The Good Lie by A.R. Torre

CHAPTER 44

We met two days later in a candlelit bar off South Beverly Drive that had a Bugatti parked out front and a hostess with more diamonds and plastic surgery than sense. He was already there, seated at a gold stool at the bar, and I paused before approaching, not certain that it was him.

In three months, Robert Kavin had become a different man. His short-cropped beard was now thick and paired nicely with a rough brush of salt-and-pepper hair. He was tan, and his eyes held a new glow of life that they hadn’t had before. He wore a collared golf shirt and dark-blue shorts with small whales embroidered on them.

“Wow.” I paused next to his stool. “You look . . . beachy.” I glanced down at my outfit. I was still in the navy suit and nude heels I’d worn at the office. “I probably should have suggested a more casual place. And changed.”

He stood and leaned in, brushing my cheek with a kiss. His beard felt foreign against my skin, and he smelled like coconuts and soap. “I like you like this. Though . . .” He gestured to the open stool beside him. “I’d love to see you let down your hair. Literally and figuratively.” He tugged on my low bun, and I batted his hand away, annoyed to see that he’d stolen a bobby pin.

“I’d like to see you with less hair.” I scowled at him. “What’s with the caveman look?”

He smiled. “I threw away my razor when I got rid of my suits.” He tugged on the side of his short beard. “You don’t like it?”

“It’s okay,” I said grudgingly and picked up the bar menu. In truth, he looked good. Really good. Melt-your-panties-off good. “How do the clients like it?”

“I wouldn’t know. I left the office and moved to Venice Beach. I found a fixer-upper on the water and am renovating.” He reached for my hand, and I pulled it away. “You were wrong, you know.”

“There’s a shocker,” I deadpanned. “In what way?”

“My goldfish is still alive.”

I laughed. “You brought him home?”

“Yep. Gave him the guest bedroom. He’s helping me with design choices. He seems to like living at the beach.”

“You seem like you do, too.” He seemed lighter, the cloak of intensity gone.

“Oh, I love Venice. I always told myself I’d retire on an island in the Caribbean, but . . .” He shrugged.

“No extradition?” I asked dryly.

He laughed. “Well, no, but my reluctance to leave was a little more noble than that.”

I caught the eye of the bartender and ordered a vodka tonic. “Yeah?”

“Well, you’re here.”

I paused, confused. “And?”

“And we have unfinished business.” He eyed me. “Think you can squeeze in one more client?”

I set down the menu. “You know, grief counseling really isn’t my specialty. My clients are normally a little darker than that.”

“I have a few skeletons in my closet,” he admitted.

“And they shave.”

He winced. “I can shave.”

I scraped my fingers across his jaw and tugged at the wild, thick tufts. “Nah. Keep it.”

He pulled the edge of my stool, bringing me closer to him. “I also wanted to give you this. You left it at my house.”

He pressed something into my palm, and I looked down to see the emerald ring. “Robert . . . ,” I protested.

“Stop,” he ordered. “We went through the argument about it already. It’s yours. Take it. Consider it a peace offering for me wanting to kill you.” He winced. “Now, can you forgive me?”

“I don’t know.” I slid the ring onto the ring finger of my right hand. “Can you forgive me for not realizing what a monster John Abbott was?”

He studied me, his pupils moving minutely as he read, judged, and processed what he saw in my eyes. “I think I already have.”

He hadn’t. The chances were high that he would never forgive me.

“How did you know that he was guilty?” I asked. The question was the one thing left unanswered, and it had followed me for three months.

He sighed, and I knew he didn’t want to walk back down that path, but I had to know what he’d seen that I had missed. “The autopsy report on Gabe. The blood labs.” He turned back to the bar and picked up his drink. “His insulin levels were perfect, as if he’d worn his pump the entire time. But in order to do that, he’d need infusion sets.”

“So why wouldn’t you suspect another diabetic?”

“There are dozens of variations of infusion sets, but more importantly, I hadn’t gotten the call to pick up his prescription. Which I didn’t notice or think about at the time. I mean, my son was missing. I barely knew what my middle name was, much less if I hadn’t gotten a call from the pharmacy. And if I had noticed, I would have chalked it up to them knowing that he was missing. But months later, almost seven months after he was gone, I was at the pharmacy, picking something up, and I thought about it.” He looked at me. “So I checked with the insurance company, and someone else had picked up his prescriptions. The insulin and also his inhaler.”

“And then you figured out it was him?”

“No.” He sighed and took a sip of his beer. “And then I ran background checks and wasted a shitload of time looking at all the wrong employees of the pharmacy before I figured out it was John.”

“Oh.” It was a cruel irony that the one thing that had probably put Gabe Kavin on John’s radar was the same thing that led to his killer.

“I had a dozen talks with John about Gabe, before, during, and after his disappearance, and I never suspected a thing.” He met my eyes. “I was a prick to assume it was any different for you.”

I shrugged. “I’m a professional. It was my job to have seen something.” And we had both been, at multiple points in this journey, pricks and liars.

“Here.” He raised his bottle. “To cradling sorrows to sleep.”

I clinked my glass against his. “I’ll drink to that.”

I smiled at the familiar toast, remembering when I had given it in the run-down country bar. It seemed like a lifetime ago. We had been strangers, our history linked without us knowing, our focus on distraction from our grief and problems.

William S. Burroughs once said that no one owns life, but anyone who can lift a frying pan can create death. He was right. Killing is the easy part. The act of living—of finding happiness in life—that’s the hard part. Moving past grief and guilt, and learning to love and to trust . . . I wanted to take that path, but I rather liked cradling my sorrows. I enjoyed the well of emotion, the proof that an empathic soul still existed in my aching chest.

One day, I’d move on and forgive myself. I’d live a proper life. But for today, I just needed to survive. To survive and make room on my calendar for one new client. A scruffy, bearded killer who smelled of sunscreen and had a goldfish as a pet.

Robert reached for my hand, and this time, I didn’t pull away.