to be her. And then he saw it was her, just having that smile slowly spreading over his face like a rising sun…

The door opened and…

…he was grinning, expectantly.

Thank police bureaucracy and security measures for ruining what would have been a lovely moment. 'Of course, they must have told him who was coming to talk to him when they moved him here from his cell,' she thought.

"I gotta say, Blondie, it is always good to see you, but right now it is DAMN good to see you," he said, and Andrea could tell he really meant it. "So does this mean that–"

"It means," she said, taking a seat and pulling a recorder from her pocket, "that it's storytime. I've done a little research, and if you think you have a hope of winning, then you must have a hell of a story to explain all this."

"Really?" Kyle excitedly shuffled forward to the edge of his seat. "You promise you're not going to leave again until I've had a chance to tell you my side of things?"

He paused just long enough for her to take a breath, but then plunged on as though he didn't want to give her a chance to say no. "Alright, so after our talk yesterday, I headed out to the farmers market, like I told you I was going to. They have the best beetroots and cucumbers in the area. You want to make sure you get them as fresh as possible to–"

Andrea held up a hand to stop him. "Is this actually important?"

"Oh absolutely! Fresh beets are key to bringing out the flavors of the dish."

Andrea rolled her eyes. "Not 'important to your recipe', important to the case!"

"I don't know, maybe?" said Kyle. "Who's to say what might turn out to be relevant?"

Andrea very much doubted that beets were going to be important to the investigation.

"Let's just skip ahead, why don't we?" she encouraged. Andrea had only recently discovered how much Kyle loved to talk about food, but she could tell if she didn't move him along, she was going to get a blow-by-blow replay of his entire shopping trip.

"You don't want to hear about the bluefin I got at the East Side Docks? It was an absolute steal!"

Deadpan, she said, "Did you steal it?"

"Of course not!" Kyle replied.

"Then a judge probably won't care."

Kyle scoffed dismissively. "Any judge with good taste would care about this. Good quality bluefin is worth its weight in gold."

"You and the judge can swap recipes after the trial is over. Let's focus on what happened when you got to your apartment."

Kyle looked like he wanted to talk more about food, but he demurred. "Alright, well after everything, it was about 8:30 pm before I got home. First thing I noticed, Triss wasn't there–"

Andrea interjected. "Sorry, Triss? Who is Triss?"

"She's the girl I mentioned… the one I was cooking dinner for…"

"Girlfriend?" Andrea asked.

For what might have been the first time Andrea had ever seen, Kyle actually looked flustered.

"Well, I don't know… I mean we'd been on a few dates… It's not like we'd put a name on it or anything… I don't even know if she was seeing anyone else… We hadn't slept together if that's what you mean."

"It—That wasn't what I meant." Andrea was pleasantly surprised, it seemed like Kyle wasn't as much of a playboy as she'd believed. "But only a few dates and she was already staying in your apartment?" she clarified.

"No, no, no, she wasn't living with me. I just lent her my key to let herself in. I knew I was going to get there later than her. Actually, she still had it from the last time I was supposed to cook for her. She ended up standing me up then, too..." He shrugged. "Maybe it wasn't supposed to be."

"Fair enough. So what did you do next?"

"Well, I went to get the bluefin on ice right away. You have to do that–"

"Enough about the fish," Andrea said with frustration. "The fish doesn't matter!"

"It does", Kyle replied. "Because it was when I went back to the kitchen to take care of it that I saw her note."

Personally, Andrea would have led with the note and left the fish out of things, but at least this sounded like progress. Given how eager he had been to tell his side of the story, he was being frustratingly frivolous considering the circumstances.

"What did it say?"

"Oh, something about getting called in for work. She's a nurse at St Terry's Memorial Hospital. Promised a raincheck next week." Kyle gave a wry shrug. "…Doesn't look like I'll be making that."

Andrea was surprised that he didn't recall the specifics with more detail, but she supposed he's had other things on his mind since then.

"So what then?"

"Well, I knew the bluefin wasn't going to last a week, and since it would have been a crime to waste it, I started prepping a little meal-for-one for myself. Dukkah-crusted bluefin tuna with a beetroot and cucumber salad. A little lighter than what I had planned for the two of us to have, but then I wasn't going to have to share any of the bluefin…"

Slowly a look of gradually dawning horror spread across Kyle's face. "Oh no… I just remembered…"

"What?!"

"I never got a chance to properly chill the bluefin! I had it out on ice still when I got arrested… do you suppose they had the sense to put it away for me?"

Andrea thought he must be joking, but he was so earnest and sincere she wasn't certain. "I don't think that's the kind of 'preserving evidence' that the CSI teams worry about…"

'Not that it would matter at this point anyway,' she thought. So far, he still wasn't shedding any light on the actual murder.

"So you didn't notice anything strange when you got home, other than Triss being gone?"

"No. I mean, the front door was still locked, there was no sign of anything amiss. I'll admit I didn't go through every room to check, but I didn't think there was any reason to."

"So the police arrived while you were cooking?"

"Not even cooking! I was still prepping the dukkah and the salad when the cops knocked on the door. They came in and said something about the guy next door telling them he'd heard a woman screaming."

"What did you tell them?"

"That I had been stood up! That I was the only one home and that I certainly hadn't heard any screaming."

"And what did they say?"

"Well, I got the impression that they were kind of skeptical. They asked if they could search the apartment. I told them sure, why not? I didn't have anything to hide. I went back to the kitchen and kept chopping beets."

Andrea had to agree that given the 911 call, she would have been skeptical, too, if she'd been in the officers' shoes. She would probably have also asked to see a warrant if she had been in Kyle's shoes. Just giving the cops permission to search his home…It was a careless thing to have done if he was innocent, it was a downright stupid thing if he was guilty.

"…Was that when they found the body?" she asked gently.

"Yeah…" Kyle lost a lot of the energy he'd had when he had been describing his food. His voice grew soft and quiet, and his movements became stiff and still where before he had been animated with excitement. "They poked their heads in the master suite… The pantry… Then one of them checked the second guest bedroom, and that's where they found her."

Kyle's subdued tone put his earlier behavior into a new context. Maybe he wasn't making light of things and focusing on food because he was callous to the murder, maybe it was just easier to not think about. Maybe he welcomed any excuse to think about something else.

As for the second guest bedroom, having seen the floor plans of the less exclusive apartments in Kyle's building, Andrea wasn't surprised to hear that his condo was so sprawling. It was still a far cry from her own cozy apartment.

He continued, "Guy must have been really determined to get in there. It's been a long time since I used the room. It was mostly for storage. I tried to go in there the other day, but the door was stuck. I thought I was going to have to call maintenance to come and fix it. I guess he must have really put his shoulder to it, because he didn't seem to have any trouble getting in."

"And you had no idea the girl was there."

"No idea at all."

"And no idea how she got there."

"None. You gotta remember, Blondie, I know less about the case than you do at this point. The police aren't in the habit of sharing their findings with their suspects. It's more the sort of thing one finds out from one's lawyer…" he said pointedly.

Andrea ignored the remark. She wanted to hear Kyle finish his story first.

"So that's when the police came back out and arrested you?"

"You could say that… I'd say that would be underselling it! He bursts out, yelling at me to get down—of course I have no idea what's going on—and then he shot me!"

"He SHOT you?!" Andrea said incredulously. As rough as Kyle was looking from his experience, he certainly didn't look like someone who had been shot the night before.

"With a taser, right here!" Kyle stood and tried to lift his shirt. "Those dart things they shoot hurt more coming out than they do going in! Not that I really felt them going in… I was too busy convulsing from the electricity and cracking my head on the counter on the way to the floor." He gestured at the cut above his eye Andrea had noticed earlier.

"Look, it's okay, you don't have to show me!" Andrea said with rising embarrassment. "I don't need you to prove you got tased." She couldn't help thinking that good lawyers were not supposed to let their clients undress during interviews.

Kyle was still trying to lift his shirt, but struggling because of the manacles.

"Could you help me out here? The police haven't treated my wounds or anything, can you take a look and tell me if it looks bad?"

"No!" she said. She thought he was being ridiculous. "I'm not taking your shirt off for you."

"It won't take a second. Please?"

Sighing, Andrea stood up and reached across the table, lifting his shirt for him.

'Oh… my…' she thought. Andrea had noticed his athletic build before but had no clue he'd been hiding these abs under his tailored shirts.

"How does it look?" he asked, his view blocked by the shirt.

"Really good… I mean…" She could see the tears in the skin where the darts had pierced. "They look sore, but not infected or anything." She reached out a hand to check the injuries and make sure they looked like they would heal and weren't inflamed.

"Why would they tase you?" she asked. The police report hadn't mentioned anything about this.

"Oh, he probably thought I was holding a blood stained knife when he came out."

When she gave him a horrified look, he continued, "Beetroot! I'd been chopping beetroot! The juice stains terribly. To get it out, you—"

"Which knife were you using?" Andrea asked.

"...My six inch chef's knife. Why?"

"No reason." If Kyle really was innocent, Andrea was glad to hear that he hadn't inadvertently used the murder weapon in his cooking.

"You seem to be, uh… you seem to be giving me a very thorough examination there, nurse," Kyle joked.

Andrea realized she had been inspecting his stomach this whole time. "Yes, right. No, you look fine. I mean, it feels fine. I mean…."

She let the shirt drop and returned to her chair before Kyle got any ideas to—

"Don't let me cut your time short if you're enjoying yourself. It's honestly quite flattering. And besides," he said, holding up his cuffs, "when are you going to get a better chance? I couldn't stop you if I wanted."

Andrea didn't dignify the offer with a response and instead purposefully checked on her recorder and focused on not blushing. So much for keeping things professional.

Kyle straightened his shirt and sat back down. "So what do you think? As my lawyer, do you think I have a case for police brutality?"

'Ah…' thought Andrea. 'Probably need to clear up that misapprehension…'

"I still haven't decided," she said.

Kyle laughed awkwardly. "But you, uh… you said if you came back that meant you'd take my case…" he said with a questioning tone, not sure what he was missing.

"I never said coming back meant my answer was yes."

Kyle furrowed his brow. "You're saying… being back here just means your answer isn't no… yet…?"

"Just so."

Kyle threw back his head and laughed. Andrea almost bristled. Was he trying to get back at her for laughing at him?

The laugh was hearty and real, and the smile it left behind was full of genuine delight.

"You know Blondie, that is some real exact-wording-of-the-contract BS to pull on a guy in my situation." He wore the grin of someone who has just been the victim of a prank, but has too much appreciation of the person who got one over on them to be mad.

Andrea arched an eyebrow. "We're both lawyers. Isn't exact-wording-of-the-contract kind of what we're all about?"

"Only the unimaginative ones. An imaginative lawyer can make a contract mean whatever they want."

"Well I'm the kind of lawyer who means what I say and says what I mean."

"So I had better pay attention?

"That's right."

"Like when you said you couldn't let me tell you my story until after you'd agreed to be my lawyer."

"That was before I found out that the eminent Mr McCabe had heard your side of things. If he doesn't think there is a conflict, then who am I to argue?"

Kyle gave another of his I-guess-you-scored-that-point grins. "That's actually pretty imaginative of you."

"Like a good lawyer should be?"

"Like I hope my lawyer would be."

"Then keep on hoping," she said.

"Because you're not my lawyer?"

"That's right"

"Not yet?"

"Not… yet…"

Andrea realized that between them both leaning forward over the desk, they were awkwardly close now. She wanted to pull away, but at the same time didn't want to back down.

As though he had realized the same thing, Kyle said in almost a whisper, quiet enough that she wouldn't have heard if they hadn't been so close, "Anyone ever tell you you're a real tease, Blondie?"

Andrea gave a smirk of her own.

Kyle cocked his head. "A guy can only take so much teasing…"

"Then how about this for a tease…" Andrea turned off her recorder with a click, stood up and smoothed down her suit. "Good night, Mr Wynn, I will see you in the morning."

Kyle's eyes went a little wide. "Promise?" he said. "Whatever your answer is, you promise you'll at least come back to tell me."

Andrea felt like she could hear a tiny note of desperation in his voice. Like he really needed this lifeline to hold onto. She supposed that she could give him at least that much.

"Sure. We'll talk again tomorrow. Now you should try and get some sleep."

"Oh sure, you get me wound up like a kid on Christmas waiting to see if he's going to get coal in his stocking, NOW you tell me to sleep," he said. Despite his words, it looked like her assurance had taken a weight off his shoulders.

As Andrea was escorted out of the police station, she still didn't know what she was going to tell Kyle in the morning. Maybe sleeping on it would help her to figure things out.