by A W Hartoin
“I’d rather do a bikini car wash.”
“That could be arranged.”
“You’re evil.”
Nazir laughed and Chuck asked, “Did you see my present?”
Dr. Grace, the head pathologist at St. James, wedged himself in beside me. “What present? Was it a ring with a diamond, per chance?”
“It was not,” I said. “He got me a Rocket espresso machine.”
Dr. Grace whistled. “I bet that cost a pretty penny.”
Both Chuck and Nazir reddened and looked away.
“Or maybe not,” said Dr. Grace. “Gotta go.”
The good doctor disappeared back into the crowd without ordering a drink.
“What was that about?” I asked. “How much did that thing cost?”
Chuck avoided looking at me and ordered a beer.
“Hello.” I tapped him on his hard bicep.
“Don’t worry about it, Mercy,” he said. “It was a gift.”
I got out my phone and googled it. “Are you crazy? 2700 dollars. You’re taking it back.”
“I didn’t pay that.” Still no eye contact. Nazir was looking at the ceiling.
“Ebay?”
“Kind of like that,” said Chuck.
I should’ve known. Police auction.
“Tell me it wasn’t found at the scene of some gruesome murder,” I said.
Nazir and every other cops made like they’d been called to a crime scene or maybe like Kronos was about to become one.
“No problem, baby,” said Chuck, blue eyes without a hint of deceit.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Why’s it no problem?”
Nazir patted him on the back. “Good luck. I’m going to go…somewhere not here.”
“Run away, you coward,” I said before turning back to Chuck. “It was, wasn’t it?”
“Might’ve been.”
“Which murder?”
“That Calabash murder-suicide.”
I groaned. “Didn’t that happen in the kitchen?”
“It ended there.”
“Tell me there wasn’t blood on it.”
“I cleaned it,” he said.
“Ew. I want that thing out of my apartment,” I said with a shudder.
Chuck nuzzled my cheek. “I’m going to make you great lattes with that.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Really. The foam is perfect for latte art.”
“No foam.”
“You’ll change your mind when you taste it.”
“Can you hear me?” I asked. “Can my voice penetrate your skull?”
“I hear you, but I know you’ll change your mind when you taste the espresso.”
“I’ll toss that thing out the window.”
He held me by the shoulders. “It cost 2,700 dollars new.”
“You mean pre-blood spatter.”
Chuck grinned with pride. “Yeah. I got it cheap. The family didn’t want it.”
“You mean nobody else wanted a bloody espresso machine? I’m shocked.”
“It was a great deal.”
“Fantastic. Where’d the ice cream maker come from? A school shooting?”
“Drug raid. No biggie.”
“Can’t you just go to Sears like other people?”
“I’m not like other people and neither are you.”
I slid off the stool. “I’m going to see Aaron, you cheap maniac.”
Chuck leaned in and I thought he would kiss me for real. Instead, I got a peck on the forehead. “You love me.”
“You’re alright.” I wormed my way around the bar and into the kitchen where Aaron had donned a pink hairnet over his permanent case of bedhead.
“You hungry?” he asked.
“Starving.”
“I got a cra—”
“No crab. Worf burger and fries, please,” I said. Aaron looked so sad, I added, “If you’ve got a poutine…”
That’s all I had to say. The little nut job was at the grill, making a super calorie bomb. That could take a while and I had stuff to do.
“Hey, Aaron,” I said. “Can I use your computer?”
He shrugged and I took that as a yes. Kronos’ so-called office was in the back corner of the large kitchen surrounded by cans of tomatoes, bins of potatoes and onions, and linens, since they never used linens. I sat down at the little desk and searched flights to Paris. Pricey, especially last minute. I was lucky that my godmothers were Millicent and Myrtle Bled, known as The Girls. Thanks to my godmothers’ love of travel, I had a million frequent flyer miles. I could use the corporate advantage, too. Airlines always catered to the Bleds. Millicent and Myrtle Bled were the matriarchs of the Bled Brewing empire. I was seen as an honorary Bled and I’d have to use that if I wanted last-minute tickets during the summer. I might be able to stay at one of the company apartments if they weren’t booked. They normally would be, considering it was Paris, and the company apartments were a perk for family and brewery employees over a certain tenure, but there had been a recent death in the Bled Brewery family.
Lester, The Girls’ long time chauffeur, had been murdered during a break-in at the Bled mansion. The entire company went into mourning and The Girls said people were afraid to go to the company properties because it had gotten out that Lester’s killers hadn’t found what they were looking for and were expected to try again. I wasn’t worried about that. The Klinefeld Group was behind the break-in. They were a shadowy not-for-profit group that claimed to only be interested in the preservation of art, but they were interested in a lot more than that. They’d sued The Girls over The Bled Collection, trying to get a hold of art that Stella Bled Lawrence had smuggled out of Europe during WWII and hadn’t been reclaimed because the owners had fallen victim to the Holocaust or hadn’t been located yet. But The Klinefeld Group wanted something else, something they had thought was concealed within the collection. They did get the inventory during the break-in and had dropped the suit when they didn’t find what they were looking for on the list.
I logged into the company site and found three properties in Paris would be vacant. Perfect. I took the Rue Montorgueil apartment. It was too big for me, but nobody else wanted it and I loved the quaint pedestrians-only shopping street. I’d have to call the airlines to wheedle my way onto a flight, but that could wait until tomorrow.
The office door swung open and I closed the browser. Aaron put a to-go bag on the desk and left without a word. Normal for him. I picked up the bag and went back into the kitchen as my phone started vibrating in my pocket—my phone, not Calpurnia’s. I took a look and groaned. Melvin. When did he get my number? It was an SOS from Uncle Morty’s brother so I supposed it wouldn’t do to ignore it.
“Hi, Melvin. What’s up?” I asked.
“Morty won’t let me in,” he said in a voice that was indistinguishable from Morty’s.
I bit my lip and winced. “In where?”
“Your apartment. Whaddya think?”
“Why are you there?”
“Supposed to be with Morty. Mom said.” There was a loud pounding on what I assumed was my door. “Let me in, you best-selling hack!”
My neighbors weren’t going to be happy. They liked a quiet building and put up with my occasional stalkers and news crews when I got involved in a criminal investigation like the Bled break-in because I, myself, was quiet and made them cinnamon rolls at Christmas, but inflicting two Van Der Hoof brothers on them was going too far.
“I’ll be there in a minute.” I hung up and rubbed my forehead. “The sooner I get out of here, the better.”
“Where are you going?”
My head jerked up and there was Chuck, standing in the door, holding a spice-encrusted fry.
“Um…”
He frowned. “Did something happen? Did The Klinefeld Group contact you?”
“No.”
He relaxed and my purse chirped. I froze. Oh my god.
“What was that?”
“What?”
; “That noise,” said Chuck. “You look weird. What’s wrong? Something happened, didn’t it?”
All I could think of was Calpurnia Fibonacci’s phone in my purse. Why the hell did I leave that in there? And it wouldn’t stop chirping.
“I…um…”
Aaron walked over and stood in front of my purse, pressing it between the wall and his chubbiness. The chirping was barely audible. Thank god.
Chuck moved in closer. I recognized that look. He was in detective mode, ready to suss out the truth at any cost.
“We’re going to Paris,” said Aaron.
Oh crap! Did he say Paris? How the—
“Paris?” asked Chuck. “Are you going without me?”
Oh my god. This cannot be happening.
“Well, no,” I said. “I was going to…” I don’t know what I was going to do.
“I thought we weren’t doing Paris until we had a plan,” said Chuck.
Chuck and I had planned to go to Paris to follow-up a lead we got on The Klinefeld Group. Unfortunately our lead, Paul Richter, the brother of a cop from Berlin who investigated a crime in 1963 that possibly involved The Klinefeld Group, had died not long after we found out about him. The cop, Werner Richter, was killed in a hit and run in 1965. There was no rush without something else to go on.
“Cooking school,” said Aaron.
“Cooking school?” asked Chuck.
We were both looking at Aaron, who was looking past us at a spot on the wall. Where was this going?
“I guess we were going to go to cooking school,” I said after a minute.
“You guess?”
“The plan wasn’t set in stone.”
“So there’s a plan and you didn’t tell me?”
“Er…”
My purse stopped chirping and Aaron returned to the grill. “She’s helping me.”
Chuck tossed the fry in the trash, a sure sign of anger. “At cooking school? You gotta be kidding.”
“Um…I know Paris and it wouldn’t hurt to talk to the Richter family while I was there.”
Chuck straightened up to his considerable height and his face went hard. “Got to go to work. I’ll see you later.” He stalked out of the kitchen after punching the swinging door open.
“What was that about? Cooking school?” I asked Aaron.
“You need to go to Paris?”
“Yes.”
“So we’ll go.”
I rubbed my head again. “What about the cooking school?”
“I’ll find one.”
“I guess there’s always a cooking class in Paris, but, Aaron, you don’t have to come.”
“I’m coming. You need me.”
That was probably true. Aaron was surprisingly useful, although I could never quite figure out how it worked out that way.
“Okay,” I said. “We leave in a week.”
He handed me a piece of crusty melted cheese off the grill. So good, but I didn’t deserve it. Chuck was upset and I didn’t know how to unupset him. He was acting weird before and I couldn’t even figure that out.
Nazir came in through the swinging door. “I need to talk to you.”
He had never taken that tone with me before. We were friends, but from the expression on his face that might not last the night.
“Okay,” I said more guilty-sounding than I wanted it to come out.
“You’re going to Paris?”
“It was just decided.”
“And you’re not taking Chuck.” Nazir’s voice was so hard, I was a little bit scared and I don’t scare easily.
“I didn’t get a chance to ask him. He marched out.”
That sounded good. Please let that have sounded good.
“So Chuck’s going?” he asked.
“If he can get the time off,” I said.
Please don’t let him get the time off. Please, God. I beg you.
“I’ll make sure he gets it,” said Nazir, his whole body relaxing.
Crap on a cracker!
“Um…why’s it so important to you?” I asked.
“Chuck needs to get away. Can’t you see that?”
“He is acting kind of odd.”
Nazir headed for the door and I grabbed his arm. “Why does he need to get away?”
He peeled my fingers off his arm. “I doubt he’ll ever tell you.” Nazir walked out the door, leaving it swinging violently in his wake.
So I was taking Aaron and Chuck to Paris while I worked on a case for Calpurnia Fibonacci. Was there any way I could pull this off without getting caught working for the mafia? It would take a miracle and I’d heard miracles were in short supply.
Chapter Five
I spent half that night trying to convince Chuck that I wasn’t investigating The Klinefeld Group without him. He took the whole detective thing very personally and I didn’t get it. He could investigate them without me. I couldn’t care less, but Chuck definitely did care. He thought I would get killed without him by my side. I had to bite back many retorts, pointing out that I seemed to do fine without him. I hadn’t been killed once.
All of this talking was done on the phone. I couldn’t lure Chuck over to my apartment with promises of back rubs or anything else, but that might not have been due to his recent oddness. Uncle Morty and his brother had taken up residence in my living room. I was in the bedroom with the door closed, but I could still hear them arguing about the merits of Star Trek, the original series, versus The Next Generation. How they could care so passionately was a mystery to me. They, also, cared about pizza. Were anchovies better than onions? Should the sauce go under the cheese or on top? This mattered. A lot. My living room was covered in stank pizzas for their taste testing. The smell seeped under my door and gave me nightmares where Mr. Cadell from the Colombia Clinic kept throwing fish and onions at me.
I finally got to sleep around two a.m., but the snoring woke me at six. I tried to go back to sleep. It was Saturday, for crying out loud, but the pizza and snoring made that impossible. So I got up and went through the Angela Riley file. It was slim. Calpurnia was right. Angela was unremarkable if you ignored the disappearing thing. I studied Angela’s face, every inch of it, until I thought I would recognize her instantly. It wouldn’t be as hard as I originally thought. Angela had very round green eyes with thick lashes that didn’t need the help of mascara. The eyes were fairly distinctive, but it was the lips that would cinch it. Her upper lip wasn’t symmetrical. Her lip line on the right was slightly higher, not very noticeable, but quite unique. Sometimes, she made the sides match with lipstick, but mostly she didn’t. If I found the woman in Gina’s pictures and got close, I would know for certain if it was Angela.
My Fibonacci phone had remained silent for the rest of the night after I returned Calpurnia’s texts. She told me that both Gina and Angela’s husband, Phillip, would be expecting me in the morning for interviews. I’d texted that I’d be there and turned the phone to vibrate.
I put my phones in my purse, dressed, and snuck past the snoring Van Der Hoof brothers. They were asleep, side by side, on the sofa. Skanky was draped over Uncle Morty’s rumbling belly. He opened an eye when I tiptoed past, but otherwise didn’t move. I locked the apartment and heaved a sigh of relief.
“Ahem.” A throat-clearing sound that boded nothing but ill for me.
Oh no.
“Ahem.”
I girded my loins and turned around. “Hi, Mrs. Papadakis.”
“Mercy,” she said before making a tsking sound.
“Yes, Mrs. Papadakis?”
“You keep me up last night. I need my beauty sleep.” Mrs. Papadakis didn’t look like she’d been kept up. She looked a lot better than me. At seven in the morning, her black hair had been curled and sprayed into its usual bouffant. She was in full makeup, complete with burgundy lipstick, and wore a silky print wrap dress and slingback heels. I’d never seen her not look exactly like this. Okay. Maybe the dress print varied, but not by much.
“You look great,” I s
aid.
She frowned, creasing the heavy foundation on her forehead. “Women must make the effort or the men…you know.” She looked at my wrinkled jeans and faded t-shirt and did not approve.
“Right. Uh huh.” I could not imagine Mr. Papadakis doing ‘you know’. He wouldn’t survive long if he did.
“This new boyfriend of yours. He is too much. He must leave and you take that nice doctor back. He was very quiet.” She squinted at me. “What did he do to make you leave him, a doctor?”
“Nothing. It was me, not him.”
“Then get him back. With your face, it will not be difficult.”
“I have a new boyfriend, Chuck. He’s a policeman, a detective.” I smiled widely to show her that was a good thing. Law and order. Upstanding citizen.
“No, no. That’s no good. He get shot. A doctor is better and he didn’t make the smells.” She waved her hand in front of her face.
“Chuck doesn’t smell. I mean, he smells good.”
“Then what is that odor?”
I looked back at the door. “Oh that. That’s not Chuck. That’s Uncle Morty and his brother. They do smell. Not them personally, but the pizza they eat.”
“Get rid of them. They yell and smell.”
I bit my lip. “I’d love to, but I can’t. They’re kind of like family.”
“Family?” Mrs. Papadakis believed in family in a huge way. When hers came over, they made Uncle Morty and Melvin seem silent in comparison. “What do they do?”
“Morty and Melvin? They’re writers.”
“Good earners?”
“I guess so. They sell a lot of books.”
“How old?” she asked with a glint in her eyes.
“Mid-fifties.” This was getting a little scary. “Why? What do you have in mind?”
“They married?” She put her hands on her bony hips.
“No.”
And there’s a good reason for that.
“I take care of it,” said Mrs. Papadakis and she spun around, dialing her cellphone. “Nicky, you come over today. I want you to meet someone.”
Oh my god. She was bringing over the cousins, Nicky, Nia, and Maria. They weren’t married and there was a good reason for that, too. If three extra chatty Greek women didn’t scare Morty and Melvin away, they’d be married before Bridget.