Lucky Catch

by Deborah Coonts

  “Don’t forget Teddie,” Romeo added, surprising me. “He’s sure turned up at some interesting places. And him taking the note from the scene of the second murder—that sorta piqued my interest.”

  Piqued mine, too, but I wasn’t going to add fuel to that fire. The thought that practically everyone close to me was working individual angles, that they were being less than forthcoming, shall we say, just hurt my heart too much. “Christ.” I glanced at Romeo, who had rotated his head and was watching me. “Jean-Charles is at the center of this whole thing.”

  “And he’s nowhere to be found.” Romeo once again closed his eyes. “Even with all that in the hopper, I still think Gregor is the likeliest candidate. He’s got a missing truffle, Fiona was right in the middle of that.”

  “What about the Berkeley guy?”

  “If the truffle was chipped, he knew where it went. Maybe he wasn’t telling.”

  “Doesn’t really make sense, then, for Gregor to kill him.” I tired to figure out where Romeo was going with all of this.

  “Maybe he didn’t care about finding the truffle.” Romeo raised his eyebrows as he raised that question.

  “And why wouldn’t he want to find it?”

  “He had it insured for a huge sum. Without the truffle, he’d get cash, and all of it, as the value of the truffle would be impossible to dicker over.”

  “So this was just about money?”

  “Well, more like life or death, for Gregor.” Romeo tried to push himself higher in the chair, then gave up. “I can’t prove it…yet…but rumor has it Gregor was in deep to some bad dudes.”

  “In deep?” That little confusion bomb exploded in my head. Then a thought hit me. “You know, back when he was running the Italian place, a rumor that he had some important friends was making the rounds.”

  “If he’s taking money from those guys, he better be careful,” Romeo said needlessly.

  “What if he borrowed the money to buy the truffle?” I was plucking at straws, but I’d always been told to follow the money when a crime had been committed. It had worked before.

  “I’ll check it out, but you’d be better at chasing that lead. You have sketchier friends.”

  I didn’t argue. “I’m sure Gregor could shed some light.”

  Romeo’s eyes shut and remained that way. “We’ve been looking for him, but can’t find him.”

  I reached over and extricated the young detective’s almost empty glass from his loosening grasp. “We both saw him at Dr. Phelps’ show.”

  “Well, he’s dropped off the grid since then.” There was a hint of fatality in Romeo’s voice. “Just once, wouldn’t it be fun to have an investigation just sort of come together seamlessly?”

  “You have the proverbial smoking gun. What more do you want?” I deadpanned, rather proud of my delivery.

  “You’re a pain in the ass, you know that?” Romeo said without even a hint of tease.

  “You’re just figuring that out? We should send you back to detective school.”

  “Nope.” Romeo still stared at the insides of his eyelids—sleep fuzzied his voice. “If I had a do-over, it’d be truck driving school. Then I could get the hell out of here.”

  This time, when the urge to give him a hug struck me, I didn’t stifle it. Amazingly, he gave me an appreciative smile.

  Pausing, I touched his face. His skin was hot. Running this long at full throttle on high-octane fuel, he was heading straight for a flameout.

  Settling back, I patted my pillows back into place. “When I saw Gregor yesterday, he was all over me about that damned truffle. Got in my face pretty good.” I leaned my head to the side, resting it on the back of the couch. Well past tired, I’d been fighting a losing battle with sleep for most of the evening. “It’s funny, but at the time, even though he was at full voice, I got the impression he was more scared than angry.”

  “Fiona was dead. I don’t know what he has to be scared of.”

  “A life sentence?”

  “Or his own funeral.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Sleep had finally come, but it had been fitful as murders both real and imagined haunted my dreams. Taking a shower in my own home, then throwing open the doors to my closet, which was large enough to fill Imelda Marcos with envy, provided a positive start to the day, making me feel more like myself than I had in a long time. I chose a pair of black jeans and a cashmere sweater, casual chic, which went with my positive mood. And some ankle boots with low heels that went with my need for comfort these days. Comfort over cool? Did that mean I was becoming sensible?

  Not a chance.

  The apartment was quiet as I tiptoed toward the kitchen, so I opted to forgo uncovering the bird and punching the coffee machine—the noise generated by both could wake the dead. I stuffed a plastic dish filled with seeds through the door to Newton’s cage, affixing it to the bars, then, feeling guilty, I added a couple of slices of apple. One foot tucked under him, Newton gave me a one-eyed look with half-lowered lid—I didn’t need to be fluent in parrot to get his meaning.

  Before I left, I scrawled a note to Romeo, who still slumbered on the couch, and left it on the coffee table in front of him under a bottle of aspirin. The note suggested he ask Jordan for his famous hangover cure. I had a feeling the kid would appreciate it.

  Curiously, when I called the elevator and the doors opened, Teddie wasn’t lurking inside. I was a bit surprised—lately he’d been turning up in so many odd places and at awkward times.

  The ride down was quicker than I remembered. Forrest nodded and gave me a bright grin, which I returned as I strode through the lobby, then pushed through the doors. Daylight assaulted me. Apparently, even though I was just joining it, the day was well under way.

  I’d tossed my replacement phone in my bag and didn’t feel like rooting for it, and I hadn’t bothered with a watch, so the actual time was anybody’s guess. Not that it mattered. If life as we know it teetered precariously over the abyss, Miss P. could find me—she was uncanny that way.

  Blinking against the sun, I decided to walk. The Babylon was twenty minutes away if I strolled, ten if I adopted a reasonable pace. I opted for something in between.

  A Metro officer was removing the yellow crime scene tape from around Jean-Charles’s food truck as I walked by. Hadn’t Adone said they were releasing the truck earlier? I waved, but he didn’t notice me, or if he did, he didn’t respond . . . the more likely scenario. Metro didn’t exactly work on engendering warm fuzzies in the population—they turned a blind eye to their employers. I never understood that, but then again, I was in customer service . . . a dying field.

  From the angle of the sun and the relative warmth, given that Thanksgiving was looming, I put the hour at just past noon. As I ambled up the curving entrance to the Babylon, a valet or two greeted me as they ran past. Others nodded and smiled.

  I loved my job. Oh, it had its moments, all jobs did—at least, that’s what I was told. This was the only life I’d ever known, so who was I to say?

  Once in the lobby, and before taking the stairs to the mezzanine and my little corner of the universe, I paused under the Chihuly winged creatures arcing across the high ceiling. They settled me, reorienting even my worst fears. They always had. I had no idea why.

  Girded for the day, I took a deep breath, then pushed through the door to my office. Brandy skittered back to her desk, and Miss P. studiously ignored me. I decided not to be alarmed. “Why are you sitting out here?” I asked the newly promoted head of customer relations. “You have a very nice office. I should know, it used to be mine.”

  When Miss P. looked up, her eyes shone and she had a goofy look on her face.

  I narrowed my eyes. “What’s going on?”

  Extending her left hand, she waggled her fingers.

  My eyes widened. Grabbing her hand and yanking it toward me, I dislodged her from the chair—she didn’t seem to mind. A bright sparkler winked on her ring finger. “Impressive. I want to hear a
ll about it.” Ignoring my overflowing message box, I parked one butt cheek across Jeremy’s stenciled name on the corner of her desk.

  “You know how much I love DW Bistro?” Breathless, she warmed to the story while she kept glancing down at her hand, as if she couldn’t quite believe the Beautiful Jeremy Whitlock had indeed come through.

  “Great place, but not the most romantic.”

  “The romance is in the remembering—Jeremy paid attention when I told him about it, and he remembered. Isn’t that the best?”

  I couldn’t help grinning—she looked twenty years younger, like a schoolgirl with her first crush. Maybe Jeremy was the first she’d really fallen for. I’d never thought about it before: why she’d never married. “You’ve captured the last good man. But he got the better of the deal.”

  She pshawed, then shared the rest of the story. There’d been Champagne—from the glazed look in her eyes, I suspected quite a bit. Then the pivotal question on one knee. The whole restaurant had been in on it, and they had partied until the wee hours, ending with a celebratory conga line on the patio.

  “This calls for some bubbly.”

  Miss P. didn’t say no, so Brandy fetched a bottle from the fridge in the kitchenette where I kept emergency rations. The three of us stood in a circle as I poured into the proffered flutes, then filled my own. Setting the bottle on the desk, I raised my glass. “A toast. To good friends, good life, good love. Don’t waste even one moment.”

  We clinked, then drank.

  I wrapped Miss P. in a hug.

  She whispered, “This is the first time. I never thought love would find me.”

  Filled with joy, I squeezed her tight.

  The door behind us burst open. Letting Miss P go, I turned at the intrusion. Amazingly, I didn’t spill even one drop of Champagne.

  Romeo skidded to a stop, his eyes taking in our glasses. He looked about as I expected: crumpled clothes that he’d slept in, a puffy face, red eyes. He held a hand to one temple, pressing as if afraid his head would explode.

  When he looked at me, a chill chased through me.

  “We found Gregor.”

  * * *

  The home of many parties, even an ice cream social for the young daughter of a famous welterweight, Bungalow 7 had never welcomed death through its doors . . . until now.

  Shoulder to shoulder, Romeo and I hurried through the casino and down the long hallway.

  “Did you have Jordan fix you his hangover cure?” I asked, avoiding the task in front of us.

  “Yeah, took the edge off.” He ran his hand through his hair and glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. He looked sheepish. “Sorry about last night. I’m not feeling even half-human these days.”

  “What are friends for?” I almost slapped him on the shoulder, then thought better of it—his head would probably roll right off its perch.

  The officers standing sentry motioned Romeo and me inside. Crime scene techs were already dusting and processing. For some reason, I tested the air for the lingering smell of the room’s most recent inhabitant, the truffle pig. Housekeeping had done a stellar job—no porcine perfume. Although I thought I detected a hint of fish. Keeping the bungalows with their in-room kitchens smelling nice was a never-ending battle for our staff. And now, they were going to have a field day with the mess the techs were making. I didn’t want to even think about what the caustic black powder would do to the fine finish on the antiques, so I didn’t.

  My plate was full.

  A man with coroner stitched in block letters across the back of his jacket knelt beside the body. Even in death, Gregor looked like the puffed-up pompous ass he had been. Lying on his back, his prodigious stomach popping the buttons on his shirt, eyes open, his skin a bluish tint, his black hair still oiled into place, he looked like he’d just dropped where he fell, overtaken by death.

  “Hey, Doc. You know Lucky O’Toole from the hotel, right?” Romeo asked as we stepped behind the coroner.

  I bent over him, like a vulture looming over dinner—an analogy that made my stomach turn. “Doc.”

  “Lucky. Figured you’d show up.” Without turning around, he reached into his kit. “You guys sure are keeping me busy. We got another note.”

  My stomach flipped. “Where?”

  Over his shoulder, he handed me a plastic bag with a scrap of white paper in it. “We found it in his jacket pocket . . . with a black Sharpie.”

  “Really?”

  The coroner answered with a nod.

  Romeo followed me as I headed toward the bar to lay the note flat on the granite surface.

  Staring down at the note, Romeo asked, his voice hushed. “Think he’s been writing all these notes?”

  “And killing everyone?” I didn’t try to hide my disbelief.

  “Then who killed him?”

  “The killer,” I deadpanned.

  He didn’t appear to appreciate my jocularity as he squinted at me out of one eye.

  “Lights too bright in here for you?”

  “No, just rethinking why I brought you along,” he growled.

  We hunched over the note, hoping for a clue. I read the lines out loud. “Mistakes made, nothing new. A gag, a joke, a dream come true. No smiles, just pain. With everything to gain. Why cheat, why steal. A Carnival, a party where no one . . .” I looked up into Romeo’s clear blue eyes, rimmed in red. “It stops in the middle.”

  “So he was writing them?”

  I thought about that a moment—conclusions were so easy to jump to, especially when you wanted some answers. “I don’t think we can assume anything. We need some proof.”

  “We’ll try to pull some prints.” The coroner’s voice was muffled as he hunched over the body. He didn’t sound hopeful.

  “If you could just give us something to go on, some hint of a connection between these three, maybe we could lighten your future workload.”

  He glanced around, holding my eyes for a moment. I didn’t have to explain.

  “Any idea what killed him?” Romeo asked, nodding toward the bloated corpse of Chef Gregor.

  Turning back to his work, the coroner reached into Gregor’s mouth with a pair of forceps. Maneuvering, he squeezed his fingers, and the catch caught with an audible sound. Pulling the forceps free, he held them aloft, rotating them as he eyed the chunk of white flesh held in the instrument’s grasp. “Fugu.”

  “What?” The young detective looked lost at sea.

  “Just a guess, mind you. I won’t know for certain until we run all the tests. But from the state of the body, the uneaten sushi feast on the counter over there—” He motioned to the dining room table. I hadn’t noticed the remains of dinner scattered there, but they explained the smell of fish. “It sure looks like a neurotoxin.” The coroner rocked back on his heels, then pushed himself to his feet. He was taller and thinner than I remembered. His eyes looked sad, but his manner was businesslike and perfunctory. Death was an everyday occurrence for him, after all. I’d noticed the same jaded look on Romeo recently. “I’ll have to run some tox screens.”

  “Fugu is a poison?” Romeo tried to catch a thread.

  “Technically, a fish,” I explained. “A delicacy in Japan, the wild fugu feeds on some sort of plankton or something that in turn ingests a large amount of neurotoxins. The fish eats so much, its flesh becomes saturated with the stuff. Especially its organs.”

  “Why would anybody eat that?”

  “As a stupid show of manhood. Just another of the many curses of the Y-chromosome.”

  The coroner actually laughed. “And how did you come to hold the male of the species in such high regard?”

  “Experience.”

  He gave me a shrug and a weak smile. “It’s the best teacher.”

  “Apparently, I’m a slow learner.” I grabbed Romeo’s arm and squeezed as a thought zinged through my synapses. “Pigs find a feast so rare.”

  His eyes widened. “It wasn’t a four-legged pig at all.” He looked at the bloated body
of Chef Gregor and winced. “The rest of the note makes sense now.”

  I turned to the coroner, who watched us with interest. “I’m interested in how Chef Gregor came by a lethal dose of fugu, assuming your theory holds up.”

  Romeo pulled out his tattered note pad and pen from his inside jacket pocket and began taking notes. Odds were, he slept with the thing. Of course, lately he’d been sleeping in his clothes, like a firefighter ready to roll out of bed, step into his boots, then run at the sound of an alarm.

  “Surely with all your Japanese clientele, you’ve had to deal with fugu at some point.” The coroner played out the obvious.

  “Of course, but the stuff is highly regulated, as you can imagine. Talk about hoops to jump through! And the sushi chef handling the stuff must have been trained by the masters in Japan and certified to work with the fish. Apparently, serving a lethal main course to high-roller clients is considered bad form, not to mention the chilling effect it could have on business.”

  Romeo looked up from his note taking, his hand poised over the paper. “High rollers?”

  “Super pricy stuff,” the coroner said.

  “Adding insult to injury.” I couldn’t help myself.

  Romeo gave me a wide-eyed look. I shrugged in response.

  “You two ought to take your act on the road.” The coroner bagged the fish and motioned to his techs, who descended on the body like flies. “But the carton over there says this stuff came from One Fish, Two Fish.”

  Our eyes wide, Romeo and I looked at each other.

  “Bingo,” we said in unison.

  * * *

  Brett Baker’s Twitter feed indicated his food truck would be downtown today at the Farmers Market. This being November, the number of farmers there would be few. With the holidays on top of us, the vendors would have mainly packaged goods, maybe even canned cranberry jellies and other traditional fare. Of course, the baked goods would be amazing—I tried to conjure some willpower, but I’d already given it up for Thanksgiving.