“Angel,” I said, and I found some difficulty believing my eyes, so I asked him, “Is that really a girl’s head there?”
He nodded and poked at the head with a pen. “Your sister says, prolly the girl from the Lowe Museum,” he said. “They put it here because this guy is such a bugero.”
I looked down at the two cuts, one just above the shoulders, the other just below the chin. The one on the head matched what we had seen before, done with neatness and care. But the one on the body that was presumably Manny was much rougher, as if it had been hurried. The edges of the two cuts were pushed together carefully, but of course they did not quite mesh. Even on my own, with no dark interior muttering, I could tell that this was different somehow, and one small cold finger crawling across the back of my neck suggested that the difference might be very important—maybe DEXTER IN THE DARK
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even to my current troubles—but beyond that vague and unsatisfying ghost of a hint, there was nothing for me here but uneasiness.
“Is there another body?” I asked him, remembering poor bul-lied Franky.
Angel shrugged without looking up. “In the bedroom,” he said.
“Just with a butcher knife stuck in him. They left his head.” He sounded a little offended that someone would go to all that trouble and leave the head, but other than that he seemed to have nothing to tell me, so I walked away, over to where my sister was now squatting beside Camilla.
“Good morning, Debs,” I said, with a cheerfulness I did not feel at all, and I was not the only one, because she didn’t even look up at me.
“Goddamn it, Dexter,” she said. “Unless you have something really good for me, stay the fuck away.”
“It isn’t all that good,” I said. “But the guy in the bedroom is named Franky. This one here is Manny Borque, who has been in a number of magazines.”
“How the fuck would you know that?” she said.
“Well, it’s a little awkward,” I said, “but I may have been one of the last people to see this guy alive.”
She straightened up. “When,” she said.
“Saturday morning. Around ten thirty. Right here.” And I pointed to the coffee cup that was still on top of the table. “Those are my prints.”
Deborah was looking at me with disbelief and shaking her head. “You knew this guy,” she said. “He was a friend of yours?”
“I hired him to cater my wedding,” I said. “He was supposed to be very good at it.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “So what were you doing here on a Saturday morning?”
“He raised the price on me,” I said. “I wanted to talk him down.”
She looked around the apartment and glanced out the window at the million-dollar view. “What was he charging?” she said.
“Five hundred dollars a plate,” I said.
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Her head snapped around to face me again. “Jesus fuck,” she said. “For what?”
I shrugged. “He wouldn’t tell me, and he wouldn’t lower the price.”
“Five hundred dollars a plate?” she said.
“It is a little high, isn’t it? Or should I say, it was.”
Deborah chewed on her lip for a long moment without blinking, and then she grabbed me by the arm and pulled me away from Camilla. I could still see one small foot sticking out of the kitchen door where the dear departed had met his untimely end, but Deborah led me away from it and over to the far end of the room.
“Dexter,” she said, “promise me you didn’t kill this guy.”
As I have mentioned before, I do not have real emotions. I have practiced long and hard to react the way human beings would react in almost every possible situation—but this one caught me by surprise. What is the correct facial expression for being accused of murder by your sister? Shock? Anger? Disbelief? As far as I knew, this wasn’t covered in any of the textbooks.