a Krispy Kreme doughnut, still warm and oozing glaze. I passed him one of the iced coffees too. His was black, but mine was spiked with a shot of glaze and cut with cream.
He took it without looking at me. “How’d you find me?”
“Where else would you be?”
This corner of the park had been our frequent hangout after my mom died, the summer one year ago I’d practically lived at his place and drank too much wine and cried every day. I told him he’d saved my life. I kept looking for opportunities to pay him back.
“Adam said you didn’t get back until four a.m.”
“Yeah.”
“You were supposed to call me.”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
I let the apology sit there for a while. Usually silence was companionable between us, but this one had sharp places, like a barbed wire fence.
I threw that morning’s Journal-Constitution down between us and poked at the photograph on the front page, a shot of Lex’s body being loaded into an ambulance. “The AJC says it’s officially a homicide now. And you’re officially a person of interest. Whatever that means.”
“It has no meaning. It’s cop words.”
The heat agitated the tension between us. “Look, I know about the shoes. I know they had blood on them, and that for some ungodly reason I cannot possibly understand, you went into a police interview wearing them.”
Rico continued to stare. “Adam told you.”
“He’s worried.”
Rico shook his head. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you think I killed Lex.”
I almost choked on my coffee. “Damn it, Rico, I know you didn’t kill anybody!”
But he had the look of a deep secret coming up, a secret that hadn’t seen the light of day yet.
“I can’t tell you all of it,” he finally said.
My stomach went cold. Then that heady disconnect, right before the bad news comes, as if you can’t even be present in your own body to hear it.
I steeled myself for whatever was about to come. “Go ahead.”
“Lex and I got in a fight right before he died.”
“What kind of fight?”
“The kind where my fist bloodies his mouth up.”
I started shaking. “Rico!”
“Don’t start. Listen first.”
I closed my mouth. He continued.
“I decided to go to the parking lot and sit a while, drink some Courvoisier I had under the seat. Clear my head.”
I pictured the parking lot, the streetlights’ glow, the Chevy Tahoe with the tinted windows. Nobody would have seen him in there.
“Go on.”
“I’d been there maybe ten minutes when Lex comes out, talking on his phone.”
Right after he’d been talking to me, right after Jackson had thrown him out, literally.
“Lex put the phone away, pulled out a cigarette. Trey came out after a while and had a brief conversation, but he only stayed a minute, then Lex was alone again. I got up to go inside, and he got in my face. Started talking nonsense about missing money, how he’d heard I hadn’t been persuaded to keep him on the team yet, how it would be a shame if I got kicked off the team too, if that missing money showed up in my possession.”
So Jackson had been right. Lex had taken the money. And he’d planned to use it to frame Rico.
“And then what happened?”
Rico shrugged. “I punched him. Not real hard either, just enough to snap his head around and split his lip. Some of the blood got on my shoe, but I didn’t notice. I went inside, did the poems, and then the fire broke out. Didn’t see the damn blood until I was in the interview with that detective. And once that DNA test comes back—”
“All it will prove is exactly what you told me.”
“That’s not what the cops will think.”
“Doesn’t matter. They need means, motive, and opportunity, all three. That fire started while you were on stage, six minutes into your set. Whoever murdered Lex also set the fire, which meant that the killing happened right before the alarm went off, while you were under spotlights surrounded by a hundred witnesses.”
“The fire could have been an accident. Somebody tosses a cigarette in the trashcan, it smolders for a while—”
“Bullshit. You’re talking coincidence. And when there’s a body on the ground, there’s no such thing as coincidence.”
Rico didn’t argue. He knew I was right. Everything adds up around a corpse. But I knew he was right too. There’s circumstantial evidence. And then there’s blood on your shoes.
I pulled the lid off my coffee and fished out an ice cube. “So let’s ask the next logical question. If you