Chapter 5

Part 2– Reunion

“Rachel, please! We’re going to be married in a month.”

I ducked under the encircling arm of my fiancé, Charles Rivera the third, and stepped to the tiny bar to make myself a drink.

“That’s exactly why I want to wait. It’ll be more special that way,” I told him, mixing myself a bay breeze, heavy on the cranberry juice and light on the vodka. “You want one?” I raised my glass to him.

“Not particularly.” He sighed and extracted himself from my overstuffed second-hand love seat with some difficulty. I sipped my drink and watched as he began wandering around my small house, picking things up and putting them back down as was his habit when he was irritated or upset.

An Assistant District Attorney in Tampa doesn’t make the big bucks, but I made enough to afford the little one-bedroom/one-bath bungalow that wasn’t too far from downtown. It had been built in the forties and recently renovated and painted a vivid shade of lilac purple. I was able to get it for a song because it straddled the line between a good neighborhood and a questionable one. Charles was always after me to move someplace safer, but I had seen to the installation of new locks myself and I felt secure and content in the little purple house.

Of course, safe, to my fiancé, meant a five-thousand-square-foot mansion on Bayshore Drive, Tampa’s answer to Boardwalk on the Monopoly game board. Generations of his family had lived in that most desirable of South Tampa locations and so would I a month from now when we finally tied the knot. But until then, I was a free woman with no plans to give up my own residence until I absolutely had to.

“I don’t see why we couldn’t have gone to my place,” Charles grumbled. He had the slightly British accent that comes with a childhood spent at the best European schools and many summers ‘abroad’. He’d only come home to study ‘American Law’ so that he could join the family firm of Rivera, Rivera, and Tuscan. R, R, & T was the largest private litigation firm in Tampa and also the wealthiest, and Charles, by virtue of his birth, was already a partner. I had met him at a meeting of the local bar association. We had become friends and then, despite his family’s unspoken but clearly expressed horror, more than friends– but still not lovers.

“I like it better at my place,” I said, taking another sip of my drink. “It’s cozier.” It was also easier to say ‘no’ on my own turf, a word I was using a lot lately with Charles.

Charles made a face and ran a hand through his hair. It wasn’t as light as my own shade of pale, honey-gold, but he was still noticeably blond. His last name might have been Rivera, but that was the most Hispanic part of him. His great-grandfather, Jose Rivera, had come to Tampa from Cuba and made a fortune in the cigar rolling and manufacturing business in the early twentieth century. He had gotten rich, built the family mansion, and his descendants had been marrying away their ethnicity as fast as they could ever since. Charles’ surfer-boy good looks and the fact that he was fluent in both French and Italian but knew almost no Spanish spoke plainly of that.

“Your place, while charming, is somewhat cramped, my dear.” Charles picked up an old photograph in a tarnished silver frame as he spoke. “I’ve never seen this here before– who is it?”

I looked up from my bay breeze and frowned. “Something I found going through my mom’s things this weekend.” I put down my drink on the cluttered counter and went to take it from him. “I believe it’s my brother.”

“You ~believe~ it’s your brother? Don’t you know? You never told me you had any siblings.” Charles cocked an eyebrow in that slightly condescending way he had.

I studied the faded picture which showed a young man of about seventeen or eighteen dressed in a black graduation gown and holding a matching cap in large, well-formed hands. He had a darkly handsome face and the slightly slanted pale green eyes that looked out from under his thick thatch of black hair were the same as my own.

“Well?” Charles was still looking at me and I realized I’d been standing there staring at the young man’s face for well over a minute. I looked up at my fiancé. For some reason, I didn’t want to discuss the picture with him.

I shrugged uneasily. “He wasn’t my biological brother, actually. My parent adopted him from another family with the same, uh, ethnicity as mine when he was only three. He fit in perfectly because he looked so much like my father, even though we weren’t really related by blood…” I shook my head. “Anyway, I haven’t seen him since I was seven. I only know it’s him because of the eyes– we all have the same eyes in my family, or did anyway.”

“Yes, so you’ve told me.” Charles raised my chin and I permitted him to kiss me lightly on the lips. “I think that’s what I fell in love with first—those charming, foreign eyes,” he murmured in a low tone I knew he meant to be seductive. On another night I might have let myself be seduced into kissing him again but suddenly I wasn’t in the mood.

“They used to call me ‘Freaky Eyes’ in school,” I said, ducking under his arm again.

“Did I ever tell you that?”

“No.” Charles looked annoyed. “You didn’t.”

“It’s true. You know how cruel kids can be–unmerciful. Richard used to defend me from all the big bad bullies.” I sighed and traced a line over the tarnished silver frame.

“Richard? That was his name, was it?” Charles looked bemused. “Why haven’t you ever mentioned him before?”

“He’s a part of my past.” I shrugged again, knowing I could never tell him how my mother had insisted almost hysterically that we forget that past, that I never try to contact Richard or my father again.

“And you never tried to find him?” Charles persisted.

I shook my head and put the picture down. The young man’s eyes seemed to follow me as I walked back to my drink. “That picture would have been taken over ten years ago now. Richard was a good five years older than me so he’s probably got his own life, a wife, kids…who knows?” I finished my drink and started making another, this time with a little more vodka. “He wouldn’t want his little sister butting into his life,” I said.

“How do you know until you try?”

“I said, no, Charles,” I snapped. “How many ways do I have to say it?” His face fell and I felt bad immediately. I sighed and ran a hand through my hair which I had just let down after a long day in court. It fell past my shoulders in silky blond waves that I had never cut.

“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry. I just haven’t had a lot of sleep lately. I’ve had a lot of research to do and...” And I had been having the dream again. The dream of the boy with eyes like mine– only lately the dream had turned bloody.

“And what?” Charles came up and put his hands on my shoulders, massaging gently. Too gently, actually, to do much good, but I let him do it anyway. “I’ve told you, Rachel, don’t kill yourself with research. Let the paralegals do it– that’s what they’re there for.”

“And ~I’ve ~told ~you~ that I don’t have an army of paralegals and legal secretaries to jump every time I snap my fingers. I have ~one~ lousy assistant and I have to share him with two other ADAs,” I said. “Don’t forget that we court-appointed types don’t get the perks you private sector fat cats do.”

“Hey, who’s a fat cat?” Charles patted his flat stomach mockingly, making me grin. “I’ll have you know I work out on a regular basis with a personal trainer, Miss Kemet. Soon to be...” He kissed me lightly on the mouth. “Mrs. Charles Rivera the third.”

“Mrs. Rachel Kemet-Rivera,” I corrected. “We talked about this, Charles. You know I’m going to hyphenate.”

“Mmm, yes, I do recall you saying something of the kind right when mother could hear you. You nearly made her choke on her salmon mousse.” He laughed and kissed me again.

His mother was an ultra-conservative woman of the old South who believed women were made to be a man’s helpmate, not to actually have a life and career and identity of their own. Needless to say, we didn’t exactly see eye to eye. I sometimes suspected that one of the deciding factors of Charles asking me to marry him was the look of horror on his mother’s face when he had announced it at the last family gathering. He loved to feel like a rebel—like the black sheep of his blue blood family. And what could be more rebellious than marrying a girl with no family, no money to speak of, and strange eyes that marked her clearly as having a little too much ethnicity for comfort?

“Yes, well—” I said and he cut me off with another kiss, this one much more amorous. ~Oh boy, here we go again,~ I thought. Another factor, although he wouldn’t admit it, in Charles’ decision to ask me to be his wife was my closely-guarded virginity. Only now that the vulgar three carat stone that had been in his family for generations was sitting on my finger, he seemed to expect me to surrender it without a struggle.

“Rachel,” he murmured in my ear, kissing a wet trail down my neck while trying to work one hand inside my blouse and grope my breasts, “You know I’ll be gentle with you, don’t you? That I’ll make your first time a night to remember forever?”

“I have no doubt you will, Charles.” I tried to push him away gently, weary of the constant battle of ‘would we, wouldn’t we.’ “And you’ll have your chance,” I promised him. “Exactly one month and two days from tonight. All right?”

“But, dearest, I need you ~now~.” Charles made puppy-dog eyes at me. It was the same trick he had used to get me to go out with him on our first date, but this time it wouldn’t fly.

I couldn’t say exactly why I had saved myself for so long when everyone around me seemed to be having sex left, right, and center, maybe it was because I had never found a man who really stirred me sexually. But I did know one thing—I hadn’t held on to my virginity this long just to give it up on my scruffy living room rug because Charles was whining like a kid who couldn’t get the toy he wanted.

I opened my mouth to tell him to forget it, at least for now, and was saved by the ringing of my cell phone.

“Let it ring,” Charles murmured, licking the inside of my ear wetly.

“I can’t.” I pushed past him, wiping my ear with the sleeve of my sweater. “It might be a client or something else to do with work. Remember, I don’t have the luxury of a private secretary who fills me in every morning.”

I grabbed my cell and flipped it open, ready for business and frankly glad to have an excuse to get away from Charles for a moment. I was beginning to feel like I was engaged to an octopus.

“Kemet here,” I said briskly, turning my back on the now-pouting Charles.

“Kemet? Detective Marks here,” responded a husky voice on the other end.

“Oh, hello, Genevieve.” I was pleasantly surprised. Genevieve Marks was a Homicide detective and one of my main links to the Tampa PD. We had worked on several cases together and she always gave me information freely and without the bullshit hassle the male cops will sometimes put you through. I suspected that one reason for this was because she had a crush on me, but at least she wasn’t overt about it.

“What can I do for you?” I asked, hoping she would give me a reason to come down to the Franklin street station and get away from Charles’ groping for a while.

“Actually, this time it’s what I can do for you,” she responded. “Got a guy down here—a real piece of work—wanted on a possible homicide.”

“What are the details?” I reached for a pad and pen I always kept on the counter.

“He was seen by several witnesses leaving an alley in Ybor City with what looked like blood on his face. When they went to check it out, they found Chulo Martinez dead with his throat ripped out.”

I stopped writing for a moment, trying to take it in. “Chulo’s dead?” He was one of the most notorious pimps in Ybor City, Tampa’s oldest and most historic district, and he had been around since I was still clerking for the DA to put myself through law school. Rumor had it that he also had ties to organized crime and though nothing had ever been proven, he was thought to be more than just a pimp.

“Yeah.” Genevieve was chewing gum, she popped a bubble loudly in my ear. “It was a couple of his girls that found him. They actually called 911 for that piece of garbage—can you believe it? But he was DRT.” Dead right there, she meant.

“Wow.” I started writing again. “Wonder what Momo the shark is going to have to say about that.” Momo ‘the shark’ Andretti was understood to be the local head of organized crime although the PD hadn’t ever been able to pin anything on him. Because it’s a port city, Tampa has its share of wiseguys, although it’s nothing like New York or Chicago. If Chulo Martinez really had been one of Momo’s ‘button men’ chances were that the mobster would be plenty pissed.

Genevieve barked out a laugh. “You know Momo—he makes the Teflon don look like, uh, hey, what’s that kind of cookware that always sticks—you know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t,” I told her. “I never eat anything that doesn’t come in a take-out container.”

She sighed. “And here I thought you were an old-fashioned girl.”

I laughed. “Guess again, Detective. If you want someone to cook for you, you’ll have to find a girl that’s a hell of a lot more femme than me.”

She laughed too, delighted at my mild flirtation. From the corner of my eye, I could see Charles scowl. Damn, I’d forgotten how jealous he was.

“So what do you need from me?” I asked, trying to get back to business. “You want me to come down and offer him a deal? Play good cop, bad ADA or something along those lines?”

“That’s a tempting offer and I’ll keep it in mind for another time. But no, this guy actually wants you to represent him.”

“What?” I shook my head disbelievingly. “Did you tell him I’m a mad-dog prosecutor and I eat guys like him for breakfast?”

“You might want to reconsider just this once.” Genevieve’s voice was flat. “See, he’s claiming to be your brother.”