Angelina Bonaparte Mysteries Box Set by Nanci Rathbun (surface ebook reader TXT) 📗

it was a storefront with a U-shaped counter and two booths. The cook (also the owner) presided over a grill situated right behind the counter, flipping burgers, scrambling eggs and frying potatoes in plain sight of customers. George, the Greek owner, would serve a free meal to a homeless man at one end of the counter, while at the other sat one of Milwaukee’s mayoral candidates. Ma’s was always the last stop before home on a night of carousing. Now, it’s expanded into a real restaurant, with its own parking lot, a kitchen that’s separate from the dining room, and many tables and booths. Thankfully, the food is still good and plentiful. And George still feeds the homeless.

We took a booth and sipped coffee while we both waited for our late-in-the-day breakfasts to arrive. In for a penny, I thought. “You said at Ed’s that your partner, Liz, was pretty good at getting information from people.”

He didn’t answer right away, but seemed to consider and reach a decision. Then he responded. “Right. She had the knack. Like you, Angie.” I raised my cup in a silent acknowledgement of his compliment. “She would’ve found out about the Elisa-Alan business, too. Maybe it’s a woman thing.” He held up his hand to stop me from interrupting. “That’s not meant in a bad way. But there are differences between the sexes, and not just physical.”

He looked at me, and I nodded and said, “Go on.”

“Well, I’ve observed that women seem to get a lot more information during questioning than men do.”

The waitress set our plates down and we started to arrange our meals—salt, pepper, jam, utensils, all the little things one does to prepare to eat. As I spread boysenberry jam on my toast, I noted, “Could be that people feel less threatened with a woman. Could also be that you come across a little hard-nosed, Wukowski.”

“You think?” He started to laugh, a deep rumble that didn’t quite burst out but escaped in short gasps, as if he were uncomfortable with a real belly laugh. “I know you’ll find this hard to believe, but I’ve heard that before. It’s not just me, though,” he said as he punctuated his speech with his fork, “’cause Iggy’s one of the friendliest guys you’ll ever meet, easy to talk to, and he doesn’t get the response, either.”

“Well, then the solution’s easy enough. The department should assign a woman partner to every team.”

His face changed to the guarded look that I was used to. I stared at him, really looked and analyzed. This wasn’t his “usual” face, I decided. The laugh lines that radiated upward from his eyes and mouth were deeper, more habitual, than the frown lines in his forehead and the downturn of his lips. Wukowski’s not a perennial badass, I decided. It’s a recent veneer, one that threatens to overwhelm the real Wukowski, but it hasn’t yet.

God help me, I wanted to reclaim him. It might be a hopeless, helpless emotion, but something in me wanted to see that other Wukowski do more than just break the surface for a quick gulp of air every once in a while. To really escape the riptide of his emotions, he needed to talk. I wondered if he’d done more than the obligatory session with the department’s shrink after Liz White’s death. He quirked an eyebrow and I realized that I was still staring at him, lost in thought.

“Sorry, my brain goes off on me like that sometimes. Where were we? Oh, yeah, women partners.” I started to cut one of my breakfast sausages into small bites. “Of course, there aren’t enough women detectives or officers to make that practical, are there?”

“Nope.”

“How about sensitivity training? Maybe they can train you guys to conduct questioning like women would. Do they do any of that?”

“Nope.”

“Think it would be worthwhile?”

“Nope.”

I started to hum “Do Not Forsake Me,” the theme from the Gary Cooper classic western, High Noon. He caught the reference and his lips turned up slightly. “See, Wukowski, the thing about a conversation is that it has to be two-sided. Otherwise, it’s just a monologue.” I kept my tone light and teasing. It was a technique that had worked with my brooding teenage son. Maybe, I thought, it will work with brooding middle-aged men, too. “Even during interviews, you give a little to get a little. You open up in order to get the other person to open up. Tit for tat, as they say.”

He nodded. “My ex-wife used to tell me that, too. But I never caught the sense of useless chatter. I just figure, if it’s not important, don’t say it.”

“And if it is important, keep it to yourself?” I smiled, but inside I was deadly serious.

“Busted,” he said, shaking his head. “You nailed me.”

“You know, this is a skill that can be learned, Wukowski. You’re not inarticulate. You just have to get over thinking that every word from your lips must be a pearl of wisdom. It’s okay to talk piffle, sometimes. For instance, what’s the last movie you saw in the theater?”

“Gladiator.”

“Russell Crowe in a toga.” I groaned.

We talked piffle for the rest of the meal—Roman war tactics, heavenly images like the Elysian Fields in the movie, philosophies of the afterlife. It turned out that we were both believers, but not in the same sense. He saw heaven as a place of final justice, where all wrongs would be righted and the bad guys would get what’s coming to them. A cop’s heaven. I saw it as a place where all hurt would be healed and wrongs forgiven, where we would live in understanding and love. A mom’s heaven.

“Take Jeffrey Dahmer,” he challenged me. “He claimed to have found Jesus in jail. Is that enough for him to be forgiven? Do you want to spend eternity with him in heaven?”

The Dahmer case touched a raw nerve in much of the Milwaukee-area population, myself included. To have a serial killer, cannibal and necrophiliac living in the