“Why are you still dressed?” she asked, her face twisting in pain. “You look like you just got home. Quickly,” she said, turning me around. “Take off those clothes, and put on a nightgown. Hurry!”
I rushed to do what she said while she stood guard at the slightly opened door, listening.
“Someone’s coming up here,” she told me as I slipped into my bathrobe and then my slippers. “You didn’t even wash off your makeup, you fool!”
She grabbed a washcloth and roughly scrubbed at my face.
There was a knock at my door. We both froze.
“Who the hell is it?” she cried.
“Jesse. You’d better come downstairs with Delia right now,” he said. “The Palm Springs police are here.”
“Why?”
“Just come downstairs, Sophia. Bring her. This is very serious.”
She went to the door and opened it to face him. “Why are the police here?”
“They want to speak with Delia,” he said. “And you.”
“Why?” she demanded, putting her hands on her hips.
Jesse looked past her at me. “It’s what they want.”
“I don’t care what they want. My mother’s not home. Tell them to come back when my mother’s home.”
“Don’t be stupid, Sophia. You’d better come downstairs right now.”
“Why? Why is it so important to talk to them now? It’s late. We were both about to go to sleep.”
“Sophia…”
“Tell them that, Jesse.”
“They won’t go away, Sophia.”
“Why not?”
Jesse looked at me. “Because Bradley Whitfield está muerto.”
My heart had already stopped, and the blood had drained from my face. It felt as if the air had been baked around me. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means he’s dead,” Jesse said.
Sophia stepped back as if he had spit at her. She looked at
me and then at him. “That’s impossible. How could he be dead?”
“How could he be? Apparently, someone threw him through a window, and the glass severed an artery. He bled to death before the ambulance arrived.”
“Bled to death?”
“The girl he was with, Jana Lawler, was too hysterical to get to a phone in time.”
“He’s really dead?”