Capturing Cleo. Linda Winstead Jones
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doughnuts here, and if that doesn’t grab you, they have pancakes. Eggs. Cinnamon buns.”
She stared at him silently.
He lifted finely shaped eyebrows and pinned those dark eyes on her. “At least get something to drink.”
The waitress was waiting. Malone was waiting. And Cleo just wanted to get this over with. “Orange juice,” she said, giving in too easily. “And toast.”
Malone led her to a booth against the window, where they could watch the people passing on the sidewalk. This position also placed them as far away as possible from the other customers, no doubt so he could interrogate her without having to lower his voice.
Cleo sat, and the old cushion sank.
“So,” Malone said, taking his own seat, which didn’t seem to sink quite so low. “Tell me about Tempest.”
Cleo fixed her eyes to Malone’s. He thought she was nervous? She’d show him. She could be fearless when she had to be, and she was not afraid of this cop or anyone else. “Jack was a mean-spirited, unfaithful, unscrupulous snake. Marrying him was the worst mistake of my life, and I am not sorry to know that I won’t ever have to see his face again.”
The waitress popped into the picture to place a huge mug of coffee before Malone and a tall glass of cold juice before Cleo. Their conversation ceased until she moved away.
“Do you know who killed him?” Malone asked calmly.
“No.”
“Would you tell me if you did?”
“Probably not.”
Malone took a long swig of coffee. “Fair enough,” he said as he set the mug on the table. “I’ll need a list of everyone who was in the club last week when you told your little grapefruit joke.”
“If I can remember.”
“Do you have a gentleman friend, Ms. Tanner?” He didn’t look at her as he asked this question, but stared into his cup of coffee. “Someone who might have felt compelled to defend your honor and then leave a grapefruit behind so you’d be sure to know this murder was a…gift?”
“No gentleman friend,” she said precisely, her heart clenching at the idea that someone might have thought she’d consider Jack’s murder a gift.
“Oh,” he said. “Then, who sent the roses?”
The temperature of her blood rose a notch. She was not about to tell Malone about her secret admirer. He’d probably find it all very amusing. Besides, secret admirers were harmless. She’d had more than her share. They all turned out to be shy, sweet men suffering from something that was no more intense than a crush, ordinary men too timid to approach her even to say hello.
“None of your business.”
“You are going to cooperate, aren’t you, Ms. Tanner?”
She didn’t like the way he said that, or the way he lifted his eyebrows and planted his eyes on her and asked the question as if it wasn’t a question at all, but a demand. No one pushed her around anymore, no one told her what to do. Not even Luther Malone.
Cleo was saved from answering when the waitress appeared again, bearing a tray laden with food. She placed a heavy white plate with four pieces of toast—three more than Cleo would eat—on the table, along with a bowl filled with small containers of butter and strawberry jam.
Malone’s plate was huge: scrambled eggs, a mound of bacon, a bowl of grits and one of those doughnuts he’d tried to entice her with. Glazed.
She shook her head and smiled as she reached for the preserves, letting loose a very small laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Malone asked defensively.
“Nothing. Just wondering if I’ll be a suspect when you keel over with hardened arteries.” She glanced at the plate. “Something which is certain to happen any day now, if that is your ‘usual.’”
“Oh,” he said, reaching for the pepper. “I thought you were laughing at the doughnut.”
“That’s just icing on the…”
“…doughnut?” he finished.
She liked the fact that he ate such a huge and fat-laden breakfast and then finished it off with the cliché of a cop’s doughnut. It made him more…human, somehow. Her smile faded. It was bad enough that she’d placed him so high on the Barney-Bruce scale and thought he was inappropriately good-looking; now she actually had to like something about him? Bad news. Very bad news.
“And to answer your question,” she said, putting on her most severe face. “No, I don’t see any reason why I should cooperate with you.”
He nodded his head as if he had already figured that out.
Cleo took a bite of her toast, glad that Malone was giving at least some of his attention to his breakfast. He did keep looking at her, though, lifting his head and staring at her hard, as if he might see something different, this time.
He lifted his head, stared at her face and pointed. “You have…” He wiggled that long finger in her direction.
“I have what?” she snapped. “Guilt written all over my face? A suspicious glint in my eye?”
He reached across the table and touched her face, there near her mouth, dragging the tip of his finger slowly and gently down. It was a shock, when he touched her—a literal, heart-jolting shock. His warm finger briefly brushed her lower lip, sending a riot of sensations she did not want or need through her body. Her heart beat too fast, her temperature rose, and she was quite sure he would be able to see the heat she felt in her cheeks.
Malone showed her his finger as it withdrew. “Strawberry jam on your face.”
When he licked the jam off his finger, she thought she would swoon.
And Cleo Tanner did not swoon! She took a napkin and rubbed it vigorously against the corner of her mouth, there where he had touched her, doing her best to wipe away any remaining jam as well as the lingering effect of that warm finger on her face and her lip.
Malone seemed unaffected, by the contact and by her reaction to it. “Do you think Tempest would commit suicide?”
“No,” she said, while he dug into his breakfast. “I already told you that.”
“I know, but…it’s the grapefruit that mucks everything up. Would he jump with a grapefruit just to screw up your life again?”
Again, like Malone knew everything about her and Jack. “Maybe,” she admitted softly. “If Jack was going to kill himself, he’d definitely go out of his way to pin it on me.”
Malone wagged an egg-laden fork in her direction. “That’s what I figured, but still…I don’t see suicide.”
He sounded almost disappointed. “Then, why the hell did you ask?”
“Gotta cover everything.”
“Then, don’t forget about Randi with an i,” Cleo said. “She’d been with Jack long enough to know what he was like, and she didn’t like me.”
“Why not?”
“Because Jack wouldn’t leave me alone, that’s why,” she said softly.
He nodded, again as if he understood.
“Now will you hurry up and eat that monster breakfast so you can get me back to my car and I can go home? I’ve had about all the cooperation I can take.”
Luther didn’t hurry, but he did quit questioning Cleo and gave his breakfast the attention it deserved, while she played with a piece of toast and sipped at her juice. Cleo Tanner hadn’t tossed her ex-husband off the First Heritage Bank building, of that he was ninety-percent sure. But she was at the middle of it, somehow.