Death by Chocolate

Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

"Nice place," Trent said when he walked into my house.

He didn't strike me as the type to say something nice just to be polite. I gave the man another point for having good taste.

"Thanks," I said. "I like it."

King Henry strolled over to wind around the detective's legs in that no-bones way of his. As I headed upstairs to get James Edwards' address, I turned back to see how Trent was dealing with Henry. The way a man deals with a cat says a lot about him.

He'd squatted to the cat's level and was stroking his back. I could hear Henry purring.

All right, that made a total of three points, but he was still in the hole big time because of the way he'd treated Paula. Besides, he was a cop and cops wrote speeding tickets. An automatic one hundred point deficit.

When I came back downstairs he was inspecting the antique Singer treadle sewing machine that I used to hold my nineteen-inch television set. I'm sure I don't have to mention that Rick got the big screen in the game room. No big deal. I don't even have a game room. He got that too.

"It originally belonged to my great-grandmother," I said. "The sewing machine, not the television."

To my surprise, he smiled. It wasn't the sunrise-in-the-desert kind of smile like Rick had, but a slow, easy smile that crinkled the corners of eyes and made them sparkle. "I like antiques," he said. "They seem to hold something from everybody who owns them so it's sort of like you have a piece of furniture with a past."

"Yeah," I agreed. "My grandmother used to sew on this when I was a little girl. I rescued it from my parents' attic. The embroidered scarf was hers too. She died a couple of years ago. I miss her. That drop-leaf table with the Tiffany lamp on it belonged to her too." Suddenly I felt a little silly, talking about my furniture and my grandmother to Detective Adam Trent. "Here's that address you wanted." I walked closer and handed him a piece of paper.

"Thanks." He accepted the paper, glanced at what I'd written, then stuck it in his shirt pocket but made no move to leave. "Your friend Paula doesn't share your love of antiques. All her furniture's new."

Should have known he'd come back to that. Deduct all those points I'd just given him.

I shrugged. "Antiques have to start somewhere. That sewing machine was new when my great-grandmother was young. Zach's grandkids will probably think that coffee table of Paula's is really cool fifty years from now."

Trent lifted one eyebrow. "Her coffee table?"

"Okay, maybe not the coffee table." The boring piece of furniture probably wouldn't last fifty years and certainly wouldn't inspire somebody to call it cool if it did. I searched my mind for another topic of conversation, anything to get away from Paula's lack of history. "You want a Coke?"

Oh, that was a great diversion! Offer him a drink, make him comfortable and give him a reason to hang around so he'd have plenty of time to quiz me about Paula.

On the other hand, I still needed to get Lester Mackey's address from him, and it wouldn't hurt to find out exactly what Trent knew about Paula, especially if it happened to be something I didn't know.

"You got anything that's not diet?" he asked. "I can't drink that diet stuff."

"Nothing diet, nothing caffeine-free. Just the hard stuff."

I went to the kitchen and got cold cans for both of us. It was only when I handed him his that I thought to ask if he wanted a glass with ice. I consume my Cokes straight from the can, full strength. Pouring a Coke into a glass wasn't something I ordinarily did.