Cold Frame [retail] Read online

  “Yeah, dude, that’s exactly what happened,” the younger man said. “So, like, why the fuck we bein’ shut down?”

  “Guys in suits?” Howie asked. “They show ID? Badges?”

  “No, they did not,” the older man said. “Nor have you, for that matter.”

  Av and Howie fished out their badges, and Av let the older guy look at his credentials. He asked him if they could go into the dining room.

  “You want to search the place?”

  “No, no, we just want to see where it happened, that’s all.”

  “So, like, what did kill that dude?” the younger man asked.

  “We don’t know, yet,” Av responded. “That’s why we’re looking into the incident. Did the guy usually pay with a credit card?”

  “Yeah,” the younger man said. “Amex.”

  Av nodded. That matched what the proprietor had said.

  “Where you guys keeping Jacques, anyway?” the older man asked.

  “We’re not keeping Jacques anywhere,” Av said. “You got a phone number for him? Home, cell, anything?”

  The older guy recited two phone numbers. “Hope you have better luck than we did,” he said. “You find him, ask him what we should do now, would you?”

  Av promised them he would. The older man, who turned out to be the chef, then took them into the dining room and to the table where it had all gone down. Everything had long since been cleaned up. The place looked like every other small French restaurant Av had ever been in. Av automatically looked for the chalked figure on the floor, but then remembered that he wasn’t homicide anymore, and that this might not even be a homicide.

  They thanked the employees and went back to their unmarked. “Like, this fucker’s turning into a stone-cold, like, mystery,” Howie said. “Hate that ‘like’ shit. But: we gotta move this bitch down the road.”

  Av agreed. “Four guys show up, escort the owner to a black SUV, and close the place down?”

  “That ain’t no Food Safety shit right there,” Howie said. “Let’s go get that notice off the door, run it by their office, see if it’s legit.”

  “Just what I was thinking,” Av said. “You wanna try those numbers?”

  They settled for Burger King on the way to the public health department. Howie innocently asked the drive-through box if they had snails today, producing an indignant squawk. Jacques’s cell number had come up with a helpful voice-mail announcement that the mailbox was full; the other number just rang.

  At the health department a Food Safety clerk told them that the closure notice was a legitimate form, but, after a quick search, that there was no record of any of their people writing the citation and closing the Bistro Nord. He checked the restaurant’s file and found no problems, leaving another dead end and even more mystery. They went back to ILB. As they were approaching the office Av heard a rhythmic thumping sound coming from the squad room down the hall.

  “Uh-oh,” Howie said, staring at the closed squad room door.

  “What?”

  “Wong Daddy’s back,” Howie said. “We don’t wanna go in there right now.”

  Sergeant Wong Daddy Bento was the larger half of the other pair of detectives in ILB. Av had been introduced when he was first assigned to ILB and he still remembered shaking hands with Wong’s viselike paws. Wong Daddy was maybe five-six if he stood up really straight, and that measurement seemed to apply to height, width, and thickness in about equal proportions. He was of mixed Asian race, predominantly Korean, with a bullet-shaped head, a wide and rather threatening face that reminded Av of some of the samurai caricatures he’d seen at the Freer Gallery, and the overall physique of a sumo wrestler minus the pendulous belly rolls. Howie had explained that when something upset Wong, he’d begin stomping one foot and then the other on the floor, much like a sumo, and growling epithets in some unknown Asian dialect. Everyone had learned to just leave the squad room whenever Wong Daddy started cranking up. Av saw Precious looking out from the doorway to her office before quickly closing her door.

  “How long does this go on?” Av asked as they backed down the hall. The stomping was getting louder and so were the epithets.

  “Till somebody finds Miz Brown,” Howie said. “He can usually get Wong to quit with all that shit.”

  “‘He’?”

  “You haven’t met him yet; been on some kinda special tasking up on the fifth floor. He’s Wong’s partner. Real name’s Willy, but everyone calls him Miz Brown. Black dude, real tall, skinny, and fussy, like an old schoolteacher. Everything’s gotta be just so, or he’ll start nagging and shit. Can’t stop talking once he starts. Drives people crazy, but amazing during an interrogation.”

  “And they keep him, why?”

  “For two reasons, but mostly because he flat moves those tarbabies. He gets it into that pointy little head to push a tarbaby your way, you might as well give up and take it on. He will wheedle and whine and bug your ass to death. Ask anyone in federal LE—they all know him. Plus: between him and Wong Daddy, they a force of nature when it comes to making perps sing. They are absolutely the very best interview team in the MPD. One of the districts gets a sphinx? They send for those two. You ever get the chance, you need to go watch that shit.”

  Av remembered now that he had heard something about this team. The wild man in the squad room had begun yelling out kiyais and slamming something on the desks. Howie said that was probably his hand. They had backed their way into the break room where, by now, the ILB secretaries were already cowering. Howie pushed the door shut with his foot.

  “Anybody findin’ Miz Brown?” Howie asked.

  One of the ladies nodded. “He comin’.”

  “What set him off?”

  “Bill collector, probably,” one of the other girls said. Howie explained that Wong Daddy was known for his expensive womanizing and was often the target of collection agencies. Av was rapidly concluding that he’d been assigned to the department’s loony bin. Wong was audibly kicking a trash can around the squad room now. Then a tall shadow flitted by in the hallway headed in the direction of the squad room.

  “That him?” Av asked.

  “Yeah. Everything be cool in a minute or so.”

  The stomping and the crashing stopped. It was replaced by a loud tirade in that same unknown dialect that went on for thirty seconds before stopping abruptly.

  “Miz Brown’s talkin’ him down,” Howie said. “And he will talk and talk and talk until Wong puts his hands over his ears and then that’s the end of it. Then Brown will talk some more.”

  “We need to go see Precious,” Av said. “Tell her what we found out up on Connecticut Avenue.”

  “Not quite yet, pardner,” Howie said, helping himself to some coffee from the machine. “We got way too many loose ends. That lady has a hate-on for loose ends.”

  “This whole thing is a loose end,” Av pointed out. It was still quiet in the squad room. The secretaries were tiptoeing back to the admin office.

  “Exactly,” Howie said. “Ain’t no point in going in there and bothering Precious when we can’t answer a single one of all the questions you know she’s gonna ask. We gotta do some more detecting and shit.”

  They went down to the squad room. Detective Brown was sitting on the corner of Wong Daddy’s desk, talking urgently in a low voice. Wong Daddy was in his chair, staring at nothing but still making low growling sounds in his throat. A badly dented metal trash can lay against one wall and Wong Daddy’s in-basket was flattened into a metal pancake. Av wondered again what he’d gotten himself into.

  * * *

  “This has federal LE all over it, you know,” Av said the next morning. “Black SUVs, the Bistro’s owner going for a ride…”

  “If any of that’s true,” Howie pointed out.

  “There is that,” Av said, having been lied to by witnesses only about a million times.

  He went to see if he could push OCME on the autopsy while Howie tried the two phone numbers again. He then ran a
reverse directory to see where the home number was located. A secretary came in and announced that Precious wanted to see them. He gave Howie the high sign and they went to her office. Av told her what they had so far, which didn’t take very long. He finished up by beginning to lay out what he proposed to do next, but Precious interrupted him.

  “You keep talking about this incident like it’s a case that needs solving,” she said. “That’s not what we do here, Detective. You’re forgetting the mission of ILB.”

  Av frowned. “But—”

  “No buts, Detective,” she said. “You’re not homicide police anymore, remember? Our mission is to move a hairball like this somewhere else. You and Mau-Mau go figure out the logical destination, and then we’ll go from there. Now, out.”

  Outside her office, Howie and Av tried to figure out what to do next. Av was getting tired of being told to not do his job.

  “If we can find out who took brother Jacques and where,” Howie said, “then I’d say that’s where this case needs to go. Maybe there’s some connection between black SUVs and what happened to that civil serpent.”

  “We still don’t know what, if anything, killed that guy,” Av pointed out. “If he just up and died, then there’s no ‘case’ to begin with.”

  “Who takes it from there, then?” Howie asked.

  “Who’s got the remains?” Av said.

  “OCME.”

  “Sounds like OCME’s problem, then,” Av said.

  Howie grinned. “Now you talkin’ like an old hand at the Briar Patch,” he said, proudly.

  “Hell with this goat-rope,” Av said. “I’m going to the gym, burn off that greaseburger I ate yesterday.”

  * * *

  When Av got back from his workout there was a call-me from OCME. He called. Apparently they had gone ahead with the autopsy after all.

  “On your John Doe,” the pathologist said. “We got nothing specific for a cause of death. Heart stopped, lungs stopped, brain stopped. If he’d had a big burn mark anywhere I’d postulate that he’d been electrocuted. He was overweight, had Lucky Strike lungs, a fatty heart, and a lumpy liver, but: there are no indications that any of those organs precipitated death. Did he eat anything at the scene?”

  “According to the restaurant people, he sat down, had one little sip of wine, said he felt cold, then went down. And it wasn’t the wine because apparently his lady friend had a glass with no ill effects.”

  “Oka-a-y,” the doctor said. “We’ve sent a bunch of blood and other bodily fluids off for further analysis. Now: we don’t have a cause of death, but for manner of death, I want to keep this one open. This may not have been death by natural causes.”

  “Whoa—really?”

  “I asked for one test right away once I examined all the major organs. It’s a test for sodium levels in the brain cells. Came back abnormally high. If the brain-blood barrier is letting sodium through at those levels, it’s symptomatic of poisoning. We’ll know more in a week or three. Now, back to disposition of remains?”

  “Don’t you have to wait for all your tests?”

  “Nope. We have all the tissue we need, and this is D.C.: we’re short for space. The court order said John Doe, and I get that, but I seem to remember a name?”

  “I was gonna ask you about that, Doc,” Av said. “How—”

  “Detective?” the pathologist said. “I won’t ask you why the court order said John Doe and you won’t ask me why the name went astray, okay? Trust me, it’ll be better for everybody that way. Now: any family?”

  “There is, and they’ve been notified,” Av said. “But that’s kind of our problem—that’s as far as we can take it.” He gave the doc a short description of ILB and its function within MPD. As in, this isn’t our problem anymore. He waited. It was worth a try.

  “Lovely,” the doc said, patiently. “But I still need disposition orders.”

  “Well, he was DHS—maybe dump the remains on their doorstep?”

  “There are days I’d like to do just that,” the doc laughed. “But, look, you’re the guys who got the court order; help us out here.”

  “Lemme see if I can get the Second District homicide people into it,” Av said, with a lot more confidence than he felt. He hung up and told Howie what was going on. Howie pointed out that they were supposed to move cases out of Metro PD, not sideways. On the other hand, he admitted, if they had a possible homicide in the Second’s patch, then maybe they had no choice here.

  “We’d better clear that with Precious,” Howie said.

  Av’s desk intercom buzzed. “Lieutenant on one for you, Detective,” the secretary said.

  Av mouthed the word “Precious” to Howie and poised his finger over the line one button. Howie did the same on his desk and they punched in and picked up together.

  “Yes, ma’am?” Av said.

  “Where are we on that Connecticut Avenue mystery?”

  Av relayed what the OCME pathologist had had to say, and that he was about to contact the homicide desk in Second District. He explained why.

  “They’re gonna push back on that noise, Detective, especially when they hear the victim was DHS. That would imply Bureau responsibility.”

  There’s an echo in here, Av thought: that’s what I wanted to do in the first place. “Sounds good to me, Lieutenant. Guy’s a federal SES in the homeland security business. The Feebs just about have to take it.”

  “The Bureau is the G, Detective. The G doesn’t have to do anything, less it wants to. But, yeah, I guess it’s about time I try again with the Hooverites. If they agree, I’ll send you two over there for some face time with the first team.”

  Both detectives rolled their eyes.

  “Mau-Mau, you eavesdropping?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Howie said, with a grin.

  “You get a proper suit on before you go consorting with Bureau people,” she ordered. “They get one look at you, they’ll be calling up their reaction force.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Howie said.

  “I’ll get back to you,” Precious said.

  When they’d hung up, Av noted that Precious didn’t miss much. Howie laughed.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” he said. “She stops in the secretaries’ office coupla times a day and reads through all the message forms. She already knew we’d had a call-me from OCME.”

  “You gonna ditch the wig?” Av asked. “Look funny with a suit.”

  “Hell, no,” Howie said.

  * * *

  Precious called them back into her office ten minutes later. “Bureau Metro Liaison desk says they don’t know what we’re talking about, refused to confirm that Ellen Whiting is a special agent or even a Bureau employee, whose black SUVs went where, or why they should care about yet another dead John Doe in the District.”

  “You told them John Doe?” Av asked. “But we know his name. And we know where he worked.”

  “First call,” Precious said. “You never give everything away on the first call, Detective. Now: the ME says it’s possibly poisoning?”

  “Inconclusive, awaiting further tests,” Av said. “But: gut feel? It’s hinky and that doc knew McGavin’s name, but would not tell me why he’d been posted as a John Doe. So: what the hell’s going on here, please, ma’am?”

  “One of those vast right-wing conspiracies is what this is,” Precious said. “Okay: we’re gonna do what any good bureaucrat does in this situation: we’re gonna sit on this one for now. I think I need to talk to somebody upstairs.”

  “Sit on it?”

  “Best thing is for us to go into a holding pattern here until the ME pronounces, one way or another. He says natural causes, we’re done. Release the remains to the wife. He says homicide…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Shit, I don’t know,” she said. “In the meantime, you guys leave it alone.” Her phone rang. She pointed them to the door. They went back to the squad room.

  “This is so bogus,” Av muttered.

  “
No, it isn’t,” Howie said. “This is ILB. We in the tarbaby biz. This is what they look like.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Av said. “But some other agency has to be mixed up in this.” Then he remembered the four guys he’d encountered on his morning run. He told Howie about that.

  Howie stopped short in the hallway. “And this happened, when? Partner?” he said.

  “Yeah, yeah, I should have said something. But: it was so out-there, you know? Like my imagination kinda thing.”

  “’Cept for those sunglasses,” Howie pointed out. “You keep ’em, by any chance?”

  Av went to his desk and pulled out the glasses.

  “Piece’a shit Chinese knockoffs,” Howie said, eyeing the offending glasses. “Low-end Walmart, at best. Nobody in federal LE would actually wear this shit.”

  “Exactly,” Av said. “So why should I take this seriously?”

  “Who spikes a pair of sunglasses on somebody’s fence, huh? Tell me that, my man.”

  “Somebody who found them on the path. My fence was the closest place to put ’em,” Av said.

  “Except,” Howie said.

  “Yeah, well, they are kinda bent in half.”

  “Uh-huh,” Howie said. “How’d you feel, those guys blowin’ past you close enough for you to smell ’em?”

  “Well,” Av said.

  “There you go,” Howie said. “Your Spidey sense ticklin’ the back of your neck when those dudes were closing in on you?”

  Av nodded.

  “Okay, then,” Howie said. “Crew gotta do something about this. You runnin’ again tomorrow morning?”

  “Well, yeah.” Av knew very well what Howie thought about running for exercise, or, for that matter, any other form of exercise. The only exercise Howie was into involved getting lunch. “You wanna come along?” he asked, innocently.

  “Hell no,” Howie said. “But I got me a plan. Those dudes like four on one, we’ll let ’em see what that feels like. Get Wong into it. He loves this kinda shit.”

  Gee, Av thought, remembering the scene this morning. What could possibly go wrong with that idea?

  * * *

  The next morning, Av warmed up outside the building just before sunrise. It was another cool, clear morning, Washington at its very best in the early fall. There was already a grunch of devoted runners headed up the narrow towpath toward the next up-and-over.