Swift Justice: A Mystery (Thomas Dunne Books)

by Laura Disilverio

  “Ooh, a Delicia Furman.”

  Gigi’s voice startled me. I looked up, self-consciously lowering the blanket from my face, to find her staring at it with delight. “A what?”

  “A Delicia Furman. I ordered one for my goddaughter’s baptism present, but there was a two-year waiting list.” She came around her desk and asked, “May I?”

  I handed her the blanket. She inspected the embroidery. “It’s definitely a Delicia. She raises her own cashmere goats, shears them, and spins the yarn herself. I met her once when she donated a blanket to a charity auction I was organizing. She looks more like a goat-herder than an artist, but there’s no mistaking her embroidery. Look how tiny the stitches are, and how the lambs all seem to have different expressions on their faces.” Gigi stroked the blanket reverently.

  “What does a Delicia Furman go for?” I asked. “A hundred, hundred fifty?”

  Gigi laughed. “Oh, honey, you’re not even in the ballpark. Try twelve to fifteen hundred, minimum.”

  Eep. For a baby blanket that was going to get drooled on and peed on? At least this told me that baby Olivia had rich relatives or friends. A thought struck me. “Do you think Delicia’d know who bought this?”

  “I don’t know what kind of records she keeps, but this is definitely a one-of-a-kind, so she might remember. She doesn’t do duplicates or copies of anything, ever.”

  I tucked the giraffe outfit into the plastic bag and folded the Delicia, snorting as I realized I was thinking of it the way one would “a Goya” or “a Rodin.” I placed both inside the car seat and maneuvered it behind my desk. “Thanks,” I told Gigi, who had returned to her desk and was staring at her computer screen, nails clicking across the keyboard.

  She wrote something on a lavender sticky note and handed it to me. “Delicia Furman’s phone number and address,” she said. “From her Web page. She’s outside Larkspur.”

  “Thanks,” I said again, studying the note. At least Gigi knew her way around a computer and the Internet. She even had a little initiative. “Do you want to come with me to talk to her?” The words popped out before I could stop them.

  “And learn PI interrogation techniques?” Her eyes lit up.

  “Think of it as an interview, or better yet, a conversation,” I suggested, already regretting the invitation.

  “Gotcha.” She made a note on a steno pad, then tucked it into her mailbag of a purse. “Now?”

  I sighed. “Might as well.”

  Gigi automatically headed for the Hummer after I collected the blanket, set the answering machine, and locked the office door.

  “No way,” I said. “We can’t go visit an artist, a woman who raises goats, for heaven’s sake, in a vehicle that looks like a Sherman tank and burns more gas than small third-world nations. She’d run us off with a shotgun.”

  “I never thought of that,” Gigi said, dropping her keys back in her purse—how did she ever find them in there?—and following me to the Subaru. “It was Les’s, you know. The Hummer. He sure loved that thing when he first got it—waxed it every weekend, wouldn’t let the kids eat or drink in it. I guess he couldn’t figure out a way to get it to Costa Rica, so he left it. Maybe he just didn’t want it anymore.”

  I ignored the wistful note in her voice, wondering if she saw the parallels between Les’s relationship with the Hummer and with her. The bastard. My anger toward Les Goldman surprised me, and I tamped it down. If I was angry, it was only because his disappearing act had foisted Gigi on me, landing me with a partner I did not need or want.

  My annoyance kept me silent throughout the twenty-five minute drive to Larkspur, a small community northwest of Colorado Springs best known for the huge Renaissance festival it hosts every summer. We drove past the festival grounds, where permanent walls, shop fronts, and castles loomed among the lodgepole pines like ghosts of medieval England. Delicia Furman’s farm was ten minutes farther on, wedged into a small valley guarded by hills on three sides. The morning sun lit up a small house, a barn, several outbuildings, and fenced enclosures full of goats. A sign at the roadside announced FURMAN’S in elegant gray script on white. We bumped down a rutted driveway, and I parked the car by the first paddock. As I opened the door, the scent of dung, warm animal, fresh hay, and clean water drifted in. The smell pulled me back to the farm outside Spokane where I’d spent several years off and on with Grandy and Gramps, my mom’s parents, while my parents missionaried in all sorts of godforsaken crannies in South America and Africa. Grandy and Gramps had raised a small herd of Barzona cattle, big red animals with the smarts of a teaspoon, but the farm smell was the same. I breathed it in.

  Gigi murmured, “Aren’t they just the cutest?”

  “Cute” wasn’t the word I’d’ve chosen. The goats were as tall as my thigh in an array of colors—tan, white, brown, gray, black—but they had long horns that swooped back from their brows and twisted to nasty-looking points. The shaggy black goat in the pen closest to me eyed me suspiciously as he chewed his cud. “You’re a handsome fellow,” I told him. Unmoved by my flattery, he scratched the side of his head against a fence post.

  Just as I was wondering where to start the search for Ms. Furman, a woman strode out of the barn fifty yards away, trundling a wheelbarrow full of what I suspected was goat poop. Thick gray hair streamed almost to her waist from beneath a blue bandanna. Stained overalls hung loosely over a white henley shirt. Knee-high galoshes enveloped her feet and calves. She stopped when she saw us and stripped work gloves from her hands as she approached.

  “Help you?” Her voice and gaze were no-nonsense. Eyes that showed more gray than blue peered from beneath straight iron-gray brows. Tanned skin beginning to soften around the jawline and pouches below her eyes testified to her life outdoors. She looked like a farmer, not an artist.

  I introduced myself and stumbled when it came time to present Gigi. I finally called her “Gigi Goldman, my associate.” My lips wouldn’t form the P-word.

  Gigi looked at me reproachfully but merely said, “We’ve met. Remember, Miss Furman? You donated that beautiful blue afghan with the star motif to our silent auction in support of the battered women’s home?”

  Furman’s sharp eyes focused on Gigi. “Right. I thought you looked familiar. Well, if you’re here for another—”

  “We need information, Ms. Furman,” I broke in, “not donations.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t deal in information,” she said, “only art.” She took two steps toward the pen and scratched the black goat on his knobbly head.

  She’d lost me. “I thought you made blankets. We just need to know who you sold this one to.” I nodded at Gigi, and she unfurled the pink blanket she’d been clutching to her chest.

  “And isn’t that art?” Furman asked, whipping around to pin me with narrowed eyes. From the look of satisfaction on her face, I knew I’d fallen into a trap she’d sprung many times. “You’re one of the culturally stunted products of our public education system who don’t consider something ‘art’ unless it was painted or sculpted by a DWEM, a dead white European male.” She pronounced it “dweem.”

  I felt heat rise to my cheeks but said, “I like Georgia O’Keeffe.”

  “Bully for you. How about Junichi Arai or Michail Berger? Maybe Chihuly?”

  I knew Chihuly did glass, but I’d never heard of the other two. “Look”—I put my hands up in a surrender gesture—“I didn’t come here for a seminar on alternative art—”

  “Alternative?” Her brows rose haughtily to her hairline. A goat coughed behind her, sounding like it was laughing.

  This was going from bad to worse. “Do you remember who bought this blanket? It was with an abandoned baby.”

  That brought her up short, and she stepped off her soapbox, reaching a surprisingly well formed and delicate hand to grasp a fold of the blanket.

  “I think it’s lovely,” Gigi said.

  “Thank you, dear,” Furman said, tracing her thumb over one of the lambs. She nodded and loo
ked over to me. “Aurora Newcastle. She bought it about six months ago. It was the last one I finished this spring before combing season.”

  “Combing?”

  “You don’t shear goats to get the cashmere, you comb it out of them,” she said, making a motion like dragging a comb down.

  I sensed another lecture coming on, this one on goat husbandry, so I asked quickly, “Was she pregnant?”

  “Aurora?” Furman laughed, a rich chuckle. “She’s as AARP eligible as I am. No, it was a gift for someone.”

  “Do you know who?” Gigi asked. She had the steno pad out, pen poised.

  Furman shook her head. “No. She didn’t say. And before you ask, no, I won’t give you her address. You understand.”

  “Sure.” It didn’t matter. It wouldn’t be hard to Google someone named Aurora Newcastle, and she apparently lived in Colorado since Furman talked like she knew her. “Thanks for your time, Ms. Furman,” I said.

  “I’d love to come back and hear about the goats sometime,” Gigi said, real interest lighting her face.

  “You do that,” Furman said. “I think they’d like you.” She turned away, striding back to the dung-filled wheelbarrow, rubber boots scraping a wsk-wsk sound from her overalls as she walked.

  “Did you hear that?” Gigi said in an awed voice. “The goats would like me.”

  I rolled my eyes and climbed into the Subaru, barely waiting for Gigi to swing her door shut before reversing with unnecessary force.

  Back at the office, I put mental blinders on to escape the new decor and retrieved phone messages. Two potential clients. I called them back and set up appointments, well aware of Gigi following the conversations from her desk. A third call was from a client who owned a string of fast food restaurants; he kept Swift Investigations on retainer to run background checks on potential employees. This time, he needed some undercover work done at his Buff Burgers restaurant on the northeast side of town. Buff Burgers was a newish franchise that sold buffalo patties with organic produce and whole wheat buns. I groaned at the prospect of doing fast food work to figure out which employee was skimming money from the cash drawer, and my eyes lighted on Gigi. The menial nature of the job should be just the thing to convince her that investigative work was not glamorous and exciting. “I’ll have an operative there in the morning,” I told Brian.

  I put on a serious face as I hung up the phone. “Gigi, I think I’ve got a case you can handle.”

  She all but clapped her hands and scurried over to plop down in the chair facing my desk.

  “It’s undercover work.” That set the hook. “It might be dangerous.” Yeah, grease splatters might burn her arms. “It’ll be hard, nasty work.” She couldn’t say I hadn’t warned her.

  Her eyes widened. “What do I have to do?”

  I wrote down the Buff Burgers address and handed it to her. “Report to this address at eight tomorrow morning. A worker quit today, and Brian Yukawa, the owner, is holding a job open for you. You’ll fill out an application like anyone would, but you’ll get the job. The manager’ll train you for your duties. Brian thinks someone—maybe the manager—is skimming from the cash register or selling inventory out the back door or something. Your job is to figure out who and how.”

  “How do I do that?”

  Good question. “Keep your eyes open, get to know your co-workers. See if anyone looks like they’re hanging out where they shouldn’t be or has more money than they ought to. This kind of undercover investigation isn’t a science—you just wing it.”

  “Gotcha.” She had the ubiquitous steno pad out, and I’d swear she wrote down “Wing it!”

  “We’ll get together in the afternoons when you’re off shift to discuss the case. Save any questions for me till then; you don’t want to make anyone suspect you’re not just a run-of-the-mill Buff Burgers employee. You’ll do just fine,” I added with an encouraging smile.

  “But what will I wear?” Gigi asked, looking down at her sunny silk ensemble.

  “Not to worry,” I said, waving a dismissive hand. “Brian said something about a uniform.”

  3

  (Wednesday)

  The next morning, after filling out her application and doing a pro forma interview with the Buff Burgers manager, a kid who looked barely older than her seventeen-year-old son, Dexter, Georgia Goldman stared in dismay at the “uniform” he presented.

  “But that’s a buffalo costume,” she protested, eyeing the heavy-looking horned head with distrust.

  “It’s a bison, actually,” the young manager, Dylan, confided. He had a nerdy air about him that convinced Georgia he’d be able to differentiate between weasels and martens or sine and cosine with the same ease he talked about bison versus buffaloes. The Daniel Boone–ish Western look of the Buff Burgers uniform merely emphasized his gawkiness. “But I guess ‘Bison Burgers’ didn’t have the same ring as ‘Buff Burgers,’ so we just go with it.”

  “And I’m supposed to put that on?” She’d spent an hour styling her hair, and it would be crushed.

  “Well, yeah. You’re Bernie the Buffalo, right? Isn’t that the job you applied for? When Brian called last night, he said you’d be in to apply for Trent’s job, and Trent was Bernie until his folks made him quit ’cause school’s started up again.”

  “Where do I change?” Gigi asked, resigned to her fate.

  “Bathroom.” Dylan jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

  With the buffalo head clutched in both hands and the rest of the costume draped over her shoulder, Georgia made her way through the mercifully empty restaurant to the bathroom. No way could she maneuver the head in one of the two tiny stalls, so she balanced it on the sink and ducked into a stall to strip. Grime in the tile grout had her aching for a scrub brush and a strong bleach solution. Maybe she should say something to Dylan about it. She’d almost wiggled into the fuzzy brown costume, luckily on the baggy side, managing not to dip the tail in the toilet, when the bathroom door squeaked open and she heard a startled “Ack!” The door clunked closed.

  Emerging from the stall, Georgia giggled, imagining how the sight of Bernie’s head on the sink must’ve startled some unsuspecting girl who only needed to relieve herself. All inclination to laugh left as she fitted the shaggy head over hers and peered at her reflection through the eyeholes in Bernie’s neck. Something straggled down in front of her field of vision, and she realized it was the buffalo’s beard. Walking carefully to counterbalance the weight atop her shoulders, she looped her tail over her arm and trudged back into the restaurant, where Dylan was waiting.

  He eyed her critically. “Hm. Well, it’ll have to do. But you have to look happier. Cheery, cheery, cheery.” He grinned so wide Gigi was sure it hurt his cheeks. “The kids don’t want a gloomy Bernie.”

  Wondering how the kids would know if she were suicidal or manic beneath Bernie’s shaggy head, Gigi swished her tail and shuffled off to greet a young mother with three toddlers as they came through the restaurant door shouting, “It’s Bernie!”

  With Gigi gainfully employed asking, “Do you want fries with that buffalo patty?” I had the office to myself Wednesday morning. Ah, bliss. I’d helped her load up most of the tchotchkes last evening, graciously conceding that the ficus and the photos could stay. I plumed myself on my generosity and sneaked a peek at the photos once I had my Pepsi in hand. Most of them showed two kids, a boy and a girl, from toddlerhood to midteens. The boy looked older, with longish hair and a smirk as he leaned against a red Beemer in the most recent photo. The girl, about fourteen, appeared in a variety of sequined, feathered, and increasingly sophisticated skating costumes. Once she got the braces off she was going to be a knockout with blond hair, a creamy complexion, and long legs. If Gigi looked like that when Les met her, I could understand why he’d fallen for her.

  Back at my desk, I reached for the phone and called a buddy of mine at the Colorado Springs Police Department. It had occurred to me last night that if Baby Girl Hogeboom was reduced to foisting
her baby on Melissa Lloyd, she might be a runaway. Perhaps, just perhaps, someone had reported her missing and I could get a line on her that way.

  Detective Connor Montgomery was willing to look through the missing persons files. “What have you got for a description, Charlie?”

  “Seventeen years old, white female, recently gave birth.”

  A pause. I could just see his dark brows drawing together, the corners of his shapely mouth getting tight. “You’re joking, right?”

  “Nope, that’s all I’ve got. I know it’s not much.”

  “Not much? It’s nothing! Jesus, Charlie, why’re you wasting my time?” The sound of paper crumpling traveled over the phone line. The line went dead.

  “Nice talking to you, too,” I said to the dial tone. Shit. Still, it wasn’t a totally wasted call. I knew Montgomery wouldn’t be able to resist peeking at the missing persons files for the local area at least, and he’d give me a call if anything looked like a possible.

  Aurora Newcastle was next up on my to-do list. A Google search yielded four brief items from the Denver Post society page about Eugene and Aurora Newcastle participating in various charity events and hosting the grand opening of the most recent in their chain of upscale wine stores, Purple Feet, in Castle Rock, a community between here and Denver. The accompanying photo was so grainy I couldn’t distinguish Aurora Newcastle from Mrs. Claus or Christie Brinkley. None of my databases yielded an address or phone number for the couple—one of the perks of being rich is being able to buy privacy—so I called Purple Feet, the flagship store in the LoDo area of Denver.