Day Shift

“No spell lasts forever without reinforcement,” she said. “Not that I know of, anyway.”

He got into his car feeling a bit… jaunty, which was an adjective he’d never thought of applying to himself. He had a good lawyer and a good witch and a kick-ass adventuress on his side. He listened to NPR on his drive to Bonnet Park, convinced it would make him feel smarter. The Dallas traffic almost popped the balloon of his confidence, but he negotiated it with some finesse and pulled into the visitor’s lot ten minutes early.

As if she’d planned it to the second, a Lexus pulled in beside him, and out of it stepped Magdalena Orta Powell. It must be her; she looked like a distinguished lawyer. He decided she was in her midforties. Her hair was short and styled perfectly, her makeup was good but understated, her skirt was a beige cotton blend and fitted her curves unapologetically, and the short-sleeved brown and white patterned blouse with its big brown buttons was attractive but definitely on the ladylike side. Her brown heels were attention-grabbers. Manfred felt certain he could not have taken a single step wearing them.

“Mr. Bernardo?” She shook his hand. Her grip was firm, but she didn’t squeeze. She stood back and gave him a head-to-toe scan. Manfred had wisely eschewed his public “all black” look for his police visit, instead wearing a pair of khakis and a white linen shirt with subdued palm trees all over it. “No jewelry aside from the piercings, good,” she said. “The piercings are bad enough.”

“But they’ll believe me,” Manfred said confidently. He didn’t know what Fiji had done to him, but he wished he could pay her to come over and do it every morning.

“Are you on drugs?” his lawyer asked sharply.

“I never use drugs,” he said. “And what do I call you? I can’t say ‘Magdalena Orta Powell!’ every time I want to get your attention.”

“Ms. Powell will do just fine,” she said. “Shall we dance?” She pointed up the walkway to the glass doors into the public safety building. “This is less intimidating than going into the Dallas police headquarters,” she added, “but don’t be fooled. This is professional law enforcement, and they hate having a messy case on their hands.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” he said, with great certainty.

“I wish I could guarantee that meant you wouldn’t end up in jail.”

He did feel a twinge of concern for a moment, but then it floated away on the tide of his conviction that he would convince the police that he was the most upright citizen they’d ever met.

“Detective,” he was saying a few minutes later when they’d been ushered back to an interrogation room. He stood and shook the detective’s hand.

“You know each other?” Ms. Powell didn’t get up, but she nodded to the detective as if she’d met him before.

“We met at the hotel, Vespers, right, Mr. Bernardo?” Detective Sterling sat down opposite them.

Manfred gave him a much closer look than he’d given when he’d first met the detective. Sterling was dark and stocky, and his close-cut hair was graying. He’d put on a pair of glasses with metal rims, which glinted in the overhead light, giving him a strangely old-fashioned look. Another man entered at that moment and took the seat by Sterling. They were wearing what amounted to a uniform: white short-sleeved shirts, blue patterned ties, and khakis. But the other detective was very tall, at least five inches over six feet, and older, too, with snowy hair. He did not wear glasses, and his blue eyes were sharp and intent in a weathered, red, lined face.

Yet Manfred was not afraid. He could feel Ms. Powell tense, though, and she said, “Well, a detective who does not seem to have met my client yet. Hi, Tom.”

Tom smiled at Ms. Powell. “Maggie. Hey, buddy, I’m Tom Freemont.”

Manfred smiled back at him as they shook hands. “Good to meet you, Detective. What can I do for you all today?”

“You’ve gotten all kind of snarled up in something, Mr. Bernardo,” said Detective Sterling. Just us good and simple folks, trying to understand. “We need to straighten that out, make sure we understand exactly what’s happening.”

Manfred tried to look intelligently interested.

Ms. Powell said, “Are you charging my client with anything?”

“No, not at the present time.”

“Then what do you need to know about? What crime are you thinking he may have committed? Because I sure haven’t heard of anything. Did not Rachel Goldthorpe die of natural causes?”

“We’re still waiting for the test results to come back. Maybe a combination of age, weight, high blood pressure, and a bad case of pneumonia all wound up together and killed her.” Detective Freemont flipped open a folder and glanced at the contents. “We have to say there was no immediately obvious cause of death.”

“So you don’t think my client had anything to do with the death of Mrs. Goldthorpe.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“So you believe she was murdered?”