Swift Justice (5 page)

“Help you?” Her voice and gaze were no-nonsense. Eyes that showed more gray than blue peered from beneath straight iron-gray brows. Tanned skin beginning to soften around the jawline and pouches below her eyes testified to her life outdoors. She looked like a farmer, not an artist.

I introduced myself and stumbled when it came time to present Gigi. I finally called her “Gigi Goldman, my associate.” My lips wouldn’t form the P-word.

Gigi looked at me reproachfully but merely said, “We’ve met. Remember, Miss Furman? You donated that beautiful blue afghan with the star motif to our silent auction in support of the battered women’s home?”

Furman’s sharp eyes focused on Gigi. “Right. I thought you looked familiar. Well, if you’re here for another—”

“We need information, Ms. Furman,” I broke in, “not donations.”

“I’m afraid I don’t deal in information,” she said, “only art.” She took two steps toward the pen and scratched the black goat on his knobbly head.

She’d lost me. “I thought you made blankets. We just need to know who you sold this one to.” I nodded at Gigi, and she unfurled the pink blanket she’d been clutching to her chest.

“And isn’t that art?” Furman asked, whipping around to pin me with narrowed eyes. From the look of satisfaction on her face, I knew I’d fallen into a trap she’d sprung many times. “You’re one of the culturally stunted products of our public education system who don’t consider something ‘art’ unless it was painted or sculpted by a DWEM, a dead white European male.” She pronounced it “dweem.”

I felt heat rise to my cheeks but said, “I like Georgia O’Keeffe.”

“Bully for you. How about Junichi Arai or Michail Berger? Maybe Chihuly?”

I knew Chihuly did glass, but I’d never heard of the other
two. “Look”—I put my hands up in a surrender gesture—“I didn’t come here for a seminar on alternative art—”

“Alternative?” Her brows rose haughtily to her hairline. A goat coughed behind her, sounding like it was laughing.

This was going from bad to worse. “Do you remember who bought this blanket? It was with an abandoned baby.”

That brought her up short, and she stepped off her soapbox, reaching a surprisingly well formed and delicate hand to grasp a fold of the blanket.

“I think it’s lovely,” Gigi said.

“Thank you, dear,” Furman said, tracing her thumb over one of the lambs. She nodded and looked over to me. “Aurora Newcastle. She bought it about six months ago. It was the last one I finished this spring before combing season.”

“Combing?”

“You don’t shear goats to get the cashmere, you comb it out of them,” she said, making a motion like dragging a comb down.

I sensed another lecture coming on, this one on goat husbandry, so I asked quickly, “Was she pregnant?”

“Aurora?” Furman laughed, a rich chuckle. “She’s as AARP eligible as I am. No, it was a gift for someone.”

“Do you know who?” Gigi asked. She had the steno pad out, pen poised.

Furman shook her head. “No. She didn’t say. And before you ask, no, I won’t give you her address. You understand.”

“Sure.” It didn’t matter. It wouldn’t be hard to Google someone named Aurora Newcastle, and she apparently lived in Colorado since Furman talked like she knew her. “Thanks for your time, Ms. Furman,” I said.

“I’d love to come back and hear about the goats sometime,” Gigi said, real interest lighting her face.

“You do that,” Furman said. “I think they’d like you.” She turned away, striding back to the dung-filled wheelbarrow, rubber boots scraping a wsk-wsk sound from her overalls as she walked.

“Did you hear that?” Gigi said in an awed voice. “The goats would like me.”

I rolled my eyes and climbed into the Subaru, barely waiting for Gigi to swing her door shut before reversing with unnecessary force.

Back at the office, I put mental blinders on to escape the new decor and retrieved phone messages. Two potential clients. I called them back and set up appointments, well aware of Gigi following the conversations from her desk. A third call was from a client who owned a string of fast food restaurants; he kept Swift Investigations on retainer to run background checks on potential employees. This time, he needed some undercover work done at his Buff Burgers restaurant on the northeast side of town. Buff Burgers was a newish franchise that sold buffalo patties with organic produce and whole wheat buns. I groaned at the prospect of doing fast food work to figure out which employee was skimming money from the cash drawer, and my eyes lighted on Gigi. The menial nature of the job should be just the thing to convince her that investigative work was not glamorous and exciting. “I’ll have an operative there in the morning,” I told Brian.

I put on a serious face as I hung up the phone. “Gigi, I think I’ve got a case you can handle.”

She all but clapped her hands and scurried over to plop down in the chair facing my desk.

“It’s undercover work.” That set the hook. “It might be dangerous.” Yeah, grease splatters might burn her arms. “It’ll be hard, nasty work.” She couldn’t say I hadn’t warned her.

Her eyes widened. “What do I have to do?”

I wrote down the Buff Burgers address and handed it to her. “Report to this address at eight tomorrow morning. A worker quit today, and Brian Yukawa, the owner, is holding a job open for you. You’ll fill out an application like anyone would, but you’ll get the job. The manager’ll train you for your duties. Brian thinks someone—maybe the manager—is skimming from the cash register or selling inventory out the back door or something. Your job is to figure out who and how.”

“How do I do that?”

Good question. “Keep your eyes open, get to know your co-workers. See if anyone looks like they’re hanging out where they shouldn’t be or has more money than they ought to. This kind of undercover investigation isn’t a science—you just wing it.”

“Gotcha.” She had the ubiquitous steno pad out, and I’d swear she wrote down “Wing it!”

“We’ll get together in the afternoons when you’re off shift to discuss the case. Save any questions for me till then; you don’t want to make anyone suspect you’re not just a run-of-the-mill Buff Burgers employee. You’ll do just fine,” I added with an encouraging smile.

“But what will I wear?” Gigi asked, looking down at her sunny silk ensemble.

“Not to worry,” I said, waving a dismissive hand. “Brian said something about a uniform.”

(Wednesday)

The next morning, after filling out her application and doing a pro forma interview with the Buff Burgers manager, a kid who looked barely older than her seventeen-year-old son, Dexter, Georgia Goldman stared in dismay at the “uniform” he presented.

“But that’s a buffalo costume,” she protested, eyeing the heavy-looking horned head with distrust.

“It’s a bison, actually,” the young manager, Dylan, confided. He had a nerdy air about him that convinced Georgia he’d be able to differentiate between weasels and martens or sine and cosine with the same ease he talked about bison versus buffaloes. The Daniel Boone–ish Western look of the Buff Burgers uniform merely emphasized his gawkiness. “But I guess ‘Bison Burgers’ didn’t have the same ring as ‘Buff Burgers,’ so we just go with it.”

“And I’m supposed to put that on?” She’d spent an hour styling her hair, and it would be crushed.

“Well, yeah. You’re Bernie the Buffalo, right? Isn’t that the job you applied for? When Brian called last night, he said you’d be in to apply for Trent’s job, and Trent was Bernie until his folks made him quit ’cause school’s started up again.”

“Where do I change?” Gigi asked, resigned to her fate.

“Bathroom.” Dylan jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

With the buffalo head clutched in both hands and the rest of the costume draped over her shoulder, Georgia made her way through the mercifully empty restaurant to the bathroom. No way could she maneuver the head in one of the two tiny stalls, so she balanced it on the sink and ducked into a stall to strip. Grime in the tile grout had her aching for a scrub brush and a strong bleach solution. Maybe she should say something to Dylan about it. She’d almost wiggled into the fuzzy brown costume, luckily on the baggy side, managing not to dip the tail in the toilet, when the bathroom door squeaked open and she heard a startled “Ack!” The door clunked closed.

Emerging from the stall, Georgia giggled, imagining how the sight of Bernie’s head on the sink must’ve startled some unsuspecting girl who only needed to relieve herself. All inclination to laugh left as she fitted the shaggy head over hers and peered at her reflection through the eyeholes in Bernie’s neck. Something straggled down in front of her field of vision, and she realized it was the buffalo’s beard. Walking carefully to counterbalance the weight atop her shoulders, she looped her tail over her arm and trudged back into the restaurant, where Dylan was waiting.

He eyed her critically. “Hm. Well, it’ll have to do. But you have to look happier. Cheery, cheery, cheery.” He grinned so
wide Gigi was sure it hurt his cheeks. “The kids don’t want a gloomy Bernie.”

Wondering how the kids would know if she were suicidal or manic beneath Bernie’s shaggy head, Gigi swished her tail and shuffled off to greet a young mother with three toddlers as they came through the restaurant door shouting, “It’s Bernie!”

With Gigi gainfully employed asking, “Do you want fries with that buffalo patty?” I had the office to myself Wednesday morning. Ah, bliss. I’d helped her load up most of the tchotchkes last evening, graciously conceding that the ficus and the photos could stay. I plumed myself on my generosity and sneaked a peek at the photos once I had my Pepsi in hand. Most of them showed two kids, a boy and a girl, from toddlerhood to midteens. The boy looked older, with longish hair and a smirk as he leaned against a red Beemer in the most recent photo. The girl, about fourteen, appeared in a variety of sequined, feathered, and increasingly sophisticated skating costumes. Once she got the braces off she was going to be a knockout with blond hair, a creamy complexion, and long legs. If Gigi looked like that when Les met her, I could understand why he’d fallen for her.

Back at my desk, I reached for the phone and called a buddy of mine at the Colorado Springs Police Department. It had occurred to me last night that if Baby Girl Hogeboom was reduced to foisting her baby on Melissa Lloyd, she might be a runaway. Perhaps, just perhaps, someone had reported her missing and I could get a line on her that way.