James Patterson - 7th Heaven

“I wouldn’t say I know her, know her, but we were cellmates one night at the women’s jail.”

“And did Ms. Moon say why she was arrested?”

“Yeah, everyone gets a turn at that.”

“And what did Ms. Moon tell you?”

“She said she was a working girl and that she had a date with Michael Campion.”

“And why did that stick in your mind?”

“Are you kiddin’? It was like, Whoa . You did the dirty with the golden boy? And like what was that like? And by and by it came out that he died when they were doing it.”

“Is that what Ms. Moon told you?”

“Yeah. She said he had a bad heart, and that happened to me once, too, but my john was no golden boy. He was a smelly old man, and he died in the front seat of his Caddy, so I just opened the door – oh, ’scuse me.”

“Ms. Brown, did Ms. Moon say what she did when Mr. Campion had a heart attack?”

“She got all weepy-like,” said Tanya Brown. “Said she and her boyfriend got rid of his body.”

“Did she say anything else?”

“She said Michael was the sweetest boy she ever met and how bad it sucked for him to die on the happiest night of his life.”

Yuki thanked the witness, made sure she didn’t roll her eyes as she turned her over to L. Diana Davis.

Davis asked Tanya Brown the same question she’d asked each of Yuki’s previous two jailhouse witnesses.

“Did Ms. Moon offer you any proof that she’d been with the so-called victim? Did she describe any distinguishing marks on his body, for instance? Show you any souvenirs? A ring, or a note, a lock of his hair?”

“Huh? No, I mean, no, ma’am, she didn’t.”

“I have no other questions,” said Davis dismissively, again.

TWILLY PHONED YUKI at the office, asked her to have dinner with him at Aubergine, a hot new restaurant on McAllister. “I’ve got so much work to do,” she moaned. Then she relented. “An early dinner, okay? That would be great.”

At six the restaurant was filling up with the loud pretheater crowd, but she and Twilly had a small table far from the bar, where it was quiet enough to talk. Twilly’s knees bumped against hers from time to time and Yuki didn’t mind.

“ Davis is like an IED,” Yuki said, moving tiny bay scallops on her plate with her fork. “She blows up in your face at every checkpoint.”

“Her act is getting old. Don’t worry,” Twilly told her. “She’s probably up every night worrying about you .”

Yuki smiled at her dinner companion, said, “Hey. That’s enough about me.” And she asked him to tell her about his first true-crime book.

“Must I? It sold about two hundred copies.”

“It did not .”

“It did , and I know because I bought all of them myself.”

Yuki threw back her head and laughed, loosening up finally, feeling pleased that she had Twilly’s attention all to herself.

“I wrote it under a pseudonym,” Twilly said. “That way if you were to Google me, that bomb won’t come up on the list.”

“Well, now I know,” said Yuki. “So, what was the book about?”

Twilly sighed dramatically, but Yuki could see he was just revving his motor before rolling out a story he loved to tell.

“It’s about this country-western singer-songwriter in Nashville,” Twilly said. “Joey Flynn. Ever hear of her?”

“Nope.”

“Okay, well, about ten years ago, Joey Flynn had cut a couple of records and was making her way up the charts. ‘Hot Damn.’ You know that song? Or ‘Blue Northern’? No? Well, it doesn’t matter.

“Joey was married to a carpenter, Luke Flynn, her high school sweetheart, and they’d had four kids before they were twenty-five. One day a fan brought Joey a hundred roses at this saloon where she was singing, and her heart went zing.”

“A hundred roses…,” Yuki said, imagining it.

Twilly grinned, said, “Joey messed around with this guy for three weeks before Luke found out and confronted her.”

“Confronted her how?”

“Rapped on the door at the Motel 6.”

“Ouch,” said Yuki.

“So that was the end of Joey’s affair, and Luke never forgave her. Over time, Joey caught on to the fact that Luke was planning to kill her.”

“Really? How?”

“How did she find out? Or how did he plan to kill her?”

Yuki laughed again, said, “Both, and I think I’m going to have that chocolate mousse cake now.”

“You deserve cake for the way you handled the governor today,” Twilly said, touching the sleeve of Yuki’s blue silk blouse, keeping his hand there for a long moment before he signaled the waiter. After ordering dessert, Twilly went on with his story.

“Five years after her fling with that fan, Joey opens the cache in Luke’s computer and sees that he’s been looking up how to poison someone.”

“Oh, my God…”

“Joey writes to her best friend saying that if anything should happen to her, the police should question her husband. Ten days later,” Twilly went on, “Joey was dead. Potassium cyanide shows up on the tox screen, and Joey’s best friend turns the letter over to the cops, and Luke Flynn is arrested and charged with murder.”

“This story reminds me of Nicole Simpson putting those Polaroids of her bruises in a lockbox for her sister in case O.J. hurt her.”

“Exactly! So I write a book proposal, get a big advance on a six-figure contract, and I start spending time with Luke Flynn, who’s cooling his jets in jail while he awaits trial. And let me tell you, there’s no food like this near the prison in Nashville.”

“Have the rest,” Yuki said, pushing two-thirds of her cake across the table.

“You sure you’re done? Okay, then,” Twilly said, accepting the cake.

Yuki said, “So what happened ?”

The waiter dropped the check on the table and Twilly placed his platinum card on it, saying, “I’ll give you a lift to your car. Tell you on the way.”

“Why don’t you follow me home in your car,” Yuki said. “The least I can do is make you coffee.”

Twilly smiled.

JASON TWILLY SAT in a loveseat in Yuki’s living room, an Irish coffee resting on the low glass table between him and where Yuki was sitting in an upholstered chair six feet away.

Yuki was thinking that Twilly was too good-looking, and that she hadn’t had sex in so long she wasn’t sure she remembered how to do it. Now here was this big-time superstar who would surely break her heart if she let him, and she didn’t have time for fun, let alone heartbreak. She had a conference call with Parisi and the DA early in the morning, she had to prepare herself for the next round in this week’s trial of the century and go to bed. To sleep.

Twilly was excited, hitting the climax of his story. “So now the DA has the letter Joey Flynn gave to her best friend, and turns out she also told her hairdresser that she was afraid Luke would kill her.”

“I’m dyin’,” Yuki said. “You better tell me what happened, Jason, because I’ve got to be in bed in ten minutes and you have to leave.”

“Come sit with me for those ten minutes,” he said.

Yuki felt her heart banging in her chest. And she felt something else: her deceased mother’s clucking presence all around her – in the furniture, in the portrait on the wall – and she knew that her mom would want her to say good night and show the stranger out.

Yuki got up and sat next to Jason Twilly.

Twilly put his arm around her, leaned forward, and kissed her. Yuki moved into the kiss, put her hands in Jason’s hair, and was jolted by the hot shock of desire that shot through her body. It was incredible! But somewhere into the second kiss, when Jason ran his hand over her breast, she pulled away, gasping and flustered, her confusion burning off into certainty.