Genie for Hire (23 page)

“That’s a pretty neat trick,” Biff said. “The way you go
back and forth between human and butterfly. Does it drain you?”

Syl cocked his head. “Drain me? The transformation? Not at
all. It’s just part of who I am. Does yours make you tired?”

Biff nodded. “Sometimes. If I’m out of this form for too
long. But the lamp helps me rejuvenate.” He sat back in his chair and looked at
the beautiful young man. “You said you just hatched from your chrysalis a few
weeks ago. How long do you live?”

Syl shrugged. “It depends. Some of my kind can only survive
a few weeks, or months. Each of us is different. It depends on our purpose in
life.”

“What’s yours?”

“I have yet to discover it,” Syl said. “My paperwork says
that I’m an HVAC maintenance engineer—working with the ventilation and air
conditioning systems of large buildings. The agency that places us lined up an
interview for me in that building where I saw you today.”

“Paperwork? Agency?” Biff asked.

“It’s a long, tedious story,” Syl said. “The short version
is that unlike real butterflies, sylphs have to make a difference in the world
they inhabit. When a sylph emerges from his cocoon, he’s presented with papers
that allow him to work in the human world. HVAC is a common placement, because
we can transform into butterflies and troubleshoot problems in the ductwork or
the machinery. But the very idea of it bores me to tears.”

A butterfly who could take shape as a human being too could
be a real asset to a detective agency, Biff thought. Perhaps Syl could flit
around Petrov and Laskin and gather some information.

“Ever thought about becoming a private eye?” Biff asked. “I
could use someone with your skill sets.”

“Really?” Syl leaned forward. “Doing what?”

“Just a freelance thing, you understand, though of course if
you can bring any work in yourself, you’d get a substantial cut. You’d be able
to make that difference in the world you’re supposed to. Right now I could use
a spy.” He explained that he needed someone who could get into restricted
places and listen in on conversations. “I’ve got a case right now, where I need
some information I can’t readily get myself.”

“Sounds fascinating! I’m all ears. Well, not in this body.
But you get the point.”

Biff pulled up his files on the case that had begun with the
theft of Sveta’s digital photos. Quickly, though, he discovered that Syl didn’t
have a very long attention span. His eyes kept darting around the room, and his
shoulders fluttered a bit.

“I’ll get to the point.” Biff pulled up photos of Igor
Laskin and Viktor Petrov on his laptop, turning the screen so Syl could see.
“These guys bring guns and other illegal materials through Miami. I need to
know when their next shipment is due.”

Syl nodded. “So you want me to flit around them until I hear
the details.”

“Absolutely.”

Syl nodded. “You’re going to have to take me to them the
first time. Once I imprint with them both, I can find them whenever I want.”

“Like you did with me,” Biff said.

Syl nodded, and Biff heard the sylph’s stomach grumble.
“Sorry, I’m behind on my nectar,” Syl said. “I need to find a hibiscus hedge
pretty soon. When can you introduce me to these guys?”

“Tomorrow morning. Igor and I work out together at the
Bolshoi Gym. Eight o’clock.”

“I’ll meet you there,” Syl said, standing up. “Must fly now.
Bye-bye!”

In a flash he was a butterfly again, flitting out of the
office.

Biff sat back. First a rodent, now an insect. His staff kept
on growing. He just shook his head and called Dilenys Cardozo. “I have the
report for you,” he said. “Your husband isn’t cheating on you, Mrs. Cardozo.
He’s just buying a lot of stuff online.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “You are in your office?”

“Yes, I am, but…”

“I will be there in ten minutes. Wait for me.”

Before he could agree or disagree, she’d hung up. He
remembered that she worked only a few minutes away. “Raki?”

The squirrel emerged from behind his chair.

Client. Stay under table
.

Hungry,
Raki said, though it was more a demand than a
statement.

Biff opened his desk drawer and brought out a bar of halvah.
He broke a piece off and gave it to the squirrel, who took it under the desk
and remained there when Dilenys Cardozo appeared in the office doorway.

She was wearing a black and white striped dress, and black
bangle bracelets, but otherwise looked just as drab as when she’d hired him.

“He’s not cheating?” she said, striding in and sitting down,
her baggy black purse on her lap. “You’re sure?”

He opened a folder of photos he had printed from Carlos
Cardozo’s emails. “Recognize these?” he asked, showing them to Dilenys.

She looked at the pictures, all slim, handsome young men in
different types of underwear.

“He’s gay?” she asked, her mouth dropping open.

“Not that I know,” Biff said. “I’m not talking about the men
in the picture, but the underwear.”

Dilenys looked at him quizzically.

“Does your husband own any of the underwear in those
pictures?” he asked.

She looked again. “Yes, these,” she said, pointing at a pair
of boxer briefs. “And these, too.” She kept shuffling through the pictures,
nodding and mumbling to herself.

When she had gone through them all she looked up at Biff. “I
found he has a place in the garage, where he has many of these stored in boxes.
But I don’t understand.”

“Call it a fetish,” he said. “Perfectly innocent. It seems
like your husband has a thing for sexy underwear. And for whatever reason, he
didn’t want you to know he was ordering it all. Maybe he’s embarrassed.”

“So he’s not cheating? Sending pictures of his crotch to
other women—or men?”

“Not that I can find. I think he’s just a secret shopper.”

She frowned. “So what do I do now? Confront him?”

“You might find this a very personal question, but I’ve got
to ask. How’s your sex life, Mrs. Cardozo?”

“We have been married fifteen years. It’s what you would
expect.”

“You have any sexy underwear of your own?”

She looked at him with alarm. “My underwear is my own
business.”

“Yes, it is. But if I might make a suggestion—make a visit
to a store like Victoria’s Secret. You’ve got a very nice figure. Buy yourself
something sexy that shows it off. And then model for your husband. Give him the
opportunity to show off for you, too.”

“This is very strange.”

“Nothing in this world is strange if it makes you—or someone
you love—feel good, Mrs. Cardozo.”

She opened her black bag with a grim expression. “What do I
owe you, Mr. Andromeda?”

Tuesday morning Biff dressed for another workout at the
Bolshoi Gym. He drove down to the gym, and as he ambled through the parking
lot, with Raki hopping and darting beside him, he noticed the white butterfly
circling in the air around him. With the lightest of touches, Syl landed on
Biff’s shoulder, and with his wings flattened he was nearly invisible against
Biff’s white T-shirt.

Raki scampered toward the grocery store in the shopping
center without a backward glance at Biff. “Have a nice day,” Biff called after
him. “Squirrels.”

The ductwork in the gym was exposed, and once they were
inside, Syl rose up to the ceiling level and perched there, probably
investigating the air handling system. Laskin wasn’t in the locker room or at
any of the machines, and Biff wondered if he was skipping another workout. To
maintain his cover, though, he began at the bench press.

He’d just completed a dozen reps when Laskin appeared next
to his head. “You don’t wait for your spotter, Bill?” he asked.

“Hey, Igor,” Biff said, making sure to huff between reps to
make it appear that he was working hard. “Wasn’t sure you’d make it.”

He appeared to struggle with the last rep, allowing Laskin
to help him replace the weights. “Wow, you are strong one, Bill.”

Biff sat up and shrugged. “Regular workouts.” He looked at
his watch. “You’re running late this morning.”

Laskin walked to the incline press and settled down. “Had to
work late. My boss, he has – moved on. So I am climbing up ladder in
organization. More work, much driving around, meeting with people.”

Biff was curious about what Laskin did now that Ovetschkin
was dead. “Yeah, I know what that’s like. They just keep shoveling more work on
you.”

“You got it,” Igor said.

They grumbled back and forth about bosses and schedules as
they moved from the lat pull-down to the leg press. “I see we think alike,
Bill,” Igor said. “Like me, you look for way to make yourself success. But
sometimes I think maybe my brain not good enough. My girl, very smart.” He
tapped his head. “Not so much, me. Nothing stop me from hard work. I go, go,
go. But hard to think ahead, you know?”

Biff pushed his feet forward on the leg press, holding the
handles by his side. “I’m more like your girl. I think ahead a lot.”

“Maybe we make good team,” Igor said. “When Natasha go to
college.”

“We’ll see,” Biff said. He looked at his watch. “I’m ready to
quit. See you tomorrow?”

Laskin gave up, stood, and stretched. “You like Russian
girls, Bill?”

“If they’re pretty.” Biff stood, too, and they walked toward
the locker room together.

“Is party tonight,” Igor said. “At the Marouschka in
Hallandale. You know it?”

“Fancy place.”

Igor nodded. “But tomorrow night is party for younger
people, like you and me. Lots of pretty girls there.”

“You think I could get in?” Biff held the locker room door
open for Igor.

“You are friend of Igor!” the Russian said, slapping Biff on
the back. “Of course you get in. Come after ten o’clock, yes?”

Biff agreed. While Laskin stripped for his shower, Biff left
the locker room and walked outside. He looked around but couldn’t see the
butterfly, and assumed that Syl was still inside, waiting for Laskin to leave.

As he unlocked his car, Raki appeared, dragging with him a
big hunk of chocolate-chip cookie.
So you’re back. Were you
afraid of
the big bad butterfly
? Biff asked.

Huh
? Raki replied, intent on chewing his cookie.

Biff gave up. Back at the office, he wrote up the notes of
his morning with Syl and Laskin, and then emailed both Jimmy and Hector that he
had established a relationship with Laskin, and had an operative following the
Russian. By the time he finished it was lunchtime. The squirrel accompanied him
outside, then disappeared to do some kind of squirrely business. Biff walked
over to the café in the shopping center and ordered a platter of
ropa vieja
,
a Cuban dish of shredded flank steak in tomato sauce. He smiled at the idea of
walking into an American restaurant and asking for a platter of old clothes.

Back in the office, he spent the afternoon familiarizing
himself with Customs procedures so that once he was embedded in the office he’d
know what he was doing. Just before four, he heard a knock on the exterior door
of his office, and he stood up and opened it for a middle-aged black woman pushing
an elderly white woman in a wheelchair.

“Good afternoon,” the aide said to Biff in a musical
Jamaican accent.

The elderly woman ignored Biff and addressed her aide
instead. “Leave me in the office and then wait outside.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the aide said. She positioned the wheelchair
carefully across from Biff’s desk and set the brakes. Then she nodded to him
and stepped into the outer office, closing the glass door behind her.

The woman was nearing ninety, Biff guessed, and her aura was
a washed-out pale green, a color he had always associated with end-of-life
issues. Her purple-tinged hair was thinning, though expertly coiffed, and she
had more wrinkles than a Shar-Pei. She wore a red suit that looked to be a
relic of the 1980s, a strand of pearls, and a diamond brooch.

“How can I help you?” Biff asked.

“These aides are robbing me blind!” she said. “I want you to
make it stop.”

The woman’s name was Etta Himmelfinger, and she lived in the
Jade Winds, a circular condo tower south of Biff’s office. She told him she had
started to notice things going missing ever since she began having a live-in
aide, and she had fired a succession of women.

“But things are still getting stolen. My diamond engagement
ring. A gold necklace my son gave me with little heads on it.”

Biff looked up in alarm. “Shrunken heads?”

“Gold heads, dummy. One for each of my grandchildren.”

He made a list of everything Mrs. Himmelfinger believed had
been stolen. “Do you have a safe in your apartment?”

“You think I can crawl on the ground like a lizard to get
into it?” she asked. “I want my things handy so I can wear them.”

He nodded, then asked for name of the agency that supplied
the aides to her. She handed him a card for it. “You want to talk to the girl? I
can call her in.”

“How about if I run some background checks, and then come
over to your apartment when I finish,” Biff said. “I can talk to her then.”

She peered at his contract through a pair of red-framed
reading glasses, and Biff wondered if she chose her glasses to match her
outfit. He imagined that there were a dozen different pairs in her voluminous
pocketbook, which he recognized as coming from Bottega Veneta, a high-end
leather store that he was sure Farishta would like.

“What is this crap about a wish?” she asked, looking up at
him.

“Do you wish me to investigate this case for you?”

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. Evelyn Greenberg spoke very
highly of you.”

He remembered Mrs. Greenberg, who had hired him to do a
background check on her granddaughter’s fiancé. He was working as a valet in
Mrs. Greenberg’s building, and it turned out he had an unfortunate penchant for
taking cars that didn’t belong to him. Biff met with him and strongly suggested
he should start over somewhere new, and the valet took the hint. The
granddaughter cried for a couple of days, then started dating the podiatrist
who came by to trim her grandmother’s toenails regularly. Mrs. Greenberg was
very pleased.