This Case Is Gonna Kill Me (11 page)

“Oh. Yeah, probably not a lot of adventuresome cooking going on there.”

The older woman behind the cash register glared at a teenage boy dressed in jeans and a T-shirt celebrating some grunge band. Prodded by the look, he slouched over and grunted, “You ready?”

“Yes.” O’Shea rattled off the order, and the waiter went away.

“Wow, that seems like a lot of food.”

“We’ll split the leftovers,” he said.

“I like this plan.”

The first things out of the kitchen were soup dumplings. O’Shea had to show me how to hold them in one of the short, sharply bent soup spoons and bite in a way that didn’t send hot soup down the front of my blouse. They were wonderful, and all I could manage were grunting sounds of pleasure as I slurped up soup and chewed at the doughy shell of the dumplings.

While we waited for the main course, O’Shea leaned back in his chair and studied me. “So, tell me about yourself.”

“Not much to tell. Born in Rhode Island. Dad’s a businessman; he owns a big vending machine company. Mom’s…” I paused, struggling to find a way to describe my mother that wouldn’t sound like the stereotypical mother/daughter relationship. “A housewife. She was my father’s secretary, and she married him.”

“You make it sound like he didn’t have a choice.”

“He didn’t.” I flashed him a smile. “I have a younger brother.”

“So, how did you end up fostered?” O’Shea asked as he filled my cup with tea. The delicate aroma of jasmine wafted up from the cup.

“My dad’s business connections. Vampires like to make money. My dad knows how to make money.”

“They normally foster kids from powerful, well-connected families—Kennedys, Rockefellers, Du Ponts, that kind of thing. Pardon me, but what you’re describing sounds rather bourgeois.”

I feigned outrage, drawing myself up to my full inconsequential height. “I’ll have you know that I’m a DAR, and a direct descendent of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.”

O’Shea laughed. I joined in, relieved to discover that he got irony and sarcasm. Most Álfar seem like they need a humor implant. But maybe that was because the ones I had met were making formal calls on a powerful vampire lord. “It’s funny,” he said. “In some ways we’re a lot alike, and in other ways polar opposites.”

“How are we alike?”

A plate of kung pao chicken and a covered bowl of rice crashed down onto the table. The teenager had returned. O’Shea spooned out a large amount of rice and slathered it with the chicken dish.

“Neither one of us knows our actual families very well. I was fostered with humans. You were fostered by a spook.”

“Okay, now that really is a pejorative. Is this you being all self-loathing or something?” I asked.

He grinned at me. It was a very nice grin, somehow both mischievous and warm.
It’s all snake oil,
the sensible part of my brain reminded me.
He’s an Álfar; they trade on charm.

The waiter returned with our vegetable moo shu. Dumped it and left. John started spreading hoisin sauce on the translucent pancakes.

“I self-identify as human, and my parents—foster parents—are the kind of people who shower after work.”

“So, you’re a blue-collar elf.”

“Yeah, that’s a good description.”

“I’m confused. I’ve never heard of Álfar putting up a child to be fostered.”

“But I bet you’ve heard of changelings.”

“So you were?”

“Yep, literally swapped in the crib. My human folks realized there was no hope of getting back their real son, so they made the best of the situation. I tried not to disappoint.”

“What does your father do?” I asked somewhat absently, because I was fascinated by the performance being made over the construction of the moo shu.

O’ Shea’s chopsticks darted into the piles of stir-fried vegetables and egg, pulling out large gobs that he deposited onto the pancakes.

“He’s a cop in Philly.” With deft twists of the chopsitcks, O’Shea folded together the edges of the pancakes to form Chinese burritos. “So, naturally, I became a cop too.”

“Oh, that’s right, Chip mentioned you’d been a cop. Sorry.”

“No problem. No reason you should remember my background.”

A moo shu was deposited on my plate. It smelled so amazingly good, my mouth filled with saliva. I picked it up with my hands, took a bite, and mumbled around the mouthful, “You’re the strangest Álfar I’ve ever met.”

“And you’re not your standard run-of-the-mill lawyer. Name one other lawyer in the firm who would have fought it out with a werewolf.”

“All the vampires.”

“Okay,
living
lawyers.”

“You’re making me sound … Look, I’m nothing special.”

“I think the jury’s out on that.”

And the smile was back. The devastating, heart-flipping, soul-wrenching smile.

7

The next day we were back on the seventieth floor, and I discovered I had been moved out of my cave and into Chip’s office. The window gave me a momentary emotional lift, followed immediately by a crushing sense of guilt. I had literally gotten this office over a man’s dead body. I also remembered McGillary’s words and attitude regarding Chip’s cases.
Don’t get too excited by this, Ellery. This is not a promotion, not really.

For a long time I just sat and contemplated my prospects. I muttered my father’s mantra. “You make your own luck.”

If I could somehow bring
Abercrombie
to a successful conclusion and then start bringing in some business on my own, this still might work out. I spotted the stack of messages I’d unearthed the day before and decided to ask The Terrifying Norma about the caller.

Norma was a woman in her mid-sixties with white hair that had been coiffed until it looked like a helmet and breasts like the bulwark on a destroyer. At every break she headed for the great outdoors, where she huddled with the other cigarette refugees. The odor of smoke and tobacco hung around her formidable person.

“What do you know about this guy?” I asked as I handed over the messages.

My attention was caught by a tall glass jar sitting on the corner of Norma’s desk. It was filled to the top with Hersey’s Kisses—the gold-wrapped ones, which meant they had almonds in them. I unconsciously reached into the jar, only to have the back of my hand firmly slapped by Norma.

“Uh-uh, buy your own. They keep me from going nuts between smokes.” I stuck my hand behind my back like a naughty child reprimanded by her governess while Norma looked through the stack. Her lips pursed in a moue of disgust. “Finkelstein, dreadful little man. He’s an ambulance chaser. I can’t imagine what he had to say to anyone in
this
firm, but Mr. Westin would never send him packing.”

“Okay, thanks. I’ll call him back when I have a free moment. Could you book a conference room for me on Friday at three p.m.? Marlene Abercrombie and her children will be coming in.”

Norma made a note on a legal pad. It was filled with scribbled notes. I glanced over at her computer. The keyboard was really, really clean. It looked like Chip hadn’t followed the usual pattern in a vampire law firm and dictated his correspondence. Which meant Norma was not accustomed to typing, and she probably wouldn’t want that situation to change just because I’d inherited her. Or maybe she’d inherited me. That certainly seemed to be her attitude.

The next few hours were spent trying to separate the materials relating to the
Abercrombie
case into organized files. Chip might have had everything filed properly in his head, but out here in the real world it was like a giant tangle of yarn.

Eventually I had everything related to the alpacas rounded up and in its own file. I had a file for real estate. In addition to his home in Virginia, Abercrombie had a house in Portugal, a shooting lodge in Scotland, apartments in Paris and Istanbul, a condo at the Taos Ski Valley (maybe that was where he got interested in alpacas), and a beach house on the Big Island of Hawaii. I could see why the ex was unwilling to accept a lump-sum cash settlement even when she didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning control of the company.

I was holding a copy of the title to the 166-foot yacht and trying to decide whether it qualified as a floating house or if it needed to go into the vehicles file along with the Ferrari, the Bugatti, and the vintage WWII Jeep, when I was interrupted by a knock.

I jumped up, wondering if it might be John O’Shea, and my heart gave this curious little swoop. I squeezed my eyes shut and said out loud, “Oh, no.” I really was getting a crush. But it wasn’t the detective in the doorway. It was Ryan, and he was holding a beautiful calla lily plant. The blossoms were a delicate peach, and the fluorescent light glowed on the leaves.

He gave me the close-lipped vampire smile. “How are you settling in?”

“Okay.” I shook my head. “But it’s not the way I’d want to get a better office.”

“Come on, you’re a lawyer. You need to hone those shark-like instincts.” This time a bit of tooth showed. I laughed, but it felt a little hollow.

“Here’s an office-warming present,” he said, offering me the plant.

“Thank you. It’s beautiful.” I took the pot and set it on a low filing cabinet beneath the window.

“I’m afraid your ficus didn’t survive four days without water. I tried to resuscitate it, but I have a black thumb. That’s why I wanted to get this to you right away.” He gestured at the calla lily. This time my laugh wasn’t so forced. “I’d also like to invite you out to Long Island to ride. We’ve got long days now, and riding near twilight is easier for me.”

I wanted to leap at the chance, but caution about interoffice involvement made me hesitate. “This isn’t a date, right?” I asked.

“No, no, a trade—horses for coaching,” he said.

“Well, in that case … it sounds lovely. Could we do it on Friday? That gives me a little more time to pull order out of chaos.” I gestured at the stacks of papers. “I’m going to meet my clients on Friday, and I have a feeling I’m going to need to blow off some steam.”

“Friday it is. What say we leave from here at 6:30?”

“Sound good.”

“Don’t forget to pack your boots,” he added with a smile, and left.

I found myself thinking less about private detectives and more about a rewarding relationship with a colleague as I plunged back into the mess. I wondered if Ryan had a hostess. Since there were no female vampires, male vampires tended to recruit older human women to fill that role. In addition to arranging social events and overseeing the care of the house, a hostess offered cover to any young woman who might be a guest in a vampire’s home. It was charmingly archaic, but it served a deadly serious purpose. It protected a vampire and a human woman from any accusation that there might be a Making. Vampires and werewolves could associate with human women—sleep with them (though the act was tougher to accomplish for a vampire) and even marry them, as shown by the May file. What they could not do was turn a woman into a vampire or a werewolf. Ever.

I thought back on the two women who had filled the hostess role for Meredith Bainbridge during my childhood. Mattie had been fifty-eight when she took the position, sixty when I arrived. She had held it until her death from breast cancer seven years later. Susan had been next, and she had been sixty-three. She was still managing the Bainbridge household, and at seventy-four she showed little sign of slowing down. I thought about Shade’s hostess—Debra, age sixty-eight.

I decided I would be fine. Ryan probably had a hostess, and even if he didn’t, I’d be mostly in the barn. No problem.

*   *   *

Marlene Abercrombie looked like an animated and angry strip of beef jerky topped with a shock of dyed red hair. I knew from the files that she was eighty-four years old, but fury had apparently held off the effects of aging. She moved toward a chair in the conference room with the energy of a whirlwind.

Her three children were with her. Andrew and Angela, the twins, were sixty-one. Andrew was fat, with fleshy lips set in a perpetual pout. Angela was plump and sported a perky haircut that was too young for her face. Her hair was dyed blonde. Then there was Natalie, age fifty-five. She had the look of a “lady who lunched.” She took after her mother in that she was whipcord thin, and her eyes had all the warmth of pieces of flint. Her hair had been highlighted by an expert, and her clothes were of a higher quality than those of her siblings. It looked like Natalie had married well.

They got settled, Norma went off to fetch coffee, and I settled into the chair at the head of the table. The four Abercrombies stared at me.

“Aren’t you a little young to take on a case of this importance?” Andrew asked. His voice didn’t match his bulk. It was high and rather reedy.

This case is shit and a nuisance to boot, and I can tell already that I’m going to hate you all.
But I didn’t say that. Instead I said, “I worked very closely with Mr. Westin on this case. I’m confident, and the senior partners are confident, that I can see this through to a mutually successful conclusion.”

“And are we getting any closer to that conclusion?” Natalie asked.

“Well, it was a definite setback when Mr. Meyers died, but I’m hopeful that Mr. Gelb will be able to attest to the conversation.” I took a deep breath and plunged on. “The problem is that time is against us. Memories grow hazy, and people are getting old and dying.” I removed a paper from one of my files. “Have you given any more thought to the latest settlement offer from Securitech?”

“What’s to think about? It’s crap,” Natalie drawled.

“Four million dollars. It’s chicken feed to these people,” Marlene said in a voice like a crow’s caw.

“We have our children to consider,” Angela whined.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have had so many,” Natalie snapped at her sister.

“Just because you’re a dried-up old—”

“Stop it!” Marlene rapped. They subsided.

I cleared my throat and tried to take back control. “However you might feel about the fairness of this offer, we should at least respond. Perhaps we can present something that better reflects your—”