no one's daughter; allow me that.
Hasibe has a lot of names - 'Angelique,' sometimes, or just 'Angel,' when she's onscreen, and once it was 'Delilah,' and once upon a time there had been a woman who called her 'Ümit' even when no one else would; she is, of course, also called Hasi most often, and the name is simple, sibilant. It suits her.
No one calls her "Ms. Ozcelik," so when she opens the door and two men in plain clothes are using that name, she knows that either she's in real trouble or something really bad has happened, heart catching in her throat. She's dressed for a day of doing a whole lot of nothing, hair tied back, in a long-sleeved crewneck and snug little denim shorts, barefoot and bare-faced, and ordinarily she would feel a little bit wistful for her armor of sharply defined dresses and towering high heels, but what they say (after she checks their badges, polite about her wariness and saying "please") leaves her too cold to care anymore.
Cameron is dead. She's only shocked because the inevitability came this soon, and because he didn't do it himself with liquor.
(And as they talk, her martini glass sits on the bar top, half-finished at 9 AM.)
They sit on the creaking antique chairs surrounding her kitchen table, and she stares at her bare legs, at the cigarette dangling between her manicured fingertips.
"Were you and Mr. Mancini close?"
Her laugh comes unbidden, but it is mirthless. "Professionally. Yes."
"But not personally." They're an odd pair, these detectives, one tall and ginger and young, the other shorter, broader, and tired. They don't look like the trenchcoat-wearing types you see on TV, but she knew that before. No big surprise.
She shakes her head, mute. It's not because she's so stunned, or because she wants to cry - there will be some regret, because she is that particular type of woman, but there will never be tears - it's just that she's running through the possibilities imagining the scenario in her head. When she does speak, it's abrupt, jerking her head up to stare evenly at both of the police officers in her kitchen.
"You may as well tell me how it happened; I'll find out eventually, anyway. Gossip travels fast in this industry." And she assumes it was a colleague of some kind who found him. In her head she imagines this cinematically: pornographer murdered! It's salacious and will probably make the papers, despite the best efforts of these officers. The fact that his exterior security guard had been killed, too, might not even merit a mention, but she makes a note of it in her thoughts, anyway. Someone had really wanted to get to Cameron specifically, and they'd been willing to make sacrifices to do it.
The tall one (he told her his name, but it's gone out of her head entirely by now) looks at his partner and says, "He was bludgeoned, probably with a crowbar or a hammer."
She frowns, tapping her cigarette into the ashtray. "Is the body, you know..."
"Not really," he says, a little resignedly.
She exhales, slow; the morning seems still and dark and too silent, and now, although she appreciates how good they're being, all she wants to do is get these men out of the apartment and escape her own self, maybe to the Nexus. Hasi doesn't really want to let this show, though, lest it look suspicious and evasive, so she just stands up and takes her martini glass to the sink to empty it of its contents.
"Where were you that night, Ms. Ozcelik?"
The question makes her pause, and she turns to look at them over her shoulder.
"At work, dancing. Sometimes I get extra money being a feature; it brings in a pretty big crowd and I sign some autographs for the handful of die-hard fans." She moves to lean the small of her back against the kitchen counter, looking at them directly, at the cups of coffee she made them going mostly untouched, and the sharp, analytical way they look at everything there. "You want to know what I think?"
They murmur their assent.
"Statistically speaking, you're looking for a male killer, obviously; the amount of strength required to bludgeon someone with an instrument, especially beyond recognition, is typically male, with exceptions. Big exceptions. But..." She drums her fingertips on the countertop behind her. "I would bet this is about a woman. Most men in this line of work, they have no respect for women, and they have no qualms about pushing buttons to get what they want. And whoever did this was annoyed. Somebody's dad or big brother, maybe."
At their expressions, she touches a hand to her hair and half-smiles, a little ruefully.
"I was a psychology major," Hasi explains, "Sorry."
When she lets them out, the older one, the one who seemed to be taking in every detail of every movement she made, gives her a card and she almost laughs again because men are always doing this, lately, it seems like, responding unconsciously to the delicate way she looks and the lingering vulnerability in how she sometimes carries herself when she isn't intentionally being perfectly untouchable, although this time it's just- professional. She takes the card between her fingertips, looking at the name on the front, processing it again.
"Let us know if anything strikes your memory," he suggests, "We'll be in touch, Ms. Ozcelik."
She smiles in that way where it's pretty clearly for the sake of being cordial, because she doesn't mind the police and she doesn't mind their attempts at help, and as she closes the door behind them, she thinks, by the way, it's Hasibe.
Just Hasibe, who abandons the card, letting it flutter to the floor, as she stands in her empty apartment and wonders.