by Amy Faye
Just 'look at her, she looks like she's had a whole wedding to prepare for in only a couple of weeks.'
She's always been good at faking her appearance. It's one of her greatest talents, and now she's doing just as well as she ever has.
Which is good, in the long run. She's not sure that she's ready to try to figure anything else out right now. Because if she does, then she knows what she'll figure out. She'll figure out that the only thing keeping her away from that kitchen, with that dark-eyed man, is Mitch Queen.
And no matter how much she knows that he's the one responsible, it doesn't matter, because there's never going to be anything that she can do about it.
So it's better not to think about it. Just like she always did.
It's just better that way.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Josh Meadows sets the phone back down on the coffee table. Face up, so he can see when the call comes through even before the ringer picks up. Because he's waiting for a call, and it'll be coming through any minute now.
It's not illegal to poke through someone's private records, not exactly. See, there's private records and then there's private records.
Detectives do this kind of thing all the time. Private detectives, not police detectives. Not usually, anyways. With only one name, it's not easy to say which members of Al Queen's estate staff are ex-cons and which aren't.
Because of the one that Josh Meadows knows, exactly one is. If you extrapolate outwards, of the thirty or forty people who Josh saw, they're all convicts. Including himself, very possibly, because someone might look at him and see his relatively shabby clothes and mistake him for a servant when he wasn't.
No, you need a list to go through. Because wildly guessing gets you nowhere. A list isn't impossible to compile, but it is pretty difficult. It's doubly difficult if you're on suspension, with or without pay.
It's triply difficult when the person who you're poking around is Al Queen, who was mayor of this damn city for going on eight years, and now who's running for congress.
No, that's not the kind of person that someone on suspension generally pokes into the affairs of. Particularly not if that someone was suspended for punching Al Queen's kid so hard that he almost certainly had to get dental work done.
That wasn't the kind of digging that got done on its own. It wasn't even the kind of digging that got done if you knew which wheels to grease. It was the kind of digging that got done if you were particularly committed to digging and you didn't mind how dirty you had to get for it.
In this case, he got off fairly light, all told. He owed a few favors, but since when was that surprising? He always owed favors. And people always owed him favors. It was practically a reciprocal economy, at times.
That's how it goes. You ask someone to look into things for you, get some information, and you ask them not to tell the Captain, and the Captain definitely doesn't call you on your cell phone, knowing full well that you're suspended and you should be damn well happy that a suspension was all you got.
Which is why Josh took a second in answering the phone, even though he'd been waiting for a call while trying to scribble out a sixth draft of his apology speech. Because the Captain was definitely not supposed to call him.
He answers the phone anyways, though. Not answering wasn't ever an option. "Captain?"
"What the fuck are these stories I'm hearing about you, Meadows?"
Josh almost smiles. "Stories, sir?"
The voice on the other side of the line is angry. She's cute when she's angry, he has to admit. Not to her face, of course. Or to any of his coworkers. Or ever think about it. Because that's not the sort of thing that you ever bring up. Not ever.
"Don't you play dumb with me, you son of a bitch. You know exactly what I'm talking about, so don't you dare try to play any games with me."
"Games, sir?"
She hates that. It's better that way. Better for everyone, probably. But what's he supposed to do, just come right out and say what he's thinking? No way. She'd shoot it right down.
So Josh is going to keep playing dumb as long as he can manage it, in spite of the fact that the Captain will very likely blow a gasket if he keeps the act up much longer.
"I told you to go home, didn't I? I told you to keep whatever the fuck this personal vendetta was at home, too, didn't I? I told you to leave the Queen boy be. Didn't I?"
"You did, sir."
"And what did you do? Exactly what, precisely, did you do not three days later? Enlighten me."
"I followed up a lead, sir."
Josh can hear her breathing through the other end of the line. She's breathing like she's going to pop a blood vessel. "I'm going to let you have three minutes, and this had better be god damned good. You cannot possibly imagine the world of shit that you will be in if you don't impress the ever loving hell out of me."
Josh thinks that he probably can, actually.
"I've been digging a little."
"Yeah, I know," she says.
"Well, what got me started was, the description of the kidnappers, what description we got from Miss Witt, sounded a little familiar. Jeffries asked me, a while ago, to take a look at that robbery case that he's working on."
She doesn't say anything.
"So I was thinking, there's a good chance that it's one of the guys he's looking at. No problems there. But the similarity in the disguises, it struck me as odd. Both wearing dark, heavy clothes. Both wear ski masks, both cover their eyes so you can't even see the color of their damn skin under the mask."
"That's pretty circumstantial, Meadows."
"Well, I figure, it's a long shot. I've got a weird feeling about Queen, though. The younger one. He didn't seem that surprised when we told him about his daughter going missing, you know."
"I don't think being an asshole is enough to justify the sort of insinuations you're making, Meadows."
"If it turns out to be nothing, I don't make any insinuations at all. I just keep it all to myself, don't say anything, unless my darling Captain calls me up and asks me to explain the whole thing."
"Fine. We'll indulge your fantasy for a minute. Speaking of which, you've got ninety seconds by my watch."
"Okay. So let's say, just for the sake of argument, that he knew in advance. How likely you think it is that someone goes to the victim and warns them about what's coming? Not likely.
"So the information can't have gone in that direction. It could only have happened the other way around. Queen knows what's going to happen because he told someone else what was going to go down before it happened. In other words, he orders it.
"I know. Long shot. You don't need to tell me that. So, if we assume that—"
"Forty-five seconds."
"You'd want pros doing this kind of thing. Only, no real good leads for any of it. Anyone in the game doesn't want to admit it, not even to C.I.s, so either they know exactly how hot the information is—not unlikely—or they're not involved.
"We assume they're not involved, for the sake of discussion. But you still want pros, right? So you would want to go to someone you trust, and someone who knows their way around a job." Josh barely has time to breathe between the words, they're coming out so fast. But as the deadline ticks closer, he's getting to the point.
"Would you like to know how many of the grounds staff at Al Queen's mansion are ex-felons? What percentage?"
"Fine. What percentage? Five, four…"
"Eighty-five. Of the fifty-odd people working there, forty-two of them are felons. The rest are convicts, but non-violent stuff. Petty thefts, fraud, shit like that. Pretty much all walks of life. And who do you think they're loyal to? Al Queen, and by extension, his son—Mitchell Ellery Queen."
The Captain is quiet for a minute.
"So you've got a lot of circumstance, I'll grant you that. That's not remotely going to be enough to make those kinds of accusations in public, Detective. You know that."
"Which is why I'm poking around."
>
She's quiet another minute.
"This conversation never happened," she says. And then she hangs up, and, as if by magic, the conversation never happened.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Anna frowns and looks at the table in front of her. Is she supposed to make choices about the wedding, or is this some kind of trick?
She'd go with the green. That part's easy. Green looks more muted. It looks better. No problem. It's only an off-white green, after all. 'Mint,' she thinks.
But there's no reason to assume that is what she's here for. She's never been asked to choose anything for Mitch before, and the odds that he would start asking her to do things like that, completely out of the blue…
Mitch was capable of surprises. He was capable of almost anything he set his mind to, and if he wanted to let her choose, then he would let her choose. That wasn't going to happen, though. Not in this lifetime.
So why had they brought it to her as if it were a choice somehow? They must know how he is, too. There's no way that someone could spend any great deal of time with Mitch Queen and not come away with the impression that he's a man who makes his own decisions, not sending away for others' decisions.
What this really feels like is a test, and it's a test that she can't pass. Not really.
If she chooses green, she won't be fitting into his plan. Her natural reaction is always the wrong one. That's the first thing she learned. Mitch likes earth tones, so green wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility, but the brown…
He'd have gone for the brown in a heartbeat. Faster than she'd go for the green, and she'd liked that green from the moment she saw it.
The problem was, she couldn't choose the brown, either. Because then he'd get her alone at some point, and he'd tell her how he just wanted her input on the colored trim for the cake because he'd wanted to have someone on the outside making decisions.
To have her input. And if she chose what she thought he would choose, then it defeated the whole exercise. She'd be stuck on the defensive, insisting that, no, she really liked the brown.
When, of course, she'd liked the green. She'd have picked the green if it didn't mean a hissy-fit from Mitch about how she was ruining their beautiful wedding.
Anna takes a deep breath and tries to decide which lecture she wants to hear more. The baby fusses in the other room, a reminder of what her real priorities are supposed to be. Ava's hungry, and it's past time to feed her.
"Um. The green."
The ladies who are supposed to be her bridesmaids smile like they're hosts of a T.V. game show and they're about to tell her what's behind Door #2. They close up the book.
"Excellent choice. We'll get back to it."
"Yeah. I hear Ava calling, so I'd better—"
"Go on," they say.
It doesn't feel like an act of rebellion, choosing the color she likes over what Mitchell would like. Maybe it should have. Maybe it should have represented something to her, the rejection of his tastes over her own, or something like that.
Maybe she should have seen it all as some sort of big battle to carve out a space for herself. But she doesn't.
There's no carving space with Mitch. He's less like marble and more like hard iron. You might be able to beat it into shape—his father had, in the few places that mattered to the elder Queen—but you couldn't just push a chisel through.
She didn't see it as any of those things. She'd picked because she was in a hurry, and because the lecture she was going to get later didn't matter as much as her daughter. Nothing did.
Not the lecture, not how she'd feel about it. She'd have to learn how to ignore them. That was just how it would have to be. Ignore Mitchell altogether, and just focus on the baby.
Anna was sure that eventually, he would come to her with more information on these so-called bridesmaids, and he'd tell her all about what he'd done. What he intended to keep right on doing. They'd reach some sort of understanding.
It would be, for all intents and purposes, completely painless for both of them. Because the truth was that the marriage didn't matter, either. The only thing that mattered was Ava.
The only thing that mattered was Ava, and nothing else—not 'the right thing,' not 'love,' not 'justice'—none of it was going to get in the way of raising her daughter.
Anna slips a little quilt out of the chest in the corner. It's almost hard to notice it. It was a wonderful idea to put them around the house. They provide an excellent opportunity for her to feed Ava without embarrassing Mitch and having to endure another nagging lecture.
She slips the blanket over her shoulder and unbuttons her blouse a little way, enough to free a breast, and a moment later Ava's drinking her fill.
Anna lays back against the sofa, keeping Ava cradled against her as she feeds. A voice comes in from somewhere in the house. The entire ventilation system is connected, and the walls vary wildly in thickness.
Some, you would struggle to hear someone making violent sex on the other side, no matter how loudly they voiced their pleasure.
Others, you could barely have a whispered conversation without the entire house hearing. And it seems that whoever was talking had wandered into one of those rooms, because Anna could hear them plainly, though they must have believed themselves to be speaking in strict confidence.
"The preparations, they're made?" A woman's voice.
"Suppose they are," the man growls. "Where's my money?"
"You'll get your money when the woman's back out of the picture. Just like he said you would."
"Well, maybe I don't trust him. Maybe I want something up front."
"There's no money up front. You knew that."
They're speaking in hushed voices. It can't have been very far, but with the labyrinthine ventilation system… it could have been the next room over, or perhaps the one above or below. Impossible to say with certainty.
Anna doesn't want to listen, but now her curiosity is piqued. Her ears strain to catch any hint of noise.
"I didn't say, 'I want money up front,' did I?"
The woman's voice suggests that she's very amused by his suggestion, whatever it might be. Anna has an idea of what he's talking about, though, and evidently so does the woman, whose voice Anna can't recognize.
"No," she pauses and sounds as if she's laughing just a little bit. "I suppose you didn't."
The voices go quiet, now. They don't say another word, but it's not hard to imagine that they likely haven't left wherever they were. If he got his way—a groan carries itself up. Barely audible over the noises of the house.
It seems, then, that he did. Anna's cheeks flush. It's tempting to think that they were talking about her. It's equally tempting to try to tell herself that she's being melodramatic, that she's just reading into things.
She might be, after all. There's plenty to read into.
But then again, she may not be making things up at all. Out of the picture, though… that sounded ominous. She doesn't like ominous. Not when it comes to her future, and when it comes to her baby.
Because even if it were for Ava's own good, she's not going to let herself be separated from her daughter again. Not in a thousand years.
Chapter Thirty-Six
There's a very specific meaning to the phrase 'this conversation never happened.' It seems like permission, and in a certain very real sense, that's exactly what it is. And yet, in another sense, it isn't that at all.
Permission means defense. Permission means that when he gets himself into trouble, the Captain will be there to dig him out. She knows what he's up to, and she knows what he's doing, and she's given him the okay to keep doing it.
When she tells him she's not going to stop him, what she means is that if he gets fucked by this plan, and he almost certainly will, then he's on his own.
But, other than that, she does agree with his judgment, more or less. He's right that there's something funky going on, she's just not going to stick her neck out for him.
I
n this case, it's hard to blame her. She'd be sticking her neck out awful damn far, for awful little evidence. With the way things were looking, they probably weren't going to get much evidence, either.
Not without bringing someone in and talking to them. Josh pulls the phone out of his pocket and dials up a number.
"Yeah, hey. It's me."
"Aren't you on suspension?"
"Sure, but that doesn't mean I'm not working."
Jeffries always was a spoil-sport, but that didn't mean that he wasn't willing to listen for a minute. Which is the only in that Detective Meadows is going to need, really.
"I've been looking into this bank job, the one you asked me to look into?"
"The safety deposit boxes, yeah. Give me a second, let me grab my files."
"Don't worry about that. I've got an idea for you. It's not much, but you might get something out of it."
"I'm listening."
The real suggestion is to muscle the hell out of this guy… Josh looks down at the page. Roy Weissman. Muscle the ever-loving shit out of him, tell him he's going back to jail, this time for good.
Tell him there's no light at the end of the tunnel, this time. That he's completely fucked and that there's as much evidence against him as there was against Tim McVeigh, and that son of a bitch confessed.
Then hope to hell he cracks. He cracked the first time. He'll crack again, because he doesn't hold up under interrogation.
There are only two guys on the staff that could have done the bank job, even if they wanted to. The problem was, the list of boxes. Why those boxes? Not one of them makes sense or has much connection to Mitch or Al Queen.
Nor do they have any connection to any of the other cases that Josh can think of off the top of his head. Answers like that will come with time. They're not really set in stone yet. But when the time comes, things will come together, because they have to.
"Yeah, I had a talk with this guy the other day, when I was working the Witt kidnapping."
"The one that ended in you knocking the hell out of the Queen kid?"