Page 17 of Stay Awake
She chooses a Greek salad instead.
“The Greek salad contains feta cheese, which is a dairy item,” the waiter says haltingly. “Is that an issue?”
“Get her what she wants,” Dean snaps. “Hurry up. We’ve been kept waiting long enough.”
When he’s gone, Emily takes out a designer shopping bag with her logo and presents it to me as a gift. Inside is a bright-yellow handbag with a tassel and a matching purse.
I’m about to refuse it as nicely as possible when Marco gives the slightest shake of his head. He’s worried I might offend them.
The plea in Marco’s eyes wins out. I thank Emily and gush over how much I love her bags, even though they’re flashy and not at all to my taste.
Emily’s salad arrives. The chef has cleverly put the cheese in its own container on the side. The rest of the meal goes in a blur of desserts and coffees. Dean uses every opportunity to get a gibe in at the waiter, who ever since the Caesar salad showdown can apparently do nothing right as far as Dean is concerned.
I look at Marco and silently beg him to say something. He gives an imperceptible shake of his head as if to indicate that he’s powerless. I suppose he is if he wants Dean’s money.
When the waiter brings the bill, Dean insists on paying. “Marco, you got it last time.” They argue the point. Dean wins by snatching the bill and waving it in the air along with his credit card.
The three of us chat as the server processes the credit card and brings it to Dean to sign. I’m vaguely aware of Dean taking out his wallet and leaving cash before we rise from the table.
It’s only as we’re walking out of the café that I hear Dean whisper to Emily that the waiter will regret his rudeness and terrible service when he sees his tip.
When we’re on the street, I turn and glance through the window of the café just as the server picks up Dean’s measly ten-dollar tip, all insingle bills. It was left under the salt shaker on our table. The waiter should have been tipped at least four times that amount based on my rough estimate of our bill.
The waiter looks up and sees me watching. I’m absolutely mortified. Dean and Emily get into a cab, while Marco kisses me goodbye and heads back to his apartment. I’ve already told him I’ll go straight home from the café since there’s a subway station at the end of the block.
When Marco’s out of sight, I go back into the restaurant. Our table is already being set for the next customer and the waiter is taking orders at another table. I approach him during a brief lull.
“I’m sorry my, er, friends were rude,” I tell him. Scrambling in my purse, I hand over forty dollars, which is by my reckoning the balance of the tip he was shortchanged on.
“You don’t need to do that.”
“You should have been tipped properly to begin with… Kevin.” I read his name off his name badge. “I served tables when I was in college. I know this is your income.”
“Thank you,” he says, putting the cash into his pocket. As I turn to leave, he says: “By the way, I’m a big fan of your columns inCultura Magazine.”
“Thanks.”
In truth, it creeps me out that he’d been listening so intently to our conversation while he served us that he knows who I am and the magazine I write for.
Chapter
Eleven
Wednesday 10:20A.M.
Detective Darcy Halliday flicked through photos of the crime scene she’d taken on her phone as Jack Lavelle steered the navy Ford through heavy traffic on their way to the city morgue. Those photos were all they’d have until they received the official crime scene images sometime in the afternoon.
The crime scene photographer had still been snapping away at the scene when they’d left, accompanying the victim’s body, which had been zipped into a black body bag and taken on a stretcher down to a morgue van on the street. Halliday and Lavelle had studiously ignored the reporters calling out questions from behind a police barricade as they exited the building.
“Our biggest problem right now is that we have no ID for the victim,” Lavelle told Halliday as he drove. “Homicide investigations are exponentially harder when the identity of the victim is unknown.”
The owner of the apartment wasn’t due to land in Hong Kong until late afternoon New York time. Lavelle hoped the owner wouldbe able to tell them who had rented the apartment for the night. That individual was most likely the victim, or possibly the killer.
In every other respect, the investigation was looking good, even though it was early days. The forensics team had found fingerprints all over the bedroom and the bathroom.
In fact, the embarrassment of riches of trace evidence found at the scene was something of a headache in disguise. They’d be lucky if they received the fingerprint results by the weekend. Hundreds of prints would have to be cross-referenced and collated before being run through the system. The lab had to exclude the victim’s prints and the prints of everyone who’d been at the scene, including Olga, the cleaner. She’d be asked to provide her fingerprints and samples of her hair when she came to the precinct later to sign her statement.
At the morgue, Halliday and Lavelle waited at the entrance of the autopsy room while the pathologist finished a Y-incision on a morbidly obese middle-aged man who lay with his lifeless head hyperextended on the slab and a sheet pulled down to his waist.
