Waking Hours by Lis Wiehl Page B

mean, mine is the first?”
    “I misspoke,” he said. “Liam’s case is the first. He asked if I could help him.”
    “Claire hired you?” Dani asked. She walked beside him, the October sky above them clear and blue.
    “Nobody hired me,” Tommy said, tossing his head back to throw his hair from his eyes. “I have more money than I know what to do with. I’m doing this because Liam is my friend, and he needs help. And you’re my friend too, I hope, and if you need my help, you’ve got it. If you ask me for it.”
    Dani didn’t know quite what to make of his offer. On the one hand, the last thing she needed was a blundering amateur muddying up the waters and trampling on the evidence. On the other hand, she needed all the help she could get. She’d been John Foley’s gofer. Now she was the lead consultant, and she didn’t have a gofer. Tommy was clearly a lot brighter than she’d given him credit for, and the fact of his celebrity could open doors for her that might otherwise be closed.
    They’d reached the curb, where Tommy had parked his motorcycle, a matte-black Harley Davidson Iron 883 Sportster with matching black saddlebags. He unlocked his helmet from the handlebar and put it on.
    “You get one of these,” he told her, patting the seat of his bike, “and you never have to worry about parking in the city.” He mounted the bike, turned the key in the ignition, and revved the throttle. The engine growled.
    For a moment Dani pictured herself riding behind him cross-country, camping along the way . . .
    “So what do you think?” he asked her, throttling down. “We could make it official, and you could hire me. That way you could fire me if it doesn’t work out.”
    “Not sure it’s in the budget,” she said.
    “One dollar,” Tommy said. “And that comes with a money-back guarantee.” He offered her his hand.
    She considered. “But I’m the boss,” she said.
    “You’re totally the boss. You say jump, I say on whom. So what do you think?”
    She hesitated, still weighing the pros and cons. His hand hung in the air.
    “Sure,” she said finally, taking his hand and shaking it. “But you can’t tell anybody you’re working for the district attorney. That didn’t come out right. I work for the DA. You work for me. You’re not—”
    “Official. I know,” Tommy said. “For the third time, I’m not doing this because anybody hired me. I just want to help. Do you have the dollar?”
    “I don’t think so,” she said. “I’d have to find an ATM.”
    “You’re good for it,” he said, revving the throttle. “You going to the candlelight vigil for Julie Leonard tonight? Eight o’clock at the high school.”
    The vigil had come together with remarkable speed, Dani thought, but with Twitter and Facebook and texting and instant messaging, such things were possible these days. Kids were frightened. There was strength, and comfort, in numbers.
    “I’ll be there,” she said. “It will be interesting to see who shows up. We’re questioning the kids who were at the party tomorrow. Call me on my cell.”
    “What’s the number?”
    He entered her numbers into his phone as she spoke them.
    “This looks like the start of a beautiful friendship,” he said. “That’s from Casablanca .”
    “I know where it’s from,” she said.
    As he rode off, she wondered what he’d look like in a white tuxedo jacket.
    When he was gone, she read the printout he’d given her. The old woman’s words were consistent with the research Dani had done into Alzheimer’s the day before. A confusion of fact and fantasy; an inability to find the words needed to communicate, hence the Italian and Latin; the inability to locate temporally, hence the confusion of present and future tenses. A person with Alzheimer’s sometimes substitutes words for what they really mean, she had read. They are trying to say something that’s important to them, though it’s often difficult to interpret what they’re trying