Michael Koryta - Tonight I Said Goodbye

I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. When the cold water turned warm I climbed in and let the spray hammer me in the face, driving away the last vestiges of sleep. My body still ached from the uncomfortable sleeping position, but at least I was awake. I got out of the shower, dried off, and dressed. When I stepped out of the bathroom I nearly trampled Betsy Weston. She was standing directly in front of the door, wearing pink pajamas with kittens on them and gigantic pink slippers. Her long dark hair stuck out from her head, fuzzy with the static from the pillowcase. She stared at me with sleepy eyes, but she didn’t look startled, so I assumed her mother had alerted her to my presence. I wondered what Julie had told her, though, or who I was supposed to be when the little girl was within earshot. Probably not the detective who was trying to find out who killed Daddy.

“Mommy says you’re here to keep us company,” she said, putting an end to that question. She stuck out her hand. “I’m Elizabeth. You can call me Betsy if you wanna.”

I knelt down to put myself closer to her height and grasped her tiny hand in mine. She shook it gravely.

“Nice to meet you, Betsy,” I said. “I’m Lincoln.”

“Like the president?” She pronounced it “prezdent.”

“Like that, yes.” I’d been named after someone, but not Abraham Lincoln. It was Percy Lincoln, a soldier who’d saved my father’s life in Vietnam. Seeking to honor the man but unable to force his son to go through life tagged Percy Perry, my father had picked the other name.

“I’m gonna go eat,” Betsy announced, and then she walked around the corner and into the kitchen. I remained kneeling on the floor. A little girl. Interesting. Children weren’t exactly my specialty. It wasn’t that I disliked them; I just wasn’t around them often enough to feel comfortable dealing with them. I found myself incapable of talking to them in the happy, high-pitched cartoon voices so many adults used for small children, so I generally talked to them as I would anyone else, only with less profanity. It seemed the best solution.

I walked into the kitchen, and Julie handed me a paper plate with a raisin bagel on it. “It’s all I had for breakfast food,” she said. “There’s a continental breakfast downstairs, but it ends at nine, so I’m afraid we missed it.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m making coffee, and there’s apple juice in the refrigerator,” she told me as she spread margarine on another bagel and handed it to Betsy. Today Julie was wearing olive shorts and a close-fitting white cotton shirt. She looked no less ravishing than she had in the swimsuit, but I tried to ignore that. Professional bodyguard Lincoln Perry at your service. No emotional attachment to his clients, and certainly no attraction for them. Can’t have it.

“Coffee will be fine, thanks,” I said. She handed me a ceramic mug with a palm tree and the resort’s name emblazoned on the side. I left the coffee black and took a small sip, then looked at Julie, impressed.

“This can’t be hotel coffee.”

She laughed and shook her head. “No way. I can’t drink that stuff. I found a deli down the street that sells gourmet coffee. I had them grind some for me.”

Damn. It was going to be hard enough to ignore her physical beauty. Now she had to make good coffee, too. It got worse and worse.

I leaned against the counter and sipped the coffee, watching the mother and daughter. It was a hell of a situation I’d gotten myself into.

“What do we have planned for the day?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if they felt safe leaving the hotel during the day, but I couldn’t imagine spending twelve hours in the confined space, even if it was much nicer than your average hotel room.

“What do we have planned?” Julie echoed. “Well, I don’t know. Do you think it’s safe…” She looked down at her daughter and selected a new sentence. “Would it be all right if we went for a walk down the beach?”

“Have you done that before?”

She nodded, dropping her eyes to the floor and looking ashamed, afraid I might view this as a cataclysmic breach of safety protocol. “Yes, we have. We wear sunglasses and baseball caps and don’t stay out very long.” She glanced at her daughter again, but Betsy was oblivious, munching away on the bagel. “It’s hard to spend the whole day in the room,” she added.

“I understand. I just wasn’t sure how you felt about it.”

“So you think it’s okay to go out, then?”

I nodded. “Why not? I’d stick to the hat-and-sunglasses routine, but this is a pretty busy place. There are thousands of unfamiliar faces around, and no one is paying attention to all of them.” I wasn’t sure how true that was, but I didn’t like the idea of remaining in the hotel all day any more than she did.

“Great,” she said, relieved. “Well, as soon as Betsy gets dressed we can go for a walk on the beach. Does that sound good, honey?”

The little girl smiled, crumbs stuck to her lips. “Grrrreat,” she growled, à la Tony the Tiger.

“One other thing,” I said, and Julie looked back at me. “I’d like to watch the video we talked about last night.”

“The video.”

“Yes. You told me you had it, correct?”

She dropped her eyes. “Yes, I do, but I haven’t watched it. I’d prefer not to watch it, honestly.”

“That’s fine. I need to see it.”

“I’ll bring it out, and you can watch it while Betsy and I straighten up the bedroom.”

She went into the bedroom, and the little girl tagged along. A minute later Julie returned with a VHS tape in hand. “Here it is,” she said, offering the tape to me uneasily, extending it as far from her body as possible, the way you might hand someone a sleeping scorpion.

“Thank you.” There was a VCR built into the television, of course-the Golden Breakers didn’t rate five stars for nothing. Julie turned to go back to the bedroom, but I caught her arm gently.

“I thought of a few things I need to know.”

“Okay.”

“First of all, do you have any idea when this tape was made? What day, what week, what month?”

She bit her lower lip and shook her head. “I don’t think so. No, I’m sure Wayne never told me. I assume it was fairly recently, though. It didn’t seem like the type of situation that had weeks to develop.”

“I see. And one other thing…” I dropped my voice a little lower and leaned down, putting my face close to hers. “Does your daughter know her father is dead?”

She met my eyes, and I saw a shimmer of moisture on hers. “No,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “I can’t tell her here. I can’t. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us, and… and until I do, I have to keep her happy. It’s hard enough to handle this when she’s happy, but if she wasn’t… ”She shook her head again. “I just couldn’t take it.”

I nodded. “That’s understandable. I’m not criticizing you or suggesting you sit her down on the bed and tell her immediately, but I wanted to know. Last question-what’s your relationship with Aaron Kinkaid?”

She frowned, puzzled by the question. “Aaron? He was Wayne’s partner.”

“I know that. He’s also helping us on this case, and he claims he was in love with you. Said their partnership ended because Wayne was mad about Aaron’s feelings for you.”

She rolled her eyes and laughed. “Aaron hit on me once at a Christmas party. He was drunk, and it was just a silly thing. Wayne wasn’t happy, but it was no big deal. I can’t believe it really meant anything to Aaron.”

I looked at her, taking in her beauty, and I thought that what seemed like a silly, drunken advance to a woman like Julie could mean an awful lot more to a man like Aaron Kinkaid. She went back to the bedroom, and I looked at the tape in my hand. I was surprised to see it was an ordinary Sony VHS tape with eight hours of recording time. I’d expected Weston would use higher-grade stuff. I slipped the tape into the VCR, turned the television on, and pressed play.