“And he was making a lot of moves, making changes. I imagine that is why your bosses decided something needed to happen to him.”
“I don’t have bosses.”
“Are we really going to do this all day?” I asked, sighing. “I know you’re in the mafia. You know you’re in the mafia. It’s kind of silly to pretend there is anything else going on here.”
“Back to your boyfriend,” he said, clearly too stubborn to give in on the matter. But at least he wasn’t outwardly denying there was a mafia anymore.
“Well, you see. You set off a chain of events when you killed him.”
“I never said I killed him.”
“And I imagine you never would. But I know it was you. It took me years to figure it all out, but I know it was you. That’s not even why I’m here, so we don’t need to harp on it.”
“You don’t want to harp on your dead boyfriend?”
“No.”
“What do you want then?”
“After Cody died, there was a period where everyone was sort of mourning and things were all up in the air. No one even asked me to move out of the apartment at that point.”
“You stayed in that apartment? Where you’d found him dead?”
“I had nowhere else to go,” I admitted.
What I chose not to tell him was that I spent a few months there, but almost all the time I did, I spent in the bedroom, far away from the living room and all the terrible memories I had of finding my boyfriend dead.
I even used some spare cash I had lying around to buy a mini-fridge, plugging it in next to the bed, so I didn’t even have to go out there to get food.
“Something forced you out eventually?” Massimo asked.
“Someone. Cody’s brother. He was Cody’s third-hand-man, if you will. His second-hand-man was his best friend. Who mysteriously went missing a week after Cody’s death. Which is so screwed up. Mike was a good guy.”
“And Cody’s brother isn’t?”
“Colin… huh,” I said, exhaling hard. “You know how there is that age-old argument about how people turn out? Is it nature or nurture?”
“Yeah.”
“Colin came out wrong,” I said, shaking my head. “Have you ever met someone like that? Like you knew the moment you met them that they just… weren’t right. There are critical screws missing. In Colin’s case, those screws would have held his conscience in. So, yeah, he had none.”
“Cody wasn’t like that?”
“Cody was…” I started, letting out a sigh. “Cody was an okay guy. I know that sounds harsh. He’d been my boyfriend. But he hadn’t been the love of my life. He wasn’t even a very good boyfriend. But he treated his men fairly and he never went out of his way to hurt me or anything.”
“But Colin does?”
“Colin is like the grown-up version of that mean little kid with a magnifying glass, trying to burn up bugs. He likes to hurt people just for the thrill it brings him.”
“Has he been trying to burn you up?” Massimo asked.
“About three weeks after Cody was buried, Colin showed up at the door. I mean, I’d been expecting to see someone. Mike, maybe. Someone, though. Since I clearly wasn’t paying the bills at the apartment, and I was going to need to find a new place to live.”
“Is that what happened?”
“Yes. And no. Colin informed me that the apartment was going to be used as the new, like, headquarters for the organization. But not to worry because he had a place for me.”
“Not liking the sound of this.”