Клео Коул - Through The Grinder

If I remembered correctly, it was Matteo who usually made coffee on those bleak mornings, still dressed in the clothes he went out wearing the night before — pumped full of adrenaline, or testosterone, or cocaine, or all three. He’d make coffee while I sat at the table or gazed out the window, sulking, and contemplating the end.

Now if I were a cruel person, I would take pleasure in this remarkable turning of the tide — and maybe I was a cruel person because a part of me knew Matt wanted me back, and I was honestly enjoying this moment. On the other hand, maybe I wasn’t cruel. Maybe I was just human.

When the pot gurgled its last, I carried the hot carafe to the table.

Matt spoke again. “Your friend Detective Quinn stopped by last night, around closing time.”

I froze in mid-pour, dribbling three dark drops. Matteo swept his hand across the table, wiping them away.

“Quinn put a tail on Bruce,” he continued. “From the report he received late last night, it appeared a woman with a bright yellow parka entered Bowman’s house. He thought it was Joy who had gone in. He came here, alarmed, looking for you. He found me instead, and I explained you’d borrowed Joy’s yellow parka. What his plain clothes officer saw was you going in. That’s when Quinn told me — ”

I finished pouring and sat down at the table across from the father of my child. “I know what he told you. He told you Bruce Bowman is a suspect in a murder.”

“ The suspect, in three murders.”

“Quinn exaggerates,” I said evenly. I tasted my coffee and found it bitter. I added an extra dash of cream — and, uncharacteristically, a heaping teaspoon of sugar.

“So maybe Bruce only killed one woman instead of two or more,” said Matt. “Yeah, I could see how Detective Quinn was exaggerating just a tad. Nothing to worry about.”

I shook my head, disturbed. “Matt, listen to me. Bruce is not a murderer. Quinn’s wrong. Misguided, over-wrought, and…wrong. And if he’s telling you about it, then he’s obviously trying to convince you to persuade me to stop seeing Bruce. But I’m not going to. Instead, I’m going to do something else.”

“Like what?”

“Like prove Quinn wrong.”

“Whoa, Clare — ”

“Don’t ‘whoa Clare’ me,” I said a little too loudly. “You want to know what I think? I think both you and Quinn are jealous. You with your public parade of serial flirtations, and Quinn with his messed-up marriage and all the baggage that comes with it. Frankly I’m sick of the both of you.”

“Aren’t we being a little harsh?”

I gritted my teeth and glared at Matt. “I meet a man. A nice man. More than a nice man. A remarkable, talented, tender, and hard-working one. Someone sane, reasonable, adult, self-aware, and brutally honest about the mistakes of his past, and you and Quinn conspire together to ruin things for me.”

“Clare, you’re starting to sound paranoid. I can’t speak for Quinn, but I’m not out to frame your boyfriend, or hurt you, believe me.”

“Not out to hurt me? That’s rich. Just what did you think you were doing all those times you had a fling with some barmaid, stewardess, or mutual friend’s wife?”

For a long minute, he had no reply.

“I didn’t do it to hurt you, Clare,” he finally said softly. “You know that.”

Sadly, I did. It had taken me years to come to terms with the idea that Matteo and I had very different attitudes toward sex. For him, physical love was just another exhilarating activity — like mountain climbing, surfing, getting falling-down drunk, or bungee jumping. Sex was no big anxiety-producing ordeal — and there certainly didn’t have to be any complicated meaning behind it. What meaning was there in a drunken binge or a bungee jump?

But for me there had to be more than the excitement of the chase, or the thrill of the seduction. Much more. I had to respect the man, and like him a lot, if not love him completely. Sex meant relationship. Sex for me could never be a one-night stand.

I know now that Matt never really understood what his little infidelities were doing to me back then. It was like he was missing some gene, or had an amazing psychological blind spot where the result of his own behavior on others was concerned. The cocaine didn’t help either, frankly. But my cognitive comprehension of my ex-husband’s shortcomings didn’t go very far to ease the pain in my heart. Or stop the anger I still felt toward him at times.

Like right now.

I picked my coffee mug up. We drank in silence.

“I’m not out to hurt you and I never was, Clare,” Matteo said after a long pause. “I just didn’t get it, you know? I do now.” He met my eyes. “I do…right now.”

I was a little taken aback. Just when I was angry with him, he said something like that — which was about as close to an apology for his past indescretions as I would ever get.

“Maybe you can help me, then. Help me find out the truth about Bruce,” I said slowly, hopefully. “These murders, if that’s what they are, and Quinn’s suspicions about Bruce…I can’t sort it all out myself…Matt, they’re like dark clouds hanging over what could be…well, what I think could be something very important for me.”

Matteo shifted impatiently, then gulped his coffee. “I’m not a cop. You’d do better getting your buddy Quinn to help.”

“You and I did pretty good the last time…with Anabelle Hart. We solved a real crime, didn’t we? We put a real killer in jail. That was something.”

Matt shook his head. “We got lucky, Clare. We could just as easily have ended up in jail for breaking and entering, or for impersonating federal officers — and need I remind you that you almost got yourself killed?”

I sat back in my chair and ran my finger along the edge of the warm coffee cup.

“You need Quinn,” said Matteo.

“I can’t go to Quinn. I can’t trust him with this.”

I paused, then decided it was time to come completely clean.

“His marriage isn’t going well, Matt…and he was telling me about it one night, and I think he might have been interested in seeing me…or at least I think he was thinking about it…before I got involved with Bruce.”

Matteo snorted. “I told you the man wanted you.”

“Christ, I didn’t say that! ”

“You said he seemed interested. What about you? Were you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Honestly.”

“Okay, I like Quinn. He laughs at my jokes, and I usually enjoy his morose sense of humor and I find him a little bit sexy — in a rumpled, hard-boiled, film noir sort of way. And, okay, we’ve been flirting pretty heavily with each other since we first met. And it’s probably Quinn, now that I think about it, who helped me start to believe that I should give the opposite sex a chance again — ”

“Clare.”

“What?”

“This is way more information than I need to hear.”

I threw up my hands. “Quinn has too much baggage. His marriage is falling apart, he loves his children and is clearly ripped up about his unresolved feelings for his wife. Anyway, I’d never get involved in a tangled mess like that and he knows it. But I also think he wasn’t thrilled to hear I was dating anybody again, let alone Bruce, and I really think Quinn’s grasping at straws where Bruce is concerned.”

“I see,” said Matt.

“I’d rather trust you with this…investigation…or whatever you want to call it. Helping Bruce is what I want to call it.”

Matteo smiled. “I’m flattered.”

“Why?”

“Because you feel you can trust me. That makes me want to help you, but the truth is you still need Quinn. He’s been investigating these crimes for weeks, he’s talked to people we don’t even know about, and he has all the facts at his disposal.”