Back in Black (McGinnis Investigations #1) - Rhys Ford Page 0,76
him for as much information as he could get about the Brinkerhoffs’ social circle. “Like who he was copying?”
“Copying?” Watson laughed, sending a spray of spittle over the coffee table in front of him. “He wasn’t copying anything. Arthur just sits down and begins painting. Not like my little girl, who would try to draw stuff out of one of those Japanese comic books she likes. There’d be some pencil marks on the canvas, but he would just go to town. I used to tease him about doing paint by numbers, because he’d be finished with the thing in about a week and someone would come by and pick up the painting after it was dry enough. I guess that’s how they pay the rent, because they never talked about working. He had a bunch of them he said weren’t good enough to sell, so I picked out that one. Painted down the black line so he had a good place to sign, and I took it down to the framing shop. You finished with that beer? Want another one?”
“Nah, I’m good.” I held up my can of fermented Denver tap water, sloshing it about so Watson could hear it was still mostly full. “But why don’t you tell us about the guy who’d come pick up the paintings? He’s probably wondering what the hell happened to Arthur and Adele, especially since no one’s been around to tell him anything. Maybe we can reach out and let him know what’s going on so he doesn’t get too worried.”
Seventeen
THE SIZZLE of cheese hitting the hot pan was loud enough to bring Honey in from the living room. She lived in the eternal hope of getting food directly from the skillet, but Jae’s hard-and-fast rule of no dogs in the cooking area meant she was bound by the invisible wall keeping her from getting too close to the stove. So she set up shop as a floppy blond beggar by the dining room table. If there was one thing the dog enjoyed about the walls we’d taken down between the bundle of small rooms at the back of the house, it was that she could have a clear line of sight whenever the possibility of food popped up.
“You’re not getting any of this, dog,” I said, fully aware I was going to take the end piece of the bread loaf, tuck a piece of American cheese into it, fold it in half, then microwave it for the dog.
There hadn’t been a plan for that when I started my dinner, but the dog knew me. She’d played on my sense of guilt from the day she came into the house. Thank God for Jae or I would pretty much have to roll her around like one of those balls people sit on in front of their desks to build up their core strength. I was an easy mark, and Jae was the only thing keeping her from looking like an oversized tribble. I would’ve tossed her a piece of cheese from the kitchen, but I’d learned the hard way about breaking Jae’s rules for the dog. The first thing I learned was that the dog could not keep a secret and was more than willing to take the tidbit I’d given her to snack on and eat it at Jae’s feet. The second thing I learned was that the universe hated me, because the last time I gave her something when Jae wasn’t around, she saved it until he came home, then promptly ate it at Jae’s feet.
She never did that if I gave her something outside of the kitchen. So Honey’s version of a grilled cheese was going to have to wait until I was done with mine.
There was something about eating a stack of slightly burned grilled bread stuffed with plastic-wrap American cheese that brought me comfort. It wasn’t something I could actually eat with my husband around, mostly because Jae questioned the preservatives I was gulping down in big bites and didn’t understand that a properly made grilled cheese sandwich required a good char. The bread had to be fluffy and white, then slathered with butter—or mayonnaise, a variation I’d recently learned—and placed into a medium-hot pan to be cooked to a darkness even Satan would approve of. The cheese had to be cheap and made by the same people who brought us Americans our neon-orange macaroni and cheese in a box.