TWILLY PHONED YUKI at the office, asked her to have dinner with him at Aubergine, a hot new restaurant on McAllister. “I’ve got so much work to do,” she moaned. Then she relented. “An early dinner, okay? That would be great.”
At six the restaurant was filling up with the loud pretheater crowd, but she and Twilly had a small table far from the bar, where it was quiet enough to talk. Twilly’s knees bumped against hers from time to time and Yuki didn’t mind.
“Davis is like an IED,” Yuki said, moving tiny bay scallops on her plate with her fork. “She blows up in your face at every checkpoint.”
“Her act is getting old. Don’t worry,” Twilly told her. “She’s probably up every night worrying about you.”
Yuki smiled at her dinner companion, said, “Hey. That’s enough about me.” And she asked him to tell her about his first true-crime book.
“Must I? It sold about two hundred copies.”
“It did not.”
“It did, and I know because I bought all of them myself.”
Yuki threw back her head and laughed, loosening up finally, feeling pleased that she had Twilly’s attention all to herself.
“I wrote it under a pseudonym,” Twilly said. “That way if you were to Google me, that bomb won’t come up on the list.”
“Well, now I know,” said Yuki. “So, what was the book about?”
Twilly sighed dramatically, but Yuki could see he was just revving his motor before rolling out a story he loved to tell.
“It’s about this country-western singer-songwriter in Nashville,” Twilly said. “Joey Flynn. Ever hear of her?”
“Nope.”
“Okay, well, about ten years ago, Joey Flynn had cut a couple of records and was making her way up the charts. ‘Hot Damn.’ You know that song? Or ‘Blue Northern’? No? Well, it doesn’t matter.
“Joey was married to a carpenter, Luke Flynn, her high school sweetheart, and they’d had four kids before they were twenty-five. One day a fan brought Joey a hundred roses at this saloon where she was singing, and her heart went zing.”
“A hundred roses . . . ,” Yuki said, imagining it.
Twilly grinned, said, “Joey messed around with thi............