"Will we have Nutcracker food?"
"Nah, not tonight. I've got a macaroni and cheese casserole in the oven. Now, kiddo, let me show you your room."
"What's my surprise?"
"It's in your room. Let's take a look."
Erin opened the door and Georgie charged in to see a barre set against a long glass wall. "Now you can practice and practice," Erin said. "I even lowered it for you. What do you think of that?"
Georgie had obviously nourished higher hopes, but the kid was polite. "It is a beautiful barre, thank you, Erin," and that little voice told her another surprise would be a lovely thing for Erin to produce. Long day for the little girl, she thought, and so full of change.
Erin said, "You know, if you don't want the mac and cheese, I could fry us up a mess of liver and put Cool Whip all over the top."
The little girl laughed and laughed as she walked over to lightly run her fingertips over the smooth wooden barre.
When, Erin wondered, did little girls, seven years and six months, usually go to bed? She had a feeling if she asked Georgie, she'd lie to her, clean.
They had a successful meal of mac and cheese, obligatory green beans, and a small salad thrown in. After an hour playing on the barre and two TV shows, Erin looked over at the droopy-eyed Georgie, who'd sworn her daddy never made her go to bed until very late, and dialed Bowie Richards's cell.
"Richards. Yeah?"
He sounded harried.
"It's Erin Pulaski. When does Georgie usually go to bed?"
There was an instant of stark silence. She could see him firmly bringing his brain back to the mundane. "An hour ago, at seven forty-five. She got you, huh?"
"Oh yeah." And she hung up.
Bowie laid his cell next to himself on the car seat. Sherlock eyed it as it slid into her. She picked it up and handed it to him.
"Oh, thank you," he said, gave it a baffled look, and stuck it in his pocket. "That was Erin Pulaski, she's my temporary babysitter, taking care of my daughter. She's, ah, a private investigator here in Stone Bridge, as well as my daughter's ballet teacher." He shook his head, flipped on his left-hand turn signal. "Some combination."
Savich said from the back seat where he was working on MAX, "Her name's Georgie, right?"
"Yeah, today she told me she was seven years and six months and not a baby anymore." He shook his head, grinned. "I'll tell you, it seems like she was wearing diapers and drooling just last week. Tell me about your little boy."
They spoke to him of Sean and their dog, Astro.
"Georgie wants a dog, what kid doesn't? We'll have to see."
The evening was cool, the moon at half-mast, the sky clear and studded with stars. Bowie said, "The restaurant is just down this road. I had their lobster the one time I ate here and it's great. Another thing, the owner, Paul Remier, wasn't too happy to be hosting three cops in his fine upscale restaurant tonight. I think he's afraid we'll slap handcuffs on someone and march him out."
Sherlock grinned. "Then let's keep him guessing."
He looked over at her, appreciated the nice black dress she was wearing, the sexy open-toed shoes that showed off her bright red toenails. She'd pulled back all that beautiful red curly hair and fastened it behind her ears with gold clips. He'd never take her for a tough-as-nails FBI agent, which is what she was.
He glanced over at Savich, who was wearing a conservative black suit, nearly a match to Bowie's. He liked them both, but he still wished they weren't here, wished they were back in Washington playing with their kid. Why did Disneyland East always think the field offices were incompetent? At least Savich and Sherlock had excellent reputations. He'd heard some talk that Savich was into psychics, or something, which sounded ridiculous to Bowie, not that he was going to ask Savich about it. What did one do? Have séances? The FBI didn't deal with ghosts. It just wouldn't work.
It was nine o'clock on the nose when they walked in. The maitre d' stood by a podium near the front door, along with the owner, Paul Remier, a very short rotund man with jet-black hair and black eyes. Neither of them looked particularly welcoming.
Sherlock gave them both a high-voltage smile. "Dr. Ella Franks tells us you serve the best oysters this side of the Atlantic."
"Ah," said Paul Remier, unbending just a bit, "this is true. So you know Dr. Franks? A fine lady. Do allow me to seat you myself. We hope you have a lovely dinner. Our chef's oysters à la maison are exceptional. I have arranged for last night's waitstaff to be available for you to speak with, discreetly, here at your table. Will that be convenient for you?"
Once they were seated, with their water poured in crystal glasses, fine virgin olive oil in a small bowl, and a warm baguette laid in a white basket on their lovely corner table, Bowie raised a brow at Sherlock. "How did you do that? I thought Remier would prefer to serve me for dinner rather than feed me oysters when I saw him this morning."
Sherlock grinned at him. "I found out Paul Remier is a neighbor of Dr. Ella Franks. Dr. Franks calls him Paulie."
14
Dillard Shanks, known to the Chez Pierre patrons as Estafan, told them he'd happened to overhear Mr. Blauvelt speaking on his cell phone, something simply no one did at Chez Pierre, and he actually sniffed. However, no one had bothered the gentleman since he was sitting at a back table, wearing an expensive English suit and Italian loafers; but still, Monsieur Remier had believed it exceedingly rude.
"Tell us what you heard him say," Bowie said.
They could tell Estafan didn't want to admit to eavesdropping, but when Bowie added, "You'll make us the happiest people in Stone Bridge if you heard something," Estafan said, "Well, as a matter of fact, I did stop and listen because the gentleman had a bit of an accent, German, I believe. I heard him say he'd made up his mind and to leave him alone. He said something about flying home, but I didn't hear enough to be certain. He listened for a couple of seconds, then nodded, just like a person was sitting across from him, and said there were always difficulties but he was good with overcoming them. Then he switched to German, laughed a little bit, then hung up." Estafan frowned at a fork beside Sherlock's plate, picked it up and rubbed it vigorously on the napkin over his forearm. "I guess he got more difficulties than he'd counted on, since he's dead."
Sherlock smiled up at him. "Thank you for the information and my shiny fork. You ever need a parking ticket fixed, you call Agent Richards."
Estafan said, "Could that include my boyfriend, who's a maniac on his motorcycle?"
"Not a problem," Bowie said, and wondered what the odds were of Chief Clifford Amos's making good. Bowie sat back in his chair and watched Estafan lean over a client four tables away, nod solemnly, and wend his way gracefully to the kitchen. "My question is, if Blauvelt was speaking to his boss in Germany, then why was he speaking in English? And what did he mean about he'd made up his mind and leave him alone?"
They enjoyed a further bit of luck with Claude-just Claude-the sommelier, who confided that the foreign gentleman at table eleven obviously had a lovely trained palate, and money, since he'd ordered a bottle of Blanklet 2004 Paradise Hills Merlot, Napa Valley, a very fine wine indeed.
"Did he drink the entire bottle?"
"Oh, yes, he did," Claude said to Sherlock, admiring the lock of red hair curling around her ear. "It costs nearly two hundred dollars a bottle here."
Bowie said, "Was he tipsy when he left?"
"I wouldn't say tipsy, no. He ordered another bottle, then paused and appeared to think about it. He changed his mind, waved me away. I didn't notice him after that."
"Okay," Savich said when the dapper Claude was out of earshot, "Dr. Franks did indeed say he'd had red wine with his venison. An entire bottle-did that make him slow, less careful?"
"Well, he certainly realized another bottle might impair him," Sherlock said. "Speaking of wine, does anyone want a
nice dry chardonnay for dinner?"
Bowie shook his head, smiling. "None for me, I don't drink."
Sherlock's left eyebrow hoisted itself. "Health reasons?"
"No, not really," Bowie said, and nothing more.
They enjoyed a lovely sauced scampi over rice, crème brûlée for dessert, and rich dark French espresso.
It was nearly midnight when Bowie dropped them back at the Norman Bates Inn. Fifteen minutes later, they were tucked into a soft bed with Janet Leigh's silent earsplitting screams on the wall behind them. Sherlock said against his shoulder, "The espresso was a mistake," and sighed.
"Maybe not," Savich said, and turned to her. After a couple of minutes, she whispered against his mouth, "Well, another dessert is always nice."
15
Tuesday morning
Erin let a well-dressed, heavy-eyed Bowie Richards into her apartment the next morning at seven thirty.
"You don't look good, Agent Richards. You on an all-night bender with those wild agents from Washington?"
"All I can hope is they had as miserable a sleepless night as I did. We all drank espresso, and the stuff was so strong it could have blasted a rocket into space. That and thinking about this gnarly murder kept me up until nearly three a.m."
Erin cocked her head to one side, tried to look uninterested, but polite. "And what did you decide after all that thinking?"
He eyed her, realized he liked the oversized white shirt over the black leggings, the ballet flats on her feet. Her hair was pulled back in a French braid, big dangly hoops in her ears. She looked all dancer this morning, not a whiff of P.I. "About what? Oh, the murder. It's interesting, we found a waiter at Chez Pierre last night who'd heard the murdered man on a cell phone saying he'd made up his mind and to leave him alone-" Bowie stopped, frowned, shook his head. "Forget I said that, I shouldn't have. Shows you my brain is still singing the espresso blues. Where's Georgie? We've got to leave for school pretty soon."
Yeah, sure, I'll forget it. It's already emblazoned on my brain. Erin said, "I heard the murdered guy's name on the news this morning. Helmut Blauvelt."
"Yeah, I forgot we let out that information."
"It's lucky the waiter at Chez Pierre understood German, isn't it?"
"Oh, he didn't. Blauvelt spoke in English, only a slight accent, Estafan told us, until the end, then Blauvelt switched to German-what's wrong with me? Keep that confidential, okay?"
Erin said easily, "Not a problem. Georgie! Your dad's here."
"I'm eating oatmeal," Georgie called out from the kitchen. "You want some, Daddy?"
Bowie rubbed his eyes. "Oatmeal? She never eats oatmeal. How'd you manage that?"
"I've got a special recipe passed down from my great-grandfather. Georgie took one bite and blissed out. She doesn't want to let the oatmeal out of her sight. Have you had breakfast yet, Agent Richards? Maybe Great-granddad's oatmeal will glue things back together again in your brain."
"Call me Bowie, please."
"All right. Call me Erin."
"Erin." He took a quick look at his watch. "I really don't have time, I've got so much stuff to do and-your great-grandfather's recipe, you say?"
"Yep. He was Polish, but he always claimed he'd learned how to make it when he lived in Inverness for three years. Come on, Bowie, come into my kitchen. It'll just take a minute. Believe me, Georgie isn't going to budge from the kitchen table until she cleans out her bowl, and it's a big bowl."
Erin eyed him as he took a tiny bite, nodded, then went to work on the oatmeal with brown sugar sprinkled on top, nodding some more as his daughter spoke nonstop to him, at him, really-about how she took a running start and landed right in the middle of the red beanbag in the living room, and then Erin tried it but she was too big and fell off the side, before switching to Erin's bedtime story about a ballet dancer who hated wearing a tutu.
Erin knew Bowie's nods were automatic-he was thinking about Blauvelt's murder, she knew, that or he was thinking about falling back into bed and sleeping around the clock. How to get more information out of him? Like, did they have any witnesses who'd seen her fall out of Caskie Royal's bathroom window? If so, had these witnesses described her?
She took a sip of her tea. "Georgie, you've told your father everything, down to the color of your socks. And you've eaten every stick of oatmeal."
"Oatmeal is gooey, Erin, there aren't any sticks."
"Hmm. Okay, you're stalling. Go brush your teeth and get your sweater, it's cool today." She waited until Georgie had cleared the kitchen door, then went for it. "That break-in at the Schiffer Hartwin headquarters, did it have anything to do with the German guy's murder? Wasn't he found right out behind the building?"
Bless her Polish great-granddad. It was the best oatmeal Bowie had ever eaten in his life. Actually, now that he thought about it, this was probably the only oatmeal he'd ever eaten. His mom hated the stuff, never made it for him or his siblings. "Break-in? Oh yeah, that was weird, truth be told."
"Why?"
He said after a moment of chewing and savoring, "I keep forgetting, you're a P.I. You've got terminal curiosity, don't you?"
If only you knew. She nodded easily. "You've got a point. Come on, Bowie, what was weird about the break-in? What was taken? Do you have any ideas who it could have been?"
Shut your mouth-too many questions, don't make him suspicious.
"All we know is it was a woman."
Had someone seen her running from the Schiffer Hartwin building? Not good, not good. "How do you know that?"
He took a last spoonful of oatmeal, sat back in the kitchen chair, and crossed his arms over his chest. "I do believe I've got my hundred-watt bulb back. That was delicious. Thank you, Erin. She went out a bathroom window that's too small for a guy."
How could I forget that wretched window was small? It's okay, then. Not a big deal. Was that all they knew?
Bowie rose when Georgie came skipping back into the small kitchen. "Thanks again for feeding me, Erin. I'll have Georgie work on you for the oatmeal recipe. Hey, you ready, kiddo?"
Georgie nodded and took his hand. "You look tired, Daddy. If you went to bed at eight o'clock like me, you wouldn't be."
"That's a fact," he said. He smiled at Erin. "Thank you for taking Georgie in. I hope she didn't give you any grief after you called me last night at bedtime?"
"Not a bit, particularly since it was well after eight o'clock when I found out when her bedtime actually was. Well, maybe I did threaten to make her do barre exercises if she wanted to stay up so late." Erin head-rubbed Georgie, and the little girl laughed and ran out of the kitchen.
"I'm going to have the strongest legs in ballet class!"
Erin waited a moment until she heard Georgie at the front door. "This murder and break-in deal, you think you'll get it solved pretty soon?"
"Oh, you're wondering how long you'll have to keep my kid as a roommate?"
No, you idiot, Georgie can stay here forever. "Yeah, I stewed about it all night. She's such a trial. No, of course not, Georgie's just fine. Forget reevaluating tomorrow, okay? Unless you think you'll have everything figured out by noon, hotshot that you are?"
"Maybe, we'll see. The big fed hotshots sent to run the investigation, turns out they're pretty okay."
"That's lucky. Now there are three hotshots cleaning things up here. Do you know, I ran into a fed once on a case and I would have sworn he wanted to pull off his wingtip and bash me with it."
He grinned, as she'd meant him to. "Did you smart-mouth him?"
"Nah, well, maybe a little bit. The jerk. So these guys are smart?"
"There are two of them, they're married of all things. The guy, Dillon Savich, he's big and tough-looking, and he's got a look about him that would scare anyone with a brain. Sherlock, his wife, she's pretty, swee
t smiles she uses very effectively, but you know in your gut she'd kick your butt all the way to Vermont if you crossed her. I'm meeting them at the police station now to talk things over."
He looked better, she thought, his eyes clear, back straighter, more focused now. Yeah, Mr. Hundred-Watt was back.
"What's wrong? Do I still look like crap?"
"No, I was thinking you look human again-the wonders of Scottish oatmeal. Have a good day, Bowie. Will you be coming by tonight before Georgie's in bed?"
"I'll try." He looked down at her, but not that far down. In her ballet flats she was about five ten, maybe eleven. In heels, they'd be eye-to-eye. "You teaching a ballet class today?"
"What? Oh, because of my getup. Yeah, this afternoon. I'm working at home until then."
"Are you working on a case yourself ?"
"Yeah, but it's no biggie. Have a nice day."
"Some guy hire you to follow his wife around?"
She gave him a smile to freeze his lungs. "Oh yeah, I might even get to hide in a bedroom closet and take a video." Then, to his utter surprise, she drew back her fist and smacked him in the arm, hard.
He was rubbing his arm when Georgie shouted, running right at him, "Daddy, I'm ready! Let's go or I'll be late."
Call him Mr. Smooth. "I guess that was a kind of stupid thing to say, wasn't it? Sorry. Bye, Erin."
"Bye, Erin. I'll see you at ballet class this afternoon." Georgie gave her a huge grin, and shook her finger at her. "Don't be late. Daddy, what did you say to Erin that was stupid?"
Erin closed the apartment door and latched the chain. She pushed the red beanbag back into the corner and paced. So they knew a woman had broken into Caskie Royal's office, no surprise there since the small window made it pretty obvious, but they couldn't have a clue it was her. She wasn't anywhere near their radar, and why should she be? They also believed the murder was connected to the break-in, but she was safe-unless she sent all her evidence, all the Culovort papers she'd copied off Royal's computer, to the media. Then they'd track her down and fry her.
The FBI Thrillers Collection: Vol 11-15 Page 107
