The Night Cafe

by Taylor Smith

  Russo. “Let her pass,” he called to the cop in the road.

  The deputy nodded, held up his hands to stop traffic in both directions, then waved Hannah across. Despite the bad feeling she had about the yellow crime-scene tape at the strip mall, the sight of Russo stirred a flutter in her middle—his dark hair a little mussed in the breeze, the silver at his temples catching the light, open shirt collar under sport coat. Guy was a babe, no doubt about it.

  He took her elbow. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to track you down.”

  “Well, hello to you, too. What’s going on?” She glanced beyond him to the huddle of deputies outside the gallery door.

  “Trouble, that’s what. Come on.” He led her to the tape and nodded to the duty officer with the crime-scene sign-in sheet. “She’s with me. Hannah Nicks.”

  The deputy wrote down her name while Russo lifted the tape for her to pass under.

  “Why is Homicide here, John?”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I have business with the owner of that gallery. I—” She stopped cold, remembering the scene at Moises Gladding’s villa. “Oh, jeez, not Rebecca, too.”

  It was Russo’s turn to freeze. “What do you mean, ‘too.’ Who else?”

  She started to speak but couldn’t begin to figure out where to start. “I’ll tell you after. What happened to her?”

  “Somebody broke into the place.” He nodded toward a heavyset, gray-haired woman sitting in the back of one of the patrol cars. “The lady who owns the gift shop next door came in this morning and found a couple of FedEx packages outside the gallery door. The lights were on inside, so she knocked. The door was unlocked. That’s when she found Ms. Powell. Medical examiner says she’s been dead for more than twenty-four hours. Hard to be sure until the autopsy.”

  “How?”

  He hesitated, but it was hardly her first taste of violent death and he knew it. “He snapped her neck.”

  “Oh, God.” She thought about Rebecca at Nora’s, remembered her painful thinness, her nervous manner. She wouldn’t have put up any fight. She had to have been terrified.

  At the gallery entrance, a blond woman came out the door and looked around, frowning. Then, spotting Russo, she skipped down the steps and walked over. Dressed in a crisp navy pantsuit and collared blouse, she was about Hannah’s age, but blond where Hannah was dark, organized and efficient looking where Hannah was completely off-kilter, after her hellish week.

  The blonde carried the blue notebook of the Sheriff’s Department Homicide Bureau, a cartoon of a fierce-looking bulldog on the cover. She glanced at Hannah, then turned to Russo. Hannah had rarely felt so summarily dismissed.

  “The M.E.’s done with the body for now. He wants to know if the coroner’s people can remove it.”

  Russo nodded, but Hannah touched his arm. “Can I see her first? Please?”

  She was thinking of Nora. Rebecca was her sister’s best friend. Hannah had been to plenty of crime scenes, and she knew Nora would hate the impersonal manner of everyone working it. It wasn’t the cops’ fault. They had to develop a thick skin or the job would destroy them. It messed them up pretty bad anyway. Just the same, Nora would want to know that at least one person had been here to grieve for her friend.

  The blonde raised an eyebrow as she waited for Russo’s inevitable refusal of Hannah’s request to go in. When he said “all right” instead, the eyebrow shot up even higher.

  Russo couldn’t help but notice. “Hannah, this is my new trainee. Lindsay, this is Hannah Nicks.”

  Lindsay Who-Didn’t-Seem-to-Have-a-Surname nodded curtly, then stood aside to let them pass—although everything about her telegraphed, You’re in charge here, Detective, but what the hell are you doing letting a civilian into our crime scene? It made Hannah really glad that Russo had introduced her as his trainee and not his partner.

  She followed him up the steps and into the gallery, Lindsay close behind. The place was softly lit, much as it had been the morning—was it only three days ago?—that Hannah had come to pick up the Koon. But pictures were askew on the walls and a couple of the pedestals had been knocked over, sending pottery shards across the carpet.

  The coroner’s gurney stood just this side of the divider that separated the gallery space from Rebecca’s office area. An M.E. Hannah remembered from her own days on the force was making notes on a clipboard. He glanced up and did a double take when he spotted her. Clearly, he remembered her, although her name seemed to be escaping him.

  “Uh, hi. Long time, no see. How you been?”

  “Good. You?”

  “Okay. You know.”

  “Yeah.” Not a conversation that would be remembered for sterling repartee, obviously. But then, there was a dead woman lying three feet away.

  The M.E. turned to Russo. “I’m all done here. You got everything you need from the body? If so, the guys there will get out of your way. Let you get on with your work.”

  “Hold on a minute, would you?”

  “Sure.”

  Hannah came around the divider. The first thing she saw were the dainty lace-up espadrilles, the same shoes Rebecca had worn to dinner at Nora’s. She was lying on her back, head tilted sharply to one side. She had on another flowing skirt, much like the one she’d worn Sunday, but it was hiked up around her bikini briefs. If she’d been sexually assaulted, the panties would probably have been ripped off, but the M.E. would have been looking for preliminary signs of it anyway.

  Hannah crouched next to her, then looked back up at Russo. “Can I?” she asked, her hand poised over the body.

  When he nodded, she pulled down the hem of the skirt and smoothed it around the mottled calves, dark at the back where the blood had pooled after she died. She pulled down Rebecca’s sweater, as well, to cover the incision mark where the medic would have inserted a thermometer to get a liver temp. Thankfully, Rebecca’s eyes were closed and her face seemed peaceful, despite the dark marbling of her skin and awkward angle of her head. That, at least, was something she’d be able to offer Nora, Hannah thought.

  She rested a hand on the skirt where she’d smoothed it over the leg. Rebecca felt so very cold. “Oh, Becs,” she whispered, “I’m really sorry.”

  Russo’s hand squeezed her shoulder gently and she got to her feet.

  “Come on, let’s sit over here and let the coroner’s people do their thing,” he said.

  He led her to a padded bench set on one side of the gallery, positioned for viewing the maximum number of paintings—as well as the work of the crime-scene technicians, who were busy dusting, print-lifting and photographing every possible nook and cranny. When they sat down, Lindsay was there like white on rice, settling on the other side of Russo, her blue notebook open, pen poised.

  “The victim’s date book showed she met with you on Monday, Ms. Nicks. We also found your business card on the desk.”

  “I imagine you did.”

  “So what was your relationship to the vic.”

  Hannah bristled. “Look, her name wasn’t ‘vic,’ Detective. It was Rebecca—or, better still, Ms. Powell.”

  “No need to get huffy. I understand you used to be a detective. You know how it goes here.”

  “Yes, but she was a close friend of my family. A little respect would be nice.”

  “It’s not—”

  “Lindsay.” Russo’s tone was weary. “Enough.”

  “I’m just—”

  “Either sit quietly and take notes while I ask the questions, or go make sure the techs are getting everything we need.”

  Clearly, she didn’t like either option, but she knew better than to argue with her training officer. Under normal circumstances, Hannah might actually have liked her spunk. But these were not normal circumstances.

  “So,” Russo said, “this lady was the gallery owner you told me about. The one who asked you to make a delivery to Mexico.”

  Hannah nodded. Lindsay made notes. Was she wondering how her bo
ss and Hannah knew each other? It wasn’t like they had enough of a relationship that Hannah’s portrait would be in a silver frame on his desk. But if she was curious, Lindsay didn’t say anything—maybe because she didn’t want to be sent away to dust doorknobs for fingerprints.

  “You might have been the last person to see her alive,” Russo said.

  “Somebody must have seen her after that. I said I saw her three days ago.”

  He shrugged. “We’re still canvassing, but you could be it. Her mail wasn’t picked up from her box outside on Tuesday or yesterday.”

  “What about the gift shop owner who found her?”

  “She noticed that the lights were on the last two days, just like she found them this morning, but these places do most of their business on the weekend. She didn’t think anything of it when the place was so quiet. It was only when she tried the door to bring in the FedEx boxes that she realized it was unlocked. That’s when she found her. All we can do is backtrack to what we do know, which is that you saw her—when, exactly?”

  Hannah briefly described spending Monday morning and part of the afternoon with Rebecca.

  “That was the day after you’d seen her at your sister’s?”

  “You know it was. I told you.”

  Russo cocked his thumb over his shoulder. “Tell it again for the detective here so she can get it in her notes.”

  So Hannah recounted the dinner at Nora’s and Rebecca’s job offer, then brought them back up to Monday afternoon. “She was alive and happy when I left her around two. Really happy. This commission was a big deal for her. She thought her bad luck was finally turning.”

  “Bad luck?” Lindsay asked.

  “Messy divorce. Money troubles.”

  “And this guy in Mexico she was sending the painting to?” Russo asked.

  “Moises Gladding.” She couldn’t fail to notice Lindsay’s dramatic eye roll, although Russo, with his back to his trainee, missed it. “What?” Hannah demanded.

  “Nothing.”

  Russo glanced back at her.

  She put on her best “who, me?” expression. “Just taking notes, boss.”

  He turned back to Hannah. “He’s a piece of work, this Gladding. There are about a dozen federal warrants out on him, did you know that?”

  “You ran a background check?”

  He nodded. “After I talked to you. Maybe your sister’s friend made a deal with the devil.”

  “Yeah, I’m beginning to think she might have. I guess it’s true what they say—if a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is.”

  There was a sudden bump and commotion over by the office area, and one of the coroner’s people cursed. They had wrapped the body and were lifting it onto the gurney when one of the men lost his grip and dropped his end. The wrapping came open and a mottled arm flopped out.

  Hannah closed her eyes, trying not to think of who it was they were manhandling. At the same time, the ex-cop in her registered the flaccidity of the body, the color of the skin, and the faint, sweetish odor that she’d been trying to block out from the moment she’d walked in the door. A body begins to enter a state of rigor about twelve hours after death as lactose acid locks up the muscles. By twenty-four hours, it’s in the state that’s the reason the term “stiff” was coined. Then, as decomp sets in, it loses rigidity at about the same rate over the next twelve or so hours. The state of Rebecca’s body made it very clear that this couldn’t have happened much later than Tuesday afternoon.

  The men tucked the arm back in and managed to get the body on the low gurney with no further mishaps. They lifted and locked the stretcher in the up position, then rolled it to the door, which opened before them, held by a sheriff’s deputy who looked like he’d just graduated from junior high.

  On the deck behind the young deputy, Hannah was shocked to see her old buddies, Special Agents Towle and Ito, along with a third man she didn’t recognize. As the men rolled the stretcher down the handicap ramp to the waiting coroner’s van, the three men entered the gallery. Hannah, Russo and his partner all got to their feet.

  The young cop quick-slipped around the new arrivals. “Excuse me, guys. Detectives, one of our guys is going on a coffee run,” he said. “Get you guys some?”

  Russo glanced at Hannah, who nodded gratefully. This was not the morning to have skipped her caffeine hit. Russo pulled out his wallet and handed over a couple of twenties. “I think we could use coffee all around right about now.”

  “Not for me, thanks,” Lindsay said. Her rosy cheeks and trim build marked her as a runner. Hannah tried to remember the last time she’d gone for a run herself. Did dodging trouble in Mexico count?

  Agent Towle turned to his partner, a thumb cocked at Russo’s trainee. “She’s always been like that. Total health nut.”

  Hannah and Russo exchanged puzzled looks.

  “Excuse me?” Russo said. “Who are you?”

  “Sorry. Special Agent Joe Towle, FBI.” He held up the leather folder that showed his shield and ID. “And you, I imagine, are Detective Russo.”

  As Russo shook hands with him, he frowned back at his partner. “Towle? As in the brother?”

  “That’s him,” Lindsay said.

  “This is Special Agent Ito,” Towle added, “and behind him is William Teagarden, formerly of Scotland Yard. Gentlemen, this is Detective John Russo and his partner, Lindsay Towle. My baby sister.”

  “Joe!” Lindsay snapped.

  “Oops, sorry. Detective Towle, a brilliant and never less than thoroughly professional police officer who happens to have an annoying older brother.” Towle turned to Hannah. “And this lady, speak of the devil, is Hannah Nicks. We were just saying on the way over here that we’d pay you a visit next. You’ve saved us a trip.”

  “Glad to help,” Hannah said, even as her brain was making the connection. Russo’s partner was Special Agent Towle’s sister. Russo had called Hannah from work on Monday and she’d told him about making a delivery to Moises Gladding. A few hours later, FBI agents had shown up on her doorstep. Coincidence? She didn’t think so.

  Russo looked mystified, however. “How do you know Ms. Nicks?” he asked the agents.

  “Agent Ito and I paid her a visit before she left for Mexico.”

  Russo said nothing for a moment, but Hannah saw his dark eyes flicker the second the penny dropped. He wheeled on his partner. “Detective, a word, if you please.”

  He marched to the other side of the room, Lindsay following behind like a defiant delinquent. They kept their voices low, but the body language left no doubt that Russo’s trainee was getting a reaming out. She somehow managed to look chastened and unapologetic at the same time.

  The older man who’d arrived with the feds turned to Hannah. “You’ve had quite an adventure, it seems, Ms. Nicks.”

  He had an accent you could cut with a knife. Somewhere in his sixties, he had grizzled, thinning hair, but a tall military bearing. His deep brown eyes twinkled and his smile could only be called mischievous. Under any other circumstances, Hannah would have been positively charmed. At the moment, however, she was only confused.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” she said.

  “William Teagarden. Detective Superintendent, retired, at your service.” As he took her hand, he flashed a disarmingly warm smile. “These days, I’m a private recovery consultant.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “I find lost works of art.”

  “Mr. Teagarden was referred to us by FBI headquarters,” Agent Towle told her.

  “That’s right,” Teagarden said. “I’ve done a great deal of work with the Bureau over the years, and the head of their Art Unit was kind enough to put me together with Special Agent Towle here. It seems we’re running parallel investigations. I’m on the trail of a stolen van Gogh, you see. An irreplaceable work called The Night Café.”

  “It was taken from the Arlen Hunter Museum in January,” Towle said. “Two security guards were killed i
n the heist. Mr. Teagarden is of the view that the painting you carried to Mexico might have been the missing van Gogh.”

  “What?” Hannah exclaimed. Russo, who’d reappeared behind her, echoed her surprise.

  Hannah turned to Towle and Ito. “You saw the painting when you came to my place on Monday night. That was no masterpiece.”

  “No, I wouldn’t have said so,” Towle agreed, “but Mr. Teagarden thinks the van Gogh might have been painted over to make it easier to spirit it out of the country.”