by R. E. Ellis
"She's kinda new," said Leo. "Moved down from Watertown in January."
"Okay," said Fairfax.
"I met her at a certain 12-step program that shall not be named. She was on duty when the call about Julio came in. Maybe it was a gut feeling? But she phoned me right away."
"Gut feeling," said Fairfax.
"Or something. In any event, I went to the police station and started asking some questions. Then they started asking me questions. This was early, like 2 am. I told them that you and Julio were at the restaurant, alone, when I left. Hope that didn't get you in trouble."
"That remains to be seen," said Fairfax, thinking.
"I have some ideas, though," said Leo, stretching out on his back, his hands behind his head.
"Oh?"
He looked up at Fairfax from his grimy mattress. "I have some theories," he said.
His smile was perturbing.
Chapter Seven
"You see," said Leo, "there are all kinds of things going on in that kitchen you have no clue about."
"That's becoming clearer to me by the minute," said Fairfax.
"For instance, d'you know about the Game?"
Fairfax shot him a puzzled look.
"It goes like this. Someone says 'Boom.' The person they're looking at has to say 'ice' back to them. If you don't, you get dinged. It's kind of like tag, but verbal. Anyway, that person has to boom someone else. Now there's three people in the Game, get it? Now the choice of words gets bigger. 'Rockstar' means the person on your left has to speak, but you can't look at them. 'Don Juan' is like a boom, only you can use it on someone who's already in the game. 'Casper the Ghost' means that person can't respond until someone Don Juans them. If someone says something else to a Casper, they get dinged."
"Wait, wait, wait," said Fairfax. "Is this some kind of drinking game?"
"Originally. It was more fun that way. But me and Ernie are sober now and our friend Julio never drank at all, so now instead of taking a drink when you screw up you have to throw a quarter into a pot. At the end of the month we order a pizza or some other shit."
Fairfax rubbed his forehead. "Jesus. I thought all that was diner-speak. Like, Casper the Ghost was parmesan or something."
"Yeah, well that was part of the rules. You can't play the Game when bossman is in the kitchen. If you do it's double quarters. But you're always in and out and people forget."
"Well," said Fairfax, feeling a bit needled that all this fun was being had behind his back, "does this have anything to do with what happened to Julio? Seems pretty minor stakes."
"For the last two months someone's been dipping into the quarter pot. We couldn't even buy a medium pie from Dominoes last month. It pissed everyone off, but especially Julio. Kid liked his Dominoes. He decided to keep track of every damn quarter – count it all at the end of every shift and again the next morning—to try and see during what shifts the quarters were disappearing. He did figure out one thing. It wasn't anyone in the kitchen. It had to be waitstaff."
"Really?"
"Yeah, and those gals get tips! Can you believe the nerve?"
"So, do you think Julio confronted them?"
"He said he was going to. Next thing you know, well, you know."
"He's dead."
"That's right," said Leo. "Do, ahem, the math."
It seemed unlikely that someone would be killed over a bunch of quarters, thought Fairfax, carefully making his way down the fire escape from Leo's studio, but people had been killed for less, he knew. People were usually killed for nothing at all, but simply out of rage. Fairfax had a small painting of a lemon under his arm—a gift from Leo. "I never liked this one," said the dishwasher, squinting at the canvas. "You can take it." He'd offered to pay, but Leo shrugged him off.
Fairfax set the painting on the passenger seat of his Volvo and turned the key. Where to next? He guessed it was time to speak to the waitstaff.
An hour later he was sipping the foam off a cappuccino—the barista had drawn a cute little cloverleaf in it—waiting for Chantal. He didn't spend a ton of time in coffee shops. They could never make the coffee dark enough for him, plus they always seemed to play music that brought him hurtling back to his high school days in the 1980's so violently it left him with a kind of PTSD. But this shop, which was called Gotcha Coffee, played music he didn't recognize. It was a refreshing change. He actually kind of liked it.
Chantal slipped into the wooden chair opposite him, setting a tall plastic cup of iced coffee and a plate with a scone on it onto the table. "Here, you can have some," she said, pushing the plate towards Fairfax. "It's fig and... I forget."
Fairfax broke off a small corner of the scone and popped it into his mouth. He chewed. It was good—very good.
"Fig and rosemary," he said. "Damned delicious."
"Right? My favorite thing right now."
The girl looked tired and anxious. Her eyes were puffy and had dark shadows. She wasn't wearing as much makeup as when she was working at the restaurant, or any makeup at all, actually. She gnawed at her fingernails. Fairfax thought she looked prettier this way, but he knew better than to say anything.
"Is this about Julio?" she asked, carefully breaking her scone into pieces.
"Well, yeah. The police seem to be dragging their feet a little. I thought I'd ask around. You know."
When she looked back up from her plate, Fairfax noticed that Chantal's eyes were welling with tears. "You know we dated," she said, roughly wiping her eyes. She blew her nose into her napkin, then wadded it up and dropped it on the table.
"I'd heard, but I try not to listen to rumors."
"Smoke, meet fire," she said.
"I'm sorry," said Fairfax. "This must be hard."
She smiled a little, then her eyes filled up again. "Bah," she said. "We weren't in love or anything. Not exactly. So I'm not sorry for myself. Just for him, you know?"
"Oh, yeah," said Fairfax, wondering how he was going to broach the subject of the murderer. He didn't have to.
"Who would kill Julio? I mean, seriously. Who would benefit? I can't even imagine." She shook her hair out of its ponytail then tied it back up again. She did this three or four times during the meeting.
"You mind answering a few questions? You can say shut the hell up whenever you want."
"Sure, ask me whatever."
Fairfax slurped a little more foam, thinking. "What do you know about the Game?
"Game? What game?"
"In the kitchen at the restaurant. Someone says 'Boom' or 'Casper the Ghost.' You know what I mean?"
"Oh, God." She exasperatedly bumped her forehead on the table top. "That thing! The kitchen guys are obsessed with it! You know, us wait staff come in and out of the kitchen and they're always bombarding us with 'Hemingway!' or 'Rockstar!' or something. It's so annoying! I feel like it's a way of getting some of our tips. That's what it feels like. Or maybe it's just super-boring in the kitchen. Ugh. I told Julio that it drives us waitresses nuts, but he said it was fun and good for morale."
"Is that why you broke up—because it was hard to work with him?"
Chantal laughed. "No! I liked dating someone at work. Sorry if that's against your policy."
Fairfax shrugged. "I don't have a policy."
"Well, it's always tricky dating someone you work with. But at first it's really fun. We liked, you know, touching each other when we passed by, kissing when no one was looking." She stared into space, as if she could see into the past. "But... well, I'm older than Julio. I want to settle down with someone, you know–someone settled."
"Of course," said Fairfax. He thought: she means someone with money. He couldn't blame her, but his radar went off. "So you broke up with him?"
Her cheeks seemed to flush a little. "Not exactly. He caught me with someone else." She looked down at her plate and picked at the crumbs. "A... married guy. So I can't really say who it is. Sorry."
"Can you tell me if he's the jealous type?"
She
laughed. "No, he's not like that! He didn't kill Julio in a, like, crime of passion or anything." She lowered her voice. "Okay, I'll tell you who it is, but you have to promise not to tell anyone."
"I can't really promise..."
"It's the guy who owns this coffee shop!" she whispered, practically beaming.
"Oh. Wow."
Fairfax knew who she meant: a short, bumptious, bald man who owned three or four bars and coffee shops in town. He was always squealing around corners in his red Jaguar. His name was Mike Something. Mike Jones, maybe? Something equally hard to remember.
"Can I talk to him?"
"I'll ask him. I know he didn't do anything to Julio. Julio just wasn't ever on his radar, you know?"
"Yeah, I get that." They were quite a minute, listening to the music.
"I have one more question," said Fairfax. "Leo tells me that someone was stealing from the pot—the pot with the quarters from the game—and that Julio thought it was the waitstaff."
Chantal laughed—a high, slightly hysterical laugh. "The waitstaff? No, sorry. We get decent tips. I don't want any of those gross quarters." Then she stopped and thought a minute. "Katy might, though. She's a desperado."
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing, really. Just, you know. She likes money. She does so many scratch tickets. She even–"
"What?"
"Nothing, really. There's just something desperate about her."
"Okay," said Fairfax.
They both watched as a man walked his impossibly small child between the tables, holding onto her small fists as she staggered along.
"By the way," asked Fairfax. "What's the name of this band that's playing?"
"Right now?" The young woman listened a moment. "Oh, that's Death Cab."
"What?"
"Death Cab for Cutie? You know them?"
"Never mind," said Fairfax.
"No, that's Nirvana," she said with a grin.
Fairfax gave up.
Chapter Eight
As Fairfax walked back to his car, a bag full of fig-and-rosemary scones in one hand and a second cappuccino in the other, he thought about whom he should pay a visit to next. Mike Jones? What excuse could he use to talk to the guy? Could he try to get the scone recipe out of him? He opened his car door, set the coffee in the cupholder and put the bag next to Leo's painting on the passenger seat. He was gathering quite a collection of prizes this morning.
The other full-time waitress, Katy White, lived in a trailer park at this end of town, and when he'd called her she said she'd be home all day. It made sense to go talk to her first. He'd have time to work up a strategy for Mike Jones later.
He sipped some more cappuccino and thought that he could definitely get used to putting milk in coffee, if it was this delicious foamy stuff.
He found the trailer park easily enough—it was a place called Floral Estates, which was a sad misnomer: no flowers, and nothing that might pass for an "estate." It was at the swampy end of the lake, in a neighborhood called The Inlet, and this time of year the damp from the lake made the cold positively bone-chilling. The trailers were well-kept up, however, and the place was established enough to have several large shade trees. It was nice as trailer parks go. Nicer than the trailer park Fairfax had lived in for a year or two in high school with his mother and step-father, for sure. Fairfax attributed his love of solitude to his time in Aspen Acres—no aspens there, either; were trailer park names always aspirational? The thin walls of the single-wide offered no protection from bathroom sounds or cooking smells. Or cooking sounds and bathroom smells, for that matter. His step-father snored so loudly, the neighbors actually complained. The close quarters of Aspen Acres offered an intense education in the all the varieties of human misery and joy. He once watched as an elderly neighbor went through his family's garbage and drank what was left in each of his step-father's discarded beer cans. The old man didn't seem bothered by the occasional cigarette butt, just spat it out. Teenage Fairfax always knew if someone was having a birthday party or if the Brazilian soccer team won or if someone's marriage was going down the tubes. It wasn't an experience Fairfax wanted to repeat, but he was glad he'd had it.
This trailer park seemed more subdued, but maybe that was because of the weather. There was an icy drizzle that would send anyone indoors. Unmanned Big Wheels and skateboards were strewn about. Patches of dirty snow clung to tiny lawns. When Fairfax found Katy's trailer, his heart sank. It had the neglected look of a home in despair: peeling paint, torn plastic dangling from the windows, dead flowers in last year's hanging baskets. There didn't seem to be a driveway, so he pulled up along-side the trailer, hoping he wasn't breaking any rules. He thought of trailer parks as places burdened by rules.
It didn't seem like anyone was home. He banged on the door for a while, but everything was quiet inside. There was no storm door, just a dented metal front door with a small circular window in it. Fairfax peered through, but it was too dark inside to see anything. That was puzzling. Katy had said she'd be home. Maybe she'd run out to the store. Fairfax was reaching into his pocket to try and call her when the door slowly swung open. A familiar face appeared in the crack, but it wasn't Katy's. The large and hairy hand that held the gun wasn't Katy's, either.
Chapter Nine
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," said Fairfax, backing up quickly.
"What do you want?" asked the face, which Fairfax recognized as belonging to, of all people, Mike Jones.
Well, that was convenient.
"Just came to chat with Katy about something. She knows I'm coming. But I'll leave if–"
"Nah, come in," he said. He gestured with his gun towards the inside of the trailer, then gave it a little spin on his finger. Fairfax, having spent entire years of his law enforcement career without removing his gun from its holster, was deeply unnerved by the man's casual attitude with the pistol, which was a fairly ugly semi-automatic, a Springfield 1911. Fairfax was hardly a gun person, but he was as familiar with them as you'd expect a cop to be, and he had respect for them. Seeing the man goof around with his pistol turned Fairfax's stomach. He couldn't help but decide the man had a bad character, as if he hadn't enough evidence already. It wasn't until Jones jammed the thing into his back pocket and Fairfax stepped inside that he noticed the guy wasn't even wearing a shirt. His belly hung over a pair of khakis and a silver chain glittered in his chest hair. "You can have a seat there," said Jones, gesturing to a broke-back sofa. "Just move the dog."
He hadn't even seen the dog amidst the magazines, plates, and jumbled clothes on the sofa. But a small, fuzzy head with two bleary eyes rose out of the mess. It appeared to be an extremely elderly poodle. Fairfax gingerly lifted the dog to the floor, where it tottered off, and Fairfax sat.
"You're a friend of K's, right?" Mike Jones reached for a bag of cheese curls and held it out to Fairfax. Fairfax raised his hand in a polite decline. Jones shrugged and delicately put a cheese curl into his own mouth.
"Kind of. I wanted to talk to Katy about something. She said now was a good time, but–"
"She'll be here in a few minutes."
As he looked around the trailer, Fairfax felt confused about something he couldn't quite put his finger on. There was the fact of a half-dressed Mike Jones in the trailer of one of his waitresses, when less than an hour before he'd learned that his other waitress had had—or was having—an affair with the guy. That was weird. The gun was weird. But there was something else. What was it?
Then he remembered: Sage. Katy's child Sage, the boy, or perhaps girl, he'd met two or three times. Did that kid live here? It was no place for a child, with random guns being flung around and no toys anywhere. No kids' books, no stuffed animals, no colorful cereal boxes.
"Does her kid live here?" Fairfax asked.
Mike Jones gave him a blank look. "She doesn't have a kid. Not that I know of."
"Yes, she does. I met-–him."
Now both men were staring at each other.
"Well, do you se
e a kid here?" said Jones. He swept his hand grandly around the room.
"I guess not."
For several minutes there was no sound except for the guy's munching.
"All right," said Jones at last. "What do you want?"
"I told you," said Fairfax. "I just want to ask Katy some questions."
Jones set his snack bag down and cracked his knuckles. "It's all right. I'm her supplier. Uppers, downers? You work in the restaurant, right? You guys all like speed. Or is it something else? She's out on a delivery, I can get it for you."
"Jesus," said Fairfax, trying to piece all these things together. "Sorry if there's been a misunderstanding. I'm not here to buy anything. Really. I'm Katy's boss at the restaurant."
Suddenly he wanted very much to get out of that squalid trailer.
"Fuck," said Jones. He was staring past Fairfax, somewhere into the middle distance. "I thought you were someone else. Fuck fuck fuck fuck."
"I'll just talk to her when I see her at work," said Fairfax, standing up from the sofa. "It's been–"
Then the gun was out and pointed right at Fairfax. Sweat, he noticed, had gathered on Jones's upper lip. "Bro," said Jones.
Fairfax had never been called 'bro' before and he didn't like it.
"Bro. You're an ex-cop, right?"
"Um, yeah, emphasis on the 'ex-.'"
Jones groaned and rubbed the butt of his gun against his forehead. "Arggghhh. Now what?" he said, as if to himself.
"Listen," said Fairfax. "None of this is any of my business. I'm not going to go shooting my mouth off. Hand to God."
"Jesus, Jesus," said Mike Jones. At that moment, the front door of the trailer opened and in walked Katy.
Chapter Ten
Katy was a slender woman in her thirties, but she had the look of someone who'd seen some tough times. Her face was thin and pinched and she wore her hair pulled back in a scanty pony tail. The cords in her neck showed. But she was perfectly made up: perfect lipstick, arched eyebrows, shiny nails. If Katy White was a drug dealer or user she certainly didn't fit the profile.
