A crazy thought dawns on me as I pull a chef’s knife out of the block to butterfly a pork loin and stuff it with figs. I’m not sure whether it is the knife or the figs that have triggered the daft notion. I take a deep breath and gaze at the Pyrex bowl of water in which the dry figs are hydrating, becoming plump again, as if reborn with a memory of themselves lolling from their stems in the copiousness of a summer tree.

The idea is so unsavory I decide not to entertain it as I prepare dinner. I pull out the rainbow chard and chop the stems separately from the leaves. Now what? I seem to be unable to keep the thought at bay. How could my client Aubrey possibly be a killer?

The other day when I ran into him outside The Girl and the Fig he was dressed up like somebody going to church, but it was a Saturday afternoon. He wore a facemask crafted from a peculiar fabric, a print that featured model airplanes. I stood there on the street wondering if Aubrey made models when he was a kid, and then I mused about him as a child, a habitual stutterer plagued with shame.

As he looked at me, his eyes bright with excitement, I made the mistake of telling him that I liked his mask and he said he really liked mine. I don’t recall which mask I was wearing, but something felt creepy when he said that. He asked if I’d heard about the murder at the restaurant. I didn’t want to talk about that with him. Really I didn’t want to talk about anything, but the particular way he mentioned the killing made it sound like a bit of dark gossip. Thankfully, he said nothing about my name’s association with the victim’s body. As far as I know that is not public knowledge. My name did not appear in either the Sonoma Index-Tribune account of the killing or in the subsequent article in the S.F. Chronicle.

Aubrey got out of the takeout line and started to follow me, although I gave him no encouragement. In fact, I was walking away from him, up Spain, past a gaggle of folks waiting to gather their takeout pizza at Mary’s. I decided to turn south on First Street East rather than to continue on my way back to the condo. I didn’t want Aubrey to know where I lived in case he kept following me. He lagged a few steps behind me, but I didn’t know how to lose him. Being rude comes naturally to me, but somehow I didn’t want to act that way toward Aubrey. He has developed a certain skill at making people feel sorry for him, which I suppose I fell victim to.

I tried a practical approach at first, telling him that he’d lose his place in line and his food would be cold by the time he got it. That didn’t seem to concern him. He spoke with minimal stuttering about “the great co-co-coince-coincidence” of running into me. I had the odd feeling that he’d been working hard to create such a “coincidence.” He went on about the dishes he had ordered; how he always bought two meals at once and managed with his own side dishes to stretch them into four meals. On that day he’d ordered a pair of duck confit legs and fried chicken for two. It all warmed up well in the microwave. Why I remember these details I do not know. Aubrey thought it was worth the drive up from the city once a week to get four meals from The Girl and the Fig.

Now I extract the figs from their broth and dry them with a towel, add salted pistachio nuts to the fattened figs, and fill the cavity of the pork loin. In the past I’ve had bad luck with tying the loin. More often than not the stuffing seeps out. So this time I find a needle with a fat eye, thread it with kitchen twine, and sew the loin together. I stand back and admire the straight seam, pour the fig broth in a saucepan, hit it with a half dozen shakes of piment d’Espelette, and boil it down a moment before pouring it over the stuffed loin and roasting it—all this in a failed effort to forget Aubrey and his possible involvement with the killing.

Aubrey followed me down First Street East, past the Plaza Bistro, Basque Boulangerie, and Sebastiani Theater, chattering the whole way.

“More than a ma-month has gone by,” he said, “and they haven’t caught the murderer yet, Pa-Pina.”

I wondered how he knew this, but my curiosity wasn’t sufficiently piqued to inquire. It felt a bit like having a rabid dog on my tail and, when I got to Napa Street, I turned to face him, and spoke sharply, “I will see you later, Aubrey.” In case he didn’t understand, I repeated the phrase.

He seemed to get it. See you later, Pa-Pina. Ga-good to see you. Can we do a Zoom soon?”

I didn’t answer. Instead, I turned the corner and slipped into Readers’ Books, hoping Aubrey wouldn’t follow me. I spent half an hour browsing through the wall of fiction, looking over my shoulder, from time to time. As far as I know, Aubrey never entered the bookshop.

I browsed the small poetry section, wandered over to travel books—a strange fantasy realm given these times—and ended up in the cookbooks, gawking at glossy photos of soufflés and moussakas—bone fide food porn—before stumbling on a book by Jennifer McLagan called Blood. The title should have given me pause, but it didn’t. McLagan had been awarded a James Beard honor a few years ago for her book Fat. The Blood book is small, not a hundred pages, but with lovely line drawings; it has twenty-six recipes. I got swept away with the idea of making Blood Meringues, substituting blood for the eggs, despite the recipe’s caution that blood takes longer to whisk into shape. The recipe for pork, chicken liver, and blood terrine caught my eye, as well as the blood pancake mix, and the chocolate blood tarts. The book even featured blood cocktails. Fancy a bloody Ramos Fizz. I ended up buying the book and when the clerk asked if I wanted it wrapped, I nodded. Who will I give it to? Perhaps a Valentine’s Day gift for Charlie, should we live that long.

I walked out the back door of the shop into the alley with my wrapped package of Blood, and saw no sign of Aubrey. But the blood stayed with me, and my secret abortion at seventeen, which I’ve spent the last thirty-five years trying to forget, played on every channel of my brain. It wasn’t that I thought it was so terrible a thing to do, or that the idea of my unborn child now entering middle age, haunted me. The craziness of keeping it secret is what spooked me. I did tell the boy, Roger, and somehow he came up with the money I needed. It was my friend Leslie that accompanied me to the clinic. Leslie’s older sister Barbara had had an abortion so that somehow made Leslie an expert consort. She told me about her older sister getting blood from a butcher shop to drizzle onto her panties so that her mother wouldn’t know that she missed her period. “Your mother does your laundry doesn’t she?” Leslie asked. I knew she was right, and the fact that my mother bought the cheapest menstrual pads, which always leaked, couldn’t be overlooked. So a week before the procedure was scheduled I drove to a butcher in Novato, where nobody knew me, and asked for blood, claiming my father was going to make blood sausage. The butcher looked at me like I was half-crocked and said, “So you want pig blood?” I walked out of the shop with a pint of pig blood when all I needed was a half a teaspoon. The next problem was what to do with all the blood I didn’t use. A sensible girl would have poured it down the toilet and flushed a couple of times for good measure. I dug a hole behind the persimmon tree in the backyard, when nobody was home and buried the blood there. Even as a daft teenager, the symbolism of the burial wasn’t lost on me. Years later, when I came home to visit my parents, I’d always go out behind the persimmon tree and stand for a moment.

Wouldn’t you know it? I’ve forgotten to pre-heat the oven. That’s how distracted I’ve become by my thinking about Aubrey and the pint of blood.

As the oven begins to warm, I wash the Swiss chard and peel potatoes, which I then cut into wedges. Now I pour myself a stiff glass of Glenlivet and drop a single ice cube into the tumbler. The sound of distant footsteps draws me to the kitchen window. I look out onto the courtyard as a young woman knocks on the door of the lower condo across the yard. It’s Rico’s place. He has a lot of young women visit him, even in these times. The door opens and the woman disappears inside. Maybe it’s Rico’s sister, I tell myself. That’s what I think every time. The man has a lot of sisters. I feel like a besotted concierge watching the street, even though I’ve barely touched my drink. It’s time to sit down and seriously address what’s in the glass.

Suddenly I remember my intake meeting with Aubrey at our Bush Street office. I asked about his history of stuttering and what kind of treatment he’d had. He spoke about his elementary school speech class and, as he did, his stuttering got worse. How bad must PTSD be for adults who grew up being humiliated for stuttering? In our first meeting Aubrey talked about some of the bullies who had made fun of him. He still could not pronounce the word bully without making a mess of it. I praised him for his perseverance. Praise, even as a strained alternative to shame, is the only antidote I know for easing the burden these longtime stutterers carry.

Aubrey seemed to calm down. He took off his sport coat and I remember being surprised that his white shirt was short sleeve and had deep yellow perspiration stains under the arms. The sight of his mighty biceps was even more startling. He noticed me looking at them and said, “I’ve been lift . . . lifting weights for years. I all-also have a ba-black belt in karate. The next bull-ba-bully who makes fun of me is going to ga-get it.”

Charlie and I have been strangers in the last week. I’m not clear what’s been consuming him most: Roscoe, his daughter’s addiction, or the sorry business with the death of the waiter. My strategy at dinner is to not mention any of that. I’m not ready to communicate my speculation about Aubrey; what kind of definitive proof am I waiting for?

Charlie is tip-toing around me as much as I am around him. Somehow we’ve arrived at a tacit agreement of what not to discuss, which leaves us not much to say. We’ve already exhausted the weather: the forecast is for a week of rain, much needed. I drink down the Pinot Noir as quickly as he pours it. We are on our second bottle now and I’ve done most of the heavy lifting, that after I had a couple of hardy wallops of Scotch. Charlie waxes eloquently about the fig and pistachio stuffed pork loin, telling me that he can cook a decent meal but that only I can rise to the level of true chef. It’s a sweet lie and I thank him.

Then Charlie surprises me; he breaks our treaty by asking me to think again about all of my clients. Couldn’t there be one who’s obsessed with me? He has a half glass of Pinot in his hand that he’s clearly not going to drink. He uses the wine glass as a prop. Let’s see if he can get the glass to talk like his fucking parrot. He’s been mocking me all night; as l pollute myself, he’s doing his sober bit. It comes naturally to him, and he finds pleasure in watching Pina get smashed on Pinot. He wants to know about the stutterer I told him about, who can’t pronounce my name, the guy who is always a little too eager.

“What about him?” Charlie asks.

I give him a name. “Aubrey.”

“Yeah, that guy.”

My mouth has a bad taste, but it’s neither from the meal or the wine. I feel like spitting. “Will you do me a favor, Charlie? Either drink your fucking wine or put down the glass.”

Charlie looks at me sideways. It makes me think of a B movie trick with cinematography—tilting the camera to indicate a character is crazed or that we are now entering a new dimension. Charlie takes a long sip of his wine and puts down the glass.

“Thank you. Yes, I was stewing about Aubrey all afternoon. I don’t want to believe it’s him.”

“Of course you don’t.”

A half an hour after we’ve cleared up the dishes, we meet Detective Boyer on the street out front of the condo. He’s smoking pot out of a curved Meerschaum pipe baring the carved head of a pirate. Charlie and I keep our distance from him. My idea had been to contact the Sheriff’s Department, but Charlie argued that Augie Boyer was a friend of a friend and would be more help to us. I told Charlie that the detective seemed like a nutcase to me, but in the end I demurred.

“Nice touch, the pipe,” says Charlie, who really seems to enjoy Boyer and his bizarre get-up.

“Yeah, my wife is trying to turn me into Sherlock Holmes. She gave me the Sherlock hat as well, but I had to draw the line somewhere.”

Boyer’s wearing an eggplant colored baseball cap with the words: “Everyday I have the blues,” stitched in tidy white cursive script across the front. Something’s wrong about the cap. Nobody who actually has the blues advertises it with neat handwriting, and yet, I remind myself that whoever carved my name into the dead waiter’s back did it carefully.

Charlie kicks off the conversation, nice and easy, asking Boyer about the predominant type of cases he gets, given that he’s based in the small river town of Guerneville.

The detective pulls out a metal pipe-cleaning tool attached to a key chain. He goes at the bowl of the Meerschaum with a few sturdy jabs and dumps the contents onto the street. After dropping the pipe in a pocket of the canvas briefcase that hangs by a strap from his shoulder, he fits his facemask into place. He’s dispensed with haikus, at least for the time being, and wears a simple surgical mask.

“The thing is,” he says, “I have offices in San Francisco and Berkeley. Actually, I am the office and I’m always in, with a Berkeley phone number and one for the city. I carry three phones; it’s the price of doing business.”

“But you don’t get a lot of murders,” Charlie says.

“No, they’re even rarer than I like my steak. You know, I always wanted my work as a detective to be iconic, Charlie: solving terrible crimes by following clues nobody else finds, but the day to day is nothing like that. It’s a cliché, is what it is. I mostly follow guys their wives suspect of cheating. I get word of mouth referrals from women from three counties. Divorce attorneys give me simple assignments. Minimal video documentation suffices. Yep, infidelity is my bread and butter. My mother would have been ashamed of me. I can hear her from the grave, ‘You’re nothing but a Peeping Tom.’”

Charlie laughs. “But don’t you get male clients suspicious about their wives?”

“Rarely, Charlie, rarely. In my experience most men are too arrogant to suspect their wives of doing the dirty with somebody else. And when a man calls I usually send him to a female detective I know. Working with cuckolds is not good for my digestion—they remind me of myself.”

“Well,” Charlie says, “you have a violent case now.”

Boyer straightens the brim of his cap. “Yeah, so what do you guys have for me? You’ve been very quiet, Pina.”

“It’s only a hunch,” I say.

“Hunches are good.”

“A man I work with, a client—I think you know that I’m a speech pathologist.”

“Yes.”

“His name’s Aubrey Kincaid.” It’s odd revealing my suspicions to Boyer. It feels a little like finking to the vice principal in middle school about another girl’s misdeeds. I remind myself that a man’s been killed and that I may know the murderer. Boyer scribbles with a yellow pencil in a notepad while Charlie nods encouragement to me. “Aubrey has a connection with The Girl and the Fig. He lives in the city but comes up to the restaurant regularly. Now he just gets take-out, but at the time of the murder they were still serving meals outside.”

I told the detective about running into Aubrey outside of the restaurant, the other day, and how he brought up the subject of the unsolved murder.

“Funny,” Boyer says, “I’ve noticed how these killers don’t like it when all the noise about their crime goes quiet. It’s like it hasn’t happened. What did they go to all that trouble for? What else can you tell me about Aubrey?”

“I think he has a crush on me.”

“Seems like everybody does, Pina.”

I flipped off the detective. Charlie looked horrified, but Boyer smiled at me.

“First time today somebody’s shot me the bird; my wife’s out of town. So, what else can you tell me about Aubrey.”

“He’s a weightlifter with a black belt in karate.”

“Or so he’s told you.”

“I’ve seen his biceps.”

“Hmm.” Boyer unfurls a leather tobacco pouch and refills his pipe with pot. I’m dying for a few hits of weed. The detective senses where I’m at. “I’ve got a doobie in a tube in here,” he says, indicating his briefcase.

I nod to him and he pulls it out. Next comes a vintage Zippo lighter with a detailed rendering of a fly on its face. Boyer gallantly lights the joint before putting fire to the bowl of his Meerschaum. It shouldn’t surprise me how much better I feel after a few tokes.

“So we have a dude who’s a bodybuilder but also a black belt. Sounds like a very careful creature—the kind of guy who wears a belt and suspenders at the same time. And yet, you think he may have blood on his hands. What else?”

“I think he has it in for people who mock his stutter.”

“What makes you think that, Pina?”

“He told me.”

Boyer takes a long hit from his pipe.

“Tell Augie how he says your name,” Charlie chirps.

I do and the detective asks me about my next session with Aubrey.

“None is scheduled. I was doing personal Zoom sessions with my clients but I needed a break.”

The detective shakes his head. “Break’s over. Schedule an in-person meeting with him next week. A lunch session with take-out from The Girl and the Fig. I’ll give you a little something to wear.”

“I have to wear a wire?”

“Don’t be dramatic, Pina,” Boyer says.

Charlie asks, “Is this safe, Augie?”

“Safe as a meal of milk and cookies. You will be in the park in plain sight and I’ll be nearby. In the meantime, relax, you two. Enjoy the coming deluge. They tell me it’s going to rain for thirty days and thirty nights. Let me know when you have a date with Mr. Aubrey Kincaid. Remember, Pina, our goal is justice for Jesus.”