The Last Romantics(72)
It wasn’t until after Renee had left that I wondered about her words. Why reassure us like that? I tried my sister’s phone, but she didn’t answer.
“Caroline,” I said. “Where’s the ring box?”
Caroline was eating a piece of pepperoni-and-pineapple pizza; we had ordered from a place one block away. “The usual for Mr. Joe?” the man on the phone had asked. “Yes,” I had answered. “The usual, please.”
Now Caroline stopped chewing and swallowed. “Let me look.” She began searching around the coffee table, under the couch. “I don’t see it,” she said.
“Do you think . . . ?” I began.
“Renee doesn’t like carelessness,” answered Caroline. “Sometimes she forgives people. Other times she doesn’t. It’s hard to know when she will or won’t.”
Caroline and I looked at each other. “We should go down to that restaurant,” I said.
Chapter 12
Renee drove across the causeway from Miami Beach, with its all-week weekend of skin and flash and thumping noise, to downtown Miami, which was slower, more restrained, particularly now, 4:00 p.m. on a Tuesday before the office buildings emptied.
Inside Revel Bar + Restaurant, the tables were empty. It was possible to see Joe here, Renee thought as she paused just inside the front door. This seemed like Joe’s kind of place. Slick, expensive, but homey, too, comfortable. The bartender was a tall man with hard, pale arms and sharp, straight-edged planes to his face. He looked vaguely dangerous, like a Russian gangster or a struggling actor who auditioned for those kinds of roles.
Renee strode to the bar and asked brightly, “Hi. I’m here to see Luna, Luna Hernandez?”
The bartender was drying a glass with a clean white cloth. He continued the motion, but his eyes rose to meet hers. “Luna? She’s not on till later.”
“Oh. What time?”
The man stopped polishing and set the glass down somewhere behind the bar. “Are you police?”
“No. Just a . . . friend.” Renee forced a smile, and with that one small lie her posture caved, her certainty crumbled. She tried to relax her shoulders, to radiate the goodwill that a friend to Luna Hernandez would surely exhibit. She must have some friends, this unknown woman who had left Joe alone; she must even have family. Had they met Joe? Did they know that he had died? A lump rose in Renee’s throat, and she could not swallow, she could not speak, so she looked down, busying herself with her purse to hide her face from this man.
“Well,” the bartender said, and he cleared his throat. “Just a moment.” He traveled the length of the bar to check on two men drinking red wine, who shook their heads—No, nothing more, thanks—and then the bartender disappeared.
*
Dima pushed through the swinging chrome doors into the kitchen, where the pre-dinner service hum was just beginning to sound. A prep cook chopped red peppers in a corner, the dishwasher thrashed through a cycle. Jorge, the sous-chef, was squinting at a packing slip, crates of condiments piled in the narrow space between the walk-in cooler and the service entry.
“You seen Luna?” Dima asked him.
“No. Not yet.” Jorge gave him a long look. “Police?”
All the kitchen staff knew about the detectives who had taken Luna away, though only Rodrigo had been on the floor to see it, Rodrigo whom they all despised because he ran the waitstaff with cruel efficiency, refused to hire more busboys or change the table allotment to a more sensible, fairer arrangement. He watered down the well bottles, dealt small packets of coke from the back men’s room on Saturday nights, never including any of them in the cut. They all wished they’d been there that day to advise Luna. They knew about police, what to refuse, how to behave. I want a lawyer. This they could all say, no matter how poor the English. If it had been any of them—any save Rodrigo—they would have been able to help Luna. Their Luna, beautiful and sad, who stayed after hours to eat a meal, have a drink. They’d seen Luna age from a sixteen-year-old still talking about college to now, twenty-five and the first fine lines blooming at her eyes when she smiled. That awful night Luna had returned from the police station shaking. Jorge gave her a cup of tea and a plate of pasta; Dima covered the whole bar for the hour it took before she was ready to go out there.
Now Rodrigo came bustling in from the prep area, holding a celery stick in one hand, a clipboard in the other, chewing. “Get out there, Dima,” he said. “What are you doing back here?” A fine sheen of sweat covered Rodrigo’s forehead, and he set down the clipboard to swipe at it with his palm.
“Someone is here for Luna.” Dima hesitated to say this, but he was not a good or a fast liar.
Rodrigo rolled his eyes. “Police again?”
“No, a woman. She says she’s a friend, but she doesn’t look like a friend of Luna’s.”
“A friend? And how is this part of your job, Dima? You’re a part-time messenger for Luna now? I hope she pays you well, because if you’re not out there in ten seconds, she will be your only employer.” Rodrigo smiled benignly and bit the celery with his big, yellowed front teeth, and Dima was reminded of the TV character Bugs Bunny, the show he’d watch for hours when he was a child, just arrived in Miami from the Ukraine, when the new English words had sounded to him like gunfire, like heavy rain: a harsh staccato that hid a meaning rather than unveiled it.